According to IBM, the new design could outperform current lithium-ion batteries in cost, charging time (less than five minutes to reach an 80 percent charge), power density and energy efficiency. The battery is also less flammable, and it could be used in aircraft and smart energy grids, as well as electric cars and trucks.IBM ResearchThe…

In late January, the wife of a cryptocurrency exchange founder testified that her husband inadvertently took at least $137 million of customer assets to the grave when he died without giving anyone the password to his encrypted laptop. Now outraged investors want to exhume the founder's body to make sure he's really dead.ARS TECHNICAThis story…

Nearly every day, in war zones around the world, American military forces request fire support. By radioing coordinates to a howitzer miles away, infantrymen can deliver the awful ruin of a 155-mm artillery shell on opposing forces. If defense officials in Washington have their way, artificial intelligence is about to make that process a whole…

The future depends on connectivity. From artificial intelligence and self-driving cars to telemedicine and mixed reality to as yet undreamt technologies, all the things we hope will make our lives easier, safer, and healthier will require high-speed, always-on internet connections.To keep up with the explosion of new connected gadgets and vehicles, not to mention the…

“We’re going to be hauling some grass and some alfalfa bales today,” Cole Sonne cheerfully tells the camera as he drives a tractor over the bumps of his family’s farm in South Dakota. And for the next 12 minutes, the video will show Sonne and his dad do just that, carefully moving hundreds of the…

For fans of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1986 comic book series Watchmen, this week is a strange moment in time. On Sunday evening, HBO’s Watchmen—at once a sequel to, and response to, that original comic—aired the final episode of its first season. Today, the final issue of DC’s Doomsday Clock, the 12-part comic book…

Like many teenagers growing up in the early- to mid-aughts, Russian photographer Rus Khasanov spent an obscene amount of money on CDs. He displayed his favorites on a shelf—Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP, Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black, assorted Harry Potter soundtracks—and protected the rest inside black faux-leather binders, handling the discs with utmost care.Photograph:…

A group of British scientists had a plan for a groundbreaking geoengineering test. Working from a disused military airstrip in Norfolk, UK, they would attach a 3,000-foot hose to a helium balloon, pump water into it, and spray the liquid into the atmosphere, where it would evaporate. The hardware test was part of a bigger…

In 1986, Cliff Stoll’s boss at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs tasked him with getting to the bottom of a 75-cent accounting discrepancy in the lab’s computer network, which was rented out to remote users by the minute. Stoll, 36, investigated the source of that minuscule anomaly, pulling on it like a loose thread until it…

There’s a cruel irony in the fact that holiday travel tends to coincide with the rise of flu season. Yet more than 47 million Americans are preparing to sit for hours inside a tube in the sky, perhaps near someone with a hacking cough. It sounds like the perfect (infectious) storm.But reaching your destination without…