It’s easy to remember one username and password. Keeping five or 10 straight is much harder. Password overload has long afflicted techies, but as we all spend more time doing everything from shopping to banking to playing games on the Web, it’s become a more widespread problem. A number of companies are trying to combat [...]

Over the past two years, governments in the Middle East have been targeted by sophisticated spying software, apparently created by world-class researchers whom unknown nation-states are paying to target sensitive data and infrastructure. Yet the latest piece of malware successfully spying on banks, government departments, and companies in Iran and nearby countries is almost laughably [...]

A $1 billion U.S. jury verdict last week did more than determine that Samsung’s smartphones and tablets violated Apple’s patents—it also clouded the future of products and research based on Google’s open-source Android operating system. Android, which is built into Samsung’s products, is used in more than 60 percent of the nearly 700 million smartphones [...]

Touching and finger-swiping are the dominant method of navigating on hundreds of millions of smartphones and tablet computers. The same touch might soon confirm your identity, too. A new device dispatches a few bits of data, representing a password, from a special ring on your finger and sends the data as tiny voltage bursts through [...]

When Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai started building their location-sharing startup, Foursquare, in 2008, they chose New York City for their headquarters, and Crowley’s kitchen table in the East Village served as their first workspace. “We never even had a conversation about, ‘the only way to make it succeed is to go to California—should we [...]

Between June and December of last year, 17 patients at the Clinical Center of the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. came down with a bloodstream infection. Six of them died. Doctors knew that a patient had arrived with Klebsiella pneumoniae in June, but it wasn’t clear how the bacterium, a common culprit [...]

Last week, officials in Dallas County in Texas began spraying insecticide from airplanes to curb the worst outbreak of West Nile virus that Dallas has ever seen. With no options for treating or preventing the disease, officials hope to prevent more people from contracting the potentially fatal illness, which is transmitted through mosquito bites. Almost [...]

A team from the company deCode Genetics reports today in the journal Nature that a father’s age determines how many new DNA mutations a child inherits, and that this may explain a recent rise in the number of children being diagnosed with autism. The chance substitution of one DNA letter for another—a mutation—is what allows [...]

This week, surgeons at Emory University in Atlanta implanted a second dose of neural cells into a patient’s spinal cord, part of an experimental treatment aimed at slowing the progression of ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. The patient, Ted Harada, is the third person this summer to receive a second dose as part of the [...]

Surgical sutures are mindless threads no more. Researchers have now coated them with sensors that could monitor wounds and speed up healing. The electronic sutures, which contain ultrathin silicon sensors integrated on polymer or silk strips, can be threaded through needles, and in animal tests researchers were able to lace them through skin, pull them [...]