Showing results by narrator "Todd Mundt" in All Categories

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9-11 Commission, was created by congressional legislation and the signature of President George W. Bush in late 2002. This independent, bipartisan commission had the task of producing a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the attack, including preparedness and immediate response, and providing recommendations designed to guard against future attacks.

The startup is exploring a molten chloride reactor concept, but says it remains committed to traveling wave reactors.

When Southwest Airlines pilot Paul Watson lands in a new city, he often strikes out to visit the labs of local scientists studying Down syndrome. He likes to stay current because his 14-year-old son, Nathan, has the condition. And Watson can take some credit for one idea spreading among parents: that the drug fluoxetine, also known as Prozac, might actually treat Down syndrome.

When Milton Wright III got his third cancer diagnosis, he cried until he laughed. He was 20 and had survived leukemia twice before, first when he was eight and again as a teen. Each time he’d suffered through years of punishing chemotherapy.

Despite their ubiquity, smartphones are still not very helpful at getting you information based on what you're already doing. For instance, if you get an e-mail from a friend asking if you want to check out a new restaurant in town, you have to leave the app behind and go conduct a Web search to learn more.

I recently got my own personal assistant, called Amy. My new helper is amazingly attentive and diligent, but also a bit strange. For one thing, she seems completely obsessed with organizing meetings and pretty much refuses to talk about anything else. Amy isn't a real person but a software agent that exists somewhere in the cloud and communicates with my contacts and me by e-mail, helping set up and reschedule meetings and other appointments.

The Islamic State is an Internet phenomenon as much as a military one. Counteracting it will require better tactics on the battlefield of social media.

Technology is now allowing artists to do something they’ve aspired to since the stone age: make their paintings move.

On a wall facing dozens of cubicles at the FBI office in Pittsburgh, five guys from Shanghai stare from “Wanted” posters. Wang Dong, Sun Kailiang, Wen Xinyu, Huang Zhenyu, and Gu Chunhui are, according to a federal indictment unsealed last year, agents of China’s People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398, who hacked into networks at American companies—U.S. Steel, Alcoa, Allegheny Technologies (ATI), Westinghouse—plus the biggest industrial labor union in North America, United Steelworkers, and the U.S. subsidiary of SolarWorld, a German solar-panel maker.

Bitcoin doesn’t have to replace government-backed money to improve the way we do business online.

Lab notebooks could determine who was first to invent a revolutionary gene-editing technology.

SolarCity’s massive new manufacturing plant in Buffalo, New York, reflects a booming demand for solar power. Is it sustainable?

Neurosurgeons hope to treat some of the most intractable mental disorders by putting advanced arrays of electrodes into patients’ brains.

The world’s poor could benefit from a system that is blanketing half Earth’s surface with a signal that provides free access to Wikipedia and other useful websites.

Does playing football cause permanent brain damage? If it wasn’t already, that question is now squarely in the zeitgeist thanks to Hollywood and Will Smith. The answer is not so straightforward, however. We are likely to learn a lot more about the subject in 2016 because so many labs are focused on concussion research right now. But scientists are only beginning to understand the details of how concussions - also a serious problem in the military - damage the brain.

Here are some key numbers for content licensors in digital media: Netflix will pay approximately $3 billion in licensing and production fees this year to the television and film industry; Hulu is paying $192 million to license South Park; Spotify pays out 70 percent of its gross revenues to the music labels that hold the underlying rights to Spotify's catalogue.

Can India modernize its manufacturing economy and supply electricity to its growing population without relying heavily on coal - and quite possibly destroying the global climate?

While many scientists and climate change activists hailed December’s Paris agreement as a historic step forward for international efforts to limit global warming, the landmark accord rests on a highly dubious assumption: to achieve the goal of limiting the rise in global average temperature to less than 2 °C (much less the more ambitious goal of 1.5 °C), we don’t just need to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide to essentially zero by the end of this century.

A billion dollars is quite a lot of money to invest - even if your goal is saving the world from the ill effects of super-smart artificial intelligence that humans can’t control.

A reincarnation of one of the oldest ideas in artificial intelligence could finally make it possible to truly converse with our computers. And Facebook has a chance to make it happen first.