In 2009, ExxonMobil announced that it would pay Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics up to $300 million to develop algae-based fuels. How did the project go? Not too well, to judge from that latest press release from Synthetic Genomics. Algae is a promising source of biofuel because it naturally produces large amounts of oil and can be [...]

The founder of once-popular virtual world Second Life, Philip Rosedale, is working on a new 3D digital world that looks like it will be operated using gestures and body-tracking hardware. Rosedale declined to talk about his new company, called High Fidelity, just yet. But videos and other material posted online by the company suggest it [...]

  One-time pads are the holy grail of cryptography–they are impossible to crack, even in principle. They work by adding a set of random digits to a message thereby creating a ciphertext that looks random to any eavesdropper. The receiver decodes the message by taking away the same set of random digits to reveal the [...]

Intel is a $53-billion-a-year company that enjoys a near monopoly on the computer chips that go into PCs. But when it comes to the data underlying big companies like Facebook and Google, it says it wants to “return power to the people.” Intel Labs, the company’s RD arm, is launching an initiative around what it [...]