The ability to re-engineer matter -- living and non-living -- at the atomic level is a key industrial story of the coming decade. The world of genes, proteins (3-100 nm), bacteria, viruses, telomeres, mitochondria (1-100 microns) and animal cells (mm) will come...

The machine itself doesn’t look very impressive. In fact, it looks more like a home experiment…something you might use to distil your own gin or vodka. There are a few working parts: some glass bottles…some chemicals…a few sequencing devices. In total it cost...

Robert Dill-Bundi was a great Swiss cycling champion. In Moscow, in 1980 he won the gold medal for the 4000m individual pursuit chasing his nearest rival down and finishing six seconds clear as he rushed across the line. When he won he stepped off the bike kneeled and...

Remember the dial-up internet and the finger tapping timpani it yielded? Well, maybe a new era of the ‘world wide wait’ looms. Global internet traffic is growing by at least 25% a year — far outstripping the current growth in bandwidth with mobile traffic growing at...

An experiment. Hold out your right arm and then slowly flex your wrist. Which comes first – the thought to flex your wrist, or the action itself? In the 1980s, an experiment by the neurologist Benjamin Libet raised some disturbing questions about the extent to which...

In 1986, Toshiba manufactured the first laptop computer in a bid to satisfy Japanese consumers’ needs for space and convenience. It was largely the work of an engineer, Tetsuya Mizoguchi, working on his own steam at the company’s Ome factory, 25 miles outside Tokyo....

Faster, Faster Tech is Running Wild Three Ways to Build a New Architecture Last summer, a group of Google researchers sent Intel a message warning them of an industry-shaking flaw in their chips. This flaw, which allowed access to 'partitioned' kernel memory, allowed...

The biggest stories of 2018 Five companies that will surface on your radar this year   We need to brace ourselves for even more extreme, non-linear events in 2018 than we saw in 2017, which left markets melting up, with further shrinking in price discovery, and a...