Category: Technology

The days of varsity jackets and commitment rings are gone. Facebook.com is the new arbiter of who is and isn’t available… Dara Hornik and her boyfriend, Eric Mickschl, have spent nearly one-third of their lives together. The 23-year-olds from the Milwaukee suburbs dated through most of high school and all of college. They know almost […]

Young Muslims look to imams online for answers to religious questions… A young Muslim from the United States earnestly asks, “I have been wanting to get a tattoo of the crescent moon and star, then found out it is against Islam to get a tattoo. But what if the tattoo is religious?” “Is it permissible […]

Tour guides at museums and historical attractions across the country have been replaced by recorded audio guides… Sunlight still streams onto the rusted iron bars of the prison cells on Alcatraz Island, but park rangers no longer lead tourists around “the Rock,” as it is known. Instead, visitors traverse the notorious island listening to audio […]

A new site explores connections between science, history and economics to see how climate change affects businesses and community life… Rising temperatures in the Middle East more than 8,000 years ago directly led to the invention of money. The carbon emitted from cars and power plants in your neighborhood may be causing destructive hurricanes. These […]

Iraq war veterans are revisiting the combat zone with the help of virtual-reality; helping researchers understand how post-traumatic stress disorder develops… Virtual reality therapy has been used to treat combat veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder since the late 1990s. Now a researcher in New York City is using it to see how the problem […]

Video games have gained growing popularity as the baby boomer generation moves into retirement. More seniors are turning to games to keep their memories and mental skills sharp… The last time Barbara St. Hillaire of Mantua, Ohio, was in New York City, she didn’t come to see the Statue of Liberty, ground zero or even […]

Businesses and call centres are rendering customers’ private details a free-for-all by failing to secure their VoIP networks against ‘wiretapping’ hackers… Scanit (www.scanit.net), a top security company that audits major IT systems, says as many as 7 out of every 10 calls being made over the internet is potentially open to hackers. Data the company […]

Security specialist Scanit says web phone installations in corporate environments have little or no protection against VoIP wiretapping… “Throughout the Middle East, the installations we have seen have not had strong security controls in place,” Scanit engineer Sheran Gunasekera explains. “Primarily, the reason for this has been the fact that the system integrator or implementer had not […]