Articles tagged as Computers | Smithsonian Magazine

Manufacturers have made it increasingly difficult for individuals or independent repair people to fix electronics. A growing movement is fighting back

July 13, 2016

Cool Finds

The Code That Sent Apollo 11 to the Moon Just Resurfaced Online and Is Chock-Full of Jokes

Published on GitHub, the array of in-jokes, pop culture and Shakespeare asides in the comments on the code show the human side of the project

July 11, 2016

Kevin Kelly unpacks 12 technological forces in his new book.

Wired Founder Kevin Kelly On the Technologies That Will Dominate Our Future

The optimistic futurist says we’ll share more, own less and spend far more time on our devices

July 7, 2016

New Research

Google’s Self-Driving Cars Are Learning to Recognize Cyclists’ Hand Signals

Cyclists, meet the nicest car you’ll ever share the road with

July 6, 2016

Ticket-buying bots are snatching up seats and jacking up the price of concert and theater tickets

June 9, 2016

Fragment 19, a piece of the back cover inscription plate, enhanced with state-of-the-art techniques to make the characters more readable.

The World’s First Computer May Have Been Used To Tell Fortunes

Researchers have decoded more writing on the 2,000-year-old Antikythera mechanism and found it may have an astrological purpose

June 8, 2016

A selection of "Emotikis" inspired by Maori culture and traditions.

Age of Humans

Emotikis and New Keyboards Bring Indigenous Cultures to Text Messaging

From Maori emojis to First Nations languages

June 1, 2016

A page of a manuscript of Gregorian chants

Cool Finds

Inside the Effort to Digitize Medieval Monks’ Chants

Scanning and interpreting centuries-old manuscripts is a challenge because musical notation wasn’t formalized yet

May 27, 2016

Technological change takes forever to boot up

May 26, 2016

A scene from "Ice Age" rendered through ta computer algorithm to look like an animated painting.

New Research

This Computer Algorithm Transforms Movies Into Breathtaking Works of Art

These neural networks can make any moving image into a masterpiece from Picasso to van Gogh

May 20, 2016

Some molecular motors in this “biocomputer” are made in the lab but copy those found in brains.

Can Proteins From Living Cells Solve Problems That Vex Supercomputers?

When nature knows best

May 2016

Future Is Here Festival

Tech Visionary Nicholas Negroponte Talks About the Future of Education

The act of writing a computer program, says the founder of MIT’s Media Lab, allows a child to learn about learning

April 20, 2016

Every single one of the 148 million pixels in this portrait was based on Rembrandt's body of work.

Cool Finds

“New” Rembrandt Created, 347 Years After the Dutch Master’s Death

The painting was created using data from more than 168,000 fragments of Rembrandt’s work

April 5, 2016

University of California, Irvine students playing League of Legends.

Cool Finds

UC Irvine Becomes the First American Public University To Offer E-Sports Scholarships

The university jumps into the world of competitive gaming

March 31, 2016

Cool Finds

Roald Dahl’s Iconic Illustrator Inspired This New Font

Quentin Blake’s handwriting has elements of spontaneity and joy

March 21, 2016

FCC chairman Tom Wheeler speaking at the 2015 TechCrunch Disrupt conference.

Regulators are taking on internet service providers over targeted ads

March 15, 2016

Cool Finds

Virtual Reality is Coming to Real-Life Rollercoasters

Soar with Superman or pilot an alien-fighting jet

March 9, 2016

She knows where this photo was taken—and so might a new neural network.

New Research

Google’s New A.I. Can Tell Exactly Where a Photo Was Taken

A new neural network is better than humans at sussing out the location of a picture

March 1, 2016

How a law signed by George Washington is being applied to Apple

February 24, 2016

Steve Wozniak’s Apple I Booted Up a Tech Revolution

With only a circuit board, keyboard and tiny, blurry monitor, the circa 1975 computer looks crude by today’s standards

March 2016