Humans may not have been the only hominids who knew how to start a fire long ago. New research suggests that as early as 50,000 years ago, Neanderthals wielded this power as well.

The work, published Thursday in Scientific Reports, provides new evidence that Neanderthals may have created flames-on-demand by striking a small piece of pyrite ...Read more

Work is underway on a "JPOD" telecom "networking hub" that is set to open this fall, connecting University of Pennsylvania researchers and area start-ups to funders and scientists at Johnson & Johnson, the New Jersey-based drug and medical-supply giant. All this networking will occur at the school's Pennovation Works business incubator at 34th ...Read more

To this country's people of unusually small stature, dwarf tossing is an insult and, according to Little People of America, "objectifies the entire dwarf community."

That didn't stop Amazon inventors from using a hypothetical dwarf figurine to illustrate the operations of a newly patented warehouse-robotics system that "tosses" inventory items ...Read more

If your neighbors in the next county complain about your snoring, chances are good that you're among the estimated 22 million Americans who suffer from sleep apnea.

Despite its depiction as "ZZZZ's" in comic strips, snoring is no laughing matter. Left untreated, sleep apnea can cause high blood pressure, stroke, heart problems, diabetes and ...Read more

Q: My friend's iPhone 5 and my iPhone SE keep telling us that we don't have enough memory capacity to store more photos. So, we reluctantly delete a large number of photos, but still get the warning. What can we do?

-- Jo-Ida Hansen, St. Paul, Minn.

A: There's no need to lose photos that you like. If your iPhone is low on storage space, you ...Read more

As sophisticated as the scheme was by Russian intelligence agents to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, they used a simple hacking technique, among others, to infiltrate the email accounts of Democratic operatives, according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's latest indictment. And that technique -- known as "spear phishing" -- ...Read more

SAN DIEGO -- Janelle Ayres, a rising star at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, has collected her second honor in a month -- one which brings $1 million to fund her microbial research.

The grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation will allow Ayres to study alternative ways to cope with dangerous bacterial and viral infections. ...Read more

Walmart and Microsoft have signed a broad five-year cloud-computing deal as both companies try to find a way around Amazon in the race to the top.

Walmart will use Azure, Microsoft's cloud-computing system, and Microsoft 365, the Redmond company's suite of office software on the cloud, to run the retailer's internal operations, power its ...Read more

While hunting for the elusive Planet X, astronomers have discovered 12 additional moons around Jupiter, bringing the grand total of the planet's known satellites up to a whopping 79.

The new moons are all relatively small -- between 1 and 3 kilometers (.6 to 1.8 miles) across, which is likely why they haven't been spotted before, scientists ...Read more

Microsoft wants Congress to regulate facial recognition technology as concerns grow that it could be used to invade privacy and improperly monitor people.

Some civil-liberties groups and employees have called on tech companies to restrict the use of facial recognition, but Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote in a lengthy blog post Friday that ...Read more

NASA's administrator is a strong defender of President Donald Trump's proposals for space -- including an armed force and a permanent presence on the moon -- and says he wants Americans to realize how much their well-being depends on what happens far above Earth.

"Every banking transaction requires a GPS signal for timing," Jim Bridenstine said...Read more

If you were thinking that the ancient Alpine traveler known as Otzi -- and often known simply as Iceman -- scraped by on a diet of foraged grasses and berries, you'd be very wrong.

A comprehensive new study of his stomach contents reveals that Otzi, who perished roughly 5,300 years ago on a mountain in the Eastern Alps of Italy, died with a ...Read more

Snowflake, a California cloud-computing data software company, has launched its products on Microsoft Azure, another boost for the Redmond company as it competes with Amazon's popular cloud service.

Snowflake CEO and former longtime Microsoft executive Bob Muglia made the announcement Thursday, noting that more clients have been asking in the ...Read more

Astronomers from around the world announced a major discovery on Thursday that could help scientists better understand the birth of the universe and some of the most exotic objects in it, including black holes.

By linking a massive detector buried under the South Pole, a command center at Pennsylvania State University, advanced satellites, and ...Read more

Using a neutrino detector made of Antarctic ice, astronomers have for the first time pinpointed the source of a handful of high-energy neutrinos from far beyond our galaxy: a powerful blazar shining like a beacon from nearly 4 billion light-years away.

The extragalactic neutrinos and their origins, described in two papers in the journal Science...Read more

Twitter accounts with legions of fishy followers are about to take a hit. As part of its efforts to fight disinformation, the company announced Wednesday that locked accounts will soon stop being counted as followers.

Accounts that boast high numbers of followers are often seen as more credible. Twitter Inc.'s move is designed to chip away at ...Read more

Q: I read your column about protecting Windows XP from malware (see tinyurl.com/yapl8out). I would like to point out that XP users are not just putting themselves at risk. They are endangering everyone else by using PCs that can be taken over and used in botnets (groups of malware-infected computers used to attack websites, steal data or send ...Read more