PHILADELPHIA -- The very day of the emergency landing in Philadelphia by Southwest Airlines Flight 1380, investigators were blaming a type of failure that spells alarm for materials engineers everywhere: metal fatigue.

That means one of the engine's titanium fan blades, after vibrating or otherwise flexing many thousands of times over its ...Read more

So much for the utopian idea of eco-friendly, electric scooters helping solve the Bay Area's urban transportation woes.

A week after impounding 66 rentable scooters that were blocking sidewalks and doorways, the San Francisco city attorney this week declared them a "public nuisance" and issued "cease and desist" orders to the three companies ...Read more

A wide range of technology giants find themselves unified by a single concern: that Amazon has the inside track to win a huge winner-take-all government cloud-computing contract that could help accelerate the Seattle company's lead in the fast-growing industry.

The Department of Defense this week released more than 1,000 comments it received in...Read more

Last month, Apple announced it acquired the digital magazine distributor Texture as an entry to the journalism world. Now, it plans to use its platform to launch a premium news subscription by 2019.

Apple plans to integrate Texture's platform -- which catalogued more than 200 magazines and curated them based on the user's interests for a $9.99-...Read more

Q: My Windows 7 laptop has been steadily losing hard disk space as new data is stored on it from a source that I can't determine. The amount of stored data has been climbing at a rate of about 270 megabytes per day for nearly five months. I haven't added anything to the PC but recommended updates and a few spreadsheets and text files. I suspect ...Read more

CHICAGO -- Meijer plans to launch a self-scanning mobile application in Chicago-area stores by the end of the summer, a move likely to be followed by some larger retailers in the near future.

The Shop & Scan service allows shoppers to scan products as they shop with a Meijer app downloaded on their phones and bag the groceries on the go. To ...Read more

Scientists have found the first hard evidence of a large and ancient protoplanet embedded in extraterrestrial diamonds that fell to Earth about 10 years ago.

To be clear, the diamonds did not fall to Earth on their own. Instead, they were discovered inside a small asteroid that slammed into the atmosphere over the Nubian Desert in northeastern ...Read more

Thousands of family-friendly apps from the Google Play Store are potentially violating federal law, according to a new large-scale study from North American and European universities and organizations.

The research, recently published in the journal Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, showed that 3,337 Android apps on Google Play ...Read more

In previous columns I wrote about computer hardware and software I rely on nearly every day. This week I'll tackle the state of stuff I don't need and, in some instances, stuff I wish I hadn't bought.

Computers -- laptops or desktops -- with less than eight gigabytes of memory: Eight gigs are the minimum for either Windows PCs or Macs. ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Social media companies have embraced artificial intelligence tools to scrub their platforms of hate speech, terrorist propaganda and other content deemed noxious. But will those tools censor other content? Can a program judge the value of speech?

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told Congress last week that his company is rapidly ...Read more

Reddit has a history of allowing its users to say just about anything. On Wednesday, its CEO said racist language is just fine -- officially giving license to the hatred that already lives on the site, which bills itself as the front page of the internet.

Now he's backpedaling a bit.

As tech companies face increasing pressure to police content...Read more

If you want to take a good stroll down memory lane, new research suggests you'd better get out of that chair more often.

In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers have found that in people middle-aged and older, a brain structure that is key to learning and memory is plumpest in those who spend the most time standing up and moving. At every age...Read more

By now Facebook users seem to finally get that they may not get charged anything for using the social networking service but it sure isn't free, not after being subjected to ad after spookily tailored ad.

Yet users still seem to have a long way to go to fully understand what Facebook and the other big tech companies are really doing. And, of ...Read more

In a previous column, I mentioned software essentials for my everyday computing, which centers on word processing, photo and video editing and money management. This column will examine hardware I can't live without.

Das Keyboard: With its clicky feel and sound, reminiscent of the first IBM keyboards, the Das has held up well after two years of...Read more

It may not be a buy-one-get-one-free deal, but an offering from Spotify and Hulu comes pretty close.

On Tuesday, Spotify said that subscribers to its Premium music-streaming service will be able to bundle it with Hulu's limited-commercial TV plan for $12.99 a month. The deal is similar to an offering Spotify made to students beginning last fall...Read more

Q: I'm having problems with Apple's "authorization" process that gives my PC the right to play songs in the iTunes program. This started when I changed e-mail addresses and switched my iTunes account to the new address. I then authorized my PC to play iTunes music. But when I try to play music, I get a message saying it's not authorized. The ...Read more