Sometimes forgotten in the spiraling U.S. crisis of opiate abuse is a clinical fact about narcotic pain medications: addiction is basically an unwanted side effect of drugs that are highly effective at blunting pain.

Addiction, of course, is a particularly dangerous and disruptive side effect, since it hijacks a patient's brain and demands ...Read more

For the first time, scientists have detected a DNA structure inside living human cells that looks more like a four-stranded knot than the elegant double helix we know from biology textbooks.

The tangled shape, known as an i-motif, had been seen before in the lab, but nobody thought it could occur in human cells -- until now.

The new work shows...Read more

Google is launching a new text messaging system for its Android platform to challenge Apple's iMessage in smartphone text messaging supremacy.

With Chat, Google is updating its current Short Messaging Service-run Android Messages app so that it can send and receive high-definition images and videos, set up group texts and allow reading receipts...Read more

CHICAGO -- It seemed like a killer idea: combat sexist harassment in online video games by unleashing hit squads of talented female players to slay the bullies.

But after marketing agency FCB Chicago launched "Bully Hunters" last week with a splashy livestream, the campaign was mocked by gamers, criticized by harassment experts and disowned by ...Read more

SEATTLE -- Airbus, Bill Gates and Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son have joined to back a spinoff from Bellevue, Wash.-based Intellectual Ventures that aims to launch a constellation of imaging satellites "that will deliver real-time, continuous video of almost anywhere on Earth."

Russell Hannigan, founder and chief executive of the new ...Read more

You walk into the grocery store with the best intentions, filing your cart with kale, broccolini, tofu and Greek yogurt.

Then you get home, feel pressed for time and order a pizza.

Before you know it, the perishables are going bad at the back of the fridge. They'll wind up in the trash, like so many other well-intentioned meals that never came...Read more

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