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

My family thinks I'm a bit of a hypochondriac, but at my age I want to head off potential problems before they turn into ones that require expensive medical attention.

I have a portable blood-pressure set. To check my blood sugar level, I have a set of lancets and test strips. A drop of blood makes the doctor go away.

Twice a year I have ...Read more

We're number 19! And in the case of the Bay Area's booming economy, that's impressive, according to a new report released Tuesday that detailed the region's "immense growth."

If the Bay Area happened to be its own independent nation, it would command the 19th-largest economy in the world, according to the Bay Area Council's Economic Institute. ...Read more

It's official. Once the preferred starting price point for many of the digital cable alternatives, the $35-all-you-can-stream bundles will, by the end of the month, vanish from the market.

That's because AT&T this week decided to hike up its DirecTV Now prices, meaning all of its streaming TV packages, including the base $35 monthly ...Read more

Since 2011, Stitch Fix's army of personal stylists has shipped curated boxes of clothing to women so they can try on and buy tops, trousers, dresses and coats from the comfort of their home.

The San Francisco company -- which went public last November -- added men's clothes in 2016. Now it's tackling a new frontier: clothes for kids.

Stitch ...Read more

Lawmakers are asking Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Larry Page how our smartphones may be tracking us without our knowledge.

In separate letters to the two chief executives, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Monday requested more information about how iPhones and Androids are collecting data on their users.

For ...Read more

There's more than one way to supersize a dinosaur. Scientists studying the ancient bones of sauropod relatives that walked the Earth more than 200 million years ago have found that they grew to multiton masses 30 million years before the appearance of their cousins, the titanosaurs.

The findings described in the journal Nature Ecology & ...Read more

The arrival of the first Europeans in the Americas in the 15th century didn't just affect the lives of native people already living here. It also took a devastating toll on their pets.

In a paper published this week in Science, an international team of archaeologists and geneticists report that the lineage of dogs that thrived alongside Native ...Read more

SEATTLE--Struck by a ship, entangled in crab pots, stillborn, emaciated: It's been a tough three months for whales.

Since April 3, whales -- mostly grays, and humpbacks -- have been entangled and/or stranded on the beach in Oregon and Washington in numbers not seen in nearly two decades, with 16 cases of large whale strandings so far, compiled ...Read more