At first you might think you are in the office of a Silicon Valley tech company. There are flip cameras everywhere. Smart phones lie strewn about among computers and 3G dongles. A Wii game console has been abandoned on a shelf. But the sweet tea and thick cigarette smoke suggest otherwise. Tucked away in a popular neighborhood of Damascus in the shadow of Mount Qassioun, the parched ridge overlooking Syria's capital, this is the makeshift headquarters ...

In a talk at the Atlantic Council this week, CIA director-general Michael Hayden said Osama bin Laden is alive. I'll take his word for it. But bin Laden's strange disappearance makes one wonder what exactly happened to him. The last relatively reliable bin Laden sighting was in late 2001. A video that he apparently appeared in last year shows him with a dyed beard. More than a few Pakistani intelligence operatives who knew bin Laden scoff at ...

Prescription pads, clipboards and patient charts are so 20th century. In the era of CT scans, gene-splicing and stem-cell breakthroughs, handwritten record-keeping feels about as outmoded as the fluoroscope. It's more than just strangely retro; it's fantastically expensive. Health care in the U.S. costs a jaw-dropping $2 trillion annually, or more than $6,600 for every man, woman and child in the country. Streamlining the industry by eliminating medical errors, labor costs and general clunkiness caused by paperwork alone ...

The iPhone started out the way a lot of cool things do: as something completely different. A few years ago, Steve Jobs noticed how many development dollars were being spent--particularly in the greater Seattle metropolitan area--on what are called tablet PCs: flat portable computers that work with a touch screen instead of a mouse and keyboard. Jobs, being Jobs, was curious. He had some Apple engineers noodle around with a touch screen. When they showed him what they came up ...

Let's dispense with the mythology right up front. A driver's license has never been just about driving. When the first ones were issued in the early 1900s, the idea was to collect fees, not to test driving skills. More recently, revoking licenses became a way to punish people who didn't pay child support or, in Wisconsin, shovel snow off their walks. In its most coveted form, the license is proof of age--or of fraud, as the case may be. In ...

They oohed as animated football players threw one another to the ground. They ahhed as vividly colored martial artists gouged each other's eyes. The crowd huddled around ultrathin TVs earlier this month at the Metreon, a four-story Sony entertainment palace in San Francisco, was getting a sneak preview of Sony's much-touted PlayStation2. And they were loving it. But this Sony-sponsored launch party was hardly a tough audience. Many of the well-dressed game gawkers were actually foot soldiers in the Sony ...

Amazon, the online retailing giant, did more than any other company to turn the sale of digital books into a real business with the 2007 launch of the Kindle electronic reader. The company has sold an estimated 1.7 million of the handheld devices in the U.S., and it's getting ready to ship millions more. On Oct. 6, Amazon announced it would soon begin selling Kindles — complete with a key feature that allows users to wirelessly download e-books from ...

Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for two breakthroughs that led to two major underpinnings of the digital age -- fiber optics and digital photography, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. Charles K. Kao, a British and U.S. citizen, won for "groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication." Willard S. Boyle, a Canadian and U.S. citizen, and George E. Smith, a U.S. citizen, "invented the first successful imaging technology using ...

For the past decade, Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell has been moving the data from his brain onto computers -- where he knows it will be safe. Sure, you could say all of us do this to some extent. We save digital pictures from family events and keep tons of e-mail. But Bell, who is 75 years old, takes the idea of digital memory to a sci-fi-esque extreme. He carries around video equipment, cameras and audio recorders to ...

What's hot off the presses this week? Any one of the more than 2 million books old enough to fall out of copyright into the public domain. Over the last seven years, Google has scanned millions of dusty tomes from deep in the stacks of the nation's leading university libraries and turned them into searchable documents available anywhere in the world through its search box. And now Google Book Search, in partnership with On Demand Books, is letting readers turn ...