The Supreme Court ended its term Monday with a high-profile ruling that violent video games are protected by the First Amendment, but a bigger technology decision could be looming. The court agreed to hear a case next term about when the government can put GPS devices on people's cars — which could produce one of the court's biggest privacy rulings in years. The GPS issue is important in its own right — the government can learn a lot ...

At 4:30, when most of Wall Street is winding down, Walter Zimmermann begins a high-stakes, high-wire act conducted live before a paying audience. About 200 institutional investors—including airlines and oil companies—shell out up to $3,000 a month to catch his daily webcast on the volatile energy markets, a performance that can move hundreds of millions of dollars. "I'm not paid to be wrong—I can tell you that," Zimmermann says. But as he clicks through dozens of screens and graphics on ...

Of all the things that have changed in China over the past 30 years, transportation has undergone one of the most obvious of transformations. Where city streets once swarmed with bicycles, they are now full of automobiles. Cars clog intersection and expressways. Their exhaust clouds the sky and the air is full of the sound of horns. But zipping through the congestion is the vanguard of another transportation revolution: vehicles that use no gas, emit no exhaust and are ...

In the future of Stephen Spielberg's Minority Report, televisions and computers have been replaced by transparent screens on which life-size images appear to be floating in thin air. Watching Tom Cruise operate this fictional technology, David Lauren, Vice President of Ralph Lauren, was inspired to develop similar screens, but with a retail spin — his version would be implanted behind a store's glass window and would be touch sensitive, allowing window shoppers to interactively browse through ...

When no one owns a resource, we tend to overuse it--winding up with polluted skies, fished-out oceans and battles over access to freshwater. But too much ownership leads to problems too. A pharmaceutical company is stymied by a web of patents and doesn't make a drug. An airport can't buy land for a new runway to ease congestion because dozens of people own slivers of property. A production house, faced with a mishmash of music-licensing rights, keeps an old sitcom ...

Health care in America is suffering a total nervous breakdown, but it isn't just because doctors are striking and maternity wards are closing. Health-care premiums are rising at unsustainable rates. Some economists estimate that unnecessary tests and procedures, ordered by doctors to build a record just in case there is a lawsuit, cost more than $100 billion a year--enough to provide health insurance for the 40 million Americans who have no coverage. Modern medical technology is bringing us miracle cures, ...

The newest technologies--computers, genetic engineering and the emerging field of nanotech--differ from the technologies that preceded them in a fundamental way. The telephone, the automobile, television and jet air travel accelerated for a while, transforming society along the way, but then settled into a manageable rate of change. Each was eventually rewarded more for staying the same than for radically transforming itself--a stable, predictable, reliable condition known as "lock-in." Computers, biotechnology and nanotech don't work that way. They are ...

The word "stem" is tossed around so much at education meetings these days, you'd think you were at a gardening seminar. STEM is shorthand for "science, technology, engineering, and mathematics" — all fields that are growing, providing lucrative jobs, and key to future American competitiveness. That's why everyone from President Obama to the United States Chamber of Commerce is worried about whether we're producing enough STEM graduates from our colleges and universities. That this ...

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was a very rich, very clever man. He got up on a big stage and held up a new kind of computer. It was flat, and it didn't have a keyboard. This very rich, very clever man then tried to convince a bunch of reporters that in five years this flat, keyboardless computer would be the most popular kind of computer in the country. Some of ...

For farmers hoping for a healthy harvest, the best place to turn for help these days is the Monsanto Corp. One of the world's leading biotechnology companies--and lately a pioneer in genetically engineered seeds--Monsanto has been incorporating flashy traits like herbicide and pest resistance into everything from canola to corn. But such supercrops don't come cheap. Farmers pay a premium for Monsanto seeds, and to make sure they keep paying, the company requires them to sign an agreement promising not ...