Articles by Katherine Noyes

For the first time in history, a manmade spacecraft has reached the outer edge of our solar system and will soon enter interstellar space Now about 10.8 billion miles from the sun, NASA's Voyager 1 probe has crossed into an area where the velocity of the hot ionized gas, or plasma, emanating directly outward from the sun has slowed to zero. Those ...

So Turkey Day has come and gone for another year here in the good old U-S-of-A, but what comes next might be even better -- at least from a geek's perspective That's right, it's Black Friday once again, and the tech shopping deals are ripe for the picking.

Nearly one in four stars similar to the sun may host planets as small as Earth, according to a new study funded by NASA and the University of California. Astronomers used the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii for five years to search 166 sun-like stars near our solar system for planets of various sizes, ranging from three to 1,000 times the mass of ...

Roughly a year after water molecules were first discovered on the moon, scientists last week announced that water is present in much greater quantities there than had originally been thought ...

A team of European astronomers has determined that a far-off galaxy spotted last year by the Hubble Space Telescope is the most distant object ever seen ...

Roughly six months after it launched an investigation into the allegations at the heart of the Blake Robbins v. the Lower Merion School District school spying case, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced on Tuesday that no charges will be filed "After a thorough review of the evidence in this matter by my office, the Federal Bureau of Invest...

The BlackBerry Torch 9800 has been widely viewed as Research In Motion's best shot at regaining even footing in its battle with rivals Apple and Google in the smartphone arena, but after just a few days on the market, the device's price has already been slashed Some 150,000 of the handsets were sold over the weekend, according to a report in The Wa...

Just a day after Oracle filed suit against Google for its use of Java in Android, the FOSS community received another blow at the hands of the tech giant in the form of news that it plans to kill the OpenSolaris project "All of Oracle's efforts on binary distributions of Solaris technology will be focused on Solaris 11," reads an internal e-mail th...

The Internet traffic management plan from Google and Verizon may be just a new proposal at this point, but in the short time since its introduction, it's proven to be nothing if not controversial Though the plan does include consumer protections against discrimination by Internet service providers, those protections are afforded only on Internet se...

Open source software is poised for rapid growth in enterprises over the next 12 months, but cost is no longer the primary driver behind open source adoption That's according to a new study from global consultancy Accenture, which based its findings on interviews with 300 executives at organizations in the United States, the United Kingdom and Irela...

As a deadline looms to decide the fate of the BlackBerry Messenger service in Saudi Arabia, Research In Motion is reportedly testing a series of in-country servers that would enable government monitoring of communications over the BlackBerry network RIM is reportedly working with the kingdom's three mobile-phone operators to test the servers, which...

Motorola and Verizon are working on a new tablet device on which users will be able to watch TV, according to a Tuesday report in the Financial Times The Android-based tablet will feature a 10-inch screen and will be closely linked with Verizon's FiOS digital pay-television service, the publication reported, according to "people briefed on the plan...

A new group announced Tuesday aims to create a community-built and -maintained version of Oracle's OpenSolaris operating system in which all portions of the code are open and fully available for use by developers Called "Illumos," the new project will replace the closed portions of Oracle's OpenSolaris code with open versions, making it possible fo...

The latest version of the Linux kernel was released on Sunday, offering not just a host of bug fixes but also new features designed for multicore environments Most notably, tapping technology contributed by Google, Linux version 2.6.35 includes Receive Packet Steering (RPS) and Receive Flow Steering (RFS) features that help to spread network handli...

The United Arab Emirates announced on Sunday that BlackBerry Messenger, BlackBerry E-mail and BlackBerry Web browsing services will be suspended in the UAE as of October 11 "BlackBerry data is immediately exported offshore, where it is managed by a foreign, commercial organization," the federation's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) exp...

Amazon's new, slimmed-down Kindle devices are notable for several things, not the least of which are the upgrades to their experimental WebKit browser It's faster and easier to navigate, says Amazon, and its new "article mode" feature extracts the main text-based content from Web pages for easier reading....

Personal data about millions of Android users could be sent to a mysterious Chinese website thanks to a set of wallpaper apps in the Android Market That's according to mobile security firm Lookout, which discovered the questionable apps as part of its new App Genome Project, an effort to identify security threats in the wild and provide insight int...

Google's "Facebook killer" came a step closer to reality Wednesday, when it was revealed that the company has been talking with game makers for potential inclusion of their wares on a new social network. Originally brought to light by a tweet last month from Digg Founder Kevin Rose, the new "Google Me" offering could include games from Playdom, El...

The LiMo Foundation and the GNOME Foundation on Monday announced that they have begun working together as partners to further open source innovation Starting immediately, LiMo Foundation will become a member of the GNOME Foundation's advisory board and the GNOME Foundation will become an industry liaison partner for the LiMo Foundation....

In what's been called the "biggest leak in intelligence history," more than 90,000 classified military documents about the war in Afghanistan came to light on Sunday and are wreaking havoc in political circles around the globe Covering the period from January 2004 to December 2009, the reports were published Sunday by whistle-blowing site Wikileaks...