Law enforcement officials, lawmakers and consumers alike have championed the idea of a mobile phone kill switch ever since the Secure Our Smartphones initiative launched nearly a year ago. The plan is simple: get wireless carriers and handset manufacturers on…

Want to loose weight but cannot resist food cravings? Here is a solution: Play Tetris. According to a research conducted by PhD student Jessica Skorka-Brown, alongside Professors Jackie Andrade and Jon May, from Plymouth university’s Cognition Institute, just three minutes…

Just a month after Snapchat's database leak, the popular photo-sharing app is in the news again for all the wrong reasons. Jaime Sanchez, a cyber security researcher, who works as a security consultant for Spanish telecommunication giant Telefonica, has discovered…

Not to be outdone by Princeton’s recent paper predicting the death of Facebook by 2017, the social network’s own “scientists” have applied the school’s same robust methodology to, well, Princeton University. In keeping with the same principle of “correlation equals…

If you’ve ever felt like Facebook is little more than an epidemic spreading through society like a contagious disease, you might not be too far off base. Researchers from Princeton University have ultimately reached the same grim diagnosis, believing that…

Ahead of President Obama's expected announcement of widespread NSA reform later this month, a new study brings the agency's mass phone data collection operation under fire saying that it has had no positive impact on preventing acts of terrorism. …

A research done at the Johns Hopkins University has revealed that it is possible to remotely activate a built-in laptop webcam without triggering the warning LED next to it, The Washington Post reports. Though researchers used the 2008-era MacBook and…

Microsoft Research has developed a new tool designed to help prevent people creating weak passwords for themselves. Known as 'Telepathwords', the system takes each character that you type for your desired password and attempts to guess the next one, giving…

I was always told growing up that playing video games was a waste of time. Turns out, those people were wrong. A new study published in Molecular Psychiatry found that video gaming causes increases in the brain regions responsible for…

A research team out of the Netherlands has produced a storage medium that can last a million years. Standard magnetic disk drive storage, which was introduced nearly 70 years ago by IBM, has improved significantly over the years in many…

A newly published study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center takes a look at the different words used by various demographics of Facebook users. Unsurprisingly and perhaps stereotypically, women talked the most about shopping and doing…

A team of researchers from Stanford University have revealed the first-ever computer based on carbon nanotubes, the material that is widely expected to replace silicon as the building block of future computers.

To most regular TechSpot readers, the thought of having no internet might be a little disconcerting. After all, many of us use the web day in and day out to connect with friends, play online games, conduct research, manage our…

A group of researchers hailing from Europe and the US have successfully demonstrated what they are calling a hardware trojan attack on Intel’s third generation Ivy Bridge processor. It’s also very difficult to detect as the exploit is able to…

Darwin discovered the Galapagos Islands some 178 years ago, and through observation of this biodiverse territory he formulated his theory of evolution. Although you might never have the opportunity to recreate Darwin’s historic journey by visiting the islands in person,…

Back in June, Facebook decided to follow in the footsteps of Twitter and implemented hashtags into news feeds and posts. Like with other social media outlets, each hashtag is clickable and delivers the user to a search page for that…

Researchers from the University of Washington have successfully performed the first non-invasive human-to-human brain interface. What would appear to be the scene of a science fiction novel, the breakthrough allows any individual to control the movements of another person using…

Security researchers from the Technical University of Berlin have discovered a new way to block both phone calls and SMS messages with just a few software modifications to their own mobile device. According to the MIT Technology Review, the exploit works…

Researchers have been trying to sneak malicious software onto the App Store to expose holes in Apple's iOS security system for a while now. Well, a team at Georgia Tech led by Tielei Wang managed to do just that a…

According to website traffic data collected by Net Applications, Windows 8 has hit a definite if seemingly unimpressive milestone. Windows 8 has finally managed to surpass its ill-liked ancestor, Windows Vista, in becoming the world's third-most used operating system.

MIT researchers have demonstrated the application of using Wi-Fi signals to track the movements, locations and number of people inside buildings. Dubbed Wi-Vi, the inexpensive and portable "through-the-wall" radar system could have practical applications in law enforcement, search and rescue…

If you're an iPhone or iPad owner who uses hotspot mode but never bothered to change the seemingly-random password suggested by iOS, now is definitely a good time. German researchers have discovered (pdf) the passwords iOS issues can be easily…

Most of us would agree that Internet access plays a significant role in our day-to-day lives but is it really more important than food or sleep? That apparently appears to be the case based on a recent study released by…

Whether they want to be or not, many PC enthusiasts are well-acclimated to noisy fans; however, some choose quiet operation over impressive overclocking. Of course, that's exactly the problem: quietness traditionally comes at the cost of performance. Noctua's "ANC project"…

A new report from Pew Research Center released earlier today revealed that a third of American adults now own a tablet, further validating the notion that the portable devices are eating away at market share once owned by traditional computers.…