Flying sick was a bad choice. Your congested ears refuse to pop and now you're stuck on an international flight, cruising at 30,000 feet of ear-splitting agony. Here's how to fix it. Read More >>

Tucked in a corner of Soho Square, cosied up against ad agencies and seemingly every media firm in London, is the London HQ of Dolby, who you may remember from the title credits of just about every film ever. Hiding in the heart of this otherwise-ordinary building, though, is arguably the coolest cinema in the country, created at enormous expense to demonstrate the next gen of cinema tech. Read More >>

Hospital infection rates are on the rise, according to CDC estimates, and in some instances people wind up more sick in hospital than when they arrived. These infections kill around 100,000 vulnerable patients and cost the healthcare industry £20 billion annually. To combat hyper-infectious agents like Clostridium difficile (C-diff) or Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), doctors are turning to a different method of disinfection to destroy bacteria by tearing their DNA apart with UV light. Read More >>

The world is up to its ears in plastic. You would be hard pressed to find items in your life that are devoid of this amazingly versatile material. But plastics are a varied bunch and some could potentially even give you cancer. So, read on to avoid being suckered into buying a knockoff water bottle that infuses a nauseating chlorine-flavour into your drink because it's made from cheap, shiny PVC. Read More >>

Microsoft enabled two-factor authentication this morning. That's awesome, because two-factor authentication is a simple, cheap method of making yourself virtually hack-proof on the internet. And not enough people use it. Read More >>

That pet rock of yours lose a bit of its luster over the years? Not to worry, NASA plans to put one big enough for the whole world to share in orbit around the moon by the start of the next decade. Here's how. Read More >>

The first people to step on to the surface of Mars won't arrive aboard the chemical-fueled rockets that delivered Apollo 11 to the Moon — they simply don't provide enough thrust to get to the Red Planet before exposing their crews to months of dangerous space radiation. Instead, NASA is turning to long-ignored nuclear-thermal rocket technology to deliver the first Martian explorers into history. Read More >>

For as ubiquitous as connectivity has become and how reliant we've grown on it, the Internet is still a digital jungle where hackers easily steal sensitive information from the ill-equipped and where the iron-fisted tactics of totalitarian regimes bent on controlling what their subjects can access are common. So instead of mucking around in public networks, just avoid them. Use a VPN instead. Read More >>

Digital copyright is broken. We know this inherently, and wheeze exasperation whenever the latest nonsensical DRM news up. But fixing it's not as simple as tossing the whole system out the window. So here's a breakdown of every way digital copyright has gone wrong, and, with luck and persistence and prevailing sanity, how it can maybe fix itself. Read More >>

If there is one complaint we hear from Android users more than any other, it's the speed at which software updates arrive. Or don't arrive. It's especially tough on tech enthusiasts who read about all the advantages of the new update, but can't get it on their own devices for six months, if at all. Even brand new devices typically fail to launch with the latest version of Android. Read More >>

While 8-tracks and cassettes are as relevent to the digital world as wax cylinders, the vinyl LP is still being steadily produced and collected despite, or perhaps thanks to, their imprecise warm analogue acoustics. Here's how LPs get their unique sound. Read More >>

Turns out, being blown out of an airlock and turning into a meat popsicle after succumbing to hypoxia isn't so bad. At least, not when compared to the multitude of other deadly maladies that await you in the depths of space. Here are just a few ways that interplanetary exploration is conspiring to kill us all. Read More >>

Lighter, less expensive and more energy dense than other secondary battery technologies, lithium-ion has become the dominant form of rechargeable battery today. It powers everything from mobile phones and laptops to cars and commercial jets. But there is one little problem — these batteries don't just short circuit, they explode into flames. Here's what goes on inside a lithium cell before it goes boom. Read More >>

That self-winding perpetual-movement monstrosity strapped to your forearm is accurate across a hemisphere's worth of time zones. But no matter how extravagantly handcrafted or precisely engineered your Rolex is, it'll never be as accurate as a cheap digital gas station watch. Here's why. Read More >>

When you listen to music, when its waves of sound collide with your ear, you don't hear a wall of sound. A great deal of information might travel in a sound wave and, if that sound wave were actually a giant wave of water rushing onto a beach, you might expect to feel it as a big shove like any other big wave of water coming in from the ocean. Except that's not what happens when this particular wave hits you. Read More >>