After nine months of number-crunching on a powerful supercomputer, a beautiful spiral galaxy matching our own Milky Way has emerged from a computer simulation of the physics involved in galaxy formation and evolution by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) and the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Zurich.

Developers have created a crowdsourced radiation map to track the flow of radiation from the failed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, using a mix of government sources and data from amateurs equipped with geiger counters.

The decades-long growth in computer performance will come to a screeching halt without huge changes in software and revolutionary new microchips. That's the stark warning in a new report from the US National Research Council and it's bad news on many levels for a trillion-dollar industry that has become an engine of economic growth.

Recent progress has renewed enthusiasm for finding avenues to build significantly more powerful quantum computers. Laboratory efforts in the United States and in Europe are under way using a number of technologies.

A newly built supercomputer in China appears poised to take the world performance lead, another sign of the country's growing technological prowess that is likely to set off alarms about U.S. competitiveness and national security.

Europe has proposed a global Internet Treaty to protect the net from political interference and place into international law its founding principles of open standards, net neutrality, freedom of expression and pluralistic governance.

Researchers are working on creating digital avatars, a lifelike digital representation that can continue long after your biological body has decomposed.

NASA scientists are crowdsourcing lunar exploration by appealing to space fans to help identify features on the Moon - and even to discover the wreckage of long-lost spacecraft.

A major hurdle in the ambitious quest to design and construct a radically new kind of quantum computer has been finding a way to manipulate the single electrons that very likely will constitute the new machines' processing components or "qubits." Princeton University's Jason Petta has discovered how to do just that -- demonstrating a method that alters the properties of a lone electron without disturbing the trillions of electrons in its immediate surroundings.

A team of quantum physicists has taken the first steps towards using a quantum computer to predict how a chemical reaction will take place.