Glenn McGee of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics argues that the effort to isolate the minimmum number of genes and organism needs to survive could allow 'viral hacking' by making it easy to assemble new viruses from scratch.

A revolutionary new chip that can translate light transmitted by fiber-optic lines into electrical signals could make broadband dreams a reality.

NASA is currently finalizing a deal that would bring about the 'first major commercial use' of the International Space Station.

Last month, the Clinton administration ended the previous practice of 'selective availability' or the intentional degrading of GPS signals to decrease their military utility. Robert Wright argues that this only makes GPS satellites more useful to terrorists and rogue states planning precision strikes with cruise missles or other crude weapons.

Scientists at the Comdex convention discuss the practical implications and future of the current boom in supercomputing.

Researchers are taking advantage of distributed computing techniques to tackle computation-intense protein folding tasks.

The world's fastest commercial supercomputer will soon be devoted exclusively to solving the world's most powerful puzzle. A new IBM supercomputer will be made available to companies trying to ask questions of the recently decoded human genome.

An overview and critical analysis of the space-oriented defense policies of the new U.S. Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

An overview of the military threat to the U.S. satellite infrastructure.

European Union nations, and perhaps even the United States, are about to make nearly any form of hacking ? even security research ? illegal by treaty. The possibility scares a group of top European computer security experts gathered in Amsterdam this week so much that one declared, ?It?s the witch hunt of the 21st century.?