Open your pocket knife and take a look at its blade. There’s a good chance it isn’t a pristine slab of steel, but rather that the area closest to the handle — an unsharpened bit called the ricasso — ...

Imagine for a moment a technology that is simple and universal, and needs no software updates. It is a string of numbers, each portion acting as a precise set of coordinates—so basic and elegant that ...

An American friend living in Beijing once said she refused to communicate with anyone whose email address consisted of a string of numbers, such as [email protected]. This made sense to me at the ...

When accepting credit card numbers over the phone from customers, you can easily identify the type of card without asking the customer. While each credit card has a unique string of numbers, in ...

If you thought the sprawl of 16 numbers across the front of your credit was randomly generated, think again: like any good string of numbers, an algorithm was involved in its creation. In fact, the ...

Lotteries, accidents and rolls of dice — the world around us is full of unpredictable events. Yet generating a truly random series of numbers for encryption has remained a surprisingly difficult task.

Introduction Have you ever tried to have a conversation with someone so far away that you couldn't really hear each other? Without yelling, it's hard to have a conversation over long distances. So ...