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 ...

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 — ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...