Using security cameras and algorithms, researchers at Carnegie Mellon created a nursing home monitoring system that "located individuals within one meter of their actual position 88 percent of the time." That's great news for people who want to be monitored all the time. For people who prefer to go about their business unobserved, it's another step toward a perfectly tracked future.

Snowflake, the long-lived gorilla who died in 2003, was famous for being the only known albino gorilla. He became a wildly popular attraction at the Barcelona Zoo in Spain, where he lived almost his entire life, becoming almost a mascot for the city. But until now, nobody knew why Snowflake looked the way he did.

A sweetener produced by most plants could hold the key to treating Parkinson's disease, a recent paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry asserts.

Last summer, in conjunction with Stanford researchers, Google[x], the R&D arm where ideas like Project Glass are born, built the world's largest artificial neural network designed to simulate a human brain. Now Andrew Ng, who directs Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab and was involved with Google's previous neural endeavor, has taken the project a step further. He and his team have created another neural network, more than six times the size of Google's record-setting achievement.

You know DNA makes proteins. It tells living things how to tick. It carries blue eyes and an early receding hairline from father to son (Sorry, son!). But beyond what it does biologically, it's also just a carrier for information-a barcode, but one that can barely be seen even under advanced microscopes.

Government email spying in the United States may have all the headlines, but America hardly has a monopoly on privacy violations. Google revealed a massive phishing scheme against users of Google products in Iran last Wednesday.

Sounds like a scenario that could have come straight from The Phantom Tollbooth's Dictionopolis. Researchers have created a program to catch pirates by their commas... to trap them with paragraph breaks.