By JAMES TEMPLE, San Francisco Chronicle

"Jeopardy!" was elementary for Watson, IBM's multimillion-dollar artificial intelligence supercomputer that trounced several of the quiz game's champions last year.

But can a computer beat the world's quickest minds in crosswords, a game defined as much by humor and wordplay as logic and knowledge?

In the spring of 2010, thousands of online customers clicked on the terms of service at Game-station.co.uk and unwittingly sold their souls.

SAN FRANCISCO - University of California-Berkeley professor Dennis Baldocchi has taken on the not-so-modest task of monitoring "the breathing of the biosphere."

In March 2008, Dr. Laura Stachel arrived in the obstetrics ward of a state hospital in Zaria, Nigeria, determined to find out why so many women were dying in childbirth.

Late last week, the Federal Trade Commission proposed an overdue update to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule that begins to address the industry's transformation.

SAN FRANCISCO - Tucked into the cluster of business parks surrounding Stanford University, a team of young engineers is assembling a fleet of robots that can fold laundry, bake cookies, flip pancakes and deliver cold beer.

Technical manuals and popular fiction helped thrust robots into the popular imagination in the late 1970s, cast in the twin archetypes of mechanical monsters or tin sidekicks.

LinkedIn's enormously successful initial public offering Thursday may well come to represent the "Netscape moment" of the social-networking era. That IPO, on Aug. 9, 1995, famously touched off the Internet boom.

Security experts watching closely for any sign that sophisticated cybercrime was making the leap from the personal computer to the smart phone caught a stunning one this fall.

A potent new variant of an infamous piece of malicious software was attacking Symbian and BlackBerry phones in a multilevel scheme designed to thwart the defenses of banks.

Attorneys general in 18 states have demanded that Craigslist remove its adult services section, the latest clash in a long-running conflict over online sexual ads. It's likely to lead to a court battle, congressional debate or both, legal experts say.