Science and Tech

The tiny male bat didn't expect to wind up in a biologist's hand when he set out in search of a nighttime snack along Box Canyon Creek here.

After being snagged in a net, weighed and measured, the unhappy creature gnashed its teeth and squirmed as Pat Ormsbee stretched its wing for inspection.

The iPod Nano has been Apple's bestseller, moving 110 million units with its promise of easy music listening in a slim package.

But Apple believes the era of dedicated devices is waning, and the Nano is a good example of how Apple is evolving its market-leading media players into much more.

Among the tens of thousands of applications created for Apple Inc.'s iPod Touch and iPhone are more than 100 that transform the devices into music makers: synthesizers, guitars and drum machines that allow you to tap out rhythms and melodies, as well as trombones, flutes and ocarinas activated by blowing into the microphone.

Computer programs already recommend books to read or DVDs to watch. But can a mathematical algorithm predict if a song will become a hit?

Singer-songwriter Ben Novak said he was skeptical that a San Francisco company's technology could determine whether his song "Turn Your Car Around" would be a winner.

A black hole walks into a bar and says, "Hey, where'd everybody go?"

That old joke captures the essence of what most people believe about black holes -- places in the universe so dense that they suck in all matter and light, letting nothing escape.

Once upon a time in the long evolution of Homo sapiens, a band of our African ancestors learned to use fire for more than cooking meat, lighting the dark or warding off attacking animals.

Wanted: Friendly, open-minded community in need of jobs and a whack of infrastructure cash. Must be willing to play host to nuclear waste, perhaps until the end of time.

You have the right to remain silent -- and tweetless.

Anything indiscreet you send out on Twitter, Facebook or a blog post might remain alive forever in cyberspace.

Perhaps there should be a Miranda warning for social network users just as there is for suspected criminals.

After hearing the warnings about the mercury we ingest when eating fish and how toxic heavy metals are, it might seem like a bad idea to use mercury in vaccines that are injected into the human body.

But scientists say that the mercury used with some vaccines -- known as ethyl mercury or thimerosal -- is much different than the methyl mercury that comes from fish.

We are about to see a sea change in visual displays, with the first significant products trickling out this fall.

You may have heard the term "OLED," organic light-emitting diode. While it might sound like something you'd find at Whole Foods, it is actually a technology in which the light from a display screen comes from a layer of organic compounds.