Silicon Valley

Every year, an infectious "superbug" known as MRSA kills thousands of Americans who never should have died. But an international group of scientists think they may have found the key to shutting down the lethal bacteria that leads to these deaths and to countless less-serious infections.

According to IBM Research, which worked with the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore on the discovery of the new antibiotic nanoparticles, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) killed 19,000 Americans in 2005.

This dangerous infectious bacteria is often found in hospitals and other places, like health clubs and schools, where people … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--After three days jammed into buses headed here from cities across the country and four days perfecting their pitches, the winners of the second-annual Startup Bus competition claimed victory tonight.

If you haven't been following the happenings of the Startup Bus, 38 teams of so-called "buspreneurs" departed on six buses from San Francisco, Chicago, Cleveland, Miami, and New York last Tuesday, headed for the South by Southwest conference (SXSW) here. Each team, formed mainly from strangers aboard their bus, faced this challenge: conceive of an idea, and take the time from departure to arrival in Austin … Read more

It sounds like the beginning of a joke: a couple dozen coders and geek entrepreneurs step off a shiny, high-tech bus at a barbecue joint in Texas.

But a joke it's not. It's a scenario that will likely play out this week on the Startup Bus, which is, yes, a group of a couple dozen coders and geek entrepreneurs riding a shiny, high-tech bus through the Lone Star State from their hometowns to the South by Southwest Interactive conference (SXSW Interactive) in Austin, Texas, part of the broader SXSW music and film festival.

This is no ordinary bus … Read more

PALM DESERT, Calif.--In 2008, when TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington told CNET that the venerable Demo conference "needs to die," he ushered in an era of extreme competitiveness in the tech start-up-oriented conference world.

Arrington issued his sinister words as part of a conversation about why he had scheduled his own conference--the TechCrunch 50--directly against Demo that year, and his general argument was that shows that charged well into five-figures to let start-ups present their wares to investors and press needed to be dispensed with.

Flash forward three years later, and the TechCrunch 50, or TC 50 as … Read more

SAN JOSE, Calif.--I'm going to just come out and admit it--I was rooting for the humans.

By "humans," of course, I mean Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two men who on the one hand are the greatest champions in the history of "Jeopardy" and who on the other just ended up getting their butts handed to them at the game by a computer that didn't even seem to know that Toronto isn't in the United States.

In case you were somehow in a cabin in the mountains with no Internet access and … Read more

President Obama is expected to meet with some of Silicon Valley's highest-profile executives tomorrow in San Francisco, including Apple's Steve Jobs, Google's Eric Schmidt, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, according to an ABC News report.

The San Francisco Chronicle and CNET cousin KCBS (part of CBS Corp.) reported earlier this week that Obama would make an appearance somewhere in the area on Thursday for meetings with "business leaders in technology and innovation," but it's unclear whether any of the meetings or appearances will be open to the public or media.

Obama has paid visits … Read more

It may sound like one of those jokes that makes everyone groan, but here's a question anyway: what would happen if The Sims and Spore creator Will Wright walked into a bar?

If it was the watering hole at the end of the universe featured in "Bar Karma," Wright's new interactive TV series, it might well be a reflection on his illustrious career.

"Bar Karma," which premieres Friday night on Current TV--which also just scored former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann--centers around a timeless bar where figures from throughout history come and face the question &… Read more

With just 20 simple words and two entries, it began: "Hello, world." And "Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes."

Written by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales on January 15, 2001, those four sentences ushered in one of the most widely used and important reference projects in history, let alone on the Internet: Wikipedia.

Tomorrow, Wikipedia turns 10 years old. It's hard to imagine that a tiny, user-created project founded by two unknowns behind the online expert-written encyclopedia Nupedia could have grown into a … Read more

A new exhibit that was two years and $19 million in the making opened at the Computer History Museum today, and if you have even a passing interest in technology (That's everyone, right?) you need to head to Silicon Valley and check it out.

Revolution: The First 2,000 Years of Computing is the name of the exhibit that contains thousands of products that track our obsession with creating machines to expand or augment human intelligence and capabilities. The abacus? Check. An original Apple I computer? Check. A working PDP-1 that you can actually play the first video game, … Read more