Technology

You hear it all the time: We humans are social animals. We need to spend time together to be happy and functional, and we extract a vast array of benefits from maintaining intimate relationships and associating with groups. Collaborating on projects at work makes us smarter and more creative. Hanging out with friends makes us more emotionally mature and better able to deal with grief and stress. Spending time alone, by contrast, can look a little suspect. In a world gone wild for wikis and interdisciplinary collaboration, those who prefer solitude and private noodling are seen as eccentric at best and defective at...

From Boston boardrooms to factory floors to kitchen tables across the state, a constant drumbeat of negative news is deepening financial anxiety, threatening to curb business development and consumer spending, and undermining an already weak economy. As the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 634.76 points yesterday, negative sentiment emanated from many sectors of the Massachusetts economy. A leading housing researcher reported a sharp increase in home foreclosures, financial companies scrambled to calm skittish investors, and several business leaders said the stock market losses and US and...

Robin O'Neill wants to leave the earth a healthy place for her three children. But what good is a thriving planet, the North Andover mother asks, if her kids are forced to live in a home lighted by bulbs that are energy efficient but ruin the look of the dining room chandelier, or take forever to get bright? After years of looming as a distant threat, the federally mandated phaseout of some incandescent bulbs is about to become very real. Many Americans have no idea that most traditional light bulbs are about to disappear, to be replaced by energy-efficient compact fluorescent lights, light-emitting...

An anti-technology group calling itself "Individuals Tending to Savagery" was responsible for a package bomb that injured two university professors just outside Mexico City, a prosecutor said Tuesday. The explosion at the Monterrey Technological Institute's campus in the State of Mexico on the outskirts of the capital Monday injured two professors, one of whom was involved in robotics research. Neither suffered life-threatening injuries. Mexico State Attorney General Alfredo Castillo said at a news conference that the group's involvement was identified from a partially destroyed...

In her pink bedroom in Wayland, Emma Levy keeps shelves full of books. But when the 9-year-old began her summer reading this month, she didn't crack open a single one. Instead, she turned on her hot pink Kindle and downloaded "Ramona Quimby, Age 8" for $1.99. "It's easy," she said. "If you want a book, you don't have to wait to go to the store. " Her 12-year-old twin brothers, Will and Sam, recently got Kindles after seeing their sister glued to hers. They, too, have been riveted to their e-books, "The Firm" and "The Greatest Game Ever Played.

You're driving down the highway, the cruise control set to 70. You come up behind a slow-moving car. There's no room to pass, yet no need to hit the brakes. The car slows automatically. When the outside lane is clear, you flip on your blinker, pull out, and let the car speed itself back up to 70. Your foot has not touched a pedal. That's the promise of the smart system known as adaptive cruise control, which uses radar to sense where traffic is, then automatically decelerates or even brakes to keep your car at a safe distance.

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. - Carmakers will squeeze more miles out gasoline and diesel engines to meet the tougher fuel economy standards announced by the government last week, the chief executive of Chrysler said yesterday. Sergio Marchionne, also head of Italy's Fiat SpA, said changes to the internal combustion engine, and not electric or hydrogen fuel cell technology, will be the answer to meeting the new standards. The nation's new car fleet must reach an average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, double the current standard.

This essay is the last in a three-part series about reading. Part one focused on the history of reading, and part two looked at current readers in transition between the page and the screen. When I finally relented and ordered a Kindle a few months ago, I thought I was stepping into the future of reading. The explosion of the Kindle and similar e-readers appear to be pointing the way toward a time when books are primarily delivered byte-by-byte rather than page-by-page.

NEW YORK -- Motorola Inc. is licensing wireless technology from a start-up led by Apple Computer cofounder Steve Wozniak, to develop devices and services that can monitor the locations of people, pets, or important possessions. The vague announcement, slated for release today, does not call for the development of any particular type of device or the addition of the technology to specific products already made by Motorola, such as cellphones, pagers, and walkie-talkies. Still, the deal marks the first major technology endorsement for Wheels of Zeus Inc.,...

LOS ANGELES - The shoe phone on TV's "Get Smart" wasn't just a sneaky spy gadget, it was a technological marvel: a wireless, portable telephone that could be used anywhere - though it did require a dime to make a call. Today, almost everyone has a pocket-sized version that also takes photos, shoots video, sends e-mail, and surfs the Internet. About the only thing it doesn't do is protect your feet. "Get Smart" has come to the big screen with a spate of new gadgets to help Maxwell Smart, Agent 99, and the other spies at CONTROL.

RE "DOING more, but noticing less" (Op-ed, Aug. 4): Elissa Ely describes how we listen in a new way - that is, our ears "hear" but our eyes are taking in other information at the same time (for example, texting under the table). The brain has to work in a different way to process multiple levels of sensory data coming in at once. The ability to give undivided attention to one stream of information becomes weak, and connections based on sensory data become more shallow. I would like to suggest a new psychiatric diagnosis to describe this: technology-induced disconnection...

MODERNIST PHOTOGRAPHY: 1910-1950 At: Museum of Fine Arts, through April 1. 617-267-9300, www.mfa.org A camera is a machine as a paintbrush and chisel are not. That didn't sit well with aesthetically ambitious photographers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They sought the status of fine artists by suppressing their medium's technological nature. Pictorialism, as this school of photography was called, employed gauzy visual effects and genteel subject matter in the pursuit of painting by darkroom means.

Zebra Technologies Corp., which makes printers for bar codes and plastic cards, said Thursday that its second-quarter net income rose as the company's hardware and supplies sales rose. For the quarter that ended July 2, Zebra earned $33 million, or 60 cents per share, compared with $23 million, or 39 cents per share, in the same period last year. Analysts polled by FactSet expected 58 cents per share, on average. However, while revenue rose 12 percent to nearly $246 million, it fell short of analysts' average estimate of $249.3 million.

WORCESTER - When New York City firefighters and police officers rushed into the World Trade Center after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, their commanding officers on the street had little knowledge of where they were, the condition they were in, or the best way for them to escape. Hundreds of emergency workers died when the twin towers collapsed, and the aftermath left safety officials looking to improve communications. As the 10th anniversary of the attacks approaches, researchers are working to perfect technology that tracks first responders so they can rescue others more...

Rudolph Technologies Inc. shares fell Monday after the company, which makes equipment to help semiconductor manufacturers test for defects in their chips, reported lower-than-expected second quarter revenue. Shares fell 44 cents, or 5.1 percent, to $8.20 in extended trading, after the results were announced. The Flanders, N.J.-based company said after the market closed that its net income was $7.0 million, or 22 cents per share, or 28 cents per share excluding some charges.

Is teaching students to love reading an unrealistic goal? The tide of literary-professorial defeatism continues to rise! Alan Jacobs argues that we should accept the fact that "American universities are largely populated by ... really smart people for whom the prospect of several hours attending to words on pages (pages of a single text) is not attractive. " The problem, essentially, is that it's hard to teach " deep attention . " (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century By Thomas L. Friedman Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 488 pp., 27.50 Thomas L. Friedman, three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times, offers a tantalizing look at the future in "The World Is Flat. " He writes: "Here's the truth that no one wanted to tell you. The world has been flattened. As a result [commerce has] been made cheaper, easier, more friction-free, and more productive for more people from more corners of the earth than at any time in the history of the world.

Verizon Communications Inc. said Monday that Richard J. Lynch, its executive vice president for enterprisewide strategic technology initiatives, is retiring as of Aug. 19. Lynch has worked at the company in this capacity since 2010. He has worked for Verizon and its predecessor companies for 39 years. The company said Lynch led many of Verizon's current and pending technological advances.

Verizon Communications Inc. said Monday that Richard J. Lynch, its executive vice president for enterprisewide strategic technology initiatives, is retiring as of Aug. 19. Lynch has worked at the company in this capacity since 2010. He has worked for Verizon and its predecessor companies for 39 years. The company said Lynch led many of Verizon's current and pending technological advances.

Linear Technology Corp. on Tuesday posted quarterly earnings that topped Wall Street's forecasts, but a forecast for falling revenue in the current period undercut its stock. Shares of the Milpitas-based chip maker shed almost 4 percent in extended trading, after the results were announced. Linear warned that its bookings declined toward the end of the latest quarter, and that customers were reducing their inventories faster than expected. The worry over U.S. and European debt issues has left some customers "cautious and delaying orders and shipments until the current economic...