Spanish researchers have created an electronic "tongue" capable of distinguishing between beer varieties and their alcohol content.
The artificial organ was accurate nearly 82 percent of the time, said its creators -- and could be the first step towards developing robots with a sense of taste.

Facebook shares jumped to record highs Thursday, buoyed by news of stronger-than-expected profits and sizzling gains in mobile advertising revenue.
The gains came as Facebook introduced a new mobile app aimed at becoming a social newspaper of sorts for the members of the world's biggest social network.

Usernames and passwords of some of Yahoo's email customers have been stolen and used to gather personal information about people those Yahoo mail users have recently corresponded with, the company said Thursday.
Yahoo didn't say how many accounts have been affected. Yahoo is the second-largest email service worldwide, after Google's Gmail, according to the research firm comScore. There are 273 million Yahoo mail accounts worldwide, including 81 million in the United States.

There's no shortage of music subscription services that offer unlimited streaming for a monthly fee. The conceit of the latest offering, Beats Music, is that its playlists and other recommendations are curated by warm-blooded humans, not robots.
As CEO Ian Rogers proclaims, "Algorithms can do 'sounds like.' They can't do 'feels like.'"

An expensive mistake by Google could turn into a golden opportunity for China's Lenovo Group as it expands beyond its success in the personal computer industry.
Google is ridding itself of a financial headache by selling Motorola Mobility's smartphone business to Lenovo for $2.9 billion. The deal announced late Wednesday comes less than two years after Google bought Motorola Mobility for $12.4 billion in the biggest acquisition of Google's 15-year history.

Nintendo has been unable to arrest a slide in console sales as more people play games on smartphones and tablets. The company's apparent solution? A move into health care.
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata vowed Thursday to stick to the company's old ways, refused to resign or cut product prices despite its dismal earnings, but said the video game maker will enter the health care industry.

Apple reshaped technology and society when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone seven years ago. Now, the trend-setting company is losing ground to rivals that offer what Apple has stubbornly refused to make: smartphones with lower prices and larger screens than the iPhone.
The void in Apple's lineup is a major reason why the company's quarterly revenue may be about to fall for the first time in more than a decade, much to the dismay of investors who are worried that Apple Inc. is losing its verve and vision.

Like any ordinary printer, this machine ingests a blank page and spits it out covered in print.
But instead of ink, it uses only water, and the used paper fades back to white within a day, enabling it to be reused.

Documents leaked by former NSA contactor Edward Snowden suggest that spy agencies have a powerful ally in Angry Birds and a host of other apps installed on smartphones across the globe.
The documents, published Monday by The New York Times, the Guardian, and ProPublica, suggest that the mapping, gaming, and social networking apps which are a common feature of the world's estimated 1 billion smartphones can feed America's National Security Agency and Britain's GCHQ with huge amounts of personal data, including location information and details such as political affiliation or sexual orientation.

Microsoft on Monday said that it bought the rights to "Gears of War" in a move that promises to keep the hit videogame franchise true to Xbox consoles.
Microsoft and rival Sony in November released new-generation videogame consoles, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 respectively, and the battle for devotees includes exclusive games.
