Is using technology addictive? One study, titled "The World Unplugged," asked 1,000 youngsters from ages 17 to 23 in 10 countries to give up the gadget and go a full day without one's phone, computer, TV, etc. Turned out it was "a horrible day," a Chilean said.

Conventional semiconductor memory encodes data (1s and 0s) by whether or not an electron is present. But an electron itself has a binary property — whether or not its spin is "up" or "down." Researchers have now discovered a way to encode data with electron spin, potentially doubling memory with zero tradeoffs.

You're not going to be using your heart as a power generator for your cellphone anytime soon, but it soon might come in handy for powering a medical implant or embedded sensor. Scientists at Georgia Tech are first trying out their Muscle-Driven In Vivo Nanogenerator idea on rats, using a minuscule nanowire to convert the motion of flexing muscles into electric current using piezoelectric energy.

In what could be considered the first steps toward something like Total Recall, researchers at the University of Barcelona in Spain are using virtual reality to study just how attached we are to our bodies, or, even more specifically, our...