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The US publishing industry appears to be turning over a new leaf: ebook sales made up 22.5 percent of the industry's net revenue last year, according to a new survey from the Association of American Publishers. That's up from just 0.05 percent 10 years prior, when the AAP first began keeping track of ebook sales, and up from 16.98 percent in 2011. The categories that saw the biggest increase in ebook revenues included adult fiction, adult nonfiction, and religious books. Even more encouraging, the overall net revenue for the US publishing industry was $7.1 billion, up 6.2 percent from 2011.

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GE wants you to feel better about going to the hospital now that it's helping "connect" medical machinery and software using...Agent Smith from The Matrix? That's the impression of a new commercial for well, no specific GE product per se, but a larger trend the company and others have taken to calling the "industrial internet," which basically involves adding internet connectivity and applying big data analytics to all sorts of industrial machinery and infrastructure, which have traditionally been self-contained and siloed-off.

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A number is said to be perfect if it equals the sum of its divisors: 6 is divisible by 1, 2, and 3, and 1 + 2 + 3 = 6.

St. Augustine wrote, “Six is a number perfect in itself, and not because God created all things in six days; rather the converse is true; God created all things in six days because this number is perfect, and it would have been perfect even if the work of the six days did not exist.”

Perfect numbers are rare. No one knows whether an infinite quantity exist, and no one knows whether any of them are odd. The early Greeks knew the first four, and in the ensuing two millennia we’ve uncovered only 44 more. But they have one thing in common — they reveal a curious harmony when expressed in base 2:

Dom Del Torto is an animator currently living in the UK. Dom Del Torto's laptop is a MacBook Pro currently living 3,000 miles away in Iran. This was not a planned separation. More »

As if inexpensive attacks on mission-critical global positioning systems weren't enough, a researcher said he's developed an Android app that could redirect airplanes in mid-flight.

The frightening scenario was presented on Wednesday at the Hack in the Box security conference in Amsterdam. It's made possible by security weaknesses in the protocol used to send data to commercial planes and in flight-management software built by companies including Honeywell, Thales, and Rockwell Collins, Forbes reports. Vulnerable systems include the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Report System used for exchanging text messages between planes and ground stations using VHF radio or satellite signals. It has "virtually no authentication features to prevent spoofed commands."

Using a custom-developed Android app dubbed PlaneSploit, researcher Hugo Tesa of N.Runs showed how a virtual plane in a laboratory could be redirected. Because there's no means to cryptographically authenticate communications sent over ACARS, pilots have no way to confirm if messages they receive in the cockpit are valid. Malformed messages can then be used to trigger vulnerabilities, Tesa told Forbes.

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Once again, our fearless leader Joshua Topolsky has taken to Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to spread the word about the latest and greatest in tech. In this episode, Josh and Jimmy trade high scores on the Ouya, try to get their heads around Chat Heads on the HTC First, and use the Makerbot Replicator to 3D-print a certain Roots member. How well does Questlove's afro turn out? You'll have to watch the video below for yourselves.

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When the lead designers of the cult hit Planescape: Torment couldn't acquire the rights they needed to make a sequel, they decided to make the next best thing. A spiritual successor called Torment: Tides of Numenera finished a Kickstarter campaign this week, ending with more money pledged than for any other video game to date. With $4,188,927 in funding, developer inXile Entertainment more than quadrupled its required goal to produce the isometric RPG. It's the company's second appeal to Kickstarter. The first campaign, nearly a year ago, funded the RPG Wasteland 2, which is still in development.

Like Planescape: Torment, the new game is based off of a fantasy setting for a tabletop RPG, and it takes a lot of cues from the...

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French agents at the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur (DCRI), apparently turning their attention to Wikipedia for the first time in years, demanded last month that the Wikimedia Foundation delete an entry about a military radio relay station written in 2009. More »