Elise Hu

Whatever our hands touch, our phones touch. And that means our mobile phones can be downright nasty. Some people even use their phones while they're in the bathroom stall. So it probably won't surprise you that a 2011 University of London study found that one in six of our ...

As further evidence that this is perhaps the year the Internet of everything really becomes a thing, Google paid $3.2 billion in cash for Nest, the home automation company that pioneered smart thermostats and lately, smoke and carbon monoxide detectors.

"The Internet of things" describes adding connectivity ...

It's 2014 and we're back to full team strength, which means we've returned with your guide to the week's previous tech coverage on NPR (in case you missed it) and from our friends at what seems like an ever-growing crop of tech journalism organizations.

ICYMI

Steve Henn was ...

Let's stipulate, for the purposes of this post, that you are looking for love. Thanks to our ever-connected devices, you can skip the bars or gyms or extracurricular activities to find a hookup. And even if you do meet someone the old-fashioned, analog way, romance and social media are so ...

It's time for our biweekly podcast, in which your NPR tech reporting team mashes together the themed reporting we do on a certain subject and produce one delightful, downloadable podcast.

This episode's theme is the changing economy and culture of the San Francisco Bay Area, thanks in large part to ...

This week, we're exploring the San Francisco Bay Area and the way income inequality is affecting the region. Check out the other pieces of the week, aggregated on this page.

The forces of gentrification and the widening income gap are showing up viscerally in San Francisco, but what makes ...

Tech giants aren't on the best terms with the Obama administration lately, with the NSA's surveillance revelations getting more widespread by the day. But a lot of big tech names have agreed to visit the White House for a chat. The White House just announced a who's who of ...

People disagree about how much it matters, but economic inequality in America is real and rising. President Obama recently called it "the defining challenge of our time" and pledged he would spend the rest of his presidency trying to reduce inequality and improve upward mobility. And Pope Francis said "

The new reality with the light-speed pace of online news sharing is that news doesn't have to be true for it to go superviral. Sometimes stories are too good to verify, too fun not to share. The New York Times delved into this with a much-tweeted piece this morning.

The disastrous rollout of the Obama administration's storefront for buying health coverage is now in a new phase — a slow recovery. But the questions about how something like this could happen and how a $600 billion technological failure can be prevented in the future made for dozens — dozens ...

There is no question that Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, Silicon Beach and all of the other places we associate with tech entrepreneurism face diversity problems.

African-American innovators represent just 5 percent of America's scientists and engineers, according to a 2010 study by the National Science Foundation.

We've covered the

Calling the improvements "night and day" from October, the Obama administration says it has met its goal of getting the troubled HealthCare.gov site working for a "vast majority" of users. But that's only part of a complex technology system that is designed to end with insurance companies providing coverage for ...

White House officials say the government's health insurance website, which has been plagued with problems ever since it launched in October, is now working smoothly for most users.

"The site is now stable and operating at its intended capacity with greatly improved performance," Jeffrey Zients, the president's appointee to fix ...

Researchers recently took data from the Facebook app Are You Interested and found that not only is race a factor in our online dating interests, but particular races get disproportionately high — and low — amounts of interest.

Of the 2.4 million heterosexual interactions researchers reviewed, the findings show:

...

The botched start of HealthCare.gov is just the latest big federal tech system to fail at launch, but information technology research group Standish found that during the last decade, 94 percent of the large-scale federal IT projects have been similarly unsuccessful.

Critics say the real root of government ...

It's time for our Friday round-up of the tech and culture stories from NPR and beyond. Here we go ...

ICYMI

All Things Considered reported from out West this week, with host Audie Cornish bringing you stories about the man who wants to diversify Silicon Valley by 2040,

Last week, as part of our kids and technology theme week, Steve Henn wrote about how video game makers are spending more time and money tracking players' behavior.

"As we play games, game designers are running tests on us and our kids. They're asking themselves what can they tweak ...

As loyal readers and listeners know, your NPR tech reporters are organizing our enterprise reporting by exploring a single theme in technology over the course of a week. Our first theme week was on kids and technology and it aired last week. We featured stories about babies and screen ...

One of the big questions facing social media giant Twitter ahead of its New York Stock Exchange debut this week is how much money it could actually make for investors.

"We have incurred significant operating losses in the past, and we may not be able to achieve or subsequently maintain ...