A journalist captured in Afghanistan told the world he was still alive over the weekend by tweeting with a prison guard's cellphone. This remarkable tale about a tweet kicks off a new meme here at Gadget Lab that we're calling Tweet of the Day.

A federal appeals court is ruling the government may obtain cell-site information mobile phone carriers retain on their customers without a probable-cause warrant under the Fourth Amendment. Cell-site location information, which carriers usually retain for about 18 months, identifies the cell tower to which the customer was connected at the beginning of a call and at the end of the call.

Most flash photos — even those shot with your new, fancy $500 camera — look like junk. But you can create amazing images using a flash if you know a few tricks.

Get out your telescopes! Two small asteroids will come within moon-distance of Earth Wednesday.

The Eastern European practice of speleotherapy claims salt air helps breathing issues, which leads to patients lining the halls of subterranean caves.

An Obama administration policy allowing U.S. border officials to seize and search laptops, smartphones and other electronic devices for any reason is being challenged as unconstitutional.

Clearly, some of us make bad decisions with our gadgets. But even without having to live down a mobile phone-fueled tirade of Mel Gibson proportions, many of us have sought forgiveness for our gadget-enabled sins through a ritual purge: a day without gadgets.

You live your life at 2.4 GHz. Your router, your cordless phone, your Bluetooth earpiece, your baby monitor and your garage opener all love and live on this radio frequency, and no others. Why? The answer is in your kitchen.

The Neuromancer author digs deep into the vertigo-inducing machinations of modern life to spin a story about militarism, marketing and "gear queers." He also calls Twitter "the most powerful novelty aggregator that has ever existed."

Get a look at the sci-fi writer's latest future-present story, in which a detail-obsessed Russian translator named Milgrim, a postmodern marketing mogul known as Hubertus Bigend and a taste-making detective called Hollis Henry tussle with technology and its far-reaching tentacles.

LONDON — Every so often, in cities across the world, a group of digital music professionals get together for a Hack Day, where they'll cobble together hardware, software and anything else they can get their hands on into innovative musical mashups. London's event took place last weekend, and it was an orgy of creativity. Here are 10 of our favorites.

Google is now allowing any Yahoo user to sign in to Google using OpenID, the company announced Tuesday. Anyone with a Yahoo account can start using Google's web apps with a new one-click sign up process.

A new survey has caught several distant galaxies ripping up their dwarfish galactic neighbors and devouring them whole.

Aaron "Wheelz" Fotheringham, an 18-year-old from Las Vegas, recently pulled off the world's first wheelchair double backflip, after several failed (and painful-looking) attempts at Camp Woodward, just east of State College, Pennsylvania.

Steve Jobs wasn't kidding when he called the iPod Touch the "iPhone without a phone." We have been calling it that for years, of course, but with each iteration the two iOS devices get closer and closer in terms of features. Now a vibrating alert has been added to the Touch.

BERLIN - Google gave a live demonstration of Google TV at Berlin’s IFA Tuesday, and CEO Eric Schmidt promised it would be a couch potato’s dream come true. 'Once you have Google television, you’re going to be very busy, he said. 'It’s going to ruin your evening.'

A new technique may one day lead to solar cells that bring themselves together like a molecular flash mob and repair damage they sustain during the rough business of turning light into electricity.

Some jerk has fired a heat-seeking missile at your Black Hawk. You've got a few options. You can try to dodge the thing, but good luck with that. You can fire off a flare in order to fool the missile into no longer following you as you maneuver. Or you can shoot off a laser from on board your bird to do the same thing. Not really a choice, is it?

An animation assembly line in Taiwan renders breaking stories the way they might have happened.