Welcome to Pogue's Pages!

My PBS series, "NOVA ScienceNow,"is available to watch online!

Each hourlong episode tackles another great scientific question, like--"What Are Animals Thinking?" or "How Smart Can We Get?" My particular favorites are "What Will the Future Be Like?" and "What Makes us Human?"

They're funny, they're cutting-edge, and they're great for entire families to watch together. Your tax dollars at work!

This week's New York Times column

Big Sensor, Small Body: A Concept That Works

When you’re shopping for a camera, you have a million specs and features to consider. Size, weight, battery life, megapixels, zoom power. ... Can you guess which aspect consumers consider most important?

The color of the body. (“Ooh, I like the shiny red one!”)

The camera buyer for a national electronics chain told me that. We both slapped our foreheads.

Please. If you’re buying a camera, shouldn’t picture quality be the most important detail?

If so, what you should care most about is the flat, rectangular light sensor inside the “film.” In general, the bigger the sensor, the happier you’ll be with the results and the more you’ll pay...more

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This week's email column

Blurry Backgrounds, Big Sensors and Bokeh

In my New York Times column on Thursday, I reviewed the Sony RX1: the first compact digital camera with a full-frame (that is, HUGE) sensor inside.

As I wrote, “these sensors are as big as an old piece of 35mm film (1.7 inches). They deliver unparalleled low-light quality, richness of color, detail and soft-focused backgrounds.” Later, I pointed out, “This camera creates beautiful blurry backgrounds. That soft-focus background effect is a hallmark of professional photography — and of big-aperture, big-sensor cameras. Until now, few pocket cameras could defocus the background at all.”

Now, photographers online are a cantankerous lot. Photography, in the end, is something of a black art, and everybody’s got an opinion. So it didn’t take long for a few e-mails to arrive along these lines:...more

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Recent video

Digging into the practice of fracking

Natural gas can be cheap and plentiful, and could supply us with energy for decades to come. But to get AT all that natural gas, you have to delve far beneath the surface of the earth. That's where FRACKING comes in. David Pogue of The New York Times reports our Cover Story...

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Special interest - Scientific American Column

Check out my monthly column in Scientific American magazine! Each month, I take a broader look at what's going on with consumer tech and society….

How Far Away Is Mind-Machine Integration?

Forget voice control or gesture recognition: gadgets may soon link directly to our brains...more

6 Electronic Devices You Can Control with Your Thoughts

From toys to mind monitoring, brain-computer interface options are already on the market...more

How to Track a Lost Smart Phone

In my Scientific American column this month, I wrote about how the police were able to recover my stolen iPhone...more

Does a Public “Find My iPhone” Search Violate Personal Privacy?

A guy stole my iPhone. I tracked it and posted his address online. Was that wrong?...more