It’s a crucial component in any laptop or desktop computer, but very few computer owners actually know what a motherboard is or what it does. There’s a motherboard (often called a logic board in smaller more mobile devices) sitting in every computer system: the processor, RAM, hard drives, graphics card, and other…

Thinking about buying a new gaming laptop? Hold up: you might not need to. A new graphics card could breathe new life into your old machine—and now it's easy to actually buy one you can install yourself.

It takes a lot of different materials to make a modern day phone, and a fair number of them are of the rare earth metal variety. But a new study by researchers at Yale shows that there's another troubling detail about the supply of pre-phone components. Many of these metals aren't just rare; they're irreplaceable.

65 years ago, December 16th 1947, William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain operated the first ever working point-contact transistor, almost known as the iotatron. Now, so many years later, we rely on the descendants of that transistor as a part of practically all of the high tech electronic devices we use…

The fellows at iSuppli have done what they do best, breaking down the material nitty gritty of the 4S to find how much its guts are worth. The answer? Slightly, slightly more than its predecessor, at $188.

When Bell Laboratories wrapped up work on the transistor in 1948, they let 25 employees vote on the name. And for some reason, those stodgy bastards passed up options such as the crystal triode and the iotatron. Sad face.

It's been just over 30 years since IBM released its first PC and shook the whole world up. Hoping to do some more world-shaking, they've built two chips that function more similarly to our brains than normal chips do.

This is all hypothetical, but what would happen to the iPhone 4 if Apple's vigorous legal campaign against Samsung caused an irreparable rift between the two companies?

So Sony's got a brand new TFT LCD. Big whoop. But here's something to write home to your grandmother about: the 3-inch screen has a switch for "outdoor mode" and "low-power mode," letting you save battery-life for when it's needed.

Qualcomm did some amazing things with the Snapdragon family of chips. Before their launch, I doubt anyone cared a hoot what processor was running in their phone. Ensuring the shine doesn't tarnish, Qualcomm's snapped up gesture recognition tech from GestureTek.

Imagine looking at Google Maps on your tablet, and feeling one corner grow heavier where your destination is located. Or reading an ebook on your phone, and being aware of the fatter side of the book.

It doesn't take long, does it? The same day Apple's new Thunderbolt cable hit retail shelves, iFixit took it apart to see what makes it tick.

A warning to the nerd who dares mix his ballpoints with this pen! It's a dangerous life for a nerdlinger, now the University of Illinois has introduced a pen that writes electrical circuits in real silver.

Some mad flexi-OLED prototypes have been shown off by other companies before, but HP's getting in on the act with screens that could be used for a multitude of purposes, and hopefully as soon as 2013.