Although women are still slightly in the minority among global Web users, they are closing ground with men and, once connected, spend about two more hours online a month on average. According to data from comScore, females exceed males particularly in communications, devoting about one-third of their online time to social networking, instant messaging and e-mail messages compared with about one-quarter for men. Women 45 and older exhibited the greatest growth in social networking.

Microsoft’s engineers and executives spent two years creating a new line of smartphones with playful names that sounded like creatures straight out of “The Cat in the Hat” — Kin One and Kin Two. Stylish designs, an emphasis on flashy social-networking features and an all-out marketing blitz were meant to prove that Microsoft could build the right product at the right time for the finickiest customers — gossiping youngsters with gadget skills. But last week, less than two months after the Kins arrived in stores, Microsoft said it would kill the products.

After the math department at the University of Texas noticed some of its Dell computers failing, Dell examined the machines. The company came up with an unusual reason for the computers’ demise: the school had overtaxed the machines by making them perform difficult math calculations.

Truro, Mass.

NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber.

So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we’re told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, one of the top-selling games of all time, has been a huge boon to its publisher, Activision Blizzard. But on Wednesday, the fate of that game franchise may have taken a bite out of its publisher’s stock price.

In an up market on Wednesday, Activision’s shares fell 3 percent to $11.90.

A team of Russian and American scientists has discovered a new element that has long stood as a missing link among the heaviest bits of atomic matter ever produced. The element, still nameless, appears to point the way toward a brew of still more massive elements with chemical properties no one can predict.

Tim Westergren recently sat in a Las Vegas penthouse suite, a glass of red wine in one hand and a truffle-infused Kobe beef burger in the other, courtesy of the investment bankers who were throwing a party to court him.

It was a surreal moment for Mr. Westergren, who founded Pandora, the Internet radio station. For most of its 10 years, it has been on the verge of death, struggling to find investors and battling record labels over royalties.

Had Pandora died, it would have joined myriad music start-ups in the tech company graveyard, like SpiralFrog and the original Napster.

Many cellulosic fuel producers are working with enzymes to break down tough, inedible plant parts, such as corncobs or switch grass, into simpler sugars that can be fermented to ethanol.

Does the latest generation of energy-saving light bulbs save energy? A comprehensive study conducted by Osram, the German lighting company, provides evidence that they do.

While that may seem self-evident, until the release of the report on Monday the answer remained unclear.

The Great Chip Wars, as we’ve come to know them, ended this week — courtesy of a new marketing campaign from Advanced Micro Devices.

AMD has decided to sell its products under the Vision banner, a slogan that emphasizes the strengths of its graphics chip instead of promoting the abilities of its CPUs, or traditional workhorse chips. PC makers and retailers will promote three flavors of AMD-based computers, called See, Share and Create models.