That evening, computer scientist Howard Gayle responded with a facetious message titled “WARNING!” He claimed that an ...

Emotion is something that is incredibly difficult to get across in a digital format. Aside from ending your texts with “lol” to appear less threatening, or ending a tweet with “/s” to indicate sarcasm ...

In the early days of the internet, computer scientist Scott Fahlman ran into a problem on Carnegie Mellon University’s online bulletin boards. People used the bulletin boards — a kind of primitive ...

The brain is a funny organ. It controls consciousness and thought but, it turns out, it can also be tricked into responding to a few punctuation marks as if they were a human face: The brain perceives ...

When you see a colon and a parentheses, you know exactly what it means. The smiley face has become ubiquitous online, and psychologists have even looked into the ways it’s used in emails. Now, ...

Samsung and Research in Motion are being sued for supposedly infringing on another company’s patent, yet another example of why our current patent system desperately needs a revision. The patent, ...

ADELAIDE, Australia, Feb. 12 (UPI) -- According to a study by researchers at Flinders University in Australia, smiley face emoticons trigger the same part of the brain as a human face. In the study, ...