Professor Peter McGraw and writer Joel Warner have teamed up to explore the science of humor on a global expedition. The Humor Code chronicles their adventures, scientific experiments and unintentional comedy along the way.

Podcaster Marc Maron says the web holds the key to comedy's future.

MONTREAL — At this year’s Just for Laughs festival, podcast poster boy Marc Maron painted a picture of a world in which the old rules of the stand-up circuit are being turned on their head thanks to the web.

Maron, a longtime comic who never reached the top of the stand-up heap, hit rock bottom three years...

A teeny tiny lens like this could be the key to an embedded projector in tomorrow

A tiny aspherical glass lens could turn your smartphone or tablet into a Star Wars-style projector.

It may not be holographic, but at least you and your friends could sit around a table or look up at a wall rather than huddling around someone’s palm-sized smartphone to watch the latest hilarity on YouTube.

At 1mm x 1mm x .8mm, the teensy FLGS3 Series lens is barely the size of the tip of mechanical pencil lead; and actually, it’s the smallest in the industry. Aspherical glass lenses like this are typically used in o...