- BeagleBone Black: A Maker's Dream?
If Arduino is too underpowered and Raspberry Pi doesn’t have enough hardware inputs for you, BeagleBone’s $45 microcontroller board will let you have your cake and eat it too.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciX08ysl6LE]
- Fertilizer You Can’t Make Bombs Out Of
A cheap way to alter ammonium nitrate fertilizer renders it unusable in IEDs.
Mixing iron sulfate, a waste product from steel foundries, with ammonium nitrate fertilizer leads to changes in its chemical composition that keep it from detonating in homemade bombs, say researchers at Sandia National Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The researchers devised the formula in response to a request from the Department of Defense for ways to combat the use of improvised explosive devices.
- "12 Hours of Separation" Connect Individuals on Social Networks
Social networks can be used to track random individuals in just 12 hours provided the right incentives are on offer, say computer scientists.
- Data Sources
Mobile phones are great sources of data—but we must be careful about privacy.
Anyone who has worked with mobile-phone data knows how incredibly useful such information can be, even when it’s anonymous. It is amazing—but at the same time frightening—what massive quantities of spatio-temporal data points from mobile phones can tell us about ourselves, our lives, and our society in general.
- Ultra-Efficient Solar Power
Doubling the efficiency of solar devices would completely change the economics of renewable energy. Here is a design that just might make it possible.
Harry Atwater thinks his lab can make an affordable device that produces more than twice the solar power generated by today’s panels. The feat is possible, says the Caltech professor of materials science and applied physics, because of recent advances in the ability to manipulate light at a very small scale.
- Regaining Lost Brain Function
How do you make an electronic brain prosthesis that could restore a person’s ability to form long-term memories? Recent experiments by Theodore Berger and his colleagues, including Sam Deadwyler at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and researchers at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, have begun to describe how it might be done.
- Beating Cancer at Its Own Game
Some cancer cell mutations can slow or halt tumor growth
A typical cancer cell has hundreds of mutated genes, but only a handful, known as drivers, are responsible for cancerous traits such as uncontrolled growth. Biologists have largely ignored the other mutations, believing they had little or no impact on cancer progression.
- Introduction to the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2013
MIT Technology Review identifies the 10 most important technology milestones of the past year.
Our definition of a breakthrough is simple: an advance that gives people powerful new ways to use technology. It could be an intuitive design that provides a useful interface (see “Smart Watches”) or experimental devices that could allow people who have suffered brain damage to once again form memories (“Memory Implants”). Some could be key to sustainable economic growth (“Additive Manufacturing” and “Supergrids”), while others could change how we communicate (“Temporary Social Media”) or think about the unborn (“Prenatal DNA Sequencing”). Some are brilliant feats of engineering (“Baxter”). Others stem from attempts to rethink longstanding problems in their fields (“Deep Learning” and “Ultra-Efficient Solar Power”). As a whole, we intend this annual list not only to tell you which technologies you need to know about, but also to celebrate the creativity that produced them.
- Prenatal DNA Sequencing
Reading the DNA of fetuses is the next frontier of the genome revolution. Do you really want to know the genetic destiny of your unborn child?
Earlier this year Illumina, the maker of the world’s most widely used DNA sequencing machines, agreed to pay nearly half a billion dollars for Verinata, a startup in Redwood City, California, that has hardly any revenues. What Verinata does have is technology that can do something as ethically fraught as it is inevitable: sequence the DNA of a human fetus before birth.
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