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• A Hospital Takes Its Own Big-Data Medicine

  Experts from Facebook and genetics labs team up to help doctors make personalized predictions about their patients.

  On the ground floor of The Mount Sinai Medical Center’s new behemoth of a research and hospital building in Manhattan, rows of empty black metal racks sit waiting for computer processors and hard disk drives. They’ll house the center’s new computing cluster, adding to an existing $3 million supercomputer that hums in the basement of a nearby building.

• The First Carbon Nanotube Computer

  A carbon nanotube computer processor is comparable to a chip from the early 1970s, and may be the first step beyond silicon electronics.

  For the first time, researchers have built a computer whose central processor is based entirely on carbon nanotubes, a form of carbon with remarkable material and electronic properties. The computer is slow and simple, but its creators, a group of Stanford University engineers, say it shows that carbon nanotube electronics are a viable potential replacement for silicon when it reaches its limits in ever-smaller electronic circuits.

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• In Search of the Next Boom, Developers Cram Their Apps into Smart Watches

  Clever apps might persuade people that they need a wrist-worn computer.

  The age of wearable computing is upon us. Forget the debate over how capable or fashionable the first devices are, how popular they may eventually become, or even whether we fully understand what we’re getting into with these devices (see “The Paradox of Wearable Technology”). The big question is simply: what will they do? And the answer will have much to do with the apps that emerge.

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• Startup Shows Off Its Cheaper Grid Battery

  Sun Catalytix is making a new type of flow battery that could store hours’ worth of energy on the grid.

  Startup Sun Catalytix is designing a flow battery for grid energy storage that uses custom materials derived from inexpensive commodity chemicals. It joins dozens of other companies seeking to make a device that can cheaply and reliably provide multiple hours of power to back up intermittent wind and solar power.

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• Bruce Schneier: NSA Spying Is Making Us Less Safe

  The security researcher Bruce Schneier, who is now helping the Guardian newspaper review Snowden documents, suggests that more revelations are on the way.

  Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and author on security topics, last month took on a side gig: helping the Guardian newspaper pore through documents purloined from the U.S. National Security Agency by contractor Edward Snowden, lately of Moscow.

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• Facebook Launches Advanced AI Effort to Find Meaning in Your Posts

  A technique called deep learning could help Facebook understand its users and their data better.

  Facebook is set to get an even better understanding of the 700 million people who share details of their personal lives using the social network each day.

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• Esther Dyson: We Need to Fix Health Behavior

  Getting people to eat well and exercise is the biggest unsolved problem in health care.

  Investor Esther Dyson is a former reporter and Wall Street analyst who has set out to tackle what she calls “the most interesting unsolved problems in health care and human behavior.” Top among them is the high rate of self-inflicted illness from bad diet and too little exercise.

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• Smart Robots Can Now Work Right Next to Auto Workers

  It used to be too dangerous to have a person work alongside a robot. But at a South Carolina BMW plant, next-generation robots are changing that.

  BMW has taken a huge step toward revolutionizing the role of robots in automotive manufacturing by having a handful of robots work side-by-side with human workers at its plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

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• Brain Injury Study Tracks Football's Youngest Players

  Researchers are using smart helmets and imaging to study brain injury risk in young football players over a season.

  The end-of-August announcement that the National Football League will pay $765 million to settle a lawsuit involving thousands of its former players over problems related to head trauma is just one sign of the growing concern that the sport’s collisions pose a serious risk to long-term player health. But little is known about how a season of head hits affects the largest group of football athletes: the nearly 4.5 million youth and high school student players.

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• Desperate U.K. Turns to Shale Gas

  To meet emissions goals, the U.K. is reluctantly turning to fracking of shale gas.

  Proposed U.K. government policies to encourage hydrofracking of natural gas ignited a firestorm of protest this summer, with critics complaining that they were not consulted and that rules will restrict local planners’ authority. But the country appears to have few other options. The United Kingdom is in an energy quagmire that is forcing it to turn to shale gas.

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• How to Trace a Sarin Attack

  New research indicates that chemical fingerprints can make positive matches between batches of sarin.

  U.S. researchers say the same methods used to confirm the presence of the deadly nerve agent sarin could eventually find matches between different samples of the chemical.

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