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• Could Electric Cars Threaten the Grid?

  Some neighborhood grids just aren’t built for huge spikes in power demand. The rise of the electric car has utilities scrambling to adjust.

  Plugging in an electric vehicle is, in some cases, the equivalent of adding three houses to the grid. That has utilities in California—where the largest number of electric vehicles are sold—scrambling to upgrade the grid to avoid power outages.

• A Novel Way to Cut the Cost of Advanced Biofuels

  Modifying a gene in plants makes it far easier to process biomass to make fuel.

  A novel genetic modification to plants could make advanced biofuels more competitive with fossil fuels, according to a study published this week in the journal Science. The modification could achieve this by rendering an expensive step in making such biofuels unnecessary.

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• Devices Connect with Borrowed TV Signals, and Need No Power Source

  Devices that can make wireless connections even without an onboard battery could spread computing power into everything you own.

  A novel type of wireless device sends and receives data without a battery or other conventional power source. Instead, the devices harvest the energy they need from the radio waves that are all around us from TV, radio, and Wi-Fi broadcasts.

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• Denser, Faster Memory Challenges Both DRAM and Flash

  A new memory technology can store a terabyte on a chip the size of a postage stamp.

  A new type of memory chip that a startup company has just begun to test could give future smartphones and other computing devices both a speed and storage boost. The technology, known as crossbar memory, can store data about 40 times as densely as the most compact memory available today. It is also faster and more energy efficient.

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• More Connected Homes, More Problems

  They might offer convenience or potential cost savings, but Internet-connected home appliances may also create security risks.

  As a growing number of Internet-connected home appliances hit the market, David Bryan and Daniel Crowley worry that digital ne’er-do-wells will get new ways to take control of these devices, unlocking your house, running up your heating bill, flushing your toilet—or worse—from afar.   

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• Cyborg Parts

  Princeton researchers, using a 3-D printer, have built a bionic ear with integrated electronics.

  Lab-made organs could do more than just serve as ready options for patients in need: with the right blend of biology and materials science, they might even be able to endow people with superhuman abilities. 

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• An Electric Therapy for Medical-Device Malware

  Researchers show how to spot viruses on equipment like drug mixers and pregnancy monitors: by examining their power usage.

  Hospital rooms beep and flash with many devices that are increasingly getting infected with malware (see “Computer Viruses Are ‘Rampant’ on Medical Devices in Hospitals”). But for several reasons, these gadgets are often incompatible with commercial security software.

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• IBM Scientists Show Blueprints for Brain-like Computing

  IBM researchers unveil TrueNorth, a new computer architecture that imitates how a brain works.

  To create a computer as powerful as the human brain, perhaps we first need to build one that works more like a brain. Today, at the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks in Dallas, IBM researchers will unveil a radically new computer architecture designed to bring that goal within reach. Using simulations of enormous complexity, they show that the architecture, named TrueNorth, could lead to a new generation of machines that function more like biological brains.

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• How Tesla Is Driving Electric Car Innovation

  If you believe Tesla, affordable, long-range electric cars could be here sooner than many think.

  I recently took a test drive in one of Tesla’s luxurious Model S electric cars and toured its R&D labs, where it’s developing its battery and recharging technology. The experience left me believing that Tesla has an important edge over its competitors in the race to bring electric cars to the masses.

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• Motorola’s Moto X: Interface Innovation with a Learning Curve

  Several days with the Moto X reveal some ingenious new features and a few shortcomings.

  The Moto X, Motorola’s first phone conceived and designed since the company’s acquisition by Google, doesn’t boast as many main processor cores or camera megapixels as its rivals at the higher end of the smartphone spectrum. It does, however, allow its users lots of control via voice and gesture commands, which speed up and simplify common tasks like taking pictures, placing calls, or getting directions (see “Motorola Reveals First Google-Era Phone, the Moto X”).

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• Romancing the Phone

  Love and sex in the age of social media and mobile communication.

  Boy meets girl; they grow up and fall in love. But technology interferes and threatens to destroy their blissful coupledom. The destructive potential of communication technologies is at the heart of Stephanie Jones’s self-published romance novel Dreams and Misunderstandings. Two childhood sweethearts, Rick and Jessie, use text messages, phone calls, and e-mail to manage the distance between them as Jessie attends college on the East Coast of the United States and Rick moves between Great Britain and the American West. Shortly before a summer reunion, their technological ties fail when Jessie is hospitalized after a traumatic attack. During her recovery, she loses access to her mobile phone, computer, and e-mail account. As a result, the lovers do not reunite and spend years apart, both thinking they have been deserted.

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