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• One-Time Pad Reinvented To Make Electronic Copying Impossible

  The ability to copy electronic code makes one-time pads vulnerable to hackers. Now engineers have found a way round this to create a system of cryptography that is invulnerable to electronic attack

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Liquefied Air Could Power Cars and Store Energy from Sun and Wind

  A 19th-century idea might lead to cleaner cars, larger-scale renewable energy.

  Some engineers are dusting off an old idea for storing energy—using electricity to liquefy air by cooling it down to nearly 200 °C below zero. When power is needed, the liquefied air is allowed to warm up and expand to drive a steam turbine and generator.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Intel Fuels a Rebellion Around Your Data

  The world’s largest chip maker wants to see a new kind of economy bloom around personal data.

  Intel is a $53-billion-a-year company that enjoys a near monopoly on the computer chips that go into PCs. But when it comes to the data underlying big companies like Facebook and Google, it says it wants to “return power to the people.”

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Other Interesting arXiv Papers (Week Ending 18 May 2013)

  The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv preprint server

  Performance of a Remotely Located Muon Radiography System to Identify the Inner Structure of a Nuclear Plant

  
  
  
  
  
  

• From Our Archive: Wearable Computing, Long Before Google Glass

  What was it like to use a wearable computer back in 1999?

   

  
  
  
  
  
  

• SAP Makes Big Data Real– And Real-Time

  The following View from the Marketplace was provided by SAP, the sponsor of our Big Data Gets Personal Business Report.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• The Impending Headache of Google Glass Apps

  Glass apps will require people to create new content filters. Maybe that’s just a losing battle.

  Would you want your daily horoscope beamed to your right eye? That’s the vision of the future I saw when I tried out the fashion magazine Elle’s app for Google Glass yesterday, one of several apps announced at the extravagant software developer love-fest the internet company puts on every year.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• The Latest Hardware Hacking Tool: A Machine that Carves Custom Circuit Boards

  Otherfab’s Kickstarter project offers an easy way to make custom circuit boards at home.

   

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Building Solar in Spain Instead of Germany Could Save Billions

  Building solar and wind projects in the wrong place is wasting billions of dollars in Europe.

  Siemens says it would make sense to build solar power plants in sunny countries in Europe rather than in cloudy ones. And wind turbines should be built in windy places.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Brain Training May Help Clear Cognitive Fog Caused by Chemotherapy

  The mental fuzziness induced by cancer treatment could be eased by cognitive exercises performed online, say researchers.

  Cancer survivors sometimes suffer from a condition known as “chemo fog”—a cognitive impairment caused by repeated chemotherapy. A study hints at a controversial idea: that brain-training software might help lift this cognitive cloud.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Smartphone Tracker Gives Doctors Remote Viewing Powers

  Here’s the smartphone technology that alerts a doctor when patients are headed for trouble.

  At the Forsyth Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, nurses can see into the lives of some diabetes patients even when they’re not at the clinic. If a specific patient starts acting lethargic, or making lengthy calls to his mom, a green box representing him on an online dashboard turns yellow, then red. Soon, a nurse will call to see if he is still taking his medication.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Cheap Magnetic Helmet Detects Some Kinds of Brain Damage

  Prototype spots swelling and bleeding in a pilot study—but the novel technique employed is relatively unproven.

  A helmet that sends a magnetic field through the wearer’s head might someday offer a quick way to reveal whether the brain is  swelling or bleeding as the result of an injury.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Seven Must-Read Stories from the Past Week

  Another chance to catch the most interesting, and important, articles from the previous week on MIT Technology Review.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Terahertz Image Reveals Goya's Hidden Signature in Old Master Painting

  Darkened varnish obscures Goya’s signature in a 1771 masterpiece, according to a new analysis using terahertz waves

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Google and NASA Launch Quantum Computing AI Lab

  The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab will use the most advanced commercially available quantum computer, the D-Wave Two.

  Quantum computing took a giant leap forward on the world stage today as NASA and Google, in partnership with a consortium of universities, launched an initiative to investigate how the technology might lead to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Novel Material Shows Promise for Extracting Uranium from Seawater

  A so-called metal-organic framework could offer a better way to get at the vast uranium resource dissolved in the ocean.

  A new material could potentially be used to extract uranium from seawater more efficiently, new research suggests.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Google’s Social Network Gets Smarter

  With dozens of new features, Google’s social network is becoming more like a photo service and a news site.

  Despite the 190 million people that Google says use its social network every month, Google Plus has always struggled to escape Facebook’s shadow and seem like a hopping social destination.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Human Embryonic Stem Cells Cloned

  Scientists produced embryonic stem cells from the DNA of one person combined with a human donor egg.

  Scientists from Oregon Health and Science University reported on Wednesday in the scientific journal Cell that they had created embryonic stem cells from a cloned human embryo. This is the first time that human stem cells have been produced using nuclear transfer, a cloning technique in which the nucleus of one person’s cell is transferred into an egg that has had its nucleus removed. The technique could be used to create patient-specific human embryonic stem cells, which could be used to study genetic diseases, aid drug development, and for therapeutic transplantation back into a patient.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Google Wants to Help Apps Track You

  Google will help people who build Android apps follow their users around without draining too much battery life.

  Google is giving mobile app creators more ways to tap into people’s activities and locations without draining too much phone battery power.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Aereo's on a Roll

  Aereo CEO says he’s boosted by winning a round in court—and that “lines are very, very long” for his Internet TV offering, despite ABC’s new competing streaming service.

  The legal battles are not over for Internet TV startup Aereo.  But for now CEO Chet Kanojia, whom I had a chance to interview yesterday, says things couldn’t be better—with “very, very long” lines in markets across the United States for his streaming local TV service that has the broadcast industry in full battle cry.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• First Quantum Memory That Records The Shape of a Single Photon Unveiled in China

  The world’s first quantum memory that stores the shape and structure of single photons has been built in a Chinese lab

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Treading Carefully, Google Encourages Developers to Hack Glass

  Breaking its own restrictions, Google will show developers how to build any kind of app for Google Glass.

  Google has set plenty of restrictions on the functionality of apps for Glass, the head-mounted display it is now shipping out to early adopters. At the company’s annual developer conference, I/O, which kicks off today, it will show app creators how to break those rules.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Augmenting Social Reality in the Workplace

  A new line of research examines what happens in an office where the positions of the cubicles and walls—even the coffee pot—are all determined by data.

  Can we use data about people to alter physical reality, even in real time, and improve their performance at work or in life? That is the question being asked by a developing field called augmented social reality.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• High Oil Prices Help Oil Production, But Not Biofuels

  An International Energy Agency report says investments in oil technology will lead to a worldwide supply boom.

  High oil prices were supposed to make biofuels and other oil alternatives more competitive. If only oil would stay above $80 a barrel (or $70 or $60), biofuels companies often say, then they’d have a market. Their technology for turning weeds into alcohol or pond scum into crude oil could really take off.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Share-Your-Car Startup RelayRides Acquires New Hardware

  Making it easier for people to rent their own cars could lead to growth in car sharing.

  With peer-to-peer car sharing, it is getting easier and easier to get away without owning a car in a city. But one barrier to growth of these kinds of marketplaces is the need to transfer the key. 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Synthetic Biology Could Speed Flu Vaccine Production

  Advanced genetic engineering is already changing vaccine development and could make inroads into other branches of medicine.

  Synthetic biology is breathing new life into the old-fashioned world of vaccine production, raising hopes that manufacturers could release vaccines much more quickly when outbreaks occur.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• It’s Time to Talk about the Burgeoning Robot Middle Class

  How will a mass influx of robots affect human employment?

  In the book Race Against the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT’s Sloan School of Management present a chart showing U.S. productivity, GDP, employment, and income from 1953 to 2011. The chart looks as you would expect from 1953 until the mid-1980s, with every one of the measures rising together: employees work more productively, companies make more money, and more hires occur as the middle class swells.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Game Theory and the Treatment of Cancer

  Thinking about cancer as an ecosystem is giving biologists access to a new armoury of mathematical tools for tackling it, such as evolutionary game theory

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• China Comes to Silicon Valley at One Startup Accelerator

  A year after launch, a startup program is helping U.S. companies reach China—and vice versa.

  When Jon Bonanno, chief commercial officer of the clean-tech startup Empower Micro Systems, got up to face a small, packed room in Santa Clara, California, last week, it wasn’t like the polished “demo days” run by the highest-profile Silicon Valley startup accelerators. There was no stage, not even a screen for the projector. The sound system buzzed with painful feedback. The 100 or so guests stood or sat in folding chairs under bright fluorescent lights in a space adjoining a large startup workplace that contained a distinct no-no of Silicon Valley office culture: cubicles.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Sharper Computer Models Clear the Way for More Wind Power

  New prediction models can allow utilities to rely more heavily on wind and save millions.

  The utility with the most wind power capacity in the United States, Xcel Energy, is relying more on this power source and saving millions of dollars thanks to new forecasting models similar to those used to predict climate change.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A More Efficient Jet Engine Is Made from Lighter Parts, Some 3-D Printed

  Composite and 3-D-printed components will mean jet engines that use 15 percent less fuel.

  A new generation of engines being developed by the world’s largest jet engine maker, CFM (a partnership between GE and Snecma of France), will allow aircraft to use about 15 percent less fuel—enough to save about $1 million per year per airplane and significantly reduce carbon emissions.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• The Algorithm That Automatically Detects Polyps in Images from Camera Pills

  Analysing the footage from camera pills is a time-consuming task for medical professionals. Now computer scientists are attempting to automate the process

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• With Personal Data, Predictive Apps Stay a Step Ahead

  Apps that proactively help people with their lives represent a significant departure from earlier approaches to software.

  A new type of mobile app is departing from a long-standing practice in computing. Typically, computers have just dumbly waited for their human operators to ask for help. But now applications based on machine learning software can speak up with timely information even without being directly asked for it. They might automatically pull up a boarding pass for your flight just as you arrive at the airport, or tell you that current traffic conditions require you to leave for your next meeting within 10 minutes.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• How to Mine Cell Phone Data Without Invading Your Privacy

  Researchers use phone records to build a mobility model of the Los Angeles and New York City regions with new privacy guarantees.

  Researchers at AT&T, Rutgers University, Princeton, and Loyola University have devised a way to mine cell-phone data without revealing your identity, potentially showing a route to avoiding privacy pitfalls that have so far confined global cell-phone data-mining work to research labs.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• New Kind of LED Could Mean Better Google-Glass-Like Displays

  Micro-display LED tech could light up the next generation of face-wearable gadgets.

  A tiny head-mounted display, like the one in Google Glass, will only be useful if you can see on-screen alerts and information clearly. And that’s tricky to achieve, especially without draining battery life—as Google notes, it can be hard to use Glass’s projected display in bright sunlight.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Reserchers Create "Hate Map" of the U.S. With Twitter Data

  The same researchers previously mapped racist Tweets about President Obama. In both cases there’s reason to be a little skeptical.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Other Interesting arXiv Papers This Week Ending 12-5-13

  The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv preprint server

  The MASTER-II Network of Robotic Optical Telescopes. First Results

  
  
  
  
  
  

• New Milestone for CO2 Levels: Mauna Loa Observatory Records 400 PPM

  We’ve hit 400 ppm of carbon dioxide, but we won’t know what that means for decades.

  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Scripps Institution of Oceanography say that the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere hit the symbolic milestone of 400 parts per million yesterday, up from about 280, the level it was at for thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Bacteria-killing Viruses Could Make Medical Implants Safer

  Researchers attach “viral hitmen” to surfaces to demonstrate a possible antibacterial defense for catheters and other medical devices.

  Medical implants like catheters and pacemakers can be a hotspot for bacteria, which grow in hard-to-treat films on the surface of such devices. Scientists and engineers are taking different approaches to changing the surface of implants so bacteria can’t take hold. For example, some groups are developing polymer films with structures that prevent bacterial growth (see “Pillowy Antibacterial Polymers”), while others are developing coatings that slowly release antibiotic compounds over time (see “Safer Joint Replacements” and “Innovators Under 35, 2007: Christopher Loose”). And now, researchers from Clemson University in South Carolina and the University of Southern Mississippi have described how a layer of bacteria-killing viruses could help prevent bacterial infections.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Facebook's Latest Data Science Insight

  In new study, Facebook’s science team says the company killed automatic sharing on “Offers” because the science said active sharing works better.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Memoto Camera Logs Your Life

  A clip-on camera that snaps a picture every 30 seconds.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Logging Life with a Lapel Camera

  A startup believes people will want a photographic record of their lives, taken at 30-second intervals.

  “We want to provide people with a perfect photographic memory,” says Martin Källström, CEO of Memoto. His startup is creating a tiny clip-on camera that takes a picture every 30 seconds, capturing whatever you are looking at, and then applies algorithms to the resulting mountain of images to find the most interesting ones.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Facebook Reacts to Criticisms of “Home” App; Promises Upgrades

  A month after the release of Home, Facebook is working to answer criticisms with improvements.

  Facebook Home—an app for Android smartphones that provides users with a constant stream of images, messages, and updates from friends on the social network—launched with fanfare a month ago along with the promise that additional features would be added shortly (see “The Facebook Phone Is Finally Here, but Who Wants It?”). Now, as some users level poor reviews at the app, the team behind it is focused on making those upgrades happen—and fast.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Glimpses of a World Revealed by Cell-Phone Data

  An examination of simple cell-phone records reveals maps of poverty levels, ethnic divides, and the movements of sports fans.

  Around the world, some mobile carriers have been releasing anonymized records of cell-phone data to researchers.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• How to Make a Cognitive Neuroprosthetic

  Enhancing the flow of information through the brain could be crucial to making neuroprosthetics practical.

  The abilities to learn, remember, evaluate, and decide are central to who we are and how we live. Damage to or dysfunction of the brain circuitry that supports these functions can be devastating, leading to Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, PTSD, or many other disorders. Current treatments, which are drug-based or behavioral, have limited efficacy in treating these problems. There is a pressing need for something more effective.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• First Quantum-Enhanced Images of a Living Cell

  Biologists have used “squeezed light” to create the first images of a living cell that beat the diffraction limit

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Can Artificial Retinas Restore Natural Sight?

  Artificial retinas give the blind only the barest sense of what’s visible, but researchers are working hard to improve that.

  Elias Konstantopoulos gets spotty glimpses of the world each day for about four hours, or for however long he leaves his Argus II retina prosthesis turned on. The 74-year-old Maryland resident lost his sight from a progressive retinal disease over 30 years ago, but is able to perceive some things when he turns on the bionic vision system.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Can Carbon Capture Clean Up Canada’s Oil Sands?

  Alberta will serve as a test bed for large-scale carbon capture and sequestration.

  Canada is betting that carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that is fairly well understood but unproven at the scale needed to significantly decrease greenhouse gas emissions, can reduce the environmental footprint associated with making fuel from oil sands—its fastest-growing source of greenhouse-gas emissions. (See “Alberta’s Oil Sands Heat Up.”)

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Even Without Accounting Gimmicks, Electric-Car Maker Tesla is Now Profitable

  To stay profitable, Tesla needs to keep cutting costs and selling more cars.

  As expected, Tesla Motors, the maker of the luxury Model S electric sedan, announced today that it was profitable for the first time in its ten-year history. During the first quarter of 2013 it had profits of $11 million. Total revenues were $562 million.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Yet Another Alzheimer’s Treatment Fails in Large Trial

  A mixed-antibody treatment does not protect patients from cognitive decline.

  More bad news from drugmakers trying to develop treatments for Alzheimer’s disease: Yesterday, Baxter announced that its mixed-antibody therapy failed to reduce cognitive decline in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease. As I reported back in July 2012, the company saw positive results in a small four-patient trial of the treatment. None of these patients showed any cognitive decline, leading some experts to hope that the disease can be stopped or slowed (see “Study Suggests Alzheimer’s Disease Can be Stabilized”). But when Baxter tested its potential treatment—a complex mixture of antibodies harvested from healthy donated blood—in nearly 100-times as many Alzheimer’s patients, the company did not find a rate of decline slower than patients given a placebo.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Preventing Migraines with a New Kind of Antibody

  A biopharmaceutical company will know this year whether an antibody produced using a unique technique can prevent chronic migraines.

  For many who suffer from chronic migraines, nothing can reliably prevent or dull the debilitating headaches that may strike as often as every other day.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Want to See What it's Like to Wear Google Glass?

  You can’t wear Google Glass–yet–but you can get a glimpse of what it will look like.

  If, like most of us peons, you haven’t gotten a chance to try out Google Glass, there’s now a way to get a sense of what it’s like to take it–and its virtual display–for a spin.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• D-Wave’s Quantum Computer Goes to the Races, Wins

  Tests suggest that a CIA-backed quantum computing technology can be very powerful for some kinds of problems.

  When I visited D-Wave last year I saw some spectacular hardware and heard of significant backing for the company (see “The CIA and Jeff Bezos Bet On Quantum Computing”). But no one was able to show me results from pitting one of D-Wave’s unusual computers directly against a conventional one to prove how much faster they could be.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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