Author: admin

• The Little Secrets Behind Apple’s Green Data Centers

  Apple is using a combination of solar, fuel cells, and renewable energy purchases to meet its clean-energy targets.

  Apple this week said that all of its data centers are powered by renewable energy. How Apple achieved that impressive goal reflects the complexity of transitioning to renewable energy. 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Other Interesting arXiv Papers This Week

  The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv preprint server

  RadioAstron – a Telescope with a Size of 300 000 km: Main Parameters and First Observational Results

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A Tale of Two Genachowskis

  FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski will leave a legacy of progress on spectrum policy and broadband expansion– in a nation of monopolies charging high prices

  In Hong Kong, I’m told you can get 500 megabits-per-second Internet service for $25 a month.  In my Massachusetts neighborhood–which happens to be served by Verizon FIOS fiber service–getting one-tenth that speed will set you back $80 (plus taxes and fees).  And whereas in Hong Kong uploads are as fast as downloads, the Verizon service gives me half-speed on the uploads.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• HBO GO-It-Alone?

  HBO mulls breaking apart from the bundle. Will its broadband partners acquiesce?

  Earlier this week, I mentioned what Aereo’s CEO had told me would be a metric for progress in TV innovation: à la carte pricing for individual networks, rather than a compulsory bundle of countless channels we don’t watch. Many people had their eyes on HBO, the strongest brand in cable right now, as the maverick that might make a move towards separating its content from cable subscriptions. After all, it was making just this happen in Scandinavia, going directly head-to-head with the likes of Netflix there.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Doctors Should Tell Patients About Some, But Not All, Unexpected Genetic Findings

  A professional medical geneticists group recommends that certain genetic risk factors be examined in all medical DNA sequence tests.

  On Thursday, the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics recommended that doctors tell patients about certain genetic disease risks if they accidentally find them when exploring a patient’s genome for another reason. However, the group does not recommend that doctors tell patients about all incidental findings.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Warning: When Selling Domestic Drones, Mileage May Vary

  As the debate continues over drones in U.S. skies, other countries could show the way.

  When I visited Australia a couple of years back, I picked up the phrase “no worries” which I still use in my speech today. And when it comes to domestic drones, it appears Aussies really are less worried than Americans. 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Startup EnerVault Rethinks Flow Battery Chemistry

  EnerVault later this year will test its first grid-scale flow battery that uses low-cost materials and proprietary pumping system.

  Flow batteries have emerged as one of most promising ways to store many hours of energy on the electricity grid. To make costs more competitive, startup EnerVault is pursuing a novel chemistry and unique mechanical design. 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Five Opportunities for Mobile Computing

  Thousands of startup companies see mobile computing as their chance to strike it big. We picked five.

  About three dozen mobile-computing startup companies get funded by investors each month in the United States, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Around the world, tens of thousands more entrepreneurs are dreaming and coding and trying to invent something big.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Skipping the Water in Fracking

  The push to extend fracking to arid regions is drawing attention to water-free techniques.

  Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, uses large amounts of water injected into wells under high pressure to help free natural gas and oil from shale deposits (see “Drilling for Shale Gas”). Yet some of the world’s largest sources of shale gas are found in deserts, making the technique seem impractical.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• No Map? No GPS? No Problem

  Startup Navisens says it can find people indoors using motion sensors and math.

  Now that it’s easy to find your way in the real world with just a smartphone in hand, the next logical navigation frontier is indoors, where GPS doesn’t work and maps are often nonexistent. Australian startup Navisens says it has a plan to track everyone from firefighters searching through burning buildings to consumers wandering through shopping malls, without requiring any special wireless signals.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Is Google Keep Better Than a Post-It?

  Keep’s paper-like qualities might just beat its computery ones.

  In January, I did something heretical for a productivity-app-obsessed tech writer: I threw away the “list” apps on my phone and went back to paper. As a queryable, bottomless, always-accessible database of my every passing thought, a Post-It stuck to my iPhone certainly falls short compared to Evernote or Clear. But here’s what I realized: for me, most of the time, I don’t need a database, nor do I want to spend time querying and managing one. I’m with Bret Victor: interacting with software mostly sucks on principle. For the job of “jotting” random stuff, paper’s form (physical, flexible, direct) just plain beat software’s function. 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Why the Bankruptcy of Suntech Matters

  The Chinese government is allowing major solar companies to fail, and that’s a good thing.

  The Chinese government helped finance a massive expansion of the solar industry, helping to create a glut of solar panels—and leading to rapidly reducing prices for solar. But now it has let the main subsidiary of its most prominent solar panel manufacturer, Suntech Power, go bankrupt.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Doomsday Recalculation Gives Humanity Greater Chance of Long-Term Survival

  And the odds would improve further, say physicists, were we to make serious efforts to counter existential threats such as asteroid strikes

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• BrightSource Pushes Ahead on Another Massive Solar Thermal Plant

  With BrightSource’s Ivanpah solar plant about to come online, the company looks to its next projects for the economics to improve.

  BrightSource Energy is planning to complete construction of one of world’s largest solar thermal power plants this year, and is now betting on an even more massive project that it hopes will come online by 2016. The Oakland, California, company’s first utility-scale plant, its 370-megawatt Ivanpah facility in the Mojave Desert, uses thousands of software-controlled mirrors to direct sunlight at three central towers that produce steam and power a turbine (see “In Pictures: The World’s Largest Solar Thermal Power Plant”). PG&E and Southern California Edison have entered long-term contracts to buy power from the three units of the project, a sprawling 3,500-acre installation that cost $2.2 billion and is slated to start firing up this summer.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Facebook and Google Create Walled Gardens for Web Newcomers Overseas

  In some countries, “the Internet” is confined to certain sites as part of a strategy to help wireless carriers offer starter packages.

  With more than half the people in the world still not online, Facebook and Google are waging a battle to make sure that Internet newcomers get their first tastes of the Web from them.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Nanoparticles Show Which Way the Stem Cells Went

  By monitoring the path of stem cells in the body, scientists can better explore experimental therapies, and doctors can better tune treatments in patients.

  Giving patients stem cells packaged with silica nanoparticles could help doctors determine the effectiveness of the treatments by revealing where the cells go after they’ve left the injection needle.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• The Elusive Power of Tweets

  Study shows mixed answers to the question of whether Tweets drive ratings–revealing limits to what we know about social media’s real-world effects

  Can Tweets drive television ratings?  Meaning, when people are gushing about a show, does it change other people’s choices and behavior?  If it does, it means we know something new about how social media activity affects events in the real world.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Apparently Samsung is Prepping a Smart Watch. Meh.

  Smart watches sound neat, but I doubt I’ll be wearing one soon.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Don’t Count Out Thin-Film Solar

  As startup Solexant resurfaces for funds, consider the possibility that thin-film will still have its day.

  Thin-film solar is back in the news as Solexant, a company that’s been hiding out for the past two years, recently resurfaced, likely with the goal of raising more funds (see “Thin-Film Solar with High Efficiency”). A few years ago, thin-film solar was all the rage in Silicon Valley. It was supposed to be a cheaper alternative to conventional silicon solar panels, promising costs as low as a jaw-dropping $1 per watt. It fell out of fashion as conventional silicon solar panels first approached, and then dropped below that cost. Thin-film solar companies started failing, or being acquired for pennies on the dollar, or dropping off the radar, lurking at a low burn rate in the hope that the solar market will surge, creating demand for their product.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• New 3-D Display Could Let Phones and Tablets Produce Holograms

  Optical trickery lets a modified LCD produce hologram-like still images and videos.

  A new kind of three-dimensional display developed at HP Labs plays hologram-like videos without the need for any moving parts or glasses. Videos displayed on the HP system hover above the screen, and viewers can walk around them and experience an image or video from as many 200 different viewpoints—like walking around a real object.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Ocean-faring Robot Cashes in on Offshore Oil and Gas

  Liquid Robotics raised $45 million to build out its fleet of self-propelled marine robots.

  Liquid Robotics is betting that autonomous vehicles will emerge as the best way to troll the oceans to gather data. 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Computer Simulations Reveal Benefits of Random Investment Strategies Over Traditional Ones

  Central Banks could use random investment strategies to make markets more stable, say econophysicists

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Video Chat That’s a Little Closer to Hanging Out in Real Life

  A startup called Rabbit believes consumers will jump for always-on video chatting that lets you watch movies with an infinite number of friends.

  With so many video-chat applications already on the market, it sounds like a silly idea: build a new one while pretending the others never existed.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Your Next Smartphone Screen May Be Made of Sapphire

  Manufactured sapphire is incredibly strong and scratch resistant. Now falling costs and technology improvements could make it competitive with glass.

  Manufactured sapphire—a material that’s used as transparent armor on military vehicles—could become cheap enough to replace the glass display covers on mobile phones. That could mean smartphone screens that don’t crack when you drop them and can’t be scratched with keys, or even by a concrete sidewalk.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Lack of Ways to Measure Success Holds Back Mobile Ads

  No one really knows if ads on smartphones work.

  Where consumer attention goes, ad dollars are supposed to follow. That hasn’t quite happened on mobile devices.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A Nanofabrication Technique Doubles Hard Drive Capacity

  Laboratory advance shows that nano-imprinting could help the hard drive industry meet its long-term goals for data storage capacity.

  Researchers at HGST, a major manufacturer of hard disk drives, have shown that an emerging fabrication technology called nano-imprinting could be used to double the data storage capacity of today’s hard disks. They say the patent-pending work, done in collaboration with a company called Molecular Imprints, could lead to a cost-effective manufacturing process by the end of the decade.

  Hard disk drives store data in magnetic material on the surface of a spinning disk. During production, this material is deposited as a thin film. Information is then written to the disk by changing the magnetic orientation of distinct individual units of the material, known as “grains.” A group of grains together make up a region that can store a single bit. Since the 1950s, when the technology was invented, hard disk manufacturers have continually found ways to keep increasing data storage capacity by reducing the area required to store a bit, most recently by using fewer and fewer clustered grains for each.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• The Television Will Not Be Revolutionized

  An ABC app is only a half-step forward.

  The New York Times is reporting that The Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC, is developing an app that would live stream ABC content to phones and tablets. Reportedly, the app would likely be available to users as soon as this year, and it stands to reason that the app would be similar to the apps WatchESPN and WatchDisney (the Disney Company owns all three networks). The app would make ABC the first American broadcaster to provide a live Internet stream of programming to users.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A Stealthy De-Extinction Startup

  By reviving lost species, a new company could put a warm and fuzzy face on advanced reproductive engineering.

  Two of biotechnology’s most prolific and far-sighted researchers say they’re teaming up to start a company that intends to rewrite the rules of animal reproduction.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Abu Dhabi Plugs in Giant Concentrating Solar Plant

  Abu Dhabi diversifies its energy with $600 million solar project.

  The oil-rich sheikhdom of Abu Dhabi plugged in what it says is the large concentrating solar power plant in the world, a sign that Middle Eastern countries are serious about developing their solar resources.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Social Networks Reveal Structure (And Weaknesses) of Businesses

  Computer scientists have recreated the international and organisational structure of large corporations using publicly available data on social networks

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• An Unlikely Plan to Revive the Passenger Pigeon

  Advances in genetic engineering have some biologists convinced they’ll re-create extinct species.

  Passenger pigeons once darkened the skies over the eastern United States. Huge flocks would roost on chestnut trees, their weight snapping off branches. By 1914, though, humans had hunted the bird to extinction.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A Near-Whole Brain Activity Map in Fish

  Neuron-level whole-brain activity maps could one day help explain brain function and disfunction.

  Image: Neurons glow red as they fire in this whole zebrafish larva brain. Credit: Misha Ahrens and Philipp Keller

  
  
  
  
  
  

• The Religion of Innovation

  Enough with innovation for innovation’s sake.

  BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins took a shot at Apple today, speaking to a reporter for The Australian Financial Review. While couching his statement in respectful terms–“Apple did a fantastic job in bringing touch devices to market”–Heins nonetheless suggested that Apple was lagging behind. “The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about is now five years old,” he told the Review. Meanwhile, a series of analysts have suggested that Apple is taking too long to release its hardware updates. Charles Golvin of Forrester said that Apple’s current rate of releases is “not an adequate cadence for Apple to remain at the forefront of smartphone innovation today.”

  
  
  
  
  
  

• How Smart Watches and Phablets Fulfill a 20-Year-Old Prophecy about Ubiquitous Computing

  Mark Weiser, who coined the term “ubiquitous computing,” foresaw current device trends decades ago.

  “Tabs, pads, and boards.” The phrase may sound like a piece of techno-buzzy cud coughed up at a TEDx or SXSW talk, but it’s actually a precise description of current hardware trends made 22 years ago by a chief scientist at Xerox PARC. That scientist, the late Mark Weiser, was talking about his then-new concept of “ubiquitous computing”: the idea that cheap connectivity and networked devices would liberate “computing” from mainframes and desktop boxes and integrate it into people’s everyday lives. But how? What would that actually look like? Weiser sketched out three basic tiers of ubiquitous computing devices based on interactive display technology: tabs (small, wearable); pads (handheld, mobile); boards (large, fixed). 

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• How to Create Thermal Images for Millions of Homes

  Two startups combine Google Street View method with infrared imaging to show homeowners where energy is being wasted.

  One of the well-worn tools of home energy auditors is thermal imaging cameras that show where buildings are poorly insulated. But how do you bring thermal images to thousands or even millions of homes? Two Boston-area startups think they have the answer. 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• The Rare Disease Search Engine That Outperforms Google

  A powerful new search engine designed to help diagnose rare diseases could prove a boon for both medics and the public

   

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Where Siri Has Trouble Hearing, a Crowd of Humans Could Help

  A program called Scribe harnesses humans on the Internet to generate speech captions in under five seconds.

  Computer scientist Jeffrey Bigham has created a speech-recognition program that combines the best talents of machines and people.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Why We Need More Solar Companies to Fail

  Solar manufacturers like Suntech are struggling. Hundreds need to die for the industry to recover.

  Suntech, a Chinese company that as recently as 2011 was the world’s largest producer of solar panels, is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. It’s running low on cash, owes bond investors half a billion dollars (which it failed to pay Friday), and is saddled with payments on billions of dollars in loans as it struggles to make money in a market flooded with its product.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A Cancer Gene Therapy Activated by a Pill

  Patients can turn off an experimental treatment if side effects get too bad.

  A unique new cancer treatment uses gene therapy to induce a cancer-fighting immune response whose intensity can then be controlled with a pill. The combination could help tailor treatment to a patient’s individual response.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• For Investors, Mobile Startup Boom Gives Way to Caution

  Some venture capitalists are avoiding consumer apps and putting their money behind the “picks and shovels” of mobile computing.

  Viddy, a mobile video-sharing service that bathed in media attention and more than $36 million in investor funds last year (see “What’s the Next Instagram?”), is facing hard times. Users have abandoned its app by the millions, and last month it had to fire its cofounder and CEO and a third of its staff.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Photovoltaic Polymer Lets Damaged Retinas See the Light

  A light-sensitive polymer could offer a new way to develop artificial retinas.

  A team of neuroscientists and materials scientists has shown that a photovoltaic polymer can restore light-sensing capabilities to damaged retinas, offering hope of a simple way to restore vision to many people with degenerative eye disease.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Other Interesting arXiv Papers This Week

  The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv preprint server

  Charged Black Hole Remnants at the LHC

  
  
  
  
  
  

• More Near-Cures for HIV

  Early treatment may be key to a drug-free life for a small percentage of patients.

  Last week, scientists reported that a baby had been “functionally cured” of HIV (see “A Toddler May Have Been Cured of HIV Infection”). Now, other researchers report in PLoS Pathogens that 14 HIV-infected adults—four women and 10 men—have survived with the virus in check even though they have stopped taking their antiretroviral medications.  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Which Google Reader Replacement Will You Use?

  Google kills its Reader, beloved by many (but not enough).

  Across the Internet, journalists and news junkies are letting out a sustained cry: “Why, Google, why?” The company announced late Wednesday that it would be killing off Google Reader, its RSS platform. I use Google Reader daily. So do yet more eminent journalists. But the Great Googlers have determined that Reader’s user base is too small for them to justify the upkeep, and who are we to blame them?’

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Twenty-Five Years in Prison for Helping Hackers? Seriously?

  A maximum sentence of 25 years for enabling hackers to vandalize a news website is totally nuts.

  Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it indicted Matthew Keys, 26, Reuter’s deputy social media editor, for allegedly enabling some members of hacker organization Anonymous to hack and change content on the LA Times’ website back in 2010. The possible maximum sentence he could face if convicted? Twenty-five years in prison.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Will Methane Hydrates Fuel Another Gas Boom?

  Energy-hungry Japan extracts natural gas from deep-sea methane hydrates, but it’s not clear whether the “flammable ice” makes economic and environmental sense.

  In a move to get closer to developing its own domestic fossil fuel, Japan is extracting natural gas from an offshore deposit of methane hydrates. The tests that are set to run until the end of this month mark the first time such production methods have been tested in a deep-sea formation.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Obama Stumps for Energy Research Through Trust Fund

  President pushes proposal to fund R&D with money from oil and gas leases on federal lands.

  President Obama today made the case for using money from oil and gas leases in the Outer Continental Shelf to fund research on alternatives to fossil fuels.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Google Searches Beyond AdWords

  Personalized and interactive advertising experiences are becoming a lot more important than just simple banner ads.

  Would you follow your favorite basketball player’s shoes on Facebook or Twitter? That’s right: the player’s shoes, connected to the Web and posting status updates live from the basketball court. Bizarre as it sounds, this could happen in the not-so-distant future of digital advertising and marketing, if some of the ideas conceived by Google’s latest advertising experiment, Art Copy & Code, take flight.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• In the Developing World, MOOCs Start to Get Real

  Putting free U.S. college courses online is only the first step to filling higher education needs around the world.

  As online education platforms like Coursera, edX, and Udacity burst onto the scene over the past year, backers have talked up their potential to democratize higher education in the countries that have had the least access (see “The Most Important Education Technology in 200 Years”). These ambitions are now moving closer to reality, as more people begin to experiment with their setup, although significant challenges remain. 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Smartphones Are Eating the World

  Smartphones have created a bridge between two previously separate industries—wireless networks and personal computing. For Internet firms and device makers, this means access to the world’s largest network of people. As can be seen above, the wireless telephone business is large compared to personal computing. In 2012, the world’s mobile operators did $1.2 trillion in business and served around 3.2 billion people, versus perhaps 1.7 billion people who used PCs to access the Internet. By comparison, the combined revenue of Microsoft, Google, Intel, Apple, and the entire global PC industry was $590 billion. Online advertising, the main driver of the consumer Internet, generated only $89 billion in revenue.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Unintentional Interfaces: Google Reader's Censorship-Busting Power Will Be Hard to Replicate

  Google’s brand name made Reader work in Iranians’ favor.

  Journalists and other professional nerds are angry that Google is snuffing out its moribund RSS software, Reader. But as Quartz’s Zach Seward points out, plain old normal folks in Iran used Reader quite a bit to get around internet censorship. And those users won’t be helped by the Reader clones popping up in its wake, because Google Reader’s unintended power as an anti-censorship interface flows from its “Google” pedigree, not its “Reader” functionality. 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• MRI Scans Reveal Distinct Brain Injuries After Concussion

  Sorting concussion patients based on internal brain injury could help doctors identify those with more severe cases.

  Brain scans may be able to detect two distinct kinds of brain injury in patients who have suffered a mild head injury or concussion, say researchers from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Differentiating between the two may help doctors better treat patients.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• The Meaning of the Google Glass Backlash

  Has a product ever provoked as much hostility before even hitting the market as Google’s geek specs are generating? There’s something special about the eyes.

  Almost 10 years ago I spent a day in Toronto with computer scientist Steve Mann to understand why he strapped a PC to his body and wore a camera and a monitor over one eye. He argued that it was the optimal method of using a computer, which meant that eventually everyone would want to do it. That prospect unnerved me, because being with Mann was difficult. He seemed distracted by whatever was over his eye—or at the very least, I worried that he was paying more attention to it than to me. Whether it was the best way to interact with a computer seemed like the wrong question; it was certainly a suboptimal way to interact with a fellow human being. It struck me as fundamentally rude to put something in front of your eye but not let the other person see it—the equivalent of whispering a secret in front of someone else.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Reining in Geoengineering Researchers

  A Science article suggests a framework for monitoring research on how to cool the earth.

  Efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions worldwide aren’t working, so some researchers think we may need to resort to spraying reflective aerosols into the upper atmosphere to shade the earth and cool it off a little. The problem is we don’t know much about what that might do to the ozone layer or precipitation, among other things. And we don’t have laws to regulate geoengineering research to make sure someone doesn’t do something stupid, like doing a large scale test before we understand the impact of the aerosols, at least on a small scale, on atmospheric chemistry..

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Chronicle of the Smart Watch Foretold: A 37-Year History

  A human-computer interaction luminary rifles through his massive electronics collection to prove today’s hottest gadget isn’t so new after all.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Global Night Light Patterns Reveal Economic Shift to the East

  The mean centre of world lighting is moving east at the rate of 60 km per year, according to a new analysis of archived satellite images

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Here’s Where They Make China’s Cheap Android Smartphones

  Apple and Samsung, beware. Practically anyone can make a smartphone these days.

  A little over a year ago, 38-year-old entrepreneur Liang Liwan wasn’t making smartphones at all. This year, he expects to build 10 million of them.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• New Disease Registry Gives Patients Some Privacy

  A new venture lets patients choose how their data is used for medical research and offers sophisticated privacy settings.

  As advances in genomics, molecular analysis, and data processing have propelled disease research forward, scientists and drug developers still face a formidable challenge: recruiting patients for their studies.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Years in the Making, Promising Rechargeable Metal-Air Batteries Head to Market

  A Scottsdale, Arizona-based startup is now selling batteries that promise to be a cheaper alternative for grid backup.

  After years of development, a novel battery technology from the startup Fluidic Energy is being commercialized (see “Betting on a Metal-Air Battery Breakthrough”). It’s a rechargeable metal-air battery whose first application is replacing diesel and lead-acid battery backup systems for telecommunications towers, and for other businesses that need a steady supply of power. The company has been quietly demonstrating its battery with customers for a year. In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Fluidic Energy founder and chief technology officer Cody Friesen made details about its product publicly available for the first time.  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• I Want Frictionless Privacy

  Netflix now allows frictionless sharing of the movies you watch on Facebook.

  Back in 2011, following Facebook’s F8 developers conference, a new phrase began to buzz: “frictionless sharing.” Soon, news-sharing apps proliferated with Facebook, which enabled automatic posting of articles you were reading to your news feed. More famously, Spotify originally required users to register via their Facebook account. Spotify claimed that it was all just to make things simpler for the user: “As most of our users are already social and have already connected to Facebook, it seemed logical to integrate Spotify and Facebook logins,” the company said in a statement. But the move was transparently to create viral buzz in Facebook news feeds. Pretty soon, my feed was full of the unneeded “news” that Joe was listening to Kanye, while Kate was listening to Madonna. My listening habits were likewise broadcast, and though I think I’ve disabled them, I’m not entirely sure (last I checked, the Spotify iPhone app’s privacy settings remained a bit opaque to me).

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Cellulosic Ethanol Inches Forward

  The technology for making fuel from wood chips and grass is late, but still on the way.

  A few years ago, large scale, billion-gallon-a-year cellulosic ethanol production seemed around the corner. Instead we’ve seen companies fail, or scale back and delay their plans, as they find it hard to secure financing or bring down costs. The technology seems to have dropped off the radar, except for the occasional news of opposition to a mandate requiring the use of cellulosic ethanol.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• First Graphene Audio Speaker Easily Outperforms Traditional Designs

  The world’s first electrostatically-driven graphene speaker matches or outperforms commercially available earphones, say physicists

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Can We Really Run the World on 100% Renewables?

  Some studies suggest we can easily drop nuclear and fossil fuels, but they raise serious questions.

  Every once in a while someone will publish a roadmap for running the world (or a state) on 100% renewable energy by some date, say 2030 or 2050. The latest considers what it would take to run New York State with sources such as wind and solar. The resulting headlines look great, and a lot of people walk away with the general impression that, if we wanted to, we could easily drop fossil fuels and nuclear power.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A Tale of Two Newspaper Interfaces

  The New York Times “prototypes” a new site design for readability, while The Daily Mail mints money by actively thwarting it.

  The New York Times revealed a “prototype” of a new online “article experience” yesterday. Was it a bold technical experiment, a new multimedia whatzit, a paradigm-busting business model? No. It was just an article, laid out… readably. That is, in such a way to encourage reading. Ian Adelman, director of digital design at the Times, told me in an email that this “prototype” is intended to “create an appealing and engaging environment for our readers/viewers, as well as for advertisers.” You’d think that the essential, obvious point of a newspaper website interface is to do exactly that, and that the essential, obvious way to accomplish it is to set said interface up in a way that encourages reading, which is the essential, obvious thing that someone comes to a newspaper website to do. This, apparently, is innovative and risky enough to require prototyping? 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Developing Nations Put Nuclear on Fast-Forward

  Fast reactors can shrink nuclear-waste stockpiles, but can designers tame the inherent hazards?

  Fast reactors, whose high-speed neutrons can break down nuclear waste, are on the road to commercialization. That message has been advanced forcefully by Russia, China, and India.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Viral Phone Game Helps Illiterate Pakistanis Find Job Listings

  A viral phone game in Pakistan trains people to use their keypad—and gives them the skills they need to hunt for a job.

  The global spread of mobile phones has brought new opportunities to many poor people around the world, but an estimated 800 million have trouble with text entry or automated voice systems because they are illiterate or only partly literate. And training programs are difficult to get going at sufficient scale.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Raging on the Web May Not Really Make Us Feel Better

  Two studies suggest venting on so-called rant sites isn’t great for you. Grr.

  Fans of venting–online and off–may find this interesting: According to recently published results of two studies, people who regularly post on websites specifically geared toward ranting (such as www.justrage.com) tend to feel calmer right after they post, but are also angrier than others generally and engage in unhealthy ways of expressing their anger. Writing, and reading, these posts can also lead to negative feelings like sadness.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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