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• Headed into an IPO, a Smart Grid Company Struggles for Profit

  After its IPO on Wednesday, Silver Spring Networks will try to become profitable by helping utilities manage energy demand.

  One of the oldest smart grid technology companies, Silver Spring Networks, is set to go public this week after putting off its IPO for almost two years (see “The 50 Most Innovative Companies: 2011”), even as other cleantech companies continue to struggle on public markets. 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Gadget Gets Under the Hood to Bring Analytics to Driving

  A $70 device will tell you how efficiently you’re driving, and can even call 911 for help in the event of an accident.

  You probably have a rough idea of how much you spend on gas each week, but chances are you don’t calculate the cost of each trip down to the penny. Unless you’re Ljuba Miljkovic, that is, who knows that in a recent week he spent $7.50 to drive over 47 miles.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• The Puzzle of Ancient Star Catalogues and Modern Brightness Corrections

  Ptolemy corrected the brightness of stars he observed in a way modern astronomers only invented 2000 years later, according to a new analysis of his ancient star catalogue

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Safer Nuclear Power, at Half the Price

  Transatomic is developing a new kind of molten-salt reactor designed to overcome the major barriers to nuclear power.

  Transatomic, an MIT spinoff, is developing a nuclear reactor that it estimates will cut the overall cost of a nuclear power plant in half. It’s an updated molten-salt reactor, a type that’s highly resistant to meltdowns. Molten-salt reactors were demonstrated in the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Lab, where one test reactor ran for six years, but the technology hasn’t been used commercially.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Google Wants to Replace All Your Passwords with a Ring

  The world’s largest search engine is now experimenting with jewelry that would eliminate the need to remember dozens of passwords.

  As part of research into doing away with typed passwords, Google has built rings that not only adorn a finger but also can be used to log in to a computer or online account.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• My Dumb Phone Experiment: Phase Two

  In which I upgrade my dumb phone – reluctantly.

  You may recall that I have become one of these Thoreau types who has forsaken all society, by which I mean that I have given up my iPhone. Or, not quite given it up – it was stolen, and then I chose not to replace it, and then I blogged about my experiences with a $20 Alcatel dumb phone for a month, and then my dad gave me a Verizon iPhone without a data plan that I use as a sort of iPod Touch. In a word, I’m not quite living in a cabin in the woods. But I’m very stubblornly trying to shed myself of the constant connectivity that was the hallmark of my prior iPhone-centric life.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Buckle up for the Vehicular Zombie Apocalypse

  Autonomous technology is being developed at a remarkable rate. This could raise new fears about cars malfunctioning.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• An App Store for Your Home Lighting

  Philips invites developers to write apps for its Hue wireless LED light bulbs.

  Home lighting has gained new status in the world of network-connected digital gadgetry.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Danger Lurks in Growing New Internet Nationalism

  Cyber-espionage is old news. What’s new is the rhetoric, which is reaching a fever pitch right now.

  For technology that was supposed to ignore borders, bring the world closer together, and sidestep the influence of national governments the Internet is fostering an awful lot of nationalism right now. We’ve started to see increased concern about the country of origin of IT products and services; U.S. companies are worried about hardware from China; European companies are worried about cloud services in the U.S; no one is sure whether to trust hardware and software from Israel; Russia and China might each be building their own operating systems out of concern about using foreign ones.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Astrobiologists Find Ancient Fossils in Fireball Fragments

  Algae-like structures inside a Sri Lankan meteorite are clear evidence of panspermia, the idea that life exists throughout the universe, say astrobiologists.

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Microsoft’s Bing Now Can Find Local Businesses That Aren’t Too Crowded

  Using smartphone microphones, the crowdsourcing tool could deduce the current atmosphere at bars and eateries.

  An app called Bing Now, demonstrated at Microsoft’s headquarters last week, could give Web searchers a way to gauge the current vibe of a bar or restaurant before they book a table.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A Wireless Brain-Computer Interface

  Broadband communication and custom signal-processing chips power a new brain-recording device that may one day help paralyzed people.

   

  
  
  
  
  
  

• An Anti-iPad for India

  Suneet Singh Tuli, the man behind the ultracheap Aakash 2 tablet, says the West doesn’t understand mobile business in the developing world.

  A devout Sikh, Suneet Singh Tuli, 44, has found his own way to live by his religion’s central belief of sarbat da bhala, or “may everyone be blessed.”

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Electronic Sensors Printed Directly on the Skin

  New electronic tattoos could help monitor health during normal daily activities.

  Taking advantage of recent advances in flexible electronics, researchers have devised a way to “print” devices directly onto the skin so people can wear them for an extended period while performing normal daily activities. Such systems could be used to track health and monitor healing near the skin’s surface, as in the case of surgical wounds.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• The Ingenious Engineering Trick That Makes Amazon Menus Usable

  Hysteresis + path prediction = slick UX.

  Drop-down menus and submenus are a necessary evil of graphical user interfaces. For a site like Amazon, which forces the customer to manipulate an endless number of Matryoshka-doll-like text labels, it’s absolutely crucial to make this hierarchical navigation as easy and fluid as possible. How can you screw up a simple submenu? Oh, trust me, there are ways. If you’ve ever encountered what engineer Ben Kamens calls the “whack-a-mole” menu, you’ll know what I mean. Here’s his example:

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• How to Choose an LED Light Bulb

  There are now many general-purpose consumer LED bulbs that give off good light. With so many, how can you tell the difference?

  After years of work, LED lighting company have finally achieved their goal of producing a good replacement for the common 60-watt incandescent bulb. 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Other Interesting arXiv Papers This Week

  The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv preprint server

  Dark Energy From Entanglement Entropy

  
  
  
  
  
  

• DNA Sequencing Giant Illumina Joins Hunt for Autism Blood Test

  Illumina will work with SynapDx’s to find a blood-test that could allow treatment to start earlier.

  Massachusetts startup SynapDx announced on Wednesday that it will work with DNA sequencer manufacturer Illumina  to develop early detection tools for autism spectrum disorders,  according to a release.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Can HP Save Itself?

  An iconic Silicon Valley company says it’s in the second year of a five-year turnaround plan. But the IT business is moving much faster than that.

  I met with two top executives from Hewlett-Packard this week and got the impression that the company is buying time before it figures out something big. But I wonder if it can do that before it’s too late.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Path Still Doesn't Know What Job We're Hiring It For

  The small-on-purpose social network adds new features, but no clear purpose.

  The tech world was buzzing about Facebook’s redesign yesterday, but I was more interested in what was new at the “anti-Facebook,” Path. If you haven’t heard of it (and, given that it only has 6 million users, you may not have), Path is a mobile-only social network that limits you to 150 connections. The idea is that this limitation matches the limit most humans have on maintaining meaningful relationships. Path, then, is supposed to be the social network where your “real” friends are. On Wednesday Path released, um, “Path 3” (they like to issue product updates as if they’re movie sequels), which includes private messaging, “Stickers” (large emoji, basically), and a “Shop” (where you can buy the Stickers and photo filters). 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Authentication System Would Use the Body to Secure Guns and Gadgets

  With Microchip’s BodyCom technology, the human body is the medium for short-range authentication.

  Leave a gun lying around, and anyone who picks it up could fire it. That could change, though, with newly announced technology from Microchip Technology, which uses the body as part of a secure authentication process.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Seven Next-Generation Energy Technologies Showcased by ARPA-E

  Companies showed off their latest clean energy innovations at the ARPA-E Summit.

  The Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy funds R&D in energy technologies that are too early for private funders to pick up. It’s funded hundreds of projects since it was first funded in 2009 in areas including carbon capture and storage, power electronics, and solar power.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• A Photo Service That Understands the Contents of Your Images

  Everpix organizes photos after analyzing them with software that can detect things such as animals, outdoor scenes, and people.

  Browsing digital photos usually means scrolling through them chronologically, unless they have been sorted into folders and collections. This week a startup company called Everpix began offering an alternative: a system that uses machine vision software to analyze each photo for its content so that photos can be browsed using categories such as “city,” “animals,” “people,” and “nature.”

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Japan's Economic Troubles Spur a Return to Nuclear

  Some of the nuclear power plants shut down after the Fukushima disaster could restart soon.

  As the second anniversary of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima nears, Japan is considering restarting nuclear reactors across the country in an effort to ease a recession that began at the end of 2012 after years of economic stagnation.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A Shrinking Garmin Navigates the Smartphone Storm

  Smartphones are digital “Swiss Army knives” that do just about everything. Can the world’s leading GPS company survive?

  Garmin was once one of the world’s hottest growth companies—“the next Apple,” according to some stock pickers. In 2007 the company, the world’s top seller of GPS devices for car dashboards and boat cockpits, doubled its sales on what seemed like unquenchable consumer demand for its location-finding gadgets.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Facebook Gets More Visual to Keep Its Users Engaged

  The social network is adapting to the popularity of image sharing and mobile devices.

  The world’s biggest social network has a problem. As the Web becomes increasingly mobile and image-centric, it must figure out how to keep users on a site that wasn’t originally built with these two trends in mind.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Does Apple Maps Deserve Another Chance?

  Test in California shows edge over Google Maps and Waze

  Back in September we wondered whether Apple’s launch of a disastrously bad mapping application was a shark-jumping moment for the much-loved company less than one year after Steve Jobs’s death (see “Is Apple Losing Its Way?”). We were hardly the only ones baffled by the misstep.  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Why Environmentalists Oppose One of the Best Ways to Cut Carbon Emissions

  Humans may be wired to respond more to immediate issues like fracking than longer term ones like global warming.

  An interesting post at The Breakthough Institute website makes a case that environmentalists should rethink their opposition to fracking.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• The Gamification of Education?

  Tablets have a place in the classroom, but are far from a panacea.

  Yesterday, at the SXSWedu conference in Austin, Amplify, the education division of News Corporation, debuted a new tablet computer. The tablet was presented by Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City schools who is now the CEO of Amplify, report the New York Times and others.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• The Brain Activity Map

  Researchers explain the goals and structure of a new brain-mapping project.

  A proposed effort to map brain activity on a large scale, expected to be announced by the White House later this month, could help neuroscientists understand the origins of cognition, perception, and other phenomena. These brain activities haven’t been well understood to date, in part because they arise from the interaction of large sets of neurons whose coördinated efforts scientists cannot currently track.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Facebook Unveils a New-Look News Feed

  Live updates from the launch event at Facebook headquarters.

  1:45 p.m. And we’re out! Zuckerberg has left the front of the room. I’m running over to join the Zuck scrum … thanks for tuning in!

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Chinese Physicists Measure Speed of "Spooky Action At a Distance"

  Einstein railed against the possibility of spooky action at a distance because it violates relativity. Now Chinese physicists have clocked it travelling more than four orders of magnitude faster than light

   

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Will Anyone Create a Killer App for Google Glass?

  The hype around Google’s new wearable computers might not translate into a big market for apps for a while.

  Last summer, Ian Shakil, then a recent graduate of Stanford business school, got to try on Google’s head-mounted computing device, Glass, earlier than almost anyone outside the company.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A Startup That Scores Job Seekers, Whether They Know It or Not

  To help recruiters, a startup called Gild has created a database of four million software developers and rated their work. Could other fields be next?

  Winning over recruiters and potential bosses can be hard enough. Now there’s something else job seekers have to woo: an algorithm.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Self-Healing Concrete Uses Sunlight to Fix Its Own Cracks

  Researchers have demonstrated a way to give concrete surfaces the ability to heal when small cracks appear, an advance that could allow bridges and other structures to last longer.

  Even the tiniest cracks on the surfaces of concrete structures can lead to big problems if they aren’t immediately repaired. Now researchers have demonstrated a sunlight-induced, self-healing protective coating designed to fix cracks on the surface of concrete structures before they grow into larger ones that compromise structural integrity.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Crime Software: Still Awaiting a Verdict

  Scientific data not yet in on how much crime-reduction software predicts, and how much it motivates.

  Seattle last week became the latest city to install software that tries to predict where crime will strike, giving cops an edge. Indeed, crime reductions have been observed in cities where the tool—called Predpol—is installed and its recommendations followed. But with a dozen cities having joined the bandwagon, one fact is worth noting: no scientific paper has showed to what extent the software itself deserves credit, and whether the power of suggestion, and increased efforts on the officers’ part, might be playing a role.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Once-Pricey LED Bulbs to Dip Under $10

  Philips and Cree predict bright, general-purpose LED bulbs under $10 will be an industry tipping point.

  Lighting companies are within reach of a price point they think will make bright LED light bulbs a mass-market item: $10.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Computer Scientists Measure the Speed of Censorship On China's Twitter

  Censorship on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, is near real-time and relies on a workforce of over 4,000 censors who stop work during the evening news, according the first detailed analysis of censorship patterns.

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• BMW’s Solution to Limited Electric-Vehicle Range: a Gas-Powered Loaner

  BMW’s approach to quelling range anxiety differs markedly from the tactics of other automakers.

  While they wait for cheaper batteries that can store more energy, carmakers are trying a range of strategies to compensate for the shortcomings of existing batteries. One of the latest, coming from BMW for the electric i3 slated to come out this year, is to offer customers loaner cars for long trips (see “BMW Shifts into Electric Gear”).

  
  
  
  
  
  

• How Facebook Slew the Mobile Monster

  The fortunes of the world’s largest social network depend on how much it can earn from mobile advertisements.

  Scarcely a year ago, Facebook was the poster child for Internet companies blindsided by the rapid shift of online activity from computers to smartphones and tablets. Just before its highly anticipated initial public offering last May, Facebook revealed that it wasn’t making “any significant revenue” from its mobile website or app—even though more than half its 900 million members used the service on mobile devices.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• When Kickstarter Works, It's Rewarding – and Potentially Addictive

  Backing a Kickstarter project that works out gives you a rewarding feeling of power over what reaches the market.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Scientists Create Tadpoles That See from Their Tails

  An eye transplanted to a tadpole’s tail can detect and interpret light.

  The latest addition to the strange menagerie of engineered animals is a group of blind tadpoles that see out their tails. The findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology in February, provide further proof of the nervous system’s remarkable capacity to rewire itself.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Brain-Boosting Technique Might Help Some Functions While Hurting Others

  Electrically stimulating the brain may enhance memory, but impede with a person’s ability to react without thinking.

  We would surely all love a way to boost our brain power. But new research suggests that one promising experimental method could come with a cost. Using a noninvasive technique to stimulate the brain, researchers found they could enhance learning when they targeted a certain spot. But that also made people worse at automaticity, or the ability to perform a task without really thinking about it. Stimulating another part of the brain had the reverse effect, on both learning and automaticity.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Why Apple Should Rename the iPhone the “WeatherVain”

  A modest proposal.

  Apple is nothing if not brilliant at marketing. Put a lowercase “i” in front of anything, and it immediately conjures the Cupertino company and its products. Here is a company that practically owns an entire letter, one 26^th of our literary heritage.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• A Toddler May Have Been Cured of HIV Infection

  An accidental discovery in pediatric HIV treatment may one day save others born into infection.

  Scientists with the National Institutes of Health announced on Sunday that a two-year-old child infected with HIV at birth had no signs of active virus despite being off anti-retroviral medication for nearly a year.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Sun Catalytix Seeks Second Act with Flow Battery

  The MIT spin-off had hoped to enable the hydrogen economy in developing countries, but is now at work on a flow battery using “designer molecules.”

  MIT spin-off Sun Catalytix has had to put its bold vision of enabling the hydrogen economy on hold. But it still has aggressive technical goals.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Global E-mail Patterns Reveal "Clash of Civilizations"

  The global pattern of e-mail communication reflects the cultural fault lines thought to determine future conflict, say computational social scientists.

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Is This Why Google Doesn’t Want You to Drive?

  Getting you to take your eyes off the road could be worth billions in new search revenue to Google.

  Google has never said exactly how it will make money off the self-driving vehicles it has been developing. Will it manufacture cars? Try to become the operating system for our highways?

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Micro 3-D Printer Creates Tiny Structures in Seconds

  Faster printing could see the technology move from research labs to industry.

  Nanoscribe, a spin-off from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, has developed a tabletop 3-D microprinter that can create complicated microstructures 100 times faster than is possible today. “If something took one hour to make, it now takes less than one minute,” says Michael Thiel, chief scientific officer at Nanoscribe.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Graphene Antennas Would Enable Terabit Wireless Downloads

  Researchers calculate the potential of using graphene for ultrafast wireless communications.

  Want to wirelessly upload hundreds of movies to a mobile device in a few seconds? Researchers at Georgia Tech have drawn up blueprints for a wireless antenna made from atom-thin sheets of carbon, or graphene, that could allow terabit-per-second transfer speeds at short ranges.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Military Malware May Have Killed the iPhone Jailbreak

  Malware developers will pay large sums for the bugs needed to loosen Apple’s software restrictions.

  Since the debut of the first iPhone, Apple has played a cat-and-mouse game with hackers who want to install “unofficial” software onto their locked-down devices. That game may be about to end thanks to the booming business in state-backed malware.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Samsung's "Eye Scroll" Hints at Post-Interactive Interfaces

  What if the future of human-computer interaction had a lot less interaction in it?

  The best essay on human-computer interaction I’ve read this year was a fake news piece in The Onion. Its title: “Internet Users Demand Less Interactivity.” What if people just “want to visit websites and look at them”? What if “using” a piece of software is simply not what we want to do with it, most of the time? 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• The 12-Digit Number the Tech Industry Needs to Watch

  Apple’s ridiculously large pile of cash is begging to be put to a use other than getting Wall Street off the company’s back.

  No company is in a better position to reshape electronics and Internet media than Apple—but not necessarily because of its design genius or engineering prowess. It’s because of Apple’s wallet.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Can A Myoelectric Armband Replace Your Mouse?

  MYO enables personal gestural computing without clunky cameras.

  [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWu9TFJjHaM]

  
  
  
  
  
  

• The Algorithm That Helps You Friend People You Don't Know

  Computer scientists have developed an algorithm that uses the structure of a social network to find the best strategy for friending people you don’t know.

   

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Google Wants to Install a Computer on Your Face

  The search company is developing a computer in a pair of glasses. But why would anyone wear them?

   

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Clues Suggest Malware Is Moving from PCs to Mobile Devices

  Researchers report signs that moneymaking malware common on PCs is being adapted to mobile phones and tablets.

  The fact that smartphones and tablets don’t need antivirus software or regular software updates is a major reason for their popularity. That could soon change, however, as security companies report evidence that criminals are getting close to finding efficient and profitable ways to compromise many mobile devices at a time.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Other Interesting arXiv Papers This Week

  The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv preprint server

  First Search for Dark Matter Annihilation in the Sun Using the ANTARES Neutrino Telescope

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Are Surgical Robots Worth It?

  The FDA looks into the safety of the da Vinci system in light of increased adverse incidents.

  Surgical robots allow surgeons to perform a variety of less invasive operations because their miniaturized instruments can work through small incisions in the body and are more dexterous than traditional laparoscopic tools (see “The Slow Rise of the Robot Surgeon”).  The result is that patients leave the operating room with a smaller surgical wound with the promise of faster recovery and less scarring.  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Engineer Plants to Reflect Light Back into Space

  Announcing this year’s so-crazy-it-might-work award from the ARPA-E Summit.

  Every year at the annual Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy Summit (which took place this week) you can count on there being at least one left-field idea that just might work—or might go horribly wrong.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Unmasked, but Unfazed—Chinese Hacking Group Is Still Active

  An exposé of its methods and technology may not have deterred a group targeting U.S. corporate secrets.

  The computer hacking group accused last week of being part of a specific unit of the Chinese military is apparently unfazed by the public attention triggered by a detailed report on its activities published by the security firm Mandiant. Another researcher tracking the group says that most of the infrastructure it had in place to carry out attacks remains in place.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Maybe Kickstarter’s Just Not That Into You

  Quality doesn’t always rise to the top in Kickstarter, as elsewhere. Creators should stay Zen about it.

  Eric Johnson over at AllThingsD calls our attention to a “breathtaking” game, the pleasingly literally titled Throw Trucks With Your Mind, on Kickstarter. The game, beloved by those who try it, uses a NeuroSky headset to enable you to control objects onscreen with the sheer force of your mind. Multiple people who’ve played the game say it’s about as close as you’re going to get to feeling like a Jedi. Sounds like a winner, right?

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Ubuntu Off to a Promising Start on Smartphones

  An early version of Ubuntu’s touch-centric OS looks smartly designed and worth watching as it develops.

  The company that makes the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system, Canonical, recently announced what I like to think of as a Lord of the Rings software philosophy: one operating system for PCs, smartphones, tablets, and TVs. Not only is it an ambitious idea, but early images and videos of smartphones and tablets running the new software look intuitive and impressively touch-focused.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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