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• 2013: The Year in Communications

  Along with NSA spying revelations, 2013 brought faster wireless technologies, global connectivity expansion, and new communications business models.

  By David Talbot

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• 2013: The Year’s Most Important Computing Stories

  Many Wearable Computers and Fundamental Advances

  By Tom Simonite

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• 2013: The Best Biomedicine Stories of the Year

  A push for new brain-mapping technology and a ban on some gene patents showcase ongoing advances in biomedical technology.

  By Susan Young

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• Too Much Information

  Are we prepared to know the genetic flaws of the unborn?

  Pregnant women and their partners can already peer at an unborn child’s chromosomes: with amniocentesis, they can learn about the presence or, more likely, absence of large-scale genetic defects, often gaining peace of mind. But only a small percentage of parents-to-be take the opportunity, because the procedure is invasive and uncomfortable—a large needle is inserted into the amniotic sac—and causes miscarriage in roughly one in 400 cases. 

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• Why We Will Need Genetically Modified Foods

  Climate change will make it increasingly difficult to feed the world. Biotech crops will have an essential role in ensuring that there’s enough to eat.

  Signs of late blight appear suddenly but predictably in Ireland as soon as the summer weather turns humid, spores of the funguslike plant pathogen wafting across the open green fields and landing on the wet leaves of the potato plants. This year it began to rain in early August. Within several weeks, late blight had attacked a small plot of potatoes in the corner of the neat grid of test plantings at the headquarters of Teagasc, Ireland’s agricultural agency, in Carlow.

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• Thinking in Silicon

  Microchips modeled on the brain may excel at tasks that baffle today’s computers.

  Picture a person reading these words on a laptop in a coffee shop. The machine made of metal, plastic, and silicon consumes about 50 watts of poweras it translates bits of information—a long string of 1s and 0s—into a pattern of dots on a screen. Meanwhile, inside that person’s skull, a gooey clump of proteins, salt, and water uses a fraction of that power not only to recognize those patterns as letters, words, and sentences but to recognize the song playing on the radio.

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• World’s Smallest Pacemaker Can Be Implanted without Surgery

  New cardiac devices are small enough to be delivered through blood vessels into the heart.

  Pacemaker surgery typically requires a doctor to make an incision above a patient’s heart, dig a cavity into which they can implant the heartbeat-regulating device, and then connect the pulse generator to wires delivered through a vein near the collarbone. Such surgery could soon be completely unnecessary. Instead, doctors could employ miniaturized wireless pacemakers that can be delivered into the heart through a major vein in the thigh.

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• Parents: Don’t Panic About Your Kids’ Social Media Habits

  Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd tries to puncture some myths about teenagers and the Internet.

  Kids today! They’re online all the time, sharing every little aspect of their lives. What’s wrong with them? Actually, nothing, says Danah Boyd, a Microsoft researcher who studies social media. In a book coming out this winter, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, Boyd argues that teenagers aren’t doing much online that’s very different from what kids did at the sock hop, the roller rink, or the mall. They do so much socializing online mostly because they have little choice, Boyd says: parents now generally consider it unsafe to let kids roam their neighborhoods unsupervised. Boyd, 36, spoke with MIT Technology Review’s deputy editor, Brian Bergstein, at Microsoft Research’s offices in Manhattan.

• How Remote Places Can Get Cellular Coverage by Doing It Themselves

  With Swedish telephone numbers and a tree-bound base station, a remote Indonesian village runs its own telecommunications company.

  A four-hour drive from the nearest cellular coverage in the remote highlands of Papua, Indonesia, a new kind of guerilla telecom network is operating, albeit outside the law, using a cheap base station roped into a treetop.

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• The Many Tongues of Twitter

  Twitter’s footprint is growing fast, although English speakers in the U.S. remain the largest demographic. The trick now is to turn its global presence into advertising dollars.

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• New Interfaces Inspire Inventive Computer Games

  Novel modes of interaction are inspiring independent games companies to come up with completely new types of games.

  The cliché is that technological innovation in video game development is the domain of the blockbuster studios. These are companies with the requisite manpower and cash reserves to explore new ways for players to interact with digital games, or to ever more closely replicate the detail and texture of reality on screen. The indie developers, meanwhile, innovate in the area of game design, where they are small and agile enough to take creative risks.

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