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• Xbox vs. PlayStation: Beginning of the End for Consoles?

  Sony and Microsoft release their first video-game consoles in seven years, but they’re battling for a world of play that is rapidly changing.

  This month marks a milestone in the turf war for the space beneath our television sets: it’s the first time that Sony and Microsoft have released new video-game consoles within weeks of one another. The PlayStation 4 launched in the U.S. two weeks ago (and launches in Europe next week), while Microsoft’s Xbox One is available around the world as of today. Both systems are Blu-ray-playing supercomputers squeezed into similar-looking black plastic casing; both are designed to usher in a new era of high-definition, online-enabled video games.

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• Optimizing Resources Amid Increasing Scarcity – Answer

  How does the ability to instantaneously reallocate physical resources change the way companies source materials, manage operations, and go to market?

• A Trick for Making Batteries Safer Could Also Make EVs Affordable

  SolidEnergy says its new battery materials store more energy and won’t catch fire.

  Bulky and expensive batteries are the bane of electric vehicles. A new MIT spinoff company, SolidEnergy, says it has a solution: materials that can increase the amount of energy that lithium-ion batteries store by 30 percent or more and lower costs enough to make electric vehicles affordable.

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• Inkjet Printing Could Be the Key to Next-Generation OLED Displays

  Kateeva says its new manufacturing equipment can produce affordable OLED displays, rigid and flexible.

  Color-rich, energy-efficient, and flexible organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays could soon be churned out more economically on giant inkjet printers. 

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• Someday Your EV Charger May Be the Roadway Itself

  A researcher envisions the ultimate cure for “range anxiety”: roadway-powered vehicles with modified on-board power receivers.

  One way to extend the range of electric vehicles may be to provide power wirelessly through coils placed under the surface of a road. But charging moving vehicles with high-power wireless chargers below them is complex.

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• Sound Off on Optimizing Resources Amid Increasing Scarcity
• A Gooey Cure for Crack-Prone High-Capacity Batteries

  Polymer glue helps fracture-prone high-capacity batteries last through more charges.

  If electric cars are ever to drive hundreds of miles between charges—as they must to compete with gas-powered cars—their batteries will need to store much more energy. Unfortunately, several of the most promising high-capacity battery materials are prone to breaking in ways that would cut an electrified road trip short.

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• How Toyota Will Be First With a Fuel-Cell Car

  Toyota says it has reduced the cost of fuel cells significantly enough to sell hydrogen cars for under $100,000.

  Toyota says it’s made several advances to hydrogen fuel cells that will make them significantly cheaper, and will allow the company to sell a car using the low-pollution technology in 2015—years before its competitors.

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• The Power of Networks – Answer

  What can a network learn that an individual cannot?

  We asked this question because we believe that society is on the verge of an unprecedented era of learning. Humanity has always been hard-wired to accumulate knowledge, but while there have been pockets of accelerated learning over the course of history, nothing can compare to the potential of digital networks (both social and business) combined with data analytics.

• Lurking Inside the iPad Is the Future of High-Def Displays

  The appearance of indium gallium zinc oxide transistors in iPads shows that the display industry is poised to begin churning out a new breed of high-performance screens.

  One of the most important innovations in Apple’s latest iPads lies behind the screen. In many of the tablets, the pixels in the display are controlled by transistors made of a material called indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO), a promising replacement for the conventional amorphous silicon.

• Three Questions for Computing Pioneer Carver Mead

  Carver Mead christened Moore’s Law and helped make it come true. Now he says engineers should experiment with quantum mechanics to advance computing.

  Computer scientist Carver Mead gave Moore’s Law its name in around 1970 and played a crucial role in making sure it’s held true in the decades since. He pioneered an approach to designing complex silicon chips, called very large scale integration (VLSI), that’s still influential today. Mead was responsible for a string of firsts in the semiconductor industry, and as a professor at the California Institute of Technology he taught many of Silicon Valley’s most famous technologists. In the 1980s, frustration with the limitations of standard computers led him to begin building chips modeled on mammalian brains—creating a field known as neuromorphic computing, which is now gaining new momentum. Now 79, Mead retains an office at Caltech, where he told MIT Technology Review why computer engineers should be investigating new forms of computing.

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• Jawbone’s New Wristband Adds You to the Internet of Things

  Jawbone’s new activity-tracking wristband can be used to start your coffeemaker when you get up.

   

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• Stores Sniff Out Smartphones to Follow Shoppers

  Indoor location technology brings Internet-style tracking to physical spaces.

  You’ve just tossed a jar of peanut butter in your grocery cart when your smartphone buzzes. You glance down at the screen to see a message that seems downright clairvoyant: Buy some jelly. Get $1 off.

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• Sound Off on The Power of Networks

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