Author: JohnVlahos

• The Quest to Put More Reality in Virtual Reality

  The inventor of Second Life has spent 15 years chasing the dream of living in virtual space. Can his new company finally give virtual worlds mass-market appeal?

  Philip Rosedale is telling me about his new company, but I can’t stop myself from looking down at my hands. With palms up, I watch with fascination as I slowly wiggle my fingers and form the “OK” sign. I curl my hands into fists as I reach my arms out in front. They look pinker than normal but work as usual. When I look back up at Rosedale, he’s wearing a smile, and his eyebrows rise slightly. “Isn’t it cool?” he says. In my right ear, I hear a quiet chuckle from one of his colleagues, Ryan Karpf, standing just outside my vision.

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• Technology and Inequality

  The disparity between the rich and everyone else is larger than ever in the United States and increasing in much of Europe. Why?

  The signs of the gap—really, a chasm—between the poor and the super-rich are hard to miss in Silicon Valley. On a bustling morning in downtown Palo Alto, the center of today’s technology boom, apparently homeless people and their meager belongings occupy almost every available public bench. Twenty minutes away in San Jose, the largest city in the Valley, a camp of homeless people known as the Jungle—reputed to be the largest in the country—has taken root along a creek within walking distance of Adobe’s headquarters and the gleaming, ultramodern city hall.

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• Isaac Asimov Mulls “How Do People Get New Ideas?”

  Note from Arthur Obermayer, friend of the author:

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• How a Wiki Is Keeping Direct-to-Consumer Genetics Alive

  The FDA ordered 23andMe to stop selling its health tests. But for the intrepid, genome knowledge is still available.

  When Meg DeBoe decided to tap her Christmas fund to order a $99 consumer DNA test from 23andMe last year, she was disappointed: it arrived with no information on what her genes said about her chance of developing Alzheimer’s and heart disease. The report only delved into her genetic genealogy, possible relatives, and ethnic roots.

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• Air Traffic Control for Drones

  If large numbers of commercial drones are to take to the skies, they’ll need an air traffic control system.

  How do you keep small drone aircraft safe in the world’s busiest national airspace? One idea is to have them use cellphone networks to feed data back to an air traffic control system made just for drones.

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• Can Apple Pay Do to Your Wallet What iTunes Did for Music?

  With added security, better design, and improved convenience, Apple Pay hopes to finally make mobile payments commonplace at the register.

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• The Right Way to Fix the Internet

  Letting go of an obsession with net neutrality could free technologists to make online services even better.

  If you’re like most people, your monthly smartphone bill is steep enough to make you shudder. As consumers’ appetite for connectivity keeps growing, the price of wireless service in the United States tops $130 a month in many households.

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• Carbon Sequestration: Too Little, Too Late?

  A few carbon capture and sequestration projects are under way, but economics and politics are holding the technology back.

  To impede climate change, scientific studies suggest, billions of tons of carbon dioxide need to be captured from hundreds of fossil-fuel power plants in the next few decades—and as soon as possible. Without large-scale carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), other measures—including rollouts of renewable and nuclear power—will not avert catastrophic climate effects in the coming century and beyond (see “The Carbon Capture Conundrum”).

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• Microsoft’s Quantum Mechanics

  Can an aging corporation’s adventures in fundamental physics research open a new era of unimaginably powerful computers?

  In 2012, physicists in the Netherlands announced a discovery in particle physics that started chatter about a Nobel Prize. Inside a tiny rod of semiconductor crystal chilled cooler than outer space, they had caught the first glimpse of a strange particle called the Majorana fermion, finally confirming a prediction made in 1937. It was an advance seemingly unrelated to the challenges of selling office productivity software or competing with Amazon in cloud computing, but Craig Mundie, then heading Microsoft’s technology and research strategy, was delighted. The abstruse discovery—partly underwritten by Microsoft—was crucial to a project at the company aimed at making it possible to build immensely powerful computers that crunch data using quantum physics. “It was a pivotal moment,” says Mundie. “This research was guiding us toward a way of realizing one of these systems.”

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• An Industrial-Sized Generator That Runs on Waste Heat, Using No Fuel

  Startup Alphabet Energy has its first product: what it says is the world’s largest thermoelectric generator.

  Power plants waste huge amount of energy as heat—about 40 to 80 percent of the total in the fuel they burn. A new device could reduce that waste, cutting fuel consumption and carbon emissions by as much as 3 percent and saving companies millions of dollars. (Three percent might not seem like much, but for context, air travel accounts for 2 percent of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions.)

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