Author: JohnVlahos

• The Contrarian’s Guide to Changing the World

  Investor Peter Thiel has inspiring advice for wanna-be entrepreneurs, but he is unrealistic about where technology really comes from.

  Is the technology investor Peter Thiel brilliant, or is he just strange? He is nothing if not industrious. Since he cofounded PayPal, in 1998, Thiel has had a hand in some of the most important and unexpected tech companies of our era. His success has made him an oracular presence in Silicon Valley.

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• Can Sucking CO2 Out of the Atmosphere Really Work?

  A Columbia scientist and his startup think they have a plan to save the world. Now they have to convince the rest of us.

  Physicist Peter Eisenberger had expected colleagues to react to his idea with skepticism. He was claiming, after all, to have invented a machine that could clean the atmosphere of its excess carbon dioxide, making the gas into fuel or storing it underground. And the Columbia University scientist was aware that naming his two-year-old startup Global Thermostat hadn’t exactly been an exercise in humility.

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• Should Industrial Robots Be Able to Hurt Their Human Coworkers?

  Standards bodies are wrestling with the impact of accidental robot strikes.

  How much should a robot be allowed to hurt its coworkers? It’s a puzzling question facing companies developing a new breed of industrial robots that work alongside humans on the factory floor.

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• Fun with Food

  Playful new cooking based on traditional methods and weird ingredients will supplant the industrial techniques that dominate modernist cuisine.

  Ever since cooks began playing with the equipment of the food industry, chefs have felt compelled to join one of two camps. The first believes any kitchen is incomplete without a centrifuge, combination steam-convection oven, and $6,000 vacuum-seal machine and immersion circulator to cook 22-hour eggs sous vide. The second camp takes pride in telling you that all these gadgets, and ingredients like hydrocolloids and calcium baths, are outlawed in their kitchens—because gadgets and industrial powders have nothing to do with cooking. But now that the equipment, ideas, and techniques of modernist cuisine have been around more than a decade, a new generation of chefs declines to declare loyalty to either camp. To me, the most interesting cooks today are not on the barricades but those eager to discover new flavors. They use low-tech means like fermentation and cook over a stove.

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• What It Will Take for Computers to Be Conscious

  The world’s best-known consciousness researcher says machines could one day become self-aware.

  Is a worm conscious? How about a bumblebee? Does a computer that can play chess “feel” anything?

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• Confessional in the Palm of Your Hand

  Sure, people say some nasty things in anonymous apps, but the good far outweighs the bad.

  “I want to quit Google,” the message on my iPhone read. “It’s boring here.”

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• Google Execs Have Ideas on How to Run Your Business

  The ex-CEO and another longtime Google executive say the “new style of managing” they developed should be widely copied.

  Google is daring, creative, and by multiple accounts an enviable place to work—but is the way it’s run a model for other companies to follow? After all, quintessentially Googley practices like giving people free time to pursue projects are easier to follow if you enjoy very large profits from a product that has remained unbeatable for a decade.

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• Three Questions with the CEO of D-Wave

  The CEO of quantum computing startup D-Wave says its machines are helping companies analyze Wall Street data and search for new cancer drugs.

  Ever since D-Wave Systems unveiled what it called the world’s first quantum computer in 2007, the small Canadian company has attracted controversy.

• Paralyzed Rats Take 1,000 Steps, Orchestrated by Computer

  Controlled by software, paralyzed rats walk and climb stairs.

  It’s a strange sight: a paralyzed rat walking on its hind legs in a precise cadence, all controlled by a computer.

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• EmTech: Illumina Says 228,000 Human Genomes Will Be Sequenced This Year

  Record number of genomes being decoded, but cost of DNA sequencing might not fall much further, says Illumina president.

  Henry Ford kept lowering the price of cars, and more people kept buying them. The San Diego–based gene sequencing company Illumina has been doing something similar with the tools needed to interpret the human genetic code.

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• EmTech: IBM Tries to Make Watson Smarter

  IBM’s senior vice president says Watson could find success with commercial apps in wealth management, call centers, and medicine.

  Three years after its artificial-intelligence engine Watson made its high-profile win on Jeopardy!, IBM is adapting the technology as it seeks practical commercial uses, an IBM executive explained today at EmTech, a conference organized by MIT Technology Review.

• EmTech: Google’s Internet “Loon” Balloons Will Ring the Globe within a Year

  Google X research lab boss Astro Teller says experimental wireless balloons will test delivering Internet access throughout the Southern Hemisphere by next year.

  Within a year, Google is aiming to have a continuous ring of high-altitude balloons in the Southern Hemisphere capable of providing wireless Internet service to cell phones on the ground.

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