Author: JohnVlahos

• Increasingly, Robots of All Sizes Are Human Workmates

  Even conventional industrial robots are becoming safer to work around, making them more likely to collaborate with humans.

  Most industrial robots are far less friendly than the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, which is safe enough to be a surprisingly popular means of feline transportation. Industrial robots often sit behind metal fences, their mechanical arms a blur of terrific speed and precision; to prevent serious injury to humans (or worse), these robots are normally shut down when anyone enters their workspace.

• 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2014
• SpaceX Brings a Booster Safely Back to Earth

  The successful test of a soft touchdown demonstrates a capability that could cut the cost of space launches significantly.

  Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, took a step toward making spaceflight less expensive by reusing its rocket boosters during a mission on Friday to the International Space Station. The Falcon 9 rocket used for the mission, dubbed Commercial Resupply-3, or CRS-3, was the first to fly with landing legs, and was the first to successfully perform a controlled ocean splashdown.

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• A Better Breed of News App

  Mobile news curation uses human editors and good design to improve the experience of reading the news on smartphones.

  In 1704, John Campbell, Boston’s postmaster, turned his handwritten newsletter into a printed half-sheet, called it the Boston News-Letter, and founded the first continuously published newspaper in the Colonies. He soon found a circulation of around 250 eager subscribers. “Royal proclamations and international news appeared first, followed by news from other colonies, and finally local news,” writes the journalist Tom Standage in Writing on the Wall: Social Media—the First 2,000 Years. “Campbell gathered information by talking to sailors, travelers, local officials, and visitors to his post office, and via handwritten newsletters from other postmasters. But most of the stories in the Boston News-Letter were simply copied from the London papers.” Campbell had been writing a kind of blog, which he made into a business that curated the news.

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• Enlightened Spaces

  For almost half a century, James Turrell has been working with light in a way that merges art and technology.

  Imagine a painting by Mark Rothko transformed into a movie. In a space behind a glass panel, fuzzy clouds of color slowly morph from one configuration to another. A golden patch may appear in a field of crimson and slowly expand like a rising sun, suffusing the whole zone. Then around the edges a filament of green appears, spreading almost imperceptibly. This, in turn, shifts and modulates. And on and on. This is the experience of looking at works in James Turrell’s Tall Glass and Wide Glass series,some of which are on displayat the Pace Gallery in London and (with other works) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

• The Cost of Limiting Climate Change Could Double without Carbon Capture Technology

  The economics of combating climate change may depend on an underfunded technology.

  When it comes to technology for averting climate change, renewable energy often gets the limelight. But a relatively neglected technology—capturing carbon dioxide from power plants—could have a far bigger impact on the economics of dealing with climate change, according to a U.N. report released earlier this week.

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• Shape-Shifting Touch Screen Buttons Head to Market

  An iPad accessory launching later this year will bring transparent morphing buttons to the device’s screen to aid touch-typing.

  As they peck out text on the featureless glass surface of their phone or tablet, some people still mourn the passing of the physical keyboard. Now technology is heading to mass production that can offer the best of both worlds: a featureless surface for watching video and buttons that rise out of it when you need to type.

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• Selling Teslas in China Won’t Do Much for the Environment

  Because China relies so heavily on coal for power, electric vehicles aren’t necessarily an improvement over gasoline-powered cars.

  Sales of electric vehicles in China, the world’s largest auto market, have been minuscule despite government incentives meant to put five million of the cars on the nation’s roads by 2020. Tesla Motors hopes to begin changing that as it makes its first deliveries of Model S sedans to customers in China this month.

• Microrobots, Working Together, Build with Metal, Glass, and Electronics

  Tiny robots that work together like ants could lead to a new way to manufacture complex structures and electronics.

  Someone glancing through the door of Annjoe Wong-Foy’s lab at SRI International might think his equipment is infested by ants. Dark shapes about a centimeter across move to and fro over elevated walkways: they weave around obstacles and carry small sticks.

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• The Limits of Social Engineering

  Tapping into big data, researchers and planners are building mathematical models of personal and civic behavior. But the models may hide rather than reveal the deepest sources of social ills.

  In 1969, Playboy published a long, freewheeling interview with Marshall McLuhan in which the media theorist and sixties icon sketched a portrait of the future that was at once seductive and repellent. Noting the ability of digital computers to analyze data and communicate messages, he predicted that the machines eventually would be deployed to fine-tune society’s workings. “The computer can be used to direct a network of global thermostats to pattern life in ways that will optimize human awareness,” he said. “Already, it’s technologically feasible to employ the computer to program societies in beneficial ways.” He acknowledged that such centralized control raised the specter of “brainwashing, or far worse,” but he stressed that “the programming of societies could actually be conducted quite constructively and humanistically.”

• World Cup Mind-Control Demo Faces Deadlines, Critics

  A Brazilian neuroscientist says brain-controlled robotics will let the paralyzed walk again.

  In less than 60 days, Brazil will begin hosting soccer’s 2014 World Cup, even though workers are still hurrying to pour concrete at three unfinished stadiums. At a laboratory in São Paulo, a Duke University neuroscientist is in his own race with the World Cup clock. He is rushing to finish work on a mind-controlled exoskeleton that he says a paralyzed Brazilian volunteer will don, navigate across a soccer pitch using his or her thoughts, and use to make the ceremonial opening kick of the tournament on June 12.

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• The Underappreciated Ties Between Art and Innovation

  Author Sarah Lewis discusses some counterintuitive pathways to breakthroughs.

  The path to a great achievement—whether it is a technological innovation or a masterwork of art—is almost never direct. On the contrary, creative breakthroughs often come after wrenching failures. That idea animates The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, a book by Sarah Lewis, an art curator who is completing her PhD at Yale. Based on 150 interviews with artists and explorers as well as scientists and entrepreneurs, the book is neither a self-help manual nor a bundle of case studies. It’s a meditation on accomplishments that come from seemingly improbable circumstances and the connections between art and science. Lewis spoke with MIT Technology Review’s deputy editor, Brian Bergstein.

• Averting Disastrous Climate Change Could Depend on Unproven Technologies

  A U.N. climate report says we’ll overshoot greenhouse gas targets, and will need new technologies to make up for it.

  A U.N. climate report released on Sunday concludes that there may still be time to limit global warming to an increase of two degrees Celsius or less, which could help the world avoid the worst effects of climate change. But doing so will depend on making extraordinary changes to energy infrastructure at a much faster pace than is happening now, and may require the use of controversial and unproven technologies for pulling greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.

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• Does Musk’s Gigafactory Make Sense?

  Tesla’s audacious plan to build a giant battery factory may mostly be a clever negotiating tactic.

  Lithium-ion batteries are just about everywhere—they power almost all smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Yet Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, says he intends to build a factory in the United States three years from now that will more than double the world’s total lithium-ion battery production. The plan is still in its early stages, but already four states are negotiating with Tesla in the hope of becoming the factory’s home.

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• Going Nuclear: The Global Power Picture

  Three years after the Fukushima disaster, some countries are pulling back from nuclear power while others grow capacity.

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• Cheap Solar Power—at Night

  New solar thermal technologies could address solar power’s intermittency problem.

  When the world’s largest solar thermal power plant—in Ivanpah, California—opened earlier this year, it was greeted with skepticism. The power plant is undeniably impressive. A collection of 300,000 mirrors, each the size of a garage door, focus sunlight on three 140-meter towers, generating high temperatures. That heat produces steam that drives the same kind of turbines used in fossil-fuel power plants. That heat can be stored (such as by heating up molten salts) and used when the sun goes down far more cheaply than it costs to store electricity in batteries (see “World’s Largest Solar Thermal Power Delivers Power for the First Time”).

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