Tech News March 6, 2013

  • Crime Software: Still Awaiting a Verdict

    Scientific data not yet in on how much crime-reduction software predicts, and how much it motivates.

    Seattle last week became the latest city to install software that tries to predict where crime will strike, giving cops an edge. Indeed, crime reductions have been observed in cities where the tool—called Predpol—is installed and its recommendations followed. But with a dozen cities having joined the bandwagon, one fact is worth noting: no scientific paper has showed to what extent the software itself deserves credit, and whether the power of suggestion, and increased efforts on the officers’ part, might be playing a role.






  • Once-Pricey LED Bulbs to Dip Under $10

    Philips and Cree predict bright, general-purpose LED bulbs under $10 will be an industry tipping point.

    Lighting companies are within reach of a price point they think will make bright LED light bulbs a mass-market item: $10.






  • Computer Scientists Measure the Speed of Censorship On China's Twitter

    Censorship on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, is near real-time and relies on a workforce of over 4,000 censors who stop work during the evening news, according the first detailed analysis of censorship patterns.






  • BMW’s Solution to Limited Electric-Vehicle Range: a Gas-Powered Loaner

    BMW’s approach to quelling range anxiety differs markedly from the tactics of other automakers.

    While they wait for cheaper batteries that can store more energy, carmakers are trying a range of strategies to compensate for the shortcomings of existing batteries. One of the latest, coming from BMW for the electric i3 slated to come out this year, is to offer customers loaner cars for long trips (see “BMW Shifts into Electric Gear”).






  • How Facebook Slew the Mobile Monster

    The fortunes of the world’s largest social network depend on how much it can earn from mobile advertisements.

    Scarcely a year ago, Facebook was the poster child for Internet companies blindsided by the rapid shift of online activity from computers to smartphones and tablets. Just before its highly anticipated initial public offering last May, Facebook revealed that it wasn’t making “any significant revenue” from its mobile website or app—even though more than half its 900 million members used the service on mobile devices.






  • When Kickstarter Works, It's Rewarding – and Potentially Addictive

    Backing a Kickstarter project that works out gives you a rewarding feeling of power over what reaches the market.






  • Scientists Create Tadpoles That See from Their Tails

    An eye transplanted to a tadpole’s tail can detect and interpret light.

    The latest addition to the strange menagerie of engineered animals is a group of blind tadpoles that see out their tails. The findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology in February, provide further proof of the nervous system’s remarkable capacity to rewire itself.






  • Brain-Boosting Technique Might Help Some Functions While Hurting Others

    Electrically stimulating the brain may enhance memory, but impede with a person’s ability to react without thinking.

    We would surely all love a way to boost our brain power. But new research suggests that one promising experimental method could come with a cost. Using a noninvasive technique to stimulate the brain, researchers found they could enhance learning when they targeted a certain spot. But that also made people worse at automaticity, or the ability to perform a task without really thinking about it. Stimulating another part of the brain had the reverse effect, on both learning and automaticity.






  • Why Apple Should Rename the iPhone the “WeatherVain”

    A modest proposal.

    Apple is nothing if not brilliant at marketing. Put a lowercase “i” in front of anything, and it immediately conjures the Cupertino company and its products. Here is a company that practically owns an entire letter, one 26th of our literary heritage.






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Tech News March 5, 2013

  • A Toddler May Have Been Cured of HIV Infection

    An accidental discovery in pediatric HIV treatment may one day save others born into infection.

    Scientists with the National Institutes of Health announced on Sunday that a two-year-old child infected with HIV at birth had no signs of active virus despite being off anti-retroviral medication for nearly a year.






  • Sun Catalytix Seeks Second Act with Flow Battery

    The MIT spin-off had hoped to enable the hydrogen economy in developing countries, but is now at work on a flow battery using “designer molecules.”

    MIT spin-off Sun Catalytix has had to put its bold vision of enabling the hydrogen economy on hold. But it still has aggressive technical goals.






  • Global E-mail Patterns Reveal "Clash of Civilizations"

    The global pattern of e-mail communication reflects the cultural fault lines thought to determine future conflict, say computational social scientists.






  • Is This Why Google Doesn’t Want You to Drive?

    Getting you to take your eyes off the road could be worth billions in new search revenue to Google.

    Google has never said exactly how it will make money off the self-driving vehicles it has been developing. Will it manufacture cars? Try to become the operating system for our highways?






  • Micro 3-D Printer Creates Tiny Structures in Seconds

    Faster printing could see the technology move from research labs to industry.

    Nanoscribe, a spin-off from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, has developed a tabletop 3-D microprinter that can create complicated microstructures 100 times faster than is possible today. “If something took one hour to make, it now takes less than one minute,” says Michael Thiel, chief scientific officer at Nanoscribe.






  • Graphene Antennas Would Enable Terabit Wireless Downloads

    Researchers calculate the potential of using graphene for ultrafast wireless communications.

    Want to wirelessly upload hundreds of movies to a mobile device in a few seconds? Researchers at Georgia Tech have drawn up blueprints for a wireless antenna made from atom-thin sheets of carbon, or graphene, that could allow terabit-per-second transfer speeds at short ranges.






  • Military Malware May Have Killed the iPhone Jailbreak

    Malware developers will pay large sums for the bugs needed to loosen Apple’s software restrictions.

    Since the debut of the first iPhone, Apple has played a cat-and-mouse game with hackers who want to install “unofficial” software onto their locked-down devices. That game may be about to end thanks to the booming business in state-backed malware.






  • Samsung's "Eye Scroll" Hints at Post-Interactive Interfaces

    What if the future of human-computer interaction had a lot less interaction in it?

    The best essay on human-computer interaction I’ve read this year was a fake news piece in The Onion. Its title: “Internet Users Demand Less Interactivity.” What if people just “want to visit websites and look at them”? What if “using” a piece of software is simply not what we want to do with it, most of the time? 






  • The 12-Digit Number the Tech Industry Needs to Watch

    Apple’s ridiculously large pile of cash is begging to be put to a use other than getting Wall Street off the company’s back.

    No company is in a better position to reshape electronics and Internet media than Apple—but not necessarily because of its design genius or engineering prowess. It’s because of Apple’s wallet.






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Tech News March 4, 2013

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Tech News March 2, 2013

  • Other Interesting arXiv Papers This Week

    The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv preprint server

    First Search for Dark Matter Annihilation in the Sun Using the ANTARES Neutrino Telescope






  • Are Surgical Robots Worth It?

    The FDA looks into the safety of the da Vinci system in light of increased adverse incidents.

    Surgical robots allow surgeons to perform a variety of less invasive operations because their miniaturized instruments can work through small incisions in the body and are more dexterous than traditional laparoscopic tools (see “The Slow Rise of the Robot Surgeon”).  The result is that patients leave the operating room with a smaller surgical wound with the promise of faster recovery and less scarring.  






  • Engineer Plants to Reflect Light Back into Space

    Announcing this year’s so-crazy-it-might-work award from the ARPA-E Summit.

    Every year at the annual Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy Summit (which took place this week) you can count on there being at least one left-field idea that just might work—or might go horribly wrong.






  • Unmasked, but Unfazed—Chinese Hacking Group Is Still Active

    An exposé of its methods and technology may not have deterred a group targeting U.S. corporate secrets.

    The computer hacking group accused last week of being part of a specific unit of the Chinese military is apparently unfazed by the public attention triggered by a detailed report on its activities published by the security firm Mandiant. Another researcher tracking the group says that most of the infrastructure it had in place to carry out attacks remains in place.






  • Maybe Kickstarter’s Just Not That Into You

    Quality doesn’t always rise to the top in Kickstarter, as elsewhere. Creators should stay Zen about it.

    Eric Johnson over at AllThingsD calls our attention to a “breathtaking” game, the pleasingly literally titled Throw Trucks With Your Mind, on Kickstarter. The game, beloved by those who try it, uses a NeuroSky headset to enable you to control objects onscreen with the sheer force of your mind. Multiple people who’ve played the game say it’s about as close as you’re going to get to feeling like a Jedi. Sounds like a winner, right?






  • Ubuntu Off to a Promising Start on Smartphones

    An early version of Ubuntu’s touch-centric OS looks smartly designed and worth watching as it develops.

    The company that makes the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system, Canonical, recently announced what I like to think of as a Lord of the Rings software philosophy: one operating system for PCs, smartphones, tablets, and TVs. Not only is it an ambitious idea, but early images and videos of smartphones and tablets running the new software look intuitive and impressively touch-focused.






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Tech News March 1, 2013

  • ARPA-E Head Sharpens Focus on Life After Grants

    The ARPA-E agency has increased its focus on commercializing energy research but it’s a concern the DOE has yet to fully address.

    The ARPA-E agency is known for its high-risk energy research projects. But this year’s annual conference had elements of a business bootcamp, offering would-be energy entrepreneurs tips on how to raise money and build a commercially viable product.






  • New Method Could Cheaply Convert Natural Gas to Chemicals

    A ceramic membrane could unlock the potential of methane-conversion catalysts and help make use of natural gas that currently goes to waste.

    High-performance ceramic membranes from the R&D company Ceramatec could lead to a cheaper way to convert natural gas into benzene, a liquid that can be used to make a wide variety of chemicals and serve as a component of gasoline.






  • Mobile Computing Is Just Getting Started

    Smartphones, tablets, and wireless data plans are already a trillion-dollar business. It’s just the beginning.

    Mobile computers are spreading faster than any other consumer technology in history. In the United States, smartphones have even begun reaching the group of relative technophobes that consumer researchers call the “late majority.” About half of mobile-phone users now have one.






  • Research Hints at Graphene’s Photovoltaic Potential

    Newly observed properties mean graphene could be a highly efficient converter of light to electric power.

    Researchers have demonstrated that graphene is highly efficient at generating electrons upon absorbing light, which suggests that the material could be used to make light sensors and perhaps even more efficient solar cells.

    Conventional materials that turn light into electricity, like silicon and gallium arsenide, generate a single electron for each photon absorbed. Since a photon contains more energy than one electron can carry, much of the energy contained in the incoming light is lost as heat. Now, new research reveals that when graphene absorbs a photon it generates multiple electrons capable of driving a current. This means that if graphene devices for converting light to electricity come to fruition, they could be more efficient than the devices commonly used today.

    Previous theoretical work had inspired hope that graphene had this property, says Frank Koppens, a group leader at the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Spain, who led the research. He says the new result, described this week in Nature Physics, represents the first experimental proof.

    To perform the experiment, the researchers used two ultrafast light pulses. The first sent a prescribed amount of energy into a single layer of graphene. The second served as a probe that counted the electrons the first one generated.






  • Let the People Live-Stream?

    Startup Koozoo wants us to join its streaming video network. I’m not convinced of its widespread utility, though.






  • R&D Faces Its Own Fiscal Cliff

    The sequester means across-the-board cuts to federal R&D and, barring a grand budget bargain, anemic research budgets in the years ahead.

    U.S. politicians of all stripes are often quick to sing the praises of innovation and the economic benefits of federally funded research. But unless there’s a dramatic turn of events, U.S. government-funded R&D is poised for years of stagnation.






  • Sergey's Android-gynous Moment

    Google cofounder calls smartphones “emasculating” while wearing goofy Google Glass.

    We’ve heard plenty of speculation about Google’s “Glass” computer headset. But at the TED conference today, Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google, finally revealed its true purpose: restoring strength and perhaps even manhood.






  • Mozilla’s Mobile Firefox OS Raises Security Questions

    Firefox’s new Web-centric OS will let users run apps from the Web, raising concerns over how to stop malicious software.

    Mozilla’s new Firefox OS for low-end smartphones—aimed initially at Eastern European and South American markets—will face challenges protecting users from the malicious mobile apps that are a growing problem around the world.






  • Why Sequestration Could Really Hurt Long-Term Research

    The U.S. budget cuts that take effect tomorrow will demoralize future inventors, researchers, and disease curers.

    The across-the-board U.S. budget cuts scheduled to take effect on March 1, known as sequestration, will have ripple effects that hurt scientific and health research for years to come, the heads of two federal research agencies said this week.






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  • Toothbrushes, BristleBots And the Nature of Intelligence

    Fix a vibrating motor to the head of a toothbrush and you have an automaton that can demonstrate surprisingly complex behaviour, say Harvard physicists






  • Rats Communicate Through Brain Chips

    Researchers show that animals can collaborate via a brain-to-brain interface.

    Pairs of rats can communicate through brain chips and collaborate to perform a task, report researchers in today’s Scientific Reports. Brain activity recorded in one rat was translated into a pattern of electrical pulses that were then transmitted to another rat that had been trained to push a particular lever in response to one of two patterns of electrical stimulation in its brain. The rats also worked together, say the researchers. If the second rat chose the wrong lever, then the first rat would change its brain function and behavior in the next trial so that the receiving rodent was more likely to get it right, claim the scientists.






  • Smartphone Makers: Don’t Leave the Elderly Behind

    They may not make up the sexiest market segment. But don’t forget Grandma and Grandpa!

    AllThingsD reports that Fujitsu is pitching an Android phone it’s calling the Stylistic, aimed at the “mature consumer” (read: old folks). Technology for the elderly may not be the sexiest topic, and seniors in general may not be the coolest demographic, but technology companies should be doing more of this. There may or may not be a business case for laving R&D on seniors, but if nothing else, it’s the right thing to do, and could inspire a kind of generational trickle-down brand loyalty to the sons, daughters, and grandkids who would buy these products.






  • A Password You Wear on Your Wrist

    Mobile security startup PassBan offers smartphone owners a slew of authentication options—including one you can wear.

    A mobile security startup called PassBan thinks the best way to keep mobile devices secure is to allow people to choose from a bevy of different authentication options—including one that you wear on your wrist.






  • Mobile Traffic, Connections, and Network Speeds—Oh My!

    The latest Mobile Operator Industry report contains some interesting stats highlighting the explosive growth of the mobile Web.

    The GSMA, which is a mobile operator industry group, released a beefy report this week on the state of the mobile economy that is nicely designed and, more importantly, chock-full of interesting tidbits.






  • Protecting Power Grids from Hackers Is a Huge Challenge

    Securing critical infrastructure needs to go far beyond the measures in President Obama’s recent executive order.

    Yesterday, the president’s cybersecurity coördinator, Michael Daniel, appeared in San Francisco at the world’s largest security conference, RSA, to explain how the president’s cybersecurity executive order—intended to help U.S. critical infrastructure to withstand computer attacks—will operate. The order, announced by President Obama earlier this month, will create voluntary security standards for power utilities and other infrastructure companies and allow them to receive classified government information about security threats.






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  • Musk Says Tesla Will Pay Off Its Loans in Half the Time

    Tesla’s CEO claims the company is a success, and partially credits the DOE loan program.

    Speaking alongside Steven Chu at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy’s annual summit outside of Washington, D.C., Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors, confidently declared that his company, which received a $465 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy, is a success story, and said the company would repay the loan in half the time it is required to. The loan is due by the end of the decade.






  • An Autopsy of a Dead Social Network

    Following the collapse of the social network Friendster, computer scientists have carried out a digital autopsy to find out what went wrong






  • Stanford Researchers Build Complex Circuits Made of Carbon Nanotubes

    A simple sensor circuit made of hard-to-handle but promising carbon nanotubes is a first step in making the materials practical for computing.

    Researchers at Stanford University have built one of the most complex circuits from carbon nanotubes yet. They showed off a simple hand-shaking robot with a sensor-interface circuit last week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.






  • Facebook Nudges Users to Catalog the Real World

    Taking aim at Google, the largest social network wants a database describing as many things as possible.

    More than one billion people visit Facebook each month, mostly to see photos and messages posted by friends. Facebook hopes to encourage some of them to do a little work for it while they’re there. By asking people to contribute data—from business locations to book titles—and to check one another’s work, Facebook is building a rich stock of knowledge that could make its software smarter and boost the usefulness of its search engine.






  • The “Six Strikes” Copyright Alert System Is Toothless

    What will stem piracy?

    When I was a wee college sophomore, about a decade ago, my Intro to Photography professor was made an example of. The Recording Industry Association of America filed a federal lawsuit against him and 260 others who it claimed were “major offenders” and had illegally downloaded 1,000 copyrighted music files or more. I wasn’t very Napster or Torrent inclined already (and am generally a fairly risk-averse person), but the move scared me off piracy for good. More to the point, as a working writer, I’m come to feel strongly about the need to be paid for what one creates.






  • House of Cards and Our Future of Algorithmic Programming

    Netflix knew why its original TV series would be a hit—based on data about the viewing habits of its 33 million users.

    Plenty is being made about how Netflix made its first original TV series, House of Cards, available all at once online, and what that portends for the future of television consumption. But this is nothing new. People now expect to fit entertainment into their own schedules. It seems inevitable that on-demand entertainment will eventually eclipse weekly scheduled broadcasts.






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  • The "World's Young and Hungry": Where Real Mobile Innovation Will Come From

    Companies are scrambling to develop products and operating systems for the developing world, but any old phone will do.

    For some time now, smartphones have become tediously similar (see “The New Smartphone Incrementalism”). We’ve been to the glitzy U.S. launches—the Motorola Droids, the Nokia Windows phones, the iPhone 5, the Blackberry 10, and so on. Let’s face it: they are much the same. Mobile World Congress this week in Barcelona was filled with the latest advances—but, again, these were at the margins. 






  • Experiments on Cadavers Settle 100 Year-Old Puzzle Over Human Skin Strength

    Langer lines map out the pattern of forces within the skin but nobody knew what caused them. Until now.






  • A Plan to Give Mobile Data Bills a Makeover

    What if mobile subscribers could click a button and top-off their data plan, or even buy mobile Internet access to a single app?

    Most people have enough to worry about without micromanaging their smartphone use, but that’s what it’s come to for many device owners. To avoid exceeding a data cap, and incurring a costly penalty, many people try to meter their phone activities or resist the temptation to click on that Pandora app or YouTube link near the end of a billing cycle.






  • Data Espionage Sleuths Aim to Put Chinese Corporations in Court

    CrowdStrike says it can help U.S. companies identify the companies that benefit from stolen data.

    In recent years, computer security companies and even U.S. government officials have alleged that attackers in China and elsewhere routinely steal company secrets from U.S. corporate computers. But tracing the perpetrators of such breaches and showing which companies may have received the data copied is extremely difficult. Now a startup company, CrowdStrike, has developed tools that it says can track attacks in enough detail for victims to publicly accuse those benefiting. The companies can then take legal action or lobby for international trade sanctions.






  • LG Acquires WebOS for Smart TVs

    Ultimately, the operating system will live or die by its engineering talent.

    LG is acquiring WebOS from Hewlett-Packard, reports CNET’s Roger Cheng, for use in LG’s future smart TV’s.






  • Brain Implants Can Reset Misfiring Circuits

    Pacemaker-like treatment calms an overactive circuit in the brains of OCD patients.

    A study that combined electrical stimulation of the brain with advanced imaging has shown how correcting misfiring neural circuits can lessen the symptoms of a common psychiatric disorder.






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  • What ARPA-E Can’t Do

    The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy is highly popular, but its impact so far has been minuscule.

    At this week’s ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit in Washington, D.C., politicians from both sides of the aisle, together with environmentalists and business leaders, will do something unusual—they’ll agree on something. They’ll all sing the praises of ARPA-E, the agency created in 2009 to fund the development of early stage energy technologies. But what could get lost in all the laudatory remarks is the fact that ARPA-E won’t solve our major energy challenges and can’t fulfill its mission alone.






  • Astronomers Calculate Orbit of Chelyabinsk Meteorite

    The Chelyabinsk meteorite is from a family of Earth-crossing rocks called Apollo asteroids and there are 80 million others like it, say astronomers






  • Coal Demand Falls in the U.S., Rises Everywhere Else

    Cheap natural gas means U.S. electricity producers are buying less coal. But the rest of the world is buying more.

    A glut of cheap natural gas in the United States has recently led utilities to replace some coal-fired electricity generation with that from cleaner-burning gas. But while the domestic coal industry is down, the international market for U.S. coal—especially in Europe and Asia—is booming.






  • Startup Engineers See-Through Solar Cells

    A spectrally selective approach could let tablets, e-readers, and windows turn light into power.

    Imagine a world where any surface could be coated with solar cells, converting sunlight and even the glow of light bulbs into small amounts of usable energy. This is the goal of a new startup called Ubiquitous Energy. The company hopes to develop affordable, transparent coatings and films that could harvest light energy when applied to windows or the screens of e-readers or tablet devices. One way to use the technology might be in electrochromic windows that turn from clear to dark when the sun is brightest.






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