Category: Tech News

• Ford CEO Explains Why It’s Hard to Build Self-Driving Cars

  Mark Fields, the head of Ford, says cars that can drive themselves may need to learn some more human traits.

  Ford didn’t announce a deal with Google to develop self-driving cars at CES this week, as some had expected. But the automaker did reiterate its commitment to developing autonomous vehicles, as CEO Mark Fields announced a new version of its self-driving test car and said the company will ramp up its fleet from 10 to 30 of them this year, letting the company gather more information faster in hopes of eventually getting to a point where it can sell such a car to consumers.

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• Human-Animal Chimeras Are Gestating on U.S. Research Farms

  A radical new approach to generating human organs is to grow them inside pigs or sheep.

  Braving a funding ban put in place by America’s top health agency, some U.S. research centers are moving ahead with attempts to grow human tissue inside pigs and sheep with the goal of creating hearts, livers, or other organs needed for transplants.

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• Battles Over Net Metering Cloud the Future of Rooftop Solar

  Nevada’s reversal of net metering fees for solar owners marks a dramatic turn in the fight over solar policies.

  Solar power installer SolarCity, the country’s largest provider of rooftop panels, has exited the Nevada market in the wake of the state’s rollback of the net metering fees paid to residential solar owners. The departure marks an escalation in the war over net metering that is roiling the industry.

• How Drones May Avoid Collisions by Sharing Knowledge

  Instead of programming drones to know what to do in every single scenario, a Stanford lab is giving them the intelligence to understand their surroundings.

  If the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration allows the widespread use of commercial drones, the skies could soon buzz with swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles–especially in dense urban cores. That means drones will be tasked with autonomously avoiding collisions, as their numbers will be too high to rely on human air-traffic controllers at all times.

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• 5 Robot Trends to Watch for in 2016

  Chinese robots, delivery drones, and machines that teach each other could be big trends in 2016.

  Will this year mark the first drone delivery, or the first time you encounter a robot at work or in your home? We saw significant advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence in 2015 (see “What Robots and AI Learned in 2015”). Here’s what we’re watching closely in 2016.

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• The 6 Biggest Technology Failures of 2015

  They caught on fire, threatened the planet, or were simply less impressive than they seemed. Meet the year’s worst technologies.

  Welcome to MIT Technology Review’s second annual list of top tech flops. Without further preamble, here are the technologies we thought did the least for humanity in 2015.

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• Here’s What We Learned About Concussion Detection in 2015 (And What We Still Don’t Know)

  Better concussion diagnostics will give scientists and physicians a more detailed understanding of brain injury.

  Does playing football cause permanent brain damage? If it wasn’t already, that question is now squarely in the zeitgeist thanks to Hollywood and Will Smith.

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• What Robots and AI Learned in 2015

  It was the year that self-driving cars became a commercial reality; robots gained all sorts of new abilities; and some people worried about the existential threat posed by super-intelligent future AI.

  The robots didn’t really take over in 2015, but at times it felt as if that might be where we’re headed.

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• 2015 in Biomedicine: Baby Engineering, Spray-On GMOs, and Cancer Cures

  During 2015, the combination of potent biotechnologies solved problems and created new ones.

  Biologists often emphasize how little anyone really knows about the brain, the genome, and the mechanisms behind effective drugs. But this year their tune changed as diverse technologies–gene editing, stem cells, cloning, and DNA databases–coalesced into an immensely powerful toolkit for manipulating life. The message in 2015 seemed to be: “We can do anything.”

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• 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2015: Where Are They Now?

  In February we chose our 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2015—here’s how they have advanced since.

  Each year MIT Technology Review selects 10 emerging technologies that we believe will remake the world. Here’s how this year’s picks got closer to reality over the past 10 months.

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• How Facebook and Google’s Plans to Boost Internet Access Advanced in 2015

  This year Google and Facebook’s efforts to get more of the world’s population online got much more serious—but also hit some setbacks.

  Some 3.2 billion people in the world are now online, the United Nations estimated late in November. That leaves 56.6 percent of the human race unconnected. And in the past year growth in the number of people who are connected slowed—the U.N. pegs it at 6.9 percent for 2015, down from 7.4 percent in 2014.

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