Tech News December 22, 2015

What’s Next?

It’s too late to stop climate change from happening. But we can begin to limit the damage and slow it down.

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Tech News December 21, 2015

The 6 Most Important Things That Happened in Virtual Reality in 2015

A lot happened in virtual reality this year; here are the key things to remember.

Though virtual reality is still far from mainstream, 2015 was a big year for the industry as new headsets were introduced—some full-featured and powerful, some simple and portable—and companies announced new ways to control and capture VR imagery, too. Throughout the year, investors poured money into companies developing the technology, content creators figured out how to make everything from films to advertisements in VR, and millions of Americans experienced virtual-reality technology for the very first time.

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Google's Quantum Dream Machine

Physicist John Martinis could deliver one of the holy grails of computing to Google—a machine that dramatically speeds up today’s applications and makes new ones possible.

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Can This Man Make AI More Human?

One cognitive scientist thinks the leading approach to machine learning can be improved by ideas gleaned from studying children.

Like any proud father, Gary Marcus is only too happy to talk about the latest achievements of his two-year-old son. More unusually, he believes that the way his toddler learns and reasons may hold the key to making machines much more intelligent.

Digest powered by RSS Digest

A Change of Mind

Diana Bianchi championed tests that find Down syndrome early in pregnancy. Now can she find a way to treat it?

Jerome Lejeune is the Frenchman who discovered the chromosomal error responsible for causing Down syndrome, half a century ago. Lejeune, who died in 1994, was a devout Catholic, and he was aghast when he realized his discovery would lead to prenatal tests and abortions. In his view, this was eliminating the patients instead of treating them. Someday, he felt certain, a cure would be found. “We will beat this disease,” he wrote. “It’s inconceivable that we won’t. It will take much less intellectual effort than sending a man to the Moon.”

Digest powered by RSS Digest

I’ve Seen the Birthday Parties of the Future

A new form of weekend entertainment combines virtual reality with a clever stage set. For now, you’ll have to visit suburban Utah to check it out.

I’m standing on a dark platform at the edge of a maze of gray walls, where two guides are helping me into my gear. They place a bulky helmet crammed with a virtual-reality headset, headphones, and gesture-recognition hardware on my head, and help me strap a modified laptop to my back.

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Are Young Athletes Risking Brain Damage?

Sports leagues should do more to protect children from the long-term problems that stem from hits to the head.

In the new movie Concussion, Will Smith plays a neuropathologist who performed a game-changing autopsy on former Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster in 2002. After a career in which Webster earned four Super Bowl rings and a spot in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, he suffered from memory loss, depression, and dementia, was homeless at times, and died at age 50. (The movie is based on a GQ article that describes Webster’s psychiatric symptoms, including “pissing in his oven and squirting Super Glue on his rotting teeth.”) When the neuropathologist, Bennet Omalu, analyzed Webster’s brain tissue, he discovered clumps of tau proteins, generally associated with neurodegeneration. In 2005, he published a paper arguing that Webster had suffered from what he recognized as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, brought on by more than two decades of brain battering on the field.

Digest powered by RSS Digest

The End of Internet Advertising as We’ve Known It

Millions of people are refusing to let intrusive, distracting, or irrelevant ads load on our devices. Consumers should seize the opportunity to demand a more mutually beneficial relationship with online advertisers.

My sister, a retired U.S. Navy commander, has a perfect military expression for what she does with her Sunday newspaper when it arrives: she “field-strips” it. Out go advertising inserts and other unwanted sections, sometimes before the paper even gets inside her house. Same goes for junk mail. The wheat gets in the door; the chaff goes in the bin.

Digest powered by RSS Digest

The Growth Industry Helping Governments Hack Terrorists, Criminals—and Political Opponents

Government agencies and oppressive regimes are snapping up software that makes it easy to hack your phone or computer. These new powers could make us all less safe.

“It looked very suspicious,” M says of an anonymous e-mail she and several other journalists received late in 2014. It promised a scoop about a government scandal, but something just didn’t sit right with her. Soon after, strange things started happening on her computer. “I remember clearly not being able to connect via Skype to give an interview about torture,” she says. “There was somehow interference and I had to use someone else’s phone.”

Digest powered by RSS Digest

This Climate Policy Could Save the Planet

Here’s a smart way for us to limit carbon emissions and keep global warming below 2 °C.

International climate-change negotiators are focused on keeping global warming at or below 2 °C above historical levels—the limit beyond which the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the consequences of global warming will become catastrophic. But even though negotiators may have finally made some progress on agreements to reduce emissions, there is a big problem: we’re already about halfway to the 2 °C threshold. In October, for example, the warmest October in 135 years of record-keeping, the global average temperature was 1.04 °C warmer than the preindustrial reading. It was no aberration: 2015 is almost certain to have been the warmest year on record, surpassing the previous record set in 2014.