Category: Tech News

• Lyft’s Search for a New Mode of Transport

  How Uber’s archenemy plans to make the world a better place by building a kind of public transit system from private cars.

  We were all in the car with Alexandr, listening to techno, which was his choice. He was driving; it was his car. As we crawled east across Los Angeles, through Hollywood, the two strangers seated behind me argued about whether you could call yourself a photographer if you only posted your photos on Instagram. None of us had met until five minutes before, and after Alexandr dropped us in the different places we were going, we’d probably never see each other again.

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• Microsoft Researchers Are Working on Multi-Person Virtual Reality

  Researchers in Jaron Lanier’s lab at Microsoft are exploring ways for people to share the experience of mixed reality.

  Augmented or mixed reality, which renders virtual images in a view of the real world, can be spectacular to experience. But it may be even more fun when you bring a friend.

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• More Life, Less Death

  The United Nations has raised its projections for the world’s population in 2050 to nearly 10 billion. While women are having fewer children, death rates are also dropping because of better health care and medical technologies.

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• How Might Apple Manufacture a Car?

  Apple could subcontract the manufacturing required to produce a car and focus on the software, which is becoming ever more important.

  Automobile production might seem a stretch for a company more accustomed to making handheld electronic gadgets and software.

• A Shocking Way to Fix the Brain

  Neurosurgeons hope to treat some of the most intractable mental disorders by putting advanced arrays of electrodes into patients’ brains.

  When Emad Eskandar talks about one of his neurosurgery patients with obsessive compulsive disorder, he’s not talking about someone who arranges his record collection by color, size, and name. Or someone who ritualistically touches the knob on the stove twice before leaving the house and says, “Sorry, I’m a little OCD.”

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• India's Energy Crisis

  Can India modernize its manufacturing economy and supply electricity to its growing population without relying heavily on coal—and quite possibly destroying the global climate?

  An old man wakes on the floor of a hut in a village in southern India. He is wrapped in a thin cotton blanket. Beside him, music wails softly on a transistor radio. A small wood fire smolders on the floor, filling the space with a light haze; above it,the bamboo timbers of the hut’s roof are charred to a glossy black.

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• Cuban Web Entrepreneur Endures a Murky Status

  Clever business people like Hiram Centelles find ways to offer online services in Cuba despite tight restrictions. Will they flourish or be swamped by foreign competition when the communist island finally opens up?

  Hiram Centelles, the 31-year-old cofounder of Revolico, a Craigslist-style marketplace and classified advertising hub for Cuba, has spent the last seven years 4,617 miles from Havana, in Córdoba, Spain.

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• Gadgets Could Get Longer Lives by Combining Batteries

  Microsoft researchers show that batteries that can be more actively managed by software might make our devices last longer.

  Mobile devices such as tablets and smart watches could become quicker to charge and slower to run out of juice thanks to a new approach to designing batteries from Microsoft researchers.

• Martian Life Could Be a Biotech Bonanza

  The discovery of briny water on the Martian surface has brought new optimism that life might exist on our neighboring planet.

  When NASA scientists announced that instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter sensed signs of liquid water seeping on the Martian surface, they meant a solution salty enough to kill most living things on Earth. Temperatures on Mars are well below zero, so any liquid water would have to be loaded with salt – and probably not ordinary sodium chloride but something nastier—perchlorates, which are used in rocket fuel.

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• What Will Alphabet Be When It Grows Up?

  To truly change the world, Google’s new holding company will need something that has eluded many previous industrial labs: an effective commercialization strategy.

  One of the more interesting documents of the information age was posted on the Internet 11 years ago, as part of the initial public offering of Google. That document, signed by founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, conveyed both a deep enthusiasm for technological innovation and a mistrust of Wall Street. Page and Brin suggested that it would be possible to balance risk-taking with a sense of fiduciary responsibility. They would implement “a corporate structure that is designed to protect Google’s ability to innovate.” Above all, Google would not be a company that existed merely to reap profits and expand market share—rather, it would aspire “to develop services that significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible.” Page warned: “As an investor, you are placing a potentially risky long term bet on the team, especially Sergey and me.”

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• This Car Knows Your Next Misstep Before You Make It

  Researchers trained a computer to recognize the behavior that precedes a particular maneuver.

  An experimental new dashboard computer can not only keep track of your behavior behind the wheel, but even predict what you’re about to do next.

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• Fighting ISIS Online

  The Islamic State is an Internet phenomenon as much as a military one. Counteracting it will require better tactics on the battlefield of social media.

  The two men pecked out messages on opposite sides of the country. “Yes the Islamic State was a fantasy in 2004, now look at it. The U.S. was a fantasy in 1776, now look at it,” the man in Virginia wrote in a Twitter direct message to an online friend in Oregon. The Virginian, who went by various Twitter handles, including one with “Jihadi” in it, had been obsessively watching slick online videos produced by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS: brutality and jihadist propaganda, much of it translated into English and other languages. Now he was talking about traveling to Syria and forming a militia in Virginia. “Washington beat an empire with 3 percent of the population. I can do it with 1 percent.”

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