Category: Tech News

• How Artificial Intelligence Can Fight Air Pollution in China

  IBM researchers are developing a system that can predict how bad pollution will be across the city of Beijing 72 hours in advance.

  IBM is testing a new way to alleviate Beijing’s choking air pollution with the help of artificial intelligence. The Chinese capital, like many other cities across the country, is surrounded by factories, many fueled by coal, that emit harmful particulates. But pollution levels can vary depending on factors such as industrial activity, traffic congestion, and weather conditions.

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• The Looming Problem That Could Kill Bitcoin

  The man who took over stewardship of Bitcoin from its mysterious inventor says the currency is in serious trouble.

  The way things are going, the digital currency Bitcoin will start to malfunction early next year. Transactions will become increasingly delayed, and the system of money now worth $3.3 billion will begin to die as its flakiness drives people away. So says Gavin Andresen, who in 2010 was designated chief caretaker of the code that powers Bitcoin by its shadowy creator. Andresen held the role of “core maintainer” during most of Bitcoin’s improbable rise; he stepped down last year but still remains heavily involved with the currency (see “The Man Who Really Built Bitcoin”).

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• Two Companies Close In on a Concussion Blood Test

  A pair of companies say they’ve identified proteins that could lead to a blood test to quickly diagnose concussions.

  A blood test that could quickly detect a brain injury and measure the damage it has done could help doctors provide better care for the millions of people suffering from such injuries, potentially improving their chances of avoiding long-term disabilities.

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• New Boss on Construction Sites Is a Drone

  Drones are being used to capture video footage that shows construction progress at the Sacramento Kings’ new stadium in California.

  For some construction workers, any thoughts of slacking off could soon seem rather quaint. The drones will almost certainly notice.

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• Tool Makes It Easier to Evade Online Censors

  New software makes Web traffic that’s banned in places like China or Iran appear as ordinary Internet use.

  After the huge chemical explosion in Tianjin, China, this month, two cleanup efforts began. Amid the wreckage, first responders rescued people and doused fires. On the Web, China’s censors began deleting content suggesting the government could have done more to prevent or contain the disaster. Hundreds of websites and social-media accounts have now been shut down.

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• Inside Illumina’s Plans to Lure Consumers with an App Store for Genomes

  An app store that holds your DNA, then sells it to you little by little.

  The CEO of the world’s leading DNA sequencing company says he knows how to finally get consumers interested in their genomes: by creating an enormous app store for genetic information. 

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• Synthetic Life Seeks Work

  A startup company says it is expanding the language of DNA to create new tools for drug discovery.

  In the May 15, 2014, edition of the journal Nature, Floyd Romesberg’s chemistry lab at San Diego’s Scripps Research Institute published a paper titled “A Semi-Synthetic Organism with an Expanded Genetic Alphabet.” Romesberg and his colleagues had created a bacterium incorporating chemical building blocks that, as far as anybody knows, have never been part of any earthly life form.

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• Innovators Under 35 | 2015

  Our 15th annual celebration of people who are driving the next generation of technological breakthroughs.

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• Paying for Solar Power

  SolarCity’s massive new manufacturing plant in Buffalo, New York, reflects a booming demand for solar power. Is it sustainable?

  The rail cars that once carried iron ore around Republic Steel’s sprawling plant at the edge of downtown Buffalo, New York, were plowed under when the steel company abandoned the location in 1984. They were recently discovered when excavation began for the so-called gigafactory to be operated by SolarCity, the country’s leading supplier of solar panels. Now the rusted cars and a scattering of other relics from the days of Republic Steel greet visitors to the construction site, a reminder of the city’s past manufacturing might and a testament to the dream that North America’s largest solar-panel manufacturing facility can help revive it.

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• Motion Pictures

  Technology is now allowing artists to do something they’ve aspired to since the stone age: make their paintings move.

  “By and large, visual art has always been defined as static,” the abstract artist Frank Stella observed to me in 1998, “but the tradition has always been to use illusion to create a sense of motion.” He was quite correct, historically speaking. From the days of the cave artists of the Cro-Magnon era, tens of thousands of years ago, artists have attempted to make images of a world that is constantly rushing, drifting, rippling, and shifting. Or as Stella put it: “If something moves, that’s how you can tell it’s alive.”

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