Category: Tech News

• How Ads Follow You from Phone to Desktop to Tablet

  Advertisers are increasingly using technology that targets users across multiple devices, and it’s working.

  Imagine you slack off at work and read up online about the latest Gibson 1959 Les Paul electric guitar replica. On the way home, you see an ad for the same model on your phone, reminding you this is “the most desirable Les Paul ever.” Then before bed on your tablet, you see another ad with new details about the guitar.

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• At a Crossroads, Biofuels Seek a New Path Forward

  New microbes and new techniques show promise for advanced biofuels, but the industry is still years away from real progress.

  Attempting to chart a path forward for the beleaguered biofuels industry, a group of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, have devised what they describe as a novel method for producing renewable jet fuel. Using sugarcane and the sugarcane waste called bagasse, the new process (described in a paper in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) could enable green refineries to put out a range of products, including bio-based aviation fuel and automotive lubricant base oils.

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• Inside India’s Phablet Revolution

  In India, bigger is better when it comes to mobile phones, but Apple is lagging behind competitors like Samsung and Xiaomi.

  Zanish Khan runs a tiny shop in Delhi’s Basrurkar Market, where India’s middle class comes to buy life’s essentials. All around him, other merchants offer everything from electric fans to dried lentils that shoppers can scoop from 100-pound burlap bags. By contrast, Khan’s merchandise is kept under glass and packed with state-of-the-art electronics.

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• Why Liquid Biopsies in Cancer Treatment Are Still Experimental

  New diagnostics can find the DNA that drives a tumor, but evidence that they help patients is missing.

  A year ago I interviewed Deborah Fletcher, a 54-year-old manager at Deloitte who was fighting inflammatory breast cancer with all her professional skills. She carried a briefcase of spreadsheets, documenting treatments, bills, research, notes about who’d said what and what her plans were.

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• 50 Smartest Companies 2015

  These companies are shaping the technology landscape, in everything from massive solar panel factories to human stem cells.

  Sometimes we hear that technology companies have lost their ambition. Too many great minds are pouring their energy into the next app for the affluent, the argument goes. Where is the daring?

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• The Struggle for Accurate Measurements on Your Wrist

  Wearable devices are getting more advanced, but can today’s technology really measure our health?

  Until recently, I didn’t know a thing about how my roughly 25-minute bike commute across San Francisco—or any other part of my day, really—affects my body, other than that I inevitably arrive at work sweaty and a bit out of breath when I’m in a big rush. How high is my heart rate? Do my sleep habits affect it? How many calories do I burn?

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• Injectable Implants Could Help Crack the Brain’s Codes

  A new type of flexible electronic device shows promise for long-term brain mapping and could be a more effective way to provide therapeutic stimulation.

  Understanding how the brain works—or doesn’t, as the case may be—depends on deciphering the patterns of electrical signals its neurons produce. Recording them requires inserting electrodes into the tissue. But the rigid devices traditionally used to record these signals, or to therapeutically stimulate certain regions, can damage the brain and elicit an immune response, and they tend not to work for very long.

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• Biotech’s Coming Cancer Cure

  Supercharge your immune cells to defeat cancer? Juno Therapeutics believes its treatments can do exactly that.

  When Milton Wright III got his third cancer diagnosis, he cried until he laughed. He was 20 and had survived leukemia twice before, first when he was eight and again as a teen. Each time he’d suffered through years of punishing chemotherapy.

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• Soft Robotic Glove Could Put Daily Life Within Patients’ Grasp

  The latest in assistive technology is a lightweight glove that helps patients with limited mobility grab and pick up objects.

  Engineers at Harvard have developed a soft robotic glove that allows people with limited hand mobility to grasp and pick up objects. The device could help the estimated 6.8 million people in the United States who have hand mobility issues, whether from a degenerative condition, stroke, or old age.

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• Who Will Own the Robots?

  We’re in the midst of a jobs crisis, and rapid advances in AI and other technologies may be one culprit. How can we get better at sharing the wealth that technology creates?

  Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of articles about the effects of software and automation on the economy. You can read the other stories here and here.

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