Category: Tech News

• Smartphones (and Motorcycles) Fuel Hyperlocal E-Commerce in India

  Entrepreneurs using couriers and mom-and-pop shops hope to outmaneuver Amazon with ultrafast deliveries in India’s big cities.

  The heat wave gripping India on a day in late May feels particularly intense in the booming Delhi suburb of Gurgaon. Temperatures have soared to 109 °F by 12:30 p.m., and they aren’t done rising. Lizards are looking for shade. A profusion of new office parks, roads, and malls has obliterated any vegetation that might have preserved a little of the previous night’s coolness. And yet Albinder Dhindsa is smiling as he looks out his window, because this sort of weather is perfect for business.

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• How to Avoid Real Objects While in a Virtual World

  Occipital wants to interrupt virtual-reality scenes with what’s coming at you in real life to prevent surprises and spills.

  How will you walk around virtual worlds without smacking into actual walls?

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• Designer Carbons Are Getting a Boost from Nanotechnology

  Manufactured materials could lead to breakthroughs in batteries, supercapacitors, and eventually carbon-capture systems.

  Typically made from coconut shells or wood chips, activated carbon has a variety of uses, from refrigerator deodorizers to water filters to batteries. Its primary characteristic is its Swiss-cheese-like structure: it’s riddled with tiny holes or pores that increase the material’s surface area, enhancing its ability to catalyze chemical reactions and store electrical charges. But activated carbon has significant drawbacks: the pores are randomly sized and unconnected, and it tends to have high levels of impurities.

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• Cyber-Espionage Nightmare

  A groundbreaking online-spying case unearths details that companies wish you didn’t know about how vital information slips away from them.

  On a wall facing dozens of cubicles at the FBI office in Pittsburgh, five guys from Shanghai stare from “Wanted” posters. Wang Dong, Sun Kailiang, Wen Xinyu, Huang Zhenyu, and Gu Chunhui are, according to a federal indictment unsealed last year, agents of China’s People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398, who hacked into networks at American companies—U.S. Steel, Alcoa, Allegheny Technologies (ATI), Westinghouse—plus the biggest industrial labor union in North America, United Steelworkers, and the U.S. subsidiary of SolarWorld, a German solar-panel maker. Over several years, prosecutors say, the agents stole thousands of e-mails about business strategy, documents about unfair-trade cases some of the U.S. companies had filed against China, and even piping designs for nuclear power plants—all allegedly to benefit Chinese companies.

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• Why Robots and Humans Struggled with DARPA’s Challenge

  The falls and fumbles of robots in the DARPA Challenge point to the remaining hurdles for human-robot interfaces.

  When some of the world’s most advanced rescue robots are foiled by nothing more complex than a doorknob, you get a good sense of the challenge of making our homes and workplaces more automated.

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• Quest to Mine Seawater for Lithium Advances

  Predicted lithium shortages are leading to novel technologies for recovering the element, now found mostly in salt lakes in South America.

  Researchers at Japan’s Atomic Energy Agency have come up with a new method of processing seawater to extract lithium—an element that plays a key role in advanced batteries for electric vehicles and one that, if current predictions for the EV market prove accurate, could be in short supply before the end of the decade.

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• The Quest to Engineer the Perfect Potato

  Researchers in the U.K. aim for a new commercial potato that resists many of the worst vulnerabilities of potato crops around the world.

  Super spuds are coming.

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• DARPA's Robot Challenge May Equip Robots to One Day Walk Among Us

  The DARPA challenge, designed to make robots disaster-ready, could have far-reaching technological benefits.

  Few people ever need to deal with a stricken nuclear reactor, but that skill could turn out to be important for the evolution of smarter robots.

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• Rebooting the Human Genome

  The official map of the human genome can’t tell you everything about your genes. Does graph theory offer a better way?

  The Human Genome Project was one of mankind’s greatest triumphs. But the official gene map that resulted in 2003, known as the “reference genome,” is no longer up to the job.

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• New Device Could Be a Safer Alternative to Lung Ventilators

  Using chip technology to precisely mimic blood vessels in the lungs could be a better way to treat patients with lung failure.

  A new technology that re-creates important characteristics of structures in the lung could eventually be a safer alternative to certain types of respiratory and cardiac machines used to treat people whose lungs have failed due to disease or injury.

• EmTech Digital 2015

  Full coverage of EmTech Digital in San Francisco, June 1-2, 2015.

  EmTech Digital: Two Perspectives on How Mobility Might Be Changing
  Two experts with different backgrounds and focus discuss how technology is changing transportation.

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