Category: Tech News

• Can Japan Recapture Its Solar Power?

  The way the Land of the Rising Sun built and lost its dominance in photovoltaics shows just how vulnerable renewables remain to changing politics and national policies.

  It’s 38 °C on the Atsumi Peninsula southwest of Tokyo: a deadly heat wave has been gripping much of Japan late this summer. Inside the offices of a newly built power plant operated by the plastics company Mitsui Chemicals, the AC is blasting. Outside, 215,000 solar panels are converting the blistering sunlight into 50 megawatts of electricity for the local grid. Three 118-meter-high wind turbines erected at the site add six megawatts of generation capacity to back up the solar panels during the winter.

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• The Troll Hunters

  A group of journalists and researchers wade into ugly corners of the Internet to expose racists, creeps, and hypocrites. Have they gone too far?

  We’ve come up with the menacing term “troll” for someone who spreads hate and does other horrible things anonymously on the Internet. Internet trolls are unsettling not just because of the things they say but for the mystery they represent: what kind of person could be so vile? One afternoon this fall, the Swedish journalist Robert Aschberg sat on a patio outside a drab apartment building in a suburb of Stockholm, face to face with an Internet troll, trying to answer this question. The troll turned out to be a quiet, skinny man in his 30s, wearing a hoodie and a dirty baseball cap—a sorry foil to Aschberg’s smart suit jacket, gleaming bald head, and TV-trained baritone. Aschberg’s research team had linked the man to a months-long campaign of harassment against a teenage girl born with a shrunken hand. After meeting her online, the troll tormented her obsessively, leaving insulting comments about her hand on her Instagram page, barraging her with Facebook messages, even sending her taunts through the mail.

• Geneticists Begin Tests of an Internet for DNA

  Scientists are starting to open their DNA databases online, creating a network that could pave the way for gene analysis at a new scale.

  A coalition of geneticists and computer programmers calling itself the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health is developing protocols for exchanging DNA information across the Internet. The researchers hope their work could be as important to medical science as HTTP, the protocol created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, was to the Web.

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• Chemical-Sensing Displays and Other Surprising Uses of Glass

  An inside look at Corning’s labs suggests what’s next for the inventor of Gorilla Glass.

  Someday your smartphone might be able to help you in a new way when you’re traveling: by telling you whether the water is safe to drink.

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• Desalination out of Desperation

  Severe droughts are forcing researchers to rethink how technology can increase the supply of fresh water.

  Even in drought-stricken California, San Diego stands out. It gets less rain than parched Los Angeles or Fresno. The region has less groundwater than many other parts of the state. And more than 80 percent of water for homes and businesses is imported from sources that are increasingly stressed. The Colorado River is so overtaxed that it rarely reaches the sea; water originating in the Sacramento River delta, more than 400 miles north, was rationed by state officials this year, cutting off some farmers in California’s Central Valley from their main source of irrigation. San Diego County, hot, dry, and increasingly populous, offers a preview of where much of the world is headed. So too does a recent decision by the county government: it is building the largest seawater desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere, at a cost of $1 billion.

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• What Are MOOCs Good For?

  Online courses may not be changing colleges as their boosters claimed they would, but they can prove valuable in surprising ways.

  A few years ago, the most enthusiastic advocates of MOOCs believed that these “massive open online courses” stood poised to overturn the century-old model of higher education. Their interactive technology promised to deliver top-tier teaching from institutions like Harvard, Stanford, and MIT, not just to a few hundred students in a lecture hall on ivy-draped campuses, but free via the Internet to thousands or even millions around the world. At long last, there appeared to be a solution to the problem of “scaling up” higher education: if it were delivered more efficiently, the relentless cost increases might finally be rolled back. Some wondered whether MOOCs would merely transform the existing system or blow it up entirely. Computer scientist Sebastian Thrun, cofounder of the MOOC provider Udacity, predicted that in 50 years, 10 institutions would be responsible for delivering higher education.

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• Forget Hydrogen Cars, and Buy a Hybrid

  Hybrids are a much more cost-effective way to reduce carbon emissions than newly released hydrogen fuel cell cars.

  If you want to help cut greenhouse gas emissions, you should probably skip the hydrogen fuel cell cars now coming to market and buy a (much cheaper) hybrid instead.

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• Innovative Technologies for Increasing Efficiency

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• A Coal Plant That Buries Its Greenhouse Gases

  The first commercial power plant to use carbon capture and sequestration shows the potential of a crucial technology.

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• Artificial Skin That Senses, and Stretches, Like the Real Thing

  South Korean and U.S. researchers have developed a stretchable material that senses touch, pressure, and moisture, and could be used to give artificial limbs feeling.

  Some high-tech prosthetic limbs can be controlled by their owners, using nerves, muscles, or even the brain. However, there’s no way for the wearer to tell if an object is scalding hot, or about to slip out of the appendage’s grasp.

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• A Feminist Critique of Silicon Valley

  Shanley Kane challenges the assumptions and practices of the tech industry.

  Shanley Kane is the founder and editor of the most interesting and original of new publications that cover technology: Model View Culture, a quarterly journal and media site that offers readers a remorseless feminist critique of Silicon Valley. The critical distance expressed by the publication’s articles, essays, and interviews, where the Valley’s most cherished beliefs and practices are derided and deconstructed, was honestly won: Kane worked for five years in operations, technical marketing, and developer relations at a number of infrastructure companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. Often frustrated by the unexamined assumptions of her industry and irritated by the incompetence of her managers, she began blogging about technology culture and management dysfunction at startups, which led to Model View Culture (the name is a play on a technology, familiar to software developers, used to create user interfaces), founded a year ago. She maintains a lively and often profane Twitter persona, where she caustically dismisses the arguments of the kinds of men who tried her patience when she worked for them, and generously amplifies the ideas of writers and thinkers she admires, mostly women and minorities. She spoke to MIT Technology Review’s editor-in-chief, Jason Pontin.

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