Category: Tech News

• Genome Surgery

  Precise and easy ways to rewrite human genes could finally provide the tools that researchers need to understand and cure some of our most deadly genetic diseases.

  Over the last decade, as DNA-sequencing technology has grown ever faster and cheaper, our understanding of the human genome has increased accordingly. Yet scientists have until recently remained largely ham-fisted when they’ve tried to directly modify genes in a living cell. Take sickle-cell anemia, for example. A debilitating and often deadly disease, it is caused by a mutation in just one of a patient’s three billion DNA base pairs. Even though this genetic error is simple and well studied, researchers are helpless to correct it and halt its devastating effects.

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• Yahoo Expands Research Labs in Search of Personalized, Mobile Experiences

  The rejuvenated research labs at Yahoo are investigating ways to predict what users want and new forms of mobile hardware.

  There are many conflicting opinions about what troubled Web giant Yahoo must do to turn itself around, but critics and company leaders at least agree on one thing: fresh ideas must be part of the solution. As a result, Ron Brachman, head of the research division Yahoo Labs, finds himself working closely with new CEO Marissa Mayer, who took charge of the company in 2012. “There is a lot of two-way dialogue with Marissa and her senior staff,” Brachman says. “They expect us to be the thoughtful leaders in innovation that can tell you where the world and technology are going.”

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• Phones, Browsers, and Search Engines Get a Privacy Overhaul

  Small companies are showing that the technology we rely on can be redesigned to protect our data—and that consumers are interested.

  As the reach of the Internet has grown, so has the medium’s favored business model: targeted advertising. Signals recording our activity are harvested as we browse the Web and, increasingly, as we use our smartphones. That information is used to build profiles that help advertisers target ads, and opting out is rarely easy.

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• Zynga Hopes to Breathe New Life into Flat Games Characters

  Zynga is switching strategy with animation technology that makes characters move more naturally.

  The future of troubled gaming company Zynga may owe more to a charming, if clumsy, ninja than to the pixelated cows of the company’s breakout hit FarmVille.

• A Robotic Hand, This Time with Feeling

  A man with a robotic hand can now feel varying degrees of pressure thanks to an implant that connects with the nerves in his arm.

  A Dutch man who lost his left hand in a fireworks accident nine years ago is now able to feel different kinds of pressure on three fingers of a prosthetic, robotic hand. The work involved a new kind of implanted device that delivers feedback directly to the remaining nerves in the man’s arm. The implant was left in place for 31 days, allowing the man to feel gradations of touch pressure, depending on the amount of electrical stimulus delivered.

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• Why Google Kept Motorola’s Research Lab

  Motorola Mobility’s sale to Lenovo only looks like a loss—the patents were cheap, and Google might yet advance wearables, home devices, and modular phone hardware.

  Google’s $2.9 billion sale of Motorola Mobility to Chinese PC maker Lenovo might seem like lousy business, given Google’s $12.5 billion purchase in 2012 and losses of $1 billion in the interim. But it leaves Google with a mobile research unit and a war chest of patents arguably bought at a very good price. And it gives a boost to Android in developing countries.

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• Burning the U.K.’s Plutonium Stockpile Could Fast-Track New Reactors

  GE’s nuclear waste-burning PRISM reactors get a new chance at commercialization.

  Pressure to reduce the U.K.’s plutonium stockpile, along with generous premiums for new nuclear power generation, is breathing new life into a decades-old reactor design—GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s Power Reactor Innovative Small Module, or PRISM, technology. PRISM is a fast reactor, whose speedy neutrons can break down waste from spent nuclear fuel.

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• Solar Thermal Technology Poses Challenges for Drought-Stricken California

  Reducing water consumption at solar thermal plants raises costs and decreases power production.

  California’s ambitious goal of getting a third of its electricity from renewable energy sources by 2030 is being tested by its driest year on record, part of a multiyear drought that’s seriously straining water supplies. The state plan relies heavily on solar thermal technology, but this type of solar power also typically consumes huge quantities of water.

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• Q&A: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston

  How the wunderkind of cloud storage deals with government snooping and recruits more geeks.

  Dropbox, the popular cloud storage system that lets people drag files to an icon that puts that data in the cloud and sync new versions across multiple devices (see “Hiding All the Complexities of Remote File Storage Behind a Small Blue Box”), recently got $250 million in new funding, giving it a $10 billion valuation.

• Monkeys Modified with Genome Editing

  Macaques in China are the first primates born with genomes engineered by precision gene-targeting methods.

  Researchers at Nanjing Medical University and Yunnan Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research in Kunming, China, have created genetically modified monkeys using a new method of DNA engineering known as Crispr. The infant macaques show that targeted genome editing is feasible in primates—a potential boon for scientists studying complex diseases, including neurological ones, and an advance that suggests that the method could one day work in humans. The work was reported in the journal Cell on Thursday.

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• The Future of Personal Entertainment, In Your Face

  The Glyph headset is weird-looking and expensive, but amazingly immersive.

  I’m watching a jellyfish pump past me lazily, its movement interrupting the twinkling of underwater particles, when a sea turtle suddenly swims my way and starts munching on the jellyfish’s tentacles.

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• “Honey Encryption” Will Bamboozle Attackers with Fake Secrets

  A new approach to encryption beats attackers by presenting them with fake data.

  Ari Juels, an independent researcher who was previously chief scientist at computer security company RSA, thinks something important is missing from the cryptography protecting our sensitive data: trickery.

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