Advanced technologies are affecting everything from our sense of privacy and free speech to the types of jobs that are available to the foods that we eat. In our best features this year, we got into these highly controversial topics.
By The Editors
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A bubble formed around social media in 2013. But other companies, nations, and ordinary people struggled to find advantage in technological change.
By Antonio Regalado
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Tesla’s profitable cars, cheap LEDs, half-price nuclear, and cheaper carbon capture are highlights of this year’s progress in clean energy.
By Kevin Bullis
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Fitness bands, watches, smoke detectors: what will be put online next?
By Rachel Metz
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Along with NSA spying revelations, 2013 brought faster wireless technologies, global connectivity expansion, and new communications business models.
By David Talbot
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Many Wearable Computers and Fundamental Advances
By Tom Simonite
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A push for new brain-mapping technology and a ban on some gene patents showcase ongoing advances in biomedical technology.
By Susan Young
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Are we prepared to know the genetic flaws of the unborn?
Pregnant women and their partners can already peer at an unborn child’s chromosomes: with amniocentesis, they can learn about the presence or, more likely, absence of large-scale genetic defects, often gaining peace of mind. But only a small percentage of parents-to-be take the opportunity, because the procedure is invasive and uncomfortable—a large needle is inserted into the amniotic sac—and causes miscarriage in roughly one in 400 cases.
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Climate change will make it increasingly difficult to feed the world. Biotech crops will have an essential role in ensuring that there’s enough to eat.
Signs of late blight appear suddenly but predictably in Ireland as soon as the summer weather turns humid, spores of the funguslike plant pathogen wafting across the open green fields and landing on the wet leaves of the potato plants. This year it began to rain in early August. Within several weeks, late blight had attacked a small plot of potatoes in the corner of the neat grid of test plantings at the headquarters of Teagasc, Ireland’s agricultural agency, in Carlow.
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Microchips modeled on the brain may excel at tasks that baffle today’s computers.
Picture a person reading these words on a laptop in a coffee shop. The machine made of metal, plastic, and silicon consumes about 50 watts of poweras it translates bits of information—a long string of 1s and 0s—into a pattern of dots on a screen. Meanwhile, inside that person’s skull, a gooey clump of proteins, salt, and water uses a fraction of that power not only to recognize those patterns as letters, words, and sentences but to recognize the song playing on the radio.
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