Category: Tech News

• World’s Smallest Pacemaker Can Be Implanted without Surgery

  New cardiac devices are small enough to be delivered through blood vessels into the heart.

  Pacemaker surgery typically requires a doctor to make an incision above a patient’s heart, dig a cavity into which they can implant the heartbeat-regulating device, and then connect the pulse generator to wires delivered through a vein near the collarbone. Such surgery could soon be completely unnecessary. Instead, doctors could employ miniaturized wireless pacemakers that can be delivered into the heart through a major vein in the thigh.

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• Parents: Don’t Panic About Your Kids’ Social Media Habits

  Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd tries to puncture some myths about teenagers and the Internet.

  Kids today! They’re online all the time, sharing every little aspect of their lives. What’s wrong with them? Actually, nothing, says Danah Boyd, a Microsoft researcher who studies social media. In a book coming out this winter, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, Boyd argues that teenagers aren’t doing much online that’s very different from what kids did at the sock hop, the roller rink, or the mall. They do so much socializing online mostly because they have little choice, Boyd says: parents now generally consider it unsafe to let kids roam their neighborhoods unsupervised. Boyd, 36, spoke with MIT Technology Review’s deputy editor, Brian Bergstein, at Microsoft Research’s offices in Manhattan.

• How Remote Places Can Get Cellular Coverage by Doing It Themselves

  With Swedish telephone numbers and a tree-bound base station, a remote Indonesian village runs its own telecommunications company.

  A four-hour drive from the nearest cellular coverage in the remote highlands of Papua, Indonesia, a new kind of guerilla telecom network is operating, albeit outside the law, using a cheap base station roped into a treetop.

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• The Many Tongues of Twitter

  Twitter’s footprint is growing fast, although English speakers in the U.S. remain the largest demographic. The trick now is to turn its global presence into advertising dollars.

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• New Interfaces Inspire Inventive Computer Games

  Novel modes of interaction are inspiring independent games companies to come up with completely new types of games.

  The cliché is that technological innovation in video game development is the domain of the blockbuster studios. These are companies with the requisite manpower and cash reserves to explore new ways for players to interact with digital games, or to ever more closely replicate the detail and texture of reality on screen. The indie developers, meanwhile, innovate in the area of game design, where they are small and agile enough to take creative risks.

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• Identifying Signs of Chronic Brain Injury in Living Football Players

  A new brain-imaging technology may reveal the true risk of repetitive head injury in contact sports.

  Eight former pro football players learned this year that they have signs of a degenerative brain disorder called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a condition linked to depression, dementia, and memory loss. These somber findings were uncovered using a new method of brain imaging that, for the first time, enables researchers to spot signs of the condition in the living brain. Previously CTE could only be identified after a victim died.

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• An Artificial Hand with Real Feelings

  A new nerve interface can simulate a sense of touch from 20 spots on a prosthetic hand.

  There have been remarkable mechanical advances in prosthetic limbs in recent years, including rewiring nerve fibers to control sophisticated mechanical arms (see “A Lifelike Prosthetic Arm”), and brain interfaces that allow for complicated thought control (see “Brain Helps Quadriplegics Move Robotic Arms with Their Thoughts”). But for all this progress, prosthetic limbs cannot send back sensory information to the wearer, making it harder for them to do tasks like pick up objects without crushing them or losing their grip.

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• Colored Plastic Doubles Solar Cell Power

  Using plastic to absorb light could lower the cost of solar power.

  A thin sheet of dyed plastic could cut the cost of solar power, particularly for applications that require solar cells to be highly efficient and flexible.

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• Separating Hype from Reality on Amazon’s Drones

  Amazon says it wants to offer 30-minute drone delivery. But companies actually working on the technology outline the limitations.

  Amazon’s plans to deliver packages by drones, which it predicts “will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today,” has been widely dismissed as little more than clever self-promotion.

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• Diagnosis for Healthcare.gov: Unrealistic Technology Expectations

  The website for the Affordable Care Act was doomed by an inordinately complex setup that tried to link disparate databases in real time.

  The fiasco with the $600 million federal health insurance website wasn’t all bureaucratic. Forcing slow and disparate databases run by government and insurance companies to work together in real time—and then launching the service all at once—would have challenged even technology wunderkinds.

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• The Continuous Productivity of Aaron Levie

  The CEO of Box is building an online file storage system designed to reshape industries.

  Aaron Levie bounds onstage with the swagger of a standup comic. But he’s not performing at the Comedy Store. He’s in the Grand Ballroom at San Francisco’s Hilton Union Square kicking off BoxWorks, his company’s annual customer conference. Steve Jobs had his black turtleneck, Mark Zuckerberg has his gray hoodie; Levie’s uniform is a staid black suit, a capitulation to the buttoned-down enterprise software market he aims to conquer. But he spices it up with a cheeky pair of colorful sneakers. Today they’re bright red.

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