Category: Tech News

• Graphene Could Make Data Centers and Supercomputers More Efficient

  New research suggests graphene could enable highly efficient optical communication in chips for data centers and supercomputers.

  Computer chips that use light, instead of electrons, to move data between electronic components and to other chips could be essential for more efficient supercomputers and data centers. Several industrial research labs are working toward such optical interconnects that rely on germanium to turn light into ones and zeros. But recent research suggests that graphene devices could be far better and cheaper.

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• Depth-Sensing Cameras Head to Mobile Devices

  Adding 3-D sensors to existing and future mobile devices will enable augmented-reality games, handheld 3-D scanning, and better photography.

  Just over a decade since cameras first appeared in cell phones, they remain one of the most used features of mobile devices, underpinning wildly popular and valuable companies such as Instagram and Snapchat. Now hardware that gives handheld computers 3-D vision may open up a new dimension to imaging apps, and enable new ways of using these devices. Early mobile apps that can scan the world in 3-D show potential for new forms of gaming, commerce, and photography.

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• When Will Gene Therapy Come to the U.S.?

  Several gene therapies are or will soon be in late-stage human trials. One of them could be the first to get FDA approval for sale in the U.S.

  Though many gene therapies have been tested in patients around the world in hopes of curing hereditary diseases, few governments have approved their sale, and none has been approved in the United States. That could change in coming years as several therapies enter advanced trials.

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• New IPCC Report Strengthens Certain of Climate Change

  The new climate report largely reaffirms scientists’ claims.

  The latest report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that scientists are more certain than ever that humans are causing global warming, and that climate change will get worse if greenhouse gas levels continue to rise.

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• A Hospital Takes Its Own Big-Data Medicine

  Experts from Facebook and genetics labs team up to help doctors make personalized predictions about their patients.

  On the ground floor of The Mount Sinai Medical Center’s new behemoth of a research and hospital building in Manhattan, rows of empty black metal racks sit waiting for computer processors and hard disk drives. They’ll house the center’s new computing cluster, adding to an existing $3 million supercomputer that hums in the basement of a nearby building.

• The First Carbon Nanotube Computer

  A carbon nanotube computer processor is comparable to a chip from the early 1970s, and may be the first step beyond silicon electronics.

  For the first time, researchers have built a computer whose central processor is based entirely on carbon nanotubes, a form of carbon with remarkable material and electronic properties. The computer is slow and simple, but its creators, a group of Stanford University engineers, say it shows that carbon nanotube electronics are a viable potential replacement for silicon when it reaches its limits in ever-smaller electronic circuits.

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• In Search of the Next Boom, Developers Cram Their Apps into Smart Watches

  Clever apps might persuade people that they need a wrist-worn computer.

  The age of wearable computing is upon us. Forget the debate over how capable or fashionable the first devices are, how popular they may eventually become, or even whether we fully understand what we’re getting into with these devices (see “The Paradox of Wearable Technology”). The big question is simply: what will they do? And the answer will have much to do with the apps that emerge.

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• Startup Shows Off Its Cheaper Grid Battery

  Sun Catalytix is making a new type of flow battery that could store hours’ worth of energy on the grid.

  Startup Sun Catalytix is designing a flow battery for grid energy storage that uses custom materials derived from inexpensive commodity chemicals. It joins dozens of other companies seeking to make a device that can cheaply and reliably provide multiple hours of power to back up intermittent wind and solar power.

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• Bruce Schneier: NSA Spying Is Making Us Less Safe

  The security researcher Bruce Schneier, who is now helping the Guardian newspaper review Snowden documents, suggests that more revelations are on the way.

  Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and author on security topics, last month took on a side gig: helping the Guardian newspaper pore through documents purloined from the U.S. National Security Agency by contractor Edward Snowden, lately of Moscow.

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• Facebook Launches Advanced AI Effort to Find Meaning in Your Posts

  A technique called deep learning could help Facebook understand its users and their data better.

  Facebook is set to get an even better understanding of the 700 million people who share details of their personal lives using the social network each day.

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• Esther Dyson: We Need to Fix Health Behavior

  Getting people to eat well and exercise is the biggest unsolved problem in health care.

  Investor Esther Dyson is a former reporter and Wall Street analyst who has set out to tackle what she calls “the most interesting unsolved problems in health care and human behavior.” Top among them is the high rate of self-inflicted illness from bad diet and too little exercise.

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