Category: Tech News

• First Tunguska Meteorite Fragments Discovered

  Nobody knows what exploded over Siberia in 1908, but the discovery of the first fragments could finally solve the mystery.

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• With Florida Project, the Smart Grid Has Arrived

  Smart grid technology has been implemented in many places, but Florida’s new deployment is the first full-scale system.

  The first comprehensive and large scale smart grid is now operating. The $800 million project, built in Florida, has made power outages shorter and less frequent, and helped some customers save money, according to the utility that operates it.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Google Glass and the Rise of POV

  Will Google Glass revive a controversial cinematographic technique?

  The other day I wrote about how I was skeptical about advertisements ever finding a home on Google Glass, largely for reasons of “screen real estate” (“reality real estate” may be more apt). I urged readers to take my argument with a grain of salt, having neither sampled Google Glass nor having seen a simulation of it. Yesterday, Google finally posted a video introduction to the Google Glass experience. Check it out here:

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Maker of World’s Most Boring Car Stops Making Cars

  Coda Automotive’s uninspired EV failed to rouse customer interest.

  The U.S. Department of Energy is being criticized for lending large sums of money to companies that went on to fail, like Solyndra, or appear to be on the cusp of failure, like Fisker Automotive (see “Why Tesla Survived and Fisker Won’t”). But here’s a company it turned down, and for good reason.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• The Twitter Account to Watch If You're Worried About Climate Change

  The planet’s rising atmospheric CO2 levels may hit a symbolic milestone this month.

  This May, the folks behind a Twitter account started four months ago are preparing to tweet an event that the planet has not seen in an estimated four million years.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Genomic Study Spots Which Tumors Are Deadliest

  Genomics signatures in uterine cancers could offer clues to prognosis.

  The first comprehensive genomic analysis of endometrial tumors divides the cancer into four subtypes and suggests potential changes to current treatment paradigms. The study, published on Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature, is the latest result of the Cancer Genome Atlas, a U.S.-funded effort to improve cancer treatment with better diagnoses and targeted drug treatments.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Anonymity of Personal Genome Project Broken by Privacy Experts

  Privacy experts have identified participants in the Personal Genome Project using “de-identified” data.

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Apps for Finding New Tunes, with a Little Help from Your Friends

  Twitter #music, EQuala, and Piki help you share and discover new music with friends, but they’re not all winners.

  I’ve been stuck in a music rut for a long time, listening to the same bands and songs over and over without adding many newcomers to the mix. It’s not that I don’t want new tunes; I’m just bad at discovering them.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A Motherlode of Cell Phone Data-Mining Research

  At conference starting Wednesday, huge trove of research papers point to enormous possibilities, but privacy issues remain.

  Cell phones generate tremendous amounts of human mobility and other data that can be particularly useful in the developing world to redesign transportation networks (see “African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data”) and provide a boon to epidemiology (see “Big Data from Cheap Phones”).

  
  
  
  
  
  

• How a Cheap Plastic Film Can Give Your Smartphone a 3-D Screen

  A plastic smartphone screen cover patterned with tiny lenses could help mobile 3-D take off.

  Last week, a company in Singapore began shipping $35 plastic screen protectors for the iPhone 5. These are no ordinary screen protectors, though—each has half a million tiny lenses precisely patterned on its surface, which can turn an ordinary phone into a device capable of displaying 3-D images and video, no glasses required.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Ghost's Blogging Dashboard Doesn't Need to Exist

  Are dashboards really the best way to deliver analytics to people who want to “just blog”?

  I can’t make sense of website analytics at all. When I go to my personal blog, I want to just blog, not pore over dials and meters like a Con Ed repairman. Which made me curious about Ghost, a new open-source platform expressly designed as, as the creators put it, “just a blogging platform.” It’s pretty darn gorgeous. And right there in the middle of their pitch is their so-called “revolutionary” analytics dashboard, which also looks great: it’s flat (in 2013, you gotta be flat, yo), it’s got great typography, it’s got Feltron-esque infographics. 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Why Big Companies Are Investing in a Service that Listens to Phone Calls

  A startup that converts conversations to text so it can offer instant information gets financing from Telefónica, Samsung, and Intel.

  Would you give your wireless carrier permission to listen in on your phone calls? Telefónica, one of the world’s largest mobile carriers, is testing a technology that can understand conversations and quickly pull up relevant information. If that info turns out to be useful, customers may want to invite it to listen in.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Carbon Nanotube Sensor Detects Glucose in Saliva

  Painful finger-prick blood tests for diabetics could become a thing of the past, say physicists who have built a sensor that measures glucose in saliva

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data

  The largest-ever release of mobile-phone data yields a model for fixing bus routes.

  Researchers at IBM, using movement data collected from millions of cell-phone users in Ivory Coast in West Africa, have developed a new model for optimizing an urban transportation system.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Updating Nest: Smarter, Sexier, and Savvier than Ever

  Bringing ordinary consumers into the pro-environmental fold is Nest’s great achievement.

  Nest, the only company that has ever gotten journalists to use the words “sexy” and “thermostat” in the same sentence (see “A Smart, Sexy–Thermostat?!”), today announces a sexy thermostat software update for its sexy thermostat hardware. As the Verge and others report, Version 3.5 of Nest’s software brings data to solve a few basic problems. For one thing, the Nest thermostat is now smarter about knowing when its being directly hit by sunlight (which could lead it to think your house is hotter than it is). Nest is also getting smarter about fighting mold, automatically turning off the AC to keep things dry in periods of high humidity. And Nest’s Auto-away feature has reportedly grown stronger, too, so it’s better at saving power when you’re out of the house. Last week, Nest also announced some features that help reduce energy demand during peak periods (that only rolled out with a few partner grids).

  
  
  
  
  
  

• What Will Terms-of-Service Agreements Look Like in the Age of Brain-Computer Interfaces?

  As consumer tech companies bring neural interfaces ever closer to the mainstream, human-friendly legalese could become a crucial part of the user experience.

  The New York Times recently claimed that brain-computer interfaces (BCI) are headed for the mainstream market sooner rather than later. Whether these kinds of “think it and the computer does it” UIs will be practical and useful enough to achieve adoption outside the “glasshole” set is up for debate. But one thing’s for sure: consumer products mean legalese–a lot of it. Few of us read the Terms of Service (TOS) agreements associated with the bevy of networked technology we blindly rely on. We only tend to notice or care about TOS when something breaks or freaks us out after the fact (as Instagram found out last year). But when a consumer product claims to jack itself right into your mind? That might just make people want to actually read these contracts up front. 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Google Now Finally Heads to the iPhone

  Google’s smart personal assistant hits iOS, but will users care?

  Google Now, which offers users automatically updated, personalized information via a series of on-screen “cards,” just made the jump from Android to the iPhone, hoping to woo fans of Apple’s Siri. iOS users can get Google Now as an update to Google’s existing Search app; you just swipe a finger upward on the app’s main screen to pull it up.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Cancer Drugs Should Cost Less, Say Doctors

  Doctors argue that some drug companies are charging too much for their cancer drugs, to the detriment of patients.

  A group of more than 100 cancer experts have called out drug companies for the high prices of cancer drugs. The doctors, all specialists in chronic myelogenous leukemia or CML,  published their opinion on what they call “astronomical” prices on Friday in the scientific journal Blood.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A Fuel Cell That Runs on Fire

  Berkeley Labs spin-off Points Source Power develops fuel-cell charger for Kenya powered by cookstove fires.

  In trying to create a power source for off-grid villagers in Kenya, entrepreneur and scientist Craig Jacobson has picked a seemingly improbable technology–a fuel cell.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Simple Trick Turns Commercial Polymer Into World's Toughest Fibre

  A materials scientist has created the world’s toughest fibre using a mechanism based on a slip knot

   

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Social Media Censorship Offers Clues to China’s Plans

  What gets removed from China’s social networks shows how censorship strategies are advancing, and can even hint at the government’s plans.

  In February last year, political scandal rocked China when the fast-rising politician Bo Xilai suddenly demoted his top lieutenant, who then accused his boss of murder, triggering Bo’s political downfall.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Energy Department Backs New Way to Make Diesel from Corn

  A novel chemical pathway could address the high cost of transporting cellulosic materials to make diesel fuel.

  Within a year, a pilot plant in Indiana will start converting the stalks and leaves of corn plants into diesel and jet fuel. The plant will use a novel approach involving acid as well as processes borrowed from the oil and chemical industry, which its developers hope will make fuel at prices cheap enough to compete with petroleum.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Other Interesting arXiv Papers This Week

  The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv preprint server

  The Potential For Photosynthesis In Hydrothermal Vents: A New Avenue For Life In The Universe?

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A QWERTY Keyboard for Your Wrist

  Zoomboard—a miniscule keyboard that zooms when you tap it—could make it easier to type on smart watches.

  It seems like everyone is building a smart watch lately. Pebble ran a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign earlier this year for its e-paper watch; Samsung has confirmed it is making one; and both Apple and Microsoft are thought to be developing their own versions, too (see “Smart Watches”).

  
  
  
  
  
  

• How to Make Gas-Guzzling Vans into Efficient Hybrids

  A Boston-based company shows how it converts delivery trucks and other commercial fleet vehicles into hybrids.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Internet Everywhere–But on Your Terms

  I hate feeling tethered to the internet. So why do I love FreedomPop?

  Rarely do I, even in casual conversation, refer to something as the “best thing ever.” And yet I’m fairly certain I’ve used that epithet a few dozen times in gushing to friends, acquaintances, and strangers about my latest toy: the Freedom Stick 4G from FreedomPop. “Go ahead!” I dare them, as they scatter to the edge of the sidewalk. “Try and name a better thing!”

  
  
  
  
  
  

• The Incompleteness of the Harm Principle

  A response to Jason Pontin’s essay on free speech.

  Jason Pontin has written a perceptive analysis of a timeless question:  what changes in law need to be adopted in order to account for technological advances (see “Free Speech in the Era of Its Technological Amplification”)? In answering that question, he takes the right approach by taking up John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, which at its core makes this claim:

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A New Computer Screen Reaches Out to Touch You

  An experimental new touch screen, the Obake, has a stretchable surface that to reacts user interaction in new ways.

  An inexpensive new prototype device called the Obake adds a new dimension to touch screen technology. The surface of the device, developed by Dhairya Dand and Rob Hemsley of the MIT Media Lab, can react to how it’s being used by reaching out toward the user. It was relatively simple to make: the researchers used an open source software framework to enable the screen to react; the hardware costs between $50 and $60, Dand says.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Yahoo's Weather App Has No "Cool" Interactions–and That's Amazing

  It’s pretty, yes. But more importantly, it doesn’t force you to interact with it.

  I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but Yahoo’s new weather app for iOS is great. Is it “innovative”? No. Well, actually it is. Its innovation is in being as non-“innovative” in its interaction design as possible. No fussy gestures, no neato animations, no infographics to “explore”. No “interactivity” at all, really. It’s more a piece of graphic design than interactive design–and my God, I wish more apps were just like it. 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Think Gestural Interactions Suck? Design Your Own

  Creating your own gestural patterns could make these interactions easier to remember, researchers say.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Another Thin-Film Solar Casualty?

  Niche provider SoloPower, which received state aid, is seeking an investor to keep operating.

  Need a reminder of how brutal the solar provider industry is? Consider the recent history of SoloPower. 

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Two Ways To Fix The Typing-on-Touchscreens Problem

  One asks us to change our behavior; the other changes its behavior to fit us.

  Considering how much typing on a glass touchscreen blows in comparison to using hard keys, it’s easy to imagine how Blackberry saw the first iPhone back in 2007 and thought, “Bah, this isn’t a threat.” We all know how that turned out. But typing on glass still blows, and voice dictation on mobile devices (while pretty awesome) isn’t a good fit for every situation. So how can we un-blowify touchscreen typing? Two interesting software-design approaches have recently emerged: one rethinks how the keyboard looks, while the other rethinks how the keyboard acts. (Spoiler alert: I think the latter has more potential.) 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Google Fiber’s Ripple Effect

  The threat of superfast Google Fiber is causing other Internet providers to crank up their own offerings.

  As Google plans to expand its ultrafast Internet service from a fledging effort in Kansas City to Austin, Texas, and Provo, Utah, evidence is emerging that the company has forced broadband competitors into offering dramatically better service.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• What Happened When One Man Pinged the Whole Internet

  A home science experiment that probed billions of Internet devices reveals that thousands of industrial and business systems offer remote access to anyone.

  You probably haven’t heard of HD Moore, but up to a few weeks ago every Internet device in the world, perhaps including some in your own home, was contacted roughly three times a day by a stack of computers that sit overheating his spare room. “I have a lot of cooling equipment to make sure my house doesn’t catch on fire,” says Moore, who leads research at computer security company Rapid7. In February last year he decided to carry out a personal census of every device on the Internet as a hobby. “This is not my day job; it’s what I do for fun,” he says.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Why Tech Companies May Really Want All Those Extra Visas

  The shortage of workers in the IT industry may be overblown, a new study claims.

  Internet and software executives are heavily lobbying for immigration reform legislation that would increase the pool of high-skilled foreign citizens who can work in the U.S., many receiving what are known as H-1B visas. They argue that a U.S. skills shortage is slowing growth in the industry. For example, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a recent a Washington Post editorial, says that each H-1B employee creates “two or three more American jobs in return.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Bird Flu: On the Move and Hard to Track

  The H7N9 virus is deadly to humans but does not present symptoms in birds, which makes it more difficult to control.

  A 53-year-old Taiwanese man has contracted the H7N9 influenza virus, most likely while on a business trip to China, reported the New York Times on Wednesday. This is the first time the virus has been reported outside of China, where that country’s Health and Family Planning Commission says the new strain has infected more than 100 people, 23 fatally, according to CNN.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Google Trends Could Predict Stock Market Moves, Study Shows

  A paper found that trading based on search query volumes for the term “debt” could yield large returns.

  This week’s fleeting stock market crash prompted by a false report from the Associated Press’s hacked Twitter account has focused attention again on the growing Wall Street practice of mining news and social data to make trades.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Nanoscale Pressure Sensors Mimic Human Skin

  New research shows how arrays of tiny electronic devices can achieve human-skin-like sensitivity to mechanical force.

  Arrays of transistors made of nanowires could form the basis of a new class of devices nearly as sensitive to mechanical force as human skin is, according to research published today in Science.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Physicists Build World's First "Magnetic Hose" For Transmitting Magnetic Fields

  Magnetic fields decay rapidly and so have never been transmitted over long distances. Until now …

   

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A Solution to Solar Power Intermittency

  Converting methane to an alternative fuel using energy from the sun could reduce carbon-dioxide emissions.

  Burning natural gas emits about half as much carbon dioxide as burning coal, but it still produces large amounts of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. A novel device being developed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) could reduce those emissions by 20 percent by using heat from the sun to convert natural gas to an alternative fuel called syngas, a lower carbon fuel.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Life's Trajectory Seen Through Facebook Data

  Data donated by Facebook users to Stephen Wolfram yields interesting patterns that may reveal how people change over time.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A Simple Way to Turn Any LCD into a Touch Screen

  Electromagnetic interference can turn a plain LCD into a touch screen on the cheap.

  Electromagnetic interference can screw up cell phone and radio reception. But it may also be the key to cheaply transforming regular LCD screens into touch- and gesture-sensing displays, according to recent research.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Why We Don’t Need Fisker

  The failing maker of luxury hybrids is in the spotlight in DC, but technologically speaking, who cares if Fisker fails?

  Congress is trying answer some important questions today about whether the government made mistakes in handling a loan to Fisker Automotive, a company that’s now teetering on the edge of bankruptcy—the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is holding a hearing on the subject. But when looked at from the perspective of innovation, Fisker doesn’t really matter much.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Wanted: A Print Button for 3-D Objects

  A lack of accessible design tools is holding back 3-D printing.

  The largest companies in 3-D printing are racing to simplify design software so that it can become as easy to make an object as it is to send a document to a printer.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• How Tumblr Forces Advertisers to Get Creative

  What the blog network’s monetization plans say about the future of publishing.

  Tumblr, sometimes unfairly shorthanded as the “hipster blogging service,” is now the ninth most visited site in the U.S. It’s a favorite of mobile phone users–to wit, Tumblr has even put out a dedicated app on Windows Phone 8, just this week. And yet Tumblr still isn’t profitable, six years in.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Nano-scale Optical Antennas Could Have a Big Impact

  A lab at Harvard is developing materials with potentially revolutionary optical characteristics.

  The antenna, a century-old technology, is everywhere. Listening to the radio? Making a call on your cell phone? Surfing the web over Wi-Fi? The antenna made it all possible.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• More Reasons to Clean Up Tweets

  Stock plunge another reminder of social media’s power – and the need for fact-checking

  Yesterday saw the most extreme example possible of why rapid crowdsourced corrections of Tweets and other social media (see “Preventing Misinformation From Spreading Through Social Media”) are critically needed– an issue that came to the fore last week as misinformation spread about the Boston bombings.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface

  Have you heard that Google Glass will let you snap photos by winking? Why that’s still going to feel weird.

  The first real-world demo of Google Glass’s user interface made me laugh out loud. Forget the tiny touchpad on your temples you’ll be fussing with, or the constant “OK Glass” utterances-to-nobody: the supposedly subtle “gestural” interaction they came up with–snapping your chin upwards to activate the glasses, in a kind of twitchy, tech-augmented version of the “bro nod”–made the guy look like he was operating his own body like a crude marionette. The most “intuitive” thing we know how to do–move our own bodies–reduced to an awkward, device-mediated pantomime: this is “getting technology out of the way”? 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• First Enzyme-Based Memory Created in the Lab

  Some clever biochemistry has led to the world’s first enzyme-based memory capable of learning, say biochemists

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Questions over Gene Patents Shake Diagnostics Industry

  The impending Supreme Court ruling on gene patents is creating uncertainty in the molecular diagnostics sector.

  At this week’s Biotechnology Industry Organization show in Chicago, a panel of law experts bemoaned the recent Supreme Court hearings on whether individual genes can be patented, saying there was no sign that anyone involved in the case truly understood the technology or the business implications of their arguments. That’s disturbing, because the decision could have important effects on industries including the developing field of molecular diagnostics.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Apple’s R&D Spending Rises, But It’s Still Small Change

  Apple plans to keep inventing new product categories without much of a boost from its cash reserves.

  As its gross margins shrink and the company casts about for its next hit product categories, Apple is continuing to spend more on research and development than it has in the past (see “Can Apple Still Innovate on a Shoestring?”).

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Preventing Misinformation from Spreading through Social Media

  New platforms for fact-checking and reputation scoring aim to better channel social media’s power in the wake of a disaster.

  The online crowds weren’t always wise following the Boston Marathon bombings. For example, the online community Reddit and some Twitter users were criticized for pillorying an innocent student as a possible terrorist suspect. But some emerging technologies might be able to help knock down false reports and wring the truth from the fog of social media during crises.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Software Predicts Which Companies Are an Easy Sell

  A former Yahoo search engineer raises funds to bring sophisticated data mining and modeling to the business world.

  A startup called Infer, led by a former Yahoo search engineer, plans to help salespeople identify potential business customers by gathering useful information from news sites and the Web. For example, marketing department job postings online might be one clue of a company’s readiness to buy marketing software.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Google Joins PayPal-Backed Effort to Kill the Password

  The search giant has signed up to a consortium that wants hardware to have a role in authenticating people.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• BeagleBone Black: A Maker's Dream?

  If Arduino is too underpowered and Raspberry Pi doesn’t have enough hardware inputs for you, BeagleBone’s $45 microcontroller board will let you have your cake and eat it too.

  [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciX08ysl6LE]

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Fertilizer You Can’t Make Bombs Out Of

  A cheap way to alter ammonium nitrate fertilizer renders it unusable in IEDs.

  Mixing iron sulfate, a waste product from steel foundries, with ammonium nitrate fertilizer leads to changes in its chemical composition that keep it from detonating in homemade bombs, say researchers at Sandia National Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The researchers devised the formula in response to a request from the Department of Defense for ways to combat the use of improvised explosive devices.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• "12 Hours of Separation" Connect Individuals on Social Networks

  Social networks can be used to track random individuals in just 12 hours provided the right incentives are on offer, say computer scientists.

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Data Sources

  Mobile phones are great sources of data—but we must be careful about privacy.

  Anyone who has worked with mobile-phone data knows how incredibly useful such information can be, even when it’s anonymous. It is amazing—but at the same time frightening—what massive quantities of spatio-temporal data points from mobile phones can tell us about ourselves, our lives, and our society in general.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Ultra-Efficient Solar Power

  Doubling the efficiency of solar devices would completely change the economics of renewable energy. Here is a design that just might make it possible.

  Harry Atwater thinks his lab can make an affordable device that produces more than twice the solar power generated by today’s panels. The feat is possible, says the Caltech professor of materials science and applied physics, because of recent advances in the ability to manipulate light at a very small scale.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Regaining Lost Brain Function

  How do you make an electronic brain prosthesis that could restore a person’s ability to form long-term memories? Recent experiments by Theodore Berger and his colleagues, including Sam Deadwyler at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and researchers at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, have begun to describe how it might be done.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Beating Cancer at Its Own Game

  Some cancer cell mutations can slow or halt tumor growth

  A typical cancer cell has hundreds of mutated genes, but only a handful, known as drivers, are responsible for cancerous traits such as uncontrolled growth. Biologists have largely ignored the other mutations, believing they had little or no impact on cancer progression.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Introduction to the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2013

  MIT Technology Review identifies the 10 most important technology milestones of the past year.

  Our definition of a breakthrough is simple: an advance that gives people powerful new ways to use technology. It could be an intuitive design that provides a useful interface (see “Smart Watches”) or experimental devices that could allow people who have suffered brain damage to once again form memories (“Memory Implants”). Some could be key to sustainable economic growth (“Additive Manufacturing” and “Supergrids”), while others could change how we communicate (“Temporary Social Media”) or think about the unborn (“Prenatal DNA Sequencing”). Some are brilliant feats of engineering (“Baxter”). Others stem from attempts to rethink longstanding problems in their fields (“Deep Learning” and “Ultra-Efficient Solar Power”). As a whole, we intend this annual list not only to tell you which technologies you need to know about, but also to celebrate the creativity that produced them.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Prenatal DNA Sequencing

  Reading the DNA of fetuses is the next frontier of the genome revolution. Do you really want to know the genetic destiny of your unborn child?

  Earlier this year Illumina, the maker of the world’s most widely used DNA sequencing machines, agreed to pay nearly half a billion dollars for Verinata, a startup in Redwood City, California, that has hardly any revenues. What Verinata does have is technology that can do something as ethically fraught as it is inevitable: sequence the DNA of a human fetus before birth.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• How To Carbon Date a Web Page

  If a web page lacks a timestamp, how do you know when it was created? A new web application could help

  Ever needed to know the age of a webpage only to discover that it lacks a timestamp saying when it was published?

  
  
  
  
  
  

• IBM Solar Dish Does Double Duty

  IBM Researchers build solar concentrator that generates electricity and enough heat for desalination or cooling.

  Cooling a supercomputer can provide clues on how to make solar power cheap, says IBM.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• The Enduring Technology of Coal

  Despite the need to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, the burning of coal has only been accelerating.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Multifunctional Drugs May Offer Better-Than-Additive Effects

  A startup called Catabasis is developing drugs that hit diseases at multiple targets.

  Sometimes a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The startup Catabasis Pharmaceuticals is hoping that will hold true for the multifunctional drugs it’s developing.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Novel Heating System Could Improve Electric Car’s Range

  A prototype system can heat and cool without draining battery power.

  Buyers considering an electric car must bear in mind that using battery-powered heating and air conditioning can decrease the car’s range by a third or more (see “BMW’s Solution to Limited Electric-Vehicle Range: A Gas-Powered Loaner”). A New York Times reviewer recently ran into this problem on a test drive, ending up stranded with a dead battery (see “Musk-New York Times Debate Highlights Electric Cars’ Shortcomings”).

  
  
  
  
  
  

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