Category: Tech News

• Other Interesting arXiv Papers This Week

  The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv preprint server

  Tracking of Fingertips and Centres of Palm using KINECT

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Ads on Google Glass Will Never Work

  An ad delivered straight to the eyeball feels like a violation.

  Some curious information came to light this week about Google Glass. For a company that owes its solvency to advertising–95% of its revenue comes from it–remarkably, Google is planning an ad-free experience for its on-eye computing experiment. At least, for now.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Building a Picture of the Bomb Suspects through Social Network Analysis

  Police can obtain huge quantities of social network data, but must sort out the junk to glean useful information.

  Within hours of obtaining identifications of the Boston marathon bombing suspects, police likely obtained search warrants and extensive digital records from mobile phone networks and social media and e-mail providers.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• DOE to Push Development of Huge Potential Source of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

  The Department of Energy and the Alaskan Government are speeding up development of oil sands and methane hydrates.

  Many environmentalists are protesting the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline because it would help facilitate the delivery of oil from Canada’s oil sands and, they argue, increase carbon dioxide emissions. They may have more reason to worry about what’s happening in Alaska. The state’s Department of Natural Resources is teaming up with the U.S. Department of Energy to speed up production of natural gas from a resource—methane hydrate deposits–that’s far larger than the oil sands in Canada, and could in theory lead to far greater greenhouse gas emissions.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Google Floats Renewable Energy Data Center Plan

  Google tries to use its buying clout to prod utilities to offer renewable energy option.

  Google has spent more than $1 billion in solar and wind energy projects but it ultimately has no control over the fuel that produces the electricity that powers its data centers. Google today is proposing a new tariff to buy renewable energy directly from utilities, a model it hopes will help scale renewable energy for data centers and other big energy consumers.
  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Samsung Demos a Tablet Controlled by Your Brain

  An easy-to-use EEG cap could expand the number of ways to interact with your mobile devices.

  One day, we may be able to check e-mail or call a friend without ever touching a screen or even speaking to a disembodied helper. Samsung is researching how to bring mind control to its mobile devices with the hope of developing ways for people with mobility impairments to connect to the world. The ultimate goal of the project, say researchers in the company’s Emerging Technology Lab, is to broaden the ways in which all people can interact with devices.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A Longer Lasting Phone? Google's Larry Page Says It's Coming

  Improved battery life and durability could be big selling points for new phones from Motorola.

  In his January earnings call, Google CEO Larry Page complained that our phones died too quickly and broke too easily. On Google’s next quarterly earnings call today, he cited the same concerns and said new products being cooked up at Motorola Mobility would address them. Google acquired for $12.5 billion last May (see “What Ideas Does Google Have Brewing at Motorola?”).

  
  
  
  
  
  

• The Digital Public Library of America Opens its Doors

  A new website is the start of a bold project to digitize America’s cultural heritage.

  The Digital Public Library of America, an ambitious, troubled effort to make the America’s entire literary heritage universally accessible, opened its doors today.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Solar Cooling With Photonic Reflector Panel

  Stanford researchers conceive of panel that ejects building heat into space.

  Stanford researchers are developing rooftop panels that cool buildings by sending heat back into space, a technique that could be more efficient than running an air conditioner from solar panels. 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• How Facial Recognition Tech Could Help Trace Terrorism Suspects

  The FBI could use software to help identify suspects, and more advanced techniques are around the corner.

  The FBI appealed to the public Thursday for help identifying two men shown in pixilated photos and video footage who are suspected of involvement in Monday’s bomb attacks in Boston.

  The two men, now identified as Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, brothers originally from Chechnya, were involved in a dramatic shootout with police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Thursday night. The pair robbed a 7/11 and killed an MIT police officer before hijacking a car and engaging police in pitched battles in the suburb of Watertown. The older of the two men, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed during a shootout with police while his younger brother, Dzhokhar, remains on the run as of Friday morning.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• uBiome Will Catalog Your Microbes, Again and Again

  Your genome may not change, but your microbiome will.

  Sequencing startup uBiome marked its next phase today with the launch of its new sales site where customers can order a swab kit for checking on the bacteria living in their gut, mouth, nose, genitals, or behind the ear.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Steve Jobs Patented an Ad-Supported Operating System – Facebook Built One

  In 1999, Steve jobs toyed with the idea of launching a free, ad-supported version of the Mac operating system, and in 2008 he filed a patent on a version of the idea. Microsoft considered making an ad-supported version of Windows in both 2004 and 2005. Neither company tried that tactic, but the idea of pushing ads in return for an operating system is soon to get a real try out, in Facebook’s new app for Android phones, Home.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Pearls And The Puzzle of How They Form Perfect Spheres

  Physicists have finally solved the problem of how pearls form almost perfect spheres–they rotate as they grow

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Intel’s Dubious Plan to Take Over TV

  Slumping PC sales and a changing server market are maiming Intel. But its plan to sell services for the home’s biggest screen is a long shot.

  When Intel lifted the veil from its stealthy media division in February, many outsiders scratched their heads. Why was the chip manufacturer, which has tried and failed to sell consumer products before, trying to launch a TV service, one of the trickiest consumer markets of all?

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Have You Embarrassed Yourself Online?

  Many web services offer an accidental megaphone. They need to protect us from ourselves.

  I haven’t used Facebook’s Groups feature, but today brings news that the company is boosting its visibility by adding the section to users’ Timeline pages. On some intuitive level, this bothers me: Groups is about having private conversations among friends and colleagues, reportedly. Yet the Timeline is one of the most visible, public parts of a Facebook user’s page. So what gives?

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Renewables Can’t Keep Up with the Growth in Coal Use Worldwide

  An International Energy Agency report calls for more research, carbon price, to help renewables compete.

  Despite remarkable growth, solar and wind power aren’t making a dent in carbon emissions, says a new report from the International Energy Agency. Coal consumption is growing too fast to offset any gains from renewables.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A Social Networking Technology Born Female

  Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s push to put more women in leadership roles has spawned a new social software tool.

  To the extent that a company has a personality, much of Facebook’s can be traced back to the fact that its creator and most of its early team were nerdy Harvard programmers. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg started Facemash, the very first version of Facebook, as a tool that upset many campus women (and men) by comparing their looks in online photos that he did not have permission to repost. At the time, the Harvard Crimson cited campus groups Fuerza Latina and the Association of Black Harvard Women voicing their anger to a familiarly apologetic Zuckerberg. He took the site down under pressure, but the rest is history.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Cracking Rock to Get More from Geothermal Fields

  An enhanced geothermal project fractures hot rocks at unproductive wells, an approach with low financial risk.

  Growth in conventional geothermal power last year was a tepid five percent. A recently-demonstrated enhanced geothermal method could squeeze more usable energy from existing wells. 

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Surfing Logs Reveal Global Eating Patterns

  The way we view online recipes reveals how our eating habits change over time, say computational sociologists.

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Better Computer Models Needed for Mega Wind Farms

  Interactions between hundreds of wind turbines make power output difficult to predict.

  With wind power getting cheaper, wind farm developers are drawing up plans for farms an order of magnitude bigger than anything around today, some with more than 1,000 turbines. But there’s one big problem: the economics of wind farms depends on accurate predictions of power output, and it is far more difficult to model how such large wind farms will behave.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• The Ads That Know Too Much

  Ads that follow you from one website to another are increasingly common, but in the rush for more tailored advertising, age-old wisdom may be lost.

  All over the Web, ads are getting more personal. They follow you from one site to the next and know your browsing history. But are such ads really effective? The answer may not be as obvious as digital marketers assume.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Will Robots Create New Jobs When They Take Over Existing Ones?

  A new class of smarter robots is being readied for the workplace.

  A new class of industrial robot is appearing. These robots are smart, affordable, and safe enough to work alongside humans, and they can do many tasks that human workers perform today (see “This Robot Could Transform Manufacturing”). But does that necessarily mean there will be fewer jobs left for humans to do?

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Death Test Reveals Strength of Social Interaction

  Social ties between humans are stronger than those between fruit flies or ants but weaker than those between bees, according to a cheerful new ranking based on how quickly creatures die when they become isolated

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A Smarter Algorithm Could Cut Energy Use in Data Centers by 35 Percent

  Storing video and other files more intelligently reduces the demand on servers in a data center.

  New research suggests that data centers could significantly cut their electricity usage simply by storing fewer copies of files, especially videos.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Proceed with Caution toward the Self-Driving Car

  Completely autonomous vehicles will remain a fantasy for years. Until they’re here, we need technology that enhances human drivers’ abilities rather than making those abilities increasingly obsolete.

   

  
  
  
  
  
  

• With E-Book Lending, Simon & Schuster Takes It Slow

  Looking before you leap: a strategy that it might not hurt more publishers to adopt.

  Simon & Schuster will become the last of the Big Six publishers to make its e-books available to libraries, reports PaidContent. The publisher will begin a one-year trial with New York City’s public libraries. No titles are off limits, reportedly, but we don’t know the exact financial terms of the deal. (Other publishers have charged up to three times as much as retail for libraries to have e-loaning privileges).

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Already Efficient, LED Lights Get Smarter

  Digital convergence is rapidly coming to lighting as component makers pave the way for customizable, networked lamps.

  Now that we have smart phones, smart TVs, and smart thermostats, perhaps its not surprising that smart light bulbs are just around the corner.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Moore's Law and the Origin of Life

  As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law. Now geneticists have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself.

   

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Interview with BRAIN Project Pioneer: Miyoung Chun

  
The trickiest thing about the brain mapping project might be that we don’t even know what we’re trying to learn.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Bitcoin Isn't the Only Cryptocurrency in Town

  Currencies designed to fix perceived flaws in Bitcoin could lead to competition that makes the idea of digital “cryptocurrency” stick.

  In recent weeks, the digital currency Bitcoin has soared and then dipped in value, along the way attracting more public attention than ever before and speculation as to whether it could become an established and widely accepted way to pay for goods and services.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Safe Texting While Walking? Soon, There May Be an App for That

  CrashAlert, created by University of Manitoba researchers, could make it easier to walk and text without smacking into things.

  The last time you saw someone walk into a lamppost while focusing intently on a smartphone, you probably thought, “That was dumb!” If you were Juan-David Hincapié-Ramos, though, you might have thought, “There should be an app for this.”

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Nanoparticle Disguised as a Blood Cell Fights Bacterial Infection

  Biomimetic nanoparticles could be an effective treatment against antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

  A nanoparticle wrapped in a red blood cell membrane can remove toxins from the body and could be used to fight bacterial infections, according to research published today in Nature Nanotechnology.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Other Interesting arXiv Papers This Week

  The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv preprint server

  How Does Group Interaction And Its Severance Affect Life?

  
  
  
  
  
  

• This Is Your Brain on E-Books

  When we read on dead trees, do we retain more?

  I don’t have the best of memories, but ever since I was young, I prided myself on a particular talent with respect to reading. Occasionally I’d be near the end of a book, and would recall a passage near the beginning that I wanted to revisit. I wouldn’t remember the page or chapter, but almost without fail, I would recall the location on the page where the passage in question was. I knew that that wondeful description of Mr. Pumblechook appeared on the bottom half of a right-hand page, perhaps 10 lines from the bottom, and a few lines after a paragraph break.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Soon Your Bird Can Sing: Twitter to Release Music App

  It sounds cool, but only a select few such as Ryan Seacrest get to play with Twitter’s music app for now.

  It’s not yet available to everyone, but Twitter’s giving a few hints about its forthcoming music app, which the social site is surely hoping will challenge music listening and sharing service Spotify.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A Decade of Advances Since the Human Genome Project

  Despite breakthroughs in technology and medicine, there’s still a lot of work ahead for understanding and using the human genome.

  This Sunday, the National Institutes of Health will celebrate the 10^th anniversary of the completion of the Human Genome Project. Since the end of the 13-year and $3-billion effort to determine the sequence of a human genome (a mosaic of genomes from several people in this case), there have been some impressive advances in technology and biological understanding and the dawn of a new branch of medicine: medical genomics

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Batteries: Cheapest Form of Grid Power?

  Using a wind energy and expensive lithium-ion batteries, AES Energy Storage is making money by stabilizing the grid.

  The conventional wisdom is that batteries, particularly lithium-ion batteries, are way too expensive to be used on the electricity grid in a financially viable way. Chris Shelton begs to differ and he has two years of data to make his case.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Last Year’s U.S. Drought Wasn’t Caused by Climate Change

  Those advocating limits on greenhouse gases can’t count on the weather to make their argument.

  Last summer, in response to an intense and prolonged drought in the U.S.—the worst, indeed, since 1895—we ran an interview with a climate scientist, Thomas Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina. He said that droughts in general will be exacerbated by climate change, while noting that it’s difficult to link any particular drought to greenhouse gases. “I suspect it will be really difficult to show how much these changing patterns contributed to the drought in the Midwest this year,” he said (see “Is Climate Change to Blame for the Current U.S. Drought?”).

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Foursquare Gets a Big Check

  The company known for check-ins is already a fundamental part of the app economy. Now it just has to make money.

  Foursquare built its brand as a social app for people to check in at locations, compete for badges, and maybe get some discounts at businesses they frequent. 

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• First Solar Shines as the Solar Industry Falters

  First Solar’s strong finances are helping fund innovation and drive down the cost of solar power.

  Innovation in solar cell technology has slowed as startups struggle to get a foothold in a tough market and solar panel manufacturers delay purchasing the equipment they need to manufacture more efficient cells. But First Solar, one of the world’s largest solar companies, continues to invest in boosting the efficiency of its solar cells.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Obama Wants Far More Money for Existing Technologies than for Developing New Ones

  Does it make sense to spend so much on already commercialized technology?

  According to the  Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, President Obama’s budget has nearly $13 billion set aside for energy-related spending–if you look just at the amount allocated for key R&D programs at the Department of Energy along with spending on tax incentives (there’s more if, for example, you include funding for Department of Defense related programs). Most of that money–$7.5 billion—is going to tax breaks of one sort of another. That is, money that goes to deploying technology we already have. The rest—about $5 billion–is for R&D and demonstration of new technology.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• How Wireless Carriers Are Monetizing Your Movements

  Data that shows where people live, work, and play is being sold to businesses and city planners, as mobile operators seek new sources of revenue.

  Wireless operators have access to an unprecedented volume of information about users’ real-world activities, but for years these massive data troves were put to little use other than for internal planning and marketing.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Big-Name Investors Back Effort to Build a Better Bitcoin

  Some of Silicon Valley’s best-known venture funds have backed OpenCoin, a startup with a new digital currency called Ripple.

  The value of a Bitcoin has grown in the four years since the digital currency was invented, but there’s been little interest from mainstream business or technology investors in using it.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• The Mermaids of Los Angeles: A Dumbphone in Exile

  On a desert journey, coffee-scented oases of WiFi.

  As loyal readers already know, a few months ago I embarked upon an experiment: I junked my iPhone. Surprising even myself, at the end of the appointed month, I decided not to go back to it. Currently, I make do with a very basic Alcatel phone, together with a hand-me-down dataless Verizon iPhone that I use as a de facto iPod Touch.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Wireless Micro LEDs Control Mouse Behavior

  Mice tap into their own neural reward circuits with the help of a new optogenetics device.

  A microscopic light-emitting diode device that controls the activity of neurons has given researchers wireless control over animal behavior. The tiny device, tested in mice, causes less damage than other methods used to deliver light into the brain, report researchers in Thursday’s issue of Science, and it does not tether mice to a light source, enabling scientists to study behaviors more naturally than is normally possible.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• First Demonstration of the Storage And Release of Light in a Metamaterial

  Nobody has been able to trap electromagnetic waves inside a metamaterial and then release them again. Until now

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Does a Tele-Robot Operator Need a Visa and W-2?

  Experts gathered this week at Stanford’s Law School to discuss the robot revolution.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• LED Lights to Cut 60-Watt Bulb to Five Watts

  Philips seeks to replace florescent tube light with an LED using technology planned for other types of bulbs.

  Philips has cut the amount of power of its overhead LED tube light in half, a sign of continuing improvements in LED lighting geared at displacing incumbent technologies.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Climate Change: The Moral Choices

  The effects of global warming will persist for hundreds of years. What are our responsibilities and duties today to help safeguard the distant future? That is the question ethicists are now asking.

  One of the defining characteristics of climate change is poorly appreciated by most people: the higher temperatures and other effects induced by increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will persist for a very long time. Scientists have long realized that carbon dioxide emitted during the burning of fossil fuels tends to linger in the atmosphere for extended periods, even for centuries. Over the last few years, researchers have calculated that some of the resulting changes to the earth’s climate, including increased temperature, are more persistent still: even if emissions are abruptly ended and carbon dioxide levels gradually drop, the temperature will stubbornly remain elevated for a thousand years or more. The earth’s thermostat is essentially being turned up and there are no readily foreseeable ways to turn it back down; even risky geoengineering schemes would at best offset the higher temperatures only temporarily.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• The First Facebook Phone: A Little Too Much Information

  The HTC First, which features Facebook’s new Home interface, will appeal only to the most devoted of Facebook users.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Cleanweb or Deep Tech: Diverging Paths for Energy Startups

  Join the app economy or invent new energy technology? Two startup events reflect evolving ideas on energy entrepreneurship.

  Entrepreneurship in energy and the environment has been going on for years but its future direction is still a matter of debate.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Microbes Can Mass-Produce Malaria Drug

  Thanks to extensive genetic engineering, drugmakers can now brew large vats of the malaria drug artemisinin, stabilizing the world supply.

  For the first time, researchers have successfully engineered a strain of baker’s yeast capable of spewing out malaria drugs on an industrial scale. The French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi has already begun brewing the microbes and announced plans to generate 70 million doses this year.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Transparent Brains Reveal Hidden Microscopic Details

  To study the microscopic structures of the brain researchers have typically had to dissect the organ into amazingly thin slices that can then be viewed on a microscope. Without doing this, any structures more than a couple millimeters deep would be impossible to see. But besides being a pain-staking process, slicing the brain into thin slices can mess with the structure and make it difficult to follow the long paths of axons from one slice to the next.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• What if Facebook Went Freemium?

  A $20 annual subscription to see Facebook ad-free would preserve the company’s profits

  Facebook’s home page proclaims that the social network is “free and always will be.” But what if you could also choose to pay for it?

  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Twitter Happiness Levels Soar As People Travel Further From Home

  Happiness levels caputred by Tweets rise logarithmically with distance from our average location, say computer scientists studying Twitter sentiment

  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• A Startup’s Nanowire Ink Lifts Solar Cell Efficiency

  Sol Voltaics plans to make a nanowire-laden ink to boost solar panel efficiency using a rapid manufacturing process.

  Ink filled with microscopic semiconductors called nanowires could make solar power cheaper by boosting the efficiency of solar panels by 25 percent, without adding much cost to manufacturing, says Sol Voltaics, a startup that has raised $11 million, and which this week announced its intention to commercialize the ink.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• AT&T Researchers Set a Long-Haul Data Record

  New optical technology paves the way for more efficient ocean-spanning transmissions.

  Researchers at AT&T have devised a way to increase the distance that large amounts of data can travel through a fiber-optic connection. The technique should allow 400-gigabit-per-second signals to travel for a distance of 12,000 kilometers—four times the previous distance possible—and it promises faster ocean-crossing transmission without adding more equipment. The feat is like sending 170 HD movies 12,000 kilometers—half-again as far as the distance from San Francisco to Tokyo.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• One App’s iOS Debacle Shows Dangers of Betting It All on Apple

  A popular app gets yanked from Apple’s App Store, illustrating the danger of betting it all on one mobile OS.

  AppGratis, an iOS app that offers users a free app each day that they’d normally have to pay for, is having a rough week. On Friday, Apple removed AppGratis from its app store, saying it ran afoul of two store guidlines: one banning apps that promote other apps, and another banning use of push notifications to send ads or direct marketing.

  
  
  
  
  
  

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