Mostrando resultados por Editor "MIT Technology Review" en Todas las categorías

In this issue: "Why Startups Are Struggling" by James Surowiecki; "Why Kickstarter's Glowing Plant Left Backers in the Dark" by Antonio Regalado; "Inside Facebook's Artificial Intelligence Engine Room" by Tom Simonite; "Find Out Which Appliance Is Sucking All Your Power" by David Talbot; "Juiced-Up Home Wi-Fi for $10 Extra a Month? It’s Coming." by Stacey Higginbotham; "How Stores Will Use Augmented Reality to Make You Buy More Stuff" by Elizabeth Woyke; "The Sacramento Kings' New Stadium Is Wired for Virtual Reality" by Tom Simonite.

Though virtual reality is still far from mainstream, 2015 was a big year for the industry as new headsets were introduced - some full-featured and powerful, some simple and portable - and companies announced new ways to control and capture VR imagery, too.

Braving a funding ban put in place by America’s top health agency, some US research centers are moving ahead with attempts to grow human tissue inside pigs and sheep with the goal of creating hearts, livers, or other organs needed for transplants.

The robots didn’t really take over in 2015, but at times it felt as if that might be where we’re headed. There were signs that machines will soon take over manual work that currently requires human skill. Early in the year details emerged of a contest organized by Amazon to help robots do more work inside its vast product fulfillment centers.

In 2012, the most important monastery in the Russian Orthodox Church published a biology textbook for 10th and 11th graders. It’s called General Biology, but it’s an explicitly creationist text, describing God’s role in the natural world to counteract generations of official atheism in Russian schools. Darwinism, according to this book, has been disastrous for the world and for the Russian people in particular.

In July 2013, an up-and-coming artist had an exhibition at the Galerie Oberkampf in Paris. It lasted for a week, was attended by the public, received press coverage, and featured works produced over a number of years, including some created on the spot in the gallery. Altogether, it was a fairly typical art-world event. The only unusual feature was that the artist in question was a computer program known as “The Painting Fool.”

When the NSA subcontractor Edward Snowden released classified documents in June 2013 baring the US intelligence community’s global surveillance programs, it revealed the lax attention to privacy and data security at major Internet companies like Apple, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Warrantless surveillance was possible because data was unencrypted as it flowed between internal company data centers and service providers.

The rash of headline-grabbing cyber­attacks on major companies over the past few years has made one thing abundantly clear: it’s not enough to rely only on traditional security tools. To venture capitalists, that means there’s money to be made by betting on startups developing new ones.

On Friday, January 8, several high-level officials from the Obama administration met at a federal office in San Jose with senior executives from Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Apple. On the agenda for the discussion, according to a one-page memo widely leaked to the press, was this question: “How can we make it harder for terrorists to [use] the Internet to recruit, radicalize, and mobilize followers to violence?”

While many scientists and climate change activists hailed December’s Paris agreement as a historic step forward for international efforts to limit global warming, the landmark accord rests on a highly dubious assumption: to achieve the goal of limiting the rise in global average temperature to less than 2 °C (much less the more ambitious goal of 1.5 °C), we don’t just need to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide to essentially zero by the end of this century.

The ongoing decline in oil prices, which began as early as 2012, accelerated noticeably in 2015. The benchmark West Texas Intermediate oil price fell to $34.53 a barrel on December 18, lower than it’s been since before the financial crash of 2008, with no floor in sight. Goldman Sachs has predicted that oil could fall as low as $20 a barrel, a development that would cripple most oil-producing economies and have geopolitical ripple effects for years to come.

The world’s largest DNA sequencing company says it will form a new company to develop blood tests that cost $1,000 or less and can detect many types of cancer before symptoms arise. Illumina, based in San Diego, said its blood tests should reach the market by 2019, and would be offered through doctors’ offices or possibly a network of testing centers.

Biologists often emphasize how little anyone really knows about the brain, the genome, and the mechanisms behind effective drugs. But this year their tune changed as diverse technologies - gene editing, stem cells, cloning, and DNA databases - coalesced into an immensely powerful toolkit for manipulating life. The message in 2015 seemed to be: “We can do anything.”

Millions of people are refusing to let intrusive, distracting, or irrelevant ads load on their devices. It’s an opportunity for consumers to demand a more mutually beneficial relationship with online advertisers.

A billion dollars is quite a lot of money to invest - even if your goal is saving the world from the ill effects of super-smart artificial intelligence that humans can’t control.

Engineering the structure of metals and ceramic materials at the nanoscale can give them superpowers that might transform how we build just about everything. They can become incredibly flexible, strong, and extremely light all at the same time, and gain the ability to spring back into shape after being crushed flat.

Will this year mark the first drone delivery, or the first time you encounter a robot at work or in your home? We saw significant advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence in 2015. Here’s what we’re watching closely in 2016.

If a team of researchers gets its way, the activist networks of the future could be organized by Twitter bots. A recent study published by Microsoft details a cohort of Twitter bots that targeted and challenged people who tweeted about government corruption in Latin America to take specific action. Some bots asked for potential solutions from the tweeters, while others offered messages of solidarity. The researchers dubbed the system “Botivist.”

The U.S. renewable energy industry got a welcome boost this week when Congress agreed on an omnibus spending bill that includes a five-year extension of the investment tax credit for solar and wind power projects. The bill will be voted on Friday and is expected to pass both houses and to be signed by President Obama.

Many years ago, I protested at the gates of a nuclear power plant. For a long time, I believed it would be easy to get energy from biomass, wind, and solar. Small is beautiful. Distributed power, not centralized. I wish I could still believe that.