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It’s the simplest business model conceivable: hand thousands of dollars over to individuals in return for nothing, no strings attached. Krisiloff insists he and his Y Combinator colleagues can’t wait to get started giving away the money. “This could be really transformative,” he says. “It may help change how humans, society, and technology all operate together in the future.”

This week energy forecaster GTM Research predicted that the price of building big solar-power farms will drop below $1 a watt by 2020. That’s a big deal because it’s seen as the threshold below which building solar power arrays becomes competitive, without subsidies, with the cost of fossil-fuel plants. It’s also the target set in 2011 by the US Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative. But there are important caveats.

Metal 3-D printing, which has been around for decades, is finally coming into its own as a genuine mass manufacturing technology: Sales of machines that print metal objects have risen rapidly as manufacturers, especially in the aerospace industry, gear up for commercial production of additively made parts they’ve been developing for years.

Having your blood pressure taken by a cuff that inflates and deflates around your upper arm is reliable, but it’s not very fast or portable, and it isn’t able to give you continuous measurements over time. A startup called Blumio is trying a different tactic. It’s building blood-pressure measuring technology that uses radar - typically employed for things like tracking ships or speeding cars by monitoring the phase changes in electromagnetic waves as they reflect off of them.

If Tesla wins the race to commercialize automated driving, it might have less to do with some technological edge than its crazy customers. At the unveiling of Tesla’s sleek and “affordable” new car, the Model 3, Musk hinted that some “next level” features had yet to be revealed. This has led some to speculate that the Model 3 might be the first car equipped to hit the road with full autonomy. Tesla has some unique technological advantages in pursuing autonomy.

A proposal by a group of scientists and businesspeople to synthesize a human genome from scratch is attracting sharp criticism for dodging the big ethical questions such a step raises. The proposal is to string together synthetically made DNA and shape from it a human genome able to power a cell in a dish, according to lead authors Jef Boeke of New York University’s Langone Medical Center and biotechnologist George Church of Harvard Medical School.

Police departments, government offices, corporations, and countless individuals have been victims of malicious software that encrypts data and demands payment for its return. But a spate of recent ransomware infections at hospitals has some experts worried that patient care could suffer.

A startup called Zipline will use a fleet of long-distance drones to airdrop precious blood and medicines to remote medical facilities across Rwanda. The potentially life-saving project hints at the potential for unmanned aerial vehicles to revolutionize the delivery of some goods. But it also highlights the fact that drone delivery currently makes most sense only in extreme situations.

Move over, silicon. Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, is preparing to embrace alternatives to the technology that has sustained computing for more than 50 years. William Holt, who leads the company’s technology and manufacturing group, said this week that for chips to keep improving, Intel will soon have to start using fundamentally new technologies.

Helmet designers have so far failed to account for a key cause of brain injury - the kinetic energy that travels through the head after an impact and makes the brain slosh inside the skull. That’s according to Ellen Arruda, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Michigan, who is leading an effort to change that. She and her colleagues have unveiled a prototype of a new helmet technology capable of dissipating a significant portion of that kinetic energy before it reaches the brain.

In this issue: "5 Things You Need to Know about Facebook’s Next 10 Years" by Rachel Metz and Tom Simonite. "Wireless, Super-Fast Internet Access Is Coming to Your Home" by David Talbot. "The Nauseating Disappointment of Oculus Rift" by Rachel Metz. "The Unbelievable Reality of the Impossible Hyperloop" by Ryan Bradley. "Coffee Under Threat" by Nanette Byrnes. "Who Approved the Genetically Engineered Foods Coming to Your Plate? No One." by Mike Orcutt. "When Smartphones Become Too Addictive, Stylish Dumb Phones Offer a Respite" by Rachel Metz.

When Southwest Airlines pilot Paul Watson lands in a new city, he often strikes out to visit the labs of local scientists studying Down syndrome. He likes to stay current because his 14-year-old son, Nathan, has the condition. And Watson can take some credit for one idea spreading among parents: that the drug fluoxetine, also known as Prozac, might actually treat Down syndrome.

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.

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.

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.

For energy technology startups in the United States, a lot has changed in five years. Between 2008 and 2011, venture capitalists were making record investments in companies building new technologies, and the government was enthusiastically doling out loans to help them commercialize products. Today, several high-profile company failures later, that support has largely evaporated.

A philosopher is perhaps the last person you'd expect to have a hand in designing your next car, but that's exactly what one expert on self-driving vehicles has in mind. Chris Gerdes, a professor at Stanford University, leads a research lab that is experimenting with sophisticated hardware and software for automated driving.