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

Smartphones can tell you when to depart for the airport to make your flight, provide voice-guided directions on the way there, and route around traffic jams. But if you wanted to get audio directions to a specific counter at the airport, you’d be out of luck. That requires a phone to understand its position in great detail, all on its own - even when it is deep inside a building, beyond the reach of GPS signals. Even the most sophisticated phones can’t do that.

The No. 2 executive at Microsoft is fighting the U.S. government in a series of cases that will shape online privacy - and the cloud business.

It happens every time James Zadina publishes a new paper or receives a write-up: the phone in his New Orleans laboratory begins to ring. The e-mails flood his in-box. The messages come from people all around the nation telling him how much they hurt.

Colon cancer is less common in India than in the US, but it tends to affect younger people and to be more aggressive when it does occur there. Indians with colon cancer also have different genetic mutations from the ones affecting patients who have been studied in Western countries and whose information is the basis of most published data on the disease. A vegetarian diet may help explain the overall statistics, but why do some Indians develop a more serious form of the disease at a younger age?

In any discussion of biohacking, Exhibit A is likely to be the "glowing plant," the wildly successful 2013 Kickstarter campaign that raised $484,013 to create bioluminescent plants visible at night.

Blockstack’s system would let you control your own personal data—for example, by revoking a site’s access to it.

Rising temperatures due to climate change will strongly affect economic growth around the world, making some countries richer and some poorer.

At a laboratory outside San Francisco, money from the founders of Google maintains a large number of naked mole rats. The hairless rodents require exacting, expensive conditions to thrive: they live in cooperative colonies like ants, led by a queen rat. But what is truly extraordinary is that they can live about 30 years—10 times longer than a mouse.

"Welcome to You.” So says the genetic test kit that 23andMe will send to your home. Pay $199, spit in a tube, and several weeks later you’ll get a peek into your DNA. Have you got the gene for blond hair? Which of 36 disease risks could you pass to a child?

In a three-month period at the end of 1879, Thomas Edison tested the first practical electric lightbulb, Karl Benz invented a workable internal-combustion engine, and a British-American inventor named David Edward Hughes transmitted a wireless signal over a few hundred meters. These were just a few of the remarkable breakthroughs that Northwestern University economist Robert J. Gordon tells us led to a “special century” between 1870 and 1970.

The tube was out back, 11 feet in diameter, 60 feet long, the unfinished end spiraling into wide ribbons of steel - like a gigantic Pillsbury dough container with its seams gaping open. Behind the tube was a big blue tent known as the robot school, where autonomous welders wheel or crawl along, making the tubes airtight. The goal is to put tracks and electromagnets inside the tube and vacuum most of the air out.

Companies taking advantage of amazing new digital technologies dominate our list of 50 Smartest Companies. But despite impressive advances in artificial intelligence and automation, the economy remains in a troubling slowdown.

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.”

Inside a large, windowless room in an electronics factory in south Shanghai, about 15 workers are eyeing a small robot arm with frustration. Near the end of the production line where optical networking equipment is being packed into boxes for shipping, the robot sits motionless.

Innovative mobile services in China are making commerce flourish and bringing new conveniences to daily life. Is that happening despite or because of the country’s strict controls on online expression?

Donald Trump says that if he becomes president, he will “get Apple to start making their computers and their iPhones on our land, not in China.” Bernie Sanders has also called for Apple to manufacture some devices in the US instead of China.

Malaria kills half a million people each year, mostly children in tropical Africa. The price tag for eradicating the disease is estimated at more than $100 billion over 15 years. To do it, you’d need bed nets for everyone, tens of thousands of crates of antimalaria drugs, and millions of gallons of insecticides. But it would take more than stuff. You’d need things the poorest countries in the world don’t have, like strong governments, purchasing power, and functioning public health systems. So malaria keeps killing.

Toyota spends $10 billion a year on research, more than any other automaker except Volkswagen. That pays for endless incremental improvements in everything from lithium batteries to seatbelt design, but such tweaks may not be enough anymore if Toyota is to remain the world’s top seller of cars.

Donning headphones, we tapped into Skype Translator, a creation of Microsoft’s research team. My chatting partners were part-time consultants to Microsoft, who happened to be thousands of miles away from my West Coast U.S. base. When I asked Chen where he grew up, it didn’t faze me to hear him say a few lines in Mandarin. A few seconds later, a friendly synthetic voice told me: “My hometown is in the northeast in China, Liaoning Province, Anshan.”

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.