Showing results by narrator "Elizabeth Wells" in All Categories

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.

Improving the energy efficiency of buildings is considered the fastest and least expensive way to cut energy use and, thus, carbon emissions. Although many states have programs in place to promote energy efficiency, mostly through rebates, the market has largely stalled because of high up-front costs, heavy regulation, limited funding mechanisms, and uncertainties surrounding the actual savings provided.

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.

Google’s cuddly-looking robotic cars have taken a big step on the way to developing a harder edge: they’ve learned to honk. In the Google Self-Driving Car Project’s latest monthly report (PDF), the company says it has been testing horn algorithms in its prototype cars for some time, playing the horn sound inside the cars as a way to make sure they’re not beeping in a way that would confuse other drivers. As the algorithm has improved, the cars have recently begun “broadcasting our car horn to the world.”

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.

A two-year government study has found a small increase in two types of cancer in male rats exposed to the kind of radiation that cell phones emit. Given the ubiquity of cell-phone usage, the implications of the findings are substantial, if they are replicated in humans.

Air particulates are invisible, but a new generation of indoor air monitors makes it easy to know the air quality instantaneously and take immediate corrective action. In my family’s case, we learned that turning on the exhaust fan helps - it lowers the PM2.5 from 250 to 100 micrograms per cubic meter, but getting the number below 50 required opening windows in the front and back of the house to get cross ventilation.

If all goes according to plan, sometime next month a surgeon in Texas will use a needle to inject viruses laden with DNA from light-sensitive algae into the eye of a legally blind person in a bet that it could let the patient see again, if only in blurry black-and-white.

Facebook keeps its map of the social connections of the 1.6 billion people who use the service each month to itself. But it is giving away for free new maps it is building that describe patterns of population density in the world’s poorest countries in unprecedented detail.

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.

For all the remarkable progress being made in artificial intelligence, and warnings about the upheaval this might bring, the smartest computer would still struggle to make it through the eighth grade.

Might the communities of microörganisms living in healthy plants hold the keys to dramatically increasing crop yields? A new venture-backed company is betting yes. Indigo, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup, is developing microbe-based crop treatments identified through the study of the beneficial bacteria and fungi - collectively known as the microbiome - that naturally live in and around plants.

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.

Could a neck-worn device protect the brains of athletes and soldiers against traumatic injury? That’s the promise of technology that researchers are beginning to test in humans after several years of animal studies.

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.

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.”