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How LEDs Are Set To Revolutionise Hi-Tech Greenhouse Farming
LEDs outperform incandescent lights, hands down. But they should also give farmers unprecedented control over plant growth, development and nutritional content in future, say researchers.
How LEDs Are Set to Revolutionize Hi-Tech Greenhouse Farming
LEDs outperform incandescent lights, hands down. But they should also give farmers unprecedented control over plant growth, development and nutritional content in future, say researchers.
FRIDAY 13. JUNE 2014
Recommended from Around the Web (Week Ending June 14, 2014)
A roundup of the most interesting stories from other sites, collected by the staff at MIT Technology Review.Response by Ray Kurzweil to the Announcement of Chatbot Eugene Goostman Passing the Turing TestRay Kurzweil may think that he has a good shot at living forever, but he doesn’t think a chat bot passed the Turing test. Here’s his explanation of why the much-hyped result from London’s...
Record-Breaking Solar Cell Points the Way to Cheaper Power
Panasonic reveals a design that surpasses a 20-year-old mark for solar cell efficiency.For roughly two decades, the most efficient silicon solar cells in the world used a structure invented in Australia at the University of New South Wales. This week, in a packed conference room at the IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference in Denver, Panasonic gave details for the first time about a new...
Seven Must-Read Stories (Week Ending June 14, 2014)
Another chance to catch the most interesting, and important, articles from the previous week on MIT Technology Review.
For One Baby, Life Begins with Genome Revealed
How a California father made an end run around medicine to decode his son’s DNA.An infant born last week in California appears to be the first healthy person ever born with his entire genetic makeup deciphered in advance.
Thermal Camera Turns Many Things into Interactive Surfaces
Could heat-tracking be the key to interacting with wearable computers?The ways we interact with smartphones and laptops are well-established, but it’s not yet known whether voice, touch, or gestures will emerge as the best way to use wearable devices like head-worn computers, which may not have touch screens and aren’t suited to mousing around.
THURSDAY 12. JUNE 2014
Digital Summit 2014: Media Wrap Up
MIT Technology Review and many other media outlets reported on our recent Digital Summit. Here are the highlights.MIT Technology Review6/9/2014 – 6/10/2014Digital Summit: 2014 Roundup
How Scare Tactics on GMO Foods Hurt Everybody
Vermont got it wrong on GMOs. Its mistake will affect people far beyond its borders.In early May, Vermont governor Peter Shumlin signed a bill into law that requires a label for any foods produced with genetic engineering. This made Vermont the first U.S. state to require mandatory labeling for foods containing genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. (More than 50 countries already require such...
Simulations Reveal How White Lies Glue Society Together And Black Lies Create Diversity
Evolutionary biologists have long thought that lying ought to destroy societies. Now computational anthropologists have shown that nothing could be further from the truth.
A Plan B for Climate Agreements
U.N. negotiations are going nowhere, and greenhouse-gas emissions are soaring. It’s time to move on.In 2007, just before he accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri, the organization’s leader, declared that the world was running out of time to prevent catastrophic global warming. “If there’s no action before...
Three Questions with a Solar Pioneer
The workhorse of conventional solar power, silicon solar cells, could soon be cheap and efficient enough to beat fossil fuels.Solar panel prices have plummeted more than 80 percent in recent years, but solar power is still more expensive than fossil-fuel power in most places, and accounts for a tiny fraction of the world’s energy supply. Few people have a better idea of what it will take to make...
WEDNESDAY 11. JUNE 2014
Digital Summit: How to Build Livable Megacities
The key to smarter cities might not be technology, but the existence of dense central zones made for walking.Cities have sprung up to serve many purposes, such as commerce and manufacturing, but the key to making them more innovative could be simply to make them more livable and walkable.
TUESDAY 10. JUNE 2014
Digital Summit: Microsoft’s Quantum Search for the “Next Transistor”
Microsoft is investing in quantum physics research that could lead to a whole new kind of computer.Microsoft is making a significant investment in creating a practical version of the basic component needed to build a quantum computer, the company’s head of research said Monday.
Digital Summit: 2014 Roundup
Innovations and ideas fueling our connected world.
Digital Summit: Facebook Puts Its Apps on a Data Diet as Part of a Global Internet Campaign
Many leading apps consume too much data to be viable in parts of the world where data is expensive, says Facebook.As Facebook eyes the six billion or so people in the world who don’t use its services, the company is learning to economize. Not with money—profits are growing healthily—but with the data demands that Facebook use places on mobile networks.
Digital Summit: How About a Sort-of-Autonomous Car?
I want a self-driving car, but it needs different levels of independence depending on the situation.There are good drivers out there–my dad, for instance, who spent years driving through awful, snowy weather in upstate New York–but most of us aren’t as good as we think we are behind the wheel. In theory, driverless cars like the ones Google is testing provide a potential solution: turn...
Designing Connections
Digital technologies have knit themselves into our lives — and, increasingly, into our bodies. How can we reap the potential benefits of these technologies without turning ourselves into cyborgs?
The Emerging Science of Computational Anthropology
Location-based social networks are allowing scientists to study the way human patterns of behaviour change in time and space, a technique that should eventually lead to deeper insights into the nature of society.
Biotech Makes Personalized Cancer Vaccines Using Tumor Samples
Training immune cells with genes harvested from a patient’s own tumor could make an already promising new cancer treatment even better.A highly personalized medical technique is allowing patients with advanced kidney cancer to live nearly three times as long as they normally do. In an experiment involving 21 patients, around half lived more than two and half years after diagnosis with kidney...
My Life, Logged
If a device could capture every moment in life for your easy recall later, would you want it to? There are plenty of things I’d rather forget.I always knew I was short, but it wasn’t until recently that I realized exactly how short.
Digital Summit: Indoor Location Tech Faces Privacy Push-Back
Indoor location technologies are a boon to retailers but may not so welcome to consumers.Just as powerful micro-location technologies able to pinpoint the whereabouts of smartphones indoors head to the marketplace, consumers are wising up to how much personal information is already being collected via their mobile devices. Those twin themes provided some tension today at the MIT Technology Review...
Digital Summit: Indoor Location Tech Faces Privacy Pushback
Indoor location technologies are a boon to retailers but may not be so welcome to consumers.Just as powerful micro-location technologies able to pinpoint the whereabouts of smartphones indoors head to the marketplace, consumers are wising up to how much personal information is already being collected via their mobile devices. Those twin themes provided some tension today at the MIT Technology...
Digital Summit: How to Secure Connected Homes?
Keeping some devices off the Internet may be the best way to secure the Internet of Things.The Internet of Things provides plenty of opportunities to make life easier: a smart thermostat like Nest can learn your routine and control your home’s temperature, for instance. A door lock like the (unreleased) August that communicates with your smartphone could recognize you and automatically let you...
Digital Summit: Microsoft Aims for Smartphones that Run For a Week
Rethinking smartphone software and battery design could make it possible for your handset to last several much longer between charges.