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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...


THURSDAY 12. JUNE 2014


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...

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



TUESDAY 10. JUNE 2014


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...

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...

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...