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Why Tech Companies May Really Want All Those Extra Visas

The shortage of workers in the IT industry may be overblown, a new study claims.Internet and software executives are heavily lobbying for immigration reform legislation that would increase the pool of high-skilled foreign citizens who can work in the U.S., many receiving what are known as H-1B visas. They argue that a U.S. skills shortage is slowing growth in the industry. For example, Facebook...

Bird Flu: On the Move and Hard to Track

The H7N9 virus is deadly to humans but does not present symptoms in birds, which makes it more difficult to control.A 53-year-old Taiwanese man has contracted the H7N9 influenza virus, most likely while on a business trip to China, reported the New York Times on Wednesday. This is the first time the virus has been reported outside of China, where that country’s Health and Family Planning...

A Solution to Solar Power Intermittency

Converting methane to an alternative fuel using energy from the sun could reduce carbon-dioxide emissions.Burning natural gas emits about half as much carbon dioxide as burning coal, but it still produces large amounts of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. A novel device being developed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) could reduce those emissions by 20 percent by using heat...


WEDNESDAY 24. APRIL 2013


Why We Don’t Need Fisker

The failing maker of luxury hybrids is in the spotlight in DC, but technologically speaking, who cares if Fisker fails?Congress is trying answer some important questions today about whether the government made mistakes in handling a loan to Fisker Automotive, a company that’s now teetering on the edge of bankruptcy—the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is holding a hearing on...

How Tumblr Forces Advertisers to Get Creative

What the blog network’s monetization plans say about the future of publishing.Tumblr, sometimes unfairly shorthanded as the “hipster blogging service,” is now the ninth most visited site in the U.S. It’s a favorite of mobile phone users–to wit, Tumblr has even put out a dedicated app on Windows Phone 8, just this week. And yet Tumblr still isn’t profitable, six years...

Another Reason to Clean Up Tweets

Stock plunge another reminder of social media’s power – and the need for fact-checkingYesterday saw the most extreme example possible of why rapid crowdsourced corrections of Tweets and other social media (see “Preventing Misinformation From Spreading Through Social Media”) are critically needed– an issue that came to the fore last week as misinformation spread about the Boston...

More Reasons to Clean Up Tweets

Stock plunge another reminder of social media’s power – and the need for fact-checkingYesterday saw the most extreme example possible of why rapid crowdsourced corrections of Tweets and other social media (see “Preventing Misinformation From Spreading Through Social Media”) are critically needed– an issue that came to the fore last week as misinformation spread about the Boston...

Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface

Have you heard that Google Glass will let you snap photos by winking? Why that’s still going to feel weird.The first real-world demo of Google Glass’s user interface made me laugh out loud. Forget the tiny touchpad on your temples you’ll be fussing with, or the constant “OK Glass” utterances-to-nobody: the supposedly subtle “gestural” interaction they came up with–snapping your...

Questions over Gene Patents Shake Diagnostics Industry

The impending Supreme Court ruling on gene patents is creating uncertainty in the fledging genetic diagnostics sector.At this week’s Biotechnology Industry Organization show in Chicago, a panel of law experts bemoaned the recent Supreme Court hearings on whether individual genes can be patented, saying there was no sign that anyone involved in the case truly understood the technology or the...


TUESDAY 23. APRIL 2013


Preventing Misinformation from Spreading through Social Media

New platforms for fact-checking and reputation scoring aim to better channel social media’s power in the wake of a disaster.The online crowds weren’t always wise following the Boston Marathon bombings. For example, the online community Reddit and some Twitter users were criticized for pillorying an innocent student as a possible terrorist suspect. But some emerging technologies might be able...

Software Predicts Which Companies Are an Easy Sell

A former Yahoo search engineer raises funds to bring sophisticated data mining and modeling to the business world.A startup called Infer, led by a former Yahoo search engineer, plans to help salespeople identify potential business customers by gathering useful information from news sites and the Web. For example, marketing department job postings online might be one clue of a company’s readiness...

Fertilizer You Can’t Make Bombs Out Of

A cheap way to alter ammonium nitrate fertilizer renders it unusable in IEDs.Mixing iron sulfate, a waste product from steel foundries, with ammonium nitrate fertilizer leads to changes in its chemical composition that keep it from detonating in homemade bombs, say researchers at Sandia National Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The researchers devised the formula in response to a request from the...