feed info
13,776 articles from Technology Review Feed - Tech Review Top Stories
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...
Google Trends Could Predict Stock Market Moves, Study Shows
A paper found that trading based on search query volumes for the term “debt” could yield large profit.This week’s fleeting stock market crash prompted by a false report from the Associated Press’s hacked Twitter account has focused attention again on the growing Wall Street practice of mining news and social data to make trades....
Nanoscale Pressure Sensors Mimic Human Skin
New research shows how arrays of tiny electronic devices can achieve human-skin-like sensitivity to mechanical force.Arrays of transistors made of nanowires could form the basis of a new class of devices nearly as sensitive to mechanical force as human skin is, according to research published today in Science....
Physicists Build World's First "Magnetic Hose" For Transmitting Magnetic Fields
Magnetic fields decay rapidly and so have never been transmitted over long distances. Until now…
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...
Keyboard App Swype Could Soon Offer Slang That Varies by City
Keyboard app Swype could soon get hyper-local dialects that automatically change depending on which city you are in.How would you like it if you could turn on your smartphone in San Francisco and get a different set of local slang loaded into the dictionary behind its keyboard than when you are in Seattle?
Life's Trajectory Seen Through Facebook Data
Data donated by Facebook users to Stephen Wolfram yields interesting patterns that may reveal how people change over time.
WEDNESDAY 24. APRIL 2013
A Simple Way to Turn Any LCD into a Touch Screen
Electromagnetic interference can turn a plain LCD into a touch screen on the cheap.Electromagnetic interference can screw up cell phone and radio reception. But it may also be the key to cheaply transforming regular LCD screens into touch- and gesture-sensing displays, according to recent research.
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...
Wanted: A Print Button for 3-D Objects
A lack of accessible design tools is holding back 3-D printing.The largest companies in 3-D printing are racing to simplify design software so that it can become as easy to make an object as it is to send a document to a printer.
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...
Nano-scale Optical Antennas Could Have a Big Impact
A lab at Harvard is developing materials with potentially revolutionary optical characteristics.The antenna, a century-old technology, is everywhere. Listening to the radio? Making a call on your cell phone? Surfing the web over Wi-Fi? The antenna made it all possible.
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...
First Enzyme-Based Memory Created in the Lab
Some clever biochemistry has led to the world’s first enzyme-based memory capable of learning, say biochemists
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
Apple’s R&D Spending Rises, But It’s Still Small Change
Apple plans to keep inventing new product categories without much of a boost from its cash reserves.As its gross margins shrink and the company casts about for its next hit product categories, Apple is continuing to spend more on research and development than it has in the past (see “Can Apple Still Innovate on a...
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...
Google Joins PayPal-Backed Effort to Kill the Password
The search giant has signed up to a consortium that wants hardware to have a role in authenticating people.
BeagleBone Black: A Maker's Dream?
If Arduino is too underpowered and Raspberry Pi doesn’t have enough hardware inputs for you, BeagleBone’s $45 microcontroller board will let you have your cake and eat it too.
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...
"12 Hours of Separation" Connect Individuals On Social Networks
Social networks can be used to track random individuals in just 12 hours, provided the right incentives are on offer, say computer scientists