feed info
13,779 articles from Technology Review Feed - Tech Review Top Stories
Blog - Physicists Discover Quantum Law Of Protein Folding
Quantum mechanics finally explains why protein folding depends on temperature in such a strange way
The famous Arrhenius relationship states that things happen faster as they got hotter. In chemistry, that's generally true but there's an important exception: the speed at which proteins fold into their functional shape....
MONDAY 21. FEBRUARY 2011
Blog - Heat A Nanotube, Make A Nanolamp
The light emitted by nanotubes completely determines their structure, say physicists
Heat a carbon nanotube in a vacuum and the tube will glow, emitting light right across the visible spectrum. And even thought this nanolamp is only a few nanometres in diameter, you can see the light it emits with the naked eye....
SUNDAY 20. FEBRUARY 2011
Blog - Oops, Here Comes the Next Dot-com Bubble
We expect our web services to be free, revenue streams be damned. It's just like in bubble 1.0....
SATURDAY 19. FEBRUARY 2011
Blog - Why Google is Buying a Video Production Company that Doesn't Produce Anything
The search giant's acquisition of Next New Networks shows how media companies of the future will work....
Blog - Pics 'n' Images
The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week...
FRIDAY 18. FEBRUARY 2011
Blog - Apple's New Subscription Plan Attracts Regulators
The plan is punishing, but regulators may not have grounds to take action.
Apple made waves earlier this week by...
Blog - Switchable Metamaterial Makes Itself Invisible
A metamaterial that turns itself off could dramatically improve magnetic resonance imaging
Magnetic resonance imaging works by blasting biological tissue with a strong, uniform radiofrequency magnetic field and then listening for the weak field generated by hydrogen nuclei in response....
Video - A Visit to Square
Twitter creator's new startup lets people accept credit cards with their smartphone....
THURSDAY 17. FEBRUARY 2011
Blog - Energy News in Brief
Greenest cars of 2011, making EVs affordable, and making 15,000 gallons of fuel per acre.
GM Volt Ranks 13th Among Green Vehicles...
Blog - Where next for IBM's Watson?
The Jeopardy-beating supercomputer looks set to end up working on more humdrum tasks.
By now you probably know the final score: we lost. Last night the human race's...
Blog - Carbon Jelly: C60s Latest Trick
Carbon soccer balls can form into gels all by themselves, say chemists, overturning the long-held belief that gels must consist of at least two chemical components
Gels are something of a puzzle for chemists. These jelly-like materials are not quite solid and yet not liquid either. Gels live in a kind of chemical twilight zone where they share many properties of both phases of matter....
Video - A Commercial Space Shuttle
The Sierra Nevada Corporation is testing a spacecraft that could replace the space shuttle, carrying people and cargo into low earth orbit and back....
WEDNESDAY 16. FEBRUARY 2011
Blog - Self-Induced Panic And The Financial Crisis
Panicky behaviour can trigger stock market collapses. Now researchers say there could be a way of spotting it in advance
One idea in the world of finance is that the volatility of a market is a good measure of the risks it represents. So it's easy to imagine that volatility should also be a good predictor of financial crises, when the biggest corrections occur....
Blog - Watson on Jeopardy, Part 3
IBM's machine improves its performance and turns the game into a rout.
The second night of the IBM/Jeopardy match was a rout for the Watson program. The questions in this episode were harder, and, in my view, the match was more interesting....
TUESDAY 15. FEBRUARY 2011
Blog - How Metamaterials Will Boost Wireless Power Transmission
A thin slab of metamaterial increases the efficiency of wireless power transmission by an order of magnitude, say researchers
Power cables are the bane of modern existence. If you own a desktop PC, a phone and perhaps a media player, you're likely to have at least one power socket that looks like spaghetti junction....
An App for Dissidents
A startup is offering free encrypted voice and text communications to protesters in Egypt.
At the height of the recent political unrest in Egypt, leaflets warned protesters not to use services like Facebook and Twitter to communicate, for fear of alerting the authorities about their intentions. Two security researchers have now created smart-phone apps that encrypt phone and text communications to...
Blog - Watson on Jeopardy, Part 2
The IBM machine's mistakes offered insights about how it works.
Watching the first night of...
Video - Innovating with Business Data
Are we only at the beginning of an era of IT-driven productivity gains? Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, says there’s still enormous potential for businesses to use information technology to test new processes and improve operations rapidly—and very cheaply....
Video - Inside a Flagship of DIY
The Arduino is giving a new generation of tinkerers the ability to design and program their own hardware....
MONDAY 14. FEBRUARY 2011
Blog - A Worthwhile Contest for Artificial Intelligence
IBM's computer can achieve a victory even if it doesn't beat the humans on Jeopardy....
Blog - First Measurement Of "Wordquakes" Shaking The Blogosphere
Certain words disrupt the blogosphere in the same way that earthquakes shake the planet. And that makes them ripe for an earthquake-like magnitude rating.
In 2007, when the search engine Technorati stopped counting, over 100 million blogs had appeared on the web. In a little over ten years, blogs have changed the nature of publishing....
Video - Growing Lasers on Computer Chips
Researchers at UC Berkeley are developing and testing lasers grown on silicon chips. Processors that incorporate electrical and optical components could make for faster supercomputers and speedier downloading on personal computers....
SATURDAY 12. FEBRUARY 2011
Blog - Blast 'n' Blown
The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week:...
FRIDAY 11. FEBRUARY 2011
Blog - Obama's Call for Wireless
Reactions to Obama's proposed wireless plan lean towards the skeptical.
Yesterday, President Barack Obama laid out a vision for how to greatly increase wireless access in the United States. A White House...