Articles by Technology Review from December 2013

A bubble formed around social media in 2013. But other companies, nations, and ordinary people struggled to find advantage in technological change.By Antonio Regalado...

Teslas profitable cars, cheap LEDs, half-price nuclear, and cheaper carbon capture are highlights of this years progress in clean energy.By Kevin Bullis...

Fitness bands, watches, smoke detectors: what will be put online next?By Rachel Metz...

Along with NSA spying revelations, 2013 brought faster wireless technologies, global connectivity expansion, and new communications business models.By David Talbot...

Coal could be a source of cheap, nontoxic fluorescent nanoparticles useful for biomedicine.Coal can be turned into large volumes of glowing quantum dots, according to Rice University researchers....

Many Wearable Computers and Fundamental AdvancesBy Tom Simonite...

A push for new brain-mapping technology and a ban on some gene patents showcase ongoing advances in biomedical technology.By Susan Young...

Are we prepared to know the genetic flaws of the unborn?Pregnant women and their partners can already peer at an unborn childs chromosomes: with amniocentesis, they can learn about the presence or, mo...

The company says it wants to wire the world. But will it do more than make its own app work better?Last spring, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg invested in an impressive domain name: internet.org. Th...

Does humanitys tightening grip on the fate of nature portend new sources of global conflict?More than a decade ago, Paul Crutzen, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research on the dest...

Researcher Ewen Mullins is testing potatoes that are engineered to resist blight in Ireland.For more on this topic, please see our recent feature Why We Will Need Genetically Modified Foods....

Are we prepared to know the genetic flaws of the unborn?Pregnant women and their partners can already peer at an unborn childs chromosomes: with amniocentesis, they can learn about the presence or, mo...

The company says it wants to wire the world. But will it do more than make its own app work better?Last spring, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg invested in an impressive domain name: internet.org. Th...

Climate change will make it increasingly difficult to feed the world. Biotech crops will have an essential role in ensuring that theres enough to eat.Signs of late blight appear suddenly but predict...

Does humanitys tightening grip on the fate of nature portend new sources of global conflict?More than a decade ago, Paul Crutzen, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research on the dest...

Microchips modeled on the brain may excel at tasks that baffle todays computers.Picture a person reading these words on a laptop in a coffee shop. The machine made of metal, plastic, and silicon cons...

New cardiac devices are small enough to be delivered through blood vessels into the heart.Pacemaker surgery typically requires a doctor to make an incision above a patients heart, dig a cavity into wh...

Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd tries to puncture some myths about teenagers and the Internet.Kids today! Theyre online all the time, sharing every little aspect of their lives. Whats wrong with them?...

Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd tries to puncture some myths about teenagers and the Internet.Kids today! Theyre online all the time, sharing every little aspect of their lives. Whats wrong with them?...

With Swedish telephone numbers and a tree-bound base station, a remote Indonesian village runs its own telecommunications company.A four-hour drive from the nearest cellular coverage in the remote hig...

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New cardiac devices are small enough to be delivered through blood vessels into the heart.Pacemaker surgery typically requires a doctor to make an incision above a patients heart, dig a cavity into wh...

Twitters footprint is growing fast, although English speakers in the U.S. remain the largest demographic. The trick now is to turn its global presence into advertising dollars....

Novel modes of interaction are inspiring independent games companies to come up with completely new types of games.The clich is that technological innovation in video game development is the domain of...

A new brain-imaging technology may reveal the true risk of repetitive head injury in contact sports.Eight former pro football players learned this year that they have signs of a degenerative brain dis...

Memoir, a new iPhone app, is meant to call up your digital memories at convenient times and places....

A new nerve interface can simulate a sense of touch from 20 spots on a prosthetic hand.There have been remarkable mechanical advances in prosthetic limbs in recent years, including rewiring nerve fibe...

Using plastic to absorb light could lower the cost of solar power.A thin sheet of dyed plastic could cut the cost of solar power, particularly for applications that require solar cells to be highly ef...

Amazon says it wants to offer 30-minute drone delivery. But companies actually working on the technology outline the limitations.Amazons plans to deliver packages by drones, which it predicts will be ...

The website for the Affordable Care Act was doomed by an inordinately complex setup that tried to link disparate databases in real time.The fiasco with the $600 million federal health insurance websit...