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the reporter's notebook of Christopher Mims

Training Bacteria To Grow Consumer Goods


The promise of 3-D printing is that we can generate any arbitrary shape at the push of a button, which sounds pretty impressive until you realize that auto-generating any arbitrary 3-D shape is exactly what living organisms have been up to since the invention of multicellular life.

Filed under: biotech, consumer technology, Fast Company, featured

Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense


When he tired of arguing with climate change skeptics, one programmer wrote a chatbot to do it for him.

Filed under: consumer technology, featured, information technology, Technology Review

The Death of the Book has Been Greatly Exaggerated


Books have a kind of usability that, for most people, isn’t about to be trumped by bourgeois concerns about portability: They are the only auto-playing, backwards-compatible to the dawn of the English language, entirely self-contained medium we have left.

Filed under: information technology, Technology Review

Here’s how we stop population growth


The United Nations projects that we’re on track to increase global population by about one-third by 2050. Most of that growth will happen in the poorest countries on Earth.

Despite their poverty, those two billion people will add to the atmosphere at least three times the current greenhouse gas emissions of the U.S.

This fact alone has given the efforts to slow population growth new urgency…

Filed under: climate change, Scientific American ,

Why The Diamond Age Nanotech Future Never Materialized


But biology happens for the precise reason that utopian nanotech can’t: The world of the ultrasmall is astonishingly violent. The surfaces of objects turn out to be seething frenzies of motion — atoms vibrating thousands of times a second, bonds forming and breaking. This energetic mess is what powers cellular machinery — but it blows apart anything humans engineer to do the same job.

Filed under: featured, green technology, Wired , , ,

Choosing the Right Electric Bicycle

Electric bikes are not for the tiny-hatted bike geeks leaning over racks of $400 carbon fiber wheels at your local bike shop. They’re not even for people who are happily biking to work already. Electric bicycles are for people who would otherwise drive.

Filed under: GOOD magazine, green technology , , ,

SpotRank, CitySense and the Smartphone Panopticon

If you have a smartphone, you are being watched 24/7 by an all-seeing eye. Good thing the data is anonymized.
Technology Review

Filed under: information technology, Technology Review , , , , , , ,

Geometry + Shannon’s Limit = Spatial Re-use

To accommodate explosive growth in demand for wireless data, many mobile carriers have begun touting next-generation “4G” networks. But to consistently achieve fast speeds, especially indoors in densely populated areas, some carriers are starting to offer small, low-power indoor cellular access points called “femtocells.”
Technology Review

The original draft of this story included a discussion of Cooper’s Law, Shannon’s limit and the fact that 3/4 of a circle’s area lies outside an area delimited by half its radius. All of which explain why AT&T isn’t crazy to ask you to pay an extra $150 to make your smartphone’s 3G radio achieve data throughput better than a local WiFi network. But that was a bit much for a piece of this scale.

Filed under: information technology, Technology Review , , , , , , , , , ,

The Ubiquity of Electric Boats

To naval engineers—who have been doing radical things with ship propulsion since the Egyptians first harnessed wind to sail up the Nile around 3500 B.C.—the latest innovations in automobile drivetrains are old hat.

GOOD magazine

Filed under: GOOD magazine, green technology , , , , ,

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