November 1, 2011 • 2:50 pm 0
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
November 2, 2010 • 3:03 pm 0
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
October 2, 2010 • 4:26 pm 1
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
August 20, 2010 • 11:12 am 0
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 , population
August 5, 2010 • 6:15 pm 0
…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 , Drexler, Neal Stephenson, Soft Machines
May 4, 2010 • 5:53 pm 0
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 , Pedego, Trek, UltraMotor
April 21, 2010 • 4:26 pm 0
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 , Atmosphere Industries, CitySense, reality mining, SimpleGEO, skyhook, smartphones, SpotRank
April 7, 2010 • 11:06 am 0
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 , Airvana, Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, femtocell, macrocell, picocell, Public Wireless, Sprint, Ubiquisys, Verizon
March 22, 2010 • 5:48 pm 0
Filed under: GOOD magazine, green technology , DNV Marine, Eidesvik, hybrid, PlanetSolar, Queen Mary 2
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