Showing results by narrator "Elizabeth Wells" in All Categories

The Human Genome Project was one of mankind’s greatest triumphs. But the official gene map that resulted in 2003, known as the “reference genome,” is no longer up to the job.

One of China's leading carmakers is testing technology that promises to prevent accidents and ease congestion by allowing vehicles as well as traffic signals to communicate wirelessly. Although no standard for the technology has emerged in China yet, representatives at the company say it could introduce some form of car-to-car communications in 2018, ahead of many US automakers.

Police departments, government offices, corporations, and countless individuals have been victims of malicious software that encrypts data and demands payment for its return. But a spate of recent ransomware infections at hospitals has some experts worried that patient care could suffer.

A proposal by a group of scientists and businesspeople to synthesize a human genome from scratch is attracting sharp criticism for dodging the big ethical questions such a step raises. The proposal is to string together synthetically made DNA and shape from it a human genome able to power a cell in a dish, according to lead authors Jef Boeke of New York University’s Langone Medical Center and biotechnologist George Church of Harvard Medical School.

Facebook and Google compete intensely for your time online and for the ad dollars of corporations. But now the two companies are collaborating on efforts to use balloons and drone aircraft to expand Internet access to the four billion people that don’t have it.

With funding from the U.S. Department of Defense, several researchers are making progress toward more humanlike prosthetic hands—ones that give users a sense of control and touch.

If a team of researchers gets its way, the activist networks of the future could be organized by Twitter bots. A recent study published by Microsoft details a cohort of Twitter bots that targeted and challenged people who tweeted about government corruption in Latin America to take specific action. Some bots asked for potential solutions from the tweeters, while others offered messages of solidarity. The researchers dubbed the system “Botivist.”

The theoretical underpinnings of quantum computing are well established. And physicists can build the basic units, known as qubits, out of which a quantum computer would be made. They can even operate qubits together in small groups. But they have not made a fully working, practical quantum computer.

When NASA scientists announced that instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter sensed signs of liquid water seeping on the Martian surface, they meant a solution salty enough to kill most living things on Earth.

Early this week the Austrian security company SEC Consult found that more than three million routers, modems, and other devices are vulnerable to being hijacked over the Internet. Instead of giving each device a unique encryption key to secure its communications, manufacturers including Cisco and General Electric had lazily used a much smaller number of security keys over and over again.

Can Tesla really deliver on its promise to offer a long-range electric vehicle that is cheap enough to attract mainstream buyers by 2017? We can’t know for sure without access to the company’s proprietary information. But one thing is clear: if Tesla is successful it will be because of significant advances to the design and manufacturing of its battery pack, which many estimates suggest represents a quarter to half of the full cost of the car.

For all the remarkable progress being made in artificial intelligence, and warnings about the upheaval this might bring, the smartest computer would still struggle to make it through the eighth grade.

Metal 3-D printing, which has been around for decades, is finally coming into its own as a genuine mass manufacturing technology: Sales of machines that print metal objects have risen rapidly as manufacturers, especially in the aerospace industry, gear up for commercial production of additively made parts they’ve been developing for years.

Facebook keeps its map of the social connections of the 1.6 billion people who use the service each month to itself. But it is giving away for free new maps it is building that describe patterns of population density in the world’s poorest countries in unprecedented detail.

This week at Facebook’s annual developer conference, F8, in San Francisco, CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out the social network’s plans for the next decade. Here’s how he plans to keep the more than 1 billion people that use Facebook every day engaged - and lure in still more users.

Facebook has built the first of what it hopes will be a large fleet of solar-powered drones that will bring Internet connectivity to hundreds of millions of people beyond the reach of today's telecommunications infrastructure. Aquila, as the V-shaped carbon fiber craft is known, is powered by two propellers and has a wingspan of about 42 meters, roughly equivalent to a Boeing 737 airliner.

Could a neck-worn device protect the brains of athletes and soldiers against traumatic injury? That’s the promise of technology that researchers are beginning to test in humans after several years of animal studies.

A colleague recently described a fun Friday night for his teenage son: staying home and chatting online. Every now and then there’s a party where all his friends talk on their laptops.

Might the communities of microörganisms living in healthy plants hold the keys to dramatically increasing crop yields? A new venture-backed company is betting yes. Indigo, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup, is developing microbe-based crop treatments identified through the study of the beneficial bacteria and fungi - collectively known as the microbiome - that naturally live in and around plants.

Air particulates are invisible, but a new generation of indoor air monitors makes it easy to know the air quality instantaneously and take immediate corrective action. In my family’s case, we learned that turning on the exhaust fan helps - it lowers the PM2.5 from 250 to 100 micrograms per cubic meter, but getting the number below 50 required opening windows in the front and back of the house to get cross ventilation.