Showing results by narrator "Elizabeth Wells" in All Categories

Researchers at Japan’s Atomic Energy Agency have come up with a new method of processing seawater to extract lithium - an element that plays a key role in advanced batteries for electric vehicles and one that, if current predictions for the EV market prove accurate, could be in short supply before the end of the decade.

Gary Marcus became fascinated by the mind in high school after reading The Mind’s I, a collection of essays on consciousness edited by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter and the philosopher Daniel Dennett, as well as Hofstadter’s metaphorical book on minds and machines, Gödel, Escher, Bach. Around the same time, he wrote a computer program designed to translate Latin into English.

Your next car could have a 3-D dashboard - no glasses required. A startup called Leia, which has already shown a prototype of a 2.2-inch screen that can display holograms, is now working on a 5.5-inch screen that gives a sense of how the technology could look if embedded in things like cars and smartphones.

A genetically modified potato that could resist destructive blight, defend itself against parasitic worms, avoid bruising, and cut down on the accumulation of a suspected carcinogen during cooking would be worth many billions of dollars per year to potato producers across the world.

The American tradition of retirement at age 65 is crumbling. As older workers stay on the job longer, challenges ranging from eyestrain to aching joints become increasingly prevalent. In response, technologists and ergonomics experts are rethinking working conditions.

This week energy forecaster GTM Research predicted that the price of building big solar-power farms will drop below $1 a watt by 2020. That’s a big deal because it’s seen as the threshold below which building solar power arrays becomes competitive, without subsidies, with the cost of fossil-fuel plants. It’s also the target set in 2011 by the US Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative. But there are important caveats.

A crowdsourced mapping startup is using computer-vision technology to turn user-submitted photographs into a searchable, 3-D map of the world.

A video posted to YouTube last year provides proof that some people can’t be trusted behind the wheel even when their car is doing all the driving.

Move over, silicon. Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, is preparing to embrace alternatives to the technology that has sustained computing for more than 50 years. William Holt, who leads the company’s technology and manufacturing group, said this week that for chips to keep improving, Intel will soon have to start using fundamentally new technologies.

The National Security Agency lost its authority to grab the phone records of millions of Americans following this week’s change in legislation enacted after 9/11. But there is no evidence that the data produced actionable intelligence during the 13 years the government had access to it anyway.

Many years ago, I protested at the gates of a nuclear power plant. For a long time, I believed it would be easy to get energy from biomass, wind, and solar. Small is beautiful. Distributed power, not centralized. I wish I could still believe that.

It can take weeks to reprogram an industrial robot to perform a complicated new task, which makes retooling a modern manufacturing line painfully expensive and slow.

In August last year, IBM unveiled a chip designed to operate something like the neurons and synapses of the brain.

Having your blood pressure taken by a cuff that inflates and deflates around your upper arm is reliable, but it’s not very fast or portable, and it isn’t able to give you continuous measurements over time. A startup called Blumio is trying a different tactic. It’s building blood-pressure measuring technology that uses radar - typically employed for things like tracking ships or speeding cars by monitoring the phase changes in electromagnetic waves as they reflect off of them.

Donning headphones, we tapped into Skype Translator, a creation of Microsoft’s research team. My chatting partners were part-time consultants to Microsoft, who happened to be thousands of miles away from my West Coast U.S. base. When I asked Chen where he grew up, it didn’t faze me to hear him say a few lines in Mandarin. A few seconds later, a friendly synthetic voice told me: “My hometown is in the northeast in China, Liaoning Province, Anshan.”

The way Hod Lipson describes his Creative Machines Lab captures his ambitions: “We are interested in robots that create and are creative.” Lipson, an engineering professor at Cornell University (this July he’s moving his lab to Columbia University), is one of the world’s leading experts on artificial intelligence and robotics.

The “artificial intelligence” found in most computer games isn’t very intelligent at all. Characters in the games tend to be controlled by algorithms that produce patterns of behaviors designed to seem natural and realistic, but the characters are actually rigid, with no capacity to learn or adapt.

Engineers at Harvard have developed a soft robotic glove that allows people with limited hand mobility to grasp and pick up objects. The device could help the estimated 6.8 million people in the United States who have hand mobility issues, whether from a degenerative condition, stroke, or old age.

The U.S. renewable energy industry got a welcome boost this week when Congress agreed on an omnibus spending bill that includes a five-year extension of the investment tax credit for solar and wind power projects. The bill will be voted on Friday and is expected to pass both houses and to be signed by President Obama.

While NASA is working to make drones quieter, one researcher at the University of Nevada, Reno, is using its noise to benefit blind athletes.