Showing results by author "Mike Orcutt" in All Categories

For energy technology startups in the United States, a lot has changed in five years. Between 2008 and 2011, venture capitalists were making record investments in companies building new technologies, and the government was enthusiastically doling out loans to help them commercialize products. Today, several high-profile company failures later, that support has largely evaporated.

Helmet designers have so far failed to account for a key cause of brain injury - the kinetic energy that travels through the head after an impact and makes the brain slosh inside the skull. That’s according to Ellen Arruda, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Michigan, who is leading an effort to change that. She and her colleagues have unveiled a prototype of a new helmet technology capable of dissipating a significant portion of that kinetic energy before it reaches the brain.

Whether or not your ethnic group has political power in the country where you live is a crucial factor determining your access to the Internet, according to a new analysis. The effect varies from country to country, and is much less pronounced in democratic nations. But the study, published today in Science, suggests that besides censorship, another way national governments prevent opposing groups from organizing online is by denying them Internet access in the first place.

The debate over whether food companies should be required to label products containing genetically modified ingredients took an important turn this month when the nation’s first labeling law took effect in Vermont. Now Congress appears to be on the verge of passing the first-ever federal standard for disclosing information about genetically engineered food, a bill that would preempt state laws.

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.

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.

Despite what your local election officials may tell you, you can’t trust the Internet with your vote.

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.

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.

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.

Does playing football cause permanent brain damage? If it wasn’t already, that question is now squarely in the zeitgeist thanks to Hollywood and Will Smith. The answer is not so straightforward, however. We are likely to learn a lot more about the subject in 2016 because so many labs are focused on concussion research right now. But scientists are only beginning to understand the details of how concussions - also a serious problem in the military - damage the brain.

The rash of headline-grabbing cyber­attacks on major companies over the past few years has made one thing abundantly clear: it’s not enough to rely only on traditional security tools. To venture capitalists, that means there’s money to be made by betting on startups developing new ones.

Bitcoin doesn’t have to replace government-backed money to improve the way we do business online.

Conflict over government access to encrypted data will inevitably reignite under President Trump.

A new report starts to quantify the effect that popular encryption products have on law enforcement.

Even if you don’t live in Britain, the U.K.’s new “Snooper’s Charter” is worth watching. It could inspire other democratic nations to adopt aggressive surveillance policies.