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. A better grasp of those details will help doctors get better at treating such injuries.

St. Louis Rams quarterback Case Keenum after taking a hard hit to the head during a game in November.

The past year featured dramatic announcements from scientists studying the relationship between concussions and brain damage. In September, researchers from the U.S Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University announced that they’d found evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE—a recently discovered neurodegenerative disease that impairs cognition—in the brain tissue of 87 out of 91 former NFL players they studied. In December, researchers conducting an extensive brain imaging study at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center revealed that they’d observed “brain scars” in advanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) exams of more than half of 834 soldiers who had been diagnosed with at least one mild traumatic brain injury, or concussion (see “Brain Scars Detected in Concussions”).

Findings like these deserve attention but should be taken with a grain of salt. Many of the former NFL players who donated their brains suspected they had a problem, so the results of that study don’t confirm the overall prevalence of the disease in football. And researchers don’t yet have enough data to understand the medical significance of the abnormalities revealed by the advanced MRI exams on soldiers.

There are crucial unanswered questions about how and why CTE arises. What are the most important risk factors for the disease? Are some people more prone to concussions, long-term damage, or both? Do specific kinds of trauma, or traumas to specific parts of the brain, carry more long-term risk? What exactly is at stake if a player or soldier returns to the field too early?

The good news is that funding for concussion-related research is surging, thanks in large part to the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense, and researchers will no doubt make progress toward answering those questions in 2016. And certain research efforts could soon lead to crucial new technologies for detecting and evaluating concussions.

Researchers are “on the cusp of a revolution” in which blood tests and new imaging techniques will make it possible to diagnose traumatic brain injury noninvasively, Ronald Hayes, cofounder and chief science officer of Banyan Biomarkers, told me earlier this year. Banyan, which is in the midst of a clinical trial involving 2,000 people, is seeking FDA approval of a blood test doctors could use to rule out the need for a CT scan, which exposes the patient to radiation. Hayes says the test could also potentially be used to diagnose concussions in the battlefield or on the sidelines (see “Two Companies Close in on a Concussion Blood Test”).

Meanwhile, researchers are scrambling to find new ways to detect concussion-related brain damage using advanced MRI and other imaging techniques. Recent results suggest that CT scans and conventional MRI exams could be missing clues that might help doctors better assess the severity of a brain injury and the risk of long-term complications. Gerard Riedy, a neuroradiologist at Walter Reed who is leading the largest-ever imaging study of traumatic brain injury in the military, says his group is on track to deliver recommendations on the use of advanced imaging techniques to the Defense Department by the fall of 2016. There are also large imaging studies going on in the civilian world, including a project at the University of California, San Francisco, that has enrolled 1,200 patients.

More detailed imaging data can be combined with blood test results and information about symptoms and long-term outcomes to help scientists develop a more quantitative understanding of the variations of concussion, the resulting symptoms, and the risk of lasting issues. Further down the road, doctors may be able to use some combination of blood tests and imaging to more precisely evaluate injuries and monitor recovery.

Finally, it’s worth asking: is a concussion pill a possibility? Just maybe. An experimental therapy reversed concussion-related brain damage in mice, according to a report Harvard scientists published in July (see “Will Football Players Someday Take a Concussion Pill?”). Kun Ping Lu, a professor of medicine who led the research, thinks the therapy, which is based on antibodies for a harmful protein that accumulates shortly after a concussion, could someday be turned into a drug for humans. In the near term, his group is pursuing a blood test.

We collected the most mesmerizing short clips about emerging technology from MIT Technology Review stories during 2015.

• By Antonio Regalado on December 30, 2015

The first 3-D printer able to squirt molten glass through a nozzle (read more)

A device keeps hearts alive and beating outside the body (read more)

VR headset lets man inhabit teddy bear (read more)

Single human cells captured in bubbles for genomic analysis (read more)

A bricklaying robot works three times as fast as a human (read more)

Scary humanoid robots that just fall over (read more)

The Falcon 9 rocket lands on its launchpad (read more)

By studying the network of links between Indian recipes, computer scientists have discovered that the presence of certain spices makes a meal much less likely to contain ingredients with flavors in common. From February …

The food pairing hypothesis is the idea that ingredients that share the same flavors ought to combine well in recipes. For example, the English chef Heston Blumenthal discovered that white chocolate and caviar share many flavors and turn out to be a good combination. Other unusual combinations that seem to confirm the hypothesis include strawberries and peas, asparagus and butter, and chocolate and blue cheese.

But in recent years researchers have begun to question how well this hypothesis holds in different cuisines. For example, food pairing seems to be common in North American and Western European cuisines but absent in cuisines from southern Europe and East Asia.

Today, Anupam Jain and pals at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur say the opposite effect occurs in Indian cuisine. In this part of the world, foods with common flavors are less likely to appear together in the same recipe. And the presence of certain spices make the negative food pairing effect even stronger.

Continued

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday defended his company's downsized version of the Internet, called "Free Basics," which is offered in developing nations around the world.

"In every society, there are certain basic services that are so important for people's wellbeing that we expect everyone to be able to access them freely," he wrote in the Times of India, citing public libraries, hospitals and schools as examples.

"That's why everyone also deserves access to free basic Internet services," Zuckerberg added.

Net Neutrality Trade-Off

Facebook launched Free Basics, a set of basic Internet services that is offered in more than 30 countries and has garnered some 15 million users over the last year, because everyone should have access to basic Internet services, he maintained.

However, the service has come under some criticism, especially in India, where last week the country's telecommunications industry regulator asked the mobile network set to partner with Facebook on Free Basics to put its efforts on hold.

Among the criticisms of Free Basics is that it stifles innovation by limiting choice, undermines net neutrality by favoring some content providers over others and confines users within a walled garden.

There is a trade-off between net neutrality and allowing more people to access the Internet, acknowledged Jan Dawson, chief analyst at Jackdaw Research.

"There's no doubt the plan is non-neutral, but it does get more people online," he told TechNewsWorld.

"Facebook would argue that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, but the objection here is that many people's first experience with the Internet will be Facebook-flavored, which gives the company an unfair advantage," Dawson continued.

Marketing Initiative

Although Free Basics has introduced millions of new users to the Internet, doubts linger about Facebook's intentions.

"There's a suspicion that Facebook has ulterior motives," said Brian Blau, a research director at Gartner.

"They're in the business of making money," he told TechNewsWorld. "They'll have to do that to pay for this, and they haven't come out and said how that's going to work in the long term."

"My assumption with Mark Zuckerberg is everything he does is a marketing initiative," said John Carroll, a mass communications professor at Boston University.

"If there's some kind of side benefit for other people, that's fine with him," he told TechNewsWorld.

Facebook as Internet

Zuckerberg is all about collecting information and then selling it to marketers, Carroll noted.

"This is a market he's looking at -- the undeveloped world -- that he can gather up and do the same thing with them that he'd done with the other billion Facebook users," he said.

By creating a walled garden, Free Basics advances one of Zuckerberg's goals for Facebook. "One of Zuckerberg's objectives has long been for Facebook to be the Internet for people," Carroll noted.

"What he wants to do is preempt movement away from Facebook to other apps and other platforms and contain users as much as possible within the Facebook walls," he said.

"With Free Basics, he's going to bring in certain content providers that he picks and chooses. In that way, he creates the entire environment of digital media for all these people who wouldn't otherwise have access," Carroll continued.

Springboard to Wider Net

Free Basics is a springboard to the Internet for users, Zuckerberg argued.

"Half the people who use Free Basics to go online for the first time pay to access the full Internet within 30 days," he wrote.

There is one thing, though, that even Zuckerberg's critics would agree with him about.

"Internet access has become a critical differentiator in terms of societal development and competitiveness," Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research, told TechNewsWorld.

It also can affect the lives of individuals.

"Lack of access to the Internet can have a negative impact on things people are trying to do to improve their lives in meaningful ways," Aaron Smith, associate director of research at the Pew Research Center, told TechNewsWorld.

John Mello is a freelance technology writer and contributor to Chief Security Officer magazine. You can connect with him on Google+.

Peer-to-peer energy trading is cropping up in several markets, including the United States.

• By Richard Martin on December 29, 2015

At Sonnenbatterie’s energy storage lab, in Germany, technicians craft the systems that will allow solar and wind power to be stored and traded.

The German company Sonnenbatterie has launched a trading platform for distributed renewable energy by offering a way for owners of small solar and wind generation capacity to buy and sell power across the utility grid.

The trading system, which will launch in early 2016, is available via subscription to anyone on the German grid. The system will give solar owners an alternative revenue stream when they produce more power than they can use, but the company’s ambition is to establish a virtual alternative to the utility grid. Sonnenbatterie CEO Boris von Bormann calls it the “Airbnb of energy,” with community members trading energy as their needs and grid conditions warrant.

Sonnenbatterie’s platform joins a handful of other programs for trading distributed energy. The Dutch platform Vandebron, for example, has more than 38,000 subscribers. Consumers pay a monthly fee to contract directly with suppliers of clean energy for a set amount of power over a set amount of time. Consumers get to choose their specific energy supplier; producers get to name their price.

Likewise, the U.K.’s Open Utility pairs consumers with producers; in this case, however, it works only with business users. And in the United States, Boston-based Yeloha matches consumers with owners who sell a portion of the power produced by their solar panels to Yeloha subscribers. As with the other systems, the power is fed onto the electricity grid, and the platform provider works with the utility to track and credit the clean energy to both providers and consumers.

Unlike these systems, which connect consumers with producers, Sonnenbatterie’s platform allows members to both purchase and sell electricity—and it will incorporate battery storage, enabling suppliers to store energy from intermittent assets and sell it when the sun’s not shining and the wind’s not blowing.

Offering an easy and efficient way to store, purchase, and transfer electricity from small, renewable generators using the existing utility grid, such trading systems have the potential to solve many of the challenges associated with integrating intermittent, distributed resources onto the grid—and to accelerate the adoption of renewable energy by giving owners a way to make money from electricity they produce but cannot consume.

When members produce more energy than they can use from their solar arrays (or small wind turbines), the trading software combines it into the pool of available energy from which community members with power shortfalls can draw. Consumers pay the generators 25 cents per kilowatt-hour. That’s less than consumers pay for power in Germany, which has expensive electricity, but more than Germany’s feed-in tariff pays owners of distributed generation to send that power back onto the grid.

While the Sonnenbatterie system uses a set price, other platforms allow producers to name their price and purchasers to decide what they’re willing to pay. A market-based system that sets the price of electricity based on supply and demand could avoid the problems of net metering (the policy of compensating distributed generators at retail electricity prices for the power they feed back onto the grid). A distributed trading system would give customers the ability to simply sell their power to the highest bidder.

A more secure type of encryption will soon be required to protect Internet users’ data, but older devices don’t support it.

• By Signe Brewster on December 29, 2015

People in developing nations, who often rely on feature phones as their main connection to the Internet, will be the hardest hit by the SHA-1 retirement.

Fearing the loss of Internet users in some of the world’s poorest and most oppressed regions, technology providers Facebook and CloudFlare are calling for a gentler shift to a new Web encryption standard that will protect everything from social media websites to online transactions.

Beginning on January 1, browsers will begin blocking access to websites that use what’s known as the SHA-1 algorithm, with the goal of replacing it with its successor, SHA-2, by 2017. Facebook and CloudFlare, which provides security and speedy connections for Web pages, would like to allow users with SHA-2-incompatible devices to continue using SHA-1, while still sunsetting SHA-1 for the rest of the world.

When Internet users browse an encrypted website, the two-way exchange of information is protected in part by an encryption tool called a hash function. These algorithms turn any message into a unique jumble of letters and numbers that assures the information came from the right source. If you see “https” in your URL, the website you are visiting may use SHA-1. It’s these sites that will begin to be blocked from a small population of Web users later this week.

Since the mid-1990s, two hash functions have been the primary protectors of consumers’ browsers. As computing power drops in cost, the ease with which the tools can be cracked has grown. The second one, called the MD5 algorithm, was retired in 2008 after researchers exposed serious security flaws. The cost to spoof an SHA-1 hash function today is estimated to be around $100,000—a number that will continue to drop.

“People have sort of said, ‘Hey we’ve seen this movie before,’ and we know what is potentially coming and the risk is getting higher and higher,” CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince says.

The most effective solution is to replace SHA-1 with the more sophisticated SHA-2. But while MD5 and SHA-1 have been compatible with consumer devices from the start, SHA-2 was released in 2001. People with old devices—predominantly low-cost feature phones used in developing nations in Asia and Africa—could be cut off from access to encrypted websites and not have the resources to upgrade. CloudFlare estimates 6.08 percent of browsers in China do not have support for SHA-2. In Syria, it’s 3.63 percent.

Richard Barnes, the head of Firefox security at Mozilla, says the company has found only 3 percent of the Web still supports SHA-1.

“Interrupting these users’ experiences is actually good for the Web,” Barnes says. “Using old software is dangerous; in addition to requiring broken cryptography, old software usually has other security problems that have been fixed in more current versions.”

If there is any reason to continue supporting SHA-1, it’s so users have time to download new software that supports the upgrade, Barnes says. Firefox actually switched off SHA-1 support last year, but then reinstated it after noticing a huge drop in Firefox downloads. People with older browsers couldn’t connect to mozilla.org to download the new SHA-2 compatible software.

As computing costs continue to drop, SHA-2 will eventually become weak and necessary to replace. Many current devices do not support SHA-3. Technology like quantum computing could suddenly make the whole line of algorithms instantly breakable.

“This is an exercise that we’re going to have to go through time and time and time again,” Prince says. “Putting in place a mechanism to responsibly support the past while migrating to the future is a good thing and will make that migration much easier.”

Welcome to Gadget Dreams and Nightmares, the column that burrows through the mountains of discarded wrapping paper to search out the best and brightest of the latest gadget announcements.

In our festive holiday edition, we take a look at connected socks with a Netflix focus, a hoverboard with a short flight time, and a robot vacuum cleaner that's also a home security system.

As always, these are not reviews, and the ratings reflect only how much I'd like to use each item. And, before I forget, I hope you're enjoying the holidays!

Netflix Socks

Finally, a pair of socks I would not be ever-so-slightly disappointed to find among my gifts on Christmas morning.

Netflix has released some designs for socks that can stop streaming the show or movie you're streaming if you should nod off. The socks detect when you've stopped moving for a long period and hit the pause button. When they're about to turn off your show, there's an LED light that flashes -- so if you're still awake, you can wiggle your big toe to halt the action.

Truly, there's little worse for streaming addicts than to miss a few episodes of a show or the end of a movie, potentially spoiling plot twists during the subsequent search to find their place.

I do wish Netflix saw enough of an opportunity here to sell the socks itself rather than posting the instructions for them online as a DIY project. The plans are somewhat complex for a complete novice at engineering (and knitting, if we're completely honest).

Then too, if you're someone who rolls around often in your sleep, there's a chance the socks won't detect your lack of consciousness and will fail to halt what you're streaming.

There's a lot of value here, though, especially for someone like myself, a heavy Netflix viewer. I just hope the socks are comfortable with all those electronics tucked in.

Rating: 5 out of 5 Are You Still Watchings?

Hover for a Moment

One of the hottest gifts this holiday season, by many accounts, is the hoverboard -- not one that actually levitates, but one that's essentially a self-balancing powered skateboard that you ride like a Segway. If you want an actual hoverboard, you'll need to dig deep.

We've seen conceptual hoverboards that use magnets to "levitate," but ARCA Space Corporation offers one that stays in the air. The US$19,900 ArcaBoard has 36 fans that output 272 horsepower to keep you afloat.

However, your ride ends in just 6 minutes, when the ArcaBoard needs a recharge, which takes six hours (unless you buy a US$4,500 accessory to reduce that to 35 minutes). The ride time drops to 3 minutes for heavier users, who will need a version of the system with extra thrust. You use a smartphone to steer, or you can disable it and use your body weight instead. Top speed is 12.5 miles per hour.

At its steep price point, the ArcaBoard doesn't offer enough return on investment.

However, I do think that eventually we'll have hoverboards that work for an extended period of time, with safety and elegance factored in. The future is coming, and it's one worth waiting for if it means we don't have to do something as prehistoric as use our legs to get around.

That said, I absolutely want to hop on one of these. I'd be crazy not to at least want to try out an actual working hoverboard.

Rating: 5 out of 5 Marty McFlys

Roaming 'Round the House

If you're a manufacturer and want your new robot vacuum cleaner to succeed, you have to bring something new to the table. LG is trying just that with the Hom-Bot Turbo+.

Along with functionality you'd expect as standard in a robot vacuum, it has an augmented-reality feature called "Home-Joy," which, like almost everything else these days, functions through a smartphone app.

When you aim your smartphone's camera at a certain area of your floor, Turbo+ will go to that spot and clean up. That is a much faster way of getting a robot vacuum to take care of a trouble spot, and I can see myself making great use of it when flour falls on the floor as I'm baking.

Thanks to the three onboard cameras, you can watch a cleaning cycle take place when you're not at home. Meanwhile, Turbo+ can operate as a security camera. If it detects movement when you're elsewhere, it can send you pictures from inside your house.

LG hasn't disclosed a price for Turbo+ as yet, because it's showcasing the system at CES 2016. Nevertheless, it's a robot vacuum with enough bells and whistles to help it stand out, and one that I'd like keeping an eye on my apartment when I'm away.

Rating: 4 out of 5 Farewells to Spills

Kris Holt is a writer and editor based in Montreal. He has written for the Daily Dot, The Daily Beast, and PolicyMic, among others. He's Scottish, so would prefer if no one used the word "soccer" in his company. You can connect with Kris on Google+.

The robots didn’t really take over in 2015, but at times it felt as if that might be where we’re headed.

There were signs that machines will soon take over manual work that currently requires human skill. Early in the year details emerged of a contest organized by Amazon to help robots do more work inside its vast product fulfillment centers.

The Amazon Picking challenge, as the event was called, was held at a prominent robotics conference later in the year. Teams competed for a $25,000 prize by designing a robot to identify and grasp items from one of Amazon’s storage shelves as quickly as possible (the winner picked and packed 10 items in 20 minutes). This might seem a trivial task for human workers, but figuring out how to grasp different objects arranged haphazardly on shelves in a real warehouse is still a formidable challenge for robot-kind.

Later in the year, we also got an exclusive look inside one of Amazon’s fulfillment centers, which showed just how sophisticated and automated they already are. Inside these warehouses, robots ferry products between human workers, and people operate as part of a carefully orchestrated, finely tuned production system.

A few months later, an even more impressive robot competition, the DARPA Robotics Challenge, was held in Pomona, California. Funded by the U.S. military and created in response to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima in Japan, the event was designed to inspire the creation of humanoid robots capable of taking over in highly dangerous disaster scenarios.

The contest pushed the limits of robot sensing, locomotion, and manipulation with a series of grueling challenges, including opening doors, climbing stairs, and operating power tools. Again, these things might be easy enough for humans, but they are still extremely hard for robots, as a series of pratfalls involving several of the million-dollar robot contestants quickly highlighted. The $2 million first place prize eventually went to a robot that was able to navigate the course quickly because it could both walk and roll along on its knees.

And while robots are still inferior to us in lots of ways, the underlying technology is improving quickly. Researchers are devising new ways for robots to learn, and ways for them to share the information they have picked up, which should help accelerate progress further still. It’s hardly surprising, then, that robots are appearing all sorts of new commercial settings, from store greeters and shopping assistants to hospital helpers and hotel concierges.

It was also a big year for automated, or “self-driving,” cars. Several new companies, including Apple, Uber, and even China’s Baidu, joined Google and many automakers in researching automated driving technology. We explored how this trend is enabled not only by cheaper sensors and better control software, but also by the increasing computerization of the automobile. The emissions scandal currently engulfing Volkswagen is another example of the growing importance of computer code in today’s vehicles.

The company that most epitomizes vehicular computerization, Tesla, also became the first to introduce advanced self-driving technology on the roads, issuing a software update that included something called Autopilot for Model S cars with the necessary sensors.

It wasn’t an entirely smooth roll out, however. Several Tesla owners posted alarming videos showing the system behaving in unexpected ways on the road, and the company was forced to backtrack by limiting the capabilities of the system until further development and testing can be done.

Google also revealed that its prototype self-driving cars have been in a number of accidents, although it blamed the crashes on the fact that its cars tend to drive in ways that can sometimes confuse other drivers on the road. Still, these incidents point to a looming ethical conundrum facing the creators of self-driving cars. As strange as it sounds, some researchers are already considering the circumstances under which these systems must be programmed to kill.

Huge progress has been made in AI over the past few years, due to the development of very large and sophisticated “deep learning” neural networks that learn by feeding on large amounts of data, and this trend continued in 2015. The world’s biggest tech companies have hired experts in the field to apply the technique to tasks such as voice recognition. We profiled the team at Facebook working on the ambitious effort to create a deep learning AI capable of parsing language and holding meaningful conversations. More recently, Facebook introduced a personal assistant service called M that uses human workers but will be used to help train Facebook’s conversational AI.

With such rapid advances in AI and robotics it is perhaps unsurprising that some experts have started to worry about the long-term ramifications. A book written by the Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom fueled this worry, with many troubling hypothetical scenarios involving an artificial “super-intelligence.” We reviewed the book, however, and found that the technical progress doesn’t exactly justify our doomsday fears just yet.

For a little more perspective, then, who better to turn to than one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, Marvin Minsky? In a rare video interview, Minsky offered his thoughts on the history of AI, and some reflections on what the field still needs to achieve.

If the coming year can match some of the early optimism felt by pioneers such as Minsky, then we may well be headed for robot revolution after all.

Spiders sprayed with water containing carbon nanotubes and graphene flakes have produced the toughest fibers ever measured, say materials scientists. From May …

Spider silk is one of the more extraordinary materials known to science. The protein fiber, spun by spiders to make webs, is stronger than almost anything that humans can make.

The dragline silk spiders use to make a web’s outer rim and spokes is amazing stuff. It matches high-grade alloy steel for tensile strength but is about a sixth as dense. It is also highly ductile, sometimes capable of stretching to five times its length.

This combination of strength and ductility makes spider silk extremely tough, matching the toughness of state-of-the-art carbon fibers such as Kevlar.

So it goes without saying that the ability to make spider silk even stronger and tougher would be a significant scientific coup. Which is why the work of Nicola Pugno at the University of Trento in Italy and a few pals is something of a jaw-dropper.

These guys have found a way to incorporate carbon nanotubes and graphene into spider silk and increase its strength and toughness beyond anything that has been possible before. The resulting material has properties such as fracture strength, Young’s modulus, and toughness modulus higher than anything ever measured.

Continued

Researchers last week revealed a zero-day flaw that lets attackers take over a Linux system by pressing the backspace key repeatedly.

Pressing backspace 17 to 20 times will overwrite the highest byte of the return address of the grub_memset() function, ultimately causing a reboot by redirecting control flow to the 0x00eb53e8 address, according to the Cybersecurity Group at the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia.

The flaw is in Grub v 1.98 and later. Grub is the bootloader used by most Linux systems, including some embedded systems.

Why the Attack Works

The processor's interrupt vector table, or IVT, resides at address 0x0.

At this stage of the boot sequence, the processor is in protected mode, which Grub2 enables from the start.

Virtual memory is not enabled; there is no memory protection and the memory is readable, writable and executable; the processor executes the 32-bit instruction set even in 64-bit architectures; the processor automatically handles self-modifying code; and there is no stack smashing protector or address space layout randomization.

In other words, the system is naked.

The integer underflow fault impacts both the grub_password_get() function and the grub_username_get() function.

Pressing the Backspace key 28 times when Grub asks for the username will show whether a system is at risk.

If the machine reboots or a rescue shell is displayed, it is.

The Danger of the Flaw

Attackers can access the Grub2 rescue function without authentication. Then they can deploy malware into a system through various means, including running a BASH shell, or they can patch the code of Grub2 in RAM to be always authenticated and then return to normal mode.

They can elevate privileges to whatever extent they desire or copy the entire disk; destroy any data, including the Grub; or overwrite ciphered disks, causing a denial-of-service attack.

The bug can be fixed by preventing cur_len overflows. Major Linux vendors -- Red Hat, Ubuntu and Debian -- have fixed the flaw, and the researchers have created an emergency patch.

Much has been made of the relative security of Linux systems compared to Microsoft PCs, but this flaw shows Linux users "have to be at least as observant and reactive as everyone else," observed Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

Easier Said Than Done

Exploiting the flaw is not as easy as it might sound.

"The ability to PWN a Grub2-based system is based on the version of Grub2, the version of the system BIOS, and physical access to a system console or network access to a virtual console," pointed out Bill Weinberg, principal analyst at Linux Pundit.

Further, its impact on embedded devices and the Internet of Things is "questionable" because it's "very much constrained to Intel architectures," he told LinuxInsider. Embedded systems are more likely to use "ARM and other non-x86 silicon, each with its own different IVT layout and, equally important, a non-Grub bootloader, such as U-Boot or RedBoot."

Still, the process the researchers described "is likely only one of several paths to exploit this zero-day vulnerability, so patching ASAP is highly advisable," Weinberg said.

Who's Gonna Get Hurt

The vulnerability will be a real problem in libraries and schools that provide access to Linux desktops with limited accounts, remarked Tripwire researcher Tyler Reguly.

"Since both Ubuntu and Red Hat -- the two most likely distributions in these environments -- have already issued updates, this is simply a matter of updating these systems," he told LinuxInsider.

Sysadmins concerned a breach has occurred should reimage the system and then apply the update.

Government installations also may be at risk, Enderle told LinuxInsider, as "governments have been attracted to the cost of Linux front ends for cost savings and they aren't well staffed to address problems like this. Cheap has its downsides."

Richard Adhikari has written about high-tech for leading industry publications since the 1990s and wonders where it's all leading to. Will implanted RFID chips in humans be the Mark of the Beast? Will nanotech solve our coming food crisis? Does Sturgeon's Law still hold true? You can connect with Richard on Google+.

Next week is CES, and I am so looking forward to coming home from that show. It used to be a lot of fun, but it covers such a massive amount of space that just getting around takes up much of the time.

Given that most folks do prebriefings if they are smart, and that most of the really cool stuff is behind closed doors and not on the show floor, every year I question the intelligence of going. However, this year it does herald what should be a rather amazing year.

I'll close with my product of the year. I thought long and hard about this one, as there were a lot of good contenders: Tesla's SUV, Microsoft's Surface, Hootsuite, Dell XPS 13, Lenovo Carbon, and the Linksys Mu-MIMO router, to name a few. It came down to which product set the best example, and my choice may surprise you.

The Year of Artificial Intelligence

2016 is looking like the year when we really see the impact of AI. That isn't just because Elon Musk launched a startup with that in mind -- it is also because so much of what we'll be seeing around us has some advanced form of intelligence in it.

Examples include drones that automatically navigate around obstacles, the first viable self-driving car prototypes, IBM Watson solutions average people can use, and robotic vacuum cleaners that seem to think about the room and bounce around walls far less often.

By the end of 2016, I expect we'll see a number of companies that are raised up because of their unique use of AI, and a bunch that either fail or are on the ropes because they didn't see either the risk or opportunity until it was too late. I also expect that 2016 may be the first year when a major election is won or lost by the use of some intelligent system -- just like the last ones were the result of better management of social media.

MU-MIMO Arrives

Your WiFi becomes obsolete in 2016 as phones that support MU-MIMO start showing up -- and I expect laptops and tablets also will start arriving with this feature. This means a huge jump in bandwidth, particularly for those attending conferences.

The folks who have phones, tablets and PCs that don't support it will be waiting even longer for their mail to download and their Web pages to load. This is good news if this is the year you typically replace your phone. If it isn't, you are likely to wish it was.

It is going to be interesting to see which phone vendors do and don't get how important the radio is to a smartphone buyer. It may even be time for you to consider that the aging tablet you thought would last you forever might need to be replaced.

The Internet of Things

Yep, you likely won't be able to hide next year, as you suddenly realize everything you are seeing in the stores at the high end is fully connected. I'm not sure how much of this stuff really will make sense -- but, in the end, you'll see an Internet-connected option for everything from your smoke detectors and thermostats to your ovens and refrigerators.

Sadly, I doubt most of these will be MU-MIMO, which suggests you'll likely have to think about replacing them again within five years. Anticipate a recommendation to hold off until the technology in these devices matches the new technology that is rolling out to market.

Self-Driving Light

You'll see the first big step to self-driving with enhanced cruise control systems that generally will keep you on the road most of the time while you're on a freeway. Other than Tesla's system, most of these will be obsolete within 18 months. That suggests you might want to save your pennies and avoid this option or avoid buying a new car until this technology is fully cooked in a couple of years.

I'm expecting most of the cars sold in this pre self-driving window to depreciate like they fell off a cliff, with the exception of Tesla models, because they're designed to accept upgrades.

I expect we'll see some interesting accidents as people ask limited self-driving systems to do things they weren't designed to do, proving yet again that some of us are idiots.

Goodbye Yahoo

Unless something dramatic happens, I think we are going to say goodbye to Yahoo in 2016. Its plan to raise money by selling off its stake in Alibaba fell through this year, and its large investors are now in an open battle with very different plans for Yahoo's future.

None of these folks appear to have the critical mass needed to drive forward any of the plans focused on raising cash or massively cutting costs, however. The end result is likely to be the confused death of a company. I hope I'm wrong here, but it looks like the sharks are circling the body -- and that doesn't bode well for Yahoo's future.

The Dell/EMC Merger

Dell/EMC is arguably the biggest technology merger in history, and it is in sharp contrast to HP's breakup.

In 2016, we'll get to see if Dell can pull off another miracle and create the biggest privately owned technology company in history.

If it pulls this off, it will have the most advanced customer loyalty program and technology forecasting programs under one roof and no drag from public investors, either in cost or decision making.

It should be kind of like what would happen if an F1 Car raced a NASCAR car. (Hint: The F1 car is much faster.)

Electric Cars Live or Die

Until this year, only Tesla seemed to get that the real electric car market was in the luxury segment. The problem, though, is that with gas dropping toward US$2 a gallon, the justification for an electric car has become far more difficult to argue.

If the Republicans win the presidential campaign -- long odds at this point, I know -- they are likely to kill electric subsidies, and the continued high cost of batteries coupled with the low cost of gas could kill off much of the segment.

If electric cars can survive 2016 on more than life support, then they are likely to make it until 2020, when they should be able displace gas cars broadly. If not...

Microsoft's Hardware Wars

This year Microsoft threw down the gauntlet with its excellent Surface 4 tablet, and really rubbed folks' faces in its Surface Book -- a stunning halo product. That hardly went unnoticed. In 2016, Dell, HP and Lenovo (among others) will bring to market their response and a fight over whether Microsoft or its OEM partners can build a better 2-in-1 PC.

This is a no-holds-barred fight, and the OEMs are pissed, which means we are likely to see some rather amazing products, including the Surface Pro 5 and Surface Book 2. The only certain winner is us, because we'll get amazing choices we likely wouldn't have seen otherwise.

The Dyson Robot Vacuum Killer

Or maybe I mean the killer Dyson robotic vacuum. This product has been a long time in coming, and, on paper, it looks to be able to eat everything else in the market -- including the new and smarter Roomba.

I doubt Roomba or Neato will be sitting this one out, so expect a robotic vacuum battle royal for your home -- and let's just hope none of them show up armed.

Wrapping Up: 2016 Should Be Amazing

We have a lot to look forward to in 2016: smarter cars, smarter tech companies, smarter wireless, and smarter appliances -- which we may want to purchase wisely, because much of what will be in the market will be in massive transition, making decisions risky.

Those risks may get worse through the end of the decade -- likely making a lot of Luddites look really smart.

That said, we'll see some amazingly tempting things. From your PCs, tablets and smartphones to your smartwatches and smarter cars, you may find that by the end of the year, much of what you own is smarter than you are. Now isn't that aggravating?

Every year I look for a product that seems both to tickle my fancy the most and to move the technology ball in a positive fashion. This year it was the BlackBerry Priv, which combined BlackBerry's market leading productivity platform (hardware and software) with the massive Android app ecosystem, bringing back the heart of the old Microsoft "embrace and extend" strategy to create the most secure and productive smartphone on Android. Apparently it is so popular it sold out, and it popped BlackBerry's stock.

BlackBerry Priv

The Priv has been like a kiss of heaven, because it gives me all the things I missed in BlackBerry and the app support I had to have to operate my smarthome. Constantly having to locate an Android tablet or borrow my wife's iOS device in order to use the gate and lights -- or even operate the house sound system -- was getting to be a pain in the butt.

With the Priv, that pain is now past, and I live off my phone. So, the product that really knocked my socks off in 2015 was the BlackBerry Priv. Who would have thought that a BlackBerry would be my favorite product any year this decade, let alone half the way through? The BlackBerry Priv was my favorite product in 2015, and it rules, so it is my product of the year.

Rob Enderle is a TechNewsWorld columnist and the principal analyst for the Enderle Group, a consultancy that focuses on personal technology products and trends. You can connect with him on Google+.

Virtual reality has grown immensely over the past few years, but 2016 looks like the most important year yet: it will be the first time that consumers can get their hands on a number of powerful headsets for viewing alternate realities in immersive 3-D.

To get a sense of how quickly virtual reality is moving toward the mainstream, consider this: in early January, more than 40 exhibitors will be showing off their technology in a dedicated “Gaming and Virtual Reality Marketplace” at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The trade group that puts on the show, the Consumer Electronics Association, says this is a 77 percent increase over what it saw in 2015.

With all that in mind, what will really matter? Here’s what we’re watching. 

Oculus’s first consumer headset, Rift, will be released in the first quarter of 2016.

High-Powered Headsets

Several virtual-reality headsets are expected to hit the market this winter and spring. Facebook-owned Oculus’s first consumer headset, Rift, is slated for release in the first quarter of the year, while the HTC Vive—a headset created by smartphone maker HTC and video-game company Valve—is set to be available to consumers in April. Sony, meanwhile, is building its own headset, called PlayStation VR, which the company says will be released in the first half of the year.

The price tags for these headsets haven’t yet been announced, and buyers may also have to factor in the cost of a compatible computer (or, in the case of the Sony headset, a PlayStation 4), since all three of them will need to be physically connected to one of these in order to work. Rift has released details about PCs that will work with it (they start at $949), but HTC hasn’t yet said what the requirements will be for Vive-compatible PCs.

Despite the fact that few headsets are yet on the market, the Consumer Electronics Association forecasts sales of 1.2 million in 2016. 

Eagle Flight, a forthcoming virtual-reality video game from Ubisoft Entertainment, lets you play from the perspective of an eagle.

A New Breed of Games

Companies are developing a number of games and other experiences to go along with these new virtual-reality headsets.

A silly but fun game from Owlchemy Labs, called Job Simulator, will be available for Oculus’s Rift, HTC’s Vive, and Sony’s PlayStation VR. The game, which I got to try out at Oculus’s developer conference in the fall, is set in a future where robots have taken over all work, and it invites the player to simulate what it’s like to perform jobs like working in an office or as a chef.

And Ubisoft Entertainment, which makes the Assassin’s Creed video games and many others, expects to release Eagle Flight in 2016. The game lets you fly around above Paris, taking on the perspective of an eagle.

The games won’t all be new: the Windows 10 version of Minecraft, the extremely popular building-block game, will be coming to Rift in the spring, as well as to Samsung’s Gear VR, an existing $100 headset developed with Oculus that requires a Samsung smartphone to serve as its computer and display.

Nokia is building a virtual-reality camera called Ozo for capturing spherical 3-D videos.

Better Camera Options

Virtual reality isn’t all about computer-generated graphics; a number of companies are making live-action content, too. There aren’t too many options out there for filmmakers, though, and some companies are coming out with cameras that they hope will help.

Nokia expects to start selling Ozo, a nine-pound, mostly spherical video camera with a long protuberance on its back (for its special combined battery and recording cartridges), for $60,000 sometime in the first quarter. And Lytro—which hasn’t had much success with a camera that lets you change the focus of images after they’ve been shot—says it’s also building a professional-grade spherical camera, called Immerge, that will be about the size of a beach ball and cost “in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.” It is expected to be available within the same time frame.

A model of the Void’s Rapture headset, which the company plans to use when it opens its first virtual entertainment center in 2016.

Beyond the Living Room

Though much of the virtual-reality action in 2016 is expected to focus on the living room, a startup in suburban Utah is bringing it into a much larger space by opening a virtual-reality entertainment center called the Void later in the year.

Located in Pleasant Grove, Utah, the Void will outfit visitors with a headset and other gear, and then let them loose in groups of six to eight people to roam a 60-by-60-foot stage filled with a maze of physical walls and effects like heat and sprays of water that match up with a range of images you’ll see on the headset.

The Void is already operating a demo stage in neighboring Lindon, Utah, where visitors pay $10 apiece for experiences that last about six or seven minutes; when the real thing opens in August or September, the company plans to charge about $34 for a 20-minute experience.

More traditional theme parks may also add virtual-reality technology in 2016, too. Ontario-based amusement park Canada’s Wonderland, for example, reportedly plans to let users pay an extra fee to wear headsets on one of its roller coasters.

The United States solar market is wrapping up the best three-month period in its history, with a total of three gigawatts worth of solar photovoltaics capacity forecast to be installed from October through the end of the year. In all, about 7.4 gigawatts of solar photovoltaics will be built in 2015, surpassing last year’s record total of 6.3 gigawatts, according to a new report released on December 9 by the Solar Energy Industries Association and produced by GTM Research.

That, however, is just a trickle compared to the flood of new projects expected to come online in 2016. GTM Research forecasts that the market will more than double next year, reaching 15.4 gigawatts of solar power installed in 2016. Worldwide, growth in solar installations is expected to rival the boom occurring in the United States. Berlin-based research firm Apricum forecasts that 54 gigawatts will be installed worldwide in 2015, with new capacity additions reaching 92 gigawatts by 2020. The largest market for solar photovoltaics will be China, with 180 gigawatts of total capacity installed by the end of 2020, followed by the U.S. (83 gigawatts) and Japan (57 gigawatts).

Prices for solar panels and other components continue to fall. But the largest reason for the expected U.S. surge in 2016 was the scheduled expiration of the federal investment tax credit at the end of the year. That changed when Congress passed an omnibus spending bill that includes a five-year extension of the investment tax credit for solar and wind power projects.

Established by the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the investment tax credit provides a tax credit of 30 percent of the value of solar projects. Annual solar installations have grown by at a compound rate of 76 percent since the act was implemented in 2006. Under the new scheme, the 30 percent solar tax credit will extend through 2019 and then decline gradually to 10 percent in 2022. After 2022 the credit will be eliminated for residential solar installations and will continue at 10 percent for commercial ones. Overall, the move by Congress will add an extra 20 gigawatts of solar power over the next five years, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance—more than the total installed in history up to the end of last year.

The wind credit will apply to projects that have come online since the start of this year and will continue through 2019, gradually diminishing each year, before going away in 2020.

The solar industry and its supporters lobbied hard for an extension of the credit—a possibility that seemed slim up until a few months ago. Now, they are no longer racing to take advantage of the tax breaks while planning for a major contraction in the industry in 2017. In fact, the extension could have the paradoxical effect of slowing down installations in 2016 as companies prolong construction schedules beyond the previous deadline of December 31, 2016.

And it will have the complementary effect of avoiding the big drop-off that loomed in 2017. GTM Research foresaw installations in 2017 shrinking to just 5.5 gigawatts, which would be a 75 percent fall from the 2016 level. That forecast is sure to be adjusted.

The new extension has boosted the share prices of solar companies, and their prospects. But 2015’s turbulence had already forced solar developers to adapt and adjust their business models. Companies like SolarCity are moving from being strictly installers of solar arrays to providers of broad solutions that include energy storage systems and energy management tools in addition to solar panels. And North American developers are looking to burgeoning foreign markets—particularly in Asia and Latin America—for new projects as the U.S. market cools after next year. India, for example, plans to build 100 gigawatts of solar in the next seven years, much of it installed by North American developers such as SkyPower and SunEdison.

Even as prices for basic solar photovoltaic components fall, developers and utilities are adding smart inverters to better integrate solar arrays with the grid, and software to help manage distributed solar resources. Solar power, still only a small fraction of the world’s energy mix, is likely to expand in the coming decades as the world weans itself off of fossil fuels. 

Security researchers have developed an automated system for detecting Android apps that secretly connect to ad sites and user tracking sites. From May 21015…

There are essentially two starkly different environments in which to download apps. The first is Apple’s app store, which carefully vets apps before allowing only those deemed fit to appear. The second is the Google Play store, which is more open because Google exercises a lighter touch in vetting apps, only excluding those that are obviously malicious. 

But because Google Play is more open, the apps it offers span a much wider quality range. Many connect to ad-related sites and tracking sites while some connect to much more dubious sites that are associated with malware.

But here’s the problem—this activity often takes place without the owner being aware of what is going on. That’s something that most smartphone users would be appalled to discover—if only they were able to.

Today, Luigi Vigneri and pals from Eurecom in France have a solution. These guys have come up with an automated way to check the apps in Google Play and monitor the sites they connect to. And their results reveal the extraordinary scale of secret connections that many apps make without their owners being any the wiser.

Continued

Biologists often emphasize how little anyone really knows about the brain, the genome, and the mechanisms behind effective drugs. But this year their tune changed as diverse technologies–gene editing, stem cells, cloning, and DNA databases–coalesced into an immensely powerful toolkit for manipulating life. The message in 2015 seemed to be: “We can do anything.”

The technology that stole the headlines was CRISPR, the versatile genetic scissors that make it easy to cut and edit DNA of living cells. For the year, the number of scientific publications involving the technique doubled to more than 1,200, as scientists use gene editing to engineer extra-muscular dogs, create mosquitoes that can’t spread malaria, and alter plants so easily that companies predict it’s just a matter of years before gene-edited foods hit our dinner plates.

We can do these things, but should we? Social and ethical questions began dogging the CRISPR breakthrough early in the year, when MIT Technology Review toured readers through one emerging debate: the possibility of genetically modifying human embryos in IVF clinics to spare children from inherited disease. With an April publication from China disclosing the first edited human embryos, the debate over whether the technology is a slippery slope to eugenics exploded, and by December many of the world’s top gene-editing scientists had gathered in Washington for a will-we-or-won’t-we debate.

They concluded that we shouldn’t, not yet. It would be “irresponsible” to use CRISPR to make customized babies, the experts declared. In fact, one participant felt that our power to engineer life had outstripped our wisdom. “We are becoming masters of manipulating genes, but our understanding of their function is very limited,” said Klaus Rajewsky of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, in Berlin.

Yet we might know enough to cure some cancers, or solve the shortage of organs for transplant. Companies including Juno Therapeutics this year raised billions to start treating patients with genetically engineered immune cells that they have crafted into a lifesaving new treatment for leukemia. Surgeons in the U.S. smashed records for so-called “xenotransplantation” (transplants between species) by keeping a monkey alive nearly six months with a gene-modified pig kidney.

Gene technology isn’t just more powerful. It’s easier to access. Entrepreneurs started selling do-it-yourself DNA engineering kits to modify bacteria, and in October we told the story of a startup founder, Elizabeth Parrish, who claimed to be the first person to thumb her nose at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and treat herself with anti-aging genes. “I am patient zero,” she declared.

It’s a sign that we are deep into the second generation of biotechnology. That also means some pioneering inventions are being retired. This year, Monsanto’s patents on its original herbicide-resistant soybeans expired (pound for pound, the beans are easily the most important product of the biotech era), allowing farmers to plant “generic GMOs” for the first time. But  Monsanto has new ideas in its pipeline, like genetic sprays that can kill bugs or even change the behavior of plants on contact. Those products rely on RNA interference, which was also used to create the world’s first biotech apple.

A different trend that gained traction was the use of electricity to heal the mind or treat the body. Some call these therapies “electroceuticals.” Doctors began using brain stimulation to treat cocaine addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other problems once “considered too complex and mysterious” to cure with a simple jolt of electricity. In Cleveland, meanwhile, specialists at Case Western ran wires between the brain of a paralyzed man and the muscles of his arm, allowing him to move the arm with his thoughts. We didn’t forget to check in with the brave volunteers who got us here. We learned how patients who received a previous generation of implants at Case were left without tech support, rendering the devices useless inside their bodies. One far-out scientific pioneer even decided to put an implant in his own brain.

That role Silicon Valley might play in biotechnology is also worth watching. For that, we checked in several times this year with famed Facebook investor Peter Thiel to learn about a cancer-fighting startup he funded and get his views on how drug development could be more efficient if only biotech companies acted a little more like computer startups. Thiel, who thinks there shouldn’t be so much trial and error going on, told us his goal is to “get rid of randomness.”

We also tracked tech companies attempting to disrupt the huge, unhealthy U.S. health-care system. It’s not going too well: consumers don’t trust tech companies with their health data, and wrist-worn devices aren’t too accurate. But tech companies won’t be dissuaded. This year we learned that Apple was in discussions with researchers to collect people’s DNA data, and a San Francisco startup called Helix, bankrolled with $100 million, said it would launch the first DNA app store for consumers in 2016.

These ideas were part of an emerging boom in consumer use of genomics, which drew in figures like J. Craig Venter. Yet the economics of consumer DNA services remain unclear, partly because DNA predictions aren’t always foolproof or useful. This year, a $699 direct-to-consumer blood test for cancer got a very chilly reception, while pregnancy tests expanded into uncharted territory and sometimes found cancer by accident. Even better-established cancer tests aren’t proven to really help patients. The leader in tumor DNA testing in the U.S., Foundation Medicine, sold a majority of its shares to Roche, a sign that its future was uncertain.

Making DNA data more useful is the goal of President Obama’s “precision medicine initiative,” a $215 million effort that includes a planned study of the health records and DNA of one million people. Only with big numbers, the government says, will the next wave of links between genes and disease be discovered. Yet big studies could cause big, unexpected problems. In March, the CEO of DeCode Genetics, a subsidiary of Amgen that runs a nationwide gene bank in Iceland, said its database was now so big that it could pinpoint each and every Icelandic woman with a dangerous breast cancer mutation. Yet because of privacy laws, DeCode complained, it is unable to tell them. 

In a world first, a machine plays chess by evaluating the board rather than using brute force to work out every possible move. From September 2015…

It’s been almost 20 years since IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer beat the reigning world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, for the first time under standard tournament rules.  Since then, chess-playing computers have become significantly stronger, leaving the best humans little chance even against a modern chess engine running on a smartphone.

But while computers have become faster, the way chess engines work has not changed. Their power relies on brute force, the process of searching through all possible future moves to find the best next one.

Of course, no human can match that or come anywhere close. While Deep Blue was searching some 200 million positions per second, Kasparov was probably searching no more than five a second. And yet he played at essentially the same level. Clearly, humans have a trick up their sleeve that computers have yet to master.

This trick is in evaluating chess positions and narrowing down the most profitable avenues of search. That dramatically simplifies the computational task because it prunes the tree of all possible moves to just a few branches.

Computers have never been good at this, but today that changes thanks to the work of Matthew Lai at Imperial College London. Lai has created an artificial intelligence machine called Giraffe that has taught itself to play chess by evaluating positions much more like humans and in an entirely different way to conventional chess engines.

Continued

Each year MIT Technology Review selects 10 emerging technologies that we believe will remake the world. Here’s how this year’s picks got closer to reality over the past 10 months.

Magic Leap

When Rachel Metz of MIT Technology Review saw the four-armed blue monster, she knew Magic Leap’s technology was something special. The company is working on a headset that can make you see virtual 3-D objects blended seamlessly into the real world. Magic Leap doesn’t talk much about its technology or strategy. But we have learned that the company is working on silicon chips that process light and is inviting developers to create content for the headset, which does not yet have a public release date. Microsoft is working on a similar headset scheduled for a limited release early next year. Comparing demonstrations of the competing technologies suggested that both projects have amazing potential.

Nano Architecture

Engineering the structure of metals and ceramic materials at the nanoscale can give them superpowers that might transform how we build just about everything. They can become incredibly flexible, strong, and extremely light all at the same time, and gain the ability to spring back into shape after being crushed flat. In September, the CalTech lab of Julia Greer, which has pioneered this idea, reported new records for the strength and resilience of such materials. But as she told MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference in Cambridge in November, making these materials practical still requires figuring out ways to make them in larger quantities.

Car-to-Car Communication

The roads would be safer if nearby vehicles automatically shared details of their speed, direction, and other information over wireless links. This year Mercedes-Benz confirmed that its version of that technology will appear in 2017 E-Class models going on sale next year, and General Motors was reported to be putting car-to-car communication in the 2017 Cadillac CTS sedan. Leading Chinese car manufacturer Changan has been testing the technology at its Michigan research center, and says it may appear in its vehicles in 2018. U.S. transportation secretary Anthony Foxx said in May that he was accelerating work on rules that would require car-to-car communication technology on all new vehicles.

Project Loon

Alphabet continued testing its giant helium balloons intended to widen Internet access in 2015. In October the company signed an agreement with the government of Indonesia to give the technology its biggest test yet. In 2016 cellular networks serving the country’s 250 million people will begin to integrate the balloons into their networks, acting as extra cellular towers floating in the stratosphere. In India, however, the planned Loon rollout reportedly hit roadblocks in communications technology and security late in the year. Alphabet’s balloon team has also begun collaborating with Facebook, which has plans to use high-altitude drones for cheap Internet access.

Liquid Biopsy

Just a vial or two of blood can reveal a wealth of information about a person’s cancer, developing fetus or transplanted organ. “Foreign” cells in the body shed fragments of DNA into the blood that can be read thanks to advances in sequencing technology. Liquid biopsies are now becoming widely used, but their power and effectiveness is still not fully understood. Many expectant mothers have blood tests to check their fetus’ chromosomes, but they sometimes reveal undiagnosed cancers, too. And although liquid biopsies for cancer have become common, the evidence they are improving outcomes/treatment is so far equivocal.

Megascale Desalination

There isn’t enough fresh water in the world to meet the needs of the world’s growing population, but technology that removes the salt from seawater has gotten much more efficient. This year a new “megascale” desalination plant that uses a technique called reverse osmosis ramped up to full capacity in Israel. It is capable of producing 627,000 cubic meters of water a day, at much lower prices than previous plants thanks to advances in engineering and materials. A new plant built on similar technology recently opened in Carlsbad, California, north of San Diego. It is expected to produce over 200,000 cubic meters of water a day, estimated to take care of 7 percent of San Diego County’s supply.

Apple Pay

The idea of paying for stuff with your phone had been around for a long time before Apple decided to take a whack at it. But with Apple Pay the company made a version of the concept significantly easier to use and more secure than those that came before. Apple also used its considerable business clout to bring banks, retailers, and payments processors on board. Uptake of Apple Pay has been steady but not explosive. As of this summer, 13 percent of people with compatible iPhones had tried it and 27 percent of U.S. retailers accepted it. That’s not bad considering how slowly retailers and the payments industry changes, but not enough to make 2015 the “year of Apple Pay,” as CEO Tim Cook predicted in January.

Brain Organoids
Lab-grown clumps of brain tissue similar to the brain of a human embryo during the first trimester provide a new way to understand brain disorders and test new treatments. Brain organoids can be cultured from skin cells and are being used to study Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, and epilepsy. One study this year used the technique to shed new light on the role of genetics in autism, and found a way to use genetic engineering to grow brain organoids from the cells of autistic people that lacked one feature characteristic of the condition.

Supercharged Photosynthesis

Late in 2014 plant scientists created a new rice plant with a massive upgrade to its capability to extract energy from sunlight. The technique could increase the productivity of rice crops, and perhaps also wheat, by as much as 50 percent, making it possible to feed more people in poor regions of the world. MIT Technology Review estimates it will be 10 to 15 years before the effort by 12 labs in eight countries pays off—longer than any other technology on this year’s list. But there has been some progress in recent months, with the project advancing to its third phase at the start of December. Having shown that they can get the enzymes needed to supercharge photosynthesis into rice, the researchers are now focused on understanding how to regulate their activity so they function correctly.

Internet of DNA

As genome sequencing has become cheaper, its use has grown rapidly—and so has the number of separate databases in the world storing genomic data. Geneticists are now rolling out infrastructure to link up those isolated DNA databanks and solve medical discoveries that can only be found by sharing and comparing genomic data. This year patients’ genomes began streaming over the Internet via one such system, called Matchmaker Exchange. In October doctors in Calgary, Canada, and Baltimore, Maryland, reported that this led them to discover that two boys thousands of miles apart with serious, unknown developmental disorders had the same genetic condition. Comparing the boys’ genome sequences helped uncover the exact mutation that causes the disease.

An algorithm’s list of the most influential universities contains some surprising entries. From December 2015…

Where are the world’s most influential universities? That’s a question that increasingly dominates the way the public, governments, and funding agencies think about research and higher education.

The problem, of course, is that it’s hard to produce an objective ranking of almost anything, let alone universities. Cultural, historical, and geographical factors can all influence these rankings in ways that are hard to quantify.

So an independent way of producing a ranking that avoids these controversies would be widely welcomed.

Today, we get such a ranking thanks to the work of Jose Lages at the University of Franche-Comte in France and a few pals. They’ve used the way universities are mentioned on Wikipedia to produce a world ranking. Their results provide a new way to think about rankings that may help to avoid some of the biases that can occur in other ranking systems.

Continued