Expert Reviews - Share The Best

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

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.”

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

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

Tagged: Computing, Biomedicine, Business, Energy, Mobile, Materials, Robotics, seven must reads

Reprints and Permissions | Send feedback to the editor

In 2015 a series of events combined to drive what may well to be profound shifts—even turning points—in the history of the energy sector.

The ongoing decline in oil prices, which began as early as 2012, accelerated noticeably in 2015. The benchmark West Texas Intermediate oil price fell to $34.53 a barrel on December 18, lower than it’s been since before the financial crash of 2008, with no floor in sight. Goldman Sachs has predicted that oil could fall as low as $20 a barrel, a development that would cripple most oil-producing economies and have geopolitical ripple effects for years to come. At the same time, the price of natural gas remains near historic lows. Cheap oil and natural gas are conventionally thought to be negative influences on the adoption of renewable energy, lessening the incentives of businesses and consumers to give up fossil fuels. But that doesn’t seem to have slowed the shift away from fossil fuels in 2015.

Electricity generation from fossil fuels through the first nine months of 2015 barely climbed from the same period in 2014, while power from solar PV increased 48 percent. And oil consumption in the United States, the world’s largest oil market, is on a long-term downward trend: between now and 2040, according to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook, U.S. oil consumption will fall by nearly four million barrels per day, returning to the levels of the 1960s.

Indeed, the adoption of clean energy hit record rates in 2015. Analysts at GTM Research, in their report “The Future of U.S. Solar,” noted that total solar power installations to date in the United States reached 26 gigawatts at the end of 2015—and forecast that they’ll reach nearly 10 times that by 2030. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called for 140 gigawatts of installed solar capacity by 2020, a goal that would entail adding as much capacity each year for the next five years as had been installed, in history, in the U.S. up until the end of 2014. Because solar power is intermittent, its capacity factor—the percentage of generation capacity that is actually used—is low compared to, for instance, coal or nuclear plants. And solar will remain in the low single digits as a source of electricity. But it is by any measure the fastest growing segment of the electricity industry. As the International Energy Agency put it, “An energy sector transition is underway in many parts of the world.”

Helping to make such forecasts plausible was the move by Congress, at the end of the year, to extend the tax credits for solar and wind power projects for another five years (see “Congress Extends Tax Credits for Renewables”). That piece of legislation alone will lead to $40 billion in new investment between now and 2020, according to GTM Research, resulting in 25 gigawatts of additional solar capacity over the next five years.

Clean energy progress in the U.S., though, is dwarfed by the ambitions of India and China. India alone intends to add 160 gigawatts of new renewable capacity by 2022, including 100 gigawatts of solar, which would represent by far the largest addition of new renewable power generation in history (see “India’s Energy Crisis”). The plans laid out in 2015 by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, and his minister of energy, Piyush Goyal, could mark a new path to development for poor countries that lack oil reserves. China and India both have huge ambitions for nuclear power as well. Beijing plans to build six to eight nuclear reactors a year through 2020, and by 2030, if its hopes materialize, should have the 110 reactors, the largest nuclear power fleet in the world.

The year also marked the first time in history that carbon emissions fell even as the world economy grew. U.S. coal consumption fell by 10.5 percent from 2013 to 2015, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and while coal use in growing economies like India (now the fastest growing emitter of greenhouse gases) and China is expected to keep climbing for some years, the rate of growth is already slowing. Indeed, coal demand in China plateaued in 2015, indicating that the burning of coal by the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide could level off well before analysts expected it to.

The biggest signpost on the energy highway was the signing of the Paris accord on climate change (see “Paris Climate Agreement Rests on Shaky Technological Foundations”). While the agreement failed to achieve what most climate activists hoped for—legally binding targets for emissions cuts, curbs on the production of fossil fuels, and a price on carbon—it nevertheless marked the first time that world leaders agreed to specific measures to reduce greenhouse gases and limit the rise of global temperatures. It was not the end of the fossil fuel era, but it may well have been the beginning of the end.

Network scientists have discovered how social networks can create the illusion that something is common when it is actually rare. From June 2015…

One of the curious things about social networks is the way that some messages, pictures, or ideas can spread like wildfire while others that seem just as catchy or interesting barely register at all. The content itself cannot be the source of this difference. Instead, there must be some property of the network that changes to allow some ideas to spread but not others.

Today, we get an insight into why this happens thanks to the work of Kristina Lerman and pals at the University of Southern California. These people have discovered an extraordinary illusion associated with social networks which can play tricks on the mind and explain everything from why some ideas become popular quickly to how risky or antisocial behavior can spread so easily.

Continued…