NewsTrust - Most Recent Stories

Adding Trust to Wikipedia, and Beyond

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By Erica Naone - Sep. 04 (News Report) - The official motto of the Internet could be "don't believe everything you read," but moves are afoot to help users know better what to be skeptical about and what to trust. A tool called WikiTrust, which helps users evaluate information on Wikipedia by automatically assigning a reliability color-coding to text, came into the spotlight this week with news that it could be added as an option for general users of Wikipedia. Also, last week the Wikimedia Foundation announced that changes made to pages about living people will soon need to be vetted by an established editor. These moves reflect a broader drive to make online information more accountable. And this week the World Wide Web Consortium published a framework that could help any Web site make verifiable claims about authorship and reliability of content.

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Solar Industry: No Breakthroughs Needed

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By Kevin Bullis - Aug. 03 (News Report) - The solar industry says incremental advances have made transformational technologies unnecessary.

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A Biofuel Process to Replace All Fossil Fuels

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By Kevin Bullis - Jul. 29 (News Report) - Joule Biotechnologies grows genetically engineered microorganisms in specially designed photobioreactors. The microorganisms use energy from the sun to convert carbon dioxide and water into ethanol or hydrocarbon fuels (such as diesel or components of gasoline). The organisms excrete the fuel, which can then be collected using conventional chemical-separation technologies.

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Light Repels Light

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By Anne-Marie Corley - Jul. 20 (News Report) - The repulsive side of an optical force could lead to ultra-fast telecommunications.

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Technology Review: Broad Use of Brain Boosters?

Mon, 18 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By Emily Singer - May. 18 (News Analysis) - Off-label use of stimulants, such as Ritalin, is on the rise among college students. Studies show that 5 percent to 15 percent of students use prescription drugs as study aids, and surveys suggest the practice may be common among academics as well. The trend has sparked debates over how and when these cognitive enhancers should be used.

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Videos: A Lifelike Prosthetic Arm

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By Michael Rosenwald - May. 04 (News Report) - A new surgical technique, developed by scientists at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, allows patients who have lost arms to use residual nerve signals to control a prosthetic limb.

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A New Processing Scheme for Algae Biofuels

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By Monica Heger - May. 01 (News Report) - OriginOil, an algae biofuel company based in Los Angeles, has developed a simpler and more efficient way to extract oil from algae.

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Does Anyone Understand Geo-Engineering?

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By Kevin Bullis - Apr. 23 (News Analysis) - Geo-engineering schemes fall broadly into two categories: those designed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and those designed to shade the earth and reflect sunlight back into space to cool the planet. Some researchers, for example, have proposed seeding the oceans with iron particles to fertilize carbon-dioxide-consuming algae. Others, including the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, have suggested injecting sulfurous particles into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, where they would block a small fraction of sunlight that reaches the earth. Other proposals range from the extremely simple--painting roofs white to reflect sunlight--to the extremely costly and elaborate: assembling sunshades in space.

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Energy and Climate Bill Advances

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By Kevin Bullis - Apr. 14 (News Report) - Congress is moving forward on legislation that would address both energy efficiency and climate change in a single bill, creating requirements for the use of renewable energy and introducing a cap on carbon dioxide emissions.

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arXiv blog: The evolution of scientific ideas

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By arXiv - Apr. 13 (News Report) - Science is an evolving discipline. . . . how exactly are these fields changing? And what does it tell us about the evolution of ideas and the changing nature of science?

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Solar-Power Breakthrough

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By Kevin Bullis - Jul. 31 (News Report) - Researchers have made a major advance in inorganic chemistry that could lead to a cheap way to store energy from the sun. In so doing, they have solved one of the key problems in making solar energy a dominant source of electricity. Daniel Nocera, a professor of chemistry at MIT, has developed a catalyst that can generate oxygen from a glass of water by splitting water molecules. The reaction frees hydrogen ions to make hydrogen gas. The catalyst, which is easy and cheap to make, could be used to generate vast amounts of hydrogen using sunlight to power the reactions. The hydrogen can then be burned or run through a fuel cell to generate electricity whenever it's needed, including when the sun isn't shining.

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The Secrets of Anti-Aging Genes

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By Emily Singer - Jul. 17 (News Report) - An ambitious plan to sequence 100 genes in 1,000 healthy old people could shed light on genetic variations that insulate some people from the ailments of aging, including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, allowing them to live a healthy life into their eighties and beyond. Rather than focusing on genetic variations that increase risk for disease, scientists plan to focus on genes that have previously been linked to health and longevity.

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Internet Gridlock

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By Larry Hardesty - Jul. 01 (News Analysis) - The idea that the Internet should be fair--that it shouldn't pick favorites among users, service providers, applications, and types of content--is generally known as net neutrality. And it's a principle that has been much in the news lately, after its apparent violation by Comcast, the second-largest ISP in the United States.

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Scheduling Wind Power

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By Peter Fairley - Apr. 18 (Special Report) - As wind power becomes more common, its unpredictability becomes more of a problem. Sudden drops in wind speed can send grid operators scrambling to cover the shortfall and even cause blackouts; unexpected surges can leave conventional power plants idling, incurring costs and spewing pollution to no purpose.

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Solar without the Panels

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

MIT Technology Review - By Peter Fairley - Feb. 29 (News Report) - This month, in the latest in a string of recent deals, Spanish solar-plant developer Abengoa Solar and Phoenix-based utility Arizona Public Service announced a 280-megawatt solar thermal project in Arizona. By contrast, the world's largest installations of photovoltaics generate only 20 megawatts of power.

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"You Don't Understand Our Audience"

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

MIT Technology Review - By John Hockenberry - Jan. 04 (News Analysis) - "One might have thought that the television industry, with its history of rapid adaptation to technological change, would have become a center of innovation for the next radical transformation in communication. It did not. Instead, the United States is arguably more isolated and less educated about the world than it was a half-century ago.

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Turning Carbon Dioxide into Fuel

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0800

MIT Technology Review - By Duncan Graham-Rowe - Dec. 17 (News Report) - Could concentrated solar energy be used to reverse combustion and convert carbon dioxide back into gasoline? That's what scientists at Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, NM, aim to find out by building a novel reactor that can chemically "reenergize" carbon dioxide.

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Stanford's New Driverless Car

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 05:10:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By Kate Greene - Jun. 16 (News Report) - Junior the autonomous car passes an initial round of tests in preparation for DARPA's Urban Challenge, slated for later this year. ... Yesterday, a Volkswagen Passat drove around a parking lot in Mountain View, CA, made three-point turns ...

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Technology Review: A Smarter Web

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 08:43:05 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By John Borland - Mar. 12 (Special Report) - Already, these techniques are helping developers stitch together complex applications or bring once-inaccessible data sources online. Semantic Web tools now in use improve and automate database searches, helping people choose vacation destinations or sort through complicated financial data more efficiently. It may be years before the Web is populated by truly intelligent software agents automatically doing our bidding, but their precursors are helping people find better answers to questions today.

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New Clues to Global-Warming Dangers

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 12:05:00 -0800

MIT Technology Review - By Emily Singer - Mar. 05 (News Report) - Using novel genomic technology, marine biologists have found troubling clues that marine life could be extremely vulnerable to climate change. By mimicking future ocean climes and using gene chips to detect how marine organisms respond, the researchers can evaluate how well different organisms deal with environmental stress. The findings, while still preliminary and incomplete, are worrisome.

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Data Centers' Growing Power Demands

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 11:47:32 -0800

MIT Technology Review - By Kate Greene - Feb. 15 (Special Report) - A report issued today estimates that the overall electricity used by servers--computers that make up the networks of organizations, from small businesses to giant financial institutions--doubled between 2000 and 2005. The reasons for this growth rate were an increase in the number of servers installed in data centers and the demands of auxiliary equipment such as cooling fans and facility lighting, says Jonathan Koomey, staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and author of the report. "I was surprised by the doubling," says Koomey. "I expected some growth, but not quite as large."

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Cheap, Superefficient Solar

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 12:56:16 -0800

MIT Technology Review - By Kevin Bullis - Nov. 09 (News Report) - Technologies collectively known as concentrating photovoltaics are starting to enjoy their day in the sun, thanks to advances in solar cells, which absorb light and convert it into electricity, and the mirror- or lens-based concentrator systems that focus light on them. The technology could soon make solar power as cheap as electricity from the grid.

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GE's Two-Battery Strategy for Fuel-Cell Buses

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 14:06:24 -0800

MIT Technology Review - By Kevin Bullis - Nov. 02 (Not sure) - Hydrogen fuel cells are still too expensive to be used widely in vehicles, so researchers at GE are taking a different tack: they're slashing the size of the fuel cell to a bare minimum while relying on two distinct kinds of advanced battery technologies to deliver the necessary horsepower under a wide range of driving conditions.

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