The Fangshan district is a quiet outer borough in southwest Beijing. Until recently it was best known for its petrochemical and steel plants. Today, this neighborhood of sleepy apartment buildings and train tracks is part of a mobile revolution enveloping cities across …Continue reading
An electric plane with no moving parts has made its first flight
Your typical jet plane is full of fast-moving blades. We need the spinning of turbines and propellers to create thrust and let us take to the skies. Or do we? In a paper out today in Nature, MIT researchers report that they …Continue reading
Here’s what a manufacturing skills gap of more than 2 million people will look like
There will be 4.6 million new manufacturing jobs in the US to fill between 2018 and 2028, according to a new report out yesterday from Deloitte. THE GAP (SEE CHART ABOVE) Over half of the newly created jobs—2.4 million—are predicted to go …Continue reading
Using Wi-Fi to “see” behind closed doors is easier than anyone thought
Wi-Fi fills our world with radio waves. In your home, in the office, and increasingly on city streets, humans are bathed in a constant background field of 2.4- and 5-gigahertz radio signals. And when people move, they distort this field, reflecting and refracting …Continue reading
IKEA designs future autonomous cars that work as hotels, stores, and meeting rooms
Once cars can finally drive themselves, we’ll have more time to enjoy the journey and do other, much more interesting stuff instead. At least that’s the concept behind some of the designs below, developed by retail giant IKEA’s “future living lab,” SPACE10, …Continue reading
US election campaign technology from 2008 to 2018, and beyond
What a difference a decade makes. Consider: In 2008, the iPhone was less than a year old. BlackBerrys and e-mail dominated the palms of corporate and political information junkies. Television continued to be the dominant medium for political advertising and debates. Social …Continue reading
Life as a bug bounty hunter: a struggle every day, just to get paid
Evan Ricafort works from home, his office taking up a room in a house that he shares with his family along a national highway in the Philippines. While the 22-year-old’s parents go to work at a convenience store the family owns in …Continue reading
China’s use of big data might actually make it less Big Brother-ish
By 2020, China’s new system of social credit scoring is expected to give each citizen a trustworthiness rating based on anything from shopping habits to choice of friends. It may seem like an ideal tool for an authoritarian government that wants to …Continue reading
Don’t just ditch Facebook—start your own social-media site instead
Fed up with political propaganda bots and discriminatory online ads? You may think the answer is to delete your Facebook and Twitter profiles and head offline, but there might be a better way: build your own networks. “These systems are affecting billions …Continue reading
Confessions of an accidental job destroyer
I expected my summer engineering internship to include things like updating old 3-D models, creating part designs, and learning the ins and outs of how a company works. I didn’t expect it to involve learning to make my colleagues obsolete. It was …Continue reading