As you read this, over a million people are in flight. Close to a third of the commercial airplanes in the sky at any given moment are Boeing 737s: it is the best-selling jetliner in history. The 737 has safely carried over …Continue reading
China vs. the US: Who wins and who loses
Born in Beijing and educated at Harvard, Yasheng Huang, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, is a keen observer of China’s entrepreneurial efforts and the role the government has played in the country’s remarkable growth. Will Knight, a senior editor …Continue reading
China is racing ahead in 5G. Here’s what that means.
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