New on MIT Technology Review

Music Festivals, Bluetooth Monitoring and the Behavior of Crowds

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 04:56:59 +0000

The unexpected behaviour of crowds at one of Europe’s largest music festivals should help organisers plan future events, say researchers

AT&T Tests Public Phone Charging Stations

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:02:29 +0000

Wireless carrier AT&T is rolling out free gadget-charging stations all over NYC.

Google Says Secret Intelligence Court Restricts Its Right to Free Speech

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:33:11 +0000

Google is demanding that a secret intelligence court allow it to share some details about surveillance requests for user data.

Last week, negative press in the wake of recent leaks about NSA surveillance prompted Facebook, Google, and Microsoft to politely ask the U.S. government to be allowed to share broad statistics on their legally required role in such activities.

Laser Scanning Reveals New Parts of an Ancient Cambodian City

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:50:00 +0000

LIDAR technology continues to reveal archeological evidence of urbanization

Airborne laser scanning has revealed the remnants of a vast urban structure in the vicinity of Angkor Wat, a famous temple in Cambodia. The study, which will be published soon in the journal PNAS, follows a previous one that showed Angkor Wat to have been one of the world’s most complex preindustrial cities.

Mobile Call Logs Can Reveal a Lot to the NSA

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:08:45 +0000

Research shows how much the NSA could glean from call records, and why efforts to downplay the significance of such metadata are misleading.

Of all the recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance activities, the collection of metadata from Verizon’s U.S. call records may be the most concerning (see “NSA Surveillance Reflects a Broader Interpretation of the Patriot Act”). Despite reassurances that the information collected is limited in its scope, academics who study such data say it could still reveal a great deal about the people being monitored.

High-Tech Cheetah Tracking Reveals the Cat’s Hunting Secret

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:39:36 +0000

Research into wild animal locomotion could inform the design of future robots.

Biologically inspired robots could prove useful for all sorts of tasks (see “Just What Soldiers Need: A Bigger Robotic Dog”). But the design of such robots has been limited by our understanding of animal locomotion. Now, thanks to tracking technology, this is changing, and more nimble-footed machines could soon follow.

So, You Wanna Be an Android?

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 04:05:00 +0000

Inside the evolution movement that wants machines to replace people.

The day before travelling to New York City to attend Global Future 2045, a gathering last weekend of so-called transhumanists who hope to download their minds into android bodies, I put in a call to the American Psychiatric Association.

Materials Scientists Build Chlorophyll-Based Phototransistor

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 04:04:14 +0000

Coat a layer of graphene with chlorophyll and you get a remarkably sensitive light-activated switch, say physicists.

America's Petrochemical Landscape