Technology

YOU’VE SEEN THE REPORTS a thousand times. Samsung is now ahead of Apple in the smartphone wars, the media says. I’m looking at BBC news while writing this, and there we have the same story, freshly posted: “Apple accounted for 18.8 per cent of all sales and Samsung 29.7 per cent.” The Daily Mail has the exact same story from a different angle: Android, the system used by Samsung, has “crushed” Apple, with 79 per cent of the market against Apple’s 13 per cent, their report says. It all seems cut and dried. The facts are stated clearly, and so are the statistics to back them up. Samsung with…

Obviously, as the creators of the four pillars of the Science 2.0 concept, we're interested in new ways to use data to make meaningful decisions, but we recognize that key breakthroughs are more likely to happen in the private sector, where money can be made filling a demand. A paper by Aetna and GNS Healthcare Inc. in the American Journal of Managed Care demonstrates how analysis of patient records using analytics can predict future risk of metabolic syndrome. This could be useful, not just because a third of the population has the somewhat fuzzily-defined metabolic syndrome, …

Tesla Motors CEO and Tony Stark do-alike Elon Musk recently raised a great deal of consternation by releasing Tesla’s patents for anyone to use “in good faith”.  Amid the hue and cry of befuddled business analysts, multiple theories bubbled up.  Is Musk angling to make the Tesla supercharger technology the industry standard?  Is he trying to sell batteries from his upcoming gigafactories?  Does he want more electric cars to give Teslas more legitimacy and attract investment?  Is he simply disillusioned with patents and claiming some open-source caché? Curiously…

A blood testcould help predict the likelihood of a woman developing breast cancer, even in the absence of a high-risk BRCA1 gene mutation, according to researchers from University College London who identified an epigenetic signature in the blood of women predisposed for breast cancer owing to an inherited genetic mutation of the BRCA1 gene. Epigenetic alterations are thought to be key molecular switches that are involved in the development of cancer. Strikingly, the same signature was discovered in the blood of women without a BRCA1 mutation but who went on to develop breast cancer, making…

'Big data' means a lot of things to a lot of people but generally it is used to indicate huge amounts of information, like texts or keywords, in use at any time by billions of people. Though it has many cultural upsides, tracking flu epidemics, monitoring road traffic in real time, or handling the emergency of natural disasters, those are all sunk costs, which means government and that means a lot of poorly-functioning government websites. Big data will be used by marketing people before it gets adopted by social services. But before they can be used by anyone, they need to be…

When it comes to organic, the last thing you expect is cheap but a new battery may end up being just that.  USC researchers have developed a water-based organic battery that is long lasting and made from cheap, eco-friendly components. It used no metals or toxic materials and is intended for use in power plants. Power plants are not in the storage business, they are in the generation business, but if solar and wind power become viable we are going to need high-capacity storage to even out the ups and downs of Mother Nature. "The batteries last for about 5,000 recharge cycles, giving them…

The world of "Fantastic Voyage" is rapidly approaching. Tiny devices are being used in therapeutic applications, and development of nanoparticles that can transport and deliver drugs to target cells in the human body is progressing also. Recently, researchers created nanoparticles that under the right conditions, self-assemble – trapping complementary guest molecules within their structure. Like tiny submarines, these versatile nanocarriers can navigate in the watery environment surrounding cells and transport their guest molecules through the membrane of living cells to sequentially…

If you ask one scientist to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar, unless they have worked specifically on that problem before, their guess won't be very accurate. But if you ask 500 random people, the mean of their responses will be quite accurate. If you ask experts to predict the future of science and technology, will they be more accurate? SciCast, the government crowd-sourcing project, hopes so. They are asking for participants to make their predictions. Though SciCast is based on the idea that collective wisdom is often more accurate at forecasting the outcome of events than that of…

Space debris in Earth's orbit, especially small things that are untraceable and unavoidable, have been a growing concern. Experiments and satellites need to be as light as possible so numerical simulation can be used to enhance or improve the protection structure of the spacecraft, and reduce the harm of the space debris.  For  the past 20 years, the Laboratory for Shock Wave and Detonation Physics Research in the China Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP) has conducted research in hypervelocity launch technology.  In their project, they work on optimization of launcher…

Driving is no fun any more. When is the last time you saw someone buy a pair of driving gloves? These days, it is a chore. It would be much better to let someone else take the wheel but the only viable alternative is public transportation - and about the first time some crazy hobo screams at you and your family, they are never going to want to take it again.  If Big Brother is the trade-off for being able to read a book without having some hobo peeing next to us on the subway, bring it on. Chauffeurs are tedious and expensive so that means we need a driverless car. Yes, Google will be…