MIT News: May/Jun 2012

Technology Review: November/December 2011

A Social-Media Decoder

New technology deciphers— and empowers—the millions who talk back to their televisions through the Web.
By David Talbot

Alberta's Oil Sands Heat Up

Thanks to its deposits of buried ­bitumen, Canada is one of the world's fastest-growing oil producers. New extraction technologies are opening up even more of the vast resource—prompting fresh environmental concerns.
By Peter Fairley

Can This Man Work Magic?

Nokia helped invent the cell-phone business, but those days of technology glory are long gone. Its new CTO has the job of creating the technologies and designs that will help the Finnish company regain its status as an innovation leader.
By William M. Bulkeley

From the Editor

Steve's Way

Emulate the methods and values of Apple's late cofounder.
By Jason Pontin

Graphiti

Going Offline

Google reveals how often ­governments ask it to banish things from its services and how often it complies.
By Brian Bergstein

Notebooks

Dirty Distraction

Controversy over a proposed oil pipeline from Alberta to Texas is sidetracking us from bigger issues.
By David Keith

Social Intelligence

Analyzing what people do online provides a way to peer into society's collective mind.
By Bernardo Huberman

Reinvention

It's a good thing for ­innovation that the age of monolithic ­corporate labs is over.
By Henry Chesbrough

Demo

Battery Fill-Up

Better Place's switching ­stations allow electric cars to swap ­batteries during long trips.
By Matthew Kalman

How Electric Cars Swap Batteries

Hack

Instrument of Control

Belts of electrodes can control muscles in the forearm to help a beginner play a musical instrument.
By Erica Naone

To Market

Technology Commercialized

Dancing robot, personal pods, radiation detection app, scanning mouse, lightbulb speaker, safety-monitoring earphones, and more.

Q&A

Bradley Horowitz

The man building Google's new social network says people deserve better than Facebook and Twitter.
By Tom Simonite

Photo Essay

A Light in the Desert

Some of the world’s largest renewable-energy facilities are setting up in the harsh Mojave Desert.
Photographs by Chad Ress
By Krista Zala

Essay

World Without Walls

When everything that can be recorded is recorded, our means of protecting privacy must fundamentally change.
By Aaron Bady

Business Impact

The Cloud Imperative

Treating computing as a utility is an old idea, but now it makes financial sense. Why cloud computing will affect businesses everywhere.

Being Smart about Cloud Security
Business Gets Remote
Facebook Shares Its Cloud Designs
Transcending Borders but Not Laws

Reviews

A New Chapter for E-Books

Lavish electronic-book projects point toward the pinnacle of the medium.
By Erica Naone

Public Mea Culpas

Scientists and the journals that publish them have a difficult time admitting to mistakes. That does real harm to both their disciplines and the public.
By Jon Cohen

Rethinking the Unthinkable

Nuclear proliferation in the 21st century should force the United States to reconsider whether the principle of deterrence actually promotes stability and peace.
By Mark Williams

28 Years Ago in TR

The Dubious Perils of Pac-Man

One writer bristled at the idea that video games might be corrupting her daughters.
By Timothy Maher

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