Seven Must-Read Stories (Week Ending August 30, 2014)

Another chance to catch the most interesting, and important, articles from the previous week on MIT Technology Review.

August 29, 2014

How ALS Could Benefit from a Flood of New Funding
A viral social-media campaign has brought unprecedented money to a rare disease. How might new funding help ALS research?
Hidden Obstacles for Google’s Self-Driving Cars
Impressive progress hides major limitations of Google’s quest for automated driving.
A Chip for Longer-Lasting Wearable Computers
Batteries for smart watches and other wearables never last long. A new microchip design could change that.
A Headset Meant to Make Augmented Reality Less of a Gimmick
A novel optical technique could overlay virtual imagery on the real world through a compact pair of glasses.
How Much Is Your Privacy Worth?
Despite the outcry over government and corporate snooping, some people allow themselves be monitored for money or rewards.
Furniture Shopping with Augmented Reality
Startup Vizera makes a projector that adds realistic-looking surfaces to actual objects, making for a new kind of shopping experience.
Germany and Canada Are Building Water Splitters to Store Energy
Improving technology is making electrolysis a viable way to store excess energy from renewable sources.

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

New large language models will transform many jobs. Whether they will lead to widespread prosperity or not is up to us.

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

We got a first look at the much-anticipated big new language model from OpenAI. But this time how it works is even more deeply under wraps.

Illustration by Rose Wong

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