Recommended from Around the Web (Week Ending January 31, 2015)

A roundup of the most interesting stories from other sites, collected by the staff at MIT Technology Review.

MIT TR Editorsarchive page

January 30, 2015

Ageing Research: Blood to Blood
Is young blood a treatment for Alzheimer’s?
—Antonio Regalado, senior editor, biomedicine

Brain Hackers Beware: Scientist Says tDCS Has No Effect
Those brain-stimulating gizmos you heard about? Many studies find they really do something. Just never the same thing.
—Antonio Regalado

Netflix’s Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human
I like Tim Wu’s New Yorker piece on how Netflix complements its trove of viewership stats with human instinct when betting on new shows.
—Kristin Majcher, special projects editor

At Silk Road Trial, Lawyers Fight to Include Evidence They Call Vital: Emoji
How do you read an emoticon in court? Silk Road underground marketplace trial runs into tricky problem of how to orally express typed conversations.
—Tom Simonite, San Francisco bureau chief

Bill Gates: How the World Will Change by 2030
Bill Gates on why he thinks life for the poor will improve more in the next 15 years than it ever has before.
—Kevin Bullis, senior editor, materials

Never Trust a Corporation to Do a Library’s Job
The story of Internet Archive, a nonprofit that’s taken on Google’ onetime mission of preserving the past.
—Nanette Byrnes, senior editor, Business Reports

Learning from Animal Friendships
“Animals share abilities once considered exclusive to humans, including some emotions, tool use, counting, certain aspects of language and even a moral sense.”
—J. Juniper Friedman, associate Web producer

Keep Reading

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.