Seven Must-Read Stories (Week Ending June 13, 2015)
Another chance to catch the most interesting, and important, articles from the previous week on MIT Technology Review.
- Magic Leap Needs to Engineer a Miracle
To make its prototype augmented-reality goggles a product, Magic Leap will have to scale up silicon photonics—something heavyweights like Intel have struggled to do. - Cyber-Espionage Nightmare
A groundbreaking online-spying case unearths details that companies wish you didn’t know about how vital information slips away from them. - Why Robots and Humans Struggled with DARPA’s Challenge
The falls and fumbles of robots in the DARPA Challenge point to the remaining hurdles for human-robot interfaces. - Designer Carbons Are Getting a Boost from Nanotechnology
Manufactured materials could lead to breakthroughs in batteries, supercapacitors, and eventually carbon-capture systems. - Quest to Mine Seawater for Lithium Advances
Predicted lithium shortages are leading to novel technologies for recovering the element, now found mostly in salt lakes in South America. - Race for a Smart Contact Lens Gets New Entry from a Thiel Dropout
With fresh funding from the Thiel Foundation, startup Medella is going up against Google and Microsoft to build a smart contact lens. - Machine Vision Algorithm Chooses the Most Creative Paintings in History
Picking the most creative paintings is a network problem akin to finding super spreaders of disease. That’s allowed a machine to pick out the most creative paintings in history. <