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.

June 12, 2015

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.