Mining the mobile phone data from 10 million people over 4 years reveals
the subtle changes that occur in the flow of information when disaster
strikes, say network scientists.
All
of this involves humans acting in ordinary situations that they have
experienced many times before. But what of the way humans behave in
extraordinary conditions, such as during earthquakes, armed conflicts or
terrorist incidents?
Nest co-founders Matt Rogers and Tony Fadell flank Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page.
Google’s newest employee, Nest CEO Tony Fadell, has a big personality
and a loud laugh. He likes to talk about Apple. In fact, when I met
Fadell and his co-founder Matt Rogers for a profile of their company
published last February (see “Control Freaks”),
the way he emoted, enthused, and vented about the design, function, and
frustrations of consumer technology reminded me of Steve Jobs’s public
persona.
Fadell worked with Jobs for years at Apple, leading the
creation of the iPod, and along with Rogers he played a major role in
birthing the iPhone. Both Nest founders repeatedly told me that their
new company was run much like their old iPhone team back in Cupertino
and featured many of the same engineers. Fadell told me that Nest came
about because working on the iPhone permanently changed his expectations
of personal technology. Everything suddenly looked stupid and too
complicated, particularly when it came to high-end technology for the
home. “These things are brain dead,” he said. “Nest is about making it
so simple that it’s empowering for everyone, just like the iPhone did or
the iPod did.”
When Scott Hassan went to Las Vegas for the International Consumer
Electronics Show last week, he was still able to get the kids up in the
morning and help them make breakfast at his California home. Hassan used
a remote-controlled screen on wheels to spend time with his family, and
today his company, Suitable Technologies,
started taking orders for Beam+, a version of the same telepresence
technology aimed at home users. This summer, it will also be available
via Amazon and other retailers.
Hassan thinks the Beam+,
essentially a 10-inch screen and camera mounted on wheels, will be
popular with other businesspeople who want to spend more time with their
kids, or those with aging parents they’d like to check up on more
often.
At a pilot plant in Menlo Park, California, a technician pours white
pellets into a steel tube and then taps it with a wrench to make sure
they settle together. He closes the tube, and oxygen and methane—the
main ingredient of natural gas—flow in. Seconds later, water and
ethylene, the world’s largest commodity chemical, flow out. Another
simple step converts the ethylene into gasoline.
The white pellets are a catalyst developed by the Silicon Valley
startup Siluria, which has raised $63.5 million in venture capital. If
the catalysts work as well in a large, commercial scale plant as they do
in tests, Siluria says, the company could produce gasoline from natural
gas at about half the cost of making it from crude oil—at least at
today’s cheap natural-gas prices.
Google made a giant bet on the so-called Internet of things Monday by
announcing that it plans to pay $3.2 billion in cash for smart
thermostat and smoke alarm maker Nest Labs–a move that may be as much a
talent grab as an effort to position itself as a leader in the market
for Internet-connected gadgets.
Given the price tag, Google clearly sees enormous value in the company: this is the company’s second-largest acquisition
thus far, after the $12.5 billion it paid for phone maker Motorola
Mobility in 2011. Nest launched in 2011 and quickly rose to prominence
as a leader in the growing market for Internet-connected consumer
devices with its first product, the Nest Learning Thermostat, which lets
users control their home’s temperature via smartphone and gradually
figures out appropriate temperature settings for different times.
Ink-jet printing technology could be a way to build new tissue meant
to restore vision to people suffering from common forms of blindness due
to retinal degeneration.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge used a standard ink-jet
printer to form layers of two types of cells taken from the retinas of
rats, and showed that
the process did not compromise the cells’ health or ability to survive
and grow in culture. Ink-jet printing has been used to deposit cells
before, but this is the first time cells from an adult animal’s central
nervous system have been printed.
