Technology

Swedish power company Vattenfall is testing a technology that stores energy in salt, with a goal of proving whether the process would be useful for storage of renewable energy such as from wind and solar farms. The pilot project, commissioned April 11 at the Reuter thermal power plant in Berlin (Figure 1), is being conducted [...]

HONG KONG — Princeton University and the US’s largest public pension plan are among a number of stateside organizations funding technology behind the Chinese government’s unprecedented surveillance of some 11 million people of Muslim ethnic minorities. Since 2017, Chinese authorities have detained more than a million Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in political reeducation [...]

Paris — Technology is often touted as a solution to the world’s environmental challenges, but it is part of the problem: industry executives are facing rising pressure to clean up their energy and resource-intensive business. How much energy, for example, does it take to send a 1MB e-mail? About 25W/hr, representing 20g of carbon dioxide emissions, [...]

Arare thing happened in an industrial park near Washington, dc,last November. Construction began on a $3bn extension to a semiconductor foundry owned by Micron Technologies, a maker of advanced memory chips, based in Idaho. “A few years ago, opening that sort of extension would have people saying, well, that is going to be moving to China soon, [...]

Technological disruptions are happening more frequently, and to every industry. When you are focusing on managing the relationships you have with your clients while also staying up to date on trends in the market, it may seem like there isn’t enough time to keep up with what’s new in technology as well. However, it’s important [...]

The practice of determining the legality of a publication based on its ownership and on the nature of its contents has existed for almost as long as recordable communication has existed. We are, of course, no longer confined to the basic forms of communication such as the written word, and content laws, once unabashedly censorship [...]

A couple lies in bed, facing away from each other, staring at empty hands cradling invisible phones. It’s a striking image from the artist Eric Pickersgill’s project “Removed,” a series of photographs altered to remove the subjects’ devices. I discovered Pickersgill’s work while scrolling on my own phone, as disconnected from the world around me [...]

Google could have avoided this huge embarrassment if they had only googled to find out what lay ahead. (Illustration by C Sasikumar) Consider this: An external advisory council, the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC) — essentially an ethics council to guide new technologies — set up by Google in the last week of March, being disbanded [...]

It’s traditionally thought that smaller advisory firms are able to embrace new technology quicker than larger firms. With fewer advisers to train or accounts to migrate, the small boat can turn quicker than the large ship. But large firms appear to have finally turned the corner with technology, and it may be boosting their bottom [...]

Television. It came on the scene for most U.S. households in the 1950’s and it completely disrupted the entertainment industry. Big boxes with small screens brought family entertainment to a new level. Kids could watch cowboy shows and Mickey Mouse Club. Adults could watch soap operas and the nightly news. People could stay at home [...]

Data breaches are not unique to the University of Washington Medicine (UW). In 2018, US companies experienced 12,449 data breaches, a 424% increase over 2017. In UW Medicine’s case, the breach was due to an internal human error that occurred when data was moved from one server to another. “We have seen a large number of [...]

Anchorage, Alaska is home to a health care organization that qualifies as something of a medical miracle. The Southcentral Foundation (SCF) is tiny compared to giant hospitals in the Lower 48. But the scale of its challenges is truly vast. It serves a geographical area larger than the state of Texas, including both Alaska’s biggest city and [...]