Nanomedicine is maturing
The ability to re-engineer matter -- living and non-living -- at the atomic level is a key industrial story of the coming decade. The world of genes, proteins (3-100 nm), bacteria, viruses, telomeres, mitochondria (1-100 microns) and animal cells (mm) will come...
DNA and the Future of Computing
The machine itself doesn’t look very impressive. In fact, it looks more like a home experiment…something you might use to distil your own gin or vodka. There are a few working parts: some glass bottles…some chemicals…a few sequencing devices. In total it cost...
How Electric Fields in Your Cells Could Help Prevent Brain Tumours
Robert Dill-Bundi was a great Swiss cycling champion. In Moscow, in 1980 he won the gold medal for the 4000m individual pursuit chasing his nearest rival down and finishing six seconds clear as he rushed across the line. When he won he stepped off the bike kneeled and...
A Chronic Shortage of Bandwidth
Remember the dial-up internet and the finger tapping timpani it yielded? Well, maybe a new era of the ‘world wide wait’ looms. Global internet traffic is growing by at least 25% a year — far outstripping the current growth in bandwidth with mobile traffic growing at...
That Voice in Your Head
An experiment. Hold out your right arm and then slowly flex your wrist. Which comes first – the thought to flex your wrist, or the action itself? In the 1980s, an experiment by the neurologist Benjamin Libet raised some disturbing questions about the extent to which...
Is Facebook a Sin Stock?
Those who want to strictly regulate Facebook or indeed Google or Amazon are baying at the moon. Take the example of Facebook. Yesterday we had the spectacle of Zuckerberg donning sackcloth and ashes before Congress. But this Facebook scandal will be a nine day...
Shenzhen: the next Silicon Valley
In 1986, Toshiba manufactured the first laptop computer in a bid to satisfy Japanese consumers’ needs for space and convenience. It was largely the work of an engineer, Tetsuya Mizoguchi, working on his own steam at the company’s Ome factory, 25 miles outside Tokyo....
How to solve the Meltdown/Spectre problem
Faster, Faster Tech is Running Wild Three Ways to Build a New Architecture Last summer, a group of Google researchers sent Intel a message warning them of an industry-shaking flaw in their chips. This flaw, which allowed access to 'partitioned' kernel memory, allowed...
What to Watch for in 2018 (East Asian Robots, a Memory Shortage and Lithium Battery Crash)
The biggest stories of 2018 Five companies that will surface on your radar this year We need to brace ourselves for even more extreme, non-linear events in 2018 than we saw in 2017, which left markets melting up, with further shrinking in price discovery, and a...