HARD TECHNOLOGY GROUP HTG NEWS TIPS

Brain implants are limited right now -- they typically measure just one thing at a time, and their stiff wiring can wreck tissue if the device stays in place for long enough. Neither of those problems will matter if MIT's flexible fiber implant becomes a practical reality, though. The school's researchers have developed very thin (almost nanoscale), flexible polymer fibers that have customizable channels for carrying chemicals, electricity and light. These strands could not only treat a patient with drugs and light stimulation, but measure the response with electrodes; you'd know whether or not your medicine is working. The bendy, unintrusive design should also be safe for your body, making it possible to tackle long-term illnesses. The current fiber production method is slow, and it'll likely be a long while before you find it in a hospital. However, the breakthrough raises the possibility that doctors will eventually have a comprehensive way of fighting Parkinson...

Ford wants you to know that it's more than just trucks and cars. It wants to be seen as a technology innovator too. Of course, the Detroit automaker has long had a friendly relationship with technology, what with its Sync infotainment platform, its support for third-party apps and, obviously, its investment in autonomous vehicles. But with its new Research and Innovation Center located in Palo Alto, Ford is hoping to accelerate its relationship with technology even further. This isn't Ford's first dance with the Valley -- it actually started its courtship several years ago when it opened its inaugural Silicon Valley office in 2012. The new center, however, is a much bigger effort, with someone new at the helm. That person is Dragos Maciuca, a former Apple engineer with significant experience in consumer electronics, semiconductors, aerospace and automotive tech. Ford also hopes to build a team of 125 professionals under Maciuca, which would make the company one of the ...

You might not be happy that Google isn't fixing a web security flaw in your older Android phone, but the search giant now says that it has some good reasons for holding off. As the company's Adrian Ludwig explains, it's no longer viable to "safely" patch vulnerable, pre-Android 4.4 versions of WebView (a framework that lets apps show websites without a separate browser) to prevent remote attacks. The sheer amount of necessary code changes would create legions of problems, he claims, especially since developers are introducing "thousands" of tweaks to the open source software every month. Ludwig suggests a few things you can do to avoid or mitigate problems, though. For a start, he recommends surfing with browsers that don't use WebView but still get updates, like Chrome (which works on devices using Android 4.0) and Firefox (which runs on ancient Android 2.3 hardware). Hackers can't abuse the vulnerable software if you're not using it, a...

​I’m standing in a room filled with chemistry sets, infrared sensors, lab notebooks, and hundreds upon hundreds of zip locked bags of coffee beans, each looking exactly the same but each tasting ever so slightly different. A man named Gustavo shakes out 11 grams of coffee in a bag labeled with a six-digit number, and pops it into an industrial-looking machine. He pours out exactly 150 milliliters of water, puts it in the machine, and heats it to exactly 194 degrees. A couple minutes later, I’ll try the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had in my life. “You’re part of the experiment now,” he says. And now, after having thrown back six or seven of these tiny cups of coffee, I realize why my cab driver seemed so proud to drop me off at the aging-but-impressive all-brick main building of Cenicafe. “Welcome,” he said, “to the NASA of Colombia.” It’s a good analogy. Of Colombia’s two famous stimulants, coffee is certainly the one the country wants to promote, and it does coffee be...

Doctors dream of helping the paralzyed walk through implants that stimulate their spinal cords, but current technology makes that impossible; these stiff, unnatural gadgets usually end up damaging or inflaming nervous tissue over time. Swiss researchers may have just solved this problem once and for all, though. Their bendy e-Dura implant combines flexible electrodes (made of platinum and silicon microbeads), cracked gold electronic tracks and fluidic microchannels to deliver both electrical impulses and chemicals while mimicking the spine's movements and avoiding friction. Paralyzed rats in lab tests could both walk again after a few weeks and keep wearing their implants after two months. It'll be a while before e-Dura implants go into human field trials and reach hospitals. With that said, scientists believe the technology's potential extends well beyond overcoming spinal cord injuries. It could treat epilepsy and Parkinson's disease, not to mention reduce chroni...

One of the biggest surprises at this year's Consumer Electronics Show was just how deep NVIDIA is getting into the automotive field. Given how reliant on armies of sensors the autonomous cars of the near future will be, however, it makes sense that the company best-known for its desktop computing power is at the forefront of transportation tech. We briefly spoke with the company's senior manager of automotive technology, David Anderson, about where he sees driver-less cars going, how long it'll take to get there and how the insurance industry might react once we do. How far off are we from seeing this autonomous tech in a production model vehicle? Last year we talked about the integration of K1 technology into Audi's Z-Fast programs. That represents the start to semi-autonomous and will lead to fully autonomous driving. The uptick of the technology is happening as we speak and literally everything we're doing, we're working with all the major automotive O...

Industry inside sources claim that Microsoft will likely scrape the WP8.1 GDR2 update and jump straight to Windows Mobile 10, or Windows 10 Mobile preview as it is known. Participants in the beta testing program should be given access to the preview pretty soon and the news should be officially announced at the upcoming Windows 10 consumer experience event on January 21. GDR2 itself was set to roll out in October and bring about a number of graphical and functional changes. Among them were an option to quickly toggle mobile data on and off and Cortana, both of which seems to have already arrived to most Windows users with GDR1. That being said there is still the matter of UI changes and most importantly broader hardware support. We were expecting support for the Snapdragon 805 SoC and QHD display resolutions, which were also on the list of the GDR2 update. These will certainly be a part of the upcoming Windows 10 Mobile version. If everything goes according to plan and the new...

Greetings and I hope you'll find everything you always wanted. At least for me, I started this year so really, really good.