Tech Review Top Stories

To stay profitable, Tesla needs to keep cutting costs and selling more cars.

As expected, Tesla Motors, the maker of the luxury Model S electric sedan, announced today that it was profitable for the first time in its ten-year history. During the first quarter of 2013 it had profits of $11 million. Total revenues were $562 million.

A mixed-antibody treatment does not protect patients from cognitive decline.

More bad news from drugmakers trying to develop treatments for Alzheimer’s disease: Yesterday, Baxter announced that its mixed-antibody therapy failed to reduce cognitive decline in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease. As I reported back in July 2012, the company saw positive results in a small four-patient trial of the treatment. None of these patients showed any cognitive decline, leading some experts to hope that the disease can be stopped or slowed (see “Study Suggests Alzheimer’s Disease Can be Stabilized”). But when Baxter tested its potential treatment—a complex mixture of antibodies harvested from healthy donated blood—in nearly 100-times as many Alzheimer’s patients, the company did not find a rate of decline slower than patients given a placebo.

A biopharmaceutical company will know this year whether an antibody produced using a unique technique can prevent chronic migraines.

For many who suffer from chronic migraines, nothing can reliably prevent or dull the debilitating headaches that may strike as often as every other day.

You can’t wear Google Glass–yet–but you can get a glimpse of what it will look like.

If, like most of us peons, you haven’t gotten a chance to try out Google Glass, there’s now a way to get a sense of what it’s like to take it–and its virtual display–for a spin.

Tests suggest that a CIA-backed quantum computing technology can be very powerful for some kinds of problems.

When I visited D-Wave last year I saw some spectacular hardware and heard of significant backing for the company (see “The CIA and Jeff Bezos Bet On Quantum Computing”). But no one was able to show me results from pitting one of D-Wave’s unusual computers directly against a conventional one to prove how much faster they could be.

Ever wondered what fuel fires potatoes out of a cannon the fastest? The US Air Force now has the answer

The creator of the Wolfram Alpha search engine explains why he thinks your life should be measured, analyzed, and improved.

Don’t be surprised if Stephen Wolfram, the renowned complexity theorist, software company CEO, and night owl, wants to schedule a work call with you at 9 p.m. In fact, after a decade of logging every phone call he makes, Wolfram knows the exact probability he’ll be on the phone with someone at that time: 39 percent.

Dummy water-plant control systems rapidly attracted attention from hackers who tinkered with their settings—suggesting it happens to real industrial systems, too.

Just 18 hours after security researcher Kyle Wilhoit connected two dummy industrial control systems and one real one to the Internet, someone began attacking one of them, and things soon got worse. Over the course of the experiment, conducted during December 2012, a series of sophisticated attacks were mounted on the “honeypots,” which Wilhoit set up to find out how often malicious hackers target industrial infrastructure.

A Department of Defense report says that China’s military is infiltrating, and could attack, U.S. government computer networks.

For years now security companies have described that attacks originating in China routinely infiltrate and steal data from U.S. corporate networks, and that similar activity targets U.S. government systems, too. But even as politicians and government officials have begun to speak more freely about the issue (see “U.S. Power Grids, Water Plants a Hacking Target”), they have stopped short of making specific accusations about who is responsible. In April, President Obama’s national security adviser Tom Donilon talked vaguely of attacks “emanating from China.”

Computer simulations show that high blood pressure can be entirely explained by arterial stiffening as we age, say researchers

As digital data expands, anonymity may become a mathematical impossibility.

In 1995, the European Union introduced privacy legislation that defined “personal data” as any information that could identify a person, directly or indirectly. The legislators were apparently thinking of things like documents with an identification number, and they wanted them protected just as if they carried your name.

Advances like GE’s new hybrid wind turbines could make renewable energy more practical.

GE recently sold the first of a new line of “hybrid” wind turbines that comes with a battery attached. The turbine’s battery can store the equivalent of less than one minute of the turbine operating at full power. But, by pairing the battery with advanced wind-forecasting algorithms, wind farm operators could guarantee a certain amount of power output for up to an hour.

Tesla’s innovations could make EVs more competitive.

The U.S. Department of Energy has been criticized for loaning money to Tesla Motors because the company makes cars that only rich people can afford. That’s probably part of the reason Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, made such a big deal last week in saying that, with a new payment plan, and figuring in savings from gas prices, about 10 percent of the U.S. population can afford a new Model S, up from about 1 percent without the plan.

How to monitor an incredibly complicated, increasingly automated system that thrives on secrecy.

Today marks the three-year anniversary of the 2010 Flash Crash, when the U.S. stock market lost 1,000 points in a matter of minutes before recovering most of these loses a few minutes later.

How to monitor an incredibly complicated, increasingly automated system that thrives on secrecy.

Today marks the three-year anniversary of the 2010 Flash Crash, when the U.S. stock market lost 1,000 points in a matter of minutes before recovering most of these loses a few minutes later.

GridCom Technologies says quantum cryptography can work to make the electricity grid control systems secure.

The notion of harnessing the physics of quantum mechanics for a massive leap in computing power is firmly in the realm of science. But many people believe that applying these techniques to secure commercial communications is far more feasible.

A quantum internet capable of sending perfectly secure messages has been running at Los Alamos National Labs for the last two and a half years, say researchers

Putting broadcast signals within LTE mobile network technology could open up bandwidth and disrupt business models.

If you want to watch video on your phone or tablet, you’ll find that many networks can’t always serve up the data fast enough. So your choices are either to find a Wi-Fi hotspot, take your chances on congestion and high data charges on a cellular network, or plug in a special dongle that picks up TV broadcasts (see “Broadcast TV Aims for Your Smartphone”).

The creators of Ushahidi, a crisis mapping platform, have developed hardware that keeps wireless communication going in the midst of chaos.

The people behind Ushahidi, a software platform for communicating information during a crisis, have now developed what they are dubbing a “backup generator for the Internet”—a device that can connect with any network in the world, provide eight hours of wireless connectivity battery life, and can be programmed for new applications, such as remote sensing.

The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv preprint server

The Extragalactic Background Light (EBL): A Probe of Fundamental Physics and a Record of Structure Formation in the Universe