Adrienne Jane Burke

Dismissing the idea that fake stories in Facebook's News Feed influenced the outcome of the U.S. election, Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at Techonomy16, grabbed global headlines and no breaks from tech reporters. It was by no means the only thing he discussed, but it got all the coverage.

Mining and shipping are industries thus far almost wholly unreconstructed by mobile tech. But soon, remote-control earthmovers, sensor-connected containers, and network-linked augmented reality goggles will change both unalterably. The Internet of Things (IoT) is going underground and out to sea.

A tech trifecta is transforming manufacturing: Cloud connectivity, cheaper, computing, and easily-shared digital information. When speed-to-market is valued over all else, businesses that best utilize these tools for R&D, production, and delivery will win. The new synergies are transforming one-man manufacturing startups as much as giants like Ford.

A Civic Innovation team survey of 2,000 U.S. adults including 100-plus in-depth interviews with people across the country revealed that half of the population are “interested bystanders,” who follow the news and the issues, but don’t participate in civic life. Although “clicktivism” is on the rise, most individuals aren't able to keep up or remember everything they click/read online. The panelist give a great insight, ultimately acknowledging that civic life, although improving, has failed to reach everyone.

As access to data and technology becomes democratized, a civic tech movement is burgeoning to help government make cities more responsive and livable. Detroit CIO Beth Niblock joined Techonomy CEO David Kirkpatrick for a discussion on "Hacking Our Way to the Cities We Need,” along with Danish architect and author Thomas Ermacora, investor and entrepreneur Jon Gosier, and Microsoft Technology and Civic Engagement leader Dan’l Lewin. Transparency and apps are making all the difference in Detroit, as well as in Barcelona, Chicago, Kampala, London, Nairobi, and Philadelphia. But too many cities still haven't gotten the memo.

Tech policy development may help strange bedfellows get better acquainted. At Techonomy Policy 2015 in Washington last week, tech billionaire Sean Parker joined Nebraska Senator Deb Fischer, a Republican cattle rancher, and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, a vegan Democrat, for a conversation with Techonomy CEO David Kirkpatrick about “Technology, Innovation, and American Progress.” Parker, whose teen hacking escapades were sufficiently sophisticated that they were investigated by the FBI, joked that he was appearing as “Senator from the Internet.” The to-some-infamous cofounder of Napster, past president of Facebook, and investor in Spotify is fast becoming known as a bipartisan political contributor and policy wonk. His new venture, Brigade, aims to put the voter back at “the center of our democracy.” He also recently launched a Washington think tank devoted to bipartisan strategies for economic growth, called the Economic Innovation Group (EIG).

Who owns data? How should data privacy be defined and protected? And what is the potential for regulation to support or impede the growth of digital data businesses? Those were among the tough questions panelists at the Techonomy Policy 2015 event in Washington last week grappled with during a session headlined “Privacy Collides with Data in a Transparent World.” Federal Trade Commissioner Julie Brill offered a contrasting perspective to those of AT&Ts federal regulatory and chief privacy officer Robert Quinn and Microsoft’s deputy general counsel Horacio Gutierrez. And Brad Burnham, managing partner at Union Square Ventures, shared an investor’s point of view on data, which he said many view as “the asset that fuels the digital economy,” but fail to see what a huge liability it can be.

From a founding father of the Internet who is now at the fore of interplanetary connectivity comes an evolved view: Competition need not be a zero sum game; collaboration can produce positive sum outcomes. Internet pioneer Vint Cerf made what he called a “bigger pie argument” at Techonomy Policy 2015 in Washington yesterday. To open the event, Cerf joined Techonomy CEO David Kirkpatrick for a discussion with AOL co-founder Steve Case and White House senior advisor for Internet, Innovation, and Privacy Policy R. David Edelman for a discussion about “Keeping America Innovative in the Age of Data Exhaust.” Cerf implored fellow panelists to drop the “competitive rhetoric” because “a rising tide raises all boats.”

Whether by gathering data from your gut, your womb, or your head, new digital devices are designed to track wellness in ways that could transform how individuals manage their own health. Four leaders of the emerging “Internet of Bio Things” market joined Buzzfeed News reporter Stephanie Lee on stage at Techonomy Bio 2015 for a discussion about how they aim to improve consumer access to health data, and what will render that data more than just a curiosity, and truly useful.

For an onstage conversation at Techonomy Bio 2015 about how science is advancing human progress around the world and where the greatest challenges still remain, Susan Desmond-Hellmann and Marc Benioff might seem an unlikely pair. She’s an oncologist accomplished in biotech, academia, and, now, the nonprofit sector as CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Benioff is chairman of the customer relationship management software company Salesforce.com. But, as the two agreed here on Wednesday, more crossover between his sector—information technology—and hers—healthcare—are exactly what’s needed for great leaps forward in life sciences.

Waving his smartphone at the audience, Stanford bioengineer Drew Endy said, “I’m trying to grow one of these.” Let the day of mindblowing conversations about the future of biology begin. Endy joined Google Director of Engineering David Glazer, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, and Merck Director of Scientific Modeling Platforms Chris Waller for the TE Bio 15 opening panel, “You Say You Want a Revolution.” Techonomy CEO David Kirkpatrick moderated the discussion about how innovations at the intersection of IT and biology will transform industries and products beyond life sciences.

American scientists pioneered the field of synthetic biology, and the U.S. government funded the research that catalyzed commercialization of its earliest products. But unless key players in the U.S. get their act together soon, other nations will dominate the booming multibillion-dollar industry. “What is at stake here is the future competitive advantage of countries, especially the U.S.,” says Nancy J. Kelley.

“As a reporter who’s covered both biotech and what the rest of the world calls just plain ‘tech,’ I can tell you those stories about biology can be tougher to tell,” said WIRED senior writer Marcus Wohlsen during a session, entitled "The Next Revolution Will Be Biologized," that he moderated at Techonomy 2014 in Half Moon Bay last week. Wholsen shared the stage with a panel of the sector’s thought leaders: attorney and consultant Nancy Kelley; chemical biologist Floyd Romesberg of The Scripps Research Institute; synthetic biology pioneer Drew Endy of Stanford University; and Brian Frezza, founder of “biotech lab for hire” Emerald Therapeutics.

While most of the world is yet to be enlightened as to how 3D printing will change manufacturing, Autodesk CEO Carl Bass is already talking about its limitations, and why biological manufacturing is the industry’s more exciting future. Bass joined fellow manufacturing industry thought leaders last week at Techonomy 2014 in Half Moon Bay, Calif., for a conversation about how hardware and software are changing manufacturing.

“Automation should not be an enemy of employment. It never was before. The only difference between now and the past is that now we’re pretending that people who do the real work are actually not,” said Jaron Lanier, explaining why he is concerned that the current high-tech economy is not on a sustainable path. In a talk at Techonomy 2014 in Half Moon Bay last week, the author, virtual reality guru, and tech consultant advocated for building a democratic and sustainable technologized economy.

Techonomy CEO David Kirkpatrick credits LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner with planting the seed for the annual Techonomy conference, which wrapped up on Tuesday, Nov. 11, in Half Moon Bay, Calif. He also credits Weiner with building what has become a “central facility for the modern economy.” Weiner spoke to Kirkpatrick onstage Monday about his vision for the professional online network, which has grown to more than 320 million members and become “the future of connection, compassion, and the corporation.”

Peter Thiel sees Western civilization as a society that “hates science and technology in all forms.” Reid Hoffman sees an uninformed public and political leadership that is biologically predisposed to fear death, not embrace change. And while Thiel accuses Washington leaders of being stuck in the Dark Ages, Hoffman concedes that “it’s hard to see a path to Congress having an intelligent technology strategy.” In the opening session of Techonomy 2014 on Sunday in Half Moon Bay, Calif., Techonomy CEO David Kirkpatrick provoked a frank discussion between the tech-industry-pioneers-turned-venture-capitalists, PayPal founder Thiel and his former Stanford classmate and longtime collaborator, LinkedIn founder Hoffman.

The quantified-self movement is rapidly moving beyond the Fitbit. Forget about wristbands to measure your vitals. DIYers known as Grinders are embedding electronics in their own bodies; transcranial direct-current stimulation experimentalists are putting wet sponges on their heads to improve cognitive function; and others, hoping to enhance their relationships with pets, are investing millions into developing EEG headsets that let them read dog thoughts. Eri Gentry, Carlos Olguin, and Drew Purves, all innovators at the fore of the field, joined WIRED writer Marcus Wohlsen at Techonomy 2014 on Monday for a conversation exploring what we mean when we talk about "innovating ourselves."

iGEM challenges multidisciplinary student teams to solve real-world problems with entirely new biological systems that they design and build from interchangeable sequences of DNA. The assembly last Monday marked the final segment of the 2014 International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition, and the culmination of a weekend of intense bonding, as well as dancing and drinking, among the world’s most brilliant young bioengineers.

Cities enabled by sensors, mobile technologies, cameras, and big data will be better places to live, according to Harvard Law School Professor Susan Crawford’s new book, “The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance,” coauthored with Harvard Kennedy School’s Stephen Goldsmith. In contrast to the notion that tech will further enable the surveillance state or nefarious uses of data in cities, such as redlining in Detroit and Philadelphia, Crawford’s is an optimistic outlook. At Techonomy Detroit this week, Crawford, who also co-directs Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, discussed with the Brookings Institution's Jennifer Bradley various ways tech is enhancing urban living standards.

Appearing on the Techonomy Detroit stage for the third year, Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey shared with Detroit CIO Beth Niblock his vision for how technology, and in particular the evolution of Square, is helping the commerce ecosystem and could help cities like Detroit. Dorsey and Niblock’s conversation followed a talk by author Andrew Keen in which the techno-polemicist cautioned the audience that tech companies operate strictly in the interest of their own profits, not to help society. Dorsey acknowledged Square’s profit motive, but pointed out that Square’s revenues depend on the success of its customers, so the company is highly invested in helping merchants succeed.

Philip Zelikow says we’re on the cusp of a change “comparable to 1880 or 1890 when the economy was about to fundamentally transform. This should be a really bright era.” Yet Gallup polls show that Americans are more pessimistic about the future than ever. And even a Techonomy panel discussion offered a less-than-optimistic view of the future for the middle class.

Tesla's $5 billion Gigafactory will be worth nearly $100 billion to Nevada over 20 years, according to the state's Governor Brian Sandoval and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, who announced plans to build the lithium-ion battery plant in the northern part of the state in the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center. In return, Nevada is expected to allow Tesla billions of dollars in tax breaks.

The media and pundits have exaggerated the threat robots present to human workers' livelihood, claims labor market scholar David Autor. Reporting on ideas Autor presented at a recent bankers' conference, New York Times writer Neil Irwin sums up the argument: "Even as computers have gotten better at rote tasks, they have progressed far less in applying common sense."

In "The Zero Marginal Cost Society," economic theorist and writer Jeremy Rifkin coins the term Collaborative Commons to describe the "digitalized space where providers and users share goods and services" in the emerging "shareable economy." It's no surprise then that Rifkin casts as shortsighted the German court system's decision this week to ban in that country the low-cost UberPop service from Uber, the global carsharing service. In response to a lawsuit filed by Taxi Deutschland in Frankfurt, the court ruled that Uber lacked legal permits to pick up passengers.

The pros and cons of the so-called "sharing economy" are getting plenty of press these days. Consider the diverse takes this week from Technology Review, the New York Times, and the Kansas City Star. In a Times report about workers who are finding "both freedom and uncertainty" in the contract employment trend, Natasha Singer explains how Navy veteran Jennifer Guidry attempts to help cover her family's food and rent costs with popup gigs.

Google's code of conduct famously instructs its staff, board members, and contractors, "Don't be evil." Those who fail to follow the code are subject to disciplinary action and termination. Can the company extend the code to Gmail users? It already has. CBS News reports this week that Google informed the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that a Gmail account holder in Texas "was allegedly sending explicit images of a young girl to a friend."

Steven Norris, an editor at Gearburn—a Cape Town, South Africa website chronicling "the latest gadget news from around the world"—admits to being endlessly amused by "staggeringly cool technology videos" that reveal how designers transform ugly tech devices into "eye-pleasing shapes." As a favor to those who share his fascination, yesterday Norris shared 13 videos "of incredible inventions that show off their makers' insane intelligence." His picks? We agree they're all staggeringly cool, but suggest that their inventors are likely quite sane geniuses.

With your FitBit on your waistband and your smartwatch on your wrist, you might be wondering where else you can attach your quantified-self tools. Your ear is being considered as a worthy candidate. Steven LeBoeuf, president of Valencell, a wearable biometrics company, tells Technology Review that the ear is the next frontier for tracking heart rate, temperature, respiration rate, energy expenditure, oxygen consumption, calories burned, and other biological and physiological signals.

Tesla Motors and Panasonic confirmed this morning that they will cooperate on the construction of a large-scale lithium-ion battery manufacturing plant in the U.S. Five states in the running to host the $5 billion Gigafactory expect an announcement of its location after the market closes today. Arizona, California, New Mexico, Nevada, and Texas are the hopefuls to house the facility, which is expected to comprise up to 10 million square feet over 1,000 acres.

Imagine a future in which people are as loyal to the brand that provides their health insurance as they are to the one that makes their favorite tech gadget, search engine, or social media platform. If $30 million from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and a team of ex-Facebook, Google, Spotify, and Tumblr engineers succeed, the old guard of health insurance companies will have to step up the innovation and tech quotient to compete. New York Magazine this week describes Oscar, the year-old Soho-based "tech-driven” health insurance company founded by three Harvard Business School buddies, as a serious threat to the status quo, with a "faster and more efficient infrastructure" than any of the big insurers offer.

You might not think that a guy who says he spends his day getting lost "in a microworld of flowers or corals that you made yourself" is making a major contribution to science. But Wim L. Noorduin, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard, is combining chemicals in a beaker to grow and shape crystalline structures that demonstrate how complex shapes evolve in nature. His micron-sized sculptures appear as intricate cake decorations, vast fields of blooming flowers, and coral reefs when viewed under an electron microscope. The artistic beauty of Noorduin's work won him a place on the cover of Science last year. And this week The Creators Project, a partnership between Intel and VICE that celebrates the innovative use of technology "to push the boundaries of creative expression," released a short video about the project.

The synthetic biology product floodgates are opening, and U.S. environmental, health, and safety regulators are at risk of drowning. That's the general sentiment expressed in a report released this week by policy researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute, the University of Virginia, and EMBO in Heidelberg. They detail how the increased use of more sophisticated synthetic biology technologies to engineer plants and microbes will present major challenges to government agencies including EPA, FDA, and USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service that have oversight of syn-bio-derived products.

“I’m rich and I’m obnoxious and I’m not eating this stuff,” Esther Dyson says of the sugar-filled yogurt being served for breakfast during the recent DLD conference in New York City. Dyson, a venture capitalist, digital age guru, and trained cosmonaut who, in golf shirt and jeans, comes across as neither rich nor obnoxious, makes the statement in an interview with Techonomy to help illustrate the challenges most Americans face in maintaining a healthy diet. The Way to Wellville, an initiative of the Health Initiative Coordinating Council (HICCup) founded by Dyson, aims to change that status quo.

Airbnb has agreed to hand over information about its New York hosts in order to comply with a subpoena it received last week from the New York Attorney General. The NYAG's office had claimed that "more than 60 percent of the service's listings in New York City on Jan. 31 appeared to violate a 2010 law targeting illicit hotels," Bloomberg reports. Crain's New York today published a letter of agreement that was signed yesterday between Airbnb General Counsel Belinda Johnson and Clark Russell, Deputy Bureau Chief of the Internet Bureau in the New York Attorney General's Office.

The day is coming when “electronic health record” doesn't mean just a digital transcript of doctors’ notes about exams and tests, but a three-dimensional digital model of your entire anatomy. The first version of such a human avatar-for-health now exists—the world’s first realistic 3D simulation of a whole human heart. It doesn't just look like a heart. Its software is designed to make it function like one. The outcome of the Living Heart Project—a stealth interdisciplinary collaboration among more than 50 medical researchers, practitioners, device manufacturers, and industry regulators—the model was introduced today by Dassault Systèmes.

Techonomists Arun Sundararajan and Andrew McAfee were among seven who contributed to a debate in The New York Times last week about how to handle the disruptive economic effects of the emerging sharing economy. The Times asked the pundits to consider whether the apps and online services that are powering the sharing economy, such as Airbnb, Uber, and TaskRabbit, are “cutting edge conveniences that should be encouraged, or money-making businesses that need more regulation?”

Bogota might soon be home to thousands more online shoppers. That’s where Lenddo introduced a “social network” Visa card to 100,000 of its customers yesterday afternoon. By 3:00 p.m. yesterday in New York, where the online lender for developing countries is based, more than 1,000 Colombians had applied for the card. Lenddo CEO and co-founder Jeff Stewart calls it the first time ever, anywhere, that approval for a credit card is based on applicants’ reputations on Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter. In emerging markets, even a steady reliable income and good education are generally no guarantee of access to credit for members of the middle class.

When serial entrepreneurs Unity Stoakes and Steven Krein set out to build a digital health company, they quickly discovered that entrepreneurs in the healthcare sector face a unique set of challenges: daunting regulations, privacy issues, long sales cycles, and industry-wide resistance to change. So they shifted their attention to creating a platform that lets healthcare entrepreneurs innovate more easily. With support from former Time Warner CEO Jerry Levin and other high-powered investors including Esther Dyson and Mark Cuban, in partnership with Steve Case’s Startup America, and with applause from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Stoakes and Krein established StartUp Health in 2011. Stoakes describes the company as part community, part knowledge base, and part academy offering a structured curriculum to help CEOs and founders, calling his audience “Healthcare Transformers.”

The economics of innovation and its impact on society was the theme of the annual economists' pow-wow in Toronto last weekend, the Institute for New Economic Thinking conference. And there was no presumption that it is, on the whole, a plus. Authoritative speakers at the three-day conference included former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and James Heckman, former co-CEO of Research In Motion Jim Balsillie, and Bank of England Chief Economist Andy Haldane. But the event's opening keynote featured a panel of experts who explored the duality inherent in innovations that create new inventions, products, sources of demand, and markets while simultaneously imposing job losses and "significant distributional consequences for society."

What do smartphones have to do with medical care? Ask any doctor who has called in pharmacy prescriptions from a golf course, reviewed brain-imaging results in a taxi, or video-chatted with emergency room physicians in another city. Or ask PointClear Solutions, an Atlanta-headquartered custom healthcare software development company that recently acquired NYC-based app developer, Worry Free Labs (profiled here last summer). We did, when we spoke with PointClear CEO David Karabinos about the acquisition and the future of mobile apps for patient care.

U.S. farmers working with a Minnesota company called Farm Intelligence have been harvesting more than corn and soybeans lately. Their fields, comprising about 1 million acres, have yielded close to a petabyte of data that they hope will inform smarter decisions throughout the growing season. Farm Intelligence CTO Steve Kickert tells Gigaom this week that his company "analyzes sensor data, data from other precision agriculture tools, aerial images, government data, and weather data to try and figure out what’s going on in the field." The tools provide early warnings of disease, pests, or other troubling crop conditions that farmers can act quickly on.

When mobster wife Mrs. Mia Wallace overdoses on heroin, hit man Vincent Vega brings her screaming out of a comatose state by jabbing an adrenaline-filled syringe into her heart. Had the talking medical device that the FDA gave fast-track approval to last week existed 20 years ago, that Pulp Fiction scene between Uma Thurman and John Travolta might not have been so dramatic. The new pocket-sized naloxone hydrochloride auto-injector, called Evzio, coaches a user through the procedure of administering the opioid-O.D.-reversing drug into a victim's muscle.

When Andreas Raptopoulos, CEO of Matternet, asked a TED audience last year to "imagine if the next big network we built in the world was a network for the transportation of matter," he wasn't talking about delivering pizzas and your Amazon orders. Raptopoulos is among the growing ranks of social entrepreneurs who want to put advanced technologies to use for causes more noble than enabling more consumption. His Palo Alto startup seeks to employ drones to deliver humanitarian aid to the billion people in the world's most remote areas.

Anthropological genomics researcher Mark Shriver at Penn State has teamed up with scientists in the university's forensics department to leverage big data, DNA, and 3D imaging to translate a drop of blood into a facial recognition tool. Shriver's lab conducts various studies using a method known as "admixture mapping," which helps them identify ancestral genes linked to facial traits, combined with population genomics to understand those genes' evolutionary histories.

Scientists at the New York Genome Center announced Wednesday that they would collaborate with IBM to test "a unique Watson prototype designed specifically for genomic research" that has been under development for the past decade in IBM’s Computational Biology Center at IBM Research. Will oncologists trust IBM Watson's cognitive abilities enough to rely on it as an advisor? It's likely they will if the supercomputer proves it can produce in seconds actionable information about an individual's cancer that would take a dozen doctors weeks or months to discover.

It’s doubtful that any publisher in the world was enlightened by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s recent blog post pronouncing that “the news business is a business like any business” and that “the news industry is going through a fundamental restructuring and transformation, for worse and for better.” But many likely wonder how he can be “more bullish about the future of the news industry over the next 20 years than almost anyone [he knows],” and why he envisions exponential growth in the next decade.

Lamenting a fast-approaching privacy crisis in the U.S., New York Times op-ed columnist Joe Nocera this week reports what experts say should be included in a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, should Congress be so inclined to draft and pass one. Nocera suggests that not just consumers, but also companies in the business of collecting their data—including Google, Facebook, and Acxiom—stand to benefit from regulation; after all, he writes, credit card companies objected to the 1967 Truth in Lending Act that turned out to be to their advantage because it "showed consumers, for the first time, that they had some protection from fraud or shady practices." Nocera's conclusion: "Sometimes, government has to save business from itself."

When Dan Gilbert told the Techonomy Detroit audience last September that the wrecking ball was the next step to reviving the Motor City, we quipped that demolition didn't seem like such a techonomic concept. It turns out technology will even expedite the process of razing some 80,000 dilapidated buildings. NPR reports this week that an army of "blexters," enabled by tablet computers and "blight texting" tools, is creating digital maps and a database of every structure across Detroit's 139 square miles.

Cyber-security expert Jody Westby calls “for the facts to be found out and the truth to be determined” about the NSA surveillance program in order for the nation’s leaders to make “informed decisions about how this country should be operating and the values it should be upholding in the digital age—before it turns into a full police state.” Under the headline, "It Is a Scandal That No One is Investigating the NSA," Westby, who is CEO of Global Cyber Risk, a fellow at the Carnegie Mellon CyLab, and adjunct professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as a frequent Techonomy participant, proclaims in a Forbes essay this week that she is stunned that no one but she has called for a full investigation.

In the cybersecurity world, the term "antivirus" is out of favor. ("McAfee" is even more so, thanks to its namesake's behavior, but that's another story.) Software and firewalls designed to detect and eradicate viruses on your system or business network—such as what Symantec, McAfee (now known as Intel Security), Cisco, and Check Point provide—still leave customers vulnerable to attacks, according to Nicole Perlroth's report in the New York Times.

Do-it-yourselfers with access to advanced tools and technologies are poised to democratize manufacturing, enable a bottom-up industrial revolution, reinvent retail, even remake America—at least that’s been the optimistic take. Evgeny Morozov offers a contrasting negative view on the so-called Maker Movement. In the context of a historical summary of the Arts and Crafts movement in early 1900s America, Morozov, a Belarus-born writer and Harvard history of science PhD candidate, suggests that modern "makers" are unwitting corporate pawns.

Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini surprised many Techonomists at our conference in Tucson last month with his frank talk about alternative therapies and the need for the current health system to be “creatively destroyed.” Who would have thought the top man at one of the nation’s largest health insurance companies would be an advocate for craniosacral therapy and meditative chanting? Bertolini’s onstage interview with David Kirkpatrick focused mostly on his innovative approaches to apps and technology at the company. But in a later on-camera conversation, Bertolini described how his progressive personal health practices jibe with his company’s mission.

Medical researchers, genomics experts, and industry pundits took wildly divergent points of view in a media storm that erupted last week over FDA’s stern letter ordering 23andMe to stop marketing its Personal Genome Service. The agency cited concerns about “the public health consequences of inaccurate results.” Others say public access to genomic information is just the beginning of ongoing disruption in healthcare.

Citing concerns "about the public health consequences of inaccurate results" from its Personal Genome Service, the FDA on Friday told 23andMe CEO Ann Wojcicki in a stern Warning Letter that her company must "immediately discontinue marketing" the service "until such time as it receives FDA marketing authorization for the device." The Twittersphere responded with shock and some outrage.

Every innovation starts with an act of insubordination. So said tech entrepreneur, futurist, and scientist Walter de Brouwer. “It starts with saying ‘no,’ with disrespect. If you respect and listen to everything, there is no innovation.” Does an insubordinate counterculture still drive innovation in today's cyberculture? It’s a question that a panel pondered at the Techonomy 2013 conference in Tucson last week. De Brouwer, CEO of health-tech company Scanadu, joined author Stewart Brand, tech journalist Ina Fried, and Techonomy's David Kirkpatrick for an after-dinner fireside chat about the culture that’s now driving IT’s evolution.

Among the crowd of optimists and cheerleaders for the transformative power of the Internet, Andrew Keen stands out as a contrarian. The Internet is transformative, all right, he says: It’s transforming humans into commoditized products—bits of sellable data. The subtitles of Keen’s two recent books sum up his point of view: “How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture,” and “How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us.” Keen, who founded Audiocafe.com in 1995, joined a panel of fellow entrepreneurs and commentators at Techonomy 2013 in Tucson last week for a discussion on the theme, “Is the Internet for or Against You?”

All the evils that can be done in the cyberworld fall into five categories, according to Craig Mundie: malicious mischief, crime, espionage, warfare, and terrorism. And there are three kinds of actors committing them: amateurs, pros, and governments. It’s a taxonomy that he says the industry only invented in recent months to give clarity to discussions about how to deter and defend against attacks. Techonomy’s David Kirkpatrick interviewed Mundie on stage at Techonomy 2013 in Tucson this week about cyber-insecurity and its impact on business.

Stewart Brand, president of the Long Now Foundation, joined Eri Gentry, cofounder of the BioCurious hackerspace in Sunnyvale and a research manager at think-tank Institute for the Future, for a wide ranging conversation about “Life 2.0” at Techonomy 2013, moderated by Andrew Hessel, a distinguished researcher at Autodesk.As visionaries of their respective generations’ maker-movements, Gentry and Brand see eye-to-eye on the transformative potential of technology in the hands of everyman.

Tony Hsieh has calculated that he spends “1,000 collisionable hours” annually in downtown Las Vegas. Collisions, or serendipitous encounters, according to the Zappos CEO, are a good thing and he’d like to see more people in his company’s new headquarters’ community having them. Hsieh is widely admired for having built an online retailer known for stellar customer service by nurturing a healthy corporate culture. At Techonomy 2013 in Tucson he described how he’s applying what he’s learned in 14 years running the company to transforming the Fremont East neighborhood surrounding Vegas City Hall—now Zappos central—into a “place of inspiration, creativity, discovery, and upward mobility.”

If you’ve lost faith in the government’s effort, Aetna’s Mark Bertolini could be the guy who gives you hope that the health insurance industry will indeed improve. A top exec with the healthcare giant since 2003, and at the helm since 2010, Bertolini exemplifies this week’s Tucson Techonomy conference theme: “Leaders must think more like technologists.”

Online ads are already creepily close to accurate, to be sure. But as media and delivery platforms morph and as marketers access more data about consumers, ad targeting will undoubtedly become more precise and more useful, industry leaders say. If you’re a vendor, that’s likely welcome news. How consumers will respond to marketers knowing just what they want to buy next will depend on whether "more useful" ads seem too invasive. A “Smart Media” panel discussion at Techonomy 2013 in Tucson on Monday asked, “As robust data-driven dialogues develop between brands and their constituencies, what does that mean for products, those who sell them, and those who consume?”

Media coverage of the HealthCare.gov debacle is plentiful, but two of the more poignant pieces to describe the cause and possible aftermath of the failed website rollout appeared in the New York Times in the past four days. Last Thursday, Clay Johnson, lead programmer for Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign, and Harper Reed, the former chief technology officer of Obama for America, gave an insiders' perspective on why only a small fraction of the 20 million Americans who have logged onto Healthcare.gov have succeeded so far in obtaining insurance. Johnson and Reed blame "the way the government buys things."

Global headlines this week are focused on U.S. military drone attacks in Pakistan. But a conference in New York last weekend addressed the myriad additional policy implications of a consumer-drone-dominated world. Wish you could have been a fly on the wall for the first-ever Drones and Aerial Robotics Conference (DARC)? In a podcast broadcast by Drone U on Slate, meeting co-chair Christopher Wong, executive director of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at the New York University School of Law, recaps the top issues on the table there.

As if baby making isn't exciting enough, the new venture of angel investor Max Levchin and his four-man founding team promises that "using Glow to conceive is effective and more fun!" Described on the company website as "an ambitious enterprise where for the first time ever, our emerging ability to crunch and analyze vast quantities of data will be specifically used to help get you pregnant," Glow is a free iPhone fertility app.

Intel's new CEO Brian Krzanich says he's been a "maker" for years, and he's leading the chipmaker into new friendships in the DIY world. Last week Krzanich unveiled the Intel Galileo board, an Arduino-compatible development board, and today Intel announced a corporate sponsorship of TechShop.

On the path to the programmable, interconnected household, two startups are pioneering the way. One is Nest, which founder and former iPod software developer Matt Rogers says aims to close the "gap between the consumer experience in mobile products and the ones in our homes." Nest's open-source competitor is SmartThings, which promises to let you "unlock a new world of possibilities by using your smartphone to communicate with everyday objects in your life."

As CEO of the website creation company 10up, Jake Goldman is an evangelist for WordPress. He began using the open-source development platform in 2006 and started his company specifically to leverage its power. Today, Goldman and several engineers on his team are core contributors to the WordPress project and maintain some of the highest rated plug-ins in the official WordPress repository.

No consumer product is more ubiquitous than the earbud. Unfortunately for the youth of the world, hearing impairment is a closely-associated byproduct. According to a recent report, one in five Americans in their 30s and 40s are now hearing-impaired, and more teenagers than ever are suffering hearing loss. Couple that trend with the painful reality of an aging baby boomer generation, and you’ve got a major emerging market for another technology: hearing aids.

The Manhattan-based invention machine Quirky just became a little more inventive. Former frog design President Doreen Lorenzo joins the four-year-old product development company as president today. Lorenzo, known for transforming frog into a global innovation firm during her 7 years as president there, was a speaker at the Techonomy conferences in 2011 and 2012.

In the land of the "world's biggest online population" Facebook has "almost zero" users, Reuters reports. Of course, that's because, since 2009, the Chinese government has blocked its citizens' access to the U.S. social media leader. Likewise, it has blocked Twitter. But when the ban is finally lifted in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone this weekend, crowds are not expected to rush on to either site.

With the public announcement of a $60 million investment offering this morning, TechShop is among the first to attempt to leverage eased fundraising regulations made possible by the JOBS Act. An 80-year SEC ban on general solicitation and advertising for certain offerings was lifted today as a result of the act. TechShop CEO Mark Hatch, who spoke at Techonomy Detroit 2012, told us Friday that the company is seeking $30 million in a Series B Preferred stock offering to support corporate overhead, and $30 million more in loans to fund construction of at least 11 new local TechShop facilities, support the new location in Pittsburgh, and relocate the one in Menlo Park.

An ice cream maker, a newspaper publisher, food trucks, pop-up shops, and numerous farmers’ market vendors are among the thousands of small businesses in Detroit using mobile apps invented by Jack Dorsey—namely Twitter and Square—to win customers, manage sales, and save time. In fact, Square has already helped to power $174 million in transactions for 5,500 Detroit businesses, the company claims. And at Techonomy Detroit this week Dorsey said entrepreneurs can expect more developments targeted to their businesses from him in the future.

The jury is still out on whether the maker movement could bring about a new American industrial revolution. But anecdotal evidence suggests it is well on its way to reinventing retail. Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson and Shapeways co-founder Marleen Vogelaar joined Detroit Creative Corridor Center director Matt Clayson and Ford’s open innovation guru K. Venkatesh Prasad for a “maker movement” discussion moderated by McKinsey & Company principal Lou Rassey at the Techonomy Detroit conference.

Demolition isn’t exactly a techonomic concept, but clearing Detroit of tens of thousands of burned-out houses and crumbling factories is a crucial next-step in urban renewal here, according to Dan Gilbert. In fact, he’d like to see a digital billboard count down the progress to the last razed building. Efforts to improve education, support entrepreneurship, and boost Detroit's cultural hub won’t mean much to locals until the blight is cleared, Gilbert argued. “If we get these structures down, all of them, we’ll be amazed at how quickly this land gets redeveloped," he said.

Understanding and making the most of disruptive technologies such as genomics, robotics, the internet of things, and synthetic biology will be a challenge best met by a mix of engineers and designers, says designer Jonathan Follett, principal at Involution Studios. In a podcast with O'Reilly's Jenn Webb today, Follett says that the problems these new technologies present to humanity make it crucial that the two disciplines evolve and work together.

With 90-percent occupancy rates, 10,000 new jobs, a brand new Whole Foods, and the repurposing of a long-abandoned GM building as a design center, midtown-downtown Detroit—soon to be linked by a new rail line—is poised to become the country’s next "innovation district," suggest Brookings Institution's Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley in The New Republic this week.

The X Prize Foundation has canceled its Archon genomics challenge, which would have awarded $10 million next month to the first team to generate medical grade sequences of 100 whole genomes for $1,000 or less per genome within 30 days. The bar for the prize, which was first announced in 2006 and set at $10,000 per genome at a lower accuracy level, had been raised due to industry advances in the years since.

Iris Melendez was pregnant with her second child in 2004 when her healthy two-year old son Nathaniel developed a mild cold and a fever. A doctor diagnosed mononucleosis, but 48 hours later the boy had pneumonia, a collapsed lung, and septic shock. Two weeks later he was dead. The cause? Complications of Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, a sudden condition that typically begins with a lung infection and affects 10,000 or more children a year in the U.S. At least 30 percent of the time, it’s fatal. In agonizing grief, but with another baby due in 8 weeks, Melendez and her husband Hank Adamczyk began researching ARDS. They wanted to understand why Nathaniel had contracted it, and were desperate to know how to prevent their next child from falling victim to it.

Here's a new barometer for measuring a technology's disruptive potential: "If there's not a capacity to exploit something for evil, it's probably not that revolutionary." That's one way 27-year-old Skybox Imaging co-founder Julian Mann explains to the Atlantic this week the transformative uses for the 200-pound, mini-fridge-sized satellites that his company intends to start launching into orbit next month.

The Techonomic view of how continued rapid technological innovation will transform society and industries is expressed on these pages every day. MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson is among those who say "our best days are still ahead of us." Northwestern macroeconomist Robert Gordon might be the anti-Techonomist.

Detroit's emerging startup scene is enough to make even an economic development guru pivot his position on the city's future. New Republic's Alec MacGillis, who's been watching the gurus closely, prefers the term "flip-flop" for Richard Florida's readjustment. Florida, a University of Toronto professor, Atlantic senior editor, and author of "Rise of the Creative Class," has been opining for years about Detroit's circumstances. Last week, Florida told CNN that anyone who's been paying attention to Detroit wasn't surprised by the bankruptcy filing. But he said it hit right when the city is finally ready to make a comeback.

Last week 3D-printing industry watcher Terry Wohlers told Techonomy "the sky is the limit" when it comes to the technology's potential to transform manufacturing. Today, tech reporter Christopher Mims says you can look for the heavens to open up in February 2014. That's when patents are set to expire on "selective laser sintering," the key to industrial-grade 3D printing. Laser sintering 3D printers, writes Mims, can take a designer "from idea to finished product in a matter of hours, and create finished products to sell to the public."

As the media forecasts the dire consequences of yesterday's largest-ever municipal bankruptcy filing—and reports on the universal lack of surprise that it comes from the Motor City—Techonomists are booking airline tickets and hotel rooms to attend the second Techonomy Detroit conference. They'll join a conversation on September 17th about the potential for a tech-induced revival there and in other post-industrial economically challenged urban areas.

A year ago, Paul Choi wasn’t having fun anymore as an investment banker covering heavy equipment, metals, and mining companies. What did excite him, however, was mobile technology services. So he searched for a promising business in need of a boost. He found Worry Free Labs, an 8-year-old boutique digital design and development firm in New York that counted American Express, Disney, Expedia, and MailChimp among its clients, but wanted to accelerate its growth. Choi told founders Jason and Kristy Curry he would invest in the company if he could lead it. Since stepping in as CEO in September 2012, Choi has mastered the language of cross-platform app design and refocused the company on customers and the bleeding edge of technology and innovation.

While space travel remains exclusive to professional astronauts and the superwealthy, operating your own robot in space is close to becoming an affordable reality for average Earthlings. NanoSatisfi, a Kickstarter-funded startup, is building open-source nanosatellites with the mission to give anyone access to control one in orbit for $250 per week. Today, exactly 51 years after the first trans-Atlantic satellite television transmission, the company got a little closer to its goal with $300,000 in additional funding from investment firm Grishin Robotics.

With the revelation that the National Security Agency’s PRISM program accesses user data at nine U.S. Internet companies, many presumed that Dropbox would be the tenth. The public cloud storage company denied that, but the mere idea should get one thinking about “personal clouds.” At least that’s what Madhan Kanagavel, founder of Austin-based CodeLathe and its Tonido storage service, is counting on. He says his “personal cloud” software and service product was inspired not by privacy concerns, but by the worry that he could lose content if his public cloud provider went out of business. The surveillance scandal, however, underscores his pitch: “Personal data is no longer safe, and hasn’t been for a long time.”

Long before the National Security Agency's PRISM program was exposed, technology industry executives had warned Congress that the Patriot Act and other laws that "give U.S. government authorities unfettered access to data stored with U.S. companies" are hampering global sales for American cloud services providers.

"A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated," the Supreme Court has ruled today unanimously. The 20-page decision written by Justice Thomas added that synthetic DNA, also known as complementary DNA or cDNA, "is patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring."

Hacked customer accounts are a bane of modern existence. LivingSocial might have been the latest major hack victim, but by now, most people with any kind of online life know what to do when notified by a vendor, bank, or e-commerce site that "unauthorized access to some customer data" has occurred: reset your passwords, check your bank accounts, monitor your credit report, perhaps freeze your credit or cancel your credit cards. But what if hackers access your DNA? There's no resetting that code.

Could consumers be persuaded to snatch up DNA sequences as must-have accessories? With former Gilt Groupe President Andy Page in a new leadership role, 23andMe might be able to swing that. The personal genetics company began late last year offering its Personal Genome service for $99 and set a goal to serve 1 million customers in 2013.

In a marketing ploy to demonstrate how “light, exciting, and fun” its new rice burgers are, Yo! Sushi in London yesterday made a splash with the first use of a drone in food service. Pedestrians in the city's Soho section stopped in their tracks to snap iPhone photos of the flying food tray delivering meals to sidewalk diners.

Bickering about intellectual property rights is interfering with a concerted global response to a dangerous new infectious disease. Middle East respiratory syndrome is a coronavirus that first emerged in that region last April and has a greater than 50 percent mortality rate. At least 54 people in Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, France, Germany, Italy, Tunisia, and the United Kingdom, have now contracted the infectious disease known as MERS-CoV, according to the World Health Organization. Thirty cases have been fatal.

Medicine is among many sectors waiting to be transformed by big data, we often hear. Conducting global studies of disease progression, integrating health records electronically, or analyzing petabyte-size banks of DNA sequence data should hasten the pace of medical discovery and lead to faster cures, the thinking goes. Not so fast, says computational biologist Michael Liebman. Health information is only as useful as the thought that went into gathering it. And Liebman says not enough thought is being applied to what data should be collected in healthcare.

"Even Google cannot answer every query." That's one of 10 reasons the new online platform TalkSession gives for why a teletherapy session with one of its mental health professionals could be good for you. And the fact that the Affordable Care Act will soon give tens of millions more Americans access to mental health insurance coverage is one of the top reasons this business idea to match patients with therapists online stands a chance.

Whoever designed my car doesn't drink coffee during their morning commute. Otherwise they'd never have put the cupholder in front of the gear stick. The manufacturer of my next car might actually be interested in my input. According to a report out this week from consulting giant PwC, co-creation is a growing trend in the automotive industry.

With more than 1.4 million Twitter followers, Cisco Systems' chief technology and strategy officer Padmasree Warrior might seem as connected as you can get. But she says the world is only 1 percent of the way toward total connectivity.

There's a Liz Phair lyric that sums up tech journalist Paul Miller's year without the internet: "...if you do it and you're still unhappy, then you know that the problem is you." The story of the 26-year-old Verge editor’s experiment is a subject of fascination in the press this week. Suffering from burnout and quarter-life existential angst, Miller cut himself off from online access. He downgraded to a dumb phone, delivered assignments via thumbdrive, and contacted sources, friends, and family by phone instead of email or Skype. And he kept that up for a mostly painful 365 days.

A fundraising campaign for a DIY biology project to genetically engineer "sustainable natural lighting" was going gangbusters on Kickstarter. And that was before it was featured on page B1 of the New York Times today. But not all of the attention has been supportive.

When two amateur astronomers noticed via a citizen science platform that NASA's Kepler space telescope software had possibly overlooked the signal of an unknown planet, they tapped "the most powerful pattern-recognition computer in the world—the human brain" to point out the mistake, Michael Lemonick reports on the New Yorker's new science and tech blog, Elements, today.

It might be surprising to hear a tobacco giant described as a tech innovator. But Philip Morris researchers are pioneering new territory with a crowdsourced approach to checking the accuracy of life sciences data. In partnership with computational biologists at IBM’s Watson Research Center, Philip Morris's so-called sbv IMPROVER project creates open challenges to encourage scientists to augment traditional peer reviews of research data. On Monday, Philip Morris launched its Species Translation Challenge, which will award three $20,000 prizes to teams whose results best define how well rodent tests can predict human outcomes.

There seems no limit to the business ideas the Internet can spawn. More than 400 tech startups, most of them dot-coms and 75% New York-based, exhibited at NY Tech Day on April 25. Some presented pre-launch concepts; others, more established, were there seeking investors, recruiting employees, and hatching partnerships. Concepts included the countercultural (InkedMatch.com, online matchmaking for tattoo lovers), the controversial (Parlor, enabling phone conversations between like-minded strangers), and the socially purposeful (Audicus.com, high-quality hearing aids sold at steep discounts to a market that includes earbud-damaged 20-somethings).

Fans of Dr. Lisa Sanders's "Diagnosis" column, which invites New York Times readers to guess what's causing anonymous patients' mysterious ailments, will love the idea behind CrowdMed, a business that announced its beta launch and $1.1 million in seed funding at TEDMED in Washington last week. CrowdMed is a crowdsourcing platform that taps the collective wisdom of regular folks to produce diagnostic suggestions for baffling cases.

Peter Weijmarshausen believes that 3D printing "is fundamentally changing the manufacturing ecosystem in its entirety." Several deep-pocketed investors agree. Weijmarshausen announced today that Shapeways, the 3D printing marketplace he heads, has raised $30 million in a series C financing led by Andreessen Horowitz. Existing investors Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures, and Lux Capital also participated in the round. Since its founding in 2007, Weijmarshausen says Shapeways has seen a drop in 3D printing prices, an expansion of printable materials, and users upload over 1 million designs.

Supercomputers and DNA sequencing instruments are the weapons of choice in an "arms race within the war on cancer." Medical centers in New York City alone are reportedly spending more than $1 billion on building, equipping, and staffing new genomic research centers.

"If you think about the scientific revolutions that have occurred in history, they've been driven by one thing--the availability of data. From Copernicus to quantum mechanics, it's data that drives innovation." So says computational biologist John Quackenbush in an interview in the May edition of Fast Company. And despite all the talk about massive amounts of genomic data being churned out by next-generation sequencing instruments, much of it is not actually available, at least not in the way Quackenbush and a lot of cancer patients want it to be.

Within moments of the explosions at the finish line of the Boson Marathon today, Google put its Person Finder into action to help friends and family locate loved ones who might have been affected and were unreachable by cell phone. At 7:00 pm, the app was tracking about 3,000 records.

With mountains of Big Data piling up, it's no surprise that the need for Big Data scientists is also increasing, and that universities are responding to the need with new training programs. The University of Washington, which offers a Big Data Ph.D., is one of several programs featured in a story today by New York Times tech reporter Claire Cain Miller.

Since Xerox researchers revolutionized putting ink on paper with the invention of the laser printer in 1969, the technology has been applied to "printing" DNA as well as 3D structures. Now the approach has a promising future in electronics manufacturing, with "ink" made from tiny fragments of silicon chips. New York Times reporter John Markoff describes in today’s Science Times how a new technique developed at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center will print computing power onto a flexible surface.

Imaging studies of cocaine addicts’ brains typically show low activity patterns in the region that is key to impulse control, the prefrontal cortex. The same goes for rodents that have been turned into cokeheads in the lab. Whether the use of the drug itself further compromises impulse control, leading to compulsive use in spite of life-threatening effects, still isn’t clear. But a team of neuroscientists reports in Nature this week that, at least in rats, there is a way to wipe away the addictive behavior with optogenetics.

In vitro fertilization (IVF), a last recourse for women who want to get pregnant, is expensive, and its outcome is uncertain. Now a Silicon Valley data-mining startup is significantly improving predictions about whether a woman's IVF will succeed. Reproductive health scientist Dr. Mylene Yao and Stanford statistics professor Wing Wong, founders of Univfy, compare detailed personal health information with large data sets taken from past efforts with thousands of women to predict the likely results of IVF treatment. It’s easy to see why it might be in demand.

NASA has put a man on the moon, but it hasn’t yet come up with an efficient and accurate way for the International Space Station (ISS) crew to track their diets. Living in a zero-gravity environment poses the risk of nutrient deficiency and bone loss, so keeping close tabs on food intake in space is crucial. But the ISS crew complain that their meal monitoring methods are unreliable and tedious. Imagine having to recount everything you ate in a week while orbiting the Earth. That’s what astronauts do in a weekly “food frequency questionnaire.” But diet logging isn’t rocket science, so NASA is turning to “the crowd” for help.

Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley's new fiancee might be a fashionista, but that's not the only reason he's checking in at Fashion Week in New York City, which starts today. Crowley judged the first-ever Fashion Hackathon last weekend, and will give the tech keynote at a Decoded Fashion event next Thursday (designer Zac Posen will give the fashion keynote).

Despite the widely hailed plummeting price and time to get a whole-human-genome sequence, it still takes a battery of software applications and a dream team of specialists to analyze, interpret, and apply DNA data in a medically useful way. A new piece of hardware described in The New York Times this weekend is positioned to substitute for at least a few players on the team.

Leroy Hood, who was awarded the National Medal of Science today by President Obama, shared a prediction earlier this week that the President probably wishes would come true during his final term: the convergence of genomics, diagnostics, digital technologies, and quantified self tools will send healthcare costs plummeting. Hood gives us a decade to get there.

Outraged over ergonomic gadget maker OXO’s introduction of a $25 dustpan-and-broom design that closely resembles a two-year-old, $12 Quirky model, Quirky staffers staged a street protest in New York last week.

Futurist, artificial intelligence pioneer, and author Ray Kurzweil announced Friday that he will start a new job on Monday, Dec. 17, as Director of Engineering for Google. The inventor says he will assist the company with tough computer science problems to turn "unrealistic" visions into reality.

When genomics pioneer George Church recently announced that he and his team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering will vie in a September 2013 competition to rapidly and accurately sequence 100 whole human genomes at a cost of $1,000 or less each, he did not say which technology they would use to do it. That’s because quite possibly it has not yet been invented.

That monitoring employees' every move will make them miserable might seem like Management 101, but an engineer and a psychologist say employers could have happier workers through surveillance. The idea is to apply the tools of the quantified-self movement to assess worker engagement and satisfaction throughout the day. In a story called "Can Technology Make You Happy?" in IEEE Spectrum's December issue Kazuo Yano, a nanostructured-silicon device engineer at Hitachi Central Research Laboratory, and Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at University of California, Riverside, along with PhD candidate Joseph Chancellor report on their collaboration to measure worker well-being with wearable biometric sensors

How do you raise two sons who will make enough money by age 30 to ensure you have a very comfortable retirement? Tell them their youth is no barrier to achieving. Take them on vacations to developing countries where their imaginations can run wild with ideas for solving the planet’s greatest problems. And teach them to rebel in the right ways. Brothers Sujay Tyle, 19, and Sheel Tyle, 21, shared their short but impressive life stories with Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick on stage at Techonomy 2012 in Tucson.

Leave it to a technology innovators’ conference to frame the relief of global malnutrition as a business opportunity. Other sessions at this week’s Techonomy meeting in Tucson described how technology is transforming developing communities and how mobile devices are already ubiquitous in Africa. But Steve Collins, an MD from Ireland devoted to improving nutrition in Africa, says think of it this way: People unaffected by irreversible brain damage—often the effect of malnutrition in infancy—are more likely consumers of technology.

In the opening session of Techonomy 2012 in Tucson today, Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick interviewed Kurzweil on stage. Their conversation covered the exponential progression of software, how the brain works, what it will mean to think “in the Cloud” or have the intelligence of IBM’s Watson computer at our fingertips, and what functions humans will still have once computers can do the jobs of even the most educated among us.

The much-heralded $1,000 genome isn't here yet, so if you have easy access to state-of-the-art sequencing technology and you lead a team of genetics experts, it must be pretty tempting to sequence your own genome. Craig Venter famously did it on the sly, and Mike Snyder, director of the Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine, couldn't resist either.

Citizen scientists playing the online game Eyewire are helping neuroscientists map the J cells of the retina—a task that will help understand the machinery of the mind. MIT professor of computational neuroscience, Sebastian Seung, described the approach at Wired 2012.

Still think college degrees earned online are universally cheaper and less esteemed in the job market than traditional ones? In the case of graduate degrees offered by universities collaborating with a company called 2U, you’d be dead wrong.

"Would you have your genome sequenced if you could afford it?" That question is posed in an (unscientific) online survey accompanying the final segment of NPR's "$1,000 Genome" series, which has been taking a look at the promise and perils of genome sequencing.

Dean Ornish's column, Eating for Health, Not Weight, in yesterday's New York Times explained the scientific arguments for how a plant-based diet is better than a low carb Atkins-type diet for improving health and reducing disease. And he points to proof in the genome.

If you've had your genome sequenced, there will soon be apps for that. Personal genome sequencing company 23andMe this week opened up its application program interface to allow third-party developers to build "a broad range of new applications and tools for the 23andMe community generated from the company’s data sets."

DNAnexus is providing genomic storage and analysis tools in the cloud. Techonomy Contributing Editor Adrienne Burke spoke with the company's leadership recently about what their innovative approach to managing this unique brand of big data means to scientific research, personalized medicine, and individuals who’ve had their DNA sequenced.

"If Detroit is on the brink of a revival, it’s technology that is proving to be the leading driver of job creation and economic growth," writes Detroit-based marketing exec Alex Southern for GrowDetroit. Southern's "if" acknowledges the pessimism some or his readers expressed last year in a survey about their hometown's prospects for recovery.

Technology in the classroom is not about putting a computer on everybody’s desk anymore. It’s about getting the right software so students can absorb the information universities and schools are teaching. Given all the technology available, increasingly students may find it tough to explain why they can’t maintain a 4.0 grade point average.

Whether to conduct online banking or engage with social networks, 95 percent of Americans rely on the cloud. But few of us understand what the cloud is, and one in five of us admits to pretending we do, according to a new survey. Do people outside of the IT field need to comprehend the cloud? Yes, argues Forbes.com contributor Joe McKendrick, who has also written about the cloud's impact on jobs, how it could decrease the federal deficit, and why Steve Wozniak doesn't trust the cloud.

In college classrooms where innovations like smart phones and Facebook are getting in the way of learning, some tech-savvy professors are taking an “if you can’t beat ’em join ’em” approach. They’re asking students to bring their web-enabled mobile devices to class and keep them turned on.