Karen Edelman

Scrubs? Check. Surgical mask? Check. Google Glass? Quite possibly. Coming soon to an operating room near you, surgeons may be donning Glass, the wearable computer from Google, to help them in their work. But will Glass be a medical game changer? In a Wall Street Journal blog, Timothy Hay, reporting on a panel presented the recent Health Innovation Summit in San Francisco, outlines the pros: Doctors can use Glass to alternate between looking at patients and viewing that patient’s medical imagery on the lens, “the same way a driver can alternative between looking at the road and glancing in the rearview mirror.”

A revealing New York Times Magazine article by Jay Caspian Kang sheds more light on the dark side of citizen journalism and what happens when the crowd gets it wrong. It all started on April 19 on Reddit, where photos of 22-year-old missing Brown University student Sunil Tripathi were posted alongside images of Suspect #2 in the Boston Marathon bombings (later confirmed to be Dzhokhar Tsarnaev). The “news” of an identified suspect spread like wildfire, cycling through Twitter and Facebook and quickly being picked up by major news media, including NBC, until the FBI eventually stomped it out by denying that Tripathi was a suspect.

Cyberattacks on large corporations and government organizations are nothing new. Over the past two decades, whole industries have been formed to stay one step ahead of the increasingly sophisticated and nefarious cadre of global hackers seeking information to gain advantage. Companies and government entities across the world view hacking as a top security threat and are continually on high alert for the next big cyberattack.

In the wake of the June 3oth Granite Mountain tragedy, in which 19 of 20 members of an elite Hotshots team died fighting a huge wildfire outside Yarnell, Arizona—the greatest loss of firefighters in a single day since the 9-11 attacks—there is a shift in focus toward the “new normal.” Prevention and preparedness clearly are not enough; by all accounts, the Hotshots were experienced, well-prepared experts, an elite force combat-trained to handle even the toughest wilderness fires. This fire, said their local fire chief, was “just too dangerous.”

Calling all app developers: Looking for the next great career opportunity? The chance to get creative on a completely different platform? There’s just one catch: You’ll need to relocate to (drumbeat, please) Detroit. “Detroit is suddenly hungry for . . . software developers and information technology specialists who can create applications for the next generation of connected vehicles,” writes Jaclyn Trop in the New York Times, noting the Michigan’s Department of Labor projection that app developer jobs will grow 36.9 percent from 2010 levels.

Is any technology inherently “good” or “evil”? The deciding factor would be how it's used (or misused), right? Consider drones. Drones—unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or aircrafts without human pilots on board—have been around since the early 1900s, and the U.S. Air Force was developing them in earnest as early as 1959. Today, the use of drones has grown dramatically. National Geographic reported this past March that at least 50 countries now use drones, and several—Iran, Israel, and China, for example—make their own.

While Google Glass is the biggest and boldest wearable cloud technology on the market today, it’s still in the early-adopter phase. But according to a recent Forbes blog by Joe McKendrick, more and more on-your-person cloud offerings—including fitness monitors, smart watches, and lifelogging cameras—are coming out, and pretty soon they’ll become ubiquitous.

With an expanding network of fast-charging stations, the 10-year-old Tesla electric car will soon be able to traverse the United States. This signals the next phase in Tesla Motors Inc.’s ability to appeal to a more geographically diverse market. “Tesla needs a broader network of charging stations to appeal to customers beyond California and the northeastern U.S., where it now has fueling spots. Without such stations, Tesla drivers are limited by the estimated 265-mile (426-kilometer) range of a battery charge,” Douglas MacMillan & Alan Ohnsman write in Bloomberg.

The world’s most famous real-estate mogul, Donald Trump, is jumping into the crowdfunding fray. Trump has partnered with Bill Zanker, founder of The Learning Annex, to create FundAnything, a crowdfunding platform that allows people to create campaigns for any amount of money in various categories—creative arts, causes, personal pursuits, business ideas. The site charges a nine percent commission, returning four percent to the creator if the fundraising goal is achieved. FundAnything also enables entrepreneurs to offer non-financial rewards in exchange for donations.

Necessity truly is the mother of invention. With almost three quarters of the Netherlands at or below sea level, Dutch engineers are finding new ways to protect themselves from the increasing threat of floods due to climate change by using nature as a defense against rising tides. For example, the Sand Engine is a vast reservoir of sand continually cultivated to protect eroding beaches,

A new wave of investment is happening in long-suffering Detroit. At first blush, that sounds eminently promising—the region, and the U.S. auto industry, is still rebounding from the recession, with mixed results. But the who and why paint a more complex picture. As part of their steady push into the U.S. auto industry, “Chinese-owned companies are investing in American businesses and new vehicle technology, selling everything from seat belts to shock absorbers in retail stores, and hiring experienced engineers and designers in an effort to soak up the talent and expertise of domestic automakers and their suppliers,” Bill Vlasic writes in The New York Times.

Ethical technological question of the day: If technology is neither good nor evil, but simply a means to an end, what happens when that end has potentially dangerous consequences? Cody Wilson, a University of Texas at Austin law student, has developed a working gun—which he calls The Liberator—using a 3D printer, and he’s made the design available on his website, Defense Distributed. Wilson's home-made firearm becomes all the more striking as the cost of 3D printing drops precipitously, with low-cost printers poised to enter the mass market.

Will college become superfluous in the digital economy? It’s a real possibility—at least, for some jobs. A new two-year, hands-on apprentice program, Enstitute, teaches skills in information technology, computer programming, and app building, and could help close the income gap between college graduates and those with just a high school degree. “Enstitute seeks to challenge the conventional wisdom that top professional jobs always require a bachelor’s degree—at least for a small group of the young, digital elite,” writes Hannah Seligson in a recent New York Times profile.

When you look at economic statistics like G.D.P. and productivity, what gets overlooked? According to a New York Times column by Eduardo Porter, these key measures fail to capture the value people get from digital technologies. But leading academics from the University of Chicago, Stanford, M.I.T., and the University of Michigan are developing metrics to assess the overall value of technology on our lives, trying to put numbers around key pieces of the puzzle, like the value of the Internet and the value of free online services.

It sounds so very Star Trek: Computers that can read your mind, and act accordingly. Brain computer interfaces—computers that are able to assess and respond to your needs, wants, and feelings—have been in the works for years. But now we’re strikingly close to seeing them in the mainstream: within a few years, predicts Nick Bolton in a New York Times Bits post. The technology “was conceived to enable people with paralysis and other disabilities to interact with computers or control robotic arms, all by simply thinking about such actions.

Finding and recruiting top programmers remains a huge challenge for fast-growth companies like Square, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Will Big Data come to their rescue? They’re willing to give it a try. These companies—along with other big names like Twitter and Walmart—are all customers of Gild, a startup that leverages information technology to find hidden talent. Gild was developed to tap self-motivated achievers—a cohort rife with what co-founder Dr. Vivienne Ming calls "wasted talent"—who are largely unknown compared to the smaller pool of much-wooed Ivy League graduates.

Apple is arguably the Brangelina of companies: It’s not young anymore, and there isn’t much new there. But our fascination and fixation endure. Widely regarded as a bellwether for the global economy and a perennial favorite on Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies list, Apple’s better-than-anticipated earnings report reveals a company that continues to capitalize on its unwavering customer loyalty numbers, baked-in culture of innovation, and relentless focus on design as a key market differentiator. But with its iconic founder gone and the company maturing under the leadership of CEO Tim Cook, some are seeing signs of stagnation and decline.

True story: Kevin Ashton, general manager of consumer electronics firm, Belkin, offers a remarkable step-by-step tutorial in Quartz on how to create the next big household name using social media. It’s easier than you’d think. Using some ingenuity and a little cash ($68, to be exact), Ashton created “Santiago Swallow,” a modern-day Internet celebrity with a verified Twitter account and more than 90,000 followers—who is entirely fake.

As the real-time manhunt continues in Boston—with the city on lockdown and one suspect still at large—we’re witnessing a profound shift in the role of the crowd. Since the Boston Marathon attacks on Monday, the public has been asked for by law enforcement officials, and taken it upon themselves, to help solve the crime. Having a plethora of evidence from a variety of sources—photos, video, and eyewitness accounts—has been key in the effort to apprehend the perpetrators. But where it gets hazy is when the public, emboldened on sites like Reddit and 4Chan Think Tank, becomes judge and jury, and ends up wrongly implicating lookalikes.

The applications of crowdfunding—leveraging technology to raise small contributions from the many—continue to grow. The crowdfunding platform is now being utilized to finance disaster relief, build startups, develop scientific research, support artists and musicians, develop inventions, enable citizen journalism, and aid political campaigns. Now a former Peace Corps volunteer, 26-year-old Chase Adam, is using crowdfunding to increase access to healthcare in 13 developing countries.