Kathryn Nave

Deep in the Sonoran Desert, tendrils crawl up the legs of solar panels, while vines sprawl beneath their shade. It may look like the natural reclamation of abandoned infrastructure, but this is no solar graveyard: This is the University of Arizona’s first agrivoltaics facility, a new approach to energy generation that combines solar panels and agriculture on the same site.
“If you look at the kind of solar projects that were created five years ago, they looked like industrial facilities,” say...

The sense of inhabiting a physical body is something most of us take for granted. Yet to create this experience, your brain must gracefully coordinate billions of signals from your eyes, muscles and skin to ensure that the hand you see, the hand you move, and the hand you touch, all feel like one thing—rather than three.
Tej Tadi, CEO and founder of Swiss neuroscience start-up MindMaze, is on a mission to reverse engineer how our brain integrates all these different signals into the unified e...

When you consider it, the retina doesn’t give us all that much to work with. Two 30mm discs of around 100 million photoreceptor cells each. Not bad on the resolution front – but only a measly 5 per cent of these are colour sensitive and the whole thing is crawling with blood vessels and punctured by a 1.5mm hole where the optic nerve enters the eyeball. So how do we get from these highly compromised little light sensors to the colourful, immersive, and undisrupted view of a bustling city stre...

Rattling around the hills of Orange County, Brian Bushway looks like any other Californian mountain biker. The steady clicking of his tongue is the only sign of something unusual. But this is no nervous tic. Bushway is an echolocator: because he is blind, he has learned to use the sound of his tongue to work out his location.
Echoes are a constant source of information about the environment around us. Though this subtly shapes our experience, it usually registers only as a vague sense of open...

The Doppel uses physical signals to trick our brain into a state of calm
If you’ve ever heard “Eye of the Tiger” blasting at the gym, or “Chilled Vibes Vol. 3” while floating around a spa, then you’ll know all about the motivating or calming power of music. But this may be less to do with empowering lyrics or soothing strings than a simple matter of rhythm. So why not cut the chords and get straight to the beat? The Doppel, a bracelet created by Team Turquoise, a London-based startup, vibrate...

Your smartphone might be able to remind you to buy a cake for your niece’s fifth birthday. But whether an Alzheimer’s patient will remember watching her blow out the candles is much more hit-or-miss. Morgan Barense, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto, wants to fix that with an app designed to help the memory-impaired recall those valuable experiences.
As anyone who has studied for an exam knows, it’s nearly impossible to retain information from a single exposure. But it’s also impr...

In 1958, as one of the few employees working through summer vacation at our company, electrical engineer Jack Kilby had the lab to himself. And it was during those two solitary weeks that he hit upon an insight that would transform the electronics industry.
Since 1948, transistors had begun to replace large, power-hungry vacuum tubes in electronics manufacturing, but hand-soldering thousands of these individual components onto a chip was expensive, time-consuming and unreliable.
Jack’s insigh...

It's a Friday evening and you've decided to cook fish tacos. So you pop into your local supermarket on the way back from work. It takes several minutes just to hunt down the cilantro. Or, more accurately, to locate the empty shelf where the cilantro should have been. After another 10 minutes waiting in line for the single-staffed checkout lane, you finally get home to realize you forgot to buy tortillas. And that's how you end up spending your Friday night eating leftover casserole.
Data move...

In 2012, Topher White was taking a break from his work as a web engineer at France’s ITER fusion reactor by volunteering at an Indonesian gibbon reserve, when he had an encounter that would change the trajectory of his life. Hiking out into what seemed like pristine rainforest one morning, White ran straight into a man with a chainsaw, chopping an old teak tree into lumber.
The reserve was small, he wasn’t far from the ranger station. Still, the three full-time guards were unable to keep a co...

Most asteroids are plain old lumps of rock and dirt. A few are composed of metals such as nickel, iron, or even platinum. But the really valuable ones—the ones that fill Planetary Resources CEO Chris Lewicki with enthusiasm—are the carbonaceous variety. Though these asteroids are predominantly composed of carbon, thanks to their porous structure, they are also rich reservoirs of space water.
“Water is the key resource for large scale development in space,” Lewicki said. “Though on earth we th...

Pia Mancini clearly recalls the moment she realized that democracy was a broken system. “I was working on a political campaign and we were being shown around this huge barn packed up with mattresses and construction materials,” explained the former chief advisor to Buenos Aires’ Deputy-Secretary of Political Affairs.
It was the coldest time of year, in a deprived area of Buenos Aires, and when Mancini questioned what all this was for, she was told it was supplies allocated by the mayor for th...

From Facebook’s, “Move fast and break things,” to Google’s, “Don’t be evil,” youthful tech startup founders have a history of coining ethical principles that come to back haunt them.
But while a cavalier approach to moral quandaries may have traditionally been accepted as part and parcel with Silicon Valley’s culture of rapid innovation, it’s increasingly difficult to overlook as tech companies move beyond designing systems for faster commerce or communications, to those that control everythi...

In 1997, a team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh reported the results of a large scale investigation into the possible use of different machine learning technologies in healthcare. The good news: When tested on 4,352 pneumonia patients from across the United States, a neural network could predict a patient’s mortality risk with 98.5 percent accuracy.
In seemingly better news for asthma sufferers, the highly successful model also predicted that the pre-existing respiratory cond...