Christopher Mims

High-definition displays that fit inside regular eyeglasses will be available in one year, said Vuzix, a company with a long history in the field of wearable displays. These could enable true “augmented reality” while replacing screens on smartphones and laptops. To back up that claim, the company today announced a new high-resolution display monocle suitable for industrial and military use. It was originally developed for the US Department of Defense.

If you own any iPhone more recent than the 4, walk into any US Apple retail store today and you’ll get a taste of the possibly-dystopian future of retail and the internet of things. That’s because Apple just rolled out a technology called iBeacon in all 254 of its US stores, and if you say “yes” to the prompts it will push to your phone when you walk in the front door, it will start sending alerts to your home screen with information and promotions when you’re standing next to pre-designated hotspots.

There’s long been a rivalry between China’s two best-known cities, Shanghai and Beijing, ranging from political cliques to business interests. A few areas where Shanghai supposedly had the lead were air quality and quality of life.

The US National Reconnaissance Office, which is responsible for America’s prodigious fleet of spy satellites, launched a secret satellite into orbit on December 5, and this is its mission logo. The official twitter account of James Clapper, principle advisor to US president Barack Obama on intelligence and national security, dropped it in public view on Dec. 5.

The Prelude is longer than the Empire State building or Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers are tall and displaces six times as much water as the world’s largest aircraft carrier. It won’t be completed until 2017, but its enormous hull was just launched from drydock in a South Korean shipyard. It was built for Shell by Samsung Heavy Industries, a Samsung affiliate with nearly $13 billion in annual revenue (by contrast, Samsung Electronics, which makes the personal gadgets, brought in over $55 billion in the last quarter alone). But why create such a monstrously large vessel? (Technically it’s not a “ship”, as it doesn’t move under its power but has to be towed.)

The first in a series.

Amazon’s next-day shipping miracle is possible only because it relies on companies like UPS to deliver its goods. So the news that UPS is experimenting with its own drone delivery system, reported today by The Verge, is an implicit endorsement of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s announcement at the weekend of Amazon’s own drone delivery plans. FedEx founder Fred Smith too has plans to deliver packages by drone, but it won’t be the small, quadcopter kind favored by Amazon. Instead, Smith wants the giant planes FedEx has criss-crossing the country to be replaced by unmanned aircraft because, he told Wired four years ago, a plane that doesn’t have to carry any people can be designed quite differently, with a lot more space for cargo.

There are a lot of reasons why Amazon delivering goods by drone anytime soon isn’t merely “optimistic,” as CEO Jeff Bezos put it, but outright silly. Technical hurdles aside, it’s likely that in the US, drones won’t even be approved to fly in the way that Amazon needs them to until 2020.

Urbee is the most aerodynamic multi-passenger vehicle on the planet, say its designers—a team of experienced engineers whose Kickstarter campaign to fund their automotive dreams has seven days left to reach its target. Urbee’s ability to slip through the air is due to its lozenge shape, achieved through 3D-printed body panels that would be difficult or impossible for a small team to otherwise achieve. This shape, plus a small electric drive system with incorporating a 7 horsepower engine (pdf) allow Urbee to travel at speeds claimed to be up to 110 km an hour (68 miles/hr).

“Being a scrappy startup, it’s funny to see some of our designers forklift once in a while,” chuckles Chieh Huang, CEO of Boxed. Unlike most of Silicon Valley, which seems obsessed with multi-billion-dollar valuations for whatever ephemera the kids are into these days, Boxed moves just as many atoms as bits. It’s an online store that, like Amazon, will deliver whatever you buy to your door—but only in bulk. If Amazon is the online Walmart, Boxed is the online Costco.

In addition to learning how to craft new technologies, undergraduate engineers are learning to not care as much about their fellow human beings, suggests a new study from a sociologist with a degree in engineering.

Nineteen-year-old Simon Tian said he was going to launch a smartwatch as powerful and capable as a smartphone, and it appears he’s on the cusp of actually doing it. A recently launched Kickstarter campaign for the Neptune Pine smartwatch reveals what appears to be a production-ready device that will ship as soon as Tian’s company has FCC approval and the funds to mass produce the Pine.

Recently I ran out of space on the consumer-focused cloud storage service Dropbox, which as of this morning is reportedly valued at $8 billion. Dropbox has been (cleverly) backing up all my photos every time I connect my phone to my laptop, encouraging me to fill up my allotted gigabytes and get me to the point that I need to pay for more.

This morning tech pundits were caught flat-footed by a Reuters report in which Samsung claimed it had “sold” 800,000 of the widely-panned Galaxy Gear smartwatches. This figure seems too good to be true for a device that critics consistently derided as light on battery life, excessively complicated and “inconsistent and frustrating.”

An Israeli entrepreneur has spent “hundreds of thousands of shekels” (tens of thousands of US dollars) to photograph and log 120,000 gravestones, in an effort to create a sort of Facebook/Wikipedia for the dead. It sounds ghoulish, but the project, Neshama, is intended to be the opposite: Each page is to be a memorial to a particular deceased person, where family members can leave remembrances.

Mice that behave like autistic humans saw many of their symptoms disappear when they ate probiotics, the same kind of healthy bacteria found in many yogurts, CalTech biologist Paul Patterson has just told NPR. His research, which will appear in a forthcoming issue of the journal Cell, is part of a growing body of evidence that the connection between the kind of bacteria that live in our gut and our psychological wellbeing is important enough that simply changing what we eat can alter, among other things, our mood and levels of anxiety.

If you want to launch a human being into space these days, you have just two options: One is the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China. The other is Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome, the oldest and largest space launch facility.

You’d think it would be easy: the sun is “up,” and, like leaves and basking reptiles, solar panels should face in that general direction. But most installers of solar panels, especially the ones for homes, follow conventional wisdom handed down from architects, which holds that in the northern hemisphere, windows and solar panels should face south.

Today a new startup, Coin, launched with an intriguing product: A battery-powered, credit card-sized device that stores all your credit card information in one place. Perhaps intentionally, it looks a bit like the heavy, exclusive black Centurion card from American Express, but with a small LED display. You simply tap a button on Coin and cycle through the cards you’ve stored on it. When it shows the one you want, you swipe it like a regular card.

Frank Nuovo was the Jony Ive of Nokia.

Cisco announced two important things in today’s earnings report: The first is that the company is aggressively moving into the Internet of Things—the effort to connect just about every object on earth to the internet—by rolling out new technologies. The second is that Cisco has seen a huge drop-off in demand for its hardware in emerging markets, which the company blames on fears about the NSA using American hardware to spy on the rest of the world.

In the $60 billion-a-year watch sector, most of the money flows to those who sell the most expensive devices: 0.6% of the watches shipped in 2012, with an average price of $4,285, were responsible for half the revenue of the entire industry.

Steven DenBaars, a research scientist at UC Santa Barbara, has been working on LED lights for 20 years. He has been instrumental in pushing them to the point that they are the true heir to Edison’s electric bulb. But in his own head, and in his lab, DenBaars is already onto the next big thing: Replacing a substantial portion of indoor lights, and the archaic bulb and socket infrastructure on which they depend, with lasers.

If the phrase “perks for social media influence” makes you think of Klout and its free Axe Body Spray, you’ll be surprised to hear what business cloud services firm Salesforce is handing out to influencers. Daniel Debow, an executive at Salesforce, said today at Quartz’s Next Billion eventthat on the company’s internal social media platform, called Chatter, influencers, who are called Chatterati, are rewarded for their influence and high follower counts with trips to Salesforce’s executive retreats. The idea is that social media within companies help surface good ideas no matter who came up with them, and sending even low-level employees to events where they can speak directly with leaders helps democratize decision making in a company.