Subrena E Smith

If the film classic The Graduate were being made today, it’s likely that, in delivering his iconic line, Walter Brooke would lean into Dustin Hoffman’s ear and offer a new career path: “graphene,” instead of “plastics.” Perceived as the next big thing in science and technology, graphene, a super-thin layer of graphite, excites many with its promise of technological breakthroughs. It conducts both electricity and heat super-efficiently, while also being incredibly strong.

Visiting Great Britain just got cheaper and a whole lot more low-resolution. The Ordnance Survey (OS), the official mapping body of the country, just made available a free, open version of its digital mapping data for England, Scotland and Wales as a downloadable map for the wildly popular and innovative game Minecraft.

A weird thing is happening with solar power. For years derided as a sideshow energy source that was only for environmentalists, solar is now being seen as an imminent threat to both the mainline energy industry and at least one national economy. As a result, those harmless people with the shiny panels on their rooftops are suddenly being seen as dangerous freeloaders and, in some potential bellwether cases, are being threatened with punitive taxes to dissuade them from their pursuit of self-generated power from a renewable resource: the Sun.

Radical life extension—pushing humans’ maximum age well beyond the natural average—is all the rage. Self-proclaimed futurist Ray Kurzweil wants us to hit the supplements and reset our biochemistry, while theoretical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey says one of us alive today will live 1,000 years thanks to new anti-aging techniques that he believes will soon emerge. Russian media millionaire Dmitry Itskov says we’ll be able to upload our minds to technological “carriers,” while other so-called transhumanists point to a mix of nanotechnology, cryonics and various medical advances as being imminently available means of extending our lives to 120 and well beyond.

Imagine handing over a complex set of construction plans to your building contractor, fresh off your fancy $12,000 Xerox WorkCentre scanner/copier/printer (link in German), only to find there were errors in the blueprints that weren’t on the original. Or, imagine passing a set of budget figures to the CFO of your company that weren’t the ones you fed into your WorkCentre, one of Xerox’s midrange color multifunction machines that, like any scanner or photocopier, is expected to reproduce a picture of the document you put in. As anyone who uses one of these devices in an office, school or home knows, whether photographing or digitally scanning a document, the camera doesn’t lie. Or does it?

One bright spot for Spain’s ailing economy has been tourism. According to a new count by the government, tourism arrivals in the first half of 2013 have been strong, and June saw the country break records with 6.3 million visitors . This was due, in part, to unrest in North Africa cutting down on the number of alternate Mediterranean destinations. While the news may be good at the top line, Spain’s traditional tourist industry is getting less of the benefit while private property owners are getting more.

It’s summer in the northern hemisphere, and with it comes cool fresh salads, delicious ripe fruit and favorites like corn and other fresh veggies on the grill. But, looking down at your picnic plate, could you tell which produce may be soon picked by non-human hands? Makers of a new class of robotic farm equipment (and some farmers) may be hoping you can’t, or won’t care, as they usher in the next generation of Silicon-based farm workers to spray, manage and harvest our favorite crops.

If you are a non-US citizen and looking to ply your trade as a game developer in the US, your quest may take some time, particularly if Congress remains locked in mortal combat around immigration reform. But if you are a crack gamer looking to come to the US simply to cast a few spells in a competitive league, you may have just gotten lucky. Riot Games, makers of game-of-the-moment League of Legends, said this week it has successfully lobbied US Immigration and Citizenship Services (USCIS) into granting visas to competitive gamers normally reserved for professional athletes.

You may or may not be able to get a full head transplant in the next few years but acquiring a new set of eyes has become sure thing.

This summer, restaurant chain Taco Bell plans to test a new Protein Power menu in some US stores, as part of its drive to stay within new “nutritional guardrails” and present a healthier face to customers. CEO Greg Creed notes increased consumer interest in protein for “performance,” presumably meaning building muscle, a great fit for its young, male-skewed dining clientele.

In the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s disclosures about alleged surveillance programs by the National Security Agency, it’s tempting to undertake a wholesale rethink of your online behavior, get a burner phone and install new e-mail tools, or just cut the cord entirely—except even that may not keep away the gaze of surveilling parties. Just living in a modern, equipped home is enough to create multiple peepholes for the government, or even foreign hackers, to figure out what you’re doing.

TaskRabbit announced a new service in late May branded TaskRabbit for Business through which it will broker temporary labor for businesses. Having built a bullpen of what the company claims are over 10,000 vetted individuals available for “temporary jobs that take multiple days, weeks, or even months to complete,” according to the company’s website, TaskRabbit has pivoted from being a matching service that pairs someone with a few spare hours to a person who has an errand, into a full-blown temp agency.

With unemployment at a 20-year high in Italy and up to one-quarter of Italian families now falling below the poverty line, according to recent government statistics, putting food on the table has become increasingly difficult. One bright spot has emerged in the city of Modena, where the local social services authority, working together with the city’s volunteer services body, has opened a “social” grocery market called Portobello.

Even though Tesla’s recent sales numbers painted a positive picture for the often beleaguered company, it’s still very early days for the electric vehicle market. The availability of EV charge points has been cited as a key obstacle in EV sales growth, but one researcher recently pointed to the newer generation of smarter charge points, meant to make EVs more attractive by offering features such as the ability to monitor or schedule charges via smartphone, or pay by touchless smart card, as also being a possible area of serious technical vulnerability. According to security analyst Ofer Shezaf, enterprising hackers could gain access to smart EV chargers and obtain access to logins, payments, hack into city or utility systems that run the chargers, or shut down parts of the networks themselves.

The disrupterati are bored, and they want to play with your food. Having flattened shopping, unshackled education, hotwired our wheels and loggified our daily lives, they now want to get into our mouths. Engineers-turned-chefs are tinkering with what’s in our food, and bringing technology to bear from other fields to do it in the name of science. However, it isn’t clear that this rush to re-engineer food is any different than what the mainstream food industry has been doing for years, only it’s coming out of a sector of industry more interested in accelerated change for change’s sake than in cracking major problems or satisfying real needs.

Most Americans will have spent the past weekend unaware of what most Europeans could not have failed to notice: the Eurovision song contest, which held its final in Malmö, Sweden. I watched it from Amsterdam, and as an American who last lived in a Europe a decade ago, I’d forgotten how hilarious the contest is, and yet also how much of a sense of connection it can foster.

While the media focus on the possibility of 3D printing assault rifles, something far more meaningful has been going on in a number of university and commercial labs across the US: research to print human tissue and organs. Though printing every other widget under the sun is happening by leaps and bounds, getting viable organ tissue is moving in baby steps. One week ago, San Diego-based Organovo announced a new milestone in this field, using 3D printing technology to assemble functioning sections of human liver tissue, which are viable for testing drugs, for example.

A collective grumble went around the web in September when Twitter launched its new API, the application programming interface where other apps and web sites talk to Twitter to get its data. The main gripe is that Twitter is accelerating the closing down of channels responsible for its rise in the first place by effectively locking out many of the third-party tools used to access the service. Hardly the first to roll up the welcome mat to other developers’ apps to focus on its own services, Twitter’s move nonetheless may have been the start of a larger shift from “the fun web” to “the serious web,” or in business terms, from the “free Web” to the “internet of cha-ching$.”

The robots are coming.

Like the trillion-dollar platinum coin several months ago, Bitcoin has jumped from a technical curiosity to “mainstream” financial news. It has become an object of economic escapism—but the kind you can’t escape from. Whether it continues to grow as a phenomenon has yet to be seen, but the underlying curiosity tells us that there is growing skepticism about global financial systems’ long-term viability, and a correlated grassroots interest in returning to smaller scale, offline, more locally-focused systems of exchange.

Cultural exports often take the shape of a nation’s pride, pushing high culture or value-added products to other countries’ consumers. Think high-performance cars from Germany, Danish furniture, Swedish murder mysteries, Korean electronics, or British period dramas. Imagine my shock, then, upon discovering that one of the hottest US exports to the UK market: sugary snacks. Eager young Brits looking for an imported sugar high can now get their fix, sold by one of several new retailers specializing in the import of crates of sweet cereals like Cap’n Crunch and Lucky Charms, Mountain Dew soda and Sugar Daddy candies, all a riot of color and corn syrup. It’s all meant to appeal to the tastes of those who might have experienced American candy on vacation, for example, and want more of it at home for their personal stash.

In 1963, in the depths of the Cold War, all of the futurists in the world could probably assemble in a largish conference room and still have space for an overhead projector. Half a century later, it would take a small stadium to hold all of the people who use the title in some form. The world of futures is a broad church today populated by everyone from author and inventor Ray Kurzweil and his obsessive focus on the singularity to Kanye West with his future-esque fashion fetishes. While it’s been a relatively quiet profession for a long time, suddenly it seems like futurists are all around, feeding a growing appetite for all things strange, metallic, and digital.

BMW plans to offer buyers of its forthcoming electric i3 vehicle the option of a gas-powered loaner BMW should they need to make a trip that would exceed the vehicle’s approximately 100-mile range. The company expects that drivers will make nine of out 10 trips with the concept model, which it touts as its “megacity car,” within that 100-mile range, but wants to offer the option as a way to help future owners not feel locked in to one mode of driving only. This is particularly critical, as the car will reportedly carry a $50,000 sticker price when it hits dealers next year.

The shot in the gesture revolution was Nintendo’s motion-sensing game controller for the Wii, followed quickly by motion capture with infrared cameras on the Xbox Kinect. Last year, nerds praised the not-yet-launched Leap Motion, which allows for gesture-based interaction with devices such as laptops. Now, a Y Combinator-backed company called Thalmic Labs has announced MYO, a cuff-like input device that uses electromyography, or detection of muscles’ electrical signals, to detect gestures and control a range of devices. Taken together, Leap, MYO and a raft of new input and interaction technology will make 2013 the year when we stop clicking and start waving.