Tech 9: Stories From the Week You Need to Read Right Now

This week the movie world celebrated the date Marty McFly set for his hoverboard-driven adventures in the future (September 26, 2013), yet nary a hoverboard was to be found. The reading world celebrated Banned Book Week, taking time to appreciate the bizarre and not especially offensive in hindsight number of books that have been met with censorship. In the tech world, Apple continued to help strip mine far-off islands of their minerals, Japanese researchers sewed new hearts into mice then made them listen to Mozart and Enya, and someone invented invisible graffiti. Here's a round-up of all the news you might have missed from the week but shouldn't have.

Michael Thomsen is Complex's tech columnist. He has written for Slate, The Atlantic, The New Inquiry, n+1, Billboard, and is author of Levitate the Primate: Handjobs, Internet Dating, and Other Issues for Men. He tweets often at @mike_thomsen.

While Apple has taken a lot of criticism for working conditions at its Foxconn assembly factories in China, focusing on one element in its massive supply chain obscures the fact that it may be impossible to build a computer without exploiting someone. Writing for The Guardian, George Monbiot looks at how the mining of tin, a basic element used to make solder to fix computer components in place, has turned the Bangka and Belitung islands in Indonesia into hell holes. 30 percent of the world's tin comes from these islands, and miners die about once a week extracting the mineral in a process that destroys the islands' rain forests and pollutes the remaining land by bringing acidic subsoil to the surface.

Read the story here.

After a long and angry debate in Congress, followed by repeated attempts to overturn the law, President Obama's contentious healthcare reform bill has found new advocates. Hoping to shore up public support for the law as it comes into effect in 2014, the White House spun up its awkward propaganda machine on Twitter and began releasing a series of cute animal photos accompanied by slogans in support of ObamaCare. "I can rest easy know that lifetime caps on healthcare coverage have been eliminated!" a mouse in a swing tells us. "Wait! Being cute isn't a pre-existing condition anymore?" a baby pig asks.

Read the story here.

For the last 20 years or so, people have tried to make as much content as possible trackable through the Internet, an effort that brought an accompanying mechanism of surveillance and data harvesting. In an effort to maintain the open access of information while limiting the ability of companies to exploit it, designer Sang Mun has created four new fonts meant to be readable to the human eye but unrecognizable to computer character recognition software used by everyone from Google to the NSA. "Sometimes these ideas about privacy can feel large and abstract to average person," Mun said in a Wired story. "I thought that addressing these issues through the design of a typeface—a building block of language and communication—would bring home the conversation to the average person."

Read the story here.

Finding water in outer space has become the focal point of a lot of recent projects, or at least that story is the one that most excited the public who sees space exploration as a means of discovering alien life. Somehow finding water has become the rosebud of all life in the universe, and this week it was announced that the Mars Curiosity Rover has discovered a significant amount of water on the red planet, with scientists estimating there are about two pints of water in every cubic foot of Martian soil. The water molecules are bound to other molecules in the planet's soil and aren't sitting around in big pools so it probably "doesn't have a very big bearing on the life on Mars discussion." And yet, we seem already to have decided that it has, because life outside of ourselves is what we are hoping for.

Read the story here.

Music is a kind of medicine. We use it to medicate horrible break-ups, jolt us out of torpor, and calm us in moments of over-excitement. Writing in the New Yorker, Maria Konnikova reports on a recent experiment in Tokyo that found that mice recovering from heart transplant surgeries recovered significantly better when given music to listen to, specifically Mozart and Verdi. They speculated that using music in a four-four time signature played between 60 and 80 beats per minute corresponds to the normal heartbeat of a healthy person, and helps encourage the body to begin functioning at a normal pace while recovering from an invasive procedure. Mice given Enya music to listen to while recuperating had markedly less effective recoveries. Go figure.

Read the story here.

The ritual of turning off electronic devices during takeoff and landing has always been a suspect practice. There's no rational reason playing an old Gameboy or running an iPad in Airplane mode would interfere with plane operations, yet the superstition that they might has persisted for years. This week an FAA advisory board announced it would recommend the prohibition on electronic devices during takeoffs and landings be lifted, an effort that has been led by Senator Claire McCaskill from Montana. It's unlikely that devices that use a cell phone antennae will be allowed to stay active, but for all other general devices, from laptops to iPods, the runway will no longer be a deadzone.

Read the story here.

This week Valve announced a plan to build a living room computer meant to compete with traditional game console makers Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. The company announced it had turned its PC gaming hub Steam into a full Linux-based operating system, which will be open source and run on a variety of different computers. The final and most interesting part of the announcement arrived with the reveal of a new kind of game controller to accompany the OS. The Steam Controller forgoes traditional joysticks in favor of two symmetrical touch pads, each connected to a haptic feedback system that provides rumble and resistive pressure to simulate a wide variety of physical feedback. The full package won't be available until sometime in 2014, but Valve is offering a limited number of units to beta testers in the interim.

Read the story here.

Rodrigo Guzman was deported to Mexico when he was 10 years old. The former fourth grader from Berkeley had lived in America since he was 2, when his parents came to visit family with tourist visas. Upon trying to return to the US after a family vacation back to Mexico City, Rodrigo and his parents were denied entry and had their passports and visas confiscated. In earlier times, Guzman would have had to rely on handwritten letters or an occasional phone call to stay connected with his old friends schoolmates in Berkeley, but today they connect through Minecraft. While they can't play in the same places anymore, his friends rented a server called "Rodrigo's World" to give the kids a shared digital space where they can play together. "I want to say thank you for this, because it's helping me," Guzman told the LA Times. "But I still hope to come back and see everyone again."

Read the story here.

NeverWet is a clear liquid that repels water and other fluids meant to protect homes and industrial machinery from water damage. An artist in Atlanta, Nathan Sharratt, decided to make art out of it instead. Sharratt used NeverWet to stencil patterns and messages into concrete sidewalks, which are invisible when dry, but when it rains the difference in wetness and the drier areas where the NeverWet has been sprayed makes the patterns visible. After experimenting with small sidewalk projects, he's now set his sights on bigger projects, including a massive drawing on the side of a 14 story building, and a series of drawings for the middle of street intersections.

Read the story here.