Reversing Paralysis: Scientists are making remarkable progress at using brain implants to restore the freedom of movement that spinal cord injuries take away.
Self-Driving Trucks: Tractor-trailers without a human at the wheel will soon barrel onto highways near you. What will this mean for the nation’s 1.7 million truck drivers?
Paying with Your Face: Face-detecting systems in China now authorize payments, provide access to facilities, and track down criminals. Will other countries follow?
Practical Quantum Computers: Advances at Google, Intel, and several research groups indicate that computers with previously unimaginable power are finally within reach.
The 360-Degree Selfie: Inexpensive cameras that make spherical images are opening a new era in photography and changing the way people share stories.
Hot Solar Cells: By converting heat to focused beams of light, a new solar device could create cheap and continuous power.
Gene Therapy 2.0: Scientists have solved fundamental problems that were holding back cures for rare hereditary disorders. Next we’ll see if the same approach can take on cancer, heart disease, and other common illnesses.
The Cell Atlas: Biology’s next mega-project will find out what we’re really made of.
Botnets of Things: The relentless push to add connectivity to home gadgets is creating dangerous side effects that figure to get even worse.
Reinforcement Learning: By experimenting, computers are figuring out how to do things that no programmer could teach them.

Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way? ... new book, “The Enigma of Reason” (Harvard), the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question. ... point out that reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context. ... Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to cooperate. Cooperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups. ... Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.

Smoking rates were in decline among well-educated consumers in developed economies; to make up for slipping sales, the companies were raising prices, which they could do for only so long. Meanwhile, a growing number of customers were switching to e-cigarettes in the hope of escaping their addiction or preserving their health. The devices, which use battery-powered coils to vaporize nicotine-infused solutions, had leapt on the scene seemingly out of nowhere. One of the first commercially available e-cigarettes had been created circa 2003 as a smoking cessation device by a Chinese pharmacist whose father had died of lung cancer. By 2013 the e-cigarette market had $3.7 billion in annual sales, according to Euromonitor International, and was expanding rapidly. ... Philip Morris International scrambled to fashion newfangled nicotine-delivering devices that would catch the wandering eye of the restless tobacco consumer. ... Everywhere you look in the industry, companies are pouring money into product development while borrowing liberally from the style of Silicon Valley. ... Tobacco executives often sound like media owners talking about content. That is, they’re open to delivering their drug via whatever pipe the consumer chooses—be it e-cigarettes, heat-not-burn devices, gum, lozenges, dip, or some medium that hasn’t been invented yet.

CATL, which had capacity to produce 7.6 gigawatt hours of batteries last year according to Goldman Sachs, says that by 2020 it plans to produce more than the gigafactory, the Tesla Motors and Panasonic joint venture that opened in Nevada in January and is expected to be the largest producer in the US. That would potentially make it the biggest battery factory in the world. ... Backed by aggressive government policies —ranging from subsidies for electric vehicles to restrictions on foreign rivals — China’s battery companies are beginning to dominate an industry which has been led for three decades by South Korean and Japanese manufacturers such as Panasonic, which makes the battery cells for Tesla cars. ... As carmakers invest more heavily in electric vehicles the lithium-ion battery will be a key technology for at least the next decade ... worth $40bn by 2025 and dominated by China.

For the past 20 years, the most widely spread and hummed tunes in the world have been written by a Swede, Max Martin, the recipient of the 2016 Polar Music Prize. It’s his melodies that bottle up our times and preserve it for the future. ... ”Most of the time, I tend to listen to my own stuff, whatever I happen to be working on at the moment.” What he listens for is details that could be improved. Is the bass too loud? Is the intro too long? ... Until now, Max Martin has refused every extensive magazine interview proposal. He did agree to do an interview for Time Magazine back in 2001. Since then: No thanks. Every newspaper, magazine and TV-channel in the world has asked him over and over again: No thanks.