Where Eye Care Is A Luxury, Technology Offers Access by Larry Abramson from National Public Radio

For millions of people in the developing world, one thing stands between them and a job or an education: a good pair of glasses. Quality eye care is often a luxury in areas where health services are scarce. So researchers and entrepreneurs are looking for breakthrough technologies to bring the cost of glasses and eye exams way down.
One group thinks that smartphones could help provide needed access to vision health care. Researchers at EyeNetra, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff company, are working on a device that would turn the phones into eye exam machines.
"Our goal, really, is to empower millions and millions around the world by bringing eye care to people's homes in a way that was never possible before," says EyeNetra's David Schafran.

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Addressing The Shortage Of Women In Silicon Valley from NPR.org

This week thousands of women gathered in Portland, Ore., for the Grace Hopper Celebration, the world's largest technical conference for women and computing. High-tech companies are hiring, but there aren't nearly enough women to meet the demand.
Kate Schmalzried, a graduate student at Stanford, recalls one of her very first classes at the university — Computer Science 106A.
"That was really a good introduction to women in tech — there weren't many women in the class," she says, chuckling. "I distinctly remember being the only girl in my section."

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Will future computers be able to rewire themselves? From Science Daily

ScienceDaily (Oct. 16, 2011) — Scientists at Northwestern University have developed a new nanomaterial that can "steer" electrical currents. The development could lead to a computer that can simply reconfigure its internal wiring and become an entirely different device, based on changing needs.

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As electronic devices are built smaller and smaller, the materials from which the circuits are constructed begin to lose their properties and begin to be controlled by quantum mechanical phenomena. Reaching this physical barrier, many scientists have begun building circuits into multiple dimensions, such as stacking components on top of one another.

The Northwestern team has taken a fundamentally different approach. They have made reconfigurable electronic materials: materials that can rearrange themselves to meet different computational needs at different times.

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