Author: idmagazine

Tech media often provide incomplete and potentially misleading reporting on patent disputes and “trolls,” according to research conducted for the Center for Intellectual Property Understanding. In an analysis of 127 randomly selected articles that used the term “patent infringement” and were published in business, technology and general news publications last year, nearly half of the articles were revealed to be op-ed or trend pieces. Such stories typically craft a narrative instead of reporting on a specific patent case or development. “Report: Patterns in Media Coverage of Patent Disputes,” found: 57 percent of case coverage of patent infringement in tech...

A drone technology advance that was once unimaginable. A customizable, add-on system for wheelchairs. And yes—a FitBit for pigs. These are among the inventions by undergraduate and graduate students who won the 2017 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, honoring promising collegiate inventors around the country. The prize is open to teams of undergraduate students and individual graduate students with inventions in categories that represent key economic sectors: health care, transportation, food and agriculture, and consumer devices. The winners and their inventions Apoorva Murarka invented an electrostatic transducer that replaces larger magnet and coil systems found in devices today using nanotechnology. About 1/1,000th the width of human...