Computers can be great at helping you accomplish things faster, but that effect really breaks down when you start trying to use computers to help you accomplish, like, forty million things at the same time, also known as multitasking. Computers can multitask on their own, but can they help you multitask out there in the real world? Brainput, a project spearheaded by MIT researcher Erin Treacy Solovey, strives to do this by monitoring your brainwaves and offloading some of the work you’re trying to multitask to computers when it notices you’re starting to freak out a bit.

We all want self-driving cars, smart traffic systems, and more awesomely automated things of all kinds. Of course, before we can really use or implement any of these things, we have to test them. A lot. The more useful and awesome automation is going to be, the more dangerous it might be if it goes wrong. Google has already had some issues finding a way to legally test their self-driving cars. Fortunately, there will soon be a place for all that. The city of Hobbs in New Mexico is going to be the site of a billion dollar ghost town, where automation can run its course without risking the lives of any citizens.

At the moment, your hard drives are all painstakingly manufactured, a process which is highly centralized. That’s why things like natural disasters can drive up hard drive prices for years. In the future, however, this might not be the case.  A breakthrough by researchers at University of Leeds in the UK and the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology might lead to growable hard drives through the use of bacteria that eat iron and turn it into magnetite.

Though we’ve recently experienced a wave of Kickstarter funding famous video game legends and super neat gadgets, there is a wealth of other corners of the world that Kickstarter hasn’t impacted in a profound way just yet. Next up: Music. Amanda Palmer, formerly of The Dresden Dolls, and the wife of Neil Gaiman, has taken to Kickstarter for her new band’s new album, and believes Kickstarter is future of music.

As many of us have noticed, Apple has been cutting down on optical media over the years. From their portable devices using internal memory, to their MacBook Air dropping the optical drive entirely, to offering their newer operating systems as downloads or data on a flash drive, Apple has been trying to cut out the use of optical media. Now, it seems Microsoft will halfheartedly join the party, as Windows 8 will be dropping DVD playback. If you really, really need DVD playback on your Windows 8 machine, however, there are a few simple alternatives.

With amount of components we can cram on a chip slowly reaching its physical limit, quantum has become the next big thing that could revolutionize the computing world. IBM is even on the cusp of building actual quantum computer protoypes. But what good is any of that if we don’t have a quantum Internet? Fortunately, we do. A team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics have just established the first working quantum network.

Considering that cellphone ownership in the U.S. has pretty much become the rule instead of the exception, you might expect that pay phones would die out entirely. It looks like they may, but not in the way you might expect. As part of a pilot program in New York City, 250 pay phones are going to be removed, but something will be put in their place: 32″ ad-supported touch screens, complete with Internet access for email, Wi-Fi hotspots for device use, and cameras for Skyping and what-have-you. Sounds a little better than holding a filthy piece of plastic up to your mouth, doesn’t it?

There have been rumors for a while, but now it’s official: Google is working on a real-life heads-up display in the form of Internet-enabled smart glasses and calling the endeavor “Project Glass.” Just as you’d imagine, the glasses aim to bring the web to you by overlaying an interface on your daily life and allowing you to interact with it via voice and eye movement. Aside from the confirmation that this is a project in development and a optimistic little “look how awesome this will be” video, there’s not much more information available. Of course, that really just means there is plenty of room for your imagination to run wild.

All you dumbphone users out there, you are soon to be in the minority. The market share of dumbphones, or “feature phones” as they are sometimes called, has been under attack from smartphones for a while now, and it seems like the scales are just about to tip. According to Nielsen, 49.7% of U.S. cellphone owners had smartphones as of February, and considering the steady growth of the smartphone share, it’s pretty likely we’ve picked up that extra .3% now that we’re well into March.

The combination of a username and password seems like an inextricable part of using a secured computer. Sure, you can use biometrics, but username and password just seems like the most natural way to identify and authorize users without the bulk of extra, expensive, and specialized equipment. That being the case, it has become second nature to most of us, but is it really natural at all? Memorizing passwords, especially “strong” ones, involves remembering long, arbitrary strings of seemingly random numbers and characters, hardly natural. That’s why DARPA has undertaken an initiative to eliminate passwords altogether and instead identify users in the background, as they work, by paying very close attention to the idiosyncratic way they type.