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Skylar Tibbits makes things that assemble themselves, with potential large-scale applications from self-adjusting water pipes to self-assembling structures in space. At his recently founded Self-Assembly Lab at MIT, he's pioneering 4D printing -- using smart materials to make objects that change shape and evolve. Here, he explains how 4D printing works, and describes his journey from architect to artist to leading inventor of self-assembly technology.

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2013 was an extraordinary year for those of us who are interested in privacy and data protection. What was previously seen as the domain of paranoid nitpickers has exploded into the public consciousness, shaking international ties and making many people re-evaluate how they live their lives online.

But it would be a mistake to see 2013 purely in terms of Edward Snowden and his revelations.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_E43zz3hnk&w=547&h=338]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_E43zz3hnk

In the developing world, would-be entrepreneurs are easily able to get microloans. But getting access to formal financial institutions -- the kind that give large-scale loans -- well, that’s much more difficult. Because 70% of those who start small businesses simply don’t have a financial identity.

TED Fellow Shivani Siroya has created a tool to help by allowing anyone with a cell phone to build a financial track record.

The newly-launched Jolla smartphone, made by a crew of mostly ex-Nokia(s nok) employees, is now available for purchase by people in the EU, Norway and Switzerland through the firm's new online shop. This will be the third batch of €399 ($546) Jolla handsets to go on sale, with the last one having been largely aimed at patriotic Finns…

The data analytics market is starting to boom. Hadoop distributions from big data companies like Cloudera have matured and are becoming more useful as they allow for better ways to perform real-time data processing by using cheap commodity hardware in clusters to spread data and then retrieve it for analysis. Customers are building data hubs that use Hadoop with data analytics on top to provide a cheaper alternative to data warehouse technologies.

Yahoo has introduced a new cleaner style of photo embeds today.  Just about everyone has used content from Flickr in various ways at some point, especially from its great store of Creative Commons licensed images. Now, Flickr can capitalize on the network effect of people seeing all of those images off of its site with a new cleaner style.

The realization that embeds help spread influence and drive traffic back to a site or service has struck every major service over the past few years.

Facebook confirmed Tuesday that users will begin seeing video advertisements play automatically in their News Feeds this week.

"Marketers will be able to use this new format to tell their stories to a large number of people on Facebook in a short amount of time — with high-quality sight, sound and motion," the company said on its blog. "This approach will continue to improve the quality of ads that you see in News Feed."

Google has given us a sneak peek at which gadgets and apps people in the U.S. have been searching for this past year.

Microsoft is set to close on a deal to purchase the vast majority of Nokia's handset business in the first quarter of 2014. The deal will see the software giant become a smartphone OEM overnight, helping its push into the hardware business.

However, the choice to purchase Nokia's Lumia line of smartphones may have been slightly less voluntary, and a bit more 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6THrxSjNH2A&w=547&h=308]

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Speaking as someone who's considered spending nearly $1,000 on a full Stormtrooper costume multiple times, I'm very interested in a new crowdfunding project designed to build and mass produce a complete Iron Man suit with electronic features like an automatic sliding faceplate. The Iron Man Mark III project from Iron Man Factory, which must violate at least 80 licensing agreements, also just looks so damn cool that I'm going to hope beyond hope it somehow gets made.