1. Speed-Reading DNA Inches Closer:
For DNA sequencing to become a routine part of patient care, it needs to become cheaper and faster. A company called Oxford Nanopore hopes to bring down both the cost and the time required for sequencing using a technique called nanopore sequencing. The company has now made an important demonstration of its technology: for the first time, researchers were able to identify DNA bases with near total accuracy. In addition to identifying the four bases of DNA, the technique can also detect a modified version of one of the bases, which may be responsible for causing cancer and other diseases.
2. Cheap Hydrogen from Scraps:
It sounds almost too good to be true: add a few bugs to food scraps and waste water to generate clean hydrogen fuel. But over the past few years, researchers have been gradually working toward this promising scheme for producing hydrogen.
Now, with the help of an unassuming stainless-steel brush, microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) have taken another step forward. The steel brush can be used to replace the expensive platinum normally employed in the electrolysis cell's cathode, slashing costs by more than 80 percent.
3. Face Recognition: Clever or Just Plain Creepy?
(New photo programs from Apple and Google include revolutionary face-spotting technology.)
Face recognition was one of those brilliant but technically iffy and ethically tricky counterterrorism technologies deployed as a result of the September 11 attacks. The idea was to automatically screen out terrorists as they walked through security checkpoints--only it didn't work out that way: at a test in Tampa, for example, airport employees were correctly identified just 53 percent of the time. Civil-liberties groups also raised concerns about false positives--people being mistakenly identified as terrorists, and possibly arrested, just because of their looks. And so, without a demonstratable benefit, face recognition largely dropped off the public's radar.
4. George Whitesides has created a cheap, easy-to-use diagnostic test out of paper:
Color change: Paper tests, such as those shown here, could make it possible to diagnose a range of diseases quickly and cheaply. A small drop of liquid, such as blood or urine, wicks in through the corner or back of the paper and passes through channels to special testing zones. Substances in these zones react with specific chemicals in the sample to indicate different conditions; results show up as varying colors. These tests are small, simple, and inexpensive.
5. Intelligent Software Assistant :
( Adam Cheyer is leading the design of powerful software that acts as a personal aide.)
Search is the gateway to the Internet for most people; for many of us, it has become second nature to distill a task into a set of keywords that will lead to the required tools and information. But Adam Cheyer, cofounder of Silicon Valley startup Siri, envisions a new way for people to interact with the services available on the Internet: a "do engine" rather than a search engine. Siri is working on virtual personal-assistant software, which would help users complete tasks rather than just collect information.
![[Valid Atom 1.0]](valid-atom.png "Validate my Atom 1.0 feed")
