23andMe slashes price on personal genetics test
September 9, 2008
23andMe Inc. has cut the price of its genetic makeup test for predicting health risks from $999 to $399, thanks to next-generation DNA analysis chips.
science + technology news
24-hour chip design cycle called possible
August 8, 2001
A new “chip-in-a-day” method could cut system-on-chip design time from months to 24 hours.The Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) claims the method be two to three orders of magnitude more efficient in power and area than previous architectures.
Bob Brodersen, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and BWRC’s scientific director, said the center’s methodology could result in “much faster transitioning of really… read more
25 leading-edge IT research projects
April 21, 2008
Cutting-edge university IT research projects include exploiting terahertz radiation for computers that would run a thousand times faster, a hybrid material combining magnetic components and computer logic operations for faster and more compact machines, and mapping the entire Internet.
$25 million prize for greenhouse gas removal
February 12, 2007
A prize of $25 million for anyone who can come up with a system for removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere was launched on Friday.
It calls for devises a system to remove a “significant amount” of greenhouse gases — equivalent to 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide or more — every year from the atmosphere for at least a decade.
It is the biggest prize in history,… read more
25% of US car accidents due to using gadgets
July 12, 2011
Driving distractions such as cell phones and other electronic devices cause as much as 25% of all U.S. car accidents, researchers at the Governors Highway Safety Association have found, WinBETA notes.
A major finding was that being distracted was the cause of 15 to 25% of all accidents, ranging from minor property damage to death.
Their findings suggest that distracted driving accidents be reported… read more
26 Most Fascinating Entrepreneurs
March 27, 2005
Ray Kurzweil has been named to Inc. magazine’s “26 Most Fascinating Entrepreneurs” list “because he is Edison’s rightful heir.”
Kurzweil in number 8 in Inc.’s slide show profiling innovative entrepreneurs, joining Richard Branson, Martha Stewart, Trip Hawkins, Michael Dell, and others.
“Kurzweil’s businesses rely on one basic theme: pattern recognition,” the Inc. slide show explains. “‘I gather as much data as I can to develop patterns at every… read more
3 Americans Share Nobel for Medicine
October 6, 2009
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded Monday to three American scientists who solved a longstanding puzzle involving telomeres (the ends of chromosomes, counting off the cell’s allotted span of life), with importance to aging and cancer.
$3 Microscope Plugs into Cell Phones
May 12, 2010
UCLA researchers have developed a prototype of a small digital microscope without a lens that costs just a few dollars.
It can plug into a cell phone and perform basic medical diagnostics that would ordinarily require expensive lab equipment.
The device can generate blood counts and identify disease cells and bacteria from simple images sent through a USB cord to a cell phone that uses software… read more
$3 million grant awarded to build ‘digital matter’
August 10, 2008
Research in diamond mechanosynthesis (DMS) — building diamond nanostructures atom by atom using scanning probe microscopy — just received a major boost with a $3 million grant from the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, awarded to Professor Philip Moriarty at the University of Nottingham for a “Digital Matter” project, the Nanofactory Collaboration plans to announce Monday.
The… read more
3,000 Images Combine for Stunning Milky Way Portrait
November 3, 2009
A new 648-megapixel panoramic image of the full night sky, melded together from 3,000 individual photographs with mathematical models, shows stars 1,000 times fainter than the human eye can see, as well as hundreds of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae.
IBM’s Zurich Research Lab has developed an avatar to allow doctors to visualize patient medical records.
The Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine (ASME) allows a doctor to click on a particular part of the computer avatar “body” to trigger a search of medical records and instantly see all the available medical history and information related to that patient’s problem area, including text entries, lab results and medical… read more
3-D avatars could put you in two places at once
April 15, 2011
In their new book, Infinite Reality, Dr. Jim Blascovich and Dr. Jerry Bailenson insist that 3-D conferences with avatars are nigh because consumer technology has suddenly caught up with the work going on in virtual-reality laboratories in academia.
These psychologists point to three developments in the past year: the Microsoft Kinect tracking system for the Xbox, the Nintendo 3DS gaming device, and the triumph on “Jeopardy!”… read more
3-D cameras for cellphones
January 6, 2012
Imagine a high-quality 3-D camera that provides more-accurate depth information than the Microsoft Kinect, has a greater range, and works under all lighting conditions — but is so small, cheap and power-efficient that it could be incorporated into a cellphone at very little extra cost.
That’s the promise of recent work by Vivek Goyal, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, and… read more
3-D chips grow up
January 2, 2012
Chipmakers are pursuing a pair of innovations in performance and power consumption by building up and into the third dimension at the level of both the individual transistor and the full microchip.
In 2012, the chip will start to become the cube.
3-D cloaking achieved for visible light
May 19, 2011
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Center for Functional Nanostructures (CFN) researchers have created the first 3-D invisibility cloak for ordinary (non-polarized) visible light, limited at this time to the 700 nm. (red) range.
Cloaking was first developed, in 2006, for the microwave range, and has more recently been extended to the infrared (IR) range. In 2010, CFN researchers presented the first 3-D… read more