In a mental flash he had pictured a strand of DNA threading its way through a microscopic pore.
Twenty-five years later the idea is now being commercialized as a gene sequencing machine that's no larger than a smartphone and
and gets its power from a USB port on a computer. Unlike other commercial sequencing machines
About 90 percent of DNA data is produced on sequencing machines from a single company Illumina of San diego (see 50 Smartest Companies:
His flash of insight was that a molecule passing through one of these pores especially a long molecule like DNA would continuously change the blob's electrical properties.
When it first announced the Minion in 2012 expectations soared off the charts (see Why a Portable DNA Device Could Yield Better Data.
if the sequencer was vaporware. By this spring Oxford had worked the bugs out enough at any rate to start mailing out beta versions of the nanopore sequencer to 500 hand-picked labs it is collaborating with.
Even with a supercomputer the puzzle often can't be solved there can be repeated too many sequences
#Intel Says Laptops and Tablets with 3-D Vision Are Coming Soon Laptops with 3-D sensors in place of conventional webcams will go on sale before the end of this year according to chip maker Intel
which is providing the sensing technology to manufacturers. And tablets with 3-D sensors will hit the market in 2015 the company said at its annual developers conference in San francisco on Wednesday.
Intel first announced its 3-D sensing technology at the Consumer electronics Show in January (see Intel s 3-D Camera Heads to Laptops and Tablets.
It has developed two different types of depth sensor. One is designed for use in place of a front-facing webcam to sense human movement such as gestures.
The other is designed for use on the back of a device to scan objects as far as four meters away.
Both sensors allow a device to capture the color and 3-D shape of a scene making it possible for a computer to recognize gestures
Intel is working with software companies to develop applications that use the technology. In the next few weeks the chip maker will release free software that any software developer can use to build apps for the sensors.
Partners already working with Intel include Microsoft s Skype unit the movie and gaming studio Dreamworks and the 3-D design company Autodesk according to Achin Bhowmik general manager for Intel s
perceptual computing business unit. None of those partners showed off what they re working on at the event this week.
But Intel showed several demonstrations of its own. One developed with a startup called Volumental lets you snap a 3-D photo of your foot to get an accurate shoe size measurement something that could help with online shopping.
Another demonstration showed how a 3-D sensor could measure the dimensions of a sofa in a store
Bhowmik also showed how data from a tablet s 3-D sensor can be used to build very accurate augmented reality games where a virtual character viewed on a device s screen integrates into the real environment.
As the tablet showing the character was moved it stayed perched on the tabletop and even disappeared behind occluding objects.
Intel also showed how the front-facing 3-D sensors can be used to recognize gestures to play games on a laptop
Those demonstrations were reminiscent of Microsoft s Kinect sensor for its Xbox gaming console which introduced gamers to depth sensing
Microsoft launched a version of Kinect aimed at Windows PCS in 2012 and significantly upgraded its depth-sensing technology in 2013
but Kinect devices are too large to fit inside a laptop or tablet. Some of Intel s demos were rough around the edges suggesting that their compact sensors are less accurate than the larger ones of Microsoft.
However Bhowmik said that any such glitches would be unnoticeable in the fully polished apps that will appear on commercial devices.
Intel s two sensors work in slightly different ways. The front sensor calculates the position of objects by observing how they distort an invisible pattern of infrared light by a tiny projector in the sensor.
Intel s new sensors are roughly the same size as the camera components used in existing devices says Bhowmik.
On Monday Dell announced that the sensors will appear later this year in its Venue 8 7000 tablet which is only six millimeters thick thinner than any other tablet on the market t
however, this doesn mean you can actually bend the screen. As with other devices featuring flexible displays,
such as those from LG and Samsung, the display has been laminated onto a stiff pane, fixing it in place to prevent the damage that would come from repeated flexing.
Even so, the appearance of the first few flexible screens in commercial devices may be a sign of things to Come in fact
fully flexible electronic gadgetsith full-color displays that wrap around a wrist or fold upay be just a few years away,
In a conventional LCD display the liquid crystals within the pixels need to be positioned perfectly between two sheets of glass.
These sheets cannot be bent without misaligning the pixels. According to Max Mcdaniel chief marketing officer for Applied materials, a company whose equipment is used to make displays,
is also extremely difficult to make a flexible backlighthe component needed to illuminate LCD pixels.
So the screen in the Apple Watch is almost certainly an OLED display. Rather than the pixels being illuminated by a backlight,
each pixel glows on its own, like a minuscule light bulb. Manufacturers can already make OLED displays flexible.
They first laminate a sheet of plastic to glass and then deposit the materials for the pixels and the electronics on top of both.
The glass stabilizes the manufacturing process and afterwards the plastic, together with display and electronic components, is lifted off the glass.
Manufacturers have known how to do this for years. Samsung showed off a fully FLEXIBLE OLED display in 2013.
The tricky part is making sure the devices are durable. OLED pixels can be destroyed by even trace amounts of water vapor and oxygen,
so you have to seal the display within robust, high-quality, flexible materials. This is costly, and there are challenges with ensuring that the seal survives being bent hundreds or thousands of times over the lifetime of a device.
The parts within a flexible display also need to survive being bent. This is tricky because different layershe battery
the electronics, and the touch componentsend to be stacked, and the innermost layers have to bend more than the outermost ones.
Novel materials for touch screens that use flexible nanomaterials could also help. One patent application suggests Apple is already looking at this issue.
while keeping the electronics lined up properly with the pixels they control. Making a flexible battery is another challenge.
While the lithium-polymer batteries used in smartphones today are somewhat flexible they can survive being bent many times.
and which also have the potential to store much more energy than conventional lithium-ion batteries (see onger-Lasting Battery Is Being tested for Wearable devices.
and Facebook Data Datacoup one of the first companies to offer people money in exchange for their personal data has closed finished a trial of its service
and is now opening it to anyone (see Sell Your Personal data for $8 a Month).
Datacoup will pay up to $10 for access to your social network accounts credit card transaction records and other personal information and will gleaned sell insights from that data to companies looking for information on consumer behavior.
Talks are in progress with major consumer brands and financial institutions says Matt Hogan CEO of the startup.
Whether an individual user gets the full $10 a month or not depends on which streams of data he s willing to share.
Options include debit card and credit card transactions and data from Facebook Twitter and Linkedin. Datacoup won t provide raw data to companies.
Instead it will provide results of analyses performed on that data. For example a company might ask Datacoup to provide information on how often women in a certain age group mention coffee on Facebook on the same day they use their credit card in a coffee shop.
Donald Waldman a professor of economics at the University of Colorado says services like Datacoup may provide useful insights about the perceived value of privacy.
The fact that people do value their information seems obvious but the question is how much do they value it?
Data streams like those that Datacoup collects could turn out to be worth more than $10 a month.
Tens of thousands of people already receive $100 a month from a company called Luth Research in return for very detailed data from their smartphones tablets
Hogan expects the price that Datacoup offers people for their data to change as his company assesses the supply of customer information
and demand from companies willing to pay for analyses of that data. The market will decide he says s
The Michigan State university researchers developed software that makes it feasible to accurately match fingerprints of children under five with off-the-shelf equipment.
but the patient-identifying system has broader applications says Anil Jain a distinguished professor at Michigan State university s Computer science and Engineering Department and coauthor of the paper.
The Michigan State university researchers needed to process images taken from fingerprint sensors using software to compensate for the small size of the children s fingerprints as well as their sometimes wet and oily skin.
In a trial in Benin West Africa the software successfully matched about 70 percent compared to 98 percent in another test in Lansing Michigan.
#Google Launches Effort to Build Its Own Quantum computer Google is about to begin designing and building hardware for a quantum computer a type of machine that can exploit quantum physics to solve problems that would take a conventional computer millions of years.
Since 2009 Google has been working with controversial startup D-Wave Systems which claims to make the first commercial quantum computer.
And last year Google purchased one of D-Wave s machines. But independent tests published earlier this year found no evidence that D-Wave s computer uses quantum physics to solve problems more efficiently than a conventional machine.
Now John Martinis a professor at University of California Santa barbara has joined Google to establish a new quantum hardware lab near the university.
He will try to make his own versions of the kind of chip inside A d-Wave machine.
and make the qubits in a different way says Martinis of his effort to improve on D-Wave s hardware.
Martinis has taken a joint position with Google and UCSB that will allow him to continue his own research at the university.
Quantum computers could be immensely faster than any existing computer at certain problems. That s because qubits working together can use the quirks of quantum mechanics to quickly discard incorrect paths to a solution
Since showing off its first machine in 2007 D-Wave has irritated academic researchers by making claims for its computers without providing the evidence its critics say is needed to back them up.
Larger systems of such qubits could be configured to run just about any kind of algorithm depending on the problem at hand much like a conventional computer.
It can only run a specific algorithm used for a specific kind of problem that requires selecting the best option in a situation with many competing requirements for example determining the most efficient delivery route around a city.
It concluded that in the tests run on the computer there was no evidence of quantum speedup.
Without that critics say D-Wave is nothing more than an overhyped and rather weird conventional computer.
Martinis s work on D-Wave s machine led him into talks with Google and to his new position.
However Google has given not up on D-Wave. In an online statement the leader of Google s quantum research said that the two companies will continue to work together
and that Google S d-Wave computer will be upgraded with a new 1000 qubit processor when it becomes available e
#Germany and Canada Are Building Water Splitters to Store Energy Germany which has come to rely heavily on wind
Over the last few decades we ve grown beyond the industrial economy to the IT economy and the Internet economy each
It s an emerging type of economic environment arising from the digitization of fast-growing multilayered highly interactive real-time connections among people devices and businesses.#
Social networks let billions of people collaborate in a variety of ways. Meanwhile business networks have enabled new types of frictionless commerce.
The numbers of people-to-people connections##business networks social networks##they ve all been growing over the past 10 years says Dinesh Sharma SAP s vice president of marketing for the Internet of things.
Now businesses processes data and things##everything###can be connected in a network. That is transforming everything.
But while social mobile and cloud computing helped set the groundwork for the Networked Economy it s important for businesses to understand that this revolutionary economic environment goes far beyond those technologies creating unprecedented new opportunities for collaboration and customization.
Google Waze an app allowing drivers to share local real-time traffic and road information; and Uber a mobile app that connects people seeking taxicabs or ridesharing services.
A business looking to purchase say a particular machine part can now turn to the ultimate consumer marketplace##ebay.
Now technology can easily extend a search via a consumer network like ebay. That dramatically increases the number of choices available
As the first generation of digital natives##people who have known never the world without computers
and the Internet##millennials are natural networkers. They re completely at home in highly connected collaborative spaces like those underlying the Networked Economy.
In 2011 with SAP s help the port developed a cloud-based system to better coordinate both land-side and port-side traffic based on a steady stream of incoming data.
You can use an ipad to tap between different realistic-looking fabric options that change via an overhead projector.
and uses software to segment the resulting 3-D model into pieces, similar to the way in
ük re-registers the real couch location with Vizera server; and if I were to move the carefully positioned throw pillow,
#A Headset Meant to Make Augmented reality Less of a Gimmick Andrew Maimone thinks augmented reality hasn been much more than a gimmick so far.
Maimone, a Phd student at the University of North carolina at Chapel hill, is developing a new kind of head-worn display that could make augmented reality hereby digital objects
While it possible to use a smartphone or tablet to, for example, conjure a virtual character
and place it onto a real world table viewed on a smartphone screen, this just sn very compellingsays Maimone. he experience doesn occur in one own vision,
Together with three other researchers from the University of North carolina and two from Nvidia Research
Maimone device, called a Pinlight Display, does not use conventional optical components. It replaces these with an array of bright dots dubbed pinlights. transparent display panel is placed between the pinlights
and form the perceived image, says Maimone. ince the light rays that hit each display pixel come from the same direction,
so the team has compensated for this by performing some image manipulation in software. ne could think of Pinlight Displays as exploiting how the eye sees an image that is out of focus,
says Maimone. he resulting hardware configuration is very simplehere are no reflective, refractive, or diffractive elementso we do not run into the trade-off between form factor
rather than something that exists only on external screens. There may be other potential benefits to the team approach. ince part of the image formation process takes place in software,
we can adjust parameters such as eye separation and focus dynamically, says Maimone. Therefore we can imagine incorporating the pinlights into the corrective lenses
or ordinary glasses, creating a display that looks like ordinary glasses with the addition of an LCD panel.
Anyone paying attention knows that his or her Web searches, Facebook feeds, and other online activity isn always safee it from the prying eyes of the NSA
or those of the companies providing a social networking service. While a substantial chunk of the populace finds all this tracking creepy and invasive,
though, there a demographic that collectively shrugs at the notion of being mined for data. Some startups hope to exploit this by buying access to your Web browsing
and banking data (see ell Your Personal data for $8 a Month. Luth Research, a San diego company
is now offering companies an unprecedented window into the private digital domains of tens of thousands of people who have agreed to let much of what they do on a smartphone, tablet,
or PC be tracked for a $100 a month. Luth Q Intelligenceservice collects and analyzes data from preselected participantsphones and computers via a virtual private network connection.
Data is routed through the company servers where it is collected and analyzed for trends. The company doesn view the contents of messages,
but what it does gather includes where smartphone users are given at any moment, what websites they are visiting,
what queries they are feeding into Google, and how often they check Twitter. The program participants are asked also to answer questions about their behavior.
Luth current and former clients include Subway, Microsoft, Walmart, the San diego padres, Nickelodeon, and Netflix. The information it collects can help companies decide where to spend advertising dollars.
Advertisers want better targeting because click-through rates for online ads now stands at less than. 01 percent.
Luth did a project for Ford motor company this yearord wanted to better understand customersath to purchase.
The company rounded up research subjects in the market for a car and then tracked the journey they took from researching to finally buying.
A customer might drive to a dealership, browse other automakerswebsites while there, and research financing options later.
If it turns out that consumer review sites are a prominent part of the process, for instance,
partnering with the sites, and buying ads there. Ultimately, Luth found that by the time a customer actually visits a car manufacturer website,
theye most likely ready to buy a car. hat a big deal, says the company senior executive for marketing,
But as many as 20,000 PC users and 6, 000 smartphone users are given, at any time,
Luth hawks that data to the highest bidder. Wu says her company approach is especially valuable
Roseanne Luth, says participants can uninstall the software anytime they want (though theyl stop earning any money at that point.
In a survey of 1, 100 smartphone users by Punchtab, an advertising company, in April 27 percent of respondents said they would allow themselves to be tracked by retailers on mobile devices
Last month, Verizon announced a new loyalty program for its 100 million U s. wireless customers,
and Web browsing behavior to be tracked and sold to marketers. This kind of tracking will only get more sophisticated.
Luth says it is working on a program that will incorporate the audio in a person environment with the data being collected to try to determine what theye doing.
#U s. Warrants for Overseas Data Trample Foreign Privacy Laws U s. Internet companies and indeed all multinationals with a presence in the United states appear to be trapped between the data access requirements of U s. law enforcement agencies
Microsoft is involved in ongoing litigation against a search warrant issued in December 2013 by a U s. magistrate authorizing the search
and seizure of e-mail accounts hosted by Microsoft. The company objected to the warrant with regard to data stored at its data center in Ireland claiming that U s. courts are authorized not to issue warrants for extraterritorial searches.
Microsoft also argued that if it turned over data stored abroad to the U s. government it would be more difficult for the company to resist requests by foreign governments for data stored in the U s
. But on April 25 the magistrate judge who issued the warrant found in favor of the government.
On July 28 Judge Loretta A. Preska of the U s. District court for the Southern District of New york affirmed that decision.
Microsoft argues that it does since it directs the company to produce information stored outside the United states. The government's argument is that
because Microsoft is subject to U s. jurisdiction it must turn over data it controls regardless of where the data is stored.
This may be the first case in which a company has opposed formally a U s. search warrant concerning data stored abroad.
But it is not surprising that other major companies (like Apple AT&T and Verizon) have supported publicly Microsoft's position.
The revelations of Edward Snowden have put them all under increasing pressure to resist U s. requests for data access.
The disclosures have intensified also their awareness of conflicts between foreign privacy legislation and the demands of U s. law enforcement.
Dozens of countries around the world grant broad privacy protection to data processed for commercial purposes (the U s. is one of the few that do not.
They generally do not allow data to be transferred to foreign authorities without the approval of local regulators.
because they are subject to U s. data access requests. For example in June the German government cancelled a contract with Verizon for Internet services.
Many more companies have a commercial incentive to contest these cross-border requests for data. The issues raised in the Microsoft case are relevant to all companies subject to U s. jurisdiction not just those in the Internet sector including companies based abroad but active in the U s. market.
Microsoft has stated that it will appeal Judge Preska's decision and sources in the U s. legal community tell me that the case could eventually go all the way to the U s. Supreme court
. But while Microsoft s argument that the case has major policy implications is compelling the U s. government's position may be difficult to overcome under the current state of the law.
What is disappointing about the discussion in this case so far is that it concentrates on the respective interests of companies and law enforcement.
The privacy expectations of the Internet users whose data may be accessed have received little attention. The best way to resolve this conflict would be to make changes to U s. legislation that balance the interests of companies and law enforcement while taking the privacy expectations of individuals into account.
However the current gridlock in Washington seems to make that impossible. An international treaty being negotiated between the United states
and the E u. known as the Umbrella Agreement might provide some relief by establishing formal rules about data sharing.
And the privacy of individuals whose data is held by companies with a U s. presence will remain largely unconsidered.
Christopher Kuner is senior privacy counsel with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Brussels and associate professor of data protection law at the University of Copenhagen n
#Wireless Power for Minuscule Medical Implants Medical implants like pacemakers deep brain stimulators and cochlear implants could someday be joined by still more bioelectronic gadgets devices that regulate insulin levels control
and existing wireless methods such as those used for cochlear implants won t work with devices buried deep in the body.
They call the technique midfield wireless powering (as opposed to near-field which refers to the exponentially decaying radiation and far-field
Morris Kesler vice president of research and development at Witricity a Massachusetts-based company that develops wireless powering systems says Poon s technique would be particularly useful for powering tiny devices.
#How to Break Cryptography With Your Bare Hands With enough technical savvy, simply touching a laptop can suffice to extract the cryptographic keys used to secure data stored on it.
The trick is based on the fact that the roundelectrical potential in many computers fluctuates according to the computation that is being performed by its processorncluding the computations that take place
when cryptographic software operates to decrypt data using a secret key. Measuring the electrical potential leaked to your skin
when you touch the metal chassis of such laptops, and analyzing that signal using sophisticated software,
can be enough to determine the keys stored within, says Eran Tromer, a computer security expert at Tel aviv University.
but it was demonstrated Tuesday at a cryptography conference in Santa barbara, California. A signal can be picked up by touching exposed metal on a computerchassis with a plain wire.
Or that wire can make contact anywhere on the body of an attacker touching the computer with a bare hand (sweaty hands work best.
The ground signal can also be measured by fastening an alligator clip at the far end of an Ethernet, VGA,
or USB cable attached to the computer, or even wirelessly with sensitive voltage-detection equipment.
The catch is that contact must be made as data is unlocked with a keyuring decryption of a folder or an e-mail message, for instance.
The work contributes to a growing body of evidence that regardless of the software protections people place on computers
that analyzing the power consumption of a computer can reveal cryptographic keys. The good news is that analyzing subtle trends in power usage can also reveal
whether a computer is being attacked (see iny Changes in Energy use Could Mean Your Computer Is Under attack. verall,
there are likely tens of undiscovered hardware-related side channelsnd we are likely going to hear more from these authors
Tromer says he doesn know of anybody performing a ground-potential attack to steal real data
but he has notified cryptography software makers. It is possible to avoid such attacks by adding random data to computations.
The developers of one popular free cryptographic software package, Gnupg, incorporated such a patch into the latest version of their software a
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
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