Advanced Technology

iPad with a Samsung

2012-08-17T05:34:00.000-07:00

You just know it's an iPad, right?

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

The Apple-Samsung trial has been such a show that it has invaded my head in the same way as the first time I learned dwarf tossing was an entertainment in places like France and Canada.

Could anyone really have wandered into Best Buy and confused a Samsung Galaxy Tab with aniPad, as has been suggested?

While some began to pulsate at rumors that many, many people had exchanged their Galaxy Tabs for iPads at Best Buy, a study suggested that only 9 percent of people who returned a Samsung product at Best Buy did so in order to exchange it for an iPad.

Even then, that doesn't mean that they thought they'd bought an iPad in the first place. Perhaps they'd just changed their minds.

So, driving back from something very moving today, I saw a Best Buy lurking in the distance and thought I'd wander in.

I decided to be a naive customer. Regular readers will know that this isn't very hard for me.

I wandered into the store and sloped toward a large Apple logo. This was full of laptops but no iPads. A kind Best Buy operative explained that the iPads had their own little display a little further along.

Indeed, there were four or five iPads, pinned to a desk, so that I wouldn't steal them. Or, perhaps, so that I couldn't test how heavy they are. The display was so much more dominant than for any of the other tablets.

I overheard a Best Buy operative talking to a keen customer about the iPad: "Here, we call it the large iPhone," he said, which was curious. She was curious, too. She asked if she could make calls on it.

Best Buy in retreat (pictures)

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Still, after I did a little finger-tapping on one of the screens, another blue-shirted man came over and wondered if I had questions. Did I ever. I asked if this iPad was the same as a Samsung Galaxy Tab. When you're naive, you're not going to be subtle.

Oscar -- that wasn't his name (why get him into trouble?) -- told me: "Yes."

"Really?" I replied, a little bemused. "There's no difference?"

"They do the same thing," Oscar clarified.

"But aren't they identical?" I insisted.

"Oh, no," he said. "Look, the design's slightly different."

And, indeed, to my eyes, it did seem different enough. I couldn't help going back to the words of the great English Judge Colin Birss, who dismissed Apple's plaintive puppy eyes by saying that Samsung's products are "not as cool" as Apple's.

The Galaxy Tab looked like it had employed a personal shopper but dressed in too much of a hurry. Perhaps I'm too used to seeing an iPad around the world, but there was no way I was going to confuse it with an iPad. And there is that Samsung logo on the front of the Tab, too.

"So do people come in here and confuse the two?" I asked, innocently.

"Nah," he said. "It's never happened to me or to anyone else I know here."

Still, I was not to be deterred. The trial was echoing in my ears. Perhaps he would push me onto a Galaxy Tab and tell me it was somehow the same. So I asked: "Which one should I buy?"

"That's easy," said Oscar. "The iPad."

"Why?" I asked

"It's easy to use," he said with gusto. "I bought my parents one each and they love them."

He could tell I was suspicious, so he offered me an interesting flourish: "iPads are generally for older people. For the younger people, I don't usually recommend an iPad so much. I recommend an Android."

More Technically Incorrect

He pointed toward a little Toshiba thing that looked like something that used to be made by Tandy, while I remembered a survey from last week that suggested Apple's fanboys are now predominantly over 35.

"Why would young people prefer something like that?" I wondered.

"Customization," explained Oscar.

I'm guessing Oscar was around 23. But he's a very nice 23, not surly and genuinely tried to be helpful.

That trial, though, was still bugging me. "But I heard at that trial that they're saying that the Galaxy Tab and the iPad look the same."

"Nah," he replied. "Look, they don't. In any case, they're not really fighting about the design at the trial. They're fighting about the insides."

Now that was something I didn't know.

I thanked Oscar and concluded that no reasonable, right-minded, fully-sighted human being could have meandered into this Best Buy and -- with all their faculties still functioning -- believed they had bought an iPad when they had actually bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Yes, they might have been confused while looking at ads, largely because Samsung's ads were so confusingly lifeless that if anyone looked at the product in them at all, they would surely have only given the briefest of glances.

I know that the trial will largely depend on a discussion of who said what to whom and when, of who really invented what little icon and who patented it and when and of minutiae that would bore the most hardened monk.

I know that Apple is, as always, swatting at a competitor, while trying to protect its future and nag Samsung into thinking a little, um, different. (Hey, look at that Samsung Galaxy Note thing. That's different.)

But if there really had been some massive deception perpetrated at America's Best Buys by Samsung's allegedly feline copiers, wouldn't at least Twitter have been full of wailing within a day?

Would you swap your iPhone for a Windows Phone?

2012-03-24T15:49:00.002-07:00

(Credit: Screenshot: Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)

It's the weekend, the time when you can wear your favorite sloppy shirts, stained shorts, and wedgie Skechers.

It's also the time that you can take a look at your iPhone or Android machine and see if you really love it anymore.

Microsoft, you see, believes your smartphones are baloneyphones. So this weekend, in all 14 Microsoft stores, it's holding a "Smoked by Windows Phone" challenge.

This is not an invitation for you to bring your favorite ham or bacon to the shop in order to have it perfectly sizzled. Instead, it's Microsoft's entertaining attempt to prove that Windows Phones are simply faster.

It works like this: if your phone is demonstrably faster, you get $1,000. Well, actually a "Hunger Games" Special Edition PC, worth $1,000.

If it isn't, you get the chance to swap your beloved gadget for a brand new Windows Phone. And you won't even have to sign a contract.

Well, not a phone contract, but Microsoft would like you to sign on the dotted line in order to appear in a future ad. (I have embedded an example of a previous challenge.)

iPhone 5 rumor roundup

2012-03-24T15:49:00.001-07:00

After unveiling a marginally improved iPhone 4S in 2011 instead of a radically different iPhone 5, Apple has returned to its development labs to cook up (no pun intended) the next iteration of its popular phone. In 2012, we're fairly certain that the real iPhone 5 will roll out of Apple's gates and that the device should be a bigger leap forward than the 4S was.
That's why after taking some time off at the end of last year, we've resurrected CNET's iPhone 5 rumor roundup to cover the new tidbits from 2012. So join us again in watching the rumor mill churn. We'll add to it until we get the real thing, and please let us know if we've left any gossip out.
March 23, 2012
Perhaps it'll be equipped with a new dock plug
Aside from more LTE rumors (this time coming from iMore), new iPhone 5 rumors are surmising that the upcoming device will come with a new dock plug. This time, it may be smaller to make room for the device's other components.
March 21, 2012
It might get a 4.6-inch screen
For those who have been dissatisfied with the iPhone's usual 3.5-inch screen, Reuters reported that the new iPhone may get a bigger display, as a South Korean media outlet says Apple is putting in orders with suppliers for a 4.6-inch Retina Display. This may allow the company more room to update the chips inside the new iPhone, perhaps adding the A5X, for example.
February 3, 2012
It's still going to be expensive
Citigroup analysts who met with Apple CEO Tim Cook and Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer reported that Apple did not feel the need to make cheaper phones. During the meeting, Oppenheimer suggested that the company will keep making "great products," and believed customers will still be willing to pay for them. Furthermore, the iPhone 5 is rumored to offer both LTE and TD-SCDMA, which is a 3G standard used in China.
February 3
Apple has its sights on June?
As reported by the Chinese newspaper Commercial Times, Apple may be going back to June as its go-to release month. Last time, the iPhone 4 was released in October, but rumor has it that the iPhone 5 may be coming to the Worldwide Developers Conference, which is scheduled for June 10 through the 15.

Google+ Hangouts now calling any phone

2012-03-24T15:44:00.000-07:00

Video chatting in Hangouts is busting out of Google+.
Video calls among two or more Google+ users was the big draw when Hangouts launched, but now Google has flipped the switch the allow Google+ users to make phone calls to almost any phone number, not just within the Google+ ecosystem. That means that users will be able, for example, place a voice call from their computers and reach friends or family on their land line or cell phone.
Related stories
Google Voice puts voice mail in your ICS call log
Google Voice newbies, start here
The feature is limited to outbound calls and cannot accept incoming calls to your Google+ account. It's also currently desktop-only, and isn't compatible with Google+ on mobile apps.
Calls to phone numbers in the U.S. and Canada are free, and callers can buy credit to dial out to international lines.
To place a call, click the "Invite" button in Hangouts, then the "+telephone" link. After entering the number, hit "add." The dialer currently stores one number at a time.
The Google Voice platform powers the entire operation, though the feature bears the Google+ Hangouts name. You can similarly place calls to land lines and mobile phones using Google Voice's integration into Gmail.
Calling out with Hangouts is a third high-profile experimental feature that Google has pulled into the mainstream product, along with screen-sharing and support for Google Docs.

Google calls Murdoch's piracy allegations 'nonsense'

2012-01-15T18:55:00.000-08:00

Murdoch, a Twitter user for only the past several weeks, used the service to fire a barrage of accusations Saturday night against President Obama and Google.

He accused the White House of being in the employ of "Silicon Valley paymasters." Murdoch claimed Google was profiting from advertisements sold against pirated materials. He also called the search company a "piracy leader." (Read more about Murdoch's Twitter tirade here).

In an e-mail sent to CNET on Sunday afternoon, Google responded to Murdoch's statements.

"This is just nonsense," wrote a Google spokeswoman. "Last year we took down 5 million infringing Web pages from our search results and invested more than $60 million in the fight against bad ads...We fight pirates and counterfeiters every day."

Murdoch's Twitter blast against the president and Google was triggered when the White House raised concerns about antipiracy legislation being debated in Congress. The Stop Online Piracy Act (House of Representatives) and Protect IP Act (Senate) are backed by numerous media companies, including News Corp.

Supporters say the legislation is needed to protect them from overseas sites that trade in pirated materials but aren't bound by U.S. copyright law.

A growing list of opponents, including much of the tech sector, argues the bills would threaten free speech, due process, and innovation without offering any protection against piracy.

Google said it thinks there are better methods to fighting piracy than those sought by copyright owners: "We believe, like many other tech companies," Google wrote in its statement, "that the best way to stop [pirates] is through targeted legislation that would require ad networks and payment processors--like ours--to cut off sites dedicated to piracy or counterfeiting."

sourse: news.cnet.com

Google evangelists release bible of good Android design

2012-01-15T18:54:00.000-08:00

Google doesn't reject apps from the Android Market just because they're ugly.

But that doesn't mean the company doesn't care--especially now that Matias Duarte has seized the spotlight as director of Android user experience. So, absent the banhammer, Google is trying gentler persuasion to get others besides itself to care about designs that look and work well in the Ice Cream Sandwich era.

For that reason, Google has released an Android design guide for ICS, aka Android 4.0. As my colleague Kent German observes, Google's accommodating ways up to this point have led to an inconsistent user experience and varying app quality. Perhaps this guide will lead programmers down the One True Path.

Maybe programmers should know intuitively that they must present alerts with short, direct, informal prose. Or that a long press now means select an item, not trigger a menu of actions. Perhaps, but I doubt it.

If nothing else, there's an army of new programmers jumping into mobile coding who need all the help they can get.

Programmer Dion Almaer called the Android guide "much-needed help to make sure your ice cream sandwich doesn't melt all over your users."

Mission accomplished?
Duarte, in an interview in Wired, called the guide the second part of the ICS launch and said, "I can feel like it's finished. Like ICS is truly complete."

Complete? There's only one phone shipping that uses it, and Samsung's Galaxy Nexus is expensive. The design guide is helpful, but coaxing programmers to implement its tenets is another matter altogether. Even eager coders will require time to adjust to the new look.
Google doesn't want any iOS-style or Windows-style objects creeping into Android apps.

Google doesn't want any iOS-style or Windows-style objects creeping into Android apps.
(Credit: Google)

Maybe Duarte meant that Google has completely laid the Android 4.0 foundation. Because in the real world, ICS has barely begun.

Duarte has been making the rounds last year ever since Google released Android 4.0, trying to convince the world that good design is a priority for Google and that it will pay off for those in the Android world. A public-relations road show is only so helpful, though.

Ice Cream Sandwich has won praise as the best Android version to date, but ICS' success hinges on more than just the apps and underlying OS that Google has released: people spend a lot of time using third-party apps. The guide could help make Android more consistent and easier to use--and therefore more competitive with Apple's iOS.

There's plenty of vagueness in the guide: "Make the user feel safe, happy, and energized," for example, or "Android apps empower people to try new things and to use apps in inventive new ways."

But a certain amount of aspirational guidance is perfectly appropriate, and the guide has lots of more concrete advice, too, for things like when to display notifications and sizing elements with density-independent pixels (dp).
What's Android's back button supposed to do? Google explains.

What's Android's back button supposed to do? Google explains.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Room for improvement
I still see plenty of room for improvement. I can see people being confused whether they should look to the navigation bar and action bars to get things done. I've found the back button handy on Android, but it behaves unpredictably for me sometimes, and there's no forward button to undo your action. Now ICS introduces the up button as well as the back button, only the up button points left, not up. Perhaps Google should have gone all the way and ditched the back button altogether. Perhaps the idea of dropping the original design so completely in favor of something so iOS-like stuck in Google's craw.

Well, at least programmers have a better idea of what to do. Overall, the guide is helpful as a resource for programmers.

Perhaps just as important, it tells consumers that Google is trying to help them, too
sourse: news.cnet.com

Why Google is ditching search

2012-01-15T18:52:00.000-08:00

Twitter and others are complaining that Google is throwing its massive 65 percent plus market share weight around and quashing smaller competitors. The reason Twitter and others are so threatened is that the pattern of shared links within Google+ provides a decent enough indicator as to what links are interesting. What's important is what's trending, and algorithms can get a sense of that with just a subset of everything that's getting shared on the Web.

The most interesting aspect of Google's move, however, is its tacit acknowledgement that its stalwart search links are largely irrelevant and might as well be replaced with social results. Google search results are essentially gamed results produced by search optimizers.

In other words, the search results that we supposedly value so highly are themselves paid placements, just like Google's keyword ads. It's just that in the case of search results, link owners have paid for SEO (search-engine optimization) to get Google's attention instead of paying for SEM (search engine marketing) to make Google give their links prominence. Either way, though, searches are mostly just producing ads by any other name.

In addition, Google's famed PageRank algorithm carries less and less weight these days, since fresh news and results inherently don't have as many inbound links as older content. (If it helps, you can think of PageRank as a kind of paleo-social search--just one that moves way too slowly for the modern Web.)
(Credit: Peter Yared/CNET)

As I've written in the past, Google well knows that its search results suck, and over the past few years, it has started to short-circuit those results by putting more and more direct "answers" at the top search pages. That, of course, makes the search results themselves less and less important.

As the screenshot to the right (click for a larger version) shows, ads and answers have started to push Google's quintessential search results below the fold into the netherworld of the Web. As it turns out, in many cases the actual "answers" to searches for airline flights or products are actually much more monetizable than ads.

At last year's D conference, Google chairman Eric Schmidt presaged the shift from links to answers, stating that "we're trying to move from answers that are link-based to answers that are algorithmically based, where we can actually compute the right answer." More and more, Google is simply going to answer your questions. Last month, it acquired predictive search company Clever Sense to accelerate this transition. New mobile search engines such as Apple's Siri also dispense with search links entirely and simply return a single answer.

So why not replace increasingly gamed and lame search links with socially curated links? The search results were increasingly irrelevant anyway.
sourse: news.cnet.com

A week of Apple rumor confirmations, and egg hurling

2012-01-15T18:50:00.000-08:00

The technology world spent this past week with its collective eyes glued to the Consumer Electronics Show. But there was a truckload of news in Apple land, including announcements that confirmed three high-profile rumors.

Amid the product unveilings going on at CES in Las Vegas, Apple quietly sent out invites to an education-related event that it's holding next week in New York. That matched up with rumors from last week claiming the company was gearing up for an event across the country from its Cupertino, Calif., headquarters.

That confirmation was joined by two others. Target confirmed that it was, in fact, building special displays for Apple products in 25 of its stores as part of a larger initiative to bring boutique shopping experiences into the fold. That was joined by a report from Bloomberg, with Apple confirming that it had purchased Anobit, a chipmaker it was rumored to have bought in early December.

For more on these and other stories, read on.

Apple Talk Weekly is a collection of some of the week's top Apple news and rumors. It appears every Saturday, and is curated by CNET's Apple reporter, Josh Lowensohn.

News

Apple holding education event next week
Smack dab in the middle of the Consumer Electronics Show, Apple stole some of the thunder, sending out invites to a special event it's holding next week at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The event, which takes place on the 19th, is rumored to focus on Apple's iBookstore and text books.
(Credit: Apple)

iPhone 4S launches in China, then stumbles
This week brought the iPhone 4S to customers in China, but things got off to a rough start. Apple's flagship store in Beijing didn't open on time, and later said it wouldn't be selling the device at all. An angry crowd threw eggs at the store, and several fights broke out between customers. In a statement, Apple said it would not be selling the device in two of its Chinese retail stores, pushing shoppers to purchase one on the Web instead.

Apple unveils supplier list in supplier report
Yesterday, Apple published the 2012 edition of its supplier report, its audit of the suppliers that it says manufacture 97 percent of its products. The big surprise was a full listing of third-party companies it uses, information that up till now had not been shared with the public. Alongside the release of the report, Apple joined the Fair Labor Association, a third-party auditing group that will keep tabs on what goes on in those factories and issue publicly available reports.

ITC says Motorola does not infringe on Apple patents
Yesterday, the International Trade Commission issued an initial determination on Apple's complaint against Motorola, ruling that Motorola's Droid smartphones do not violate three of Apple's patents. The ruling is preliminary and now goes to an approval stage with the ITC's six-member commission.

Kodak sues Apple again
Kodak took aim at Apple once again, adding to its existing lawsuits with new complaints filed with the International Trade Commission and local courts this week. In its complaint, which also targets HTC, Kodak says the two companies are infringing on a number of its patents with their smartphones and tablets, and is seeking a sales ban.

Apple confirms Anobit acquisition
Where there's smoke, there's fire--or so the saying goes. That indeed turned out to be the case this week, with Apple finally acknowledging its acquisition of Israel-based flash-memory maker Anobit. Reports of the sale date back to December. Apple has acquired a handful of companies in recent years, but has a long history of not announcing those deals. Most recently that's included the pickup of Quattro Wireless, which it rolled into iAds, and Siri, which became the namesake feature of the voice assistant in the iPhone 4S.

Target details mini Apple store plans
The store-within-a-store concept that Apple Insider reported last week is, in fact, coming to a handful of Target stores. Target this week announced plans to bring specialty Apple displays to 25 of its locations. Which stores, and when they're rolling out, are yet to be unveiled.

Rumors
Apple's dual-core A5 processor rumored to be jumping to four-cores in the next iPad.

Apple's dual-core A5 processor rumored to be jumping to four-cores in the next iPad.
(Credit: Apple)

iPad 3 to bring 4G, quad-core processor, HD display?
A report from Bloomberg yesterday pegged March as the month we'll get a follow-up to the iPad 2. Citing manufacturing partners in Asia, the outlet said the new tablet will be packing a quad-core processor, along with support for 4G LTE networks. The display on the tablet is also said to be making the jump to HD, falling in line with a number of earlier reports pegging this next model as the one with the same pixel density as can be found on Apple's latest-generation iPhones and iPod Touches.

iPad 3 not so different on the outside?
The iPad 3 is seemingly months away, but in a report this week, iLounge says it's already gotten its hands on the device. iLounge Editor-in-Chief Jeremy Horwitz wrote that the new model looks nearly identical to the iPad 2, right down to the button placement. The only change is that it's 1mm thicker, the report said.

Sharp no longer making iPad 3 displays?
Display maker Sharp is out of the running for sourcing Apple with displays for Apple's next-generation iPad. That's according to Korean outlet Electronic Times Internet News, which said that the work instead went to LG Display and Samsung after Sharp could not meet Apple's specifications for the high-density pixel displays.

sourse: news.cnet.com

CES 2013 will be Google's show

2012-01-15T18:45:00.000-08:00

Not that many years ago, nearly every computing product on the CES exhibit floor ran Windows. This year, that was not the case. Sure, the new "ultrabooks" are Windows-powered, but Android is everywhere else: in tablets, in phones, and in TVs.

Even though Microsoft Windows still dominates the PC and laptop markets, Microsoft itself is no longer the leader in consumer tech innovation. It's sad but appropriate that the company will no longer be kicking off the leading consumer electronics trade show.

After Apple, Google is leading the charge in consumer electronics. Apple doesn't officially participate in CES, leaving Google as the most influential platform company there. The most interesting tablet products at CES ran Android (examples: Asus 370T; Asus Transformer Prime; Samsung Galaxy Note, while the the Windows-powered ultrabooks appeared pedestrian in comparison (except perhaps for Lenovo's Yoga). And it's a safe bet that most of the smartphone manufacturers see Google Android as their only feasible defense against the iPhone juggernaut. Windows Phone 7, good as it is, is too late.

It would make sense for Google to get the 2013 CES keynote spot. It was the most important vendor at this year's show and it's likely to be even more critical to the CE industry next year.

Google rose to this position in CE by using the same playbook as the company it's displacing. As Microsoft did with Windows, Google now makes the operating system that every manufacturer knows how to bake into its hot products and that developers like to build for due to its expanding market footprint and technical flexibility. In consumer computing, Microsoft perfected this virtual cycle, but in the new era of mobile devices, it's Google that's doing the best job implementing the model.

Will it be Google?
Jason Oxman, senior vice president of Industry Affairs at the Consumer Electronics Association, wouldn't tell me who has been invited to give the keynote at CES 2013. But he did discuss with me the process. CEA execs will decide on the "thematic direction" for the 2013 show shortly after the 2012 show closes. Then they'll extend invitations to speakers.

Another safe bet: the CEA isn't going to determine that the thematic direction for CES 2013 will in any way relate to portable PCs running Windows 8. Nor for any sensible 2013 theme (mobile computing, search, social computing, the cloud, or media), does Microsoft sit at the head of the class.

At some point, a major manufacturer like Samsung, Sony, LG, or Toshiba may manage to get real traction with an integrated media-sharing platform that competes with Apple (they are all building them). If it does, it could end up as a good keynote candidate. But as of CES 2012, these initiatives all seem secondary to these manufacturers' hardware lines. They're not as well integrated, or nearly as good, as iTunes is with Apple TV, its iOS devices, and the Macs.
CES 2013 keynote
Which company should keynote the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show?

Apple, for its part, does participate in CES. The company sent hundreds of employees to CES this year. Some reports called them "spies" because they were quiet deal-makers and observers, not press-facing flag-wavers. But if Apple sent spies, Google sent generals. Eric Schmidt and Marissa Meyer, for example, both appeared on CNET livestreamed events. Google is already laying the groundwork to dominate CES.

Next year, when Microsoft has neither the keynote slot nor its mega-booth in the Central Hall (which it did not renew), the company will do a similar thing: It will send hundreds of employees and likely "embed" them in the booths where Windows 8-running products are being pushed. But no matter how ever-present Microsoft is in partner booths, it won't be able to control the message to the same extent it would if it had a native exhibit. Microsoft will be Apple-like in 2013.

The 2013 CES will belong to Google even if it doesn't get (or accept) the keynote spot. Google was the most influential company at CES 2012, it's arguably the most important company for other CE vendors to work with, and it deserves the top billing at CES 2013.

(Tidbit: No matter who gets the nod as the kick-off company for CES 2013, it's not clear if they'll get what the CEA calls the "Microsoft keynote," the talk the night before the show officially opens. In fact, no one might. That pre-show kickoff slot was created 14 years ago specifically for Microsoft. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have anchored that talk, but no other company has. The CEA is considering eliminating that slot and pushing the media to treat the official opening-day keynote as the show launch instead. This year, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs had that spot.)

sourse: news.cnet.com

The Year in Materials

2012-01-12T18:26:00.000-08:00

Tiny crystals called quantum dots emit intense, sharply defined colors. Now researchers have made LED displays that use quantum dots. Five years ago, QD Vision demonstrated its first, rudimentary one-color displays, using the nanoscale crystals. This year it demonstrated a full-color display capable of showing video. The company says it could be another five years before the technology appears in commercial displays. Samsung might get there first—it's also developing quantum-dot displays, and demonstrated a full-color one in February.

Quantum-dot displays could use far less energy than LCDs. Another ingenious way to reduce energy use is make displays that emit no light at all, but instead reflect ambient light, an approach being taken by Qualcomm with its full-color Mirasol displays, which use only a tenth of the energy of an LCD. The technology has started to appear in tablet computers in South Korea.

No display looks good after it's covered with fingerprints. A new coating based on soot from a candle flame could provide a cheap oil-repelling layer that could eliminate smudges.

Novel nanostructured materials could greatly enhance the power output of solar panels and make them cheaper by capturing light that would have otherwise been reflected. They could also achieve these goals by converting near infrared light into colors that conventional silicon solar cells can absorb. Another material could render stealth aircraft invisible at night—and invisible to radar night and day.

Metamaterials offer another approach to invisibility: instead of absorbing light, metamaterials bend it around an object. Until this year, researchers have only been able to make metamaterials on a small scale—less than a millimeter across. Now they've made them big enough to be practical. They don't work yet for all wavelengths of light, but they could render objects invisible to night vision equipment.

Stanford researchers built a battery electrode that can be recharged 40,000 times—compared to the 1,000 charges you'd get with a typical laptop battery. Since the electrode lasts so long, and is made of abundant materials, it could provide an inexpensive way to store power from wind turbines and solar panels.

Other researchers have developed inexpensive materials that can store 10 times as much energy as conventional graphite electrodes in lithium-ion batteries. Paired with an equally high-capacity opposite electrode, these could transform portable electronics and electric vehicles. One technology in particular, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, seems promising because it uses a conductive polymer that can be incorporated into existing manufacturing lines, instead of requiring the expensive new technology for making nanostructures required by others.

New tools could speed the next materials breakthroughs. A modeling program developed at Harvard has led to one of the best organic semiconductors ever made. And a robotic system for making thousands of battery cells with unique electrode chemistries has discovered materials that could boost lithium-ion battery storage capacity by 25 percent.

source: technologyreview.com

Growing Heart Cells Just for You

2012-01-12T18:16:00.000-08:00

Peering through a microscope in Madison, Wisconsin, I watched my heart cells beat in a petri dish. Looking like glowing red shrimp without tails, they pulsated and moved very slowly toward one another. Left for several hours, I was told, these cardiomyocytes would coalesce into blobs trying to form a heart. Flanking me were scientists who had conducted experiments that they hoped would reveal whether my heart cells are healthy, whether they're unusually sensitive to drugs, and whether they get overly stressed when I'm bounding up a flight of stairs.

It was snowing outside the office-park windows of Cellular Dynamics International (CDI), where I was observing an intimate demonstration of how stem-cell technologies may one day combine with personal genomics and personal medicine. I was the first journalist to undergo experiments designed to see if the four-year-old process that creates induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells can yield insight into the functioning and fate of a healthy individual's heart cells. Similar tests could be run on lab-grown brain and liver cells, or eventually on any of the more than 200 cell types found in humans. "This is the next step in personalized medicine: being able to test drugs and other factors on different cell types," said Chris Parker, CDI's chief commercial officer, looking over my shoulder.

CDI scientists created the little piece of my heart by taking cells from my blood and reprogramming them so that they reverted to a pluripotent state, which means they are able to grow into any cell type in the body. The science that makes this possible comes from the lab of CDI cofounder and stem-cell pioneer James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin, the leader of one of two teams that discovered the iPS-cell process in 2007. (The other effort was led by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University.) The results are similar to the special cells that appear in embryos a few days after fertilization.

Since late 2008, the company has been manufacturing cardiomyocytes and mailing the frozen cells on dry ice to academic scientists to study how these cells work, and to researchers in the pharmaceutical industry to use in early tests of drug candidates. One important reason to use the cells is that they could reveal whether drugs are toxic to the heart, information that other types of testing can miss. "Several drugs have made it to the market that have cardiotoxic profiles, and that's unacceptable," Parker says. He says that the cardiomyocytes derived from iPS cells are a huge improvement over the cadaver cells sometimes used to test potential drug compounds. Unlike the cadaver cells, IPS-generated cells beat realistically and can be supplied in large quantities on demand. What's more, iPS-generated cells can have the same genetic makeup as the patients they came from, which is a huge advantage in tailoring drugs and treatments to individuals. These made-to-order cells are not cheap, however. Cellular Dynamics' CEO, Robert Palay, says they cost about $1,500 for a standard vial of 1.5 million cells.

An especially sensational prospect is that iPS cells could be transplanted into patients so they could regenerate diseased or damaged spines, brains, hearts, or other tissue—a proposition that is particularly enticing because these cells wouldn't be rejected by the host's body. They could also defuse the political controversy around embryonic stem cells, because they may one day make it possible to harvest pluripotent cells without destroying a human embryo.

Transplantation, however, is years away for most tissue types, says Alexander Meissner, a Harvard University stem-cell researcher. "It's not trivial to regenerate brain tissue," he says. "This is going to take longer than people think." Thomson agrees. "Talk about transplantation has been a kind of irrational exuberance," he says. The process of using iPS cells to create new tissue still poses certain dangers: some cell lines, for example, harbor mutations that could lead to cancer, and in some cases cells retain a faint chemical memory of their previous identity as skin or blood cells.

Shining bright: A layer of the author’s cardiac cells looks like a chaotic clump under the microscope. Credit: Greg Ruffing

Thomson believes these are temporary setbacks. "We have had bone marrow transplantation for a long time, which is essentially stem cells," he says. "And work is being done right now on using iPS cells to repair macular degeneration. But repairing damage to the nerves in a spine is much more difficult." Others share his cautious optimism. "Virtually everything about iPS cells is overhyped," says Chris Austin, director of the Chemical Genomics Center at the National Institutes of Health. "But for the purpose of testing drug candidates, I think the possibilities are considerable, and we and lots of other people are pursuing this. There are lots of problems. Are iPS cells really normal? How do you get enough pure differentiated cells? But the potential is definitely there."

Sticking to Science
I first visited James Thomson on another snowy, frigid day in Wisconsin in 2008, a few weeks after the publication of his paper announcing iPS cells derived from human cells. A scrappy, no-nonsense man in a casual sweater and beat-up Dockers, he sat in a small office adorned with tropical fish, ferns, and an antique dartboard and discussed his original discovery of human embryonic stem cells in 1998. His work set off a storm of protest: opponents argued that destroying a human embryo to harvest its stem cells is tantamount to murder. President George W. Bush restricted most federal funding for embryonic-stem-cell research in 2001, and critics have continued to vilify Thomson, although he tries to keep a low profile. "I don't talk much about it," he said. "I stick to the science."

The creation of iPS cells in 2007 seemed like an elegant bookend to the 1998 finding, because it offered a new way to produce stem cells that can differentiate into any cell type—one that might actually be better, because the cells would be genetically identical to patients' own. "It was a relief that we might have a solution to this political and ethical situation," Thomson said. The breakthrough, however, was a surprise. "We knew that the iPS process was a possibility," he said, "but when we started out, I was sure it would take 10 years at least." Thomson and a Wisconsin postdoc, Junying Yu, set out to create iPS cells by modifying skin cells with "regulator" genes normally found only in embryos. The method, he said, "surprised everyone by working."

Thomson cofounded CDI in 2007, around the same time that several other stem-cell luminaries became involved in iPS-cell companies. These would-be competitors, however, are primarily focused on creating therapeutics. They use iPS cells to help identify and develop drug candidates and to design processes that might one day lead to transplantation. So far CDI has no serious competitors in the market to sell iPS-generated cells in volume for use in research and drug screening. In part, this is because Thomson and his scientific team have been working longer to overcome difficulties in industrializing the technology. "Making iPS cells that are functional in large quantities is tough," says Harvard's Meissner.

Privately held, the company has not detailed its performance, but its CEO told a local newspaper that CDI gets "multimillions" in revenues from selling its heart cells to about 40 customers, including most large pharmaceutical companies. Next year the company plans to roll out iPS-generated liver, brain, and blood cells.

Coldhearted: Samples of the author’s cells are stored in trays under cryogenic conditions. Credit: Greg Ruffing

"This is a game-changer," says stem-cell biologist Sandra Engle, a senior principal scientist at Pfizer who has used CDI's cells. "Before CDI, these cells were very difficult to obtain, and we would only get tiny amounts. This doesn't work for high-throughput testing for drugs." For Kyle Kolaja, global head of predictive toxicology screens and emerging technologies at Roche, the benefit of the CDI cells is that they behave like "real" cells. "They are already having a major impact on drug safety and development," he says. "They have already changed what we're doing."

Cellular Clues
Although companies like Roche and Pfizer are currently using iPS cells simply to screen potential therapeutics for toxicity and other characteristics, someday iPS-based tests could be performed on individual patients to see whether they are at particular risk for side effects. Euan Ashley, a cardiologist at Stanford University, is trying to use iPS cells to help diagnose and treat a 16-year-old boy with early symptoms of dilated cardiomyopathy, a potentially fatal disease in which the heart swells and weakens. "This is the sort of severe genetic disease that runs through families that we think can benefit from iPS technologies and genomics," says Ashley. He has scrutinized the boy's DNA for telltale genetic markers associated with the disease and has tested his brother and parents to see if they carry the markers as well. The Stanford team plans to create iPS cells by reprogramming skin cells taken from the family and then induce them to differentiate into cardiomyocytes bearing the characteristic genetic variations. By studying the biochemistry of these heart cells, the scientists hope to gain clues to how they might respond to various drug candidates.

"We will use the iPS cells to check the differences between this child and others with and without the condition," says Ashley, "and to test what drugs will work best for the boy and other impacted family members." Ashley says one goal is to develop tests to determine how the genetic variations actually affect the cells. "The importance of genetic factors will be reflected in these cells," he says.

Other clinicians and labs are also using iPS cells in experiments intended to shed light on disease. For instance, researchers at the Salk Institute are studying iPS-derived neurons from people with schizophrenia to see how they differ from normal neurons, and they will examine what happens when the cells are exposed to antipsychotic drugs. At the NIH, a group is studying iPS-generated cells from patients with a fatal genetic disorder known as Niemann-Pick disease type C. Other researchers have proposed using iPS-generated cells to test the effects of toxic chemicals such as mercury and pesticides.

The hope, say researchers, is to create a library of iPS cell lines from people who have specific symptoms or behaviors associated with a particular disease. Roche has started a program with Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston to create cell lines that reflect different types of heart disease; the results could help the company develop drugs. This summer, CDI and the Medical College of Wisconsin announced a $6.3 million grant from the NIH to create iPS-generated heart cells from 250 patients who have left ventricular hypertrophy, a condition that causes high blood pressure and increases the risk for cardiovascular disease.

Scientists are still a long way from using iPS cells routinely to diagnose disease or offer individual prognoses. The NIH's Austin cautions that individual cells tell only part of the story of what happens in the dynamic system that is the human body. "In some cases, you don't have a cell that can give you a real answer about a disease like depression," he says. "What cell type do you use for that?"

Pluripotent pioneer: University of Wisconsin biologist James Thomson cofounded Cellular Dynamics International in 2007 after developing a method of reprogramming ordinary human cells to create induced pluripotent stem cells, which can give rise to any cell type. Thomson has since helped pioneer the use of iPS cells in drug development. Credit: Greg Ruffing

My Mambo
I launched my own iPS journey in a small Quest Diagnostics clinic on a leafy street in San Francisco. Wrapping a rubber tube around my arm, the phlebotomist stuck in a needle to withdraw several vials of blood that would be shipped on ice to Madison. Once they got to CDI, technicians cracked open my white blood cells and used a bioengineered retrovirus to introduce "master transcription" genes into their DNA. These genes reprogrammed the cells so that when they replicated, the results were pluripotent cells rather than more white blood cells. Their transformation into functioning iPS cells took several months of coaxing, purification, and verification that cost about $15,000, which the company paid on my behalf. Once my pluripotent cell line was humming along, the scientists at CDI tweaked a few cells to make them differentiate into three types of heart cells—which I first saw pulsing in a video clip they e-mailed to me.

In Madison, nearly a year after giving up my blood, I was just a bit anxious as I stared at my beating heart cells. I was about to get a rundown on the experiments CDI had performed to demonstrate what these little bundles of bioengineered cytoplasm and nuclei might say about my health and my sensitivity to various drugs.

Chris Parker and the company's product manager for cardiomyocytes, Blake Anson, took the lead in walking me through a series of assessments that began with tests "to make sure these cells are still you," said Parker. They showed me a slide of the 23 paired chromosomes taken from my original blood sample and compared it to a slide showing the chromosomes taken from the cardiomyocytes. They had also run a simple genetic comparison using 16 DNA markers, a test used by law enforcement that provides a quick, relatively cheap way to assess whether two samples match up. When my manufactured cells passed muster, the scientists moved to step two: seeing if they behaved like real cardiomyocytes.

First they buzzed the cells with electricity to check the range in duration of the action potentials—the electrical impulses that drive cardiac contractions. Then they measured the beats of the cells in the aggregate against a kind of EKG waveform like those that appear as up-and-down pulses on a hospital monitor. My cells appeared normal.

A third test pitted the cells against two drugs. One was epinephrine, which triggers the fight-or-flight response and speeds up a person's pulse. "We can see this here: beat, beat, beat," said Parker, showing me a slide with an EKG line. "Your heart rate increases dramatically, so that means you're okay—you can run from that bear." The scientists then dropped in a "sympathetic agonist," a drug that slows the heart way down. "So your cells can relax after running from that bear," said Parker. When I sent Euan Ashley my test results, he verified my persistent normalcy—and confirmed that the cells in question were what they were supposed to be. "These tests prove that the cells are cardiomyocytes," he said, "which at this early stage in this science is important."

Video

A few weeks later, CDI ran another round of experiments that subjected my cells to drugs with known toxic side effects. First came Hismanal, an antihistamine, and Propulsid, a drug to treat gastrointestinal distress. Both medications were pulled from the market in many countries, including the United States, because they were associated with rare but potentially life-threatening heart arrhythmias. "This propensity is due to the unanticipated and unwanted side effect of both drugs blocking and disrupting the normal activity of a specific ion channel in the heart," said a report e-mailed to me from CDI. "Both drugs had similar effects on David Duncan's iPS-derived cardiomyocytes: a dose-dependent increase in the duration of the action potential ... Prolonged action potential durations are a recognized trigger for cardiac arrhythmia that can result in sudden death."

For a second round of pharmaceutical testing, the scientists exposed my cells to two cancer drugs: Gleevec, used mostly to treat some forms of leukemia, and Sutent, used to treat tumors in the stomach, bowel, and esophagus. Both drugs have side effects that include damage to the heart, though they remain in use because the diseases they treat are so serious. "In vitro tests on David Duncan's iPS-derived cardiomyocytes demonstrated that both drugs had adverse effects," said my report, "and that the Gleevec-mediated effect may have been caused by disrupting mitochondrial function." Again, the reactions of my cells were not atypical, although the researchers told me that if I had cancer, further testing might turn up specific responses that could help a physician decide which medications were best for me.

Ashley told me that iPS-generated heart cells offer great potential as a way to test cancer treatments. "Chemo drugs are really hard on hearts, and on heart cells," he said. "If this technology can help, that will be really important."

CDI has told me that as the science unfolds, it may run tests based on the extensive DNA sequencing I had done for a recent book, Experimental Man. I'd be especially interested in a test that could determine how worried I should be about a genetic risk factor for side effects of cholesterol-lowering statins. According to my genetic profile, I have a substantial risk of myopathy—muscle weakness—if I take certain forms of these drugs. However, this condition is due to a malfunctioning enzyme produced by the liver, not the heart, so finding out depends on whether CDI is willing to create liver cells from my iPS line.

Before I left the CDI lab, I took one more look at my heart cells pounding away in their petri dish in a sort of freakish mambo, and I wondered when such banks of individual cells would become a routine part of medical care. Many obstacles remain before this can happen, including the high cost of making the cells. Yet despite the expense, says Thomson, "there will be people that will want to do this—wealthy early adopters who want to know about a disease or a drug. Or some people might do it because they think having their beating heart cells is cool."

As for me, I'm still amazed that the cardiomyocytes in the dish are part of me—let alone that they might one day be used as stunt doubles for my real cells.

David Ewing Duncan is a San Francisco-based writer. His most recent book is Experimental Man: What One Man's Body Reveals about His Future, Your Health, and Our Toxic World.

source: technologyreview.com

Technological Healing

2012-01-12T18:12:00.000-08:00

In cardiologist Eric Topol's vision, medicine is on the verge of an overhaul akin to the one that digital technology has brought to everything from how we communicate to how we locate a pizza parlor. Until now, he writes in his upcoming book The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care, the "ossified" and "sclerotic" nature of medicine has left health "largely unaffected, insulated, and almost compartmentalized from [the] digital revolution." But that, he argues, is about to change.

Digital technologies, he foresees, can bring us true prevention (courtesy of those nanosensors that stop an incipient heart attack), individualized care (thanks to DNA analyses that match patients to effective drugs), cost savings (by giving patients only those drugs that help them), and a reduction in medical errors (because of electronic health records, or EHRs). Virtual house calls and remote monitoring could replace most doctor visits and even many hospitalizations. Topol, the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, is far from alone: e-health is so widely favored that the 2010 U.S. health-care reform act allocates billions of dollars to electronic health records in the belief that they will improve care.

Anyone who has ever been sick or who is likely to ever get sick—in other words, all of us—would say, Bring it on. There is only one problem: the paucity of evidence that these technologies benefit patients. Topol is not unaware of that. The eminently readable Creative Destruction almost seems to have two authors, one of them a rigorous, hard-nosed physician/researcher who insightfully critiques the tendency to base treatments on what is effective for the average patient. This Topol cites study after study showing that much of what he celebrates may not benefit many individual patients at all. The other author, however, is a kid in the electronics store whose eyes light up at every cool new toy. He seems to dismiss the other Topol as a skunk at a picnic.

Much of the enthusiasm for bringing the information revolution to medicine reflects the assumption that more information means better health care. Actual data offer reasons for caution, if not skepticism. Take telemonitoring, in which today's mobile apps and tomorrow's nanosensors would measure blood pressure, respiration, blood glucose, cholesterol, and other physiological indicators. "Previously, we've been able to assess people's health status when they came in to a doctor's office, but mobile and wireless technology allow us to monitor and track important health indicators throughout the day, and get alerts before something gets too bad," says William Riley, program director at the National Heart, Lung & Blood Institute and chairman of a mobile health interest group at the National Institutes of Health. "Soon there won't be much that we can't monitor remotely."

Certainly, it is worthwhile to monitor blood pressure, glucose, and other indicators; if nothing else, having regular access to such data might help people make better choices about their health. But does turning the flow of data into a deluge lead to better results on a large scale? The evidence is mixed. In a 2010 study of 480 patients, telemonitoring of hypertension led to larger reductions in blood pressure than did standard care. And a 2008 study found that using messaging devices and occasional teleconferencing to monitor patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes and heart disease reduced hospital admissions by 19 percent. But a 2010 study of 1,653 patients hospitalized for heart failure concluded that "telemonitoring did not improve outcomes." Similarly, a recent review of randomized studies of mobile apps for smoking cessation found that they helped in the short term, but that there is insufficient research to determine the long-term benefits. Given the land rush into mobile health technologies, or "m-health," the lack of data on their helpfulness raises concerns. "People are putting out systems and technologies that haven't been studied," says Riley.

These concerns also apply to technologies we don't have yet, like those nanosensors in our blood. For instance, studies have reached conflicting conclusions about whether diabetics benefit from aggressive glucose control—something that could be provided by nanosensors paired with insulin delivery devices. Several studies have found that it can lead to hypoglycemia (dangerously low levels of blood glucose) and does not reduce mortality in severely ill diabetics. And sensors may be no better at detecting incipient cancers or heart attacks. If the ongoing debate about overdiagnosis of breast and prostate cancer has taught us anything, it should be that an abnormality that looks like cancer might not spread or do harm, and therefore should not necessarily be treated. For heart attacks, we need rigorous clinical trials establishing the rate of false positives and false negatives before we start handing out nanosensors like lollipops.

EHRs also seem like a can't-miss advance: corral a patient's history in easily searched electrons, rather than leaving it scattered in piles of paper with illegible scribbles, and you'll reduce medical errors, minimize redundant tests, avoid dangerous drug interactions (the system alerts the prescriber if a new prescription should not be taken with an existing one), and ensure that necessary exams are done (by reminding a physician to, say, test a diabetic's vision).

In practice, however, the track record is mixed. In one widely cited study, scientists led by Jeffrey Linder of Harvard Medical School reported in 2007 that EHRs were not associated with better care in doctor's offices on 14 of 17 quality indicators, including managing common diseases, providing preventive counseling and screening tests, and avoiding potentially inappropriate prescriptions to elderly patients. (Practices that used EHRs did do better at avoiding unnecessary urinalysis tests.) Topol acknowledges that there is no evidence that the use of EHRs reduces diagnostic errors, and he cites several studies that, for instance, found "no consistent association between better quality of care and [EHRs]." Indeed, one disturbing study he describes showed that the rate of patient deaths doubled in the first five months after a hospital computerized its system for ordering drugs.

Financial incentives threaten another piece of Topol's vision. Perhaps the most promising path to personal medicine is pharmacogenomics, or using genetics to identify patients who will—or will not—benefit from a drug. Clearly, the need is huge. Clinical trials have shown that only one or two people out of 100 without prior heart disease benefit from a certain statin, for instance, and one heart attack victim in 100 benefits more from tPA (tissue plasminogen activator, a genetically engineered clot-dissolving drug) than from streptokinase (a cheap, older clot buster). Genetic scans might eventually reveal who those one or two are. Similarly, as Topol notes, only half the patients receiving a $50,000 hepatitis C drug, and half of those taking rheumatoid arthritis drugs that ring up some $14 billion in annual sales, see their health improve on these medications. By preëmptively identifying who's in which half, genomics might keep patients, private insurers, and Medicare from wasting tens of billions of dollars a year.

Yet despite some progress in matching cancer drugs to tumors, pharmacogenomics "has had limited impact on clinical practice," says Joshua Cohen of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, who led a 2011 study of the field. Several dozen diagnostics are in use to assess whether patients would benefit from a specific drug, he estimates; one of the best-known analyzes breast cancers to see if they are fueled by a mutation in the her2 protein, which means they are treatable with Herceptin. But insurers still doubt the value of most such tests. It's not clear that testing everyone who's about to be prescribed a drug would save money compared with giving it to all those patients and letting the chips fall where they may.

Genotyping is not even routine in clinical trials of experimental cancer drugs. As Tyler Jacks, an MIT cancer researcher, recently told me, companies "run big dumb trials" rather than test drugs specifically on patients whose cancer is driven by the mutation the drug targets. Why? Companies calculate that it is more profitable to test these drugs on many patients, not just those with the mutation in question. That's because although a new drug might help nearly all lung cancer patients with a particular mutation, a research trial might indicate that it helps—just to make up a number—30 percent of lung cancer patients as a whole. Even that less impressive number could be enough for Food and Drug Administration approval to sell the drug to everyone with lung cancer. Limiting the trial to those with the mutation would limit sales to those patients. The risk that the clinical trial will fail is more than balanced by the chance to sell the drug to millions more people.

Such financial considerations are not all that stands in the way of Topol's predictions. He and other enthusiasts need to overcome the lack of evidence that cool gadgets will improve health and save money. But though he acknowledges the "legitimate worry" about adopting technologies before they have been validated, his cheerleading hardly flags. "The ability to digitize any individual's biology, physiology, and anatomy" will "undoubtedly reshape" medicine, he declares, thanks to the "super-convergence of DNA sequencing, mobile smart phones and digital devices, wearable nanosensors, the Internet, [and] cloud computing." Only a fool wouldn't root for such changes, and indeed, that's why Topol wrote the book, he says: to inspire people to demand that medicine enter the 21st century. Yet he may have underestimated how much "destruction" will be required for that goal to be realized.

Sharon Begley, a former science columnist at Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal, is a contributing writer for Newsweek and its website, the Daily Beast.

source: technologyreview.com

Discovery Could Lead to an Exercise Pill

2012-01-12T18:11:00.000-08:00

Researchers have discovered a natural hormone that acts like exercise on muscle tissue—burning calories, improving insulin processing, and perhaps boosting strength. The scientists hope it could eventually be used as a treatment for obesity, diabetes, and, potentially, neuromuscular diseases like muscular dystrophy.

In a paper published online today by the journal Nature, the scientists, led by Bruce Spiegelman at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, showed that the hormone occurs naturally in both mice and humans. It pushes cells to transform from white fat—globules that serve as reservoirs for excess calories—into brown fat, which generates heat.

Because the hormone is present in both mice and humans, Spiegelman speculates that it may have served as an evolutionary defense against cold by triggering shivering. He named it irisin, after the Greek messenger goddess Iris, who allowed humans to communicate with the gods in Greek mythology, because exercise appears to "talk" to various tissues in the body via irisin.

Mice given irisin lost a few grams in the first 10 days after treatment, the study shows, and certain genes involved in powering the cell were turned on. Irisin also appeared to reduce the damage done by a high-fat diet, protecting mice against diet-induced obesity and diabetes, according to the paper, whose first author is postdoctoral fellow Pontus Boström.

"We are hopeful, though we have no evidence, that this hormone may embody some of the other benefits of exercise, perhaps in the neuromuscular system," Spiegelman says. If so, it could also be used to treat disorders like muscular dystrophy and muscle wasting.

Researchers still have to figure out how much benefit irisin could provide someone with diabetes or other health problems, says Spiegelman, also a professor of cell biology and medicine at Harvard Medical School. "I'm optimistic," he says. "I just don't want to overpromise and underdeliver."

Harvard Medical School's Dean Jeffrey Flier, an endocrinologist, says he is quite enthusiastic about the new hormone. The study, he says, "opens up a completely new approach to understanding the links between exercise, body weight, and diabetes."

Flier believes irisin offers strong therapeutic potential. "Though much remains to be learned about the action of irisin, and its status in humans with various diseases, this work has the potential to be a game-changer in the field of metabolic disease."

Last month, Spiegelman formed a Boston-based company named Ember Therapeutics to develop his brown-fat research projects, including irisin. The company raised $34 million in series A financing, and is backed by Third Rock Ventures of Boston.

Harvey Lodish, a professor of biology and bioengineering at MIT, and a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, says it may be harder to make irisin into a drug than Spiegelman anticipates. Lodish tried for years to make adiponectin, a hormone he discovered in the mid-1990s, into a similar drug, but never succeeded.

The concentration of both hormones in the blood is already so high that manufacturing enough to make a difference in health is quite challenging, he says. Maybe irisin will be easier to produce, he says, or maybe it could be delivered via gene therapy, in a modified version of the delivery system Spiegelman used in his research—but Lodish is dubious.

However, of Spiegelman's new research, he says, "It's very nice, it's very elegant."

source: technologyreview.com

The Art of 3-D Printing

2012-01-12T18:10:00.001-08:00

As part of our special report on manufacturing, we asked Neri Oxman, a professor at the MIT Media Lab and an internationally recognized artist whose work is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to create a sculpture that would illustrate the future of manufacturing. (See a gallery of images here.)

What she produced, in collaboration with MIT materials science professor Craig Carter, is a powerful demonstration of the possibilities of 3-D printing, using techniques that take advantage of the capabilities of 3-D printers in ways that conventional manufacturing techniques cannot.

3-D printing encompasses a range of technologies—from inkjet heads mounted on gantries that can deposit plastics layer by layer to form intricate models, to more recent laser-based systems that sinter metal powders to make durable parts for airplanes. 3-D printers have mainly been used for prototyping, but they are becoming an option for manufacturing as well, and may eventually even be used to print buildings, Oxman says. But designers and architects haven't yet learned to take advantage of their capabilities.

Oxman, who trained as an architect, says buildings are designed today with an eye toward the components they can be made of—sheets of plywood, panes of glass, steel beams, and concrete columns. As a result, those designs are limited, in much the way Lego bricks constrain the shapes that children can build. There are similar limitations in conventional manufacturing; there are some shapes that simply can't be built with existing molds and machining tools, and designers have had to design with these limits in mind.

Oxman is exploring ways to break with conventional design thinking by looking to patterns and processes found in nature, and using equations that define these processes to generate new designs. The results are often surprising shapes and structures that can be made only with 3-D printers.

To help develop the algorithms needed, Oxman has teamed up with Carter and others. In some cases, the algorithms provide new aesthetics, but they can also have practical applications—such as varying the structure to help bear loads. For one sculpture—a model of a chaise longue reclined chair—the team combined algorithms taken from nature with a map of the pressure a body exerts on a chair. The result depends on where the algorithms determine the chair needs to be soft to provide comfort and where it needs to be stiff to provide support.

source: technologyreview.com

Magnetic Memory Miniaturized to Just 12 Atoms

2012-01-12T18:02:00.000-08:00

A memory-storage element made at IBM Research points to future computing systems built atom by atom.

Thursday, January 12, 2012
By Katherine Bourzac

The smallest magnetic-memory bit ever made—an aggregation of just 12 iron atoms created by researchers at IBM—shows the ultimate limits of future data-storage systems.

The magnetic memory elements don't work in the same way that today's hard drives work, and, in theory, they can be much smaller without becoming unstable. Data-storage arrays made from these atomic bits would be about 100 times denser than anything that can be built today. But the 12 atoms making up each bit must be painstakingly assembled using an expensive and complex microscope, and the bits can hold data for only a few hours and at low temperatures approaching absolute zero, so the miniscule memory elements won't be found in consumer devices anytime soon.

As the semiconductor industry bumps up against the limits of scaling by making memory and computation devices ever smaller, the IBM Almaden research group, led by Andreas Heinrich, is working from the other end, building computing elements atom-by-atom in the lab.

The necessary technology for large-scale manufacturing at the single-atom scale doesn't exist yet. Today, says Heinrich, the question is, "What is it you would want to build on the scale of atoms for data storage and computation, in the distant future?"

As engineers miniaturize conventional devices, they're finding that quantum physics, which never had to be accounted for in the past, makes devices less stable. As conventional magnetic memory bits are miniaturized, for example, each bit's magnetic field begins to affect its neighbors', weakening each bit's ability to hold on to a 1 or a 0.

The IBM researchers found that it was possible to sidestep this problem by using groups of atoms that display a different kind of magnetism. The key, says Heinrich, is the magnetic spin of each individual atom.

In conventional magnets, whether they're found holding up a note on the refrigerator or in a data-storage array, the magnetic spins of the atoms are aligned. It's this alignment that leads to instability when magnetic-memory elements are miniaturized. The IBM researchers made their tiny memory elements by lining up iron atoms whose spins were counter-aligned.

source: technologyreview.com

Researchers Engineer a Mightier Mouse

2011-11-20T16:06:00.002-08:00

Mice that grow larger muscles and can run for twice as long as their unaltered littermates before tiring could point toward new treatments for the muscle loss that can occur with aging.

The mice were engineered to lack a molecule called NCOR in their muscle tissue. In a second, related study, knocking out the same molecule in fat resulted in mice that were overweight but sensitive to insulin, a result that could lead to more targeted treatments for diabetes. Both studies were published in the journal Cell last week.

NCOR acts as a dimmer switch for other molecules in a cell. It is known as a corepressor, slowing the production of transcription factors, which in turn regulate the expression of genes. Dimmer-switch molecules are often good drug targets thanks to this subtle effect, says Johan Auwerx, a researcher at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, who led the first study, which involved knocking out NCOR in muscle. "That's better from a medical standpoint, because you don't want to turn a molecule all on or off," he says.

Because NCOR acts on different molecules in many parts of the body, Auwerx and others have been using genetic techniques to create mice that lack the protein in only certain types of tissue. Knocking out the molecule in all tissues from birth is lethal.

According to the second study, eliminating the molecule in fat had a very specific effect: fat cells became more sensitive to insulin, as did cells in the muscle and the liver. Insulin resistance is one of the hallmarks of metabolic syndrome, a precursor to type 2 diabetes, so the findings could inform drug development for the disease.

"The results suggest that adipose is the organizing tissue for metabolic syndrome," says Jerrold Olefsky, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego, who led the second study. "If you can treat it, you get systemic effects on other tissues."

On a molecular level, knocking out NCOR appeared to mimic the effect of a class of diabetes drugs known as thiazolidinediones, or TZDs. These drugs target the same molecule as NCOR, but have significant side effects, including hepatitis, liver failure, water retention, and heart failure. Some have been pulled from the market.

The researchers did not see any of these ill effects in the mice, suggesting that if you target treatment to adipose tissue, "you get rid of unwanted side effects," says Olefsky. "Targeting NCOR is better because it has a much more selective role."

Olefsky's team also identified more than 100 genes that are activated by deleting NCOR in fat. They're now studying these genes as potential drug targets.

The mice that lacked NCOR in their muscles had a different outcome—their muscles had many more mitochondria, the fuel source of the cell, which allowed them to run longer. "That means better capacity to keep energy levels up," says Auwerx. The researchers knocked out the same gene in the muscle tissue of worms, which also grew larger muscles, suggesting that the same trick should work in other animals.

Auwerx is now looking for drugs that can modulate NCOR levels. Fasting brings levels down, while glucose pushes it up. The results could be useful in treating aging-related muscle loss, which occurs even in old people who exercise, as well as diseases such as muscular dystrophy.

The future of Mars exploration

2011-11-20T16:06:00.001-08:00

(CNN) -- With NASA's "Curiosity" rover due to launch on November 25, Mars exploration is once again on the space agenda.

"Curiosity" -- full name Mars Science Laboratory "Curiosity" -- will search for signs that Mars is, or ever was, able to support microbial life.

But even as the Science Laboratory is being prepared for launch, more missions to the Red Planet are being planned and new technologies are being researched that will allow ever more information about Mars to be collected.

Take our quiz and find out how much you know about the future of Mars exploration.

Iconic Yahoo billboard coming down after 12 years

2011-11-20T16:04:00.000-08:00

Since 1999, it has greeted visitors to San Francisco while standing as a symbol of the Bay Area's status as a tech hub: A Yahoo billboard, retro-styled to look like a 1960s-era motel sign, with the tag line, "A nice place to stay on the Internet.

"Now, it's finally coming down.According to a report in the San Francisco Egotist, a sales manager for Clear Channel Outdoor in San Francisco has confirmed the billboard space will be available for new ads starting December 1.Some bloggers are already speculating that a more of-the-moment Bay Area tech company, such as Facebook or Google, may take its place.The neon Yahoo billboard near the onramp to eastbound I-80 is a holdover from the dot-com boom of the late 1990s and inspired sister billboards in New York City and Los Angeles.It has outlasted four Yahoo CEOs, most recently Carol Bartz.The billboard's space entertained passing motorists with such messages as, "FREE E-MAIL. ALL U CAN EAT BUFFET" and "YOU LOOK CUTE TODAY."The inevitable Save the Yahoo! Billboard page has already sprung up on Facebook, where it had amassed more than 800 likes as of early Friday afternoon.

http://edition.cnn.com/

RIM facing mass defection over BlackBerry blunders

2011-10-20T15:38:00.003-07:00

RIM may believe its BlackBerry outage compensation is “a pretty comprehensive set of efforts” but it may not be enough to staunch the flow of users ditching the platform, according to new research. A full 30-percent of large scale BlackBerry users plan to jump ship in 2012, Enterprise Management Associates‘ figures claim, with a mere 14-percent of users themselves happy with their RIM smartphone. In comparison, 44-percent of iPhone users were content with their device.

“We expected to see some market share loss by RIM,” EMA research director Steve Brasen suggests, ”but these results were far more dramatic than we could have anticipated.” BlackBerry always had its security and reliability counting in its favor, but last week’s outage – which lasted for up to three days for some users, and saw RIM admit it had no idea what was the cause of the technical fault – has scraped away at that confidence.

As well as throwing free apps at users – with the promise of over $100 worth of previously premium titles now being given away free through the BlackBerry App World over the next four weeks – RIM has also attempted to court frustrated enterprise customers. They’ll be offered a month’s free technical support, usually a subscription-based service, in the hope that the extra attention will encourage them to stay.

Nonetheless, if EMA’s figures are correct, RIM’s market share among enterprise customers with 10,000 or more users will drop next year from the majority platform, at 52-percent, to just 36-percent.

[via InfoWorld]

Sears’ Alphaline digital download store closes down

2011-10-20T15:38:00.001-07:00

Another digital content provider has apparently gone quietly to the graveyard, with RoxioNow-powered Alphaline Entertainment no longer operational. The service – which launched back in December 2010 as a partnership between retailer Sears and platform provider Sonic Solutions – has been taken offline, with the company’s site now suggesting that, as of September, Alphaline was no longer available.

“We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause you” the terse message on the site reads. “If you have purchased content for ownership through Alphaline Entertainment, we have sent you an email setting out how purchased content for ownership is being handled.”

There’s no mention on Sears’ site as to what happened to the service, though it’s likely that waning appeal in an over-saturated digital downloads marketplace saw usage underwhelm. Alphaline was charging around $19.99 for movie purchases or $3.99 for rentals, with availability promised for the same day as physical media release. Back in March, Sears added further compatibility with internet-connected TVs and other platforms.

Did you use Alphaline Entertainment for digital downloads or rentals? Received an email telling you what to do with your purchases now? Let us know in the comments.

[Thanks Chris!]

Nokia Sabre Windows Phone pic leaks

2011-10-20T15:37:00.001-07:00

We already know that Nokia and Microsoft are tying up to try and save the Nokia smartphone business and pull Windows Phone out of the slump it is in with some appealing new devices. A photo has leaked online today that is claimed to be a shot of the Nokia Sabre smartphone running Mango. We heard a bit about the Sabre back in September. The source of the leak offered up some claimed specs for the smartphone as well.

The source claims that the Sabre features a 1.4GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 3.5-inch WVGA screen. The rear camera is a 5MP unit and it is claimed to have a price of 300-350 EU or roughly $410 to $480. The spy pic snapper did the typical spy photo thing and over exposed parts of the image so we can’t make out all of the details.

Presumably somewhere in the white blob section would be the back, home and search buttons that Windows phones all share. We expect that the phone will go official along with lots more at the Nokia World event set to kick off soon.

Android Face Unlock might be fooled with a photo

2011-10-20T15:36:00.000-07:00

Google has admitted that the Face Unlock feature in its new version of Android could be fooled by a photo of the user, telling SlashGear that the security system is still in its early stages. The Ice Cream Sandwich feature – which logs into an Android 4.0 device by recognizing a pre-registered face, rather than using a PIN code or other credentials – struggled to recognize Google head of user experience Matias Duarte under the keynote lighting earlier this week, but could, we’re told, still be convinced by a snapshot.

Google acquired the facial recognition technology used in Face Unlock when it bought PittPatt earlier this year, a startup that was spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. The recognition engine they developed consists of “tools to search images for faces, determine if faces are the same person, track faces in video sequences, and pinpoint constituent landmarks in faces using a straightforward C-language interface” and has already been used to mine Facebook profiles in third-party research.

“[Face Unlock] will only get better” we were told by a Google representative when we questioned the potential for fooling the system with a still image. Using a photograph to unofficially log in “might work” they conceded, but only because the technology is still relatively young.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich demo:

Still, while Google is undoubtedly refining its recognition engine, it’s a potentially embarrassing hiccup in the new Android platform. Google isn’t the only one to come in for great attention over possible security flaws: earlier today, researchers criticized Apple’s Siri voice recognition system because, by default, it can be accessed even when the iPhone 4S is PIN-locked, giving anybody who picks the phone up the ability to send messages and use its other features.

Update: It’s worth noting that another Google Androider, Tim Bray, has previously said that Face Unlock should be able to differentiate between a photo and a real person.

More on Ice Cream Sandwich in our full hands-on report, as well as in our Galaxy Nexus hands-on.

Motorola Admiral push-to-talk QWERTY Android announced

2011-10-20T15:34:00.000-07:00

You didn’t think the portrait-style QWERTY smartphone was dead, did you? No way, Jose, it’s just beginning! Here with the Motorola Admiral, an otherwise mid-range device with Android 2.3 Gingerbread, a single-core 1.2GHz processor, and a 3.1-inch VGA touchscreen, is the first time a smartphone is available with Direct Connect. And not only that, the specs are what Motorola is calling “military spec tough.” This device will be available on the 23rd of October for $99.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate via reward card, November 13th in stores — is this your new work phone?

This device has the ability to work with Direct Connect, what the first carrier of this device calls its gold-standard push-to-talk capabilities, and meets military standard 810G for dust, shock, solar radiation, vibration, low pressure, and temperatures of all kinds. The display is made of Corning Gorilla Glass – only diamonds, more Gorilla Glass, or really sharp puppy teeth can bust it. What we’ve got to ask here is of Motorola – is this combined with the Motorola DROID RAZR the start of a tough lineup throughout the future?

Because check it out if you haven’t already: the DROID RAZR is made of mostly metal, Kevlar plating and Gorilla Glass on the front. It’s both super thin and nearly indestructible for your day to day activities – and here comes to the Admiral, a device we first heard about several weeks ago in name only, now we see that it’s not only inexpensive, its tough as nails! This look like a device you might pick up

Andy Rubin asks: Should smartphones be assistants or tools?

2011-10-20T15:33:00.001-07:00

We’re right in the midst of a possible rift in the way smart devices function and act, ladies and gentlemen, and though the functionality has been there for some time, it is Apple that’s brought the idea that the smartphone should be your assistant rather than just your tool for communicating to the forefront. I’d like to concentrate today on a statement made by Andy Rubin (SVP of Google) this week at AllThingsD’s AsiaD conference, he here asking (or telling, rather) whether or not it makes sense for a system like Siri, currently planted on the iPhone 4S, to turn your smart device into a personal assistant rather than just allowing the device to act as a tool for communication. I invite you, the reader and the user, to lay down your opinions as well.

This week at AsiaD, Andy Rubin spoke highly of both the iPhone and future Windows Phones by saying “Apple is a good competitor, but a different one. Both [an iPhone and a Windows phone] are going to feel very good in your hand and both going to look very beautiful physically…” This statement written up by Daily Tech and the following statement written up by Ina Fried of AllThingsD. Certainly nice words from the leader of the main competition for both of those platforms. The real bomb came later when Rubin spoke on the nature of the smartphone:

“I don’t believe that your phone should be an assistant. Your phone is a tool for communicating. You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone. … To some degree it is natural for you to talk to your phone. We’ll see how pervasive it gets. … This isn’t a new notion. In projecting the future, I think Apple did a good job of figuring out when the technology was ready to be consumer-grade.” — Andy Rubin of Google at AsiaD, October 19, 2011

What do you think? If you ask me, I’m in agreement with Rubin on the idea that the device should be a tool, not a replacement for a human assistant, a tool for communicating with people, entertaining ones self with media, and presenting media to your colleagues. Of course therein lies the specific nature of the situation — isn’t that allowing the device to act as your assistant again?

Without a doubt, this question is more about defining the functions of a smartphone than it is deciding how a smartphone should act. Smart devices have been changing the lives of millions of people across the earth now for several years – does it really matter what we call them? You decide!

I’ll Never Ditch Netflix (And You Shouldn’t Either)

2011-10-20T15:32:00.001-07:00

Just yesterday, I was listening to the radio and before the DJ introduced the next song, he got into a discussion about Netflix with his co-host. They were discussing the company’s streaming library and said that based on what they’ve found, it’s filled with old movies and in many cases, television shows they’ll never want to watch.

Based on that, they said, they had decided to save their $7.99 per month and end their Netflix subscriptions.

The discussion and their eventual conclusion took me by surprise. I’ll be the first to admit that Netflix could be better and I would also argue that the service’s selection of movies could be more up-to-date. But to say that the smart move because of that is to end a subscription is just plain nonsense.

The fact is, Netflix is loaded with quality content. Right now, I can launch the service to turn on “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” if I’m in the mood to watch some television. If I’m in a movie mode, I can sift through the nearly endless supply of quality documentaries or check out any number of film classics, including “Die Hard,” “Toy Story 3,” and a more recent favorite of mine, “The Fighter.”

Moreover, Netflix appears committed to bringing more television content to the service. The company recently inked a deal with Discovery Communications to bring content from that company’s many networks to the service. And its expanded relationship with AMC made “Breaking Bad” available to stream. (Pro tip: “The Walking Dead,” another new addition to Netflix, is one more show worth checking out on the service.) By all measure, Netflix is a television juggernaut.

Now, on the movie side, I’ll admit things could be better. And I’m a little worried that Netflix and Starz have broken off their talks to extend their content partnership past next February. But I’ve been in this place of doubt before with Netflix. And each and every time, the company finds a way to deliver programming that I want. Therefore, I’m somewhat confident that even if it loses Starz content, it can overcome that.

"At $7.99, I view it as a bargain, even though it doesn’t have every movie I want to watch"

But let’s just say that you’re someone who isn’t so enthusiastic about Netflix. Let’s say that you only like a few of the shows on the service, and every now and then you’ll turn Netflix on to watch an old movie. Although you might wish to see more, wouldn’t you agree that for just $7.99 per month, it’s worth it to keep Netflix?

The cost of Netflix is perhaps the most compelling argument I can think of to continue to subscribe to the service. If Netflix cost me $20 per month, like many, I might start to question my subscription to the service. But at $7.99, I view it as a bargain, even though it doesn’t have every movie I want to watch.

So, I won’t be ditching Netflix anytime soon. And I don’t think you should either. For as many flaws as Netflix has — and there are many — it’s still a worthwhile option for just about anyone who enjoys to be entertained in the living room or while on the road.