Tiny computer inside the body could treat disease

Tiny computer inside the body could treat disease
Scientists believe they are closer than ever to creating computers that can live inside the body and detect disease.

Scientists have worked out how to use biological molecules to store information and to transmit data from one cell to another Photo: Alamy


By Amy Willis

11:36AM GMT 29 Mar 2013

The “biological computer” is made from the organic molecules and is capable of working within the living cells of organisms.


The tiny biodegradable devices could detect changes in the environment, deliver drugs within the body or even destroy potentially cancerous cells.


Scientists have already worked out how to use biological molecules to store information and to transmit data from one cell to another.


The latest study, published in Science and reported in The Independent, adds the third critical component of computing – a biological transistor that acts as a “logic gate” to determine whether a biochemical question is true or false.


Drew Endy, assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University in California, who led the study, said the discovery could help science develop a computer to detect disease.


“Biological computers can be used to study and reprogram living systems, monitor environments and improve cellular therapeutics,” he said.

Biological computers have been the dream of electronic engineers for decades because they open the possibility of a new generation of ultra-small, ultra-fast devices that could be incorporated into the machinery of living organisms.

“For example, suppose we could partner with microbes and plants to record events, natural or otherwise, and convert this information into easily observed signals. That would greatly expand our ability to monitor the environment,” Professor Endy said.

“So the future of computing need not only be a question of putting people and things together with ubiquitous silicon computers. The future will be much richer if we can imagine new modes of computing in new places and with new materials – and then find ways to bring those new modes to life,” he said.

The Mystery of the Tiny Door in a Tree

The Mystery of the Tiny Door in a Tree
A tiny door at the base of a tree in Golden Gate Park is drawing the interest of many

By Joe Rosato Jr.
| Friday, Mar 29, 2013 | Updated 4:12 PM PDT






A tiny door in the base of a tree in Golden Gate Park is attracting a lot of visitors. Joe Rosato Jr. reports.
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PHOTOS AND VIDEOS


PHOTOS
The Mysterious
Tiny Door in a Tree


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Weird News PhotosMore Photos and Videos


Pam Madigan walked deliberately among the Golden Gate Park Concourse’s grove of knotted old trees as if searching for a pot of gold -- ignoring the attractions of the nearby DeYoung Museum and Academy of Sciences.

With her infant son cradled in her arms, her eyes darted to the base of a particular elm where a tiny wooden door covered a large knot hole. She summoned her group of friends and children, pointing to the tiny door which was not more than a foot tall.


“It was sort of an idea to have a scavenger hunt and go out and look for it,” Madigan said. “It’s not on a map.”

VIDEO: Watch Visitors Explore the Tiny Door

The tiny door hinged to the base of the tree may not be on a map, but it has made the internet, which is often easier to navigate than a map. Posts about the mysterious door recently showed up on the Richmond Blog. The blog’s writers said it was its most popular topic ever, even more popular than the local crime stats.

“We think a little gnome might live in there right?” Madigan asked with a wink.

The group of kids taking part in Madigan’s expedition wasted no time in sliding in the dirt to size-up the door and its contents.

“There’s a bunch of like notes and stuff,” said Kale Almeida peering beyond the door. “It’s like a little house.”

PHOTOS: What's inside the tree?

No one in the blogosphere or at San Francisco’s Parks and Rec Department knew who installed the door. Park workers noticed it about a week ago, but we’re leaving it alone in case enchanted inhabitants were indeed responsible.

“As of now we don’t have any plans other than to leave the elf door and continue to take care of Golden Gate Park,” said Andy Stone, the park department’s section supervisor.

News of the wee door has drawn other curious seekers to the concourse to witness the strange sight. Some were inspired to leave treasures inside the door, like notes, acorns and pennies, which only seem handy for making wishes.

“They just stick the notes in for the squirrels I guess,” concluded middle-school student Chris Gallo who was attending a school field trip with classmates from Escalon in the Central Valley. Gallo said back in Escalon, people never install doors in trees.

Another student took the opportunity to write a note, drawing inspiration from the unusual door’s artistic subtleties.

“I like cheesecake,” she scratched on the scrap of paper before shoving it inside the knot hole.

A bit later, a group of boys playing football caught sight of the door and moved into investigate.

“It reminded me of Alice in Wonderland,” said Anthony Perez, pondering the meaning of the cryptic letters.”[I] actually saw some of the notes and it just said ‘I like cheesecake.’”

Young Kale didn’t know much about Alice in Wonderland, but figured the door probably belonged to a gnome house. With a sweatshirt full of fresh dirt, he closed the door and thoughtfully wondered about its existence.

“It’s cool,” he said. “Who wouldn’t like a little door in a tree?”





The tiny door can be found inside the Concourse in Golden Gate Park. (Google Maps)

Will email kill the postal system?

Will email kill the postal system?

Caitlin McGarry@Caitlin_McGarry
Mar 15, 2013 5:50 AM

There’s something sweet and old-fashioned about checking your mailbox and seeing a handwritten letter, a birthday card, or a package full of overnighted Amazon goodies.

But physical mail needs more than nostalgia to survive in the era of email.

The U.S. Postal Service’s financial problems have been extensively reported; theagency lost some $15.9 billion last year and proposed a plan to cut Saturday service to save money. Congress is opposed to the idea and passed a budget bill requiring the USPS to continue six-day delivery.

Good news for the post office: People still send and receive snail mail. In 2012, the USPS processed 160 billion pieces of mail, and not all of it was credit card offers and coupons (just about half was advertising mail). Plenty of reasons for checking your mailbox still exist, whether they're bills you can’t pay online, letters from relatives who aren’t hip to Facebook, Netflix DVDs, or magazines and catalogs.

But even snail mail is going high-tech. The USPS recognizes that while first-class mail—those letters we stopped sending—is going by the wayside, new, disruptive technologies can be built on top of the postal system’s infrastructure.
Letters come to life

Most of us, at one point or another, like to receive traditional mail. But we’re also looking for ways to use the devices that we almost always have on hand—tablets and smartphones—to make our lives easier.The USPS app.

The postal service has an iOS smartphone app that you can use to track packages, calculate shipping costs, find a post office, and other mail-related tasks. The app has been downloaded more than 3.4 million times. But the USPS is stepping up its game. The agency last year created a digital solutions group whose mission is to bring the USPS into the 21st century.

Many of the postal service’s tech initiatives pertain to direct mail, otherwise known as those ads, coupons, and offers you often don’t want. Tom Foti, the USPS’s manager of direct mail and periodicals, says that the post office has been offering rotating promotions over the last few months to offer discounts to companies that incorporate new tech.

The post office wants the businesses that send you offers to let you scan an ad’s QR code to get more information about a product or authenticate your identity for notices from your bank or for debit card activation, or to use augmented reality tech in their mailers.

The augmented reality promotion, which begins this summer, will let you use your smartphone to see 3D content from a mailer.

The post office also wants businesses to test near-field communication (NFC) chips in their ads to encourage people to use their smartphones as digital wallets and buy the products they see in ads and catalogs. Sounds like an expensive undertaking, but the postal service is offering discounts for businesses that try out such emerging tech to see how it works in real life.

Encouraging people to buy by mail would be a big boost for the postal system, which sees a significant amount of money ($11.6 billion last year alone) from shipping packages. In a strange twist, while e-commerce has dented brick-and-mortar retail sales, it’s big business for the post office.
Betting big on real mail

The postal system doesn’t just route packages from Amazon to your front door. Some startups are turning the post office itself into a moneymaking venture.

Apps that organize your email are a dime a dozen, but a handful of companies are carving a niche by electronically organizing your letters and junk before that physical mail hits your doorstep.

Betting on a struggling system is risky, but Outbox is turning physical mail into digital mail with its new service, currently available only in San Francisco.OUTBOXOutbox on the iPad.

Think of Outbox as Dropbox for physical mail, says cofounder Evan Baehr. Outbox’s “unpostmen” (dressed in bright red) pick up your mail from your mailbox, use a machine to digitize each piece, then store the digital copies in an account you access from the Outbox app. The service is $5 a month. You can have the team deliver anything you need hard copies of and shred the rest.

“A lot of people joke and say, ‘You’re going to digitize my mail and send me a bill electronically—isn’t that called email?’” Baehr says. “People point to a range of digital communication channels, but what we found is that there are actual reasons why people continue to send stuff in the printed form. The explanation why mail still comes to your house is there isn’t a digital alternative that’s attractive enough.”

Security is another concern, but Baehr says Outbox’s “unpostmen” go through rigorous background checks, and the company has identity theft insurance for each customer.OUTBOXOUTBOXOutbox on a smartphone.



The Austin-based startup, founded by Baehr and Harvard Business School classmate Will Davis, kicked off this month with service to residents in San Francisco’s SoMa (South of Market Street) neighborhood, and Baehr says response has been off the charts.

Another company in the digital mail space is Zumbox, which works with businesses that send you mail (such as major banks and utility companies) and stores the mailing pieces in a Digital Mail Box account. Zumbox differs from Outbox in that it doesn’t collect your mail from your mailbox and digitizes only mail from businesses, not people.
Signed, sealed, delivered

A post office that exists to digitize your mail is probably not in our future, says postal strategy consultant John Callan. But you can expect a hybrid of electronic and physical, a transition period with one foot in each realm. The post office is straddling both worlds in its efforts to adopt QR codes and NFC tech, and you can see companies looking to innovate in ways that a large-scale agency like the USPS might not be able to do.

“[Entrepreneurs] do it on the postal platform, which is wonderful,” Callan says. “This is where innovation comes from.”

The postal system has hundreds of years of experience (though the USPS as an agency is just a few decades old), with the structures in place to deliver mail to even the most rural, remote homes in a short time. Startups like Outbox can create a new niche using the post office as a foundation.

Callan is the founder of the annual PostalVision 20/20 conference that brings together big names in the postal industry to discuss its future, but he doesn’t deny that snail mail is marching to its doom. Millennials don’t use the post office the way Baby Boomers do, so their needs will need to be addressed if the system is going to last beyond this generation.

But there is always the nostalgia factor; snail mail is so old-fashioned that it could become cool again—like vinyl records. Even millennials like this writer, often written off as a selfish, tech-obsessed generation, can appreciate tactile, meaningful reminders of the past. Callan says receiving mail at your home is “palpably personal in a way that no electronic medium can be, and will become more appreciated as an art form.”

What 3-D Printing Could Mean for Small Businesses

What 3-D Printing Could Mean for Small Businesses

BY JOHN PATRICK PULLEN




In formation: The olloclip lens and Shapeways products.
Photo© Ben Alsop

A ball. A cup. A gear. Even an electric car. 3-D printers can't print money, but they can produce prototypes for almost anything else. And as prices for the desktop devices drop, entrepreneurs are seeing them kick out something more: tangible business results.



3-D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, uses technology born of paper printing. But rather than outputting two-dimensional renderings, it makes actual physical objects. There are a few methods. Fused deposition modeling printers push heated material through a tube (much like inkjets), "printing" objects in three dimensions, one layer at a time. Selective laser sintering (SLS) units, meanwhile, operate like laser printers, shining a high-powered beam of light onto a bed of powdered resin, turning it into a hardened material. And stereolithography works similarly to SLS, but with liquid resin.

"There are a ton of companies, from one- and two-person organizations to sub-100-person organizations, that actually make themselves competitive with the 10,000-pound gorilla in their particular marketplace because of the advantages they get with 3-D printing," says Bruce Bradshaw, marketing director of Objet, a 3-D printing provider based in Israel that was merging with Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Stratasys at press time. He says Objet's annual revenue has grown 35 percent over the past three years, driven largely by small- and medium-size business customers. Meanwhile, the average cost of basic 3-D printers has fallen from $200,000 to $15,000.

Huntington Beach, Calif.-based company olloclip has used 3-D printing to make a big name for itself with its little iPhone accessory. The snap-on camera lens has garnered rave reviews and is one of the few peripherals stocked in every Apple Store (not to mention Best Buy and Target). "I can't imagine doing this without owning our own 3-D printer," says CEO Patrick O'Neill.

Olloclip has invested $50,000 in 3-D printing, not only to prototype its own products, but also to create mock-ups of rumored iPhones so that lenses can be designed quickly each time Apple releases a new version. "We can literally sketch an idea in the morning, model it in the afternoon, pop it in the printer and have a sample made that evening," says olloclip design director Chong Pak. Fast turnaround is key for companies in this space; olloclip finished and validated an iPhone 5 version of its product within days of the handset's announcement.

But olloclip's biggest challenge is in fending off counterfeiters in China. Poorly made fake olloclips flood Asian markets. Thanks to 3-D printing, olloclip can keep its computer-aided design files in-house and safe, rather than having samples produced through rapid prototyping service bureaus, which have been known to leak blueprints. "You hope that the people you send the files to are ethical, but you just don't know," O'Neill says. "If you keep it in-house, you don't have to worry about that."

The efficiency of 3-D printing has transformed business for Houston-based ClearCorrect, a maker of invisible braces. Previously it used milling machines to make models of customers' teeth that were thermoformed with a thin, clear plastic to make braces. Only one model could be made before resetting the expensive, high-powered machinery, which often broke down. With 3-D printing, CEO Jarrett Pumphrey discovered, they could run batches of 60 to 70 models at once, taking five minutes each, vs. 13 minutes with milling.

The 130-person company expected a 30 percent sales gain for 2012 and is now using only 4,000 square feet of its facility and three to four people to produce models, rather than the 11,000 square feet and 10 to 15 people needed with the milling machines.

Still, investing in 3-D printing isn't for everyone. That's where providers like New York City-based Shapeways come in. It offers 3-D printing in more than 30 materials--including plastic, glass, metal and ceramic--and an online marketplace where anyone can sell products. It offers 8,000 shop owners a low barrier to entry by charging only for materials used in production, plus a 3.5 percent transaction fee. Clients include designers of jewelry, tech gadgets and housewares; Shapeways enables them to produce and sell their creations in limited numbers but in a cost-effective way. "Our value proposition," says director of marketing Carine Carmy, "is that we can offer the price and quality of what you can buy in a store, and have that still be custom."

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Physicists say they have found a Higgs boson

Physicists say they have found a Higgs boson

Mar 14, 9:28 AM (ET)

By JOHN HEILPRIN


(AP) This 2011 image provided by CERN, shows a real CMS proton-proton collision in which four...
Full Image


GENEVA (AP) - The search is all but over for a subatomic particle that is a crucial building block of the universe.

Physicists announced Thursday they believe they have discovered the subatomic particle predicted nearly a half-century ago, which will go a long way toward explaining what gives electrons and all matter in the universe size and shape.

The elusive particle, called a Higgs boson, was predicted in 1964 to help fill in our understanding of the creation of the universe, which many theorize occurred in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang. The particle was named for Peter Higgs, one of the physicists who proposed its existence, but it later became popularly known as the "God particle."

The discovery would be a strong contender for the Nobel Prize. Last July, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, announced finding a particle they described as Higgs-like, but they stopped short of saying conclusively that it was the same particle or was some version of it.

Scientists have now finished going through the entire set of data.

"The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said Joe Incandela, a physicist who heads one of the two main teams at CERN, each involving several thousand scientists.

Whether or not it is a Higgs boson is demonstrated by how it interacts with other particles and its quantum properties, CERN said in the statement. After checking, scientists said the data "strongly indicates that it is a Higgs boson."

The results were announced in a statement by the Geneva-based CERN and released at a physics conference in the Italian Alps.

CERN's atom smasher, the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider that lies beneath the Swiss-French border, has been creating high-energy collisions of protons to investigate how the universe came to be the way it is.

The particle's existence helps confirm the theory that objects gain their size and shape when particles interact in an energy field with a key particle, the Higgs boson. The more they attract, so the theory goes, the bigger their mass will be.

Debunking the staffing company myths

Debunking the staffing company myths


01.25.2013

Debunking the staffing company myths


It's crucial to use whatever tools you can to help out your job search, whether it's social media to expand your network, online job listings to regularly search for open positions or informational meetings that help you figure out exactly what kind of job you want.

However, one of the most overlooked resources is also one of the most helpful - staffing companies.

According to Business2Community, staffing companies have become instrumental in helping job hunters find a position, as well as giving candidates a potential direction to go in when it comes to the right field or industry. Unfortunately, as demand for temporary work grew during the recession, so too did the number and scale of myths surrounding employment agencies.

One of the most misunderstood aspects of a staffing agency is the kinds of jobs these companies can help you get. While everyone knows these firms are great for entry-level positions, many believe they can't help you move your career further.

This, however, is just plain wrong.

Staffing companies work directly with employers that need all levels of experience, and can help candidates find jobs after years in a particular field. The healthcare, accounting and finance or IT sectors all have huge room for growth, and staffing firms often specialize in placing higher-level jobs in these industries.

Another misconception is that even if you do find a job, a slice of your salary will go to the search firm. Most of the time, a staffing firm will work directly with a business who needs a certain kind of worker, and if the recruiter succeeds in finding that ideal candidate, they are paid by the company that hired you - not you yourself.

If you're worried that even a staffing company doesn't have the power to find an open job amid unemployment that is just under 8 percent, think again. Yes, the unemployment rate isn't ideal, but there are still some 3.7 million jobs out there. Some of them may require a highly specific skill set, but employment agencies typically work with these companies to learn what is most in-demand, the media outlet stated.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 7,800 temporary jobs were added in November 2012, and this number remained virtually the same in December 2012. Across the professional and business services sector as a whole, 19,000 jobs were added in December, following 32,000 new jobs in November.