Cutting Edge

Software may soon enable cell phone users to record their coughs and diagnose a cold, flu, etc.

(Credit: Mac Users Guide/Flickr)

We've already written this week about using cell phone imaging to analyze a blood sample and diagnose disease. Because viruses such as influenza are smaller than light waves, diagnosing something like H1N1 is not yet possible.

Thankfully, the sounds of our coughs might be all we need to diagnose whether we have a cough, flu, or respiratory disease. It all boils down to the quality of a cough, such as whether it is dry or wet (aka "productive" or "unproductive"), where the presence or absence of mucus on the lungs helps to determine the cause of the cough.

Trained health workers are already able to distinguish cough types by sound. Thanks to software currently being developed by Star Analytical Services, people may soon be able to install an app to have this audio know-how at their fingertips.

"We are relying on doctors and nurses with good old technology from the 19th century," Suzanne Smith of Star tells Discovery News. "Why haven't we been measuring coughs?"

The software would work much like a fingerprint check, comparing one recording to a database of pre-recorded coughs that contain the sounds of all known respiratory diseases from people of both genders, and various ages and weights. The current database is only several-dozen large; the Star scientists anticipate needing about 1,000 recordings for the software to be truly effective.

If it's true that each respiratory illness carries distinct audio cues, comparing one's cough to a database could be a great way to get an idea of whether you've got a cold, flu, or some other illness. But I'm skeptical that a sound check can give a definitive diagnosis.

For one, certain coughs could contain a variety of underlying issues from preexisting conditions (a heavy smoker, an asthmatic, someone who has a cough and then gets the flu). And second, as far as I know, I've never had a doctor or nurse definitively diagnose an illness through the sound of my cough alone.

Still, there are certainly circumstances under which I'd prefer coughing into my cell phone to get an educated guess over trekking to the doctor's and paying to be told I simply need to rest.

After months of tests and analysis, engineers plan to beam commands to NASA's Spirit Mars rover Monday, kicking off a long-awaited attempt to free the hardy craft from the talcum powder-like soil of a hidden crater that trapped it last April.

"Spirit's facing the most challenging situation it's seen yet on the surface of Mars," Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars exploration program, said Thursday. "We know a lot of people around the world...view Spirit with great affection, exploring the Red Planet along with it, experiencing the excitement, seeing new and exciting vistas, seeing new landscapes, uncovering some incredible new knowledge about our sister planet.

The view from the Spirit rover looking north, back along its path, from the point where it got trapped last April. The rover is believed to be straddling the rim of a hidden crater. Note the front-left wheel, nearly buried in powdery soil.

(Credit: NASA)

"I'd like everybody to be hopeful, but I'd also like them to be realistic," he said. "If Spirit cannot make the great escape from this sand trap, it's likely that this lonely spot, straddling the edge of this crater, might be where Spirit ends its adventures on Mars."

Designed to operate for just three months on the frigid surface of Mars, Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, have been exploring opposite sides of the planet since early 2004, collecting data in concert with orbiting spacecraft to help scientists understand the role of water in the Martian environment.

Chalking up a steady stream of discoveries over the past five years, the unexpectedly long-lived rovers are held in high esteem by the scientists and engineers who drive them across the surface of Mars and eagerly await the data they send back.

"In many ways, we think of these rovers kind of as our children that we've sent off into the world way too early," said Ashley Stroupe, a rover driver at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "And like most parents, when their kids go off to college, we can't reach out to help them every time they really need us. So it really is a bond, not just between us and the rover, but also the team has become a very close family as well."

Last April 23, the six-wheel Spirit was slowly rolling backward on the western side of a feature known as "Home Plate," heading toward the south and a pair of volcanic structures that scientists wanted to examine. The rover was driving backward because its right front wheel stopped working in 2006.

The ground to the south of Spirit looked normal, but as it rolled along, its wheels broke through an upper-crust-like layer of soil and into a softer, unseen material.

"Essentially, the rover was driving on what we call a dirt crust," said John Callas, the project manager of the Mars exploration rovers at JPL. "It was a hard surface that we broke through, and underneath this material, camouflaged underneath, was this loose, fine material where the rover is challenged right now."

Scientists later determined that Spirit's path was straddling the rim of an ancient, 26-foot-wide crater just beneath the surface. The crater was filled in with sulfate sands that formed layers with different compositions.

Initial attempts to drive out in a crablike fashion by turning the front and back wheels in the same direction only made matters worse.

Pictures from navigation cameras on the rover show its forward and rear wheels almost buried in the soil, their treads caked with a powdery coating that reduces traction. Even worse, photographs show a pyramid-shape rock sticking up from the soil directly below Spirit's body that threatens to rub against the belly, possibly lodging in an indentation. If the rock ends up bearing any of the weight of the rover, traction could be reduced even more.

A view under the Spirit rover showing a pyramid-shape rock close to the belly of the robot.

(Credit: NASA)

NASA managers decided to halt any additional attempts to free Spirit until engineers could complete a thorough analysis using a full-scale mockup and simulated Martian soil.

"Unfortunately, Spirit may have met its match in this one," McCuistion said. "We will see if we can get it out of this talcum powder-type soil that laid beneath a seemingly innocuous surface crust that we broke through...The rover teams have been working very hard since April, they've been testing, strategizing, analyzing, and modeling to figure a way out. We even called experts in soil mechanics and mechanical systems in to try to help us understand the environment. But there's only so much you can do on Earth to simulate Mars."

Late Monday, commands will be uplinked to Spirit in an attempt to drive north, back along the furrows its wheels dug as the rover moved into the sand trap last April. Engineers will find out how the move went on Tuesday. No one expects a quick extraction, and engineers said it likely will take weeks or months to either free the rover or determine that it can't be done.

A mockup of the Spirit rover in a "sand box" at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where engineers have been testing techniques for driving the vehicle out of loose soil.

(Credit: NASA)

"Our best plan at this point is to try to drive forward, retracing our steps as we drove in," Stroupe said. "And we believe this is our best plan for several reasons. One is that we believe this softer material may be easier to plow through than trying to break through the crust and cut new tracks. So if we follow our old tracks out, we may be able to make better progress.

"We have very little ground clearance under the vehicle. Wheel turns cause us to sink further into this material, and there is no guarantee that any plan we come up with will succeed in extricating the vehicle," she said. "This is going to clearly be a very long process, to either get to extrication or perhaps even to determine if extraction is going to work."

The team's progress will be assessed in February. Depending on the success or failure of the work at that point, NASA could opt to continue with additional attempts or decide to call it off. Even in that worst-case scenario, scientists could still use Spirit's instruments to study nearby rocks and soil, and to monitor the martian weather.

But Stroupe hopes it won't come to that.

"I think a lot of us, while we're waiting for that plan to execute (Monday), will not get a lot of sleep," she said. "But regardless of the outcome, none of us can have anything but primarily positive emotions about this mission. It's been such an incredible experience, we've come so far beyond what we thought we would accomplish...We're so proud of them, and we're so thrilled to have been part of this project. It will be sad to see them go. But we're not ready to let go yet, and we don't plan to let go yet. We still have a lot of work to do."

Over the past few weeks, we've heard more and more about 2012 when, according to some, the world will end. Responding to all that talk with a healthy dose of skepticism, scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have launched a Web page to dispel the myths surrounding the momentous occasion.

On an FAQ page called, "2012: Beginning of the End or Why the World Won't End?" NASA wrote that much like the Y2K scare a decade ago, the end of the world won't come in 2012.

"Impressive movie special effects aside, December 21, 2012, won't be the end of the world as we know," NASA scientists wrote on its 2012 page. "It will, however, be another winter solstice."

According to NASA scientists, "nothing bad will happen to the Earth in 2012." The scientists wrote on the page that "our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012."

But it's further down on the page where the scientists bring out the big guns. They said although the myth surrounding 2012 contends planets will align and crash into Earth, "there are no planetary alignments in the next few decades, Earth will not cross the galactic plane in 2012, and even if these alignments were to occur, their effects on the Earth would be negligible. Each December the Earth and sun align with the approximate center of the Milky Way galaxy but that is an annual event of no consequence."

In the end, it was a simple comment from NASA senior research scientist Don Yeomans that might sum up the agency's feelings on 2012: "There apparently is a great deal of interest in celestial bodies, and their locations and trajectories at the end of the calendar year 2012. Now, I for one love a good book or movie as much as the next guy. But the stuff flying around through cyberspace, TV, and the movies is not based on science."

(Credit: Oto Melara)

The Italian army has ordered 81 Hitrole Light remote-controlled weapon stations for its Iveco Lince vehicles in response to increased attacks in Afghanistan employing improvised explosive devices, according to a statement last month from Italian Ministero della Difesa, or ministry of defense.

Italy has struggled to live up to its NATO commitments in the face of widespread domestic opposition to the war in Afghanistan, and it has gone to great lengths to keep casualties to an absolute minimum. One way to do that is to stay buttoned-up.

The Hitrole is an electrically powered machine gun turret, operated by a single gunner ensconced safely below. The gunner aims and fires, using a flat-panel display and a joystick; elevation and traverse functions are electric. The standard sensor package contains a color daytime TV camera, infrared night sight, and an eye-safe laser range finder (PDF).

The gun system, which is fully stabilized, features an automatic target tracker, increasing the probability of first-round hits on both stationary and fleeting targets, even while the platform is moving, according to Italian manufacturer Oto Melara, which signed a contract worth 20 million euros with the Italian defense ministry.

A subsidiary of Finmeccanica, Oto Melara was once called Vickers Terni, of rugged World War 1 Vickers machine gun fame.

The unit can be fitted with a variety of weapons up to a .50 caliber machine gun or an automatic grenade launcher. Reloading is also preformed from below, with belt ammunition being fed through a flexible duct.

There have been at least 1,500 coalition deaths in Afghanistan since the war began, according to a recent tally--22 of whom were Italian.

(Credit: Peking University and Tsinghua University)

That tiny, plastic-looking black cube up there can absorb up to 180 times its own weight in toxic waste without absorbing any water. How? As with just about every amazing and/or inexplicable scientific breakthrough nowadays, the answer is spelled N-A-N-O.

Researchers at Peking and Tsinghua universities, both in Beijing, have adapted carbon nanotubes into a sponge-like material that can be squeezed dry, which sounds like extremely exciting news for the infomercial cleaning product industry. One minor detail:

Since carbon nanotubes are hydrophobic, there's no modification required to make them not absorb water.

For the record, that includes mysteriously blue infomercial demo water, so there goes that. If not absorbing 20 times as much water as its leading competitor, what exactly is this new type of sponge good for? Environmental cleanup, evidently. See, instead of just dropping dispersants into the middle of an oil or chemical spill--which forces the spill to simply absorb into the water--these light and porous nanosponges could float in water and be used to sop up the spill, after which they could theoretically be wrung dry and reused, like so:

The scientists detail their findings in Advanced Materials. It's an amazing idea, but I get the feeling that carbon nanotube sponges, riskily abbreviated as CNT sponges, won't exactly be cheap.

This story originally appeared on Gizmodo.

Desktop virtualization is saving St. Vincent's both electric and staff energy.

(Credit: Pano Logic)

It's no secret that the installed base of technology at large medical facilities needs refreshing, especially as hospitals work toward digitizing medical records.

At St. Vincent's Catholic Medical Center in New York, a nonprofit with 42 facilities across five boroughs, the constant accessing and updating of patient records through the hospital's shared-bandwidth MPLS network resulted in unacceptable lag time pretty much all day, every day.

So Kane Edupuganti, director of IT Operations & Communications, convinced the higher-ups to retire the hospitals' hundreds of five-plus-year-old desktops and buy more than 600 zero client cubes from Pano Logic.

"About six months ago we did the proof of concept and rolled out our first batch in three weeks," Edupuganti says. "That's how easy it was. Right now we are at 300 and change, and we'll be at 640 by the end of the year."

By opting for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), St. Vincent's went from being bogged down on the MPLS network to running applications and the desktop in the data center, with screen scrapes done to an endpoint device.

The Pano Device uses less than 3 percent the energy of even EnergyStar desktop PCs.

(Credit: Pano Logic)

Edupuganti has placed his faith in Pano Logic because the stateless, tiny Pano Device (3 inches by 3 inches by 2 inches) "simply serves to connect peripheral devices--a keyboard, mouse, VGA display, and audio output--along with other USB peripherals, to a virtualized Microsoft Windows desktop operating system running on a server in the data center."

No OS, no CPU, no memory, no fan, no moving parts at all. As Edupuganti puts it, the devices are essentially just screensharing, using VMware ESX in the background to spin up the hospitals' virtual desktops. If a nurse was in the middle of updating a record and is interrupted (not uncommon in a hospital setting), the nurse could finish updating via an entirely different cube in a distant unit.

Beyond the obvious savings in staff time, from the perspective of not only medical personnel but the center's eight engineers who serve 7,000 people, Edupuganti is already seeing enormous energy savings, with each cube using less than 3 percent of even EnergyStar PCs: "Regular fat PCs suck up 140 to 160 watts; Pano Logic uses 5. Multiply that times 500 units. It's huge."

And it needs to be. In its existence BP (Before Pano), St. Vincent's was purportedly one of New York State's top five power hogs. The significant reduction in energy costs is not only good for the environment, but a key factor in justifying the cost of the Pano devices.

Of course, the cubes are only as good as the network, whose occasional blips result in blank screens on the user's end that a simple restart does not fix, and can be a nuisance when the entire IT department is sleeping soundly at home. But that's a small price to pay, compared to the fat client problems that came before.

Google software luminaries such as Unix co-creator Ken Thompson believe that they can help boost both computing power and programmers' abilities with an experimental programming language project called Go.

And on Tuesday, they're taking the veil of secrecy off Go, releasing what they've built so far and inviting others to join the newly open-source project.

The computing industry is in constant tension between making a fresh start and evolving the current technology. The limits of today's hardware designs and programming technology led the Go team to take the former approach.

Gordon, the Go gopher mascot, drawn by Rob Pike's wife and illustrator Renee French.

(Credit: Google)

"We found some of those problems to be frustrating and decided that the only way to address them was linguistically," said Rob Pike, a principal software engineer working on Go. "We're systems software people ourselves. We wanted a language to make our lives better."

So far, Google's Go project consists of the programming language, compilers to convert what programmers write into software that computers can run, and a runtime package that endows Go programs with a number of built-in features. It's most similar to C and C++, but, Pike said, it employs modern features and has enough versatility that it could even be used within Web browsers.

Go's assets
There's a huge step between creating a new programming language and building into a major force in the industry. Sun Microsystems, which succeeded with Java, has had less success with a would-be Fortran successor called Fortress.

But Go has some assets most languages don't.

First, the project is at Google, which has a powerful incentive to make something useful in order to get more out of its hundreds of thousands of servers and its countless in-house programmers. An experiment at Google could have more commercial relevance than many other company's actual products, and Go is already graduated from a 20 percent time project to one with formal support.

"We don't intend it to be experimental forever," Pike said. "We really want to build stuff for real with this."

Second, there's the Go team's pedigree. Among them:

• Thompson, the winner of the 1983 Turing Award and 1998 National Medal of Technology, who, along with Dennis Ritchie, was an original creator of Unix. Thompson also came up with the B programming language that led to the widely used C from Ritchie.

• Pike, a principal software engineer who was a member of Bell Labs' Unix team and a later operating-system project called Plan 9. He's worked with Thompson for years and with him created the widely used UTF-8 character-encoding scheme.

• Robert Griesemer, who helped write Java's HotSpot compiler and V8, the Chrome browser's JavaScript engine; Russ Cox, a Plan 9 developer; and Ian Taylor, who has worked on improving the widely used open-source GCC compiler.

The name Go itself stems from the challenging board game, a reference to Google itself and, of course, the idea of going somewhere, Pike said.

What's Go for?
Google has high hopes for Go.

It's designed to address some issues in getting software to take advantage of multicore processors that can perform multiple tasks in parallel. It has an approach to ease some of the pains of object-oriented programming. It has modern language features such as "garbage collection," which helps programmers deal with mundane but important memory management issues. And it's designed to be fast--nearly as fast as programs written in C or C++--and enable fast creation of programs in the first place.

"It seems it's getting much harder to build software than it used to be," even though computers are vastly faster than in the past, Pike said. "The process of software development doesn't feel any better than it did a generation ago. We deliberately tried to make a language that focused in part on rapid development, that compiles really efficiently, and that expresses dependencies efficiently and precisely so the compilation process can be controlled well. I find it much more productive to work in."

When it comes to the speed programs at which programs run, "Our target was to get as close as we could to C or C++," Pike said. They're reasonably close--programs run about 20 percent to 30 percent slower right now, he said.

The Go Web site itself is built with Go, but Google has broader ambitions. The software is designed to build server software--Google's Gmail is one example of what it's suited for. Google thinks that it could be good for other cases, including running software in a Web browser, a task JavaScript handles today.

"It's at least an order of magnitude better than JavaScript," Pike said. Note that Google built its own browser, Chrome, in part to speed JavaScript and Web performance, and that Google already is incorporating its technology such as Native Client and Gears.

Another nice Web-related feature in Go: tasks can be shared by servers and client devices such as PCs or mobile phones that use those services. That makes a service more easily adapted to different amounts of processing power for those clients, Pike said.

Making the most of multicore
Go also is designed to tackle one of today's big challenges, multicore processors. Programs often work sequentially, moving through a task one step at a time, but multicore processors are better at handling many tasks in parallel.

Go is no magic bullet for the problem, but Pike is optimistic that it will help. "We think we have support sufficient to take a crack at it," he said.

Specifically, Go uses a technology dating back to the 1960s called CSP, or communicating sequential processes, that handles interactions among a set of cooperating programs, Pike said. The technology made an appearance in programming languages such as Occom and Erlang, but it generally hasn't been applied in systems programming.

"We don't believe we've solved the multicore-programming problem," Pike said. "But we think we've built an environment in which a certain class of problems can take advantage of the multicore architecture."

The design also can apply, to some extent, to spreading tasks among multiple servers connected over a network, he added.

Lending a hand
The Go team is looking for help. One big area is in improving the runtime library from which Go programs can draw.

Such libraries speed up programming by providing many tools and functions so programmers don't have to create those ingredients on their own, and Go's library includes many elements crucial to Go's design. Go's libraries supply resources for handling concurrency, garbage collection, and other "low-level gunk you don't want to expose to programmers," Pike said.

The Go team also is looking for compiler help. Thompson has written some compiler support for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 processors, and for ARM processors, and Taylor has written a Go front end for the GCC compiler.

ARM processors are dominant in the mobile-phone market that Google is trying to spur into greater activity with the Android operating system, and Go software will be able to run on mobile phones, he said. "We're looking at interesting applications on things like Android phones. We're not sure where that's going to lead, but it's too intriguing to let it go," Pike said.

Google has released many products as open-source software over the years, in part to give something back to the pool from which it's drawn and in part because it stands to gain from the collective-development philosophy. Go fits with those motives.

"We did this to help Google first, but we decided (that) we need to open-source it," Pike said. "It's interesting, but it needs help from the community."

For all Google's ambitions for Go, the company doesn't expect it to erase today's technology.

"I don't think we'll replace anything," Pike said. "We're just putting another player into the arena."

A space race lifted off Friday in Southern California, only this one involved elevators.

Powering their laser-controlled robot to climb a 900-meter-long cable, the team from Seattle-based LaserMotive was crowned the winner in NASA's Space Elevator Power-Beaming Challenge game on Friday.

Held at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base in Lancaster, Calif., the challenge pits teams against each other to see whose robotic space elevator can inch up the cable the quickest in under 7.5 minutes. A helicopter holds the steel cable in place as each robotic elevator races to the top. The LaserMotive crew crossed the finish line four times, the fastest time being 3 minutes and 48 seconds.

The goal behind the games is to build a robotic climber that could someday be turned into a space elevator that would carry supplies into orbit without need of a ship. The elevator would rise up a tether that rotates with the Earth and be capable of carrying about 10 tons of payload.

As the winner, LaserMotive will take home a check of $900,000 from the sponsor, Spaceward Foundation. If the team had been able to climb the entire tether in three minutes or less at a speed of at least 5 meters per second, it could have won the top prize of $2 million.

The other two teams, the Kansas City Space Pirates and the University of Saskatchewan Space Design Team (USST), both ran into technical troubles, preventing them from reaching the top of the cable in any of their attempts.

NASA's Space Elevator race has seen its ups and downs for the past few years, with contestants coming close but not quite attaining the grand prize.

An additional $1.1 million in prize money is still available, according to the Spaceward Foundation, so another challenge will be held in the future to see if any team can win the race at 5 meters per second.

My dad used to say technology is advancing so quickly that, by the time a product reaches market, it is already obsolete. Moreover, if you wait just a little longer, you can pay a lot less. The sequencing of the human genome takes the advancement of technology, and its fast reduction in cost, to an entirely new level.

Whole-genome sequencing could be affordable and accurate enough to perform on every newborn with a simple heel-prick blood test in a matter of years.

(Credit: Elizabeth Armstrong Moore/CNET)

The Human Genome Project, which officially completed the mind-boggling achievement of sequencing Jim Watson's genome in 2006, carried the equally mind-boggling price tag of $3 billion. If I may be so bold as to use that word thrice in one paragraph, even more mind-boggling is that a company called Complete Genomics has just sequenced three human genomes for $4,400 in materials, with an error rate of less than one base in 100,000.

DNA sequencing technology, which could help us detect genetic predispositions to illnesses, customize treatments accordingly, lead to the development of new energy sources, etc., is currently being used to either do long reads of hundreds of bases on genomes that have yet to be sequenced (see the news this week on the full sequencing of the domestic horse genome), or shorter reads that only align with a genome we have already sequenced (ours, for example).

In a paper published in the journal Science on Thursday, Complete Genomics shares the methods it used, which John Timmer at Ars Technica describes as "clever variants of well known molecular biology techniques to read massive amounts of DNA fragments that are, in total, about 65 bases long."

Moreover, Complete Genomics used more common--read more affordable--materials. For a detailed explanation of how this was done, check out the paper in Science, or Timmer's illustrated translation for Ars Technica.

Complete Genomics is not the lone warrior in this field. As CNET's Stephen Shankland reported in October, IBM Research has jumped into the game, and hopes to reduce the cost of genetic testing to as little as $100 per person. And then there's genomic technology manufacturer Illumina, and 454 Life Sciences. The list grows.

At this rate of advancement, it has been widely reported that the technology for whole-genome sequencing could be affordable and accurate enough to perform on every newborn with a simple heel-prick blood test in a matter of years. This makes a lot of people uneasy for several reasons, not the least of which is privacy.

"Bad things can be done with the genome," Dr. Jay Flatley of Illumina tells Times Online. "It could predict something about someone--and you could potentially hand information to their employer or their insurance company. People have to recognize that this horse is out of the barn, and that your genome probably can't be protected, because everywhere you go you leave your genome behind."

I have to wonder which is more unnerving to most people--that others will be able to access our genomic fingerprints, or that our bodies are able to be so accurately read at all. The secrets currently locked within us carry a certain mystique, and once unlocked could be put to uses that are possibly beyond our control. Whether this makes the human body more or less magical is debatable, but this much is not: The horse is out of the barn.