Emerging tech

Hacker collective focuses on biotech (audio slideshow)

SUNNYVALE, CALIF., - When it comes to splicing genes and replicating DNA, backrooms and basements are not the most ideal labs. The next wave of home hacking appears to be in biotech, and around the country, a handful of collectives have sprung up in the past few years to accommodate these biohackers.

As the members of a loose-knit biohacking group in the San Francisco Bay Area saw the passion for their homebrew hackers club growing rapidly, they decided it was time to expand. What they eventually built opened late last year as BioCurious, the Bay Area's first hackerspace for … Read more

Litmus-like sensor could detect chemical weapons

Researchers at the University of Michigan say they have developed a simple litmus-like test for nerve gas that could clue military personnel into when they might actually need to use those heavy masks and protective gear. (Nerve gases, the most toxic of chemical warfare agents, and are colorless, odorless, and tasteless.)

"To detect these agents now, we rely on huge, expensive machines that are hard to carry and hard to operate," Jinsang Kim, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Michigan, said in a statement. "We wanted to develop an equipment-free, motion-free, … Read more

EO car explores power-sharing platoons

HANOVER, Germany--The future of cars--or at least one possible future of cars--is on display here at CeBIT.

The Robotics Innovation Center at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) is showing off an electric-car prototype designed to test new technologies.

For one thing, the car can lengthen itself and lower the profile of its podlike passenger compartment when it's time for fast driving, then shorten its wheelbase when it's time for tight-turning urban driving. For another, it can toe its tires in as much as 90 degrees, letting it rotate in place or drive sideways for painless … Read more

New iPad shows tablet trajectory from nice to necessary

Don't like playing by Apple's rules? Tough beans.

Because for the foreseeable future, Apple's financial power and customer appeal gives it a powerful command over the industry--everything from component suppliers to programmers. That poses all kinds of problems, but it also means we'll be moving much faster into the future of computing--call it the post-post-PC era.

Yesterday's launch of the new iPad shows just how complete that power is. Sure, we'll still have Windows PCs, Android phones, and even MacBooks, but the iPad is on a steady trajectory that leads from entertaining toward essential. … Read more

Haptic app helps visually impaired learn math

For the blind and visually impaired, it can be nearly impossible to follow along when a math teacher spends most of a lecture in front of a blackboard or projector drawing shapes, parabolas, X-Y planes, and other visuals.

It's about time there's an app for that, thought mechanical engineering grad student Jenna Gorlewicz, who'd spent a few years at Vanderbilt's Medical and Electromechanical Design Laboratory miniaturizing endoscopic robotic capsules and was looking for a more people-oriented project.

So Gorlewicz, who says she loves both teaching and math, set out 18 months ago to try to develop a tablet app that uses haptic (or tactile) technology to help the visually impaired learn math and other subjects with a strong visual component.… Read more

How fast is that soccer player? Fraunhofer can tell

HANOVER, Germany--Today, baseball is the statistician's playground, but telematics technology that tracks players and the ball could bring the same numeric precision to soccer as well.

At the CeBIT trade show here, the Fraunhofer Institute is showing technology that attaches chips with radio transmitters to soccer players and the ball. A collection of 12 receivers around a stadium measures the players' position 200 times a second and the ball's position 2,000 times a second, said Ingmar Bretz, a project leader.

"You can distinguish between good and bad players in real time," he said, by gauging … Read more

Hi-def fiber tracking helps pinpoint brain damage

When a 32-year-old man crashed his all-terrain vehicle without wearing a helmet, he slipped into a coma for three weeks. Though his initial CT scans revealed bleeding and swelling, and an MRI scan a week into the coma revealed bruising and swelling in the same area, neurosurgeons had no way of knowing precisely how the man would be affected if he did come out of his coma.

Three weeks later, the man awoke without the ability to move his left leg, arm, or hand. Only then were doctors able to begin planning rehabilitation.

Fortunately for the patient, a novel imaging … Read more

Jeff Jaffe lights a fire under Web standardization

BARCELONA--It's been an action-packed two years since Jeff Jaffe took over as the World Wide Web Consortium's chief executive, but more action is the order of the day at the standards group.

The W3C oversees the standardization of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), technologies that carry tremendous importance as the Web expands from a medium to publish documents into a foundation for applications that can run on anything from mobile phones and cars to TVs and tablets. These Web standards, combined with the JavaScript programming language and other related technologies, let programmers reach a … Read more

Playing the light field with the Lytro camera (photos)

With the ability to adjust the focus of a photo after taking the picture, the Lytro Light Field Camera is one of the biggest technological advances in photography we've seen since the industry went digital. It's some pretty amazing technology, and with a few refinements, I'm sure this could be something that could change photography forever. Read CNET's review of the Lytro Light Field Camera, and take a look at some of these shots taken in San Francisco.