Emerging tech

The tricorder, that handheld geological, biological, and meteorological device of general awesomeness from the Star Trek universe, has spawned several real-life iterations boasting such uses as the detection of ulcers and deadly gases.

So in May, the X Prize Foundation announced that, alongside Qualcomm, it would award a $10 million Tricorder X Prize to the person who develops a mobile device that can diagnose a broad range of common health ailments as well as--or better than--a panel of board-certified physicians.

A team at Oregon State University in Corvallis is now one step closer to what remains a pretty tall order.… Read more

In the words of William Gibson, the future is already here. It may be barely Google-able in an obscure scientific publication, but it has profound implications for the future of implantable medical (and other) sensors.

That future is a nanoscale device that manages to transmit data wirelessly up to 30 feet and operate without a battery, instead harvesting energy from the environment via such sources as the pulse of a blood vessel or the gust of a breeze.

"It is entirely possible to drive these devices by scavenging energy from sources in the environment such as gentle airflow, vibration, … Read more

Monotype Imaging has opened up a batch of 500 more typefaces for use on the Web and announced a partnership under which those publishing on Acquia's Drupal Gardens can use the service.

Web fonts, after languishing for years, are giving typeface makers a new business opportunity with the arrival of new abilities in the formatting technology called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in modern browsers. With it, Web publishers can employ downloadable fonts to give their Web sites a more memorable look or to add some pizazz not possible with the limited number of "Web-safe" fonts that can be expected to already be installed on a browser's computer.

It's not that such typography wasn't possible before on the Web. It's just that it likely was done with graphics rather than type. Graphics, though, can be bulky to download, don't scale well to different screen sizes, aren't noticeable as text to search engines, and can't be copied and pasted as text.

Monotype Imaging now licenses hundreds of its fonts for online use through its Fonts.com site. Among the new arrivals to the online service is ITC Avant Garde Gothic, a widely used sans-serif typeface.

It seems likely that budget-minded publishers might steer clear of fonts with a fee, opting instead for free options such as Google's Web-font options. But Drupal Gardens also is used by corporations and others that might be more concerned about a refined look or proper brand identity.

Drupal Gardens also announced recently that it's now hosting more than 50,000 sites and that it's improved several publishing tools. … Read more

With millions of implantable medical devices in the U.S. alone, and some 300,000 more people receiving them worldwide every year, the need to protect these wireless devices from being hacked is increasingly urgent.

Wearers might soon be better protected, thanks to new work out of MIT and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, so long as they don't mind walking around in invisible shields.

The system the research team will be proposing at the Association for Computing Machinery's Sigcomm conference in Toronto this August uses a jamming transmitter small enough to be worn as a watch or necklace.

The device would essentially be authorized to access the implant and send encrypted instructions to the transmitter (the team calls this the "shield"), which would in turn decode the encryption and relay the instructions to the implant.

Using a device that is separate from the medical implant is key for a few reasons: it allows for post-encryption in devices that are already implanted; it enables authorized emergency responders to simply remove the patient's shield in the event of emergencies; and it doesn't require the size of the implants to increase to accommodate and power the shield.

The new system expands on a technique recently developed at Stanford University that allows for sending and receiving signals in the same frequency band. In typical wireless technology, using the same frequency band interferes with the signal, but by employing three antennas positioned precise distances apart, one band can now be used.… Read more

SPDY, a would-be standard with which Google hopes to speed up the Web, has taken a baby step outside its founding company's walls.

Strangeloop Networks, a Vancouver company that sells technology and services for hosting content on the Web, now includes SPDY in its products, the company announced yesterday.

SPDY is basically a new and improved HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), the standard that Web browsers and Web servers use to communicate. To develop and test such a technology, a company needs to control both ends of a communication channel, and that's just what Google has done. Google's … Read more

Reassured by a relatively smooth test of IPv6 last week, some Web sites are choosing to keep servers available over the next-generation Internet technology.

And that's good news for an Internet that's bursting at the seams. The results of the test, called World IPv6 Day, may help encourage others to make the IPv6 upgrades.

In the test, a number of organizations broadcast that their servers were available on IPv6. That meant anybody who had an IPv6 Internet connection would get that version of the server rather than the usual IPv4 one.

"There is a great sense of … Read more

Many of us know at least one person who has a hearing aid that sits on a shelf somewhere, collecting dust. The usual complaint: The thing just doesn't work right.

A professor at the University of Essex in the U.K. says these aren't just excuses, but legitimate complaints. "Today's hearing aids don't help to separate sounds--they just amplify them," said Ray Meddis, who has led work on a new kind of hearing aid. "They often make everything too noisy for the wearer, especially in social situations like parties, and some wearers still can't make out what people are saying to them. They find the whole experience so uncomfortable that they end up taking their hearing aids out," Meddis said in a statement released today.

Meddis and his team at Essex have been working on a new kind of aid they say could revolutionize what is now an antiquated approach to treating hearing impairments. The key, they say, is to use unique computer models (what they call "hearing dummies") that treat the root causes, not just the symptoms, of the user's unique condition.

"In the same way that a tailor's dummy is used to measure and fit a garment for a particular person, our software dummy is used to gauge a patient's hearing requirements so that their hearing aid can then be programmed to suit their needs," Meddis said.… Read more

Barely a day goes by that some company doesn't pitch me on its mobile application developer tools. It shows just how hot the market has become.

I'm not a programmer, but when I got the announcement that iBuildApp now supports Android as well as iOS, I thought I'd dabble a bit. The sales pitch is that anybody can create an app with their tools for free, after all. The company asserts that 10,000 people have already used it.

Not every app is necessarily great, though, and unfortunately, I found iBuildApp's tool unsatisfying. It was workable … Read more

In the days of the Cold War, the United States used the Voice of America radio station to spread information in countries without speech and press freedoms. Now it's begun a 21st century equivalent to bypassing censors using independent Internet and mobile phones technology.

Through the shadow network effort, reported yesterday by The New York Times, involves activities such as building a mesh network of suitcase-housed wireless Internet access points. Another $50 million project seeks build an independent mobile phone network in Afghanistan that the Taliban can't shut down, the newspaper reported. A third shadow network, not described … Read more