Emerging tech

After taking second place in the 2011 Imagine Cup finals, Team Lifelens of the U.S. is one of four teams from around the world to win a $75,000 Imagine Cup grant, Microsoft announced today at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

The Lifelens project is run by students at universities across the country who have been working since November 2010 on an app that can image malaria cells for fast diagnosis right there on the phone, sans Internet.

The premise is straightforward. Apply a blood sample to a slide with a dye that only malaria … Read more

Glucose levels are 100 times more concentrated in blood than in saliva, which is why in spite of many efforts to use saliva, diabetics are still pricking themselves to get accurate glucose readings.

But now, harnessing the power of nanotechnology, engineers at Brown University say they've designed a biochip that can measure glucose levels in saliva almost as accurately as current devices can measure levels in blood.

To do this, the engineers etched a complicated array of thousands of plasmonic interferometers (no, this is not an episode of Farscape) onto a fingernail-size biochip. This means they were essentially using … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Those who scoured the health and wellness zones at CES both this year and last may be wondering why they came at all in 2012. Many of the gadgets and services were either already in the works last year or being held behind the curtain for future reveals.

Within the designated Fitness TechZone in the North Hall, a few sub- or satellite genres were nearly empty or devoid of cutting-edge tech. Being six months pregnant, I had a personal interest in Mommy Tech this year. Yet when I approached BabyPlus(one of the only booths in the tiny Mommy … Read more

Google has dropped the "incoming" stream of posts from Google+, saying the feature was confusing, rarely used, and obsolete.

The incoming stream showed posts from people who followed you but whom you didn't follow. Google+ Engineering Manager Dave Besbris announced the end of the incoming stream in a Google+ post last night:

The "Incoming" stream was a part of Google+ from the very start and it served an important purpose at the time to help people discover others on Google+. Since then however we've added a suggested user list, What's Hot, the ability … Read more

Google stepped into trouble when it announced yesterday it's personalizing search results with Google+ information.

The move incurred Twitter's wrath and raised the prospect of yet another grueling round of antitrust scrutiny.

But Google had no choice.

It has choices about how exactly to make what it calls Search plus Your World work. Google can change how it presents search results derived from social services. It can change what services it chooses to listen to. It can offer different actions that people can take when seeing social information. It can give people different controls over how exactly their … Read more

At CES, scientific-equipment giant Life Technologies unveiled a DNA sequencer designed to decode an entire human genome in a day for $1,000 by the end of 2012.

The Ion Proton Sequencer, priced at $149,000, isn't your typical hot commodity on the show floor. But the benchtop sequencer costs far less than its bulkier, slower predecessors (typically in the $500,000 to $750,000 range), and the $1,000 price tag--once costs fall to that level--could put personal gene sequencing directly into the hands of the masses.

"This is such an amazing moment in history," said … Read more

Sure, the idea of augmented reality has some appeal.

Overlaid on your view of the real world, your Net-connected glasses show navigation instructions, prompt you with the name of the person you're talking to, and run an ad-blocker app to turn billboards into wallpaper with soothing nature photos. And with one display for each eye, you see in 3D, so you can turn the outisde world into an immersive videogame.

The only problem is that you look like a total dork walking around with bulky electronic devices stuck to your face.

Vuzix, which sells such products, says it's … Read more

In these heady days before the biggest U.S. tech trade show of the year, the Internet is awash with CES 2012 predictions.

It's amazing how many there are. Hell, the CES hashtag has been featured already on the Twitter Discover tab since Tuesday--a full week before the show formally opens. At CNET, we've been writing about our predictions for weeks in our special CES 2012 package. Netbooks, ultracheap laptops, amazing OLED TVs. It's all there.

Out of curiosity, a colleague looked up the CES schedule for the next 10 years--yes, it exists, with dates selected … Read more