Cutting Edge

Noisebridge co-founder Jacob Appelbaum

(Credit: James Martin/CNET )

SAN FRANCISCO--About 30 people listened intently on a recent Thursday night to short presentations on linear algebra and beer brewing, watched a demo of an iPhone cyberspace shooter game, and learned how to make a light staff (acrylic rod, LED, resistor, tape, no soldering required).

For the last talk, a speaker billed as "Dr. Baron Mikheil von Burstein, esq." explained how to pull off his interactive public art specialty--swings that hang in the aisles on the underground trains in the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system.

"I installed it publicly, illegally and got away with it," he boasted. He had materials with him to hang four swings, he said, adding "Let's install a swing right now on BART!"

At least half the crowd followed him, officially ending Five Minutes of Fame, an event held the third Thursday of every month at the Noisebridge Hacker Space.

Noisebridge is described on its Web site as a nonprofit "space for sharing, creation, collaboration, research, development, mentoring, and of course, learning." It was conceived by Jacob Appelbaum and Mitch Altman while they were at a hacker conference in Berlin, Chaos Communication Camp 2007.

Noisebridge hacker collective (photos)

"Something clicked there and we both independently came up with the notion that we would make a hacker space happen in San Francisco," Altman, a computer security expert, said in a recent interview. Altman and Appelbaum spread the word to friends, and a group started meeting in cafes on Tuesday nights, until they found their first space. They quickly outgrew that spot, and in October they moved to their current 5,200 square foot space a block or so away in the heart of San Francisco's Mission District.

The large second-floor concrete warehouse space was packed with programmers, artists, writers, lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and urban hipsters with bike messenger bags for the open house party on a Friday night in early October. Electronic music played, people lined up to buy drinks, and a variety of digital toys were on display, including a computer-controlled mill someone was using to etch the Noisebridge logo into metal. A light display with a sign next to it said, "Hack me. I'm proprietary."

In a far back corner, a curious architectural feature stands out--a small room that houses the servers and is accessible only via a ladder and a crawl space near the ceiling. The back story, or at least part of it anyway, was revealed on a subsequent visit.

"This death trap is a response to a political battle," said Appelbaum. "There used to be a door here," he said, pointing to an area obviously boarded up and painted over. "But some people wanted to lock the server room and log access. So, what is the eventual outcome? This wall."

Noisebridge co-founder Mitch Altman shows people how to solder and work with electronics at his weekly Circuit Hacking workshop.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET )

Oddities and whimsy abound at Noisebridge. The handles on the door of the refrigerator (which is stocked with the hacker drink of choice, caffeinated Club-Mate) are on the opposite side from where it opens. A red pay phone is rigged up to be a voice over IP phone, allowing calls anywhere for free. And a laptop is precariously perched atop a wall divider that operates a touch panel designed to control the HVAC, lights, and building access.

Noisebridge members take their automation designs seriously. The front door can be opened remotely over the Internet by someone at home. The system also calls the cell phones of certain members the day before the weekly trash pickup, and whoever can respond is automatically connected to a phone at Noisebridge. Whoever picks up is asked to put the trash cans out front.

"It's funny that we have to have that [system] to manage the trash," joked one Noisebridge member.

It's very much a do-it-yourself space, with members building an induction stove, a custom tile countertop decorated with the Noisebridge logo, a dark room and optics lab, and an industrial shop. A cyborg group is working on augmenting reality with artificial senses and creating an anklet that lets the wearer feel which way is north. One person working on a genetically modified bacterium wanted to create a bio-hacking area, but that idea was rejected after some debate, according to one member.

There have been courses on sewing and crafting; workshops for French, German, Mandarin, American Sign Language, cryptography, creme brulee making, and, of course, lock picking. Coming up: a knot-tying workshop, a class on CPR, and an EFF presentation on hacker spaces and the law.

While the world of hacking traditionally is built around mystery and exclusivity, Noisebridge aims for more widespread appeal.

"We'd like to take hacking from the underground, where it's inaccessible, and make it accessible to everyone," Appelbaum said. "It's not just about bits and bytes...it's about the intersection of art and technology and changing the greater world around you."

"Hacker spaces have evolved in a good way," said Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer of security firm Veracode who was in the L0pht Heavy Industries hacker group in Boston in the 1990s. He visited Noisebridge recently and noted that the group "has more resources, more space and equipment, and it seems like more diversity of people."

While there are about 100 members of Noisebridge (each paying $40 to $80 per month), L0pht typically had 7 or 8 members at any one time, primarily focused on hardware and computer security, according to Wysopal.

Noisebridge has an executive board whose members are elected, but decisions are made by consensus of the entire membership. The group's motto is "Be excellent to each other," a line from the movie "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure."

"It's more anarchy than anything else; people getting together to form temporary, smaller, organized groupings to perform a task," said co-founder Altman, who runs a circuit hacking workshop every week and makes the TV-B-Gone device that remotely shuts off TVs.

Members learn from each other and create things, but more importantly, they have a safe space to form a community that they can't get elsewhere, especially not on the Internet, according to Altman.

"A lot of us are introverted geeks who were bullied and even beaten up, like I was," he said. "Now, we can get together and celebrate our unique geekiness, share that with the world, and make the community around us better."

My colleague James Martin created an audio slideshow on Noisebridge:

The world's largest particle accelerator has performed its first collisions, and its first beam acceleration.

Progress on the giant experiment has been rapid in the four days since the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was restarted, CERN director of communications James Gillies told ZDNet UK on Tuesday.

"These collisions are the first in the LHC at all," said Gillies. "We've been going into new territory. It's been going quite remarkably fast."

Gillies told ZDNet UK that not only had scientists recorded the first collisions of protons on Monday, but that overnight one of the beams had been accelerated....

Read more of "Beams all round as LHC progress accelerates" at ZDNet UK.

Dr. Joseph Adelgan's Cows for Kilowatts program won the Tech Awards 2009 Intel Environment Award. The project turns slaughterhouse waste into fertilizer and cooking gas.

(Credit: Elinor Mills/CNET)

SAN JOSE, Calif.--Projects that turn slaughterhouse waste into energy and fertilizer, and zinc oxide from fuel cells into fertilizer, as well as programs to fortify rice with nutrients, feed Indian children, and boost wages for artisans were honored Thursday night at the Tech Awards for technology benefiting humanity.

Established in 2001, the Tech Awards recognize 15 laureates in the categories of education, equality, environment, biosciences economic development, and health. One laureate in each category receives a $50,000 cash prize. The winners were announced at a ceremony at which Al Gore, former U.S. vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, received a humanitarian award.

The Intel Environment Award went to the Cows to Kilowatts project, which Dr. Joseph Adelgan conceived of after realizing that people in his hometown of Ibadan, Nigeria, were being exposed to high levels of Salmonella, E.coli and other disease-causing microorganisms from waste runoff from the local slaughterhouse that ended up in surface water and groundwater.

"People were drinking from shallow wells," Adelgan, founder of the Global Network for Environment and Economic Development Research, said during an interview on Thursday. "People in the neighborhood were getting sick and they didn't understand why they were getting sick."

Cows to Kilowatts uses biogas technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the decomposing organic waste from the slaughterhouse. A bioreactor converts the methane and carbon dioxide into cooking gas and fertilizer. The biogas could also be used to generate electricity.

The BD Biosciences Economic Development Award was presented to the Alternative Energy Development Corp., which makes zinc-air fuel cells, an affordable, alternative energy. The fuel cells generate energy and provide light in areas of Malawi, Namibia, Zambia, and South Africa without electricity, while the waste zinc oxide created by the fuel cells during energy production is used to fertilize vegetable gardens, said Rolf Papsdorf, head of the Alternative Energy Development Corp.

Dipika Matthias, project director for PATH's Ultra Rice, shows off the nutrient-fortified grain.

(Credit: Elinor Mills/CNET)

The winner of the Nokia Health Award is tackling the problem of malnutrition in developing countries. Seattle-based PATH offers Ultra Rice, which blends micronutrients like Vitamin A and iron with rice flour into grains that look, smell, and taste like traditional rice. The grain costs 2 percent to 5 percent more than regular rice, or about 41 cents per child per year in India.

Ultra Rice enriched with iron is being fed to 60,000 school children in India, while Brazilians are eating Ultra Rice fortified with iron, zinc, folic acid, and thiamin to combat anemia, said Dipika Matthias, project director at PATH.

Every year in developing countries, Vitamin A deficiency causes about 1 million deaths, folic acid deficiency is responsible for about 200,000 severe birth defects, and more than 60,000 women die from iron deficiency during pregnancy and childbirth, according to PATH.

Winning the Katherine M. Swanson Equality Award was the Fair Wage Guide from the World of Good Development Organization. The free online tool helps artisans around the world make a decent living by calculating fair wages for their work.

The open-source platform generates a localized price analysis of wages paid to artisans in comparison to international poverty levels and helps them figure out how to modify their products to improve efficiency and reduce costs.

The goal is to get their wages to 10 percent higher than the minimum wage for their area, said Audrey Seagraves of the Emeryville, Calif.-based organization.

"Many of the artisans don't know how much to charge for the items they make," she said. The Fair Wage Guide helps them set prices that are reasonable while making a decent wage, she added.

The winner of the Microsoft Education Award went to the Akshaya Patra Foundation, a public-private partnership that uses innovative technology, smart engineering, and good management in kitchens to offer school lunches to children in India at a low cost. The program feeds millions of children lunches for $28 per child per year.

Other laureates include the mPedigree network, which offers a way for people to check that the drugs they take are not counterfeits by texting a code from the label to a server; FrontlineSMS, technology that allows people to text large groups for election monitoring and providing rural medical services; Solar Ear, rechargeable digital aids and batteries for hearing aids, and LeafView: An Electronic Field Guide, which allows field researchers to automatically identify plant species. Sean White, who developed LeafView, said he is working on an iPhone app version of the guide.

Sean White uses a Sony Vaio ultra-mobile PC to take a photo of a ginkgo leaf for analysis and matching in the Electronic Field Guide he developed.

(Credit: Elinor Mills/CNET News)

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.

(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.

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.

You've probably heard of or even owned a computer that automatically turns off its hard drive when it senses shock or heavy vibrations. That is an example of sensitive human-machine intimacy. Another example I like is tilting the iPhone to use it as the driving bar for my racing games. Well, that nifty human-to-computer interaction is about to go to whole new level.

HP announced Thursday a new inertial-sensing technology that enables the development of digital micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) accelerometers that are up to 1,000 times more sensitive than those in high-volume products currently available.

A MEMS accelerometer is a sensor that can be used to measure vibration, shock, or change in velocity. When implemented, this allows the device to "feel" the environment it is in.

According to HP, the new sensing technology--the result of HP's 25 years of nano-sensing research--includes multiple detectors as part of a complete sensor network and therefore is capable of real-time data collection, management evaluation, and analysis. This information enables users to make better, faster decisions, and take subsequent action to improve safety, security, and sustainability.

Warwick Warp BioLog equipment is already in use on construction sites, where workers have notoriously abraded prints.

(Credit: University of Warwick)

It's long been held that no two fingerprints are exactly alike, rendering the old-fashioned print more reliable than current DNA sampling, which has resulted in false positive identifications.

But what if a fingerprint is warped? When I volunteered to be a mentor recently, I had to get my prints taken, and the process was tedious and full of re-dos because, as I rotated each finger, I tended to slightly smudge the results. (I might have made a good criminal, but I was an annoyed--and inky--mentor.)

Now, the biggest problem with fingerprints--that a good one is hard to find--may have finally been solved, according to new research out of the University of Warwick in the UK.

Most fingerprint techniques identify a handful of features on a print and match the entire set of characteristics against each fingerprint in a database of templates--a laborious, often time-consuming endeavor. Researchers at the University of Warwick took a different approach.

Considering the entire pattern of a print, they would transform its topology into a standard coordinate, thus allowing the "unwarping" of any print distorted by such common real-world issues as smudging and uneven pressure. The clearer digital representation of the print is then mapped onto an "image space" of all other prints in a given database, so instead of comparing one print to every other print in that database, the overlaying of the print against the entire database finds a match, if there is one, in seconds, regardless of whether that database holds a million or a thousand prints.

The unwarping is so effective, it turns out, that it even compares the position of individual sweat pores (there are hundreds) on a print. Previously, the slightest distortion of a print rendered these densely-packed pores unreadable.

The technology has already won over the construction industry, with spinout company Warwick Warp installing its BioLog for security and staff management at six building sites. (Apparently construction workers often have abraded fingerprints due to the nature of their work.)

And the results have already impressed more than the construction industry. In the past week, the technology has been examined by two of the world's most respected technical fingerprint benchmarking tests; the UK's National Physical Laboratory ranked Warwick Warp's fingerprint technology best overall for accuracy, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the U.S. ranked it third.

The signature may soon be obsolete. Want to use your credit card, see personal medical files, buy beer when you look underage? Take off your glove, please.

The Department of Energy on Monday named the first winners of a program aimed at generating breakthroughs in clean-energy technologies.

The program, called Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), began taking applications earlier this year for research ideas that reduce imports of foreign fuel, cut greenhouse gas emissions, and improve energy efficiency. Funding for the agency is part of the Obama administration's goal to improve the economic competitiveness of the U.S. by investing in energy technology.

The DOE is awarding $151 million in 37 grants to both academics and green-tech companies, most of which are start-ups. The ideas are meant to be high-risk and high-reward, with a number not expected to meet their goals.

Authority to create the agency, roughly modeled on the DARPA defense program that spawned the space race, happened in 2007 but it wasn't funded until earlier this year. ARPA-E now has authority to fund as much as $400 million in research. A second tranche of grant awardees is scheduled to be announced later this fall.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)

The naming of ARPA-E grants is being closed watched in the green-tech start-up community and among researchers. There were 3,600 concept papers submitted, followed by 300 full applications and ultimately 37 awardees.

One awardee is an effort at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to make an all-liquid battery, which would make storage of storage of solar and wind power more cost effective.

Another is funding for a bioreactor developed by the University of Minnesota that proposes using two microorganisms to make a vehicle fuel. One bacteria would convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into a sugar, and another would convert the sugar into a fuel.

Two other efforts include developing enzymes that would more effectively capture carbon dioxide from power plants and a low-cost material for making LED lighting. The full list of awardees is at the ARPA-E site (click for PDF).

Energy Secretary Steven Chu is scheduled to speak at Google Monday morning in Google to make an announcement, after which Google CEO Eric Schmidt will speak with Chu. Through its philanthropic arm Google.org, Google has invested in a number of renewable energy companies. It has also developed Web-based energy monitoring software for consumers.