News Blog

CORONADO, Calif.--It's not a vacation home in Santa Barbara, but the best thing that people can leave to their children might just be a DNA map.

At least, that's what Ryan Phelan, founder and CEO of DNA Direct, thinks about her company's services. Phelan told attendees at the Future in Review conference that people who are taking several different prescription drugs or have a family history of cancer should consider looking into their genetic profile.

DNA Direct offers people a chance to send in a DNA sample (a cotton swab to the inside of the cheek) and get the results back in three to eight weeks. Naturally, there's a profit motive behind the pitch. The cheapest test offered by DNA Direct costs $199, and it scales up from there.

Tests are available to determine the genetic probability of several types of cancer, cystic fibrosis, and blood-clotting disorders, among other things. Knowing one's probability for diseases or other health problems could prompt people to get advance screenings when treatment could make a difference, Phelan said. And assembling a family DNA profile could make future generations aware of their susceptibility to various diseases.

Phelan took the opportunity in front of the conference attendees to float a trial balloon: are people interested in paying for a home DNA storage kit? According to an unscientific show of hands, lots of people are willing to pay $100 for such a kit, and Phelan's company is thinking about offering such a product.

CORONADO, Calif.--The real threat to the future security of the world might just be the AIDS virus, according to a U.N. official.

More than 25 years after the discovery of the virus that causes AIDS, 65 million people have been infected and 25 million have died, said Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, at the Future in Review conference. The way the world looks at AIDS is changing from short-term fear to long-term worries about the stability of countries that fail to control the epidemic, he said.

"It's moved into one of the defining issues of our time," Piot said. Countries in the Americas, Europe and Africa have been dealing with these problems for years, but countries such as Russia and China are starting to realize they will have to plan for AIDS as a way of maintaining stability, not just as a public health problem.

Russia has the fastest-growing rate of infection, and some countries in Africa are staggering with 30 to 40 percent of their citizens infected. "When one-third of your population has an incurable disease, that's destabilizing for your country," Piot said.

Progress is being made, Piot said. The political will of major countries to fight AIDS has never been stronger, and as a result contributions to AIDS programs have never been higher. The key? Governments and research organizations are starting to see a "return on investment," not just good will, from their contributions toward fighting AIDS.

Still, little progress has been made on a vaccine, which is an old story, Piot said. Since the 1980s, researchers working on vaccines have promised results in "five years," and that marker keeps moving out. "This is the smartest virus we know."

CORONADO, Calif.--Future versions of Windows will have to be "fundamentally different" in order to take advantage of multicore processors, according to Ty Carlson of Microsoft.

"You're going to see in excess of 8, 16, 64 and beyond processors on your client computer," said Carlson, director of technical strategy at Microsoft, during a panel discussion at the Future in Review conference. Windows Vista, on the other hand, is "designed to run on 1, 2, maybe 4 processors," he said, referring to the fact that quad-core processors are now available from Intel and are on the way from Advanced Micro Devices.

The problem, as has been noted on many occasions, is that loads of PC applications were programmed with serial processing in mind, meaning that the performance of those applications increased as a chip's clock speed increased. That's not how it works anymore. The chip industy has decided that multiple cores are the best way to keep increasing performance, and that means applications now have to be designed with parallel processing in mind.

Intel and AMD have not confirmed processor plans beyond eight cores, and only in theory at that. Intel has demonstrated an 80-core processor, but that's just a research project that can't run conventional code. But Carlson appears convinced that he and other software developers should start getting ready for that world.

"In 10 to 15 years' time we're going to have incredible computing power. The challenge will be bringing that ecosystem up that knows how to write programs," Carlson said. Windows Vista is designed to take advantage of multiple processing threads, but not 16 threads. And application developers are even further behind in making the transition to the multicore world.

CORONADO, Calif.--Fed up with a cell phone contract that seemingly renews for another two years every time you call to check the balance? Try WiMax.

Kamran Elahian, chairman of Global Catalyst Partners and an investor in WiMax chipmaker Beceem Communications, compared the current state of cellular data communications on smart phones to the old America Online days. Right now, carriers want to have control similar to AOL's control of your dial-up connection, as it tried to keep you within its own network, discouraging exploration of that wild, wooly Internet thing.

But that changed as other ISPs simply connected PC users to the Internet, doing away with the fancy AOL-only portals. The same thing is going to happen to the cellular smart phone industry if carriers can bring high-speed Internet connections to phones and PCs using WiMax technology.

"The world wants a fat pipe," Elahian said. The problem, of course, is that carriers want to recoup their investment in expensive networking technology required to build that fat pipe by charging users hand over fist, he said. The idea behind WiMax appears to be that you would have several WiMax devices, like a laptop and a cell phone, but only pay for one service contract rather than by the device.

That would end the carrier subsidy model, but it would also mean they no longer get to control every aspect of your mobile data surfing, Elahian said. He pointed to Apple's iPhone, with its built-in Wi-Fi chips, as something that might start to change the game. Those early iPhone users might find it easier to get a cheap basic data plan and do all their heavy Internet uploading or downloading over Wi-Fi, and maybe one day WiMax. That's lost revenue for the carrier.

CORONADO, Calif.--The car of the future will apparently have more in common with a kitchen appliance than a lawn mower.

Car design in years to come?

(Credit: Cuisinart)

"The future is going to be an automobile that looks like a two-ton Cuisinart," said Josh Wolfe, managing partner of Lux Capital, at the Future in Review conference Wednesday. Wolfe was part of a panel discussion entitled "The Future of Energy on the Nanoscale," in which panelists focused mostly on battery technologies and how those will evolve for cars and other devices.

The night before, researcher J. Craig Venter suggested that fuels derived from algae could provide a much more abundant source of energy than that black goo under the deserts of the Middle East. Venter has been analyzing samples of ocean water taken during a cruise of the Sargasso Sea, and he and his team think they can use gene-sequencing technology to create microbes that could provide a future source of fuel. "My goal is to replace the petrochemical industry by the next decade."

Wednesday's panelists steered clear of biology, preferring to work on finding new markets for their existing products. "The nanomaterials and nanoscience haven't hooked up with the market," said Keith Blakely, CEO of Nanodynamics, which is working on fuel cell technology*.

"Most important is the electrification of automobiles, this is the trend, more than biofuel or gas substitutes," Wolfe said.

The Future in Review agenda is filled with discussions on future energy sources and challenges, and more debates are sure to emerge on how best to reduce the world's dependence on oil and coal.

*UPDATED - Keith Blakely notes in the comments below that I misinterpreted the tense on his remarks, in that when the Future in Review conference first started, the market opportunities weren't there. But, as evidenced by the fact that companies like Nanodynamics exist, the situation has changed. Sorry, Keith.