Technology

Oxitec's novel genetic fluorescent marking technology can substantially improve control of the cotton pest moth, pink bollworm, according to findings of a new study.  Oxitec scientists, working in partnership with the US Department of Agriculture, have shown that using their genetic marker in sterilized pink bollworm could provide a means of tracking the progress of control efforts against the globally important pest. The sterile insect technique (SIT), which depends on the mass-release of sterilized male insects, has been used for decades to control this moth over 1 million acres of…

In my October 4, 2011 Science 2.0 article “A Search In Time Is A Memorable Path” I defined Chronocity as “the measurement of the distance in Time between where we are (Now) and where we were at some point in the past (or where we will be at some time in the future) with respect to a specific object, or document.”  In other words, Chronocity is the degree of change across a series of sequential states determined through discrete time slices. Like many others analyzing large data sets, Internet marketers use time-slicing to look for trends.  I use time-slicing to look for trends…

A team of Georgia Tech Sonification Lab (SonLab) students and psychologists have converted numerical data of celestial bodies into music. The band Echo Movement wanted something distinct so they asked Georgia Tech for help. Rhythms,  pitches and tempos needed to evoke a "heavenly" sound so the musicians and students went to work with existing data gathered by NASA's Kepler telescope. They began with a binary star, Kepler 4665989, which had brightness levels recorded for more than a year. The star dimmed and brightened each time its companion star crossed its path, providing varying…

“1984” is a novel by George Orwell, set in dystopian Londonunder the rule of the totalitarian government named simply “The Party” and takes place after a cataclysmic nuclear war that decimated the planet. The Party creates a terrifying living environment for its members in which it is impossible to have any privacy and enforces its will through the use of technology. In every home there is a “telescreen”, a version of a flat screen television with a built in camera and microphone to observe the occupants and where the telescreens cannot see there are hidden microphones. This world is one…

At my kid's graduation party on Sunday I had a chance to meet Tom Goddard who, it turns out, works on a tool used to look at the spatial organization of chromosomes in the cell nucleus and protein structures determined by electron cryo-microscopy. The tool is called Chimera (a fun name by any measure) and it is developed/maintained by the Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics (RBVI) group at UC San Francisco. Want to visualize density maps and conformational ensembles of molecular structures?  Well, now you can download their tool and go for it. To my knowledge, it's…

I have set out to write about "Naturality" for this column three times since the beginning of 2012 and each time I have abandoned the article.  It's a complex topic that easily gets away from me.  I have been measuring Naturality in search engine results for several years now.  Some years ago I devised a simple formula to help me explain Naturality to people: 1 = Ny + Ty + Oy Essentially you take any search result for a query (up to 1,000 listings) and categorize each listing as "Natural (not intentionally targeted at that query)", "Transparent (clearly intentionally targeted…

YiZRi LLC has unveiled VoiceSee, the world's first hands-free, eyes-free web navigation platform that uses mobile apps to read aloud recipes, digital newspapers and Wikipedia entries for the Android smartphone. VoiceSee's flagship beta application, Culinary Pal, is a cooking web navigation mobile app that will follow your voice commands to search for recipes and choose the one you want. Sadie, the voice of VoiceSee, will then read aloud the ingredients list followed by preparation and cooking or baking instructions. She will pause at your command so you can finish each task before listening…

The University of Luxembourg has agreed to actively participate in the Open Access initiative.  Defined in the Budapest (2002), Bethesda (2003) and Berlin (2003) declarations on Open Access, it is an effort to make scholarly publications freely available to the public - because the content creator pays for publication, rather than a corporation underwriting the cost and retaining copyright while charging a subscription fee for access. Through the signature of a collaboration agreement with the University of Liège (ULg), the University of Luxembourg hopes to inspire its researchers to use…

Pentamodes, proposed in 1995 by Graeme Milton and Andrej Cherkaev, have been purely theoretical but three-dimensional transformation acoustics ideas, for example inaudibility cloaks, acoustic prisms or new loudspeakers, could become reality in the near future. The mechanical behavior of materials like water (or even gold) is expressed in terms of compression and shear parameters. For examples, water as an incompressible fluid that can barely be compressed in a cylinder is described through the compression parameter, but that it can be stirred in all directions using a spoon is expressed…

I make the case for replacing business executives with robots.*† This is no smart-ass slur on the intellects of executives. A transformation of business soon will be upon us. In the transformed enterprises, robots will take on more and more business decisions. Humans will retain a smaller but still crucially important role. The argument involves ‘real options’ and ‘agency theory.’ Explaining them is simple, though lengthy. So let’s get started, using an illustrative example: An opportunity requires Rineu Corporation to invest $10,000 now, with an assured first-year cash flow of $6,000. The…