Emerging tech

To determine if there is cancer in one's lymph nodes, a typically advanced stage requiring more aggressive treatment, pathologists are stuck performing several specific, detailed tests that may or may not target the cancerous cells. Using the needle-in-a-haystack analogy would be apt.

But thanks to the work of researchers at the University of Missouri in Columbia, a technique using photoacoustics could scan a lymph node biopsy with laser pulses, whereby the pigment of melanin reacts to the laser's beam, absorbing the light, and heating and cooling (read: expanding and contracting) rapidly. This produces a popping sound that's … Read more

You'd be hard-pressed to find standards as ubiquitous as SATA, which is used to plug hard drives into computers. But its success inside the computer chassis turns out to have been a bad predictor of its success outside.

Years ago, SATA allies created a variation of the specification called eSATA that would let people attach hard external hard drives to computers. The big advantage over USB: an eSATA drive reads and writes data just as fast as an internal drive.

Despite its branding disaster of a name--eSATA stands for External Serial AT Attachment, and AT stands for nothing in particular--eSATA achieved some measure of success. I for one am glad it exists as a way to give laptops some measure of storage expandability of desktop machines. But overall, it never built critical mass, and I believe new technologies that match its speed and exceed its breadth will consign it to obscurity among mainstream computer users.

The nearest competitive threat is the new USB 3.0 "SuperSpeed," which offers transfer speeds of 5 gigabits per second compared to the 480 megabits per second of the currently prevailing version of the multipurpose Universal Serial Bus technology.

The new USB version is just now assuming the throne after a dangerously long reign by its predecessor. The first hard drives supporting it are on the market, and soon it will become mandatory in PCs. … Read more

If you're someone who's never had to deal with sleep apnea, as I am, it may come as a surprise to learn that the most effective--and frequently prescribed--device to treat the disorder, CPAP, is an enormous, unwieldy in-the-vein-of-a-bad-Halloween-costume mask that tends to find its way to such places as the closet, waste basket, or list of inventions to improve before you die.

So it is with great relief that I, even with my lack of sleep apnea, have been tipped off to a new technique currently being tested in Belgium that, if effective, could do wonders for those whose health can seriously suffer from sleep apnea.

ImThera, a privately funded start-up, has developed a tiny neurostimulator surgically implanted near the tongue that is programmed to essentially keep parts of the tongue awake enough to not block one's airway at rest.

Called Targeted Hypoglossal Neurostimulation (THN) Sleep Therapy, the technique consists of a small electrical device implanted under the skin near the lower jaw and along the Hypoglossal (12th cranial) nerve, then connected to a programmable implantable pulse generator (IPG) implanted near the surface of one's upper chest. … Read more

An engineering professor at the University of Missouri in Columbia is developing an acoustic resonant sensor smaller than a human hair to test bodily fluids for a variety of diseases, including breast and prostate cancers.

The real-time sensor uses micro- and nano-electromechanical systems (M/NEMS) to detect diseases in bodily fluids, and can be integrated with small circuits instead of bulky data-reading and analyzing equipment.

Jae Kwon, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, won a $400,000, five-year National Science Foundation Career Award in January of 2009 to continue his sensor research.

"Many disease-related substances in liquids are … Read more

GE Healthcare on Monday announced the commercial release of a new, smartphone-size imaging tool that lets physicians carry ultrasound technology in their pockets.

The group says its Vscan imaging device is now commercially available after receiving clearance by the FDA in the U.S. and getting the CE Mark from the European Union and the Medical Device License from Health Canada.

Specifically, Vscan is cleared as a prescription device for ultrasound imaging, measurement, and analysis in the clinical applications of abdominal, cardiac (adult and pediatric), urological, fetal/OB, pediatric, and thoracic/pleural motion and fluid detection.

Early trial user Dr. Anthony N. DeMaria … Read more

Google, never satisfied with the pace of change, plans a test that will provide 50,000 to 500,000 people with fiber-optic broadband Internet access with a network speed of a gigabit per second starting as soon as this year.

"We're planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We'll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections," Google product managers Minnie Ingersoll and James Kelly said in a … Read more

Microsoft hopes to vamp up its HealthVault and other health services by making it easier for users to do everything from track their caloric intake to count their steps using their cell phones, according to researchers at a Microsoft forum on health care technology in Beijing.

Microsoft researchers are also busy investigating the potential of Xbox 360 units--which are cheaper than similar hospital equipment yet often just as powerful--to feed and filter information from electronic medical records onto in-room display screens for patients and caregivers, according to Desney Tan, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, who spoke during the … Read more

Google has made YouTube available over IPv6 in an effort to encourage more use of the next-generation and more capacious Internet addressing system.

The transition from the current Internet Protocol version 4 has been slow and difficult for the computing industry. But Google has been gradually making its services available over IPv6, including search in March 2008, to those with sufficiently reliable connections.

"The service most requested to have IPv6 support has unquestionably been YouTube," said Lorenzo Colitti and Steinar H. Gunderson, Google IPv6 network experts, in a blog post Friday. "Given all of this, we're … Read more

Google has filed at least four patent applications for technology it's building into its Chrome browser to try to make the Web a more powerful foundation for applications.

Three patent applications concern Google's Native Client, a technology for letting downloaded software modules run directly on a processor rather than more slowly through on-the-fly decoding as with the commonly used JavaScript. And one patent application involves O3D, a technology to let browser applications take advantage of 3D acceleration of graphics hardware.

Patents can serve a variety of purposes. They can be used to keep competitors away from new technology until the patent expires. They can be licensed to others for their use or used as bargaining chips when negotiating patent cross-license agreements that let companies use each other's patents. They can be hoarded for defensive purposes, ready for deployment in a patent infringement countersuit if one company is sued by another. They can be used to gain more favorable terms in the creation of industry standards that relate to the patents. And of course they can bolster corporate chest-thumping when it comes time to boast about levels of innovation.

Thus far, Google hasn't proven to be a litigious company, but its presence is looming ever larger over the computing industry. The new patents are in a particularly fast-moving area, the development of Web browsers and associated technology for making cloud computing a more powerful foundation for applications. … Read more