Science and biotech

Engineers at Mountain View, Calif.-based SST have come up with technology that uses acoustic sensors to help police pinpoint the exactly location of a gunshot as soon has it goes off.

SmartPlanet visited the San Francisco Police Department to see SST's gunfire-detection software in action.

This video first appeared at SmartPlanet under the headline "Acoustics technology alerts police of gun violence."

After IBM's Watson computing system defeated two human competitors on Jeopardy this year, it partnered with the nonprofit Scripps Research Institute to direct the tournament prize money toward finding a cure for drug-resistant malaria.

Now all the team is asking for is a little help from around the globe. It's using the World Community Grid, described as a "supercomputer of the people," to use spare computing power from volunteered PCs.

Since the Grid was set up seven years ago, some 575,000 people in more than 80 countries have donated spare computing power from nearly 2 … Read more

We've already celebrated Pi Day, Tau Day, and Nigel Tufnel Day this year. Now it's time to commend the commode, show some love to the latrine, and praise the privy. Saturday, November 19 is World Toilet Day. Yippee!

The year in toilet tech It's been a busy year for toilet tech news. We met a toilet seat that can handle 1,000 pounds of humanity. Japanese toilet manufacturer Toto created a motorcycle that runs on the power of people poo.

We also found proof that connectedness is just as important in the loo as it is outside of it. Tablet owners (35 percent of them) fessed up to taking their devices to the toilet.

Tempted by toilet inventions? Urine luck! A creative maker fashioned a toilet paper dispenser that prints off Twitter feeds. Kohler unveiled a $6,400 toilet that already has a tablet to control its functions. You can still bring your iPad along for more entertainment options, though.… Read more

Call them a bunch of intellectual lightweights.

Researchers at HRL Laboratories, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Irvine have created what they say is the lowest-density material, a lattice of hollow tubes of the metal nickel.

Its volume is 99.99 percent air, and its density is 0.9 milligram per cubic centimeter--not including the air in or between its tubes. That density is less than one-thousandth that of water.

The metallic microlattice, as the researchers call it, could be useful for absorbing sound, vibration, and shock. Other possibilities, according to HRL: electrodes that could … Read more

Now that's some serious bandwidth.

The Department of Energy today is scheduled to officially unveil the Advanced Networking Initiative, a network that will connect three supercomputer centers at 100 gigabits per second.

The network, which the DOE says is 10 times faster than commercial Internet speeds, will allow for collaborative research in a variety fields, including mining data from the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, predicting changes in the climate, and genetics. Linking the the first three supercomputers at DOE national labs will be announced today at the SC11 supercomputer conference going on this week in Seattle.

Energy Secretary … Read more

We're getting so many reassurances from NASA these days that the world is not about to be destroyed by some space-borne phenomenon that I'm starting to wonder if there's something the space agency isn't telling us.

Aside from falling satellites--one of which apparently threatened to rain space junk down perhaps a little too close to a couple of heavily populated Chinese cities--there was that aircraft-carrier-size asteroid that didn't, repeat didn't, sideswipe the Earth this past week (though it got closer than the moon).

Now there's the specter of a giant solar flare turning the Earth into a crispy critter sometime next year. But don't worry, our friends at NASA cheerfully assure us in a recent post on the agency's Web site, this version of the apocalypse isn't likely to occur either.… Read more

A U.K. company is now unveiling what it calls the world's first prototype handheld device that doubles as a fingerprint scanner and drug testing device.

In a matter of minutes, the portable device can detect the presence of a wide range of drugs using dyed antibodies that, as we reported back in July, stick to metabolites in the sweat of the fingerprints and change color depending on the presence of drugs.

"The launch of this prototype is a significant milestone," Paul Yaltes of development firm Intelligent Fingerprinting said in a statement. "There has already been … Read more

Could a shot in the arm help destroy a growing tumor? That concept is looking more and more plausible.

Scientists have been investigating the potential of vaccines to prevent various types of cancer for several years. In 2010, one study found that a single vaccination prevented breast cancer tumors from forming in mice.

A team of researchers at the National Cancer Institute's Laboratory of Tumor Immunology and Biology now is reporting in the journal Clinical Cancer Research that a vaccine might show promise in treating (as opposed to preventing) both metastatic breast cancer and ovarian cancer.

Led by cancer … Read more

It's not every day that a news item details the intelligence of the masses, lurking in the brains of unassuming passersby, just waiting to be uncovered for the greater good. But when it comes to the massively multiplayer online game Foldit, this is precisely the story, and it keeps getting better.

Launched in 2008 at the University of Washington, the protein folding game first made news for its potential to use the collective brainpower of gamers everywhere to unlock the fundamental mysteries of certain diseases. Then gamers began to prove this potential, solving various protein riddles that further our … Read more