Disease in a Dish

Disease in a Dish

Generating cells from patients suffering from such disorders as  Down syndrome, schizophrenia, and ALS lets scientist study these diseases in the lab and test new drugs.

Just four years ago, scientists from the United States and Japan developed a way to create stem cells from human skin cells. Since then, researchers have used the technology to generate such cells from people with a variety of different diseases, including diabetes, Down syndrome, and Parkinson’s disease. By differentiating these cells into the cell type affected in the disease, scientists can search for molecular missteps unique to these cells. The findings are already beginning to shed light on these diseases and are being used as a tool to test new treatments.
Here, researchers created stem cells from patients with a rare neurological disease, familial dysautonomia, and then differentiated them into the specific neurons (shown labeled with red and blue markers) affected by the disease.  They found that the cells did not differentiate into neurons as readily as cells derived from healthy people, nor did they migrate as easily as normal cells. Researchers used the cells to test a handful of potential treatments for the disorder, identifying one candidate that reversed the defect in differentiation.

If Facebook Made a Phone, Would You Friend It?

Computing

If Facebook Made a Phone, Would You Friend It?

Experts weigh in on whether the concept would be a hit with users.

Why would you want to buy a "Facebook phone," if—as is widely rumored—one is under development?
Here's why: if social networking is already the center of your online activity, a Facebook smart phone might be far easier to use. If a fraction of Facebook's 800 million users were to make the switch, they would represent a powerful market force.
The phone project was revealed in reports last week that said Facebook had forged a partnership with handset maker HTC and was planning to use a version of the Android operating system, which will be tweaked to integrate Facebook deeply into its services and will support HTML5 as a platform for mobile games and apps. The reports said the phone could take 12 to 18 months to reach market. Facebook is saying nothing about the project; a spokesman said the company would not comment on "rumor and speculation."
Already, Facebook's are among the most popular apps on most smart phones. The company says that its apps on different platforms have 350 million active mobile users. The problem Facebook confronts is that its product is not very deeply "integrated," in industry parlance, into the devices that people use socially every day to e-mail, send photos, and keep in touch with friends.  It's just one of many apps people use.
For example, on an iPhone, if you open a Web page and click on the menu, you have the option of tweeting the link but not of sharing it on Facebook. That's because Twitter got itself integrated, and Facebook, for whatever reason, did not. On some Android phones, Facebook is integrated in this way, but it could be even better integrated into the devices.
To use an iPhone to send a link to your Facebook friends, you need to take more steps to open and use the Facebook app. And much the same problem pertains to reporting your location, sending a photo, playing games, or engaging in any of a host of other activities.
But on a Facebook phone, such functions could be the default option. And people would find it easier to use Facebook itself—making Facebook an even more titanic Hoover of personal information than it already is.
Facebook could go even further by directing all communications—including voice and text messaging—through its platform. And it could use that same platform to deliver content, including music and video, to users.

"This could potentially shift the paradigm of what social networking and mobility can be and should be," says Raymond Llamas, a senior research analyst for IDC's mobile devices group. "Consider this: a smart phone that automatically checks you in on your location, finds your friends in the same area, uploads pictures of what you do to Facebook for all your other Facebook friends to see."
The biggest challenge, Llamas says, would be convincing people to switch from existing phones, which do a pretty good job on many fronts, including providing a way to use Facebook via an app.
Then too, the company would have to expand the functionality of its phone beyond Facebook. "Here's the whole crux of the situation for them," says Mike Morgan, an analyst at ABI. "Is FB enough to make a device desirable? To this I would say no. The day of single-purpose devices has long since passed."
Chetan Sharma, a mobile communications consultant, says that Facebook's user base makes "entry into the [smart-phone] market compelling." However, he adds that simply adapting the Android operating system may not be enough. "If they want be serious longer term, they might have to own a platform. They could also entirely focus on HTML5-based platforms and services and avoid the investment" of developing apps for a new operating system.
Al Hilwa, program director for IDC's application development software group, says that in the long view, a giant like Facebook just needs to spread its reach, much the way Google branched out by launching the Android mobile platform and the Google+ social network. "If someone gets into your business, it's almost incumbent on you to get into their business—otherwise, you get into a situation where they block you out. That's not an immediate risk right now for Facebook, but that is one of the considerations. You want to try and own the whole data chain, end to end."
Indeed, ABI's Morgan says that a Facebook-centric smart phone is an obvious next step. "If Facebook wants a stronger mobile presence it needs to be deeply embedded so it can become part of the usage flow, so that more of what you do to collect and interact with people using your device ends up in the Facebook realm.  The more you use it, the more 'sticky' it is," he says.
And the result will be a huge and sustained flow of information to Facebook, which helps the company. "In the end," Morgan notes, "they are serving us ads."

A Brighter Way to Make Solar Cells

A Brighter Way to Make Solar Cells

A manufacturing method that uses light instead of heat wastes less energy and makes the cells more efficient.

Bright idea: This furnace uses lightbulbs, not heating elements, to treat silicon wafers.
Credit: NREL/Dennis Schroeder

Making solar cells involves subjecting silicon wafers to temperatures in excess of 1,000 °C. The process normally involves the use of heating elements, and requires a lot of energy.
A new optical furnace developed by researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, heats up solar wafers by focusing light on them—a much more efficient process that uses about half the energy of a conventional furnace. More importantly, the new design also uses light to remove certain impurities from the silicon wafers, a step that can improve the power output of finished cells.
The work is at an early stage—so far the researchers have only improved the efficiency of the resulting solar cells by half a percentage point. But based on lab tests, they think they can increase the efficiency by four percentage points, from about 16 percent efficient to 20 percent, which would be a big deal in the solar industry, which celebrates even half-a-percent increases.
High temperatures are needed at more than one step during solar-cell manufacturing. Furnaces are used to introduce dopants into the silicon to create electric fields within the material, to create electrical contacts, and to oxidize surfaces to improve efficiency. The new furnace also allows for better control of some of these processes, which can improve a solar cell's efficiency.
NREL's design isn't the only one that uses light to process silicon. Rapid thermal processing furnaces, used in the microelectronics industry, also use light to heat up semiconductors. But the new furnaces use highly reflective and heat-resistant ceramics to ensure that the light is absorbed only by a silicon wafer, not by the walls inside the furnace. "That makes it many times more efficient," says Bhushan Sopori, the researcher in charge of the furnace project at NREL.

By precisely designing the shape of the interior of the furnace, the researchers can control exactly where the light is focused, ensuring the wafers are heated evenly. It's not enough to make sure the wafer is evenly illuminated—the edges have to receive more light because they lose heat more rapidly than the rest of the wafer.
The process reduces thermal stress on the wafers, and it allows for precise control over the chemical reactions that heating enables. Precise control of the rates and timing of the heating can also improve the electrical contacts on the solar cell, improving its efficiency. And it makes it practical to introduce an oxidation step. Oxidation has typically been used by only a few manufacturers for high-end solar cells, but the new process would make it cheaper and thus allow more manufacturers to use it.
Sopori says NREL has developed processes that take better advantage of photonic effects than the rapid thermal processing furnaces. As photons interact with the silicon, they can cause deleterious impurities such as iron to move out of the material, while keeping advantageous ones such as boron, which is needed for the solar cell to perform properly.
The researchers haven't yet realized the complete four percentage point improvement in efficiency in part because the new processing steps aren't all compatible with other steps in conventional manufacturing. Sopori says they are working to modify the other steps to take full advantage of the optical furnace.
NREL is also working with Advanced Optical Systems to develop a machine that can process not just one wafer at a time, as with the lab version, but up to 2,000. Such high throughput will be necessary if the furnaces are to compete with conventional ones, which are cheap to operate.

Eye Ball

Eye Ball

A globe studded with cameras captures a panorama if you throw it in the air.

• January/February 2012
• By Stephen Cass

If you toss this foam-covered ball skyward, an accelerometer inside determines when it has reached its maximum height. At that moment, 36 cameras are triggered simultaneously, creating a mosaic that can be downloaded and viewed on a computer as one spherical panoramic image. The ball was created by researchers at the Technische Universität Berlin after one of them, Jonas Pfeil, labored to create panoramas while on vacation in Tonga. On that trip, he tried a cumbersome process that required snapping pictures in different directions and stitching them together later in a photo-editing program. Now he hopes to license the camera-ball technology for commercial production.
A. Outer Shell
The sphere, about the size of a softball, is protected by blocks of foam. Thirty-six cell-phone camera modules, each with a resolution of two megapixels, are set into the surface. Each module stores its portion of the mosaic until it is transferred to the ball's microcontroller.
B. Inner Shell
The prototype's inner shell, made from a strong yet somewhat flexible nylon material, gives the ball structural strength. The shell was made using a 3-D printing service.
C. Power Source
The ball's power source, a relatively heavy lithium-polymer battery, is secured in an inner cage to keep its center of gravity close to its geometric center so that it behaves predictably when thrown.
D. Microcontroller
A microcontroller uses data from an accelerometer to determine when to trigger the cameras. Then it stores the resulting mosaic of images. The prototype can store one mosaic, but it has a hardware slot for a memory card that could store additional panoramas.
E. Panorama
Images are uploaded to a personal computer via a USB connection. Software on the computer allows panoramas to be rotated or enlarged, and portions can be exported as 2-D images.

More Transparent Tracking—Why Is There No App for That?

More Transparent Tracking—Why Is There No App for That?

A call for smart-phone software that lets users see what data their gadgets are sending out.

Amid widespread concern over an obscure piece of smart-phone diagnostic software that some experts say could be used to collect and transmit sensitive information, a leading academic has called on the industry to give users a one-click way to see what their gadgets are actually doing.
"It would be good to have some form of auditing function built into our devices," says Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law School professor and cofounder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "The auditing function can be implemented by Apple and by handset makers through Android. Make it part of the 'About' tab. And it would show with whom the phone has been communicating and the sorts of things it has been sending."
Zittrain raised the idea in an interview following a controversy over software developed by a small company called Carrier IQ. Installed on at least 140 million phones, the software is designed to operate in the background and send performance data from handsets to telecom carriers, allowing carriers to diagnose dropped calls and obtain other network information.
The company was thrown on the defensive recently when a security researcher, Trevor Eckhart, said the software collected more sensitive information including "geographical location of the device, the end user's pressing of keys on the device, [and] usage history of the device," and posted a video showing the software capturing the text of his text messages, Google search terms, and location information—even though he'd disabled his GPS.
Carrier IQ has taken issue with the dark implications of the researcher's report. It says the details of the implementation were up to handset makers and that its product didn't "record, store, or transmit" personal information. That stance has been backed up by some researchers who have nonetheless called for tighter control over what the software can do and—echoing Zittrain's proposal—for more visibility for end users.
Already, some members of Congress have gotten involved, with Senator Al Franken, of Minnesota, demanding from Carrier IQ a detailed accounting of what data was collected and who got it, including whether law enforcement ever sought or obtained permission to use the technology as a back door for surveillance. The company is slated to reply to those questions on December 14.

There is no easy way for users to disable or remove the tool, which runs behind the scenes regardless of what the user is doing on the phone. But some handset makers, including HTC, have said they are exploring whether to allow consumers to opt out of data collection by Carrier IQ. And a security company, Bitdefender, last weekend released an app that can detect whether Carrier IQ is running on a phone. Another company, Whisper Systems, already offers Android apps that can help keep track of what different apps are up to on a device.
Catalin Cosoi, head of online threats at Bitdefender, however, says that inserting the Carrier IQ auditing function would have to be done at the operating system level, to which application developers do not have access. It would require a tweak by Apple to its iOS operating system, or by handset makers and networks using Android and other operating systems.
Until that happens, Cosoi adds, users have one other way to check what their smart phones are sending out: they can connect the phone to a laptop or PC running a traffic-sniffing program, such as Wireshark. But this is a fairly technical procedure, not the kind of simple function that users have come to expect on their phones.
Carriers and handset makers, including Apple, didn't immediately return calls for comment on the transparency-app idea yesterday. AT&T replied to reiterate that it used Carrier IQ only for network maintenance, and it did not address questions about whether it might give customers a way to audit data dispatches.
On the specifics of Carrier IQ, Zittrain says it is too soon to say how serious the matter might be. "It seems like there are competing empirical claims about what the software is doing," he says. And until more is known, he says, it is not particularly useful to focus on what the software has the potential to do. "You could say any application or process on a traditional PC has the potential to wipe your hard drive or monitor its bits, too," he notes.
But an easy-to-use auditing window would resolve the problem and prevent future controversies. "Why shouldn't we know what our phones are up to?" says Zittrain.

You Press the Button. Kodak Used to Do the Rest.

You Press the Button. Kodak Used to Do the Rest.

Kodak saw the shift from analog to digital photography coming. Here's why it couldn't win.

When I photographed Eastman Kodak's shuttered and vandalized film processing center outside of Stockholm a few years ago, it became clear to me that I held the very cause of all this destruction in my own hands: a digital camera.
Kodak held a monopoly position in the photographic-film industry throughout most of the 20th century. At its peak, the company employed more than 140,000 people, and its logo could be seen at every tourist attraction. In its hometown of Rochester, New York, the company was referred to as "The Great Yellow Father." A job at Kodak was considered a job for life. In 1997, the stock market valued the company at over $30 billion.
Today Kodak is worth only $265 million. As rumors abound about a looming bankruptcy, the story we hear is that it failed to see the shift to digital photography, and management incompetence sped its decline. A closer look, however, reveals a different picture: Kodak not only recognized the coming shift to digital photography but was also in many ways a pioneer.

Source: PMA

How is it possible for a company to have seen a technological discontinuity yet still end up on the brink of bankruptcy? To understand what at first appears to be a paradox, think back to Kodak's famous slogan "You press the button, we do the rest."
Kodak always sold cameras, but its real business was "doing the rest" – supplying and processing film. During Kodak's decades of dominance, the company built a vast and specialized infrastructure of machines, equipment, and skills in manufacturing, R&D, and distribution for film and photographic paper. With huge economies of scale and skills that were hard to replicate, barriers to entering the film business were very high. Competitor Fujifilm began to increase its global presence in the 1950s, but it took several more decades before the Japanese company became a serious threat to Kodak.
The large and complex process of operating a film business required a high degree of vertical integration. Kodak owned most parts of the supply chain; needless to say, control over basic research, raw materials, and film finishing further increased barriers to entry. The company had low production costs and few competitors, and back then people had no choice but to buy film in order to take photos. Kodak enjoyed tremendously high gross profit margins. Each "Kodak moment" was money in the bank.

First in class: Kodak created new a consumer market for photography with packaged film and inexpensive cameras like the $1 Brownie (shown), first introduced in 1900. Credit: Kodak

Kodak also invested extensively in research and development. In fact, the first electronic camera using a charge-coupled device was invented by a Kodak engineer named Steven Sasson in 1975, and Kodak in many ways led early development in digital photography. The company introduced the first megapixel sensor in 1986, and the QuickTake camera launched by Apple in 1994 had to a large extent been developed by Kodak. It looked like a pair of binoculars, stored 32 photos, and could be connected to a personal computer.
But the limited performance and the high price tag of such cameras (the QuickTake cost about $800 and a high-end digital news camera ran $15,000) meant that the market for digital photography was very small, almost insignificant for a multibillion-dollar company like Kodak. It is often difficult for large firms to bother with small markets and small profits, but Kodak nevertheless made these efforts in the 1990s.
In the meantime, Kodak's previously stable and solid film business became increasingly vulnerable. Fujifilm kept gaining market share, and in the mid-1990s a price war between Kodak and Fuji broke out in the United States. Eventually, Kodak had to lower prices. When George Fisher became CEO in 1993, he faced the challenge of fixing the core film business while at the same time preparing Kodak for the shift to digital photography.

Source: PMA

Fisher and most of his top management realized that digital imaging would displace film in the near future and that the company had to make dramatic efforts to transform itself. In a speech to the Academy of Management in Boston 1997, he said, "We are not in the photographic-film business or in the electronics business; we are in the picture business." Seeking to ride out the technological shift, Kodak kept launching better and better digital cameras, pushed its way into digital printing, and began laying off thousands of workers.
But the industry landscape was completely different in the digital era. Barriers to entry were significantly lowered and the industry was flooded by entrants with a background in consumer electronics, such as Casio, Samsung, and Hewlett-Packard, not to mention Japanese camera manufacturers including Canon, Nikon, and Olympus. Large parts of Kodak's competence base related to chemistry and film manufacturing were rendered obsolete. The vertical integration that had previously been a core asset to Kodak lost its value. Digital cameras became a commodity business with low margins. The problem facing Kodak wasn't just that film profits had died but that those revenues could not be replaced.
Once images became digital, Kodak's business model of "doing the rest" was effectively destroyed. Doing the rest used to entail a large and complex process that only a couple of companies in the world could master. Today, it is done by the click of a button.
Christian Sandström is a PhD researcher at the Ratio Institute in Stockholm and at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology.