Daily Tech News

Microsoft is now looking to biology to come up with solutions for data storage. The tech giant just purchased ten million strands of synthetic DNA from Twist Bioscience to use for digital data storage research. The purchase involves ten million long oligonucleotides. Twist Bioscience CEO Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D. said in a  press release : “Today, the vast majority of digital data is stored on media that has a finite shelf life and periodically needs to be re-encoded. DNA is a promising storage media, as it has a known shelf life of several thousand years, offers a permanent storage format and can be read for continuously decreasing costs.” “We need new methods for long-term, secure data storage,” says Doug Carmean, a Microsoft partner architect in its Technology and Research organization. Their initial tests have shown that they can successfully encode and recover 100 percent of binary data from synthetic DNA. Twist Bioscience is a San Francisco-based biology startup ...

Stanford University   researchers just synthesized a material which, when tested, produced some pretty remarkable results —it’s  super stretchy, self-healing, and responsive to an electrical field. These  properties make it a perfect material for  artificial  skin and muscle. The study,  published  in  Nature Chemistry , was conducted by professor Zhenan Bao’s work group, which  has been on a quest to develop artificial skin for quite some time now, and has previously had some success. According to the press release , when the researchers tested the newly synthesized elastomer, the results surprised them…its “stretchiness” had gone beyond the limits of the machine used to measure its elasticity and breaking point! The limit is only about 45 inches, so the researchers had to stretch the material on their own, and the 2.54 cm (1 in) sample they used had expanded to over 100 times its length. Beyond its shoc...

With hundreds of millions of tonnes of plastic  being produced  globally every year, the race is on to find environmentally friendly alternatives to things like water bottles, so that huge amounts of unrecycled waste don't end up in landfill or  the ocean . Some of the most promising solutions could be garbage-eating worms and plastic-eating bacteria , but what if there's an even simpler approach? Icelandic product design student Ari Jónsson had such an idea: for a biodegradable drinking bottle made from a material that, unlike plastic, doesn't leave a near-permanent problem behind after it's been used. "I read that 50 percent of plastic is used once and then thrown away so I feel there is an urgent need to find ways to replace some of the unreal amount of plastic we make, use and throw away each day," Jónsson told  Dezeen magazine . "Why are we using materials that take hundreds of years to break down in nature to drink from once and then throw away?...

A team of international scientists from Canada, the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden announced Friday that they had developed a model biological supercomputer capable of solving complex mathematical problems using far less energy than standard electronic supercomputers. The model “biocomputer,” which is roughly the size of a book, is powered by Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) — dubbed the “molecular unit of currency.” According to description of the device, published in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , the biocomputer uses proteins present in all living cells to function. It uses a strategy similar to that of quantum computers, which use qubits — the quantum computing equivalents of bits — to perform “parallel computation,” wherein  computers are able to process information quickly and accurately by performing several calculations simultaneously, rather than sequentially. In the case of the biocomputer, the qubits are replaced with ...

Whatstools for Whatsapp, What is this? WhatsApp is a very popular mobile messaging app available for google android, Apple iOS, Blackberry, Nokia Series 40, Symbian 60, Windows Phone. In addition to sending text messages over the internet, it also allows users to share and send Images, Audios, and Videos with each other. But it has certain limitations you can face as shown bellow,  It allows users to send only image, audio and video files only. There is no in-built option to send other file types such as PDF, DOC, APK, etc. The maximum video size that can be sent over WhatsApp is restricted to 16 MB. You cannot send videos larger than 16 MB. However, WhatsApp allows you to trim and compress the video before sending. But still its a limited feature. We cannot send large videos. If you have noticed, when you send images on WhatsApp, they are compressed and sent to the receiver. However the quality is not noticeable on mobile, but it can be noticed on a ...

Ultrathin, flexible photovoltaic cells could find many new uses. Imagine solar cells so thin, flexible, and lightweight that they could be placed on almost any material or surface, including your hat, shirt, or smartphone, or even on a sheet of paper or a helium balloon. Researchers at MIT have now demonstrated just such a technology: the thinnest, lightest solar cells ever produced. Though it may take years to develop into a commercial product, the laboratory proof-of-concept shows a new approach to making solar cells that could help power the next generation of portable electronic devices. The new process is described in a paper by MIT professor Vladimir Bulovic, research scientist Annie Wang, and doctoral student Joel Jean, in the journal Organic Electronics . Bulovic, MIT's associate dean for innovation and the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technology, says the key to the new approach is to make the solar cell, the substrate that supports it, and a...

An NEW ERA IN SMARTPHONES Many of us use our smartphones these days to complete a wide range of tasks; however, tablets still come in handy, allowing us to complete a variety of tasks that would otherwise be difficult (if not impossible) on a smaller screen. But with Samsung’s latest invention, you can forget about having to budget twice as much for two separate electronic devices. Samsung has announced its plan to create a foldable smartphone, dubbed the ‘smartlet.’ The phone is a 2-in-1…a smartphone that can transform into a 7-inch tablet when unfolded. You can probably picture it acting a bit like a book. And indeed, it kind of does. SO, HOW DOES THE THING WORK? The ‘smartlet’ uses an OLED screen (organic light-emitting diode) that allows the device to fold. These OLEDs also provide a brighter display on electronic devices, are super thin, and use less energy than LCDs. This new development comes about as Smartphones are reaching their climax. There’s...