The device is called the MinION. I would imagine that the samples of DNA still need to be prepared in the lab, then the samples would be dropped into its little sequencer chamber where they be sequenced continuously as a DNA strand is pulled through a small hole and inside the machine. The sequencing requires some sort of enzyme solution and inside the device is a small bio-mechanical sieve.

MinION will cost about $900(USD) when it comes to market sometime later this year, however it sounds like that it’s a disposable device which would be used for just a single experiment.

I wonder if this tiny device is the start of a society like that in the movie Gattaca where DNA determines everything you can do. Probably not, but this should make it much cheaper for companies and educational institutions to get into DNA sequencing, assuming the device is accurate.

[via EverythingUSB]

Researchers have made a new breakthrough in memory for electronics that is inside a soft gel with the consistency of Jell-O. The soft memory is biocompatible and the body should not reject it if implanted. The new memory is also suitable to working in a wet environment such as the brain. The soft memory can’t store much data right now, but the researchers are tweaking it.

The material works by creating an oxidized skin when a positive charge is applied to the material. The skin prevents it from conducting electricity and makes it the “0″ needed for binary code. When a negative charge is applied, the skin disappears and it conducts electricity making the “1″ needed for binary code. The new discovery has a long way to go before it is ready for medical procedures on humans.

There is another type of endoscope camera that is in a large pill that the patient can swallow. That would be much more comfortable than the long tube for sure. The catch is that the typical pill camera can’t be controlled and can only go where the muscle contractions inside the body take it. Some researchers in Japan have figured out a way to control that pill camera though.

They grafted a magnetic propulsion system that reminds me a lot of the old flick Innerspace onto the back of the normal pill camera. The capsule has a little tail that flips to propel it around the body. It can swim in the stomach and presumably crawl back up that colon rather than getting flushed too soon. The device is code named “Mermaid” which is lame. I would have went with “Bird of Prey” because then I could use that old “There are Klingons near Uranus” joke. The worst job in the research group would have the be the person in charge of retrieving the prototype.

[via Yahoo News]

The scientists – led by, Prof. Paul Sharpe, a specialist in the field of regenerative dentistry at the Dental Institute of King’s College, London – also claim to have successfully tested the technique in mice. Based on The Guardian‘s article, however, it seems that although Sharpe’s team can coax the stem cells to become a tooth, they can’t force it to become a specific kind of tooth, like a molar or an incisor. Still, this is an amazing breakthrough.  Bad news for the tooth fairy. And for people who make dentures.

[via Neatorama]

Mitragori and his colleagues are already looking at various applications for their creation, including using it as a means of delivering medicine through our body, although they’ve yet to conduct human trials. Will vampires be able to tell the difference between fake blood and real blood? Or will an enterprising vampire soon come up with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Blood! ?

[via Discover via Neatorama]

I’m sure there are lots of things that he knows that we common folks don’t. But to support his claims, Kurzweil, whose future self sent the picture below, also mentions recent breakthroughs in biotechnology, such as artificial pancreases for diabetics and neural implants for Parkinson’s patients.

Kurzweil – whose future future self sent the picture below, I don’t know how or why - also pulled the ol’ computer analogy: “Our phones now perform tasks we wouldn’t have dreamed possible 20 years ago. When I was a student in 1965, my university’s only computer cost £7 million and was huge.  Today your mobile phone is a million times less expensive and a thousand times more powerful. That’s a billion times more capable for the same price.”

Using the Law of Accelerating Returns – which btw is his own theory – Kurzweil estimates that “we will experience another billion-fold increase in technological capability for the same cost in the next 25 years.” Dammit. I wasn’t planning to buy a new laptop till 2030! How expensive will a Core Quadrillion MacBook be by then? Kurzweil, whose future future future self drew the picture below, also mentions a bit of NSFW stuff that I’d rather not share with you.

What do you think of Krangzweil Kurzweil’s predictions? You can read his article here if you want. Our technological progress has really been exponential, so yeah, maybe he’s right.  But let’s not forget that despite all of our fancy gadgets and Gundam statues, we’re not really progressing a lot in other aspects: lots of people are still suffering in one way or another, and we still bicker and fight over lots of things.

If Kurzweil’s 2029 ever comes true, I hope it’s not just the rich or privileged who reap the advantage of this supposedly godlike technology. I’m telling you, as a Third World gamer and techie who spends most of his time browsing the net and reading about First World developments, sometimes it feels like you folks are already in the future, because I sure as hell don’t see or experience a lot of the things that I read about. Also, I’m finding it very hard to be dramatic and serious with Krangzweil around.

[via DVICE, Kurzminators via faceinhole]

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the goal of experiments like this is to one day have an abundant (and hopefully cheap) supply of organs. Some people may not approve of this, but I’d rather breed donor animals than donor humans. Hopefully scientists will have breakthroughs with stem cells so we won’t have to resort to building organ farms.

So they went and tried to see if they could strengthen another biological material – in this case spider silk – by adding metals to it. After trying various metallic compounds, the scientists found that “all of the compounds dramatically increased both the tensile strength of the silk, as well as its extensibility. In short, the researchers had taken an unusually tough material and made it even tougher, with the best results produced by the aluminum and titanium treatments. ”

Here’s where it gets better: The scientists further theorized that this sort of spider silk can be mass produced. Woohooo! Segway schmegway: web slinging is the future of pedestrian transportation. Please let it be so.

[via Ars Technica]

For the low, low price of $4000, you can pick up a hypoallergenic cat from San Diego biotech firm, Allerca. These cats are bred exclusively from litters that don’t carry the Fel D1 glycoprotein, the cause of most common cat allergies. There’s about a one-year waiting list for these critters, so maybe you can just save the $4000 and buy yourself a crapload of Claritin.

[via MedGadget via SlashGear]