Science

OPINION

Genomics Meets Sacramento

Personalized medicine is touted as the wave of the future, but recent government action points to problems for Americans looking to join the health revolution. Last week, California's Department of Public Health issued cease-and-desist letters to 13 genetic testing startups, threatening to deny serv...

Candy bar maker Mars is working with IBM and the United States Department of Agriculture - Agricultural Research Service to apply their scientific experience and computing resources to sequence and analyze the entire cocoa genome. This scientific inquiry is more than a simple effort to produce riche...

A new study is raising questions over how radio frequency identification chips could be interacting with hospital equipment. The report, published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests RFID chips could cause some medical devices to fail when in close contact. RFID ch...

Scientists on Friday confirmed that NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has uncovered ice in the sandy soil of the red planet. "It is with great pride and a lot of joy that I announce today that we have found proof that this hard bright material is really water ice and not some other substance," said Phoenix...

NASA has launched a new mission to unravel some of the universe's most intense mysteries. Scientists sent GLAST -- the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope -- into orbit from the Kennedy Space Center. A Delta 2 rocket catapulted the high-tech scope to its destination Wednesday in a meager 90 minutes...

Google cofounder Sergey Brin on Wednesday became the first person to put down a deposit of $5 million toward a future orbital spaceflight through a new program from Space Adventures. Brin's reservation uses one of six spots initially created in Space Adventures' new Orbital Mission Explorers Circle,...

IBM has designed a new $100 million supercomputer, called "Roadrunnner," that's powerful enough to operate at 1 petaflop -- a cool 1 thousand trillion calculations per second. That's twice as fast as the next closest supercomputer -- the IBM Blue Gene system -- and nearly three times as fast as othe...

A new NASA land use agreement is bringing Google -- and, ultimately, the general public -- one step closer to outer space. Google announced a 40-year plan Thursday to build a massive research and development campus within NASA's Ames Research Center. Google will pay $3.66 million a year for the 42.2

Nintendo's release of the Wii Fit in May brought the up-and-coming gaming genre of exercise gaming, or exergaming, into the spotlight. Suddenly, it seemed, Nintendo was challenging the long-standing stereotype of the out-of-shape gamer sitting on the couch eating potato chips. But is this new trend ...

Last week, President Bush signed into law the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, or GINA, which will protect individuals from employer and insurance discrimination based on the results of high-tech gene tests. Fighting discrimination is a good idea, but the lack of opposition to GINA points ...

Nanotechnology may be considered one of the most promising new technologies emerging today, but it's also the source of considerable concern about potential risks to the environment and human health. A new study published Tuesday in Nature Nanotechnology adds further evidence that there's good reaso...

Google launched the beta version of its Google Health personal health records aggregator Monday. The service, according to Google, will put users in control of their own medical records, giving them 24-hour-a-day access to their health records from a variety of sources. With the introduction of Goog...

Atlantic hurricanes will be fewer in number but more intense as a result of global warming, a new study predicts. In the study, which was conducted by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., researchers performed h...

Fighting the animated powers of evil may be a reward unto itself for some gamers, but it can't hold a candle to finding a cure for cancer. A new game from scientists at the University of Washington, however, aims to tap gamers' brain power to make medical discoveries, with the potential even to win ...

At last week's UCLA Technology & Aging Conference, representatives from Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Toyota and other big-name firms discussed how technology is reshaping lifestyles for older individuals. However, important policy implications directly connected to these new tools went unspoken.

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