Tiny plastic fibers could be the key to some diverse technologies in the future — including self-cleaning surfaces, transparent electronics, and biomedical tools that manipulate strands of DNA. Researchers created surfaces that, seen with the eye, look as flat and transparent as a sheet of glass. But seen up close, the surfaces are actually carpeted with tiny fibers.
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Posted by Sep Kamvar, Engineering Lead for Personalization

Sometimes I think I know a lot. I can code like a champ and also know the difference between a Monet and a Manet. But on closer inspection, maybe I don’t know very much at all. When it comes to fine wines, for instance, I can’t tell the difference between Châteauneuf-du-Pape and Chateau-de-Cardboard, and if you asked me who played in the Super Bowl last year, I’d probably say the Dolphins. And lots of people at Google are like me: we know some things, and have some good ideas, but we certainly don’t know everything or have all the good ideas.

So when we designed iGoogle, our personalized homepage, we baked that recognition right in to the product by developing the Google Gadgets API. Google Gadgets are applications that developers can create and anyone can embed into their iGoogle homepage or their own website. In the year and a half since we launched Google Gadgets, we’ve seen a lot of growth in this program. The developer community has created thousands of gadgets, and the top gadgets get tens of millions of pageviews per week. This is great for our developers, as iGoogle gives the gadgets broad distribution, and it’s great for our iGoogle users, as they benefit from a richer variety of options for their personalized homepage. There have been some really interesting gadgets created, from to-do lists to Zelda, from a pair of eyes that follow your mouse around the screen to an entire customer relationship management (CRM) application.

We’ve been hearing from a lot of gadget developers that they’d like to spend more time developing if they could, and we’ve been thinking about ways to help them do that. To that end, we’re happy to announce Google Gadget Ventures, a new pilot program that will help fund third-party gadget development and gadget-related businesses. We plan to offer two types of funding: $5,000 grants for gadget developers who want to invest time making their already successful gadget even better, and $100,000 seed investments for new gadget-related businesses. For now, applications are restricted to gadget developers who have more than 250,000 pageviews per week on their gadget.

Our hope with Google Gadget Ventures is to help create an ecosystem where developers can spend more time doing what they love — building great gadgets. You’ll find more details on how to apply on Tom’s post on the Google Code Blog and the Google Gadget Ventures web page. I’m extremely excited to see what you all come up with!
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Researchers are calling into doubt one of the most popular means of assessing the strength of the so-called ‘biological pump,’ which removes carbon dioxide from the air to the deep ocean.
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The first pigs containing genes responsible for Alzheimer’s disease will be born in Denmark in August. This event is a landmark achivement in the effort towards finding a cure for the disease.
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NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity is scheduled to begin a descent down a rock-paved slope into the Red Planet’s massive Victoria Crater. This latest trek carries real risk for the long-lived robotic explorer, but NASA and the Mars Rover science team expect it to provide valuable science.
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Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) have announced the results of work on genome transplantation methods allowing them to transform one type of bacteria into another type dictated by the transplanted chromosome. The work, published online in the journal Science, by JCVI’s Carole Lartigue, Ph.D. and colleagues, outlines the methods and techniques used to change one bacterial species, Mycoplasma capricolum into another, Mycoplasma mycoides Large Colony (LC), by replacing one organism’s genome with the other one’s genome.
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Scientists at the Buck Institute for Age Research have shown that combining two environmental toxic substances accelerated age-related degeneration in neurons associated with Parkinson’s disease (PD) in mice. Additionally, the study showed that pre-treating the mice with an antioxidant weakened the impact of the environmental exposures, suggesting the substances damage the neurons via oxidative stress. The toxics involved include increased neonatal iron intake and exposure to the herbicide paraquat.
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Researchers at the University of Kentucky have advanced research of a natural product found in an Indian medicinal plant that has shown effectiveness in blocking blood-vessel and tumor growth. The discovery may help lead to treatments for certain types of metastatic breast, prostate and colon cancers.
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A new, non-surgical procedure called radio-frequency ablation (RFA) offers new hope for patients with inoperable kidney and liver tumors. RFA uses heat to “vaporize” tumors.
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Increasingly, drug abusers are getting their next fix from their medicine cabinets, instead of from drug dealers. More than 6 million Americans abuse prescription drugs, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. One in 10 teenagers admits to abusing painkillers, such as Vicodin and Oxycontin. Painkillers cause more overdoses than cocaine and heroin combined.
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