Apple's iPhone 4S announcement yesterday was somewhat anticlimactic save the incorporation of Siri, a voice-command application that is now integrated deeply into Apple's new iOS 5 and allows users to ask their phones questions and give them commands in natural language. And if that kind of voice recognition and command sounds somewhat familiar to you technophiles, it should. Siri is the indirect spawn of DARPA, Danger Room reports, envisioned to help military commanders organise their data and otherwise make sense of fast-moving situations.
Potentially big stem cell news out of the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory today in Nature, though in our experience it's always good to temper one's expectations when it comes to these sorts of things. After all, we've thought we cracked the code on embryonic stem cell cloning technology more than once, only to find this kind of biology is much more difficult and complex than originally thought. Nonetheless, researchers have reprogrammed an adult human egg to an embryonic state and used it to create a self-reproducing embryonic stem cell line. And that's a big deal.
Scientists at California's Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and the University of Rhode Island recently reported on the same-sex mating habits of Octopoteuthis deletron, a deep-sea squid that indiscriminately shoots sperm packets onto both male and female squids passing by.
Vindication has to be one of the most satisfying effects of a Nobel Prize win - after years of work, the scientific community has finally recognised the real weight of a discovery someone probably fought a very long time to prove. So Daniel Shechtman must feel really satisfied today. The Israeli chemist is a Nobel laureate for his discovery of quasicrystals, a unique form of solid matter whose discovery cost him his job and reputation.
The European Space Agency announced its next two space science missions yesterday, and given recent events they may not come as a huge surprise. The first will orbit the sun, coming closer to the solar surface than any previous science spacecraft to measure the solar wind and its influence on the planets to an unprecedented degree. The second will explore dark energy and the accelerating expansion of the universe--a characteristic whose discovery won three physicists the Nobel prize in physics yesterday.
The tedious, carpal-tunnel-inducing pipette work of cell biologists may soon be relegated to robots, thanks to a new cell factory developed in Germany. This could free humans to perform new studies and ask new questions, as automated equipment takes over the time-consuming task of growing, feeding and observing cells in the lab.
Get ready to witness some James Bond-esque, HALO-style active camouflage action. Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas have cleverly tapped the unique characteristics of carbon nanotubes and the light-bending weirdness of the mirage effect to create a kind of invisibility cloak that can be turned on and off at the flip of a switch.
Despite how easy they make it look on TV dramas, determining time of death for a body requires a lot of difficult guesswork (unless someone is there when the person passes, of course). A range of environmental factors and other mitigating circumstances make any declaration of time of death an estimation at best. But a team of Italian scientists think they've found a built-in clock in the human nasal cavity that ticks off the minutes after a body expires, and it could make estimating the time of death a more precise exercise.
Today in Cupertino, USA, Apple announced the newest version of its bajillion-selling iPhone, to be named the iPhone 4S. Like the iPhone 3GS, this is a small, mostly internal upgrade over its predecessor - a new dual-core processor here, an improved camera there - though there is a major addition in the form of Siri, a voice-command service Apple bought awhile back that allows you to ask your phone questions, or tell it to do things, in natural language. Lots of things.
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