Two from The Economist Technology Quarterly

The Economist magazine has published its regular "Technology Quarterly". In addition to an article describing the difficulties of producing fuel efficient, low cost cook stoves that meet the differing cultural needs of poor people in developing countries, the issue has these two articles that caught my attention:

"Spinning a good tale"

The article describes efforts to utilize a quantum-mechanical effect called giant magnetoresistance (GMR -- the basis of modern hard-disk drives) in nanoscale devices called spin valves and to combine them with antibodies (which will bond to proteins, sugars and so on) or single-stranded DNA (which will bond to a complementary DNA strand) to make biosensors. It is hoped that using these techniques firms will eventually produce individual chips that can search for many biological targets at once. If successful, such chips could have applications in medicine, science, and environmental monitoring.

"Enlightenment man"

A profile of Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, focusing on his belief and efforts to promote global access to knowledge. It specifically noted the efforts of Google and a firm co-founded by Brin's wife, 23andMe, to ccmbine computing and genetic power to make genetic information widely available.