A Spit Test for Age

Researchers are able to predict individuals' ages from DNA modifications in their saliva.

Analyzing a few chemical markers in the DNA of saliva can determine a person's age with surprising accuracy. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have found that the presence of just two chemical modifications allowed them to predict the ages of members of a sample group within a range of about five years. The technique, if validated, could be a useful tool in forensics. It also points to the possibility that DNA modifications might offer a way to measure aging that's more medically relevant than counting birthdays.

The discovery, published this week in PLoS One, began as part of different research into the biological basis of sexual orientation. The UCLA team analyzed saliva samples of 34 pairs of identical male twins aged 21 to 55, looking for chemical modifications of DNA called methylation, a common marker of gene regulation, or epigenetics. The researchers, led by geneticist Eric Vilain, noticed that patterns in a subset of methylation sites tend to vary with age, with some sites on the genome becoming more methylated across large groups of cells and others less so.

They identified 88 sites on the genome that correlated strongly with age, and confirmed these findings in a group of 31 men and 29 women aged 18 to 70. Many of the genes associated with these sites are linked to cardiovascular and neurological disease. The researchers chose the two sites that correlated most strongly with age and used them to create a predictive model.

Sven Bocklandt, the study's lead author, formerly of UCLA and now at biotech company Bioline, says that the model, which can determine a typical person's age within 5.2 years, "is by far the most accurate predictive tool" of age yet developed. The tool could have clear benefits for forensics, in which the ability to narrow down the age of a suspect would aid investigations. However, the accuracy of the method needs to be validated in other samples, and also in other body fluids and tissues.

Jean-Pierre Issa, a epigenetics expert at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center who was not involved in the study, says the findings are in line with work by him and others demonstrating that DNA methylation patterns change with age. But he adds that certain lifestyle factors, like heavy smoking or drinking, may affect methylation and make people seem to be older than they are. He notes that some study subjects were outliers whose methylation did not correspond as closely to age. In the study, the outliers could be identified because their real age was known, but in forensics applications this wouldn't be the case.

These outliers also raise the possibility that methylation status might hint at a "biological age" that differs from chronological age. For example, someone with an unhealthy lifestyle might be older biologically than chronologically. Having an objective way to assess this might help predict risks of age-related diseases or better guide the need for age-related screenings and other health recommendations. Issa says this idea has been around since the 1990s but has not been studied enough to verify it.

Scientists have investigated a similar concept based on the length of telomeres—caps on the ends of chromosomes that get shorter with age but that have also been found to respond to stress. Issa says DNA methylation may prove to be a simpler and more accurate measure of biological age.

End of the Internet as We Know It

A new Internet protocol will vastly increase the number of addresses from which devices can connect.

The Internet routes packets of data from one Internet protocol (IP) address to another. Every Internet-connected device anywhere in the world has its own IP address.

This month's World IPv6 Day served as a test run for a protocol that should dramatically increase how many devices can be connected to the Internet. The new protocol will be crucial if many more objects—including light bulbs, kitchen appliances, and environmental sensors—are to have IP addresses, connect to the Internet, and send and receive data.

What needs replacement is called Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4). This has been the basis for communication between devices since 1981, and it allows for nearly 4.3 billion addresses. The new system allows for around 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses—nearly 50 octillion for every person on earth.

If you live in the U.S. you're less likely than people elsewhere to notice the need to switch the Internet to IPv6. Each of a range of large U.S.-based companies and organizations, including Apple, IBM, HP, Ford, and MIT, were allocated a block of nearly 17 million addresses soon after IPv4 was introduced, and a large portion of those addresses remain unused.

In countries where the number of people connecting online is growing fast, the problem is more urgent. China has nearly 400 million Internet users but only about 330 million IP addresses. Compare those figures with those for the United States, which holds about 1.5 billion addresses—40 percent of the total of 3.7 billion usable addresses. (The other half billion are unusable for a variety of reasons.) India, with its population of roughly 1.1 billion, has only about 35 million addresses.

Discrepancies like these no doubt explain the fact that the region managed by APNIC, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, is leading the rest of the world in IPv6 deployment.

Mobile Health Apps That Share

A project aims to collect data from apps, potentially enabling new kinds of health research.

A set of tools for building cell-phone apps that collect health-related information aims to change the way health information is stored, shared, and used.

The Open mHealth project, developed at UCLA and UCSF, provides technology for health apps that transmit a variety of data to the project's central data warehouse. This data can include information entered by users and also such things as smart-phone GPS- and accelerometer-tracking information. One pilot project, for instance, is studying the diet, stress, movement, and exercise patterns of overweight new mothers. Users have control over what data is captured and get to choose with whom it is shared. Hospitals, health-care providers, and startup companies could design additional apps to draw on the data.

Mobile phones are increasingly used to track illness and promote wellness, but for the most part, this occurs by way of a patchwork of incompatible applications doing different jobs, says Deborah Estrin, professor of computer science, director of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a researcher on Open mHealth. "Right now, most of the mobile health applications send data back to a proprietary website which could sell the information back to you or to others."

Estrin says sharing mobile health data could help advance medical research: "When people share components of the infrastructure, there is more rapid innovation than when people are working separately to reinvent the wheel."

She gives the example of inviting patients prescribed antidepressants to take part in a research study via a phone app. This would track side effects and levels of depression and activity, and send the information to a physician to review before forwarding it to the study. If only one out of every 250 U.S. patients for whom antidepressants have been prescribed took part, the study would still include more than 100,000 subjects.

The Open mHealth project has already launched five apps and related pilot studies.The one for overweight new mothers collects GPS and accelerometer data from their smart phones, together with information users enter about their diet and stress levels. "We actually redesigned this app after we heard from some of the new moms," says Estrin. "We added a stress button on the phone—when a participant is feeling stressed, she taps the button and it registers her time and location."

To protect users' privacy, the Open mHealth project developed a feature called the personal data vault, which holds the data being collected and analyzed. The user can choose to delete things from the data vault or set filters so the phone does not monitor behavior during certain times of the day.

It should be possible for health-care organizations to use the Open mHealth infrastructure and add functions on top of it to analyze the data and send it out to third parties, such as a clinician, says Dr. Michael Swiernik, director of medical informatics at the University of California, Los Angeles, who also works on the project. Swiernik says that ultimately such data might be integrated into users' electronic medical records.

According to some experts, the project may prove easier to implement outside the United States. "The success of Open mHealth hinges on its ability to integrate with other software and hardware such as point-of-care devices and a back-end electronic medical record," says Leo Anthony Celi, a physician and researcher at MIT who is creating open-source mobile medical protocols for developing countries. "In the U.S., a vast majority of this software and hardware is proprietary."

Why the Internet Is Fundamentally Less Secure Than It Used to Be

Your passwords are stored on more sites than ever—too bad you've never bothered to change them.

Your company's data is only as secure as the weakest security of the most fly-by-night website to which anyone in your organization has ever given their password.

Think about that for a moment: One of your summer interns used the same password on your company intranet as they use on the hacked-together open source message board on which they swap stories with their friends about how awesome it was to do whippets around the campfire at last year's Bonnaroo.

That's why leaks of user data and passwords like the kind that are happening with increasing frequency are so devastating -- no security system can protect a web application from a user who has the keys required to get in. (Aside: That's not entirely true; two-factor authentication systems can, but they're not common.)

One way to make your web identities more secure -- there's no such thing as actually securing them -- is simply to acknowledge that there are entire classes of websites for which you should simply pretend that your password is already public. Think of anything short of your bank and your email service provider as compromised-in-advance. (Although even your bank may be compromised already.)

The more often you re-use a password, the less secure that password is. (Unless you're using a system like 1password, which can generate and remember a new, significantly-more-secure-than-average password for each site.)

That's why last December I outlined my own system for attempting to keep my logins secure. Since then I've simplified it: you need only memorize three passwords. Enforcing this personally can help keep your data secure; making it a company-wide policy to force users to periodically update their accounts with unique, strong passwords is an important part of keeping an entire network secure.

1. All sites other than your email account and anyplace that stores your bank or credit card information get a throwaway password. Facebook, Twitter, the billion other sites that require a login -- forget it; they're toast. Would it kill you to have these accounts hacked? If the answer is no, these are the sites that are among the 97 percent or so of sites you use that will all be secured by the same password.

2. Sites with your credit card or bank information get a unique, secure password that you use on no other sites. Here are some tips on creating a secure password.

3. Your email account gets a totally unique, secure password used on no other sites. God only knows what's in your Gmail. Enough sensitive data to bury your online life forever. Make sure the only way to ever give an attacker access to this email is by going in the front door -- through Google's security -- and not by simply punching in a password they found elsewhere, on a less-secure site. Accessing Gmail with a password that was re-used on other, compromised sites is the most common way that Gmail is "hacked."

Also: learn how to recognize phishing attacks. This is the other most common way that users give up access to their email accounts.

Google's New Google+ Social Network Challenges Facebook, Promotes (Safe) Sharing

Google's experiments with social media have largely landed with a particularly embarrassing thud--Buzz was a security nightmare, Wave was incomprehensible, and Orkut is only popular in Brazil, for some reason. But Google is nothing if not determined, and today announced its biggest social push ever: Google+. It is definitely similar to Facebook at first glance, but there's a fundamentally different idea underlying Google+ that separates it from the pack. Facebook was an outcropping of networks like MySpace and dating sites--centered around the profile page. Google+, though, is a sharing engine.

Google+ is, despite that difference, essentially Google's riff on Facebook. It may not seem all that new at first, but it is a very big idea and implemented into Google's myriad properties, especially Gmail, on a scale we haven't seen before. Facebook was an outcropping of networks like MySpace and dating sites--centered around the profile page. Google+, though, is a sharing engine. Google describes the main thrust of Google+ as sharing: It's designed to let you share status updates, links, videos, and whatever else with exactly who you want.

To do that, Google created "Circles," which are essentially groups into which you place specific clumps of people--family, friends, co-workers, that kind of thing. Sharing is done to those circles, rather than to everyone in your social network (which might include coworkers, exes, relatives, and other undesirables). The layout of the Circles is pretty cute; removing a contact from a Circle blasts them into a puff of smoke, to which you are free to add your own laser noises. Interface has historically been a weak spot at Google, as many Android owners (or foes) will tell you, but the head of design for Google+ is an ex-Apple designer who seems to be overcoming Google's design woes.

There are a few other ways to communicate with a set group of people: There's an instant-messaging-type service for small groups, and a video chat service called Hangouts that lets you spontaneously jump into group video chats. The latter feature is definitely something we haven't seen before, and it's emblematic of Google's new strategy with Google+: Google wants you to spend as much time as possible in Google+, rather than the typical Google method of getting you in and out with your data quickly.

Then there's a feature called Sparks, which is sort of like an automated news feed--add your interests, and it gives you a stream of things you might care about, a bit like StumbleUpon, which you can then share with whomever you want. Presumably, Google

Google+ will be all over Google; aside from an Android (and, soon, iPhone) app, you'll see a link to your Google+ page whenever you use any Google web service, alongside the links to search, Maps, Reader, and all the rest. It's in a small private beta for now, as Google works on the kinks to avoid another Buzz situation. But this is going to be a major part of Google's identity from now on--if we're to believe the hype, this isn't just a new app. This is a new direction for Google itself. Whether people will use it...well, that remains to be seen.

Haptic Vibrating Belts Guide U.S. Soldiers Through the Darkness

Soldiers already have plenty of nighttime tech to help them navigate battlefields, but goggles can be clunky and obtrusive, and backlit GPS displays can betray a lurking warfighter’s position. A new haptic interface developed by Army researchers will help soldiers feel their way through the darkness instead.

Researchers at the Army Research Office developed a vibrating belt with eight mini actuators — “tactors” — that signify all the cardinal directions. The belt is hooked up to a GPS navigation system, a digital compass and an accelerometer, so the system knows which way a soldier is headed even if he’s lying on his side or on his back.

The tactors vibrate at 250 hertz, which equates to a gentle nudge around the middle. Researchers developed a sort of tactile morse code to signify each direction, helping a soldier determine which way to go, New Scientist explains. A soldier moving in the right direction will feel the proper pattern across the front of his torso. A buzz from the front, side and back tactors means “halt,” a pulsating movement from back to front means “move out,” and so on.

Researchers led by Elmar Schmeisser and Linda Elliott at the Army Research Office have been testing the belts on various Army personnel as they performed a series of training exercises, both at night and during the day. The subjects had to respond to requests for information, search for targets and navigate at the same time, New Scientist reports. They liked it because they didn’t have to take their eyes off their surroundings or put down their weapons to fumble with a GPS, Elliott told NewSci.

The researchers are now working with a company that makes a haptic glove system, like the one we saw here, to allow platoon leaders to communicate with standard military hand gestures.

Elliott is presenting research on the haptic belt at a Human-Computer Interaction conference in Orlando in July.

Federal Study of Power Grid Might Disrupt The Nation's Clocks

Soon, when you sleep through your Monday morning alarm, it may be Uncle Sam’s fault. Federal officials are considering an experiment on the nation’s electrical grid that could interrupt the way your appliances tell time — from your bedside alarm to your automatic coffeemaker.

Once they’re programmed, electrically powered clocks tell time based on the rate of the electric current that feeds them, as an Associated Press story explains. Electrical utilities keep the current’s frequency stable in part to keep clocks precise, the AP says. But utilities could save energy and money by allowing for greater frequency variation, so the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is considering allowing the change.

Joe McClelland, head of electric reliability for FERC, wondered whether anyone really uses the grid to tell time.

“Let’s see if anyone complains if we eliminate it,” he said.

Renewable energy is one primary reason FERC cares about frequency variation. Power sources like wind and solar energy will ramp up and drop off with great variability, inducing spikes and valleys in the energy flowing through the nation’s electrical grid. Adjusting for those differences is expensive, and can be wasteful, according to FERC. Forgetting about it would just be easier — unless all the nation’s clocks are suddenly off.

With a more variable current, wall clocks and appliance clocks, like the one that’s programmed to brew your coffee every morning, will become less accurate every second, a phenomenon that can get much worse over time. One trade group that has studied the potential effects says East Coast clocks could run 20 minutes fast over a year, and timepieces on the West Coast clocks would be off by about 8 minutes.

Officials from FERC said they are tentatively planning to test a more variable frequency in mid-July, AP said.

It’s a good thing we have ridiculously accurate atomic clocks to keep us all on track.

News Corp Close to Selling Myspace

News Corp is expected to sell the troubled social media site Myspace in the next two days, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Two front-runners have emerged in the auction process: online ad company Specific Media and private equity firm Golden Gate Capital, the source said.

A representative for Specific Media could not be reached for comment. Golden Gate Capital declined to comment.

The deal is likely to be a mix of cash and stock for less than $100 million.

While Specific Media and Golden Gate Capital are close contenders, other bidders are involved in the process including Myspace co-founder Chris DeWolfe in a partnership with Austin Ventures; Criterion Capital Partners, which bought social media site Bebo from AOL; and Activision Blizzard Chief Executive Officer Bobby Kotick, according to the source.

Additionally, more than 50 percent of Myspace's 500-strong workforce is expected to be laid off because of the sale.

The deal is expected to be sealed on the heels of the Sun Valley conference, the annual gathering at an Idaho resort of media and technology moguls, as well as a host of other U.S. and international luminaries.

News Corp paid $580 million in 2005 for Myspace -- once a pioneer of the social networking space -- but soon lost ground to Facebook, now the world's No. 1 social networking site.

Last year, News Corp relaunched Myspace as a social entertainment site with a focus on music, movies and celebrities.

The news of the front runner and timing was first reported by News Corp-owned AllThingsD.

Twitter Founders Return to Roots, Relaunch Obvious

Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams plan to revive Obvious, the company they conceived years ago as a technology project incubator that eventually spawned Twitter.

Stone and Williams will continue to advise Twitter on strategic matters, but devote the lions' share of their time to The Obvious Corporation, Stone told the Aspen Ideas Conference at the ski resort on Tuesday.

The pair, along with others such as Jack Dorsey, who now runs payments service Square, created the four-year-old website that allows users to send 140-character messages across the Internet. It has grown into a microblogging phenomenon used by celebrities and heads of state alike, hailed at times as a crucial tool in promoting the free flow of information.

Neither Stone nor Williams told conference attendees explicitly what they intended with Obvious, apart from saying that they were excited about building projects that will improve people's lives.

"All the biggest ideas are obvious in retrospect," said Williams. "If we get as lucky as Twitter, that would be great."

Dick Costolo replaced Williams as Twitter's CEO in October, a move Silicon Valley sources have said re-focused the microblogging sensation on monetization, or translating its fast-growing pool of users into revenue.

"The Twitter crew and its leadership team have grown incredibly productive. I've decided that the most effective use of my time is to get out of the way until I'm called upon to be of some specific use," Stone said in a blog post. here

"Our plan is to develop new projects and work on solving big problems aligned along a simple mission statement: The Obvious Corporation develops systems that help people work together to improve the world."

"This is a dream come true!" Stone said.

Dynamic Duo

In a conversation with Walter Isaacson, the Aspen Institute's chief executive, the duo skipped from topic to topic, flummoxing audience members hoping for clues on their new venture.

They discussed the advantages of closed versus open systems online; how the Internet was changing philanthropy through services such as Kickstarter that allow crowdsourced funding; and how the Internet has affected distribution of content much more than content itself.

"There are more fundamental things than how distribution evolves to change publishing," Williams said.

The two charmed the audience, frequently drawing laughs with their deadpan wit. Stone described himself and Williams as "hallucinogenically optimistic", while their Obvious partner Jason Goldman, formerly vice president for product at Twitter, "is always like, 'here are the 10 ways we can get screwed'."

Social networking services like Twitter and Facebook are increasingly challenging established online powers like Google Inc and Yahoo for Web surfers' time and advertisers' dollars.

Twitter, which began courting advertisers one year ago, is still in the early stages of building a business. The company is expected to bring in about $150 million in ad revenue this year, compared with Facebook's roughly $4 billion in ad revenue, according to research firm eMarketer.

In December, Twitter was valued at $3.7 billion in a $200 million funding round led by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. An auction of Twitter shares on the secondary market in March suggested investors were valuing the company at more than $7 billion.

One audience member asked if there was a bubble in technology.

"Maybe investor excitement is outpacing the development," Williams allowed. But he was firm about his corporate progeny.

"I'm holding my Twitter stock long-term," he said. "If there is a correction, these things always go in cycles. So that will be fine."

Microsoft Rolls Out Office in the Cloud

Microsoft Corp made its biggest move into the mobile, Internet-accessible world of "cloud" computing on Tuesday, taking the wraps off a revamped online version of its hugely profitable Office software suite.

The world's largest software company is heaving its two-decade old set of applications -- including Outlook email, Excel spreadsheets and SharePoint collaboration tools -- into an online format so that customers can use them on a variety of devices from wherever they can get an Internet connection.

It wants to push back against Google Inc, which has stolen a small but worrying percentage of corporate customers with Google Apps -- a cheaper, Web-only alternative that removes the need for companies to spend time on installing software or managing servers.

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer presented the overhauled and updated set of offerings -- collectively called Office 365 -- at an event in New York City on Tuesday morning, stressing that online versions and built-in conferencing tools can save users money, especially small and medium-sized businesses.

The full launch of Office 365, which has been in beta testing since last autumn, spices up the lively competition with Google for new users.

"While Office 365 does put Microsoft in mortal combat with Google, it is not really an existential threat for Google since Microsoft is essentially validating the model that Google pioneered with Google Apps," said Matt Cain, an analyst at tech research firm Gartner. "I would expect that Office 365 actually heightens interest in Google Apps."

Microsoft shares were up 2.4 percent on Tuesday afternoon, following a 3.7 percent jump the day before, partly buoyed by hopes that the company can ultimately boost profits by extending its software dominance to the growing cloud sector.

Microsoft has offered online versions of some Office programs -- chiefly Outlook email -- for its corporate customers for several years, and last year rolled out free versions for individual home users.

"The biggest thing I like about it is that it takes the need to manage servers away and puts it in someone else's hands," said Kevin Lisota, CEO of Seattle real estate startup Findwell, which has five employees and has been using the test version of the product.

"It takes our email and team Internet sites and basically makes that Microsoft's problem so I don't have to worry about that," said Lisota, who was invited by Microsoft to an Office 365 launch event at its headquarters near Seattle.

Growing Market

The market for Web-based software services is heating up, and every company, government department and local authority is getting pitches from Microsoft and Google whenever they re-evaluate their office software.

It is a new challenge for Microsoft, which built itself up on expensive versions of software installed on individual computers. That business model turned the Office unit into Microsoft's most profitable, earning more than $3 billion alone last quarter.

Microsoft's plan is to make up for smaller profit margins from Web-based applications -- due to the cost of handling data and keeping up servers -- by grabbing a larger slice of companies' overall technology spending.

Microsoft said it will charge from $2 per user per month for basic email services to $27 per user per month for advanced offerings, with a standard, small business package priced at $6 per user per month. Google charges a flat fee of $50 per user per year for its Web-based Google Apps product, which offers email, calendars, word processing and more online.

Microsoft, like Google, will host users' data remotely, and maintain all the servers in vast data centers. Unlike Google, it will also allow companies to put their data on dedicated servers should they choose, or keep the data on their own premises.

Google, which has had the most success in the small and medium-sized business range, says there are now 40 million users of online Google Apps suite. Microsoft does not publish equivalent numbers, but research firm comScore has estimated 750 million people worldwide use Office in some form.

But Internet-centric Google -- whose success is based on its dominance in Web search -- is confident it has the upper hand in the cloud.

"Compared to what they (Microsoft) have in the market today, they have nowhere to go but up," said Dave Girouard, head of Google's worldwide enterprise business, in an interview last week. "We feel we're years ahead of them in terms of building a viable cloud solution that just works."

Japan Mobile Gaming Firm Gree Targets 1 Billion Users

Japanese mobile social gaming firm Gree will aim for 500 million to a billion users worldwide, rivaling Facebook, the company's founder and chief executive said on Wednesday.

Gree this year paid $104 million to buy fast-growing U.S.-based mobile social gaming platform OpenFeint, which has 90 million users worldwide and is adding 2.8 more per second.

"We are aiming for 500 million to a billion users, though we don't have a timeframe, or particular countries," Yoshikazu Tanaka said. Facebook is said to have 700 million, and we are also aiming for that level," he added.

Gree competes with DeNA in the mobile social gaming market, which grew rapidly with the spread of sophisticated feature phones in Japan, and the two are jostling to export their highly profitable business model, based on in-game microtransactions.

But some analysts say they may face a difficult transition to the smartphone era, with Apple restricting integration of social and gaming applications on the iPhone and the spread of free applications on phones based on Google's Android operating system.

Google this week announced its own social networking challenge to Facebook.

Some in the industry expressed surprise at the high price Gree paid for OpenFeint, which made a net loss of $6.6 million on sales of $282,000 in fiscal 2010, according to a Gree statement.

Tanaka said he was confident he could turn the business profitable, though he did not specify the timing, saying it would depend on how much Gree chose to invest.

Gree itself made 19.6 billion yen ($242 million) in operating profit in the financial year to June last year on sales of 35.2 billion yen, and expects to hike operating profit to 27-30 billion yen in the financial year ending on Thursday.

Tanaka also said he expects more growth in the Japanese market, where Gree boasted more than 25 million users as of March 2011.

"The population is about 120 to 130 million, so I think there is still room for growth," he said.

Concerns about the economy in the United States, where consumers are gloomy with unemployment stuck over 9 percent, [ID:nLDE7520PE] are unlikely to affect the company's expansion, he said.

"I don't think there's a connection. We have grown very rapidly in Japan in the past few years, even though the economy has not been good," he said. "It's a cheap way of enjoying games, because you don't have to buy a console," he added.

DeNA said in October last year it would pay up to $403 to buy out U.S. rival ngmoco as it bids to build up its own global network.

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