The startup LS9 reveals a discovery that could lead to biofuels that would work in conventional engines. Many species naturally make small amounts of hydrocarbons. Now researchers at the startup LS9 , based in South San Francisco, CA, have described the genes and enzymes responsible for this production of alkanes, the major components of fuels such as diesel . The findings, reported in the current issue of the journal Science , have allowed the researchers to engineer E. coli bacteria that can secrete alkane hydrocarbons capable of being burned in diesel engines.

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Genes to Make Hydrocarbon Fuels

Software that gives users more control of a camera could revolutionize photography. Camera-phone owners can use new software to reprogram these devices–and capture images that would previously have been impossible to get.

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New Focus for Digital Photography

Implantable devices work in diabetic pigs for over a year–human tests could be next. Researchers have successfully tested a fully implantable glucose-monitoring device in pigs for nearly two years, according to new research published today in Science Translational Medicine . Scientists plan to file for approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin human tests. Eventually, researchers aim to couple this kind of device with one that would automatically deliver insulin in response to changing blood-sugar levels.

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Glucose Monitors Get Under the Skin

A computer security researcher demonstrates attacks on cash machines. Yesterday, during a flashy presentation at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, a computer security expert showed several ways to break into ATMs.

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How to Make an ATM Spit Out Money

A chemical-infused scaffold generates new tissue by attracting stem cells. Today’s titanium replacement joints work very well for 10 to 15 years, but replacing them after they’ve worn out is a challenge for both patient and surgeon. A team of researchers from Columbia University proposes a way around that problem: by implanting a scaffold that encourages the patient’s own stem cells to regrow the joint.

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Helping Joints Regrow Themselves

Wireless chargers are more convenient, but less efficient. GM and Nissan will have to overcome many consumer concerns as they bring mass-market plug-in hybrid and electric cars to market this winter. One aspect that might make potential buyers hesitate is a fear that they’ll forget to plug in their cars when they get home, and thus won’t have a charged-up car in the morning.

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Can Electric Vehicles Lose the Plug?

Digital encoding could catch future informants. Attorney General Eric Holder’s new probe into Wikileaks’s posting of 91,000 war documents will likely find that tracing the path of the documents back through the Internet is next to impossible. But watermarks–if they were embedded in the files–could reveal the whistle-blower.

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The Hunt for the Wikileaks Whistle-blower

New services try to make location information useful but not invasive. The location-based applications Foursquare and Gowalla –which reward users with points for “checking in” at different places–are all the rage in some social groups. But many other people balk at sharing their precise location and struggle to see the point of doing so. A new location-based application for mobile phones called face2face hopes to attract new types of users by offering more filtered, useful information and providing more privacy controls.

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App Lets You Know When Friends Are Nearby

Creators introduced the programming languages that they hope will revolutionize computing. Creators of two dozen new programming languages–some designed to enable powerful new Web applications and mobile devices–presented their work last week in Portland, OR. The reason for the gathering was the first Emerging Languages Camp at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention.

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New Languages, and Why We Need Them

The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week: Cluster Reverberation: A Mechanism For Robust Short-Term Memory Without Synaptic Learning

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