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

Creating single photons is becoming straightforward. Now engineers have worked out how to steer the photons they produce with the flick of a switch. Photon guns are important tools for engineers attempting to build the next generation of quantum communications gear.

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Blog – Get Ready for Steerable Photon Guns

Electric cars could benefit from a new manufacturing method. A new chemical trick for making nanostructured materials could help increase the range and reliability of electric cars and lead to better batteries that could help stabilize the power grid.

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A Boost for Battery Life and Capacity

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

The DOE funds a research center aimed at making artificial photosynthesis practical. The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded $122 million to establish a research center in California to develop ways of generating fuel made from sunlight. The project will be led by researchers at Caltech and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and will include researchers at various other California institutions, including Stanford University, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of California, Berkeley.

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Fuel from the Sun

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

A federal investigation finds conflicting test results and false marketing claims.

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Video – Genetic Tests Get Bad Grades

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Proximity based social network

A federal investigation finds conflicting test results and false marketing claims. Consumers who buy genetic tests in hopes of seeing what diseases they are likely to contract may be misled, according to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. In addition, the results can vary so widely that they are “of little or no practical use,” the report concludes.

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Genetic Tests Get Bad Grades