Tech Scrape

New software aims to expose mobile malware by monitoring a device’s memory usage. Yesterday at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, a researcher presented a new way to detect malware on mobile devices. He says it can catch even unknown pests and can protect a device without draining its battery or taking up too much processing power.

Fuel made from waste by-products could lower greenhouse gas emissions. A novel chemical process developed by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison converts cellulose from agricultural waste into gasoline and jet fuel. It produces fuel by modifying what until now had been considered unwanted by-products (levulinic acid and formic acid) of breaking cellulose down into sugar. The work was described in this week’s issue of the journal Science .

Rodents could be an effective model for researchers looking for new hepatitis drugs. Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have engineered a mouse with a mostly human liver by injecting human liver cells, or hepatocytes, into genetically engineered mice. Researchers say the mouse/human chimera could serve as a new model for discovering drugs for viral hepatitis, a disease that has been notoriously difficult to replicate and study in the lab. The team exposed the altered mice to hepatitis B and C viruses and, after treating the rodents with conventional drugs, found that the mice responded much like human patients.

The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week:

The money has helped the solar and wind industries, but hasn’t created many manufacturing jobs. In the year since it was enacted by Congress, the federal stimulus bill has helped the solar and wind markets grow in the United States, but has done relatively little to boost domestic renewable energy manufacturing.

Cells from people with premature aging disease get “younger” with the help of stem cell technology. Reverting skin cells from people with a premature aging disease back to a more embryonic state appears to overcome the molecular defect in these cells. People with the disease have abnormally short telomeres, a repetitive stretch of DNA that caps chromosomes and shrinks with every cell division, even in healthy people.

New technology being tested could provide a noninvasive approach to treating stroke. An ultrasound device designed to produce highly focused sound waves might one day be used to break up stroke-causing blood clots in the brain without surgery or drugs. So far, the system has only been tested on clots in test tubes and animals, but researchers aim to start human tests by the end of 2011.

The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week:

The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week:

Francis Collins’s book offers optimism but no grand plan. In the final pages of his new book about personalized medicine, Francis Collins offers a compelling vision of the future via a fictional character named Hope, born on January 1, 2000. Collins describes a world where Hope and most other people have had the entirety of their DNA sequenced and integrated with predictive models that make suggestions about diet, lifestyle, and treatments to optimize their health. The result for Hope is a healthy and productive life beyond age 100.