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

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

Tools that find serious bugs automatically could lead to safer, more stable software. Several talks at the Black Hat security conference this week in Las Vegas will focus on tools that could make software safer by automatically searching for bugs–and pinpointing the ones that could be most dangerous.

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So Many Bugs, So Little Time

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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Blog – Facts ‘n’ Fixes

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Proximity based social network

A malicious site can find out what social-networking groups you belong to–and then figure out your identity. People often get categorized by social group–jock, geek, soccer mom. The same is true for our online identities: If you have an account on Facebook or LinkedIn, you might also belong to several groups on each site.

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Your Groups Tell Hackers Who You Are

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