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June 15, 2007

Mobile Payment Testing

Motorola signed on to participate in the GSMA Pay-Buy-Mobile Initiative in Europe. Motorola will participate in trials to develop mobile payment activities, and provide feedback to GSMA Near Field Communications (NFC) Technical Guidelines white papers. The trails will also work under the standardization bodies such as ETSI and the NFC Forum. Motorola sees the NFC and associated applications including payments as an area of strategic focus, and sees this as a means to facilitate the development and implementation of an NFC ecosystem.

The concept of using a mobile phone as an electronic wallet has been met with mixed response by consumers. While it’s hard to find someone outside the home without his cell phone these days, which lends the handset to act as a wallet, privacy and security concerns needs to be worked out before it can widely become a mode of payment.

Source

December 09, 2006

Caltech scientists build DNA logic circuits that run in a test tube

molecule-dna.jpg

We've seen DNA logic before, but a new variety at Caltech has created a set of circuits that can work in salt water, possibly paving the way for cell-based computers. The researchers created a small series of circuits and included gates to perform all the binary logic functions: AND, OR, and NOT. Each gate, a set of DNA strands, receives DNA molecules as input and spits out different ones as output.

They've succeeded in building 12 gates in a cascade five layers deep - pretty simple compared to your average microchip, but nonetheless pretty impressive!

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