What’s the News: Researchers have found high concentrations of rare earth metals, essential materials for making nearly all high-tech electronics, in mud on the floor of the Pacific Ocean, according to study published online earlier this week in Nature Geoscience. These huge deposits could help satisfy ever-increasing demand for rare earth metals, but there are major questions about the economic viability and ecological effects of mining the seabed.

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What’s the News: To much fanfare, Google has released a preview version of Google+, their long-anticipated move into the social-networking space dominated in the U.S. by Facebook, whose meteoric growth challenges Google’s dominance over the Web itself. The new service lets users send messages and pictures to each other, like Facebook, but puts more emphasis on grouping and communicating with varying-sized audiences, as with email or in the real world of meatspace.

The two consensus early reactions (from the small group of people who have access) are that the service is mostly smooth and functional, a welcome change after Google’s social flops Buzz and Wave; and that it sure looks a heck of a lot like Facebook. Will that be enough to challenge Facebook, whose enormous base of users have uploaded much of their lives to one social network and may not want to invest time in another?

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What’s the News: Lytro, a Silicon Valley start-up, has designed a camera that lets you shoot first and focus later. The camera captures the far more light and data than traditional models, and comes with software that lets you focus the photo, shift perspective, or go 3D after you’ve taken the photo. The company plans to sell a consumer, fits-in-your-pocket model by the end of the year.

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Many implants like this pacemaker can receive
and transmit wireless signals

What’s the News: Topping the list of things you don’t want hacked is your heart. And with 300,000 medical devices such as pacemakers and drug pumps implanted each year, many of which can be controlled through wireless signals, that might soon be a real risk for patients to consider. 

To prevent such attacks, researchers from MIT and UMass Amherst are developing a jamming device that can be worn as a necklace or watch and keeps implants from receiving orders from unauthorized senders. The team will present their experiments with defibrillators [pdf], with off-the-shelf radio transmitters playing the role of the shield, at the SIGCOMM conference in Toronto.

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Surgeons created the new heart using ventricular assist devices (shown above).

What’s the News: Checking a person’s pulse is often the first thing you do to see if they’re still alive. But a new artificial heart, developed this past spring, will complicate this common diagnosis: Researchers at the Texas Heart Institute have now created a fully functioning artificial heart that uses rotors to circulate blood instead of contractions, like a natural heart.

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The internet can fit in here, thanks to a State Department-backed effort.

What’s the News: The US government is spearheading—and funding—projects to create “shadow” internet and mobile phone systems, the New York Times reported on Sunday. These systems would allow dissidents to share information and go online in areas where governments have cut off, censored, or severely slowed access to global internet and cellphone networks.

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What’s the News: The currency on the tech world’s lips these days isn’t the yen or the yuan. It’s Bitcoin, a digital form of money that’s totally anonymous and currently valued at many times the worth of the dollar and the Euro. How does it work, what can you buy with it, and why is it making people mad?

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The way bubbles are filled in encodes quite a bit of identifying information

What’s the News: Standardized tests aren’t as impersonal as you might think. Much as detectives analyze a note’s handwriting to pinpoint its author, scientists have developed a way to identify test-takers, voters, and so on just from the way they fill in bubbles.

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What’s the News: Radio and television broadcasters in France must soon abandon self-promoting messages like, “Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.” The French equivalent of the FCC, the Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel (CSA), is banning the mention of specific social-networking sites on the radio or TV. While this rule applies to all online social networks, the ruling was directed at the juggernauts Facebook and Twitter.

“Why give preference to Facebook, which is worth billions of dollars, when there are other social networks that are struggling for recognition,” explains CSA spokeswoman Christine Kelly (via the Guardian).

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What’s the News: Disconnecting people from the Internet or unduly restricting the flow of information online is a violation of human rights and goes against international law, according to a United Nations report (pdf) released Friday.

The report, written by UN special rapporteur Frank La Rue, highlights “the unique and transformative nature of the Internet not only to enable individuals to exercise their right to freedom of opinion and expression, but also a range of other human rights, and to promote the progress of society as a whole,” its summary says. Furthermore, the report specifies two dimensions of Internet acces: unrestricted access to online content and the availability of sufficient technology and infrastructure “to access the Internet in the first place.”

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Diagram of the new DNA circuit

What’s the News: Researchers have built the most complex DNA-based computer yet, a circuit of 130 strands of DNA that can compute the square root of numbers up to 15. The system, reported today in Science, is made of biological logic gates, which do computations using DNA strands’ natural propensity to zip and unzip. This new method is easily adapted for different calculations and can be automated, meaning it could be used to build much larger circuits.

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What’s the News: Anyone who has had their thighs baked by a laptop knows that computing releases heat. And it’s more than a common-sense maxim: physicists have shown that heat released by information processing is bound by a physical law, where a bit of information processed must cause a corresponding rise in temperature. But could quantum mechanics allow computations that actually cool computers down? In a recent Nature paper, researchers describe how this paradox is possible.

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D-Wave says its chips use quantum mechanics to solve gargantuan problems.

What’s the News: Quantum computing is so complex an idea that even experts have a hard time telling whether a computer is actually “quantum.” But D-Wave Systems, a startup that’s made news and drawn skepticism over the last four years for claiming to have developed a quantum computer, has just made their first sale, to the defense contractor Lockheed Martin. And recent research shows that despite the suspicions D-Wave has endured, there may be at least something to their claim.

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What’s the News: Cyber attacks undertaken by another nation can be considered an act of war, according to a new Pentagon policy to be released in the next month. If you mess with the US online, the Pentagon has decided, it may retaliate offline, in the form of bombs, missiles, and other very real attacks. One military official sums it up thusly to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story: “If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks.” How exactly this stance will be put into practice, though, isn’t clear.

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