Canadian scientists have transformed pinches of human skin into petri dishes of human blood — a major medical breakthrough that could yield new sources of blood for transfusions after cancer treatments or surgery.

The discovery, by researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., could one day potentially allow anyone needing blood after multiple rounds of surgery or chemotherapy, or for blood disorders such as anemia, to have a backup supply of blood created from a tiny patch of their own skin — eliminating the risk of their body’s immune system rejecting blood from a donor.

Researchers predict the lab-grown blood could be ready for testing in humans within two years.

The achievement, published Sunday in the journal Nature, raises the possibility of personalizing blood production for patients for the first time.

“This is a very important discovery. I think it represents a seminal contribution” to the rapidly evolving field of stem-cell research, said Michael Rudnicki, scientific director of the Canadian Stem Cell Network and director of the Regenerative Medicine Program at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute.

“That one can play with the fate of a cell and force it sideways into something that it doesn’t at all resemble, and then being able to use it, is tremendously exciting.”

The procedure is also relatively simple. It involves taking a small piece of skin just centimetres in size, which would require only a stitch to close, extracting fibroblasts — abundant cells in the skin that make up the connective tissue and give skin its flexibility — and bathing them in growth factors in a petri dish. Next, by adding a single protein that binds to DNA and acts as an on/off switch, the researchers turned on or off some 2,000 genes and reprogrammed the skin cells to differentiate or morph into millions of blood progenitors — the cells the produce blood.

Visa Inc is participating in a test program started by rival MasterCard Inc that will let consumers pay for some New York subway tickets by tapping a credit card or a smartphone at the turnstile.

MasterCard said in June that it was working with New York and New Jersey mass transit agencies on a six-month pilot program to test “contactless” payments on certain commuter routes.

The program allows consumers to buy a subway, bus or train ticket by tapping or waving their credit or debit card, or a sticker attached to the back of their phone, over a turnstile electronic reader, instead of buying a separate ticket.

Mathematician Prof. Elon Lindenstrauss of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has won the prestigious Fields Medal for 2010, the first Israeli to win the honor. The Fields Medal is considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics.

Lindenstrauss, 40, won the Fields Medal for his work on numbers theory. The Fields Medal is awarded every four years to mathematicians under the age of 40, with the goal of encouraging them to make extraordinary achievements. Lindenstrauss will win a C$15,000 prize, a rather small amount in comparison with the $1 million Noble Prize awards.

Three regular folks from Iowa and Germany are being credited with the discovery of a radio pulsar, spinning in space 17,000 light-years away, thanks to an unassuming screensaver program called Einstein @ Home.

The program, which has been downloaded to 500,000 computers around the world over the past five years, almost literally turns volunteers into Einsteins at home. It’s designed to download astronomical data, 2 megabytes at a time, and look for signs of gravity-wave bursts or radio pulsar flashes during times when the computer is otherwise idle.

The pulsar discovery, announced today on the journal Science’s website, marks the first time Einstein @ Home has had a hit. But it won’t be the last. And it gives hope that even more ambitious distributed-computing projects such as SETI @ Home could eventually hit paydirt as well.

Thanks to Japanese based JFE Engineering, you can now add half-charging your EV to the list, courtesy of its ultra-fast charge station.

Designed to comply with the CHAdeMo standard developed by Tokyo Electric Power Company, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Subaru and Toyota, the system is capable of charging a 2011 Mistubishi i-Miev from empty to 50% full in just three minutes.

Even just three minutes plugged into the fast-charge station was enough to enable a standard 2011 Mitsubishi i-Miev to travel a further 50 miles before further charging was required.

More doctors are sounding the alarm over the new full-body scanners becoming popular in airports.

Several doctors are expressing concerns that full-body scanners may indeed deliver a low level of energy as advertised — reportedly this is why they’re “safe” compared to X-ray machines — but they worry that all the energy becomes dangerously concentrated on and directly beneath the skin, particularly at the face and neck, delivering much more radiation to the traveler than previously thought.

The upshot: You may not get lung cancer from the machines, but your risk of skin cancer — particularly basal-cell carcinoma — could be significantly higher. In children, the impact may likely be even worse.

Columbia University’s David Brenner says that this effect of concentrating energy on the skin means that the level of radiation delivered is actually 20 times higher than official estimates.

In this city known for producing laws both path-breaking and contentious, legislators have forcefully stepped into another debate - this time over the potential danger of cell phone use.

With the Board of Supervisors’ 10-1 vote in favor of an ordinance Mayor Gavin Newsom has indicated he will sign, San Francisco has waded into the as-yet unresolved debate over the relationship between long-term use of cell phones and health problems such as brain tumors.

It would be the country’s first law requiring cell phone retailers to disclose the phones’ specific absorption rate, or SAR, to customers.

SAR measures the maximum amount of radiation absorbed by a person using a handset. The Federal Communications Commission limits SAR to an average of 1.6 watts per kilogram of body tissue, but information about radiation levels is not usually readily available when people purchase phones at stores.

Oracle Corp. is cutting more jobs as part of its takeover of slumping computer-server maker Sun Microsystems.

Oracle, the world’s biggest database-software maker, said in a regulatory filing Friday that the new round of cuts would mostly hit employees in Asia and Europe.

It didn’t specify how many employees would be laid off. But it did say the new restructuring would be at least twice as expensive as the one Oracle initiated immediately after closing the Sun deal in January.

The new cuts will cost Oracle $675 million to $825 million. The previous cuts, which are ongoing, will cost an estimated $325 million.

Affected employees started to get notified May 28.

Netflix has canceled a contest designed to improve its movie recommendation system out of concern it might compromise the privacy of its customers.

The decision was announced in a blog post, published Friday, by Netflix chief product officer Neil Hunt. A previous competition that handed over anonymous user data to more than 50,000 contestants ended poorly after researchers showed it was possible to identify individuals’ viewing habits by connecting the dots.

“In the past few months, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asked us how a Netflix Prize sequel might affect Netflix members’ privacy, and a lawsuit was filed by KamberLaw LLC pertaining to the sequel,” Hunt wrote. “In light of all this, we have decided to not pursue the Netflix Prize sequel that we announced on August 6, 2009.”

Iran has arrested 30 people suspected of belonging to a U.S.-linked cyber network gathering information on Iranian nuclear scientists and sending people abroad for training, a news agency reported on Saturday.

It said the group sought to recruit people through the Internet for training in Iraq with the People’s Mujahideen Organization, a leftist exile group which launched attacks on the Islamic Republic from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq

“Thirty people were arrested in connection with an organized American cyber war network via a series of complex security measures in the field of information technology and communications,” the Fars news agency said.

Texas health officials secretly transferred hundreds of newborn babies’ blood samples to the federal government to build a DNA database, a newspaper investigation has revealed.

According to The Texas Tribune, the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) routinely collected blood samples from newborns to screen for a variety of health conditions, before throwing the samples out.

But beginning in 2002, the DSHS contracted Texas A&M University to store blood samples for potential use in medical research. These accumulated at rate of 800,000 per year. The DSHS did not obtain permission from parents, who sued the DSHS, which settled in November 2009.

Now the Tribune reveals that wasn’t the end of the matter. As it turns out, between 2003 and 2007, the DSHS also gave 800 anonymised blood samples to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) to help create a national mitochondrial DNA database.

Dave, a Java developer writes about the Myths About Older Software Developers.

Our field is ripe for age discrimination in so many ways. We value hot, new technologies, the ability to absorb them at unheard of rates, working insane hours to push products out the door–all things attributed to the younger workers of our field. And did I mention that younger workers are cheaper? A lot cheaper. But the trends of computer science degrees do not bode well for having a plethora of young, cheap workers at a manager’s disposal indefinitely. In fact, all data point to one conclusion: CS degrees enrollments have been declining or flat for almost a decade. And if anything, the candidate pool for hiring is getting worse, at least according to Jeff Atwood. You’re going to have to hire someone to write your next project, and with the backlash against outsourcing, who you gonna call, Egon?

If you’re thinking you’re going to avoid the “grey matter” of software development, think again. There are a number of myths about older software developers that continue to be perpetuated in IT and software development that somehow put older, experienced workers at a disadvantage in our field. But they’re largely crap and considering the degree trends, ignoring everyone 40 and over because we’re too old seems plain foolish. Let’s debunk these myths one-by-one.