Oxford Nanopore's MinION device. Credit: Oxford Nanopore.

Oxford Nanopore says it will begin selling by the end of the year a disposable DNA sequencer about the size of a USB memory stick that can be plugged directly into a laptop or desktop computer and used to perform a single-molecule sensing experiment. The device is expected to sell for $900, according to the company. 

The company also unveiled a larger benchtop version of the technology. It says a configuration of 20 of the benchtop instruments could completely sequence a human genome in 15 minutes.

The technology is based on a radically different sequencing method that has been in the work for more than a decade at Oxford University, Harvard and the University of California, Santa Cruz. DNA strands are pulled through nanopores embedded in a polymer. As the DNA passes through the nanopore, specific sequences are identified based on varying electronic signals from the different bases. As a result, the technology can read DNA sequences directly and continuously. The company says double-stranded DNA can be sensed directly from blood.

The announcement comes at a time when the cost and time of DNA sequencing is dropping dramatically. Earlier this year, Life Technologies showed off a benchtop sequencer that it says can decode a human genome in one day for less than $1,000. By making sequencing far cheaper and faster, the new generation of instruments could finally make personalized medicine a reality. 

The creators of the Firefox Web browser have revealed further details of a bold plan to release a purely Web-based OS for mobile devices.

The Mozilla Foundation's Boot to Gecko (B2G) project would provide a way for Web applications to access a device's hardware. This could let Web apps run just as fast as conventional smart phone apps, and make them easier to port to different platforms. We covered Boot to Gecko in this story last year.

Here’s how the foundation describes B2G :

“Boot to Gecko is a project to build a[n] OS that runs HTML5, JavaScript and CSS directly on device hardware without the need for an intermediate OS layer. The system will include a rich user experience, new APIs that expose the power of modern mobile phones through simple JavaScript interfaces; a privilege model to safely and consistently deliver these capabilities to websites and apps with the user in control. Boot to Gecko leverages BrowserID, the Open Web app ecosystem and an identity and apps model that puts users and developers in control."

In a way, the approach builds upon HP’s WebOS, which was recently released as open source software by HP, following the failure of its WebOS-based devices. WebOS apps make use of Web standards and technologies, but still need to be downloaded to run on a device. 

The roadmap for the project suggests some Mozilla developers are already testing phones running B2G and we can expect to see a Product Demo version of the platform early in 2012.

The challenge for Mozilla, of course, will be persuading phone makers to put its software on their devices. But if Boot to Gecko can gain enough developer momentum, and if Google focuses on delivering a better Android experience on Motorola, which it is close to absorbing—then perhaps some device makers, afraid of falling behind with Android, could be tempted to give it a try.

As one of the leading manufacturers of the equipment that routes data around the Internet, Cisco Systems is in good position to know just how many 0s and 1s go zipping around all day, every day. Today it released an annual analysis of how much Internet usage is growing on mobile devices, and the report produced some staggering numbers.

For example, Cisco estimates that the amount of data that was ferried to and from mobile devices last year was eight times greater than the data on all of the Internet in 2000. Global mobile data traffic is expected to see an 18-fold increase between 2011 and 2016. Not surprisingly, video is a big reason: Cisco expects there to be 7.6 exabytes of data flowing to mobile devices every month in 2016, about 70 percent of the total of 10.8 exabytes of data per month. (An exabyte is more than 1 billion gigabytes and equivalent to 250 million DVDs, if that helps you wrap your mind around it.)

But you might be surprised by the second-leading source of the expected surge in traffic. It won't come from people, but from machine-to-machine communications, or "M2M." Think of sensors in cars and in appliances, surveillance cameras, smart electric meters, and devices still to come, monitoring the world and reporting to each other and to centralized computers what they're detecting. The chart below, reprinted from the Cisco report, shows just how extreme the jump in machine-to-machine communications could be. It is expected to grow, on average, 86 percent a year, and by 2016 it is expected to reach 508 petabytes a month, or half a billion gigabytes.

Source: Cisco's Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2011-2016