IBM aims for personalised medicine
IBM aims to expand the life span of humans by developing a chip that could make personalised medicine affordable and quick, says PC World.
The company plans to develop a chip that can quickly map out genetic code contained within the biological structures of organisms. The chip will try to understand genetic code by sequencing strands of DNA, the basic building block of life, to help individualise courses of medical treatment for patients, said Gustavo Stolovitzky, a scientist and manager of functional genomics at IBM Research.
IBM hopes the genome reader will be able to map out genetic code in a matter of minutes at a cost of between $100 and $1 000, he said.
UK IT at risk of 'brain drain'
IT professionals fear the sector could suffer from a "brain drain" as they start questioning the future of their careers, reports Computing.co.uk.
About 76% of 261 respondents polled by recruitment specialist The IT Job Board said the UK could be at risk of losing its expertise.
Offshoring was cited as the main driver for the potential depletion of technical personnel by 39% of those polled, followed by contract rate reductions and concerns over long-term career development. Relocation is a possibility for 80% of the respondents, with 61% considering a move to Australia and 59% to the US.
IBM readies Exadata killer
IBM is getting ready to release its own database clustering box for online transaction processing (OLTP) and data warehousing, according to sources familiar with the company's plans, says The Register.
The machine, which is apparently going to be called DB2 Pure Scale, is obviously meant to blunt the attack of the Exadata 2 box cluster that Oracle and soon-to-be acquired Sun Microsystems unveiled mid-September.
This machine is based on Sun's x64 rack servers and flash and disk storage, as well as Oracle's Real Application Clusters extensions to its 11g database and its Exadata storage software.
Bird-watching turns to tech
Guillemots on Skomer Island are at the forefront of a project to use computers to monitor vulnerable habitats, reports The BBC.
Computers watching the birds are recording key behaviour such as how long they spend at the breeding colony.
Researchers hope to gather detailed information about changing behaviours and spot key trends.
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