Philippines halts RFID plan

The Philippines' Land Transportation Office (LTO) has indefinitely postponed a multi-billion peso plan to roll out radio frequency identification (RFID) devices in vehicles, states ZDNet Asia.

Public uproar has resulted in the LTO halting the project. Lawmakers have questioned the legality of the RFID plan, which would cost the government 2.5 billion pesos ($51.2 million) to roll out.

The plan calls for stickers containing RFID tags, priced at 350 pesos ($7.4) per tag, to be installed in all types of motor vehicles, as part of a registration process that will be valid for 10 years.

IBM scientists are working on an ambitious research project where nano-sized holes will be drilled into computer chips and DNA passed through to create a genetic code reader, reports IT Pro.

IBM says if the project is successful, it could make personalised genome analysis as cheap as $100 to $1 000, compared to the first ever sequencing done for the Human Genome Project, which cost $3 billion.

IBM research scientist Gustavo Stolovitsky says: “The technologies that make reading DNA fast, cheap and widely available have the potential to revolutionise bio-medical research and herald an area of personalised medicine.”

Google celebrates the anniversary of the bar code, which was patented on 7 October 1952, by putting a decorated logo on its site, says the Guardian.

The special date coincides with the announcement of the joint winners of the Nobel Prize for physics, without whom bar codes could not be read.

Other Google doodles have featured Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Confucius and Michael Jackson, upon his death. The doodles are overseen by Dennis Hwang, who joined the company in 2000 and has gradually been using the logo to remind people of particular dates or events.