Month: April 2016

Enlarge (credit: Tobias Lortzing)

Nature is, it’s often said, red in tooth and claw. But sometimes a claw scratches someone’s back in return for a symbiotic scratch of one’s own. Ants provide many examples of such mutually beneficial arrangements. As weird as it sounds, drinking the “blood” of a wounded bittersweet nightshade plant appears to be one of them.

Ants and plants are often good friends (leafcutters aside) because ants prey on insects that munch on the plants. Some plants keep ants on retainer by secreting nectar from special structures (fittingly called “nectaries”) that can be found in various parts of the plant. The acacia tree even goes as far as growing hollow thorns that ants can nest inside when they aren’t dining on the gourmet ant food the tree provides. (Full disclosure: acacias also drug the ants so they can’t live off other food sources. It’s a complicated relationship...) The benefits the tree obtains from its ant security detail apparently outweigh the energetic costs of these lavish gifts.

Something a little more subtle is going on with the bittersweet nightshade plant. A group of researchers led by Tobias Lortzing of the Free University of Berlin noticed that this nightshade bleeds sugary droplets when damaged, rather than quickly closing up its wounds. Seeing ants hit up those droplets for a snack, they wondered whether the plant adapted to call in ant support when herbivores come a-munching.

Enlarge / Google Play on Windows! It could happen some day. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Microsoft / Google)

Earlier this week, some Chrome OS code surfaced that suggested the Google Play Store would bring "millions" of Android apps to Chrome OS. Google has experimented with Android apps on Chrome OS, but now it seems poised to unleash the full collection of Android apps onto the "browser only" operating system. There's no official word from Google on how this will play out, but the very architecture of Google's Android-apps-on-Chrome OS implementation opens some interesting possibilities.

The feature is possible because of the "App Runtime for Chrome (ARC)," a project that implements the Android runtime on top of Chrome's "Native Client" extension architecture. Native Client is a Chrome sandboxing technology that was designed with performance and portability in mind, allowing plugins to run at "near native" speeds by taking full advantage of the system's CPU and GPU. ARC took a big step last year when it added support for the Google Play Services APIs, which many Play Store apps depend on to work.

The Play Store on Chrome OS would open Google Play apps to a new form factor (horrible Android laptops notwithstanding), but it could also be the tip of the iceberg. Remember, ARC is just a Chrome extension, so it works everywhere desktop Chrome works. If the full Google Play Store comes to ARC, it would be possible for it to work on not just Chrome OS, but also Chrome's other host desktop operating systems: Windows, OS X, and Linux.

The Web browser is likely the most used piece of software on the average computing device. Yet despite its ubiquity, there is relatively little competition in the browser space. These days even experienced users would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the major offerings. Internet Explorer's new Edge incarnation is slightly different, but Firefox, Chrome, and even Opera are indistinguishable both in appearance and features available.

There may be some small differences, but for the most part a Web browser is a Web browser is a Web browser.

This is especially true when there's no Web browser. The rise of the embedded browser in mobile apps has very nearly eliminated the need for a dedicated one if you spend most of your time in mobile applications. But the disappearance of the browser is not a bad thing. The point after all is not the browser—it's the Web it accesses.

(credit: Apple)

Following the huge success of Apple’s ResearchKit—which connected tens of thousands of patients with clinical research in its first year—comes the release today of its medical sibling, the open source platform CareKit.

First unveiled by Apple last month, the platform is set up to be a springboard for apps that will allow users to manage their own health through mobile devices. Specifically, the platform includes four modules designed to allow patients to: monitor their progress through medical treatment plans; aggregate health and activity data via device sensors and manual logs; analyze that data in graphical interfaces; and share all of the information with health professionals and care takers by easily creating PDF files that can be e-mailed.

(credit: Glow)

The goal, according to Apple, is to empower patients to control and personalize their own medical care while providing doctors with more complete pictures of their patients’ health and progress. Inspiration for the new platform came from ResearchKit users who, after logging and tracking health data in apps, felt as though their phones were more in tune with their medical status than their doctors.