Hints of How Google's OS Will Work

Google isn't saying how its new operating system will function, but the clues lie in its browser.

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Soon after Google announced plans for its own operating system (OS), called Google Chrome OS, on Tuesday night, the Web giant clammed up about technical details, saying that the project is still at too early a stage. The first netbook devices running Chrome OS won't be released until the second half of 2010, so most users will have to wait until then to find out precisely how the software will work. But that doesn't mean there aren't hints out there already, and the biggest clues can be found in Google's Chrome browser, which the company says will be a key part of the new OS.

According to a post written by Sundar Pichai, a vice president of product management at Google, and Linus Upson, the company's engineering director, the open-source Chrome OS will consist of a Linux kernel with the Google Chrome browser running on top inside an entirely new desktop environment.

The Chrome browser was released nine months ago and is Google's effort to reinvent the browser completely: it's designed from scratch with Web applications in mind and is meant to be the only application that a Web-savvy user needs on her computer.

In an interview in March, Darin Fisher, an engineer on the Google Chrome team, said that in early sessions, the engineers decided to "take a page out of the operating system book" when they built the browser. Notably, the Chrome team decided to treat the browser as a launchpad from which the user can start different Web applications. Each application operates independently so that if one crashes, it doesn't affect the others. OSes, Fisher said, had to take the same approach to allow a single application to crash without requiring a user to reboot the whole system. This change in browser design helps give Web applications the stability that desktop applications enjoy.

The concept is easily extended back to the OS. Provided that the user relies on Web applications, such as Gmail, Google Docs, and the like, this simplifies the OS a great deal. It vastly reduces the number of applications that need to be installed and the amount of data that must be stored and processed on the computer itself.

With Chrome OS, Google will blur the line between the browser and the OS completely, says Ramesh Iyer, head of worldwide business development for mobile computing at Texas Instruments, which is one of Google's partners on the project. "The browser is your operating system," Iyer says. "The browser is your user interface. The browser is the mechanism from which you launch applications."

Streamlining the OS to focus on the Web, Iyer says, will allow devices to run more powerful programs with less powerful processors. By keeping processor requirements low, new devices could use less battery power and stay lighter. Texas Instruments, for example, is working with Google to integrate the Chrome OS software with its OMAP 3 multimedia applications processors, creating a system that could be easily installed in netbooks and other devices.

Giving Web applications deeper access to the underlying kernel could make it easier for Web developers to provide better functionality and a better user experience, says Jared Spool, founding principal of User Interface Engineering, a consulting firm based in North Andover, MA. When Web applications such as Gmail and Google Maps first appeared, Spool says, the software engineers who built them had to do a lot of hacking to create the appropriate levels of interaction. "When we went from the desktop to the browser, we took a huge step backward," Spool says.

With an OS tied closely to the Web, Google can introduce sophisticated resource management tools that will allow Web applications to run much more smoothly. A major role for the OS is allocating memory to applications and adjusting it as their needs change. A big problem with interactive Web applications to date has been that browsers didn't have efficient ways to adjust the memory assigned to different Web pages. The Chrome browser has already improved the situation, Spool says, and he expects the OS to go even farther. He says that this will allow more powerful Web applications that run more smoothly on the new OS.

But building the Chrome OS won't be as simple as sticking a browser on top of the Linux kernel, Spool says. The browser version of Chrome relies on the underlying OS's user interface, for example. Features such as scrollbars come from the OS, not the browser, so Google will need to build all of this from scratch, and even simple things will require significant time and effort.

The Chrome browser also lacks the drivers needed to power any external devices, such as printers or iPods. Texas Instruments' Iyer envisions a new way that Chrome OS could address this problem. "Wouldn't you rather have a printer connected in the cloud?" he says. As more devices, including cameras, printers, GPSes, and so on, become able to connect to the Internet in their own right, the concept of a Web interface between a user's computer and the device comes closer to reality. "This is the holy grail of the Internet," Iyer says.

Pichai and Upson have also said that Chrome OS will support all Web-based applications automatically, and that new applications written for Chrome OS will run "on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac, and Linux." While Web application development has exploded in recent years, this might also introduce limitations, preventing the user from accessing interesting applications developed in programming languages not intended for the Web.

However, Google may have a solution for that too. The company is working on an experimental project called Google Native Client that would allow code written in non-Web languages such as C and C++ to run securely in the browser.

Chris Rohlf, a senior security consultant for Matasano Security, which has been involved in testing the implementation of Native Client, says, "It could be Google's secret weapon when it comes to Chrome OS, because it would allow developers to extend that platform with things like video and graphics without having to wait for Google to implement any of that."

Portable DNA Purifier for Poor Countries

A new handheld device isolates DNA from human fluid without the use of electrical power.

A standard bicycle pump is all that's required to power a DNA purifying kit, designed by Catherine Klapperich and her students at Boston University. The thermos-size device, dubbed SNAP (System for Nucleic Acid Preparation), extracts genetic material from blood and other bodily fluids by pumping fluid through a polymer-lined straw designed to trap DNA. A user can then pop the straw out and mail it to the nearest lab, where the preserved DNA can be analyzed for suspicious bacteria, viruses, and genetic diseases.

DNA pump: A new portable device extracts DNA from human fluids without using electricity. Credit: Catherine Klapperich

A DNA extraction device that requires no power, such as the SNAP prototype, would have tremendous value in rural communities, says Paul Yager, a professor and acting chair of the University of Washington's Department of Bioengineering, who was not involved in the research. "This would be the front end for a lot of potential instruments people could use," he says.

To test for diseases like HIV, clinicians typically take blood samples from patients, which then must be refrigerated and transported to the nearest laboratory. Technicians then extract and analyze the DNA. In areas where electricity is scarce, blood may not be adequately refrigerated, potentially degrading a sample's quality. Isolated DNA, on the other hand, remains relatively stable at room temperature, so extracting DNA from blood before shipping it to a laboratory may eliminate the need for expensive refrigeration.

"Instead of taking blood samples and keeping them cold, with our technology, they would be able to prepare all the samples at the point of care," says Klapperich, an assistant professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering at Boston University. "They would also have a longer period of time to get a much more preserved sample to a central lab someplace else."

The conventional method of extracting DNA from blood involves a number of instruments: researchers first break open blood cell walls, either with chemicals or by shaking the blood, in order to get at genetic material inside cells. They then add a detergent to wash away the fatty cell walls, and spin the DNA out of solution with a centrifuge. The SNAP prototype performs a similar series of events with a bicycle pump, some simple chemicals, and a specialized straw lined with a polymer designed to attract and bind DNA.

A clinician first takes a fluid sample, such as blood or saliva from a patient, and injects it into the disposable straw within the device. A large cap on the device contains two small packets: a lysis buffer and an ethanol wash. Pressure from the pump releases the lysis buffer, which breaks open cells in the fluid, releasing DNA. A second pump of air releases ethanol, which washes out everything but the DNA.

So far, Klapperich has used the prototype to isolate DNA from nasal wash samples infected with influenza A. Compared with traditional DNA extraction kits in the laboratory, Klapperich says, the SNAP prototype isolates less DNA. "But in general, our data show that the nucleic acid we get back is cleaner," she says. The DNA can also be amplified using the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, one of the most common methods of amplifying DNA in the lab. In the near future, the group plans to experiment with other human fluids that contain different viruses; DNA from various bacteria and viruses may behave differently at room temperature.

Jose Gomez-Marquez, program director for the Innovations in International Health Initiative at MIT, first learned of Klapperich's invention at a recent meeting about medical technology for the developing world. Since then, he and Klapperich have worked together to refine the prototype. Gomez-Marquez will soon be bringing a model to Nicaragua, where he hopes to get feedback on its effectiveness and user friendliness from local clinicians and patients. "This device doesn't wait for a cold system to be in place for diagnostic samples to be transferred from one place to another," says Gomez-Marquez. "You can take five days or two weeks to get a sample out there--you don't have to worry about refrigerating it."

Tracking the Evolution of a Pandemic

Understanding how viruses evolve could help predict the next outbreak.

A close examination of the genetic evolution of the three major influenza epidemics of the 20th century concludes that all of the viruses involved evolved slowly, through interspecies genetic exchange, and that genes from the catastrophic 1918 pandemic may have been circulating as many as seven years earlier. If true, this means that widespread genetic surveillance methods should have ample time to detect the next pandemic strain, and possibly even vaccinate against it before it gets out of control.

Birth of a bug: New research on the emergence of the 1918 influenza virus suggests that it may have evolved in a manner similar to that of the current H1N1 strain (shown here). Credit: Center for Disease Control and Prevention

Prior research suggested that the 1918 influenza strain was the result of an avian virus introduced into humans just before the epidemic began. But the latest study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that all three influenza pandemics--1918, 1957, and 1968--were the result of stepwise genetic integrations of both avian and mammalian genes over a number of years, ultimately creating the more virulent virus strains.

And although the research was done before the emergence of the current H1N1 "swine flu" strain, the scientists' conclusions are relevant, showing that the current virus follows the same historical pattern. For each pandemic, "our results argued that there was at least one intermediate host that was most likely to be pigs, and that they're involved in the emergence of these pandemic strains," says Gavin Smith, the paper's lead author and a viral-evolution researcher at the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases, at the University of Hong Kong.

The researchers collected all available genetic sequences of the influenza virus--human, bird, and pig variants--then plugged the data into a computer program that uses genetic information to build evolutionary trees, dating species' divergence back to their most recent common ancestor. But there are no known precursor viruses to the 1918 strain, so the computational results can only infer the time of interspecies transmission, based on known patterns of genetic evolution. The genetic data itself was derived from virus strains that have evolved since 1918.

Such studies have only become possible in the past few years, with the advancement of computational techniques that can incorporate known rates of various species' evolution--techniques that are proving to be quite accurate when tested against known relationships. But the results are still, as Smith notes, "all just inference," working backward from known relationships and based on estimated dates.

According to the virus's updated family tree, the 1918 strain was not newly minted but actually a slightly modified version of a mild flu strain already in the human population. In fact, according to the new analysis, some genes of the virus may have been circulating as early as 1911. "It was certainly different in terms of severity of the actual pandemic," Smith says. "But our results show that, in terms of how the virus emerged, it looks like much the same mechanism of the 1957 and 1968 pandemics, where the virus gets introduced into the human population over a period of time and reassorts with the previous human strain."

Each of the pandemics appears to have the same pattern when emerging in humans, with different genetic components floating around in people for a few years before a pandemic strain is detected. And the detailed computational analysis showed that different component genes of the viruses seemed to be different ages. "What this suggests is that it's not one virus coming in and mixing with the human seasonal strain to produce a pandemic strain," Smith says. "Rather, there are a number of reassortment events, where one gene comes in and mixes with the human strain, and then another gene comes in and mixes with the human in a stepwise pattern."

If the researchers are right, the 1918 flu may have even more in common with the current swine flu virus than scientists previously believed. And finding such a pattern among known pandemic strains holds implications for future surveillance. By looking backward, at which genes have caused prior influenza strains to turn lethal, the research may one day enable researchers to look forward too. "What this paper is saying is that we're actually in a position now to get hints about these viruses even years in advance," says Greg Poland, a vaccine and infectious-disease expert at the Mayo Clinic, who was not involved in the research. "I think it will inform surveillance efforts, I think it will inform vaccine development efforts, and I think it will eventually inform policy-making decisions."

In addition to keeping an eye out for influenza variants in humans, Poland and Smith believe that it's just as important to start doing deeper surveillance in birds and pigs, and on a much more extensive basis. And, Poland notes, knowing that the strains emerge slowly could help inform vaccine efforts as well.

"There's no reason we can't move away from [creating] a vaccine against what we think we know will circulate this year, toward including proteins from variants we suspect might become problematic in the future," says Poland.

Smith hopes that more full-genome sequencing will provide advance warning of which genes might show up in humans, and that a deeper look at the genomes will provide clues about where and why the animal-to-human transmission occurs. He also hopes that one day, the team's research could help change governmental approaches from pandemic preparedness to pandemic prevention. "But the problem is that we still don't know what it is about a virus that makes it pandemic," Smith says. "Is it mutation? Is it a certain combination of genes? These are things that we still need to look at."

Injured Racehorses Can Save Your Knees..

Orthopedic stem-cell therapies are moving into human trials.

A runner with a torn tendon has reason to envy a racehorse with the same affliction: horses have treatment options not available to human patients--most notably, injections of adult stem cells that appear to spur healing in these animals with shorter recovery time than surgical treatments. Now the same stem-cell therapies used routinely in competitive horses and increasingly in dogs are beginning to make their way into human testing.

Tendon repair: These ultrasound images show the tendon in a horse’s front leg. An area of damage (circle in yellow, top) has healed (bottom) after the injection of stem cells derived from the animal’s fat. Credit: Vet-Stem

Human stem-cell treatments are advancing quickly in many areas: therapies using adult stem cells derived from both fat and bone marrow are currently being tested for a variety of ailments, including Crohn's disease, heart disease, and diabetes. (Bone-marrow-derived stem-cell transplants have been used for decades to treat blood diseases and some cancers.) But when it comes to orthopedic injuries, such as torn tendons, fractures, and degenerating cartilage, veterinary medicine has outpaced human care.

Veterinarians and private companies have aggressively tested new treatments for the most common injuries in racehorses, in large part because these animals are so valuable and can be so severely incapacitated by these wounds. "Soft-tissue injury is the number-one injury competitive horses will suffer and can end a thoroughbred horse's career," says Sean Owens, a veterinarian and director of the Regenerative Medicine Laboratory, at the University of California, Davis. Veterinary medicine also has much more lax regulations when it comes to treating animals with experimental therapies, allowing these treatments to move rapidly into routine clinical use without clinical trials. "Regulatory oversight of veterinary medicine is minimal," says Owens. "For the most part, the USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture] and the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] have not waded into the regulatory arena for us."

Owens's newly created research center aims to move both animal and human stem-cell medicine forward by conducting well-controlled trials not often performed elsewhere. "Part of our mission is to do basic science and clinical trials and also improve ways of processing cells," says Owens. The center has a number of ongoing clinical trials in horses--one for tendon tears and one for fractured bone chips in the knee--that are run in a similar way to human clinical trials. The goal is to develop better treatments for horses, as well as to leverage the results to support human studies of the same treatments. Owens is partnering with Jan Nolta,director of the Stem Cell Program, at UC Davis, who will ultimately oversee human testing.

A handful of studies in animals have shown that these stem-cell therapies are effective, allowing more animals to return to racing, reducing reinjury rates, and cutting healing times. VetCell, a company based in the United Kingdom that derives stem cells from bone marrow, has used its therapy on approximately 1,700 horses to date. In a study of 170 jumping horses tracked through both treatment and rehabilitation, researchers found that nearly 80 percent of them could return to racing, compared with previously published data showing that about 30 percent of horses given traditional therapies could return to racing. After three years, the reinjury rate was much lower in stem-cell-treated animals--about 23 percent compared with the published average of 56 percent, says David Mountford, a veterinary surgeon and chief operating officer at VetCell.

While scientists still don't know exactly how the cells aid repair of the different types of injuries, for tendon tears, initial studies show that stem cells appear to help the tissue regenerate without forming scar tissue.

Mountford says that the company chose to focus on tendon injuries in horses in part because they so closely resemble injuries in humans, such as damage to the Achilles tendon and rotator cuff. For both people and horses, tendon tears trigger the formation of scar tissue, which has much less tensile strength and elasticity than a healthy tendon. "It becomes a weak spot and prone to injury," says Owens.

Next year, VetCell plans to start a human clinical trial of its stem-cell treatment for patients with degeneration or damage of the fibers of the Achilles tendon. As in the horse therapy, stem cells will be isolated from a sample of the patient's bone marrow, then cultured and resuspended in a growth medium also derived from the patient. Surgeons will then inject the solution into the area of damage, using ultrasound imaging to guide the needle to the correct location. "Our long-term goal is to use it to treat a number of tendon injuries," says Mountford.

Stem-cell therapies also show promise for arthritis. Vet-Stem, a California-based company that uses stem cells isolated from fat rather than bone marrow, has shown in a placebo-controlled trial that the treatment can help arthritic dogs. "About 200,000 hip replacements are done every year in humans," says Robert Harman, a veterinarian and founder of the company. "That's a very good target for someone to look at cell therapy."

For osteoarthritis, the stem cells seem to work not by regenerating the joint, but by reducing inflammation. "But in the last couple of years, evidence has come out that the cells we use reduce inflammation and pain, and help lubricate the joint," says Harman.

While Vet-Stem does not plan to move into human testing, Cytori, a company based in San Diego, has developed a device for isolating stem cells from fat in the operating room. (Vet-Stem does the procedure manually: veterinarians collect a fat sample from the animal and then send it to the company for processing.) Cytori's device is currently approved for use for reconstructive surgeries in Japan but not yet in the United States.

Innovation: Smarter phone calls for your smart phones

Two slick new handsets launched last week continue the trend for phones to become ever more powerful and multi-functional computing devices. Gadgets like these could make technological novelties like augmented reality commonplace.

But while hardware manufacturers are finding ever more things for us to do with our phones, their most basic function – to help us receive and manage calls – hasn't changed much in years. For most of us, call management remains a matter of basic redirection and voicemail services.

Rather than enhancing these core services, network operators have made their calling packages attractive by tying them to coveted gadgets, and in some cases to third-party services such as Twitter and Skype. Now, however, a number of recent developments mean that smarter call management is on its way – though it won't be the telecom companies that deserve the credit.

What's your number?

It will probably come as little surprise that Google, a serial innovator when it comes to communications, is one of the prime movers in this area. Two years ago, it acquired GrandCentral, a company whose service allowed customers to integrate their various telephone numbers and mailboxes into a single, web-accessible account.

The service, now dubbed Google Voice, provides users with a single number that is transferred to different combinations of devices according to who is calling and what time it is. So you might, for example, send a call from a business contact to your work voicemail after office hours, while routing one from a friend to your home line and cellphone, even though both would have dialled the same number.

This is the kind of service that established network operators are in the best position to offer. But they're currently being left behind by an upstart from a different sector altogether.

Google has recently added features that could yank more control away from the networks, including centralised voicemail, automated voicemail transcription, and caller-specific voicemail. And this week, it was reported that users will be able to take their existing numbers with them to the Google Voice – overcoming one frequent obstacle to new telecom services. There's no launch date for Google Voice as yet, though, and for the moment, it remains invitation-only.

Reviews from users that have access to the service suggest it can radically change a person's relationship with their phone and phone number. And in the Android cellphone operating system, Google has a powerful platform to support and promote their new product.

White spaces

Google Voice sits on top of the existing network infrastructure; you still need to subscribe to a network for calls to reach your cellphone, for example. But a patent filed by Google last year has the potential to shake up the industry much more directly. It envisages that your device would switch to the cheapest provider every time a connection was needed, rather than being tied to a single network.

That's not all. Last week, the US switched off all analogue television signals, freeing up large swathes of wireless spectrum. That virtual real estate will be made available to a new class of "super Wi-Fi" mobile devices thanks to successful campaigning by the White Spaces Coalition, a group of eight technology firms (including Google).

Although prototype white space devices have been submitted to the Federal Communications Commission for testing, it's too early to say exactly what they might offer. Nonetheless, they clearly they have the potential to cause major headaches for purveyors of traditional phone connections: by creating a national voice-over-broadband system that could stand entirely apart from the conventional telecom networks, for example.

Bill per byte?

These new possibilities are now starting to emerge because of the shift away from the point-to-point principle of telephony – a concept that hasn't changed much since it was pioneered by Alexander Graham Bell. Today, we're moving towards a world where every person has a computer in their pocket that is able to communicate in a variety of ways over a network that also offers multiple ways to make connections.

That undermines the traditional way networks have charged their customers. A UK space scientist last year calculated that the per-byte cost of text messages far exceeds that of data sent from space. That means texting is an expensive business once a quota of free messages runs out – but a smartphone user can send any number of email messages, which are functionally very similar, without additional charges.

Then there's Skype, now probably the world's biggest carrier of international voice calls. While some networks remain hostile to Skype, prohibiting its use over their mobile broadband networks, others have embraced it, allowing free Skype calls between handsets. Again, that raises uncomfortable – for the network operators, anyway – questions about the cost of traditional voice calls.

Ultimately, these distinctions are hard to justify in a digital world, full of devices that can readily switch between communications media. They imply that the 1s and 0s which make up a voice call, a Skype call or a webpage are somehow worth different amounts. Perhaps it's time to address that anomaly and switch to pricing according to the amount of data carried, and to open up to new ideas about carrier-side services that would allow communications gadgets to realise their full potential. Then we would really have smart phones.