Tasunke's Random Ramblings

Xerox has announced that they have developed a procedure to print with “low-temperature” silver ink using ink-jet technology on a variety of surfaces. What makes this new technique so different and promising is that existing techniques required high temperatures, which would melt materials such as plastics, and/or a so-called “clean room” environment. This new development requires neither.

This is the sort of breakthrough that the RFID industry has been waiting for. With this, it becomes practical to print RFID tags on everything, as costs have been dramatically lowered. According to PC Mag, Xerox claims that this could bring costs for RFID tags down from where they are at about a dollar (US) or so, down to roughly a penny each. In the research I’ve done on RFID in the past, this sort of drop has been seen as critical in the development of item-level tagging.

If this really takes off (and I do believe it will), this could cause alot of changes in retail. Everything from better inventory management due to “smart shelves” that can tell how much/how many of an item still remains on them, to effortless checkout, where you just push your cart through a reader and it rings up all your items at once. Videos after the jump.
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Newscientist.com reports that a drug that is commonly used to treat certain rare metabolic disorders has been found by a group of University of Alberta scientists to cause cancer cells to self-destruct. Cancer cells have shut off their mitochondria, and thus don’t get the usual signals sent by mitochondria that tell an abnormal cell to die. This drug turns back on the mitochondria, which causes the cancerous cells to die. This has been tested on both human cells cultured outside of the body, and on rats, no clinical trials on humans have been conducted yet.
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