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...interest drug designers because they provide a molecular lineup of potential drug targets. But scientists trying to identify those targets have long been limited to probing active genes one at a time. No longer. Microarray kits, like those made by Affymetrix, based in Santa Clara, Calif., allow scientists to scan up to 60,000 gene sequences in a single step...
...According to USA Today, the 3,141 counties in the United States use six different methods to record and tally votes: 40 percent use optical scan devices (think of No. 2 pencils and the SATs); 18 percent use punch cards (think Palm Beach and Votomatics); 15 percent use '50s-era lever machines (flip the switches and pull the lever); 12 percent use paper ballots (drop them in a box or mail them in); 9 percent use electronic touch-screens; 2 percent use Data Vote, which is punch-card voting without the Votomatics...
...Something can go wrong with all of them. In New York, voters complained that some switches on their lever machines were stuck, or broken off. On the optical-scan device, some voters make an X or something instead of filling in the circle, and their vote isn't picked up by the machine. As we know, absentee ballots can be confusing...
Faced with what once seemed an unlimited number of e-tail sites, Web surfers have shifted the task of locating the stuff they want to shopping robots--a.k.a. bots--which are software tools that instantly scan hundreds of retail sites to find the lowest price for a given product. Some 4 million shoppers used these bots in October, double the number a year ago. "Shop bots offer a real value to consumers," says Barry Parr, a director with IDC, an online research firm. "They're here to stay...
This isn't science fiction. The National Cancer Institute and NASA plan to spend $12 million a year for the next three years to develop nanosensors--devices less than one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair--that will scan the body for the molecular signatures of cancer--the aberrant proteins found on malignant cells, for instance--and map the locations and shapes of tumors. If engineered to carry drugs or genes, the sensors could treat cancers one cell at a time, attacking malignant cells but leaving healthy ones unharmed. The result: an end to the pharmaceutical carpet bombing...