Health officials say it’s crucial to uncover a flu outbreak early, and stories on Science magazine’s ScienceInsider blog and in the San Diego Union-Tribune reveal how technology developed in the San Diego area helped local officials do just that during the current swine flu outbreak.

The Ibis T5000 biosensor system, which allows rapid identification and characterization of viruses and other microbes, was developed in Carlsbad by Ibis Biosciences, which was acquired in January 2009 by Abbott Laboratories (NYSE: ABT). The device, the Union-Tribune recounts, helped scientists at at San Diego’s Naval Health Research Center (NHRC) identify one of the two first U.S. cases of swine flu, in a 9-year-old girl who was seen in a community clinic in Brawley, CA. Around the same time, the CDC identified swine flu in a sample taken from a 10-year-old boy who was seen at the San Diego Naval Medical Center.

Developed with government funding, the T5000 is a six-foot-long, three-foot tall machine with a price tag of almost half million dollars. Launched two years ago, it’s still for research only, though Abbott has asked for government approval to permit its sale as a diagnostic device. The T5000 incorporates a mass spectrometer, and it characterizes a sample in approximately five hours, compared to the days it takes with conventional techniques, Abbott Molecular vice president Stafford O’Kelly told the Union-Tribune. ScienceInsider gives a great history of how the first two U.S. cases of swine flu were identified and of the federal disease-surveillance program that used the Ibis technology, in part, to help pull off the feat.

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Chandigarh, Sunday, December 7—I drove straight north from Delhi to Chandigarh about 300 km, on a much improved four-lane highway. Chandigarh is a planned city that was designed by the French architect Le Corbusier in the late 1950s. It remains a delightfully livable city that the rest of India has failed to emulate. I am attending the wedding of my cousin’s daughter, a recent dental school graduate, to a young engineer who works with Tata. The local TiE chapter has also invited me to speak to their members tomorrow.

I have met several entrepreneurs who have returned from the U.S. to take care of aging parents and then set up businesses here. Chandigarh is considered to be a tier 2 city (tier 1 being Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, and Chennai), in the same league as Pune and Ahmedabad. In reality those cities are far more industrial, including technology-related industry, than Chandigarh. There is a nascent life sciences industry forming, especially around agricultural products: Chandigarh is the capital of Punjab, India’s bread basket. However, most of the entrepreneurs I met had small outsourced information technology businesses with customers primarily from the U.S..

There is an excellent engineering college in Chandigarh, and I had the chance to meet with the director of the college, Manoj Datta. He is busy setting up new degreed programs to respond to industry needs. For example, he was evaluating a graduate program in biomedical instrumentation in conjunction with a local biological institute. We had a vigorous debate about the viability of that degree, along with the head of Philips Labs from Delhi. Philips Labs are creating new products for emerging markets by launching them first in India; they support all Philips divisions, including the medical division in Andover, MA. For instance, they recently launched a UV water purifier that is more effective than charcoal filters. Tainted water is a big problem in India, as many tourists have found. The public water supply is invariably contaminated and almost everybody has a water purifier at home. Boston University has a world-renowned public health department that has projects in India; I need to connect them to Philips Labs and Punjab Engineering College.

I had an interesting conversation with the CEO of the Usha Group, which has been making ceiling fans and air conditioners for many years. He showed me a cell phone that they have launched in tier 3 and 4 cities in India. The cell phone is manufactured by an ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) in China to their specifications and distributed via thousands of cell phone retail distributors. Usha has been struggling to differentiate itself on grounds other than price. To illustrate how powerful this can be, the CEO told the story of an upstart competitor that had inferior products but had stumbled onto a need in the rural marketplace for phones that had long battery life. Electricity is not readily available in most India villages and is unreliable when it is.

I asked him if he had considered differentiating on the cell phone user interface, perhaps by using the Google Android operating system and then customizing the UI for rural India consumers. I will discuss this further with him when I return to Delhi.

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Technique Predicts Wi-Fi Dead Zones

A graduate student at Rice University has developed a technique to predict holes in a city’s Wi-Fi coverage. Ars Technica reports that Joshua Robinson found that dead zones could be as small as 10 meters in diameter. He also found that adding more access nodes doesn’t necessarily fill in all the holes.

Broad-Spectrum Vaccine Might Fight Next Pandemic

Public health officials worry that a strain of bird flu or some other version of the influenza virus might mutate so it spreads rapidly among humans who have no resistance. The current method for making flu vaccines takes months and is not always effective against the strain of the virus in circulation. But Technology Review says that scientists have developed a DNA-based vaccine that could protect against a variety of strains, and they hope to begin testing in humans soon.

Google Wants Clean Energy by 2030

Google, which is into everything these days, has released a proposal for getting to clean energy by 2030. On its public policy blog, the company outlines three broad steps it feels should be taken immediately. These are to reduce demand through increased efficiency, develop renewable energy that’s cheaper than coal, and electrify transportation while reinventing the energy grid.

Search Engines Add More Graphics to Results

While Google is out saving the world, other search engine companies are working on developing better search engines. CNET News reviews half a dozen new entries, all of which are trying to make the results better by adding graphics. The reviewer didn’t like a couple of the offerings, but thinks others are definitely worth trying out.

Socialtext Brings Social Networking to Business

A Web 2.0 company called Socialtext, of Palo Alto, CA, is trying to provide businesses with a more grown-up version of popular social networking applications such as Facebook and Twitter. For instance, as the New York Times reports, Socialtext Signals is just like Twitter, but for internal company use only, so people can use it to communicate with their colleagues about what they’re working on.

The Cure is in the Mail

Federal officials have a proposal for getting antibiotics to tens of thousands of people in the event of an anthrax terrorist attack—mail them. Since the Post Office has a system for delivering items to the whole population already in place, officials say it makes sense to have them deliver pills in case of an emergency. The Washington Post reports that the mailmen would be asked to volunteer, with the incentive of a guaranteed supply of antibiotics for their families and a police escort on their rounds.

MIT Students Become Tree Pluggers

Chemistry students at MIT have figured out how to get electricity out of trees, enough to power a small sensor, perhaps. As MSNBC explains, the students found that a difference in the acidity level of the tree and the soil creates a small current they can tap into. With some additional equipment, they were able to get 2.4 volts from trees.

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Carriers Upgrading Long-Distance Networks

Telecommunications carriers are upgrading their networks by replacing equipment designed to carry 10 gigabits of data per second with 40 gigabit equipment. GigaOm reports that 23 companies have purchased 40-Gb equipment since Nortel started selling it in April. The need to upgrade the core is being driven by the increase in high-bandwidth fiber closer to homes and more demand for high-bandwidth services such as high-definition video.

Floating Farms Could Replenish Fish Supplies

Conventional fishing is predicted to wipe out commercial stocks of fish by 2050, leading researchers to consider fish farms to replenish the stock. As New Scientist reports, researchers worry that placing a giant fish cage in one spot would cause a build-up of fish feces, and leave the cages vulnerable to strong storms. So an MIT scientist is developing self-propelled mobile fish farms that wouldn’t stay in one place long enough to cause environmental damage and could drift with storm waves.

Measles Vaccine Does Not Cause Autism, Study Finds

Public health officials are hoping that a new study will encourage parents to get their children vaccinated against measles, which has seen a resurgence this year. The Columbia University study found that there is no link between the measles vaccine and autism; a fear of such a link has led parents to refuse to vaccinate their children, says Scientific American. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 131 cases of measles in the first seven months of 2008, more than double the annual number of cases in 2001 through 2007.

Candidates Have Big Differences on Energy

Republican presidential candidate John McCain opposes subsidies, earmarks, and heavy regulation regarding energy, while Democrat Barack Obama wants a stronger federal role in developing renewable energy, according to a report from the research firm New Energy Finance. CNET News reports that the firm dug through voting records and public statements to determine each candidate’s positions on energy policy. It found, for instance, that McCain wants to scale back the government’s role in promoting ethanol, while Obama would continue it.

Which Cars Will be Hot in the Next Four Years?

Depending on whether John McCain or Barack Obama is the next president, different cars could turn out to be more popular, says TheCarConnection.com, which takes a tongue-in-cheek look at the candidates car preferences. If Obama is president, the site predicts, a Honda Accord biodiesel or a subcompact like the Ford Fiesta would be in line with his energy policies. If it’s McCain, think about buying a Toyota Prius hybrid, a Honda Civic GX that burns natural gas, or Chevrolet’s plug-in hybrid, the Volt.

New Grants Hope to Stimulate Bio Research

The National Institutes of Health plan to dole out $42.2 million in “Eureka” grants to fund “exceptionally innovative research.” The Chronicle of Higher Education says the grants are a response to critics who say the NIH tends to fund only safe research with predictable results.

Small Turbines May Not Pay Back Their Costs

Plenty of people, from Jay Leno to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, are interested in generating local electricity with small wind turbines perched on rooftops. At about $5000 per turbine, the machines may produce so little energy that they’ll never recoup the cost, reports the New York Times. At the same time, big turbines are getting larger and more powerful, and may soon compete with natural gas for cost efficiency.

Algae Fuel Company Wins $3 Million in Funding

Researchers at Arizona State University, who have developed a method of producing jet fuel from algae, have received $3 million to start a company to commercialize the technology. The startup is a collaboration between Heliae Development and Science Foundation Arizona, the Cleantech Group reports. Separately, University of Virginia researchers are developing ways to commercially produce algae more efficiently.

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