ITNews

iOS and Android are great, but they each have their own rules and policies that  certainly inhibit the creative efforts of developers. Mozilla has since decided to build a new mobile operating system from scratch, one that will focus on true openness, freedom and user choice. It’s Firefox OS. Firefox OS is built on Gonk, Gecko and Gaia software layers – for the rest of us, it means it is built on open source, and it carries web technologies such as HTML5and CSS3. Firefox OS is designed to provide a complete, community-based alternative operating system, for running web applications directly or those installed from an application marketplace.  The applications use open standards and approaches such as JavaScript and HTML5, a robust privilege model, open web APIs that can communicate directly with hardware, e.g. cellphone hardware. As such, it competes with commercially developed operating systems such as Apple's iOS, Google's Android, Microsoft's Windows Phone...

Speculations about  Xiaomi  opening another front in its battle against Apple and Lenovo Group have been doing rounds since quite sometime.  The news comes courtesy DigiTimes which is claiming that Taiwan-based contract notebook maker Inventec will manufacture Xiaomi's 12.5-inch laptops at its Shanghai factory and that the laptops will be ready for shipping by April 2016.  The Chinese company threw in a huge surprise by launching its first-ever laptop line, the Mi Notebook Air, running on Windows 10. It comes in two sizes -- the powerful 13.3-inch and the portable 12.5-inch -- and both feature a slim body, a 1080p display with slim under-glass bezels (while still managing to fit in a 1-megapixel webcam), a backlit keyboard, a USB Type-C charging port plus a minimalistic metallic design -- in gold or silver, naturally -- with no logo on the outside. The best part of all? The top-spec model costs just 4,999 yuan or about $750.   The ...

cells to remember and respond to series of stimuli New approach to biological circuit design enables scientists to track cell histories. Synthetic biology allows researchers to program cells to perform novel functions such as fluorescing in response to a particular chemical or producing drugs in response to disease markers. In a step toward devising much more complex cellular circuits, MIT engineers have now programmed cells to remember and respond to a series of events.   These cells can remember, in the correct order, up to three different inputs, but this approach should be scalable to incorporate many more stimuli, the researchers say. Using this system, scientists can track cellular events that occur in a particular order, create environmental sensors that store complex histories, or program cellular trajectories. “You can build very complex computing systems if you integrate the element of memory together with computation,” says Timothy Lu, an associate pr...