Google (GOOGL) is busy inventing your future.
And judging by the company’s new products and initiatives, it hopes to be as disruptive as a modern-day "Big Bang."
But if you think that its ultra-futuristic inventions won’t be around for many years yet… you’re dead wrong.
At the company’s annual I/O conference for Android and other developers last week, Google showed that the future is happening today by introducing some remarkable new innovations that are already available.
Let’s dig in…

Innovation #1: Welcome to "Brillo"

What’s the only thing better than the internet?
Why, the internet of everything, of course!
At Wall Street Daily, we’ve already covered the Internet of Things (IoT) pretty extensively as one of today’s fastest-growing tech trends. And Google is right in the mix here.
For example, I’ve written before about how Google and Facebook (FB) are creating various internet universes, in hopes of driving the IoT revolution themselves.
With Google specifically, I noted how the company is centering its ambitions on the Nest smart thermostat.
But Google just gave its universe a big bang!
It’s making the creation of IoT devices easy for developers by designing a new operating system called “Brillo.”
Brillo is essentially a scrubbed-down version of its Android system, which is layered on top of the existing Android platform. The communications language behind Brillo will be called Weave – and between the two new creations, Google will put IoT devices within reach of anyone who currently develops Android products.
Think about that: Thousands, if not millions, of developers and companies around the world will now have a brand-new, easy platform to create their IoT-enabled products.
The other “universes” I mentioned will have their uses… but this one is as big a kick-start to the IoT revolution as can be imagined.

Performance and Horsepower

More Specs at a Glance

Design and Ergonomics

Voice and Data

Display and Sound

Camera

Battery Life

As with other recent HTC unibody phones, the battery is sealed inside, so you can’t swap in a spare as needed on the road. As a consolation, the 2020 mAh Lithium Ion Polymer battery has good stamina despite the big high res display and 4G LTE. Chalk that up to excellent power management and the Qualcomm S4 Pro’s power frugalness. Like most powerful, big screen smartphones, you’ll likely have to charge the phone nightly with moderate use (some calling, web, push email, music and 30 minutes of video playback), but we routinely ran the phone from 8am to 10pm without running out of power.

The fight against cancer has risen to a fever pitch in the last decade, with new research avenues increasing almost by the day. If we are to believe Ray Kurzweil and the singularity folk, the specter of cancer may soon be a thing of the past. Lending credence to such optimism, new research by a team at MIT and UC San Diego employs genetically engineered bacteria to detect cancer, and perhaps someday treat it as well. Enlisting the help of bacteria in the battle against cancer may prove key in turning the tables on this awful menace.
The basis for this new form of cancer diagnosis is the unusual relationship between cancer and bacteria. Whereas healthy human tissue will aggressively fight off most bacterial infestations, the immune system within tumors has been compromised by the many mutations taking place there, and so bacteria accumulate in them at a higher-than-normal rate. The researchers exploited this characteristic to devise a means of detecting tumors long before other methods could catch them.
By removing a snippet of DNA programming found in fireflies and transferring it to a harmless form of E. Coli bacteria, the researchers were able to cause these bacteria to fluoresce at the critical concentrations that occur within tumors. The analogy would be to that of creating a flashlight that automatically turns on when it finds a tumor. The ability to detect tumors as small as one cubic millimeter makes this one of the most sensitive diagnostic tools to date. In treating cancer, early detection is pivotal, since the sooner a tumor is detected, the easier it is to contain and eliminate.
But before letting out a collective sigh of relief, it should be kept in mind that this method has only been successfully applied to liver cancers. Early on in the study, the researchers realized the orally ingested bacteria would not reach sufficient concentrations throughout the whole body to successfully detect all tumors therein. For instance, the blood brain barrier prevents the bacteria from entering the human brain as would be necessary for this method to detect brain tumors. The liver, however, proved an exception, in that the E. Coli bacteria in question naturally occurs there and would multiply rapidly in the presence of a tumor.
Despite its limitations, this is nonetheless a significant development. Many tumors that begin in the colon quickly spread to the liver, where they prove difficult to detect and go on to infect other parts of the body. Therefore, catching liver cancer early can play a key role in preventing cancers in many other place of the body.
The scientists involved in the study, including Tal Danino and Arthur Prindle, are now hopeful that the same bacteria can be programmed to fight cancer as well. The goal is to engineer the bacteria to cause genetic disruption of cancer cell function, deliver drugs, or signal the immune system to destroy the cancer itself. In the future, the cup of yogurt you have in the morning may not only improve digestive health, but simultaneously track down and eliminate cancers growing within the body.

Ever since Intel launched its high-performance Thunderbolt interface, it’s been fighting to win market share away from USB devices. There’s never been any question of which standard was faster — first-generation Thunderbolt blew USB 3.0 out of the water — but higher device costs, expensive cables, and limited OEM uptake have limited Thunderbolt’s market penetration. Today, with the announcement of Intel’s Alpine Ridge, that schism is effectively over. Third-generation Thunderbolt won’t just be faster than USB 3.0 or USB 3.1, it’ll offer all of its performance over a reversible USB-C plug.
Thunderbolt 3, aka Alpine Ridge, accomplishes this by integrating a USB 3.1 controller directly on-platform, neatly bypassing the entire “Should I use Thunderbolt 3 or USB” argument altogether.

Here’s what this means, in aggregate: You can now run DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, USB 3, and PCI-Express over a single Thunderbolt port. Even better, the USB 3.1 port in question is USB 3.1 Gen 2, as opposed to the USB 3.1 Gen 1 (aka USB 3.0), port that Apple uses for its new MacBook’s USB-C port. Unlike Thunderbolt 2, which kept total bandwidth the same as Thunderbolt 1.0, but allowed for more flexible bandwidth sharing options to improve performance, Thunderbolt doubles real bandwidth to up to 40Gbps.

Intel doesn’t include PCI-Express on its list of interfaces, but at this point, it could. 40Gbps works out to 5GB/s worth of bandwidth — which means Thunderbolt 3 can provide roughly a bit less bandwidth than an older PCI-Express 2.0 connection. The new standard offers support for up to two 4K 60Hz panels or a single 5K 60Hz display (this makes sense, as a 5K 60Hz panel is roughly 1.8x as many pixels as a 4K panel). This works out to an x4 PCI-E 3.0 connection. While not exactly suited for multi-GPU configurations, it should be enough bandwidth to run a single card at near-full speed in the vast majority of cases.
The combined Thunderbolt 3 / USB 3.1 standard will offer up to 100W for laptop charging if the manufacturer certifies the port to draw that much power and 15W of power for standard, bus-powered devices. 15W is significant because that’s more than enough energy to run most hard drive docks or external peripherals, including low-power portable displays.

The new configurations are also supposed to be flexible. Second device ports offer all the same functionality as the computer port, meaning you can plug a USB device into a monitor, which then connects to the computer via a Thunderbolt cable. Up to six devices can be daisy chained. Intel is also pushing the entire concept of a Thunderbolt external graphics dock for mobile gaming, and even the use of Thunderbolt for networking purposes.
One of the problems with Thunderbolt has been its reliance on expensive cabling. While the standard has never required the optical cables that were originally meant to debut alongside it, the available copper cables have often been expensive. Intel has improved the situation somewhat: Thunderbolt 3 will support passive cabling up to two meters with bandwidth of up to 20Gbps, 40Gbps active copper cables for full 40Gbps connectivity (again, up to two meters long), and 40Gbps optical cables arriving in 2016, with lengths of up to 60 meters.

Could Thunderbolt 3 finally catch on?

I’ve always been dubious about Thunderbolt’s chances of finding wide acceptance, but this latest announcement makes me think claims of Thunderbolt’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. FireWire may have lost its fight with USB, but FireWire never took the step of integrating a USB controller into the same package.
The two major questions remaining are how much Thunderbolt chips will cost and when they’ll ship. Intel has said it expects to begin shipping devices by the end of this year, which implies the new technology will show up on Skylake. If the licensing fees are reasonable, high-end devices with combined Thunderbolt / USB 3 ports could quickly become commonplace.

Brain waves and their potential for use as human biometric identification, which we first covered in 2013, have risen to the surface once again, as hacks, Internet hoaxes and scams, and phishing attacks have become all too common on the Web. Humanity knows the password isn’t secure enough to remain the universal standard forever Examining so-called ‘passthoughts’ can already serve as a way to distinguish humans, but a new study from Spain points to word meanings as a specific type of identifier. A team lead by Blair Armstrong, head of the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language, recorded the brainwaves of 45 individuals as they read through a list of 75 acronyms such as “DVD” and “FBI.” The team scored a 94% accuracy rating in using the brain waves of the patients to distinguish their identities.
Word meanings are often more “set in stone” in the brain than isolated memories, such as when a person trips and falls on a hard surface, or sprains an ankle sliding into first base in a college baseball game. Some memories haunt us with emotions we can’t shake. Other memories, once deemed horrific, serve as stepping stones to greater awareness of ourselves as time passes. While these memories (called episodic) can change over time as our interpretations of such events change, the meanings of words don’t change as often. We may find ourselves in a new career as compared with where we were five years ago. But the meaning Americans attach to the word “dollar,” or Europeans attach to the word “euro,” doesn’t change – even if currency exchange rates do.

Meanwhile, no two fingerprints are alike — but fingerprints, like passwords, can be manipulated with some know-how and mastery. Hackers have shown in recent days how fingerprint scanners, such as the ones on the Apple iPhone 6 and Samsung Galaxy S5, can become targets for hackers. Fingerprints are more secure than passwords, and especially passcodes (which often have just four numerals). But fingerprints are still subject to possible extrapolation from the surface of mobile devices. Passthoughts can’t be visibly touched, but reside within an individual.
To make the case against fingerprint security, Armstrong recounts a 2005 Malaysian carjacking where a victim’s fingers were cut off to gain access to his car starter that was fingerprint-guarded. With Apple’s and Google’s decisions to encrypt newer iOS (iPhone 6 and 6 Plus) and Android devices (Android M, with its native fingerprint security), consumers could find themselves in legal situations where they’re prompted to register their fingerprint to unlock a device for law enforcement access. Such evidence uncovered during a fingerprint unlock event could be used in American courts to indict or convict a suspect. Passthoughts could not be subjected to legal statutes as easily.
Passthoughts could become the measuring standard for biometric identification in the days and months ahead, but the concept needs some work before becoming a form of mainstream security. Could brain waves indict an individual in the future? We sure hope not, since the acronym “IRS” would betray the thoughts of every American taxpayer alone come April 15th.