iPoop:The bathroom accessory of my dreams!

Inspired by a Photoshop contest, a clever young man came up with a simple yet brilliant multifunction bathroom accessory for laptops and tablets: The iPoop. I just really hope the concept's name doesn't get changed if anyone ever manufactures it.

Peter, the creator of this design, describes iPoop as a "bathroom wastebasket that doubles as a laptop/tablet stand" and is currently attempting to rally interest and catch the eye of a manufacturer using a Facebook group!

Soon You'll Unlock Hotel Room Doors By Playing Songs on Your Phone

Some Holiday Inn locations will soon begin using the OpenWays door system. This means that guests will be offered the option of having a unique melody sent to their smartphones and playing that to open doors instead of swiping keycards.

The OpenWays system is explained as being as secure as a traditional keycard system and sounds pretty simple to use: The technology sends an encrypted, unique audio code to a guest's phone prior to check-in. When played back outside the guestroom, the signal unlocks the door, letting the guest skip the front desk-guests would also receive a text message with their room assignments-while also eliminating the need for keycards.

The first hotels to test the technology will be the Holiday Inn Chicago O' Hare Rosemont and the Holiday Inn Express Houston Downtown Convention Center.

Wow!

Immaculate Creation!

For the first time, scientists have created life from scratch – well, sort of. Craig Venter's team has made a bacterial genome from smaller DNA subunits and then transplanted the whole thing into another cell.

What did Venter's team do?

The cell was created by stitching together the genome of a goat pathogen called Mycoplasma mycoides from smaller stretches of DNA synthesised in the lab, and inserting the genome into the empty cytoplasm of a related bacterium. The transplanted genome booted up in its host cell, and then divided over and over to make billions of M. mycoides cells.

Craig Venter and his team at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, and San Diego, California have previously accomplished both feats – creating a synthetic genome and transplanting a genome from one bacterium into another – but this time they have combined the two.

"It's the first self-replicating cell on the planet that's parent is a computer," says Venter, referring to the fact that his team converted a cell's genome that existed as data on a computer into a living organism.

How can they be sure that the new bacteria are what they intended?

Venter and his team introduced several distinctive markers into their synthesised genome. All of them were found in the synthetic cell when it was sequenced.

These markers do not make any proteins, but they contain the names of all the scientists on the project and several philosophical quotations written out in a secret code. The markers also contain the key to the code. Crack the code and you can read the messages.

Does this mean they created life?

It depends on how you define "created" and "life". Venter's team made the new genome out of DNA sequences that had initially been made by a machine, but bacteria and yeast cells were used to stitch together and duplicate the million base pairs that it contains. The cell into which the synthetic genome was then transplanted contained its own proteins, lipids and other molecules.

Venter himself maintains that he has not created life . "We've created the first synthetic cell," he says. "We definitely have not created life from scratch because we used a recipient cell to boot up the synthetic chromosome."

Whether you agree or not is a philosophical question, not a scientific one as there is no biological difference between synthetic bacteria and the real thing, says Andy Ellington, a synthetic biologist at the University of Texas in Austin. "The bacteria didn't have a soul, and there wasn't some animistic property of the bacteria that changed," he says.

What can you do with a synthetic cell?

Venter's work was a proof of principle, but future synthetic cells could be used to create drugs, biofuels and other useful products. He is collaborating with Exxon Mobil to produce biofuels from algae and with Novartis to create vaccines.

"As soon as next year, the flu vaccine you get could be made synthetically," Venter says.

Ellington also sees synthetic bacteria as having potential as a scientific tool. It would be interesting, he says, to create bacteria that produce a new amino acid – the chemical units that make up proteins – and see how these bacteria evolve, compared with bacteria that produce the usual suite of amino acids. "We can ask these questions about cyborg cells in ways we never could before."

What was the cost of creating life?

About $20 million. Cheap for a deity, expensive if you are a lab scientist looking to create your own synthetic bacterium. "This does not look like the sort of thing that's going to be doable by your average lab in the near future," Ellington says.

This reminds me of Frankenstein's monster! Are synthetic cells safe?

Yes. Venter's team took out the genes that allow M. mycoides to cause disease in goats. The bacterium has also been crippled so it is unlikely to grow outside of the lab. However, some scientists are concerned that synthetic organisms could potentially escape into the environment or be used by bioterrorists.

Ellington brushes aside those concerns, noting that the difficulty of engineering cells is beyond the scope of all would-be bioterrorists. "It's not a real threat," he says. "Unless you are Craig Venter with a crew of 20 postdocs you're not going to do this."

However, George Church, a synthetic biologist at Harvard Medical School, is calling for increased surveillance, licensing and added measures to prevent the accidental release of synthetic life. "Everybody in the synthetic biology ecosystem should be licensed like everybody in the aviation system is licensed."

The InfoLadies of Bangladesh, Armed With Bicycle and Netbook

Many people living in Bangladesh's impoverished villages haven't yet been reached by technology. But a determined band of InfoLadies—young women equipped with netbooks, phones, and medical equipment—are delivering technology's benefits to those people, one village at a time.

These villages—and the Bangladeshis who live in them—are held back in many ways merely by a scarcity of information. The InfoLadies are the bearers of that information. Their netbooks come preloaded with relevant content that can be easily translated to local languages, and their messenger bags carry items like blood pressure monitors and pregnancy kits. Says one InfoLady:

Ask me about the pest that's infecting your crop, common skin diseases, how to seek help if your husband beats you or even how to stop having children, and I may have a solution.

It seems that they often do have solutions—while the young, modern InfoLadies were initially regarded as something of a "scandal," they're now welcomed enthusiastically by individuals looking to check their blood pressure or increase the yield of their crops. One man, hoping to find work in technology, used an InfoLady's netbook to get a crash course on Microsoft Office. Before the InfoLadies arrived, he said, "I had only seen computers in books."

Chameleon-Magic!

GPS Signals Will Improve Thanks To Massive $8bn Overhaul

Despite fears last year that the US Air Force wouldn't be able to afford many more GPS satellites, a massive $8bn upgrade is being planned for overhauling the satellites, replacing each of the 24 satellites over the next decade.

The Los Angeles Air Force Base in El Segundo will be working on the upgrade (said to be three years behind schedule), with 24 going "upstairs" and six being kept back in case of damage. The new satellites will be targeting outages, and will triple the signals available for commercial use—meaning that accessing Google Maps on our phones, using Sat-Navs in our cars, or even withdrawing money from ATMs will be faster and more accurate than before.

Google: The Next 6 Months of Android Will "Blow Your Mind"

Android 2.2 is out, and it's pretty nice! But what's next for Android? A better keyboard? More sexy? And how exactly does Google decide what goes into each version of Android anyway? Let's ask Lead Android Andy Rubin.

The highlights, if you don't want to read the interview below (which is fairly interesting if you're into Android, if I do say so myself):

• It's actually "pretty random" what goes into every version of Android, and
they don't plan more than one release out
• There's not much they can do about phones with custom UIs lagging behind on
new versions of Android
• They know the keyboard could use some work
• HTC may very well be on their own with Apple's patent lawsuit
• The next 6 months will "blow your mind"

Gizmodo: So my personal thing, the one question I want to ask personally, is when is the keyboard going to get better?

Andy: I mean, it does need a little bit of improvement. I think we did a pretty good job given that it's pretty generic for all different screen sizes—you have small screens, big screens, you have landscape, you have portrait. But what I think you start needing is more specific for the device. It's a framework—pretty generic—and we need to do a little better job. The voice team, I think, did a good job of basically making the keyboard kind of optional in some areas. I speak to my phone when I'm sending SMSes. I speak to it, and correct it a little bit with the keyboard. My primary use case is voice, but I think you're right, we do need to be kind of reviving it a little bit.

A lot of that, it's not necessarily the software—a lot of the time it's the type of touch screen the OEM uses. You've seen all those tests where they have like the Droid touchscreen, the Nexus touchscreen—they're all a little different and it's hard to make one keyboard work across all those different flavors of touch screens.

Gizmodo: We're up to Froyo 2.2 now, but we have devices with custom interfaces, which often lag behind latest version of Android. People with, say, a Droid Eris or a Hero waited around 6 months or longer just to get to 2.1, and now 2.2 is coming. So how do you address that sort of issue and where does Google stand on that type of thing?

Andy: I mean, if I was like a dictator I would enforce this stuff and everyone would have to have the same version at the same time and there would be a big switch with great fanfare, but it's just not in the cards. So we'll do a great version, and if they decide to adopt it, they'll adopt it. The difference between those two models: The first model, it's really hard for people to differentiate, everybody gets the same thing. So you are kind of commoditizing a whole slew of companies in the process and that's painful because people will literally go out of business potentially. In our model, it allows differentiation. At the platform layer, it is still compatible, so the apps in the marketplace will still run in the platform. But yeah, they have to modulate how quickly they can put their differentiating features on top of the base platform, and that's a race.

Gizmodo: But if you're not running 2.1, for instance, you can't get the official Twitter app.

Andy: I mean there are apps written for Vista, just like Photoshop CS5 does not run on Windows 3.1. I mean it's just a fact, there's nothing new here. This is how it has always been and that's why I made the distinction of legacy. We have legacy and if somebody wants to use a feature that's in the new OS, they really can't run that app on an older OS. So it's just things are happening so quickly that it becomes really obvious that we went from 2.0 to 2.2 in a very short time frame. I think that will slow down a little bit. I'm actually advocating coming out with releases around the buying seasons, May and September, October.

Gizmodo: So how does the update process go? How do you decide what goes into each release?

Andy: It's pretty random. We roadmap one release out, so we don't plan out the year, or two years or five years like a lot of other people do. It's more run like an internet company would run it, so there's a lot of iteration and what we are finding is innovation comes from all over the place. Like the Simplify Media guys, that was a company we acquired and now their stuff is in the Froyo release.

Gizmodo: HTC been in a sort of interesting position in terms of patents—they're licensing technology from Microsoft. That kind of actually makes Android not free for them to use. Are you worried about that in the future?

Andy: If I do an implementation of an MP3 codec, down the line, the guy selling the device—the guy that's making the money—he's going to have to pay a royalty to the MPEG association, the guys who own that intellectual property around that. If I implement the ActiveSync protocol and talked to Exchange servers, somebody's going to have to pay Microsoft for the royalty. And that happens in phones today—there's no difference between Android or something else.

Gizmodo: What is it you want to fix or add to an Android next? Like what's on your list of "Things I Wished I Could Have Done"?

Andy: Well, even to me, when we released the first version, it didn't feel like a 1.0, it kind of felt like a 0.8. If you look at where we were 18 months ago and where we are today, that just makes the future brighter. Because the rate at which we went from that kind of 0.8 to 2.2 was so fast that we're just earning how to master that type of engineering—that type of iterative engineering—and all of the innovation, I mean it's game on. There is going to be stuff that's just going to blow your mind. In 6 months. Before it was 18 months, now it's 6 months.

Gizmodo: So where do you want to see Android in a year or two, in terms of bigger goals?

Andy: For Android it's a numbers game. It's an end product with end OEMs and product categories today, but what we demonstrated at IO was pretty unique. We demonstrated big screen and small screen; we demonstrated ARM processor and Intel processor, and we demonstrated stuff from different OEMs: HTC, and Sony on the TV side. So look, we're cross product category, cross manufacturer, cross CPU architecture, agnostic, and we have all the services pointed to the platform, and the platform is just going to go pretty broad across those product categories. It's never been done before.

If you look at it as a graph, we're right in the middle of a hockey stick right now. You don't realize that you're right in the middle of it until after the fact and you're looking at it—oh that's where it was, but we're right in the middle of it right now. So I think it's just going to be exponential in the amount of adoption.

Thanks to Google VP of Engineering, and head of Android Andy Rubin for talking to us!

Send an email to matt buchanan, the author of this post, at matt@gizmodo.com.