At the age of 17 I was paying attention in college, but still enjoying the student life as much as studying towards my career goals. What I wasn’t doing was working at the cutting edge of cancer treatment and developing a potential cure.

Angela Zhang is, and she’s just been awarded the $100,000 Grand Prize in the Individual category of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology. Her project was entitled “Design of Image-guided, Photo-thermal Controlled Drug Releasing Multifunctional Nanosystem for the Treatment of Cancer Stem Cells.”

Her creation is being heralded as a “Swiss army knife of cancer treatment.” Zhang managed to develop a nanoparticle that can be delivered to the site of a tumor through the drug salinomycin. Once there it kills the cancer stem cells. However, Zhang went further and included both gold and iron-oxide components, which allow for non-invasive imaging of the site through MRI and Photoacoustics.

As to why she chose this as her project, Zhang explains that she was surprised when looking at the survival rates of patients receiving cancer treatment. As cancer stem cells are resistant to many forms of cancer treatment, it seemed like an area worth focusing on. Her nanoparticle is award-winning due to the fact it has the potential to overcome cancer resistance while offering up the ability to monitor the effects of the treatment in real-time using existing imaging techniques.

Zhang’s achievement is impressive considering she is only 17 years old, but also due to the level of understanding required to create such a nanoparticle in the first place. She has spent over 1,000 hours since 2009 researching and developing the particle, and wants to go on to study chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, or physics. Her dream job is to be a research professor.

The Siemens Competition is in its 13th year and aims to highlight talent at the high school level for those interested in science research. Last year 15-year-old Benjamin Clark won the Individual category for his work into how stars are born. In 2009 Ruoyi Jiang won for his research into chemotherapy drug resistance.

I think we can all agree this is a very worthwhile competition, and long may it continue if it pushes young minds to create solutions to some of our biggest problems.

Read more at the Siemens Foundation and The George Washington University

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A long time ago in Portugal (okay it was 2003) two German friends started dreaming up a tent. The funny part is eight years later they’ve got their own startup that sells an innovative tent. Partially funded by a European incubator, Heimplanet is the collaborative offspring of Stefan Clauss and Stefan Diekhoff, who think they’ve designed a better tent than all the rest.

Taking its shape from a geodesic globe, what makes the ‘The Cave’ unique is its outer frame—call it an exoskeleton if you will. The exoskeleton is an inflatable structure that supports a multi-sided habitat that can fit six occupants or at least three sleeping bodies. According to Heimplanet, setting up this tent would take less than a minute.

Currently based in Hamburg, the guys over at Heimplanet think they’ve come up with a tent for every possible tent-situation, whether it’s a muddy three-day music festival, a wilderness escapade, or anadventure in the snowy alps.

The catch is The Cave from Heimplanet (check out their Tumblr blog) is quite expensive, currently selling for $699 plus shipping.

Source Gizmag

Tapping devices together to share data isn’t a new concept — we’ve seen it before (in numerous variations) on iPhone and Android devices. But Microsoft might have some very ambitious plans for what it’s calling “beaming” in future versions of Windows, Windows Phone, and even the Xbox.

According to @MS_nerd, Microsoft is dusting off the Zune’s “squirting” feature — their term, not mine. On the Zune, squirting allowed users to send songs from one device to another via Wi-Fi. Beaming has a much nicer ring to it, and it’s also going to be a tad more useful.

Beaming will allow users to wirelessly transfer data among all three Microsoft-powered screens. The feature will reportedly utilize NFC, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi Direct pairing, and will enable experiences very similar to what Microsoft, Infusion Direct, and BNP Paribas showed off in their Future of Retail Banking concept video.

Potential uses go way beyond blowing up a Powerpoint presentation on a nearby HDTV. WithSkyDrive providing a cloud back-end for future Microsoft consumer efforts, your Windows Phone could act like a portable profile access device. Get it close to your friend’s Xbox 360 console, and you could have instant access to your Live account and achievements. The same could be true for a Windows 8 computer, especially since we already know the new OS is going  to support Windows Live logins and an implementation of roaming profiles.

With the Windows 8 beta on track for February 2012, and NFC-equipped tablets already floating around the retail space, there’s a good chance we could see at least a small demonstration of beaming’s potential early next year.

More at LiveSide and Twitter

Gaming on iOS and Android is about to get more mature — as in M for Mature. Rockstar Games’ classic Grand Theft Auto III will be released for the rival platforms next Thursday, December 15. The best part: the game will cost a mere $4.99.

This will be GTA III‘s first appearance on mobile devices. Previously available on consoles and PCs, the release is in honor of the title’s ten year anniversary. The game was a breakthrough for sandbox gaming, combining driving, shooting, and hand-t0-hand combat in an open-world setting. Rockstar later built on that, but the level of freedom in GTA III was a monumental achievement in 2001.

Not every Android and iOS device will be able to play it. On iOS, the iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, 4th gen iPod touch, and both generations of iPad will be compatible. Android phones supported include the Rezound, Optimus 2x, Atrix 4G, Droid X2, Photon 4G, Galaxy R, and G2x. Android tablets in the clear are the Acer Iconia, Eee Pad Transformer, Dell Streak 7, Optimus Pad, Xoom, Galaxy Tab 8.9 and 10.1, Sony Tablet S, and Toshiba Thrive.

This will be Rockstar’s second full title in the App Store, and the first on Android. It previously ported the underrated DS and PSP title Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars to iOS in early 2010. While that game returned to GTA’s roots with a top-down view, GTA III will be the first mobile version of the 3D Grand Theft Auto world that is familiar to console gamers.

The visuals and gameplay remain mostly unchanged from earlier editions, but the graphics are closest to the PC version on maximum settings. It’s still a ten-year-old game, but mobile gamers can be thankful that it looks sharper than the PS2 release.

The $4.99 price is a reasonable offer from Rockstar: the recent Mac App Store release of the same game rings up at $14.99, and the simpler Chinatown Wars costs $10 on iOS. If you have a single GTA-loving bone in your body, you will want to pick this up.

via Rockstar

It would appear that Apple may have to find a new name for its iPad tablet in China, as the company has lost a trademark dispute with a company who owned the trademark in China for the name iPad.

And if Apple continues to use the iPad name in China it may end up having to pay up to 1.5 billion in damages to the company who owns the iPad trademark.

We wonder if Apple will decide to change the name of the iPad in China, or whether they will continue to sell it under the iPad name and just pay the company that owns the trademark the damages.

Source TG Daily, Ubergizmo

At the end of last month we reported that the new 3DS firmware would be delayed until December 8th. But now Nintendo have rolled out the firmware update a day early to 3DS owners.

Looking for a new Bluetooth speaker for your smartphone or Bluetooth device? If you are then the new Big Blue Live wireless speaker might well be worth more investigation.

As with many Bluetooth speakers the Big Blue can also be used as a speaker phone and measures just 5″ wide x 2.5″ deep by 2.36″ high, making it very portable. Its also equipped with dual stereo speakers, together with a passive radiator to provide thumping bass.

The wireless speaker resonates sweet highs and deep lows, say its creators, and is also cable of providing up to 4 hours of play time from a full charge. The Big Blue is compatible with any Bluetooth-enabled devices. including iOS devices, laptops, desktops, Android smartphones and more.

Source: Coolest Gadgets

Launching less than two years ago, iBooks quickly established itself as a leading eBook app. It has a gorgeous interface, a store with thousands of titles, and even allows sideloaded PDF and EPUB files. Last night Apple pushed the biggest update to iBooks since its inception.

The update, 1.5, adds nighttime reading mode, a full-screen layout, and additional fonts. Select books will also offer pop-up footnotes, and the annotation palette has also seen a redesign.

This is a significant leap forward for Apple’s reading app. Kindle for iOS app has had nighttime mode for years, and its omission surely ushered many a late-night reader away from iBooks. The execution in the new version is what you’d expect:

Full-screen mode is another big change. The classic interface had a faux hardcover texture around the border. Now you can lose that and have all reading, no borders. Full-screen mode needs to be activated from the text menu as the default setting is still the classic iBooks UI.

The new fonts are Athelas, Charter, Iowan, and Seravek. Fonts depend greatly on personal taste, but having more options isn’t going to hurt anybody. This is Seravek:

Redesigned covers for public domain books are a subtle — but welcome — change. When a book doesn’t have an official cover, iBooks used to default to a bland tan cover with nothing but the title and author. That generic cover now has color and texture. The best part: when you have multiples, each will have a different color.

There is a logic behind the improved cover art. When iBooks launched, it was to Apple’s benefit to make the free titles look bland. To compete with Amazon, the new store had a lot of catching up to do; Apple wanted to make the purchased books stand out. Now that the iBookstore is well-established, those old tan covers were only uglying up the UI and subracting from iBooks as a whole.

The iBooks 1.5 update is waiting in the App Store for all iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch owners on iOS 4 and beyond.

The digital age is much like the wild west. Lawmakers and judges have spent the last ten years cluelessly scrambling to make and interpret appropriate legislation for this new electronic frontier. One particularly head-scratching rule that came out of that period is the illegality of jailbreaking. In 2010, iOS jailbreaking was given an exemption, but it’s still forbidden to tamper with other devices. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wants to change that: it has petitioned the US Copyright Office to make jailbreaking and rooting universally acceptable under law.

The iOS exemption still allows Apple to void your warranty and refuse to service your device if you jailbreak, but you’re still within your rights to do so. This isn’t the case for other smartphones, tablets, or video games consoles. That’s why Sony was able to drag PS3 hacker George Hotzthrough the legal system earlier this year, before ultimately settling.

Why is jailbreaking illegal in the first place? Any argument for the criminality of hacking falls short. If vendors are concerned about unstable devices racking up tech support fees, then they have the right to refuse service on them. If someone is worried about a (to this point imaginary) wave of catastrophic malware infecting thousands of devices, then that’s the risk that the jailbreaking owners took. If content sellers are worried about increased piracy, then they’re barking up the wrong tree: file sharing is their problem, not device unlocking.

When you buy an electronic device, you aren’t buying 50% of it. You paid 100% of the advertised price, so you therefore own 100% of it. It’s yours to do with as you please. When will our government’s laws and regulations reflect this simple logic?

More at the EFF, via Macworld