A couple in the United Kingdom used a new technique for screening embryos to select children without the genetic fingerprint of cystic fibrosis. The embryos were tested in vitro prior to being implanted. It’s a controversial precedent: detractors argue that it’s a slippery slope from here to Gattaca.

All those evanescent bits flying about the world’s networks aren’t as free as we’d like to think. Server farms generate a huge energy bill, and the economics are starting to drive innovation in energy thriftiness.

Bruce Schneier says have your cake and eat it too. As Armchair Anarchist pointed out in a recent post, paper is a mature voting technology. I countered in the comments that electronic voting machines have a lot going for them (although they’re not perfect). Schneier suggests in a column for Forbes that you get the best of both worlds by using machines to generate paper ballots.

The trend-watchers predict that mobile phones will become a major computing platform over the next decade or so, equalling or superceding the current capabilities of desk- and lap-tops. If that is the case, social networking will almost certainly be a driving force behind the change – and ‘loopt’ is just the sort of application to do it. ‘Loopt’ is a location-based mobile social mapping service, using geotagging capabilities to keep the user informed of the locations of people in their network relative to their own. You’ll never have to ‘just miss’ someone again – unless you really want to, of course.

Technology has ways of empowering those who would have been considered furthest from its reach a few decades ago. Case in point are tribes of Amazonian Indians who are defending their homelands from the encroachment of logging outfits and rogue miners, by using GPS devices and Google Earth to accurately map the extent of their reservations – which in turn helps them preserve their unique knowledge of the bio-diverse ecosystem that surrounds them.