Nanoparticles — is there anything they can't do? — embedded in the hydrogel lenses react with glucose molecules in naturally occurring tears. A chemical reaction then causes the lenses to shift their hues, alerting the wearer to falling or spiking blood sugar levels. The wearer can then make the appropriate adjustments to his or her blood sugar, all without having to carry around (and use) devices for drawing and analyzing blood.

U. of Western Ontario Professor Jin Zhang has just collected $216,000 from the Canada Foundation for Innovation as a result of the breakthrough process to develop other applications for multifunctional nanocomposites, which can be used in everything from biomedicine to food preservation to packaging. We think a head-up display for glucose levels is pretty good, but if nanocomposites can also make the packaging on that blood-sugar-leveling candy bar biodegrade more quickly, all the better. [Institute of Nanotechnology]

Popular Science is your wormhole to the future. Reporting on what's new and what's next in science and technology, we deliver the future now.

Traditionally, these light-to-dark lenses have been constructed by coating a normal lens with a photochromic dye. When UV light hits the dye, the individual molecules expand, darkening the lens and absorbing light. Coating contacts, however, doesn't work so well.

So researchers in Singapore have laced contacts with a matrix on nano tunnels filled with these photochromic dyes. Not only has the team been successful in producing transition contacts; these contacts darken in the presence of UV light faster than standard lenses (just 10 to 20 seconds).

Researchers are now working on isolating the photochromic material to just corneal region of your eye, granting you all of the UV filtering without turning your entire iris black.

But until they graft the timeless style of a Wayfarer onto my eyeball, I'll pass. [Technology Review and image]

This week, Gizmodo is exploring the enhanced human future in a segment we call This Cyborg Life. It's about what happens when we treat our body less as a sacred object and more as what it is: Nature's ultimate machine.

The shots are branded Windows 6.5.1, but as PocketNow says, we know what 6.5.1 looks like and it definitely doesn't share the modern, finger-sized aesthetic of these shots. The screenshots cover basics like the call screen, contacts list, mail, and on-screen keyboard, and all in all it looks substantially more modern (read: Similar to Android, iPhone, WebOS) than WinMo ever has before. Interestingly, the trademark Windows Start button appears to be a no-show: Is this a conscious choice to move away from the WinMo of the past? [PocketNow]

University of Washington Associate Professor of Biotechnology Babak A. Parviz describes the current state of the art, and it's pretty intense. They're trialing mockups of the lenses—which are sorta like older gas permeable lenses except with independently fabricated microcomponents like, biosensors and circuits—in bunnies' eyeballs right now, using lens with integrated metal circuits, with no problems for up to 20 minutes of wear. They're up to one LED for display now that's powered wirelessly by RF, but eventually, what's embedded in the lenses will include hundreds of LEDs to form images, and semi-transparent optoelectronics like antennas.

They've still got some challenges before they're embedded in everybody's eyeball, like the fact red LEDs contain toxic substances you don't want to shove in your eyeball. And figuring out whether to use an active display, like an array of LED pixels—which is the current main road forward—or a passive display using ambient light that would require less power. What's crazy is that for a truly vivid LED display, because of the way your eye focuses, they need to build another tiny array of lenses into the main lens so the virtual image would look visible a foot or so away. Or they use an array of microlasers. Power will come from RF or solar energy.

Bottom line says Parviz:

All the basic technologies needed to build functional contact lenses are in place. We've tested our first few prototypes on animals, proving that the platform can be safe. What we need to do now is show all the subsystems working together, shrink some of the components even more, and extend the RF power harvesting to higher efficiencies and to distances greater than the few centimeters we have now.

[IEEE Spectrum]

It's an extension of their other Missing Sync products that are already out for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile. It lets you grab contacts and calendar (great), as well as ringtones and podcasts, both of which were able to be synced before just with the USB disk mode. It costs $40, which is kinda high, but better than having to loop your contacts around into Google every time you want to do a sync. [Mark Space via Boy Genius]

Faster syncing with Mac and PC. Changes you make to contacts and calendars on your Mac (Address Book and iCal) or PC (Microsoft Outlook) are now automatically pushed up to the cloud every time you make an update. Likewise, changes you make on me.com, iPhone, or iPod touch are automatically pushed to your Mac or PC. As a result, your contacts and calendars update faster across all your devices. To take advantage of faster syncing, be sure you're running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6 (Mac) or MobileMe Control Panel 1.3 (Windows).

After a lousy launch in 2008, Apple decided to avoid associating the word "push" with Mobile Me until they could get synchronization between computers and mobile devices (iPhones, iPod touch) down to acceptable times. Looks like it's close enough now to bring the term back.

Another new feature, iDisk file sharing, has been around since the 13th. Improved iPhone notification and syncing and better web app performance round out the improvements.

Dear MobileMe member:

Over the past few months, we have been working hard to make MobileMe the best service it can be. Here is a summary of the improvements and performance enhancements that have recently been completed.
Easy file sharing. iDisk now makes it even easier to share files that are too big to email. Simply select a file in the iDisk web app and click the Share File button to generate an email with a download link. You can also optionally add password protection and set an expiration date for the link. For more details, view this tutorial.

Faster syncing with Mac and PC. Changes you make to contacts and calendars on your Mac (Address Book and iCal) or PC (Microsoft Outlook) are now automatically pushed up to the cloud every time you make an update. Likewise, changes you make on me.com, iPhone, or iPod touch are automatically pushed to your Mac or PC. As a result, your contacts and calendars update faster across all your devices. To take advantage of faster syncing, be sure you're running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6 (Mac) or MobileMe Control Panel 1.3 (Windows).

Improved notifications and sync on iPhone. Reliability of new email notifications and syncing of contacts and calendar with MobileMe have both been improved. To get the best MobileMe experience on your iPhone or iPod touch, you should be running iPhone Software 2.2 or later.

Better web app performance. We have also improved the overall performance of the web apps at me.com including faster start time in Calendar and searching in Contacts. For more details, see this support article.
Remember, to take advantage of these improvements, your computers and devices must be running the latest software versions indicated above.

The USB device comes in four styles: bee, alien, panda and flaming skeleton. Put your Poken's hand up to your buddy's; then when you plug yours into a USB port, your friend's contacts will automatically sync to your Poken account (which then propogates to Facebook, MySpace and other networks). It all works fine as long as everyone you possibly want to trade details with also has a Poken. [Poken via Fire Box]

In the meantime, remember these things:
1) We do not pull data from your contact list before notifying you. There is now a notification in-game when this is done. And it is only done on the community page by YOU pressing the submit button.
2) We never store your contact list on our web server.
3) All data sent over the wire is now completely encrypted.
4) No contact data is saved on your phone's hard drive anymore. This has been removed.

Sounds good to us. [Aurora Feint]

According to their forums, if you opt-in to the community feature, Aurora Feint looks through your contact list, sends it unencrypted to their servers, and matches you up with your friends who are currently playing right now. Great feature, for sure, but that whole looking through our contact list and sending it in plain text to your server is cause for us to go OMGWTFBBQ.

When we discovered that the Apple SDK allowed us to look through your contact list we thought it would be a great idea to automatically show you which friends are playing the game. Why automatically? Well, everyone always complains about the keyboard on the iPhone and how annoying it is to type on it. So we thought, "Hey, why don't we make this feature REALLY easy to use – no typing!" And such, the community feature was born. Some people have said that it would have been ok if we had a better notice explaining what was going on. I agree! We weren't trying to be sneaky about how this worked. It was just overlooked. No one we showed it to even asked a question about it – nor did we. It just simply never came up as a potential issue when we beta tested the game with early users.

Upside is, if you didn't use the community feature, you're OK.

In the 1.0 version of the game we just didn't get around to doing everything we wanted to do in time for the launch: remember we tried to do a high quality game in 10 weeks flat. So, if you opt-in to the community feature, when you refresh your friends, the data is sent unencrypted to our web servers. Before you freak out though, let me explain why this was done. We just thought that it was a cool feature and that we'd implement security stuff if we became popular. To that end, the web server we launched with was a teeny box with almost no power. We spent the first few days scrambling to scale our servers. We really had no idea how popular we were going to be. We added this feature in near the end of our development cycle and simply decided that we didn't have enough time to spend to make it secure in advance of knowing if it was even going to be a hit.

Good intentions by slightly amateur programmers. It's alright. No malice intended. They're actually asking the community as to how they should proceed, and you should go tell them.

It's also a credit to Apple for finding out the mistake and shutting it down. Even though the line about having all apps be vetted through the store in the first place was to make sure all of them are safe, some stuff like this still slipped through because it's pretty much unfeasible to test each application to make sure they're not sending out your private data. Apps and app updates are already delayed for a week or more because Apple's checking them out. [Thanks mjborch1]

Specifically, they're looking for "information on technology areas for the creation of micro- and nano-scale display technologies for the purpose of creating displays that could be worn as transparent contact lenses." And they want it now. Okay, like three to five years, but that's practically immediate for the Pentagon. Right in time for Halo 5. [Federal Business Opportunities via Danger Room]

Previous methods often employed visual solutions such as cameras, which can get mucked up by rapid motions, light, or glasses. They hope to use the technology to better track the attention of combat personnel such as pilots, whose eyes help them interact with their heads-up displays. [New Scientist]

The Zyb service supports 200 types of phones, and once backed up, your contacts can be managed using a web interface and shared with other Zyb users. The service is based on the SyncML data interface, so most phones should be able to use it. Check the list to see if yours is supported. Best yet, the service is free. – Jason Chen

Product Page [Zyb via Pop Gadget]