Paypal cofounder Peter Thiel doesn’t shy away from making risky bets in disruptive technology and research.

Today, the Thiel Foundation announced it would grant $350,000 to two of Breakout Labs’ teams: SkyPhrase and Stealth Biosciences. Both startups are working to bridge the gap between technology and the biological sciences.

SkyPhrase is working on making computers understand human language with greater precision. It’s creating a platform to search, access, and monitor data that relies on natural language processing. The company is already viewed as a potential competitor to Apple’s Siri, which struggles to understand complex-language questions.

Stealth Biosciences is developing a device that can exert control over biological processes at the level of single cells. The technology is the brainchild of Stanford University professors Nick Melosh and Craig Garner. These devices could be a new toolset for research and diagnostic applications; it will initially use the funding to develop a “Nanostraw” device that can reprogram human T-cells for the purposes of cancer therapy.

Thiel is funneling the millions he made through early investments in Facebook, Yammer, and Yelp into potentially life-saving research. Through the nonprofit Breakout Labs, which was founded in 2011 and received financing through the Thiel Foundation, he kick-starts ideas that most traditional venture capitalists wouldn’t touch.

Last year, Breakout Labs’ funded a dozen startups, including a venture to produce bioengineered animal products — lab-grown meat — with about $4.5 million. Breakout Labs awards grants from $50 to 350,000 on a rolling basis, but the funded companies retain their intellectual property.

Many of the companies admitted into Breakout Labs go on to win government and academic grants, and many of the founders are university professors. This reflects “a growing and much welcome interest from the academic community in commercialization,” said Breakout Labs executive director Lindy Fishburne.

Peter Thiel image via Kenneth Yeung/Flickr

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Dev shop Zurb, which makes the Foundation web framework, has just released Foundation 4. The new version brings a host of new tricks and treats for developers and designers, all intended to bring mobile to the forefront.

The framework, said Zurb reps, has been rewritten to work with mobile-first approaches to product design and development — and the mobile-first trend is, indeed, shaping up to be a defining aspect of modern applications.

“Foundation 4 empowers a designer to reverse their thinking — design for the mobile experience before you design for the desktop,” read a Zurb statement on today’s news.

“One big hurdle for designers and developers is trying to figure out a solid starting place for their mobile designs — for them, Foundation is an excellent starting place and a great way to dive head-first into the world of designing for all types of mobile devices.”

Zurb reps said Foundation 4 brings “smarter, more semantic coding” to the table as well as placeholder classes and “mix-ins.”

“The more-streamlined code will allow designers to focus primarily on the HTML, which speeds up coding and time between iterations,” the statement said. “In addition, the JavaScript has been refined. We’ve opted to go with Zepto, a lighter and faster version of jQuery, to ensure that pages load quickly and efficiently given our mobile focus.”

Here’s a sneak peek:

Foundation 4 is available now to download. You can dive right in or browse around the documentation first.

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Cue big data.

Source: Sephora

ColorIQ from Sephora

Sephora has teamed up with color experts at Pantone to help women (and, hey, maybe some adventurous guys) find the right shade of makeup for just their skin, on the first try.

It’s called ColorIQ, and it uses digital imagining technology to record 27 separate color-corrected images in less than two seconds while using eight different visible light settings and one ultraviolet light setting.

In other words, it’s geek enough for any dude.

According to Sephora, your skin tone is a unique combination of ethnicity, hemoglobin, sun exposure, freckles, skin conditions, and melanin levels.

“Our partner Pantone has spent decades working on the science of color,” Sephora senior vice president Julie Bornstein told me today. ”We’ve mapped 110 shades of skin tone in the U.S.”

Once the ColorIQ device has measured your specific skin tone signature, big data comes into play. Taking the digital images from your face and breaking them down into 100-pixel blocks, Sephora creates a color composite for your skin, and your Pantone SkinTone number.

Then, all the data from women that Sephora has tested worldwide helps determine what foundation will work for you from over 1,000 different combinations, Bornstein says. A representative will simply enter the SkinTone number into Sephora’s iPad app for personalized suggestions.

As Bornstein told VentureBeat: ”This gives us the ability to truly recommend a product based on a woman’s skin for the first time.”

Source: Sephora

The new me, thanks to Sephora. Or not.

Women in one of Sephora’s New York or San Francisco stores will be able to come in and get their skin scanned in the next few weeks. Roll-out to the full 300+ stores in the U.S. will happen at some later time.

“The concept of virtual try-it-on in both the clothing and makeup industries is growing,” Bornstein says. “But this is the first thing that I’ve seen that has a purity to it that’s going to make it very effective.”

Customized fashion using technology and big data to help individual women find the best beauty solutions? Very cool.

But I think I’ll have to pass, personally.

Image credit: Subbotina Anna/ShutterStock

Seeing Framework’s magic in action is, well, a bit magical. As the screen resolution (or browser window size) changes, links become buttons. Images automatically resize. Layouts morph.

Try it out yourself; go to one of the many sites built on Foundation, then manipulate the size of the browser window. Take it down to a tablet size, then a smartphone size, and watch the site change fluidly along with you.

The benefit of Foundation is that you, the designer, don’t have to customize each layout on a device-by-device basis.

“The framework does all the work,” said Dmitry Dragilev, lead marketer at design shop Zurb, which created Foundation. “People don’t need to worry about this stuff anymore.”

User experience these days lives on mobile as much as on the web. That’s why Foundation, a new building and prototyping framework for front ends, works across all platforms. Better still, it’s open source software; you can check it out on Github.

In some ways, the framework is a lot like Twitter’s open-source front-end framework, Bootstrap.

But Zurb representative Dmitry Dragilev says Zurb’s framework is superior because of its emphasis on multi-device scaling. “Bootstrap just works for desktop apps. The one we’re releasing is designed to work on any kind of device, mobile or not, and that’s crucial now that mobile web use has started to overtake desktop use.”

The basis of Foundation is the Grid, a layout framework that seamlessly scales your content across all form factors, including mobile devices, small screens, large desktops and even huge screens, such as Internet-connected TVs. The Grid is a twelve-column, semi-liquid “grid of awesomeness that you’re gonna love,” Zurb claims.

In addition to the Grid, Foundation includes a slew of tools for rapid web and mobile prototyping, including typography, tabs, buttons, image grids, pagination, forms and more. “We also included some of our most popular JavaScript plugins, Orbit and Reveal, so you can handle image and content sliders and modals,” stated Zurb in a company blog post.

Finally, Foundation prototypes can be built into full sites for maximum developer/designer efficiency.

Dragilev said Dictionary.com already uses Foundation (check it out on their Word Dynamo app), as do a number of other sites and apps. Also, Zurb is presenting today at Mozilla’s WebFWD initiative for open web solutions.

Next, Zurb will be further refining the framework (squashing bugs and fixing edge cases), as well as adding templates, site generation, more common elements and even better mobile support.

Image courtesy of Juri Pozzi.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Over the past few years, Rose’s involvement in Digg has varied. He seemed to step back from Digg while focusing on his Diggnation show on Web TV channel Revision 3, then he took over as interim CEO earlier this year, then he stepped down again and has been vague about his future involvement. Meanwhile, the social news aggregation site remains very popular, but it has also seen a big backlash from fans over the recent launch of Digg version 4.

The Foundation newsletter is apparently a mutated version of Rose’s previously announced project Fforward. Subscribers will need to pay $3.99 per month — Rose said the money will go toward “equipment, travel, and editing.” The videos will eventually be posted publicly (generating more attention for the show), but subscribers will get access a week before everyone else.

It seems like there’s been a bit of a renaissance in the startup world’s use of email recently. Weblogs and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis has been sending out most of his thoughts via email, rather than on a blog, as has Path founder Dave Morin.

I’ve embedded the first video below, which features Rose’s interview with Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter and CEO of mobile payments startup Square.