Raindance Technologies gets $20M to improve genetic testing, signs deal with Myriad Genetics

"Imagine all diagnostics some day being reduced to a simple blood test," said CEO Roopam Banerjee, who believes Raindance products are a "step in that direction."

‘Kickstarter for science’ wants to cure Alzheimers, teach coding, save the pandas

Microryza is a crowdfunding platform for scientific research projects.

Mind-reading rats connect across continents via ‘brain-net

A research team at Duke electronically linked the brains of a pair of rats to transmit sensory information and solve problems, across continents.

Using big data to cure cancer, Bina ushers in new era of medicine

Bina's platform significantly reduces the time and cost of processing the human genome, which has far-reaching implications for the world of healthcare.

IP-uh-O: Going public kills the startup magic, decreasing innovation by 40%

Public companies are safer, more boring, less innovative, and take fewer risks than startups, right? Stanford professor Shai Bernstein tracked almost 2000 technology companies to find out.

Clipboard’s new strategy takes on traditional research methods

Digital archiving service Clipboard strikes a strategic investment deal with educational software company Scientia.

Staples, Home Depot, and other online stores change prices based on your location

A simple Swingline stapler from the office supply chain Staples could cost you either $15.79 or $14.29, depending on where you live.

Curiosity scientists say Mars’ radiation levels are safe for astronauts

Initial readings found that levels of radiation are about the same astronauts typically experience in the low-Earth orbit.

European consortium builds €8.4M Paasage in the cloud

A group of 14 European partners have banded together with €8.4 million to launch a major research initiative called PaaSage.

Mars Curiosity takes a Myspace-like selfie for researchers

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory prepared for a lot of variables when it sent Curiosity, the car sized rover, to Mars, but it didn't prepare for it to become a tween-aged girl on Myspace.

90% of consumers say Maps issue ‘irrelevant’ as iPhone 5 selling at record pace

Only 3 percent of consumers say Apple's Maps are a "big problem." I guess those 3 percent are Silicon Valley tech blog writers.

Microsoft’s ‘Digits’ hand sensor shows off the future of interactions (video)

Microsoft already made controller-less motion interaction popular with Kinect, so why not try to revolutionize other kinds of sensor and interaction technology too? Its new Digits hand sensor could work for gaming, augmented reality, mobile device apps, and more.

How one researcher is using tech to make science & medicine better & faster

Scientist Robert Arauz is setting out to solve some of researchers' biggest problems -- not problems about funding or litigation, but the simpler challenges of communication.

BlackBerry creator pays big to go small: donates $100M to quantum computing and nanotech center

Research in Motion founder Mike Lazaridis, who created the BlackBerry smartphone, has donated $100 million to a new center pursuing radically small computing innovations.

TransLattice on Google’s new ‘planet-spanning’ database: We were first

Yesterday Google Research pulled the shroud off Spanner, Google's "scalable, multi-version, globally-distributed, and synchronously-replicated database," claiming to have created "the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions."

Want extra credit? Professors can now track who’s reading on Academia.edu

Academia.edu launches analytical dashboard for professors to track who's reading their research.

Forrester: 30% of online shoppers research Amazon before buying

Thirty percent of online shoppers research a product on Amazon before they purchase it, another sign of Amazon’s incredible dominance in e-commerce, according to new research from Forrester.

“Ever since Amazon.com opened for business in July 1995, its impact on …