Trends & Innovations - Monday

• Investor's Business Daily
• On 6:39 pm EDT, Monday October 19, 2009

Mobile phone problems common

Two out of three people who surf the Web via cell phone have encountered problems when accessing sites on their phones in the last 12 months, with slow load times topping the list of problems. That's according to a survey of 1,001 users by Gomez Inc., which optimizes Web and mobile applications. Another top problem was sites were either too large or too small for the size of phones' screens. Gomez found 80% of users would visit sites more from their phones if the experience was as fast and reliable as it is on a PC.

Antidepressants improve muscles

A regular antidepressant combined with an intensive treadmill training program can help people with partial spinal injuries walk better and faster, a study by the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago found. Antidepressants, which affect a message-carrying brain chemical called serotonin, help strengthen remaining nerve connections along the spine. The drugs seemed to work by increasing muscle spasms and strengthening the residual connections between the brain and the spinal cord.

A power utility in Maryland is offering annual discounts of up to $100 to customers who take part in its smart grid effort, an MSNBC report says. The utility, Pepco , would shut off these consumers' AC units occasionally when demand is high. The report says the move raises privacy concerns, since smart grids enable utilities to reconstruct when customers usually get home from work or go on vacation.

Salt crystals could be used to create huge data storage that can hold 100 times more data than current systems, according to scientists at the Univ. of Edinburgh in Scotland. The team succeeded in turning salt crystals into a gel by using low-energy lasers. The technology can store a terabyte of data in a space the size of a sugar cube. A new method of screening human eggs can double the success rate of fertility treatments, researchers at Oxford Univ. found. The screening can check for abnormalities in embryos, which could cause miscarriage, so only those embryos with the best chance of success are used in fertility treatment.

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