Which of the following is not an April Fool's Day story‾
A. NTT DoCoMo has successfully demonstrated the world's first molecular delivery system for communications, combining communication technology and biochemistry, to develop systems that could transmit information about the biochemical conditions of living organisms.
B. A man in Florida has filed an application to patent a cell phone with a defibrillator feature which can convey electric shocks in case of a heart attack.
C. Global IP Solutions (GIPS) teleports a banana from San Francisco to Stockholm using its own videoconferencing engine.
ANSWER: C. You can tell from the really bad acting in the video.
Also, the DoCoMo story came out last Thursday. Which is a dead giveaway.
I read the brief for DoCoMo's molecular communications over the weekend, and while it's not the first time I've seen communications technology being modeled after biological principles, it's the first time I've seen a press release from a mobile operator talking about DNA hybridization, motor proteins and cargo molecules.
Obviously we're talking really short-range comms here, but with recent talk of mobile devices becoming health diagnostic tools, the idea of a bio-sensitive chip is intriguing.
Biometrics may be another application - imagine your handset demanding a DNA sample to prove you're the owner, or sending the encoded sample to a Bluetooth or NFC-enabled door lock.
No fooling.