An economist at a digital ad agency devises a way to use Twitter and Facebook to forecast sales of everything from cars to tampons.What's social media good for? Marketers see it as a new way to engage with consumers.

Economist-turned-advertising executive Jason Harper sees an additional function: as a real-time laboratory for measuring how multi-million dollar ad campaigns are succeeding or failing to drive product sales.Armed with a masters degree in applied economics, Harper was hired three years ago, at age 30, by the Detroit office of Organic Inc., a leading digital ad agency, to crunch the ad campaign data of car companies -- with the goal of seeing whether digital marketing efforts were helping move vehicles off lots. Assigned to Chrysler's Jeep and Dodge Ram truck accounts, Harper had to figure out how to correlate whether TV commercials were driving website visits, Twitter conversation and Facebook brand page activity. [Read the full article]

Brazil's investment in transgenic animals shows how opposition to such technologies in the United States is opening opportunities elsewhere.A slow-moving U.S. project to manufacture anti-diarrhea medicine using the milk of transgenic goats is getting a new start in Brazil, where it is receiving heavy funding from the surging South American power.Researchers at the University of California, Davis, plan to ship goat semen to the Brazilian state of Cear, where local scientists have received $3.5 million from Brazil's government to establish a herd of transgenic goats and initiate human trials on their milk.The Brazil case illustrates how anti-biotech sentiment in the U.S. may be pushing some biotechnologies toward the developing world, where science budgets are growing and scientists are eager to master these new technologies. [Read the full article]

A trial cell-phone network in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, gets by without something every other wireless carrier needs: its own chunk of the airwaves. Instead, xG Technology, which made the network, uses base stations and handsets of its own design that steer signals through the unrestricted 900-megahertz band used by cordless phones and other short-range devices.It's a technique called "cognitive" radio, and it has the potential to make efficient use of an increasingly limited resource: the wireless spectrum. By demonstrating the first cellular network that uses the technique, xG hopes to show that it could help wireless carriers facing growing demand but a relatively fixed supply of spectrum.Its cognitive radios are built into both the base stations of the trial network, dubbed xMax, and handsets made for it. Every radio scans for clear spectrum 33 times a second. [Read the full article]

Researchers in the U.K. have made a new kind of nanoscale memory component that could someday be used to pack more data into gadgets. The device stores bits of information using the conductance of nanoscale transistors made from zinc oxide.The researchers published a paper about a prototype memory device fabricated on a rigid silicon substrate last week in the online version of the journal Nano Letters. They are now testing flexible memory devices in the laboratory, says Junginn Sohn, a researcher at the University of Cambridge Nanoscience Center and lead author of the Nano Letters paper.The nanowire device stores data electrically and is nonvolatile, meaning it retains data when the power is turned off, like the silicon-based flash memory found in smart phones and memory cards. The new memory cannot hold data for as long as flash, and it is slower and has fewer rewrite cycles, but it could potentially be made smaller and packed together more densely. [Read the full article]