In a warehouse building in Boston, wedged between a cruise-ship drydock and Au Bon Pain’s corporate headquarters, sits Ginkgo BioWorks, a new synthetic-biology startup that aims to make biological engineering easier than baking bread. Founded by five MIT scientists, the company offers to assemble biological parts–such as strings of specific genes–for industry and academic scientists.

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As the Iranian government continues a cat-and-mouse game of limiting or blocking access to social networking sites, instant messaging, cellphone service and the Internet in general, citizens and onlookers keep developing workarounds to help protesters stay online.

One of the tools gaining attention is Tor, an application that makes it difficult for outside parties to monitor a consumer’s Web use. “The idea is similar to using a twisty, hard-to-follow route in order to throw off somebody who is tailing you–and then periodically erasing your footprints,” the site for the Tor Project says. (MIT’s Technology Review has a video of Tor Project’s Roger Dingledine explaining its origins.)

Andrew Lewman, Tor Project’s executive director, told CNET that the organization has seen Tor users with Iranian IP addresses double in recent days.

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As online advertising money starts shrinking in the economic downturn, some researchers are looking for ways to make the most of every single dollar. Recent research from HP Labs in Palo Alto, Calif., shows that it’s possible to predict, with reasonable accuracy, how popular an online video clip or news story will become simply by looking at how well it does within the first few hours of being posted. If content providers can predict how many views a video or article will get over a set period, then they can match the most popular items with specific high-dollar ads. Additionally, content providers can place potentially popular content in eye-catching spots on their site, further increasing the number of people who see it and the accompanying ads.

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