Imagine the supermarket line without it.
The bar code is now so ubiquitous no one even notices it. But those scanable bars have only been in wide use since the 1970s. The National Science Foundation helped fund research into improving the devices that read them.
NSF has an annual budget of nearly $7 billion, most of which goes toward basic R&D funding for various areas of research.
In 2010, for its 60th anniversary, NSF highlighted 60 programs it helped fund. The list included everything from clean water research to an early Google prototype created by Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Google has revealed the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the latest "Google phone" that serves as the bench-setter for Android devices.
