Artificial Pancreas Improves Treatment Of Type 1 Diabetes

Written By: editor

Published Date: December 1, 2014 Last Edited: September 7, 2018

John

Provided by William Raillant-Clark, University of Montreal
The world’s first clinical trial comparing three alternative treatments for type 1 diabetes was conducted in Montréal by researchers at the IRCM and the University of Montreal, led by endocrinologist Dr. Rémi Rabasa-Lhoret. The study confirms that the external artificial pancreas improves glucose control and reduces the risk of hypoglycemia compared to conventional diabetes treatment. The results, published November 26 in the scientific journal The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, could have a significant impact on the treatment of type 1 diabetes, a chronic disease that can cause vision loss and cardiovascular diseases.
An emerging technology to treat type 1 diabetes, the external artificial pancreas is an automated system that simulates the normal pancreas by continuously adapting insulin delivery based on changes in glucose levels. Two configurations exist: the single-hormone artificial pancreas that delivers insulin alone and the dual-hormone artificial pancreas that delivers both insulin and glucagon. While insulin lowers blood glucose levels, glucagon has the opposite effect and raises glucose levels.
“Our clinical trial was the first to compare these two configurations of the artificial pancreas with the conventional diabetes treatment using an insulin pump,” says Dr. Rabasa-Lhoret, Director of the Obesity, Metabolism and Diabetes research clinic at the IRCM and professor at the University of Montreal’s Department of Nutrition. “We wanted to determine the usefulness of glucagon in the artificial pancreas, especially to prevent hypoglycemia, which remains the major barrier to reaching glycemic targets.”
People living with type 1 diabetes must carefully manage their blood glucose levels to ensure they remain within a target range in order to prevent serious long-term complications related to high glucose levels (such as blindness or kidney failure) and reduce the risk of hypoglycemia (dangerously low blood glucose that can lead to confusion, disorientation and, if severe, loss of consciousness, coma and seizure).
“Our study confirms that both artificial pancreas systems improve glucose control and reduce the risk of hypoglycemia compared to conventional pump therapy,” explains engineer Ahmad Haidar, first author of the study and postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Rabasa-Lhoret’s research unit at the IRCM. “In addition, we found that the dual-hormone artificial pancreas provides additional reduction in hypoglycemia compared to the single-hormone system.”
“Given that low blood glucose remains very frequent during the night, the fear of severe nocturnal hypoglycemia is a major source or stress and anxiety, especially for parents with young diabetic children,” adds Dr. Laurent Legault, pediatric endocrinologist at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, and co-author of the study. “The artificial pancreas has the potential to substantially improve the management of diabetes and the quality of life for patients and their families.”
IRCM researchers are pursuing clinical trials on the artificial pancreas to test the system for longer periods and with larger patient cohorts. The technology should be available commercially within the next five to seven years, with early generations focusing on overnight glucose control.
According to the Canadian Diabetes Association, an estimated 285 million people worldwide are affected by diabetes, approximately 10 per cent of which have type 1 diabetes. With a further 7 million people developing diabetes each year, this number is expected to hit 438 million by 2030, making it a global epidemic. Today, more than nine million Canadians – or one if four – are living with diabetes or prediabetes.
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Global Quantum Communications – No Longer The Stuff Of Fiction?

Written By: editor

Published Date: December 1, 2014 Last Edited: December 1, 2014

editor

Provided by Agata Meissner and Dr. Wojciech Wasilewski, Faculty of Physics University of Warsaw

Neither quantum computers nor quantum cryptography will become prevalent technologies without memory systems able to manipulate quantum information easily and effectively. The Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw has recently made inroads into popularizing quantum information technologies by creating an atomic memory with outstanding parameters and an extremely simple construction.

Following years of tests in physics laboratories, the first quantum technologies are slowly emerging into wider applications. One example is quantum cryptography – an encryption method providing an almost full guarantee of secure data transmission, currently being introduced by military forces and banking institutions. Processing quantum information and sending it over long distances has so far been severely limited due to a lack of adequate memories. A solution is now within reach: the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw (FUW), Poland, has created a fully-functioning atomic memory with a simple, reliable construction and numerous potential applications, including in telecommunications.

“The greatest challenge in the construction of our quantum memory was the precise selection of system parameters that would allow it to save, store and read quantum information effectively. We have also found a novel way of reducing noise during detection,” says Dr. Wojciech Wasilewski (FUW).

Contemporary fiber-optic communications involve the transmission of classical information using laser light propagated inside optical fiber cables. Attenuation causes the light signal in the optical fiber cable to weaken as the distance it travels increases. When long optical fiber cables are used, laser amplifiers multiplicating photons are placed along them at intervals of approximately 100 km. These turn a weak signal comprising a low number of photons into a strong signal with high numbers of photons.

However, in quantum communications it is the individual photons and their quantum states that are important. Here signal amplification of the signal does not simply mean increasing the number of photons, but rather preserving their original, undisturbed quantum states. Unfortunately, quantum information cannot be duplicated with impunity: performing any measurement of the quantum state of the photon will inevitably affect its original state. The impossibility of quantum cloning, co-discovered by the Polish physicist Prof. Wojciech Żurek, places fundamental limitations on the operations that can be conducted on quantum information.

In 2001, a team of physicists from the University of Innsbruck and Harvard University proposed the DLCZ quantum transmission protocol, making it possible to send quantum information over long distances. Under this protocol, quantum information reaching each relay point along the channel must be stored there for a sufficiently long time to ensure that attempts at transmitting it to the next node are successful, as confirmed via a normal signal. In such a protocol, therefore, a key role is played by quantum memory in which quantum information needs to be stored for a sufficiently long time.

“Until now, quantum memory required highly sophisticated laboratory equipment and complex techniques chilling the systems to extremely low temperatures approaching absolute zero. The atomic memory device we have been able to create operates at far higher temperatures, in the region of tens of degrees Celsius, which are significantly easier to maintain,” notes Radek Chrapkiewicz, doctoral student at the Faculty and co-author of the paper in the renowned journal Optics Express.

The main element of the memory device constructed by the University of Warsaw physicists is a glass chamber 2.5 cm in diameter and 10 cm long, with rubidium-coated sides, filled with a noble gas. When the tube is heated gently, rubidium pairs fill the inside, with the noble gas restricting their movement and thereby reducing noise. When quantum information is stored in such a memory, photons from the laser beam “imprint” quantum states on many rubidium atoms. Other photons are emitted at the same time; their detection confirms that the information has been saved. Information stored in the memory can then be retrieved using another specially selected laser pulse.

To record and retrieve quantum information, the researchers used advanced methods of light filtering (patent pending) and an innovative camera of their own design. This camera, able to detect individual photons, is characterized by extremely low noise levels and a speed tens of times higher than existing cameras.

“The stability of the quantum information stored in our memory lasts from a few microseconds up to tens of microseconds. You’d be forgiven for asking how such short-lived memory could be useful at all, but bear in mind that it depends on the application. In telecommunications, microsecond timescales are sufficient to conduct several attempts at transmitting a quantum signal to the next relay station,” stresses Michał Dąbrowski, a doctoral student from the Faculty.

Skillfully harnessing subtle quantum optics phenomena has enabled the University of Warsaw researchers to significantly reduce noise levels in the quantum signals. When the information is retrieved, most of the noise is carried away by photons which are emitted by the memory cells in a different direction than the photons carrying the relevant quantum information.

A single atomic quantum memory cell, as developed at the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, can also store light with several different spatial modes (types of vibration). This means this is currently the solution with the highest capacity. In real quantum telecommunications applications, a single cell of this new type could serve as a buffer memory for several fiber-optic cables concurrently.

This work on atomic quantum memory cells received funding from the Polish National Research Centre.

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Fibromyalgia

Relaxation and Music: Could These Be Actual Fibromyalgia Treatments?

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating

Published Date: November 30, 2014 Last Edited: November 30, 2014

We all experience pain at least once in our lives, regardless of whether it is a physical kind of pain or an emotional one.

And yet, when both physical pain and emotional pain get together and when they affect every day of one’s life, it can be more than just uncomfortable.

For millions of Americans and people all over the world, this is a sad reality. Fibromyalgia may not take your life in the literal sense of the word, but it can place you in a bed from which you are not able to come out simply because the pain is too much to handle.

Fibromyalgia can be terrible to deal with and it can be downright confusing both for you as a patient and for your doctor.

Why Is Fibromyalgia So Complicated?

Fibromyalgia is, without any trace of doubt, one of the most complex and least understood medical conditions we know of. There is so little we understand about the way in which this condition develops and installs itself in the body that it can be absolutely baffling even to put the right diagnosis.

In fact, there are still many medical professionals refusing to accept the fact that fibromyalgia is real. There are many celebrities who have come out to speak about this condition and there has been a high level of media coverage to raise awareness, but even so, there are still many skeptics out there.

On top of that, fibromyalgia shows such a large array of symptoms and it can behave so differently in different people that putting the wrong diagnosis happens too often. Myofascial pain syndrome, arthritis, lupus, chronic fatigue syndrome – these are among the things people are very commonly diagnosed with when their primary condition is fibromyalgia.

Sensitivity to foods, medication, light, odors, irritable bowels and bladder, headaches, depression, anxiety, insomnia, restless leg syndrome and, in some cases, even cognitive issues (which are commonly referred to as “fibro fog”) – all these symptoms (and more) can appear together with the widespread chronic pain that can get debilitating at times.

What about Treatment?

There is no cure for this syndrome and it cannot be prevented either. Fibromyalgia’s causes are unknown currently and even if certain risk factors are now being taken into consideration, the truth is that no research has been able to point out the exact cause of fibromyalgia.

Genetics, for example, appear to play an important role in the way in which this syndrome develops especially since there are studies showing that there is greater likelihood that one gets fibromyalgia when his/her parents or relatives had it too.

But even if certain genes have been studied and “blamed” to be responsible for fibromyalgia, they cannot be attributed directly to this syndrome since they can be connected to other medical conditions too.

The only treatment patients have is that which targets at their symptoms, not at their condition’s cause. The Food and Drug Administration has approved three types of drugs to treat fibromyalgia, but their effectiveness is not explained properly.

They can, indeed, alleviate the pain, the fatigue and other symptoms too, but scientists have not yet been able to explain exactly why they are efficient.

Lyrica, Cymbalta and Savella (the three FDA approved drugs for treating fibromyalgia) all show side effects. Cymbalta and Savella are anti-depressants in nature, which means that they will most likely show side effects similar to those of the anti-depressives: sleepiness or insomnia, weight gain or weight loss, suicidal thoughts, sweatiness and so on.

Lyrica was initially approved to treat nerve pain, shingles rashes and seizures, but it too shows side effects so it is probably the best to try to understand these before taking the drug (or any other type of medicine, for that matter).

Relaxation: Is This Really the Key to Successfully Treating Fibromyalgia?

Among the schools of thought regarding the cause that leads to fibromyalgia, there is a particular one which believes that fibromyalgia is mainly caused by stress and stressful events. According to them, things such as living a stressful life, living in a stressful and abusive relationship, an accident, losing someone you love or any other event of this type can trigger fibromyalgia’s development in your body.

Thus, the theory according to which relaxation could be an effective tool against pain, fatigue, depression and the other fibromyalgia symptoms does make sense at least from this point of view. However, which are the best relaxation techniques and why are they recommended? Here are some things you may want to keep in mind:

1- Meditation can take your thoughts off pain and off the other symptoms experienced together with it. Learning how to meditate is easy and it can be extremely relaxing even if you don’t necessarily suffer from fibromyalgia or other medical conditions.

2- Yoga can be practiced as a relaxation technique too. There are poses meant to relax the body and the mind and the fact that they also help you stretch your overly sensitive muscles can indeed be a great thing for your fibromyalgia pain.

3- Believe it or not, simply taking a warm bath can help. Try to add essential oils for relaxation (such as lavender, which has almost magical properties when it comes to insomnias, muscle stiffness and muscle cramps).

4- Light up some scented candles or some incense sticks. There are aromas out there which have the power to relax us. Same as with the essential oils added to the bath (which can also be burned as well), lighting up some scented candles or incense sticks can help you relax much better and it can help you take your mind off the pain.

5- Turn on the music. There is no greater and more powerful art than music! Without being touchable, music has the power to send us emotional messages and it has the power to relax us like nothing else. Listen to chill out music, to classical music or to instrumental music and you will be able to relax and give your pain a “break” too.

New Device Platform Combines Sound And Light For Improved Wireless Communications Performance

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 30, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
While sound typically travels far slower than light, engineers from the University of Minnesota have created sound that is loud enough so that slower sound waves can bend faster-moving light waves on a computer chip.
This new device platform, which is described in a recent edition of the journal Nature Communications, could improve wireless communications systems using optical fibers, and could also one day be used for computations involving quantum physics.
According to the study authors, sound normally travels 768 miles per hour, while light can reach speeds of in excess of 670,000,000 miles per hour. However, the new National Science Foundation (NSF) and Air Force Office of Scientific Research-funded study creates and confines both types of waves so that the sound can control the light.
The chip used in the experiment was created using a silicon base coated with a layer of aluminum nitride which conducts an electric charge. Applying alternating electrical signals to the material causes it to periodically deform, generating sound waves that grow on its surface similar to how seismic waves generate from an earthquake’s epicenter. This technology has previously been used in cell phones, microwave filters and other wireless devices.
“Our breakthrough is to integrate optical circuits in the same layer of material with acoustic devices in order to attain extreme strong interaction between light and sound waves,” lead author Mo Li, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said in a statement.
Li and his colleagues used this cutting-edge type of nanofabrication technology to develop arrays of electrodes that were just 100 nanometers (0.00001 centimeters) wide in order to excite sound waves at an unprecedented high frequency – one higher than 10 GHz, the frequency commonly used for satellite communications.
“What’s remarkable is that at this high frequency, the wavelength of the sound is even shorter than the wavelength of light. This is achieved for the first time on a chip,” said Semere Tadesse, a graduate student in the University of Minnesota’s School of Physics and Astronomy and first author of the study. “In this unprecedented regime, sound can interact with light most efficiently to achieve high-speed modulation.”
“In addition to applications in communications, researchers are pursuing quantum physics applications for the novel device,” the university added. “They are investigating the interaction between single photons (the fundamental quantum unit of light) and single phonons (the fundamental quantum unit of sound). The researchers plan to use sound waves as the information carriers for quantum computing.”
The device was fabricated in the cleanroom at the Minnesota Nano Center at the University of Minnesota. The project was conceived and supervised by Li, while the experiments were designed and the paper co-authored by both he and Tadesse. Tadesse also performed the fabrication, and measured and analyzed the resulting data.
Back in October 2012, Li was part of a University of Minnesota team which invented a unique microscale optical device capable of dramatically increasing download speeds while also lowering the cost of bandwidth. That device used the force generated by light to rapidly turn a mechanical switch of light on and off, a breakthrough which offered superior performance while also reducing power consumption.
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World’s Oldest Computer Is Older Than Previously Believed

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 30, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek astronomical calculator believed to be the first computer ever, is as much as 100 years older than originally believed, according to new research appearing in the latest edition of the Archive for History of Exact Science.
The device, which Ellie Zolfagharifard of the Daily Mail describes as “an ancient Greek mechanism that modeled the known universe 2,000 years ago,” had previously been placed to between 100 to 150 BC by radiocarbon dating. However, researchers have now discovered that an eclipse prediction calendar located on the mechanism includes a reference to a solar eclipse that took place in May 205 BC.
The authors of the new paper, University of Puget Sound physics professor Dr. James Evans and University of Quilmes history of science professor Christián Carman, studied both the Antikythera Mechanism and Babylonian records of eclipses over the course of several years before reaching their conclusion. Their findings also indicate that the ancient Greeks were able to predict eclipses, and were able to engineer the complex machine at an earlier stage than first thought, said Kukil Bora of International Business Times.
“The study also supports the idea that the eclipse prediction scheme was not based on Greek trigonometry – which was nonexistent in 205 BC – but on Babylonian arithmetical methods, borrowed by the Greeks,” Bora added. “The dating of the Antikythera Mechanism’s creation also supports an old belief that Archimedes created a similar mechanism, which was carried back to Rome by the Roman general Marcellus… in 212 BC.”
Eighty-two rusty bronze fragments originating from the device were found more than a century ago in a Roman shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera, for which it was named. In 2006, a team of US, UK and Greek scientists used specially developed X-ray scanning and imaging technology to analyze the corroded bronze, first discovering hidden machinery and a type of written user’s manual belonging to the device.
At the time, Cardiff University astronomy professor and project leader Mike Edmunds said the 82 fragments that survived had been dated to between 140 BC and 100 BC, included over 30 gear wheels, and were covered with “astronomical, mathematical and mechanical inscriptions.” In addition to predicting eclipses, the box-shaped mechanism “showed the position of the sun and moon in the zodiac, the phase of the moon, and we believe also it may have shown the position of some of the planets, possibly just Venus and Mercury.”
Now, however, the research of Evans and Carman revealed the revised 205 BC date by eliminating dates during which the eclipse patterns of the Antikythera Mechanism matched up with Babylonian records as reconstructed by John Steele of Brown University, the University of Puget Sound explained in a statement Tuesday. Their calculations also took into account lunar and solar anomalies, missing solar eclipses, lunar and solar eclipse cycles, and other astronomical phenomena.
Two great mysteries continue to surround the device, according to John Markoff of the New York Times: Who built the Antikythera Mechanism, and where was it made? Six years ago, a research team reported that language inscribed on the device suggested it had been manufactured in either Corinth or Syracuse, where Archimedes lived.
However, Markoff explained, “Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier in 212 BC, while the commercial grain ship carrying the mechanism is believed to have sunk sometime between 85 and 60 BC,” meaning that it seems unlikely that the device was directly connected to the Ancient Greek mathematician and inventor. An inscription on one of the dials refers to an athletic competition that was held in Rhodes, one researcher noted.
“If we were all taking bets about where it was made, I think I would bet what most people would bet, in Rhodes,” Alexander Jones, a specialist in the history of ancient mathematical scientists at New York University, told the New York Times. However, Dr. Evans said he remained dubious about attempting to identify its inventor, adding that it was “probably safer not to try to hang it on any one particular famous person.”
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Coffee Can Help Lower Alzheimer’s Disease Risk – But For How Long?

Written By: Brett Smith

Published Date: November 29, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Like chocolate and red wine, coffee is one of those items which seem to make headlines for its positive or negative health effects every few weeks.

This week, research sponsored by the Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee (ISIC) and presented at an Alzheimer Europe session indicated that at least three cups of coffee per day could help lower short-term risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

“Cognitive decline is a feature of aging, and although some changes can be expected in all of us, there is some evidence that diet and lifestyle may be related to cognition,” said Iva Holmerov, Alzheimer Europe’s vice chairperson, according to Yagana Shah of the Huffington Post. “In fact epidemiological studies suggest that certain lifestyle factors and nutritional elements, including the consumption of coffee and caffeine, may help to slow age-related cognitive decline seen in the older generation.”

The ISIC researchers pointed to two components of coffee that could explain why it lowers the risk for dementia: caffeine and polyphenols. Caffeine helps in avoiding the development of amyloid plaques and neurofibrulary knots in the brain, both of which are factors in Alzheimer’s disease development. Also, both caffeine and polyphenols lessen inflammation and reduce the wearing down of brain cells, especially in the hippocampus and cortex, which are both vital to memory function.

ISIC said its researchers had noticed a significant lack of study collectively involving the long-term and short-term effects of coffee when it comes to Alzheimer’s – although there have been studies that looked at these time frames independently.

The institute therefore commissioned an evaluation of a study with about 5,000 middle-aged participants which tracked self-reported coffee intake from 1989 to 1991. Participants in the study were tracked after this initial period from 1997 to 2011.

The study team found that three or more cups a day lowered the risk for dementia in a four-year follow-up period. However, after those four years – the protective relationship diminished significantly, to the point where there was actually a negative relationship between high coffee consumption intake and dementia.

The study team theorized that the subsequent negative relationship could be due to “a reverse causal effect,” in which the short-term protective effects simply put off the development of Alzheimer’s.

“The majority of human epidemiological studies suggest that regular coffee consumption over a lifetime is associated with a reduced risk of developing Alzheimer’s Disease, with an optimum protective effect occurring with three to five cups of coffee per day,” noted Arfram Ikram, an assistant professor in neuroepidemiology at Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands who presented the findings.

“The findings presented in this report are very encouraging and help to develop our understanding of the role nutrition can play in protecting against Alzheimer’s disease,” Holmerova concluded. “Coffee is a very popular beverage enjoyed by millions of people around the world and I’m pleased to know that moderate, lifelong consumption can have a beneficial effect on the development of Alzheimer’s disease.”

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Graphene Could Build Better Bulletproof Vests

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 29, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Writing in the latest edition of the journal Science, Rice University and the University of Massachusetts researchers demonstrate that bulletproof vests made from graphene could withstand the impact of a bullet better than those made from steel or Kevlar.
According to BBC News online science editor Paul Rincon, Jae-Hwang Lee of the University of Massachusetts Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and his colleagues carried out small-scale ballistics tests by firing silica spheres at sheets of the thin, nearly transparent sheets of pure carbon. They found that graphene can be stronger than steel when absorbing impact.
The material, Rincon explains, consists of a sheet of single atoms that have been arranged in a honeycomb structure. It is thin, strong and flexible, and is also an extremely efficient conductor of heat and electricity. Lee’s team used lasers to observe the silica spheres as they penetrated sheets of the material that were 10 to 100 layers thick, and compared the kinetic energy of those so-called “microbullets” both before and after piercing the graphene.
“Observations using an electron microscope revealed that graphene dissipates energy by stretching into a cone shape and then cracking in various directions,” he said. The tests demonstrated that the material’s “extraordinary strength, elasticity and stiffness allowed it to absorb between eight and 10 times the impacts” of steel, but that the impact left a “wider impact hole” in the graphene, which Rincon calls “a potential disadvantage.”
Ever since graphene was first discovered in 2004, researchers have been performing extreme stunts to demonstrate its strength, Matthew Gunther of RSC’s Chemistry World explained. However, while there have been claims that the material “could withstand the force of an elephant balancing on a pencil,” this marks the first time it has been “subjected to the extreme conditions of high speed ballistics, the true strength test for armored materials.”
Lee explained to Gunther that they were unable to use conventional methods such as using a gun barrel or gunpowder on a test of this scale, so instead they used the laser to accelerate a microscale silica sphere at the multilayer graphene targets. That bullet was propelled into the stacked graphene sheets at of speeds of up to 2000 mph by the gases produced by laser pulses rapidly evaporating a gold film, he added, and the researchers calculated the energy difference of the bullet both before and after impact to determine how much energy was absorbed.
“The researchers found that the sheets were able to dissipate the energy of the bullet by stretching backwards – sort of like when someone jumps on a trampoline,” said Bob Yirka of PhysOrg. “The researchers found that the graphene was able to perform twice as well as Kevlar, the material currently used in bullet-proof vests, and up to ten times as well as steel.”
“The ability of graphene to dissipate energy, the team explains, is due to a high degree of stiffness combined with low density, which means that energy can move through it very quickly, allowing for the dissipation of energy from something traveling as fast as a bullet,” he added. “The researchers efforts show that graphene could very well mean a better bullet-proof vest, if a way could be found to produce it in enough quantity and at a low enough price.”

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Pitfalls Of Using Social Media For Scientific Studies Examined

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 29, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Behavioral scientists and other academic researchers are increasingly turning to social media to find subjects for their studies, but doing so could lead to erroneous results with serious implications, computer experts from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh and McGill University in Montreal report in a newly published study.
According to the authors of the paper, which was published in the November 28 edition of the journal Science, social media appears attractive to researchers behind behavioral studies because it gives them a quick and inexpensive way to gather massive amounts of data about peoples’ thoughts and feelings. Some of those dataset may be misleading, however, they explained.
In their paper, Carnegie Mellon’s Juergen Pfeffer and McGill University’s Derek Ruths note that thousands of research papers each year are based on information gathered through social media. However, they contend that scientists need to find ways for correcting the inherent biases in information gathered from the likes of Facebook and Twitter, or at the very least acknowledge that there could be issues with such data.
“Not everything that can be labeled as ‘Big Data’ is automatically great,” said Pfeffer, an assistant research professor in CMU’s Institute for Software Research, explained in a statement. He said that while many researchers believe that if they can gather a large enough dataset, it will overcome any potential biases or distortions inherent in that data, “but the old adage of behavioral research still applies: Know Your Data.”
He and Ruths, an assistant professor of computer science at McGill, said that even though the problem is far from insignificant, social media is still difficult to resist as a source of data. “People want to say something about what’s happening in the world and social media is a quick way to tap into that,” Pfeffer said. For example, following 2013’s Boston Marathon bombing, he said he collected 25 million tweets related to the topic in just two weeks time.
The main problem, according to the researchers, is the attempt for study authors to generalize their results to a broad population. However, social media sites often have significant population biases in that different social networks attract different types of users. For example, Pinterest’s membership is primarily females aged 25 to 34 with average household incomes of $100,000, while Instagram appeals mostly to adults under the age of 29, African-Americans, Latinos, women and urban dwellers, Pfeffer and Ruths explained.
Other possible issues include the fact that publically available data feeds may not necessarily provide an accurate representation of the platform’s overall data; the design of a social media platform may impact how users behave, and what behavior can be measured (for example, the lack of a “dislike” button on Facebook makes it harder to detect negative responses to content); and large numbers of bots and spammers may masquerade as human users, and thus their input may mistakenly be incorporated into behavior-related measurements and predictions.
“Researchers often report results for groups of easy-to-classify users, topics, and events, making new methods seem more accurate than they actually are,” McGill University’s Chris Chipello explained. “For instance, efforts to infer political orientation of Twitter users achieve barely 65 percent accuracy for typical users – even though studies (focusing on politically active users) have claimed 90 percent accuracy.”
“The common thread in all these issues is the need for researchers to be more acutely aware of what they’re actually analyzing when working with social media data,” Ruths noted, comparing the issue to the telephone survey errors that led to the infamous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline during the Presidential election of 1948.
“Rather than permanently discrediting the practice of polling, that glaring error led to today’s more sophisticated techniques, higher standards, and more accurate polls,” he added. “Now, we’re poised at a similar technological inflection point. By tackling the issues we face, we’ll be able to realize the tremendous potential for good promised by social media-based research.”
Recommended Reading
> In The Name Of Science – Manipulating Facebook Users’ Emotions
> How to Think Like a Behavior Analyst: Understanding the Science That Can Change Your Life
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Secret Sony Project Revealed: A Watch Made Of E-Paper

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 29, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
An experimental smartwatch made from electronic paper and purportedly the work of a “startup” known as Fashion Entertainments is actually a secret project in the works at Sony, the Wall Street Journal first reported on Friday.
According to WSJ blogger Takashi Mochizuki, the Japanese technology giant has quietly been experimenting with e-paper, a display technology which mimics the appearance of ordinary ink on paper. Unlike traditional backlit flat panel displays, e-paper displays reflect light, making them easier to read and giving them a wider viewing angle.
Sony, under the Fashion Entertainments label, is studying how to use the material to develop fashion products, Mochizuki explained. A spokesman with the company told the Journal that Sony is working on a prototype known as the FES Watch, which has a wristband based on e-paper, comes with 24 design patterns that can be changed manually, and can alter its appearance based on the user’s gestures.
The company has sought to keep its involvement in the project secret, even putting it on Japanese crowdfunding website Makuake back in September in order to gauge interest in the product, according to CNET’s Rich Trenholm. To date, it has raised 3.5 million yen ($30,000) from over 150 supporters, nearly doubling its original goal, and those who contributed have been told that they will receive their watches sometime after May 2015, he added.

Image Above Credit: Fashion Entertainments

Fashion Entertainments is headed up by Hiroki Totoki, the new head of Sony’s smartphone efforts, and is part of a program of internal entrepreneurship conceived by Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai, explained Darrell Etherington of TechCrunch. He noted that Sony decided to mask their involvement so that it could evaluate customer reaction to the proposed product without people becoming influenced by its well-known brand name.
“Turning e-paper into a fabric has a number of potential benefits – including the ability to change pattern and design of things you’re wearing in an instant, including colored options using newer color e-ink technology,” Etherington said. “The material’s extremely low power draw means it should be able to last a long time without charging.”
In fact, BBC News technology reporter Dave Lee said that the FES watch has an estimated battery life of 60 days. Lee also noted that the display resembles those used by e-readers such as the Amazon Kindle, and that Fashion Entertainments is also working on a whole line of e-paper products, including bow ties, shoes and glasses.
Mochizuki said that Sony and its CEO are “encouraging its employees to come up with new product or business ideas by providing financial and advisory support.” Fashion Entertainments is the latest result of that initiative, following Sony Real Estate (a real-estate service company launched in April) and the Sony Seed Acceleration Program (which was launched earlier this year “to foster creative ideas through auditions,” the WSJ writer said).
As for the FES Watch, Etherington said that smartphone-style functions such as notifications and messaging services could be possible with the technology, but the primary goal of the project is to keep it simple and showcase e-paper as more of a “fabric or building block” and less as a piece of technology. While pre-order customers will get their devices after next May, Sony has not announced an official release date for the new watch.

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Fibromyalgia

Memory Loss in Fibromyalgia – Is it real?

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating

Published Date: November 28, 2014 Last Edited: November 28, 2014

If you have fibromyalgia then you probably feel like your mind is slowly slipping away while your body has turned against you. The experience of memory loss in fibromyalgia is very real, and it can be frightening.

It is important to know that what you are experiencing is real, but is a result of a natural reaction of the body to the stress caused by fibromyalgia. It is something that can be handled and you can regain your composure, and your ability to function at a level that is much better than where you may be now.

How does it affect memory?

Many people report that they experience memory loss during the course of their experience with fibromyalgia. What is uncertain is whether this is a symptom of fibromyalgia, or if it is a result of the stress of the constellation of symptoms that this chronic disease can present. There is also the possibility that some of the common and popular medications used to relieve fibromyalgia can cause memory loss too.

Memory loss versus the “fibro fog”

The term memory loss refers to a very specific deterioration of brain processes. What many people experience with fibromyalgia, and is considered one of the hallmarks of the disease, is a loss of focus and concentration. A loss of focus and concentration is not memory loss, although it can be a part of a condition that can exist with memory loss. The loss of focus and concentration is often called the “fibro fog”, where people feel like they can never really “wake-up” or connect with the world. This may be more of a result of the cumulative effect of chronic pain on memory and thinking that would fit with the constellation of symptoms found with fibromyalgia.

The cumulative effect of chronic pain on memory

All pain, inflammation, infection and illness is a stress upon the body. When the body is under stress it does not care what the cause of the stress is, or even whether it is a good type of stress (such as proposing marriage). The body will react in the same way by releasing hormones such as cortisol. When you have a condition with chronic pain or inflammation, the body is always under stress and is releasing constant stress hormones. The body cannot process the hormones quickly enough and the buildup in the system can then lead to memory loss in fibromyalgia. Control the pain and inflammation, and you can help to reduce the stress reaction and improve your focus and concentration.

What are the best treatments for fibromyalgia?

A wonderful way to help beat memory loss with fibromyalgia is to learn to meditate. You can meditate to decrease your fibromyalgia symptoms, and it will also improve your overall mental and emotional health too. Meditation can help you to manage your pain, improve your thinking and give you a needed break from the stress of chronic illness. Another highly recommended treatment is to engage in yoga, qi gong or tai chi. These are exercise methods that have an emphasis on circulation and breathing, plus they will help you to maintain a healthy body weight too.

When will there be a cure?

There is no known cure for fibromyalgia currently. Scientists are just starting to understand some of the ways that it works within the body and this is helping them to shape better treatments so that you don’t have to suffer from the disease. There are many things that you can do with lifestyle changes, as well as effective medicines and alternative treatments too. What will work for you may not be what will work for someone else. If you have other conditions that you need to take care of you need to make sure that your care is coordinated so that treatments for one disorder don’t complicate the symptoms of another as well. It is also important that you and your treatment team revisit your treatments in light of recent findings so that you are always taking advantages of the latest discoveries made about effective treatment of fibromyalgia.

Can anyone get it?

While fibromyalgia is primarily found in women between the ages of 40 and 60, it has been diagnosed in men as well. Doctors now think that the symptoms of fibromyalgia in men may not be as easily recognizable as they are in women. Most of the research has centered on women, but that is slowly changing. It is not known why someone develops fibromyalgia but there are a few markers in your medical and family history that may indicate an increased risk of developing the disorder. If anyone in your family has it, you do have a higher risk of developing it. Also, there is a correlation between brain injury and fibromyalgia that is just being recognized and explored now. Also, certain diseases, illness and disorders can raise your risk as well. Your best bet is to get as full and complete a family history, and your own medical history, together when you see your doctor about your symptoms.

What should I do?

If you are experiencing symptoms that you think may be fibromyalgia it is important that you see your doctor. They will eliminate the possibility of your symptoms being from another illness so you can pursue proper treatment. If you are experiencing memory loss in fibromyalgia it is important that you talk to your doctor. You need to first look at whether it can be aside effect of a medication you are on, and if not, develop a plan to help you retain your memory or compensate for areas in which you have difficulty. Fibromyalgia is a chronic and life-long condition, but it is not terminal. It is also something that much progress has been made in understanding how to relieve you symptoms. You don’t have to suffer, and if you are experiencing memory loss, you don’t have to live with fear – talk to your doctor and find out what you can do.

Endangered Hammerhead Shark Found Migrating Into Unprotected Waters

Written By: editor

Published Date: November 28, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

editor

Provided by Joel Winston, BioMed Central

The precise movements of a young hammerhead shark have been tracked for the first time and are published in the open access journal Animal Biotelemetry. The study, which ran over a 10-month period, reveals important gaps in current efforts to protect these endangered sharks and suggests key locations that should be protected to help the survival of the species.

Hammerhead sharks, which have recently received new protections from the UN Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, are experiencing drastic population declines in excess of 90% in several parts of world. Scalloped hammerhead sharks, found in the Gulf of California, Mexico, are particularly susceptible to being caught by fishing nets while moving into the open sea, but little information exists on their exact movements, especially those of juvenile sharks as they go through the critical period of adolescence.

Researchers from the Centro Interdisciplinario de Ciencias Marinas, Mexico and the University of California, Davis, USA travelled out into the Gulf of California by boat and collected three live juvenile hammerhead sharks of the appropriate size (around 95 cm) for tracking their movements through adolescence. At the base of their pelvic fins they inserted small electronic tracking devices, able to calculate position and depth, and then released the young sharks back into the water.

Only one shark, a female which had grown to 123 cm, was recaptured 10 months later by local fisherman after they identified the visible tag and reward notice during fishing. After the tracking device was removed and the shark released, the downloaded data revealed a wealth of information about her 3,350 km journey, uncovering important insights into habitat use and pinpointing key sites to be considered for protection by ecologists and conservationists.

Study author Mauricio Hoyos from Pelagios Kakunjá (a Mexican NGO) said “In Mexico in the eighties, the sea of Cortes was one of the best places to see these beautiful and majestic animals but at present it’s hard to see even a few. The key to protecting this species is detecting their nursery grounds and protecting them in their more vulnerable stages. This is the first time ever that we have an idea of the behavior of this life stage in this zone and this information will be important to design management plans to protect this species in Mexico.”

The young female hammerhead was found to swim within a school of fellow hammerheads at an offshore island during the day, but migrated away at night, diving to greater depths to feed on fish and squid, sometimes as deep as 270m.

By completing her biological cycle in both coastal and offshore areas of the central and southwestern Gulf of California, the researchers believe that the hammerhead was maximizing her foraging opportunities and continued growth. Scalloped hammerhead shark pups have high metabolic rates and as they grow older require higher ration levels to fulfil their energetic needs. Those sharks that do not become successful in learning how to catch prey quickly may starve as a result, which would partially explain the early migration of this juvenile female to off-shore waters for richer food.

The research suggests that juvenile female hammerheads are trading off the risks of greater exposure to predators in the open sea, in exchange for the opportunity to get offshore as early as possible and grow big quickly. By doing this they can jockey for position, assert dominance in the schools, establish social rank and increase their reproductive potential.

The new insights suggest that current management measures for sharks set by the Mexican government may not be sufficient for the conservation of this species. Increased human fishing pressure has reduced the size of the population of scalloped hammerhead populations to a negligible size in the Gulf of California, with the species becoming extremely rare in the Mexican Pacific.

Measures including the current prohibition of commercial fishing from large vessels within 50 nautical miles from the coast have resulted in some protection, but the researchers say that this new information highlights that hammerhead sharks may still be in danger, due to their use of both coastal and offshore waters during early life stages. They say that coastal nursery grounds and offshore refuging areas for scalloped hammerheads are therefore critical habitats where protected marine reserves should be sited.

Study author James Ketchum from Pelagios Kakunjá (a Mexican NGO) said: “For the first time, we’ve seen the shift from a coastal-inhabiting juvenile to a migratory adolescent that remains mostly offshore in order to maximize growth and reproductive potential. Because of their dependence on both coastal and offshore waters during their early life-stages, we think that they may be more susceptible to fisheries than previously thought, and current protective measures in Mexico may unfortunately be insufficient.”

The study is limited by its low sample size, and the researchers say that considerable additional research is needed in order to determine critical habitats of hammerheads in the Gulf of California. This study is the first of a new article type: Telemetry Case Reports, being published by Animal Biotelemetry, which hopes to highlight small pilot studies on single individuals or very limited samples.

Citation: Ontogenetic migration of a female scalloped hammerhead shark Sphyrna lewini in the Gulf of California. Mauricio E Hoyos-Padilla, James T Ketchum, Peter A Klimley and Felipe Galván-Magaña. Animal Biotelemetry 2014, 2:17

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High-Tech Mirror Could Reduce The Need For Air Conditioning

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 28, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
High-tech mirror beams heat away from buildings into space
Engineers from Stanford University have developed a new ultrathin, multilayered material capable of cooling down buildings by radiating warmth from the inside out into space and reducing incoming heat by reflecting sunlight.
The revolutionary coating, which is described in a research paper published online Wednesday in the journal Nature, is designed to deal with both visible and invisible light in the form of infrared radiation. The authors explain that infrared radiation is one of the ways in which all living beings and all objects give off heat, but their new material diverts it away from buildings.
Stanford electrical engineering professor Shanhui Fan, research associate Aaswath Raman and their colleagues refer to the technique used by the coating as photonic radiative cooling, a combination of offloading infrared heat from inside a building while also reflecting the sunlight that would otherwise have caused it to grow warmer.
“This is very novel and an extraordinarily simple idea,” Eli Yablonovitch, director of the Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science and an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement Wednesday. “As a result of professor Fan’s work, we can now [use radiative cooling], not only at night but counter-intuitively in the daytime as well.”
The material, which was designed to be cost-effective for large-scale deployment on building rooftops, could reduce the need for buildings to use air conditioning, the study authors said. While the technology is still in its formative stages, they believe it could reduce the demand for electricity, especially the 15 percent required to power air conditioning systems in the US.
Raman, who was the lead author of the Nature paper, said that there is a need to find cooling technologies that do not require power, and that “photonic radiative cooling makes off-grid cooling a possibility” in rural regions and across the developing world. It would also help meet “skyrocketing demand for air conditioning in urban areas,” he added.
Heat can be transferred in three different ways: through touch (conduction), through movement of air or fluids (convection) or as infrared light (radiation). The new coating developed by the Stanford engineers first radiates heat-bearing infrared light directly into space, sending it away from buildings at a frequency that allows it to pass through the atmosphere without causing harm to the air. It also serves like a mirror, reflecting sunlight away from the building.
“Together, the radiation and reflection make the photonic radiative cooler nearly 9 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the surrounding air during the day,” the university explained. “The multilayered material is just 1.8 microns thick, thinner than the thinnest aluminum foil. It is made of seven layers of silicon dioxide and hafnium oxide on top of a thin layer of silver. These layers are not a uniform thickness, but are instead engineered to create a new material.”
“This photonic approach gives us the ability to finely tune both solar reflection and infrared thermal radiation,” said Linxiao Zhu, a doctoral candidate in applied physics and co-author of the paper. Marin Soljacic, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), added that he was “personally very excited about their results” and said that the research was “a great example of the power of nanophotonics.”
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GOCE Satellite Data Used To Create More Accurate Ocean Current Map

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 28, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Data collected by the ESA’s Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) has helped scientists produce what they are calling the most accurate gravity maps of global ocean currents ever.
GOCE, which was operational from 2009 through 2013, was used to provide extremely precise measurements of the Earth’s gravitational field. Scientists received the final data package from the mission four months ago, and presented some of their findings (including the new map) this week at a conference at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.
According to BBC News science correspondent Jonathan Amos, the new model will be useful to climate scientists because the circulation of ocean water helps transport heat around the world. GOCE’s instruments could detect very subtle changes in gravity, and using that information, the team was able to develop a “geoid” or a depiction of the “level surface” on a perfect world.
In reality, gravitational pull varies from place to place due to the uneven distribution of mass inside the planet, Amos explained. However, a “geoid” depicts the shape the oceans would take if they were not disturbed by winds, currents or tides. By comparing this model to measurements of sea-surface height made by other spacecraft, the researchers are able to determine where water started piling up.
Furthermore, as Patrick J. Kiger of Discovery News noted, using simulations of the Earth’s oceans at rest allows scientists to better observe the impact of gravity on ocean currents. Under real-life conditions, the relationship between gravity and currents is more difficult to accurately chart due to the influence of other forces (such as wind), which causes those ocean currents to deviate from the patterns established by gravity.

Gulf Stream current velocities. Image: TUM IAPG

“Clearly visible in the map at the top of this page are the Agulhas Current flowing down the African coast; the Gulf Stream running across the Atlantic; the Kuroshio Current that sweeps south of Japan and out into the North Pacific; as well as the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, and the system of currents that hug the Equator,” the BBC News writer said. “In places, these great trains of water move in excess of 1m per second.”
The geoid is also described in a new study from researchers at the University of Bonn Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformation, the Graz University of Technology Institute of Theoretical Geodesy and Satellite Geodesy, the Space Research Institute at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Institute for Astronomical and Physical Geodesy at Technische Universität München. That paper appears in the November 25 online edition of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
“The new GOCE model of ocean circulation has been checked and integrated with the point measurements from drifting buoys. This has helped capture some of the smaller-scale features in the currents that lie beyond the capabilities of satellites, even one that made as highly resolved observations as the ESA mission,” said Amos.
“Scientists can now add in data collected about sea temperature to calculate the amount of energy the oceans move around the Earth. Computer models that try to forecast future climate behavior have to incorporate such details if they are to run more realistic simulations,” he continued, noting that “many other applications” could use GOCE data, including those monitoring Antarctic ice loss or the deep-Earth movements responsible for earthquakes.
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UPDATED: Philae’s Instruments Confirm Presence Of Organic Molecules On Comet 67P/C-G

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 28, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
UPDATE: November 28, 2014 (6:10 a.m. CST)
The organic molecules detected on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (67P/C-G) by the Philae lander earlier this month may be complex carbon compounds, scientists involved with the project told BBC News correspondent Pallab Ghosh on Wednesday.
“We can say with absolute certainty that we saw a very large signal of what are basically organic (carbon) compounds,” team leader Professor Ian Wright of The Open University said. “There is a rich signal there. It is not simple. It is not like there are two compounds; there are clearly a lot of things there – a lot of peaks. Sometimes a complicated compound can give a lot of peaks.”
Those so-called peaks refer to a graph produced by instruments on board Philae’s Ptolemy instrument, which indicate the different molecules detected on the comet and matches up well with previous data obtained using the German Aerospace Center’s (DLR) COSAC instrument. The detection of carbon “supports a view that comets may have brought key chemicals to Earth to kick-start life,” the BBC reporter said.
Wright went on to tell Ghosh that Ptolemy had gathered a tremendous amount of data, and that the results of their experiments could help determine the composition of the carbon and nitrogen on the comet. That information, he explained, could help scientists determine exactly what was took place while the planets were first forming.
ORIGINAL: November 19, 2014 (6:00 a.m. CST)
Before the Philae lander’s batteries depleted late last week, one of its instruments was able to detect organic molecules on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (67P/C-G), scientists involved with the mission have confirmed.
The German Aerospace Center (DLR) briefly mentioned in a statement released Monday that its COSAC instrument “was able to ‘sniff’ the atmosphere” and “detect the first organic molecules” before the probe was forced to enter “idle mode.”
The DLR did not elaborate, but BBC News online science editor Paul Rincon said Dr. Fred Goessmann, principal investigator on the COSAC team, had confirmed the findings, but noted that he and his colleagues were still attempting to interpret the results.
Rincon noted that the scientists did not disclose which molecules had been found, or how complex they might be. However, he noted the results “are likely to provide insights into the possible role of comets in contributing some of the chemical building blocks to the primordial mix from which life evolved on the early Earth.”
“Scientists are analyzing the data to see whether the organic compounds detected by Philae are simple ones – such as methane and methanol – or a more complex species such as amino acids, the building blocks for proteins,” added Gautam Naik of The Wall Street Journal. “A drill on Philae also obtained some material from the comet’s hard surface, but data about organic molecules from that experiment have yet to be fully analyzed.”
Analysis of the organic materials found on 67P/C-G “will help us to understand whether organic molecules were brought by comets to the early Earth,” which could have served as the catalyst for life on our planet, DLR scientist and Philae lander manager Stephan Ulamec told Naik.
While the Philae team expected to find organic molecules on the comet, the lander’s instruments make it possible for the first time to conduct a direct search for organic molecules in both its gases and its surface material, the WSJ reporter added. The data will be compared to earlier measurements, which were obtained by Rosetta and detected water, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and trace amounts of ammonia, methane and methanol.
COSAC is not the only Philae instrument that has sent back scientific data, however. On Tuesday, the ESA reported in its Rosetta blog that the thermal mapper in the Multi-Purpose Sensors for Surface and Subsurface Science instrument package (MUPUS) had recorded temperatures of nearly -153 degrees Celsius close to the floor of the lander’s balcony prior to deployment.
Furthermore, following its deployment, the sensors near its tip cooled by roughly 10 degrees Celsius over approximately 30 minutes time. Jörg Knollenberg, instrument scientist for MUPUS at DLR, said that this is either due to the radiative transfer of heat to the cold nearby wall that had previously been captured in images, or to the fact that the probe had wound up in a pile of cold dust following its rough landing on Wednesday.
“Looking at the results of the thermal mapper and the probe together, the team have made the preliminary assessment that the upper layers of the comet’s surface consist of dust of 10–20 cm thickness, overlaying mechanically strong ice or ice and dust mixtures,” the ESA said. “At greater depths, the ice likely becomes more porous, as the overall low density of the nucleus – determined by instruments on the Rosetta orbiter – suggests.”
Since part of the MUPUS instruments were contained in the harpoons, some temperature and accelerometer data could not be gathered due to Philae’s landing issues. Should the probe eventually regain power, however, DLR researchers said that they would likely use MUPUS to perform direct observations of the dust layer where the probe currently resides, and seeing if it evolves as the comet moves closer to the sun.
As for the chances that the lander will reactivate in the near future, Reuters reporter Irene Klotz noted that those involved in the mission are hopeful that, as 67P/C-G grows warmer, the jets of gas released by the comet could help lift Philae out of its shadowed area and into more direct sunlight, thus allowing its solar panels to recharge its batteries.
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CDC: US Smoking Rates Reach Historic Lows

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 28, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Smoking rates among US adults have dipped to an all-time low, falling from 20.9 percent in 2005 to less than 18 percent in 2013, according to new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistics released this week.

In addition, the CDC reported that the percentage of people who smoked cigarettes daily dropped from 16.9 percent to 13.7 percent. Among those daily smokers, the amount of people smoking 20 to 29 cigarettes per day (CPD) dropped from 34.9 percent to 29.3 percent, and the number smoking more than thirty fell by five percent.

Credit: CDC

While those figures represent “the lowest percentage since the annual survey began keeping track in 1965,” Karen Kaplan of the Los Angeles Times noted that “Americans still have a ways to go to meet the nation’s Healthy People 2020 target” of bringing the adult smoking rate in the US down to 12 percent, according to the study.

While the CDC statistics reveal that the amount of smokers dropped from 45.1 million to 42.1 million, Time.com’s Alexandra Sifferlin said that public health officials are still concerned about the number of people who are smoking. In addition, a report released earlier this month indicated that there is still a high amount of younger people who smoke, despite the health risks.

“Though smokers are smoking fewer cigarettes, cutting back by a few cigarettes a day rather than quitting completely does not produce significant health benefits,” Dr. Brian King, a senior scientific advisor with CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, said in a statement. “Smokers who quit before they’re 40 years old can get back almost all of the 10 years of life expectancy smoking takes away.”

“There is encouraging news in this study, but we still have much more work to do to help people quit,” added Dr. Tim McAfee, director of the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health. “We can bring down cigarette smoking rates much further, much faster, if strategies proven to work are put in place like funding tobacco control programs at the CDC-recommended levels, increasing prices of tobacco products, implementing and enforcing comprehensive smoke-free laws, and sustaining hard-hitting media campaigns.”

According to the CDC, cigarette smoking is the leading preventable cause of disease and death in the US and is responsible for over 480,000 deaths each year. While smoking rates have dropped, the report indicated that they remain particularly high in some groups, including those below the poverty level, those with less education, males, those living in the South or Midwest, the disabled and those who are lesbian, gay or bisexual.

Data from the report was obtained from the 2013 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), an annual and nationally representative in-person survey of the US civilian population. The 2013 NHIS featured 34,557 respondents at least 18 years of age. Participants were categorized as current cigarette smokers if they reported smoking at least 100 cigarettes during their lifetimes, and were currently smoking every day or some days at the time of the interview.

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Multiple Media Outlets Victimized By Thanksgiving Day Attack

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 28, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The websites of several news organizations were targeted by a Thanksgiving Day attack involving pop-up ads promoting a group of hackers known as the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), various media outlets are reporting.
According to PCWorld and CNET, affected websites included those belonging to the Boston Globe, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), CNBC, the Chicago Tribune, UK newspapers The Independent and The Telegraph, and PCWorld itself.
In addition, CNBC’s Katrina Bishop said that companies such as Dell, Ferrari and Microsoft, as well as the website of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the online versions of Forbes and Italy’s La Repubblica were also affected. Bishop also confirmed that some CNBC users had reported seeing the message.
The SEA took credit for the attack via Twitter, which Andrew Griffin of The Independent said was pulled off by attacking the domain name system (DNS) entries of the popular Gigya comment platform through domain registrar GoDaddy.
Griffin said the attackers were able to alter the DNS technology, which changes the “.com” website addresses into directions to the actual website, and direct it to websites other than the intended destination. By doing so, they were able to redirect the traffic to SEA-related images or messages hosted on other websites. Gigya and GoDaddy worked together to remove the redirection, he said, though the fix may not immediately appear for all users.
Griffin said that the commenting system itself was not hacked, and CEO Patrick Salyer added that “neither Gigya’s platform itself nor any user, administrator or operational data has been compromised and was never at risk of being compromised. Rather, the attack only served other JavaScript files instead of those served by Gigya.”
CNET’s Stephen Shankland said the attack was a variation on methods previously used by SEA hackers, and security experts told Bishop the attack was likely launched on Thursday because it was Thanksgiving in the US. Since it was a holiday, they explained, many Americans would be at home and browsing news websites on their computers and/or mobile devices.
“It is PR move to show they have the skills, but what they are doing is not dramatically sophisticated,” Ernest Hilbert, managing director of cybercrime at investigations firm Kroll, and former FBI agent, told CNBC. “This is a defacement of a website and they redirected traffic from the real site to a site with their stuff on it instead.”
The SEA has previously targeted the websites of the New York Times, the BBC and Microsoft, as well as the Twitter accounts of other media organizations, the Chicago Tribune reported. Likewise, Shankland noted that the group has also gone after news organization Reuters and satirical website The Onion in the past, and Bishop noted that the collective appears to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“Unlike many state-sanctioned hack attacks, the SEA tends to focus on extremely public targets, and uses its successes to promote its cause and gain publicity,” said Alex Hern of The Guardian. “It is also notable for attacking its targets using a mixture of social engineering and ‘spear phishing,’ rather than exploiting computer vulnerabilities.”
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Fibromyalgia

How your menstrual cycle and fibromyalgia affect each other

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating

Published Date: November 27, 2014 Last Edited: November 27, 2014

You don’t need an article to tell you that the menstrual cycle and fibromyalgia aren’t the best companions. In fact, science has discovered that there may be a direct correlation between flare-ups of the disease and the menstrual cycle. What may surprise you is that it may not be happening during the phase of the cycle that you think.

While menses is recognized as the “cycle,” it is actually a much longer process that is divided into several different phases. How these phases interact with fibromyalgia is leading researchers to identify certain aspects of the disease that may explain why more women get it than men.

Why do more women get fibromyalgia than men?

While men do get fibromyalgia, almost 90% of the people diagnosed with this disease have been women. As more and more is coming to be understood about the effect of the menstrual cycle and fibromyalgia symptoms on each other, there is a growing trend of thinking that hormones play a pivotal role in the experience of the disease. Many women experience more flare-ups with their fibromyalgia during the leuteal phase of their menstrual cycle than any other time of the month.

What is the leuteal phase?

The leuteal phase is the phase when women with fibromyalgia may be most affected by their menstrual cycle. Most women don’t recognize this phase as it does not occur with menses, but is the period after ovulation and is the 14 to 16 day period before menses. During this time the primary hormone that is being produced is progesterone. It is thought that it is the increased levels of this hormone during this cycle that can lead to increased difficulties with fibromyalgia associated symptoms.

Why doesn’t it affect all women in the same way?

Not all women experience menstrual cycle and fibromyalgia symptom increase. Science is beginning to think that the levels of progesterone produced during the leuteal phase are what determines a flare up in symptoms but that since these levels are not going to be the same in every woman, the change in symptoms won’t be as well. It is not a case of an increase in progesterone being the problem, but the amount of the increase as compared to the base level of the hormone in the body. The more dramatic the increase, the more a woman may experience increased fibromyalgia symptoms. Another aspect of the complications of the menstrual cycle and fibromyalgia symptoms lies in the mood difficulties associated with the cycle.

The role of Estrogen in mood

Many women experience a form of pre-menstrual syndrome (PMS) that is marked by a change in mood stability. This is due to the increased levels of estrogen that occur on or near the on-set of menses. Estrogen is related to how the body and mind controls and processes serotonin and dopamine.

The influx or depletion of the hormone can cause mood swings that can make you over-reactive compared to how your emotional state is during non-hormonal cycles. With women who have dramatic increases in progesterone during the leuteal cycle there may be higher levels of estrogen produces on or near the time of menses, leading to greater mood disparity.

The Menstrual Cycle and Pain

The menstrual cycle and fibromyalgia combination tends to lead to an increase in pain and inflammation due to the levels of hormones in the body that have to do with serotonin and dopamine. If you are in a state of hyper-arousal, you will also feel greater pain. Through a process that is not yet fully understood, the pain and inflammation associated with fibromyalgia can increase during this time as well.

Part of it is attributed to the body’s natural tendency to retain water during the menstrual cycle. This water retention can increase pressure on inflamed tissue and cause greater pain, which may be experienced with more sensitivity do to the increased hormone levels in the body.

How to manage pain during your cycle

There are many ways that you can help to manage your menstrual cycle and fibromyalgia. Many doctors recommend an SSRI to help maintain an even serotonin and dopamine reaction in the body. You may also want to try a diuretic during the menses stage.

Eating a diet that avoids foods that can increase water retention and inflammation – such as foods that are too high in salt or that have been cooked at very high temperatures can help to regulate symptoms and pain as well. Exercise is considered to be under-prescribed for fibromyalgia and is one of the most effective ways of managing the condition, and hormone production in the body. Many of the alternative exercises, such as yoga or tai chi, teach a form of breathing that aids in pain management as well.

Fibromyalgia and menopause

Many women are diagnosed with fibromyalgia in their 40s through 60s which led many scientists to believe that menopause is associated with its onset. There is more understanding as to how the changing levels of progesterone and estrogen in the body can affect the menstrual cycle and fibromyalgia to lend credence to that theory. While there is no known cure for fibromyalgia, many women can avoid the onset of severe symptoms by adopting preventative and pain control life style habits before the onset of menopause.

Tips for how to keep yourself going

Dealing with your menstrual cycle and fibromyalgia can seem like a very unfair hand to have been dealt in life. There are many ways to manage the symptoms of both so that you don’t lose your quality of life while experiencing each. One of the best ways to manage fibromyalgia symptoms is to create a bedtime routine that will help keep your body and your cycles on track. A healthy diet and lifestyle is also recognized as essential to pain and inflammation management.

Your doctor may also prescribe SSRIs and anti-inflammatory medication to help you to be able to learn new lifestyle habits more easily. There are also many alternative and complementary treatments that women with fibromyalgia have had great success with in controlling their symptoms.

Early Results From Ebola Vaccine Trial Called ‘Encouraging’

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 27, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
An experimental Ebola vaccine caused no serious side effects and triggered a positive response in the immune systems of all 20 healthy volunteers who received the treatment, according to research published in Wednesday’s journal of the New England Journal of Medicine.
The vaccine, which is known as ChAD3, uses a modified chimpanzee adenovirus that was developed by researchers at GlaxoSmithKline and US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). It also includes genetic material from two Ebola strains – Sudan and Zaire, the latter of which is responsible for the current outbreak in West Africa – but no virus, meaning that it cannot cause Ebola hemorrhagic fever, according to Reuters.
The trial began on September 2, and the volunteers will be monitored for a total of 48 weeks to make sure they continue to remain healthy. While the main goal is to make sure the intramuscular vaccine is safe, the researchers also hope it will prove effective. So far, the results seem promising, according to Lauran Neergaard of the Associated Press (AP).
“The vaccine is designed to spur the immune system’s production of anti-Ebola antibodies, and people developed them within four weeks of getting the shots,” Neergaard said. “Half of the test group received a higher-dose shot, and those people produced more antibodies… [and] some people also developed a different set of virus-fighting immune cells, named T cells, the study found. That may be important in fending off Ebola.”
Prior research revealed that the immune systems of monkeys that had received the vaccine produced a similar response, the AP medical writer said. NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose agency led the work, said that stimulating both types of immune response was a “promising” outcome. While no serious side effects were reported, two people who received the higher-dose vaccine had high-grade fevers which lasted no more than one day.
GSK chief executive Sir Andrew Witty told BBC News that the early data from the trial was “very encouraging,” and that if the trials continue to provide positive results, it could mean a viable Ebola vaccine could be available before the end of 2015. He added that the vaccine was “well tolerated” by the volunteers, and that while the trial was still ongoing, the trial “gives us very significant cause for optimism.”
“Whether it’s a breakthrough depends on making sure that all the rest of data over the next few weeks and months is in line,” Witty said. “We’ve been looking at a potential Ebola vaccine, we’ve been looking at its basic safety and whether or not it can generate an immune response in healthy volunteers – and the data is very encouraging. But we need to put it into context – this is a very accelerated development program and this is the first bit of data.”
According to the NIAID, the trial involved volunteers between the ages of 18 and 50. Ten of those individuals were given an intramuscular injection of the vaccine at a lower dose, and the other 10 received the same vaccine at a higher dose. Their blood was tested both two weeks and four weeks post-vaccination in order to determine if any anti-Ebola antibodies were generated. All 20 volunteers had developed such antibodies within four weeks of receiving the vaccine, the researchers said.
The ChAD3 vaccine is one of two currently undergoing clinical trials, the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota explained in a statement. Two phase 1 studies of the Canadian-developed vaccine, which uses an Ebola virus protein spliced into a vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV-EBOV), launched in the US in October. Early results from that trial are also expected to be reported before the end of the year.
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EU Pushes Google To Extend ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ To US Website

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 27, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
European regulators are putting pressure on Google to expand “right to be forgotten” requests worldwide, including to the Mountain View, California company’s US-based “.com” search engine, various media outlets are reporting.
According to BBC News technology desk editor Leo Kelion, a panel of EU data protection officials said that the expansion was necessary in order to prevent the company from getting around the law by de-listing results in the European version of its search engine but not the international one.
Currently, European visitors to Google.com are redirected to localized editions of the website, such as Google.co.uk and Google.fr. However, a link is provided from those pages to allow users to switch back to the international version, making it theoretically possible for people in European countries to avoid the censored versions of search results.
“Limiting de-listing to EU domains on the grounds that users tend to access search engines via their national domains cannot be considered a sufficient means to satisfactorily guarantee the rights of data subjects according to the ruling,” representatives from the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party (WP29) said in a statement Tuesday. “In practice, this means that in any case de-listing should also be effective on all relevant .com domains.”
The organization, which drafted the revised regulations following a two-day meeting in Brussels, also rebuked Google for notifying media outlets about story links it has removed under the “right to be forgotten” regulations, which were adopted back in May. WP29 said that doing so risks putting individuals who had been seeking privacy back into the spotlight, according to Bloomberg News.
A Google spokesman told PC Magazine’s Stephanie Mlot that the company had not seen the WP29 guidelines, but would “study them carefully when they’re published.” Mlot added that the company is also battling European regulators who are considering a proposal that would force them to split its search business from the rest of the company’s operations in all EU nations. A vote on that is expected Thursday, she said, though the European Parliament lacks the authority to force companies to break apart.
“The WP29’s guidelines also contain a list of common criteria that data protection authorities will apply to handle complaints filed with national offices following refusals of de-listing by search engines,” noted Loek Essers of PC World. “The list contains 13 main criteria that should be applied on a case-by-case basis, and aims to provide a flexible tool to help authorities to make the right decisions.”
As Bloomberg pointed out, the new guidelines are not binding, but national lawmakers can use them to put pressure on Google and seek legal recourse to make them comply. The news organization added that, while the “right to be forgotten” has been criticized by free-speech advocates in the US and UK, to date Google has removed 41.5 percent of the more than 500,000 links it has been asked to evaluate since the original EU court decision.
In May, the European Court of Justice ruled that search engines were responsible for removing sensitive information from Internet search results, and that companies such as Google could be ordered to delete links to information about individuals deemed to be outdated. It centered around a 2010 case filed by a man named Mario Costeja González, who sued the publisher of a prominent Spanish newspaper to remove links to articles about his social security debts.
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Scientists Discover Impenetrable Star Trek-Like ‘Force Field’ Surrounding Earth

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 27, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Researchers using NASA’s Van Allen Probes have discovered a nearly impenetrable barrier that prevents the most energetic electrons from reaching Earth and protects both astronauts and satellites from potential harm.

A team of experts from MIT, the University of Colorado and elsewhere discovered the invisible shield approximately 7,200 miles above the Earth. The barrier blocks dangerous ultrarelativistic electrons from bombarding the planet by allowing them to get no closer than 11,000 kilometers from the Earth’s surface.

According to Jennifer Chu of the MIT News Office, ultrarelativistic electrons comprise the outer band of the Van Allen radiation belt, and can travel around the entire planet in just five minutes. As they do, they bombard anything in their path, and exposure to such high-energy radiation could pose serious health risks to space travelers or damage satellite electronics.

However, the newly discovered invisible barrier prevents that from happening, keeping the high-energy radiation at bay thanks to a phenomenon known as “plasmaspheric hiss,” which the researchers identify has extremely low-frequency electromagnetic waves in the upper atmosphere that resembles static when played through a speaker.

The shield was discovered in the Van Allen radiation belts, a pair of two doughnut-shaped rings above Earth that are filled with high-energy electrons and protons, University of Colorado professor Daniel Baker said in a statement. Baker and his colleagues report on their findings in the November 26 online edition of the journal Nature.

“It’s almost like theses electrons are running into a glass wall in space,” explained Baker, the study’s lead author. “Somewhat like the shields created by force fields on Star Trek that were used to repel alien weapons, we are seeing an invisible shield blocking these electrons. It’s an extremely puzzling phenomenon.”

The researchers initially believed that the highly charged electrons, which travel around the Earth at speeds topping 100,000 miles per second, would slowly drift downward into the upper atmosphere and gradually be wiped out by interactions with air molecules. However, the impenetrable barrier stops the electrons before they get that far.

“When you look at really energetic electrons, they can only come to within a certain distance from Earth,” said Shri Kanekal, the deputy mission scientist for the Van Allen Probes at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and a co-author on the Nature paper. “This is completely new. We certainly didn’t expect that.”

They analyzed several scenarios under which such a barrier could be created and maintained. They considered if the Earth’s magnetic field lines, which trap and control protons and electrons, might have something to do with it. In addition, they examined if radio signals originating from transmitters on Earth could be scattering charged electrons at the barrier, preventing them from traveling downward. Neither explanation proved to be an adequate solution.

Instead, it was the plasmaspheric hiss that was found to keep the radiation from getting too close to the planet’s surface. Based on their data and calculations, the study authors believe that this phenomenon deflects incoming electrons, causes them to collide with neutral gas atoms in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, and ultimately disappear. Furthermore, they said the barrier appeared to be extremely rigid.

“It’s a very unusual, extraordinary, and pronounced phenomenon,” said John Foster, associate director of MIT’s Haystack Observatory. “What this tells us is if you parked a satellite or an orbiting space station with humans just inside this impenetrable barrier, you would expect them to have much longer lifetimes. That’s a good thing to know.”

Image Above: A cloud of cold, charged gas around Earth, called the plasmasphere and seen here in purple, interacts with the particles in Earth’s radiation belts — shown in grey— to create an impenetrable barrier that blocks the fastest electrons from moving in closer to our planet. Credit: NASA/Goddard

NASA explained that, in addition to the radiation belts, there is a giant cloud of charged particles known as the plasmasphere that fills the outermost region of the planet’s atmosphere. The particles at the outer boundary of this plasmasphere cause particles in the outer radiation belt to scatter, removing them from the belt.

“This scattering effect is fairly weak and might not be enough to keep the electrons at the boundary in place, except for a quirk of geometry: The radiation belt electrons move incredibly quickly, but not toward Earth,” the US space agency said. “The Van Allen Probes data show that in the direction toward Earth, the most energetic electrons have very little motion at all – just a gentle, slow drift that occurs over the course of months.”

“This is a movement so slow and weak that it can be rebuffed by the scattering caused by the plasmasphere,” NASA added. “This also helps explain why – under extreme conditions, when an especially strong solar wind or a giant solar eruption such as a coronal mass ejection sends clouds of material into near-Earth space – the electrons from the outer belt can be pushed into the usually-empty slot region between the belts.”

> Watch an animation of the radiation belts with confined charged particles and plasmapause boundary.

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Selenium Compounds Boost Immune System To Fight Against Cancer

Written By: editor

Published Date: November 27, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Provided by Stine Rasmussen, University of Copenhagen

Cancer types such as melanoma, prostate cancer and certain types of leukemia weaken the body by over-activating the natural immune system. Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have now demonstrated that selenium – naturally found in, e.g., garlic and broccoli – slows down the immune over-response. In the long term, this may improve cancer treatment. The findings have been published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

The immune system is designed to remove things not normally found in the body. Cells undergoing change, e.g. precursors of cancer cells, are therefore normally recognized and removed by the immune system. Unfortunately, the different cancer cells contain mechanisms that block the immune system’s ability to recognize them, allowing them to freely continue cancer development.

Certain cancer cells overexpress immunostimulatory molecules in liquid form. Such over-stimulation has a negative impact on the immune system:

“You can say that the stimulating molecules over-activate the immune system and cause it to collapse, and we are, of course, interested in blocking this mechanism. We have now shown that certain selenium compounds, which are naturally found in, e.g., garlic and broccoli, effectively block the special immunostimulatory molecule that plays a serious role for aggressive cancers such as melanoma, prostate cancer and certain types of leukemia,” says Professor Søren Skov, Department of Veterinary Disease Biology, University of Copenhagen.

Dissolved molecules

In this study, the researchers are focusing on the so-called NGK2D ligands. There are eight variants, of which one in particular has caught the researchers’ attention, because it assumes liquid form. It is precisely the molecular dissolution that causes serious problems, once the cancer is raging. The entire bloodstream is, so to speak, infected, and the molecule is therefore used as a marker of serious illness:

“Molecules are found both on the surface of the cancer cells and dissolved in the blood of the affected person. We are now able to show that selenium compounds appear to have a very beneficial effect when it comes to neutralizing the special variant of the NGK2D ligand – both in soluble form and when the molecule is placed on the cell surface,” says Professor Søren Skov.

Better drugs in future

The researchers are constantly learning more about the disease mechanisms causing aggressive cancers in the skin, blood and reproductive organs:

“The overexpression seen in cancers such as melanoma, prostate cancer and certain types of leukemia significantly impairs the immune system. If we can find ways to slow down the over-stimulation, we are on the right track. The new results are yet another small step towards better cancer drugs with fewer adverse effects,” says Søren Skov.

> Continue reading…

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Thanksgiving Wrap-Up: The Web’s Top Turkey Day Stories

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 26, 2014 Last Edited: November 26, 2014

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Before you sit down to watch a little football or enjoy some turkey and stuffing with your extended family, why not kick back and savor some of the most succulent Thanksgiving-related stories and blogs the Internet has to offer?
NASA GOES Satellites Predict Travel Troubles
Before any holiday get-together can actually get underway, people need to get to where they’re going, and that often depends on the weather – as NASA reported on Tuesday. The agency’s GOES-East and GOES-West satellites detected an active weather pattern, which foretold a heavy snowstorm which is expected to affect travelers in the Carolinas and along the East Coast of the US starting Wednesday and into Thanksgiving Day.
Google Data Reveals Most Distinct Dishes For Each State
Once you get to where you’re going, odds are you can expect a traditional-style Thanksgiving dinner: turkey (usually roasted or deep fried), stuffing, cranberry sauce, and more. But what are the most unique dishes served throughout the country? That’s what the New York Times set to find out, with an assist from Google.
The popular search engine documented for the most-looked for and most distinct types of Turkey Day foods throughout each of the 50 states. Among the more interesting dishes: Alabama’s Sweet Potato Dumplings, Connecticut’s Butternut Squash Casserole, Delaware’s Pretzel Salad, Georgia’s Key Lime Cake, Indiana’s Persimmon Pudding and New Jersey’s Stuffed Artichokes. The most unusual sounding dish, Frog Eye Salad, is a combination of pasta, fruit, eggs, whipped cream and marshmallows that topped the list in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Wyoming.
Thanksgiving Side-Dish Ideas For Gluten-Free Eaters
While Thanksgiving is one of the biggest eating days of the year, it can be tough for those with gluten allergies to feel comfortable dining to their heart’s content without knowing that the meals are safe and 100 percent wheat-free. Fortunately, redOrbit’s Rayshell Clapper has scoured the Internet and gathered recipes for a few gluten-free offerings that you can prepare for this year’s festivities, including Fried Zucchini Chips, Gluten-Free Dinner Rolls and Pumpkin Pie Tart with Almond Crust.
Just make sure that you don’t eat too much or this may happen to you…

Astronauts Set To Enjoy Different Kind Of Thanksgiving Dinner
Even Americans in orbit are looking forward to enjoying a Thanksgiving meal, although the menu for the NASA astronauts on board the International Space Station probably looks a bit different than yours. Their dinner will consist of irradiated smoked turkey, thermostabilized candied yams, freeze-dried green beans and mushrooms, NASA’s own freeze-dried cornbread dressing and thermostabilized cherry-blueberry cobbler for dessert.
On the bright side, at least they can enjoy a freshly brewed cup of coffee thanks to the recent arrival of ISSpresso, an espresso machine made specially to work in the microgravity environment of space. Borrowing concepts perfected by pod coffee makers, ISSpresso keeps both the water and the coffee in separate capsules, heating and pressurizing the water before running it through the coffee pod.
Astronauts Send Special Holiday Message From The ISS
Speaking of the space station, NASA astronaut and Expedition 42 Commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore broadcast a special Thanksgiving message from the orbiting research facility, sharing his thoughts on the holiday, what it means to him and his family, and some of the various things that he is especially grateful for.
Giving Thanks: The Science Of Gratitude Examined
Thanksgiving is about many different things to many different people, but as Wilmore expressed in his message (and as the holiday’s name implies), counting your blessings is an important part of marking the occasion – and researchers from the University of California-Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center say that gratitude can improve your physical and psychological health.
Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas, science director of the Greater Good Science Center, and her colleagues found that people who had been conditioned to practice gratitude had stronger brain structures for social cognition and empathy, as well as improved function in the brain that processes reward. She recommended starting a “gratitude journal” and writing in it a couple of times each week in order to remind yourself of who and what you’re thankful for.
Tryptophan: Unfairly Blamed For Post-Dinner Naps
After all the thanks have been said, the meals have been eaten, the dishes cleaned up and the leftovers put away, there’s still one big Thanksgiving Day tradition left: taking a nap. An amino acid found in turkey meat known as tryptophan has long been blamed as the reason that people feel drowsy after eating it, largely due to the fact that it makes serotonin, a neurotransmitter which helps regulate sleep.
However, as Lee Rannals explained last year, while tryptophan does make people drowsy, it is not the sole reason that people feel the need to nap Thursday evening. In actuality, it is a mixture of meat and carbohydrates consumed at Thanksgiving that actually sets the stage for the amino acid to do its dirty work. The carbs clear out all amino acids except for tryptophan, allowing the substance to reach the brain and increase serotonin production.
And For Black Friday: Products To Avoid At The Toy Store
Finally, once Thanksgiving’s all said and done, it’s time to start Christmas shopping – and once again Rayshell Clapper has you covered by listing the Top 10 toys to avoid for safety reasons this holiday season, as selected by the World Against Toys Causing Harm (WATCH). Topping the list in 2014 are the Air Storm Firetek Bow, the Radio Flyer Ziggle and the Cata Pencil (a pencil and slingshot all in one).
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, and remember to thank the chef!

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Samsung Launches Improved Second-Generation Eye-Controlled Mouse

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 26, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Samsung unveiled the second-generation of its EYECAN+ eye mouse on Tuesday, promising that the device would enable people with disabilities to browse the Web and create and edit documents with the blink of an eye.
According to Alyssa Newcomb of ABC News, the hands-free device is a portable box that is positioned below a computer monitor. It does not require the user to wear any special equipment or place their head in a special position, and after calibration, the device will even remember the characteristics of the user’s eyes.
“From there, users will be able to write and edit messages and browse the Internet while they’re seated or lying down – controlling the system with their subtle eye movements,” Newcomb said, noting that it works at distances of up to two feet. “It sounds like a futuristic dream, but Samsung’s engineers [on Tuesday] showed off the result of their passion project, which they hope will allow people with disabilities to be better able to use computers.”
“EYECAN+ is the result of a voluntary project initiated by our engineers, and reflects their passion and commitment to engage more people in our community,” Samsung Vice President of Community Relations SiJeong Cho said in a statement. The technology will not be commercially sold, but will instead be produced in limited quantities, donated to charity organizations and then made open source.
EYECAN+ is far from the only input device designed with accessibility in mind, although as Slashgear’s JC Torres points out, many eye-driven input devices that have been developed focus more on entertainment than productivity. Samsung’s new device was designed to take the place of a mouse and give users nearly total control of a computer.
Users can operate this “eye mouse” while either sitting or lying down, as long as both the computer monitor and the box itself are within sight, Torres said. They select an option by focusing their eyes on an icon and blinking to simulate a mouse click. EYECAN+ has 18 commands available, and all of them can be configured to a specific action, and the user interface can appear as a pop-up rectangular menu or a floating menu wheel, he added.
Among the 18 commands included in the device are options to copy, paste, select all, zoom in, scroll and drag and drop, noted CNET journalist Lance Whitney, and the device can also be programmed to execute custom commands. He added that the company is promising more accurate calibration and a better user experience than the first-generation EYECAN, which was released in March 2012.
The company said that much of the device’s upgrades are due to the work of Hyung-Jin Shin, a graduate student in computer science at Yonsei University in Seoul. Shin was born quadriplegic, and spent 17 months working with engineers and piloting the eye mouse to ensure that the device was easy to use, and the functions and commands were practical and could be accessed without difficulty.
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Role Of Stress, Flower Loss In Bee Population Declines Investigated

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 26, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The loss of wildflowers could be a bigger threat to bee populations than climate change, but stress management could help save these essential pollinators, according to the researchers behind a pair of recently-published studies.
Experts have long known that bees, and honeybees in particular, currently face a vast array of different threats, including pesticides and the parasitic Varroa mite. Now, a paper published Monday in the journal Trends in Parasitology have found that stress could be one of the primary causes of recent widespread losses in honeybee colonies in the northern hemisphere.
More specifically, the study authors report that a complex and mysterious interplay of different stresses and their impact on the health and immune systems of bees could be at fault. As a result, bees have grown weaker and have become more susceptible to diseases that insects can ordinarily carry without issue. The Italian researchers behind the study believe that stress management and improved nutrition could help rectify the situation.
Honeybees live in complex societies frequently characterized by densely packed populations, and as a result have developed unique mechanisms for interacting with pathogens, the researchers explained. However, pathogens such as Deformed Wing Virus (DWV) can cause asymptomatic infections normally contained by their immune systems, and stress factors can synergistically promote replication of the disease and symptomatic infections.
“These covert infections are very common all over the world and represent a kind of Damocle’s sword for honeybee colonies,” study author Francesco Nazzi of the University of Udine said in a statement. “When bees are exposed to stress agents, which may adversely affect the immune competence, a sudden health decay can occur due to uncontrolled pathogen proliferation.”
In their study, he and co-author Francesco Pennacchio of the University of Napoli call for more research into the molecular mechanisms driving the underlying immune responses of bees. They also suggest increased efforts to select bee populations that are more naturally resistant to these stresses, and by “enhancing the bee competence to face the challenge of environmental stress that may negatively influence immunity and health conditions.”
Another key factor that could be driving the decline of wild bee populations is the loss of pollen host plants, ecologist Dr. Jeroen Scheper of Wageningen University in The Netherlands and his fellow researchers wrote in a study published in Monday’s online early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“Growing concern about bee declines and associated loss of pollination services has increased the urgency to identify the underlying causes,” the authors wrote. “We assessed the relative importance of a range of proposed factors responsible for wild bee decline and show that loss of preferred host plant species is one of the main factors associated with the decline of bee populations in The Netherlands.”
According to Ars Technica reporter Diana Gitig, the basic concept behind the study is that wildflowers have been disappearing, and since bees rely on the nectar and pollen found in those flowers, it would only make sense that the loss of wildflowers would also result in the loss of bees. However, it has been a difficult idea to demonstrate.
“Different species of bees rely on different plants – the bee species that are disappearing have never been analyzed in terms of taste for the plants that are disappearing to see if they match up. And, once the bees or plants are gone, it’s hard to figure out what relationship (if any) they might have had,” she said. The new study, however, avoids this problem “by examining museum specimens of bees to figure out which bees like which flowers.”
Their efforts demonstrate that the bee species that have declined are those that prefer the pollen from the flower species that have also declined, Gitig added. Dr. Scheper’s team concluded that the loss of preferred host plants is actually one of the main factors that has driven the recent decline in wild bee populations, and it plays every bit as big a role as body size (in that larger bees require more food and are more sensitive to its loss).
How big of a problem is wildflower loss? As the Daily Mail reported on Tuesday, an estimated 97 percent of the UK’s flower-rich grassland has been lost since the 1930s, and two types of bees, Cullem’s bumblebee (Bombus cullumanus) and the short-haired bumblebee (Bombus subterraneus), have become extinct since the start of the 21st century.
“Based on these results, enhancing floral resources may be a good strategy for mitigating bee loss,” said Gitig. “Conservationists just need to figure out which bees they want to save, and they can increase the proper host plant species.”
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Substance In Turkey Could Help Produce Life-Saving Antibiotic

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 26, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
When you sit down to enjoy your turkey dinner this Thanksgiving, you can do so content in the knowledge that it will not only tickle your taste buds, but it could one day help save your life, according to research appearing in the December edition of the Journal of Bacteriology.
In the new study, BYU microbiologist Joel Griffitts and his colleagues explain that the biological agent required to produce a potentially life-saving antibiotic can be found in turkeys. This microbe, known as Strain 115, produces the MP1 antibiotic that can help combat staph infections, strep throat and nearly half of all infectious bacteria.
“Our research group is certainly thankful for turkeys,” Griffitts, whose team is exploring the origins of the turkey-born antibiotic, said in a statement. “The good bacteria we’re studying has been keeping turkey farms healthy for years and it has the potential to keep humans healthy as well.”
Currently, the complex structure of the antibiotic prohibits it from being used on a widespread basis. However, the study authors have been using a combination of spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy in order to change that by determining how Strain 115 is capable of producing MP1 without killing itself in the process.
“What they’re finding,” BYU said, “is that the mechanism for producing it is surprisingly simple.”
According to the researchers, a compact DNA molecule located inside of Strain 115 produces both the killer antibiotic and a special substance that protects itself. This molecule, also known as a plasmid, creates a backup ribosome part that can be inserted into a normal ribosome, thus making it immune to the antibiotic. Griffiths compared it to putting special tires on an automobile in order to protect the vehicle against unusually hazardous road conditions.
“But what makes this turkey story so great is that, just like Thanksgiving, it has a great beginning,” the university noted. “It started with a turkey farm more than three decades ago, when now-retired BYU professor Marcus Jensen discovered Strain 115… [and] went on to develop three vaccines vital to the prevention of diseases in turkeys.”
Despite the fact that his work with turkeys became widely known and won him multiple awards, Jensen decided to shelve his work and take his research in other directions back in 1983. Now, three decades later, the strain was discovered in a freezer by a BYU student, causing work on the project to resume and leading to the new study.
“Sometimes bacteria retire with the people who discover them. We simply rediscovered it and now we are capitalizing on it once again,” said Griffitts, who co-authored the study along with Philip R. Bennallack, Michael J. Heder and Richard A. Robison of the BYU Department of Microbiology and Molecular Biology and Scott R. Burt of the Provo, Utah university’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
The new study comes just in time for Thanksgiving, a holiday in which 46 million turkeys are consumed by people celebrating the holiday in the US, and during which 88 percent of Americans dine on the succulent bird. Of course, it’s far from the only day in which turkey is consumed here in the US – in 2011, 736 million pounds of turkey were consumed, and consumption of the poultry product has increased by 104 percent during since 1970.
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Blu-Ray Discs Can Improve The Performance Of Solar Cells

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 26, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
From old Jackie Chan movies to your favorite episodes of Family Guy, the technology works just the same
Just as VHS tapes were replaced by DVDs, which were themselves replaced by Blu-ray discs, something will eventually come along and replace them as well. But when that happens, don’t be too quick to get rid of your old Blu-rays, as new research suggests that they can be repurposed to improve the performance of solar cells.
According to Rachel Feltman of The Washington Post, experts from the Northwestern University found that the patterns etched onto the discs contain nanoscopic pits and grooves that can be used to enhance the light-absorption properties of solar panels. The researchers also found that quasi-random patterns (those that absorb more than one wavelength of light, but not unusable ones) work the best, she added.
“We had a hunch that Blu-ray discs might work for improving solar cells, and, to our delight, we found the existing patterns are already very good,” Jiaxing Huang, an associate professor of materials science and engineering in the university’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, said in a statement. “It’s as if electrical engineers and computer scientists developing the Blu-ray technology have been subconsciously doing our jobs, too.”
Huang and his colleagues, who published their findings in Tuesday’s edition of the journal Nature Communications, tested a vast array of different movies and TV shows, including action films, dramas, cartoons and documentaries. They found that the content of the discs was irrelevant, and that Jackie Chan movies enhanced light absorption just as well as episodes of “Family Guy.”
“For solar cell applications, we want to enhance light absorption over the entire solar spectrum – wavelengths from about 350 nanometers to 2,300 nanometers,” he added in an interview with Live Science Contributor Charles Q. Choi. Typically, “very expensive fabrication techniques are usually needed to create quasi-random patterns suitable for solar cells,” Choi added, but the new study indicates that using Blu-ray discs make it possible to create these patterns at a fraction of the cost.
The experiments took a few months to conduct, noted Arielle Duhaime-Ross of The Verge, but when all was said and done, the researchers concluded that Blu-rays could be used to produce rubber stamps that could be pressed into polymer solar cells. The resulting patterns, the Northwestern University researchers said, could enhance the overall light absorption properties of solar arrays by 20 percent.
Huang told Duhaime-Ross the discovery was unexpected, and the imprinting process used to produce the rubber stamps still had to be adjusted in order to achieve thicker cells or different types of materials. Once their technique is perfected, however, it could give new life to Blu-ray discs once they are no longer wanted or become obsolete.
Knowing that it worked wasn’t enough, however. The researchers next set out to discover “why” it worked. To do so, they closely analyzed the data processing algorithms in the Blu-ray standard, and discovered that the algorithms serve two major purposes: they achieved as high a degree of compression as possible by converting the video signals into a seemingly random sequence of 0s and 1s; and they increased error tolerance by adding controlled redundancy into the data sequence, which also limited the number of consecutive 0s and 1s.
“These two purposes, the researchers said, have resulted in a quasi-random array of islands and pits (0s and 1s) with feature sizes between 150 and 525 nanometers. And this range, it turns out, works quite well for light-trapping applications over the entire solar spectrum,” the university said. “The overall broadband absorption enhancement of a Blu-ray patterned solar cell was measured to be 21.8 percent, the researchers report.”
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First-Ever 3D-Printed Object Created In Space

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 26, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The 3D printer onboard the International Space Station (ISS) has created the first-ever object made in space using additive manufacturing: a faceplate for the extruder printhead which identifies the company that designed and built the equipment used in the process (Made In Space) and was emblazoned with the NASA logo.
While the object itself is nothing too special, it does successfully demonstrate the feasibility of astronauts creating their own tools and parts while in a zero-gravity environment, CNET’s Michelle Starr explained, and it could help pave the way for future long-term space expeditions by removing the need to have equipment delivered from Earth.
“When the first human fashioned a tool from a rock, it couldn’t have been conceived that one day we’d be replicating the same fundamental idea in space,” Made In Space CEO Aaron Kemmer told Starr on Wednesday. “We look at the operation of the 3D printer as a transformative moment, not just for space development, but for the capability of our species to live away from Earth.”
“This first print is the initial step toward providing an on-demand machine shop capability away from Earth,” Niki Werkheiser, project manager for the International Space Station 3-D Printer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, added in a statement. “The space station is the only laboratory where we can fully test this technology in space.”
The 3D printer was installed on the space station by Expedition 42 commander and NASA astronaut Barry “Butch” Wilmore on November 17, during which time the first calibration test print was conducted, the US space agency said. Based on the results of that test-printing, ground control personnel sent instructions to realign the printer and conducted a second test on November 20, the results of which verified the printer was ready for manufacturing operations.
On Monday, Wilmore and his crew received the go-ahead to create the faceplate of the extruder casing, not only creating the first 3D part ever printed in space but also demonstrating that the printing equipment can fabricate replacement parts for itself. The additive manufacturing process requires that a relatively low-temperature plastic filament be heated and extruded one layer at a time to build a part defined by the preprogrammed design.
Wilmore removed the part from the printer and inspected it on Wednesday, NASA said. He reported that part adhesion on the tray was stronger than anticipated, which means the microgravity environment could have an impact on layer bonding – something the crew will need to investigate in future 3D printing attempts. A new print tray was installed, and the ground team requested the printer alignment to be tweaked and a third calibration test. Once that is complete, the ISS crew will be able to order the printer to produce a second object.
“This is the first time we’ve ever used a 3-D printer in space, and we are learning, even from these initial operations,” explained Werkheiser. “As we print more parts we’ll be able to learn whether some of the effects we are seeing are caused by microgravity or just part of the normal fine-tuning process for printing. When we get the parts back on Earth, we’ll be able to do a more detailed analysis to find out how they compare to parts printed on Earth.”
“It’ll be a while before there’s significant progress,” noted Jon Fingas of Engadget. “More 3D-printed objects are coming, but they won’t come back to Earth for studies until early 2015. And like you’d imagine, it’ll take longer still before spaceborne printing is truly ready for prime time. Eventually, though, NASA expects spacecraft to be 3D printing their own spare parts, saving crews from having to carry a lot of extra supplies just in case something goes wrong.”

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Daily Yogurt Consumption May Help Lower Type 2 Diabetes Risk

Written By: Brett Smith

Published Date: November 26, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Full of protein and calcium, a serving of yogurt can be a healthy choice to start the day, and now a new study has shown that a daily serving can also lower your risk of Type 2 diabetes.

Published in the journal BMC Medicine, the new study included the findings of three prospective cohort analyses which tracked the medical history and lifestyles of over 190,000 health care professionals over several decades – the Health Professionals’ Follow-up Study (HFPS), the Nurses’ Health Study (NHS) and Nurses’ Health Study II (NHS II).

At the beginning of each study, volunteers filled out a survey to collect baseline data on lifestyle and incidence of chronic illness. Volunteers were then interviewed every two years with a compliance rate of over 90 percent. Volunteers were ruled out if they had diabetes, coronary disease or cancer at baseline. Volunteers were also ruled out if they did not provide any data on dairy intake.

“Our study benefited from having such a large sample size, high rates of follow up and repeated assessment of dietary and lifestyle factors,” said study author Mu Chen, a researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health.

In the three study groups, more than 15,000 cases of Type 2 diabetes were discovered during follow-up. The scientists learned that the overall dairy intake had no connection to the risk of getting Type 2 diabetes. When viewing intake of specific dairy products and considering for chronic illness risk factors, it was found that a high intake of yogurt was connected with a reduced risk of contracting the metabolic condition.

The study team then followed up by integrating their results and other released scientific studies, up to March 2013, that looked into the connection between dairy products and Type 2 diabetes. The analysis discovered that intake of one daily 10-ounce serving of yogurt was linked with an 18-percent reduced risk of Type 2 diabetes.

“We found that higher intake of yogurt is associated with a reduced risk of Type 2 diabetes, whereas other dairy foods and consumption of total dairy did not show this association,” said study author Frank Hu, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. “The consistent findings for yogurt suggest that it can be incorporated into a healthy dietary pattern.”

The researchers noted that prior study has found that calcium, magnesium, or particular fatty acids contained in dairy products may reduce the chance of Type 2 diabetes. Research has also revealed that probiotic bacteria in yogurt enhance fat profiles and antioxidant conditions in people with Type 2 diabetes. They said this might have a risk-lowering impact in creating the metabolic condition and called for clinical trials to see if yogurt does indeed create a lower risk for the disease.

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QUIZ: How Much Does The Average American Know About Technology?

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 26, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
While three-fourths of all American Internet users know that a megabyte is bigger than a kilobyte and roughly 70 percent can correctly identify a captcha from a picture, less than half know when the first iPhone was released, and not even one in four know that the Internet and the World Wide Web are two different things.
Those revelations are among the findings of a recent Pew Research Center quiz designed to test the average US Internet user’s knowledge of modern technology. As part of an ongoing series commemorating the Web’s 25th anniversary, Pew recruited just over 1,000 adults and asked each 17 questions covering a range of tech-related issues, including major advanced, important industry figures, and the Internet’s infrastructure.
“Substantial majorities of internet users are able to correctly answer questions about some common technology platforms and everyday internet usage terms,” explained Pew senior researcher Aaron Smith. “A substantial majority of online adults do not use Twitter, but knowledge of Twitter conventions is fairly widespread nonetheless… On the other hand, relatively few internet users are familiar with certain concepts that underpin the internet and other modern technological advances.”
For instance, 82 percent of online Americans knew that hashtags were most commonly used on the microblogging platform, and 60 percent knew that Twitter limits users posts to 140 characters. Conversely, only one-third (34 percent) knew that Moore’s Law relates to the number of transistors that can be put on a microchip, and just 23 percent knew that “the Internet” and “the World Wide Web” are not two different terms for the same thing.
According to Elizabeth Weise of USA Today, 83 percent of the people who responded to the poll could identify Microsoft co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates on sight. In addition, 69 percent knew that the term URL stood for Uniform Resource Locator, and 61 percent knew that Net Neutrality referred to equal treatment of digital content by ISPs.
“While it’s easy to assume that the younger generation has technology down pat, you may be surprised to find out that 18- to 29-year-olds often scored similarly to their older counterparts,” PC Magazine’s Stephanie Mlot said. On the other hand, there was a larger divide when it came to education levels, as Smith told Mlot that college graduate tend to score higher on Pew quizzes, this one included.
“Net neutrality and privacy policy understanding was pretty consistent, though younger internet users did show more familiarity with social media and things like hashtags,” added Chris Davies of SlashGear. “With issues like privacy and data protection so timely, and yet comprehension of what’s actually at stake so generally low, it comes as only a mild shock that some of the things we’d take for granted aren’t, in fact, commonly understood.”
The Pew Research quiz also found that 77 percent of responders knew that any email program could be used to send a PDF file, 66 percent knew that a Wiki was a tool which allows people to modify online content in collaboration with other users, and just 44 percent understood that a privacy policy does not ensure a company will keep your information confidential. Only nine percent knew that Mosaic was the first popular graphical Web browser.

Pop on over to Pew’s website and test your own Web IQ by taking the interactive knowledge quiz.

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Magnetic Fields And Lasers Elicit Graphene Secret

Written By: editor

Published Date: November 26, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Provided by Christine Bohnet, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf

Scientists at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) have studied the dynamics of electrons from the “wonder material” graphene in a magnetic field for the first time. This led to the discovery of a seemingly paradoxical phenomenon in the material. Its understanding could make a new type of laser possible in the future. Together with researchers from Berlin, France, the Czech Republic and the United States, the scientists precisely described their observations in a model and have now published their findings in the scientific journal Nature Physics (DOI: 10.1038/NPHYS3164).

Graphene is considered a “wonder material”: its breaking strength is higher than steel and it conducts electricity and heat more effectively than copper. As a two-dimensional structure consisting of only a single layer of carbon atoms, it is also flexible, nearly transparent and approximately one million times thinner than a sheet of paper. Furthermore, shortly after its discovery ten years ago, scientists recognized that the energy states of graphene in a magnetic field – known as Landau levels – behave differently than those of semiconductors. “Many fascinating effects have been discovered with graphene in magnetic fields, but the dynamics of electrons have never been studied in such a system until now,” explains physicist Dr. Stephan Winnerl from HZDR.

The HZDR researchers exposed the graphene to a four-Tesla magnetic field – forty times stronger than a horseshoe magnet. As a result, the electrons in graphene occupy only certain energy states. The negatively charged particles were virtually forced on tracks. These energy levels were then examined with free-electron laser light pulses at the HZDR. “The laser pulse excites the electrons into a certain Landau level. A temporally delayed pulse then probes how the system evolves,” explains Martin Mittendorff, doctoral candidate at the HZDR and first author of the paper.

Electron redistribution surprises scientists

The result of the experiments has astonished the researchers. This particular energy level, into which new electrons were pumped using the laser, gradually emptied. Winnerl illustrates this paradoxical effect using an everyday example: “Imagine a librarian sorting books on a bookshelf with three shelves. She places one book at a time from the lower shelf onto the middle shelf. Her son is simultaneously ‘helping’ by taking two books from the middle shelf, placing one of them on the top shelf, the other on the bottom. The son is very eager and now the number of books on the middle shelf decreases even though this is precisely the shelf his mother wishes to fill.”

Because there were neither experiments nor theories regarding such dynamics before, the Dresden physicists initially had difficulty interpreting the signals correctly. After a number of attempts, however, they found an explanation: collisions between electrons cause this unusual rearrangement. “This effect has long been known as Auger scattering, but no one expected it would be so strong and would cause an energy level to become depleted,” explains Winnerl.

This new discovery could be used in the future for developing a laser that can produce light with arbitrarily adjustable wavelengths in the infrared and terahertz ranges. “Such a Landau-level laser was long considered impossible, but now with graphene this semiconductor physicists’ dream could become a reality,” says Winnerl enthusiastically.

Berlin researchers calculate complex model for Dresden experiments

After the fundamental model used in the experiments had worked satisfactorily, the precise theoretical work followed, which was carried out at the Technical University Berlin. Berlin scientists Ermin Malic and Andreas Knorr confirmed, using complex calculations, the Dresden group’s assumptions and provided detailed insights into the underlying mechanisms. The HZDR researchers additionally cooperated with the French High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Grenoble (Laboratoire National des Champs Magnétiques Intenses – LNCMI), the Charles University Prague and the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta (USA).

The research has been funded by the German research association DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) within the program “Graphene”.

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Diabetes And Heart Disease Risk Linked To Diet High In Carbs, Not Saturated Fat

Written By: editor

Published Date: November 25, 2014 Last Edited: November 28, 2018

John

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Does Doubling Saturated Fat Intake Increase Saturated Fat In The Blood?

What does and doesn’t constitute a good diet seems to change almost every day. One item that we have consistently been warned about, however, is saturated fat. Links have been found to obesity, cognitive decline, diabetes and heart disease, just to name a few. But how much is too much, and where do we draw the line?

A new study from The Ohio State University found that doubling or even nearly tripling your intake of saturated fat does not drive up the saturated fat levels in the blood. The findings of their controlled diet study, published in a recent issue of PLOS ONE, also revealed that increasing levels of carbohydrates in the diet during the study promoted a steady increase in the blood of a fatty acid linked to an elevated risk for diabetes and heart disease.

The finding “challenges the conventional wisdom that has demonized saturated fat and extends our knowledge of why dietary saturated fat doesn’t correlate with disease,” Jeff Volek, a professor of human sciences at The Ohio State University, told Emily Caldwell in a statement.

Sixteen adults were recruited, who all had metabolic syndrome — defined as having three of the five markers that increase the risk for heart disease and diabetes. These five markers are excess belly fat, elevated blood pressure, low “good” cholesterol, insulin resistance or glucose intolerance, and high triglycerides. The participants were brought to a baseline through a reduced-carb diet for three weeks.

Then, the participants were fed the same diets, which changed every three weeks, for 18 weeks. The daily diet consisted of 2,500 calories with about 130 grams of protein. They started with 47 grams of carbs and 84 grams of saturated fats each day, and ended with 346 grams of carbs and 32 grams of saturated fat per day.

The team found that the levels of total saturated fat in the blood did not increase. In fact, it went down in most people, despite the fact that the carbs in the diet were decreased as the total fat and saturated fat were increased. The researchers found that palmitoleic acid — which is a fatty acid associated with the unhealthy metabolism of carbohydrates that promote disease — also decreased with low-carb intake. It increased again as carbs were reintroduced to the participants’ diets.

“It’s unusual for a marker to track so closely with carbohydrate intake, making this a unique and clinically significant finding. As you increase carbs, this marker predictably goes up,” Volek said.

Volek noted that when that marker increases, it signals that an increasing proportion of carbs are being converted to fat instead of being burned as fuel. To ensure that the body will promptly burn the saturated fat as fuel and not store it, the researchers found that carbs should be reduced in the diet, while the fat is added in a well-formulated way.

“When you consume a very low-carb diet your body preferentially burns saturated fat,” Volek said. “We had people eat 2 times more saturated fat than they had been eating before entering the study, yet when we measured saturated fat in their blood, it went down in the majority of people. Other traditional risk markers improved, as well.”

Volek and his team found that the carb-intake point at which the body begins to store fat is highly variable between individuals, especially at the highest carb intake.

“There is widespread misunderstanding about saturated fat. In population studies, there’s clearly no association of dietary saturated fat and heart disease, yet dietary guidelines continue to advocate restriction of saturated fat. That’s not scientific and not smart,” Volek said. “But studies measuring saturated fat in the blood and risk for heart disease show there is an association. Having a lot of saturated fat in your body is not a good thing. The question is, what causes people to store more saturated fat in their blood, or membranes, or tissues?

“People believe ‘you are what you eat,’ but in reality, you are what you save from what you eat,” he said. “The point is you don’t necessarily save the saturated fat that you eat. And the primary regulator of what you save in terms of fat is the carbohydrate in your diet. Since more than half of Americans show some signs of carb intolerance, it makes more sense to focus on carb restriction than fat restriction.”

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Pain-Sensing Neurons Created From Human, Mouse Skin Cells

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 25, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Two different teams of researchers, one led by scientists from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and the other involving members of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) have discovered ways to create the neurons that detect pain, itch and other sensations in laboratory conditions out of human and mouse skin cells.
The TSRI study, which was published online Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience, used what the authors referred to as a simple technique to create neurons that normally reside in clusters called dorsal root ganglia (DRG) along the outer spine. Those neurons are often affected by spinal cord injuries and a neurodegenerative condition known as Friedreich’s ataxia.
According to the researchers, DRG sensory neurons extend their nerve fibers into skin, muscle and joints located throughout the body. The neurons are capable of alternately detecting gentle touch, painful contact, heat, cold, wounds, inflammation, chemical irritants, itch-inducing agents and fullness of the bowels and bladder. They also relay information about the position of the body and limbs, and have been linked to aging and autoimmune disease.
Due to the difficulties involved in culturing adult human neurons, most research relating to DRG neurons has been done in mice. However, the rodents are of limited use in understanding the human version of this “somatosensory” system, TSRI explained. The new discovery will allow this type of human neurons and their associated sensory mechanisms to be studied with relative ease in laboratory conditions, according to the study authors.
“We have found a way to produce induced sensory neurons from humans where these genes can be expressed in their ‘normal’ cellular environment,” associate professor Kristin K. Baldwin, an investigator in TSRI’s Dorris Neuroscience Center, said in a statement. “This method is rapid, robust and scalable. Therefore we hope that these induced sensory neurons will allow our group and others to identify new compounds that block pain and itch and to better understand and treat neurodegenerative disease and spinal cord injury.”
Similarly, the HSCI-led study, which included experts from Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) and Harvard’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology (HSCRB), was able to successfully convert mouse and human skin cells into pain-sensing neurons that responded to several different types of stimuli responsible for causing both acute and inflammatory pain.
The authors of this study, which also appeared in Wednesday’s online edition of Nature Neuroscience, said that their research could help scientists better understand the different types of pain that we experience, as well as better identify why people respond to pain in different ways and why some individuals are more or less likely to develop chronic pain. It could also result in the development of improved pain-relieving medications.
The six-year project resulted in the creation of neuronal pain receptors that respond to both the types of intense stimuli triggered by a physical injury, and the more subtle stimuli triggered by inflammation which results in pain tenderness. The researchers report that the fact the neurons can respond to both the gross and fine forms of stimulation which produce separate types of pain in humans confirm that they are functionally normal.
HSCI Executive Director Brock Reeve said that the project “exemplifies the type of long-term collaboration between academia and industry that is critical for advancing basic science and providing new ways to discover drugs,” and said that despite early struggles, the investigative team “had a dogged kind of persistence” which allowed their efforts to pay off as they discovered new transcription factors previously undetected in mice that allowed them to transform the skin cells directly into pain-sensing neurons.
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Understanding The Drinking Mechanics Of Cats And Dogs

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 25, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Both cats and dogs lap up liquids in much the same way. So why do canines spill so much more water than felines when they drink? As it turns out, there’s a valid scientific reason behind the phenomenon.
Researchers from Virginia Tech and Purdue University analyzed the drinking habits of various dog breeds, identifying the mechanics and modeling the fluid mechanics involved when dogs drink water. They found that the reason dogs create more backsplash is because they have the cheeks of a predatory quadruped.
The findings will be presented Tuesday at the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD) meeting in San Francisco, California, and builds on similar research previously conducted by the same team in which they used high-speed cameras to analyze the drinking habits of felines.
“Three years ago, we studied how cats drink,” Sunny Jung, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech, explained in a statement provided to NewsWise. In that November 2011 study, Jung and his colleagues reported that cats use their tongues to delicately draw up water without breaking the liquid’s surface, thus harnessing a perfect balance between the physical forces of gravity and inertia.
As Jennifer Viegas of Discovery News explains, neither cats nor dogs are able to suck in liquids the way humans do because their cheeks are designed for the lifestyle of a four-legged predator. While dogs are omnivores, the wolves from which they evolved are predators that typically hunt hoofed animals such as deer, moose, elk and caribou.
Like dogs, cats are members of the order Carnivora and have incomplete cheeks, allowing them to open their mouths wide enough to deliver the fatal blow to their prey. However, the same biological traits which make them effective hunters also makes it impossible to create suction while drinking. Since dogs cannot seal their cheeks completely, they are unable to create negative pressure and suck up water into their mouths like humans do.
Cats also lack suction, but they make up for it by drinking using a two-part “water entry-and-exit” process, the researchers explained. It compensates by just barely brushing the surface of water with the smooth tip of its tongue before drawing its tongue back in, forming a column of liquid between the tongue and the water’s surface. It then closes its mouth to pinch off the top of the column, using both gravity and inertia to keep its chin dry.
According to Reuters, when Jung and his colleagues started analyzing dogs, they expected to find that canines used a mechanism similar to their feline counterparts. However, they found that while cats gently touch the liquid surface with their tongues, dogs are far more aggressive and create more backsplash. Also, while felines pull up their tongue to create a water column with a force up to twice that of gravity, canines generate a force of up to eight times gravity.
The study authors also devised a model using glass tubes to simulate a dog’s tongue, which allowed them to alter the parameters of the experiment and mimic the acceleration and column formation during the exit process. Moving forward, Jung and his colleagues plan to study the diving dynamics of plunging seabirds, the skittering motion of frogs and the response of leaves to exposure to fast-moving raindrops.
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Sony Movie Studio Computers Crippled By Apparent Cyberattack

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 25, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) has warned employees not to connect to corporate networks or access their email accounts after the Culver City, California-based movie studio was targeted by hackers on Monday.
According to Ryan Faughnder, Paresh Dave and Saba Hamedy of the Los Angeles Times, the attack has left all of SPE’s computer systems unusable, and employees who attempted to log in were met with an ominous image of a red skeleton before the system went dark.
“Staff from coast to coast couldn’t log on to computers or access email, bringing the workday to a crawl. They were reduced to using old-fashioned pen and paper to complete assignments and taking calls on landline telephones,” the reporters wrote. “Without specifying demands, the group warned Sony that it had obtained ‘secrets’ and threatened to leak them to the Web. The hackers said they would release internal information late Monday.”

Image Credit: Imgur
The images said that the company had been “Hacked by #GOP,” short for the group Guardians of Peace, according to Bloomberg reports, and while the apparent blackmail attempt is under investigation, the Los Angeles Times said that there appears to be no indication that the hacker followed through on their threats to release corporate data.
Todd Spangler, NY Digital Editor at Variety said that the warning indicated the group planned to divulge the information by 3pm Pacific time (6pm Eastern time) on Monday, and that it is not clear what their specific goals are. However, they claimed to have “all” of Sony’s “secrets,” and said that the hacking was “just the beginning.”
In addition, since-deleted tweets were posted to Sony-operated social media accounts specifically calling out CEO Michael Lynton. Russell Brandom of The Verge reported that the information obtained by the hackers included “a number of sensitive documents” which were listed in .zip files uploaded to URLs posted by the group.
“The documents named in the .zip file are widely varied, suggesting the attackers pulled the full contents of an employee server,” Brandom added. “Dozens of podcast mp3 files are named alongside potentially sensitive records and password files, the latter of which would explain how the group was able to commandeer so many Twitter accounts at once. There is already a Reddit thread devoted to piecing through the files.”
The company confirmed to reporters that it had been “investigating an IT issue” but would not elaborate. However, The Next Web said that an anonymous source had confirmed the hack was real, and that the attack started with a single compromised server in the movie studio’s network before spreading to other systems.
As Spangler pointed out, this is far from the first time that Sony has been targeted by hackers. In August, the company’s PlayStation Network (PSN) was taken down using a denial-of-service attack, and while no user data was compromised in that attack, a 2011 breach did expose the names and passwords of millions of PSN customers.
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Exercise In A Bottle Under Development By Nestle Food Scientists

Written By: Brett Smith

Published Date: November 25, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Future food and nutritional products could emulate the effects of exercise on the body’s metabolism

Image Credit: Nestle

Running 5k on a treadmill or an hour-long spin class can be a real pain in the you-know-what, but a team of Nestlé scientists may have found a work-around for all that effort – call it exercise in a bottle.

According to a new study in the Journal of Chemistry and Biology, the Nestlé scientists are currently working on a compound called C13 that is designed to target AMPK, the “master switch” of the human body’s metabolism.

“AMPK is a key protein in every single cell in your body and is naturally activated by exercise. It monitors your energy status, like a fuel gauge in a car, and tells you to fill up when your energy is low,” said Kei Sakamoto, the Head of Diabetes and Circadian Rhythms at the Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences in Switzerland.

By turning on AMPK, C13 would effectively amplify the fitness benefits from a brisk walk into the equivalent benefits from a more extreme workout. Nestlé isn’t the first company to identify AMPK as a target for weight loss, and the successful development of C13 could lead to its use in a wide range of products, from energy bars to weight-loss smoothies.

“The enzyme can help people who can’t tolerate or continue rigorous exercise,” Sakamoto told Bloomberg News reporter Corinne Gretler. “Instead of 20 minutes of jogging or 40 minutes of cycling, it may help boost metabolism with moderate exercise like brisk walking. They’d get similar effects with less strain.”

The Nestlé scientist added that C13 could also be used to treat metabolic diseases, such as diabetes, in people who may have trouble exercising due to physical limitations.

“Our research has revealed new knowledge about this master switch,” Sakamoto said in a statement. “In some conditions, such as diabetes, the body doesn’t respond properly to insulin and muscle cells reject the message about their need to take up glucose.”

“However, even under such medical conditions, AMPK can find an alternative way and take up glucose in muscle,” he added.

By pursuing a compound that acts on the body’s natural systems, Nestlé could be wading into pharmacological waters as a number of drug companies are also pursuing AMPK as a target for treatment. Nestlé said it would not be partnering with any drug companies in its work on C13, however.

“Ideally, we’ll be able to develop products that will help promote and augment the effects of exercise,” Sakamoto said, adding that the pursuit of C13 should not be seen as an effort to replace exercise.

“Exercise has so many different effects – a cognitive role and physiological function – we’ll never be able to mimic all those effects in a single product,” Sakamoto said.

Ed Baetge, Head of the Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences, said the current efforts revolve around applying basic knowledge.

“The next stage is to identify natural substances that can influence this molecular mechanism,” he said. “This could lead to the development of new dietary approaches with targeted effects on the body that, like exercise, could help in addressing metabolic problems and maintaining a healthy energy balance.”

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Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia Patients Can Lead Healthy, Normal Lives

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating

Published Date: November 25, 2014 Last Edited: November 25, 2014

What is Fibromyalgia?

Fibromyalgia is characterized by an enveloping pain that is not localized to a single region of the body.

The pain differs in severity from individual to individual, but it produces concentrated points of sensitivity known as tender points.

Additionally, subjects with this condition develop sleep disturbances that complicate the condition by disrupting many of the body’s processes, along with severe fatigue that impedes both memory and concentration.

The sobering realization is that one or more of these symptoms may burgeon into myriad other symptoms. For example, the sleep deprivation resulting from the intense muscle pain and stiffness may produce mood disturbances and disorganized thinking, along with anxiety and depression. Treatment is absolutely imperative in terms of mitigating the presence of this condition.

This condition is complicated by varying factors, and has been known to mimic the searing pain experienced by arthritis sufferers. For this reason, professionals have in some cases misclassified fibromyalgia by putting it in the same category as arthritis.

The key distinction between fibromyalgia and arthritis, bursitis and tendinitis is that while the latter conditions have focal points of severe pain, fibromyalgia immerses the entire body in pain.

This gives rise to a disabling impact on the sufferer. Bed rest often proves ineffective, and weakness and exhaustion continue to intensify. For this reason, even after a full night of rest, the sufferer may feel as if they have not slept at all.

Treatments

Which treatments afford patients with the highest level of effectiveness? This is highly contingent on the gender, genetic makeup, and disease severity of the patient. However, generally speaking, the most effective treatments focus on muscle pain and tender points. Additionally, any treatment that reduces stress, anxiety, insomnia and depression can provide the fibromyalgia sufferer with significant relief.

While no cure currently exists for this disease, a plethora of treatments are available. Treatment recommendations require patients to integrate healthy lifestyle changes with holistic methods (if they so choose), physical therapy and conventional medical treatments. Refer to the following list for a decisive course of treatment options to take:

Aerobic exercise has been said to bolster energy levels, minimize the effects of fatigue, alleviate painful symptoms and even permit more fulfilling nights of rest. Aerobic exercise has also been associated with a more elevated mood.

According to a multitude of different studies, research likens aerobic exercise to a potent medical treatment, in terms of its overall effectiveness. It has been said that exercise is one of the most salient treatments for this disease. While many patients with this disease avoid exercise for fear of pain and injury, exercise is crucial. One of the reasons why exercise produces such noticeable effects is because it helps synthesize endorphins, which functions as nature’s most affordable painkillers.

They’re produced directly in the body and released into the bloodstream during and after an exercise session. It is recommended that sufferers of this condition start slowly and gradually increase the intensity and duration of their exercise regimen to avoid injury.

Physical therapy is a commonly-prescribed method for treating fibromyalgia. Among its many effects, it has been said to counteract both pain and stiffness. An established, physical therapy regimen with a qualified professional can reacquaint one with healthy bodily movement and good posture, which can help to reduce wear and tear on already-sore muscles.

A good physical therapist can teach you how to stretch for maximum pain relief and reduce the amount of pain-management medication you need.

Various drugs can be prescribed in order to treat this condition with the utmost effectiveness. The American Pain Society has indicated the preferred initial treatment is to administer antidepressants. These medications can enhance pain management, counteract depression and fatigue, and normalize sleep cycles.

FDA-approved anticonvulsant drugs can actually mitigate pain and increase mobility in some people. Although such medications are sometimes associated with dizziness, pain and weight gain, they can treat this condition.

Medications that improve sleep cycles and minimize sleep disturbances may reduce fibromyalgia symptoms significantly. For example, specific antidepressants can produce this effect when they are taken in specific quantities before bedtime. However, there is a widespread consensus that sleeping pills are highly ineffective in the context of treating this disease.

Anti-inflammatory drugs, including NSAIDS, do not minimize fibromyalgia symptoms in any capacity. This is because inflammation is not the cause of the symptoms in this disease. Conversely, acetaminophen has proven effective in terms of mitigating pain.

Muscle relaxers have been said to alleviate pain, especially the painful muscle aches and tender spots that are characteristic of fibromyalgia. While orally ingested steroids produce no effect in fibromyalgia patients, they do improve symptoms when injected directly into the muscle experiencing the pain or spasm.

Alternatively, cognitive behavioral therapy is used to address the mental and emotional aspects of this condition. Acupuncture is believed to interact with energy pathways and alter the brain’s chemistry. In this sense, it can interfere with relevant pain pathways and produce a more favorable response. Chiropractic practices have been said to reduce pain and increase mobility.

Furthermore, deep tissue massage can alleviate stiffness, muscle tension and enhance circulation. Neuromuscular massage is a practice that applies eastern medical philosophies, such as shiatsu or acupressure. Biofeedback facilitates one’s ability to management their reaction to pain and reduce its impact on their happiness and sense of control over their lives.

While meditation possesses only a few, conceivable pain reduction properties, it does alleviate the depression and anxiety associated with this disease. It is believed that specific herbal remedies may contribute to pain management of this condition, as well.

These remedies include Echinacea, black cohosh, and lavender. Dietary supplements can infuse the body with much-needed vitamins and nutrients, which can then facilitate serotonin production, muscular healing and recovery and pain management.

A healthy diet that excludes foods associated with mood and sleep disturbances should be adopted in an effort to control fibromyalgia symptoms as much as possible. For example, diets high in unhealthy fats like trans-fats should be strictly avoided.

Space-Mapping Neurons React Differently To Virtual Reality

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 25, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
While virtual reality technology can recreate sensory experiences like sight, sound and touch, a new study from UCLA neurophysicists has found that the space-mapping neurons located in the brain’s hippocampus aren’t necessarily fooled – they react differently to the simulations than they do to real-world environments.
The hippocampus is the region of the brain involved in conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, depression, epilepsy, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), stroke and schizophrenia, the researchers explained, and it also plays an important role in forming new memories and creating “cognitive maps” as a person explores a new environment.
The mechanisms used to develop those mental maps remain a mystery, but neuroscientists have determined that the hippocampus is able to compute distances between the subject and his or her surrounding landmarks. In an actual maze, however, cues such as smells and sounds can also help the brain determine distances and spaces.
Image Left: UCLA’s Mayank Mehta. Credit: Reed Hutchinson/UCLA
“The pattern of activity in a brain region involved in spatial learning in the virtual world is completely different than when it processes activity in the real world,” senior author Mayank Mehta, a UCLA professor of physics, neurology and neurobiology in the UCLA College, said in a statement. “Since so many people are using virtual reality, it is important to understand why there are such big differences.”
In research published Wednesday in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Mehta’s team tested to see if the hippocampus could form spatial maps using only visual landmarks. They devised a noninvasive virtual reality environment, then studied how the hippocampal neurons in the brains of rats reacted without being able to rely on sounds and smells.
Each rat was outfitted with a small harness and placed on a treadmill surrounded by large video screens depicting a virtual environment described by the study authors as more immersive than IMAX. The room was otherwise dark, and the scientists measured the behavior of the rats and the activity of the neurons in their hippocampi. They then repeated those measurements when the rodents walked in a real room identical to the VR environment.
Much to their surprise, the scientists found that the results from both the virtual and real-world environments were completely different. While in the VR world, the rats’ hippocampal neurons appeared to fire randomly, suggesting that the neurons had no idea where the rat was. Despite the fact that the rodent appeared to behave perfectly normally in both the real and virtual environments, their spatial map appeared to completely disappear.
“Nobody expected this. The neuron activity was a random function of the rat’s position in the virtual world,” Mehta, director of a W.M. Keck Foundation Neurophysics Center and a member of UCLA’s Brain Research Institute, told UCLS’s Stuart Wolpert. He added that “the neural pattern in virtual reality is substantially different from the activity pattern in the real world. We need to fully understand how virtual reality affects the brain.”
By retuning and synchronizing these rhythms, Mehta believes that doctors could be able to repair damaged memory. However, this would still be an “enormous” challenge, as neurons and the connections between them (synapses) combine to form an immensely complex network. He had previously demonstrated in previous research that the hippocampal circuit rapidly evolves with learning, and that brain rhythms play a critical role in this process.
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Put Down The Pitchforks: New Product Doesn’t Make Vaginas Smell Like Peaches

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 24, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A probiotic product that became an Internet sensation after published reports claimed that it could make a vagina smell like peaches does actually exist, but wasn’t invented by the two male Silicon Valley bio-hackers originally believed to be responsible and doesn’t do what they claimed it would do.
According to a November 19 story by Inc.com San Francisco Bureau Chief Jeff Bercovici, Cambrian Genomics founder Austen Heinz and Personalized Probiotics founder Gilad Gome revealed a product line known as Sweet Peach Probiotics during the DEMO conference in San Jose, California last Wednesday. The supplement, they said, would “enable women to change the way their vaginas smell” and would be produced using Cambrian’s DNA printing technology.
Bercovici noted that Sweet Peach would have “practical benefits, like preventing yeast infections and other health problems caused by microorganisms,” but Heinz said the main idea was “personal empowerment” by eliminating odors “produced by the creatures that live on you. We think it’s a fundamental human right to not only know your code and the code of the things that live on you but also to write your own code and personalize it.”
Viral Peaches Storm The Net…
It didn’t take long for the story to spread across the Web like wildfire, with various bloggers, reporters and social media users chiming in with their opinions not just on the concept of the product, but on the apparent audacity of two men coming up with a product designed to biologically alter a very female part of the anatomy.
Allison P. Davis of New York Magazine said that the “personal empowerment” assertion “totally makes sense for a product insinuating that women need to fix or enhance their nether regions,” and quipped that “lest you think women’s vaginas are the only fix-it targets,” Heinz and Gome also had plans “to create a pill that will make pets feces smell like bananas.”
Arwa Mahdawi of The Guardian suggested that women might be “perfectly happy with your healthy vagina’s natural smell and have never felt the slightest urge to have the scent of fuzzy fruits waft up from your lady garden,” and that many would “almost certainly…wonder why two guys have such firm ideas of how your vagina should smell.”
Buzzfeed Beauty Editor Arabelle Sicardi pointed out that the project had been “booted off of Kickstarter for being too controversial” and that “many vagina owners are not exactly thrilled at the prospect” of using the product. Sicardi also noted that Heinz gave little insight as to why they were purportedly working on a product that would alter feminine hygiene odors.
Not So Fast…
As it turns out, however, Heinz and Gome did not actually invent the product.
In a follow-up story, Bercovici explained that he was contacted by the REAL founder and CEO of Sweet Peach Probiotics, a 20-year-old, self-described “ultrafeminist” named Audrey Hutchinson. Hutchinson, the Inc.com reporter explained, is a former student at Bard College who left school to develop ways for women to manage reproductive health that did not require doctors or trips to the clinic. Yes, she is female, and she called the way her product has been characterized as highly misleading.
“I don’t think women should have vaginas that smell like peaches or anything like that,” she said. “I’m obviously sort of appalled that it’s been misconstrued like this because it was never the point of my company. I don’t want to apologize for [Heinz, who owns just a 10 percent stake in the company; Gome has no involvement whatsoever], but at the same time I want to apologize to every woman in the world who’s heard about this and wants my head on a stake.”
So how will it work? Hutchinson explained that a user will take a sample of her vaginal microbiome and send it in to be analyzed. After scientists determine its makeup and figures out what microorganisms live in her vagina, the company will supply the customer with a personalized regimen of probiotic supplements designed to optimize her vaginal health.
The goal is to make sure that desirable microbes flourish in their proper balance while ensuring that undesirable ones, such as those that cause yeast infections are kept in check. And the name? It does not refer to the fact that the supplements will make a woman’s nether-regions smell like a deciduous tree fruit; rather, it was chosen because the peach has long been used as a symbol of the vagina in literature, said Bercovici.
While Heinz said that some of his investors had pulled out in the wake of the controversy, he told the Inc.com reporter that he believed the “mischaracterization” would be “great for Sweet Peach. Typically in the press, philosophical controversy can be useful when you’re selling a product. So it’s great for Audrey.” He personally, however, had lost “a lot of money” due to the perception that “Cambrian is a sexist organization who think women’s vaginas smell bad,” he added.
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Stargazer Shrimp Discovered In South African Waters

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 24, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A newly-discovered species of shrimp living in South African waters has been dubbed the Stargazer Mysid due to the way its large, candy-striped eyes appear to gaze permanently upward, researchers from the University of Cape Town (UCT) announced recently.
Even though the 10- to 15-millimeter long crustacean appears to have a devoted interest in astronomy, the university explained that the phenomenon is simply a trick of nature, as the eyes of shrimps lack pupils and irises. Instead, the creatures have compound eyes comprised of several simple elements, each of which look in different directions.
The colorful patterns on its eyes are believed to give the appearance that they belong to a much larger creature, thus scaring off predators, UCT researchers noted. The creature’s official name is Mysidopsis zsilaveczi in honor of Guido Zsilavecz, the underwater photographer who first discovered the creature at False Bay in southwest South Africa.
“The university’s senior marine biologist, Charles Griffiths, could not identify the species when Zsilavecz brought it to him and so samples were sent to an expert in Vienna,” Reuters reporter Helen Nyambura-Mwaura wrote in a Friday article. “Zsilavecz also recently found a new type of nudibranch, a soft-bodied sea slug, around Cape Town.”
Griffiths said that he was surprised by the vivid coloring of the shrimp, as well as its “fake eyes,” which he compared to “the eye spots on moths’ wings.” He and Wittmann describe the new Mysidopsis species – the ninth creature of its kind to be discovered in Southern Africa – in the journal Crustaceana.
Zsilavecz, a computer scientist and co-founder of the Southern Underwater Research Group (SURG), explained that he has long been interested in aquatic life and purchased an underwater camera in order to record his experiences in pictures. He has contributed to marine guidebooks and had previously helped identify other new species.
The discovery of Mysidopsis zsilaveczi “confirms that the coastal waters of this subcontinent are one of the biodiversity hotspots in this genus,” Griffiths said, adding that “some 30 new marine species are found in South African waters annually.” In this case, however, there was an interesting footnote to the discovery.
According to the university, once Wittmann realized this was a new species of shrimp, he found that he only had males among the first several samples sent to him. He asked Griffiths and Zsilavecz to find and send him female stargazer mysids. They collected eight additional specimens which looked different, assuming they were females.
However, when Wittmann examined the first two vials, he found not female stargazer mysids, but two additional new species of shrimp – and UCT said that the unopened vials could have even more new types of crustaceans.
“These can form the topic of another paper next year, but we wanted to get the description of this first species published in the interim,” Griffiths told UCT’s Helen Swingler. “It’s amazing that we’re still finding so many new species in heavily dived waters like False Bay, right on our doorstep”
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Security Experts Uncover New, Stuxnet-Like Cyber-Espionage Trojan

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 24, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The same experts who helped discover Stuxnet four years ago have found a new advanced cyberespionage tool that they believe has been used to spy on governments, companies and researchers for over six years.
The malware program was discovered by security experts at Symantec, makers of the Norton antivirus suite of products, and has been identified as “Regin,” said Arik Hesseldahl of Re/Code. Its origins are unknown, but Symantec said that nearly 100 Regin infections have been detected to date, with more than half occurring in Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Regin is “a back door-type Trojan” that “has been used in systematic spying campaigns against a range of international targets since at least 2008,” researchers at the Mountain View, California-based company said in a blog post. They added that it is “a complex piece of malware whose structure displays a degree of technical competence rarely seen.”
“Customizable with an extensive range of capabilities depending on the target, it provides its controllers with a powerful framework for mass surveillance and has been used in spying operations against government organizations, infrastructure operators, businesses, researchers, and private individuals,” the researchers said. “It is likely that its development took months, if not years, to complete and its authors have gone to great lengths to cover its tracks.”
Symantec went on to note that the capabilities of the Trojan and the resources that would have been required to create it suggest that it is one of the primary cyberespionage tools used by an unknown country. Hesseldahl noted that, due to the complexity of the malware, only a handful of countries would be capable of developing such a program. Among the countries on that so-called short list are the US, China and Israel.
Regin “appears to have been aimed against particular individuals and small businesses,” said Gregory Wallace of CNN Money, and some telecommunications companies were also targeted in an apparent attempt to eavesdrop on phone calls made using those networks. Furthermore, the Trojan was also deployed in the hospitality and energy industries, he added.
Symantec also said the malware is able to conceal itself and has multiple layers of protection, including several types of encryption, Wallace added. Regin also uses a so-called modular structure that hides the deeper layers of the malware, making it extremely difficult to determine exactly what the program is doing at any given time. In those regards, it has drawn comparisons to the Stuxnet worm, the researchers noted.
“Regin’s highly customizable nature allows for a wide range of remote access Trojan capabilities, including password and data theft, hijacking the mouse’s point-and-click functions, and capturing screenshots from infected computers,” CNET nighttime news editor Steven Musil said, adding that it was also observed monitoring network traffic and analyzing emails.
Symantec also believes that many components of this multi-layered Trojan remain undetected, and that there may be other versions that have not yet been detected. Reuters added that nearly half of all Regin infections occurred at the addresses of Internet service providers (ISPs), and that the Symantec report said customers of companies were more likely to be targeted than the companies themselves.
“The discovery of Regin highlights how significant investments continue to be made into the development of tools for use in intelligence gathering,” Symantec said. “The development and operation of this malware would have required a significant investment of time and resources, indicating that a nation state is responsible. Its design makes it highly suited for persistent, long term surveillance operations against targets.”

Image Above: Regin’s five stages. Credit: Symantec

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Italy’s First Female Astronaut Among New ISS Crew Members

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 24, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Three new crew members, including Italy’s first female astronaut, arrived on the International Space Station (ISS) after lifting off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazahkstan onboard a Russian Soyuz rocket on Sunday.
NASA astronaut Terry Virts, Anton Shkaplerov of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency (ESA) lifted off at 2101 GMT (4.01 p.m. EST) Sunday and arrived at a berthing port on the Russian side of the orbiting laboratory approximately six hours later, according to Reuters reporter Irene Klotz.
The trio joins fellow Expedition 42 members Commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore of NASA and Alexander Samoukutyaev and Elena Serova of Roscosmos on the ISS, where they will “continue to take advantage of the orbital lab’s unique microgravity environment and expand the scope of research,” NASA said in a blog post overnight.
The six-person crew will “perform experiments that cover human research, biological and physical sciences, technology development and Earth observations as well as engage in educational activities,” the US space agency added. They are also “scheduled to greet a host of cargo vehicles during their mission,” oversee “the departure of the final European ATV cargo spacecraft” and “conduct up to three US spacewalks,” it added.

Image Above: In the front row, from left are the newest Expedition 42 crew members Anton Shkaplerov, Samantha Cristoforetti and Terry Virts. In the back are Elena Serova, Commander Barry Wilmore and Alexander Samokutyaev. They are in the Zvezda service module for a traditional crew greeting ceremony with family and mission officials on the ground. Credit: NASA TV
Those tasks will take place over the next six months, Klotz said, and the spacewalks are designed to help get the space station prepared for the arrival of a new fleet of American-designed commercial space vehicles designed to begin ferrying astronauts to the ISS in late 2017. Wilmore, Samoukutyaev and Serova will return to Earth in March 2015, and Virts (who will become Expedition 43 Commander), Shkaplerov and Cristoforetti follow in May.
The 37-year-old Cristoforetti, a pilot with the Italian Air Force, is that country’s first female astronaut. With her joining Serova, a 38-year-old engineer from Russia, on board the space station, it marks only the second time in the 16-year history of the facility that two women are part of the long-term ISS crew, according to the AP Aerospace Writer Marcia Dunn.
Despite the rarity of the situation, both astronauts have deflected questions about the gender issue.
According to the Reuters reporter, Cristoforetti was asked about being Italy’s first female astronaut during a webcast prelaunch press conference from Kazakhstan over the weekend. She said that she had “done nothing special” to earn that right, and that she “just wanted to fly to space and I happen to be the first.”
Dunn added that, prior to Serova’s departure, Russian reporters asked her if she was taking makeup with her, and wondered what hairdo she would sport during her time in space. She ignored the first question, but responded to the second by asking the reporter why the question wasn’t directed to male counterpart Alexander Samokutyaev.
“To Americans old enough to remember, it felt like a time machine hurtling back to 1983 and Sally Ride’s first flight into space when she got similar questions,” Dunn said. “Both Serova and Cristoforetti will spend six months aboard the 260-mile-high complex, following in the footsteps of nine American women who logged lengthy stays. Two of those US women shared the place in 2010, with four men. Another two women rose to station commander rank.”
“Cristoforetti is the first woman assigned to a lengthy space station mission by the European Space Agency,” she added. “Serova is one of only four Russian women to fly in space and the first to live at this space station. It was 1963 when Russia launched the world’s first spacewoman, Valentina Tereshkova, beating America by two full decades, and 1984 when it flew the first world’s female spacewalker, Svetlana Savitskaya.”
[ Watch the Video: Expedition 42/43 Launches To The International Space Station ]
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New Stem Cell Treatment Found To Cure ‘Bubble Baby’ Disease

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 24, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

A new stem cell gene therapy developed by researchers at UCLA is set to begin clinical trials early next year after the technique reportedly cured 18 children who were born without working immune systems due to a condition known as ADA-deficient Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID) or “Bubble Baby” disease.

The treatment was developed by Dr. Donald Kohn, a member of the UCLA Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research, and his colleagues, and according to the university, it is able to identify and correct faulty genes by using the DNA of the youngsters born with this life-threatening condition.

Left untreated, ADA-deficient SCID is often fatal within the first year of a child’s life, reports Peter M. Bracke for UCLA. However, after more than three decades of research, Dr. Kohn’s team managed to develop a gene therapy that can safely restore the immune systems of children with the disease by using their own cells and with no noticeable side effects.

“All of the children with SCID that I have treated in these stem cell clinical trials would have died in a year or less without this gene therapy, instead they are all thriving with fully functioning immune systems,” Dr. Kohn, who is also a professor of pediatrics and of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics, said in a recent statement.

Children born with SCID have to be isolated in a controlled environment for their own safety, because without an immune system, they are extremely vulnerable to illnesses and infections that could be deadly. While there are other treatments for ADA-deficient SCID, Dr. Kohn noted that they are “not always optimal or feasible for many children.” The new technique, however, provides them with “a cure, and the chance to live a full healthy life.”

SCID is an inherited immunodeficiency that is typically diagnosed about six months after birth, the researchers said, and children with the condition are so vulnerable to infectious diseases that even the common cold could prove fatal to them. This particular form of the condition causes cells to not create ADA, an enzyme essential for the production of the white blood cells which are a vital component of a healthy, normally-functioning immune system.

Approximately 15 percent of all SCID patients are ADA-deficient, according to the university, and these youngsters are typically treated by being injected twice per week with the required enzyme. This is a process that must continue throughout a patient’s entire life, and even then it doesn’t always work to bring their immune systems to optimal levels. Alternately, they could undergo bone marrow transplants from matched siblings, but those matches are rare and the transplanted cells themselves are often rejected by the child’s body.

Dr. Kohn and his colleagues tested two therapy regimens on 18 ADA-deficient SCID over the course of two multi-year clinical trials starting in 2009. During the trials, the blood stem cells of the patients were removed from their bone marrow and genetically modified in order to correct the defect. All 18 of the patients were cured.

The technique used a virus delivery system first developed in Dr. Kohn’s laboratory in the 1990s – a technique which inserts the corrected gene that produces the ADA into the blood forming stem cells in the bone marrow. The genetically corrected blood-forming stem cells will then produce the T-cells required to combat infections.

“He and colleagues tested different viral vectors, modifying each and perfecting viral delivery as the best method to put the healthy ADA genes back into the bone marrow cells of the patients,” Bracke reported. “With the newly-transplanted cells now able to produce the needed enzyme, they use the powerful self-renewal potential of stem cells to repopulate the blood stream and the child develops their own new, fully-functioning immune system.

“The next step is to seek FDA approval for the gene therapy in the hopes that all children with ADA-deficient SCID will be able to benefit from the treatment,” the researchers added. “This cutting-edge research also lays the groundwork for the successful gene therapy to be clinically tested for treatment of sickle cell disease, with trials set to begin next year.”

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A ‘Hands-On’ Approach For Treating Constipation

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 24, 2014 Last Edited: November 24, 2014

Brian Galloway

Instead of reaching for a laxative the next time you’re feeling constipated, you might want to give perineal self-acupressure a try, experts from the UCLA Center for East-West Medicine reported in research published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
What is perineal self-acupressure? According to the UCLA researchers, it is a simple technique in which a person applies external pressure to the area between the anus and the genitals known as the perineum. While it might sound strange to many, the authors said that 72 percent of study participants said the technique helped them have bowel movement.
Nearly one-in-five North Americans suffer from constipation, the researchers said, and the condition is more common in women, non-whites, people older than 60, those who are not physically active, and the poor. It is also a costly ailment, with an estimated $4.25 billion in hospital fees linked to the treatment of constipation in 2010 alone, and it can also lead to depression, lower quality of life and a decrease in work productivity, they added.

Study participants loved the technique

Principal investigator Dr. Ryan Abbott, a visiting assistant professor of medicine in the division of general internal medicine and health services research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and his colleagues recruited a total of 100 patients (nine of whom dropped out during the study).
Each of the participants was at least 18 years old, and all met the clinical criteria for functional constipation. Those criteria included having no more than three defecations per week and having the following symptoms for at least 25 percent of their bowel movements: straining during defecation, having hard to lumpy stools, experiencing a sensation of incomplete evacuation, experience a sense of obstruction or blockage, or having to use manual maneuvers.
The patients were given three to five minutes worth of instruction on the perineal self-acupressure process and were encouraged to perform the exercises on their own for four weeks whenever they felt the urge to defecate. The patients reported using the method an average of three to four times per week, and the technique reportedly helped break up hard stools, relax muscles and stimulate the nerves responsible for bowel movements.
In all, 72 percent of participants said that the technique helped them break up, soften or pass stools, while 54 percent claimed it helped avoid hemorrhoids or lessen the severity of existing hemorrhoids. Eighty-two percent told the researchers that they would continue using the technique, and 72 percent said they would recommend perineal self-acupressure to their family and friends, the university revealed in a statement.

This method could be very helpful before a battle with the porcelain throne. (Credit: Thinkstock)

“This unique self-administered acupressure treatment for constipation is just one example of how an integrative approach to medicine helps patients and is cost-effective, too,” Dr. Ka-Kit Hui, founder and director of the UCLA Center for East-West Medicine and one of the study authors, told UCLA’s Enrique Rivero. “Utilizing both Eastern and Western approaches helps create a new paradigm of medicine that combines the best of both worlds.”
The authors did point out that there were some limitations to their study, including the fact that it was not a blinded trial and that the sample size was relatively small. In addition, they noted that it was unclear if the technique could be used to prevent constipation, or if other, similar techniques would have resulted in comparable results. However, they do believe that their results indicate the usefulness of perineal self-acupressure alongside other types of treatment.
“As a non-invasive, non-pharmacological treatment intervention for constipation, perineal self-acupressure likely carries a lower risk for side effects and complications than commonly used medications such as stool softeners, fiber supplements, stimulants, laxatives and lubricants,” the study authors wrote in their report.
“In addition, perineal self-acupressure may help to control treatment costs because it only requires a brief, initial period of training,” they added. “Furthermore, not all patients respond favorably to existing treatment options, and perineal self-acupressure may represent an effective alternative to conventional treatment options.”
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Image credit: Thinkstock
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Running Better Than Walking For Maintaining Energy Efficiency In Seniors

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 23, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Seniors who regularly run several times each week in order to keep fit typically walk as efficiently as someone in their 20s, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and Humboldt State University report in a new study.

However, older adults who walk for exercise instead of jog typically expended the same amount of energy walking as older, sedentary adults, and both of those groups expend as much as 22 percent more energy walking than 20-somethings, Humboldt State professor Justus Ortega and his colleagues wrote in Thursday’s online edition of the journal PLOS ONE.

As part of their study, the researchers recruited 30 healthy adult volunteers (15 men and 15 women) with an average age of 69. Each participant regularly ran or walked at least three times a week for a minimum of 30 minutes per workout for at least six months, and all of them were given preliminary health screenings at the CU-Boulder Clinical and Translational Research Center (CTRC).

The subjects were then asked to walk at three different speeds (1.6 mph, 2.8 mph, and 3.9 mph) on a force-measuring treadmill at a locomotion laboratory operated by Rodger Kram, an associate professor at the CU-Boulder Department of Integrative Physiology. Their oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production was measured during the training session, and older runners were found to have a greater energy economy than older walkers.

“Older adults who regularly participate in highly aerobic activities – running in particular – have a lower metabolic cost of walking than older, sedentary adults and… seniors who regularly walk for exercise,” Ortega said in a statement. “It’s been known for a long time that as people age their maximum aerobic capacity… declines, and that is true for runners as well. What’s new here is we found that old runners maintain their fuel economy.”

“The bottom line is that running keeps you younger, at least in terms of energy efficiency,” added Kram, a co-author on the study. “Walking for exercise has many positive health effects, like fending off heart disease, diabetes, weight gain and depression – it’s just that walking efficiency does not seem to be one of them. Because we found no external biomechanical differences between the older walkers and runners, we suspect the higher efficiency of senior runners is coming from their muscle cells.”

Specifically, he believed that mitochondria could be involved. Mitochondria, which are small bodies found inside individual cells, generate a type of chemical energy (adenosine triphosphate or ATP) that powers a person’s muscle fibers and allows them to move, lift heavy objects and, of course, run.

Those who exercise regularly generally have greater amounts of mitochondria in their cells, which given them more energy to power larger muscles, Kram said. However, he noted that additional research was required to determine exactly what impact mitochondria have on the increased energy efficiency demonstrated by seniors who run.

“It was surprising to find that older adults who regularly run for exercise are better walkers than older adults who regularly walk for exercise,” noted Owen Beck, a co-author of the study and a graduate student at CU-Boulder. “The take-home message of the study is that consistently running for exercise seems to slow down the aging process and allows older individuals to move more easily, improving their independence and quality of life.”

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Google’s Project Loon Balloons Can Now Be Launched Faster, Fly Longer

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 23, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The hot air balloons being used as part of Project Loon, the Google initiative to bring high-speed Internet access to remote regions of the planet, can now fly 10 times longer than they did in 2013, with some remaining airborne for over 100 days, the Mountain View, California-based company revealed on Thursday.
In addition, Google said that it is able to launch up to 20 of these balloons each day, thanks in part to improvements made to its autofill equipment that allows each of them to be filled with air in less than five minutes, according to VentureBeat’s Emil Protalinski.
The company also revealed that Project Loon balloons have collectively flown 3 million kilometers (roughly 1.86 million miles), equivalent to circumnavigating the Earth nearly 75 times or traveling to the moon and back approximately four times, Protalinski added. The company attributes its success to good old-fashioned trial and error, through which they found multiple ways to refine the process and prevent errors.
“We’ve learned a great deal about what it will take to bring the Internet to everyone, no matter where they are,” Google officials posted to the Project Loon Google+ page. “For example, what footwear is it best for our manufacturing team to wear when they need to walk on the balloon envelopes? Turns out it’s very fluffy socks, the fluffier the better, to ensure the least amount of friction when building our balloons.”
That was “just one of the hundreds of discoveries that has helped prevent leaks and refine our automated manufacturing process,” the company added. “As we’ve launched more long-lasting balloons in the stratosphere we’ve needed to ensure that we can accurately maneuver them to where they need to go. By constantly computing thousands of trajectory simulations it turns out we can get pretty close to our targets.”
The Project Loon balloons and their flight-control systems were built by Raven Aerostar, a company that manufactures balloons for the government-sponsored and NASA-run Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, and the first of them were launched in August 2013. They are about 40 feet tall and 50 feet wide, use helium for lift, operate from the stratosphere and can be piloted remotely.
“We believe that it might actually be possible to build a ring of balloons, flying around the globe on the stratospheric winds, that provides Internet access to the earth below,” Google officials said after announcing Project Loon in June 2013. “It’s very early days, but we’ve built a system that uses balloons, carried by the wind at altitudes twice as high as commercial planes, to beam Internet access to the ground at speeds similar to today’s 3G networks or faster.”
While the initiative has been criticized by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Google is not the only company working on a way to bring Internet access to less developed nations. Facebook is reportedly working on a fleet of drones, satellites and airplanes designed to bring remote broadband access to remote parts of the world, said Fast Company West Coast correspondent Alice Truong.
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Europa Image Remastered Using Latest Image Processing Techniques

Written By: editor

Published Date: November 23, 2014 Last Edited: November 23, 2014

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Provided by Preston Dyches, Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Scientists have produced a new version of what is perhaps NASA’s best view of Jupiter’s ice-covered moon, Europa. The mosaic of color images was obtained in the late 1990s by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft. This is the first time that NASA is publishing a version of the scene produced using modern image processing techniques.

This view of Europa stands out as the color view that shows the largest portion of the moon’s surface at the highest resolution.

An earlier, lower-resolution version of the view, published in 2001, featured colors that had been strongly enhanced. The new image more closely approximates what the human eye would see. Space imaging enthusiasts have produced their own versions of the view using the publicly available data, but NASA has not previously issued its own rendition using near-natural color.

The image features many long, curving and linear fractures in the moon’s bright ice shell. Scientists are eager to learn if the reddish-brown fractures, and other markings spattered across the surface, contain clues about the geological history of Europa and the chemistry of the global ocean that is thought to exist beneath the ice.

In addition to the newly processed image, a new video details why this likely ocean world is a high priority for future exploration.

Hidden beneath Europa’s icy surface is perhaps the most promising place in our solar system beyond Earth to look for present-day environments that are suitable for life. The Galileo mission found strong evidence that a subsurface ocean of salty water is in contact with a rocky seafloor. The cycling of material between the ocean and ice shell could potentially provide sources of chemical energy that could sustain simple life forms.

The Galileo mission was managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.

More information about Europa is available at: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/europa

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A Bad Marriage Can Really Be A Heartbreaker

Written By: Brett Smith

Published Date: November 23, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

A loving marriage has been shown to provide all kinds of physical and emotional benefits to both partners; however, a bad marriage can literally be a heartbreaker.

According to a new study in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, people in a bad marriage have increased risk for cardiovascular disease compared to those in a happy marriage. The relationship was particularly prevalent in women and older individuals.

“Married people seem healthier because marriage may promote health,” study author Hui Liu, a Michigan State University sociologist, told Elahe Izadi of The Washington Post. “But it’s not that every marriage is better than none. The quality of marriage is really important.”

In the study – said to be the first to look at quality of marriage as it relates to heart health – researchers examined data on 1,200 adults in their late 50s to mid-80s. The study team established respondents’ heart health by looking at factors like cardiac arrest events, hypertension, strokes and levels of cholesterol. They also contrasted heart health with how these adults described their marriages, including how close they felt to their partners, how content they said their marriages were, and how challenging or helpful they felt their spouses were in their lives.

The researchers noted that both positive descriptions and negative descriptions of participants’ marriages were taken into account.

“Some people really love each other and have a lot of happiness, but at other times they may have a lot of arguments,” Liu told Izadi.

Unfortunately, negative descriptions of marriage appeared to have a stronger negative impact on heart health than positive descriptions. Liu framed the ‘negatives’ of a marriage as adding up and having a cumulative effect.

“It’s not like you have contact with your spouse and the next day you have heart disease,” Liu told Izadi in an interview. “It really takes time. That may explain why it’s stronger for older people. Your body will remember the effect.”

The study team also noted that an unhappy marriage could drive people toward unhealthy habits, like drinking or smoking, and these habits could be pushing people toward poor cardiovascular health.

The researchers were unable to explain why women showed a stronger correlation between poor marriage quality and poor heart health, but speculated that women may internalize negative feelings more than men, leading to stronger physiological effects. Interestingly, the study team also found that women going through heart disease negatively impact the marriage, while the same effect was not seen in men.

A stronger negative effect was also seen in older people and Liu said this find should spark concerns about the quality of marriage for older couples.

“Marriage counseling is focused largely on younger couples,” Liu said in a recent statement. “But these results show that marital quality is just as important at older ages, even when the couple has been married 40 or 50 years.”

The MSU sociologist said her future research will focus on marriage quality and diabetes, as well as the health dynamics within marriages.

Liu’s co-researcher on the project is Linda Waite, sociology professor at the University of Chicago.

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Turing Test Alternative Proposed By Georgia Tech’s Mark Riedl

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 23, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

For decades, the Turing Test has been the standard method used to measure whether or not a machine or computer program exhibits human-level intelligence, but now a Georgia Institute of Technology researcher has devised an alternative method that relies not on its ability to converse, but on its ability to create a convincing story, poem or painting.

The new test is known as Lovelace 2.0 and it was developed by Mark Riedl, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing. In his work, Riedl sought to improve upon the original Lovelace Test, which was first proposed back in 2001, by creating clear and measurable parameters by which to judge the artistic work created by the artificial intelligence (AI) system.

“For the test, the artificial agent passes if it develops a creative artifact from a subset of artistic genres deemed to require human-level intelligence and the artifact meets certain creative constraints given by a human evaluator,” he explained to BBC News technology reporter Jane Wakefield. “Creativity is not unique to human intelligence, but it is one of the hallmarks of human intelligence.”

The original Lovelace Test required that the AI agent develop a creative work in such a way that the person or team who designed it cannot explain how it developed said item, meaning that the creation must have been made in a way deemed valuable, novel and surprising. In Riedl’s new updated version of the test, however, the evaluator is asked to work within defined constraints without making value judgments about the artistic object.

The Georgia Tech researcher proposes that Lovelace 2.0 is an alternative to the Turing Test, which was originally proposed by computing pioneer Alan Turing back in 1950. Originally known as the Imitation Game, the Turing Test has long been used to test the intelligence capabilities of computational systems, despite the fact that it often relies on deception and the fact that the man who developed it never envisioned using it as a diagnostic tool.

“It’s important to note that Turing never meant for his test to be the official benchmark as to whether a machine or computer program can actually think like a human,” Riedl said in a recent statement. “And yet it has, and it has proven to be a weak measure because it relies on deception. This proposal suggests that a better measure would be a test that asks an artificial agent to create an artifact requiring a wide range of human-level intelligent capabilities.”

According to Wakefield, a computer is considered to have passed the Turing Test if it is mistaken for a human more than 30 percent of the time during a five-minute series of keyboard conversations. In June, a program designed to simulate a 13-year-old Ukrainian allegedly passed the test, though some experts dispute those claims. Riedl told the BBC that even “no existing story generation system can pass the Lovelace 2.0 test.”

“I think this new test shows that we all now recognize that humans are more than just very advanced machines, and that creativity is one of those features that separates us from computers – for now,” added Professor Alan Woodward, a computer expert from the University of Surrey who thinks it could help make a key distinction.

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Extreme Oasis Of Life On Earth Provides Clues To Alien Life

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 23, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
NASA scientists are analyzing tiny shrimp living in one of the planet’s deepest underwater hydrothermal vents to determine if the creatures and their unusual ecosystem could offer clues as to what life might be like on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa and other planetary objects.

Those shrimp are piled one on top of another in layers, and they spend much of their time crawling on rock chimneys that eject hot water, the US space agency said. In addition, they play host to bacteria that live inside their mouths and in specially evolved gill covers, and the microbes produce organic matter upon which the crustaceans feed.
Those bacteria are able to survive in extreme environments because of a process known as chemosynthesis, which allows the organisms to get energy from chemical reactions and functions in the absence of sunlight. In this particular case, the bacteria use hydrogen sulfide, a chemical abundant at the vents, to create organic matter.
The temperatures at those vents can reach upwards of 750 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius), but waters located just an inch away are cool enough to keep the shrimp alive, NASA explained. Also, while hydrogen sulfide in high concentrations is toxic to organisms, the shrimp actually position themselves on the border separating normal, oxygenated ocean water and sulfide-rich water so that both they and the bacteria can survive.
Max Coleman, senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, was a member of a team lead by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) researcher Chris German who discovered the vents off the coast of Cuba in 2009. Their research was funded by NASA’s Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets (ASTEP) program and located the vents by detecting their chemical signals in the water.
“The overall objective of our research is to see how much life or biomass can be supported by the chemical energy of the hot submarine springs,” Coleman explained in a statement. “For two-thirds of the Earth’s history, life has existed only as microbial life. On Europa, the best chance for life would be microbial.”
“Whether an animal like this could exist on Europa heavily depends on the actual amount of energy that’s released there, through hydrothermal vents,” added Emma Versteegh, a postdoctoral fellow at JPL.
Coleman, German and their colleagues returned to the site in 2012 and collected extensive specimens from two different hydrothermal vent fields: the Von Damm field at 7,500 feet (2,300 meters) and Piccard, the world’s deepest vent at more than 16,000 feet (4,900 meters). They examined the shrimp for the first time the following year.

Image Above: Shrimp called Rimicaris hybisae at deep hydrothermal vents in the Caribbean seem to have different dietary habits depending on the proximity of other shrimp. In dense clusters, the shrimp live mostly off bacteria, but when the shrimp population is sparse, they are more likely to turn carnivorous. Credit: Courtesy Chris German, WHOI/NSF, NASA/ROV Jason © 2012 WHOI
“A bonus finding from studying this extreme oasis of life is that some of the shrimp, called Rimicaris hybisae, appear to be cannibalistic,” NASA noted. “When the shrimp arrange themselves in dense groups, bacteria seem to be the main food supplier, as the shrimp likely absorb the carbohydrates that the bacteria produce. But in areas where the shrimp are distributed more sparsely, the shrimp are more likely to turn carnivorous.”
While the researchers said that they did not directly observe any instances of the shrimp practicing cannibalism, they did report discovering small amounts of crustacean remains in the shrimps’ guts, and Rimicaris hybisae is the most abundant crustacean species in the area by far. Researchers from Duke University were also involved in the study, and the Schmidt Ocean Institute provided support for marine and underwater robotic operations.
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Blueberries May Not Help You See Better In The Dark After All

Written By: editor

Published Date: November 23, 2014 Last Edited: May 4, 2018

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Provided by Michael Bernstein, American Chemical Society

Blueberries are super stars among health food advocates, who tout the fruit for not only promoting heart health, better memory and digestion, but also for improving night vision. Scientists have taken a closer look at this latter claim and have found reason to doubt that the popular berry helps most healthy people see better in the dark. Their report appears in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural & Food Chemistry.

Wilhelmina Kalt and colleagues note that studies published decades ago provided the first hints that blueberries might improve people’s night vision. Later lab experiments appeared to shore up these early findings. For example, anthocyanins, which are pigment molecules in blueberries and other plants, encourage the regeneration of key molecules in the eye involved in perceiving light. But reviews of the earlier clinical research that tested the effect of blueberries on night vision in human subjects revealed that the studies were poorly controlled. Kalt’s team wanted to revisit the matter with a new set of carefully designed experiments.

The researchers found that a blueberry-supplemented diet did not improve sight in the dark, but they did help subjects recover normal vision after exposure to a bright light. The enhancement, however, was small and not likely noticeable to most healthy people, the researchers concluded. But they added that anthocyanins might improve visual health among people who have existing eye disorders, though this remains to be demonstrated with well-designed studies.

The authors acknowledge funding from Agriculture & Agri-Food Canada and the U.S. Highbush Blueberry Council.

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