Out of sync: Body clocks altered at cell level in depression

Out of sync: Body clocks altered at cell level in depression

May 13, 2013 — Every cell in our bodies runs on a 24-hour clock, tuned to the night-day, light-dark cycles that have ruled us since the dawn of humanity. The brain acts as timekeeper, keeping the cellular clock in sync with the outside world so that it can govern our appetites, sleep, moods and much more.

But new research shows that the clock may be broken in the brains of people with depression -- even at the level of the gene activity inside their brain cells.

It's the first direct evidence of altered circadian rhythms in the brain of people with depression, and shows that they operate out of sync with the usual ingrained daily cycle. The findings, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, come from scientists from the University of Michigan Medical School and other institutions.

The discovery was made by sifting through massive amounts of data gleaned from donated brains of depressed and non-depressed people. With further research, the findings could lead to more precise diagnosis and treatment for a condition that affects more than 350 million people worldwide.

What's more, the research also reveals a previously unknown daily rhythm to the activity of many genes across many areas of the brain -- expanding the sense of how crucial our master clock is.

In a normal brain, the pattern of gene activity at a given time of the day is so distinctive that the authors could use it to accurately estimate the hour of death of the brain donor, suggesting that studying this "stopped clock" could conceivably be useful in forensics. By contrast, in severely depressed patients, the circadian clock was so disrupted that a patient's "day" pattern of gene activity could look like a "night" pattern -- and vice versa.

The team uses material from donated brains obtained shortly after death, along with extensive clinical information about the individual. Numerous regions of each brain are dissected by hand or even with lasers that can capture more specialized cell types, then analyzed to measure gene activity. The resulting flood of information is picked apart with advanced data-mining tools.

Lead author Jun Li, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the U-M Department of Human Genetics, describes how this approach allowed the team to accurately back-predict the hour of the day when each non-depressed individual died -- literally plotting them out on a 24-hour clock by noting which genes were active at the time they died. They looked at 12,000 gene transcripts isolated from six regions of 55 brains from people who did not have depression.

This provided a detailed understanding of how gene activity varied throughout the day in the brain regions studied. But when the team tried to do the same in the brains of 34 depressed individuals, the gene activity was off by hours. The cells looked as if it were an entirely different time of day.

"There really was a moment of discovery," says Li, who led the analysis of the massive amount of data generated by the rest of the team and is a research assistant professor in U-M's Department of Computational Medicine at Bioinformatics. "It was when we realized that many of the genes that show 24-hour cycles in the normal individuals were well-known circadian rhythm genes -- and when we saw that the people with depression were not synchronized to the usual solar day in terms of this gene activity. It's as if they were living in a different time zone than the one they died in."

Huda Akil, Ph.D., the co-director of the U-M Molecular & Behavioral Neuroscience Institute and co-director of the U-M site of the Pritzker Neuropsychiatric Disorders Research Consortium, notes that the findings go beyond previous research on circadian rhythms, using animals or human skin cells, which were more easily accessible than human brain tissues.

"Hundreds of new genes that are very sensitive to circadian rhythms emerged from this research -- not just the primary clock genes that have been studied in animals or cell cultures, but other genes whose activity rises and falls throughout the day," she says. "We were truly able to watch the daily rhythm play out in a symphony of biological activity, by studying where the clock had stopped at the time of death. And then, in depressed people, we could see how this was disrupted."

Now, she adds, scientists must use this information to help find new ways to predict depression, fine-tune treatment for each depressed patient, and even find new medications or other types of treatment to develop and test. One possibility, she notes, could be to identify biomarkers for depression -- telltale molecules that can be detected in blood, skin or hair.

And, the challenge of determining why the circadian clock is altered in depression still remains. "We can only glimpse the possibility that the disruption seen in depression may have more than one cause. We need to learn more about whether something in the nature of the clock itself is affected, because if you could fix the clock you might be able to help people get better," Akil notes.

The team continues to mine their data for new findings, and to probe additional brains as they are donated and dissected. The high quality of the brains, and the data gathered about how their donors lived and died, is essential to the project, Akil says. Even the pH level of the tissue, which can be affected by the dying process and the time between death and freezing tissue for research, can affect the results. The team also will have access to blood and hair samples from new donors.

The researchers note that the Pritzker funding in combination with federal research funding made it possible for the scientists to study this issue in an exploratory way. The research was historically funded by a Conte Center grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, and partly funded by the William Lion Penzner Foundation, the Della Martin Foundation, the Office of Naval Research (N00014-09-1-059 and N00014-12-1-0366), the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression's Abramson Family Foundation Investigator Award, and an International Mental Health Research Organization -- Johnson & Johnson Rising Star Translational Research Award.

The work was funded in large part by the Pritzker Neuropsychiatric Disorders Research Fund, and involved researchers from the University of Michigan, University of California's Irvine and Davis campuses, Weill Cornell Medical College, the Hudson Alpha Institute for Biotechnology, and Stanford University.

In addition to Li and Akil, the study's authors are Blynn G. Bunney, Fan Meng, Megan H. Hagenauer, David M. Walsh, Marquis P. Vawter, Simon J. Evans, Prabakhara V. Choudary, Preston Cartagena, Jack D. Barchas, Alan F. Schatzberg, the late Edward G. Jones, Richard M. Myers, U-M MBNI co-director Stanley J. Watson, Jr., and William E. Bunney.

TAG:Mental Health Research Brain Tumor Genes Depression Mental Health Intelligence

Grammar errors? The brain detects them even when you are unaware

Grammar errors? The brain detects them even when you are unaware

Participants in the study -- native-English speaking people, ages 18-30 -- had their brain activity recorded using electroencephalography, from which researchers focused on a signal known as the Event-Related Potential (ERP). This non-invasive technique allows for the capture of changes in brain electrical activity during an event. In this case, events were short sentences presented visually one word at a time.

Subjects were given 280 experimental sentences, including some that were syntactically (grammatically) correct and others containing grammatical errors, such as "We drank Lisa's brandy by the fire in the lobby," or "We drank Lisa's by brandy the fire in the lobby." A 50 millisecond audio tone was also played at some point in each sentence. A tone appeared before or after a grammatical faux pas was presented. The auditory distraction also appeared in grammatically correct sentences.

This approach, said lead author Laura Batterink, a postdoctoral researcher, provided a signature of whether awareness was at work during processing of the errors. "Participants had to respond to the tone as quickly as they could, indicating if its pitch was low, medium or high," she said. "The grammatical violations were fully visible to participants, but because they had to complete this extra task, they were often not consciously aware of the violations. They would read the sentence and have to indicate if it was correct or incorrect. If the tone was played immediately before the grammatical violation, they were more likely to say the sentence was correct even it wasn't."

When tones appeared after grammatical errors, subjects detected 89 percent of the errors. In cases where subjects correctly declared errors in sentences, the researchers found a P600 effect, an ERP response in which the error is recognized and corrected on the fly to make sense of the sentence.

When the tones appear before the grammatical errors, subjects detected only 51 percent of them. The tone before the event, said co-author Helen J. Neville, who holds the UO's Robert and Beverly Lewis Endowed Chair in psychology, created a blink in their attention. The key to conscious awareness, she said, is based on whether or not a person can declare an error, and the tones disrupted participants' ability to declare the errors. But, even when the participants did not notice these errors, their brains responded to them, generating an early negative ERP response. These undetected errors also delayed participants' reaction times to the tones.

"Even when you don't pick up on a syntactic error your brain is still picking up on it," Batterink said. "There is a brain mechanism recognizing it and reacting to it, processing it unconsciously so you understand it properly."

The study was published in the May 8 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

The brain processes syntactic information implicitly, in the absence of awareness, the authors concluded. "While other aspects of language, such as semantics and phonology, can also be processed implicitly, the present data represent the first direct evidence that implicit mechanisms also play a role in the processing of syntax, the core computational component of language."

It may be time to reconsider some teaching strategies, especially how adults are taught a second language, said Neville, a member of the UO's Institute of Neuroscience and director of the UO's Brain Development Lab.

Children, she noted, often pick up grammar rules implicitly through routine daily interactions with parents or peers, simply hearing and processing new words and their usage before any formal instruction. She likened such learning to "Jabberwocky," the nonsense poem introduced by writer Lewis Carroll in 1871 in "Through the Looking Glass," where Alice discovers a book in an unrecognizable language that turns out to be written inversely and readable in a mirror.

For a second language, she said, "Teach grammatical rules implicitly, without any semantics at all, like with jabberwocky. Get them to listen to jabberwocky, like a child does."

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders of the National Institutes of Health supported the research (grant 5R01DC000128).

TAG:Language Acquisition Perception Intelligence Child Development Neuroscience Brain Injury

Reversing paralysis with a restorative gel

Reversing paralysis with a restorative gel

Now a team of Tel Aviv University researchers, including Dr. Shimon Rochkind of TAU's Sackler Faculty of Medicine and Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center and Prof. Zvi Nevo of TAU's Department of Human Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry, has invented a method for repairing damaged peripheral nerves. Through a biodegradable implant in combination with a newly-developed Guiding Regeneration Gel (GRG) that increases nerve growth and healing, the functionality of a torn or damaged nerve could ultimately be restored.

This innovative project is now gaining international recognition. Its initial successes were reported at several recent scientific congresses, including the World Federation of Neurological Societies and the European Neurological Society. And the therapy, already tested in animal models, is only a few years away from clinical use, says Dr. Rochkind.

Like healing in the womb

A nerve is like an electrical cable. When severed or otherwise damaged, power can no longer be transferred and the cable loses its functionality. Similarly, a damaged nerve loses the ability to transfer signals for movement and feeling through the nervous system.

But Dr. Rochkind and Prof. Nevo found a way to breach the gap. In their method, two severed ends of a damaged nerve are reconnected by implanting a soft, biodegradable tube, which serves as a bridge to help the nerve ends connect. The innovative gel which lines the inside of the tube nurtures nerve fibers' growth, encouraging the nerve to reconnect the severed ends through the tube, even in cases with massive nerve damage, Dr. Rochkind says.

The key lies in the composition of the gel, the researchers say, which has three main components: anti-oxidants, which exhibit high anti-inflammatory activities; synthetic laminin peptides, which act as a railway or track for the nerve fibers to grow along; and hyaluronic acid, commonly found in the human fetus, which serves as a buffer against drying, a major danger for most implants. These components allow the nerve to heal the way a fetus does in the womb -- quickly and smoothly.

Keeping cells safe for transplant

The implant has already been tested in animal models, and the gel by itself can be used as a stand-alone product, acting as an aid to cell therapy. GRG is not only able to preserve cells, it can support their survival while being used for therapy and transplantation, says Dr. Rochkind. When grown in the gel, cells show excellent development, as well as intensive fiber growth. This could have implications for the treatment of diseases such as Parkinson's, for which researchers are actively exploring cell therapy as a potential solution.

TAG:Neuropathy Nervous System Disability Brain Injury Dementia Depression

‘Sentrollers’ taking over from ‘People’ as the majority population on the Internet, says GreenPeak Technologies

‘Sentrollers’ taking over from ‘People’ as the majority population on the Internet, says GreenPeak Technologies

GreenPeak Technologies has released a white paper called “Sentrollers and the Internet of Things” where it defines Sentrollers as a new, all-encompassing term for sensors, actuators and controllers – the various devices that make up the new Internet of Things.

The white paper also describes the important role of ZigBee, the technology of choice for the Smart Home, as the crucial enabler for the development of the Internet of Things.

Most of the end-nodes on the internet today are people using PCs, laptops and smart phones. However this is rapidly changing as more devices in the home are connecting to the internet, building the Smart Home, and starting to shift the balance away from people towards connected things.

These devices are usually sensors, controllers, actuators or combinations that together, can be considered as “Sentrollers”. For instance: a thermostat senses the temperature, compares this with a desired temperature and activates a heater or air conditioner, controlling, essentially “sentrolling”, the temperature. The Smart Home will also accelerate the use of sentrollers beyond the home: in building automation, for the smart grid, and from there in logistical, industrial and agricultural applications.

Multi-Service Operators (MSOs) are driving the Smart Home applications already through their service offerings, like security, energy management and home care. The number of devices connecting to the internet is steadily growing by several millions per week – a quiet revolution going on. The wireless access technology for the Smart Home is ZigBee, the open worldwide IEEE standard, equivalent to WiFi.

WiFi guarantees reliable high data rate connectivity for content sharing and distribution. ZigBee, with its low power and meshing capabilities is ideally suited as access technology for “sentrollers” processing low data rate communication packets from these wireless devices on life-long batteries. Just like WiFi was a real milestone starting the use of internet at home, the Internet of Things with ZigBee has started at home as well, enabling the next wave in the technology revolution.

“The number of things connected to the internet will soon surpass the number of people and in the future sentrollers will dominate the Internet of Things.” says Cees Links, Founder and CEO of GreenPeak Technologies. “Industry analysts predict factors of 100 things for 1 person when the Internet of People transforms into the Internet of Things. In the same way as WiFi today is synonymous for wireless internet (of People), ZigBee is becoming synonymous for the wireless Internet of Things, making it possible for “any-Thing” to seamlessly connect to the Internet without worries about power or battery life.”

The white paper on “Sentrollers and the Internet of Things” is available for download from the GreenPeak website and explains how ZigBee wireless technology plays a crucial role in the foundation and establishment of the Internet of Things.

Visit GreenPeak Technologies at www.greenpeak.com

This article originally appeared on EE Times Europe.

TAG:Sentrollers Internet of Things sensors controllers white paper ZigBee smart home Greenpeak

Terahertz technology: Seeing more with less

Terahertz technology: Seeing more with less

May 13, 2013 — Single-chip integration of the components needed for sending and receiving terahertz radiation should help applications in imaging and communication

Terahertz technology is an emerging field that promises to improve a host of useful applications, ranging from passenger scanning at airports to huge digital data transfers. Terahertz radiation sits between the frequency bands of microwaves and infrared radiation, and it can easily penetrate many materials, including biological tissue. The energy carried by terahertz radiation is low enough to pose no risk to the subject or object under investigation.

Before terahertz technology can take off on a large scale, however, developers need new kinds of devices that can send and receive radiation in this frequency range. Worldwide, electronic engineers are developing such devices. Now, Sanming Hu and co-workers from the A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics (IME), Singapore, have designed novel circuits and antennas for terahertz radiation and efficiently integrated these components into a transmitter-receiver unit on a single chip. Measuring just a few millimeters across, this area is substantially smaller than the size of current commercial devices. As such, it represents an important step towards the development of practical terahertz technologies.

Hu and his co-workers based their terahertz design on a fabrication technology known as BiCMOS, which enables full integration of devices on a single chip of only a few cubic millimeters in size. "Currently, commercial products for terahertz technologies use discrete modules that are assembled into a device," explains Hu. These module-based devices tend to be considerably more bulky than fully integrated systems.

"In a commercial terahertz transmitter-receiver unit, the central module alone measures typically around 190 by 80 by 65 millimeters, which is roughly 1 million cubic millimeters," says Hu. The novel design of Hu's team unites the essential components of a terahertz device in a smaller two-dimensional area of just a few millimeters along each side. According to Hu and his co-workers, this compact device paves the way towards the mass production of a fully integrated terahertz system.

As the next step, the team will use the IME's cutting-edge technologies to build more complex structures composed of several two-dimensional layers, which will be based on their new designs. Although the team is not pursuing any specific applications, their devices potentially open up a wide range of possibilities. These include wireless short-range transfers of data sets -- the content of a Blu-ray disc could be sent in as little as a few seconds, for example -- high-resolution biosensing, risk-free screening of patients and passengers, and see-through-envelope imaging (see image).

TAG:Technology Electronics Medical Technology Aviation Biometric Batteries

Solar panels as inexpensive as paint?

Solar panels as inexpensive as paint?

May 13, 2013 — Most Americans want the U.S. to place more emphasis on developing solar power, recent polls suggest. A major impediment, however, is the cost to manufacture, install and maintain solar panels. Simply put, most people and businesses cannot afford to place them on their rooftops.

Fortunately, that is changing because researchers such as Qiaoqiang Gan, University at Buffalo assistant professor of electrical engineering, are helping develop a new generation of photovoltaic cells that produce more power and cost less to manufacture than what's available today.

One of the more promising efforts, which Gan is working on, involves the use of plasmonic-enhanced organic photovoltaic materials. These devices don't match traditional solar cells in terms of energy production but they are less expensive and -- because they are made (or processed) in liquid form -- can be applied to a greater variety of surfaces.

Gan detailed the progress of plasmonic-enhanced organic photovoltaic materials in the May 7 edition of the journal Advanced Materials. Co-authors include Filbert J. Bartoli, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Lehigh University, and Zakya Kafafi of the National Science Foundation.

Currently, solar power is produced with either thick polycrystalline silicon wafers or thin-film solar cells made up of inorganic materials such as amorphous silicon or cadmium telluride. Both are expensive to manufacture, Gan said.

His research involves thin-film solar cells, too, but unlike what's on the market he is using organic materials such as polymers and small molecules that are carbon-based and less expensive.

"Compared with their inorganic counterparts, organic photovoltaics can be fabricated over large areas on rigid or flexible substrates potentially becoming as inexpensive as paint," Gan said.

The reference to paint does not include a price point but rather the idea that photovoltaic cells could one day be applied to surfaces as easily as paint is to walls, he said.

There are drawbacks to organic photovoltaic cells. They have to be thin due to their relatively poor electronic conductive properties. Because they are thin and, thus, without sufficient material to absorb light, it limits their optical absorption and leads to insufficient power conversion efficiency.

Their power conversion efficiency needs to be 10 percent or more to compete in the market, Gan said.

To achieve that benchmark, Gan and other researchers are incorporating metal nanoparticles and/or patterned plasmonic nanostructures into organic photovoltaic cells. Plasmons are electromagnetic waves and free electrons that can be used to oscillate back and forth across the interface of metals and semiconductors.

Recent material studies suggest they are succeeding, he said. Gan and the paper's co-authors argue that, because of these breakthroughs, there should be a renewed focus on how nanomaterials and plasmonic strategies can create more efficient and affordable thin-film organic solar cells.

Gan is continuing his research by collaborating with several researchers at UB including: Alexander N. Cartwright, professor of electrical engineering and biomedical engineering and UB vice president for research and economic development; Mark T. Swihart, UB professor of chemical and biological engineering and director of the university's Strategic Strength in Integrated Nanostructured Systems; and Hao Zeng, associate professor of physics.

Gan is a member of UB's electrical engineering optics and photonics research group, which includes Cartwright, professors Edward Furlani and Pao-Lo Liu, and Natalia Litchinitser, associate professor.

The group carries out research in nanphotonics, biophotonics, hybrid inorganic/organic materials and devices, nonlinear and fiber optics, metamaterials, nanoplasmonics, optofluidics, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), biomedical microelectromechanical systems (BioMEMs), biosensing and quantum information processing.

TAG:Solar Energy Graphene Energy Technology Energy and the Environment Renewable Energy Geochemistry

High-performance set-top box SoC supports high-end Android-based IPTV

High-performance set-top box SoC supports high-end Android-based IPTV

STMicroelectronics says that the company’s Orly system-on-chip (SoC) is now powering a new generation of advanced set-top boxes introduced by NTT Plala Inc., a leading Internet / IPTV service provider in Japan.

The STB has been developed by Sumitomo Electric Networks, Inc., a major Japanese equipment producer for home entertainment and broadband service providers, with operations around the world.

ST’s Orly was selected as the high-end SoC best fit for Sumitomo’s global set-top box middleware platform based on Linux, Android Ice Cream Sandwich and HTML5. In particular, the Orly’s dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor allows the set-top boxes to run the Android operating system and so connect easily to new marketplaces including mobile ecosystems. The integrated ARM Mali 3D graphics processor has allowed Sumitomo to create a rich user interface for Android-based services.

By integrating a dedicated real-time multimedia processor, multi-standard video decoding engines, and high-performance video encoding with support for HD and 3DTV standards, ST’s Orly provides the ideal platform enabling operators to deliver high-quality, innovative broadcast and Internet-based services. Its high processing capabilities enable fast transcoding for true multi-screen experiences on PCs, televisions, tablets and mobile devices throughout the home.

Other important features include a high-performance security engine supporting the latest conditional access specifications and Digital Rights Management (DRM) for IPTV, OTT (Over-The-Top) and multi-screen, multi-room services with DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance), ST’s proven Faroudja video-enhancement technology, media and data-driven applications, and support for Internet video standards.

ST’s Software Development Kit (SDK), created specifically for the SoC, supported Sumitomo’s efforts to simplify and accelerate the development of smart IPTV set-top boxes. The SDK provides components and tools needed to run Android on the set-top box and integrate proprietary IPTV middleware, while also supporting rich user-interface development leveraging native Android tools.

“By offering new smart IPTV STBs, we enhance user interface operability and deliver triple-tuner functionality,” said Katsumi Nagata, Board Director, Executive Director, Technology and Engineering Division, NTT Plala Inc. “By supporting Japan’s first cloud game called ‘Hikari TV Game’ and various applications called ‘Hikari TV Apps’, we are offering more convenient smart TV services that perfectly fit the lifestyle of our customers.”

Hiroaki Nishimoto, Director & Co-CTO, Sumitomo Electric Networks, Inc., said: “The new generation of our StreamCruiser SmartTV common STB platform middleware allows our customers to choose the SoC that is best suited for the strategic positioning and expected use-case of the STB, since our solution is independent of the architecture of the SoC while providing the APIs to allow Android, native Linux and HTML5 applications the secure access to the hardware engines and optimized usage of the multi-core.”

Visit STMicroelectronics at www.st.com

This article originally appeared on EE Times Europe.

TAG:set top box SoC Internet IPTV

Bluetooth low energy temperature sensor platform offers low cost smart monitoring using a smartphone

Bluetooth low energy temperature sensor platform offers low cost smart monitoring using a smartphone

Hong Kong-based National Electronics & Watch Co. Ltd has announced a Bluetooth low energy temperature sensor platform could reduce the cost of installing smart ambient temperature monitoring networks into homes and commercial buildings by using the simplicity of a smartphone.

Called the 'BlutolTemp Thermometer', the product will allow anyone that owns a smartphone with the latest version 4.0 of Bluetooth (that includes Bluetooth low energy/Bluetooth Smart as a hallmark feature) to set-up and use a wireless smart temperature monitoring network of up to 10 continuously monitored sensors within minutes that can continuously collect, store, and display temperature data on a smartphone app.

Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF8001 offers class-leading ULP performance and size to enable each NEWCO Bluetooth low energy temperature sensor to run for over one year from a regular CR2032 coin cell under typical usage conditions (10s updates) while featuring a slim (0.8cm-thick) and compact (3.5 x 2.4 cm) plastic sensor housing that is water resistant to 10 m (1 atm) and weighs less than 1/3-oz (9g).

"One of the most challenging parts of developing this solution was achieving the 10 m water resistance in such a small form factor," comments Alfred Ma, Chief Engineer at NEWCO who helped develop the BlutolTemp Thermometer. "We had to draw on our company's heritage in watch making since 1975 and focus on getting all the parts to fit together with high precision in order to maintain a hermetic seal - including a battery compartment that can be easily opened by the end user."

"Until now consumers and commercial organizations wishing to employ a smart temperature monitoring solution to, for example, minimize energy and heating consumption, would have had to look at some kind of costly ZigBee based platform that would have required professional installation," adds Jackson Chan, Assistant Sales General Manager at NEWCO. "In contrast, our solution is 'Plug&Play', likely to retail for as little as $20-30 per sensor, and can be installed quickly and easily by the end users themselves without specialist training or equipment beyond having a Bluetooth v4.0 compatible smartphone."

NEWCO is actively looking for partners interested in developing branded product solutions based on its BlutolTemp Thermometer platform.

Visit Nordic Semiconductor at www.nordicsemi.com

This article originally appeared on EE Times Europe.

TAG:Bluetooth low energy temperature sensor platform smart home smartphone

Spurred by Google Glass, IHS Forecasts nearly 10 Million smart glasses to ship from 2012 to 2016

Spurred by Google Glass, IHS Forecasts nearly 10 Million smart glasses to ship from 2012 to 2016

Initiated by the arrival of Google Glass and magnified by Google's efforts to promote application development for the product, the global market for smart glasses could amount to almost 10 million units from 2012 through 2016, according to IMS Research.

Shipments of smart glasses may rise to as high 6.6 million units in 2016, up from just 50,000 in 2012, for a total of 9.4 million units for the five-year period, according to an upside forecast from the market research firm. Growth this year will climb 150 percent to 124,000 shipments, mostly driven by sales to developers, as presented in the high-end outlook in the attached figure. Expansion will really begin to accelerate in 2014 with the initial public availability of Google Glass, as shipment growth powers up to 250 percent, based on the optimistic forecast.

Smart glass products like Google Glass are wearable computers with a head-mounted display. Google Glass this month began shipping to application developers who registered as early backers and paid the $1,500 price tag. This is expected to spur innovations in applications that should take Glass from early adopters to the mass market. As the developers get to work and Google encourages venture capitalists to back them, shipments will begin to surge to high volumes, according to the upside forecast.

However, the success of Google Glass will depend primarily on the applications developed for it. If developers fail to produce compelling software and uses for the devices, shipments could be significantly lower during the next several years.

“The applications are far more critical than the hardware when it comes to the success of Google Glass,” said Theo Ahadome, senior analyst at IHS. “In fact, the hardware is much less relevant to the growth of Google Glass than for any other personal communications device in recent history. This is because the utility of Google Glass is not readily apparent, so everything will depend on the appeal of the apps. This is why the smart glass market makes sense for a software-oriented organization like Google, despite the company’s limited previous success in developing hardware. Google is betting the house that developers will produce some compelling applications for Glass.”

The glass is half full
According to the optimistic scenario, developers will succeed in producing augmented reality applications for smart glasses that provide the user with information that can be safely and conveniently be integrated into casual use. Such applications typically are known as augmented reality, which involves adding a layer of computer-generated data to real-world people, places and things.

“The true success of Glass will be when it can provide some information to users not apparent when viewing people, places or things,” Ahadome said. “This information may include live updates for travel, location reviews and recommendations, nutritional information and matching personal preferences, and previous encounters to aid decision making. The upside for smart glasses will arise when they become a powerful information platform. In many ways, this is exactly what Google already does via other mediums, and also is why the upside scenario seems more likely.”

Broken glass
Under a more pessimistic scenario, IHS forecasts that only about 1 million smart glasses will be shipped through 2016. According to this outlook, applications for smart glasses will be limited to some of those already displayed by Google in its Glass marketing. These include scenarios where smart glasses become more of a wearable camera device than a true augmented reality system. In this case, smart glasses will be mainly used for recording sports and other non-casual events, like jumping out of a plane, as demonstrated at the Google I/O developer conference in 2012.

However, Glass will face competition from alternative wearable camera devices already in the market, such as GoPro Hero or Recon MOD Live. While the wearable camera market was worth more than $200 million in 2012, it is not the multibillion-dollar market that smart glasses can achieve with wider applicability.

“The less frequently consumers interact with any personal communications device, the less valuable it becomes,” Ahadome observed. “If smart glasses become devices that are used only occasionally, rather than all the time, they become less attractive and desirable to consumers.”

Visit IHS at www.ihs.com

This article originally appeared on EE Times Europe.

TAG:Google Glass smart glasses forecast IMS research

Group backs publish/subscribe open protocol for M2M messaging

Group backs publish/subscribe open protocol for M2M messaging

Organizations from around the world are collaborating on a lightweight reliable messaging transport protocol for Machine-to-Machine (M2M) connections and Internet of Things (IoT).

The new Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) Technical Committee will develop a standardized version of the MQTT protocol based on technology from Eurotech in Italy. The group includes Cisco, Eclipse Foundation, Eurotech, IBM, Kaazing, M2Mi, Red Hat and Software AG as part of the OASIS open standard consortium.

MQTT is a publish/subscribe messaging transport protocol optimized to connect physical world devices and events with enterprise servers and other consumers. It is designed to overcome the challenges of connecting the rapidly expanding physical world of sensors, actuators, phones, and tablets with established software processing technologies.

“MQTT is well suited to underpin the world of M2M/IoT and mobile applications where resources such as bandwidth and battery power are at a premium. It is an extremely lightweight, simple yet reliable protocol, designed for use where small code footprints are often advantageous,” said Richard Coppen of IBM, who co-chairs the new OASIS MQTT Technical Committee, along with Raphael Cohn.“At OASIS, we’ll be addressing IoT data flow challenges and other issues that have been identified by the community,” said Cohn. “We’ll broaden the range of enterprise solutions by enabling integration with business applications and expanding connectivity to different types of networks and remote devices.”

MQTT is already implemented across a variety of industries and applications. For example, MQTT has been used in sensors communicating to a broker via satellite links, over occasional dial-up connections with healthcare providers (medical devices), and in a range of home automation and small device scenarios. MQTT is well suited for mobile applications because of its small size, minimized data packets, and efficient distribution of information to one or many receivers says the group.

“The M2M industry will need to adopt technology based on open standards and open source implementation to ensure widespread adoption. MQTT is well on its way to being a key standard for M2M applications. We are happy to be involved in the OASIS MQTT standardization process and host the MQTT reference implementation in the Eclipse Paho project,” said Mike Milinkovich. Executive Director of Eclipse Foundation.

The MQTT specification has been contributed to the OASIS MQTT Technical Committee by IBM and Eurotech, authors of the original version of the protocol. “We are excited to encourage further adoption of the MQTT protocol, which has the potential to simplify Internet of Things applications and services," said Giampietro Tecchiolli, CTO and Executive VP at the Eurotech Group. "Connecting distributed devices using this efficient and elegant protocol offers companies flexibility to integrate disparate data sources like intelligent devices and sensors into enterprise IT landscapes, to deliver truly useful and actionable information that drives business decisions.”

“We applaud IBM and Eurotech for bringing MQTT into the OASIS open standards process. Companies feel more confident about implementing the protocol when they can actively participate in its future,” said Laurent Liscia, CEO of OASIS. “We’re very pleased that the MQTT Technical Committee will operate the OASIS Non-Assertion Intellectual Property Rights mode, which will provide added reassurance for developers and promote widespread adoption.”

New members are encouraged to join the OASIS MQTT Technical Committee at any time. Archives of the work are accessible to both members and non-members, and OASIS invites public review and comment on the work.

www.oasis-open.org/committees/mqtt

This article originally appeared on EE Times Europe.

TAG:M2M messaging Message Queuing Telemetry Transport MQTT publish subscribe open protocol IoT

LED luminaires transmit data at high bandwidth

LED luminaires transmit data at high bandwidth

The Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) in Berlin has further developed its broadband optical communications technology which utilizes standard commercial LEDs used for lighting purposes to transmit data. While hitherto data rates of up to 800 Mbit/s have been possible, the researchers succeeded in increasing this bandwidth to 3 Gbit/s.

According to HHI, the Berlin researchers developed new building blocks which under laboratory conditions achieve data rates of up to 1 Gbit/s. Since however in commercial LED products, three light colors are generated which can be utilized separately for the data transmission, the effective data rate sums up to 3 Gbit/s.

The institute did not elaborate on the properties of the new components. It however said that the modular building blocks are suitable for integration into existing wireless data communications applications; as an example the institute named car-to-x systems.

In general, environments where conventional electromagnetic wireless technologies could be unfit for safety reasons, could benefit from the technology. Examples could be hospital operating theatres, exhibition halls, manufacturing halls and the like.

See also /en/heinrich-hertz-institute-shows-broadband-communication-from-the-led-ceiling-light.html?cmpid=7&newsid=222907442

This article originally appeared on EE Times Europe.

TAG:broadband optical communications LED luminaires transmit data

Climate change will cause widespread global-scale loss of common plants and animals, researchers predict

Climate change will cause widespread global-scale loss of common plants and animals, researchers predict

Research published today in the journal Nature Climate Change looked at 50,000 globally widespread and common species and found that more than one half of the plants and one third of the animals will lose more than half of their climatic range by 2080 if nothing is done to reduce the amount of global warming and slow it down.

This means that geographic ranges of common plants and animals will shrink globally and biodiversity will decline almost everywhere.

Plants, reptiles and particularly amphibians are expected to be at highest risk. Sub-Saharan Africa, Central America, Amazonia and Australia would lose the most species of plants and animals. And a major loss of plant species is projected for North Africa, Central Asia and South-eastern Europe.

But acting quickly to mitigate climate change could reduce losses by 60 per cent and buy an additional 40 years for species to adapt. This is because this mitigation would slow and then stop global temperatures from rising by more than two degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial times (1765). Without this mitigation, global temperatures could rise by 4 degrees Celsius by 2100.

The study was led by Dr Rachel Warren from UEA's school of Environmental Sciences and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. Collaborators include Dr.Jeremy VanDerWal at James Cook University in Australia and Dr Jeff Price, also at UEA's school of Environmental Sciences and the Tyndall Centre. The research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

Dr Warren said: "While there has been much research on the effect of climate change on rare and endangered species, little has been known about how an increase in global temperature will affect more common species.

"This broader issue of potential range loss in widespread species is a serious concern as even small declines in these species can significantly disrupt ecosystems.

"Our research predicts that climate change will greatly reduce the diversity of even very common species found in most parts of the world. This loss of global-scale biodiversity would significantly impoverish the biosphere and the ecosystem services it provides.

"We looked at the effect of rising global temperatures, but other symptoms of climate change such as extreme weather events, pests, and diseases mean that our estimates are probably conservative. Animals in particular may decline more as our predictions will be compounded by a loss of food from plants.

"There will also be a knock-on effect for humans because these species are important for things like water and air purification, flood control, nutrient cycling, and eco-tourism.

"The good news is that our research provides crucial new evidence of how swift action to reduce CO₂ and other greenhouse gases can prevent the biodiversity loss by reducing the amount of global warming to 2 degrees Celsius rather than 4 degrees. This would also buy time -- up to four decades -- for plants and animals to adapt to the remaining 2 degrees of climate change."

The research team quantified the benefits of acting now to mitigate climate change and found that up to 60 per cent of the projected climatic range loss for biodiversity can be avoided.

Dr Warren said: "Prompt and stringent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally would reduce these biodiversity losses by 60 per cent if global emissions peak in 2016, or by 40 per cent if emissions peak in 2030, showing that early action is very beneficial. This will both reduce the amount of climate change and also slow climate change down, making it easier for species and humans to adapt."

Information on the current distributions of the species used in this research came from the datasets shared online by hundreds of volunteers, scientists and natural history collections through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

Co-author Dr Jeff Price, also from UEA's school of Environmental Studies, said: "Without free and open access to massive amounts of data such as those made available online through GBIF, no individual researcher is able to contact every country, every museum, every scientist holding the data and pull it all together. So this research would not be possible without GBIF and its global community of researchers and volunteers who make their data freely available."

TAG:Nature Endangered Plants Endangered Animals Global Warming Climate Environmental Issues

Non-inherited mutations account for many heart defects

Non-inherited mutations account for many heart defects

May 12, 2013 — New mutations that are absent in parents but appear in their offspring account for at least 10% of severe congenital heart disease, reveals a massive genomics study led, in part, by researchers at the Yale School of Medicine.

The analysis of all the genes of more than 1800 individuals found hundreds of mutations that can cause congenital heart disease, the most common form of birth defect that afflicts nearly 1% of all newborns. In particular, the study found frequent mutations in genes that modify histones, proteins that package DNA in the nucleus and orchestrate the timing and activation of genes crucial to development of the fetus.

The results of the study, part of the Pediatric Cardiac Genomics Consortium funded by the NIH's National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), were published online May 12 in the journal Nature.

"These findings provide new insight into the causes of this common congenital disease," said Richard Lifton, Sterling Professor and chair of the Department of Genetics, investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and a senior author of the paper. "Most interestingly, the set of genes mutated in congenital heart disease unexpectedly overlapped with genes and pathways mutated in autism. These findings suggest there may be common pathways that underlie a wide range of common congenital diseases."

"This is an important piece of the puzzle that gives us a clearer picture of the causes of congenital heart disease," said Gary H. Gibbons, M.D., director of the NHLBI. "What this international, multi-center collaborative research effort was able to accomplish, in a small amount of time, is truly remarkable. The state-of-the-art sequencing techniques that were used are allowing us to push the envelope and envision a day when we may be able to better treat and eventually prevent congenital heart disease in the early stages of heart formation."

The mutations can occur at the same site, and both increase and decrease the modification histone proteins, said Martina Brueckner, professor of pediatrics and genetics at Yale and another senior author of the study. The results suggest a very sensitive developmental system that might also be influenced by environmental factors in development.

"These findings point to fundamental mechanisms that play a role in a wide range of congenital diseases," Lifton said.

TAG:Heart Disease Birth Defects Diseases and Conditions Cholesterol Stroke Prevention Chronic Illness

Sifting through atmospheres of far-off worlds

Sifting through atmospheres of far-off worlds

One breakthrough to come in recent years is direct imaging of exoplanets. Ground-based telescopes have begun taking infrared pictures of the planets posing near their stars in family portraits. But to astronomers, a picture is worth even more than a thousand words if its light can be broken apart into a rainbow of different wavelengths.

Those wishes are coming true as researchers are beginning to install infrared cameras on ground-based telescopes equipped with spectrographs. Spectrographs are instruments that spread an object's light apart, revealing signatures of molecules. Project 1640, partly funded by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., recently accomplished this goal using the Palomar Observatory near San Diego.

"In just one hour, we were able to get precise composition information about four planets around one overwhelmingly bright star," said Gautam Vasisht of JPL, co-author of the new study appearing in the Astrophysical Journal. "The star is a hundred thousand times as bright as the planets, so we've developed ways to remove that starlight and isolate the extremely faint light of the planets."

Along with ground-based infrared imaging, other strategies for combing through the atmospheres of giant planets are being actively pursued as well. For example, NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes monitor planets as they cross in front of their stars, and then disappear behind. NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will use a comparable strategy to study the atmospheres of planets only slightly larger than Earth.

In the new study, the researchers examined HR 8799, a large star orbited by at least four known giant, red planets. Three of the planets were among the first ever directly imaged around a star, thanks to observations from the Gemini and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, in 2008. The fourth planet, the closest to the star and the hardest to see, was revealed in images taken by the Keck telescope in 2010.

That alone was a tremendous feat considering that all planet discoveries up until then had been made through indirect means, for example by looking for the wobble of a star induced by the tug of planets.

Those images weren't enough, however, to reveal any information about the planets' chemical composition. That's where spectrographs are needed -- to expose the "fingerprints" of molecules in a planet's atmosphere. Capturing a distant world's spectrum requires gathering even more planet light, and that means further blocking the glare of the star.

Project 1640 accomplished this with a collection of instruments, which the team installs on the ground-based telescopes each time they go on "observing runs." The instrument suite includes a coronagraph to mask out the starlight; an advanced adaptive optics system, which removes the blur of our moving atmosphere by making millions of tiny adjustments to two deformable telescope mirrors; an imaging spectrograph that records 30 images in a rainbow of infrared colors simultaneously; and a state-of-the-art wave front sensor that further adjusts the mirrors to compensate for scattered starlight.

"It's like taking a single picture of the Empire State Building from an airplane that reveals a bump on the sidewalk next to it that is as high as an ant," said Ben R. Oppenheimer, lead author of the new study and associate curator and chair of the Astrophysics Department at the American Museum of Natural History, N.Y., N.Y.

Their results revealed that all four planets, though nearly the same in temperature, have different compositions. Some, unexpectedly, do not have methane in them, and there may be hints of ammonia or other compounds that would also be surprising. Further theoretical modeling will help to understand the chemistry of these planets.

Meanwhile, the quest to obtain more and better spectra of exoplanets continues. Other researchers have used the Keck telescope and the Large Binocular Telescope near Tucson, Ariz., to study the emission of individual planets in the HR8799 system. In addition to the HR 8799 system, only two others have yielded images of exoplanets. The next step is to find more planets ripe for giving up their chemical secrets. Several ground-based telescopes are being prepared for the hunt, including Keck, Gemini, Palomar and Japan's Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

Ideally, the researchers want to find young planets that still have enough heat left over from their formation, and thus more infrared light for the spectrographs to see. They also want to find planets located far from their stars, and out of the blinding starlight. NASA's infrared Spitzer and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) missions, and its ultraviolet Galaxy Evolution Explorer, now led by the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, have helped identify candidate young stars that may host planets meeting these criteria.

"We're looking for super-Jupiter planets located faraway from their star," said Vasisht. "As our technique develops, we hope to be able to acquire molecular compositions of smaller, and slightly older, gas planets."

Still lower-mass planets, down to the size of Saturn, will be targets for imaging studies by the James Webb Space Telescope.

"Rocky Earth-like planets are too small and close to their stars for the current technology, or even for James Webb to detect. The feat of cracking the chemical compositions of true Earth analogs will come from a future space mission such as the proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder," said Charles Beichman, a co-author of the P1640 result and executive director of NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech.

Though the larger, gas planets are not hospitable to life, the current studies are teaching astronomers how the smaller, rocky ones form.

"The outer giant planets dictate the fate of rocky ones like Earth. Giant planets can migrate in toward a star, and in the process, tug the smaller, rocky planets around or even kick them out of the system. We're looking at hot Jupiters before they migrate in, and hope to understand more about how and when they might influence the destiny of the rocky, inner planets," said Vasisht.

NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute manages time allocation on the Keck telescope for NASA. JPL manages NASA's Exoplanet Exploration program office. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

A visualization from the American Museum of Natural History showing where the HR 8799 system is in relation to our solar system is online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDNAk0bwLrU .

More information about exoplanets and NASA's planet-finding program is at http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov .

TAG:Extrasolar Planets NASA Pluto Astronomy Space Exploration Space Telescopes

Carbon dioxide at NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory reaches new milestone: Tops 400 parts per million

Carbon dioxide at NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory reaches new milestone: Tops 400 parts per million

May 10, 2013 — On May 9, the daily mean concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mauna Loa, Hawaii, surpassed 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time since measurements began in 1958. Independent measurements made by both NOAA and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have been approaching this level during the past week. It marks an important milestone because Mauna Loa, as the oldest continuous carbon dioxide (CO₂) measurement station in the world, is the primary global benchmark site for monitoring the increase of this potent heat-trapping gas.

Carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by fossil fuel burning and other human activities is the most significant greenhouse gas (GHG) contributing to climate change. Its concentration has increased every year since scientists started making measurements on the slopes of the Mauna Loa volcano more than five decades ago. The rate of increase has accelerated since the measurements started, from about 0.7 ppm per year in the late 1950s to 2.1 ppm per year during the last 10 years.

"That increase is not a surprise to scientists," said NOAA senior scientist Pieter Tans, with the Global Monitoring Division of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. "The evidence is conclusive that the strong growth of global CO₂ emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas is driving the acceleration."

Before the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, global average CO₂ was about 280 ppm. During the last 800,000 years, CO₂ fluctuated between about 180 ppm during ice ages and 280 ppm during interglacial warm periods. Today's rate of increase is more than 100 times faster than the increase that occurred when the last ice age ended.

It was researcher Charles David Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, who began measuring carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa in 1958, initiating now what is known as the "Keeling Curve." His son, Ralph Keeling, also a geochemist at Scripps, has continued the Scripps measurement record since his father's death in 2005.

"There's no stopping CO₂ from reaching 400 ppm," said Ralph Keeling. "That's now a done deal. But what happens from here on still matters to climate, and it's still under our control. It mainly comes down to how much we continue to rely on fossil fuels for energy."

NOAA scientists with the Global Monitoring Division have made around-the-clock measurements there since 1974. Having two programs independently measure the greenhouse gas provides confidence that the measurements are correct.

Moreover, similar increases of CO₂ are seen all over the world by many international scientists. NOAA, for example, which runs a global, cooperative air sampling network, reported last year that all Arctic sites in its network reached 400 ppm for the first time. These high values were a prelude to what is now being observed at Mauna Loa, a site in the subtropics, this year. Sites in the Southern Hemisphere will follow during the next few years. The increase in the Northern Hemisphere is always a little ahead of the Southern Hemisphere because most of the emissions driving the CO₂ increase take place in the north.

Once emitted, CO₂ added to the atmosphere and oceans remains for thousands of years. Thus, climate changes forced by CO₂ depend primarily on cumulative emissions, making it progressively more and more difficult to avoid further substantial climate change.

On the Web:

• NOAA carbon dioxide data: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html
• Scripps Institution of Oceanography carbon dioxide data: http://www.keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/
• NOAA's Maua Loa Observatory: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/obop/mlo/
• ANIMATION (carbon dioxide levels over 800,000 years): http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html
• IMAGES: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/Photo_Gallery/Field_Sites/MLO/

TAG:Global Warming Climate Air Quality Environmental Issues Environmental Policy Forest

Potential flu pandemic lurks: Influenza viruses circulating in pigs, birds could pose risk to humans

Potential flu pandemic lurks: Influenza viruses circulating in pigs, birds could pose risk to humans

A new study from MIT reveals that there are many strains of H3N2 circulating in birds and pigs that are genetically similar to the 1968 strain and have the potential to generate a pandemic if they leap to humans. The researchers, led by Ram Sasisekharan, the Alfred H. Caspary Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT, also found that current flu vaccines might not offer protection against these strains.

"There are indeed examples of H3N2 that we need to be concerned about," says Sasisekharan, who is also a member of MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. "From a pandemic-preparedness point of view, we should potentially start including some of these H3 strains as part of influenza vaccines."

The study, which appears in the May 10 issue of the journal Scientific Reports, also offers the World Health Organization and public-health agencies' insight into viral strains that should raise red flags if detected.

Influenza evolution

In the past 100 years, influenza viruses that emerged from pigs or birds have caused several notable flu pandemics. When one of these avian or swine viruses gains the ability to infect humans, it can often evade the immune system, which is primed to recognize only strains that commonly infect humans.

Strains of H3N2 have been circulating in humans since the 1968 pandemic, but they have evolved to a less dangerous form that produces a nasty seasonal flu. However, H3N2 strains are also circulating in pigs and birds.

Sasisekharan and his colleagues wanted to determine the risk of H3N2 strains re-emerging in humans, whose immune systems would no longer recognize the more dangerous forms of H3N2. This type of event has a recent precedent: In 2009, a strain of H1N1 emerged that was very similar to the virus that caused a 1918 pandemic that killed 50 million to 100 million people.

"We asked if that could happen with H3," Sasisekharan says. "You would think it's more readily possible with H3 because we observe that there seems to be a lot more mixing of H3 between humans and swine."

Genetic similarities

In the new study, the researchers compared the 1968 H3N2 strain and about 1,100 H3 strains now circulating in pigs and birds, focusing on the gene that codes for the viral hemagglutinin (HA) protein.

After comparing HA genetic sequences in five key locations that control the viruses' interactions with infected hosts, the researchers calculated an "antigenic index" for each strain. This value indicates the percentage of these genetic regions identical to those of the 1968 pandemic strain and helps determine how well an influenza virus can evade a host's immune response.

The researchers also took into account the patterns of attachment of the HA protein to sugar molecules called glycans. The virus' ability to attach to glycan receptors found on human respiratory-tract cells is key to infecting humans.

Seeking viruses with an antigenic index of at least 49 percent and glycan-attachment patterns identical to those of the 1968 virus, the research team identified 581 H3 viruses isolated since 2000 that could potentially cause a pandemic. Of these, 549 came from birds and 32 from pigs.

The researchers then exposed some of these strains to antibodies provoked by the current H3 seasonal-flu vaccines. As they predicted, these antibodies were unable to recognize or attack these H3 strains. Of the 581 HA sequences, six swine strains already contain the standard HA mutations necessary for human adaptation, and are thus capable of entering the human population either directly or via genetic reassortment, Sasisekharan says.

"One of the amazing things about the influenza virus is its ability to grab genes from different pools," he says. "There could be viral genes that mix among pigs, or between birds and pigs."

Sasisekharan and colleagues are now doing a similar genetic study of H5 influenza strains. The H3 study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

TAG:Bird Flu Influenza Cold and Flu Bird Flu Research Microbes and More Virology

What Nook could buy Microsoft

What Nook could buy Microsoft

Microsoft has bid $1 billion to buy the digital assets of Nook Media, the e-book business led by Barnes & Noble, according to a report published late Wednesday.The news sparked immediate enthusiasm on Wall Street, where the bookseller's stock price was up 18% as of early Thursday afternoon. But, despite the excitement, an all-important question remains: If Microsoft goes on to consummate the rumored deal, what will it get out of the acquisition?

TechCrunch broke the news, claiming it had acquired internal documents that revealed not only Microsoft's offer, but also plans to phase out Nook's Android-based tablets by the end of 2014. An anonymous source told The New York Times that the documents are authentic and only a few weeks old. According to the Times, which noted that Nook was valued at $1.8 billion as recently as December, it is not yet clear if a deal will be closed. Microsoft has so far declined to comment, but the Times source claimed any announcements are at least weeks away.

Click to read the rest of this story on InformationWeek.


TAG:Barnes and Noble Microsoft Nook E Reader

Kestrels, other urban birds are stressed by human activity

Kestrels, other urban birds are stressed by human activity

The peer-reviewed paper "Reproductive failure of a human-tolerant species, the American kestrel, is associated with stress and human disturbance," was published in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology (May 10, 2013). Boise State University graduate student Erin Strasser, now with the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory, and Julie Heath, a professor in the Boise State Department of Biological Sciences and Raptor Research Center, conducted the research.

Strasser and Heath conducted research along one of Idaho's major expressways, Interstate 84, and in suburban and rural areas south of the state's capital city of Boise. Since 1987, researchers from Boise State and the U.S. Geological Survey have monitored a number of nest boxes located along the area's roadways, in people's back yards, and in sagebrush-steppe habitat.

In this study, Strasser and Heath were interested in understanding how human-dominated landscapes affect breeding kestrels, with particular attention paid to the link between disturbance, stress and nest failure. The two monitored the boxes to determine nest fate, and collected a small blood sample from adult birds. The researchers were looking at corticosterone levels, which indicate stress levels (the equivalent in humans is cortisol). Corticosterone can lead to behavioral and physiological changes that allow individuals to cope with stressful situations, while suppressing other activities such as reproduction.

The data showed that female kestrels nesting in areas with high human activity, such as along noisy roadways, have higher corticosterone levels, but males do not. This could be because females spend more time in the nesting box and thus are exposed more often to stressors such as vehicle noise. Too much ambient noise may make it difficult for them to assess the level of danger, leading to higher stress levels and increased vigilance behavior, decreased parental care or the decision to abandon their nest. Kestrels nesting in high disturbance areas were almost 10 times more likely to abandon their nest than those in more isolated areas, and this effect lessened the further a nest was from the road.

"We hypothesized that this was a mechanism for how humans are impacting wildlife," Heath said. "To birds, areas with human activity may be perceived as a high-risk environment."

Given that the vast majority of land in the continental United States is within a mile of a road, wildlife increasingly are exposed to chronic levels of road noise. The resulting increase in stress levels could cause fundamental changes in physiology and behavior across species inhabiting human-dominated environments, which over time could lead to population declines.

As scientists continue to connect the dots between human disturbances and the resulting long-term effects on wildlife, changes already are yielding positive results. Research conducted in preserve areas, such as state parks, has led to reduced speeds and attempts to limit noise, although noise mitigation, while locally effective, may not protect widespread populations such as kestrels from the pervasive threat of traffic noise.

The study concludes that until regulations or economic incentives are developed to encourage engineering innovations that result in quieter roads, projects in areas of human activity with favorable habitat should be discouraged to decrease the risk of ecological traps. In the meantime, Boise State's nesting boxes have been moved from freeway locations to more suitable areas.

"Birds evolved in an environment that was not dominated by humans," Heath noted. "In recent history, human roads and structures have left few areas untouched. We're just starting to understand the real consequences."

TAG:Birds Nature Pollution Environmental Issues Urbanization Land Management

Markets erode moral values

Markets erode moral values

May 10, 2013 — Many people express objections against child labor, exploitation of the workforce or meat production involving cruelty against animals. At the same time, however, people ignore their own moral standards when acting as market participants, searching for the cheapest electronics, fashion or food. Thus, markets reduce moral concerns. This is the main result of an experiment conducted by economists from the Universities of Bonn and Bamberg.

The results are presented in the latest issue of the journal Science.

Prof. Dr. Armin Falk from the University of Bonn and Prof. Dr. Nora Szech from the University of Bamberg, both economists, have shown in an experiment that markets erode moral concerns. In comparison to non-market decisions, moral standards are significantly lower if people participate in markets.

In markets, people ignore their individual moral standards

"Our results show that market participants violate their own moral standards," says Prof. Falk. In a number of different experiments, several hundred subjects were confronted with the moral decision between receiving a monetary amount and killing a mouse versus saving the life of a mouse and foregoing the monetary amount. "It is important to understand what role markets and other institutions play in moral decision making. This is a question economists have to deal with," says Prof. Szech.

"To study immoral outcomes, we studied whether people are willing to harm a third party in exchange to receiving money. Harming others in an intentional and unjustified way is typically considered unethical," says Prof. Falk. The animals involved in the study were so-called "surplus mice," raised in laboratories outside Germany. These mice are no longer needed for research purposes. Without the experiment, they would have all been killed. As a consequence of the study many hundreds of young mice that would otherwise all have died were saved. If a subject decided to save a mouse, the experimenters bought the animal. The saved mice are perfectly healthy and live under best possible lab conditions and medical care.

Simple bilateral markets affect moral decisions

A subgroup of subjects decided between life and money in a non-market decision context (individual condition). This condition allows for eliciting moral standards held by individuals. The condition was compared to two market conditions in which either only one buyer and one seller (bilateral market) or a larger number of buyers and sellers (multilateral market) could trade with each other. If a market offer was accepted a trade was completed, resulting in the death of a mouse. Compared to the individual condition, a significantly higher number of subjects were willing to accept the killing of a mouse in both market conditions. This is the main result of the study. Thus markets result in an erosion of moral values. "In markets, people face several mechanisms that may lower their feelings of guilt and responsibility," explains Nora Szech. In market situations, people focus on competition and profits rather than on moral concerns. Guilt can be shared with other traders. In addition, people see that others violate moral norms as well.

"If I don't buy or sell, someone else will."

In addition, in markets with many buyers and sellers, subjects may justify their behavior by stressing that their impact on outcomes is negligible. "This logic is a general characteristic of markets," says Prof. Falk. Excuses or justifications appeal to the saying, "If I don't buy or sell now, someone else will." For morally neutral goods, however, such effects are of minor importance. Nora Szech explains: "For goods without moral relevance, differences in decisions between the individual and the market conditions are small. The reason is simply that in such cases the need to share guilt or excuse behavior is absent."

TAG:Consumer Behavior Behavior Perception Ethics Bioethics Economics

Huawei CEO dismisses security, spying concerns

Huawei CEO dismisses security, spying concerns

The founder and CEO of Chinese networking equipment manufacturer Huawei, in his first-ever media interview, Thursday dismissed allegations that backdoors may have been built into the company's products to facilitate Chinese espionage.

"Huawei has no connection to the cybersecurity issues the U.S. has encountered in the past, current and future," Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei, 68, told local reporters -- through an interpreter -- while on a visit to New Zealand this week, according to news reports.

Since founding the company 26 years ago, Ren had previously refused to conduct media interviews. But during his visit this week to New Zealand, he agreed to meet with reporters from four of the country's news outlets.

Click to read the rest of this article on Information Week.
TAG:security China Huawei ZTE backdoor cyber spy telecommunications cyber espionage

Epson AR glasses aim at industry

Epson AR glasses aim at industry

PORTLAND, Ore. -- When Epson first announced its augmented reality (AR) head-mounted display (HMD) called Moverio last year, it was aimed at the same consumer applications as the Google Glass research project, only Epson's solution was here today. However, if Epson's experience is any indicator, Google Glass will be a failure. Now Epson is one generation ahead of Google Glass, since it is readying a second-generation Moverio, but this time their aim is the industrial market, for which they already have succeeded by signing up professional customers such as Scope Technologies (Edmonton, Alberta).

"We immediately saw the potential for Epson's Moverio for industrial applications, such as eliminating the need for service manuals by showing technicians exactly how to perform maintenance tasks with heads up information displayed right on the device being repaired," said founder of Scope Technologies founder, Scott Montgomerie.

Scope Technologies uses Moverio to project tactical information -- such as showing virtual tools performing the necessary task right on the equipment to be repaired. Thus instead of consulting a service manual, the technician merely dons the Moverio glasses and looks at the device to be repaired, with the location of the faults and the steps to repair them appearing to be projected right onto the parts.

Epson's Moverio augmented reality (AR) glasses obsolete the service manual by directing personnel in how-to with arrows and text added right on top of the device being serviced. SOURCE: Epson Click on image to enlarge.

"We are currently working with our industrial partners like Scope Technologies, to bring this wearable see-through technology to the professional market," said Eric Mizufuka, new markets product manager at Epson.
Next: Micro-miniaturized projectors
TAG:EETimes NextGenLog Electronics

Earliest archaeological evidence of human ancestors hunting and scavenging

Earliest archaeological evidence of human ancestors hunting and scavenging

May 10, 2013 — A recent Baylor University research study has shed new light on the diet and food acquisition strategies of some the earliest human ancestors in Africa.

Beginning around two million years ago, early stone tool-making humans, known scientifically as Oldowan hominin, started to exhibit a number of physiological and ecological adaptations that required greater daily energy expenditures, including an increase in brain and body size, heavier investment in their offspring and significant home-range expansion. Demonstrating how these early humans acquired the extra energy they needed to sustain these shifts has been the subject of much debate among researchers.

A recent study led by Joseph Ferraro, Ph.D., assistant professor of anthropology at Baylor, offers new insight in this debate with a wealth of archaeological evidence from the two million-year-old site of Kanjera South (KJS), Kenya. The study's findings were recently published in PLOS One.

"Considered in total, this study provides important early archaeological evidence for meat eating, hunting and scavenging behaviors -cornerstone adaptations that likely facilitated brain expansion in human evolution, movement of hominins out of Africa and into Eurasia, as well as important shifts in our social behavior, anatomy and physiology," Ferraro said.

Located on the shores of Lake Victoria, KJS contains "three large, well-preserved, stratified" layers of animal remains. The research team worked at the site for more than a decade, recovering thousands of animal bones and rudimentary stone tools.

According to researchers, hominins at KJS met their new energy requirements through an increased reliance on meat eating. Specifically, the archaeological record at KJS shows that hominins acquired an abundance of nutritious animal remains through a combination of both hunting and scavenging behaviors. The KJS site is the earliest known archaeological evidence of these behaviors.

"Our study helps inform the 'hunting vs. scavenging' debate in Paleolithic archaeology. The record at KJS shows that it isn't a case of either/or for Oldowan hominins two million years ago. Rather hominins at KJS were clearly doing both," Ferraro said.

The fossil evidence for hominin hunting is particularly compelling. The record shows that Oldowan hominins acquired and butchered numerous small antelope carcasses. These animals are well represented at the site by most or all of their bones from the tops of their head to the tips of their hooves, indicating to researchers that they were transported to the site as whole carcasses.

Many of the bones also show evidence of cut marks made when hominins used simple stone tools to remove animal flesh. Some bones also bear evidence that hominins used fist-sized stones to break them open to acquire bone marrow.

In addition, modern studies in the Serengeti--an environment similar to KJS two million years ago--have also shown that predators completely devour antelopes of this size within minutes of their deaths. As a result, hominins could only have acquired these valuable remains on the savanna through active hunting.

The site also contains a large number of isolated heads of wildebeest-sized antelopes. In contrast to small antelope carcasses, the heads of these somewhat larger individuals are able to be consumed several days after death and could be scavenged, as even the largest African predators like lions and hyenas were unable to break them open to access their nutrient-rich brains.

"Tool-wielding hominins at KJS, on the other hand, could access this tissue and likely did so by scavenging these heads after the initial non-human hunters had consumed the rest of the carcass," Ferraro said. "KJS hominins not only scavenged these head remains, they also transported them some distance to the archaeological site before breaking them open and consuming the brains. This is important because it provides the earliest archaeological evidence of this type of resource transport behavior in the human lineage."

Other contributing authors to the study include: Thomas W. Plummer of Queens College & NYCEP; Briana L. Pobiner of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution; James S. Oliver of Illinois State Museum and Liverpool John Moores University; Laura C. Bishop of Liverpool John Moores University; David R. Braun of George Washington University; Peter W. Ditchfield of University of Oxford; John W. Seaman III , Katie M. Binetti and John W. Seaman Jr. of Baylor University; Fritz Hertel of California State University and Richard Potts of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution and National Museums of Kenya.

The research was supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, Leakey Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Geographic Society, The Leverhulme Trust, University of California, Baylor University and the City University of New York. Additional logistical support was provided by the Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program and the Peter Buck Fund for Human Origins Research, the British Institute of Eastern Africa and the National Museums of Kenya.

TAG:Environmental Policy Global Warming Sustainability Cultures Ancient Civilizations Lost Treasures

TSMC's sales boom in April

TSMC's sales boom in April

LONDON – Leading foundry chip maker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. has seen its sales in 2013 running at 25 percent higher than in 2012 with the prospect of strong second half to the year.

TSMC has reported net sales for April of NT$50.07 billion (about $1.69 billion), an increase of 13.5 percent from March 2013 and up 23.5 percent over April 2012.

The company's revenues for the first four months of the year were NT$182.83 billion (about $6.16 billion), an increase of 25.1 percent compared to the same period in 2012.

At the most recent analysts' conference call Morris Chang, chairman and CEO said that in 2013 TSMC would grow at much higher rate than the 10 percent he forecast for the foundry sector as a whole. Chang applies a top-down view and said that for 2013 TSMC's estimate of global GDP remains unchanged at about 2.6 percen growth. The semiconductor market he forecasts wlll grow at about 4 percent. The fabless industry is set to grow at 9 percent and the foundry sector at 10 percent.

Much of TSMC's current success is based on its commanding position in the supply of 28-nm CMOS and the demand for it for mobile applications. In the call Chang said that TSMC would triple production and revenue from 28-nm wafers in 2013 compared with 2012. The high-K metal gate variant will start shipping in higher volume than the oxynitride version of 28-nm in third quarter of 2013, Chang said.

April sales at rival foundry United Microelectronics Corp. were flat sequentially and its year-to-date sales of NT$10.28 billion (about $350 million) was up by 3.9 percent compared to the same period in 2012. Manufacturing capacity utilization at UMC was 78 percent in 1Q13, down from 80 percent in 4Q12.


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TAG:Morris Chang TSMC foundry sales April semiconductor UMC

IBM analytics solving cancer

IBM analytics solving cancer

PORTLAND, Ore. -- IBM's medical diagnostics analytics are not exactly a 'cure' for cancer, but they are aiming to lower the cost of a promising new remedy for destroying existing tumors. The new technique uses a high-energy particle accelerator -- a room-sized version of the gigantic accelerators used to unravel physics -- that directs a proton beam to precisely kill the cancer cells inside tumors, leaving adjacent tissue untouched. IBM Research (Austin, Texas) is aiming to reduce the cost of this promising new therapy, using software analytics running on a Power7 cluster supercomputer.

The stakes are huge. Last year there were over 12 million cancer patients worldwide receiving various therapies, and that number is predicted to increase to 21 million by 2030. Unfortunately, today there are only 10 centers offering proton therapy, however 17 new ones are currently under construction at a cost of over $200 million each. Over $3.4 billion is being invested in current-generation proton accelerators, and smaller, less expensive accelerators are also being designed to make the technique more affordable.

The big bottleneck, however, is the computational workload required to utilize proton therapy.

Today proton therapy requires a long involved preparation process, starting with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computational tomography (CT) scan to identify the tumor's location, after which a bevy of doctors and technicians spend over a week mapping out exactly how to use a proton beam to destroy it. Unlike traditional radiation therapy, proton beams do not affect human tissue as they pass through it, only releasing their energy at the very end of the path, which must be carefully plotted to end precisely within the tumor.

Today it takes a team of doctors and technicians a week to map out the path for a proton beam to kill tumors, but in the meantime it grew, making success less likely. IBM's analytics running on a Power 730 cluster computer maps out the same proton beam path in 15 minutes. SOURCE: IBM Click on image to enlarge.

"The protons are accelerated to half the speed of light, but do not loose that energy until they hit a threshold, after which they release burst of kinetic energy," said IBM Research scientist, Sani Nassif. "Therefore, they can go deep into the body -- almost six inches deep -- where they create a very dynamic hot spot while not touching anything between the skin and that point."
Next: How it works
TAG:Medical Cancer Tumor Cure EETimes NextGenLog Electronics

Tower upbeat despite loss-making Q1

Tower upbeat despite loss-making Q1

LONDON – Tower Semiconductor Ltd., the specialty foundry that trades as TowerJazz, made a net loss of $23.2 million on revenues of $112.6 million in the first quarter of 2013. Revenues were down 23.7 percent from $147.6 million in the previous quarter and down 33.0 percent from the same quarter a year before.

The decline in revenue was on the low side of previously given guidance for the quarter of $110 million to $120 million. The steep drop in revenue was predicted to come from the phasing out of supply contracts with Micron Technology Inc. at a wafer fab in Nishiwaki, Japan. Tower (Migdal Haemek, Israel) acquired the fab from Micron and is in the process of bringing up replacement customers.

Tower said it expects 2Q13 revenue to be in the range $122 million to $132 million with a mid-point up 13 percent on first quarter revenue.

"We leave first quarter confident in our tactics and strategies, demonstrated by quarter over quarter double digit guidance growth, and projected quarter over quarter growth throughout the year. This growth is driven by a record number of full mask tape-outs into our 8-inch facilities in Newport Beach, Migdal HaEmek and Nishiwaki and strong and increasing demand in our Israeli 6-inch factory," said Russell Ellwanger, CEO of Tower, in a statement.


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TAG:Tower TowerJazz semiconductor financial results