A bin for my favorite articles
science & technology
Apple wins patent for iPhone touch-screen controls
Jan 27th
Apple has won a US patent for touch-screen controls and gained a potential legal weapon against iPhone competitors.
US Patent 7,479,949 is awarded to “(Steve) Jobs et al” for a method of “detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display” to command computing devices.
A multi-page patent available online at the US Patent and Trade Office on Monday details iPhone or iPod Touch commands such as finger or thumb swiping, twisting, or spreading to flip pages, rotate views, or enlarge images.
The patent was issued last week, a day before Apple on January 21 announced record-high quarterly profits.
Word of the patent provides ominous context for a warning made by Apple chief operating officer Tim Cook during a conference call that followed release the California firm’s earnings report.
Cook said he believes iPhones are “years ahead of the competition” and that they are vigilantly watching to make certain rivals don’t usurp Apple’s intellectual property.
“We think competition is good,” Cook said. “We are ready to suit up and go against anyone. However, we will not stand for having our IP ripped off and will use whatever weapons at our disposal.”
While not mentioning a specific competitor, Cook made his comment in reply to a question related to a new Palm Pre touch-screen mobile telephone unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show this month to stellar reviews.
Global warming ‘irreversible’ for next 1000 years
Jan 27th
Climate change is ‘largely irreversible’ for the next 1,000 years even if carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions could be abruptly halted, according to a new study led by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The study’s authors said there was “no going back” after the report showed that changes in surface temperature, rainfall and sea level are “largely irreversible for more than 1,000 years after CO2 emissions are completely stopped.”
NOAA senior scientist Susan Solomon said the study, published in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, showed that current human choices on carbon dioxide emissions are set to “irreversibly change the planet.”
Researchers examined the consequences of CO2 building up beyond present-day concentrations o.
f 385 parts per million, and then completely stopping emissions after the peak. Before the industrial age CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere amounted to only 280 parts per million.
The study found that CO2 levels are irreversibly impacting climate change, which will contribute to global sea level rise and rainfall changes in certain regions.
The authors emphasized that increases in CO2 that occur from 2000 to 2100 are set to “lock in” a sea level rise over the next 1,000 years.
Rising sea levels would cause “irreversible commitments to future changes in the geography of the Earth, since many coastal and island features would ultimately become submerged,” the study said.
Decreases in rainfall that last for centuries can be expected to have a range of impacts, said the authors. Regional impacts include — but are not limited to — decreased human water supplies, increased fire frequency, ecosystem change and expanded deserts.
US approves world’s first human embryonic stem cell therapy
Jan 24th
US authorities have approved the first human trials using embryonic stem cells testing a pioneering therapy for paralyzed patients, the FDA said Friday.
“The FDA has granted its clearance for a new drug application of Geron Corp for a phase one clinical trial of an embryionic stem-cell based therapy in patients with acute spinal cord injury,” FDA spokeswoman Susan Cruzan told AFP.
All federally funded research on new lines of stem cells was banned under the previous administration of president George W. Bush.
Global warming hitting all of Antarctica: scientists
Jan 22nd
Scientists on Wednesday unveiled evidence to suggest global warming is affecting all of Antarctica, home to the world’s mightiest store of ice.
The average temperature across the White Continent has been rising for the last half century and the finger of blame points at the greenhouse effect, they said.
The research, published in the British journal Nature, takes a fresh look at one of the great unknowns — and dreads — in climate science.
Any significant thaw of Antarctica could drown many coastal cities and delta regions. Bigger than Australia, Antarctica holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by 57 metres (185 feet).
Previous monitoring has already pinpointed the Antarctic Peninsula — the tongue that juts 800 kilometres (500 miles) towards South America — as a “hotspot” where hundreds of glaciers have been in retreat since the start of the decade.
But until now the news has been reassuring regarding Antarctica’s two massive icesheets.
Indeed, a common belief is that the icy slabs have even cooled slightly and possibly thickened, partly in response to the chilling seasonal effects of the ozone hole over the South Pole.
Not so, the new study says.
It calculates that West Antarctica has been warming by 0.17 degrees Celsius (0.3 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade over the past 50 years.
This is even more than the Peninsula, where the average rise is estimated as 0.11 C (0.2 F) per decade.
There has indeed been some cooling in East Antarctica, but this was mainly in the autumn, and occurred as a result of the ozone hole. There was also a period of strong cooling between 1970 and 2000.
But, overall and when calculated over 50 years, East Antarctica has warmed too — by an average of 0.1 C (0.18 F) per decade, a figure that the authors describe as “significant”.
“The sense of ‘Oh, it’s cooling in East Antarctica,’ is based essentially on the 1970-2000 period, and it’s warmed since then — although we don’t have a lot of data for the most recent period — and it definitely warmed prior to the 1970s,” Eric Steig, a professor of Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington, told AFP.
“When you look at the big picture on that, the average [trend in East Antarctica] is actually warming.”
Put together, the average temperature rise for Antarctica is put at 0.12 C (0.22 F) per decade, the study said.
The work is based on a 25-year archive of observations by satellites measuring the intensity of infrared light radiated by the snow pack. These were buttressed by data from automated weather stations deployed around the Antarctic coast since 1957.
The paper does not venture any estimate about ice loss or predict the icesheets’ stability, but says only global warming can logically explain the temperature trend.
“This shouldn’t cause anyone to worry more than they did before. But what it does do is kill off the rather silly and careless statements out there from some people to the effect that Antarctica’s cooling,” said Steig.
Such comments “put into question all the other science that supports the idea that there is warming and it’s human beings’ fault,” he said.
There could be bad news a few decades down the road, when efforts to fix the ozone hole bear fruit, added Steig.
“The hole could be eliminated by the middle of this century. If that happens, all of Antarctica could begin warming on a par with the rest of the world,” he warned.
The West Antarctic icesheet, which holds enough ice to boost global sea levels by up to six metres (19.5 feet), lies at an average height of about 1,800 metres (6,000 feet).
The East Antarctic icesheet, divided from West Antarctica by a mountain chain, has an average elevation of around 3,000 metres (10,000 feet), which makes it not only bigger but also colder.
If it melted in its entirety — something that most scientists discount except only as a very distant doomsday scenario — today’s coastlines would be drowned to a height of 50 metres (165 feet).
Faulty gene condemns millions in India to heart disease: study
Jan 21st
Tens of millions of people from the Indian subcontinent are destined to suffer heart disease due to a single genetic mutation, according to a study published on Sunday.
The wayward gene, found almost exclusively among the more than 1.5 billion people in or from South Asia, is almost guaranteed to lead to heart trouble, usually later in life, the researchers reported.
Four percent of the region’s population — some 60 million people — carry the mutation, the study concludes.
Scientists have long suspected that India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and probably Bangladesh carry an outsized share of the global burden of health disease.
One recent study predicts that by the end of this year India alone will account for 60 percent of the world’s heart-related problems, which can have both lifestyle and genetic origins.
The new research by an international team of 25 scientists and doctors from four countries provides a partial answer as to why this is so: an unexpectedly common defect in a gene, MYBPC3, that provides the blueprint for a certain kind of heart protein.
“The mutation leads to the formation of an abnormal protein,” said the study’s main architect, Kumarasamy Thangaraj of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderbad, India.
“Young people can degrade the abnormal protein and remain healthy, but as they get older it builds up and eventually results in the symptoms that we see.”
These include severe hypertension, an inflammation and weakening of the heart called cardiomyopathy, and death due to sudden cardiac arrest.
Thangaraj and colleagues first discovered the mutation — the deletion of 25 bits of genetic code — five years ago in two Indian families. But its significance only came to light with the new research.
In two separate clinical tests, researchers checked for the presence of the variant in 800 heart patients and 699 healthy individuals across India. The link between the symptoms and the genetic defect “were almost off the scale,” leaving no doubt that the mutation played a key role in causing heart disease. Further tests in different parts of the country of 28 unrelated families carrying the mutation showed that more than 90 percent of the oldest members in each family had heart problems.
While virtually absent among peoples from other parts of the world, the deadly genetic variant is equally spread across most of India’s regions, its social castes, as well as its language and religious groups.
In a follow-up sampling of more than 2,000 indigenous individuals from 26 countries across five continents, the telltale mutation showed up in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, with some presence in Malaysia and Indonesia, but nowhere else. The findings raise a perplexing question: if the bit of missing genetic code is so harmful, how did it become so common? Why did it not die out over the course of evolution, as usually happens to maladapted genes?
“The harmful effects are felt mainly late in life after people have had their children, so the mutation is essentially invisible to natural selection,” explained co-author Chris Tyler-Smith, a researcher at The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England.
“When carriers have children, the genes remain in the population,” he told AFP by phone.
While many diseases hit in old age, very few are caused by a single mutation.
“The only other example I can think of is Alzheimer’s, where there is a variant that affects the very late-onset form of the disease,” Tyler-Smith said.
The MYBPC3 variant, he added, probably accounts for no more than five percent of heart disease in India, but still affects tens of millions of people.
“The bad news is that many of these mutation carriers have no warning that they are in danger,” said Perundurai Dhandapany of Madurai Kamaraj University in Madurai, India.
“But the good news is that we now know the impact of the mutation.”
The researchers said the findings should lead to better screening to identify those at risk, and may ultimately pave the way for the development of new treatments.
An estimated 17 million people around the world die of cardiovascular diseases every year, particularly heart attacks and strokes.
Medical ‘microbot’ to swim human arteries
Jan 21st
In 1966, the movie ‘Fantastic Voyage’ recounted the tale of doctors who are miniaturised along with a submarine and injected into the body of a Soviet defector, sailing up his bloodstream to destroy a brain clot that imperils the VIP’s life.
The improbable storyline — and the equally improbable casting of sex icon Raquel Welch as a scientist in a wetsuit — invited the audience to suspend their disbelief and enjoy a good sci-fi romp.
More than 40 years later, some of the futuristic potential of “Fantastic Voyage” has taken a step closer to realisation, thanks to a remarkable achievement in miniaturisation unveiled on Tuesday.
There’s no submarine or Raquel Welch, but instead a motorised robot that its inventors believe is small enough to be injected into the human bloodstream.
One day, the remote-controlled bot could carry sensor equipment for observation work, relaying images back to surgeons.
Or it could become a tiny surgeon, cutting away blood clots, reaming out clogged arteries or repairing damaged tissue, its inventors hope.
The “microbot” measures just a quarter of a millimetre, or “two or three human hairs wide,” said lead scientist James Friend, from the Nanophysics Laboratory at Monash University, Australia.
“We are looking for something that can be placed in human arteries, especially in locations where it can’t be done with the technologies that were around previously,” he told AFP.
Conventional methods of “keyhole” and other minimally invasive surgery today use tubes called catheters, which are inserted into body cavities and arteries.
But catheters are rigid and despite their small size can still puncture thin arterial walls.
In a paper published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, Friend’s team describe prototype work on a motor based on piezo-electricity, the energy used in quartz watches, upmarket cigarette lighters and gas-stove lighters.
Piezo-electric materials are ceramics or crystals that generate a voltage in response to mechanical stress.
In this case, the materials vibrate a corkscrew-like microstructure inside the bot that then drives a “propellor” comprising soft flagella. Like a swimming bacterium — but guided externally by remote control — the robot would make headway against the bloodstream, at least in blood vessels where the flow is not too great, the inventors hope.
The device could transmit images, deliver microscopic payloads and, eventually, carry out surgery, said Friend. It would then be retrieved by syringe at the point of entry.
“For the moment, we are going for observation, because it is the easiest thing to do,” said Friend. “From that point on, we will go for other kinds of operations, mainly snipping and cutting.”
If the device breaks down, it would return downstream to the point of entry and then be picked up, or it could be recovered by micro-catheter, he said.
The team has produced prototypes of the motors and is now looking at how to improve the assembly method and a mechanical device that moves and controls the micromotor.
But years of work probably lie ahead before it is used on a human patient.
In a link with “Fantastic Voyage,” the microbot has been baptised Proteus, carrying the same name as the miniaturised sub in the movie.
The moniker was chosen by readers in a “name-that-bot” poll on the technology website Wired, said Friend.
Scientists to solve astronomical riddle using Galileo DNA
Jan 21st
Italian scientists are trying to get Galileo’s DNA in order to figure out how the astronomer forged groundbreaking theories on the universe while gradually becoming blind, a historian said Monday. Scientists at Florence’s Institute and Museum of the History of Science want to exhume the body of 17th Century astronomer Galileo Galilei to find out exactly what he could see through his telescope.
The Italian astronomer – who built on the work of predecessor Nicolaus Copernicus to develop modern astronomy with the sun as the centre of the universe – had a degenerative eye disease that eventually left him blind. “If we succeed, thanks to DNA, in understanding how this disease distorted his sight, it could bring about important discoveries for the history of science,” said the institute’s director, Paolo Galluzzi.
“We could explain certain mistakes that Galileo made: why he described the planet Saturn as having ‘lateral ears’ rather than having seen it encircled by rings for example,” said Galluzzi. In an effort to recreate what Galileo – who lived from 1564 to 1642 – saw, the scientific team has made an exact replica of his telescope.
They now want to get DNA proof of what ophthalmologists have said was a genetic eye disease and thereby more fully understand the conditions under which he made observations that revolutionised our understanding of the cosmos. It will take the team one year to raise the 300,000 euros (390,000 dollars) needed to finance the project and clear administrative hurdles to open Galileo’s tomb in Florence’s Santa Croce Basilica, Galluzzi said.
The United Nations proclaimed 2009 the International Year of Astronomy, marking the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s observations. In 1609, he discovered spots on the Sun, craters and peaks on the surface of the Moon and satellites orbiting Jupiter, thereby confirming Copernicus’s theory that planets orbit the Sun rather than the Earth.
Women less able to suppress hunger than men: Study
Jan 21st
Faced with their favorite foods, women are less able than men to suppress their hunger, a discovery that may help explain the higher obesity rate for females, a new study suggests. Researchers trying to understand the brain’s mechanisms for controlling food intake were surprised at the difference between the sexes in brain response.
Gene-Jack Wang of Brookhaven National Laboratory and colleagues were trying to figure out why some people overeat and gain weight while others don’t.
They performed brain scans on 13 women and 10 men, who had fasted overnight, to determine how their brains responded to the sight of their favorite foods. They report their findings in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“There is something going on in the female,” Wang said in a telephone interview, “the signal is so much different.”
In the study, participants were quizzed about their favorite foods, which ranged from pizza to cinnamon buns and burgers to chocolate cake, and then were asked to fast overnight.
The next day they underwent brain scans while being presented with their favorite foods. In addition, they used a technique called cognitive inhibition, which they had been taught, to suppress thoughts of hunger and eating.
While both men and women said the inhibition technique decreased their hunger, the brain scans showed that men’s brain activity actually decreased, while the part of women’s brains that responds to food remained active.
“Even though the women said they were less hungry when trying to inhibit their response to the food, their brains were still firing away in the regions that control the drive to eat,” Wang said.
Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Addiction and a co-author of the paper, said the gender difference was a surprise and may be because of different nutritional needs for men and women, although she stressed that idea is speculative.
Because the traditional role of the female is to provide nutrition to children, the female brain may be hard-wired to eat when foods are available, she said. The next step is to see if female hormones are reacting directly with those specific parts of the brain.
“In our society we are being constantly being bombarded by food stimulus,” she said in a telephone interview, so understanding the brain’s response can help in developing ways to resist that stimulus.
Eric Stice, an expert on eating disorders at the Oregon Research Institute, called the findings provocative.
“I think it is very possible that the differences in hunger suppression may contribute to gender differences in eating disorders and that they are likely linked to gender differences in estrogen and related hormones,” said Stice, who was not part of Wang’s research team.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 35.3 percent of American women and 33.3 percent of men were considered obese in 2006.
Rosalyn Weller, a professor of psychology at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, said she was surprised by the results and “thought the dissociation between subjective reports of hunger and brain activation in women but not men was very interesting.”
The results suggest that training in reducing food desires or in reacting to food cues could be effective treatments to combat obesity, said Weller, who was not part of the research team.
Weller was a co-author of a recent paper in the journal NeuroImage that studied women’s brains when participants were shown pictures of food. They found that obese women had a much stronger reaction than normal-weight women in brain regions related to reward.
Wang noted that behavioral studies have shown that women have a higher tendency than men to overeat when presented with tasty food or under emotional distress.
This may result from differences in sex hormones, he said, and further research is planned to see if that is the case.
Alice H. Lichtenstein, an expert in eating behavior at Tufts University, called Wang’s research “very interesting … I hope to see more like it.”
But, she added, a lot of different factors figure in what and when we eat.
“As we learn more about the different factors that go into making that decision we’ll be better at helping people regulate” their eating, said Lichtenstein, who was not part of the research team.
Obesity has been increasing and Wang also suggested that another part of the reason is changes in society.
While food choices were seasonal and more limited for our ancestors, choices today are wider and the food is so tempting, he said.
“You go to the buffet, you see the food, you want it,” Wang went on. “Some people go to the buffet, they don’t eat so much, some do. There is something different in the people.”
The study was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and by the General Clinical Research Center of Stony Brook University.
Study sees no eye cancer risk from cell phones
Jan 21st
Regular mobile phone use does not appear to increase a person’s risk of getting a type of cancer called melanoma of the eye, German researchers said.
The study involving about 1,600 people detected no link between the time a person spent using a cell phone over about a decade and their chances of developing melanoma of the eye, they wrote in journal of the National Cancer Institute, Healt News reported.
Melanoma is an aggressive form of cancer that can spread quickly. It arises in cells that produce the pigment called melanin that gives skin its colour. The eyes also have cells that produce melanin. Melanoma of the eye is rare.
The issue of whether long-term use of cell phones can cause cancer, in particular brain tumors, has been a hot topic, but most studies examining the matter have found no such association.
“We did not corroborate our previous results that showed an increased risk of uveal melanoma among regular mobile phone users,” Dr. Andreas Stang of the Martin-Luther-University of Halle- Wittenberg in Germany wrote in the journal.
“Uncertainty exists about the role, if any, of radio waves transmitted by radio sets or mobile phones in human carcinogenesis (cancer development),” they said.
First combined heart-lung transplant
Jan 19th
The first combined transplantation of a heart and lungs in Japan is planned at Osaka University Hospital on Saturday from a man in his 30’s
who has been certified as brain dead, the Tokyo-based Japan Organ Transplant Network said.
The heart and lungs of the man, who was pronounced brain dead yesterday at Hyogo Emergency Medical Center in Kobe where he was being treated for head injuries, is scheduled to be transplanted to a man, also in his 30s, at the hospital in Suita, Osaka Prefecture, the network said.
In addition, the donor’s liver will be transplanted to a man in his 50s in Fukuoka, the pancreas and one kidney to a woman in her 40s in Tokyo, and the other kidney to a man in his 50s in Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture.
The donor had indicated his willingness to provide his small intestine as well, but the network said it could not match the organ with a prospective recipient.
It is the 79th case in Japan in which a brain-dead person’s organs will be transplanted based on the Organ Transplant Law, which came into effect in October 1997.
According to the network, the combined transplantation of the heart and lungs can be carried out only when it is determined that each of the donor’s organs is suitable for a patient chosen from a waiting list for the multiple-organ transplant.
Registration for patients wanting to undergo a heart-lung transplant began in 2003, but the network has had to give up on arranging such an operation in the past as suitability could not be confirmed.