The Human Body, Searchable in 3-D

BIOMEDICINE

The Human Body, Searchable in 3-D

A new tool lets people see the inside of the body up close and in great detail.

The online 3-D interactive search tool of the human body was released .  It allows a user to view and navigate the human anatomy, male or female, down to the finest detail—from the muscles and deep muscles to the nerves, arteries, vessels, and bones. This new tool, called BodyMaps, was developed by Healthline Networks, a company that provides medical information to consumers online, and GE Healthyimagination, a Web-based platform that shares and promotes projects that focus on consumer health, such as apps or healthy how-to videos.

BodyMaps is a consumer tool developed to educate the user on health conditions or medical ailments. At the center of the BodyMaps page is a 3-D image of the body; at left is textual information about the body section being shown.  As a user mouses over the text, the section of the body in the image is highlighted, and vice versa if a user mouses over the image. At the bottom is a scrubber that lets the user rotate the body 360 degrees. The page also features videos, tips on staying healthy, information on symptoms and conditions, and a definition of the section in view.

The user can select a body region to explore by clicking the text or image, or by using the search tool. Selecting shoulders generated a crisp, high-definition 3-D image of the shoulder section, starting at the skin level, with the option to click through to see the muscles, nerves and vessels, and bone. Choosing the deltoid muscle, a definition popped up and the remaining muscles were shaded out. An option to read more provided a lengthy definition and description of the muscle, including common injuries and their causes and symptoms.

There is also an anatomy list for each body section  the user chooses to view—the heart even has a cross-section view and a diagram of blood flow while the knee shows each layer of connective tissues.

Body Maps is a flash application and can be viewed in any browser; it does not require the user to download any software or special programs to run. "This is not a science experiment," says West Shell, chairman and CEO of Healthline Networks. "We have built this as a search product for consumer education," he says. Google is working on a similar project called Google Body, which is part of Google Labs. Unlike BodyMaps, it requires a Web 3-D standard called WebGL and can only be used in a Chrome browser. Google Body also lacks the level of detail both in its imagery and information that is available in BodyMaps.

BodyMaps was built using Healthline's taxonomy, a database of health and medical information the company spent 10 years building. It relates the different attributes and facets of a disease or condition to relevant symptoms and treatments, types of doctors, and even insurance billing codes. When a user conducts a search, all the relevant information is displayed.  To create the 3-D graphics, Healthline and GE Healthyimagination used over 25 medical illustrators to first make the drawings. They then partnered with Visible Productions to do the 3-D modeling and applied the existing taxonomy and search and navigation technology to the models.

Shell says the most viewed information on Healthline.com is visual data such as images, videos, and animations. "We are enhancing the visual learning experience by making the 3-D body the platform for navigation," he says.

The next phase of development for the new 3-D tool is to make it available on mobile devices and tablets.  To do so, Healthline is building the application in HTML 5, a programming language that is supported by most devices. Shell  expects Body Maps to be on mobile platforms in the next six months to a year.

The system, while the first of its kind, still needs some work. Some queries, like "large intestine," produce no results, and certain "read more" sections, such as in the knee region, do not have any additional information.  Also, choosing to "read more" about the muscle "biceps brachii," displayed in the shoulder region, makes the user go back to the arm section.

The company expects to introduce additional capabilities by June that will let users explore in 3-D graphics the progression of a disease, how a drug works in the body, a medical procedure, or even an injury. At least 20 different scenarios will be launched initially, and new ones will continue to be released. Further planned improvements will let users upload his or her medical imagery into the system and compare it with the information in BodyMaps.

Shell says Healthline is conducting a pilot study with GE, integrating the imagery from the company's electronic medical record system with BodyMaps. This application will not be available to users "for a while," but should be implemented widely across GE for testing later this year, he says.

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Thylacine was not a wolf, but a tiger

Thursday, 5 May 2011

by Taylor Burns

Cosmos Online

Single page print view

A pair of thylacines photographed at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo circa 1906.

Credit: Wikimedia

CAMBRIDGE: New evidence that the recently extinct thylacine - Tasmania's 'king of beasts' - may have been less wolf-like than previously thought, according to a new study.
In popular science vernacular, the thylacine has been commonly referred to as either the 'marsupial wolf', due to its superficially dog-like features, or 'Tasmanian tiger', due to its striped fur coat. A quantitative, skeletal analysis by Christine Janis and Borja Figueiredo from Brown University in Rhode Island provides support for the suggestion that thylacines were not pursuit predators, with particular emphasis on the animal's ability to rotate its elbow.
The study, published in Biology Letters, questions the degree to which the thylacine was a 'marsupial wolf', and perhaps suggests 'Tasmanian tiger' to be a more appropriate vernacular label.
""It's become the icon of marsupial and placental convergence, so it's a good thing to point out that it's not the exact analogue of the wolf," said Janis. "Nobody has really done a more modern quantification of any part of the skeleton, that we did here."
Discovering the 'Tasmanian tiger'
The thylacine was the largest marsupial carnivore on Australia's mainland, the last of them thought to have lived up to 3,000 years ago. Shortly after the appearance of dingoes 4,000 years ago, the dwindling population of thylacines lived exclusively in Tasmania.
When discovered, scientists saw the now-extinct animal as a textbook example of convergence between marsupials (such as kangaroos) and placentals (such as wolves). The skull of the thylacine received much attention, with several studies confirming the animal's carnivorous diet and wolf-like skull - its species name, cynocephalus, translates to 'dog head'.
But recently, researchers have been increasingly sceptical of the evolutionary link between thylacines and wolves, suggesting that thylacines specialised on smaller prey instead of large-prey pack hunting, and that their skeleton is not well-adapted to the running abilities of dogs.
Head of a wolf, elbow of a tiger
The new study now adds postcranial evidence that the thylacine was poorly adapted to wolf-like behaviour, confirming rare eyewitness reports of more predatory hunting rather than pack pursuit. Though several morphological characteristics were examined, the most telling was the thylacine's elbow.
To exhaust their prey, pack-hunting wolves have their forepaws 'locked in' for marathon running, whereas other predatory animals have more flexible, manipulative forearms. By comparing the thylacine elbow to more than 30 other animals, Janis and Figueirido discovered that, similar to the latter group, the thylacine's elbow allowed for both pronation and supination of the forearm - a highly flexible, non-wolf-like characteristic.
But this is not to say that the thylacine is cat-like. Its claws are not retractile or effective in grabbing prey. Rather, it simply lacks some of the essential features of dogs that are associated with fast running. The head is wolf-like, but the postcranial skeleton is not.
Dingoes and the 'niche overlap hypothesis'
This finding raises questions about why the thylacine initially disappeared. It has been widely speculated that the thylacine was pushed out of Australia because the dingo had similar predatory techniques and thus competed for the same food - the so-called 'niche overlap hypothesis'.
The duo's research makes clear that there is less convergence between thylacines and large canids - like wolves or dingoes—than was previously assumed, meaning the niche overlap hypothesis might be overstated. However, this still does not explain the coincident timing of the thylacine's disappearance.
"There is a low probability that the arrival of the Dingo and coincident disappearance of the thylacine from mainland [Australia] is a coincidence," said Michael Archer, a palaeontologist at the University of New South Wales who initiated attempts to clone the thylacine. "[This is] aaugmented by the fact that dingoes never got to Tasmania, which is where thylacines survived until we blew them out of existence after 1788."
Are there still some out there?
The problem, said Janis, is that is very difficult to know what prey was hunted by dingoes and thylacines. There is simply a lack of information.
"I'm not saying dingoes had nothing to do with it, they may well do," said Janis. "But I'm saying that they are not the exact same kind of ecological counter animal, so I think we need to look at that a little more carefully."
Until then, Janis - a frequent visitor to Australia with a 'house full of thylacine memorabilia'- will continue to be inspired by the mystery surrounding one of Australia's most mythical creatures.
"I'm still holding out a very vague hope that there are some out there somewhere," said Janis. "I don't think it's likely, but I think it's not impossible. The mystery makes it so appealing."

The Desktop Is Turning Mobile

Credit: Technology Review

Computing

The Desktop Is Turning Mobile

In many ways mobile technologies are derivative of their desktop brethren. Your iPhone's e-mail app is like the e-mail client on your desktop, for example. The mobile world is the desktop world in miniature, a "lite" version.
But the mobile world is no longer just following; it's leading. PC sales are sagging, while sales of mobile devices—smart phones and tablets—are on the rise. As the operating systems that power these devices become the new norm, we can expect to see certain aspects of desktop and laptop operating systems start imitating the little upstarts that had initially imitated them.
This transition is already happening. Apple's Mac OS X Lion includes the Mac App Store, full-screen apps, and multitouch gestures. Apple also recently announced a big developers' conference in June, during which it said it would "unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS." Other companies are following similar paths of convergence. Though Google's Android (for mobile) and Chrome OS (for laptops) have notable differences, CEO Eric Schmidt has long maintained that "although it appears they are two separate projects, there's a great deal of commonality. Eventually they may merge even closer." HP's webOS, which the company acquired when it bought Palm, is designed for mobile use, but it will also be coming to notebooks and desktops. And we have reason to believe a similar convergence is on its way with Windows 8.
"It's very likely that PC operating systems will be affected by mobile devices' operating systems—and more broadly, that the lines between the two will increasingly blur," says Michael Dahlin, a professor of computer science at the University of Texas, who has expertise in operating systems. "Things have evolved to the point today where the difference between the smart-phone OS and the laptop and desktop OS is narrowing—and really already pretty narrow in terms of capability and core architectures," he says.

This trend is nothing new in the history of technology. In the case of mobile and PC operating systems, however, Dahlin thinks another factor is speeding it along: the cloud. "The cloud is part of what's going to enable and probably drive convergence between phone and mobile operating systems and desktop operating systems," he says. Now that a user's data isn't necessarily tied to a particular device, manufacturers feel they'll be expected to make that data accessible with equal ease, and in the same manner, on multiple devices.
What features associated with mobile might migrate back to desktops and laptops? Some are long rumored to be on the way in devices from Apple and other manufacturers: touch screens, gesture-based interfaces, more speech recognition, and so on. The novel constraints on mobile devices mandate their own kind of innovation and shape our experiences; then we expect to be able to replicate those experiences back at our PCs. That forces the traditional forms of those devices to change. "A little four-inch-by-four-inch silver square sits where my mouse used to sit," says Dahlin, referring to the multitouch gesture pad on Apple laptops.

New Type of Drug Kills Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

Nano killer: This drug-resistant staph bacterium has been split open and destroyed by an antimicrobial nanoparticle.
Credit: IBM

Biomedicine

New Type of Drug Kills Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

Scientists hope bacteria won't develop resistance to nanoparticles that poke them open.

Researchers at IBM are designing nanoparticles that kill bacteria by poking holes in them. The scientists hope that the microbes are less likely to develop resistance to this type of drug, which means it could be used to combat the emerging problem of antibiotic resistance. This type of drug has not had much success in clinical trials in the past, but initial tests of the nanoparticles in animals are promising.
Drug-resistant bacteria have become a major problem. In 2005, nearly 95,000 people in the United States developed a life-threatening staph infection resistant to multiple antibiotics, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It takes just one to two decades for microbes to develop resistance to traditional antibiotics that target a particular metabolic pathway inside the cell, says Mary B. Chan-Park, professor of chemical and biological engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, who was not involved with the research. In contrast, drugs that compromise microbes' cell membranes are believed to be less likely, or slower, to evoke resistance, she says.
"We're trying to generate polymers that interact with microbes in a very different way than traditional antibiotics," says James Hedrick, a materials scientist at IBM's Almaden Lab in San Jose, California. To do this, Hedrick's research group took advantage of past work on a library of polymer building blocks that can be mixed and matched to make complex nanoparticles. To make a nanoparticle that would selectively attack bacterial membranes and then break down harmlessly inside the body, the IBM group put together three types of building blocks. At the center of the polymer sequence is a backbone element that's water-soluble and tailored to interact with bacterial membranes. At either end of the backbone is a hydrophobic sequence. When a small amount of these polymer chains are added to water, the differences between the ends and the middle of the sequence drive the polymers to self-assemble into spherical nanoparticles whose shell is entirely made up of the part that will interact with bacterial cells. This work is described this week in the journal Nature Chemistry.
IBM's labs aren't equipped for biological tests, so the researchers collaborated with Yi Yan Yang at the Singapore Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology to test the nanoparticles. They found that the nanoparticles could burst open and kill gram-positive bacteria, a large class of microbes that includes drug-resistant staph. The nanoparticles also killed fungi. Other types of deadly bacteria that have different types of cell membranes would not be vulnerable to these nanoparticles, but the IBM researchers say they are developing nanoparticles that can target these bacteria, too, though it is more difficult. "Through molecular tailoring," says Robert Allen, senior manager of materials chemistry at IBM Almaden, "we can do all sorts of things"—designing particles with a particular shape, charge, water solubility, or other property.

Ancient possums were a social bunch

Monday, 9 May 2011

by Catherine de Lange

Cosmos Online

Two intermingled and fragmentary skeletons of Pucadelphys andinus. Click to next image to view a reconstitution.

Credit: Lemzaouda/MNHN

LONDON: A rare fossil discovery made by an international team of scientists suggests for the first time that some early mammals - the ancient relatives of modern marsupials - lived in social groups.

The finding, published in the current issue of Nature, challenges the current understanding of mammalian evolution and reveals the intricate details of how these opossum-like marsupials lived.

"This study is very exciting because we discovered 35 almost complete skeletons and skulls of marsupials, which is very rare. In the history of mammals, we have very few clues as to how they lived because we only have access to a few fossil specimens," said lead author Sandrine Ladevèze from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, Belgium.

Modern marsupials weren't always loners.

Living marsupials, with the exception of larger herbivores like kangaroos, live highly solitary lives. Until now, it was thought that this is how these animals evolved, but the evidence was based on a very limited fossil record, such as isolated fragments of teeth or crushed skulls.

This new, bumper find provides an unprecedented amount of fossil evidence for scientists to work with. What's more, it is the first time such a large number of specimens have been found together, suggesting that a whole population was wiped out by a single catastrophic event around 65 million years ago—probably a landslide.

The mass grave included males, females, and young, all in close proximity, and their bodies were intermingled. This historical snapshot led Ladevèze and her team to think that these ancient marsupials lived in large social groups—unlike modern marsupials such as opossums.

Instead of being an ancient trait, the solitary lifestyle we see in marsupials today must have evolved much more recently, the study suggests.

Females not territorial

Ladevèze and her team studied the skulls and teeth of these ancient marsupials, called Pucadelphys andinus, to determine their sex. They concluded that there were 20 adult females and 6 males, as well as young adults and one infant.

The fact that the males and females were living together and the fossils were intermingled means that the females were not territorial, unlike the marsupials we are familiar with today. The skulls of the males were also longer and wider than those belonging to females and had larger canine teeth.

These differences normally indicate that there would have been strong competition between males and that each male would have had more than one mate.

New Test Spots Infections in Hours, Rather than Days

Faster test: This instrument can let doctors know if a deadly fungus is present in a blood sample in about two hours.
Credit: T2 Biosystems

Biomedicine

New Test Spots Infections in Hours, Rather than Days

A startup has developed a device that uses magnetic particles to identify pathogens rapidly.

A startup called T2 Biosystems is developing a test that uses magnetic nanoparticles to detect blood-borne infections in hours—compared to the days it now takes using conventional lab methods. The company's first device—about the size of a printer—will target Candida, a fungus that is the third-most-common cause of hospital-acquired infections. The detection system can identify Candida in human blood samples in about two hours. Clinical trials involving samples from actual patients are in the works.
The sooner a hospital lab can identify the cause of a patient's infection, the faster that patient can be put on the right antibiotics. Today, microbiologists often try to grow the infectious agent in the lab and run various tests to identify it. This can take a few days, and some organisms, including Candida, grow more slowly than others. Tests based on amplifying genetic material are considerably faster, but require complicated processing equipment. Tests that use fluorescent labels to light up a target are also faster, but samples like blood are too cloudy for the light to pass through.
T2 Biosystems's technology is based on work carried out by researchers at MIT, Harvard, and Massachusetts General Hospital on tailoring iron-oxide nanoparticles to bind to specific biomarkers, and then using a miniature magnetic system to detect the binding. The detector is essentially a tiny, simplified version of a nuclear magnetic resonance imaging system. Such systems usually require very large, expensive magnets, whereas T2 Biosystems's device uses a magnetic detector about the size of a penny.
Company founder and MIT materials science professor Michael Cima says there are two main advantages to the magnetic particle approach: magnetic fields can travel through blood and other media that light can't penetrate, and the magnetic detection system is very sensitive—so it can tell clinicians precisely how much of a particular pathogen is present.

Got an iPhone? There's an App for Hacking That

Open sesame: JailbreakMe is a website that disables an iPhone’s security protections. Experts warn that the technique could be adapted and used to steal information from a device.

Computing

Got an iPhone? There's an App for Hacking That

Over the past few years, researchers have warned that viruses and other security threats could soon start appearing on mobile devices. The buzz at two major hacker conferences suggests that such threats could finally be about to arrive in force. The Black Hat and Defcon conferences, which bring together computer security researchers, consultants, and independent hackers, both took place last week in Las Vegas.
This weekend, a hacker known as "comex" grabbed headlines by launching a website called "JailbreakMe" for breaking the security architecture built into the iPhone. Simply visiting www.jailbreakme.com on an iPhone and clicking a button will disable these security features.
JailbreakMe doesn't appear to be designed to harm an iPhone or the data stored on it. Some users "jailbreak" their iPhones in order to install applications that haven't been approved by Apple, or to run the phones on a network other than Apple's partner, AT&T. But the technique used by JailbreakMe could just as easily be used by malicious hackers or virus writers. It was also just one of many mobile exploits discussed at both Black Hat and Defcon.
According to Dave Marcus, security research and communications manager for the security company McAfee, JailbreakMe relies on two vulnerabilities: one involves the way an iPhone processes PDF files, and another is buried deep in the phone's operating system. Together, these vulnerabilities allow "remote code execution"--making it possible to run programs on the device without going through Apple's App Store or getting permission from the user.

In a post on McAfee's site, Marcus noted that vulnerabilities that work as reliably as those used by JailbreakMe tend to be picked up by other attackers and used for malware and other nefarious purposes. "I hope I am not the only one who is bothered by this because it begs the question, 'What else can this be used for?' " Marcus wrote.
JailbreakMe "shows exactly the threat scenario that mobile phones can face," adds Vincenzo Iozzo, an engineer for Zynamics. Iozzo was part of a team that won an iPhone hacking contest earlier this year at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver. He explains that smart phones are often protected by a technology known as "sandboxing," which is supposed to isolate some functionality in the phone from installed software, thus preventing attackers from gaining total control. JailbreakMe bypasses sandboxing, demonstrating a serious threat to the device.

GE and EADS to Print Parts for Airplanes

Energy

GE and EADS to Print Parts for Airplanes

The technology could be used to make parts that perform better and cost less.

GE is starting a new lab at its global research headquarters in Niskayuna, New York, that's devoted to turning three-dimensional printing technology into a viable means of manufacturing functional parts for a range of its businesses, including those involving health care and aerospace. The company aims to take advantage of the technology's potential to make parts that are lighter, perform better, and cost less than parts made with conventional manufacturing techniques.
Technology for printing three-dimensional objects has existed for decades, but its applications have been largely limited to novelty items and specialized custom fabrication, such as the making of personalized prosthetics. But  the technology has now improved to the point that these printers can make intricate objects out of durable materials , including ceramics and metals such as titanium and aluminum,  with resolution on the scale of tens of micrometers.
As a result, companies such as GE and the European defense and aerospace giant EADS are working to apply it in situations more akin to conventional manufacturing, where large numbers of the same part are needed.
GE's first application of the technology could be ultrasound machines that are cheaper and perform better than current versions. One of the most expensive parts of an ultrasound machine is the device that transforms electronic signals into sound and back again—the part that's pressed against a person's skin during an ultrasound. These transducers are made up of thousands of tiny columns spaced just 30 to 40 micrometers apart, with each column being extremely thin, about eight to 10 times taller than they are wide. It's extremely difficult to make such parts using casting, since it's hard to free the part from the mold. So GE makes them using a precise cutting tool that very slowly carves away at a chunk of ceramic. The process is slow and expensive and can only be used to make a limited range of shapes.

Now GE has developed a new printing technology that spreads out a thin layer of a slurry composed of ceramic embedded in a polymer precursor. When a pattern of ultraviolet light is projected on this layer, the material solidifies only where it's been exposed to the light. Another layer of slurry is spread out on top of this and flashed with light, and the structure is built up in this way, layer by layer.
The process is still not ready for mass production, says Prabhjot Singh, a mechanical engineer and project manager at GE Research. But because the process is faster and saves material, "it could achieve orders of magnitude reduction in cost," he says. GE designers using the new process could improve the performance of the transducer because they won't be as constrained in the types of shapes they can make. This could lead to higher resolution ultrasounds.

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