First comprehensive DNA study of mast cell leukemia uncovers clues that could improve therapy

  by Biomechanism

Sequencing a cancer patient’s ‘exome’ reveals mutations critical for improving diagnostic power and targeted therapy

Cancer researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have carried out the first comprehensive study of the changes seen in the DNA of a patient with mast cell leukemia (MCL), an extremely aggressive subtype of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with a very poor prognosis.

Their genomic survey has helped identify two previously unknown mutations that could directly influence patient response to currently available therapeutic drugs.

The details uncovered by the study not only suggest a diagnostic improvement and an alternative treatment strategy for MCL, but could also serve as a springboard for novel diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for other cancers such as lymphoma.

“This is incredibly exciting because we’ve gone from knowing very little about the genetics of MCL to uncovering information that could directly benefit patients diagnosed with MCL,” says Research Investigator Mona Spector, Ph.D., who led the team’s efforts.

The study, which appears online in the journal Leukemia on December 16, is a collaboration between cancer researchers at CSHL and clinicians led by Steven L. Allen, MD, FACP, associate chief of hematology at North Shore-LIJ’s Monter Cancer Center and associate investigator at The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research. “This collaboration between the North Shore-LIJ Health System and CSHL allows us to increase medical knowledge and make innovative discoveries that may lead to new treatments for patients who are living with AML,” says Allen.

Made possible in large part by funding from the Don Monti Memorial Research Foundation, “the goal of this collaboration was to sequence patient DNA to find information about individual cancers that could be used to improve or design patient-specific treatment strategies,” explains CSHL Adjunct Professor and HHMI Investigator Scott Lowe, Ph.D.

In this study, the CSHL scientists used two approaches to identify genetic changes seen in an MCL patient who succumbed to the disease about three months after diagnosis. MCL is characterized by out-of-control proliferation of transformed mast cells – the same immune system cells that are notorious for their release of histamine during an allergic response.

In one approach, the CSHL team used a method called array comparative genomic hybridization (aCGH) to identify copy number variations—genomic alterations that result in an abnormal number of copies of one or more sections of DNA—in the leukemic mast cells. In a second approach, the team sequenced the majority of the “exome,” – the “exons” which are the DNA sequences that encode for protein (only about 2% of the genome).

This enabled them to identify mutations that result in the difference of a single nucleotide, or chemical “rung” in the DNA “ladder,” between the patient’s normal and tumor cells. These mutations often result in the production of aberrant proteins and can cause a cell to grow uncontrollably.

Bioinformatic analysis of the gigabytes of sequencing data by CSHL Fellow Ivan Iossifov, Ph.D., revealed the differences between the two genomes. Although several of the mutations occur within genes that have been previously linked to cancer, Spector immediately zeroed in on the mutations in two genes, KIT and MS4A2.

“MCL patients are screened for a mutation in the KIT gene that occurs at a specific amino acid referred to as D816V. This mutation not only spurs uncontrolled mast cell proliferation but also causes resistance to imatinib, a drug that works against some forms of leukemia; so patients with this mutation would normally not be treated with this drug,” explains Spector.

“Our analysis showed that this patient, who lacked D816V and therefore received the drug, actually had a different KIT mutation called V654A, which may also cause resistance to the drug. Had this information been known before, the patient might have been treated differently and been spared the drug’s side-effects.” Spector hopes that this information might now encourage physicians to screen MCL patients for both KIT mutations.

The second mutation of interest occurs within the MS4A2 gene, which encodes for a protein that is part of a receptor that sits on a mast cell’s surface and is required for its survival. The mutation identified by Spector occurs within the region of the protein that is essential both for its presence on the cell’s surface, and more importantly, for triggering intracellular signaling by the enzyme Syk kinase. So Spector suspects that the MS4A2 mutation might be an “activating” mutation that may constantly keep the Syk signal in an “on” state, thereby prolonging the mast cell’s life and eventually leading to cancer.

“If we prove this to be the case, then our finding could be therapeutically exploited because there already is a drug that blocks Syk signaling that has shown efficacy in a clinical trial for lymphoma,” says Spector. She also observes that their findings might have implications beyond MCL. “For example, Syk signaling is also important in another type of immune cell called B cells, so researchers studying B cell cancers might also want to now look for mutations in genes within this pathway to identify patients who might respond to the Syk inhibitor drug,” she says.

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The study was supported by funding from the Don Monti Memorial Research Foundation and The Ryan Gibson Foundation.

“Mast-cell leukemia exome sequencing reveals a mutation in the IgE mast-cell receptor b chain and KIT V654A,” appears online ahead of print in Leukemia on December 16. The full citation is: MS Spector, I Iossifov, A Kritharis, C He, JE Kolitz, SW Lowe and SL Allen.

In the genome, an answer to a mysterious movement disorder

  by Biomechanism 

Children with a rather mysterious movement disorder can have hundreds of attacks every day in which they inexplicably make sudden movements or sudden changes in the speed of their movements.
New evidence reported in an early online publication from the January 2012 inaugural issue of Cell Reports, the first open-access journal of Cell Press, provides an answer for them. Contrary to expectations, the trouble stems from a defective version of a little-known gene that is important for communication from one neuron to the next.
The findings might lead to new strategies for treating a variety of movement disorders, the researchers say.

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“People with this disorder look and feel normal,” said Louis Ptáček of the University of California, San Francisco. “They might be sitting there, get up to go to the kitchen, and start writhing for five or ten seconds.”
Any time they transition from one thing to another—sitting to standing, walking to running—they might suffer an attack. “Sometimes they will experience an attack even if they think about moving,” he added. “It’s always been completely fascinating to me.”
Ptáček has a personal connection to the condition, known as paroxysmal kinesigenic dyskinesia (PKD): he made his first diagnosis as a medical student. He recalls that people suspected that first patient’s symptoms were all in his head. “They thought he was crazy,” Ptáček said.
PKD can also be associated with brain tumors or other structural problems in the brain, he explained, but those with the inherited form of the disease suffer the same abnormalities in movement even as their brains appear perfectly normal. When Ptáček read about the condition in the library late at night those many years ago, he knew he had found a diagnosis. He got that first patient the medication he needed, essentially curing him. It was part of what made Ptáček decide to continue on in neurology, and he never forgot it.
In the new study, Ptáček’s team sequenced the genomes of six people from families with well-defined PKD, finding that nearly all of those individuals carried one mutation or another in the gene PRRT2 (proline-rich transmembrane protein 2). Similar mutations in that gene also turned up in many individuals from a second group of families with the disorder.
The disease apparently results when people make half as much PRRT2 protein in their axons, the “cables” that send signals from one neuron on to the next. Indeed, PRRT2 is known to interact with another protein that is also important for neural communication. With too little PRRT2, neurons become hyperexcitable, leading to the abnormal movements recognized as PKD.
PKD responds to treatment with drugs that target ion channels with links to epilepsy. As a result, scientists had suspected that PKD was a “channelopathy.” The new findings refute that notion, but “it’s all connected,” Ptáček says. The defects that his team has uncovered in PRRT2 likely do influence the function of those channels that are so critical for the delivery of nerve messages.
New treatments aren’t needed for PKD, Ptáček says, noting that the condition can be well controlled with existing drugs and often goes away with age for reasons that are as mysterious as its origins once were. Nevertheless, he adds, these new biological insights might lead to drugs for other neurological disorders, such as Huntington’s or Parkinson’s disease, that aren’t so easily treated.

Diabetes risk reduced among Latinos in UMass clinical study

  by Biomechanism 

The community-based Lawrence Latino Diabetes Prevention Project teaches healthy food choices

An inexpensive, culturally sensitive diabetes prevention program created by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School reduced pre-diabetes indicators in a Latino population at risk for developing diabetes. The results of this three-year study, published online in the American Journal of Public Health, are significant because they replicate similar studies carried out in more educated and higher-income populations and were much more expensive to conduct. The model for the Lawrence intervention could provide an affordable approach for similar low-income people.

The Lawrence Latino Diabetes Prevention Project, a $2.6 million clinical trial funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2004, brought together an array of community groups in Lawrence to introduce weight control, nutrition and exercise programs to Lawrence Latinos who were at risk for developing type 2 diabetes.

The study was conducted by principal investigator Ira Ockene, MD, the Barbara D. Milliken Professor of Preventive Cardiology and professor of medicine, Milagros Rosal, PhD, associate professor of medicine, and other colleagues from UMass Worcester and UMass Lowell. In addition to the researchers, the Greater Lawrence Family Health Center, the Lawrence Senior Center and the YWCA of Greater Lawrence were essential community partners.

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“The study results are important as they suggest that small reductions in weight may reduce the risk of diabetes in some ethnic populations that have a high risk for developing diabetes, such as disadvantaged Latinos,” said Dr. Rosal.

The study aimed to test a community-based, literacy-sensitive and culturally tailored lifestyle intervention among low-income, Spanish-speaking Latinos with increased risk for diabetes. More than 300 participants, each of whom was followed for one year, were randomly assigned to lifestyle intervention care or usual care between 2004 and 2007.

The intervention was implemented by trained Spanish-speaking individuals from the community who shared the culture of the study participants. They used a 16-session curriculum that included cooking and exercise classes and strategies for food shopping and eating out in restaurants, as well as education about diabetes, the risk factors for developing it, and its consequences. Unique aspects of the program included a soap opera that illustrated common attitudes and lifestyles of Latinos and desirable changes toward a healthier lifestyle, and a food guide that helped people distinguish between healthy, less healthy and unhealthy foods by the colors of a traffic light (green=healthiest; yellow=caution; red=avoid or eat in tiny amounts and infrequently). Participants discussed the content of the soap opera. They applied their knowledge of foods during cooking classes that emphasised modifying ethnic recipes to make them healthier, rather than eating unfamiliar foods.

Participants were encouraged to increase intake of whole grains and non-starchy vegetables and reduce the intake of sodium, total and saturated fat, portion sizes and refined carbohydrates and starches, with a physical activity component that called for increasing walking by 4,000 steps per days as measured with a pedometer that they were provided.

The results were small but meaningful. Compared with individuals who had usual care (or no intervention), the individuals who participated in the intervention had modest but significant weight reduction and clinically meaningful reduction in indicators for pre-diabetes, including insulin resistance. They also consumed a lower percentage of total and saturated fat in their diets. Previous research has shown that even small reductions such as those shown in the Lawrence study can significantly impact long-term health.

In addition to the clinical success of the study, the close collaboration between the researchers from UMass and the partnering community organisations was a model for participatory community research and resulted in the effective recruitment of study participants and a notably low drop-out rate.

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Courtesy University of Massachusetts Medical School

om sai ram

Seven Ways to Get Yourself Hacked

Pedro Miguel Sousa

As targeted scams become more common, it's vital to protect yourself.

• By Simson Garfinkel

Audio »

In recent months, I've met at least three people who have been the victim of hackers who've taken over their Gmail accounts and sent out e-mails to everyone in the address book.
The e-mails, which appear legitimate, claim that the person has been robbed while traveling and begs that money be wired so that the person can get home. What makes the scam even more effective is that it tends to happen to people who are actually traveling abroad—making it more likely that friends and families will be duped.
Although it's widely believed that a strong password is one of the best defenses against online fraud, hackers increasingly employ highly effective ways for compromising accounts that do not require guessing passwords.
This means that it is more important than ever to practice "defensive computing"—and to have a plan in place for what to do if your account is compromised.

Malware. Sometimes called the "advanced persistent threat," a broad range of software that was programmed with evil intent is running on tens of millions of computers throughout the world.
These programs can capture usernames and passwords as you type them, send the data to remote websites, and even open up a "proxy" so that attackers can type commands into a Web browser running on your very computer. This makes today's state-of-the-art security measures—like strong passwords and key fobs—more or less useless, since the bad guys type their commands on your computer after you've authenticated.
Today, the primary defense against malware is antivirus software, but increasingly, the best malware doesn't get caught for days, weeks, or even months after it's been released into the wild. Because antivirus software is failing, many organizations now recommend antediluvian security precautions, such as not clicking on links and not opening files you receive by e-mail unless you know that the mail is legitimate. Unfortunately, there is no tool for assessing legitimacy.
Windows XP. According to the website w3schools, roughly 33 percent of the computers browsing the Internet are running Windows XP. That's a problem, because unlike Windows 7, XP is uniquely susceptible to many of today's most pernicious malware threats. Windows 7, and especially Windows 7 running on 64-bit computers, has security features built in to the operating system such as address space randomization and a non-executable data area. These protections will never be added to Windows XP. Thus, as a general rule, you should not use Windows XP on a computer that's connected to the Internet. Tell that to the 33 percent.
Kiosk computers. You should avoid using public computers at hotels, airports, libraries, and "business centers" to access webmail accounts, because there is simply no way to tell if these computers are infected with malware or not. And many of them are running Windows XP. So avoid them.
Open Wi-Fi. Wireless access points that don't require an encryption key to access don't protect your data as it transits through the air. This means that your username and password can be "sniffed" by anyone else using the access point as well. I haven't been able to find any reports of malware-infected laptops running sniffers at coffee shops, but it's really just a matter of time. The only way to protect yourself is to be sure that the websites and e-mail servers you use employ SSL ("https:") for everything, not just logging in.
Man-in-the-middle attacks. Those same open Wi-Fi access points can sniff your password using a variety of so-called man-in-the-middle attacks, in which your computer sends information to the wrong website, which, in turn, passes it to the correct one—so that the communication channel seems fine.
Man-in-the-middle attacks are especially easy over Wi-Fi, but they can take place anywhere on the Internet. Man-in-the-middle attacks can also be implemented through malware. Here even SSL is not enough—you need to be sure that the certificate of the SSL-enabled website is legitimate (a forged certificate will tell your browser that it's connecting to the right site using SSL). Most people also ignore certificate mismatch errors.
Phishing scams. Surprisingly, a fair number of users still fall for phishing scams, in which they voluntarily hand over their username and password to a malicious website. Typically users end up at these sites when clicking on a link they receive by e-mail.
Different website, same password. Finally, many websites (including major newspapers and magazines) require that you set up an account with an e-mail address and a password in order to access their content. Don't use the same password that you use to access your e-mail—otherwise the website owners (and anyone who hacks that website) will be able to take over your other accounts, including your e-mail.
What happens if you follow all of these precautions and your e-mail account still gets compromised?
Here are some ideas:
Be an authentication pioneer. Google, E*Trade, and other firms have deployed systems that allow you to augment passwords with your cell phone or a handheld security token. Although these systems can be defeated with malware, they are still more secure than passwords alone. Currently you need to opt in to these systems. If you care about your security, you should be a pioneer and give them a try.
Be prepared. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and others allow you to take proactive security measures to protect your account in the event that the password is compromised. This includes registering alternative e-mail addresses, registering cell phone numbers for backup authentication, and providing answers to "secret questions." Unfortunately, you have to do this before your account gets hacked, not after.
Be alert. Facebook allows you to provide a cell phone number that gets an SMS message whenever someone logs in using a different browser. This is a simple, effective way to monitor when someone other than you accesses your account. If your account is accessed, you'll be in a race to change your password before the attackers do.
Maintain multiple accounts. Don't put all of your eggs in one basket! Have accounts at multiple e-mail providers—and accounts at multiple financial institutions for your money, as well. That way, when you get hacked, at least you'll have a backup.
Keep offline copies. Finally, don't keep the sole copy of your precious data at some cloud provider—download your data to your home computer, then burn it to disc or copy it to a disconnected hard drive. That way, even if you lose your online access, at least you'll have a copy.
Simson L. Garfinkel is an author and researcher in Arlington, Virginia, who focuses on such topics as computer forensics and privacy. He is a contributing editor at Technology Review.

சிறுநீரக கோளாறு போக்கும் எருக்கன் பூக்கள்!

தேவ மூலிகை அல்லது விருட்சம் என்று கூறப்படும் வெள்ளெருக்கு அரிதான பொருள் இருக்கும் இடத்தில்தான் முளைக்கும் என சங்க கால நூல்களில் குறிப்பிடப்பட்டுள்ளது. புதையல், ரத்தினங்கள், சிலைகள் பதுக்கி வைத்திருக்கும் இடம் ஆகிய இடங்களில் மட்டுமே வெள்ளெருக்கு முளைக்கும் என விருட்ச நூல்களில் கூறப்பட்டுள்ளது. ஆனால் குப்பை மேடுகளிலும், தரிசு நிலங்களிலும் காணப்படும் எருக்கன் செடியை விஷ செடி என்று நாம் ஒதுக்கி விடுகிறோம். எருக்கன் செடியில் பூக்கும் பூக்களில் எண்ணற்ற மருத்துவ குணங்கள் கொண்டுள்ளன. விஷக்கடிக்கு மருந்தாக பயன்படும் இந்த பூக்கள் சிறுநீரக கோளாறுகளை மூன்று நாட்களில் குணமடையும்.

ஆஸ்துமா குணமடையும்
வெண்மை நிற எருக்கன் பூக்கள் ஆஸ்துமா நோய்க்கு மருந்தாகும். வெண்ணிற எருக்கன் பூக்களை அவற்றில் உள்ள நடு நரம்புகளை நீக்கிவிட்டு வெள்ளை இதழ்களை மட்டும் எடுத்து அதனுடன் சம அளவு மிளகு, கிராம்பு, சேர்த்து மை போல அரைத்து கிடைத்த விழுதை மிளகு அளவு மாத்திரைகளாக உருட்டி, நிழலில் உலர்த்தி பத்திரப்படுத்தி கொள்ளவும். இதனால் இரைப்பு நோய் அதிகரிக்கும் சமயம் ஒரு உருண்டை சாப்பிட்டு நீர் அருந்த உடனே தணியும்.
10 கிராம் இஞ்சி,3வெள்ளெருக்கன் பூ,6 மிளகு இவற்றை நசுக்கி அரை லிட்டர் நீரில் போட்டு கால் லிட்டராகக் காய்ச்சி தினம் இருவேளை பருகி வர இரைப்பு குணமாகிவிடும்.
வாதவலி வீக்கம்
எருக்கன் பூவை தேவையான அளவு எடுத்து வதக்கி வீக்கம், கட்டிகள் மீது வைத்துக்கட்ட வீக்கம், கட்டி குறையும். ஆறாத புண்கள் இருந்தால் எருக்கன் பூக்களை உலர்த்தி பொடி செய்து வைத்துக்கொண்டு அந்த பொடியை புண்களின் மீது மருந்தாக போட்டு வர சீக்கிரத்தில் புண்கள் ஆறிவிடும்.
பாம்பு கடி விஷமருந்து
நல்ல பாம்பு கடித்து விட்டால் உடனே எருக்கன் பூ மொட்டு 5 எடுத்து அதனை வெற்றிலையில் வைத்து நன்றாக மென்று சாப்பிட சொல்ல வேண்டும். இதனால் விஷம் இறங்கிவிடும். இதன்பின்னர் மருந்துவரிடம் சென்று சிகிச்சை அளிக்கவேண்டும்.

(நன்றி வீரமுனை இணையம்)

How 3-D Photovoltaics Could Revolutionize Solar Power

Replacing flat panels with three dimensional structures can significantly change the economics of solar power generation, say engineers

The Sun sends some 87 Petawatts of power our way and converting some small fraction of this into usable power is one of the key battlefronts in the fight to free the world from its addiction to oil.
One way to do this conversion is to turn light into electricity using flat photovoltaic panels. This form of power generation is rapidly expanding all over the world.
But it suffers from various problems that prevent its more widespread adoption, particularly at higher latitudes where the amount of energy that can be converted varies dramatically throughout the day and by season too.
This variation can be mitigated by solar tracking mounts but these are expensive and potential points of failure.
Today, Marco Bernardi and pals at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge say there is a simple fix that could dramatically increase the performance of photovoltaics. Instead of two dimensional flat panels, Bernadi and co suggest using three dimensional structures.
They've simulated the performance of various shapes and tested several of these on the roof of a building at MIT. Their results indicate that 3D structures can increase the amount of energy that can be generated by a given footprint by as much as 20 times. These structures can also double the number of useful peak hours of generation and reduce seasonal variation to boot.
There are two effects at work. The 3D structure can pick up light when the Sun is at lower angles and internal reflections within the structure help increase the amount of captured light.
These structures needn't be complex. A simple cube, open at the top and covered inside and out with photovoltaic cells, can generate as much 3.8 times the power of a flat panel with the same footprint. By comparison, a solar tracking mount produces an increases of only up to 1.8 times.
The ultimate test for this idea is in the economics, of course. A cube has a much higher surface area than a flat panel and is more expensive to produce in the first place. But Bernadi and co say the extra power it generates more than compensates up for this.
If the numbers work out as these guys say, 3D structures could significantly change the photovoltaics market. Bernadi and co suggest their 3D structures could be shipped as flat packages that easily "pop up" into 3D structures when assembled.
And there may be significant improvements to be had in future too. They say the inspiration for this work is "the three-dimensionality of sunlight collecting structures found in Nature." Presumably, they mean trees and plants.
These are far from the box-like shapes studied so far. Instead, nature seems to rely on fractal structures for solar energy capture. Just how much better these shapes are needs to be established. Copying these shapes will also be difficult with today's methods of manufacture so advances will be needed in this area too.
But clearly, there's plenty of potential for further work here. .
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1112.3266: Solar Energy Generation in Three-Dimensions

TRSF: Read the Best New Science Fiction inspired by today’s emerging technologies.

The Death of Range Fuels Shouldn't Doom All Biofuels

Gerfriedc

Energy

The influential biofuels startup failed because its technology proved too expensive.

• By Kevin Bullis

Audio »

This month, Range Fuels, one of the first companies in a wave of startups that promised cheap biofuels made from sources such as wood chips rather than corn, shut its doors for good and was forced to auction off its assets.
The company failed for many reasons, but the biggest seems to be that its technology proved too expensive, something that experts say shouldn't be a surprise, since it was similar to other technologies with well-known problems.
Range Fuels benefited from being an "early mover" in the field, says David Berry, a partner at the venture capital firm Flagship Ventures. "It got a lot of attention, and so it was well positioned to raise a bunch of money. The reality was, the technology couldn't quite keep up with the attention," he says. "That led to the company's demise."
Range Fuels, which had planned to turn wood chips into ethanol, received substantial attention in 2006, after President Bush declared in his State of the Union Address that the United States was "addicted to oil" and pointed to "cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn, but from wood chips and stalks, or switchgrass."

By the following year, Range Fuels had received a $76 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy and had broken ground on a commercial-scale plant in Soperton, Georgia. That plant was designed to produce 20 million gallons of fuel a year at first, and eventually 100 million gallons.
At the time, Range Fuels said its plant could produce fuel by 2008, but it still wasn't finished in 2009, when it received an $80 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help with construction. In addition to government funding, over its history, the company received over $150 million in venture capital.
The Range Fuels plant produced some methanol in 2010, but it operated at a loss, and it was shut down in 2011. By December 2011, the company had received just over $40 million of the full grant awarded by the DOE (the rest was to come at the next phase of construction). David Aldous, the CEO of Range Fuels, says $37 million of the loan guarantee is outstanding.

Tilting the Scales

“Listen Rama, I will now tell You where You, Sita and Lakshmana should reside. Those whose ears are like oceans which are constantly replenished by, and never overflow from, streams represented by stories of Your wonderful activities – in their hearts You should make Your charming abode.” (Maharishi Valmiki speaking to Lord Rama, Ramacharitamanasa, Ayodhya Kand, 127.1-2)
“Eat a balanced diet. Don’t watch too much television or you’ll strain your eyes. Don’t eat too many sweets or you’ll suffer indigestion later on. Don’t drink too many adult beverages in one sitting or the onset of intoxication will be so quick that you won’t know what hit you. Don’t exercise too much or you’ll get injured.” On the flip side, there are the recommendations for things which you aren’t doing enough. “You need to get more sleep. You’re not eating enough; have some more food. You’re not taking enough time off from work; being a workaholic is not good for you.” Balance is necessary for vitality and good health in all respects. It is important for both physical wellbeing and success in an endeavor. With one particular discipline, however, no balance is required. No amount of immersion into the divine pastimes and qualities of the Supreme Personality of Godhead can ever be harmful to the soul desperately searching after someone to love without inhibition.
Imagine a body of water that is constantly receiving raging waters from every which direction, sort of like a bucket that has a steady flow of water coming in from the top. Then imagine that the target container, the body of water in this case, never overflows despite the amount of water that constantly pours in. This wonderful analogy was used by Maharishi Valmiki to describe the position of the devotees of God, especially those who are attracted to Lord Rama, the Supreme Lord in His avatara as a warrior prince of the Raghu dynasty.
This comparison was made in response to a question put forth directly by Rama. The Supreme Lord is a singular entity, eka, from whom many, aneka, have sprung. Despite the stark difference in reservoirs of transcendental qualities, the Supreme Lord has no penchant for domineering over His many expansions. There is only love in pure goodness found in the person most of the world refers to as God. His compassionate nature brings Him from the hallowed grounds of the spiritual world down to the place that we have called home for many lifetimes.
In the Vedas the living entities are described as sarva-ga, which means that they can have their home anywhere. This is already the case with the human being, as people live in virtually every corner of the globe, habituating to places where it doesn’t seem possible for a human being to survive. The harsh winters and their accompanying sparse daylight hours in places like Alaska and Siberia would make it seem that no human being could live there. On the reverse side, the extreme heat of Africa and the tropical storms that regularly arrive in states like Florida also would deter human beings from congregating there. But we see that these places have residents nonetheless.
The Vedic angle of vision applies the scope of residence to way beyond the human species. The ants live in the ground, the birds in the trees, the fish in the water, and the human beings on land. Therefore the many species, which are different forms of the same living force, can have different homes, but for Goswami Tulsidas and the devotees of the Lord, their only home is in bhakti, or divine love. More specifically, that love is facilitated through the holy name, the transcendental sound vibration that best represents the person with whom they are trying to connect. Try to remember a famous personality and you’ll have trouble doing so without thinking of their activities. Perhaps you will have to connect with their body of work - be it a book, film, television series, famous game or match; otherwise your connection will not last long. The same can be said about connecting with close friends and family.
With the Supreme Lord, however, His complete presence is available through His names, of which there are many. Saints like Tulsidas and Valmiki prefer the name of Rama, while the Vedas consider the holy name of Krishna to be even more powerful, though it addresses the same Rama, the Supreme Lord. Just imagine being in a distressed condition, unsure of the future, afraid of what might happen with a particular circumstance. Then imagine the most pleasant condition, where everything has gone so well that you can’t believe your good fortune. In either of these circumstances, just sit quietly and chant, “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare”, and hear the vibrations you are producing. This simple method, followed under regulative principles, with firm faith, love and devotion, can give one all the happiness they need.

“There are an infinite number of living beings, both moving and nonmoving, who have many different abodes, with some residing on the earth, some in the sky, and some in the water. But O helpless Tulsi, for you Shri Rama’s holy name is your only home.” (Dohavali, 37)

Chanting and hearing the names allows devotees to connect with God through His pastimes, the activities He performed in the past and also those that will take place in the future. Just as the positions of north, south, east and west can be relative to the person’s situation and the objects they are comparing, past, present and future also aren’t absolute. Our present life is actually the afterlife from a previous existence. In addition, by tomorrow, today will become part of the past life. Thus there is constant shifting of time, with only the Supreme Lord able to fully make light of the complexities.
The universe goes through cycles of creation and destruction, and there are many universes as well. What we consider the past activities of Lord Rama and Lord Krishna will actually take place in the future somewhere else. This is confirmed in Vedic literature, including in the wonderful Ramacharitamanasa, Tulsidas’ most famous work. In the section describing the marriage ceremony of Lord Rama and Sita Devi in this work, it is said that the first obeisances were made to Lord Ganesha, who is the son of Mother Parvati and Lord Shiva. The Ramacharitamanasa is different from the Ramayana authored by Maharishi Valmiki, for the latter is the original account of the life and pastimes of Lord Rama as they take place during the Treta Yuga, or second time period of creation.
The Tulsidas work is in Hindi, and it doesn’t follow the original Ramayana exactly. The reason for the difference is revealed by the poet himself in the introductory verses of the Ramacharitamanasa . Tulsidas uses a famous conversation between Lord Shiva and his wife as the primary reference tool for his poem. This conversation dealt entirely with Rama’s life and pastimes, and it was later spoken by Lord Shiva to other people as well. This was the version that Tulsidas first heard, being blessed with the words from his guru. Therefore, to show honor and respect to his spiritual master, Tulsidas chose Lord Shiva’s accounts, which are slightly different because of the many times that Rama descends to earth and enacts pastimes, as the basis for his Hindi poem. Lord Shiva’s original telling is found in the Brahmanda Purana and it later became known as the Adhyatma Ramayana.
Since Lord Shiva was watching Rama’s activities from his perch in heaven, when Rama got married, Ganesha had yet to be born. Nevertheless, Ganesha was being offered the first prayers, as is the standard custom for any Vedic ritual. This puzzling contradiction is explained by the fact that the creation continually goes through cycles of manifestation and annihilation; thus Ganesha was honored even before he specifically appeared during that time.
When Sita, Rama and Lakshmana [the Lord’s younger brother] were making their fourteen year journey through the forests of India, they met up with Maharishi Valmiki at his ashrama. After offering obeisances, as was social custom, Rama asked the sage if he knew of a good place that the group could set up camp. Valmiki cleverly replied with a description of the qualities of devotees, saying that Rama should live in their hearts. One of the qualities stated was that devotees have ears that are like oceans that regularly receive water in the form of Rama’s activities. Yet they delight so much in Rama’s pastimes that this ocean never fills up, despite the constant inflow of water in the form of Rama-lila.
Valmiki wasn’t exaggerating, as balance is never an issue in bhakti. One of the greatest fears for a parent following Vedic traditions is that their child will decide to renounce the world early after learning Vedanta philosophy. Veda means “knowledge” and anta means “the end” or “conclusion”. Therefore Vedanta represents the summit of knowledge, the conclusion of conclusions. Unfortunately, this fear is mistakenly there even when the children take to bhakti-yoga, or devotional service, which is above Vedanta study. From Valmiki’s description, we can understand that the bhaktas never have a need to give up anything outright, for their primary aim is pleasure. Whatever they can do to find circumstances favorable for hearing about God and singing His glories, that is the path the devotees will accept. Formal renunciation, or the sannyasa order, is not required for one who is only looking for devotion.
The requirement for balance and restriction does not apply to one who is looking for transcendental pleasure. There is no question of trying to balance spiritual life and material life when the aim is to swim in the ocean of nectar that is divine love. Even if there is a perceived need for balance in the beginning, then one should at least introduce some bhakti into their life. In the absence of loving association with God, the spirit soul will find so many other things to love. Yet when on the material playing field devoid of God consciousness, the need for balance immediately arises. Therefore the condition described by Valmiki can never be found with any material endeavor. This is why every non-spiritual guidebook, every recommended system of maintenance not rooted in divine love, calls for balance. Want to find material opulence? You need to have tolerance and avoid attachment to the outcomes of events. Want to practice mystic yoga and bask in the resulting health benefits? You need balance in your eating and sleeping. Want to save up to buy something expensive? You’ll need to moderate your spending habits.
The sad thing is that accompanying the requirement for balance is the cap on enjoyment, the limit on how much the received reward can be utilized. For instance, material opulence can only go so far, as the wealthiest individuals in the world are known for choosing philanthropy and activism after their enjoyment in life has fizzled out. A lean and fit body that is the reward for exercise and eating in moderation must have a purpose to fulfill, otherwise the healthy person will lose interest and fall back to their uncontrolled eating.
When following bhakti, the desire for connecting with God only increases. The immediate enjoyment received through chanting and hearing isn’t long-lived, but the benefits most certainly are. After the joy of hearing about Rama and His supreme kindness wears off, the devotee will want to hear about the same topics again. The rivers thus keep flowing into the ocean of the mind, and the level of satisfaction never tops off. The Supreme Lord is the most benevolent benefactor because He makes the gifts we really need readily available. The general rule is that those things which are too expensive are things that we don’t require. As the audible nectar of Rama’s holy names and pastimes gives life to the man drowning in the pool of material existence, it is available to every single person, provided they have the desire to enjoy it. The saints carry this healing remedy, and they try to distribute it to as many people as possible. Those who keep this medicine in good supply with them at all times and apply it every single day never worry about finding too much bhakti, for that is never possible.
In Closing:
Keep running up and down pleasure’s hill,
Eventually enjoyment reaches fill.
Moderation in habits required,
Else in constant suffering one mired.
Either on enjoyment put a cap,
Or accept more to avoid unhealthy trap.
But in bhakti balance is never an issue,
Endless ways of divine love spirit soul due.

Tulsidas, Valmiki and Shiva very well know this,

Thus they pass on Rama-lila’s transcendental bliss.

Alcohol tastes sweeter in noisy environments

(Medical Xpress) -- People find alcohol sweeter in noisy environments, which might drown out our ability to judge how much we’re drinking, according to new research.
The research, conducted by Dr Lorenzo Stafford, a psychologist from the University of Portsmouth, is the first experimental study to find out how music can alter the taste of alcohol.
Dr Stafford said: “Since humans have an innate preference for sweetness, these findings offer a plausible explanation as to why people consume more alcohol in noisy environments.
“This was a small-scale study, but it has huge implications for those who drink alcohol in noisy environments. It also has implications for bars, the drinks industry and local authorities.”
The research builds on earlier observational research which found that people drank more alcohol and at a faster rate if loud music was playing.
In Dr Stafford’s study, participants had to rate a selection of drinks varying in alcohol content on the basis of alcohol strength, sweetness and bitterness. They were given one of four different levels of distraction, from no distraction to loud club-type music playing at the same time as reading a news report.
The study found that drinks were rated significantly sweeter overall when participants were listening to music alone.
Dr Stafford said: “This is an interesting finding as we might have expected the music in addition to repeating a news story to exert a more distracting effect on taste judgement. It appears that our primary sense of taste is somewhat immune to very distracting conditions but is indeed influenced by music alone.
“Researching multi-sensory perception is a growing field of study and an interesting area to explore. Although individuals might well expect to consume more alcohol in club type environments anyway, it is important they understand how environment can potentially influence over-consumption and act accordingly.”
The findings are published in the journal Food Quality and Preference and the research was funded by Alcohol Research UK.
Provided by University of Portsmouth

"Alcohol tastes sweeter in noisy environments." December 15th, 2011. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-12-alcohol-sweeter-noisy-environments.html

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Robert Karl Stonjek

Kenya Has Mobile Health App Fever

Nairobi startup's health app surges; Safaricom gives subscribers links to experts for two cents a minute.

• By David Talbot

Audio »

Phone doc: Steve Mutinda Kyalo, a cofounder of Shimba Technologies, which makes the MedAfrica app.
Erik Hersman

Mobile health platforms are fast emerging in Kenya, where one startup's newly launched mobile health platform is attracting nearly 1,000 downloads daily, and the dominant telecom, Safaricom, has forged a partnership that will give its 18 million subscribers access to doctors.
A World Bank official sees significant promise from such efforts, pointing to the fact that 50 percent of all Kenyan banking is already done on mobile phones—suggesting that the population is ready to go mobile with health care, too.
"In terms of providing basic services through mobile phones on the continent, Kenya is in the lead in many ways, and showing the way," says Elizabeth Ashbourne, director of global health information forums at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. "Local applications in the health space are absolutely frontier activities."
Many Kenyans have serious health problems; for example, according to the World Health Organization, more than 30 percent of children under age five show stunted growth. At present, only 7,000 doctors serve a nation of 40 million people. But Kenya is rich in mobile phones, with 25 million subscribers (Africa has more than 600 million of them).

The new app, called MedAfrica—available for smart phones and less powerful feature phones—is the product of Shimba Technologies, a Nairobi-based company founded by two locally educated entrepreneurs, Stephen Kyalo and Kezia Muoki, with $100,000 in seed money from a European VC.
Shimba's business model is straight from Silicon Valley: free content supported by advertising, with future plans to offer premium content for a subscription, and to charge doctors about $10 a month for access to its user base. Of the 25,000 people who have downloaded since the launch in November, 60 percent are "active users," says Kyalo. Shimba has not yet sold ads or begun trying to get doctors to pay.
The ambitions are ultimately pan-African. "The goal is to have MedAfrica as a household name in African homes and to provide increased health care to the masses," Kyalo says. "We want to impact the lives in Africa. People still are dying from malaria. The problem is too few heads with vital information."
The platform aggregates information from many sources. So far, it supplies first-aid recommendations from local hospitals, and health alerts and updates from other hospitals, as well as lists of doctors and dentists. The company plans to connect to a data feed from the national Ministry of Health for information on things like disease outbreaks or the discovery of counterfeit drugs. Shimba also hopes to aggregate information from NGOs.
Shimba expects to launch a Yelp-like comment feature by January that would let users comment on the doctors.  "I think the greater value will come when I know not just a laundry list of providers, but also context for who is better," says Erik Hersman, cofounder of Ushahidi, the mobile crisis and event-mapping platform, and a creator of iHub, an organization devoted to bringing together innovators and investors in Nairobi.
"MedAfrica is a continuation of the innovation we continue to see out of the Kenyan tech startup scene," Hersman says. "It gives access to information on doctors, clinics, and other health-care information in a simple way, on simple phones, for ordinary Kenyans."
MedAfrica is, however, still a small effort, and it faces competition from the country's dominant telecom—Safaricom. At nearly the same time that MedAfrica launched, Safaricom forged a partnership with another startup, Call-a-Doc, to allow Safaricom's 18 million subscribers to call ­doctors for expert advice for about two cents a minute. A smaller SMS-based mobile-health effort, called Mpedigree, is rolling out at health-care centers to provide a way to check serial numbers on drugs to make sure counterfeits are not being administered in Kenya.
The fact that nearly 1,000 people daily are downloading the app is "very solid," Hersman says. And Ashbourne adds: "That's a respectable number. Even that people know to do that at all—I think that's pretty impressive."
Mobile health platforms are making a strong showing in other parts of Africa, too. In South Africa, efforts include platforms that give HIV-infected patients automated ways to receive health information and reminders about upcoming doctor visits. In Johannesburg, 10,000 people infected with HIV have taken on these SMS-based alerts, resulting in big declines in missed appointments.
In Ghana and Liberia, a group called Africa Aid is experiencing strong success with MDNet, a system that allows users to call or text doctors for free. Since its founding in 2008, 1,900 physicians in Ghana have logged more than a million calls to patients, the group says.

Download Knowledge Directly to Your Brain, Matrix-Style

By Rebecca Boyle 

MRI Machine Wikimedia Commons

For the first time, researchers have been able to hack into the process of learning in the brain, using induced brain patterns to create a learned behavior. It’s not quite as advanced as an instant kung-fu download, and it’s not as sleek as cognitive inception, but it’s still an important finding that could lead to new teaching and rehabilitation techniques.
Future therapies could decode the brain activity patterns of an athlete or a musician, and use them as a benchmark for teaching another person a new activity, according to the researchers.

Scientists from Boston University and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to study the learning process. They were examining the adult brain’s aptitude for visual perceptual learning, or VPL, in which repetitive training improves a person’s performance on a particular task. Whether adults can do this as well as young people has been an ongoing debate in neuroscience. Led by BU neuroscientist Takeo Watanabe, researchers used a method called decoded fMRI neurofeedback to stimulate the visual cortex. First they showed participants circles at different orientations. Then they used fMRI to watch the participants’ brain activity. The researchers were then able to train the participants to recreate this visual cortex activity.
The volunteers were again placed in MRI machines and asked to visualize shapes of certain colors. The participants were asked to “somehow regulate activity in the posterior part of the brain” to make a solid green disc as large as they could. They were told they would get a paid bonus proportional to the size of this disc, but they weren’t told anything about what the disc meant. The researchers watched the participants’ brain activity and monitored the activation patterns in their visual cortices.
“Participants can be trained to control the overall mean activation of an entire brain region,” the study authors write, “or the activation in one region relative to that in another region.”
This worked even when test subjects were not aware of what they were learning, the researchers said.
“The most surprising thing in this study is that mere inductions of neural activation patterns corresponding to a specific visual feature led to visual performance improvement on the visual feature, without presenting the feature or subjects' awareness of what was to be learned,” Watanabe said in a statement.
Watanabe and colleagues said this method can be a powerful tool.
“It can ‘incept’ a person to acquire new learning, skills, or memory, or possibly to restore skills or knowledge that has been damaged through accident, disease, or aging, without a person’s awareness of what is learned or memorized,” they write.
The paper appears in the journal Science.
[FellowGeek via Slashdot]

Scientists discover new way to target cancer

  by Biomechanism 

Scientists have discovered a new way to target cancer through manipulating a master switch responsible for cancer cell growth.
The findings, published today [12 Dec] in the journal Cancer Cell, reveal how cancer cells grow faster by producing their own blood vessels.
Cancer cells gain the nutrients they need by producing proteins that make blood vessels grow, helping deliver oxygen and sugars to the tumour. These proteins are vascular growth factors like VEGF — the target for the anti-cancer drug Avastin. Making these proteins requires the slotting together of different parts of genes, a process called splicing.

---

Scientists at UWE Bristol and the University of Bristol discovered that mutations in one specific cancer gene can control how splicing is balanced, allowing a master switch in the cell to be turned on. This master switch of splicing makes cancer cells grow faster, and blood vessels to grow more quickly, as they alter how VEGFs are put together.

In experimental models, the researchers found that by using new drugs that block this master switch they prevented blood vessel growth and stopped the growth of cancers.
Dr Michael Ladomery spearheading the work from UWE Bristol, said: “The research clearly demonstrates that it may be possible to block tumour growth by targeting and manipulating alternative splicing in patients, adding to the increasingly wide armoury of potential anti-cancer therapies.”
Professor David Bates who led the team from the University of Bristol’s School of Physiology and Pharmacology, said: “This enables us to develop new classes of drugs that target blood vessel growth, in cancer and other diseases like blindness and kidney disease.”
The work, which started on kidney cancer, also involved groups at Southmead Hospital, where patients with kidney disease helped by allowing tissues that had been removed during surgery to be used in the research.
Professor Steve Harper, Consultant Nephrologist and part of the research team, said: “This shows how important it is for patients, doctors and scientists to come together in an excellent environment like Bristol to make these groundbreaking discoveries.”
Professor Moin Saleem, Consultant Pediatric Nephrologist, whose lab helped to make the cells used, added: “We are really grateful to the patients who allowed their cells to be used in this research, as we hope it will eventually help the development of new drugs.”

___________

The paper, entitled ‘WT1 mutants reveal SRPK1 to be a downstream angiogenesis target by altering VEGF splicing’, is published today in Cancer Cell. The research was sponsored by a UWE Bristol Faculty PhD studentship, which funded Elianna Amin, the first author on the paper, and by University of Bristol research grants from the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Wellcome Trust, Medical Research Council Fight for Sight and the Skin Cancer Research Fund.

Device Tracks Blood Flow in the Brain

Biomedicine

A headset ultrasound monitor could make it easier to detect the dangerous aftereffects of brain injuries.

• By Courtney Humphries

Audio »

A new ultrasound device could make it easier to detect a potentially life-threatening condition that is common in soldiers with blast-related brain injuries and patients who survive aneurysms.
The condition, called cerebral vasospasm, occurs when blood vessels suddenly constrict. The effect is like squeezing a garden hose: the velocity inside the artery builds as pressure grows, and less blood flows to the brain. The condition can develop several days after an initial injury, and is currently detected using ultrasound, which requires a trained technician to find the relevant blood vessels and hold the ultrasound beam in place.
PhysioSonics, based in Bellevue, Washington, has developed a monitor that makes this process automatic, eliminating the need for a technician. The company is adapting the product for military use, and hopes to expand it to also detect a potentially dangerous buildup of pressure inside the head.
The company's monitor consists of a headset that directs an array of ultrasound beams through the head and uses a proprietary algorithm to automatically detect the mid-cerebral artery, one of the major arteries supplying blood to the brain. The device then locks the relevant beam onto the artery and measures its blood flow. A machine attached to the headset gives an index of flow and peak velocity.

"The point is to give you a variable" that could be read similarly to a heart-rate monitor, says Michel Kliot, company cofounder and a neurosurgeon at University of Washington, where the technology was initially developed.
In November, the company received a military grant of $2.5 million to adapt the device for monitoring vasospasm in soldiers. Nearly half the soldiers who sustain blast injuries develop vasospasm, and the company plans to make a more rugged version of its commercial device for the battlefield.
The device could also be used to monitor patients who survive aneurysm ruptures, a high proportion of whom develop vasospasm. For such patients, a technician would typically measure blood flow with an ultrasound once or twice a day during a hospital stay of several days. Kliot says the new device makes it possible to continuously monitor patients at high risk, and for longer periods of time. "We see putting it on the head and measuring constantly or frequently over two weeks," says Kliot.
Nerissa Ko, a neurologist in the intensive care unit at University of California San Francisco Medical Center, says the device is building on a well-accepted diagnostic technology, with the added innovation of automation. If it proves effective, she says, the device could make it easier to track blood flow over time, which she says is the best way to detect vasospasm.
Brad Harlow, president and CEO of PhysioSonics, says the company has conducted a study comparing the algorithm's accuracy to a technician's and is filing for approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration within the month.
The company has also been developing an algorithm that would use the same technology to monitor pressure inside the head. Such monitoring currently requires doctors to drill a hole in the skull. Ko cautions, however, that while the blood-flow changes detected by ultrasound could serve as a surrogate for direct pressure measurements, it's still not clear if the device is sensitive enough to monitor the subtle changes that can signal danger.

New Camera Captures Light in Motion

The system records 0.6 trillion frames a second—good enough to follow the path of a laser beam as it bounces off objects.

• By Tom Simonite

Audio »

Hollywood has to resort to trickery to show moviegoers laser beams traveling through the air. That's because the beams move too fast to be captured on film. Now a camera that records frames at a rate of 0.6 trillion every second can truly capture the bouncing path of a laser pulse.

See a video of a laser pulse moving through a Coke bottle, or bouncing off a tomato.
The system was developed by researchers led by Ramesh Raskar at MIT's Media Lab. Currently limited to a tabletop inside the group's lab, the camera can record what happens when very short pulses of laser light—lasting just 50 femtoseconds (50,000 trillionths of a second) long—hit objects in front of them. The camera captures the pulses bouncing between and reflecting off objects.
Raskar says the new camera could be used for novel kinds of medical imaging, tracking light inside body tissue. It could also enable novel kinds of photographic manipulation. In experiments, the camera has captured frames roughly 500 by 600 pixels in size.

The fastest scientific cameras on the market typically capture images at rates in the low millions of frames per second. They work similar to the way a consumer digital camera works, with a light sensor that converts light from the lens into a digital signal that's saved to disk.
The Media Lab researchers had to take a different approach, says Andreas Velten, a member of the research team. An electronic system's reaction time is inherently limited to roughly 500 picoseconds, he says, because it takes too long for electronic signals to travel along the wires and through the chips in such designs. "[Our shutter speed is] just under two picoseconds because we detect light with a streak camera, which gets around the electrical problem."
More typically used to measure the timing of laser pulses than for photography, a streak camera doesn't need any electronics to record light. Light entering the streak camera falls onto a specialized electrode—a photocathode—that converts the stream of photons into a matching stream of electrons. That electron beam hits a screen on the back of the streak camera that's covered with chemicals that light up wherever the beam falls. The same mechanism is at work in a traditional cathode ray tube TV set.

Because a streak camera can only view a very narrow line of a scene at one time, the MIT system uses mirrors to build up a full view. A conventional digital camera captures the images from the back of the streak camera, and these images are then compiled by software into the final output. Each image captured by the digital camera records only the tiny fraction of a beam's journey visible to the streak camera.
One result of this design is that videos captured by the team show the sequence of events as a laser pulse bounces around, but they don't capture the fate of a single pulse of light. Rather, they capture a sequence of snapshots from the actions of many successive, identical light pulses, thanks to tight synchronization between the light pulses and streak camera. "We need an event that is repeatable to create an image or video," says Velten.
That is in contrast to what is widely known as the "world's fastest camera," a system unveiled in 2009 by a research group at the University of California, Los Angeles, that captures 6.1 million frames per second and has a shutter speed of 163 nanoseconds, compared to the 1.7 picoseconds of the MIT group.
Because the MIT system can't image events that don't happen on a regular cycle, there are limits to what it can be used for, but Velten says there's still value in slowing down the usually unobservable movement of light.
One possible application is a new kind of medical imaging that Velten and Raskar call "ultrasound with light." That would involve firing laser pulses into tissue and using the camera's ability to record light movements beneath a surface to learn about structures and other information invisible using normal illumination and cameras. The potential for that can be seen in the group's videos, says Velten. "You can see reflections happening and light moving beneath the surface of objects."
The MIT research group previously used a similar setup to gather images from around corners, by bouncing a laser around a corner and then capturing any light that bounced back.
Srinivasa Narasimhan, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who researches computational photography, calls the MIT fast imaging system "amazing." He says physicists and chemists could use it to image very brief events and reactions, or to refine our understanding of how light interacts with objects. "We have known for a long time how to simulate light propagation," he says. "Now we can actually see light propagate and interact with the scene in slow motion to verify these things. Seeing is believing."
Because the MIT camera can see exactly how light interacts with a scene, it is also able to gather 3-D information that could be used to perform novel kinds of photographic manipulation, says Velten. "When you have that extra information about a scene, you can do things like change the lighting in a photo after you have taken it," he says. Startup company Lytro recently launched a camera that records the path that light takes in order to perform similar tricks.
The MIT system's impressive speed currently comes along with some bulk: the camera setup covers a dining table-sized bench, with the laser filling the space underneath. But Velten says the laser is over a decade old, and could be replaced by one roughly the size of a desktop computer. He adds that research is underway that will shrink the entire system to the size of a laptop.
Velten says the research team is now focusing on making the system more compact, identifying specific applications, and increasing the size of the images it collects. Further increasing the speed is a low priority, he says. "We're already looking at light moving, so there's no reason to go faster."

A Brighter Way to Make Solar Cells

A manufacturing method that uses light instead of heat wastes less energy and makes the cells more efficient.

• By Kevin Bullis

Audio »

Bright idea: This furnace uses lightbulbs, not heating elements, to treat silicon wafers.
NREL/Dennis Schroeder

Making solar cells involves subjecting silicon wafers to temperatures in excess of 1,000 °C. The process normally involves the use of heating elements, and requires a lot of energy.
A new optical furnace developed by researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, heats up solar wafers by focusing light on them—a much more efficient process that uses about half the energy of a conventional furnace. More importantly, the new design also uses light to remove certain impurities from the silicon wafers, a step that can improve the power output of finished cells.
The work is at an early stage—so far the researchers have only improved the efficiency of the resulting solar cells by half a percentage point. But based on lab tests, they think they can increase the efficiency by four percentage points, from about 16 percent efficient to 20 percent, which would be a big deal in the solar industry, which celebrates even half-a-percent increases.
High temperatures are needed at more than one step during solar-cell manufacturing. Furnaces are used to introduce dopants into the silicon to create electric fields within the material, to create electrical contacts, and to oxidize surfaces to improve efficiency. The new furnace also allows for better control of some of these processes, which can improve a solar cell's efficiency.

NREL's design isn't the only one that uses light to process silicon. Rapid thermal processing furnaces, used in the microelectronics industry, also use light to heat up semiconductors. But the new furnaces use highly reflective and heat-resistant ceramics to ensure that the light is absorbed only by a silicon wafer, not by the walls inside the furnace. "That makes it many times more efficient," says Bhushan Sopori, the researcher in charge of the furnace project at NREL.
By precisely designing the shape of the interior of the furnace, the researchers can control exactly where the light is focused, ensuring the wafers are heated evenly. It's not enough to make sure the wafer is evenly illuminated—the edges have to receive more light because they lose heat more rapidly than the rest of the wafer.
The process reduces thermal stress on the wafers, and it allows for precise control over the chemical reactions that heating enables. Precise control of the rates and timing of the heating can also improve the electrical contacts on the solar cell, improving its efficiency. And it makes it practical to introduce an oxidation step. Oxidation has typically been used by only a few manufacturers for high-end solar cells, but the new process would make it cheaper and thus allow more manufacturers to use it.
Sopori says NREL has developed processes that take better advantage of photonic effects than the rapid thermal processing furnaces. As photons interact with the silicon, they can cause deleterious impurities such as iron to move out of the material, while keeping advantageous ones such as boron, which is needed for the solar cell to perform properly.
The researchers haven't yet realized the complete four percentage point improvement in efficiency in part because the new processing steps aren't all compatible with other steps in conventional manufacturing. Sopori says they are working to modify the other steps to take full advantage of the optical furnace.
NREL is also working with Advanced Optical Systems to develop a machine that can process not just one wafer at a time, as with the lab version, but up to 2,000. Such high throughput will be necessary if the furnaces are to compete with conventional ones, which are cheap to operate.

Modified Cotton Cleans Itself When Exposed to Sunlight

By Rebecca Boyle 

Clothesline Mike Lacon via Flickr

Future shirts and socks could clean themselves using just sunlight, chemists report — all you’ll have to do is drape them over the balcony and voila, clean laundry. A coating of titanium dioxide makes this possible.
Titanium dioxide is found in products like solar panels and sunscreen — it absorbs ultraviolet light — and in several cleaning products, because it can be used to oxidize organic material. Cement, paint, windows and even odor-free socks contain TiO₂, which is prized for its ability to kill microbes and break down dirt.

Other researchers have incorporated titanium dioxide into clothes before, but they don’t get clean unless exposed to ultraviolet light, which isn’t exactly practical. Mingce Long of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Deyong Wu of the Hubei University for Nationalities in Hubei, China, set out to create clothing with titanium dioxide coating that can self-clean using only sunlight. To do this, they doped some TiO₂ with nitrogen, which had been previously shown to work as a light-activated catalyst in visible light. They developed a new method to put this nanoparticle solution in liquid form, dunked cotton in it for one minute, then pressed the cotton, dried it and re-rinsed it. Then they added some silver iodide nanoparticles, which were intended to improve the fabric’s overall light sensitivity. The researchers stained the fabric with orange dye, and then exposed it to sunlight. The cotton broke down the orange, and also sterilized bacteria.
The best part: The coating remains intact after washing and drying. So even if you decide to break down and do actual laundry — or if someone does it for you — you can still revert back to the self-cleaning sunlight method later.
The paper is published in the American Chemical Society journal Applied Materials & Interfaces.

Baby lab reveals surprisingly early gift of gab

From the moment they're born, babies are highly attuned to communicate and motivated to interact. And they're great listeners.
New research from the University of Notre Dame shows that during the first year of life, when babies spend so much time listening to language, they're actually tracking word patterns that will support their process of word- learning that occurs between the ages of about 18 months and two years.
"Babies are constantly looking for language clues in context and sound," says Jill Lany, assistant professor of psychology and director of Notre Dame's baby lab, where she conducts studies on how babies acquire language.
"My research suggests that there are some surprising clues in the sound stream that may help babies learn the meanings of words. They can distinguish different kinds of words like nouns and verbs by information in that sound stream."
Lany's studies shows that babies as young as twelve months can identify "adjacent relationships" in which a phrase or sound like "it's a" occurs immediately before an object.
"If I were to say to you, 'Oh look, it's a dax,' you might not know what a 'dax' is but the cue 'it's a' let's a baby know that what follows is an object," Lany says.
Similarly, if a person were to say "I'm daxing it," the same principal is at work with cues and word patterns that indicate a verb or action word. Babies actually can use these patterns as clues to the meanings of new words they are learning.
By about 15 months, babies are able to track more complicated "non-adjacent relationships" in which the word cue may be even further removed.
"We often think about grammar coming after word-learning, but in fact, my research shows that all this information that babies are picking up in that first year of life about how words are occurring in their language, actually is supporting this process of word-learning prior to mastery of language."
Provided by University of Notre Dame

"Baby lab reveals surprisingly early gift of gab." December 9th, 2011. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-12-baby-lab-reveals-surprisingly-early.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek