Would an iPhone 'Assistant' Really Help?

COMMUNICATIONS

Apple may be building the technology into iOS. But can it succeed where others have failed?

• BY DAVID ZAX

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Are we on the cusp of an era of ubiquitous "virtual personal assistants"? If Steve Jobs has his way, we just might be.

Back in the spring of 2010, Apple acquired Siri, a company that produced an app that described itself in just those terms. Now, clues dug up recently by 9to5Mac, a site dedicated to scrutinizing all things Apple, suggest that Apple may be ready to introduce Siri-like features in the next version of iOS, its operating system for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

If Apple is indeed about to launch a personal assistant, it could help set the iPhone apart from other smart phones in the market. Android's voice-command system is considered one of its chief advantages over the iPhone, but a Siri-derived personal assistant would add more voice functionality, eliminating Android's advantage. But it will be a gamble, as other efforts to foist a personal assistant upon computer users have backfired badly. Remember Clippy, the animated paper clip that would pop up every time you tried to write a letter in Microsoft Word?

In a screenshot that 9to5Mac turned up, apparently from the menu on an iPhone "test unit," one button reads "Assistant"; another reads "Speaker," suggesting that the assistant can talk back, if you want it to; and a tab reading "MyInfo" suggests that the assistant will be able to use data on your phone such as address book contacts and location to help find the information you want. 9to5Mac further claims to have plumbed the depths of an iOS software development kit and found lines of code that correspond to the features in the screenshot.

Siri's original app, which licensed voice recognition technology from Nuance, a company based in Burlington, Massachusetts, enabled users to perform searches and make appointments or reservations using voice commands. It worked remarkably well for these simple tasks. (You can see a video of it in action here.)

Work on Siri began about eight years ago, when DARPA funded a massive AI initiative called CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes). The idea, says Norman Winarsky, vice president of ventures at SRI, based in Menlo Park, California, the prime contractor for CALO, was to develop a virtual personal assistant as good as the character ofRadar O'Reilly on the TV show M*A*S*H. "Radar always knew what the captain wanted before the captain knew what the captain wanted," says Winarsky.

As the CALO program wound down, SRI recognized a massive market opportunity in the research it had been doing. Over a period of a few years, SRI built the company Siri and launched an app. 

Apple scooped up the company less than three months after the Siri app launched. Since then, we've all been held in suspense. Once Apple acquires a company, says Winarsky, "they go into radio silence, and believe me, they don't share with SRI or anybody" as to just what their plans are.

But, even if Apple is ready to offer a virtual personal assistant to every iPhone 5 buyer, does that mean every iPhone 5 buyer is ready for a virtual personal assistant? Not if it doesn't at least outperform Clippy.

Jason Hong, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a member of its Human-Computer Interaction Institute, says Microsoft Word's Clippy failed for two reasons: he was intrusive, interrupting you when you had already begun a task, and he simply wasn't very smart, often failing to understand your intentions, when you bothered to indulge him, that is. Hong found an explanation at a talk given by Eric Horvitz, the Microsoft researcher who worked on some of the AI behind Clippy. "They had to lobotomize all the machine learning they used, to make it primitive enough to run fast and in real time" on your desktop, says Hong.

Now, though, smart phones are blisteringly fast, and complex processing can be outsourced to the cloud, which means we can fully leverage the fruits of AI research even from relatively simple hardware. What's more, adds Hong, Siri is crucially "driven by what the user is explicitly asking"—it doesn't pop up officiously, like that insufferable paper clip.

Winarsky is betting that virtual personal assistants will be ubiquitous, and widely accepted, sooner than many expect. Looking beyond the restaurant reservations that Siri handled so well, Winarsky foresees an era when virtual personal assistants offer advice and recommendations on a range of topics. Eventually, he says, the technology will be folded into the desktop and the Web, and it will make people rich. "Within 10 years," he says, "we will see the value associated with virtual personal assistants throughout our marketplace to be in the many tens of billions—and [it] optimally might reach the 100-billion-dollar level."

The biggest stumbling block ahead might just be how willing people are to be heard constantly issuing commands in carefully enunciated English into their iPhones. "I used to play a game of guessing whether people I saw talking to themselves were drunk, crazy, or on the phone," says Hong. "And sometimes it was pretty hard to tell."

In that sense, the most important feature visible on the leaked 9to5Mac screenshot may well be the button labeled "OFF."

The Most Accurate Human Genetic Map to Date

A map created using DNA sequence from African-Americans highlights "hot spots" in the genome, which are often linked to disease.

Researchers have developed the most sophisticated map yet of the human genome, highlighting the regions where maternal and paternal chromosomes recombine, or swap parts. Recombination is one of the driving forces of genetic variability, which underlies evolution.

The genetic "hotspots" where recombination is most likely to take place are also linked to inherited diseases, since these regions are vulnerable to errors in the genetic code. "When recombination goes wrong, it can lead to mutations causing congenital diseases, for example diseases like Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, or certain anemias," said Simon Myers, a lecturer in the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford who led the research, in a release from Harvard Medical School.

"Charting recombination hotspots can thus identify places in the genome that have an especially high chance of causing disease," said David Reich, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, who co-led the study, in a release from Stanford.

The map is the first constructed from recombination data collected from African Americans. Previous maps have used genome information primarily from people of European decent. Researchers found that African Americans and Europeans have different recombination sites. 

According to the release;

These findings are expected to help researchers understand the roots of congenital conditions that occur more often in African Americans (due to mutations at hotspots that are more common in African Americans), and also to help discover new disease genes in all populations, because of the ability to map these genes more precisely.

The new map is so accurate because African American individuals often have a mixture of African and European ancestry from over the last two hundred years. David Reich and Simon Myers are experts in analyzing genetic data to reconstruct the mosaic of regions of African and European genetic ancestry in DNA of African Americans. By applying a computer program they previously wrote, Anjali Hinch identified the places in the genomes where the African and European ancestry switches in almost 30,000 people, detecting about 70 switches per person. These areas corresponded to recombination events in the last few hundred years. Thus, the researchers identified more than two million recombination events that they used to build the map.

NASA's WISE Finds Earth's First 'Trojan' Asteroid

This artist's concept illustrates the first known Earth Trojan asteroid, discovered by NEOWISE, the asteroid-hunting portion of NASA's WISE mission. The asteroid is shown in gray and its extreme orbit is shown in green. Earth's orbit around the sun is indicated by blue dots. (Credit: Paul Wiegert, University of Western Ontario, Canada)

Science Daily  — Astronomers studying observations taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission have discovered the first known "Trojan" asteroid orbiting the sun along with Earth.

Scientists had predicted Earth should have Trojans, but they have been difficult to find because they are relatively small and appear near the sun from Earth's point of view.Trojans are asteroids that share an orbit with a planet near stable points in front of or behind the planet. Because they constantly lead or follow in the same orbit as the planet, they never can collide with it. In our solar system, Trojans also share orbits with Neptune, Mars and Jupiter. Two of Saturn's moons share orbits with Trojans.

"These asteroids dwell mostly in the daylight, making them very hard to see," said Martin Connors of Athabasca University in Canada, lead author of a new paper on the discovery in the July 28 issue of the journal Nature. "But we finally found one, because the object has an unusual orbit that takes it farther away from the sun than what is typical for Trojans. WISE was a game-changer, giving us a point of view difficult to have at Earth's surface."

The WISE telescope scanned the entire sky in infrared light from January 2010 to February 2011. Connors and his team began their search for an Earth Trojan using data from NEOWISE, an addition to the WISE mission that focused in part on near-Earth objects, or NEOs, such as asteroids and comets. NEOs are bodies that pass within 28 million miles (45 million kilometers) of Earth's path around the sun. The NEOWISE project observed more than 155,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and more than 500 NEOs, discovering 132 that were previously unknown.

The team's hunt resulted in two Trojan candidates. One called 2010 TK7 was confirmed as an Earth Trojan after follow-up observations with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

The asteroid is roughly 1,000 feet (300 meters) in diameter. It has an unusual orbit that traces a complex motion near a stable point in the plane of Earth's orbit, although the asteroid also moves above and below the plane. The object is about 50 million miles (80 million kilometers) from Earth. The asteroid's orbit is well-defined and for at least the next 100 years, it will not come closer to Earth than 15 million miles (24 million kilometers). An animation showing the orbit is available at:http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=103550791 .

"It's as though Earth is playing follow the leader," said Amy Mainzer, the principal investigator of NEOWISE at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Earth always is chasing this asteroid around."

A handful of other asteroids also have orbits similar to Earth. Such objects could make excellent candidates for future robotic or human exploration. Asteroid 2010 TK7 is not a good target because it travels too far above and below the plane of Earth's orbit, which would require large amounts of fuel to reach it.

"This observation illustrates why NASA's NEO Observation program funded the mission enhancement to process data collected by WISE," said Lindley Johnson, NEOWISE program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "We believed there was great potential to find objects in near-Earth space that had not been seen before."

NEOWISE data on orbits from the hundreds of thousands of asteroids and comets it observed are available through the NASA-funded International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass.

JPL manages and operates WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The principal investigator, Edward Wright, is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. The mission was selected under NASA's Explorers Program, which is managed by the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah.

The spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more WISE information visit: http://www.nasa.gov/wise .

Reservoirs of Ancient Lava Shaped Earth

Geological history has periodically featured giant lava eruptions that coat large swaths of land or ocean floor with basaltic lava, which hardens into rock formations called flood basalt. (Credit: © ollirg / Fotolia)

Science Daily  — Geological history has periodically featured giant lava eruptions that coat large swaths of land or ocean floor with basaltic lava, which hardens into rock formations called flood basalt. New research from Matthew Jackson and Richard Carlson proposes that the remnants of six of the largest volcanic events of the past 250 million years contain traces of the ancient Earth's primitive mantle -- which existed before the largely differentiated mantle of today -- offering clues to the geochemical history of the planet.

Scientists recently discovered that an area in northern Canada and Greenland composed of flood basalt contains traces of ancient Earth's primitive mantle. Carlson and Jackson's research expanded these findings, in order to determine if other large volcanic rock deposits also derive from primitive sources.Their work is published online July 27 by Nature.

Information about the primitive mantle reservoir -- which came into existence after Earth's core formed but before Earth's outer rocky shell differentiated into crust and depleted mantle -- would teach scientists about the geochemistry of early Earth and how our planet arrived at its present state.

Until recently, scientists believed that Earth's primitive mantle, such as the remnants found in northern Canada and Greenland, originated from a type of meteorite called carbonaceous chondrites. But comparisons of isotopes of the element neodymium between samples from Earth and samples from chondrites didn't produce the expected results, which suggested that modern mantle reservoirs may have evolved from something different.

Carlson, of Carnegie's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, and Jackson, a former Carnegie fellow now at Boston University, examined the isotopic characteristics of flood basalts to determine whether they were created by a primitive mantle source, even if it wasn't a chondritic one.

They used geochemical techniques based on isotopes of neodymium and lead to compare basalts from the previously discovered 62-million-year-old primitive mantle source in northern Canada's Baffin Island and West Greenland to basalts from the South Pacific's Ontong-Java Plateau, which formed in the largest volcanic event in geologic history. They discovered minor differences in the isotopic compositions of the two basaltic provinces, but not beyond what could be expected in a primitive reservoir.

They compared these findings to basalts from four other large accumulations of lava-formed rocks in Botswana, Russia, India, and the Indian Ocean, and determined that lavas that have interacted with continental crust the least (and are thus less contaminated) have neodymium and lead isotopic compositions similar to an early-formed primitive mantle composition.

The presence of these early-earth signatures in the six flood basalts suggests that a significant fraction of the world's largest volcanic events originate from a modern mantle source that is similar to the primitive reservoir discovered in Baffin Island and West Greenland. This primitive mantle is hotter, due to a higher concentration of radioactive elements, and more easily melted than other mantle reservoirs. As a result, it could be more likely to generate the eruptions that form flood basalts.

Start-up funding for this work was provided by Boston University.

New Invisibility Cloak Hides Objects from Human View

A real-life invisibility cloak, shown in this cross- sectional illustration, can hide objects from human view. (Credit: ACS)

Science Daily  — For the first time, scientists have devised an invisibility cloak material that hides objects from detection using light that is visible to humans. The new device is a leap forward in cloaking materials, according to a report in the ACS journal Nano Letters.

Although the study cloaked a microscopic object roughly the diameter of a red blood cell, the device demonstrates that it may be "capable of cloaking any object underneath a reflective carpet layer. In contrast to the previous demonstrations that were limited to infrared light, this work makes actual invisibility for the light seen by the human eye possible," the scientists write.Xiang Zhang and colleagues note that invisibility cloaks, which route electromagnetic waves around an object to make it undetectable, "are still in their infancy." Most cloaks are made of materials that can only hide things using microwave or infrared waves, which are just below the threshold of human vision. To remedy this, the researchers built a reflective "carpet cloak" out of layers of silicon oxide and silicon nitride etched in a special pattern. The carpet cloak works by concealing an object under the layers, and bending light waves away from the bump that the object makes, so that the cloak appears flat and smooth like a normal mirror.

The authors acknowledge funding from the U.S. Army Research Office, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

Fundamental Matter-Antimatter Symmetry Confirmed

Artist's rendering of an antiproton (black sphere) trapped inside a helium atom being probed by two laser beams. (Credit: Image courtesy of Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics)

Science Daily — An international collaboration including Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics scientists has set a new value for the antiproton mass relative to the electron with unprecedented precision.

Now the independent research group “Antimatter Spectroscopy” of Dr. Masaki Hori, which is associated with the Laser Spectroscopy Division of Prof. Theodor W. Hänsch at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, has measured the mass of the antiproton relative to the electron with a precision of 1.3 parts per billion (Nature, 28 July 2011). For this they used a new method of laser spectroscopy on a half-antimatter, half-matter atom called antiprotonic helium. The result agreed with the proton mass measured to a similar level of precision, confirming the symmetry between matter and antimatter. The experiment was carried out at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva (Switzerland) in a project led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and Tokyo University (Japan), and including the University of Brescia (Italy), the Stefan Meyer Institute (Vienna, Austria), and the KFKI Research Institute (Budapest, Hungary).According to modern cosmology, matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts in the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe. Physicists are developing concepts to explain why the visible universe now seems to be made entirely out of matter. On the other hand, experimental groups are producing antimatter atoms artificially to explore the fundamental symmetries between matter and antimatter, which according to the present theories of particle physics should have exactly the same properties, except for the opposite electrical charge).

Physicists believe that the laws of nature obey a fundamental symmetry called “CPT” (this stands for charge conjugation, parity, and time reversal), which postulates that if all the matter in the universe were replaced with antimatter, left and right inverted as if looking into a mirror, and the flow of time reversed, this “anti-world” would be indistinguishable from our real matter world. Antimatter atoms should weigh exactly the same as their matter counterparts. If scientists were to experimentally detect any deviation, however small, it would indicate that this fundamental symmetry is broken. “Small” is the keyword here – it is essential to use the most precise methods and instruments available to make this comparison with the highest possible precision.

Antimatter is extraordinarily difficult to handle in the laboratory, because upon coming into contact with ordinary matter (even the air molecules in a room), it immediately annihilates, converting into energy and new particles. In 1997, researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in cooperation with other European, Japanese, and American groups began construction of a facility called the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) at CERN. Here antiprotons produced in high-energy collisions are collected and stored in a vacuum pipe arranged in a 190-m-long racetrack shape. The antiprotons are gradually slowed down, before being transported to several experiments. The so-called ASACUSA¹ (Atomic Spectroscopy and Collisions using Slow Antiprotons, named after a district in Tokyo) collaboration, of which Dr. Hori is one of the project leaders, sends the antiprotons into a helium target to create and study antiprotonic helium atoms.

Normal helium atoms consist of a nucleus with two electrons orbiting around it. In antiprotonic helium, one of these electrons is replaced by an antiproton, which finds itself in an excited orbit some 100 picometres (10^-10 m) from the nucleus. Scientists fire a laser beam onto the atom, and carefully tune its frequency until the antiproton makes a quantum jump from one orbit to another. By comparing this frequency with theoretical calculations, the mass of the antiproton can be determined relative to the electron.

An important source of imprecision arises because the antiprotonic atoms jiggle around randomly according to their thermal energy, so that atoms moving towards the laser beam experience a different frequency compared to those moving away. This is similar to the effect that causes the siren of an approaching ambulance to change pitch as it passes you by. In their previous experiments of 2006, the MPQ / ASACUSA scientists used one laser beam, and this effect limited the precision of their measurement.

This time to go beyond this limit, a technique called “two-photon laser spectroscopy” was used. The atoms were struck by two laser beams travelling in opposite directions, with the result that the effect was partially cancelled, leading to a four to six times higher precision. The first laser caused the antiproton to make a quantum jump to a virtual energy level normally not allowed by quantum mechanics, so that the second laser could actually bring the antiproton up to the closest allowed state. Such a two-photon jump is normally difficult to achieve because the antiproton is heavy, but MPQ scientists accomplished it by building two ultra-sharp lasers and carefully choosing a special combination of laser frequencies. To do this, an optical frequency comb – a special device invented 10 years ago by the group of Prof. Theodor W. Hänsch to measure the frequency of light – was used.

The new measurements showed that the antiproton is 1836.1526736(23) times heavier than the electron, the parenthesis showing the 1-standard deviation imprecision. “We have measured the mass of the antiproton relative to the electron with a precision of 10 digits, and have found it exactly the same as the proton value known with a similar precision”, Masaki Hori explains. “This can be regarded as a confirmation of the CPT theorem. Furthermore, we learned that antiprotons obey the same laws of nonlinear quantum optics like normal particles, and we can use lasers to manipulate them. The two-photon technique would allow much higher precisions to be achieved in the future, so that ultimately the antiproton mass may be better known than the proton one.”

The Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) uses the results of this experiment as one of several input data to determine the proton-to-electron mass ratio, which in turn influences the values of many other fundamental constants. Olivia Meyer-Streng

¹ASACUSA is one of several experiments studying antimatter at CERN. ATRAP and ALPHA investigate antihydrogen atoms, AeGIS studies how antihydrogen falls under gravity, and ACE studies the possible use of antiprotons for cancer therapy.

World Population to Surpass 7 Billion in 2011; Explosive Population Growth Means Challenges for Developing Nations

In 2011, global population is expected to hit 7 billion. (Credit: © Feng Yu / Fotolia) Science Daily  — Global population is expected to hit 7 billion later this year, up from 6 billion in 1999. Between now and 2050, an estimated 2.3 billion more people will be added -- nearly as many as inhabited the planet as recently as 1950. New estimates from the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations also project that the population will reach 10.1 billion in 2100. These sizable increases represent an unprecedented global demographic upheaval, according to David Bloom, Clarence James Gamble Professor of Economics and Demography at the Harvard School of Public Health, in a review article published July 29, 2011 in Science. Over the next forty years, nearly all (97%) of the 2.3 billion projected increase will be in the less developed regions, with nearly half (49%) in Africa. By contrast, the populations of more developed countries will remain flat, but will age, with fewer working-age adults to support retirees living on social pensions. "Although the issues immediately confronting developing countries are different from those facing the rich countries, in a globalized world demographic challenges anywhere are demographic challenges everywhere," said Bloom. The world's population has grown slowly for most of human history. It took until 1800 for the population to hit 1 billion. However, in the past half-century, population jumped from 3 to 7 million. In 2011, approximately 135 million people will be born and 57 million will die, a net increase of 78 million people. Considerable uncertainty about these projections remains, Bloom writes. Depending on whether the number of births per woman continues to decline, the ranges for 2050 vary from 8.1 to 10.6 billion, and the 2100 projections vary from 6.2 to 15.8 billion. Population trends indicate a shift in the "demographic center of gravity" from more to less developed regions, Bloom writes. Already strained, many developing countries will likely face tremendous difficulties in supplying food, water, housing, and energy to their growing populations, with repercussions for health, security, and economic growth. "The demographic picture is indeed complex, and poses some formidable challenges," Bloom said. "Those challenges are not insurmountable, but we cannot deal with them by sticking our heads in the sand. We have to tackle some tough issues ranging from the unmet need for contraception among hundreds of millions of women and the huge knowledge-action gaps we see in the area of child survival, to the reform of retirement policy and the development of global immigration policy. It's just plain irresponsible to sit by idly while humankind experiences full force the perils of demographic change."

Programmed cell death in plants revealed

LA TROBE UNIVERSITY

Arabidopsis plant used for genetic research Image: dra_schwartz/iStockphoto Research at La Trobe University has provided new insight into how programmed cell death may be controlled in plants. The work, led by plant biologist Professor Roger Parish, is reported in the latest issue of the international scientific journal, The Plant Cell, published by the American Society of Plant Biologists. As the world’s population rises and demand for food and bio-fuel increases, it has important implications for improving agricultural crop production. Key to the La Trobe study is the discovery of an enzyme, aspartic protease, called ‘UNDEAD’ With its Zombie connotation, the enzyme helps decide such things as when cells in the tapetal layer – which provides building blocks for the pollen – live or die. ‘One of the big issues in plants, just as in animals and humans, is programmed cell death,’ explains Professor Parish. ‘To date nobody has really known how it works in plants. There have been lots of theories. ‘It’s very important for plant development that certain cells die at the right time so that the plant can develop and reproduce – so this new work is a real breakthrough,’ he says. Other members of the La Trobe research team are Dr Huy Anh Phan, Dr Sylvana Iacuone, and Dr Song F Li. The new discovery follows previous studies by Professor Parish’s research group on male sterility and anther development in plants. This has already led to new technology for hybrid seed production. The researchers are also working on ways to help protect plants against cold and dehydration. A few years ago the La Trobe group discovered a ‘Godfather’ gene (AtMYB80) which acts as a master ‘switch’ for pollen production.  When researchers ‘knocked out’ this gene, plants became male sterile. When they reversed the process, re-inserting the gene with some modification, plants again began to produce pollen. It is this system that is now used to produce seeds with ‘hybrid vigour’, a trait which leads to increased yields. Key to producing hybrid seeds is the ability to stop plants from self pollinating. This system can also be used to contain genetically engineered plants, and stop seeds from setting so plants can direct extra energy into making more leaves. The latest La Trobe research also provides insights into the role of a host of other biochemical players involved in the process of cell death that is triggered by the master gene. The researchers identified more than 400 genes controlled by the master gene. They isolated and identified various suspects and tracked down one that ‘codes’ for an aspartic protease enzyme called UNDEAD that digests, or breaks down, other proteins. ‘This gene, along with AtMYB80, appears to regulate the timing of programmed cell death in the tapetum,’ says Professor Parish. The La Trobe research was carried out on Arabidopsis thaliana, or thale cress. The same genes are found in wheat, barley, canola, cotton, broccoli, rice, cabbage – and even poplar trees. So the work can be applied to improve plants for a wide range of agricultural industries. Professor Parish’s lab also specialises in the mechanisms of seed mucilage production and seed coat development. It is funded by the Grains Research and Development Council, the Australian Research Council and the company Pacific Seeds.

Tiny shocks help schizophrenics

NEUROSCIENCE RESEARCH AUSTRALIA

Brain function in people with schizophrenia improves after 20 minutes of being subjected to very mild, painless electrical current to the brain through electrodes on the scalp, a study found. Image: cosmin4000/iStockphoto In a recent study using a technique called transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS), scientists from Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA) have shown that brain function in people with schizophrenia can improve after applying the stimulation for just 20 minutes. “We found that this type of brain stimulation boosted learning from feedback which is important in everyday life, for example, in learning to act on cues from other people in social situations,” says lead researcher Dr Tom Weickert. “There are very few new treatment options for people with schizophrenia, so finding a different treatment that is promising and has little in the way of side effects is very exciting,” he says. tDCS transmits a very mild electrical current to the brain through electrodes on the scalp. This technique has previously been shown to improve brain function in healthy people and people with depression. The study applied tDCS to a region of the brain called the pre-frontal cortex of people with schizophrenia for 20 minutes. One of the characteristics of schizophrenia is reduced brain activity in the pre-frontal cortex, an area at the front of the brain used for thinking, motivation and learning. During the application, participants were asked to complete a computer task designed to measure improvements in a type of learning called ‘implicit learning’, in this case learning to predict the weather (rain or shine) using tarot cards. The team found that tDCS improved learning abilities in those people who already showed some potential to learn during an initial testing session without brain stimulation. “The brain stimulation may encourage other nerve cells close by to become active and improve learning,” says Dr Weickert. The next step in the research is to determine whether the brain stimulation technique has a lasting effect on learning abilities. The study, in which participants will receive 20 minutes of tDCS five days a week for four weeks, is already underway. The research was published in the journal Schizophrenia Research.

Growing ‘Epidemic’ of Heart Attacks, Strokes, Cancer, Diabetes Threatens China’s Economic and Social Well-Being

Addressing non-communicable diseases could let China set an example for the world

BEIJING July 26, 2011 – Non-communicable diseases (NCD)[1] such as cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and chronic respiratory illnesses are China’s number one health threat, accounting for over 80 percent of annual deaths and contributing to 68.6 percent of the country’s total disease burden, says a World Bank report released today.

While this rising ‘epidemic’ has serious implications for the country’s future prosperity, the report suggests that China can seize the opportunity to respond effectively, providing a powerful example for other countries worldwide where an increase in these diseases is becoming a major challenge. 

The report Toward a Healthy and Harmonious Life in China: Stemming the Rising Tide of Non-Communicable Diseases was prepared in coordination with the Chinese Ministry of Health and the World Health Organization, based on assessments conducted by the World Bank in 2008-2010. It presents evidence on the economic and social consequences of explosive increases in NCDs in China and proposes a range of policies and strategies to confront and prevent them.

According to the report, the number of cases of cardiovascular diseases, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, diabetes and lung cancer among Chinese people over 40 will double or even triple over the next two decades if effective prevention and control strategies are not implemented. This trend is rooted in the social, economic, and environmental changes the country has experienced in recent decades, in particular, the rapid aging of the population and exposure to health risk factors such as high smoking rates among males, growing obesity due to increased consumption of fast foods rich in fat and salt, sugar-rich soft drinks and decreased physical activity in cities.

 “First and foremost, it is the human toll that should concern policy-makers when addressing NCDs. Mounting medical costs have a severe impact on individual and families when NCD occurs, and loss of loved ones causes immense grief that could have been avoided with the right policies in place”, said Klaus Rohland, World Bank Country Director for China. “But there is substantial economic cost associated with NCDs as well.”

For example, estimates for China presented in this report indicate that the economic benefit of reducing cardiovascular diseases by one percent per year over a 30-year period (2010–2040) could generate an economic value equivalent to 68 percent of China’s real GDP in 2010, more than US$10.7 trillion.

If an effective response is not mounted, warns the report, the disease burden will aggravate the economic and social impact of the expected population increase of older citizens and a smaller workforce in China.  The report notes that a less healthy workforce and an elderly population that is chronically ill will increase the odds of a future economic slowdown and pose significant social challenges in China.

The report identifies the coming ten years as a critical time for China to prevent and control the ‘epidemic’, stressing that much of the country’s NCD burden can be avoided or managed by adopting good practices that have been proven effective internationally, tailored to local conditions.

“Cost-effective policy options exist for adopting a comprehensive multisectoral response to deal with NCDs in China,” said Shiyong Wang, a World Bank Senior Health Specialist and the lead author of the report. “With more healthy behavior, improved socioeconomic environments conducive to health, and expanded access to quality health services, not only do people live longer, but their quality of life is also improved by the reduction of sickness and disability.” 

Data from successful efforts in developed countries reveal that health improvements occur in a shorter time frame than commonly believed – within a year or a few years rather than decades – after the reduction and elimination of the exposure to major health risk factors.

According to Patricio Marquez, a World Bank Lead Health Specialist, as co-author of the report: “this can be accomplished through higher excise taxes on tobacco and alcohol products, regulatory measures to curtail advertisement and restrict smoking in public places, information, education and communication activities to educate the population about these risks, as well as a redesigned health system that gives people timely access to quality medical care, particularly to well organized and funded primary health care services.”

The report concludes that a healthier and more productive population is critical to ensuring sustainable economic growth and harmonious social development in China over the medium and longer term.

[1] NCDs are a set of chronic diseases, including cardiovascular disease, cancers, chronic respiratory diseases, and diabetes, characterized by a long latency period, prolonged clinical course and debilitating manifestations.