Found Stuff

Clock Turned Back on Aging Muscles, Researchers Claim

2009-10-02T08:15:00.001-07:00

Scientists have found and manipulated body chemistry linked to the aging of muscles and were able to turn back the clock on old human muscle, restoring its ability to repair and rebuild itself, they said today.

The study involved a small number of participants, however. And the news is not all rosy.

Importantly, the research also found evidence that aging muscles need to be kept in shape, because long periods of atrophy are more challenging to overcome. Older muscles do not respond as well to sudden bouts of exercise, the scientists discovered. And rather than building muscle, an older person can generate scar tissue upon, say, lifting weights after long periods of inactivity.

"Our study shows that the ability of old human muscle to be maintained and repaired by muscle stem cells can be restored to youthful vigor given the right mix of biochemical signals," said study leader Irina Conboy of the University of California, Berkeley. "This provides promising new targets for forestalling the debilitating muscle atrophy that accompanies aging, and perhaps other tissue degenerative disorders as well."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/clockturnedbackonagingmusclesresearchersclaim

Bell Labs breaks optical transmission record, 100 Petabit per second kilometer barrier

2009-09-30T09:59:00.001-07:00

Alcatel-Lucent today announced that scientists in Bell Labs, the company’s research arm, have set a new optical transmission record of more than 100 Petabits per second.kilometer (equivalent to 100 million Gigabits per second.kilometer).

This transmission experiment involved sending the equivalent of 400 DVDs per second over 7,000 kilometers, roughly the distance between Paris and Chicago. This is the highest capacity ever achieved over a transoceanic distance and represents an increase that exceeds that of today’s most advanced commercial undersea cables by a factor of ten. To achieve these record-breaking results the Bell Labs researchers made innovative use of new detection techniques and harnessed a diverse array of technologies in modulation, transmission, and signal processing

High speed optical transmission is a key component of Alcatel-Lucent’s High Leverage Network architecture, key elements of which have already been selected by leading service providers.

http://www.physorg.com/news173455192.html

Scientists Cure Color Blindness In Monkeys

2009-09-17T12:25:00.001-07:00

ScienceDaily (Sep. 16, 2009) — Researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Florida used gene therapy to cure two squirrel monkeys of color blindness — the most common genetic disorder in people.

"We've added red sensitivity to cone cells in animals that are born with a condition that is exactly like human color blindness," said William W. Hauswirth, Ph.D., a professor of ophthalmic molecular genetics at the UF College of Medicine and a member of the UF Genetics Institute and the Powell Gene Therapy Center. "Although color blindness is only moderately life-altering, we've shown we can cure a cone disease in a primate, and that it can be done very safely. That's extremely encouraging for the development of therapies for human cone diseases that really are blinding."

About five weeks after the treatment, the monkeys began to acquire color vision, almost as if it occurred overnight.

"Nothing happened for the first 20 weeks," Neitz said. "But we knew right away when it began to work. It was if they woke up and saw these new colors. The treated animals unquestionably responded to colors that had been invisible to them."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090916133521.htm

On Demand Books Turns Google's eBook Archive Back Into Paperbacks

2009-09-17T12:23:00.001-07:00

When you think about Google Books, chances are that you are thinking about eBooks and searching books on your desktop. Starting today, however, On Demand Books, the makers of the Espresso Book Machine, will have access to Google's vast library of public domain books, and bookstores that buy an Espresso Book Machine will be able to provide on-demand printing services for any of these close to 2 million books in Google's repository.

The Espresso Book Machine can print out about 145 pages per minute at a cost of about 1 cent per page. The machine itself costs around $10,000 (ed: $100,000). On Demand Books argues that this device can revolutionize the distribution of books by decentralizing the marketplace for the distribution of books and can give libraries and bookstores a potentially unlimited inventory in their shops. In its press release about today's agreement with Google, On Demand Books likens its machine to "an ATM for books."

For now, these printers are only available in a about a dozen locations, including the University of Michigan Shapiro Library in Ann Arbor, MI, and the Bibliotheca Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt. The Harvard Book Store will also soon get one of these machines as well. By early 2010, On Demand Books hopes to have sold about 35 to 40 machines and this new deal with Google will surely help the company to reach this goal.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/on_demand_books_turns_googles_public_domain_book_a.php
http://www.ondemandbooks.com/home.htm
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h7wxlKuKJFNcU_QllAW_0PYVgQEA

In One Study, a Heart Benefit for Chocolate

2009-09-16T10:47:00.001-07:00

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Published: September 14, 2009

In a study that will provide comfort to chocoholics everywhere, researchers in Sweden have found evidence that people who eat chocolate have increased survival rates after a heart attack — and it may be that the more they eat, the better.

The scientists followed 1,169 nondiabetic men and women who had been hospitalized for a first heart attack. Each filled out a standardized health questionnaire that included a question about chocolate consumption over the past 12 months. Chocolate contains flavonoid antioxidants that are widely believed to have beneficial cardiovascular effects.

The patients had a health examination three months after their discharge from the hospital, and researchers followed them for the next eight years using Swedish national registries of hospitalizations and deaths. After controlling for age, sex, obesity, physical inactivity, smoking, education and other factors, they found that the more chocolate people consumed, the more likely they were to survive. The results are reported in the September issue of The Journal of Internal Medicine.

Compared with people who ate none, those who had chocolate less than once a month had a 27 percent reduction in their risk for cardiac death, those who ate it up to once a week had a 44 percent reduction and those who indulged twice or more a week had a 66 percent reduced risk of dying from a subsequent heart event. The beneficial effect remained after controlling for intake of other kinds of sweets.

But before concluding that a box of Godiva truffles is health food, chocolate lovers may want to consider some of the study’s weaknesses. It is an observational study, not a randomized trial, so cause and effect cannot be definitively established. The scientists did not ask what kind of chocolate the patients ate, and milk chocolate has less available flavonoid than dark chocolate. Finally, chocolate consumption did not reduce the risk for any nonfatal cardiac event.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/health/15choc.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Fighting to Allow College Education at $99/Month

2009-09-14T14:37:00.000-07:00

Higher education is ready to be re-invented and this re-invention should not be delayed for two decades.

The next generation of online education could be great for students—and "catastrophic" for universities.

StraighterLine is offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. It offers as many courses as you want for a flat rate of $99 a month.

If the USA and other countries truly cared about effectively educating the people, increasing the productivity of economy, then legislative efforts would be made to breakdown the barriers to effective and affordable online education. Funding could be provided to help educational institutions to transition to a new world where they are less land/building intensive and where they have less of an undergraduate cash cow. Some inferior institutions would be shutdown.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/09/far-more-important-than-freeing-music.html
http://www.straighterline.com/

Magnetic Monopoles Detected In A Real Magnet For The First Time

2009-09-14T10:08:00.001-07:00

ScienceDaily (Sep. 4, 2009) — Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie have, in cooperation with colleagues from Dresden, St. Andrews, La Plata and Oxford, for the first time observed magnetic monopoles and how they emerge in a real material.

Magnetic monopoles are hypothetical particles proposed by physicists that carry a single magnetic pole, either a magnetic north pole or south pole. In the material world this is quite exceptional because magnetic particles are usually observed as dipoles, north and south combined. However there are several theories that predict the existence of monopoles. Among others, in 1931 the physicist Paul Dirac was led by his calculations to the conclusion that magnetic monopoles can exist at the end of tubes – called Dirac strings – that carry magnetic field. Until now they have remained undetected.

In this work the researchers, for the first time, attest that monopoles exist as emergent states of matter, i.e. they emerge from special arrangements of dipoles and are completely different from the constituents of the material. However, alongside this fundamental knowledge, Jonathan Morris explains the further meaning of the results: "We are writing about new, fundamental properties of matter. These properties are generally valid for materials with the same topology, that is for magnetic moments on the pyrochlore lattice. For the development of new technologies this can have big implications. Above all it signifies the first time fractionalisation in three dimensions is observed."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090903163725.htm

Children With Autism Use Alternative Keyboard

2009-09-02T07:38:00.001-07:00

The OrbiTouch keyboard. (Credit: Blue Orb)

ScienceDaily (Sep. 1, 2009) — Autism can build a wall of poor communication between those struggling with the condition and their families. While a personal computer can help bridge the divide, the distraction and complexity of a keyboard can be an insurmountable obstacle.

Using a unique keyboard with only two "keys" and a novel curriculum, teachers with Project Blue Skies are giving children with autism the ability to both communicate and to explore the online world.

The Project Blue Skies curriculum is based on the functions of the OrbiTouch, which allows a user to input letters, symbols and any other command by independently manipulating two computer-mouse shaped grips forward, back, diagonally and to the sides.

Teachers guide the students and monitor their progress, ultimately helping the kids better communicate with their families. While the primary goal of Project Blue Skies is to help people with autism develop stronger social skills, McAlindon is working with partners to start integrating standard coursework into the program.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090831080957.htm

Quantum amnesia gives time its arrow

2009-09-02T07:35:00.001-07:00

No going back (Image: Mike Kemp/Getty)

NOTHING in the fundamental laws of physics says that time should only move forwards. Yet we never see any reversal of time - in the form of a shattered egg that suddenly reassembles, say, or an ice cube that forms from a pool of tepid water. Now a new study suggests that the arrow of time is the result of quantum-mechanical amnesia that erases any trace that time has moved backwards.

Our sense of time is captured by the second law of thermodynamics, which says that any closed system - from particles in an isolated box to the entire universe - can only become more disordered. The measure of this disorder, known as entropy, can only increase.

In the world of large-scale objects, increasing entropy is associated with the flow of heat, which always goes from a hot object to a colder one. Change in entropy can also be described as a flow of information: the higher the entropy of a system, the less information it contains.

In the quantum world, a box full of particles gains entropy – and loses information – when it becomes more entangled with the outside world.

An outsider who observes the box may become more entangled with it. This entanglement – which involves the loss of information in the particles – increases the information available to the observer.

n this context, the unceasing growth of entropy, and hence the second law of thermodynamics, may be just an illusion, an artefact of quantum mechanics, says Lorenzo Maccone of MIT.

The laws of quantum mechanics are time-symmetric, which means that time can flow both forwards and backwards. "But if you analyse [the laws] carefully, you'll see that all the processes where things run backwards can happen, but they don't leave any trace of having happened," he says.

The work also doesn't yet explain a bigger mystery – why the universe was born as such a uniform soup of matter and energy, which has a very low entropy, says Sean Carroll of Caltech. Because entropy is in some measure the probability of a particular configuration, the universe's low entropy initial state is considered extraordinarily unlikely.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327234.700-quantum-amnesia-gives-time-its-arrow.html

Researchers Hope to Mass-Produce Tiny Robots

2009-09-02T07:30:00.001-07:00

An illustration of the I-SWARM robot: (1) solar cell, (2) IR-communication module, (3) an ASIC, (4) capacitors, (5) locomotion module. Image credit: Edqvist, et al.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Tiny robots the size of a flea could one day be mass-produced, churned out in swarms and programmed for a variety of applications, such as surveillance, micromanufacturing, medicine, cleaning, and more. In an effort to reach this goal, a recent study has demonstrated the initial tests for fabricating microrobots on a large scale.

The researchers, from institutes in Sweden, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, explain that their building approach marks a new paradigm of robot development in microrobotics. The technique involves integrating an entire robot - with communication, locomotion, energy storage, and electronics - in different modules on a single circuit board. In the past, the single-chip robot concept has presented significant limitations in design and manufacturing. However, instead of using solder to mount electrical components on a printed circuit board as in the conventional method, the researchers use conductive adhesive to attach the components to a double-sided flexible printed circuit board using surface mount technology. The circuit board is then folded to create a three-dimensional robot.

The resulting robots are very small, with their length, width, and height each measuring less than 4 mm. The robots are powered by a solar cell on top, and move by three vibrating legs. A fourth vibrating leg is used as a touch sensor. As the researchers explain, a single microrobot by itself is a physically simple individual. But many robots communicating with each other using infrared sensors and interacting with their environment can form a group that is capable of establishing swarm intelligence to generate more complex behavior. The framework for this project, called I-SWARM (intelligent small-world autonomous robots for micro-manipulation) is inspired by the behavior of biological insects.

Images of the robots showing their size proportional to various objects. Image credit: Edqvist, et al.

http://www.physorg.com/news170678733.html

Microscopes zoom in on molecules at last

2009-08-28T15:58:00.001-07:00

Thanks to specialised microscopes, we have long been able to see the beauty of single atoms. But strange though it might seem, imaging larger molecules at the same level of detail has not been possible – atoms are robust enough to withstand existing tools, but the structures of molecules are not. Now researchers at IBM have come up with a way to do it.

The earliest pictures of individual atoms were captured in the 1970s by blasting a target – typically a chunk of metal – with a beam of electrons, a technique known as transmission electron microscopy (TEM).

Leo Gross and his colleagues at IBM in Zurich, Switzerland, modified the AFM technique to make the most detailed image yet of pentacene, an organic molecule consisting of five benzene rings (see picture).

The molecule is very fragile, but the researchers were able to capture the details of the hexagonal carbon rings and deduce the positions of the surrounding hydrogen atoms.

One key breakthrough was finding a way to stop the microscope's tip from sticking to the fragile pentacene molecule because of attraction due to electrostatic and van der Waals forces – van der Waals is a weak force that operates only at an intermolecular level.

The team achieved this by fixing a single carbon monoxide molecule to the end of the probe so that only one atom of relatively inactive oxygen came into contact with the pentacene.

The image is "astonishing", says Oscar Custance of Japan's National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba. In 2007, his team used AFM to distinguish individual atoms on a silicon surface, but he acknowledges that the IBM team has surpassed this achievement. "This is the highest resolution I have ever seen," he says.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17699-microscopes-zoom-in-on-molecules-at-last.html

The Time to Unlearn is Now!

2009-08-27T13:30:00.001-07:00

This is the latest iteration of famous "Shift Happens" video with a focus on social media. If nothing else, it should serve as a reminder of to all of us why we must constantly unlearn. Enjoy!

Social Media Revolution

http://www.unlearning101.com/fuhgetaboutit_the_art_of_/2009/08/the-time-to-unlearn-is-now.html

Agile robots, dexterous robots

2009-08-27T09:46:00.001-07:00

Forget about clumsy, lumbering robots.
Think fast, precise, and acrobatic.

Robotic hand
BigDog

http://metamodern.com/2009/08/27/agile-robots-dexterous-robots-with-videos/

Artificial life will be created 'within months'

2009-08-27T09:13:00.000-07:00

Scientists are only months away from creating artificial life, it was claimed yesterday.

Dr Craig Venter – one of the world’s most famous and controversial biologists – said his U.S. researchers have overcome one of the last big hurdles to making a synthetic organism.

The first artificial lifeform is likely to be a simple man-made bacterium that proves that the technology can work.

But it will be followed by more complex bacteria that turn coal into cleaner natural gas, or algae that can soak up carbon dioxide and convert it into fuels.

They could also be used to create new vaccines and antibiotics.

The prediction came after a breakthrough by the J Craig Venter Institute in Maryland.

Researchers successfully transferred
the DNA of one type of bacteria into a yeast cell, modified it and then transferred it into another bacterial cell.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1208047/Life-order-Man-organisms-months-say-biologists.html?ITO=1490

Found: first amino acid on a comet

2009-08-26T12:19:00.001-07:00

An amino acid has been found on a comet for the first time, a new analysis of samples from NASA's Stardust mission reveals. The discovery confirms that some of the building blocks of life were delivered to the early Earth from space.

Amino acids are crucial to life because they form the basis of proteins, the molecules that run cells. The acids form when organic, carbon-containing compounds and water are zapped with a source of energy, such as photons – a process that can take place on Earth or in space.

Previously, researchers have found amino acids in space rocks that fell to Earth as meteorites, and tentative evidence for the compounds has been detected in interstellar space. Now, an amino acid called glycine has been definitively traced to an icy comet for the first time.

"It's not necessarily surprising, but it's very satisfying to find it there because it hasn't been observed before," says Jamie Elsila of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, lead author of the new study. "It's been looked for [on comets] spectroscopically with telescopes but the content seems so low you can't see it that way."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17628

First Steps Toward A Machine-Controlled Human Cell

2009-08-12T14:58:00.001-07:00

A semipermeable membrane encloses each of your cells, selectively allowing molecules in and out. And now, scientists have figured out how to use nanowires to control the mechanism that makes your cells permeable, thus creating a computer-regulated cell.

A team led by Lawrence Livermore Lab scientists Nipun Misraa and Julio A. Martinez worked on the discovery, and their results were published earlier this week in PNAS. According to a release about the research:

[The researchers] created a biomechanical hybrid in which nanowires are coated in a lipid bilayer-the same type of membrane that envelopes cells and controls the passage of molecules in and out of the cell. The authors incorporated gated channels in this membrane, and used molecular transport through these channels to trigger an electric signal. The researchers show that the nanowire circuit can be used to make the channels open and close as they would in a biological cell. Although their work is currently in an early stage, later versions of the nanowire technology could find applications in biosensing, neuroscience, and medicine.

There are two things that are very exciting about this early-stage research. One, it means that cellular membranes could be incorporated into computerized devices that are designed to respond to molecules in the environment. Essentially, you could have a cellular sensor at the end of a nanowire.

http://io9.com/5335779/first-steps-toward-a-machine+controlled-human-cell

Pacific Biosciences Real Time DNA Sequencing $100 Genomes releasing 2013

2009-08-12T09:16:00.001-07:00

Pacific Biosciences has a Single Molecule Real-Time (SMRT) DNA sequencing, due to be released commercially in 2010 and could enable $100 genome sequencing in 15 minutes in 2013.

The second generation real time DNA reader in 2013 is the one that is expected to hit the $100 genome sequencing price. They will release a product in 2010 but it will not be that cheap.

Instead of inspecting DNA copies after polymerase has done its work, SMRT sequencing watches the enzyme in real time as it races along and copies an individual strand stuck to the bottom of a tiny well. Every nucleotide used to make the copy is attached to its own fluorescent molecule that lights up when the nucleotide is incorporated. This light is spotted by a detector that identifies the color and the nucleotide -- A, C, G, or T.

By repeating this process simultaneously in many wells, the technology hopes to bring about a substantial boost in sequencing speed. "When we reach a million separate molecules that we're able to sequence at once … we'll be able to sequence the entire human genome in less than 15 minutes," said Turner.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/08/pacific-biosciences-real-time-dna.html

Immortality improves cell reprogramming

2009-08-11T09:37:00.001-07:00

Specialized adult cells made 'immortal' through the blockade of an antitumour pathway can be turned into stem-like cells quickly and efficiently.

The findings — which should make it easier to generate patient-specific cells from any tissue type, including certain diseased cells that have proved difficult to transform — suggest that cellular reprogramming and cancer formation are inextricably linked.

The studies also shed light on the mechanism of tumour formation, says study author Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, a developmental biologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and at the Center of Regenerative Medicine in Barcelona, Spain. Because it's now clear that p53 has a key role in both nuclear reprogramming and cancer development, Izpisúa Belmonte says, tumours can be thought of as cells that acquire more and more stem-cell-like characteristics — such as the ability to keep reproducing themselves forever. "If you connect the dots, you can say that cancer is really a de-differentiation problem," he says.

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090809/full/news.2009.809.html

Artificial brain '10 years away'

2009-07-23T07:46:00.001-07:00

Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, has already simulated elements of a rat brain.

He told the TED Global conference in Oxford that a synthetic human brain would be of particular use finding treatments for mental illnesses.

"It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years," he said.

The Blue Brain project was launched in 2005 and aims to reverse engineer the mammalian brain from laboratory data.

In particular, his team has focused on the neocortical column - repetitive units of the mammalian brain known as the neocortex.

"It's a new brain," he explained. "The mammals needed it because they had to cope with parenthood, social interactions complex cognitive functions.

"It was so successful an evolution from mouse to man it expanded about a thousand fold in terms of the numbers of units to produce this almost frightening organ."

And that evolution continues, he said. "It is evolving at an enormous speed."

"It's a bit like going and cataloguing a bit of the rainforest - how may trees does it have, what shape are the trees, how many of each type of tree do we have, what is the position of the trees," he said.

"But it is a bit more than cataloguing because you have to describe and discover all the rules of communication, the rules of connectivity."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8164060.stm

Major Genetic Differences Between Blood And Tissue Cells Revealed

2009-07-17T10:25:00.001-07:00

ScienceDaily (July 16, 2009) — Research by a group of Montreal scientists calls into question one of the most basic assumptions of human genetics: that when it comes to DNA, every cell in the body is essentially identical to every other cell. Their results appear in the July issue of the journal Human Mutation.

This discovery may undercut the rationale behind numerous large-scale genetic studies conducted over the last 15 years, studies which were supposed to isolate the causes of scores of human diseases.

Except for cancer, samples of diseased tissue are difficult or even impossible to take from living patients. Thus, the vast majority of genetic samples used in large-scale studies come in the form of blood. However, if it turns out that blood and tissue cells do not match genetically, these ambitious and expensive genome-wide association studies may prove to have been essentially flawed from the outset.

Schweitzer is optimistic that this discovery may lead to new treatments for vascular disease in the near to medium term.

"The timeline might be five to 10 years," he said. "We have to do in-vitro cell culture experiments first, prove it in an animal model, and then develop a molecule or protein which will affect the mutated gene product. This is the first step, but it's an important step."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090715131449.htm

The Mysterious Lizards Who Swim In Sand

2009-07-16T12:29:00.001-07:00

When the tiny lizard known as the sandfish moves through sand, it literally dives under the surface of the ground as if swimming. Now physicists have figured out how they do it - and want to build sandfish robots.

Georgia Tech physicist Daniel Goldman and his team observed the sandfish as they swam through sand, using X-rays and tiny sensors placed in the sand that measured how grains were displaced as the lizards moved through them. One thing they discovered right away was that the sandfish were indeed "swimming" - they tucked their legs up next to their bodies and moved in an undulatory wave like fish through water. Another interesting finding was that the lizards could go slightly faster in tightly-packed sand, as long as they varied the frequency of the wave created by the movement of their bodies. Their work is published today in Science.

There are implications for this research that go beyond understanding how lizards move through sand. Goldman and his team think it could help roboticists in designing rescue bots that could worm their way through collapsed rubble. It would also be useful for creating surveillance robots that can swim invisibly under sand, tracking enemy locations or even recording conversations that take place outdoors in sandy regions.

http://io9.com/5316290/the-mysterious-lizards-who-swim-in-sand

Scientists Discover Light Force with 'Push' Power

2009-07-14T07:59:00.001-07:00

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of Yale University researchers has discovered a "repulsive" light force that can be used to control components on silicon microchips, meaning future nanodevices could be controlled by light rather than electricity.

The team previously discovered an "attractive" force of light and showed how it could be manipulated to move components in semiconducting micro- and nano-electrical systems—tiny mechanical switches on a chip. The scientists have now uncovered a complementary repulsive force. Researchers had theorized the existence of both the attractive and repulsive forces since 2005, but the latter had remained unproven until now. The team, led by Hong Tang, assistant professor at Yale's School of Engineering & Applied Science, reports its findings in the July 13 edition of Nature Photonics's advanced online publication.

"This completes the picture," Tang said. "We've shown that this is indeed a bipolar light force with both an attractive and repulsive component."

The attractive and repulsive light forces Tang's team discovered are separate from the force created by light's radiation pressure, which pushes against an object as light shines on it. Instead, they push out or pull in sideways from the direction the light travels.

Using both forces means they can now have complete control and can manipulate components in both directions. "We've demonstrated that these are tunable forces we can engineer," Tang said.

These light forces may one day control telecommunications devices that would require far less power but would be much faster than today's conventional counterparts, Tang said. An added benefit of using light rather than electricity is that it can be routed through a circuit with almost no interference in signal, and it eliminates the need to lay down large numbers of electrical wires.

http://www.physorg.com/news166711942.html

Facebook growth

2009-07-02T09:57:00.001-07:00

It’s been just under 90 days since Facebook announced it has crossed the 200 million active user mark. Today, that number is somewhere around 240 million, perhaps even close to 250 million. If Facebook were a country, it would now have the 4th largest population in the world.

While Facebook has been growing at around 300,00 to 400,000 active users per day for most of the last three quarters, its growth rate seems to have again significantly increased in recent weeks to around 700,000 to 750,000 new users per day based on data we are tracking from Facebook’s advertising tools.

If Facebook continues at this rate, it could reach 300 million active users by November. Keep in mind, however, that as has been the case for most of the last year, about 70% of that growth is happening outside the United States. Nevertheless, Facebook still grew at an 8% monthly clip in the US in May, up to nearly 70 million active users today.

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/07/02/facebook-now-growing-by-over-700000-users-a-day-updated-engagement-stats/

The Value of Real Disease Cures and Inexpensive Tests

2009-07-01T12:51:00.001-07:00

A blog makes a point that the healthcare funding battles are like generals fighting the last war. The new healthcare should focus on cures and cheap tests.

This site covered the detailed statistics that most of the healthcare costs are focused on the chronic diseases for the sickest 5% of people.

Curing cancer is worth $50 trillion to the USA alone according to a 2006study by Kevin M. Murphy and Robert H. Topel of the University of Chicago.

- A 10% reduction in cancer death rates has a value of roughly 5 trillion dollars to current and future Americans
- Reducing cancer death rates by 10% would generate roughly 180 billion dollars annually in value for the U.S. population
- These figures don’t even count any gains from reduced morbidity and improved quality of life
- Gains in longevity from 1970 to 2000 were worth roughly 95 trillion dollars to current and future Americans
- This amounts to a gain of over 3 trillion dollars per year (roughly 25% of annual GDP)
-Value of reducing the death rate by 1/10,000 worth roughly $630 to one person
- This corresponds to a value of a statistical life of $6.3 million

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/07/value-of-real-disease-cures-and.html

Bad eBay picture

2009-07-01T12:17:00.001-07:00

kettle_1
Originally uploaded by a2brute

Check your photos carefully before posting them!