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Now, chocolate bar that keeps wrinkles at bay

May 21, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

London, May 21 (ANI): Good news for chocolate lovers: A new kind of chocolate has been created that apparently slows the ageing process and fights wrinkles.

Made by the world”s largest chocolate manufacturer, Acticoa is packed with natural antioxidants, which can protect the skin from damage by harmful free radicals.

Studies have shown that just 20g a day of the chocolate could help prevent wrinkles by hydrating the skin and improving elasticity.

The time-defying bars, drinks and buttons are the brainchild of chocolatiers at Barry Callebaut, whose 7,500 strong workforce in 26 countries make 3- billion-pound worth of chocolate each year, supplying household names like Cadbury and Thorntons.

“Chocolate and health do not seem to fit together but it is a very interesting proposition: if I can eat something I like and it is good for me, that is great. Chocolate is probably at the bottom of the list when you think about making food healthier,” the Telegraph quoted Harry Vriens, of Barry Callebaut, as saying. (ANI)

Filed Under: International News Tagged With: ageing process, Barry Callebaut, bottom of the list, brainchild, Cadbury Chocolate, Chocolate And Health, chocolate bar, Chocolate Health, Chocolate Lovers, Chocolate Manufacturer, Chocolatiers, drinks, elasticity, Harmful Free Radicals, household names, London, natural antioxidants, Telegraph, workforce, wrinkles

How spiders spin their silk

May 13, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

London, May 13 (ANI): Spider silk is a fascinating material. It is stronger than steel and any available man-made fiber, and scientists have long puzzled over how to develop a material with such strength and flexibility. They might be one step closer.

Researchers have just figured out one step in the silk-making process: how the liquid proteins the eight-legged creatures carry onboard get spun into webs at a moment”s notice.

Specifically, spider silk has five times the tensile strength (a measure of how much something can be stretched before it breaks) of steel, and triple that of the best artificial fibers available today.

“The high elasticity and extreme tensile strength of natural spider silk are unmatched, even by fibers produced from pure spider silk proteins,” said Professor Horst Kessler, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen in Germany.

Kessler and colleagues wanted to pursue a particularly puzzling question: How do spiders keep the ingredients for silk at hand in such high concentrations, ready to be spun into webs at a moment”s notice.

Spider silk consists of protein molecules, long chains comprising thousands of amino-acid elements. X-ray structure analyses show that the finished fiber has areas in which several protein chains are interlinked via stable physical connections. These connections provide the high stability. Between these connections are unlinked areas that give the fibers their great elasticity.

The situation within the silk gland is, however, very different: The silk proteins are stored in high concentrations in an aqueous environment, awaiting deployment. The areas responsible for interlinking may not approach each other too closely; otherwise the proteins would clump up instantaneously. Hence, these molecules must have some kind of special storage configuration.

X-ray structure analysis, which is so successful in other domains, was of little help here, since it can only be used to analyze crystals. And up to the instant in which the solid silk fiber is formed, everything takes place in solution. The method of choice was therefore nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR).

Using the equipment of the Bavarian NMR Center, Franz Hagn, a biochemist from Horst Kessler”s work group at the Institute for Advanced Study (TUM-IAS) at the TU Muenchen, managed to unravel the structure of a control element responsible for the formation of the solid fiber. Now the researchers could shed light on this control element”s mode of operation.

“Under storage conditions in the silk gland these control domains are connected pair-wise in such a way that the interlinking areas of both chains can not lie parallel to each other. Interlinking is thus effectively prevented,” Thomas Scheibel said.

The protein chains are stored with the polar areas on the outside and the hydrophobic parts of the chain on the inside, ensuring good solubility in the aqueous environment.

When the protected proteins enter the spinning duct, they encounter an environment with an entirely different salt concentration and composition. This renders two salt bridges of the control domain unstable, and the chain can unfold.

Furthermore, the flow in the narrow spinning duct results in strong shear forces. The long protein chains are aligned in parallel, thus placing the areas responsible for interlinking side by side. The stable spider silk fiber is formed.

The results have been published in the current issue of the prestigious scientific journal Nature. (ANI)

Filed Under: International News Tagged With: Aqueous Environment, Artificial Fibers, clump, Eight Legged Creatures, elasticity, Horst Kessler, long chains, Physical Connections, Protein Chains, protein molecules, Silk Gland, Silk Proteins, spider silk, Storage Configuration, stronger than steel, Structure Analyses, Structure Analysis, Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Tensile Strength, x-ray

GigaSpaces Launches Version 7.1 of eXtreme Application Platform (XAP), Making Dynamic Scaling Simpler Than Ever

April 16, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, Apr 14 (MARKET WIRE) —
GigaSpaces announces the release of eXtreme Application Platform (XAP),
version 7.1, which automatically implements dynamic scalability and
multi-tenancy, based on an organization’s individual business
requirements. This significantly simplifies development, deployment and
operations while enabling enterprises to maximize utilization of modern
IT resources with no change to the way they do business.

“We have always delivered reliable technology that guarantees dynamic
scalability and high availability with millisecond latency,” says Nati
Shalom, GigaSpaces CTO. “Now we are simplifying operations for developers
and administrators. With each new generation, we focus on features that
most benefit the enterprise’s bottom line.”

Simplified API Streamlines Development & Operations

XAP eases development, deployment, and operations with its new API for
the Elastic Data Grid. Users input their business requirements, and XAP
deploys and configures the data grid cluster automatically, saving
substantial effort and cost involved in sizing, hardware provisioning,
and configuring distributed middleware.

“Enterprises perpetually need to reduce costs and optimize utilization of
hardware and software resources,” says Massimo Pezzini of Gartner. “They
look for application platform technology providing elasticity,
“continuous” availability as well as automatic deployment and scaling of
applications, while reducing administration burdens.”

XAP automatically maintains SLAs during production, doing everything
necessary to continue meeting the business requirements. When existing
machines exhaust their resources, when a machine fails, when loads
change, or when machines are added, XAP automatically adjusts the cluster
and rebalances the application. Users do not have to manually intervene
to make sure there is enough computing power or memory.

If an organization has special requirements, XAP is flexible enough to
allow for custom deployment behavior via its administration API, which
provides fine-grained control and monitoring over all deployment
parameters.

Built-in Multi-tenancy Eases Resource Sharing

XAP 7.1 is the world’s first middleware platform with built-in
multi-tenancy. Not only does it significantly simplify development, but
it also provides better isolation among multiple users and independent
life cycle management for each tenant. The Elastic Data Grid offers one
simple parameter defining the isolation level, allowing a variety of
configurations such as allocating a dedicated machine per application,
allowing multiple instances of the application to share the same
resources while isolating others, or sharing everything among everyone.

Hardware Efficiency Creates Cost Savings

XAP 7.1 features concurrent transaction management for improved
utilization of multicore processors. This follows previous improvements
in multicore utilization, which resulted in up to 300% performance
improvement on the Intel Nehalem processor.

GigaSpaces XAP 7.1 is certified for use with Cisco UCS, which can form a
cluster that reaches a memory capacity of several terabytes with massive
computing power. This combination offers a full, scalable stack – from
the hardware to the application level – enabling deployment in one API
call for even the largest in-memory operations. New benchmarks will be
released shortly.

Additional Features in XAP 7.1

– Extended in-memory querying capabilities – brings the data grid closer
to the querying capabilities of traditional databases
– Real-time troubleshooting – administrators can automatically gather
dumps and logs from a large number of machines when any suspicious event
occurs or get logs and dumps from an entire distributed system at the
click of a button
– First milestone of web-based dashboard – version 7.1 gets closer to
making XAP’s full management and monitoring GUI accessible using a
regular web browser

Availability

Download the latest XAP 7.1 Product Version

For more information, please visit www.gigaspaces.com/xap7-1. We invite
you to attend the following two webinars related to the 7.1 release:

– April 21: How a Top Financial Firm Uses XAP for Dynamic Scaling and How
7.1 Makes It Simpler than Ever
– April 28: XAP 7.1 Webinar and Live Demo: What’s New in 7.1

About GigaSpaces

GigaSpaces Technologies is a leading provider of a new generation of
application platforms for Java and .Net environments that offers an
alternative to traditional application servers. Its flagship product, XAP
7.1, is an enterprise-grade application server for deploying and
dynamically scaling distributed applications under any requirement.

GigaSpaces customers depending on our reliability and millisecond latency
include dozens of Global Fortune 100/500 companies, including Societe
Generale and British American Tobacco; six of the world’s top 10
investment banks and financial services companies like Dow Jones; leading
telecommunications carriers and eCommerce companies like Nortel and eBay;
and five of the world’s top online gaming companies and Internet media
organizations. GigaSpaces was founded in 2000 and has offices in the
United States, Europe, and Asia.

For more information, please visit http://www.gigaspaces.com, our blog at

http://blog.gigaspaces.com.

Contacts:
K2 Strategic Innovations
Amy Kenigsberg
+972 9 794 1681 (GMT +2)
U.S. +1 913 440 4072 (ET +7)
amy@k2-si.com

Filed Under: International News Tagged With: Application Platform, Application Users, Automatic Deployment, Burdens, Business Requirements, Computing Power, Continuous Availability, Data Grid, development operations, elasticity, Gigaspaces, Grid Users, High Availability, latency, Orga, platform technology, Reliable Technology, Software Resources, Substantial Effort, Users Input

Silk made by common Australian green lacewing toughest: Study

September 10, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Melbourne, September 10 (ANI): A new research has found that Australian lacewings build tougher silk than silkworms.

Scientists at CSIRO Entomology have learnt that silk made by the common Australian green lacewing can be stretched up to six times further than silkworm silk.

Moreover, its unusual structure makes it potentially much easier to manufacture artificially.

The common Australian green lacewing (Mallada signata) produces silk to create tiny stiff stalks to hold each of its eggs on.

The insect pushes out a liquid drop of silk dope before stretching it out to the point at which it stiffens and then placing the egg safely on top.

Researchers found that the lacewing silk was different from the silk created by other insects and had had its own evolutionary pathway.

Unlike the plank-like structure of other silks from spiders or silkworms, lacewing silk contains two fibrous proteins structured like a concertina door, giving it extra toughness and elasticity.

According to Dr Tara Sutherland, who was part research team, the lacewing silk protein is also shorter and less repetitive, making it easier to reproduce artificially by fermentation in bacteria.

“Silks are made under benign conditions. They’re made at room temperature, from an aqueous system and from readily replaced building blocks, so it’s a very environmentally friendly process, in contrast to the synthetic equivalents,” ABC Science quoted Sutherland as saying.

She added: “The material has a lot of strength and it’s very, very light so it’s quite remarkable. It’s also very tough.”

Apart from the traditional textile uses, the biocompatibility of the natural fibre allows this kind of silk to be used in high-tech medical applications such as providing the scaffolding for growing new human cells on.

The research will be published in the Journal of Structural Biology. (ANI)

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Junk food cholesterol may pose the greatest heart disease risk

August 21, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Aug 21 (ANI): Health freaks know that high levels of total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol can increase the risk of heart attacks. Now, scientists have discovered a little-known type of cholesterol which may prove to be the most lethal of all.

Cholesterol called oxycholesterol is virtually unknown to the public and may be the most serious cardiovascular health threat of all.

Fried and processed food, particularly fast food, contains high amounts of oxycholesterol.

Scientists from China presented one of the first studies on the cholesterol-boosting effects of oxycholesterol at the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society.

The researchers hope their findings raise public awareness about oxycholesterol, including foods with the highest levels of the substance and other foods that can combat oxycholesterol’s effects.

“Total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL), and the heart-healthy high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL) are still important health issues,” says study leader Zhen-Yu Chen, Ph.D., of Chinese University of Hong Kong.

“But the public should recognize that oxycholesterol is also important and cannot be ignored. Our work demonstrated that oxycholesterol boosts total cholesterol levels and promotes atherosclerosis ["hardening of the arteries"] more than non-oxidized cholesterol,” the expert added.

In the study, Chen’s group measured the effects of a diet high in oxycholesterol on hamsters, often used as surrogates for humans in such research. Blood cholesterol in hamsters fed oxycholesterol rose up to 22 percent more than hamsters eating non-oxidized cholesterol. The oxycholesterol group showed greater deposition of cholesterol in the lining of their arteries and a tendency to develop larger deposits of cholesterol. These fatty deposits, called atherosclerotic plaques, increase the risk for heart attack and stroke.

Most importantly, according to Chen, oxycholesterol had undesirable effects on “artery function.” Oxycholesterol reduced the elasticity of arteries, impairing their ability to expand and carry more blood. That expansion can allow more blood to flow through arteries that are partially blocked by plaques, potentially reducing the risk that a clot will form and cause a heart attack or stroke.

But a healthy diet rich in antioxidants can counter these effects, Chen said, noting that these substances may block the oxidation process that forms oxycholesterol. (ANI)

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Scientists unveil new way to clinically assess condition of tooth enamel using lasers

August 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, August 19 (ANI): A collaborative study conducted by Australian and Taiwani researchers has led to a novel way to analyse the health of human teeth using lasers.

Described in the open-access journal Optics Express, the new approach involves measuring how the surface of a tooth responds to laser-generated ultrasound, which can help evaluate the mineral content of tooth enamel-the semi-translucent outer layer of a tooth that protects the underlying dentin.

This is the first time that any research team has been able to non-destructively measure the elasticity of human teeth, creating a method that can be used to assess oral health and predict emerging dental problems, such as tooth decay and cavities.

“The ultimate goal is to come up with a quick, efficient, cost-effective, and non-destructive way to evaluate the mineralization of human dental enamel,” says David Hsiao-Chuan Wang, a graduate student at the University of Sydney in Australia and first author on the paper.

For research purposes, “nano-indentation” is commonly used for gaining information on the elasticity of tooth enamel-a measure of its mineral content. However, nano-indentation destroys the measured regions of the enamel in the process and is only used to look at extracted teeth.

Wang and his advisor Simon Fleming, a physics professor at the University of Sydney’s Institute of Photonics and Optical Science, said that they wanted to develop a clinical method that would give as much information as nano-indentation and could be used to assess tooth enamel in actual patients while being completely non-destructive.

So, added the researchers, they developed a way to measure the elasticity of tooth enamel by adapting laser ultrasonic surface wave velocity dispersion, a method similar to what industrial engineers use to evaluate the integrity of thin films and metals.

They have revealed that their approach uses short duration laser pulses to excite ultrasonic waves that propagate along the surface, and penetrate only a small distance into a tooth.

The velocity of these waves is influenced by the elastic properties of the enamel on a tooth, and by detecting the ultrasonic waves with fibre optics at various points, they can determine the enamel’s elasticity, which is directly related to its mineralisation.

In their research article, the researchers have written that they could use this technique on extracted human teeth.

They admit that they have not yet tested the technique on a living person’s teeth, and that it will likely take several years before any eventual device is ready for use in the dentist’s office. (ANI)

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‘Earthquake cloaks’ may one day make buildings invisible to devastating tremors

June 27, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, June 27 (ANI): Let alone hiding persons or objects from prying eyes, future invisibility cloaks may even conceal buildings from the devastating effects of earthquakes, if physicists in France and the UK are to be believed.

Stefan Enoch of the Fresnel Institute in Marseille, France, is the researcher behind the “earthquake cloak” idea.

A research team led by Enoch has for the first time suggested that the physics of invisibility cloaks may one day enable scientists to design a cloak that could render objects “invisible” to destructive storm waves or tsunamis.

The seismic waves of an earthquake fall into two main groups: body waves that propagate through the Earth, and surface waves that travel only across the surface.

While controlling body waves will be too complex, Enoch’s team say that controlling surface waves is within the ability of conventional engineering.

Team member Sebastien Guenneau, associated with the UK-based University of Liverpool, says that the finding attains significance as it is surface waves that are more destructive.

The researchers have revealed that the new theoretical cloak comprises a number of large, concentric rings made of plastic fixed to the Earth’s surface.

They say that the stiffness and elasticity of the rings must be precisely controlled to ensure that any surface waves pass smoothly into the material, rather than reflecting or scattering at the material’s surface.

According to them, while travelling through the cloak, waves are compressed into tiny fluctuations in pressure and density that travel along the fastest path available.

The researchers believe that by tuning the cloak’s properties, that path can be made to be an arc that directs surface waves away from an area inside the cloak. When the waves exit the cloak, they return to their previous, larger size.

Unlike some of the optical invisibility cloaks studied in recent years, the new cloak is “broadband” and thus can divert waves across a range of frequencies.

The research group say that this becomes possibly by tuning different rings of the cloak to incoming waves of different frequencies. Waves pass largely unaffected through rings not tuned to their frequency.

“The outer rings remain nearly still, but the pair of rings tuned to the frequency of the wave move like crazy, bending up and down and twisting. For each small frequency range, there’s one pair of rings that does most of the work,” New Scientist magazine quoted Guenneau as saying.

Thus far, the researchers have simulated cloaks containing as many as 100 rings, even though fewer would be needed to protect against the most common kinds of earthquake surface waves.

As to how this technique can be applied to buildings, Guenneau says that they may be built into the foundations.

Even though work remains to be done to replicate the theoretical results experimentally, physicist Ulf Leonhardt at the University of St Andrews, UK, thinks that it is possible that invisibility physics may see its first real world applications of in guiding seismic or ocean waves rather than to manipulate light.

“I think this is fantastic – I really like taking ideas that have emerged from optics and using them in other applications,” he said.

A research article describing the “earthquake cloak” idea has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters. (ANI)

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Scientists create soft and tough fibres that closely resemble biological tissue

May 16, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 16 (ANI): A group of Australian and Korean researchers have successfully used a robust network of DNA strands and carbon nanotubes to create supersoft sponge-like material whose mechanical properties closely resemble those of biological soft tissues.

Lead researchers Geoffrey M. Spinks and Seon Jeong Kim consider their team’s work to be a significant advance because it takes scientists a step closer to synthetically making implant materials that will closely emulate their natural counterparts-such as tendons, muscles, arteries, and skin or other organs.

Because many biological tissues are regularly subjected to intense mechanical loads, it is also important that the implant material have comparable elasticity in order to avoid inflammation. At the same time, the material must be very strong and resilient, or it may give out.

The researchers say that the materials they have made are as elastic as the softest natural tissues, while simultaneously derive great strength from the robust DNA links used for their creation.

They further reveal that an additional advantage is the electrical conductivity of the new material, which can thus also be used in electrodes for mechanical actuators, energy storage, and sensors.

A research paper describing this work has been published in the journal Angewandte Chemie. (ANI)

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Now, chocolate bar that keeps wrinkles at bay

How spiders spin their silk

GigaSpaces Launches Version 7.1 of eXtreme Application Platform (XAP), Making Dynamic Scaling Simpler Than Ever

Silk made by common Australian green lacewing toughest: Study

Scientists unveil new way to clinically assess condition of tooth enamel using lasers

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