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Soon, robot controlled by human brain cells

September 10, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, Sept 10 (ANI): Scientists from University of Reading are working on developing a robot that would be controlled by human brain cells.

Lead researchers Kevin Warwick and Ben Whalley have already used rat brain cells to control a simple wheeled robot.

During the study, the researchers grew around 300,000 rat neurons in a nutrient broth and device producing spikes of electrical activity were connected to the output of the robot’s distance sensors.

The neurons could successfully steer the robot around a small enclosure.

Based on the findings rat models, the researchers are now working on steering the robot with the help of human brain cells.

The researchers believe that understanding how the neuron culture responds to stimulation could lead to deeper insights of neurological conditions such as epilepsy.

For instance, the way large numbers of neurons sometimes spike in unison – a phenomenon known as “bursting” – may be similar to what happens during an epileptic seizure.

The research team suggests if the behavior could be altered by changing the culture chemically, electrically or physically, it might pave way for potential therapies.

To make the system a better model of human disease, a culture of human neurons will be connected to the robot once the current work with rat cells is completed.

They will analyze the differences in the behavior of robots controlled by rat and human neurons.

“We’ll be trying to find out if the learning aspects and memory appear to be similar,” New Scientist quoted Warwick as saying. (ANI)

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High-performance, low-cost green LEDs to brighten up the future

September 6, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 6 (ANI): A scientist is aiming to develop a high-performance, low-cost green LED (Light-emitting diode).

According to Christian Wetzel, professor of physics and the Wellfleet Professor of Future Chips at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), “Going green means different things to different people. For companies, going green means making a profit by selling equipment and services that allow one’s customers to be more efficient and reduce costs.”

“I’m doing both of those, but I’m also trying to make an LED that literally shines green light,” he said.

First discovered in the 1920s, LEDs are semiconductors that convert electricity into light.

When switched on, swarms of electrons pass through the semiconductor material and fall from an area with surplus electrons into an area with a shortage of electrons.

As they fall, the electrons jump to a lower orbital and release small amounts of energy. This energy is realized as photons – the most basic unit of light.

Unlike conventional light bulbs, LEDs produce almost no heat.

The color of light produced by LEDs depends on the type of semiconductor material it contains.

“We have high-performance red LEDs, we have high-performance blue LEDs, and if we paired them with a high-performance green LED we would be able to produce every color visible to the human eye – including true white,” said Wetzel.

“Every computer monitor and television produces its picture by using red, blue, and green. That means developing a high-performance green LED would likely lead to a new generation of high-performance, energy-efficient display devices,” he added.

“The problem, however, is that green LEDs are much more difficult to create than I, or anyone else, imagined,” he explained.

Simple preliminary attempts to create green LEDs, by merely adding more indium (In) to the gallium nitride (GaN) materials that composed blue LEDs, were unsuccessful.

The resulting green LEDs just weren’t strong or bright enough to stand toe-to-toe with red or blue.

Wetzel and his research group have been working to tweak precisely how to add more indium, and how to grow the structure more carefully into a device, with the goal of boosting the strength and light output of green LEDs.

“They’re endeavoring, he said, to close the green gap,” said Wetzel.

Once they overcome the challenge of developing efficient green LEDs, Wetzel envisions LED technology will quickly evolve from its current applications in signs and small displays and grow into a universally adopted, globally used replacement for traditional light bulbs and compact fluorescence tubes. (ANI)

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Now, a smart home that can alert owner about a stove burner left on

September 3, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, Sep 3 (ANI): Ever thought that your home would tell if you have left a stove burner on after making your breakfast? Well, it is now possible, thanks to the new sensor-stuffed apartment created by researchers at Washington State University in Pullman.

The smart home, known as Casas, developed by Diane Cook and colleagues, can learn the ways of its inhabitants by observing their daily habits and how they use different appliances everyday.

The technology could be used in houses to support people with cognitive difficulties or dementia with their daily living needs, or to make things easier for healthy people.

For example, the apartment can recognise when a person is performing actions associated with making breakfast and can prompt them with audio and video signals to warm them of any anomaly like a stove left burning.

While Casas was developed to analyse the sensors’ output, Graduate student Parisa Rashidi has improved the system, so that it can learn a person’s habits without prior assumptions about what events or patterns to expect.

While previous smart homes used movie cameras to pre-define key activities before recognising them, the new system was successfully tested in a specially outfitted apartment with a single resident on campus.

It required around a month of training to accurately tease out the resident’s habits from the sea of sensor data, said Rashidi.

Once trained, Casas can identify patterns as complex as “at 6 am the kitchen light comes on, the coffee maker turns on, and the toaster turns on” without any prior knowledge of what to expect.

To maintain a resident’s sense of privacy Casas works without cameras, RFID chips or microphones.

Instead less “invasive” sensors that detect motion, temperature, light, humidity, water, door contact and the use of key items, such as opening a bottle of medication or switching on the toaster.

“We don’t want to give residents the feeling that Big Brother is watching them,” New Scientist quoted Rashidi as saying.

The researchers developed a number of data-mining algorithms to help make sense of the sensor output.

One algorithm uses a grid of motion sensors to map out how a person walks around the home, looking for daily “trajectories”, or routes through the house.

A second algorithm finds patterns in a sequence of events, such as learning to expect the resident to turn on a tap after turning on the oven.

And a third algorithm looks to correlate events it detects with the time of day to identify the pattern, for example, of when the person eats dinner.

Now the researchers are working on upgrades that allow the apartment to decipher the actions of multiple inhabitants and recognise subtle variations in commonly repeated tasks.

The study has been published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Systems Man and Cybernetics. (ANI)

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Pressmart Indonesia Print Media Awards launched

August 25, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Indonesia, Aug 24 (ANI/Business Wire India): Pressmart Media Ltd, (www.pressmart.com), a global leader in the digital publishing and delivery solutions, today announced the launch of “Pressmart-Indonesia Print Media Awards (IPMA)” in a bid to recognize the best publishing houses in Indonesia over the calendar year 2009, just after associating with the magazine publishers in Singapore, for its awards as the lead sponsor.

IPMA will be conferred annually starting February, 2010, is the exciting new competition created to promote magazines, tabloids and newspapers – both in print and digital and also encourage the publishing industry in Indonesia.

The Indonesian leading newspaper publisher’s association, Serikat Penerbit Suratkabar (SPS) Pusat will host the Pressmart-Indonesia Print Media Awards.

The nominations are open to the registered members of the SPS and all other publications in Indonesia. IPMA finalist entries will be put in front of jury members led by Pressmart, SPS and highly reputed industry experts from India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.

SPS Chairman, Dahlan Iskan said: “The Pressmart-Indonesia Print Media Awards are unique in recognizing excellence, innovation and outstanding creative output throughout the print media supply chain. These awards will set new benchmarks, bring new insights and most importantly be an ideal learning opportunity for publishing houses to succeed in today’s uncertain economy.”

“We are delighted to launch the first of its kind publishing awards in Indonesia,” said Sanjiv Gupta, Chairman and CEO of Pressmart.

“Most importantly, we want to recognize all of these inspirational print media houses and encourage the publishing industry in Indonesia for the amazing work that they do,” added Gupta. (ANI)

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Flexible high-resolution home theatre displays come closer to reality

August 21, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, August 21 (ANI): You may soon get to enjoy facilities like flexible high-resolution home theatre displays, wearable health monitors, and biomedical imaging devices because scientists are working on a novel process for creating new classes of lighting and display systems.

John Rogers, the Flory-Founder Chair Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois, has revealed that the new process is all about creating and assembling ultrathin, ultrasmall inorganic light-emitting diodes (LEDs) into large arrays offers new classes of lighting and display systems with interesting properties, such as see-through construction and mechanical flexibility.

He said that such properties would be impossible to achieve with existing technologies.

“Our goal is to marry some of the advantages of inorganic LED technology with the scalability, ease of processing and resolution of organic LEDs,” said Rogers.

Compared to their organic counterparts, inorganic LEDs are brighter, more robust and longer-lived.

Organic LEDs, however, are attractive because they can be formed on flexible substrates, in dense, interconnected arrays.

Rogers and his colleagues-including collaborators from Northwestern University, the Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore, and Tsinghua University in Beijing-say that the new technology combines features of both.

“By printing large arrays of ultrathin, ultrasmall inorganic LEDs and interconnecting them using thin-film processing, we can create general lighting and high-resolution display systems that otherwise could not be built with the conventional ways that inorganic LEDs are made, manipulated and assembled,” Rogers said.

To overcome requirements on device size and thickness associated with conventional wafer dicing, packaging and wire bonding methods, the researchers have developed epitaxial growth techniques for creating LEDs with sizes up to 100 times smaller than usual.

They have also developed printing processes for assembling these devices into arrays on stiff, flexible, and stretchable substrates.

To create an array, a rubber stamp contacts the wafer surface at selected points, lifts off the LEDs at those points, and transfers them to the desired substrate.

“The stamping process provides a much faster alternative to the standard robotic ‘pick and place’ process that manipulates inorganic LEDs one at a time. The new approach can lift large numbers of small, thin LEDs from the wafer in one step, and then print them onto a substrate in another step,” Rogers said.

The researcher says that shifting position and repeating the stamping process can transfer LEDs to other locations on the same substrate, and, in this fashion, large light panels and displays can be crafted from small LEDs made in dense arrays on a single, comparatively small wafer.

Given that the LEDs can be placed far apart and still provide sufficient light output, Rogers says that the panels and displays can be nearly transparent.

He even envisions the creation of flexible and even stretchable sheets of printed LEDs, which can have potential use in the health-care industry.

“Wrapping a stretchable sheet of tiny LEDs around the human body offers interesting opportunities in biomedicine and biotechnology, including applications in health monitoring, diagnostics and imaging,” Rogers said.

A research article describing the researchers’ work has been published in the journal Science. (ANI)

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China’s carbon emissions may peak around 2030

August 18, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

New Delhi, August 18 (ANI): A panel of experts have determined that China’s carbon emissions output could peak around 2030 if the government continues to be serious about “strengthened measures” to improve energy efficiency and if it accelerates exploration of renewable energy.

According to the panel from the National Development and Reform Commission and the Development Research Center of the State Council, with the right policies, emissions growth could slow after 2020, with a peak around 2030.

This is the first time a Chinese think-tank has officially announced when it thinks China’s carbon emissions will peak.

The international community has closely watched the country’s carbon emissions curve because China and the US are the top two carbon emissions countries in the world.

The panel has advised China to invest significantly in low-carbon technology research and development, saying the strategy of developing such technology is “a stone killing two birds”.

“Only by using advanced low-carbon technologies can China’s greenhouse gas emissions peak around 2030; otherwise, the peak will be delayed and we don’t want to see the latter scenario,” said Jiang Kejun, a leading economist of the panel.

If the peak happens around 2030, the huge investment in low-carbon technologies could keep China’s economy growing at a fast pace and make China a global leader in cutting-edge technologies.

“I think China will become a major supplier of nuclear, wind and hydropower technologies and electricity transmission by 2030,” said Jiang. “And that should be a strategic goal for the Chinese government to pursue,” he added.

If China can achieve these goals, by 2050, its carbon emissions from fossil fuel “could fall to the same emissions levels as in 2005 or even lower”, the report said.

Jiang said that the Chinese government has been “on the right track” in making policy decisions to develop low-carbon technologies as new economic growth engines while countries worldwide are working on a plan by October to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire in 2012. (ANI)

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‘India can sustain 8 to 9 per cent growth rate’

July 11, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

On Board special flight, July 11 (ANI): Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh has said India should be able to sustain with little bit difficulty growth rate of 8 to 9 per cent notwithstanding difficulties on the international front.

Addressing a press conference onboard after attending the G8-G5 summit at L’Aquila in Italy, Dr. Singh said, “India’s saving is 35 per cent with normal capital output 4:1. I am confident that India will come out of this crisis stronger, but it will be a difficult road to travel.”

“Our exports have suffered, capital flows from abroad have declined, and international bank lending to the developing countries have declined. Therefore, challenge for us is to sustain and revive the growth which we have built up in last five years notwithstanding the deterioration,” he added.

The Prime Minister further said: “All available indicators of 2009 points to weakening of US and European economies and therefore one can say that the global environment for development of the countries of third world has undergone on sharp deterioration.”

Earlier, Dr. Singh expressed confidence that the country can achieve eight to nine per cent growth rate in the coming two to three years and the government will be working to achieve it.

The Prime Minister emphasized that though the fiscal deficit is high, there is a need to rapidly expand economy, create jobs and resources for spending on flagship programmes on education, health, rural development and scope for expansion in infrastructure development. By Naveen Kapoor (ANI)

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Male seahorses prefer large females

July 8, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, July 8 (ANI): Swiss scientists have found that male seahorses have a strong preference for large females when it comes to selecting a mating partner.

According to Beat Mattle and Tony Wilson from the Zoological Museum at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, by being choosy and preferring large females, they are likely to have more and bigger eggs, as well as bigger offspring,

Seahorses have a unique mode of reproduction: male pregnancy. Male seahorses provide all post-fertilization parental care, yet despite the high levels of paternal investment, they have long been thought to have conventional sex roles, with females choosing mating partners and males competing for their attention.

However, clutch, egg and offspring size all increase with female body size in seahorses, suggesting that males may obtain fecundity benefits by mating with large-bodied females.

The researchers investigated the mating behaviour of the pot-bellied seahorse (Hippocampus abdominalis), concentrating on the importance of partner body size in mate selection.

A total of 10 female and 16 male sexually mature seahorses, obtained from a captive breeding facility in Tasmania, took part in the experiment.

Individuals of both sexes were presented with potential mating partners of different sizes. Mating preferences were quantified in terms of time spent courting each potential partner.

The researchers found striking differences in courtship behaviour between male and female seahorses, with choosy males and indiscriminate females.

Male seahorses were highly active and showed a clear preference for larger partners. In contrast, females were significantly less active and showed ambiguous mating preferences.

“The strong male preferences for large females demonstrated here suggest that sexual selection may act strongly on female body size in wild populations of H. abdominalis, consistent with predictions on the importance of female body size for reproductive output in this species,” the authors said.

The study has been published online in Springer’s journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. (ANI)

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Laser beam powered optical transistor may lead to ultrafast light-based computers

July 2, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, July 2 (ANI): Swiss researchers have made an optical transistor that uses one laser beam to control another, an instrument that could form the heart of a future generation of ultrafast light-based computers.

Conventional computers are based on transistors, which allow one electrode to control the current moving through the device and are combined to form logic gates and processors.

According to a report in New Scientist, the new component achieves the same thing, but for laser beams, not electric currents.

A green laser beam is used to control the power of an orange laser beam passing through the device.

This offers another possible route to light-based rather than electronic, computing.

Such “photonic” computing is desirable because components using optical fibres carrying light could be much faster than those using wires to carry electricity.

However, previous attempts to make optical transistors for such circuits only produced very weak effects.

The new device could change that.

To make their device, Vahid Sandoghdar and colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, suspended tetradecane, a hydrocarbon dye, in an organic liquid.

They then froze the suspension to -272 degrees Celsius using liquid helium – creating a crystalline matrix in which individual dye molecules could be targeted with lasers.

When a finely tuned orange laser beam is trained on a dye molecule, it efficiently soaks up most of it up – leaving a much weaker “output” beam to continue beyond the dye.

But when the molecule is also targeted with a green laser beam, it starts to produce strong orange light of its own and so boosts the power of the orange output beam.

This effect is down to the hydrocarbon molecule absorbing the green light, only to lose the equivalent energy in the form of orange light.

“That light constructively interferes with the incoming orange beam and makes it brighter,” said Sandoghar’s colleague Jaesuk Hwang.

Using the green beam to switch the orange output beam from weak to strong is analogous to the way a transistor’s control electrode switches a current between “on” and “off” voltages, and hence the 0s and 1s of digital data.

Doing it with a single molecule means billions could be packed into future photonic chips. (ANI)

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Rain prayers in Rajouri

July 2, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Rajouri, July 2 (ANI): Residents offered prayers for rains at a shrine in Jammu and Kashmir’s Rajouri District, putting all their hopes on divine intervention.

Situated near to the Line of Control (LoC) between India and Pakistan, the shrine of saint Sain Lal Din at Sorah Pani is said to cure all woes of devotees and fulfil all their wishes.

Devotees from the state and from outside are visiting the shrine with the hope that with god’s grace there shall be rain.

“There were prayers especially for the rain and for prosperity in the country. By the grace of god everything will be sorted out and nothing will remain unsolved,” said Ali Shah Bokhari, a resident.

Lack of rains has caused concerns among the people across the country. Thus, farmers are desperately seeking divine intervention.

The four-month (June-September) monsoon is the main source of water for irrigation in the country.

Ample rainfall helps agricultural output, which contributes a fifth of the country’s gross domestic product. (ANI)

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Shanghai firm rolls out antiviral drug to combat swine flu

June 27, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Shanghai, June 27 (ANI): A pharmaceutical company in Shanghai has rolled out the first batch of antiviral drugs to combat Influenza A (H1N1) virus, which is responsible for the swine flu pandemic around the world.

The Shanghai Pharmaceutical (Group) Co. Ltd. has manufactured 256,000 Oseltamivir Phosphate Capsules, after all the quality tests required were passed.

“The antiviral drug, or the Chinese version of Tamiflu by Swiss drugmaker Roche Holding, was first produced in 2005 to cope with the bird flu outbreak with the authorization of Roche,” said Xinhua quoted Wu Jianwen, president of Shanghai Pharmaceutical, as saying.

The Shanghai Pharmaceutical had closed down production of Oseltamivir Phosphate Capsules in 2007, however, following a call from the central government to combat the A(H1N1) flu, it resumed production of the pill in April 2009.

“Currently, we’ll be able to turn out 2 million pills per month, and we can expand the output capacity in the future if the flu epidemic shows new changes,” said Wu Jianwen.

According to the Chinese Ministry of Health, China has at least 570 confirmed cases of A(H1N1) flu, but no fatalities have been reported.

Meanwhile, China has also set up laboratory tests on the country’s first developed A(H1N1) flu vaccine, with the help of the seed virus that they have received from a World Health Organization (WHO) lab.

The vaccine will undergo a 14 day safety tests in labs and two-month of clinical tests from July. Subsequently, it is expected to be available in markets in September. (ANI)

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Prime Minister wants officials to keep an eye on Monsoon delay

June 23, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

New Delhi, June 23 (ANI): As a delayed monsoon creates concern for farm output, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has asked officials to monitor the situation closely on everyday basis.

Seasonal rains have stopped in the tracks near Mumbai in the absence of a strong surge. Generally, these rains should have covered most parts of the country by now.

PM has asked the Cabinet Secretary to convene a meeting of a Committee of Secretaries and to monitor the situation on a daily basis.

Earth Sciences Minister Prithviraj Chavan said the Prime Minister’s Office, through the Cabinet Secretariat, has been monitoring the monsoon on a daily basis.

Moreover, a meeting of agriculture secretaries of states that have not received any rains has been convened on Friday to take stock of the situation arising out of the delayed monsoon. (ANI)

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BBC’s appointment of Muslim as head of religious content panned by Church Synod

June 22, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, June 22(ANI): The BBC’s appointment of a Muslim head for its Channel 4 religious and ethical output, is being singled out for criticism by the members of General Synod, the parliament of the Church of England.

Members have complained to the BBC about the appointment of Aaqil Ahmed, claiming it to be a ‘worrying’ decision that could undermine BBC’s coverage of Cristianity.

Ahmed will be the first Muslim and only the second non-Christian in the role.

“Many of the Channel 4 programmes concerned with Christianity, in contrast to those featuring other faiths, seem to be of a sensationalist or unduly critical nature,” the Telegraph quoted Nigel Holmes, a Synod member, as saying.

“From this point of view it is worrying that the Channel 4 religion and multicultural commissioning editor, Aaqil Ahmed, who is a Muslim, is soon to be responsible for all the religious output from the BBC,” he added.

In the midst of complaints that Christians are now only portrayed as freaks, Anglicans will now vote on a motion condemning the decline of religious programming on the channel.

The motion is expected to attract the support of senior bishops when it is debated by the Synod next month.

Meanwhile, a BBC spokesman said that the corporation had an unequivocal commitment to religious broadcasting and said that Christians, as the majority UK faith, would remain its central audience. (ANI)

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How obesity increases diabetes risk

June 22, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, June 22 (ANI): Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have discovered how obesity makes a person more prone to diabetes, and why thin people can become insulin-resistant.

Led by Dr. Marc Montminy, a professor in the Clayton Foundation Laboratories for Peptide Biology, the study has shown how a condition known as ER (endoplasmic reticulum) stress triggers abnormal glucose production in the liver, an important step on the path to insulin resistance.

ER stress is induced by a high fat diet, and is overly activated in obese people.

In healthy people, a “fasting switch” only flips on glucose production when blood glucose levels run low during fasting.

“The existence of a second cellular signalling cascade-like an alternate route from A to B-that can modulate glucose production, presents the potential to identify new classes of drugs that might help to lower blood sugar by disrupting this alternative pathway,” Nature magazine quoted Montminy as saying.

However, not all obese people become insulin resistant, and insulin resistance occurs in non-obese individuals, which led researchers to suspect that fasting-induced glucose production was only half the story.
“When a cell starts to sense stress a red light goes on, which slows down the production of proteins. This process, which is known as ER stress response, is abnormally active in livers of obese individuals, where it contributes to the development of hyperglycemia, or high blood glucose levels. We asked whether chronic ER stress in obesity leads to abnormal activation of the fasting switch that normally controls glucose production in the liver,” said Montminy.

A transcriptional switch called CRTC2 turns on glucose production.

Normally, CRTC2 sits outside the nucleus waiting for the signal that allows it to slip inside and do its work and after entering the nucleus, it teams up with a protein called CREB and together they switch on the genes necessary to increase glucose output.

In insulin-resistant mice, however, the CRTC2 switch seems to get stuck in the “on” position, and the cells start churning out glucose like sugar factories in overdrive.

But when the conditions of ER stress were mimicked in mice, CRTC2 moved to the nucleus but failed to activate gluconeogenesis, and instead switched on genes important for combating stress and returning cells to health.

On closer inspection, the researchers found that in this scenario CRTC2 did not bind to CREB, but instead joined forces with another factor, called ATF6a.

However, it was found that the more ATF6a is bound to CRTC2, the less there is for CREB to bind to.

“This clever mechanism ensures that a cell in survival mode automatically shuts down glucose production, thus saving energy,” said a co-author of the study.

The researchers then found the levels of ATF6a to go down when ER stress was chronically activated, compromising the cells’ survival pathway and favouring the glucose production pathway.

Hyperglycemia wins in conditions of persistent stress.

“Our study helps to explain why obese people have a stronger tendency to become diabetic. When ER stress signaling is abnormal glucose output is actually increased,” said a co-author.

“It is possible that mutations in the highly conserved CRTC2 lead to a predisposition to inappropriate gluconeogenesis,” said Montminy.

The study has been published in the advance online edition of the journal Nature. (ANI)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: activation, advance, Alternate Route, ANI, atf, bind, biological, biology, blood, blood glucose levels, cell, Classes Of Drugs, Clayton, Clayton Foundation, co-author, condition, CREB, CRTC, Development, diabetes, diabetes risk, diet, Dr. Marc Montminy, edition, energy, existence, factor, Foundation, glucose, glucose production, Half The Story, Health, high blood glucose, High Blood Glucose Levels, hyperglycemia, inspection, institute, insulin, insulin resistance, Insulin Resistant, journal, June, liver, livers, London, magazine, mechanism, mode, Nature, nature magazine, nucleus, obese, obese individuals, obesity, Online, output, path, pathway, peptide, person, position, potential, predisposition, process, production, professor, protein, red-light, resistance, response, reticulum, risk, route, salk, salk institute for biological studies, scenario, signal, step, story, stress, stress response, study, sugar, survival, switch, tendency, transcriptional, work

Now obesity increases diabetes risk

June 22, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, June 22 (ANI): Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have discovered how obesity makes a person more prone to diabetes, and why thin people can become insulin-resistant.

ER stress is induced by a high fat diet, and is overly activated in obese people.

In healthy people, a “fasting switch” only flips on glucose production when blood glucose levels run low during fasting.

“When a cell starts to sense stress a red light goes on, which slows down the production of proteins. This process, which is known as ER stress response, is abnormally active in livers of obese individuals, where it contributes to the development of hyperglycemia, or high blood glucose levels. We asked whether chronic ER stress in obesity leads to abnormal activation of the fasting switch that normally controls glucose production in the liver,” said Montminy.

A transcriptional switch called CRTC2 turns on glucose production.

In insulin-resistant mice, however, the CRTC2 switch seems to get stuck in the “on” position, and the cells start churning out glucose like sugar factories in overdrive.

On closer inspection, the researchers found that in this scenario CRTC2 did not bind to CREB, but instead joined forces with another factor, called ATF6a.

However, it was found that the more ATF6a is bound to CRTC2, the less there is for CREB to bind to.

“This clever mechanism ensures that a cell in survival mode automatically shuts down glucose production, thus saving energy,” said a co-author of the study.

The researchers then found the levels of ATF6a to go down when ER stress was chronically activated, compromising the cells’ survival pathway and favouring the glucose production pathway.

Hyperglycemia wins in conditions of persistent stress.

“Our study helps to explain why obese people have a stronger tendency to become diabetic. When ER stress signaling is abnormal glucose output is actually increased,” said a co-author.

“It is possible that mutations in the highly conserved CRTC2 lead to a predisposition to inappropriate gluconeogenesis,” said Montminy.

The study has been published in the advance online edition of the journal Nature. (ANI)

Virtual model of sunspots may unlock Sun’s mysteries

June 20, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, June 19 (ANI): Scientists have created the first-ever comprehensive computer model of sunspots, a breakthrough that will help scientists unlock mysteries of the sun and its impacts on Earth.

Sunspots are associated with massive ejections of charged plasma that can cause geomagnetic storms and disrupt communications and navigational systems.

They are also linked to variations in solar output that can affect weather on Earth and exert a subtle influence on climate patterns.

“Understanding complexities in the solar magnetic field is key to ‘space weather’ forecasting,” said Richard Behnke of NSF’s (National Science Foundation’s) Division of Atmospheric Sciences.

“If we can model sunspots, we may be able to predict them and be better prepared for the potential serious consequences here on Earth of these violent storms on the sun,” he added.

Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., collaborated with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, building on a computer code that had been created at the University of Chicago.

“If you want to understand all the drivers of Earth’s atmospheric system, you have to understand how sunspots emerge and evolve. Our simulations will advance research into the inner workings of the sun as well as connections between solar output and Earth’s atmosphere,” said lead paper author Matthias Rempel.

Sunspots accompany intense magnetic activity that is associated with solar flares and massive ejections of plasma that can buffet Earth’s atmosphere.

The resulting damage to power grids, satellites and other sensitive technological systems takes an economic toll on a rising number of industries.

The new computer models capture pairs of sunspots with opposite polarity.

In striking detail, they reveal the dark central region, or umbra, with brighter umbral dots, as well as webs of elongated narrow filaments with flows of mass streaming away from the spots in the outer penumbral regions.

They also capture the convective flow and movement of energy that underlie the sunspots, and which are not directly detectable by instruments.

The models suggest that the magnetic fields within sunspots need to be inclined in certain directions in order to create such complex structures.

The researchers conclude that there is a unified physical explanation for the structure of sunspots in umbra and penumbra that’s the consequence of convection in a magnetic field with varying properties.

The simulations can help scientists decipher the mysterious, subsurface forces in the sun that cause sunspots.

Such work may lead to an improved understanding of variations in solar output and their impacts on Earth. (ANI)

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Anand Sharma keen to stabilise industrial production

May 29, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

New Delhi, May 29 (ANI): Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma today said that the Government would take every possible step to stabilise industrial production.

Talking to reporters here, Sharma said, “In the present climate, when economies across the world have been adversely affected and there is continuous fall in demand, we would like to ensure that every possible step is taken to ensure that industrial output remains stable.”

Sharma is taking charge of the trade ministry at a time when India’s exports have suffered a severe setback due to the global downturn.

The economy is also growing at a much slower pace.

For 2008-09, the GDP growth dropped to 6.7 per cent against nine per cent in the previous fiscal. (ANI)

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Sea cucumbers inspire sponge that absorbs CO2

May 16, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 16 (ANI): An Australian researcher has suggested that the porous structure of sea cucumbers could be the perfect model to create a sponge that absorbs C02 (carbon dioxide) and boosts hydrogen fuel production.

According to a report by ABC News, the researcher in question is Chemical engineer Dr Andrew Harris of the University of Sydney.

Australia’s main source of hydrogen currently comes from burning fossil fuels, which also releases C02.

Dr Harris said that the C02 released during this process could be absorbed by sponges made of calcium oxide.

Harris is using a group of marine creatures known as echinoderms, which includes starfish, sea urchins and sea cucumbers, as his source of inspiration.

He said that the creatures have an “awesome” calcium carbonate skeleton, ideal for absorbing C02, which he hopes to mimic the structure to produce a synthetic sponge.

Harris said that removing carbon dioxide from the combustion process dramatically increases the output of hydrogen from 50 percent to 80 percent of the total volume.

To carry out their research, Harris and his team have been awarded a research grant from European Energy Company E.ON.

They will investigate materials like silicon carbide and alumina to build synthetic sponges, which would be grafted with calcium oxide to absorb the C02.

To keep them cost effective, the C02 would have to be re-released so the sponges can be used again.

“You want to be able to use the calcium oxide again and again. It’s prohibitively expensive to mine calcium oxide just to mop up C02,” said Harris. (ANI)

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‘Spooky action’ to distinguish between two similar quantum devices

May 2, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, April 28 (ANI): Physicists are using the phenomenon dubbed as ‘spooky action’ to distinguish between two similar quantum devices.

‘Quantum ghosts’ are far distant particles that can somehow ‘talk’ to each other, a theory put forward by famous scientist Albert Einstein, who called it ‘spooky action at a distance’.

Having confirmed its existence, scientists today are learning how to use this ‘spooky action’ as a helpful tool.

Now, a team of physicists at the University of Bristol and Imperial College London have harnessed this phenomenon to shed light on another unusual and previously difficult aspect of quantum physics – that of distinguishing between two similar quantum devices.

In the everyday world, any process can be considered as a black box device with an input and an output.

If you wish to identify the device you simply apply inputs, measure the outputs and determine what must have happened in between.

But, quantum black boxes are different.

Distinguishing between them is impossible using only single particle inputs because the outputs are not distinguishable: a fundamental consequence of the laws of quantum mechanics is that only very few states of a quantum particle can be reliably distinguished from one another.

The Bristol-Imperial team has shown how to get around this problem using ‘spooky action’.

According to Anthony Laing, PhD student in the Department of Physics, who performed the study, “Apart from providing insight into the fundamentals of quantum physics, this work may be crucial for future quantum technologies.”

“How else could a future quantum engineer build a quantum computer if they can’t tell which circuits they have?” he explained.

The new findings have implications for our understanding of quantum mechanics as well as the emerging potential of quantum information science. (ANI)

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Mars exploration rover Spirit resumes driving

April 26, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Apr 25 (ANI): For the first time since April 8, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit went on a drive on April 23.

The drive took Spirit about 1.7 meters (5.6 feet) toward destinationsbout 150 meters (about 500 feet) away.

The engineers facilitated the drive while they investigate bouts of amnesia and other unusual behaviour exhibited by Spirit in the past two weeks.

Already, the rover has operated more than 20 times longer than its original prime mission on Mars.

This week, rover engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., judged that it would be safe to send Spirit commands for Thursday’s drive.

The engineers were thinking if the rover experience another amnesia event, the day’s outcome could be helpful in diagnosing those events.

Thrice in the past two weeks, Spirit has failed to record data from a day’s activity period into non-volatile flash memory, which is a type of computer memory where information is preserved even when power is off, such as when the rover naps to conserve power.

“We expect we will see more of the amnesia events, and we want to learn more about them when we do,” said JPL’s Sharon Laubach, chief of the rover sequencing team, which develops and checks each day’s set of commands.

Researchers are also investigating two other types of problems Spirit has experienced recently- failing to wake up for three consecutive communication sessions about two weeks ago and rebooting its computer on April 11, 12 and 18.

However, engineers have not yet found any causal links among these three types of events.

Last week, the researchers checked whether moving the rover’s high-gain antenna could trigger problems, but routine communication via that dish antenna resumed on April 20.

Spirit has maintained stable power and thermal conditions throughout the problem events this month, although power output by its solar panels has been significantly reduced since mid-2007 by dust covering the panels.

“We decided not to wait until finishing the investigations before trying to drive again. Given Spirit’s limited power and the desire to make progress toward destinations to the south, there would be risks associated with not driving,” said Laubach.

Researchers have made a change in Spirit’s daily routine in order to help in the diagnostic work if the rover experiences another failure to record data into flash memory. (ANI)

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