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YOU NEED NOT DIE FROM CANCER - CURE IS HERE

2012-03-04T00:34:00.001+05:30

YOU NEED NOT DIE FROM CANCER - CURE IS HERE

WHY DIE FROM CANCER

Cancer Treatment:

ALWAYS EAT FRESH FRUIT ON AN EMPTY STOMACH,

A highly interesting article.

Dr Stephen Mak told that he treats terminal cancer patients in an "un-orthodox" way, and many patients recovered. He explained that before he uses solar energy to clear the illnesses of his patients, he believes on natural healing in the body against illnesses.

See the article below

Dear Shereen,

Thanks for the email on fruits and juices. It's one of the strategies to heal cancer. Lately, my success rate in curing cancer is about 80%. Cancer patients shouldn't die. The cure for cancer has already been found, whether you believe it or not.

I am sorry for the hundreds of cancer patients who die under the conventional treatments. Very few live for 5 years under conventional treatments, and most live for only about 2 to 3 years... The conventional treatments don't make any difference, because most cancer patients also live for about 2 to 3 years without any treatment. It is difficult to cure cancer patients who've undergone chemo and radiotherapy, as their cells are toxic and weak. When there is a relapse, the cancer spreads very fast, as the resistance is poor.

Thanks, and God bless.

Dr Stephen Mak

EATING FRESH FRUITS

This is very informative!

We all think eating fruit means just buying fruit, cutting it up and popping it into our mouths. It's not that easy. It's important to know how and when to eat fruit.

What's the correct way to eat fruit?

IT MEANS NOT EATING FRUIT AFTER A MEAL! FRUIT SHOULD BE EATEN ON AN EMPTY STOMACH.

Eating fruit like that plays a major role in detoxifying your system, supplying you with a great deal of energy for weight loss and other life activities...

FRUIT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT FOOD.

Let's say you eat two slices of bread, then a slice of fruit. The slice of fruit is ready to go straight through the stomach into the intestines, but it's prevented from doing so.

In the meantime, the whole meal rots and ferments, and turns to acid. The minute the fruit comes into contact with the food in the stomach, and digestive juices, the entire mass of food begins to spoil.

Eat your fruit on an empty stomach, or before your meal! You've heard people complain: Every time I eat watermelon I burp, when I eat durian my stomach bloats, when I eat a banana I feel like running to the toilet, etc. This will not happen if you eat the fruit on an empty stomach. Fruit mixes with the putrefying other food and produces gas. Hence, you bloat!

Graying hair, balding, nervous outburst, and dark circles under the eyes - all of these will NOT happen if you eat fruit on an empty stomach.

There's no such thing as some fruits, like orange and lemon are acidic, because all fruit becomes alkaline in our body, according to Dr. Herbert Shelton who did research on this matter. If you have mastered the correct way of eating fruit, you have the Secret of Beauty, Longevity, Health, Energy, Happiness and normal weight.

When you need to drink fruit juice drink only fresh fruit juice, NOT from the cans. Don't drink juice that has been heated. Don't eat cooked fruit; you don't get the nutrients at all. You get only the taste... Cooking destroys all of the vitamins.

Eating a whole fruit is better than drinking the juice. If you should drink the juice, drink it mouthful by mouthful slowly, because you must let it mix with your saliva before swallowing it. You can go on a 3-day fruit-fast to cleanse your body. Eat fruit and drink fruit juice for just 3 days, and you will be surprised when your friends say how radiant you look!

KIWI: Tiny but mighty, and a good source of potassium, magnesium, vitamin E & fiber. Its vitamin C content is twice that of an orange!

AN APPLE a day keeps the doctor away? Although an apple has a low vitamin C content, it has antioxidants & flavonoids which enhances the activity of vitamin C, thereby helping to lower the risk of colon cancer, heart attack & stroke.

STRAWBERRY: Protective Fruit. Strawberries have the highest total antioxidant power among major fruits & protect the body from cancer-causing, blood vessel-clogging free radicals.

EATING 2 - 4 ORANGES a day may help keep colds away, lower cholesterol, prevent & dissolve kidney stones, and reduce the risk of colon cancer.

WATERMELON: Coolest thirst quencher. Composed of 92% water, it is also packed with a giant dose of glutathione, which helps boost our immune system. Also a key source of lycopene, the cancer-fighting oxidant. Also found in watermelon: Vitamin C & Potassium...

GUAVA & PAPAYA: Top awards for vitamin C. They are the clear winners for their high vitamin C content. Guava is also rich in fiber, which helps prevent constipation. Papaya is rich in carotene, good for your eyes...

Drinking Cold water after a meal = Cancer!

Can u believe this? For those who like to drink cold water, this applies to you. It's nice to have a cold drink after a meal, however, the cold water will solidify the oily stuff that you've just consumed, which slows digestion. Once this 'sludge' reacts with the acid, it will break down and be absorbed by the intestine faster than the solid food. It will line the intestine. Very soon, this will turn into fats and lead to cancer... It is best to drink hot soup or warm water after a meal.

A serious note about heart attacks.

HEART ATTACK PROCEDURE

Women should know that not every heart attack symptom is going to be the left arm hurting. Be aware of intense pain in the jaw. You may never have the first chest pain during the course of a heart attack. Nausea and intense sweating are also common symptoms. Sixty percent of people who have a heart attack while they're asleep do not wake up. Pain in the jaw can wake you from a sound sleep. Be careful, and be aware. The more we know, the better our chance to survive.

A cardiologist said if everyone who gets this mail sends it to 10 people, you can be sure that we'll save at least one life.

It may even be your own life!

Natural remedies for the 15 most common aches, pains, and health complaints

2012-03-04T00:19:00.001+05:30

Natural remedies for the 15 most common aches, pains, and health complaints

Is the economy beating you up? It’s time to get creative. Next time you have an ache or pain, forget about a costly trip to the drugstore and test-drive some of your grandmother’s remedies instead. It’ll save money and be gentler on your body and the environment. Recessionistas (and gents), welcome to the DIY medicine cabinet.

1. Stop Bleeding

You’d think it would burn, but a sprinkle of cayenne pepper on a cut will quickly stop the bleeding and actually relieve the pain.

2. Toothache

There’s nothing so bad as the shooting pain of a toothache. You don’t want to ignore a tooth problem, because an infection that close to your brain can be extremely dangerous if it spreads. But in order to reduce swelling and pain while you wait for a dentist appointment, try putting a few drops of clove oil on your tooth and gums, and bite down on a smashed piece of garlic (which has excellent antibacterial properties). This has always worked for me.

3. Rashes and Allergies

Prescription and OTC antihistamines can cause some serious side effects. Before you head for the strong stuff, try green tea, which contains compounds with antihistamine properties. You’ll need to drink 2-3 cups a day to get the full effect.

4. Athlete’s Foot

It’s a foot fungus, and it stinks. Air those piggies, then soak them in salty water, wash them with garlic juice, or soak them with diluted white or apple cider vinegar. All of these things will help kill the fungus.

But you have to be persistent, consistent, and diligent: No matter what treatment you use, do it a few times a day and stick with it until at least a week after you think the symptoms are gone! Fungus excels at hiding out and coming back when you least expect it.

5. Acne and Sensitive Skin

First, you really have to look at your lifestyle, because imbalances in your health can show up in your skin. But in the meantime, wash your face with oatmeal. It’s a gentle exfoliant and draws out oil and impurities.

6. Ear Infections

Ear infections can become quite serious and cause permanent damage, so please see a doctor if your ear ache has become severe.

But if you feel like your infection is mild and at the beginning stages, put a few drops of garlic oil or white vinegar into your ear canal and lay down on the opposite side to let those drops do their work. Garlic and vinegar create an environment that won’t support the bacteria causing the infection. Repeat a few times a day until the symptoms disappear. (If your symptoms last longer than a few days, you should definitely see a doctor!)

7. Sore Muscles and Bruises

After a hard afternoon of rowing with a friend, I resigned myself to a few days of burning muscles and soreness. But my friend saved the day with a tube of arnica cream. He rubbed it on my shoulders and voila, instant relief and absolutely no aches the next day. The humble arnica flower makes an incredible cream that no medicine cabinet should be without. Use it immediately to speed up the healing of bruises, sprains, sore muscles, and other general aches.

8. Flatulence

Some foods, like beans and raw veggies, are more likely to cause gas, but if you find flatulence to be too common of an occurrence, try taking a digestive enzyme with your meals. You can find these at any health food store.

In the meantime, make use of digestive spices such as ginger, anise, peppermint, coriander, and dill. You can make tea with these ingredients or incorporate them into your food.

9. Dandruff

Have you looked at the ingredients in dandruff shampoo? It seems like they contain almost everything in theToxic Ingredients You Must Avoid list. Better to try something natural first before resorting to chemicals. Many people swear by rubbing aloe vera gel onto the scalp (leave it on for 20 minutes than rinse it out). This will certainly help with dry, itchy scalp.

Another remedy is a rinse with apple cider vinegar. Try these remedies a few times before deciding if they work for you. Even dandruff shampoo requires regular use to see results, so give the natural stuff a chance!

10. Headache and Migraine

Try rubbing peppermint or lavender oil on your temples and the base of your neck; sniffing these oils may also help.

Rub a fresh cut lemon or lime on your forehead. Feverfew is a good herbal remedy for headaches.

Have a little caffeine by way of green tea, and don’t forget to use an ice pack for 20 minutes to dull the throbbing.

11. Indigestion and Heartburn

It almost goes without saying – but consider why you’re getting heartburn in the first place. Did you overeat? Too much grease or spicy food? Eating late at night? Scout out the cause and try to stop this before it happens. Then, put down the antacids.

The belching, bloat, and heartburn caused by indigestion come about because you don’t have enough stomach acid to do the job right. A spoonful or two of apple cider vinegar will help break down the excess food that is causing you trouble and bring your stomach back to balance.

12. Constipation

First, drink more water and eat more fruit and salads. You’re backed up for a reason and taking lots of laxatives is not the answer. Meanwhile, drinking a few teaspoons of olive oil mixed with a bit of orange or (diluted) lemon juice can help things get moving.

Another surefire remedy is 1/4 teaspoon of epsom salts drunk in 1/2 a glass of water. Sometimes calorie restriction or avoidance of healthy fats (such as the good fats found in fish, nuts, and avocados) can worsen constipation.

And though it’s counterintuitive, some people relieve their constipation by actually cutting back on grain consumption! True, grains contain fiber, but some people don’t digest grains very well. Other causes of constipation include stress, depression, inactivity, and nutritional deficiencies. If your constipation is chronic, it may be a sign of a more serious problem, so please seek medical advice and adjust your lifestyle.

13. Sore Throat

Sore, scratchy throats are usually a sign of a cold or flu coming on, so you don’t want to ignore this symptom, but you can relieve the pain by gargling with warm salt water a few times a day and then drinking a soothing honey-lemon tea.

14. Burns

So you bumped up against the stove again? Ouch. Rinse first with cold water, but then immediately applyaloe vera gel to the burn.

For those of us who don’t have aloe in the house, slice a potato and rub its cool, soothing juices all over the burn.

And honey, with its antibacterial properties, is also good topical ointment. If you can catch the burn immediately, mustard is also reportedly a great salve.

15. Nausea

The classic cure for nausea or carsickness is ginger tea or candied ginger. You can chew on the stuff raw, if you like, but it’s so spicy and strong it might just make you feel worse.

Sniffing real peppermint or lavender oil can also help.

Give some of these remedies a try – and share your own tried-and-true treatments, too.

source: http://ecosalon.com/

SABAH SNAKE GRASS...CURE CANCER !!!

2012-03-04T00:04:00.002+05:30

SABAH SNAKE GRASS...CURE CANCER !!

Sabah Snake Grass

Good News!!!

Recently, I met a man who had Lymphatic Cancer - Stage 4 with 123 lymph nodes affected. His cancer started in March 2008.

Affected parts: 1st: Right lung, 2nd: Left lung, 3rd: Groin, 4th: Eye and 5th Mouth.

After 9 chemo therapies he stopped the treatment on 10/11/2008 because 5 specialists said he can only survive for 3 months. Today, after more than 2 years, he has recovered and is still living. Thanks to the Sabah Snake Grass (Clinacanthus) which he planted outside his house.

He blended the leaves with green apple (minus skin and seeds) and drank them after breakfast everyday.

After 3 days, 6 tumours disappeared.

After 13 days, he went for a blood test.The oncologist said that he was 96% cured.

So far more than 200 people who had taken the herbs showed improvement.

Case 1) Man - age 54

Lung Cancer: 3rd stage.

Chemothrapy 6 times

Tumour before taking Sabah Snake Grass 29mm, 44mm, 76mm

Tumour two weeks after taking Sabah Snake Grass

reduced to 20mm, 27mm, 67mm respectively

Case 2) Woman

Uterus cancer – tumour size 6cm

Scheduled for surgery. After taking SSG, reduced to 3.5cm.

Doctor said no need to operate

Continue taking the SSG, the tumour disappeared.

Case 3) Man

Prostate Cancer

After taking SSG for 11 days, the tumour disappeared.

Case 4) Woman from KL

Breast and Lung Cancer

Both breasts removed - 4 stage. Very weak, cannot eat, on drip and lying in hospital.

Family member poured SSG juice into her mouth through tube.

After a few days, could eat and was discharged.

28 days later was all tumours disappeared.

Case 5) Woman from Taiping

Breast Cancer

After taking SSG for 3 days, the wound dried up.

Case 6) Leukemia Patients

So far 4 cases have been cured after drinking SSG juice.

They also drank juice from 3 leaves of Guo Sai Por

(Ti Tham Tou) once per week.

Case 7) Dialysis Patients

After taking SSG for 10 days, stopped going for dialysis treatment.

Case 8) Patients with High Cholesterol, High Blood, High Uric Acid and Diabetes

After taking SSG, the conditions improved.

Number of leaves used for treatment for Cancer:

Stage 1 : 30 leaves everyday

Stage 2 : 50 leaves everyday

Stage 3 : 100 leaves everyday

Stage 4 : 150 – 200 leaves everyday

When the patients get better, reduce the number of leaves.

Direction for juicing SSG

a) Pour half cup of clean water in a blender

b) Add 1 or 2 ice cubes to prevent heating during blending

c) Add 1 quarter of lemon or half a lime juice (provide Vitamin C and prevent oxidization )

d) Wash the required fresh SSG leaves and put them into the blender

e) Peel a green apple and remove the core/seeds

f ) Cut the apple into 8 pieces

g) Put in the pieces of apple

h) Blend and drink immediately or within 5 minutes. (consume daily)

I ) If your body is "cooling" add a few slices of ginger or drink warming herbs

I stay in Bandar Kinrara, Puchong, Selangor, Malaysia. If you have problem getting the SSG, email or sms me. I can get them from Seremban. You only need to pay for my transportation from KL to Seremban and back, cost of the plants and postage if necessary. I need your name, address, h/p no. and the patient's condition and type of cancer.

Food to avoid : Sugar and products made with sugar, honey, kembong fish, ray fish, 7 angled-fish, chicken meat, duck meat, yam, glutenous rice, margarine, durians, bird nest, ginseng and other rejuvenating herbs.

Besides SSG, papaya, apricot seeds, lemon grass and many types of fresh raw vegetable and fruit juices can also be used for treating cancer.

I believe all chronic diseases can be cured with the combination of detoxification, maintaing blood Ph 7.35-7.4, increasing body oxygen, eating natural nutrients and herbs, a healthy lifestyle and good eating habits.There are quite a number of patients with cancer and other chronic diseases recovering and got cured based on my coaching above and natural treatments.

So if you are having any chronic diseases and need coaching and alternative treatments, please contact me.

For more information on health, health talk, coaching and natural treatments, please read my postings.

Nails and Health: Read the Signs

2012-03-03T23:55:00.003+05:30

Below is only a guide, consult you doctor if in doubt

Did you know your nails can reveal clues to your overall health? A touch of white here, a rosy tinge there, or some rippling or bumps may be a sign of disease in the body. Problems in the liver, lungs, and heart can show up in your nails. Keep reading to learn what secrets your nails might reveal.

Pale Nails

Very pale nails are sometimes linked to aging. But they can also be a sign of serious illness, such as:

· Anemia

· Congestive heart failure
· Diabetes
· Liver disease
· Malnutrition

White Nails

If the nails are mostly white with darker rims, this can indicate liver problems, such as hepatitis. In this image, you can see the fingers are also jaundiced, another sign of liver trouble.

Yellow Nails

One of the most common causes of yellow nails is a fungal infection. As the infection worsens, the nail bed may retract, and nails may thicken and crumble. In rare cases, yellow nails can indicate a more serious condition such as severe thyroid disease or psoriasis.

Bluish Nails

Nails with a bluish tint can mean the body isn’t getting enough oxygen. This could indicate an infection in the lungs, such as pneumonia.

Rippled Nails

If the nail surface is rippled or pitted, this may be an early sign of psoriasis or inflammatory arthritis. Psoriasis is a skin condition that starts in the nails 10% of the time.

Cracked or Split Nails

Dry, brittle nails that frequently crack or split have been linked to thyroid disease. Cracking or splitting combined with a yellowish hue is more likely due to a fungal infection.

Puffy Nail Fold

If the skin around the nail appears red and puffy, this is known as inflammation of the nail fold. It may be the result of lupus or another connective tissue disorder.

Dark Lines Beneath the Nail

Dark lines beneath the nail should be investigated as soon as possible. They are sometimes caused by melanoma, the most dangerous type of skin cancer..

Gnawed Nails

Biting your nails may be nothing more than an old habit, but in some cases it’s a sign of persistent anxiety that could benefit from treatment. Nail biting or picking has also been linked to obsessive-compulsive disorder. If you can’t stop, it’s worth discussing with your doctor.

Nails Are Only Part of the Puzzle

Though nail changes accompany many conditions, these changes are rarely the first sign. And many nail abnormalities are harmless -- not everyone with white nails has hepatitis. If you’re concerned about the appearance of your nails, see a dermatologist .

Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens

2012-02-14T20:29:00.008+05:30

Image: Raygun Studio

The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse. It can see millions of colors, adjust easily to shifting light conditions, and transmit information to the brain at a rate exceeding that of a high-speed Internet connection.

But why stop there?

In the Terminator movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character sees the world with data superimposed on his visual field—virtual captions that enhance the cyborg’s scan of a scene. In stories by the science fiction author Vernor Vinge, characters rely on electronic contact lenses, rather than smartphones or brain implants, for seamless access to information that appears right before their eyes.

These visions (if I may) might seem far-fetched, but a contact lens with simple built-in electronics is already within reach; in fact, my students and I are already producing such devices in small numbers in my laboratory at the University of Washington. These lenses don’t give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet. But we have built a lens with one LED, which we’ve powered wirelessly with RF. What we’ve done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology.

Conventional contact lenses are polymers formed in specific shapes to correct faulty vision. To turn such a lens into a functional system, we integrate control circuits, communication circuits, and miniature antennas into the lens using custom-built optoelectronic components. Those components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye, such as words, charts, and photographs. Much of the hardware is semitransparent so that wearers can navigate their surroundings without crashing into them or becoming disoriented. In all likelihood, a separate, portable device will relay displayable information to the lens’s control circuit, which will operate the optoelectronics in the lens.

These lenses don’t need to be very complex to be useful. Even a lens with a single pixel could aid people with impaired hearing or be incorporated as an indicator into computer games. With more colors and resolution, the repertoire could be expanded to include displaying text, translating speech into captions in real time, or offering visual cues from a navigation system. With basic image processing and Internet access, a contact-lens display could unlock whole new worlds of visual information, unfettered by the constraints of a physical display.

Besides visual enhancement, noninvasive monitoring of the wearer’s biomarkers and health indicators could be a huge future market. We’ve built several simple sensors that can detect the concentration of a molecule, such as glucose. Sensors built onto lenses would let diabetic wearers keep tabs on blood-sugar levels without needing to prick a finger. The glucose detectors we’re evaluating now are a mere glimmer of what will be possible in the next 5 to 10 years. Contact lenses are worn daily by more than a hundred million people, and they are one of the only disposable, mass-market products that remain in contact, through fluids, with the interior of the body for an extended period of time. When you get a blood test, your doctor is probably measuring many of the same biomarkers that are found in the live cells on the surface of your eye—and in concentrations that correlate closely with the levels in your bloodstream. An appropriately configured contact lens could monitor cholesterol, sodium, and potassium levels, to name a few potential targets. Coupled with a wireless data transmitter, the lens could relay information to medics or nurses instantly, without needles or laboratory chemistry, and with a much lower chance of mix-ups.

Three fundamental challenges stand in the way of building a multipurpose contact lens. First, the processes for making many of the lens’s parts and subsystems are incompatible with one another and with the fragile polymer of the lens. To get around this problem, my colleagues and I make all our devices from scratch. To fabricate the components for silicon circuits and LEDs, we use high temperatures and corrosive chemicals, which means we can’t manufacture them directly onto a lens. That leads to the second challenge, which is that all the key components of the lens need to be miniaturized and integrated onto about 1.5 square centimeters of a flexible, transparent polymer. We haven’t fully solved that problem yet, but we have so far developed our own specialized assembly process, which enables us to integrate several different kinds of components onto a lens. Last but not least, the whole contraption needs to be completely safe for the eye. Take an LED, for example. Most red LEDs are made of aluminum gallium arsenide, which is toxic. So before an LED can go into the eye, it must be enveloped in a biocompatible substance.

So far, besides our glucose monitor, we’ve been able to batch-fabricate a few other nanoscale biosensors that respond to a target molecule with an electrical signal; we’ve also made several microscale components, including single-crystal silicon transistors, radio chips, antennas, diffusion resistors, LEDs, and silicon photodetectors. We’ve constructed all the micrometer-scale metal interconnects necessary to form a circuit on a contact lens. We’ve also shown that these microcomponents can be integrated through a self-assembly process onto other unconventional substrates, such as thin, flexible transparent plastics or glass. We’ve fabricated prototype lenses with an LED, a small radio chip, and an antenna, and we’ve transmitted energy to the lens wirelessly, lighting the LED. To demonstrate that the lenses can be safe, we encapsulated them in a biocompatible polymer and successfully tested them in trials with live rabbits.

Photos: University of Washington

Second Sight:

In recent trials, rabbits wore lenses containing metal circuit structures for 20 minutes at a time with no adverse effects.

Seeing the light—LED light—is a reasonable accomplishment. But seeing something useful through the lens is clearly the ultimate goal. Fortunately, the human eye is an extremely sensitive photodetector. At high noon on a cloudless day, lots of light streams through your pupil, and the world appears bright indeed. But the eye doesn’t need all that optical power—it can perceive images with only a few microwatts of optical power passing through its lens. An LCD computer screen is similarly wasteful. It sends out a lot of photons, but only a small fraction of them enter your eye and hit the retina to form an image. But when the display is directly over your cornea, every photon generated by the display helps form the image.

The beauty of this approach is obvious: With the light coming from a lens on your pupil rather than from an external source, you need much less power to form an image. But how to get light from a lens? We’ve considered two basic approaches. One option is to build into the lens a display based on an array of LED pixels; we call this an active display. An alternative is to use passive pixels that merely modulate incoming light rather than producing their own. Basically, they construct an image by changing their color and transparency in reaction to a light source. (They’re similar to LCDs, in which tiny liquid-crystal ”shutters” block or transmit white light through a red, green, or blue filter.) For passive pixels on a functional contact lens, the light source would be the environment. The colors wouldn’t be as precise as with a white-backlit LCD, but the images could be quite sharp and finely resolved.

We’ve mainly pursued the active approach and have produced lenses that can accommodate an 8-by-8 array of LEDs. For now, active pixels are easier to attach to lenses. But using passive pixels would significantly reduce the contact’s overall power needs—if we can figure out how to make the pixels smaller, higher in contrast, and capable of reacting quickly to external signals.

By now you’re probably wondering how a person wearing one of our contact lenses would be able to focus on an image generated on the surface of the eye. After all, a normal and healthy eye cannot focus on objects that are fewer than 10 centimeters from the corneal surface. The LEDs by themselves merely produce a fuzzy splotch of color in the wearer’s field of vision. Somehow the image must be pushed away from the cornea. One way to do that is to employ an array of even smaller lenses placed on the surface of the contact lens. Arrays of such microlenses have been used in the past to focus lasers and, in photolithography, to draw patterns of light on a photoresist. On a contact lens, each pixel or small group of pixels would be assigned to a microlens placed between the eye and the pixels. Spacing a pixel and a microlens 360 micrometers apart would be enough to push back the virtual image and let the eye focus on it easily. To the wearer, the image would seem to hang in space about half a meter away, depending on the microlens.

Another way to make sharp images is to use a scanning microlaser or an array of microlasers. Laser beams diverge much less than LED light does, so they would produce a sharper image. A kind of actuated mirror would scan the beams from a red, a green, and a blue laser to generate an image. The resolution of the image would be limited primarily by the narrowness of the beams, and the lasers would obviously have to be extremely small, which would be a substantial challenge. However, using lasers would ensure that the image is in focus at all times and eliminate the need for microlenses.

Whether we use LEDs or lasers for our display, the area available for optoelectronics on the surface of the contact is really small: roughly 1.2 millimeters in diameter. The display must also be semitransparent, so that wearers can still see their surroundings. Those are tough but not impossible requirements. The LED chips we’ve built so far are 300 µm in diameter, and the light-emitting zone on each chip is a 60-µm-wide ring with a radius of 112 µm. We’re trying to reduce that by an order of magnitude. Our goal is an array of 3600 10-µm-wide pixels spaced 10 µm apart.

One other difficulty in putting a display on the eye is keeping it from moving around relative to the pupil. Normal contact lenses that correct for astigmatism are weighted on the bottom to maintain a specific orientation, give or take a few degrees. I figure the same technique could keep a display from tilting (unless the wearer blinked too often!).

Like all mobile electronics, these lenses must be powered by suitable sources, but among the options, none are particularly attractive. The space constraints are acute. For example, batteries are hard to miniaturize to this extent, require recharging, and raise the specter of, say, lithium ions floating around in the eye after an accident. A better strategy is gathering inertial power from the environment, by converting ambient vibrations into energy or by receiving solar or RF power. Most inertial power scavenging designs have unacceptably low power output, so we have focused on powering our lenses with solar or RF energy.

Let’s assume that 1 square centimeter of lens area is dedicated to power generation, and let’s say we devote the space to solar cells. Almost 300 microwatts of incoming power would be available indoors, with potentially much more available outdoors. At a conversion efficiency of 10 percent, these figures would translate to 30 µW of available electrical power, if all the subsystems of the contact lens were run indoors.

Collecting RF energy from a source in the user’s pocket would improve the numbers slightly. In this setup, the lens area would hold antennas rather than photovoltaic cells. The antennas’ output would be limited by the field strengths permitted at various frequencies. In the microwave bands between 1.5 gigahertz and 100 GHz, the exposure level considered safe for humans is 1 milliwatt per square centimeter. For our prototypes, we have fabricated the first generation of antennas that can transmit in the 900-megahertz to 6-GHz range, and we’re working on higher-efficiency versions. So from that one square centimeter of lens real estate, we should be able to extract at least 100 µW, depending on the efficiency of the antenna and the conversion circuit.

Having made all these subsystems work, the final challenge is making them all fit on the same tiny polymer disc. Recall the pieces that we need to cram onto a lens: metal microstructures to form antennas; compound semiconductors to make optoelectronic devices; advanced complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor silicon circuits for low-power control and RF telecommunication; microelectromechanical system (MEMS) transducers and resonators to tune the frequencies of the RF communication; and surface sensors that are reactive with the biochemical environment.

The semiconductor fabrication processes we’d typically use to make most of these components won’t work because they are both thermally and chemically incompatible with the flexible polymer substrate of the contact lens. To get around this problem, we independently fabricate most of the microcomponents on silicon-on-insulator wafers, and we fabricate the LEDs and some of the biosensors on other substrates. Each part has metal interconnects and is etched into a unique shape. The end yield is a collection of powder-fine parts that we then embed in the lens.

We start by preparing the substrate that will hold the microcomponents, a 100-µm-thick slice of polyethylene terephthalate. The substrate has photolithographically defined metal interconnect lines and binding sites. These binding sites are tiny wells, about 10 µm deep, where electrical connections will be made between components and the template. At the bottom of each well is a minuscule pool of a low-melting-point alloy that will later join together two interconnects in what amounts to micrometer-scale soldering.

We then submerge the plastic lens substrate in a liquid medium and flow the collection of microcomponents over it. The binding sites are cut to match the geometries of the individual parts so that a triangular component finds a triangular well, a circular part falls into a circular well, and so on. When a piece falls into its complementary well, a small metal pad on the surface of the component comes in contact with the alloy at the bottom of the well, causing a capillary force that lodges the component in place. After all the parts have found their slots, we drop the temperature to solidify the alloy. This step locks in the mechanical and electrical contact between the components, the interconnects, and the substrate.

The next step is to ensure that all the potentially harmful components that we’ve just assembled are completely safe and comfortable to wear. The lenses we’ve been developing resemble existing gas-permeable contacts with small patches of a slightly less breathable material that wraps around the electronic components. We’ve been encapsulating the functional parts with poly(methyl methacrylate), the polymer used to make earlier generations of contact lenses. Then there’s the question of the interaction of heat and light with the eye. Not only must the system’s power consumption be very low for the sake of the energy budget, it must also avoid generating enough heat to damage the eye, so the temperature must remain below 45 °C. We have yet to investigate this concern fully, but our preliminary analyses suggest that heat shouldn’t be a big problem.

Photos: University of Washington

In Focus:

One lens prototype [left] has several interconnects, single-crystal silicon components, and compound-semiconductor components embedded within. Another sample lens [right] contains a radio chip, an antenna, and a red LED.

All the basic technologies needed to build functional contact lenses are in place. We’ve tested our first few prototypes on animals, proving that the platform can be safe. What we need to do now is show all the subsystems working together, shrink some of the components even more, and extend the RF power harvesting to higher efficiencies and to distances greater than the few centimeters we have now. We also need to build a companion device that would do all the necessary computing or image processing to truly prove that the system can form images on demand. We’re starting with a simple product, a contact lens with a single light source, and we aim to work up to more sophisticated lenses that can superimpose computer-generated high-resolution color graphics on a user’s real field of vision.

The true promise of this research is not just the actual system we end up making, whether it’s a display, a biosensor, or both. We already see a future in which the humble contact lens becomes a real platform, like the iPhone is today, with lots of developers contributing their ideas and inventions. As far as we’re concerned, the possibilities extend as far as the eye can see, and beyond.

The author would like to thank his past and present students and collaborators, especially Brian Otis, Desney Tan, and Tueng Shen, for their contributions to this research.

Shrinking Memory Bits a Million Times Through Antiferromagnetically Coupled Atoms

2012-02-14T20:16:00.003+05:30

Punctuating 30 years of nanotechnology research, scientists from IBM Research have successfully demonstrated the ability to store information in as few as 12 magnetic atoms. This is significantly less than today's disk drives, which use about one million atoms to store a single bit of information.

While silicon transistor technology has become cheaper, denser and more efficient, fundamental physical limitations suggest this path of conventional scaling is unsustainable. Alternative approaches are needed to continue the rapid pace of computing innovation. By taking a novel approach and beginning at the smallest unit of data storage, the atom, scientists demonstrated magnetic storage that is at least 100 times denser than today’s hard disk drives and solid state memory chips. Future applications of nanostructures built one atom at a time, and that apply an unconventional form of magnetism called antiferromagnetism, could allow people and businesses to store 100 times more information in the same space.

“The chip industry will continue its pursuit of incremental scaling in semiconductor technology but, as components continue to shrink, the march continues to the inevitable end point: the atom. We’re taking the opposite approach and starting with the smallest unit -- single atoms -- to build computing devices one atom at a time.” said Andreas Heinrich, the lead investigator into atomic storage at IBM Research – Almaden, in California.

This scanning tunneling microscope image shows a group of 12 iron atoms, the smallest magnetic memory bit ever made. Credit: IBM

IBM Scientists Create World's Smallest Magnetic Memory Bit, Paving The Way For 100 times denser HDDs and SSDs

Scientists from IBM Research have successfully demonstrated the ability to store information in as few as 12 magnetic atoms, a breakthough that could lead multiply the capacity of today's storage media.

For comparison, today's disk drives use about one million atoms to store a single bit of information.

While silicon transistor technology has become cheaper, denser and more efficient, fundamental physical limitations suggest this path of conventional scaling is unsustainable. Alternative approaches are needed to continue the rapid pace of computing innovation.

By taking a novel approach and beginning at the smallest unit of data storage, the atom, scientists demonstrated magnetic storage that is at least 100 times denser than today's hard disk drives and solid state memory chips. Future applications of nanostructures built one atom at a time, and that apply an unconventional form of magnetism called antiferromagnetism, could allow people and businesses to store 100 times more information in the same space.

"The chip industry will continue its pursuit of incremental scaling in semiconductor technology but, as components continue to shrink, the march continues to the inevitable end point: the atom. Were taking the opposite approach and starting with the smallest unit -- single atoms -- to build computing devices one atom at a time." said Andreas Heinrich, the lead investigator into atomic storage at IBM Research ? Almaden, in California.

How it Works

The most basic piece of information that a computer understands is a bit. Much like a light that can be switched on or off, a bit can have only one of two values: "1" or "0". Until now, it was unknown how many atoms it would take to build a reliable magnetic memory bit.

With properties similar to those of magnets on a refrigerator, ferromagnets use a magnetic interaction between its constituent atoms that align all their spins - the origin of the atoms' magnetism - in a single direction. Ferromagnets have worked well for magnetic data storage but a major obstacle for miniaturizing this down to atomic dimensions is the interaction of neighboring bits with each other. The magnetization of one magnetic bit can strongly affect that of its neighbor as a result of its magnetic field. Harnessing magnetic bits at the atomic scale to hold information or perform useful computing operations requires precise control of the interactions between the bits.

The scientists at IBM Research used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to atomically engineer a grouping of twelve antiferromagnetically coupled atoms that stored a bit of data for hours at low temperatures. Taking advantage of their inherent alternating magnetic spin directions, they demonstrated the ability to pack adjacent magnetic bits much closer together than was previously possible. This greatly increased the magnetic storage density without disrupting the state of neighboring bits.

Eureka! Kitchen Gadget Inspires Scientist to Make More Effective Plastic Electronics

2012-02-14T20:02:00.003+05:30

One day in 2010, Rutgers physicist Vitaly Podzorov watched a store employee showcase a kitchen gadget that vacuum-seals food in plastic. The demo stuck with him. The simple concept – an airtight seal around pieces of food – just might apply to his research: developing flexible electronics using lightweight organic semiconductors for products such as video displays or solar cells.

“Organic transistors, which switch or amplify electronic signals, hold promise for making video displays that bend like book pages or roll and unroll like posters,” said Podzorov. But traditional methods of fabricating a part of the transistor known as the gate insulator often end up damaging the transistor’s delicate semiconductor crystals.

Drawing inspiration from the food-storage gadget, Podzorov and his colleagues tried an experiment. They suspended a thin polymer membrane above the organic crystal and created a vacuum underneath, causing the membrane to collapse gently and evenly onto the crystal’s surface. The result: a smooth, defect-free interface between the organic semiconductor and the gate insulator.

The researchers reported their success in the journal Advanced Materials. In the article, Podzorov and three colleagues describe how a single-crystal organic field effect transistor (OFET) made with this thin polymer gate insulator boosted electrical performance. The researchers further reported that they could remove and reapply membranes to the same crystal several times without degrading its surface.

Organic transistors electrically resemble silicon transistors in computer chips, but they are made of flexible carbon-based molecules that can be printed on sheets of plastic. Silicon transistors are made in rigid, brittle wafers of silicon.

The methods that scientists previously applied to organic transistor fabrication were based on silicon semiconductor processing, explained Podzorov, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, School of Arts and Sciences. These involved high temperatures, high-energy plasmas or chemical reactions, all of which could damage the delicate organic crystal surface and hinder the transistor’s performance.

“People have tendencies to go with something they’ve known for a long time,” he said. “In this case, it doesn’t work right.”

Podzorov’s innovation builds upon a decade of Rutgers research in this field, including his invention of the first single crystal organic transistor in 2003. While his latest innovation is still a ways from commercial reality, he sees an immediate application in the classroom.

“Our technique takes 10 minutes,” he said. “It should be exciting for students to actually build these devices and immediately see them work, all within one lab session.”

“We could place our samples between plastic sheets and pull a vacuum,” he said. “Then I thought, ‘why don’t we try doing this for our gate insulator?’

Why is the universe magnetized?

2012-02-14T19:56:00.002+05:30

Why is the universe magnetized?

It's a question scientists have been asking for decades. Now, an international team of researchers including a University of Michigan professor have demonstrated that it could have happened spontaneously, as the prevailing theory suggests. The findings are published in Nature. Oxford University scientists led the research.

"According to our previous understanding, any magnetic field that had been made ought to have gone away by now," said Paul Drake, the Henry S. Carhart Collegiate Professor of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Sciences and a professor in physics at the University of Michigan. "We didn't understand what mechanism might create a magnetic field, and even if it happened, we didn't understand why the magnetic field is still there. It has been a very enduring mystery".

With high-energy pulsed lasers in a French laboratory, the researchers created certain conditions analogous to those in the early universe when galaxies were forming. Through their experiment, they demonstrated that the theory known as the Biermann battery process is likely correct. Discovered by a German astronomer in 1950, the Biermann process predicts that a magnetic field can spring up spontaneously from nothing more than the motion of charged particles. Plasma, or charged particle gas, is abundant in space. Scientists believe that large clouds of gas collapsing into galaxies sent elliptically shaped bubbles of shockwaves through the early universe, touching off flows of electric current in the plasma of the intergalactic medium.

Anyone who has built an electromagnet in middle school science class is familiar with this concept, Drake said. "If you can make current flow, you make a magnetic field," Drake said. The question in astrophysics was what could have generated the current. This experiment demonstrated that such asymmetrical shockwaves could do the job. The results, Drake said, aren't particularly surprising. But it's important for scientists to test their theories with experiments. "These results help strengthen the understanding that we've taken from our interpretation of astrophysical data," Drake said. "And understanding the universe and most definitely the origin of life is one of the great human intellectual quests."

A composite image (left) shows a laser-produced shock wave on the left side. Brighter colors show the shock region of higher density or temperature. The right side shows a simulation of a shock wave collapsing, as it would have during the pre-galactic phase in the universe.

The paper is titled "Generation of scaled protogalactic seed magnetic fields in laser produced shock waves." Other co-authors are from the University of Oxford, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Laboratoire pour l'Utilisation de Lasers Intenses, the University of Strathclyde, the University of California-Los Angeles, the University of York, the Institute of Laser Engineering at Osaka University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Wolfgang-Pauli-Strasse. The work is funded by the European Research Council, Laserlab-Europe, the Science and Technology Facilities Council, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the United Kingdom.

Half your Heating Bill With One 12 Inch " Miracle Tube "

2012-02-14T19:47:00.002+05:30

Amazing British invention creates MORE energy than you put into it - and could soon be warming your home

It sounds too good to be true - not to mention the fact that it violates almost every known law of physics.

But British scientists claim they have invented a revolutionary device that seems to 'create' energy from virtually nothing.

Their so-called thermal energy cell could soon be fitted into ordinary homes, halving domestic heating bills and making a major contribution towards cutting carbon emissions.

Even the makers of the device are at a loss to explain exactly how it works - but sceptical independent scientists carried out their own tests and discovered that the 12in x 2in tube really does produce far more heat energy than the electrical energy put in.

The device seems to break the fundamental physical law that energy cannot be created from nothing - but researchers believe it taps into a previously unrecognised source of energy, stored at a sub-atomic level within the hydrogen atoms in water.

The system - developed by scientists at a firm called Ecowatts in a nondescript laboratory on an industrial estate at Lancing, West Sussex - involves passing an electrical current through a mixture of water, potassium carbonate (otherwise known as potash) and a secret liquid catalyst, based on chrome.

This creates a reaction that releases an incredible amount of energy compared to that put in. If the reaction takes place in a unit surrounded by water, the liquid heats up, which could form the basis for a household heating system.

If the technology can be developed on a domestic scale, it means consumers will need much less energy for heating and hot water - creating smaller bills and fewer greenhouse gases.

Nano Memory 1,000 Times Faster!!!!

2012-02-14T19:30:00.001+05:30

Scientists from the University of Pennsylvania have developed nanowires capable of storing computer data for 100,000 years and retrieving that data a thousand times faster than existing portable memory devices such as Flash memory and micro-drives, all using less power and space than current memory technologies.

example of nanowires

...

Tests showed extremely low power consumption for data encoding (0.7mW per bit). They also indicated the data writing, erasing and retrieval (50 nanoseconds) to be 1,000 times faster than conventional Flash memory and indicated the device would not lose data even after approximately 100,000 years of use, all with the potential to realize terabit-level nonvolatile memory device density.

“This new form of memory has the potential to revolutionize the way we share information, transfer data and even download entertainment as consumers,” Agarwal said. “This represents a potential sea-change in the way we access and store data.”

...

Current solid-state technology for products like memory cards, digital cameras and personal data assistants traditionally utilize Flash memory, a non-volatile and durable computer memory that can be erased and reprogrammed electronically. Data on Flash drives provides most battery-powered devices with acceptable levels of durability and moderately fast data access. Yet the technology’s limits are apparent. Digital cameras can’t snap rapid-fire photos because it takes precious seconds to store the last photo to memory. If the memory device is fast, as in DRAM and SRAM used in computers, then it is volatile; if the plug on a desktop computer is pulled, all recent data entry is lost.

Therefore, a universal memory device is desired that can be scalable, fast, durable and nonvolatile, a difficult set of requirements which have now been demonstrated at Penn.

“Imagine being able to store hundreds of high-resolution movies in a small drive, downloading them and playing them without wasting time on data buffering, or imagine booting your laptop computer in a few seconds as you wouldn’t need to transfer the operating system to active memory” Agarwal said.

This may not be as impressive as the Optical Memory 50.000 Times Faster, but if this nano-memory gets here before optical memory... I'll just make due with the nano-memory for a while.

Cancer Cure May Be "Available In Two Years"

2012-02-14T19:20:00.002+05:30

Cancer sufferers could be cured with injections of immune cells from other people within two years, scientists say.

US researchers have been given the go-ahead to give patients transfusions of “super strength” cancer-killing cells from donors.

Dr Zheng Cui, of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, has shown in laboratory experiments that immune cells from some people can be almost 50 times more effective in fighting cancer than in others.

Dr Cui, whose work is highlighted in this week’s New Scientist magazine, has previously shown cells from mice found to be immune to cancer can be used to cure ordinary mice with tumours.

The work raises the prospect of using cancer-killing immune system cells called granulocytes from donors to significantly boost a cancer patient’s ability to fight their disease, and potentially cure them.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week gave Dr Cui permission to inject super-strength granulocytes into 22 patients.

Dr Cui said: “Our hope is that this could be a cure. Our pre-clinical tests have been exceptionally successful.

“If this is half as effective in humans as it is in mice it could be that half of patients could be cured or at least given one to two years extra of high quality life.

“The technology needed to do this already exists, so if it works in humans we could save a lot of lives, and we could be doing so within two years.”

Dr Cui is confident patients could benefit from the technique quickly because the technology used to extract granulocytes is the same as that already used by hospitals to obtain other blood components such as plasma or platelets.

Prof Gribben, a cancer immunologist at Cancer Research UK’s experimental centre at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, said: “The concept of using immune system cells to kill off someone else’s cancer is very, very exciting.”

Dr Cui, who presented his latest findings at an anti-ageing conference in Cambridge last week, extracted granulocytes from 100 people, including some with cancer.

When the immune cells were mixed with cervical cancer cells, those from different individuals demonstrated vastly varying abilities to fight the cancer.

Those of the strongest participants killed close to 97 per cent of the cancer cells in 24 hours, while those of the weakest killed only two per cent.

The abilities of the cells of participants aged over 50 were lower than average, and those of cancer patients even lower.

Dr Cui noticed that the strength of a person’s immune system to combat cancer can also vary according to how stressed they are and the time of year.

Initial experiments suggest it may be possible to transfer granulocytes which have demonstrated strong cancer-fighting powers into cancer sufferers.

In 1999 Prof Cui and colleagues discovered a male mouse that appeared to be completely resistant to virulent cancer cells of several different types.

Since then more than 2000 mice in 15 generations have been bred from the original cancer-free mouse and 40 per cent of the offspring have inherited the immunity.

Probable cure: When tested on mice the tumours almost completely disappeared although it will be years before scientist will be able to run tests on humans (File photo)

With the immune system, some types of cells which provide “innate immunity” are constantly on patrol for foreign invaders, while others have to firstly learn to identify a specific threat before going on the attack.

Scientists developing cancer vaccines have generally attempted to stimulate responses in the immune system cells that require prior exposure.

Last year Dr Cui caused shockwaves in the cancer research community when he identified granulocytes as the cells responsible for the mouse cancer immunity – because they are among those which act automatically.

Prof Gribben said: “This is surprising because it goes against how we thought immune system works against cancer. It makes us think again about our preconceived notions.”

Prof Cui injected granulocytes from immune mice into ordinary mice, and found it was possible to give them protection from cancer.

Even more excitingly he found the transfusions caused existing cancers to go into remission and to clear them completely within weeks.

A single dose of the cells appeared to give many of the mice resistance to cancer for the rest of their lives.

Granulocyte transfusion has previously been used to try to prevent infections in cancer patients whose immune systems have been weakened by chemotherapy.

However their effectiveness has been unclear because they have mainly been given to patients in an advanced stage of disease.

Prof Gribben warned the US researchers would have to be careful to avoid other immune system cells from the donor proliferating in the patient’s body.

He added: “If they’re using live cells there is a theoretical risk of graft-versus-host disease, which can prove fatal.”

Dr Cui said he is working on ways to minimise this risk.

Scientists Create First Atomic X-Ray Laser And Heat Matter To 2-Million-Degrees

2012-02-14T19:02:00.001+05:30

Scientists are currently using the most powerful X-ray laser in the world to further their understanding of fusion processes.

The U.S. Department of Energy is the proud owner of the Linac Coherent Light Source, the globe's most powerful X-ray laser. Researchers at the lab have worked over the past few years to craft the world's first atomic X-ray laser pulse, and to superheat and manipulate a cluster of matter heated to approximately 2 million degrees Celsius.

Scientists are hoping the X-ray laser pulse can help them understand how biological molecules function. What's more, they contend they are gaining insight into the processes of nuclear fusion through their work with superheated molecules. Engineers are conducting the experiments at DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Popular Science reports that the researchers first use the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) to flash-heat a miniature piece of aluminum foil, which ultimately results in the creation of what is known as hot dense matter. The laser is so powerful that it only takes approximately one-trillionth of a second to heat the aluminum to 2 million degrees Celsius, or 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit.

Scientists assert that by developing a more comprehensive understanding of the process, they could one day understand and potentially recreate the process of nuclear fusion. Researchers have struggled to effectively incite nuclear fusion in laboratory settings, but SLAC's X-ray is enhancing their knowledge of how hot dense matter not only forms, but also acts.

"The LCLS X-ray laser is a truly remarkable machine," Oxford University postdoctoral fellow and study lead Sam Vinko said in a statement. "Making extremely hot, dense matter is important scientifically if we are ultimately to understand the conditions that exist inside stars and at the center of giant planets within our own solar system and beyond."

Vinko, who along with his fellow researchers published the study's findings in the journal Nature this week, acknowledged that scientists have long been able to create plasma from gases. However, the sheer power of the LCLS has enabled them to do the same at solid densities, a feat conventional lasers are incapable of achieving, according to study co-author Bob Nagler.

"The LCLS, with its ultra-short wavelengths of X-ray laser light, is the first that can penetrate a dense solid and create a uniform patch of plasma – in this case a cube one-thousandth of a centimeter on a side – and probe it at the same time," Nagler said.

This photograph shows the interior of a Linac Coherent Light Source SXR experimental chamber, set up for an investigation to create and measure a form of extreme, 2-million-degree matter known as “hot, dense matter.”

The central part of the frame contains the holder for the material that will be converted by the powerful LCLS laser into hot, dense matter. To the left is an XUV spectrometer and to the right is a small red laser set up for alignment and positioning.

Photo courtesy University of Oxford/Sam Vinko

"X-rays give us a penetrating view into the world of atoms and molecules," said physicist Nina Rohringer, who led the research. A group leader at the Max Planck Society's Advanced Study Group in Hamburg, Germany, Rohringer collaborated with researchers from SLAC, DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Colorado State University.

Aside from their work studying hot dense matter, scientists at SLAC also have developed the first atomic-scale X-ray laser. That research is part of a separate ongoing study at the laboratory that could result in the creation of an altogether new field of atomic imaging, experts say.

Researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used the LCLS to essentially inject energy into a group of neon atoms. Their goal, according to the group's findings, was to lase at shorter wavelengths, an exceedingly difficult endeavor as achieving such shortened wavelengths requires atomic manipulation. Using the LCLS, the scientists were able to shift electrons to higher energy states, which ultimately prompted a surge of X-ray emissions.

The group essentially was able to create a miniature version of an atomic-sized laser. With its shortened pulses and improved lighting quality, the atomic laser could be used to further scientists' understanding of atomic-scale processes, according to the researchers.

The LCLS is located in Palo Alto, California, and is massive in scope, encompassing a distance of more than one mile. It is far and away the most technologically advanced X-ray laser on Earth, according to scientists: it is capable of generating bursts of X-ray radiation that are more than one billion times brighter than any other laser source.

Genome at Home: Biohackers Build Their Own Labs

2012-01-18T15:27:00.001+05:30

A tiny spare bedroom is not an ideal space for a high tech biofabrication facility. To get to the one Josh Perfetto is putting together, visitors must walk all the way to the back of his mostly unfurnished house in Saratoga, California—through the kitchen, past some empty rooms, across a den with a lone couch—then climb a poorly lit staircase and round a corner. The room itself is about 120 square feet and has one big window with a view of an adjacent roof. There’s an 8-foot-wide gap in the middle; the rest of the room is for science. “I thought about moving the lab to the empty living room downstairs,” Perfetto says. “I really need more space. But that’s right by the front door. I don’t want to freak people out.”

He laughs a little awkwardly, and it’s easy to see why he’s worried. With its Pyrex containers on metal racks and other clinical-looking equipment, the bedroom looks perfect for cooking crystal meth. A mass of wires spills out of a wooden box; on top sits a metal plate punched full of holes. A table holds several laptops, test tubes, a box of purple surgical gloves, a rack with pipettes in various sizes, rubber tubes connected to vials, an orange plastic box with a blue light in the bottom, and a centrifuge that looks like an oversize rice cooker. The wooden box is actually a homemade device for doing polymerase chain reactions (PCR), a process that turns small samples of DNA into quantities large enough to analyze. And the orange plastic thing runs gel electrophoresis, a way to sort DNA strands by size. Perfetto, an engineer, built a few of the gadgets himself.

“I’ve been sleeping in here,” says Mackenzie Cowell, Perfetto’s business partner. “And who knows what kinds of chemicals have soaked into this rug!” He flew out to California from Boston a week earlier and has been working with Perfetto on a DIY genomics kit to sell through their new business, CoFactor. The problem is, right now extracting and amplifying DNA at home still takes too many steps. The guys are worried that people won’t enjoy the process if it’s too complicated.

And the home audience is their target market. Cowell is the cofounder of DIYbio, a worldwide network of “biohackers” dedicated to creating pop-up labs and doing biology outside the traditional environments of universities and industry. But when he ran into Perfetto at the 2010 Bay Area Maker Faire, the two men agreed that community labs just aren’t as exciting as they sound. Not yet anyway. Looking at your blood under a microscope is the opposite of innovation—it’s arts and crafts. “People would jump up and say, ‘I want to do this. What do I do?’ And no one had any good ideas. Or the ideas were too complicated to be translated into a starter project,” Cowell says. Before the burgeoning world of garage labs could really take off, it needed to be easier for people to get their own home projects started. And the barrier to entry wasn’t education or even space. It was a lack of affordable tools. CoFactor aims to supply them.

This homemade machine from OpenPCR amplifies DNA samples—just like a professional device.
Photo: Justin Fantl

Science is all about coming up with smart ways to answer hard questions. But sometimes getting those answers requires expensive machines. Physicists looking to understand the universe don’t just set up a pendulum anymore—today they build multibillion-dollar underground particle accelerators. PCR machines, critical to genetics-powered biology, start at around $6,000. And these machines, with their intricately tuned bits and pieces, aren’t friendly to the kind of void-your-warranty hacking at the heart of the maker movement (not to mention creative experimental design). In short, no amateur is going to drop tens of thousands of dollars to get a lab running, and many scientists don’t understand the inner workings of their expensive, grant-funded gadgetry well enough to whimsically crack the machines open and see how they can be modified. But thanks to the DIY revolution and Arduino, the open source circuit board, big thinkers like Cowell and engineers like Perfetto (whose OpenPCR device sells for just $599) are reverse engineering the big-budget tools. And then they’re sharing their methods with the world.

Ask people inside the biohacker movement where they think it will have the biggest impact and they talk about education—being able to do genetics in classrooms. They (regularly) bring up Sushigate, the 2008 case of New York City high school students who used DNA testing to discover that sushi restaurants and supermarkets were mislabeling their fish. The results may be cool, but for now the machines are where the real action is. Behind the scenes, engineers and science enthusiasts are teaming up to mod tools and technologies and then sell their inventions—or simply share tips on how to build them—to anyone interested. Homemade PCR devices are drawing the most attention, since anyone who wants to work with DNA has to put it through a PCR machine first.

That’s what has drawn a few hundred people to the online community surrounding Perfetto’s OpenPCR project. Polymerase chain reaction is really just a process of heating and cooling genetic material. Weill Cornell Medical College researcher Russell Durrett, cofounder of New York City’s community lab GenSpace, built one using a lightbulb, an Arduino board, an old computer fan, and some PVC pipe. Biotech advocate Rob Carlson also has a version, called the LavaAmp, that he says could be easily mass-manufactured just like any consumer product. “It doesn’t have to be a big company,” Carlson says. “The manufacturing is set up so that if anybody wanted to make 100,000, they could do that, and the quality of the resulting molecules would be just fine.”

But PCR machines are only the beginning. Keegan Cooke, a former microbial fuel cell researcher, has been selling a home-built battery called a MudWatt kit. The MudWatt creates energy by capturing electrons released when mud-borne bacteria eat sugars. The kit comes with an anode, a cathode, and an LED light. Users fill the box with about two cups of muck—any sort has the right microbes, though stinkier stuff seems to work better—and some leftovers from the fridge (to feed the critters). The microbes generate electricity as they eat, and the electrodes capture it to power the light. This microbial fuel cell tech isn’t good enough to be scaled up to wide use yet, but the open source model for distribution means that people can start making advances in their backyards. Cooke has already updated and modified his kit based on user feedback. “Another customer found that the mud in his nearby river generated almost double the power. He also recommended that we try a different material for our electrodes, and we found that it also produced double the power. It’s nice, this process of people giving us feedback and evolving the technology,” Cooke says.¹

Another example: Cathal Garvey’s DremelFuge. The centrifuge—a device for rapidly spinning substances to separate lighter components from heavy ones—is essential in many fields of science, but a professional-grade version can cost thousands of dollars. Garvey, a biologist in Cork, Ireland, designed one that can be made by 3-D printers—either with an at-home printer called a MakerBot or by the 3-D print-on-demand company Shapeways (for $57). The DremelFuge is a small round disk with slots that hold standard microcentrifuge tubes. It’s designed to fit snugly onto a rotary tool, which can spin the tubes at 33,000 rpm, producing up to 51,000 g’s. (A standard professional centrifuge produces only about 24,000 g’s.) Garvey gave his DremelFuge a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license, meaning it can be used or remixed by anyone.

BUILD YOUR OWN LAB

Conventional laboratory equipment is powerful but expensive. The biohacking movement is remaking those tools on the cheap.—E.B.

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DIY GEAR		PRO GEAR
OpenPCR Maker: CoFactor Features: A polymerase chain reaction device. Replicates DNA by heating and cooling so it can be analyzed. Able to perform 16 reactions at once. Comes with temperature sensors, a control board, and control software. Price: $599		StepOne System Maker: Applied Biosystems Features: Able to run 48 reactions at a time. Touchscreen interface and real- time monitoring. Price: $6,000-17,000
GeneLaser Maker: CoFactor Features: All the chemicals you need to amplify DNA on a PCR device. Users then send the genetic material to a lab for analysis. Price: $99 for four reactions		DNA Test Kit Maker: 23andMe Features: A test tube that you spit into (copiously) and send back to the company, which does all the processing and analysis. Price: $200-400
MudWatt Microbial Fuel Cell Maker: KeegoTech Features: Fill the plastic box with a handful of mud and food leftovers, and two graphite electrodes capture the electrons released by hungry bacteria. Instant battery! Price: $45		No laboratory equivalent Custom microbial fuel-cell systems can cost several hundred thousand dollars to assemble.
SpikerBox Maker: Backyard Brains Features: Electrodes and a chip set let you listen to—and with an iPhone, visualize—the neurons firing in, say, a cockroach leg. Price: $90		Preamplifier Maker: Stanford Research Systems Features: Two inputs and similar noise measurement, but no audio output. Weighs 15 pounds. Price: $2,400

Perhaps the biggest tool-making success so far, however, comes from the world of neuroscience. It’s a hand-sized box made of translucent neon-orange plastic with some electronics inside and a wire sticking out. For just $90, the device—called a SpikerBox—does something remarkable: It records and makes audible the sound of neurons firing. Connect two electrodes to the leg of a live cockroach (included); every time the bug twitches, its neurons emit an electrical spike that translates into a loud click. It sounds simple, but the ability to reveal a spike for such a small amount of money is a bit of a revolution in the study of neurobiology.

The SpikerBox grew out of the frustration of its inventors—engineers Tim Marzullo and Greg Gage—with the high cost of their lab equipment. As students at the University of Michigan’s Neural Engineering Laboratory, they came to feel that their work wasn’t having enough impact given the money being spent. “In that lab you do silly things like design electrodes that cost thousands and thousands of dollars,” Gage says. “And then they would sit on a shelf afterward, because they were someone’s PhD project.”

Eventually, Marzullo says, they realized that “if the objective is to show spikes, you don’t need a million dollars and a clean room.” They started on what Gage calls a self-imposed engineering challenge: Make electrodes for $100. They told each other that if they pulled it off, it’d be “funny.” Then they wrote an abstract and brought prototypes of their hack to the Society for Neuroscience conference in 2008. At their poster presentation, the prototype SpikerBox didn’t work—yet it still caused a stir. “We were flooded with neuroscientists and educators who said they’d been waiting for this for years,” Marzullo says. (Shortly thereafter they built a box that worked.)

In 2009, Marzullo and Gage started a company, Backyard Brains, to sell the box. They’ve shipped over 550 kits and demo’d the device for more than 6,000 people (including passengers on a Delta Air Lines flight, where they stuck a sign to the bathroom door reading free neuroscience lessons at seat 33a and b). Though they’re keen to earn a living from their company, they’re fine with the relatively small amount of money they’re making now—as long as someone out there is learning about neuroscience. (A recent $250,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health also helps.) Which is why they’re strong believers in keeping the device and its intellectual property open source. It can be purchased in various stages of assembly, and detailed instructions for building the SpikerBox are available for free download on their website, along with software for interpreting the intensity and duration of the spikes.

SpikerBoxes are even making their way into real science labs. W. David Stahlman, a professor of psychology at UCLA, recently purchased one to use in his research on hermit crab behavior. Traditionally, he says, psychologists don’t focus on neuroscience. But while studying attention, learning, and distraction in the hermit crabs, he grew interested in how those behaviors are exhibited in the crabs’ brains. A SpikerBox means that doing this kind of experimentation is no longer cost-prohibitive for a young professor. Even better, there’s no warranty to void. “When you’re working with equipment that’s much more expensive, you’re more hesitant to open it up and tinker with it,” Stahlman says. And as a nifty bonus, he can capture the data right to an iPhone or iPad.

The companies that sell professional-grade PCR machines to laboratories are predictably unimpressed by all this fuss. Jeff Rosner, head of research and development for the PCR division at Life Technologies and a former engineer at Hewlett-Packard, says he’s intrigued by the OpenPCR movement, but he hardly sees the gadgets it’s producing as competition. “What they’re doing is really sort of PCR 101,” he says. “The thermal-cycling machine is only a small piece of what’s important about PCR and what’s required to do it. You need so many other things, including access to chemistry that’s way harder to hack than the machinery itself.” (Most chemical reagents are proprietary, and every manufacturer has a unique process for making the chemicals work. Perfetto and Cowell have been mixing and matching chemicals and protocols to simplify the process for their home kits.)

Still, it’s difficult for Rosner to conceal his excitement over the fact that hackers are getting interested in his technology—and he admits that he actually has a machine shop in his own backyard. “There are some real barriers for them,” Rosner says. “The reality is that costs have declined from hundreds of thousands of dollars to tens of thousands, but they have to get down lower before they’ll be accessible to hackers.” Then, after a pause, he adds, “I hope that happens.”

But Perfetto and Cowell don’t see any reason to wait. Cowell is churning with ideas for new projects. He organized two weekend prototype-building hackathons last spring called FutureLabCamp—and, of course, he also participated. “I want to build an LED spectrophotometer with an Arduino,” Cowell says. “People have done it before, but I want to make it better. I want to build a tiny incubator for test tubes. They’re easy to build, but they’re all big. There are no tiny ones. Then there’s a biology idea, a genetic idea—I can’t remember now. Maybe it was building a transluminator gel box for electrophoresis.” Sounds like that upstairs bedroom is about to get even more crowded.

Note 1.[Correction appended/Sept. 30,/17:00] The mud-borne bacteria collected in the MudWatt kit eat sugars, not metal oxides, and the user who found that mud generated double the power was not a sixth-grader, as previously reported.

IBM Brains Turn 12 Atoms Into World’s Smallest Storage Bit

2012-01-18T15:13:00.001+05:30

IBM's scanning tunneling microscope captured this image of a byte of data, shown in eight 12-atom increments. Those other bumps are stray xenon atoms. (Image: IBM)

IBM researchers have found a way to put a single bit of data on a 12-atom surface, creating the world’s smallest magnetic storage device.

It’s a breakthrough that’s not likely to make its way into hard drives or memory sticks for decades, but it gives us a hint at how much road lies ahead for magnetic storage devices.

Before now, physicists really didn’t know how small they could take magnetic storage before the laws of quantum mechanics would take over, making it impossible to reliably store data. String together 8 atoms, for example, and you simply can’t get a stable magnetic state, says Andreas Heinrich, the IBM researcher behind the discovery. “The system will just spontaneously hop from one of those states to another state in a timescale that is too fast for us to claim anything like a data storage [demonstration]. It might be switching 1,000 times per second.”

Another problem: how to keep neighboring bits of data from interfering with each other? Today’s hard drives store data in what’s known as a ferromagnetic structure. This is how a compass needle or a refrigerator magnet work: They have lots of atoms lumped together, all pointing in the same magnetic directions.

IBM’s 12-atom bit-keeper uses an antiferromagnetic structure, however, meaning that the atoms point in opposite directions. This keeps the atoms from interfering with each other, an important feature when you’re storing data just 12 atoms at a time. “In a ferromagnet all of these atoms add together to make a big spin and that big spin interacts with the neighboring big spin. And so you cannot control these independently anymore,” Heinrich says. “But in an antiferromagnet there is no big spin, and so you can put these guys very close together”

Heinrich did his work using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), something that IBM researchers invented 30 years ago, which allows them to see and move around atoms.

12-atom storage devices would be much, much smaller than today’s disks. Heinrich’s friends at hard-drive maker Hitachi estimate that their storage drives require about 800,000 atoms per bit.

So what’s keeping the atom-scale flash drive from showing up at your local Best Buy? Well, first off, they operate at 1 degree kelvin. That’s about -458 Fahrenheit. Bump things up to room temperature and Heinrich thinks it would take about 150 atoms per bit.

And there’s an even bigger problem. Nobody has a clue how to build something this small outside of the lab. And certainly, nobody can do it cheaply, Heinrich says. “That is something that many people are working on, but nobody has solved it yet.”

Still, when Heinrich got his first glimpse at the 12 atoms holding a charge in his STM last spring, he was mesmerized. He sat at his Almaden lab for four hours straight, switching the tiny clump of atoms back and forth between magnetic states. “I was basically just blown away,” he says. “Every once in a while, even we who work with this kind of stuff on an almost daily basis get blown away that it is actually possible.”

How Vegetarians Can Solve The Middle East Water Crisis

2011-12-20T19:18:00.000+05:30

Hope floats. Want to help save water and feed nine billion people? Go vegetarian!!!

For vegetarians who have researched all the possible angles to justify their meatless habit – it’s healthier, we might say, or Islam sanctions it, it is no secret that raising meat taxes the environment. In addition to methane gases released, particularly by giant beef and chicken factories (a sustainable free-range facility is far less onerous), raising meat requires significant water resources. Now a leading water expert is spreading the news that scaling back our carnivorous ways is an important step in alleviating the Gulf countries’ serious water woes.John Anthony Allan is a Professor at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and an expert on the role that water plays in the Middle East. He is also the man who pioneered the concept of virtual water – how much water we use in order to produce certain goods, whether its food or clothing or machinery.

At a lecture delivered in Dubai last night, he was expected to help attendees better understand their water consumption in terms of the food that they eat, according to The National.

He explained that the average meat-eating American consumes five cubic meters of water compared to half of that, which vegetarians consume. But not all meat is equally water intensive.

“Beef requires 15,500 litres of water per kilogram compared with chicken, which needs 3,900 litres per kilogram,” he told the paper. So at the very least, consumers could think about reducing their beef consumption – since this requires the most unsustainable water footprint – and each more chicken instead.

“People often think about how much water is needed for domestic purposes, such as bathing, washing clothes or gardening,” Vesela Todorova wrote. “But the water necessary to produce food dwarfs all other uses, with agriculture taking between 80 to 90 per cent of water resources in the world,” she said.

Professor Allan added that most of the water any country needs is for food, since agriculture accounts for 80-90% of our water footprint.

With the Nile and Yellow Rivers drying up – both of which service enormous populations – and with the world population projected to reach nine billion within forty years, Allan and others suggest that governments need to oversee our agricultural habits (which are currently in the hands of individuals and businesses).

“While not everyone can be vegetarian,” he told The National, “if people in rich countries focused on eating less water intensive foods, there would be more available to grow food for an expanding world population.”

Protein Electronics devices could be on the market within ten years

2011-12-11T21:10:00.000+05:30

Similar proteins demonstrate different charge transport characteristics offering a route to biological electronic devices

Long-range electron transfer in proteins is an important biological process, driving functions such as cellular respiration. If the charge transport properties of these biological materials can be fully understood and controlled, opportunities open up for cheap, flexible, biocompatible electronics. Yuichi Tokita and colleagues from Sony and Nagoya University in Japan have now revealed the electronic properties of two structurally similar proteins that take part in charge transport in cellular membranes.

The researchers deposited the two proteins with similar active centers but oppositely charged molecular surfaces onto self-assembled monolayers chosen so as to present the most electronically active part of the molecule to a light source overhead. On illumination, zinc-substituted versions of the two proteins, cytochrome c (Zn-cyt-c) and cytochrome b562 (Zn-cyt-b) generated photocurrents with different characteristics — the former displayed hole conduction via the valence band while the latter showed electronic conduction (see image).

Tokita and his colleagues then carried out a series of calculations to investigate the mechanisms underlying these different photoinduced responses. They identified the electronic orbitals responsible for photoexcitation and attributed charge transfer to orbital coupling in a four-orbital model. In the electron-conducting Zn-cyt-b, electrons traverse unoccupied orbitals in the protein’s conduction band, whereas in the hole-conducting Zn-cyt-c, holes traverse the valence band of occupied orbitals. The orbitals involved are located appropriately in the proteins’ band structures to achieve a semiconductor state.

In studying the ground state electronic structure of the two proteins, the researchers found that the energies of the molecular orbitals of Zn-cyt-b was higher than that of Zn-cyt-c, reflecting a difference in charge. They found that it was the difference in charge that ultimately decided whether the protein was hole- or electron-conducting, as the charge controls the electron density in the molecular orbitals.

“The most challenging part of the project as a whole is to apply our findings to develop practical technologies,” says Tokita. “The next step will be to make functioning devices, such as a p–n diode using p and n proteins.” The researchers are optimistic about the future of the field. “We think protein-based electronic devices could be on the market within ten years,” says Tokita

Handheld Gene-Z System Detects Cancer with the Help of iPhones and Android Devices

2011-12-11T20:18:00.003+05:30

Mobile devices can do just about anything these days, thanks to third-party developers. iPhones and Android devices have been known to do some pretty wild things. Need a dupe key made? Scan and order one with your iPhone. Want to know if you're hotter than Justin Bieber? Compare your facial features. Are you a policeman who needs to ID a suspect? Scan their fingerprints and irides. Want to control your Canon DSLR remotely? Use your Android phone.

Think you might have cancer?

There is an expensive iPhone accessory called the Handyscope that acts as a dermatoscope, which can detect malignant lesions in your skin. But researchers from Michigan State University (MSU) have recently developed something better in the world of mobile cancer detection—a handheld and low cost solar-powered system called Gene-Z that's run by not only iPhones, but iPads and Android tablets, too.

The difference between the Handyscope and Gene-Z is that one looks for cancerous cells in the skin, while the other performs genetic analysis on microRNAs in blood samples. MicroRNAs are single-stranded molecules that regulate genes, and changes in certain types of microRNAs have been linked to cancer and other health-related issues.

To run a test, a blood sample is placed on a smartphone-sized microfluidic lab chip, which is then inserted into the Gene-Z system. The detectors send readings of the sample back to the iOS device or Android system, which shows the results to the health worker on hand.

"Gene-Z has the capability to screen for established markers of cancer at extremely low costs in the field," said Syed Hashsham, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at MSU and developer of Gene-Z. "Because it is a hand-held device operated by a battery and chargeable by solar energy, it is extremely useful in limited-resource settings."

Meaning it's a great device for low-income cities and resource-limited countries to help physicians detect and diagnose cancer, or in rural areas where the pathology department is far out of reach or non-existent.

But it doesn't end with cancer detection. The Gene-Z system is also being developed to diagnose tuberculosis and drug-resistant TB, determine HIV virus levels during treatment, and monitor overall antibiotic resistance.

Now we just need to work on that cure for cancer.

5 innovative ways of cell phones for medical use

2011-09-26T17:17:00.005+05:30

1. Cellphone microscope – Developed by UCLA electrical engineering professor Aydogan Ozcan , a microscope to be incorporated into cellphone , can be used to produce an image showing the cells within a small sample of fluid. Useful for monitoring condition of HIV or malaria patients.

2. Cell Phone as medical imaging – Developed by University of California bioengineering professor Boris Rubinsky. It’s a portable electromagnetic scanner works cellphone and computer: It plugs into the cellphone and sends data to the computer, which then generates an image to be sent to the doctor or hospital no matter where they’re.

3. Cellphone as heart monitor – Cellphone monitors the user’s cardiac activity and calls 911 once it’s detected the user’s heart beat rate steps into danger zone. It’s now being developed by Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh.

4. Cell Phone as Smart Band Aid – Gentag, a startup has developed a wireless wrist-worn band aid that has an RFID chip that is able to transmit info to a cell phone. The band-aid can warn a medical technician technician if a patient is allergic to certain drugs. It’s also able to monitor the patient’s temperature and glucose level and informs medical personnel when there is a spike.

5. Smart phone as Ultra sound machine – USB ultrasound probe developed by St. Louis-based Washington University engineers , is able to hook up with a smartphone. And you can make the pair to image image the kidney, liver, bladder and eyes, as well as endocavity probes for prostate and uterine screenings and biopsies. Genetic testing, blood screening and advanced imaging such as MRI will be possible on cellphones in the future.

Sneezer Beam – effective relief for hay fever and allergies

2011-09-26T17:15:00.003+05:30

SneezerBeam is a little handy gadget that is able to give you a relief if you suffer from hay fever or any other nasal allergies. This little device has no side effect, it’s drug-free, what it uses is light to shine into your nostrils to clear your blockages and allergies.

Apparently, the little SneezerBeam device is to be inserted into your nostrils and then turn on the attached controller to activate the light beams. The light beams are able to inhibit the cells in your nose that release histamine, which is at the center of what triggers your allergic symptoms.

This little device has the full support from the medical world. It’s not a joke, it’s a technology based upon a clinical trial on 40 patients suffering from allergic rhinitis. The result was 72% of the patients showed improvement of their symptoms after being treated with light therapy using the SneezerBeam. It’s easy to use, each session takes you 3 minutes only, and you have to do it two or three times everyday.

Electronic Cigarette charges via USB

2011-09-26T17:13:00.003+05:30

Electronic Cigarettes are not new to us. But none of them we’ve seen charges via the computer’s USB port. For one that charges via USB port is definitely much handier for geeks who always stay in front of the computer. Just keep your cigarette connected to the USB to keep it burning nicotine forever.

Here comes the Electronic Cigarette from Thanko, which allows you to hook it up to the USB port and supply it with electricity to keep your smoking non-stop. This electronic Cigarette provides inhaled doses of vaporized nicotine, which allows the smoker to puff away without all the harmful effects to second hand smokers.

The e-cigarette comes in a pack that contains 11 filter butts and an atomizer. It costs only $33. The handiness is it doesn’t need batteries. This is especially handy for frequent travelers who always have their laptops or netbooks with them. When this electronic cigarette is out of juice, what you need to do is to hook it up to the USB port of your computer for a recharge.

Weightbot – a weight tracking tool for the iPhone and iPod Touch

2011-09-26T17:01:00.003+05:30

If the iPhone or iPod Touch is always with you, it’ll be the most handy gadget to help you track your weight if you’re on a slimming plan. Here comes the Weightbot, which is an application that is specially designed for both the iPhone and iPod Touch to track the weight of the users.

The Weightbot comes with beautiful graphs to track you weight over time, it displays those graphs which show the weekly, monthly, and yearly progress of your weight, so you can make use of it whether you’re still on track or deviated from your original weight loss plan.

The Weightbot allows the weight information collected to be backed up online over a secure connection, and you can set your own goal weight and watch your weight slope towards the finish line. And of course, the app treats your weight information as the highly confidential one, which allows you to set passcode, so others will not be able to take a peek or spy on your weight.

With all the fancy graphs and high usability, it definitely costs some, but it’s highly affordable. For only $1.00, you can get it from Apple App Store, but it’ll be on the store for a limited time only.

Blood-analyzing computer chip, detects cancer in 10 minutes

2011-09-26T16:59:00.003+05:30

A little chip has been invented which is used for testing blood and it takes only 10 minutes and needs only a single blood drop to carry out the most precise test.

The conventional blood test carried out in the hospital or clinic will normally involve doctors or nurses to 10 to 15 mililiters of blood into several vials. It will then involve multiple technicians to carry out the analysis, which may sum up a total cost of $500.

The new micro chip is claimed to be able to do the same, and it needs only one drop of blood. And it’s able to produce the test result showing you with full information about your healthiness in only 10 minutes. In another words, you’ll know within 10 minutes whether you’ve got cancer, HIV etc.

This microfluidic chip is being developed by James Heath, a chemistry professor at Caltech, and Institute for Systems Biology founder Leroy Hood. The chip is able to segregate cells and proteins in the blood drop, and tag those proteins so they will light up under a microscope if anything is found.

Epocrates Rx – a drug information databank for your iPhone

2011-09-26T16:56:00.003+05:30

If you’re a pharmacist, a doctor or someone who needs to frequently access to information on drugs, and you’re also an iPhone user, you can then download the Epocrates Rx software onto your iPhone to give you a helpful databank of those drugs and pills.

The Epocrates Rx software is now available as a free download, which allows iPhone without Internet connection to be able to access the database of drugs and pills. The database contains more than 3,300 brand and generic drugs. You’ll get helpful information on drugs using this app including the pill ID, drug interactions, and reference formula information.

Each pill shown by the Epocrates is also associated with a clear image to show you how the pill looks like. It’s handy especially while you’re on the go. And since you’re someone into the profession that needs to deal with drugs and pills, you’ll always get some friends and relatives to ask you questions about those drugs. But you may not remember every single drug.

If you have your iPhone installed with the Epocrates Rx, you could then quickly access the information and tell the one who asked about it without losing your professional image.

Philips goLITE shines you with blue light to fight Winter Blues

2011-09-26T16:32:00.005+05:30

We need to be exposed to certain amount of lights a day in order to stay healthy and in good mood. For those who always keep themselves in darkness, having very low exposure to lights will lead to develop depressions like winter blues and cabin fever.

Exposure to lights here doesn’t mean you need to be exposed to sunlights directly. You can simply point a lamp at your face, that will give you certain amount of lights. But, it’s definitely not a pleasant feeling for having to point a lamp on your own face as it simply blinds you from seeing other things for a moment.

Now, thanks to Philips, which they’ve just released a handy gadget, called the goLITE, which emits soft and pleasant blue lights that our body needs. Our body responds best to certain wavelengths of light. The goLITE simply emits the suitable wavelengths that our body needs. It uses optimal frequency blue LEDs to deliver the most positive effect on the body.

The light from the goLITE is actually not weak, but it is okay to human eyes, which gives little bit of visual imprint when you glance away from it. It’s certainly much better than having a lamp shining on your face that most likely blinds you for a short while. The light emitted by goLITE will give you the feeling like sunshine in winter.

The device is also equipped with a back lit touchscreen which can be used to adjust the light intensity, set timer or alarm clock, and it can be used as a desktop clock when it’s not used to shine the blue light. There is also a magnetic stand on the back that keeps this unit up on your desk.

High-quality DNA purified from saliva collected with the Oragene DNA Self-Collection Kit using the Gentra Puregene Buccal Cell Kit

2011-09-09T22:50:00.006+05:30

High-quality DNA purified from saliva collected with the Oragene DNA Self-Collection Kit using the Gentra Puregene Buccal Cell Kit

Laboratories performing DNA-based clinical tests or population genetics studies often prefer to use alternatives to invasive whole blood sample collection. One such alternative is the Oragene DNA Self-Collection Kit (DNA Genotek), which provides a convenient method for storing and shipping saliva samples at room temperature. It is important, however, that the DNA purified from this sample type is of high quality and performs well in sensitive downstream applications such as PCR. High-quality DNA can be purified from saliva collected with the Oragene DNA Self-Collection Kit using the Gentra Puregene Buccal Cell Kit.

Materials and methods

Saliva samples (2 ml) were collected from 16 individuals and mixed with 2 ml DNA-preserving solution in the Oragene DNA collection vial, according to the manufacturer's instructions.

The vials were incubated overnight in a 50°C air incubator and then stored at room temperature. DNA was purified from all samples using the Gentra Puregene Buccal Cell Kit. All DNA samples were hydrated in 300 µl DNA Hydration Solution.

DNA yield and purity were determined by measuring the absorbance at 260 nm (A₂₆₀) and the ratio of absorbance at 260 nm and 280 nm (A₂₆₀/A₂₈₀) with background correction. The quality of DNA was confirmed by running 100 ng hydrated DNA on a 0.7% agarose gel and by amplifying the CYP2D6 gene (1.5 kb) using 100 ng purified DNA in a final reaction volume of 50 µl. PCR efficiency was visualized by running a 10 µl aliquot from the PCR on a 1% agarose gel.

Results

The average total DNA yield from the Oragene DNA/saliva samples was 85.5 ± 47.3 µg, with an average DNA purity (A₂₆₀/A₂₈₀) of 1.79 ± 0.03.

High-molecular-weight DNA was purified from all samples, as visualized on agarose gels (see figure "High-quality DNA from Oragene DNA/saliva samples"). In addition, all purified DNA amplified successfully, indicating that the DNA was of high quality (see figure "Efficient amplification of Oragene DNA/saliva samples").

High-quality DNA from Oragene DNA/saliva samples. The quality of DNA purified from saliva collected with the Oragene DNA Self-Collection Kit using the Gentra Puregene Buccal Cell Kit was confirmed by running 100 ng hydrated DNA on a 0.7% agarose gel. M1: uncut Lambda DNA; M2: Lambda HindIII marker.

Efficient amplification of Oragene DNA/saliva samples. Amplification of the 1.5 kb CYP2D6 gene (50 µl reaction volume) was performed using 100 ng DNA purified from Oragene DNA/saliva samples. PCR products (10 µl) were visualized on a 1% agarose gel. M: 1 kb ladder.

Oragene•DNA

The Oragene®•DNA sample collection kit provides an all-in-one system for the collection, stabilization, transportation and purification of DNA from saliva.

All genetic research and testing starts with the collection of DNA samples. Blood samples are invasive to collect, as well as complex and costly to ship, store and process. Buccal swabs provide a low quality and quantity of DNA, typically resulting in failed samples and a requirement to recollect, incurring additional cost, effort and time.

Eliminate these challenges by collecting superior samples with the Oragene sample collection product line.

Easy collection, transportation and processing
Painless, non-invasive collection of high-quality, high-quantity DNA
DNA is stable for years at room temperature
Proven on downstream applications

Oragene•DNA is superior to blood

Higher donor compliance with painless self-collection
Lower collection costs with no phlebotomy required
Safer handling
Easier to purify

Oragene•DNA is superior to mouthwash & buccal swabs

Higher DNA yield and quality
More reliable for downstream applications
Lowest bacterial content of all oral collection methods
Less invasive and completely painless: Most mouthwash donor protocols require the patient to swish alcohol-based mouthwash for at least one minute

Proof of Concept for Translating Brain Waves into Speech

2011-08-16T01:09:00.002+05:30

Proof of Concept for Translating Brain Waves into Speech

In an early step toward letting severely paralyzed people speak with their thoughts, University of Utah researchers translated brain signals into words using two grids of 16 microelectrodes implanted beneath the skull but atop the brain.

“We have been able to decode spoken words using only signals from the brain with a device that has promise for long-term use in paralyzed patients who cannot now speak,” says Bradley Greger, an assistant professor of bioengineering.

Because the method needs much more improvement and involves placing electrodes on the brain, he expects it will be a few years before clinical trials on paralyzed people who cannot speak due to so-called “locked-in syndrome.” The Journal of Neural Engineering’s September issue is publishing Greger’s study showing the feasibility of translating brain signals into computer-spoken words.

The University of Utah research team placed grids of tiny microelectrodes over speech centers in the brain of a volunteer with severe epileptic seizures. The man already had a craniotomy – temporary partial skull removal – so doctors could place larger, conventional electrodes to locate the source of his seizures and surgically stop them.

Using the experimental microelectrodes, the scientists recorded brain signals as the patient repeatedly read each of 10 words that might be useful to a paralyzed person: yes, no, hot, cold, hungry, thirsty, hello, goodbye, more and less.

Later, they tried figuring out which brain signals represented each of the 10 words. When they compared any two brain signals – such as those generated when the man said the words “yes” and “no” – they were able to distinguish brain signals for each word 76 percent to 90 percent of the time.

When they examined all 10 brain signal patterns at once, they were able to pick out the correct word any one signal represented only 28 percent to 48 percent of the time – better than chance (which would have been 10 percent) but not good enough for a device to translate a paralyzed person’s thoughts into words spoken by a computer.

“This is proof of concept,” Greger says, “We’ve proven these signals can tell you what the person is saying well above chance. But we need to be able to do more words with more accuracy before it is something a patient really might find useful.”

People who eventually could benefit from a wireless device that converts thoughts into computer-spoken spoken words include those paralyzed by stroke, Lou Gehrig’s disease and trauma, Greger says. People who are now “locked in” often communicate with any movement they can make – blinking an eye or moving a hand slightly – to arduously pick letters or words from a list.

University of Utah colleagues who conducted the study with Greger included electrical engineers Spencer Kellis, a doctoral student, and Richard Brown, dean of the College of Engineering; and Paul House, an assistant professor of neurosurgery. Another coauthor was Kai Miller, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the University of Utah Research Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

This photo shows two kinds of electrodes sitting atop a severely epileptic patient's brain after part of his skull was removed temporarily. The larger, numbered, button-like electrodes are ECoGs used by surgeons to locate and then remove brain areas responsible for severe epileptic seizures. While the patient had to undergo that procedure, he volunteered to let researchers place two small grids -- each with 16 tiny "microECoG" electrodes -- over two brain areas responsible for speech. These grids are at the end of the green and orange wire bundles, and the grids are represented by two sets of 16 white dots since the actual grids cannot be seen easily in the photo. University of Utah scientists used the microelectrodes to translate speech-related brain signals into actual words -- a step toward future machines to allow severely paralyzed people to speak.

The study used a new kind of nonpenetrating microelectrode that sits on the brain without poking into it. These electrodes are known as microECoGs because they are a small version of the much larger electrodes used for electrocorticography, or ECoG, developed a half century ago.

From the Source:Scientists Decode Words from Brain Signals

Mysterious Fungi Discovered Hidden For Millions of Years Underground

2011-08-16T00:38:00.004+05:30

Mysterious Fungi Discovered Hidden For Millions of Years Underground

Researchers at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala, Sweden, have cultivated and classified fungi that had previously been known only through DNA sequences. The fungi, which have lived hidden underground for millions of years, represent a class of fungi that is new to scientists, Archaeorhizomycetes. The findings are being published in the scientific journal Science on August 12.

Culture stained make cell walls visible. Hyphae (long, branching filamentous structure) and swellings (clamydospores) are visible. Credit: Audrius Menkis

A type of fungus that's been lurking underground for millions of years, previously known to science only through its DNA, has been cultured, photographed, named and assigned a place on the tree of life
Archaeorhizomyces finlayi was isolated from the tip of a pine root that was colonized by a mycorrhizal fungus. However, scientists have not been able to show that A. finlayi forms ectomycorrhizal structures on roots in the lab. Photographed with a light microscope.

The fungi now classified are considerably more prevalent in the ground than was previously thought, and they probably occur all over the world, scientists believe. DNA has been identified from about a hundred different species of Archaeorhizomycetes. The findings are based on more than 50 studies from different ecosystems such as pine forests in Sweden, grasslands in California, and tropical rainforests in Costa Rica and Australia.

– I believe it would be difficult to find a soil sample that does not contain these fungi, says Associate Professor Anna Rosling, who led the work at the SLU Department of Forest Mycology and Plant Pathology. Since they are so common in the ground, we assume they play an important role in soil ecosystems, and now that we can cultivate them, we can finally explore what they do.

Fungus hyphae and swellings (chlamydospores). The fungus was fixated and then photographed using a scanning electron microscope.

– It’s not quite clear what their role is, but our findings will be of great importance for how we study the function of fungi in the ecosystem and for our understanding of the evolution of fungi.

Nearly twelve years ago, Anna Rosling and her colleagues took samples of coniferous tree roots in Nyänget outside Umeå in Sweden. They cultivated fungi from these roots, but it was a long time before they realize that the slowly growing, beige-colored culture was a unique species, the first known culture of a mysterious type of new soil fungi.

The species was named by the SLU researchers: Archaeorhizomyces finlayi. The “last name” is after a colleague at the department, Professor Roger Finlay.

– We wanted to recognize his many contributions to the scientific understanding of ground ecosystems, says Anna Rosling.

Engineered bacteria mop up mercury spills

2011-08-16T00:16:00.003+05:30

Transgenic Bacteria Mop Up Mercury Spills

Thousands of tonnes of toxic mercury are released into the environment every year. Much of this collects in sediment where it is converted into toxic methyl mercury, and enters the food chain ending up in the fish we eat. New research, published in BioMed Central’s open access journal BMC Biotechnology, showcases genetically engineered bacteria which are not only able to withstand high levels of mercury but are also able to mop up mercury from their surroundings.

These mercury-resistant bacteria, developed by researchers from Inter American University of Puerto Rico, Bayamon Campus, contained either the mouse gene for metallothionein or the bacterial gene for polyphosphate kinase. Both strains of bacteria were able to grow in very high concentrations (120µM) of mercury, and when the bacteria containing metallothionein were grown in a solution containing 24 times the dose of mercury which would kill non-resistant bacteria, they were able to remove more than 80% of it from the solution in five days.

Dr Ruiz who led the research said, “The inclusion of heavy metal scavenging molecules in bacteria provides a viable technology for mercury bioremediation. This method not only would allow us to clean up mercury spills from the environment but the high accumulation of mercury within the transgenic bacteria also provides the possibility of recycling it for further industrial applications.”

Microbiology Books

2011-08-14T01:40:00.003+05:30

Foundations in Microbiology

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Microbiology - An Introduction (10 edition)

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Industrial Microbiology: An Introduction

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Genetic Engineering Books

2011-08-14T00:03:00.009+05:30

Gene Cloning and DNA Analysis: An Introduction (Brown,Gene Cloning and DNA Analysis) by T. A. Brown

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Principles of Gene Manipulation and Genomics - 7th Edition

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Principles of Genetics by Robert H Tamarin (7th Edition )

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Lemon Grass Prompts Cancer Cells To Commit Suicide!

2011-08-06T18:54:00.002+05:30

Lemon Grass Prompts Cancer Cells To Commit Suicide!

Fresh lemon grass fields in Israel turns out to be the best cure for cancer patients. Did you know that?

A drink with as little as one gram of lemon grass contains enough citral to prompt cancer cells to commit suicide in the test tube.

Israeli researchers find way to make cancer cells self-destruct - Ben Gurion University

At first, Benny Zabidov, an Israeli agriculturalist who grows greenhouses full of lush spices on a pastoral farm in Kfar Yedidya in the Sharon region, couldn't understand why so many cancer patients from around the country were showing up on his doorstep asking for fresh lemon grass. It turned out that their doctors had sent them.

'They had been told to drink eight glasses of hot water with fresh lemon grass steeped in it on the days that they went for their radiation and chemotherapy treatments ,' Zabidov told ISRAEL21c. 'And this is the place you go to in Israel for fresh lemon grass.'

It all began when researchers at Ben Gurion University of the Negev discovered last year that the lemon aroma in herbs like lemon grass kills cancer cells in vitro, while leaving healthy cells unharmed.

The research team was led by Dr. Rivka Ofir and Prof. Yakov Weinstein incumbent of the Albert Katz Chair in Cell-Differentiation and Malignant Diseases, from the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at BGU.

Citral is the key component that gives the lemony aroma and taste in several herbal plants such as lemon grass (Cymbopogon citratus), Melissa (Melissa officinalis) and verbena (Verbena officinalis.)

According to Ofir, the study found that Citral causes cancer cells to 'commit suicide: using apoptosis, a mechanism called programmed cell death.' A drink with as little as one gram of lemon grass contains enough Citral to prompt the cancer cells to commit suicide in the test tube.

The BGU investigators checked the influence of the Citral on cancerous cells by adding them to both cancerous cells and normal cells that were grown in a petri dish. The quantity added in the concentrate was equivalent to the amount contained in a cup of regular tea using one gram of lemon herbs in hot water. While the Citral killed the cancerous cells, the normal cells remained unharmed.

The findings were published in the scientific journal *Planta Medica* , which highlights research on alternative and herbal remedies. Shortly afterwards, the discovery was featured in the popular Israeli press.

Why does it work?

Nobody knows for certain, but the BGU scientists have a theory.
In each cell in our body, there is a genetic program which causes programmed cell death. When something goes wrong, the cells divide with no control and become cancer cells. In normal cells, when the cell discovers that the control system is not operating correctly for example, when it recognizes that a cell contains faulty genetic material following cell division - it triggers cell death, ' explains Weinstein. 'This research may explain the medical benefit of these herbs.' The success of their research led them to the conclusion that herbs containing Citral may be consumed as a preventative measure against certain cancerous cells.
As they learned of the BGU findings in the press, many physicians in Israel began to believe that while the research certainly needs to be explored further. In the meantime it would be advisable for their patients, who were looking for any possible tool to fight their condition, to try to harness the cancer-destroying properties of Citral.

That's why Zabidov's farm - the only major grower of fresh lemon grass in Israel - has become a pilgrimage destination for these patients. Luckily, they found themselves in sympathetic hands. Zabidov greets visitors with a large kettle of aromatic lemon grass tea, a plate of cookies, and a supportive attitude.

'My father died of cancer, and my wife's sister died young because of cancer,' said Zabidov. 'So I understand what they are dealing with. And I may not know anything about medicine, but I'm a good listener. And so they tell me about their expensive painful treatments and what they've been through. I would never tell them to stop being treated, but it's great that they are exploring alternatives and drinking the lemon grass tea as well.'

Zabidov knew from a young age that agriculture was his calling. At age 14, he enrolled in the Kfar Hayarok Agricultural high school. After his army service, he joined an idealistic group, which headed south, in the Arava desert region, to found a new moshav (agricultural settlement) called Tsofar.

'We were very successful; we raised fruits and vegetables, and,' he notes with a smile, 'We raised some very nice children.'

On a trip to Europe in the mid-80s, he began to become interested in herbs. Israel, at the time, was nothing like the trend-conscious cuisine-oriented country it is today, and the only spices being grown commercially were basics like parsley, dill, and coriander.

Wandering in the Paris market, looking at the variety of herbs and spices, Zabidov realized that there was a great export potential in this niche. He brought samples back home with him, 'which was technically illegal,' he says with a guilty smile, to see how they would grow in his desert greenhouses. Soon, he was growing basil, oregano, tarragon, chives, sage, marjoram and melissa, and mint just to name a few.
His business began to outgrow his desert facilities, and so he decided to move north, settling in the moshav of Kfar Yedidya, an hour and a half north of Tel Aviv. He is now selling 'several hundred kilos' of lemon grass per week, and has signed with a distributor to package and put it in health food stores.
Zabidov has taken it upon himself to learn more about the properties of Citral, and help his customers learn more, and has invited medical experts to his farm to give lectures about how the Citral works and why.

He also felt a responsibility to know what to tell his customers about its use. 'When I realized what was happening, I picked up the phone and called Dr. Weinstein at Ben-Gurion University, because these people were asking me exactly the best way to consume the Citral. He said to put the loose grass in hot water, and drink about eight glasses each day.'

Zabidov is pleased by the findings, not simply because it means business for his farm, but because it might influence his own health.

Even before the news of its benefits was demonstrated, he and his family had been drinking lemon grass in hot water for years, 'just because it tastes good.'

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Did You Know Warm Water Can Prevent Heart Attacks?

2011-08-06T18:45:00.003+05:30

Did you know by drinking only warm water, you can prevent Heart Attacks?

For those who likes to drink cold water, this article is applicable to you.

It is nice to have a cup of cold drink after a meal. However, the cold water will solidify the oily stuff that you have just consumed. It will slow down the digestion. Once this "sludge" reacts with the acid, it will break down and be absorbed by the intestine faster than the solid food. It will line the intestine. Very soon, this will turn into fats and lead to cancer. It is best to drink hot soup or warm water after a meal.

A serious note about heart attacks - You should know that not every heart attack symptom is going to be the left arm hurting. Be aware of intense pain in the jaw line.

You may never have the first chest pain during the course of a heart attack. Nausea and intense sweating are also common symptoms. 60% of people who have a heart attack while they are asleep do not wake up. Pain in the jaw can wake you from a sound sleep. Let's be careful and be aware. The more we know the better chance we could survive.

A cardiologist says if everyone who reads this message and refer 10 people to this site, you can be sure that we'll save at least one life. Read this & Send this link to a friend. It could save a life. So, Please be a true friend and send this link or article to all your friends you care about.

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Nanotechnology could provide a rapid DNA sequencing and economic

2011-08-03T00:47:00.002+05:30

Suite 3 billion of nitrogenous bases of four different types , the genome contains the plans of operation of our organization.

Its alteration by mutation causes the appearance of diseases or impairments such as cancer and muscular dystrophy . To decipher the genomes of individuals could target these mutations for patients to understand the changes causing the disease, can make predictions for predisposition to certain diseases, making early detection and propose targeted treatment. This is the key to both preventive medicine and completely personalized.

However , these promises can be held only if the decryption – the sequencing of DNA – is fast and inexpensive. Knowing that it took 15 years of efforts, between 1989 and 2004 , and over a billion dollars to achieve completely decipher the human genome under the Human Genome Project ( HUGO ) , must be put in place techniques reducing the costs and time by a factor of 100,000. That’s what the program ” $ 1,000 Genome ” in place in the United States since 2004 in which nanotechnology plays a central role [1,2] . $ 9.5 million of funding has been invested by the National Human Genome Research Institute ( NHGRI ) in this program for Fiscal Year 2010.

DNA and current methods of sequencing

Four building blocks (adenine , thymine, cytosine and guanine – A, T , C and G ) which follow two complementary strands coiled double helix DNA can be compared to a long string of characters . In the case of man, should be 1000 books 700 pages to write all 3 billion letters of the genome . DNA sequencing is complete reading of the 1000 book , letter by letter. The most effective method seems to start by the first page of the first book and perform the decryption letter after letter. But the double helix of DNA has a diameter of 4 nm and the nitrogen bases that constitute the concatenation are spaced 0.34 nm . No instrument can now go to “read ” the molecule at this scale . Researchers have developed the techniques with macroscopic methods available. The analogy with the books can get an idea of the monumental effort it represents .

You have before you 1000 pounds of 700 pages each. On each page , you know there are characters write in invisible ink . You can make a character appear randomly on both the page and whether it is an A, T, C or G. You can also make a layer of the page that allows you to copy the position of letter that you showed .

The Sanger method involves first to tear a page in a book . You get to see a letter on the page and you base the page . The letter goes. Can you get a second letter and get a new layer. The problem is that you can not choose the letter that you appear. We must therefore make thousands of layers to be on seeing all the letters appear on the page. The next step is to order all the layers obtained in order to reconstruct the full sequence of characters on the page . It ‘ll just repeat this work for each of the 700,000 pages to read . The last step is to put these pages in order . This is only possible using supercomputers, capable of finding the overlap between the different pages in order to reconstruct the succession .

This method , long expensive, was the one used in the HUGO project . Copies deciphered sections are made with enzymes whose reliability is not perfect and produce a number of errors. The multiplication of portions to decipher also causes the proliferation of reading errors . It is thus necessary to repeat the operation several times to achieve decoding error rates of 1 per 10,000 bases, set in the context of HUGO .

The pyrosequencing represents the second generation of methods and is now the most common technique employed . It is a sequencing by synthesis. An enzyme creates the complementary strand of the strand to sequence by adding nucleotides one after the other . At each addition, a chemical reaction causes the appearance of a light signal that identifies the nitrogenous base that has been integrated . This method has the advantage of not requiring the reproduction of multi -stranded DNA sequencing . It reduces the costs and delays of a factor 3 compared to the Sanger method .

These last three years, a third generation methods, ” Single Molecule Sequencing Real Time ” made its appearance . She is already using nanotechnology in progress to optimize the pyrosequencing methods . It is again to build the complementary strand of DNA using an enzyme. This time , the fluorophores are directly attached to nucleotides . A nanophotonic structure , called “zero -mode wave guide ” , composed of holes 70 nm in diameter and 100 nm long in a layer of aluminum deposited on a glass ensures effective detection of light signals and allows parallel sequencing many strands . The Companies Pacific Biosciences has received a grant of $ 6.6 million under the program ” $ 1000 genome ” the NHGRI to commercialize the method developed at Cornell University [ 3] .

The methods do not allow second- generation sequencing as pieces composed of a few tens of nitrogenous bases . The third generation improves the performance for the sequencing of strands up to 1000 bases at a speed of 10 bases per second. However , these techniques are limited by the relatively slow speed with which enzymes generate the complementary strand. To overcome these techniques , researchers are working on methods not requiring enzymes and based on “solid state nanopores ” .

The nanopores , key enablers of future sequencing

The development of nanotechnology now allow us to consider the drastic simplification of the sequencing methods . The control of matter at the nanometer scale allows one to create means of direct reading of the sequence of nitrogenous bases of DNA. These techniques are based on the translocation of a strand of DNA through a nanopore .

These nanopores are holes with a diameter of few nanometers , which are made in different materials depending on the technique used. The material separating two liquid media . The strand of DNA , negatively charged , is immersed in an environment negatively charged and is attracted by this solution of the other side of the nanopore , positively charged. This is where the DNA strand through the nanopore that scrolls the reading of nitrogenous bases that is can take place.

The use of nanopores allows playback of long chains of DNA directly without having to duplicate them in quantities as important as what was required by the old methods. The recombination sequences decoded is also simplified because they are much less numerous.

Optical detection

The group of Prof. Amit Meller of Boston University College of Engineering has developed a method for optical detection [4 ]. The technique used is an indirect method of reading DNA . The rope is first converted , each base is translated as a single assembly of two oligonucleotides (series of some bases ) , a method called circular DNA conversion . This single strand of DNA “lying ” is then probed using fluorophore labeled oligonucleotides to obtain double stranded helix ( Figure 2 ).

Passing through the nanopore , drilled in a silicon nitride layer 50 nm thick, the hybridized portion of the strand is detached causing the excitation of fluorophores and the emission of a characteristic light signal . The registration of the succession of these signals by a CCD camera to trace the sequence of oligonucleotides and therefore nitrogenous bases of DNA strand initial [5,6].

The frequency of reading is between 50 and 250 bases per second. By improving the technology through the use of four fluorophores instead of 2 now, researchers hope to reach frequencies of 500 bases per second. Restricting the technique is linked to the procurement capacity of the CCD camera becomes the limiting factor . By improving the camera, it will be possible to accelerate the process since the speed of the blade through the nanopore is controlled precisely.

A quick calculation to realize that even at a rate of 500 continuous bases read per second , it takes 70 days in order to decipher the entire genome of an individual. The main advantage of optical detection lies in the fact that the parallel between nanopores presents no difficulty. Thus , instead of using a single pore , the researchers plan to build hundreds of nanopore arrays facing an acquisition matrix CCD ( Figure 3 ) . Each pixel of the CCD acquires the light signals emitted by a nanopore.

This net benefit outweighs the main drawback of the method is the conversion step of the DNA strand in a string of oligonucleotides and hybridization . The commercialization of this method is considered by the creation of a start – up, NobleGen Biosciences , Inc. .

Electrical detection

Other methods are developed based on the detection of variation of electric current at the nanopore during the passage of different nitrogen bases during translocation . These techniques require immobilization of the DNA strand at each nitrogenous base to allow the acquisition of the measure .

To check this , the IBM researchers have developed a transistor DNA . It is a multilayer structure of nanometric thickness is dug in which a nanopore . The succession of conductive and insulating layers of the structure to control the passage of DNA strands in the nanopore to carry out the measures necessary for the identification of nitrogenous bases. To conduct this work, the IBM researchers are associate researchers at Roche to combine expertise in microelectronics , information technology and computational biology skills in the first sequencing of the second. Roche is in fact the current leader of the sequencing methods with automatic equipment developed by his firm 454 Life Sciences was founded in June 2000 [7] .

The main advantage of the electrical detection comes from the fact that the strands of DNA can be analyzed directly . However , the nitrogen bases are separated by only 0.34 nm , this involves securing an extreme precision in the manufacture of multilayer transistor DNA . For now , theoretical models and numerical simulations indicate that this is possible . The practical realization of the structure remains to be demonstrated. A conversion step , identical to that used by the team of Prof. Miller might be necessary.

This need for precision could be obtained using graphene . A team from the University of Pennsylvania has developed a structure comprising a nanopore in a graphene layer (Figure 1) [ 8]. The layer is monatomic, its thickness is less than the distance between two nitrogen bases . However, to improve the robustness of the nanopore and improve the signal to noise ratio of the measurement of electric current , the graphene layer is coated with titanium oxide . If the detection step is improved by the layer of graphene , the team must work on controlling the scrolling of the strand of DNA in the nanopore.

A team of researchers at Arizona State University have used carbon nanotubes as nanopores [9] . Variations of currents in the nanotubes recorded during the passage of DNA strands that would suggest possible to control and perform a reading of nitrogenous bases using nanotubes. However, modeling is needed to understand the mechanisms of electronic interaction between the nanotubes and the DNA strands .

The main difficulty of using nanopore technology is to control the speed of DNA migration . The methods developed using all cylindrical nanopores . A team from Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico is developing a nanopore sawtooth slowing the translocation of DNA by a factor of 5 (Figure 4 ) [ 10 ].

Another advance has been published by researchers at the University of Washington [ 11 ]. Jens Gundlach ‘s team used a nanopore of organic origin . This is a barrel -shaped protein , porin , which ensures the exchange of certain molecules in the membranes of bacteria. It took a change of these bacteria , M. smegmatis to produce a suitable nanopore . The transition of DNA in the nanopore is a variation of ion current to the translocation of the strand . Each nitrogenous base induces a different variation of this current which identifies them .

But it takes a millionth of a second nitrogenous base that passes through the nanopore. Too fast for a reading of the strand. To control the speed of translocation , the researchers used a method of extending the genome. They have added a section of DNA double strand between each of the nitrogenous bases of single-stranded sequence . The double strands are too large to pass through the pore . They then blocked the translocation till they split . Researchers have created a barrier that stops the translocation for a few milliseconds, the time to capture the signal of the nitrogen base to identify.

Conclusion

In 10 years, the evolution of techniques of DNA sequencing has been spectacular . The first generation method is exceeded, the second is heavily used , the third is nearing commercialization , and in their laboratories , researchers are preparing already the fourth generation that looks revolutionary.

Nanotechnology will soon allow ” read “the DNA in the same way that a laser beam reads the estate of a CD . However, beyond the technical difficulty of developing an effective reader , the sequencing of DNA leads to other problems . How , for example , store and manage the huge amount of data represented by the DNA sequencing of millions of people ? How to protect data ?

If knowledge of the individual genome will provide individualized medical responses , it may also be the source of discrimination, particularly on the part of health insurance policies . To solve these ethical problems, Congress passed, almost unanimously , May 21, 2008 , the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) . This law prohibits discrimination on the genome. Will there be enough to ensure a beneficial use of sequencing the human genome?

Food That Relates To Your Body Parts!

2011-08-03T00:37:00.002+05:30

Interesting theories on food related to your body organs

You are what you eat, so eat well. A stupendous insight of civilizations past has now been confirmed by today's investigative, nutritional sciences. They have shown that what was once called 'The Doctrine of Signatures' was astoundingly correct. It now contends that every whole food has a pattern that resembles a body organ or physiological function and that this pattern acts as a signal or sign as to the benefit the food provides the eater. Here is just a short list of examples of Whole Food Signatures.

A sliced Carrot looks like the human eye. The pupil, iris and radiating lines look just like the human eye...and YES science now shows that carrots greatly enhance blood flow to and function of the eyes.

A Tomato has four chambers and is red. The heart is red and has four chambers. All of the research shows tomatoes are indeed pure heart and blood food.

Grapes hang in a cluster that has the shape of the heart. Each grape looks like a blood cell and all of the research today shows that grapes are also profound heart and blood vitalizing food.

A Walnut looks like a little brain, a left and right hemisphere, upper cerebrums and lower cerebellums. Even the wrinkles or folds are on the nut just like the neo-cortex. We now know that walnuts help develop over 3 dozen neuron-transmitters for brain function.

Kidney Beans actually heal and help maintain kidney function and yes, they look exactly like the human kidneys.

Celery, Bok Choy, Rhubarb and more look just like bones. These foods specifically target bone strength. Bones are 23% sodium and these foods are 23% sodium. If you don't have enough sodium in your diet the body pulls it from the bones, making them weak. These foods replenish the skeletal needs of the body.

Eggplant, Avocadoes and Pears target the health and function of the womb and cervix of the female - they look just like these organs. Today's research shows that when a woman eats 1 avocado a week, it balances hormones, sheds unwanted birth weight and prevents cervical cancers. And how profound is this? .... It takes exactly 9 months to grow an avocado from blossom to ripened fruit. There are over 14,000 photolytic chemica l cons tituents of nutrition in each one of these foods (modern science has only studied and named about 141 of them).

Figs are full of seeds and hang in twos when they grow. Figs increase the motility of male sperm and increase the numbers of Sperm as well to overcome male sterility, and guess what they resemble?

Sweet Potatoes look like the pancreas and actually balance the glycemic index of diabetics.

Olives assist the health and function of the ovaries.

Grapefruits, Oranges are Citrus fruits look just like the mammary glands of the female and actually assist the health of the breasts and the movement of lymph in and out of the breasts.

Onions look like body cells. Today's research shows that onions help clear waste materials from all of the body cells They even produce tears which wash the epithelial layers of the eyes.

Do you have any other related fruits? Post here!

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Researchers Create Better Ways to Spot Cancer Cells

2011-08-03T00:23:00.002+05:30

Cancer can be notoriously difficult to spot, so scientists are working to develop new techniques to better detect tumors in the body.

Such tools could potentially identify cancer cells more reliably and earlier than currently available methods, such as mammography, biopsies and magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI. Improved detection methods could help speed up treatment decisions and monitor whether a therapy is working.

Some cancer researchers are working with metal nanoparticles—tiny bits of matter that are 100,000 times smaller than the thickness of a sheet of paper—and sensitive magnetic fields to locate breast-cancer cells. The technique appears to be much more sensitive than current methods allow and eliminates fears of radiation from a mammogram. Other scientists are attempting to improve detection of melanoma skin cancers without taking painful biopsies that can leave unsightly scars.

Another research project, also involving nanoparticles, aims to identify the molecular "fingerprint" of cancer of the abdomen, which could reveal how invasive the cancer is and from what part of the body it may have originated.

Current cancer-detection methods have limitations. Some technologies, like mammography used for screening for breast cancer, can only detect cancerous tumors after they have grown to a certain size. With biopsies, in which samples of tissue are removed for study, only a portion of the sample is examined; it is too time consuming and expensive to look at the entire biopsy. And, because tissues are sampled randomly from suspicious regions, it is hit-or-miss whether the biopsies actually capture any cancerous cells that may be present. MRIs are more sensitive than mammography but are more expensive and have some limitations on image quality.

With some types of cancer, like melanoma, distinguishing between a normal mole and cancerous skin tissue is extremely challenging, even for experienced medical professionals, says Mitchell Kline, a New York-based dermatologist and an expert in diagnostic tools for melanoma. There is a lot of variability in the appearance of skin tissue, he says. Recent research suggests that as few as 1 in 30 skin biopsies conducted turn out to be cancerous.

Edward Flynn, a retired fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and his colleagues are working with nanoparticles to detect breast-cancer cells. The technique involves attaching nanoparticles of iron oxide to certain antibodies, which are then injected into the patient. If a tumor is present, the antibodies, with the nanoparticles in tow, naturally recognize and bind to the HER-2 receptor of breast-cancer cells.

The patient is then surrounded with sensitive magnetic coils known as SQUID, for superconducting quantum interference device. A magnetic field is generated and all of the metal nanoparticles align in one direction. When the magnetic field is broken, the nanoparticles emit an electromagnetic signal as they relax back into their original state. By measuring the strength of the signal, doctors can tell how many metal particles, and therefore how many cancer cells, are present, and where in the breast they are located.

Metastatic melanoma cells

With mammography, which uses low doses of radiation to image the breast, approximately 100 million cancer cells—equal to a tumor about 6 to 8 millimeters in size—must be present before they show up on the film. Dr. Flynn says early tests of the SQUID technology in mice have shown that the technique can detect as few as 50,000 breast-cancer cells. That suggests a cancer could be detected 2½ years sooner using SQUID rather than a mammogram, he says. Dr. Flynn says he and his team plan to submit the data for publication soon.

Dr. Flynn, who also serves as chief executive of nanomedicine firm Senior Scientific LLC of Albuquerque, N.M., originally worked as a nuclear physicist at Las Alamos, studying how the atomic nucleus functions. He began wondering if the technology could be used to study the body, and he turned his attention to researching the brain and later to looking at cancer.

A key challenge of the SQUID technology is getting the nanoparticles, which are made in a lab using chemical techniques, into cancer cells at sufficient quantities to detect the magnetic charge, Dr. Flynn says. Another issue: making sure the antibodies bind only to cancer and not to normal cells. Only 30% to 40% of breast cancers contain the HER-2 receptor, the target in the current experiment. If more cancer-specific receptors can be identified, the technology's utility could grow, he says.

Dr. Flynn's team previously demonstrated that the SQUID technology could be used to assess the progress of leukemia patients. The process enables doctors to count cancer cells before and again after a chemotherapy treatment to gauge the effectiveness of the therapy. The results were published in a 2009 paper in the journal Cancer Research.

Jered Haun, a researcher at the Center for Systems Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and colleagues are running a program to analyze abdominal cancer. They take a biopsy of the tumor and, after attaching magnetic nanoparticles, examine the types of proteins the cancer cells produce. A "smart-phone"-like device using the same magnetic technology as an MRI can read the molecular "fingerprint" of cancer, potentially providing data about how invasive the cancer is, where in the body it originated and whether a treatment is working, says Dr. Haun. The findings, published last week in the journal Science Translational Medicine, showed the technology correctly identified that samples were cancerous in 44 of 50 patients.

Another cancer-detection effort is aimed at melanoma, which is normally diagnosed using skin biopsies. Bill Wachsman, a hematologist oncologist at the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues have developed a Scotch-tape-like adhesive to remove dead cells from the skin for a sample of the genes that are active in skin cells in that region. Dr. Wachsman, who also serves as an advisor to La Jolla, Calif.-based biotech DermTech International, says the genes are then compared to a panel of 17 genes known to be common to various forms of melanoma. Similarities in the pattern indicate that melanoma is present.

Results from a recent study showed that the test was able to accurately diagnose 100% of malignant samples, but falsely identified 12% of the normal samples as positive for cancer. With biopsies, some 95% of clinically performed biopsies are false-positives, says Dr. Wachsman. The paper was published recently in the British Journal of Dermatology.

Supercomputer Performs Laser Cancer Surgery

2011-08-02T23:53:00.007+05:30

Increased access to high-performance computing power means physicians and technologists can reshape the frontiers of surgical procedure.

The pervasion of IT in medical applications has been steady over the last 40 years, but within the operating theatre it has encountered some profound barriers to entry. The use of computer-assisted technology to aid or augment human procedures has long been a theoretical possibility, but the massive back-end processing requirements have not been available with the flexibility, versatility, and affordability.

Supercomputers - the performance vehicles of the computer hardware world - have been around for decades, but the cost and complexity of these highly sophisticated platforms, engineered for applications where the highest processing speeds were an absolute prerequisite, precluded them from all but the most specialised and well-funded disciplines, such as meteorological modelling.

The emergence in recent years of easier access to supercomputing resources - and even so-called ‘personal supercomputers’ - is changing the situation. Computation in surgery has two distinct applications that can be categorised as extending the eyes and the hands of the surgeon, to reach otherwise inaccessible parts of the body, and perform operations remotely in the field. There is also a fast-emerging third area in pre-operative planning, where high-performance computing (HPC) is having a growing impact either by modelling possible courses of treatment, or in some cases calculating the shape of implants .

Robotics comes into the category of extending the surgeon’s hands, although usually also involving imaging of some form to extend the eyes as well - but at present still under some form of master-slave relationship with the surgeon controlling the movement via a console.

Robotic surgery was pioneered in the military sphere, with Nasa and the US Defence Department leading the way in the early 1990s with the development of the Da Vinci ‘tele-presence surgery’ system designed to operate on the battlefield with the surgeon safely remote in a hospital at home. Now a commercial system, Da Vinci comprises articulating instruments including cameras, with the surgeon viewing the field of operation through binoculars providing a 3D video image, controlling the system via a console. The role of computation is to modulate both the image and the surgeon’s instructions, with one of the advantages being that it to some extent captures the skill of the surgeon within the system and dampens out small errors and in particular hand tremors.

The idea of extended dexterity has been taken further in other systems with the development of tiny robots that are in effect just micro-instruments too small for surgeons to operate directly, particularly for procedures in parts of the body where the proximity of delicate tissues or systems leaves little margin for error. This is the case with neural surgery, and for the head and neck in general, with such tiny robots close to being ready for clinical use for in middle ear operations.

Computer-aided imaging

Important though the role of IT is for controlling and navigating robots, this is not the cutting edge as far as HPC goes; however, HPC is closely involved in the imaging that makes the use of robots and novel small surgical instruments possible, as HP’s global HPC technology programme manager Frank Baetke points out: “3D rendering and image reconstruction from scans are by far the most demanding applications computationally,” he says, “compared to navigation and robotic control.”

Computer-aided imaging is having the strongest impact on existing procedures, particularly tumour surgery, where the challenge is to remove all malignant tissue in order to avoid recurrence of the cancer, while minimising collateral damage on healthy tissue. Even the process of taking biopsies (tissue samples) to test for cancer in a particular region can be dangerous, but the risks will soon be reduced through computer-enhanced imaging, using either CT (Computerised Tomography, i.e., 3D reconstruction from slices) or MRI (magnetic resonance imaging).

One such system has been developed by a German/Polish team. “Our research was to make biopsies safer with respect to neighbouring tissues,” says Matthias Helbig, an otolaryngologist (ear, nose, and throat) at the University Hospital of Frankfurt, involved in the project. “Though this system is not yet used in daily surgical work, it soon will be. It will be used initially for head and neck biopsies where accuracy is particularly critical to avoid damaging vital components.”

Another operation where great accuracy is needed for similar reasons lies in removal of shrapnel from injuries on the field of battle, requiring removal of all debris to avoid infection or damage to tissues, while leaving neighbouring structures intact. Israel has led the way here, developing technology that relies on computation to integrate two different imaging systems.

First, the location of the shrapnel is determined approximately in advance through a surgical navigation system which performs scanning before the operation. As the shrapnel can move slightly during the operation, the scans are updated by data generated by a metal detection system, enabling the exact real-time position of the debris to be superimposed on the background scan of the area of operation.

“Combining a metal detector probe and a surgical navigation system in this way significantly decreases the operative time and increases the surgeon’s confidence, especially where migration of the metal fragment occurs during searching and extracting,” says Rami Mosheiff, professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the Hadassah-Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The idea of integrating different imaging or visualisation systems leads to one of the potentially most exciting avenues opened up by HPC, called virtual endoscopy. Like flight simulation technology, this mimics the effect of navigating through a patient, creating a powerful new tool for training, planning of surgery, and demonstrating to patients what they are about to have done to them.

Most exciting of all is the potential for combining the virtual endoscopy with real-time imaging, enabling for example the location of important regions to avoid, or that must be removed such as a tumour, to be superimposed onto the live image.

“The real image is directly comparable with the virtual view,” says Florian Schulze, a researcher at the Medical Visualization Centre in Vienna, Austria, specialising in virtual endoscopy: “At the same time the virtual view can be augmented with additional information.” Schulze and colleagues have described a procedure where this additional information comprises virtual images of blood vessels and nerves as well as tumour tissue itself that would not show up directly on the real images.

The effect is to combine different sources of imaging information including visual and also deep-scanning data to create a much more comprehensive overall view providing surgeons with vital clinical and navigational information in real time. But this is still work in progress, with Schulze admitting there is still work to do ensuring the virtual view of the anatomy is kept totally synchronised with the real one as details change, for example as the result of swelling caused by the surgery itself.

Extreme multi-tasking

The tumour taker

A glimpse of how the surgical procedure of the future might operate came in April 2008, when a supercomputer-based system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in Austin destroyed prostate cancer tissue in a dog by directing lasers externally, dispensing not just with the surgeons but their traditional tools as well. In this case the supercomputer used was TACC’s Lonestar, a Dell Linux Cluster with 11.6 Terabytes of memory and 5,840 processor cores (within 1460 Dell PowerEdge blades, 16 PowerEdge 1850 compute-I/O server-nodes, and two PowerEdge 2950 login/management nodes), many of which were occupied by this procedure analysing location information obtained by thermal imaging to direct the lasers accurately; the TACC Lonestar has a peak performance speed of 62 Teraflops (Floating point Operations Per Second).

This could be applied to a substantial number of procedures, including many types of cancer treatment, where tissue has to be removed or destroyed, which can be done via external focusing of laser, ultrasound, or other types of radiation, controlled in response to feedback from various imaging systems. The process involved a pre-procedure phase that also makes great use of the supercomputer’s powers, reports TACC science and technology writer Aaron Dubrow: “Several days before the surgery, the patient received an initial MRI that provides the topography of the medical region of interest).

Using the data from the MRI and software available at TACC and ICES, a hexahedral mesh representing the biological domain as a 3D model is created and laser parameter pre-optimisation begins. In cancer treatment, optimisation means more than just determining where to point the laser and for how long. Doing maximum damage to the tumour must be balanced with protecting healthy tissue, while simultaneously minimising heat-shock proteins, whose expression can prevent tumour eradication.

The treatment itself is in four stages:

1. Lonestar instructs the laser to heat the domain with a non-damaging calibration pulse.

2. the thermal MRI acquires baseline images of the heating and cooling of the patient’s tissue for model calibration.

3. Lonestar inputs this patient-specific information and re-computes the optimal power profile for the rest of the treatments;

4. Surgery begins, with remote visualisations and evolving predictions continuing throughout the procedure.

“We had a 15-minute window in which a million things had to go right for this treatment to be successful,” David Fuentes, post-doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES), and central developer of the project, told ZDNet. “There had to be no flaw, no silly bug, everything had to go perfectly.”

This is a highly computationally-intensive process, with many complex application stages performing in real time, and demanding as much processing power as is available, with absolutely no margin for error or latency droops. In this case the canine patient died, but the operation was still judged a success because it proved the principle even if improvements in outcome are required before such procedures are applied to humans.

The procedure demonstrated not just the application of computational power, but also accompanying infrastructure and software designed to maximise availability and safety.

HPC-based imaging will also be used for more conventional procedures involving instruments or robotic devices, where one of its primary roles will be to increase accuracy of navigation. Memory and storage performance are critical for such applications, and IBM has promoted its System x mainframes and Power System servers here, along with its Bladecentre servers integrated with the General Parallel File System, which is suitable for accessing huge unstructured data sets.

Similar high performance is required for some forms of orthopaedic surgery, where the power is needed to construct accurate models for implants. Another emerging field for HPC is in modelling blood flow, which is required for best results in kidney dialysis. Although a long established procedure, kidney dialysis benefits from HPC through calculations of blood flow to optimise the size and positioning of the grafts that connect up the patient’s blood circulation to the machine.

High-Throughput Next Generation Books

2011-07-26T01:29:00.006+05:30

Due to their novel concepts and extraordinary high-throughput sequencing capacity, the “next generation sequencing” methods allow scientists to grasp system-wide landscapes of the complex molecular events taking place in various biological systems, including microorganisms and microbial communities. These methods are now being recognized as essential tools for a more comprehensive and deeper understanding of the mechanisms underlying many biological processes. In High-Throughput Next Generation Sequencing: Methods and Applications, experts in the field explore the most recent advances in the applications of next generation sequencing technologies with an emphasis on microorganisms and their communities; however, the methods described in this book will also offer general applications relevant to the study of any living organisms. Written in the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology™ series format, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials and reagents, step-by-step, readily reproducible laboratory protocols, and key tips on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls.

Comprehensive and cutting-edge, High-Throughput Next Generation Sequencing: Methods and Applications is an excellent collection of chapters to aid all scientists who wish to apply these innovative research tools to enhance their own pursuits in microbiology and also biology in general.

Download:
http://www.filesonic.com/file/886185894/sharebookfree.com_1992703356.rar

Next-Generation Genome Sequencing Book

From the first genomic landmark of deciphering the phiX174 bacteriophage genome achieved by F. Sanger’s group in 1977 (just over a 5000 bases of contiguous DNA) to sequencing several bacterial megabase-sized genomes in the early 1990s by The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) team, from publishing by the European Consortium the first eukaryotic genome of budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae in 1996 to producing several nearly finished gigabase-sized mammal genomes including our own, Sanger sequencing definitely has come a long and productive way in the past three decades. Sequencing technology has dramatically changed the face of modern biology, providing precise tools for the characterization of biological systems. The field has rapidly moved forward now with the ability to combine phenotypic data with computed DNA sequence and therefore unambiguously link even tiny DNA changes (e.g., single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)) to biological phenotypes. This allows the development of practical ways for monitoring fundamental life processes driven by nucleic acids in objects that vary from single cells to the most sophisticated multicellular organisms.

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A New Level in Next Generation Sequencing

2011-07-26T01:20:00.001+05:30

The capacities of modern next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies have been slingshot to a new level during the past two years. The remaining limitations for large-scale molecular profiling, which include throughput, cost, data management and automation issues, can now be circumvented by a brand new technology, enabling deep re-sequencing of selected parts of the genome. Febit is offering this new powerful technological solution, which provides all the required features: robust automation, simple assay workflows and manageable data pipelines.

This highly automated and capable technology from febit is called HybSelect. The extended multiplexing capability and high degree of automation of HybSelect make it an affordable way to conduct NGS for large cohort studies of hundreds or thousands of patient samples. Such comparative and meaningful large-scale studies can help the pharmaceutical and diagnostic industry to develop enhanced knowledge about the genesis and progress of diseases. The improved understanding resulting from individual molecular profiling holds the potential for further personalized therapies.

Sequence capture

The core of HybSelect is a highly efficient microfluidic biochip that uses robust automation, fast processing and high-density microarrays as a binding matrix. The biochip is synthesized with capture probes (oligonucleotides) specific to the genomic region of interest in a particular research project. They serve as bait for the desired DNA-fragments. After all non-hybridized fragments are washed away, the enriched target DNA is eluted and can be directly applied to NGS platforms.

The microfluidic chip architecture reduces the volume and amount of DNA needed for NGS. The eluted DNA can be directly applied to next generation sequencers and enables studies without the bias of PCR-amplification or other methods currently on the market.

HybSelect offers unmet advantages: short hands-on time (minutes instead of hours), a high degree of reproducibility and unmatched parallelism in selecting several genomic samples at a time.

Recent applications

In several biomedical studies of early access customers over the past months, HybSelect demonstrated superb enrichment factors and deep sequencing coverage for a broad range of diseases and cancer-related human genes and genomic regions.

Scientists at the TGen Institute in Phoenix, Arizona are currently using HybSelect's sequence capture technology to discover diagnostic biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease, developing a set of markers for monitoring disease progression.

Researchers at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany, used HybSelect to perform a NGS study on samples from approximately 200 patients. They identified a specific microRNA marker associated with doubled survival rates in a certain type of cancer. An ongoing study at the Saarland University, Germany, investigates malignant brain cancer by deep-sequencing of the 100 most relevant genes.

HybSelect will be one of the workhorses for the detection of novel tumor markers at the newly developed Biomarker Discovery Center (BDC) in Heidelberg, Germany. The BDC is currently working on about 20 oncology and five inflammatory disease-related projects that are using febit's technology together with ABI and Illumina next generation sequencers.

Moving forward

HybSelelect will allow the characterization of exons from hundreds of genes involved in complex diseases. Currently, the identification of new tumor-specific mutations as well as aberrant non-coding RNAs (ncRNA), like microRNAs, is underway. The determination of novel markers in comprehensive large-scale studies will be an important step towards standardized diagnostic assays as well as the development of new 'personalized' pharmaceuticals and the investigation of new therapeutic delivery models.

Febit will stay at the forefront of cancer research with the 2 Mb exon cancer biochip released this summer and a 30 Mb biochip planned for release in 2010. The demand for comprehensive and effective technologies like HybSelect will grow dramatically alongside the expanding understanding of biologic pathways and genetic regulation

Medical Nano-Bots Utilize Sperm Tails For Propulsion

2011-07-24T00:49:00.002+05:30

Imagine a tiny robot or drug-delivery device that could swim through your veins, using blood sugar as its fuel. Such a device could be powered by the same chain of chemical reactions that propel sperm toward an egg, according to researchers at Cornell University.

The researchers are trying to reproduce (pardon the pun) the steps whereby a sperm's whiplike tail generates energy. (Sperm also generate energy using the mitochondria in their midsection.) Running the length of the tail is a fibrous sheath with 10 enzymes attached to it. These enzymes act in series to break down glucose into ATP, the energy source for cells, in a process known as glycolysis.

So far, the Cornell researchers have managed to attach three of the 10 enzymes to a computer chip and confirm that the enzymes still work. If they can attach all 10 enzymes, they'll have a working version of a sperm engine, which could then be attached to nano-devices. The researchers presented their findings at the American Society for Cell Biology's annual meeting today.—Dawn Stover

Sony’s glucose-generated greener juice for gadgets

2011-07-24T00:10:00.005+05:30

Developed a bio battery generates electricity by glucose- Meet the world's highest output - passive-type bio batteries

Sony Corporation (hereafter Sony) is a source of carbohydrates contained in plant nutrients (glucose) and biological mechanism of extracting energy applied to decompose in the enzyme activity, remove the electrical energy to generate power instead of active energy has developed a bio battery ^{※ 1.}

The prototype bio battery, as the research basis for passive bio battery ^{※ 2, ※ 3} has achieved the world's highest output of 50mW. You can also use the prototype bio battery, walkman (memory type) has been achieved by playing music.

In the world to achieve maximum output, so you can retrieve the electrical energy efficiently decompose glucose, enzymes and electron transport materials to help the electronic conductivity, while maintaining a high density electrode activity (negative ) has developed a technique to immobilize. In addition, efficiently be incorporated into the oxygen required for the reaction, the electrode (cathode), moderately developed a technology to keep moisture in the. High power output became possible by using an electrolyte that is optimized for these two technologies.

Glucose, the plants received sunlight, one of the substances synthesized by photosynthesis, and renewable energy sources are abundant on the earth, bio battery generates electricity by glucose is an environmentally friendly energy future The device is expected.
Sony, such as improved performance and durability to power through the development of enzyme immobilization and electrode materials will continue to conduct research and development of the various component technologies, we aim to commercialize in the future.
In addition, the research is, ACS American Chemical Society held on 19 - 23 August in Boston, Massachusetts, USA (American Chemical Society) was adopted on 234th National Meeting & Exposition, at 11 am on August 22 local time ( August 23, midnight GMT) was announced.

■ The newly developed bio battery mechanism

Bio battery generates electricity in a glucose electrode, immobilized substance and electron transfer enzyme that breaks down glucose (negative) and the electrode immobilized substance electron transport enzymes and the reduction of oxygen (cathode) and across the separator has structure.
In the negative side, the external glucose (glucose) uptake of aqueous solution, hydrogen ions and eject electrons when oxidized by the enzyme glucose degradation.
[Glucose → gluconolactone ⁺ 2H + + 2e ^-]
Hydrogen ions through the separator to move from the negative to the positive side. In the positive side, the uptake of oxygen in the air, water is generated by reduction with electrons and hydrogen ions.
[(1 / ₂₎ O 2 ⁺ 2H + + 2e ^- → H 2 O]
Through this series of electrochemical reaction, when electrons move to the external circuit, electrical energy is extracted.
■ Main points of research and development
1) The power generation performance technologies enzyme immobilization density of the electron transport material

In the negative electrode on the electrode, the electron mediator and an enzyme must be immobilized at high density while maintaining activity. Now, as a substance that acts as a glue to immobilize these substances, we used two polymers. This immobilization method is not intended to be immobilized at high density on the electrode material and the electron transport enzymes using electrostatic interaction of two polymers of different signs with the ionic membrane ionic balance and immobilization By optimizing the electrode preparation process, we have succeeded in dramatically improving the efficiency of retrieving electronic break down the glucose.

2) The performance of the developed electrode structure generation by introducing more efficient oxygen

In the cathode, while oxygen incorporated efficiently in order to work efficiently enzymes responsible for the reduction of oxygen, must maintain a moderate amount of water in the electrodes. This time, the porous carbon electrode immobilized enzyme electron transport material, and using a cellophane separator, by optimizing their structures and processes, the positive electrode, and keep moderately moist may be able to improve the reaction efficiency.

3) The optimized structure of the battery electrolyte own bio

Typically, the concentration of sodium phosphate buffer solution contained in the bio-battery electrolytes are used by approximately 0.1 M. In contrast, the structure of the newly developed bio battery has a concentration above 1 M is used in the conventional sense. By using this electrolyte, found that the activity of the enzyme to efficiently draw is immobilized on the electrode surface, and succeeded in significantly improved power characteristics.

4) The prototype bio battery that combine a compact high-power

Was a prototype bio battery technology for compact high power with a newly developed. Bio battery is just dropping the glucose solution into contact with the anode tank, agitation of the solution is not required, is incorporated into the cathode by passive diffusion from the external nature of oxygen. Achieved the world's highest output of 50 mW at 1 unit of bio battery of 39 mm cubes on one side. This time, walkman memory types can be connected in series with a 4-unit bio battery this (NW-E407) speakers with passive (operated by power supplied from the Walkman) to be operated only by the power of bio battery, and play music able to. The bio battery casing is vegetable-based plastic (polylactic acid) made, it is the image of the cell design.
Technical specifications of the newly developed bio battery passive ■
Enzyme : (Negative side), glucose dehydrogenase, diaphorase (positive side), bilirubin oxidase
Electronic transmitter : (Negative side), Vitamin K3, NADH coenzyme
(Positive side), ferricyanide
Electrode material : Porous Carbon
Current collector materials : Titanium Mesh
Separator : Cellophane
Glucose solution : Glucose solution (0.4M) and sodium phosphate buffer (1M, pH7.0) mixed solution
Maximum output : 1.5 mW / cm ² (0.3V, 5mA / cm ²⁾
Stability data generated one minute after the start of power generation ※
OCV : 0.8V
The prototype bio battery ■ (1 unit) specification
External dimensions : 39 × depth 39 × height 39 Width (mm)
The capacity of the battery : Approximately 40cc (excluding housing real size)
Maximum output : About 50 mW

Fuel cell breakthrough aims at commercialization

2011-07-20T01:15:00.004+05:30

PORTLAND, Ore.—Fuel cells have been ready for commercialization for years, albeit only for use with pure hydrogen—easy to purchase for the lab, but expensive to mass produce. Even the best fuel cell designs become poisoned by impurities in hydrogen derived from natural gas—the most abundant source—causing them to fail prematurely. Now Cornell University scientists working for the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) believe they have a cure using nanotechnology that could make hydrogen fuel cells commercially viable.

The scientists discovered the cure after analyzing the problem—carbon-monoxide poisoning. Fuel cells electrochemically decompose hydrogen fuel, stripping off its electrons by bonding it with oxygen to form water vapor—its only emission. However, the platinum/ruthenium-alloy catalyst used for the anode in traditional PEM (proton exchange membrane) fuel cells is not only expensive, but can be poisoned by exposure to even trace levels of carbon monoxide. Commercial methods exist for scrubbing carbon monoxide from the hydrogen produced from natural gas, but that inflates the cost of the hydrogen to uneconomical levels.

To solve the problem, a research team led by professor Hector Abruna of Cornell University's Energy Materials Center harnessed nanotechnology to fabricate a catalyst that is less expensive than platinum/ruthenium alloys and yet can tolerate levels of carbon monoxide found in hydrogen produced from natural gas.

The new catalyst is composed of titanium oxide and tungsten coated with a thin-film of platinum nanoparticles, resulting in a tolerance for as much as two-percent carbon monoxide—about 2,000 times more than the amount required to poison a pure platinum catalyst.

Hydrogen fuel cells today use a platinum/ruthenium-alloy catalyst for their anode, but Cornell University researchers say substituting their nanotech catalyst could make fuel cells commercially viable.

Now that the researchers have proven the concept in the lab, they are fabricating a complete PEM fuel cell using their new catalyst. So far the prototype fuel cells outlast traditional fuel-cells, which fail prematurely, and now the team wants to quantify for how long their new architecture will extend a fuel cell's life.

Other researchers contributing to the work included Cornell professor Francis DiSalvo, post doctoral researcher Deli Wang, research associate Hongsen Wang and doctoral candidates Chinmayee Subban and Eric Rus.

15 cellphone charger that harness kinetic energy for a clean recharge

2011-07-20T01:03:00.004+05:30

Human body is often blamed to be an inefficient, energy-wasting machine. However, if we consider “energy harvesting” from the human body itself and harness the kinetic aspect of it, it might help us reducing our reliance on alternative resources of energy, like solar power, wind power, etc. Here is a list showing certain innovative and out of the box mechanical devices for generating electricity for your gadgets like cellphones and parallel devices.

• Foot-powered cell phone charger:

power pump 1 ktclf 69

Developers: Orange and Gotwind.

The device harnesses kinetic energy from an airbed foot pump that drives an embedded turbine. This energy is then converted into an electrical current that recharges your mobile phone. The company claims that about 1 minute of pumping or 60 pumps can give the user enough charge to use the phone for a 5-minute call. Though the charging system won’t completely charge a dead battery, it could still be a part of your camping emergency kit.

• Mechanical Mobile:

mechanical mobile

Designer: Mikhail Stawsky.

The Mechanical Mobile generates ample energy to power itself when you spin it around your finger or crank the tip. So, make sure your fingers keep exercising all through the power-generation process.

• Yo-Yo mobile phone charger:

yoyo mobile phone charger concept1 2nilv 24429

Designer: Emmanuel Hansen.

The hand-held mobile phone charger concept harnesses the kinetic energy generated through playing a yoyo. This energy is then used to juice up your cellphones. Swing it in the air or toss it down, it will generate power as long as it keeps moving.

• iYo induction charger:

iyo mobile phone charger

Designer: Peter Thuvander.

The yo-yo induction charger, dubbed as iYo, contains a small Li-ion battery inside it that charges with only 30 cranks. Later, electrical gadgets like iPhones, mobile phones or iPads could be plugged into it for charging.

• Finger-powered phone battery:

finger powered battery 1 3f8mu 11446

Designer: Song Teaho and Hyejin Lee.

Expressly meant for tough situations, when you don’t have your charger or an electric point around, you simply need to remove finger-powered battery for a few turns around your index finger and it’s amply charged to last a conservation. Not for a lengthy one, mind you. If you want to talk more, you have to repeat the process.

• M2E portable charger:

m2e portable charger

Developer: M2E Power.

The portable charger for mobile devices, which is the size of a pack of cards, gathers power from cumulative motion from walking, jogging, cycling, or driving. Six hours of motion provides 30 to 60 minutes of extra power.

• Kinetic energy iPhone charger:

golf charger3 y3tug 69

Designer: Mac Funamizu.

The gadget charges your iPhone or other mobile phones by harnessing the kinetic energy of the swing of the golf stick. This charger only has the handgrip and not the actual club, thereby preventing the user from stroking a golf ball with this. By swinging the grip for a specific number of times, sufficient energy is produced to charge mobile phones and other portable gadgets for a couple of hours.

• Watts Maker:

watts maker cellphone charger

Designer: Oscar L’Hermitte.

The Watts Maker consists of a small kinetic generator that generates power when you pedal to work. While the charging time is just 90 minutes, it keeps on generating energy as long as the wheels keep turning.

• Viber Burst concept charger:

viber burst jxqz7 69

Designer: Josh Pell.

The Viber Burst concept charger harnesses the power of motion, be it in your bag, your hand or your shoes to charge a cellphone. It takes only two seconds to transfer the generated energy into your cellphone’s battery, once the device is fully charged.

• Wearable cellphone:

ntt docomo k8cic 69

Developer: NTT DoCoMo.

The concept phone made from recycled materials will be powered by kinetic energy generated from the movements of the user. The cellphone will also be equipped with simultaneous translation software to connect the user to everyone else, anywhere, anytime. It will also be used as an ID to enter the family home or board a flight, a device to video-chat with friends and also a remote control to command the robo-vacuum cleaner.

• Roto Charger:

ideaforge roto charger 1 hm25q 69

Developer: ideaForge.

Touted as the world’s first truly sustainable cellphone charger, the Roto Charger recharges cellphones by either cranking the handle or rolling the device on any surface. The device takes just one minute of rotation to provide three minutes of talktime and about 30 minutes of stand-by time.

• Etive - A kinetic energy charger:

etive 1 cvn1i 69

Designer: Kyle Toole.

The renewable energy generating system, Etive, is designed to harvest the vibrating shock forces which are concentrated at the knee during the heel strike phase of walking. The current prototype can recharge a 1500mAh NiMH battery in approximately 9 hours, which is comparable to portable solar chargers, and mains AA battery chargers. This power output is achieved by stacking four generator modules. A single generator module produces 3.8V (peak AC). This is enough to fully recharge two mobile phones or an I-pod.

• nPower Personal Energy Generator:

peg ahp3b 5638

Developer: Tremont Electric.

The device uses kinetic energy to generate electricity. Once you attach it to your hips or your bag while on the move, the up and down movement of your body provide the required kinetic energy to the device. It can charge your devices at the same rate as your wall chargers do. The device is compatible with 90% of handheld devices. PEG can generate up to 4 watts of power and most of the internal components are recyclable.

• HuMo - The Human Dynamo:

humo kwxkd 24429

Designer: Nick Reddall.

The jacket-like device allows your clothing to harness the kinetic energy produced by body movements. It harvests energy from the normal arm swing of the person wearing it. Interestingly, the power is straight applied to lighting, so that the wearer is always safe whether he is running or walking down the street. The HuMo is able to generate an average of half a watt of power from a normal walking arm swing, which could be used to charge the power-hungry devices. There is a small string laid inside the sleeve that drives a pre-planned linear generator to create a natural feeling and resistance.

Human dynamo: Movements of knee to generate power for gadgets

2011-07-20T00:29:00.003+05:30

We love green energy, we’ll spend every single effort to find ways to generate green power for our gadgets, even though it’s little absurd. The new idea here is to make use of the movements of your knee to generate electricity to power your portable gadgets or cellphones. It’s be a device that is to be strapped to your leg around the knee, converting the movements of your knees into electricity while you’re walking.

Surely, at the early prototype stage of the device, it looks bulky, which makes you look little absurd, like a Robocop. Perhaps, it’ll make you a little bit clumsy with your movements, while having it strapped to your knee. The researchers are looking into the possibility of making a much smaller version that could be incorporated into clothing.

Dr Arthur Kuo of the University of Michigan is the inventor of this device. And he calls it “biomechanical energy harvester”. He said the device works similar the power-generating brakes found in hybrid cars.

Anyway, this device will be helpful for joggers to power up their iPods while running or commuters to charge their mobile phones while dashing for a train.

US and Canadian scientists have created a unique and useful device that will use your body movements while walking to charge up your batteries for a whole host of gadgets. As a human dynamo you will effortlessly produce enough energy to power up your mobile for 30 minutes form just one minute walking.

The dynamo is strapped to your knee and works as you move, using a process that similar to those found in hybrid cars. Each one of your steps will generate power using the car technology known as ‘regenerative braking’. The knee brace has a series of gears and sensors that are used to assist your muscles in the walking action and simultaneously produce electricity.

Your energy harvesting efforts will give off 5 watts of electricity (for a slow walk), and at 1.6kg and aesthetically-challenged this early version is not quite ready for either the rigours of daily living or the catwalk.

Blood Pressure Monitors for iPhone & iPad

2011-07-14T19:21:00.002+05:30

Blood Pressure Monitors for iPhone & iPad

Now you can check your blood pressure using your iPhone or iPad with two products that make it easy — download an app onto your iOS device, put on a blood pressure cuff, tap the touchscreen, and soon you have a blood pressure reading that you can track every day. They’re quick and reasonably priced, but are they accurate?

For my tests, I pitted the iHealth BP3 for iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad against the Withings Blood Pressure Monitor, which also works with the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad. Our family doctor’s been taking blood pressure readings for 30 years, so I figured he’d be a good one to give me his opinion about these devices. So I took both units to his office and comparing their readings with that of an old-fashioned manual blood pressure cuff in his skilled hands.

iHealth BP3

Like a conventional BP cuff, It's secure to the arm with Velcro

In addition to the Iphone app, there is a free Ipad app available

iPad and Ipad 2 both fit

Press Start to begin

It has a charging station

That's a USB connector to charge the dock and your iOS device, too

There is pot for the air hose

Clean interface, great graphing features, and you can share your results on Twitter and Facebook as well as email.

This $99.95 iHealth BP3 blood pressure monitor also functions as a charging dock. I tested it with an iPad, iPad 2 and an iPhone 4, all of which fit easily into this attractive desktop unit. You plug the air hose into the side of the dock, and the other end is permanently attached to the blood pressure cuff.

The doctor showed me the proper way to use a blood pressure cuff, placing it about an inch above the elbow, and after touching the start button, the iHealth was doing its work, making a subdued whirring sound. Take a look at the video below that compares the two test units, and you’ll get an idea of how they work — they feel just like any other blood pressure cuff, and for this iHealth unit, the whole process took only 31 seconds for each test.

The free iHealth app looks great on the iPad and iPhone. It displays systolic and diastolic blood pressure readings as well as pulse rate. I especially like its graphing feature, which works in both portrait and landscape mode, showing you the history of blood pressure readings over time. I also like the way it can share blood pressure readings via email, but I’m not sure I’d want to opt for its other capabilities: sharing on Facebook or Twitter.

After two tests on each arm (with a bit of waiting in between for blood vessels to go back to their normal state), the blood pressure readings were all in the same range of around 120/80. While none of the readings were exactly alike, all were within the margin of error of the traditional blood pressure cuff used by the doctor.

The doctor says: “iHealth is accurate,” and especially liked the way the dock held the iPhone at an easily viewed angle. He also liked the iHealth’s blood pressure cuff, commenting that he thought it was more comfortable than the other one we tested from Withings. Here’s a video of both units in action:

An added advantage of the iHealth BP3 is its ability to function as a dock even when you’re not using it to measure blood pressure. Plug its included cable into the AC adapter included with iOS devices, and you have yourself a sleek-looking charging station. The dock itself also needs to be charged, so it can perform its blood pressure measurement duties without the necessity of being near a power outlet. The upside of that? It runs on its own power, and doesn’t use power from the iPhone or iPad. The makers of iHealth say it’ll run for 100 tests on a charge. Neat.

Whitings Blood Pressure Monitors

This $129 Withings Blood Pressure Monitor is a self-contained unit, powered through the universal dock connector that plugs into an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Its blood pressure cuff is more rigid, making it slightly less comfortable than the iHealth, but a little easier to manage when you’re placing it on your arm.

When you first connect the unit to your iOS device, you’re prompted to download the free Withings app. Because I already use a Withings Wi-Fi scale, I already had the app on my iPhone and iPad, and I immediately realized the advantage Withings has here: On a single graph, you can see daily measurements of your weight and body fat percentage delivered by Wi-Fi, along with your blood pressure readings from this blood pressure device. You can email all that data to your doctor or caretaker, too. This e-medicine routine gives you an idea of what the remote health care of the future might be like.

As I did with the iHealth BP3, the doctor and I performed three separate blood pressure readings on each arm (each test taking 35 seconds to complete, 4 seconds slower than the iHealth), and compared those to the readings taken by the doctor using the traditional blood pressure cuff. All the readings from the Withings unit were within the same range as the conventional blood pressure cuff and the iHealth BP3.

The doctor says: “It’s equally accurate,” but he thought the Withings self-contained blood pressure cuff was bulkier and less comfortable than the iHealth’s, and noticed that the way the connector plugged into the iPhone and iPad (without that dock used in the iHealth) made the screen less convenient to operate and view.

As you saw in the video above, the Withings system offers its results on a nicely designed app that shows the systolic and diastolic blood pressure readings as well as heart rate. The Withings app also allows its readings to be shared on Facebook and Twitter, and has the added advantage of connecting with Microsoft HealthVault and GoogleHealth, allowing you to keep all of your health records in one place.

Which is best? Both units are easy to use, accurate, and work well. If you don’t already have a charging dock for your iPad or iPhone, the iHealth would be a more practical choice, and at $99.95, it’s a better overall value. If you already have a Withings Wi-Fi scale, you might want to choose the Withings blood pressure monitor (even though it costs $29.05 more than the iHealth BP3), so you can coordinate your weight and body fat measurements with your blood pressure readings and see them all on one graph together.

Best of all, neither of these units require a stethoscope and medical training to use and are reasonably priced (especially if you already have an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch), giving you daily readings of your blood pressure that might make you aware of a previously unknown condition, and perhaps even save your life.

Surgeons Perform the World’s First Synthetic Organ Transplant

2011-07-14T19:07:00.002+05:30

The replacement windpipe was grown in the lab

Surgeons in Sweden have carried out the world's first synthetic organ transplant.

Scientists in London created an artificial windpipe which was then coated in stem cells from the patient.

Crucially, the technique does not need a donor, and there is no risk of the organ being rejected. The surgeons stress a windpipe can also be made within days.

The 36-year-old cancer patient is doing well a month after the operation.

Professor Paolo Macchiarini from Italy led the pioneering surgery, which took place at the Karolinska University Hospital.

In an interview with the BBC, he said he now hopes to use the technique to treat a nine-month-old child in Korea who was born with a malformed windpipe or trachea.

Professor Macchiarini already has 10 other windpipe transplants under his belt - most notably the world's first tissue-engineered tracheal transplant in 2008 on 30-year-old Spanish woman Claudia Costillo - but all required a donor.

Indistinguishable

The key to the latest technique is modelling a structure or scaffold that is an exact replica of the patient's own windpipe, removing the need for a donor organ.

To do this he enlisted the help of UK experts were given 3D scans of the 36-year-old African patient, Andemariam Teklesenbet Beyene. The geology student currently lives in Iceland where he is studying for a PhD.

Using these images, the scientists at University College London were able to craft a perfect copy of Mr Beyene's trachea and two main bronchi out of glass.

This was then flown to Sweden and soaked in a solution of stem cells taken from the patient's bone marrow.

After two days, the millions of holes in the porous windpipe had been seeded with the patient' own tissue.

Dr Alex Seifalian and his team used this fragile structure to create a replacement for the patient, whose own windpipe was ravaged by an inoperable tumour.

Despite aggressive chemotherapy and radiotherapy, the cancer had grown to the size of a golf ball and was blocking his breathing. Without a transplant he would have died.

During a 12-hour operation Professor Macchiarini removed all of the tumour and the diseased windpipe and replaced it with the tailor-made replica.

The bone marrow cells and lining cells taken from his nose, which were also implanted during the operation, are able to divide and grow, turning the inert windpipe scaffold into an organ indistinguishable from a normal healthy one.

And, importantly, Mr Beyene's body will accept it as its own, meaning he will not need to take the strong anti-rejection drugs that other transplant patients have to.

Professor Macchiarini said this was the real breakthrough.

"Thanks to nanotechnology, this new branch of regenerative medicine, we are now able to produce a custom-made windpipe within two days or one week.

"This is a synthetic windpipe. The beauty of this is you can have it immediately. There is no delay. This technique does not rely on a human donation."

He said many other organs could be repaired or replaced in the same way.

A month on from his operation, Mr Beyene is still looking weak, but well.

Sitting up in his hospital bed, he said: "I was very scared, very scared about the operation. But it was live or die."

He says he is looking forward to getting back to Iceland to finish his studies and then returning to his home in Eritrea where he will be reunited with his wife and young family, and meet his new three-month-old child.

He says he is eternally grateful to the medical team that has saved his life.

Chlorophyll in our body

2011-07-14T18:56:00.003+05:30

Some health benefits of chlorophyll

Chemically, structure of chlorophyll has similarities with hemoglobin. The difference is only on the central atom of molecule. Central atom in chlorophyll is magnesium (Mg) whereas hemoglobin is iron (Fe). If hemoglobin is identified as the red blood of human, then the chlorophyll can be identified as green blood.

Because of similar structure, chlorophyll molecules are the only one molecule that naturally can be accepted by the body and become a vital nutrient for it.

Chemical structure of chlorophyll and hemoglobin

Why chlorophyll?

Chlorophyll is the fastest red blood cell-forming in the human body

In the process of metabolism; the energy comes from red blood cells, which inside them there are molecules carrying oxygen named hemoglobin.

Chlorophyll is the fastest red blood cell-forming in the human body. By consuming it, blood cell count can rise quickly so that energy supply in the body can be continuously assured.

In his book, The Healing Power of Chlorophyll, Bernard Jensen asserted various experiments with rats, which their blood was replaced by chlorophyll. The result was that chlorophyll was still to maintain the survival of rats.

Tim O'Shea in his book, The Sancity of Human Blood, also confirmed that chlorophyll was the only molecule that could be accepted by the body because of its similarity to hemoglobin so that it is potential in increasing the resilience of human body.

Main functions of chlorophyll

What are the main functions of chlorophyll?

The use of chlorophyll to the human body can help in terms of:

Increase the number of blood cells, particularly increasing the production of hemoglobin in the blood,

Overcome anemia,

Clean the body tissues,

Helps cleanse the liver and its function,

Increase body resistance against foreign substances (viruses, bacteria, parasites),

Strengthen the cell,

Protect DNA against damage, but the most important of chlorophyll is safe to our body.

In addition, chlorophyll also serves as a disinfectant and antibiotics, even before the existence of synthetic drugs. It cleanses the body tissues and residual waste disposal sites in the body's metabolism, as well as against parasites, bacteria and viruses that exist in the human body. In fact, it can eliminate toxic chemical compounds in the body.

Tail of chlorophyll molecules that are hydrophobic can dig into the cell/tissue and lift hydrocarbon compounds from the cell membrane and then release toxic compounds. That hydrocarbon is pesticides, drug that accumulates in the body, food coloring, even bacteria, parasites and viruses.

Ann Wigmore in the Wheatgrass Book, 1985, stated that chlorophyll could protect us from the carcinogenic compounds, where food and other drugs were not working anymore. Chlorophyll acted to strengthen the cells, release toxic substances from the liver and bloodstream, and chemically neutralize pollutants.

Latest Development of Chlorophyll Applications

This article will explain about the latest development of chlorophyll applications

Because of dengue viruses attack that causes symptoms of bleeding and decreased platelet counts, chlorophyll is properly noticed in the attempt of alternative medicine. In the term of prevention, consuming chlorophyll is a prudent action to increase the body's defense allowing us against foreign substances entering into the body.

Blood circulation, which is clean and rich in red blood cells, is the most body's natural defense mechanisms. Actually, nature has provided the sources of chlorophyll those can be consumed. The simplest way is to eat regularly chlorophyll-rich green vegetables every day.

Although chlorophyll could be directly ingested, but recent research showed that pure chlorophyll affected by many processing (cooked), its main function would be damaged. It would be difficult to be absorbed by the human body, even wasted in the exhaust system. So, it is highly recommended for people to consume fresh vegetables without being processed.

For patients who really need chlorophyll, by utilizing high-tech, its extraction can be performed before its quality and its main function is declined. By adding a magnesium atom together with copper and sodium in the molecule, so that chlorophyll molecules can be dissolved in water and become stable. The addition of these new atoms will produce new chemical structures called Chlorophyllin. It has been traded with various trademarks in the form of tablets, capsules or liquid.

In addition as treatment for dengue fever, chlorophyll also has potential as photosensitizer (a trigger drug activated by light stimulus) to treat tumors and cancer. Drugs like this are not new thing, having been applied in photodynamic therapy. In Japan, Germany and the United States, these techniques had been used to tackle cancer such as: brain, lung and mouth. Photodynamic becomes an alternative therapy more secure than radiowave therapy and chemotherapy, often accompanied by side effects such as: hair loss and skin damage. Unlike chemotherapy which takes the time interval between administrations, photodynamic therapy can be performed more often in a specified period.

Utilization of photodynamic technology (TFD) is essentially based on the assumption that photosensitizer (chlorophyll) will be able to kill cancer cells when the compounds were exposed to visible light at specific wavelengths (630-800 nm) and particular intensity. In its application, chlorophyll is injected into the body, which then automatically absorbed by the cells. Chlorophyll, which acts as a photosensitizer, will accumulate in cancer cells and stay longer when compared to its presence in normal cells. To detect the presence of chlorophyll in cancer cells, patients given the medication were scanned. Part contained chlorophyll would glow brightly.

Action mechanism of chlorophyll as a sensitizer is to be the trigger of oxygen species into the highly reactive singlet oxygen that will kill cancer cells. The process is when the photosensitizer absorbs light. It will be excited in singlet state. This situation did not last long; the photosensitizer will change to triplet state. In this state, photosensitizer will react with oxygen which must exist in human tissue, including cancerous tissue. Oxygen in the ground state will be excited to highly reactive singlet oxygen, which in turn will destroy cancer cells. In the end, photosensitizer that has been doing its duties will be back to normal.

Next about chlorophyll...

In the future, research of chlorophyll is predicted taking place primarily for further application

It is based on the fact that chlorophyll is natural ingredients and not toxic as chemical drugs that have been commonly used. In addition, use of chlorophyll from photosynthetic bacteria as a cancer drug is still meeting resistance.

In the research, there are three important electronic stages such as: fundamental stage, radical cation and exited stage. During research, it stuck on exited stage because the lifetime of molecule is very short, at the level of pico-seconds (10-9 seconds), so that very difficult to measure molecules very unstable even if its structure can be obtained.

Benefits we can get from the use of chlorophyll is the importance of back to nature by re-consuming foods produced by nature. In synthetic drugs, we only isolate their bioactive compounds (toxic compounds) effective as anti-disease for the plant without taking its anti-toxic compound, while natural remedy has provided as well as two compounds. They are toxic compounds and antitoxic.

Enzyme	:	(Negative side), glucose dehydrogenase, diaphorase (positive side), bilirubin oxidase
Electronic transmitter	:	(Negative side), Vitamin K3, NADH coenzyme (Positive side), ferricyanide
Electrode material	:	Porous Carbon
Current collector materials	:	Titanium Mesh
Separator	:	Cellophane
Glucose solution	:	Glucose solution (0.4M) and sodium phosphate buffer (1M, pH7.0) mixed solution
Maximum output	:	1.5 mW / cm ² (0.3V, 5mA / cm ²⁾ Stability data generated one minute after the start of power generation ※
OCV	:	0.8V

External dimensions	:	39 × depth 39 × height 39 Width (mm)
The capacity of the battery	:	Approximately 40cc (excluding housing real size)
Maximum output	:	About 50 mW

Biotechnology View|biotechnology discovery|biotech articles|biotech news|future of biotech

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Natural remedies for the 15 most common aches, pains, and health complaints

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SABAH SNAKE GRASS...CURE CANCER !!!

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No laboratory equivalent

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Materials and methods

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Oragene•DNA

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