Spiders Fleeing Pakistan's Floodwater Take to the Trees

Last summer’s floods in Pakistan displaced millions of people--and millions of spiders. Although spiders rarely migrate to trees during natural disasters, the flooding was so heavy and prolonged, they had to climb trees and remain there. According to University of Akron biologist Todd Blackledge, who studies web-weaving spiders, some spin new webs each day. After weeks, the dense layers of silk, seen here in Sindh province, covered the trees--a result of continuous web spinning by the eight-legged refugees.

During a humanitarian-aid trip last December, Russell Watkins, a photographer with the British government agency the Department for International Development, encountered the web-veiled landscape. “I wasn’t prepared for the scale,” he says. “Literally thousands of trees and bushes over dozens of miles were shrouded. It really was very spooky.”

While the floods displaced spiders, the mosquitoes were surprisingly unaffected. The stagnant water should have provided prime breeding grounds for the insects, but local inhabitants noticed that there were far fewer mosquitoes than expected. Although the spiders could have accounted for some of the mosquito population drop, John Gimnig, an entomologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says that shifts in climate affect mosquitoes more than spiders do.

Source: Gizmag

Andy Rubin: 500,000 Android Activations Daily

According to Google’s Android boss Andy Rubin, half a million new Android devices are being activateddaily. Not only that, the the numbers are growing by over four percent every week. Those numbers are frankly astonishing.

Back in January, Apple announced (in a roundabout way) over 360,000 daily iOS activations, and at that time Google was seeing 300,000 activations. It’s certain that Apple’s numbers have jumped significantly since then, especially considering the launches of both the Verizon iPhone and the iPad 2 in the meantime, but have they yet reached the 500,000 mark?

It’s impossible to know. Surely Rubin’s announcement via Twitter will set “analysts” a-shaking their magic 8-balls to help them pluck another made-up number from the air (possible answer: “Reply hazy, try again”), but until Apple makes an official announcement, we won’t know.

My own guess is that either Apple hasn’t reached 500,000 yet, or has already jumped so far past it that it is waiting to hit the magic million mark before saying anything. I’m no analyst, though, so what could I possibly know?

Also, Steve Jobs has in the past accused Google of juicing the Android activation numbers by including updates and reinstalls. Given that Rubin’s last Tweet before today’s announcement was 82 days ago, I don’t expect clarification soon, at least not via that channel.

However you slice it, though, those are big — and very impressive — numbers.

Source: Wired

Andy Rubin’s Tweet [Twitter]

Artificial pancreas for diabetics being developed by Mayo Clinic

If a just-announced research project is successful, then maybe - just maybe - diabetics will finally be free of having to perform daily finger prick blood tests and insulin injections. Based on new findings regarding the body's production of insulin, Mayo Clinic endocrinologists Yogish Kudva and Ananda Basu are in the process of developing an artificial pancreas, that would automatically deliver the hormone when needed.

One of the key revelations is the fact that activity after meals greatly affects the blood sugar levels of people with type 1 diabetes. When diabetics engage in even low-grade activity after eating, their sugar levels stay close to those of people with normally-functioning pancreases. When eating isn't followed with activity, however, the sugar levels rise.

The artificial pancreas would be a closed loop system, that would include a blood sugar monitor, an automatic insulin pump, a set of activity monitors that attach to the body, and a central processing unit. Receiving input from the activity monitors and the blood sugar monitor, a pancreas-imitating algorithm in the CPU would activate the insulin pump as necessary, to maintain normal glucose levels in the bloodstream.

"Physical activity enhances insulin action, hence lowering blood glucose concentration," said Dr. Kudva. "Real-time detection of physical activity - and modeling of its effect on glucose dynamics - is vital to design an automatic insulin delivery system."

Clinical trials on inpatient volunteers are likely to begin this November at the Mayo Clinic. Participants will follow strict diet, exercise and insulin-delivery regimens, with the resulting data being used to form the basis of the algorithm.

D-Dalus - an entirely new genre of aircraft arrives

Austrian research company IAT21 has presented a new type of aircraft at the Paris Air Show which has the potential to become aviation's first disruptive technology since the jet engine.

The D-Dalus (a play on Daedalus from Greek mythology) is neither fixed wing or rotor craft and uses four, mechanically-linked, contra-rotating cylindrical turbines, each running at the same 2200 rpm, for its propulsion.

The key to the D-Dalus' extreme maneuverability is the facility to alter the angle of the blades (using servos) to vector the forces, meaning that the thrust can be delivered in your choice of 360 degrees around any of the three axes. Hence D-Dalus can launch vertically, hover perfectly still and move in any direction, and that's just the start of the story.

Like most cars and aircraft these days, it sounds very complex but it's all controlled by computer algorithms, so it's simple joystick control for the user, and far less exacting than a helicopter to fly.

Existing rotary wing aircraft offer VTOL capabilities but have vulnerabilities which make them unsuitable for many applications. They are challenged in bad weather, at long ranges, at high speed and in operating to and from lurching platforms, such as boats in rough weather.

By contrast, D-Dalus is particularly suited for such conditions and can thrust upwards and hence "glue down" on landing, which it can also do on a moving vehicle. Indeed, landing on a moving vehicle is one of the D-Dalus' many party tricks, and it's a natural for landing on watercraft. Not surprisingly, since it initially broke cover at the Royal Aeronautical Society conference a few days ago, it has already attracted a lot of interest from military quarters.

The D-Dalus is also near-silent, and has the dynamic stability to enter buildings and handle rough weather with ease - things which existing rotorcraft simply cannot achieve. The aircraft also has a sense-and-avoid system which, in conjunction with its complete lack of vulnerable external parts (such as rotors), means it can hover in very close proximity to vertical rock faces and walls, making it suitable for search-and-rescue operations, as a surveillance drone with hover-and-stare capabilities and as a proactive tool for urban battlefield situational awareness.

The lack of vulnerable external moving parts will give a small D-Dalus-type drone the ability to fly into buildings through windows, and its unique capabilities also offer 360 degree vision, another aspect lacking in traditional rotor craft which have blind spots due to the rotors, and nowhere near the same maneuverability as the D-Dalus.

IAT21 forsees many applications based on these key new criteria - apart from being able to enter and search buildings, it could conceivably remove radioactive contamination or explosives, extract casualties, or hold and direct water hoses for fire fighters.

As it can lift heavy loads, and becomes even more efficient in doing so as it scales upwards in size, it is also envisaged as a platform for loading and unloading ships when cranes are not available.

The D-Dalus is also so simple mechanically that it needs little maintenance and requires no more maintenance expertise than an auto mechanic. It should be noted that all VTOL aircraft capable of carrying large payloads are complex and very costly to maintain.

Currently, tests are being conducted using a 120 bhp KTM engine and turbines around five feet long - and the capability of lifting a payload of 70 kg. More tests are planned over the coming weeks. IAT21 is now also working with Cranfield University in the U.K. on a larger, more powerful motor, a new hull shape for the craft, and advanced guidance and control systems.

The forces on the blade pivots are understandably huge, and in initial testing it was found that all available bearings failed, so inventor Meinhard Schwaiger, who already has more than 150 patents to his name, knuckled down and invented (and patented) his own, near-frictionless swivel-bearing to cope with the stresses.

The D-Dalus is constructed of carbon fiber, and appears to be scalable for a range of potential applications including maritime search and rescue, freight transport, operating alongside and within buildings during fires - the long term hopes for the platform include a passenger version for public transit.

New Alloy Can Convert Heat Directly Into Electricity

A new alloy with unique properties can convert heat directly into electricity, according to researchers at the University of Minnesota. The alloy, a multiferroic composite of nickel, cobalt, manganese and tin, can be either non-magnetic and highly magnetic, depending on its temperature.

Multiferroic materials possess both magnetism and ferroelectricity, or a permanent electric polarization. Materials with both of these properties are very rare; check out this explainer from the National Institute of Standards and Technology if you’re interested in the electron orbital arrangements that cause these phenomena.

In this case, the new alloy — Ni45Co5Mn40Sn10 — undergoes a reversible phase transformation, in which one type of solid turns into another type of solid when the temperature changes, according to a news release from the University of Minnesota. Specifically, the alloy goes from being non-magnetic to highly magnetized. The temperature only needs to be raised a small amount for this to happen.

When the warmed alloy is placed near a permanent magnet, like a rare-earth magnet, the alloy’s magnetic force increases suddenly and dramatically. This produces a current in a surrounding coil, according to the researchers, led by aerospace engineering professor Richard James. Watch a piece of the alloy leap over to a permanent magnet in the video clip below.

A process called hysteresis causes some of the heat energy to be lost, but this new alloy has a low hysteresis, the researchers say. Because of this, it could be used to convert waste heat energy into large amounts of electricity.

One obvious use for this material would be in the exhaust pipes of vehicles. Several automakers are already working on heat transfer devices that can convert a car’s hot exhaust into usable electricity; General Motors is using alloys called skutterudites, which are cobalt-arsenide materials doped with rare earths.

Rare earth magnets are already a necessity in many hybrid car batteries, so heat-capture devices made of the new multiferroic compound could be placed near the magnets.

The material could also be used in power plants or even ocean thermal energy generators, the researchers said.

A paper on the alloy was published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials.

Source: Eurekalert

Japanese Supercomputer Unseats Chinese Supercomputer, Is Now the World's Fastest

A Japanese supercomputer is now the world’s fastest, unseating the previous record-holder by nearly a factor of four. The K Computer, based at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, can perform 8 petaflops — that’s 8 quadrillion calculations per second.



The next-best computer is China’s Tianhe-1A , which set a record at 2.6 petaflops last fall. The U.S.-based Jaguar computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is now in third place with 1.75 petaflops.

K Computer topped the newest TOP500 List of the world’s fastest supercomputers, announced Monday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg.

K Computer, built by Fujitsu and entirely made in Japan, has 672 racks equipped with a current total of 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs, each with eight cores. It will eventually have 800 racks and will be capable of performing 10 petaflops, according to a news release from RIKEN. RIKEN and Fujitsu plan to have the computer fully operational by November 2012.

At least two American 10-petaflop machines are set to come online next year — IBM is building Mira, based at Argonne National Laboratory, and Blue Waters, based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is getting a 20-petaflop IBM model called Sequoia.

K computer will be used for global climate research, meteorology, disaster prevention, and medicine, according to RIKEN.

Source: Popsci via Engadget

The First Self-Powering Nano-Device That Can Also Transmit Wireless Data

Scientists working with DARPA and Department of Energy backing have cracked the code on a kind of technological milestone, for the first time developing a nano-device capable of powering itself by harvesting energy from vibrations while at the same time transmitting data wirelessly over long distances. That kind of technology could have huge implications for devices ranging from surveillance implements to airborne sensors to implantable medical devices.

Publishing their findings in the journal ACS Nano Letters, the team describes a nanogenerator that turns mechanical vibrations scavenged from anything from a person’s pulse to a breeze to a person walking or cars driving over a bridge into electricity to power the device. That in and of itself isn’t so impressive, as such vibration-driven generators already existed previously.

The game-changer here is the fact that this nano-device can generate and store (in a capacitor) enough energy to also transmit wireless signals to a receiver up to 30 feet away via a transmitter roughly equivalent to those in Bluetooth headsets. The idea that something so small might be able to transmit data across distances could lead to new generations of medical sensors powered by a person’s own blood flow, environmental sensors powered by the ebb and flow of atmospheric air, and wearable sensors that run and transmit on the power leftover by the wearer’s own footsteps.

Source: Popsci via ScienceDaily

Scientists turn 'bad fat' into 'good fat'

Scientists say they have found a way to turn body fat into a better type of fat that burns off calories and weight.

The US Johns Hopkins team made the breakthrough in rats but believe the same could be done in humans, offering the hope of a new way to treat obesity.

Modifying the expression of a protein linked to appetite not only reduced the animals' calorie intake and weight, but also transformed their fat composition.

"Bad" white fat became "good" brown fat, Cell Metabolism journal reports.


Brown fat is abundant in babies, which they use as a power source to generate body heat, expending calories at the same time.

But as we age our brown fat largely disappears and gets replaced by "bad" white fat, which typically sits as a spare tyre around the waist.

Experts have reasoned that stimulating the body to make more brown fat rather than white fat could be a helpful way to control weight and prevent obesity and its related health problems like type 2 diabetes.

Novel approach


Various teams have been searching for a way to do this, and Dr Sheng Bi and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine believe they may have cracked it.

They designed an experiment to see if suppressing an appetite-stimulating protein called NPY would decrease body weight in rats.

When they silenced NPY in the brains of the rodents they found their appetite and food intake decreased.

Even when the rats were fed a very rich, high-fat diet they still managed to keep more weight off than rats who had fully functioning NPY.

The scientists then checked the fat composition of the rats and found an interesting change had occurred.

In the rats with silenced NPY expression, some of the bad white fat had been replaced with good brown fat.

The researchers are hopeful that it may be possible to achieve the same effect in people by injecting brown fat stem cells under the skin to burn white fat and stimulate weight loss.

Dr Bi said: "If we could get the human body to turn bad fat into good fat that burns calories instead of storing them, we could add a serious new tool to tackle the obesity epidemic.

"Only future research will tell us if that is possible."

Dr Jeremy Tomlinson, an expert at the University of Birmingham's Centre for Obesity Research, said: "This is exciting, novel and interesting.

"We will need a lot more work to tease this out, but it could offer a feasible way to develop new treatments for obesity."
Source: BBC

Nasal spray vaccine could prevent type 1 diabetes

A nasal spray vaccine currently being trialed in Australia could prevent the development of type 1 diabetes. Previous research showed that the nasal vaccine was successful in preventing the disease in mice, and now the results of a study involving 52 adults with early type 1 diabetes has provided encouraging evidence that it could also be effective in preventing the disease humans.

Type 1 diabetes occurs when the body's immune system attacks and kills the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas. The subsequent lack of insulin leads to increased blood and urine glucose, which can result in heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, blindness and premature death if left untreated, with the most common treatment being the daily injection of insulin.

Although the 52 participants in the study had early type 1 diabetes and had evidence of immunity to insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas, they were not yet at the stage of requiring insulin injections. For the study, the participants were given either the nasal vaccine or a placebo for 12 months.

When administered through the nasal passages, the insulin vaccine stimulates the immune system present in the mucosal linings and works to desensitize the whole immune system to insulin so that the immune system's white blood cells are prevented from attacking insulin in the beta cells.

"The results showed that the vaccine allowed the immune system to restore immune tolerance to insulin," said Professor Len Harrison of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia. "When subsequently given insulin by injection, the participants who had received the nasal insulin vaccine were found to be desensitized to insulin."

The researchers from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute and the Royal Melbourne Hospital say the results of the study indicate they are on the right track to finding a vaccine for type 1 diabetes and the same approach could also be adapted to other autoimmune diseases.

"The nasal vaccine approach, if shown to be successful in human type 1 diabetes, could also be tested with different vaccines for the prevention of other autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis," added Professor Harrison.

The Type 1 Diabetes Prevention Trial, which was previously known as the intranasal insulin trial, INIT II), began in 2006 and is now halfway through the testing phase. Following the encouraging results of the study, hopes are high a nasal vaccine for type 1 diabetes could be available in as little as two years.

Details of the research was published in the April 2011 issue of the journal Diabetes.

Google brings Search by Image and Voice Search to desktops

While Google is still by far the most dominant search engine on the Web, it can't afford to rest on its laurels with Microsoft constantly adding new features to its Bing search engine. At Google's 'Inside Search' event, the company has announced several new features designed to ensure it stays on top of the lucrative search engine game. Users will now be able to search using images, enter search terms by voice and have the top search results pre-rendered so they appear instantly.

Google Goggles has been letting users conduct searches based on pictures taken on mobile devices since 2009 and now Search by Image brings the same functionality to the desktop. Users can drag and drop an image from the Web or stored locally on their computer over the Google search box and Google will try and identify it and bring up relevant results. Users can also Search by Image by copying and pasting an image URL or uploading an image by clicking on the camera icon in the search box. Google is also releasing extensions for Chrome and Firefox browsers that will let users search an image on the web by right-clicking on it.

The company says it is rolling out the feature globally in 40 languages now, but it doesn't look to have been activated in my neck of the woods yet so I wasn't able to put it the test by attempting to identify the location of my holiday snaps. If you point your browser to images.google.com and see a camera icon in the search box, however, you should be good to go.

Another feature making its way from mobile devices to the desktop is Voice Search. The feature is limited to Chrome 11 or higher users who will see a microphone icon in the search box. Users can click on the icon and speak their search - provided their computer has a built-in or attached microphone.

Also revealed at 'Inside Search' is Instant Pages, which is basically an evolutionary step of its Instant Search feature introduced last year that provides search results as you type. To speed up things even further, Instant Pages will pre-render the top search result in the background so it will appear instantly when clicked. Instant Pages will be included in the next beta release of Chrome but can be tried now with the developer version.

Check out the videos below for examples of the new Google features.

Search by Image 

Voice Search 

Instant Pages 

Cool Your Brain For Better Sleep

You can't sleep.  You've tried counting sheep, drinking warm milk, maybe even taking medications like Benadryl or sleeping pills.

Maybe next you should try cooling your brain.



According to research presented Monday at Sleep 2011, the annual meeting of the Associated Profession Sleep Societies, cooling the brain and can reduce the amount of time it takes people with insomnia to fall asleep -- and increase the length of time they stay that way.

To achieve "frontal cerebral thermal transfer," as the cooling is called, researchers Dr. Eric Nofzinger and Dr. Daniel Buysse of the Sleep Neuroimaging Research Program at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine outfitted 24 people --  12 with insomnia, and 12 without -- with soft plastic caps.  The caps had tubes for circulating water at neutral, moderate or maximum "cooling intensity."

The team observed how well participants slept with and without the caps, and at the different temperature levels.  Patients with insomnia who were treated at maximum cooling intensity for the whole night took about 13 minutes to fall asleep and slept 89% of the time that they were in bed, the researchers said.  That's similar to the sleep enjoyed by healthy study subjects who didn't have insomnia (who took 16 minutes to fall asleep and also slept 89% of the time).

The method is effective because it slows metabolism in the frontal cortex, according to the presenters.  Insomnia is associated with increased metabolism in that part of the brain; reduced metabolism, apparently, has the opposite effect.

In a press release, Nofzinger noted that only 25 percent of patients on sleeping pills said they were satisfied with the drugs, which can cause side effects and dependence.  The cooling caps may provide an effective, safe and natural alternative.  "We believe this has far-reaching implications for how insomnia can be managed in the future," he said.
Source: LA Times

Researchers Build the First Living Laser, Using Human Cells and Jellyfish Protein

Researchers at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital built a living laser partly to study interactions between electronic and biological systems, and partly out of sheer curiosity. The world’s first biological laser, made from a single living cell, could lead to better microscope imaging inside the body and even targeted light therapies, researchers say.

A single human cell engineered to express green fluorescent protein can be used to amplify photons into super-short pulses of laser light, the researchers say.

Lasers consist of a gain medium, the source of optical gain within the laser which absorbs external energy and excites atoms or molecules into a more energized state, inside an optical cavity. Most lasers use semiconductors, crystals or gases as a gain medium. In this case, the researchers used green fluorescent protein (GFP).

First, the researchers filled an inch-long cylinder with a GFP solution, and placed mirrors at each end. They pulsed it with light and confirmed the GFP solution could amplify the input energy into short pulses of laser emissions, according to anews release from Mass. General. This proved GFP could serve as the laser’s gain medium. Green fluorescent protein, isolated from jellyfish, will emit green light when it is exposed to blue light.

Then the team engineered human embryonic kidney cells to produce GFP, and placed a single cell between two mirrors, just 20 micrometers apart. The researchers flooded the cell with blue light, and the cell lit up. The mirrors served as the optical cavity, allowing light to bounce through the cell many times, amplifying it into a coherent green beam that was visible to the naked eye.

Living Laser Schematic: When a single biological cell genetically programmed to produce green fluorescent protein is placed inside an optical resonator consisting of two parallel mirrors separated by 20 µm (0.02 mm), the cell can generate green laser light.  Nature Photonics/Malte Gather, Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital

The cell’s spherical shape acted as a lens, refocusing the light and therefore requiring less energy for lasing than was necessary in the cylinder experiment. Best of all, the cells survived the lasing process, and were able to produce hundreds of pulses of laser light.

A living laser could have a wide range of medical uses, according to lead author Malte Gather at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Mass. General. They could be used to activate drugs using light, for instance, or for new forms of imaging — it is difficult for visible and UV light to penetrate very far inside the body. Eventually, living lasers could enable optical communications and computing inside the body, using living systems instead of electronics.

Sourcs: Popsci,Eurekalert, BBC

First Graphene-Based Integrated Circuit Smaller than a Grain of Salt

IBM researchers have built the first integrated circuit based on graphene, a breakthrough the company says could herald a future based on graphene wafers instead of silicon. The circuit, a 10 gigahertz frequency mixer, could give wireless devices greater range. At higher frequencies, the technology could someday allow law enforcement and medical personnel to see inside objects or people without the harmful effects of X-rays, according to IBM.



It's yet another advancement in the use of graphene—which, in case you forgot, is that fantastic, ultra-thin "wonder material" that won two scientists the Nobel prize for physics. Graphene is only one layer of (carbon) atoms thick—but despite its ultra-lightness, it's still nearly indestructible. Like, 200x stronger than steel and the strongest substance in the known universe kind of indestructible. But it's also flexible and its conductivity is 100x greater than silicon. So it's badass.


The circuit is a broadband radio-frequency mixer, which, as IEEE Spectrum explains, is a crucial component of radios. It creates new radio signals by finding the sum and difference between two input frequencies. IBM’s circuit performed frequency mixing up to 10 GHz, and worked well up to 257 degrees F. The research team believes it can get even faster — if so, chips like these could improve cell phone and transceiver signals, possibly allowing phones to work in spots where they currently can’t receive service, the company says.


Several teams have been working on graphene transistors and receivers, but it has been difficult to marry the single-carbon-atom sheets to the metals and alloys used on chips. This circuit also uses aluminum, gold and palladium, for instance, which do not adhere well to graphene. What’s more, graphene can be easily damaged in the etching process, as Yu-Ming Lin and colleagues at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center explain in a paper about the new circuit.


The team figured out a new process that clears those hurdles by growing graphene on the silicon face of the silicon-carbide wafer. Then they coated the graphene in a polymer, conducted the necessary etching, and removed the polymer using some acetone. The transistor gates are only 550 nanometers long, and the entire wafer is the size of a grain of salt, IBM says.


Pretty soon, we could be seeing applications of graphene in high-bandwidth communication and low-cost smart phone and TV displays. 


Compared to silicon, the graphene transistor could be less expensive, use less energy and significantly free up room in portable electronics and smart phones.

The research is reported in today’s issue of the journal Science.


Source: Popsci Via Gizmodo

Preventing Heart Attack Using Magnetic fields

Overly-viscous blood can damage blood vessels and lead to heart attacks. Therefore, people who are at risk of heart attacks take medications such as Aspirin, in order to thin their blood. Such drugs can have unpleasant side effects, however, and can only be taken a certain number of times per day. Prof. Rongjia Tao, a physicist from Philadelphia's Temple University, now thinks he might have come up with a better way of thinning human blood - he subjects it to magnetic fields.

Tao had previously researched the use of magnetism for decreasing the viscosity of oil in engines and pipelines. Because blood contains iron, it turns out that it, too, becomes more fluid when magnetized.

In lab tests, Tao and Temple collaborator Ke "Colin" Huang subjected human blood samples to a magnetic field of 1.3 Telsa (roughly equivalent to an MRI) for approximately one minute. This polarized the red blood cells, which caused them to link together into short chains. These chains, because they are larger than single cells, tend to flow down the middle of blood vessels, instead of creating friction by moving against the inner walls. All told, he was able to decrease the viscosity of the samples by 20 to 30 percent.

The blood did return to its original viscosity once the magnetic field was removed, although it took several hours to do so. It is apparently safe to repeat the treatment over and over, however, as the function of the red blood cells does not appear to be affected.

"By selecting a suitable magnetic field strength and pulse duration, we will be able to control the size of the aggregated red-cell chains, hence to control the blood's viscosity," said Tao. "This method of magneto-rheology provides an effective way to control the blood viscosity within a selected range."

More work is required, although Tao hopes to ultimately make the treatment available as a preventative therapy.

The research is being published in the journal Physical Review E.

Source: Gizmag

Detecting and controlling seizures with brain implants

In the future, people who are prone to seizures may get an array of electrodes implanted in their brains. These electrodes would be capable of detecting the onset of a seizure, and then releasing medication to prevent it from happening. While it might sound far-fetched, scientists at the University of Pittsburgh have already demonstrated the technology on lab rats.

Multielectrode arrays (MEAs) are capable of recording or controlling the electrical activity in neurons, and are used in devices such as ear implants and pacemakers. The Pittsburgh team coated MEAs with the polymer Polypyrrole (PPy), which is known for its electrical conductivity. Mixed in with the PPy were anti-convulsive neurochemicals.

The coated MEAs were then placed on a rat's brain, and electrically stimulated. This caused the neurochemicals to dissociate from the PPy, and diffuse into the adjacent regions of the brain. Testing indicated that after dissociation, the drugs still remained effective.

Similar technologies have involved implants with built-in drug reservoirs, although these would be larger than the coated MEAs, and could cause tissue damage.

"By directly loading a drug of interest onto an individual electrode site and using an electrical signal to trigger its release, we can precisely control the drug delivery site with ease," said the study's co-author, Prof. X Tracy Cui. "Additionally, our technology can be used for a combination of exogenous chemicals such as subtype-specific receptor antagonists, thus potentially allowing for more precise dissection of neural circuit function at the molecular level."

The research was published this week in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

Source: Gizmag

German Outbreak Caused By Mutant Super-Glue Producing Strain of E. Coli

Scientists probing the deadly E. coli strain in Europe are finding the bacteria combines a highly poisonous, but common, toxin with a rarely seen "glue" that binds it to a patient's intestines.

It may take months for the global team of researchers to fully understand the characteristics of the bacteria that has killed at least 17 people in Europe and sickened 1,500. But they fear this E. coli strain is the most toxic yet to hit a human population.

Most Escherichia coli or E. coli bacteria are harmless. The strain that is sickening people in Germany and other parts of Europe, known as 0104:H4, is part of a class of bacteria known as Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli, or STEC.

This class has the ability to stick to intestinal walls where it pumps out toxins, causing diarrhea and vomiting. In severe cases, it causes hemolytic uremic syndrome or HUS, attacking the kidneys and causing coma, seizure and stroke.

"Germany is now reporting 470 cases of HUS. That is absolutely extraordinary," Dr. Robert Tauxe, a foodborne diseases expert at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Reuters. The CDC has been working with German health authorities on the case since late last week.

"That is 10 times more than the largest outbreak in this country," he said, referring to a 1993 outbreak involving fast food hamburgers that sickened more than 700 people and killed 4. In that outbreak, there were only 44 cases of HUS.

Asked if this was the world's deadliest E. coli outbreak yet, Tauxe said: "I believe it is."

He said a strain very similar to the German strain had been seen in Korea in the 1990s, but is very rare.

Remarkably, the German strain appears to combine the toxin found in the most common type of STEC bacteria in the United States, known as E. coli O157:H7, with an unusual binding agent. Tauxe said that "glue" is typically only found in children in the developing world.

"The glue that this bug is using is not the same glue that is E. coli 0157 or most other STEC bacteria," he said. "It's this combination from the glue from another kind of E. coli and the shiga toxin that makes this an unusual strain," he said.

The World Health Organization has confirmed that the strain "has never been isolated from patients before," and said the bacteria had likely acquired some extra genes that may make it especially deadly.

SOURCE UNKNOWN

The source of the outbreak is unknown, but scientists say it is highly likely to have originated in contaminated vegetables or salad in Germany.

E.coli infections are spread by consuming even miniscule particles of feces of infected animals or humans, often via contaminated food or water.

Tauxe said the CDC has notified public health officials in all U.S. states to be on the lookout for the infections. So far, two adults from two different states have developed HUS after having traveled to Northern Germany.

U.S. health officials have not confirmed that the infections match the German strain, but Tauxe said it is very likely they are part of the same outbreak and more tests are being done to see if the infections have the same fingerprint.

He would not release the individuals' names or say where they lived.

Scientists at the Beijing Genomics Institute in Shenzhen city in southern China, who have sequenced the genome of the strain, also noted that the strain is highly resistant to several classes of antibiotics.

Tauxe said it is not clear how the bacteria became so resistant because antibiotics are not recommended as a treatment for E.coli.

He said there is no evidence that antibiotics help, and they could make things worse. "It is curious to us that it is so resistant," he said.

Dr. Phillip Tarr, a professor of microbiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, said E. coli mutate all of the time and it may take months before scientists can fully understand the scientific characteristics of this strain.

"This is almost certainly something that cannot be sorted out in any rapid sequence," he said.

Source: Reuters