British first as baby born free of breast cancer gene
AFP
A researcher performs a DNA test. A mother who is the first woman in Britain to have a baby selected free of a gene which causes breast cancer has given birth successfully, doctors say.
Photograph by: Robert King/Newsmakers/Getty Images
LONDON - A mother who is the first woman in Britain to have a baby selected free of a gene which causes breast cancer has given birth successfully, doctors said Friday.
"The mother and her little girl are doing very well," said University College London (UCL) of the baby, who grew from an embryo screened to ensure it did not contain the faulty BRCA 1 gene.
The baby’s 27-year-old mother, who wants to remain anonymous, decided to take the step because several of her husband’s close female relatives suffered from breast cancer.
Any daughter born with the BRCA 1 gene has an 80 per cent risk of developing breast cancer and a 60 per cent chance of developing ovarian cancer - as well as a 50 per cent risk of passing on the anomaly to their own children.
Doctors said the parents were relieved to have a guarantee that the faulty gene would not be passed to their daughter.
"This little girl will not face the spectre of developing this genetic form of breast cancer or ovarian cancer in her adult life," said Paul Serhal, head of the Assisted Conception Unit at UCL Hospital.
"The parents will have been spared the risk of inflicting this disease on their daughter. The lasting legacy is the eradication of the transmission of this form of cancer that has blighted these families for generations," he said.
The mother said in June: "We felt that, if there was a possibility of eliminating this for our children, then that was a route we had to go down."
The procedure was carried out using a technique known as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis which has already been used here to screen embryos resulting from in vitro fertilization for disorders like cystic fibrosis.
It was given the green light in Britain in 2006.
The procedure is still relatively rare but has been used to screen embryos for breast cancer in the United States and Belgium.
© Copyright (c) AFP
****
Science - and ethics - of this screening are complexSarah Boseley
The Guardian, Saturday 10 January 2009 Article history
The little girl born free of the BRCA1 gene that so often causes breast cancer is not a designer baby in the strict sense of the phrase.
Her parents did not choose her hair colour, or select an aptitude for maths. But the birth breaks new ground because, for the first time, embryo selection was made for the purpose of reducing, not eliminating, the baby's chances of getting breast cancer when she grows up - and because the discarded embryos might also have become cancer-free women.
Genes are not the only trigger for breast cancer. Women with the genes that have been the most strongly identified with the disease, BRCA1 and BRCA2, have a risk up to seven times higher than other women of developing breast and ovarian cancer, but some will remain cancer free. And some who get cancer will be cured.
Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) involves testing a group of embryos derived from fertility treatment to ensure that the one returned to the womb does not carry unwanted the genes.
In the past, scientists have used it to prevent babies being born who would certainly have suffered life-shortening diseases, such as cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease.
These inherited diseases are caused by single defective genes. If the embryo has the faulty gene, which runs in the family, the baby will certainly develop the disease.
There has been comparatively little controversy over selecting embryos free of such genes, where parents want it. But the selection of babies free of specific cancer genes is much more complex.
In recognition of this, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which regulates IVF, including genetic testing on embryos, held a public consultation before deciding to grant permission for PGD to be carried out to screen for the breast cancer genes.
Most people would be sympathetic to the technique being carried out in families where there is a long history of generations of women succumbing to breast or ovarian cancer - the genes can cause both - which results in daughters and granddaughters living in fear that the disease might happen to them.
The baby born in London after screening has a reduced risk of breast cancer, because she does not carry the BRCA1 gene which runs through her father's family. But she could still get the disease.
While genes have not yet been discovered that are as strongly implicated in breast and ovarian cancer as BRCA1 and BRCA2, there are many others, some identified and some not, that raise the risk of breast cancer.
There are also a number of environmental risk factors, such as smoking, drinking too much alcohol, obesity and diet.
The question now for ethicists will be how much further society wants to travel down the road of selecting babies free of specific genes that may, but also may not, cause disease.
***
TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT
January 11, 2009
My Genome, My Self
By STEVEN PINKER
ONE OF THE PERKS of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself. I have been tested for vocational interest (closest match: psychologist), intelligence (above average), personality (open, conscientious, agreeable, average in extraversion, not too neurotic) and political orientation (neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian). I have M.R.I. pictures of my brain (no obvious holes or bulges) and soon will undergo the ultimate test of marital love: my brain will be scanned while my wife’s name is subliminally flashed before my eyes.
Last fall I submitted to the latest high-tech way to bare your soul. I had my genome sequenced and am allowing it to be posted on the Internet, along with my medical history. The opportunity arose when the biologist George Church sought 10 volunteers to kick off his audacious Personal Genome Project. The P.G.P. has created a public database that will contain the genomes and traits of 100,000 people. Tapping the magic of crowd sourcing that gave us Wikipedia and Google rankings, the project seeks to engage geneticists in a worldwide effort to sift through the genetic and environmental predictors of medical, physical and behavioral traits.
The Personal Genome Project is an initiative in basic research, not personal discovery. Yet the technological advance making it possible — the plunging cost of genome sequencing — will soon give people an unprecedented opportunity to contemplate their own biological and even psychological makeups. We have entered the era of consumer genetics. At one end of the price range you can get a complete sequence and analysis of your genome from Knome (often pronounced “know me”) for $99,500. At the other you can get a sample of traits, disease risks and ancestry data from 23andMe for $399. The science journal Nature listed “Personal Genomics Goes Mainstream” as a top news story of 2008.
Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee. It could usher in an era of personalized medicine, in which drug regimens are customized for a patient’s biochemistry rather than juggled through trial and error, and screening and prevention measures are aimed at those who are most at risk. It opens up a niche for bottom-feeding companies to terrify hypochondriacs by turning dubious probabilities into Genes of Doom. Depending on who has access to the information, personal genomics could bring about national health insurance, leapfrogging decades of debate, because piecemeal insurance is not viable in a world in which insurers can cherry-pick the most risk-free customers, or in which at-risk customers can load up on lavish insurance.
The pitfalls of personal genomics have already made it a subject of government attention. Last year President Bush signed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, outlawing discrimination in employment and health insurance based on genetic data. And the states of California and New York took action against the direct-to-consumer companies, arguing that what they provide are medical tests and thus can be ordered only by a doctor.
With the genome no less than with the Internet, information wants to be free, and I doubt that paternalistic measures can stifle the industry for long (but then, I have a libertarian temperament). For better or for worse, people will want to know about their genomes. The human mind is prone to essentialism — the intuition that living things house some hidden substance that gives them their form and determines their powers. Over the past century, this essence has become increasingly concrete. Growing out of the early, vague idea that traits are “in the blood,” the essence became identified with the abstractions discovered by Gregor Mendel called genes, and then with the iconic double helix of DNA. But DNA has long been an invisible molecule accessible only to a white-coated priesthood. Today, for the price of a flat-screen TV, people can read their essence as a printout detailing their very own A’s, C’s, T’s and G’s.
A firsthand familiarity with the code of life is bound to confront us with the emotional, moral and political baggage associated with the idea of our essential nature. People have long been familiar with tests for heritable diseases, and the use of genetics to trace ancestry — the new “Roots” — is becoming familiar as well. But we are only beginning to recognize that our genome also contains information about our temperaments and abilities. Affordable genotyping may offer new kinds of answers to the question “Who am I?” — to ruminations about our ancestry, our vulnerabilities, our character and our choices in life.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magaz ... &th&emc=th
My Genome, My Self
By STEVEN PINKER
ONE OF THE PERKS of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself. I have been tested for vocational interest (closest match: psychologist), intelligence (above average), personality (open, conscientious, agreeable, average in extraversion, not too neurotic) and political orientation (neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian). I have M.R.I. pictures of my brain (no obvious holes or bulges) and soon will undergo the ultimate test of marital love: my brain will be scanned while my wife’s name is subliminally flashed before my eyes.
Last fall I submitted to the latest high-tech way to bare your soul. I had my genome sequenced and am allowing it to be posted on the Internet, along with my medical history. The opportunity arose when the biologist George Church sought 10 volunteers to kick off his audacious Personal Genome Project. The P.G.P. has created a public database that will contain the genomes and traits of 100,000 people. Tapping the magic of crowd sourcing that gave us Wikipedia and Google rankings, the project seeks to engage geneticists in a worldwide effort to sift through the genetic and environmental predictors of medical, physical and behavioral traits.
The Personal Genome Project is an initiative in basic research, not personal discovery. Yet the technological advance making it possible — the plunging cost of genome sequencing — will soon give people an unprecedented opportunity to contemplate their own biological and even psychological makeups. We have entered the era of consumer genetics. At one end of the price range you can get a complete sequence and analysis of your genome from Knome (often pronounced “know me”) for $99,500. At the other you can get a sample of traits, disease risks and ancestry data from 23andMe for $399. The science journal Nature listed “Personal Genomics Goes Mainstream” as a top news story of 2008.
Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee. It could usher in an era of personalized medicine, in which drug regimens are customized for a patient’s biochemistry rather than juggled through trial and error, and screening and prevention measures are aimed at those who are most at risk. It opens up a niche for bottom-feeding companies to terrify hypochondriacs by turning dubious probabilities into Genes of Doom. Depending on who has access to the information, personal genomics could bring about national health insurance, leapfrogging decades of debate, because piecemeal insurance is not viable in a world in which insurers can cherry-pick the most risk-free customers, or in which at-risk customers can load up on lavish insurance.
The pitfalls of personal genomics have already made it a subject of government attention. Last year President Bush signed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, outlawing discrimination in employment and health insurance based on genetic data. And the states of California and New York took action against the direct-to-consumer companies, arguing that what they provide are medical tests and thus can be ordered only by a doctor.
With the genome no less than with the Internet, information wants to be free, and I doubt that paternalistic measures can stifle the industry for long (but then, I have a libertarian temperament). For better or for worse, people will want to know about their genomes. The human mind is prone to essentialism — the intuition that living things house some hidden substance that gives them their form and determines their powers. Over the past century, this essence has become increasingly concrete. Growing out of the early, vague idea that traits are “in the blood,” the essence became identified with the abstractions discovered by Gregor Mendel called genes, and then with the iconic double helix of DNA. But DNA has long been an invisible molecule accessible only to a white-coated priesthood. Today, for the price of a flat-screen TV, people can read their essence as a printout detailing their very own A’s, C’s, T’s and G’s.
A firsthand familiarity with the code of life is bound to confront us with the emotional, moral and political baggage associated with the idea of our essential nature. People have long been familiar with tests for heritable diseases, and the use of genetics to trace ancestry — the new “Roots” — is becoming familiar as well. But we are only beginning to recognize that our genome also contains information about our temperaments and abilities. Affordable genotyping may offer new kinds of answers to the question “Who am I?” — to ruminations about our ancestry, our vulnerabilities, our character and our choices in life.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magaz ... &th&emc=th
Scientists find gene for brain aging
By Becky Rynor, Canwest News ServiceJanuary 17, 2009
A research team has identified an"important gene"that regulates the aging process in the brain.
"Overall, we have now established that the Bmi1 gene is a direct regulator of cell aging in brain and retinal neurons of mammals," said Dr. Gilbert Bernier, a University of Montreal scientist who led the team.
Bernier said age is the primary risk factor for diseases such as macular degeneration, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.About 30 per cent of all people over 80 years old will develop Alzheimer's, he said.
"That's a very high proportion of the population. Nobody knows why aging is the prime factor to develop this disease," Bernier said Friday.
"In our case, we actually found a gene that regulates the speed of aging in the brain. If you mutate that gene, you have a hyper-accelerated aging process of the neurons in the brain. We think maybe we can do the reverse . . . if we increase its activity, maybe we can slow down the aging process."
He said the findings are "a giant step" to unravelling genetic coding associated with brain aging and allowing scientists to one day slow that process and prevent such diseases.
Bernier partnered with researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California in a study that identified a mutation in mice that dramatically accelerates the process of aging in the brain and the eye.
"It's quite dramatic," he said. "These mice, at 20 days after birth, they looked like two-year-old mice. "So that's how fast this (mutation) was going on."
The findings are published in the current edition of The Journal of Neuroscience.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
By Becky Rynor, Canwest News ServiceJanuary 17, 2009
A research team has identified an"important gene"that regulates the aging process in the brain.
"Overall, we have now established that the Bmi1 gene is a direct regulator of cell aging in brain and retinal neurons of mammals," said Dr. Gilbert Bernier, a University of Montreal scientist who led the team.
Bernier said age is the primary risk factor for diseases such as macular degeneration, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.About 30 per cent of all people over 80 years old will develop Alzheimer's, he said.
"That's a very high proportion of the population. Nobody knows why aging is the prime factor to develop this disease," Bernier said Friday.
"In our case, we actually found a gene that regulates the speed of aging in the brain. If you mutate that gene, you have a hyper-accelerated aging process of the neurons in the brain. We think maybe we can do the reverse . . . if we increase its activity, maybe we can slow down the aging process."
He said the findings are "a giant step" to unravelling genetic coding associated with brain aging and allowing scientists to one day slow that process and prevent such diseases.
Bernier partnered with researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California in a study that identified a mutation in mice that dramatically accelerates the process of aging in the brain and the eye.
"It's quite dramatic," he said. "These mice, at 20 days after birth, they looked like two-year-old mice. "So that's how fast this (mutation) was going on."
The findings are published in the current edition of The Journal of Neuroscience.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Galileo's DNA could help solve astronomical riddle
Herald News ServicesJanuary 20, 2009
Italian scientists are trying to get Galileo's DNA to figure out how the astronomer forged groundbreaking theories on the universe while gradually becoming blind, a historian said Monday.
Scientists at Florence's Institute and Museum of the History of Science want to exhume the body of 17th-century astronomer Galileo Galilei to find out exactly what he could see through his telescope.
The Italian astronomer --who built on the work of predecessor Nicolaus Copernicus to develop modern astronomy with the sun as the centre of the universe--had a degenerative eye disease that eventually left him blind.
"If we succeed, thanks to DNA, in understanding how this disease distorted his sight, it could bring about important discoveries for the history of science," said the institute's director, Paolo Galluzzi.
"We could explain certain mistakes that Galileo made: why he described the planet Saturn as having 'lateral ears' rather than having seen it encircled by rings for example," said Galluzzi.
In an effort to recreate what Galileo--who lived from 1564 to 1642--saw, the scientific team has made an exact replica of his telescope.
They now want to get DNA proof of what ophthalmologists have said was a genetic eye disease and thereby more fully understand the conditions under which he made observations that revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Herald News ServicesJanuary 20, 2009
Italian scientists are trying to get Galileo's DNA to figure out how the astronomer forged groundbreaking theories on the universe while gradually becoming blind, a historian said Monday.
Scientists at Florence's Institute and Museum of the History of Science want to exhume the body of 17th-century astronomer Galileo Galilei to find out exactly what he could see through his telescope.
The Italian astronomer --who built on the work of predecessor Nicolaus Copernicus to develop modern astronomy with the sun as the centre of the universe--had a degenerative eye disease that eventually left him blind.
"If we succeed, thanks to DNA, in understanding how this disease distorted his sight, it could bring about important discoveries for the history of science," said the institute's director, Paolo Galluzzi.
"We could explain certain mistakes that Galileo made: why he described the planet Saturn as having 'lateral ears' rather than having seen it encircled by rings for example," said Galluzzi.
In an effort to recreate what Galileo--who lived from 1564 to 1642--saw, the scientific team has made an exact replica of his telescope.
They now want to get DNA proof of what ophthalmologists have said was a genetic eye disease and thereby more fully understand the conditions under which he made observations that revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
And they call this science?
Calgary HeraldJanuary 26, 2009
F irst it was safe, then not. Now it's safe again, and even good for you.
We're talking about hormone replacement therapy for women during menopause. But it could apply to any number of things that pose a risk to your health, depending on the day of the week.
Cellphones are another favourite topic on the on-again off-again hazardous list, as are the dangers of energy-saving light bulbs. And that's just in one week.
It's a wonder anyone comes out from behind locked doors on a daily basis, and goes about their lives.
If you believe what you read, hormones are back in favour for women suffering from hot flashes and other symptoms of menopause.
Apparently there's no better treatment than hormone therapy, according to an expert panel convened by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada.
The experts reached this conclusion after they conducted an "extensive" review of new data, and re-analyzed old data that led doctors to stop prescribing hormones over fears they increased the risks for heart disease, strokes and breast cancer.
Physicians advised patients to instead lose weight. They were given old fashioned advice like using fans or soothing their faces under a cold cloth, as women have done for generations.
The new advice is back to pop-ping pills again, even though the authors say the study was "completely arm's length; there was no pharmaceutical involvement whatsoever."
Doctors are being told hormones can even be good for their patients, as they prevent bone loss and fractures.
Herbal remedies such as black cohosh and soy, they say, are no more effective than placebos or sugar pills.
The bottom line is menopause isn't a disease, nor should it be viewed as something to be cured. It's a natural condition, that for many women occurs with little fanfare and no need for prescription drugs.
While the glow is back on hormones, compact-fluorescent light bulbs appear not to be such a bright idea after all.
Health Canada is testing the safety of the low-cost green alternative bulbs, to see if they emit ultraviolet radiation. In the meantime, the government should delay a 2012 ban that eliminates incandescent bulbs. It should also stop heavily promoting the low-energy bulbs as long as there is a possibility they may be harmful. They do contain mercury and burst when the temperature drops below a certain level, making them impractical for outdoor lighting in most of the country during winter.
In other bad news this week, alert parents learned cellphones could be hazardous to their children's health.
France is about to make it illegal to market the devices to kids under 12, while other European countries and India and Israel are advising limited use for children. The concern is the prolonged, cumulative effect of radiation on young kids, which isn't clear. But if you listen to Health Canada, "there's no convincing evidence of increased risk," says an e-mail sent to CBC's Marketplace.
What people need to fear is the proliferation of alarming studies that flip-flop in their advice on a seemingly weekly basis. It's a wonder with all of this lurching around, we all don't suffer from whiplash.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Calgary HeraldJanuary 26, 2009
F irst it was safe, then not. Now it's safe again, and even good for you.
We're talking about hormone replacement therapy for women during menopause. But it could apply to any number of things that pose a risk to your health, depending on the day of the week.
Cellphones are another favourite topic on the on-again off-again hazardous list, as are the dangers of energy-saving light bulbs. And that's just in one week.
It's a wonder anyone comes out from behind locked doors on a daily basis, and goes about their lives.
If you believe what you read, hormones are back in favour for women suffering from hot flashes and other symptoms of menopause.
Apparently there's no better treatment than hormone therapy, according to an expert panel convened by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada.
The experts reached this conclusion after they conducted an "extensive" review of new data, and re-analyzed old data that led doctors to stop prescribing hormones over fears they increased the risks for heart disease, strokes and breast cancer.
Physicians advised patients to instead lose weight. They were given old fashioned advice like using fans or soothing their faces under a cold cloth, as women have done for generations.
The new advice is back to pop-ping pills again, even though the authors say the study was "completely arm's length; there was no pharmaceutical involvement whatsoever."
Doctors are being told hormones can even be good for their patients, as they prevent bone loss and fractures.
Herbal remedies such as black cohosh and soy, they say, are no more effective than placebos or sugar pills.
The bottom line is menopause isn't a disease, nor should it be viewed as something to be cured. It's a natural condition, that for many women occurs with little fanfare and no need for prescription drugs.
While the glow is back on hormones, compact-fluorescent light bulbs appear not to be such a bright idea after all.
Health Canada is testing the safety of the low-cost green alternative bulbs, to see if they emit ultraviolet radiation. In the meantime, the government should delay a 2012 ban that eliminates incandescent bulbs. It should also stop heavily promoting the low-energy bulbs as long as there is a possibility they may be harmful. They do contain mercury and burst when the temperature drops below a certain level, making them impractical for outdoor lighting in most of the country during winter.
In other bad news this week, alert parents learned cellphones could be hazardous to their children's health.
France is about to make it illegal to market the devices to kids under 12, while other European countries and India and Israel are advising limited use for children. The concern is the prolonged, cumulative effect of radiation on young kids, which isn't clear. But if you listen to Health Canada, "there's no convincing evidence of increased risk," says an e-mail sent to CBC's Marketplace.
What people need to fear is the proliferation of alarming studies that flip-flop in their advice on a seemingly weekly basis. It's a wonder with all of this lurching around, we all don't suffer from whiplash.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
January 27, 2009
A Conversation With Peter Agre
Using a Leadership Role to Put a Human Face on Science
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
In February, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Peter Agre, 60, will be inducted as the 163rd president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nation’s largest scientific organization. Dr. Agre is the director of the Malaria Research Institute at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. We spoke in January for two hours in a back room at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore (the current exhibition is “The Marriage of Art, Science & Philosophy”) and also later on the telephone. An edited version of the conversations follows.
Q. YOU WON THE 2003 NOBEL CHEMISTRY PRIZE FOR YOUR DISCOVERY OF AQUAPORINS. WHAT EXACTLY ARE THEY?
A. The plumbing system for cells. Every cell in our body is primarily water. But the water doesn’t just sit in the cell, it moves through it in a very organized way. The process occurs rapidly in tissues that have these aquaporins or water channels.
Until 1985, when my lab found the protein they are made of, aquaporins hadn’t yet been identified. There had been a controversy in biology for more than 100 years about how water moved through cells. The assumption was that it somehow leaked through the cell membrane. And indeed some water moves that way. But the very rapid movement of water through some cells was not explained by this theory.
Q. HOW DID YOU MAKE THE DISCOVERY?
A. By serendipity. We had an N.I.H. grant to study the Rh blood group antigen. We had developed a method to isolate the Rh molecule. And a second protein called 28K kept appearing in the tests. At first, we thought 28K was a piece of the Rh molecule — some kind of breakdown product of the Rh, a contaminant that showed during testing. But as we studied it further, 28K seemed to be an undiscovered molecule. No scientist had ever reported it before. But what did it do?
As a part-time project on weekends, we pursued that question. We calculated 28K presence in different types of cells. This mysterious protein was enormously abundant in red blood cells and kidney tubes. And after we cloned and sequenced it, we found it to be related to a series of proteins of very diverse origins — like the brains of fruit flies, bacteria, the lenses of eyes, even plant tissues. Still: what was it?
Then in 1991, I visited John Parker. (He died in 1993.) He’d been my hematology professor at the University of North Carolina. He said, “Boy, this thing is found in red cells, kidney tubes, plant tissues; have you considered it might be the long-sought water channel?” It was his suggestion that caused me to change the direction of my research. What my lab team was able subsequently to prove was that 28K formed these little tubes inside many cells and that water passed through them. With that, more than 100 years of scientific controversy was ended.
Q. WHY WAS IT IMPORTANT TO LEARN THIS?
A. Because once the protein had been identified, you had the possibility of manipulating it. You had the possibility of solving such medical problems as fluid retention in heart disease, brain edema after a stroke, even dry eye syndrome. This hasn’t happened yet. But we’ve done the basic research.
Q. WERE YOU SURPRISED TO WIN THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR THIS FINDING?
A. There were some clues that this might happen. Like getting invited to Sweden to give lectures. But at 5:30 a.m. on an October morning, the phone rang. “Hello, Professor Agre, this is Stockholm. You have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In about 10 minutes we’re having a press conference and the whole world will hear — so you’d better get on with your day.” I sprinted into the shower, and my wife, Mary, called my mother, who said, “That’s very nice, but don’t let it go to his head.”
Q. YOUR MOTHER SAID THAT?
A. She’s a South Dakota farm girl — Lutheran. I told that story once to a Jewish colleague and he said, “My mother would have said, what took the Nobel Committee so long?”
Q. ON A DIFFERENT TOPIC, YOU CONSIDERED RUNNING FOR SENATE FOR THE SAME MINNESOTA SEAT THAT AL FRANKEN IS FIGHTING FOR. WHY DIDN’T YOU GO FOR IT?
A. Because it was a long shot, though it seemed winnable. Two years ago, the polls indicated that Norman Coleman, the Republican incumbent, would have trouble getting re-elected. I’m a lifelong Democrat and my party, at the time, didn’t have a candidate — though Franken was talking about running.
I grew up in Minnesota. Four generations of my father’s people are buried there. So the first thing I did was talk to key Democrats in Minnesota. They were courteous, but not supportive. So what does a scientist do in a new area? They do a pilot experiment, which in politics is a called a poll. Our poll said that if I got the nomination, I could win. I’d have to raise 10, 20 million dollars, though. Without the enthusiastic support of the party insiders, that seemed impossible.
Q. RESEARCH AMERICA, THE WASHINGTON ADVOCACY GROUP, HAS BEEN TRYING TO GET SCIENTISTS TO RUN FOR OFFICE. IS THAT REALISTIC?
A. Oh, it’s doable. But the Senate is a very lofty place to start at, unless you’re prominent or extremely wealthy. There are other places for scientists to serve: school boards, town councils, state legislatures, even Congress. Bill Foster, a physicist at Fermilab, ran for Congress when Dennis Hastert gave up his seat. Leon Lederman (a Nobel Prize-winning physicist) organized a bunch of us to get out for Bill, and he won.
During the Bush administration, you heard a lot of complaining about science policy. Staying in our laboratories wasn’t going to change that. One of the things I wanted to do from the Senate is put a human face on science. I can also do that this year as president of the A.A.A.S.
Q. YOU’RE PART OF A GROUP OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS WHO WANT TO OPEN UP COMMUNICATION WITH NORTH KOREAN SCIENTISTS. WHAT CAN YOU SAY ABOUT THAT?
A. There’s a team that’s attempting to organize scientific visits to North Korea. Even during the Cold War, when the governments of the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. were at odds, scientists kept in touch.
I think particularly with North Korea now, there’s every reason that scientists should be part of the group that welcomes them back into the international community. We see this as an opening to do something like the cultural exchange that happened with the New York Philharmonic. So yes, we’re hoping to make a visit. But it’s still in the planning stages.
******
January 27, 2009
A Tool to Verify Digital Records, Even as Technology Shifts
By JOHN MARKOFF
Simple-to-use digital technology will make it more difficult to distort history in the future.
On Tuesday a group of researchers at the University of Washington are releasing the initial component of a public system to provide authentication for an archive of video interviews with the prosecutors and other members of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Rwandan genocide. The group will also release the first portion of the Rwandan archive.
This system is intended to be available for future use in digitally preserving and authenticating first-hand accounts of war crimes, atrocities and genocide.
Such tools are of vital importance because it has become possible to alter digital text, video and audio in ways that are virtually undetectable to the unaided human eye and ear.
The researchers said history was filled with incidents of doctoring, deleting or denying written records. Now, they say, the authenticity of digital documents like videos, transcripts of personal accounts and court records can be indisputably proved for the first time.
“The closest analogy are the revisionist histories of the Holocaust, where there are assertions that people weren’t put in camps and put in ovens,” said Batya Friedman, a professor of computer science at the Information School at the University of Washington. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to say that in a period of time some people will say there really weren’t 800,000 people who were massacred with machetes.”
Designing digital systems that can preserve information for many generations is one of the most vexing engineering challenges. The researchers’ solution is to create a publicly available digital fingerprint, known as a cryptographic hash mark, that will make it possible for anyone to determine that the documents are authentic and have not been tampered with. The concept of a digital hash was pioneered at I.B.M. by Hans Peter Luhn in the early 1950s. The University of Washington researchers are the first to try to simplify the application for nontechnical users and to try to offer a complete system that would preserve information across generations.
Both because of the rapid pace of innovation and the tendency of computers to wear out in months or years, the likelihood that digital files will be readable over long periods of time is far less certain even than the survival of paper documents. Computer processors are quickly replaced by incompatible models, software programs are developed with new data formats, and digital storage media, whether digital tape, magnetic disk or solid state memory chips, are all too ephemeral.
Several technologists are already grappling with the evanescent nature of digital records.
Danny Hillis, a computer scientist, helped found the Long Now project in 1996, warning about the possibility of a “digital dark age.” The group is now designing a clock that will “tick” annually and that is designed to have a life span of 10,000 years. It is intended as a counterpoint to the “faster/cheaper” ethos of today’s increasingly computerized world.
Mr. Hillis has argued that before the rise of digital information people valued paper documents and cared for them. Since then, there has been progressively less attention paid to the preservation of information. Now information is routinely stored on media that may last for only several years.
To that end, another computer scientist, Brewster Kahle, founded the Internet Archive in 1996 in an effort to preserve a complete record of the World Wide Web and other digital documents. Similarly, in 2000 librarians at Stanford University created LOCKSS, or Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe, to preserve journals in the digital age, by spreading digital copies of documents through an international community of libraries via the Internet.
However, Ms. Friedman distinguishes her design work from those who have focused on the simple preservation of digitized materials. Instead, she said she was trying to design complete digital systems that would play a role in strengthening social institutions over time by creating a digital historical record that offered continuity across multiple life spans.
“Building a clock is iconic,” she said. “What is really different is that we are trying to solve socially significant, real-world problems.”
Because problems like genocide, H.I.V. and AIDS, famine, deforestation and global warming will not be solved in a single human lifetime, she argues that information systems designed to ensure continuity across many generations are a necessity.
To ground the group’s research in a real-world situation, the researchers began by building an archive of video interviews with the judges, prosecutors and other members of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The goal was to design a system that would ensure that the information was secure for more than a century.
Last fall Ms. Friedman traveled with a group of legal experts and cinematographers to Arusha, Tanzania, where the tribunal is based, and to Kigali, Rwanda, to conduct video interviews.
After capturing five gigabytes of video in 49 interviews, the group began to work on a system that would make it possible for viewers to prove for themselves that the videos had not been tampered with or altered even if they did not have access to powerful computing equipment or a high-speed Internet connection.
Despite the fact that there are commercial applications that make it possible to prove the time at which a document was created and verify that it has not been altered, the researchers wanted to develop a system that was freely available and would stand a chance of surviving repeated technology shifts.
At the heart of the system is an algorithm that is used to compute a 128-character number known as a cryptographic hash from the digital information in a particular document. Even the smallest change in the original document will result in a new hash value.
In recent years researchers have begun to find weaknesses in current hash algorithms, and so last November the National Institute of Standards and Technology began a competition to create stronger hashing technologies. The University of Washington researchers now use a modern hash algorithm called SHA-2, but they have designed the system so that it can be easily replaced with a more advanced algorithm.
Their system will be distributed as part of a CD known as a “live CD,” making it possible to compute or verify the hash just by inserting the disk in a computer. The disk will also include software components that will make it possible to view documents and videos that may not be accessible by future software.
The problem is complex, said Michael Lesk, a professor in the department of library and information science at Rutgers University, because not only must you be able to prove that the information has not changed in its original format, but you must also be able to prove that once the format is altered, the original digital hash is still valid.
The Long Now Foundation is developing a software tool to easily convert documents between digital formats, said Stewart Brand, a co-founder of the project.
“The idea is to be able to change anything into anything else,” he said.
A Conversation With Peter Agre
Using a Leadership Role to Put a Human Face on Science
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
In February, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Peter Agre, 60, will be inducted as the 163rd president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nation’s largest scientific organization. Dr. Agre is the director of the Malaria Research Institute at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. We spoke in January for two hours in a back room at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore (the current exhibition is “The Marriage of Art, Science & Philosophy”) and also later on the telephone. An edited version of the conversations follows.
Q. YOU WON THE 2003 NOBEL CHEMISTRY PRIZE FOR YOUR DISCOVERY OF AQUAPORINS. WHAT EXACTLY ARE THEY?
A. The plumbing system for cells. Every cell in our body is primarily water. But the water doesn’t just sit in the cell, it moves through it in a very organized way. The process occurs rapidly in tissues that have these aquaporins or water channels.
Until 1985, when my lab found the protein they are made of, aquaporins hadn’t yet been identified. There had been a controversy in biology for more than 100 years about how water moved through cells. The assumption was that it somehow leaked through the cell membrane. And indeed some water moves that way. But the very rapid movement of water through some cells was not explained by this theory.
Q. HOW DID YOU MAKE THE DISCOVERY?
A. By serendipity. We had an N.I.H. grant to study the Rh blood group antigen. We had developed a method to isolate the Rh molecule. And a second protein called 28K kept appearing in the tests. At first, we thought 28K was a piece of the Rh molecule — some kind of breakdown product of the Rh, a contaminant that showed during testing. But as we studied it further, 28K seemed to be an undiscovered molecule. No scientist had ever reported it before. But what did it do?
As a part-time project on weekends, we pursued that question. We calculated 28K presence in different types of cells. This mysterious protein was enormously abundant in red blood cells and kidney tubes. And after we cloned and sequenced it, we found it to be related to a series of proteins of very diverse origins — like the brains of fruit flies, bacteria, the lenses of eyes, even plant tissues. Still: what was it?
Then in 1991, I visited John Parker. (He died in 1993.) He’d been my hematology professor at the University of North Carolina. He said, “Boy, this thing is found in red cells, kidney tubes, plant tissues; have you considered it might be the long-sought water channel?” It was his suggestion that caused me to change the direction of my research. What my lab team was able subsequently to prove was that 28K formed these little tubes inside many cells and that water passed through them. With that, more than 100 years of scientific controversy was ended.
Q. WHY WAS IT IMPORTANT TO LEARN THIS?
A. Because once the protein had been identified, you had the possibility of manipulating it. You had the possibility of solving such medical problems as fluid retention in heart disease, brain edema after a stroke, even dry eye syndrome. This hasn’t happened yet. But we’ve done the basic research.
Q. WERE YOU SURPRISED TO WIN THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR THIS FINDING?
A. There were some clues that this might happen. Like getting invited to Sweden to give lectures. But at 5:30 a.m. on an October morning, the phone rang. “Hello, Professor Agre, this is Stockholm. You have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In about 10 minutes we’re having a press conference and the whole world will hear — so you’d better get on with your day.” I sprinted into the shower, and my wife, Mary, called my mother, who said, “That’s very nice, but don’t let it go to his head.”
Q. YOUR MOTHER SAID THAT?
A. She’s a South Dakota farm girl — Lutheran. I told that story once to a Jewish colleague and he said, “My mother would have said, what took the Nobel Committee so long?”
Q. ON A DIFFERENT TOPIC, YOU CONSIDERED RUNNING FOR SENATE FOR THE SAME MINNESOTA SEAT THAT AL FRANKEN IS FIGHTING FOR. WHY DIDN’T YOU GO FOR IT?
A. Because it was a long shot, though it seemed winnable. Two years ago, the polls indicated that Norman Coleman, the Republican incumbent, would have trouble getting re-elected. I’m a lifelong Democrat and my party, at the time, didn’t have a candidate — though Franken was talking about running.
I grew up in Minnesota. Four generations of my father’s people are buried there. So the first thing I did was talk to key Democrats in Minnesota. They were courteous, but not supportive. So what does a scientist do in a new area? They do a pilot experiment, which in politics is a called a poll. Our poll said that if I got the nomination, I could win. I’d have to raise 10, 20 million dollars, though. Without the enthusiastic support of the party insiders, that seemed impossible.
Q. RESEARCH AMERICA, THE WASHINGTON ADVOCACY GROUP, HAS BEEN TRYING TO GET SCIENTISTS TO RUN FOR OFFICE. IS THAT REALISTIC?
A. Oh, it’s doable. But the Senate is a very lofty place to start at, unless you’re prominent or extremely wealthy. There are other places for scientists to serve: school boards, town councils, state legislatures, even Congress. Bill Foster, a physicist at Fermilab, ran for Congress when Dennis Hastert gave up his seat. Leon Lederman (a Nobel Prize-winning physicist) organized a bunch of us to get out for Bill, and he won.
During the Bush administration, you heard a lot of complaining about science policy. Staying in our laboratories wasn’t going to change that. One of the things I wanted to do from the Senate is put a human face on science. I can also do that this year as president of the A.A.A.S.
Q. YOU’RE PART OF A GROUP OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS WHO WANT TO OPEN UP COMMUNICATION WITH NORTH KOREAN SCIENTISTS. WHAT CAN YOU SAY ABOUT THAT?
A. There’s a team that’s attempting to organize scientific visits to North Korea. Even during the Cold War, when the governments of the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. were at odds, scientists kept in touch.
I think particularly with North Korea now, there’s every reason that scientists should be part of the group that welcomes them back into the international community. We see this as an opening to do something like the cultural exchange that happened with the New York Philharmonic. So yes, we’re hoping to make a visit. But it’s still in the planning stages.
******
January 27, 2009
A Tool to Verify Digital Records, Even as Technology Shifts
By JOHN MARKOFF
Simple-to-use digital technology will make it more difficult to distort history in the future.
On Tuesday a group of researchers at the University of Washington are releasing the initial component of a public system to provide authentication for an archive of video interviews with the prosecutors and other members of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Rwandan genocide. The group will also release the first portion of the Rwandan archive.
This system is intended to be available for future use in digitally preserving and authenticating first-hand accounts of war crimes, atrocities and genocide.
Such tools are of vital importance because it has become possible to alter digital text, video and audio in ways that are virtually undetectable to the unaided human eye and ear.
The researchers said history was filled with incidents of doctoring, deleting or denying written records. Now, they say, the authenticity of digital documents like videos, transcripts of personal accounts and court records can be indisputably proved for the first time.
“The closest analogy are the revisionist histories of the Holocaust, where there are assertions that people weren’t put in camps and put in ovens,” said Batya Friedman, a professor of computer science at the Information School at the University of Washington. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to say that in a period of time some people will say there really weren’t 800,000 people who were massacred with machetes.”
Designing digital systems that can preserve information for many generations is one of the most vexing engineering challenges. The researchers’ solution is to create a publicly available digital fingerprint, known as a cryptographic hash mark, that will make it possible for anyone to determine that the documents are authentic and have not been tampered with. The concept of a digital hash was pioneered at I.B.M. by Hans Peter Luhn in the early 1950s. The University of Washington researchers are the first to try to simplify the application for nontechnical users and to try to offer a complete system that would preserve information across generations.
Both because of the rapid pace of innovation and the tendency of computers to wear out in months or years, the likelihood that digital files will be readable over long periods of time is far less certain even than the survival of paper documents. Computer processors are quickly replaced by incompatible models, software programs are developed with new data formats, and digital storage media, whether digital tape, magnetic disk or solid state memory chips, are all too ephemeral.
Several technologists are already grappling with the evanescent nature of digital records.
Danny Hillis, a computer scientist, helped found the Long Now project in 1996, warning about the possibility of a “digital dark age.” The group is now designing a clock that will “tick” annually and that is designed to have a life span of 10,000 years. It is intended as a counterpoint to the “faster/cheaper” ethos of today’s increasingly computerized world.
Mr. Hillis has argued that before the rise of digital information people valued paper documents and cared for them. Since then, there has been progressively less attention paid to the preservation of information. Now information is routinely stored on media that may last for only several years.
To that end, another computer scientist, Brewster Kahle, founded the Internet Archive in 1996 in an effort to preserve a complete record of the World Wide Web and other digital documents. Similarly, in 2000 librarians at Stanford University created LOCKSS, or Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe, to preserve journals in the digital age, by spreading digital copies of documents through an international community of libraries via the Internet.
However, Ms. Friedman distinguishes her design work from those who have focused on the simple preservation of digitized materials. Instead, she said she was trying to design complete digital systems that would play a role in strengthening social institutions over time by creating a digital historical record that offered continuity across multiple life spans.
“Building a clock is iconic,” she said. “What is really different is that we are trying to solve socially significant, real-world problems.”
Because problems like genocide, H.I.V. and AIDS, famine, deforestation and global warming will not be solved in a single human lifetime, she argues that information systems designed to ensure continuity across many generations are a necessity.
To ground the group’s research in a real-world situation, the researchers began by building an archive of video interviews with the judges, prosecutors and other members of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The goal was to design a system that would ensure that the information was secure for more than a century.
Last fall Ms. Friedman traveled with a group of legal experts and cinematographers to Arusha, Tanzania, where the tribunal is based, and to Kigali, Rwanda, to conduct video interviews.
After capturing five gigabytes of video in 49 interviews, the group began to work on a system that would make it possible for viewers to prove for themselves that the videos had not been tampered with or altered even if they did not have access to powerful computing equipment or a high-speed Internet connection.
Despite the fact that there are commercial applications that make it possible to prove the time at which a document was created and verify that it has not been altered, the researchers wanted to develop a system that was freely available and would stand a chance of surviving repeated technology shifts.
At the heart of the system is an algorithm that is used to compute a 128-character number known as a cryptographic hash from the digital information in a particular document. Even the smallest change in the original document will result in a new hash value.
In recent years researchers have begun to find weaknesses in current hash algorithms, and so last November the National Institute of Standards and Technology began a competition to create stronger hashing technologies. The University of Washington researchers now use a modern hash algorithm called SHA-2, but they have designed the system so that it can be easily replaced with a more advanced algorithm.
Their system will be distributed as part of a CD known as a “live CD,” making it possible to compute or verify the hash just by inserting the disk in a computer. The disk will also include software components that will make it possible to view documents and videos that may not be accessible by future software.
The problem is complex, said Michael Lesk, a professor in the department of library and information science at Rutgers University, because not only must you be able to prove that the information has not changed in its original format, but you must also be able to prove that once the format is altered, the original digital hash is still valid.
The Long Now Foundation is developing a software tool to easily convert documents between digital formats, said Stewart Brand, a co-founder of the project.
“The idea is to be able to change anything into anything else,” he said.
A 'reasonable physician' would not implant octuplets: doctor
Canwest News ServiceFebruary 1, 2009
N adya Suleman's goal in life was to be a mother, her friends and family said. Which is why, even with a brood of six, including two-year-old twins, she decided to have more embryos transferred, in hopes, her mother said Friday, of getting "just one more girl."
"Look what happened. Octuplets. Dear God," said Angela Suleman, four days after her 33-year-old daughter became only the second person in the U. S. to ever give birth to eight babies at once.
Suleman stressed her daughter "is not evil, but she is obsessed with children. She loves children, she is very good with children, but obviously she overdid herself."
Angela Suleman said all the children are from the same sperm donor, but she did not identify him. Her daughter is divorced, but Suleman said the ex-husband is not the father.
Fertility experts, including the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, have raised concerns about the number of embryos implanted and whether it was within medical guidelines.
"I cannot see circumstances where any reasonable physician would transfer (so many) embryos into a woman under the age of 35, under any circumstance," said Arthur Wisot, a fertility doctor in Redondo Beach, Calif., and the author of Conceptions and Misconceptions.
Doctors likely could not deny treatment to a woman simply because she already had children, but they should have made sure she did not have so many babies, he said.
"I certainly think you can talk to her about it if you feel like she's making a decision that's not in her best interest or the interests of her children," Wisot said.
"You can send her for psychological evaluation, but I honestly don't know if you can say, 'No, I won't take care of you because you have too many children.' "
The California Medical Board, which investigates doctors, and the California Department of Public Health, which licenses clinics and hospitals, said no doctors or facilities are currently being investigated regarding the births.
It is also unlikely the Los Angeles County Department of Child and Family Services would get involved unless they receive a complaint of child abuse or neglect.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Canwest News ServiceFebruary 1, 2009
N adya Suleman's goal in life was to be a mother, her friends and family said. Which is why, even with a brood of six, including two-year-old twins, she decided to have more embryos transferred, in hopes, her mother said Friday, of getting "just one more girl."
"Look what happened. Octuplets. Dear God," said Angela Suleman, four days after her 33-year-old daughter became only the second person in the U. S. to ever give birth to eight babies at once.
Suleman stressed her daughter "is not evil, but she is obsessed with children. She loves children, she is very good with children, but obviously she overdid herself."
Angela Suleman said all the children are from the same sperm donor, but she did not identify him. Her daughter is divorced, but Suleman said the ex-husband is not the father.
Fertility experts, including the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, have raised concerns about the number of embryos implanted and whether it was within medical guidelines.
"I cannot see circumstances where any reasonable physician would transfer (so many) embryos into a woman under the age of 35, under any circumstance," said Arthur Wisot, a fertility doctor in Redondo Beach, Calif., and the author of Conceptions and Misconceptions.
Doctors likely could not deny treatment to a woman simply because she already had children, but they should have made sure she did not have so many babies, he said.
"I certainly think you can talk to her about it if you feel like she's making a decision that's not in her best interest or the interests of her children," Wisot said.
"You can send her for psychological evaluation, but I honestly don't know if you can say, 'No, I won't take care of you because you have too many children.' "
The California Medical Board, which investigates doctors, and the California Department of Public Health, which licenses clinics and hospitals, said no doctors or facilities are currently being investigated regarding the births.
It is also unlikely the Los Angeles County Department of Child and Family Services would get involved unless they receive a complaint of child abuse or neglect.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
February 2, 2009
Bringing the Internet to Remote African Villages
By CHRIS NICHOLSON
ENTASOPIA, Kenya — The road from Nairobi winds 100 miles to this town deep in Masai country. The asphalt gives way to sand and dust, until finally it is just a dirt track climbing over broken hills and plunging back to desert flats. The going is slow.
The outpost, with about 4,000 inhabitants, is at the end of that road and beyond the reach of power lines. It has no bank, no post office, few cars and little infrastructure. Newspapers arrive in a bundle every three or four weeks. At night, most people light kerosene lamps and candles in their houses or fires in their huts and go to bed early, except for the farmers guarding crops against elephants and buffalo.
Entasopia is the last place on earth that a traveler would expect to find an Internet connection. Yet it was here, in November, that three young engineers from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, with financial backing from Google, installed a small satellite dish powered by a solar panel, to hook up a handful of computers in the community center to the rest of the world.
In recent years the mobile phone has emerged as the main modern communications link for rural areas of Africa. From 2002 to 2007, the number of Kenyans using cellphones grew almost tenfold to reach about a third of the population, many of whom did not have land lines, according to the International Telecommunication Union.
But many of the phones were simple models made more for talking than Web browsing, and wireless data networks are slow, with sporadic coverage.
Satellite connections are faster and more stable, which is why they are attracting interest from the likes of Google, as a way to provide Internet connections to the estimated 95 percent of Africans who, according to the telecommunications union, have no access.
Although providing Internet access is outside the normal business realm of Google, with this project it is looking at how obstacles might be overcome in Kenya and other parts of Africa.
The dish at Entasopia was intended to operate for months with little maintenance under harsh conditions. This station, along with two others in villages almost as remote, is part of a larger push by Google into small, marginal communities, providing them with new tools to access information, work with distant colleagues, and communicate with friends and family.
Google paid for the final design of the stations and is covering the monthly fees for satellite bandwidth. The company has also invested in O3b, a start-up that hopes to deploy a constellation of satellites over Africa by the end of next year.
“Building infrastructure is not necessarily Google’s objective, but if you look at all the areas that Google has gone into, in many cases it has been to fill a gap,” said Joseph Mucheru, who heads Google’s East Africa office. “The market should see the opportunity.”
Just how much opportunity there is remains unclear. Google is uncertain whether such satellite stations can pay for themselves in rural areas, given the cost of equipment and bandwidth. Communities may well benefit from the connection, but they do not all have the means to afford it.
Bandwidth fees for stations like the one in Entasopia could cost as much as $700 a month, though slower ones cost less, said Wayan Vota, a senior director at Inveneo, a nonprofit that works to disseminate Internet technology throughout Africa and the developing world. As these connections are introduced more widely, which is O3b’s goal, the price could fall, Mr. Vota said.
When Internet connections arrive in small towns like Entasopia, they put new tools into the hands of people hungry to use them, and for some there, that has had wide repercussions.
James Mathu has worked for the Kenyan agriculture ministry in Entasopia for five years, advising farmers on the environment, crop husbandry and soil conservation. The stable Internet link allows him to send information to district headquarters in Kajiado, instead of spending days traveling there and back to deliver monthly reports, which are too lengthy for him to send via cellphone.
“It is a five-day affair,” he said, estimating that the Internet saved him 12,000 shillings a year, or $152, in a country where the gross domestic product per person is $1,700.
Julius Kasifu, 40, is using the Internet to try to help others. His family runs a farm, but because his legs were crippled by polio as a child, he was limited in the farm work he could do.
In Masai society, he said, disabilities like his were seen as bad omens. Traditionally, disabled newborns were abandoned and their mothers were put through a ritual cleansing to banish the evil spirits that were said to have caused the disability, while the place where the birth took place was burned. Even now, such children are often kept hidden away in the family manyatta, a wattle-and-daub hut.
Mr. Kasifu is leading a campaign to raise awareness and to build a shelter, called Tuko, for such children. With the Internet connection, he has been able to upload a short video about their plight.
“The mothers come to me and say: ‘Have you got a place to take our children?’ ” he said. “It hurts, but what can I do? Out of that hurt came this project.”
But there are significant limits to how many Kenyans the Internet can reach. Even if it is available free, not everyone can take full advantage of it, one obstacle being computer literacy.
Teddy Chenya, who for the past eight months has helped staff the community center for the Arid Lands Information Network, the Kenyan nongovernmental organization running the satellite ground stations, said that younger people were more likely to visit him than older ones, because they had time to spend and were willing to sit down, three to a computer, and learn by trial and error.
“Most people looking for information, they need help,” he said. “They still don’t know where to look or what a Web address is. I played for them streaming video, and they said: ‘Is it a radio? Is it a TV?’ ”
Another obstacle is literacy itself: many of the adults in Entasopia, especially women, cannot read.
Nthenya Mule, East Africa manager for Acumen Funds, a nonprofit organization, directs investments in regional businesses that have a social-development aspect. Ms. Mule said there were many challenges facing poor, rural communities, and progress was often held back by larger problems like lack of infrastructure, health care or loan availability, rather than the scarcity of Internet access.
“Is VSAT what’s most important?” she asked, referring to very small aperture terminal, the satellite technology being used in the project.
Still, Ms. Mule said, “there are so many issues, sometimes you just begin acting where you can.”
****
New tool to predict cancer survival
Breast tumour analysis to offer options for treatment
By Jordana Huber, Canwest News ServiceFebruary 2, 2009
Researchers in Toronto have developed a new tool that will enable doctors to better predict whether a patient with breast cancer will survive their disease.
The new technology analyzes breast cancer tumours to determine a patient's best treatment options and can predict with more than 80 per cent accuracy a patient's chance of recovering from breast cancer, according to a study published this week in Nature Biotechnology online.
Dr. Jeff Wrana, a senior investigator at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital, said researchers have developed a tool to analyze networks of proteins in cancer cells.
By taking a "Google Earth," or far-away, view of the networks, he said researchers discovered signature differences that can be used to predict the likely outcome of new patients.
"What we're looking at is the organization of the network from a global scale," he said, using highways as an analogy. "If you step back, you might suddenly see in poor outcome cancers, there are connections between highways that otherwise don't normally exist." In a study of 350 patients, those who survived breast cancer had a different organization of the network of proteins within the tumour cells compared to patients who succumbed to the illness, he said. "I think it could provide a different way of thinking about cancer as this global disorganization or change in the organization of protein networks," said Wrana, who co-authored the study with PhD candidate Ian Taylor.
In the future, researchers are also hoping to apply the technology, called DyNeMo, to other types of cancers, he said.
The technology is still five years away from clinical use, but it will serve to benefit patients and clinicians in making better choices about how to deal with the disease, Wrana said, noting breast cancer is the most common cancer in Canadian women.
He said the real "power" of the discovery will come if researchers can develop a way to predict how patients will respond to different types of chemotherapy.
"We really want to take each person's tumour as an individual disease and apply individualized therapy to those patients and, thereby, get much better and more effective outcomes," he said.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Bringing the Internet to Remote African Villages
By CHRIS NICHOLSON
ENTASOPIA, Kenya — The road from Nairobi winds 100 miles to this town deep in Masai country. The asphalt gives way to sand and dust, until finally it is just a dirt track climbing over broken hills and plunging back to desert flats. The going is slow.
The outpost, with about 4,000 inhabitants, is at the end of that road and beyond the reach of power lines. It has no bank, no post office, few cars and little infrastructure. Newspapers arrive in a bundle every three or four weeks. At night, most people light kerosene lamps and candles in their houses or fires in their huts and go to bed early, except for the farmers guarding crops against elephants and buffalo.
Entasopia is the last place on earth that a traveler would expect to find an Internet connection. Yet it was here, in November, that three young engineers from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, with financial backing from Google, installed a small satellite dish powered by a solar panel, to hook up a handful of computers in the community center to the rest of the world.
In recent years the mobile phone has emerged as the main modern communications link for rural areas of Africa. From 2002 to 2007, the number of Kenyans using cellphones grew almost tenfold to reach about a third of the population, many of whom did not have land lines, according to the International Telecommunication Union.
But many of the phones were simple models made more for talking than Web browsing, and wireless data networks are slow, with sporadic coverage.
Satellite connections are faster and more stable, which is why they are attracting interest from the likes of Google, as a way to provide Internet connections to the estimated 95 percent of Africans who, according to the telecommunications union, have no access.
Although providing Internet access is outside the normal business realm of Google, with this project it is looking at how obstacles might be overcome in Kenya and other parts of Africa.
The dish at Entasopia was intended to operate for months with little maintenance under harsh conditions. This station, along with two others in villages almost as remote, is part of a larger push by Google into small, marginal communities, providing them with new tools to access information, work with distant colleagues, and communicate with friends and family.
Google paid for the final design of the stations and is covering the monthly fees for satellite bandwidth. The company has also invested in O3b, a start-up that hopes to deploy a constellation of satellites over Africa by the end of next year.
“Building infrastructure is not necessarily Google’s objective, but if you look at all the areas that Google has gone into, in many cases it has been to fill a gap,” said Joseph Mucheru, who heads Google’s East Africa office. “The market should see the opportunity.”
Just how much opportunity there is remains unclear. Google is uncertain whether such satellite stations can pay for themselves in rural areas, given the cost of equipment and bandwidth. Communities may well benefit from the connection, but they do not all have the means to afford it.
Bandwidth fees for stations like the one in Entasopia could cost as much as $700 a month, though slower ones cost less, said Wayan Vota, a senior director at Inveneo, a nonprofit that works to disseminate Internet technology throughout Africa and the developing world. As these connections are introduced more widely, which is O3b’s goal, the price could fall, Mr. Vota said.
When Internet connections arrive in small towns like Entasopia, they put new tools into the hands of people hungry to use them, and for some there, that has had wide repercussions.
James Mathu has worked for the Kenyan agriculture ministry in Entasopia for five years, advising farmers on the environment, crop husbandry and soil conservation. The stable Internet link allows him to send information to district headquarters in Kajiado, instead of spending days traveling there and back to deliver monthly reports, which are too lengthy for him to send via cellphone.
“It is a five-day affair,” he said, estimating that the Internet saved him 12,000 shillings a year, or $152, in a country where the gross domestic product per person is $1,700.
Julius Kasifu, 40, is using the Internet to try to help others. His family runs a farm, but because his legs were crippled by polio as a child, he was limited in the farm work he could do.
In Masai society, he said, disabilities like his were seen as bad omens. Traditionally, disabled newborns were abandoned and their mothers were put through a ritual cleansing to banish the evil spirits that were said to have caused the disability, while the place where the birth took place was burned. Even now, such children are often kept hidden away in the family manyatta, a wattle-and-daub hut.
Mr. Kasifu is leading a campaign to raise awareness and to build a shelter, called Tuko, for such children. With the Internet connection, he has been able to upload a short video about their plight.
“The mothers come to me and say: ‘Have you got a place to take our children?’ ” he said. “It hurts, but what can I do? Out of that hurt came this project.”
But there are significant limits to how many Kenyans the Internet can reach. Even if it is available free, not everyone can take full advantage of it, one obstacle being computer literacy.
Teddy Chenya, who for the past eight months has helped staff the community center for the Arid Lands Information Network, the Kenyan nongovernmental organization running the satellite ground stations, said that younger people were more likely to visit him than older ones, because they had time to spend and were willing to sit down, three to a computer, and learn by trial and error.
“Most people looking for information, they need help,” he said. “They still don’t know where to look or what a Web address is. I played for them streaming video, and they said: ‘Is it a radio? Is it a TV?’ ”
Another obstacle is literacy itself: many of the adults in Entasopia, especially women, cannot read.
Nthenya Mule, East Africa manager for Acumen Funds, a nonprofit organization, directs investments in regional businesses that have a social-development aspect. Ms. Mule said there were many challenges facing poor, rural communities, and progress was often held back by larger problems like lack of infrastructure, health care or loan availability, rather than the scarcity of Internet access.
“Is VSAT what’s most important?” she asked, referring to very small aperture terminal, the satellite technology being used in the project.
Still, Ms. Mule said, “there are so many issues, sometimes you just begin acting where you can.”
****
New tool to predict cancer survival
Breast tumour analysis to offer options for treatment
By Jordana Huber, Canwest News ServiceFebruary 2, 2009
Researchers in Toronto have developed a new tool that will enable doctors to better predict whether a patient with breast cancer will survive their disease.
The new technology analyzes breast cancer tumours to determine a patient's best treatment options and can predict with more than 80 per cent accuracy a patient's chance of recovering from breast cancer, according to a study published this week in Nature Biotechnology online.
Dr. Jeff Wrana, a senior investigator at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital, said researchers have developed a tool to analyze networks of proteins in cancer cells.
By taking a "Google Earth," or far-away, view of the networks, he said researchers discovered signature differences that can be used to predict the likely outcome of new patients.
"What we're looking at is the organization of the network from a global scale," he said, using highways as an analogy. "If you step back, you might suddenly see in poor outcome cancers, there are connections between highways that otherwise don't normally exist." In a study of 350 patients, those who survived breast cancer had a different organization of the network of proteins within the tumour cells compared to patients who succumbed to the illness, he said. "I think it could provide a different way of thinking about cancer as this global disorganization or change in the organization of protein networks," said Wrana, who co-authored the study with PhD candidate Ian Taylor.
In the future, researchers are also hoping to apply the technology, called DyNeMo, to other types of cancers, he said.
The technology is still five years away from clinical use, but it will serve to benefit patients and clinicians in making better choices about how to deal with the disease, Wrana said, noting breast cancer is the most common cancer in Canadian women.
He said the real "power" of the discovery will come if researchers can develop a way to predict how patients will respond to different types of chemotherapy.
"We really want to take each person's tumour as an individual disease and apply individualized therapy to those patients and, thereby, get much better and more effective outcomes," he said.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Ultra-small computers could be on horizon
By Keith Gerein, Edmonton JournalFebruary 3, 2009 9:01 AM
Scientists at Edmonton's National Institute for Nanotechnology have made a significant breakthrough that could help pave the way for new generations of smaller, more energy-efficient computers.
The team led by Robert Wolkow has invented the world's smallest quantum dots, single-atom-sized devices capable of controlling electrons at a fraction of the power of current semiconductor-based technology.
"Roughly speaking, we predict there could be a 1,000-time reduction in power consumption with electronic computers built in this new way," said Wolkow, a physicist at the University of Alberta, "and they could be something like 1,000 times smaller in size," he said.
"So, it's reaching the very limit, as far as anyone could imagine of how small things could get."
The team's work is published in the latest edition of Physical Review Letters, considered the world's premier physics journal.
Current computers work through transistors, which are essentially valves for flowing streams of electrons around a circuit.
In recent years, scientists have found ways to make these devices smaller, but pushing electrons through narrower spaces raises the danger of the machines overheating and failing.
"So the problem is no longer how do we make it smaller; it's how do we consume less power,"Wolkow said.
That's why his development is timely, because it largely eliminates the need for electron flow, instead making use of a wavelike phenomenon to transmit information, he said.
The discovery is a highly anticipated milestone in nanotechnology circles.
Even before the technology was created, scientists have been developing plans for putting it to work in all kinds of electronic devices, from the largest government systems to the tiniest iPods and cellphones.
"There are still many big questions about how to achieve that, what some people call an architecture," Wolkow said.
"We've kind of discovered the new house, and now we need the big design of how these little elements or houses all come together with streets and plumbing to make a city."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
By Keith Gerein, Edmonton JournalFebruary 3, 2009 9:01 AM
Scientists at Edmonton's National Institute for Nanotechnology have made a significant breakthrough that could help pave the way for new generations of smaller, more energy-efficient computers.
The team led by Robert Wolkow has invented the world's smallest quantum dots, single-atom-sized devices capable of controlling electrons at a fraction of the power of current semiconductor-based technology.
"Roughly speaking, we predict there could be a 1,000-time reduction in power consumption with electronic computers built in this new way," said Wolkow, a physicist at the University of Alberta, "and they could be something like 1,000 times smaller in size," he said.
"So, it's reaching the very limit, as far as anyone could imagine of how small things could get."
The team's work is published in the latest edition of Physical Review Letters, considered the world's premier physics journal.
Current computers work through transistors, which are essentially valves for flowing streams of electrons around a circuit.
In recent years, scientists have found ways to make these devices smaller, but pushing electrons through narrower spaces raises the danger of the machines overheating and failing.
"So the problem is no longer how do we make it smaller; it's how do we consume less power,"Wolkow said.
That's why his development is timely, because it largely eliminates the need for electron flow, instead making use of a wavelike phenomenon to transmit information, he said.
The discovery is a highly anticipated milestone in nanotechnology circles.
Even before the technology was created, scientists have been developing plans for putting it to work in all kinds of electronic devices, from the largest government systems to the tiniest iPods and cellphones.
"There are still many big questions about how to achieve that, what some people call an architecture," Wolkow said.
"We've kind of discovered the new house, and now we need the big design of how these little elements or houses all come together with streets and plumbing to make a city."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
60-year-old delivers twins
Reproductive technology allows women to become pregnant long after ovaries have stopped functioning
By Shannon Proudfoot, and Michelle Lang, Canwest News ServiceFebruary 6, 2009 2:06 AM
Medical technology that allows women to give birth at ever more advanced ages -- and to more babies at once -- is overshadowing the critical question of whether they should, experts say.
The concerns come after a 60-year-old Calgary woman giving birth to twins conceived with donor eggs implanted in India, and the week after a single mother of six in California gave birth to octuplets conceived through in-vitro fertilization.
"Is it in the best interests of the child to come into existence with a 60-year-old mother?" said Margaret Somerville, founding director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University.
"Are we doing a right thing in doing an end-run around nature in this particular case?"
We've tended to look at reproductive technology as "repairing nature when it fails," she said, and that's a mistake.
She said she strongly believes the state has no right to interfere when people want to have children through natural means, but added reproductive technology shouldn't be treated the same way.
Instead, it should be more like adoption, where the state is involved because it feels an obligation to protect the children at the heart of the issue, Somerville said.
"My basic position is that the best interests of the child must always be given priority," she said.
Individuals seek out and pay for infertility treatments on their own, she said, but it's society's resources, hospitals and doctors that make it possible, so we have a collective obligation to consider the results.
"It's the same question that is raised with the octuplets: Was that a wrong thing to do?" Somerville said. "I think it was."
Several Canadian fertility clinics say they won't treat women over age 50.
"We believe that people should have babies in their normal reproductive age group," said Dr. Cal Greene, who treats fertility disorders at the Calgary-based Regional Fertility Program.
"We think parents should be around to take care of their children."
Greene also noted that pregnancies over age 50 are risky for both mothers and their babies. Reports suggest Ranjit Hayer had several complications during her pregnancy, including gestational diabetes and high blood pressure.
Dr. Al Yuzpe, co-director of the Genesis Fertility Centre in Vancouver, said there's also the question of whether they can raise children as well at an advanced age.
"If women were meant to be having babies at 60, their ovaries wouldn't stop working at 50," he said.
"They stop working for a reason, so maybe women aren't supposed to get pregnant over the age of 50."
"I'm not saying they need to get pregnant at 25 or 30," he said.
"I'm saying that women need to make a conscious decision about when they want to get pregnant, but take into consideration not just their careers and their education and financial stability and all that, but also the effect of their reproductive aging."
For 30 years, reproductive technology had been moving faster than the ethics and regulations that govern it, and it's accelerating, said Abby Lippman, a professor in McGill's faculty of medicine and former chair of the Canadian Women's Health Network. She said she hopes concern over the unusual fertility stories of the last week will spark closer examination of an issue that's "stalled terribly."
Old moms
This week's birth in Canada is by no means a world record for the age of the mother.
- The oldest known mother to give birth was 70-year-old Omkari Panwar, who gave birth to twins in India last year after receiving in vitro fertilization.
- In 2006, a 67-year-old Spanish woman had twins, her first children, in Barcelona. That woman also received in vitro fertilization.
- Romanian Adriana Iliescu was 66 when she had twins in early 2006, but one child died hours after birth.
- Also in 2006, a 64-year-old Turkish woman successfully gave birth to a boy in Istanbul.
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
Reproductive technology allows women to become pregnant long after ovaries have stopped functioning
By Shannon Proudfoot, and Michelle Lang, Canwest News ServiceFebruary 6, 2009 2:06 AM
Medical technology that allows women to give birth at ever more advanced ages -- and to more babies at once -- is overshadowing the critical question of whether they should, experts say.
The concerns come after a 60-year-old Calgary woman giving birth to twins conceived with donor eggs implanted in India, and the week after a single mother of six in California gave birth to octuplets conceived through in-vitro fertilization.
"Is it in the best interests of the child to come into existence with a 60-year-old mother?" said Margaret Somerville, founding director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University.
"Are we doing a right thing in doing an end-run around nature in this particular case?"
We've tended to look at reproductive technology as "repairing nature when it fails," she said, and that's a mistake.
She said she strongly believes the state has no right to interfere when people want to have children through natural means, but added reproductive technology shouldn't be treated the same way.
Instead, it should be more like adoption, where the state is involved because it feels an obligation to protect the children at the heart of the issue, Somerville said.
"My basic position is that the best interests of the child must always be given priority," she said.
Individuals seek out and pay for infertility treatments on their own, she said, but it's society's resources, hospitals and doctors that make it possible, so we have a collective obligation to consider the results.
"It's the same question that is raised with the octuplets: Was that a wrong thing to do?" Somerville said. "I think it was."
Several Canadian fertility clinics say they won't treat women over age 50.
"We believe that people should have babies in their normal reproductive age group," said Dr. Cal Greene, who treats fertility disorders at the Calgary-based Regional Fertility Program.
"We think parents should be around to take care of their children."
Greene also noted that pregnancies over age 50 are risky for both mothers and their babies. Reports suggest Ranjit Hayer had several complications during her pregnancy, including gestational diabetes and high blood pressure.
Dr. Al Yuzpe, co-director of the Genesis Fertility Centre in Vancouver, said there's also the question of whether they can raise children as well at an advanced age.
"If women were meant to be having babies at 60, their ovaries wouldn't stop working at 50," he said.
"They stop working for a reason, so maybe women aren't supposed to get pregnant over the age of 50."
"I'm not saying they need to get pregnant at 25 or 30," he said.
"I'm saying that women need to make a conscious decision about when they want to get pregnant, but take into consideration not just their careers and their education and financial stability and all that, but also the effect of their reproductive aging."
For 30 years, reproductive technology had been moving faster than the ethics and regulations that govern it, and it's accelerating, said Abby Lippman, a professor in McGill's faculty of medicine and former chair of the Canadian Women's Health Network. She said she hopes concern over the unusual fertility stories of the last week will spark closer examination of an issue that's "stalled terribly."
Old moms
This week's birth in Canada is by no means a world record for the age of the mother.
- The oldest known mother to give birth was 70-year-old Omkari Panwar, who gave birth to twins in India last year after receiving in vitro fertilization.
- In 2006, a 67-year-old Spanish woman had twins, her first children, in Barcelona. That woman also received in vitro fertilization.
- Romanian Adriana Iliescu was 66 when she had twins in early 2006, but one child died hours after birth.
- Also in 2006, a 64-year-old Turkish woman successfully gave birth to a boy in Istanbul.
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
Robotic Einstein mimics visitors
By David Lawsky, ReutersFebruary 7, 2009 4:01 AM
http://www.calgaryherald.com/Technology ... story.html
The Einstein robot on display at the TED 2009 Conference in Long Beach, Calif., looks at people, follows them with his eyes, then smiles or frowns whichever is appropriate.
Photograph by: Kevin Carpenter, Reuters, Reuters
Albert Einstein looked around, made eye contact and smiled.
Of course the renowned scientist has been dead for more than 50 years, but he was reincarnated this week in the form of a so-called empathetic robot that pushes the boundaries of automation by being able to interact with people using emotional nuances.
The rubberized rendition of Einstein's head and shoulders, with piercing, movable eyes, a shock of white hair and distinctive moustache, dazzled a crowd of 1,500 at the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference that seeks to foster creativity among entrepreneurs, scientists and designers.
The robot Einstein follows people with his eyes and smiles or frowns as appropriate.Even up close, it looks surprisingly real. "It's machine empathy," roboticist David Hanson told the audience. "This is a robot that can understand feeling and mimic.
Einstein got his personality two weeks ago when Hanson's contraption was married to software from the Institute for Neural Computation at the University of California, San Diego.
Einstein's creators believe that one day computers will be able to relate to people -- listening and responding at a level not yet seen.
Some of the same computer techniques were used inTheCurious Case of Benjamin Button. Ed Ulbrich, the movie's digital visual effect producer, showed the TED audience how Brad Pitt's expressions were imposed on a computer-created version of him as an old man. It was a task that involved 155 people.
Hanson, an artist/roboticist based in Dallas, designed Einstein to mimic all of the face's roughly 48 facial muscles.
It uses 32 motors that are in some cases more versatile than the muscles they mimic.Two hid-den cameras look out its lifelike eyes.
The robot's software tracks 13 parameters, everything from the blink of an eye to the raise of an eyebrow or the wrinkle of a nose. More is in the works.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
****
Pre-human fossil scans shed light on evolution
ReutersFebruary 7, 2009 4:01 AM
D igital X-rays have turned Lucy, perhaps the world's best known pre-human, inside out, and may answer questions about how our ancestors came down from trees and walked, scientists said on Friday.
The team at the University of Texas in Austin, in collaboration with the Ethiopian government, completed the first high-resolution computed tomography or CT scan of the human ancestor, who lived 3.2 million years ago.
"These scans we've completed at the University of Texas permit us to look at the internal architecture -- how her bones are built," anthropology professor John Kappelman, who helped lead the work scanning all 80 pieces of the skeleton, told Reuters.
Scientists hope studying a "virtual" Lucy will offer further clues about the human ancestor's lifestyle. Lucy, found in Ethiopia in 1974, is the best-preserved example of Australopithecus, a species of pre-human.
"It opens it up to people who, instead of having to travel to some distant museum to see the original, can actually call it up on the desktop," Kappelman said.
Kappelman said the scans could tell more about how Lucy's bones fit together--and thus whether she and her kind climbed trees as well as walked.
"We're quite certain this set of studies we're going to be conducting here with the CT data are going to go some distance to resolving this long-standing question," Kappelman said.
Lucy's fossil is visiting the United States as part of a world premier exhibit organized by the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The one-metre tall skeleton is about 40 per cent complete.
"It's going to help us fill in what was one of the earlier stages . . . of our evolution to really better understand the behaviours of an extinct cousin. In some ways it's like . . . being able to tune the time machine back to three million years ago, jump in and pop back and be able to reconstruct what this fossil was doing on a day-today basis," Kappelman said.
"She's arguably now -- and I think will be for a long time -- the most famous fossil on planet Earth," he added.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
By David Lawsky, ReutersFebruary 7, 2009 4:01 AM
http://www.calgaryherald.com/Technology ... story.html
The Einstein robot on display at the TED 2009 Conference in Long Beach, Calif., looks at people, follows them with his eyes, then smiles or frowns whichever is appropriate.
Photograph by: Kevin Carpenter, Reuters, Reuters
Albert Einstein looked around, made eye contact and smiled.
Of course the renowned scientist has been dead for more than 50 years, but he was reincarnated this week in the form of a so-called empathetic robot that pushes the boundaries of automation by being able to interact with people using emotional nuances.
The rubberized rendition of Einstein's head and shoulders, with piercing, movable eyes, a shock of white hair and distinctive moustache, dazzled a crowd of 1,500 at the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference that seeks to foster creativity among entrepreneurs, scientists and designers.
The robot Einstein follows people with his eyes and smiles or frowns as appropriate.Even up close, it looks surprisingly real. "It's machine empathy," roboticist David Hanson told the audience. "This is a robot that can understand feeling and mimic.
Einstein got his personality two weeks ago when Hanson's contraption was married to software from the Institute for Neural Computation at the University of California, San Diego.
Einstein's creators believe that one day computers will be able to relate to people -- listening and responding at a level not yet seen.
Some of the same computer techniques were used inTheCurious Case of Benjamin Button. Ed Ulbrich, the movie's digital visual effect producer, showed the TED audience how Brad Pitt's expressions were imposed on a computer-created version of him as an old man. It was a task that involved 155 people.
Hanson, an artist/roboticist based in Dallas, designed Einstein to mimic all of the face's roughly 48 facial muscles.
It uses 32 motors that are in some cases more versatile than the muscles they mimic.Two hid-den cameras look out its lifelike eyes.
The robot's software tracks 13 parameters, everything from the blink of an eye to the raise of an eyebrow or the wrinkle of a nose. More is in the works.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
****
Pre-human fossil scans shed light on evolution
ReutersFebruary 7, 2009 4:01 AM
D igital X-rays have turned Lucy, perhaps the world's best known pre-human, inside out, and may answer questions about how our ancestors came down from trees and walked, scientists said on Friday.
The team at the University of Texas in Austin, in collaboration with the Ethiopian government, completed the first high-resolution computed tomography or CT scan of the human ancestor, who lived 3.2 million years ago.
"These scans we've completed at the University of Texas permit us to look at the internal architecture -- how her bones are built," anthropology professor John Kappelman, who helped lead the work scanning all 80 pieces of the skeleton, told Reuters.
Scientists hope studying a "virtual" Lucy will offer further clues about the human ancestor's lifestyle. Lucy, found in Ethiopia in 1974, is the best-preserved example of Australopithecus, a species of pre-human.
"It opens it up to people who, instead of having to travel to some distant museum to see the original, can actually call it up on the desktop," Kappelman said.
Kappelman said the scans could tell more about how Lucy's bones fit together--and thus whether she and her kind climbed trees as well as walked.
"We're quite certain this set of studies we're going to be conducting here with the CT data are going to go some distance to resolving this long-standing question," Kappelman said.
Lucy's fossil is visiting the United States as part of a world premier exhibit organized by the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The one-metre tall skeleton is about 40 per cent complete.
"It's going to help us fill in what was one of the earlier stages . . . of our evolution to really better understand the behaviours of an extinct cousin. In some ways it's like . . . being able to tune the time machine back to three million years ago, jump in and pop back and be able to reconstruct what this fossil was doing on a day-today basis," Kappelman said.
"She's arguably now -- and I think will be for a long time -- the most famous fossil on planet Earth," he added.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Effective cold cure likely in five years
Genetic codes of all 99 strains cracked
By Sharon Kirkey, Canwest News ServiceFebruary 13, 2009
Scientists are boldly predicting we may soon have to stop complaining that if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we cure the common cold?
Researchers have cracked the genetic code for all 99 known strains of the human rhinovirus, the virus that accounts for the majority of human cold infections.
The work, published this week in the journal Science, could lead to the first effective treatments for the common cold within five years, researchers say.
But they also found something entirely unexpected: the viruses have an uncanny ability to swap genes and make completely new strains, something once thought impossible.
As well, more than one virus can infect people at a time.
"That's why we'll never have a vaccine for the common cold," lead author Ann Palmenberg, professor of biochemistry and chair of the Institute for Molecular Virology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in announcing her team's work.
"Nature is very efficient at putting different kinds of paint on the viruses."
This genetic intermixing, called recombination, might also lead to the emergence of a new strain, a highly infectious bug that causes more severe respiratory trouble than garden-variety cold bugs, warns senior author Dr. Stephen Liggett, professor of medicine and physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
The work to create the code book for what's inside cold viruses lays the groundwork for better drug design, Liggett said in an interview.
It won't be as simple as "one drug fits all,"he says, but rather different anti-virals targeted at specific gene regions.
"What we're trying to do is immediately attenuate it. I don't think we're going to have the situation where you're taking a pill every day for your whole life to keep from getting the common cold,"Liggett says, "but I think it's going to be better than just treating the symptoms.
"You get infected. You take a pill. You'll have a couple of bad days, but it won't be a week, like some of these can take you down."
University of Ottawa virologist Earl Brown says the work is important because it provides the first detailed look "at the largest group of viruses that cause the commonest type of infections in humans."
Young children contract around six colds per year, adults, two.
Sequencing the cold virus is one thing, Brown says. The harder problem will be figuring out how the genes work, how the viruses mutate and which ones matter most. With so many different strains, "it will make it hard to get an effective therapy hit against any one of them."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Genetic codes of all 99 strains cracked
By Sharon Kirkey, Canwest News ServiceFebruary 13, 2009
Scientists are boldly predicting we may soon have to stop complaining that if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we cure the common cold?
Researchers have cracked the genetic code for all 99 known strains of the human rhinovirus, the virus that accounts for the majority of human cold infections.
The work, published this week in the journal Science, could lead to the first effective treatments for the common cold within five years, researchers say.
But they also found something entirely unexpected: the viruses have an uncanny ability to swap genes and make completely new strains, something once thought impossible.
As well, more than one virus can infect people at a time.
"That's why we'll never have a vaccine for the common cold," lead author Ann Palmenberg, professor of biochemistry and chair of the Institute for Molecular Virology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in announcing her team's work.
"Nature is very efficient at putting different kinds of paint on the viruses."
This genetic intermixing, called recombination, might also lead to the emergence of a new strain, a highly infectious bug that causes more severe respiratory trouble than garden-variety cold bugs, warns senior author Dr. Stephen Liggett, professor of medicine and physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
The work to create the code book for what's inside cold viruses lays the groundwork for better drug design, Liggett said in an interview.
It won't be as simple as "one drug fits all,"he says, but rather different anti-virals targeted at specific gene regions.
"What we're trying to do is immediately attenuate it. I don't think we're going to have the situation where you're taking a pill every day for your whole life to keep from getting the common cold,"Liggett says, "but I think it's going to be better than just treating the symptoms.
"You get infected. You take a pill. You'll have a couple of bad days, but it won't be a week, like some of these can take you down."
University of Ottawa virologist Earl Brown says the work is important because it provides the first detailed look "at the largest group of viruses that cause the commonest type of infections in humans."
Young children contract around six colds per year, adults, two.
Sequencing the cold virus is one thing, Brown says. The harder problem will be figuring out how the genes work, how the viruses mutate and which ones matter most. With so many different strains, "it will make it hard to get an effective therapy hit against any one of them."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Scientists blown away by speed of songbirds
By Margaret Munro, Canwest News ServiceFebruary 13, 2009
One purple martin, fitted with a tiny geolocating "backpack,"flew 7,500 kilo-metres from the Amazon basin to North America in just 13 days.
The swallow averaged 577 kilometres a day as it hightailed it back to its breeding ground last spring, say researchers who describe the remarkable journey today in the journal Science.
"It's really stunning, I don't think anyone had any idea that these little songbirds could travel this fast," says biologist Bridget Stutchbury, at York University in Toronto, who is leading the international project that shows migrating songbirds fly three times faster than expected.
While the purple martins were the quickest, wood thrushes, better known for sweet melodies than for speed, wasted little time returning from Honduras.They made the trip to their northern breeding ground in just two weeks, travelling up to 271 kilometres a day, often taking a perilous shortcut across the Gulf of Mexico.
"It's a 12-to 14-hour non-stop flight over water," says Stutchbury, noting how the birds are "doomed" if they run out of steam and end up in the water.
Her team is the first to use miniature "geolocators" to track songbirds in a bid to better understand threats to the birds which are in serious decline.
The rectangular devices, which at 1.5 grams weigh less than a dime, are strapped to the birds using thin straps.
"It looks very much like a(miniature) kids'backpack,"Stutchbury told reporters in a teleconference. They sit just above the hips and the straps go around the legs so as to not interfere with the wings.
The key component is a light sensor that sticks up out of the feathers on the bird's back. It keeps a daily record of sunrise and sunset, data that enables researchers to figure out latitude and longitude and map the bird's travels.Unlike bulkier tracking devices that can relay information back by satellite, these tiny sensors store the data on board. To retrieve the data the researchers have to recapture the birds, which proved more challenging than expected. Stutchbury says the project gives an intriguing "window"on migration. Not only has it showed the birds can fly faster than expected, but it also indicates songbird migration rate is two to six times more rapid in spring than in the fall. One purple martin took 43 days to reach Brazil in the fall, but returned in the spring in just 13 days.
"They have very high motivation to return in spring," says Stutchbury. Early arrivals have a better chance of scoring high quality territory and mates, she says.
****
Thoughts control prosthetic arms
Nerve rerouting shows promise for amputees
THOMAS H. MAUGH II
Los ANGELES TIMES
By rerouting truncated nerves from an amputated arm to chest muscles where nerve impulses can be detected with sensors, Chicago researchers have made it possible to control prosthetic arms using only the patient's thoughts.
Tests on five patients show that the arms move almost as fast and accurately as healthy arms, Dr. Todd A. Kuiken of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago reported Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
"I was amazed at the level of hand function and how fast I was able to control the arm and hand," said Amanda Kitts, who was fitted with the device after losing an arm in an automobile accident. "I was able to pick up a penny off the table and could catch an object in motion like a checker that was rolling across the table."
Existing prosthetic arms are biomechanical and so clunky that many amputees do not even bother with them. By flexing a back muscle, for example, the patient activates cables and pulleys to bend the arm. Flexing the bleep can close the hand. Motions are slow and in most cases only three different motions are possible.
In contrast, with a new prosthetic arm, developed by Johns Hopkins University for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the motions are operated electrically and as many as 10 individual motions are possible. The problem has been controlling the motions.
In 2007, Kuiken announced development of a new way to do so. Muscles from the arm are attached to chest muscles, whose movements amplify the signal. Sensors placed over the new locations on the chest pick up impulses from the brain and transmit them to the prosthetic arms, a process called targeted muscle reinnervation.
In the new study, Kuiken and his colleagues studied five amputees who had the procedure and compared them with five nonamputees, measuring the time it took to initiate and complete arm motions.
They found that it took the amputees only slightly longer: Initiating a motion, such as flexing or rotating the wrist, took about 0.22 seconds in the amputees, compared with 0.16 seconds in the controls. Completing a task took 1.29 seconds for amputees and 1.08 seconds for controls.
Conventional prosthetic arms require much longer times for both tasks.
The primary drawbacks to the new technique are its expense — costs are not yet known—and required extensive surgery and recuperation. Kuiken said it will be years before it is available for widespread use.
Nonetheless, Dr. Gerald E. Loeb of the University of Southern California wrote "this is a step in the right direction."
Calgary Herald, 14th Feb 2009
By Margaret Munro, Canwest News ServiceFebruary 13, 2009
One purple martin, fitted with a tiny geolocating "backpack,"flew 7,500 kilo-metres from the Amazon basin to North America in just 13 days.
The swallow averaged 577 kilometres a day as it hightailed it back to its breeding ground last spring, say researchers who describe the remarkable journey today in the journal Science.
"It's really stunning, I don't think anyone had any idea that these little songbirds could travel this fast," says biologist Bridget Stutchbury, at York University in Toronto, who is leading the international project that shows migrating songbirds fly three times faster than expected.
While the purple martins were the quickest, wood thrushes, better known for sweet melodies than for speed, wasted little time returning from Honduras.They made the trip to their northern breeding ground in just two weeks, travelling up to 271 kilometres a day, often taking a perilous shortcut across the Gulf of Mexico.
"It's a 12-to 14-hour non-stop flight over water," says Stutchbury, noting how the birds are "doomed" if they run out of steam and end up in the water.
Her team is the first to use miniature "geolocators" to track songbirds in a bid to better understand threats to the birds which are in serious decline.
The rectangular devices, which at 1.5 grams weigh less than a dime, are strapped to the birds using thin straps.
"It looks very much like a(miniature) kids'backpack,"Stutchbury told reporters in a teleconference. They sit just above the hips and the straps go around the legs so as to not interfere with the wings.
The key component is a light sensor that sticks up out of the feathers on the bird's back. It keeps a daily record of sunrise and sunset, data that enables researchers to figure out latitude and longitude and map the bird's travels.Unlike bulkier tracking devices that can relay information back by satellite, these tiny sensors store the data on board. To retrieve the data the researchers have to recapture the birds, which proved more challenging than expected. Stutchbury says the project gives an intriguing "window"on migration. Not only has it showed the birds can fly faster than expected, but it also indicates songbird migration rate is two to six times more rapid in spring than in the fall. One purple martin took 43 days to reach Brazil in the fall, but returned in the spring in just 13 days.
"They have very high motivation to return in spring," says Stutchbury. Early arrivals have a better chance of scoring high quality territory and mates, she says.
****
Thoughts control prosthetic arms
Nerve rerouting shows promise for amputees
THOMAS H. MAUGH II
Los ANGELES TIMES
By rerouting truncated nerves from an amputated arm to chest muscles where nerve impulses can be detected with sensors, Chicago researchers have made it possible to control prosthetic arms using only the patient's thoughts.
Tests on five patients show that the arms move almost as fast and accurately as healthy arms, Dr. Todd A. Kuiken of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago reported Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
"I was amazed at the level of hand function and how fast I was able to control the arm and hand," said Amanda Kitts, who was fitted with the device after losing an arm in an automobile accident. "I was able to pick up a penny off the table and could catch an object in motion like a checker that was rolling across the table."
Existing prosthetic arms are biomechanical and so clunky that many amputees do not even bother with them. By flexing a back muscle, for example, the patient activates cables and pulleys to bend the arm. Flexing the bleep can close the hand. Motions are slow and in most cases only three different motions are possible.
In contrast, with a new prosthetic arm, developed by Johns Hopkins University for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the motions are operated electrically and as many as 10 individual motions are possible. The problem has been controlling the motions.
In 2007, Kuiken announced development of a new way to do so. Muscles from the arm are attached to chest muscles, whose movements amplify the signal. Sensors placed over the new locations on the chest pick up impulses from the brain and transmit them to the prosthetic arms, a process called targeted muscle reinnervation.
In the new study, Kuiken and his colleagues studied five amputees who had the procedure and compared them with five nonamputees, measuring the time it took to initiate and complete arm motions.
They found that it took the amputees only slightly longer: Initiating a motion, such as flexing or rotating the wrist, took about 0.22 seconds in the amputees, compared with 0.16 seconds in the controls. Completing a task took 1.29 seconds for amputees and 1.08 seconds for controls.
Conventional prosthetic arms require much longer times for both tasks.
The primary drawbacks to the new technique are its expense — costs are not yet known—and required extensive surgery and recuperation. Kuiken said it will be years before it is available for widespread use.
Nonetheless, Dr. Gerald E. Loeb of the University of Southern California wrote "this is a step in the right direction."
Calgary Herald, 14th Feb 2009
February 16, 2009
Editorial
Space Vacuums?
It’s hard to know whether to be more concerned about the debris spewed into orbit by the collision of two satellites last week or by the fact that no one was able to predict the collision before it happened. Neither bodes well for the long-term safety of space operations.
An American communications satellite owned by the Iridium network and a no-longer-functioning Russian communications satellite slammed into each other 490 miles above northern Siberia in what appears to be the first collision between two intact satellites.
Hundreds of fragments were strewn into space, where they will pose at least a small additional hazard to other satellites or spacecraft that move through the area. The international space station, orbiting 215 miles up with three astronauts aboard, will face an elevated but still very small risk of being struck by space debris.
Those who thought that our nation’s space tracking systems could see such things coming will be surprised to learn that there are gaps in coverage and capabilities. The military does indeed track some 19,000 objects in space, including active and nonfunctioning satellites, hordes of debris fragments, and thousands of unknown objects that might threaten the safety of American satellites. It publishes their coordinates and velocity in a catalog on a Web site that anyone can view free of charge.
But the military doesn’t calculate all possible collisions. It lacks the computing power, trained personnel and sensor capabilities to pull off that feat. Instead, it focuses primarily on potential collisions that might endanger the space station and shuttles, its own satellites and those of other federal agencies.
A private company fills part of the gap by assessing potential collision threats to other active satellites on a daily basis. It publishes a top 10 list of likely close encounters. As it turned out, the satellite that was demolished did not make the top 10 list that day, partly because other satellites looked even more likely to pass close to debris and partly because these calculations are inherently imprecise. Iridium, which is ultimately responsible for its own satellites, apparently had no clue that one of them was about to be smashed.
The new debris adds to the growing amount of junk accumulating in orbit. Thus far the annoying objects have not had a major impact on human or robotic missions into space, but there are grave concerns for the future. At some cluttered altitudes, collisions are producing debris faster than gravity can eliminate it. If the trend is not reversed, one can imagine a time when it could be too risky or too expensive to fly spacecraft through the debris fields.
The United Nations has adopted voluntary guidelines to minimize the creation of new space debris. It recommends such steps as designing spacecraft so that no debris is released during normal operations, removing leftover propellants at the end of a mission and moving nonoperational satellites out of congested orbits. A U.N. meeting in Vienna this month will assess how well that effort is going. The looming problem yet to be addressed is how to get rid of the debris and objects already up there and proliferating with every collision.
****
Obama poised to lift stem cell ban: aide
ReutersFebruary 16, 2009
U. S. President Barack Obama will soon issue an executive order lifting an eight-year ban on embryonic stem cell research imposed by his predecessor, President George W. Bush, a senior adviser said on Sunday.
"We're going to be doing something on that soon, I think. The president is considering that right now,"Obama adviser David Axelrod said on Fox News Sunday.
In 2001, Bush limited federal funding for stem cell research only to human embryonic stem cell lines that already existed.
It was a gesture to his conservative Christian supporters who regard embryonic stem cell research as destroying potential life, because the cells must be extracted from human embryos.
Embryonic stem cells are the most basic human cells which can develop into any type of cell in the body.
Scientists believe the research could eventually produce cures for a variety of diseases, including Parkinson's disease, diabetes, heart disease and spinal cord injuries.
Obama vowed to reverse Bush's ban during his presidential campaign and in his inaugural address last month promised to return science to its proper place in the United States.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last month cleared the way for the first trial to see if human embryonic stem cells could treat people safely.
The trial will try to use stem cells from existing lines to regrow nerve tissue in patients with crushed spinal cords.
Stem cells are the body's master cells, giving rise to all the tissues, organs and blood.
Embryonic stem cells are considered the most powerful kinds of stem cells, as they have the potential to give rise to any type of tissue.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Editorial
Space Vacuums?
It’s hard to know whether to be more concerned about the debris spewed into orbit by the collision of two satellites last week or by the fact that no one was able to predict the collision before it happened. Neither bodes well for the long-term safety of space operations.
An American communications satellite owned by the Iridium network and a no-longer-functioning Russian communications satellite slammed into each other 490 miles above northern Siberia in what appears to be the first collision between two intact satellites.
Hundreds of fragments were strewn into space, where they will pose at least a small additional hazard to other satellites or spacecraft that move through the area. The international space station, orbiting 215 miles up with three astronauts aboard, will face an elevated but still very small risk of being struck by space debris.
Those who thought that our nation’s space tracking systems could see such things coming will be surprised to learn that there are gaps in coverage and capabilities. The military does indeed track some 19,000 objects in space, including active and nonfunctioning satellites, hordes of debris fragments, and thousands of unknown objects that might threaten the safety of American satellites. It publishes their coordinates and velocity in a catalog on a Web site that anyone can view free of charge.
But the military doesn’t calculate all possible collisions. It lacks the computing power, trained personnel and sensor capabilities to pull off that feat. Instead, it focuses primarily on potential collisions that might endanger the space station and shuttles, its own satellites and those of other federal agencies.
A private company fills part of the gap by assessing potential collision threats to other active satellites on a daily basis. It publishes a top 10 list of likely close encounters. As it turned out, the satellite that was demolished did not make the top 10 list that day, partly because other satellites looked even more likely to pass close to debris and partly because these calculations are inherently imprecise. Iridium, which is ultimately responsible for its own satellites, apparently had no clue that one of them was about to be smashed.
The new debris adds to the growing amount of junk accumulating in orbit. Thus far the annoying objects have not had a major impact on human or robotic missions into space, but there are grave concerns for the future. At some cluttered altitudes, collisions are producing debris faster than gravity can eliminate it. If the trend is not reversed, one can imagine a time when it could be too risky or too expensive to fly spacecraft through the debris fields.
The United Nations has adopted voluntary guidelines to minimize the creation of new space debris. It recommends such steps as designing spacecraft so that no debris is released during normal operations, removing leftover propellants at the end of a mission and moving nonoperational satellites out of congested orbits. A U.N. meeting in Vienna this month will assess how well that effort is going. The looming problem yet to be addressed is how to get rid of the debris and objects already up there and proliferating with every collision.
****
Obama poised to lift stem cell ban: aide
ReutersFebruary 16, 2009
U. S. President Barack Obama will soon issue an executive order lifting an eight-year ban on embryonic stem cell research imposed by his predecessor, President George W. Bush, a senior adviser said on Sunday.
"We're going to be doing something on that soon, I think. The president is considering that right now,"Obama adviser David Axelrod said on Fox News Sunday.
In 2001, Bush limited federal funding for stem cell research only to human embryonic stem cell lines that already existed.
It was a gesture to his conservative Christian supporters who regard embryonic stem cell research as destroying potential life, because the cells must be extracted from human embryos.
Embryonic stem cells are the most basic human cells which can develop into any type of cell in the body.
Scientists believe the research could eventually produce cures for a variety of diseases, including Parkinson's disease, diabetes, heart disease and spinal cord injuries.
Obama vowed to reverse Bush's ban during his presidential campaign and in his inaugural address last month promised to return science to its proper place in the United States.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last month cleared the way for the first trial to see if human embryonic stem cells could treat people safely.
The trial will try to use stem cells from existing lines to regrow nerve tissue in patients with crushed spinal cords.
Stem cells are the body's master cells, giving rise to all the tissues, organs and blood.
Embryonic stem cells are considered the most powerful kinds of stem cells, as they have the potential to give rise to any type of tissue.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
February 17, 2009
The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives
By JOHN MARKOFF
The cellphone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer. The four billion cellphones in use around the globe carry personal information, provide access to the Web and are being used more and more to navigate the real world. And as cellphones change how we live, computer scientists say, they are also changing how we think about information.
It has been 25 years since the desktop, with its files and folders, was introduced as a way to think about what went on inside a personal computer. The World Wide Web brought other ways of imagining the flow of data. With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. New in one sense, that is. It is also as ancient as humanity itself. That metaphor is the map.
“The map underlies man’s ability to perceive,” said Richard Saul Wurman, a graphic designer who was a pioneer in the use of maps as a generalized way to search for information of all kinds before the emergence of the online world.
As this metaphor takes over, it will change the way we behave, the way we think and the way we find our way around new neighborhoods. As researchers and businesses learn how to use all the information about a user’s location that phones can provide, new privacy issues will emerge. You may use your phone to find friends and restaurants, but somebody else may be using your phone to find you and find out about you.
Digital map displays on hand-held phones can now show the nearest gas station or A.T.M., reviews of nearby restaurants posted online by diners, or the location of friends. In the latest and biggest example of the map’s power and versatility, Google started a location-aware friend-finding system called Latitude in 27 countries early this month.
On its face, Google’s new service — available on dozens of mobile systems — is simply a way for friends to keep track of one another and meet up, for families to stay in touch or for parents to find comfort in knowing where their children are.
But it will generate a gold mine of new information about where millions of people travel each day, and there is no doubt that Google and others are planning to dig in that mine. “Everyone is watching Google, and this will open a floodgate of location-oriented applications and services,” said Greg Skibiski, the chief executive of Sense Networks, a New York City firm that mines the millions of digital trails left by cellphone users for marketing purposes.
It was the arrival of the so-called WIMP interface — for windows, icons, menus, pointer — in the 1980s on both the Apple Macintosh and computers using Microsoft Windows that made personal computers personal and moved them beyond the world of hobbyists and business. Now many of the software designers who created those interfaces say they see a change of similar magnitude with phones and maps.
“We’re way early on, and we don’t know what the Macintosh of maps will be yet,” said Paul Mercer, a former Apple Computer software designer who more recently worked on the development of the Palm Pre smartphone. “But because of their relationship to the real world, maps will be a metaphor for a huge swath of mobile computing.”
Indeed, a new generation of smartphones like the G1, with Android software developed by Google, and a range of Japanese phones now “augment” reality by painting a map over a phone-screen image of the user’s surroundings produced by the phone’s camera.
With this sort of map it is possible to see a three-dimensional view of one’s surroundings, including the annotated distance to objects that may be obscured by buildings in the foreground. For starters, map-based cellphones simply translate paper maps into a digital medium, but future systems will probably begin to blur the boundaries between the display and the real world.
“I always said the next interface would be Quake,” said Steve Capps, one of the designers of the original Macintosh interface, referring to the popular video game. “How long will it be before you come out of the subway and you hold up your screen to get a better view of what you’re looking at in the physical world?”
Increasingly, phones will allow users to look at an image of what is around them. You could be surrounded by skyscrapers but have an immediate reference map showing your destination and features of the landscape, along with your progress in real time. Part of what drives the emergence of map-based services is the vast marketing potential of analyzing consumers’ travel patterns. For example, it is now possible for marketers to identify users who are shopping for cars because they have traveled to multiple car dealerships.
“When I go from point A to point B with my feet, there is something of real value there,” said Tony Jebara, a Columbia University computer scientist who is a co-founder of Sense Networks.
A full-blown map-based, location-aware mobile world would entail rethinking basic American notions of privacy. For a generation of older Americans, exposing their precise location around the clock to an army of little brothers for marketing and advertising purposes is a privacy invasion.
Today the vast majority of cellphone users in the United States still use the devices primarily for just one function: talking. About 10 percent of cellphone users take advantage of map features, according to the market research firm M:Metrics. But the number is growing, the company said. And a survey by another market research firm, LJS, showed that 24 percent of those interviewed wanted GPS mapping capabilities on their next phone, but only 19 percent wanted an Internet connection.
On the other hand, there is a generation of smartphone users in their 20s that has grown up sharing the most intimate details of their lives on MySpace and Facebook. They may have a different point of view.
Recently, for example, Sam Altman, a 23-year-old Stanford University computer science graduate and the founder of Loopt, a pioneering friend-finding service, was having dinner in Palo Alto, Calif., when he noticed from the screen on his phone that his freshman college roommate was having dinner just two restaurants away. The two met after dinner at a bar, where they were joined by another former Stanford student who noticed on his display that they were socializing together.
Mr. Altman said his willingness to display his location was just as valuable in his business dealings. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, he turned on a feature that broadcasts his location and his name. He had more than a dozen business contacts as he traveled around the vast trade show, and he said he was able to kick off four deals from his random contacts.
The map interface even seems to have a biological basis, as suggested by new brain studies showing how the world is represented in brain maps.
“Humans evolved with amazing navigational abilities in our brains from an evolutionary perspective,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. He argues that the correlation between the map on the phone and the internal map in your head is a natural way to navigate all kinds of information.
For example, neuroscientists have discovered that people who have occupations that require them to maintain complex mental maps of the world, like London taxi drivers, have an enlarged hippocampus. What happens when our hand-held computers become extensions of the way we think?
“I have wondered about the fact that we might as a culture lose the skill of mapping our environment, relying on the Web to tell us how to navigate,” said Hugo Spiers, a neurobiologist at University College London. “Thus, it might reduce the growth of cells in the hippocampus, which we think stores our internal maps.”
Among cellphone makers, the map metaphor has been adopted most aggressively by Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones. The company has acquired digital maps of 69 countries and is now rushing to deliver to developers the tools to create software for Nokia phones oriented toward maps and navigation. In many ways this is similar to the tool kit that early computer designers gave programmers to develop Windows applications.
“This is a new metaphor upon which others can build,” said Michael Halbherr, Nokia’s vice president for social location services.
The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives
By JOHN MARKOFF
The cellphone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer. The four billion cellphones in use around the globe carry personal information, provide access to the Web and are being used more and more to navigate the real world. And as cellphones change how we live, computer scientists say, they are also changing how we think about information.
It has been 25 years since the desktop, with its files and folders, was introduced as a way to think about what went on inside a personal computer. The World Wide Web brought other ways of imagining the flow of data. With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. New in one sense, that is. It is also as ancient as humanity itself. That metaphor is the map.
“The map underlies man’s ability to perceive,” said Richard Saul Wurman, a graphic designer who was a pioneer in the use of maps as a generalized way to search for information of all kinds before the emergence of the online world.
As this metaphor takes over, it will change the way we behave, the way we think and the way we find our way around new neighborhoods. As researchers and businesses learn how to use all the information about a user’s location that phones can provide, new privacy issues will emerge. You may use your phone to find friends and restaurants, but somebody else may be using your phone to find you and find out about you.
Digital map displays on hand-held phones can now show the nearest gas station or A.T.M., reviews of nearby restaurants posted online by diners, or the location of friends. In the latest and biggest example of the map’s power and versatility, Google started a location-aware friend-finding system called Latitude in 27 countries early this month.
On its face, Google’s new service — available on dozens of mobile systems — is simply a way for friends to keep track of one another and meet up, for families to stay in touch or for parents to find comfort in knowing where their children are.
But it will generate a gold mine of new information about where millions of people travel each day, and there is no doubt that Google and others are planning to dig in that mine. “Everyone is watching Google, and this will open a floodgate of location-oriented applications and services,” said Greg Skibiski, the chief executive of Sense Networks, a New York City firm that mines the millions of digital trails left by cellphone users for marketing purposes.
It was the arrival of the so-called WIMP interface — for windows, icons, menus, pointer — in the 1980s on both the Apple Macintosh and computers using Microsoft Windows that made personal computers personal and moved them beyond the world of hobbyists and business. Now many of the software designers who created those interfaces say they see a change of similar magnitude with phones and maps.
“We’re way early on, and we don’t know what the Macintosh of maps will be yet,” said Paul Mercer, a former Apple Computer software designer who more recently worked on the development of the Palm Pre smartphone. “But because of their relationship to the real world, maps will be a metaphor for a huge swath of mobile computing.”
Indeed, a new generation of smartphones like the G1, with Android software developed by Google, and a range of Japanese phones now “augment” reality by painting a map over a phone-screen image of the user’s surroundings produced by the phone’s camera.
With this sort of map it is possible to see a three-dimensional view of one’s surroundings, including the annotated distance to objects that may be obscured by buildings in the foreground. For starters, map-based cellphones simply translate paper maps into a digital medium, but future systems will probably begin to blur the boundaries between the display and the real world.
“I always said the next interface would be Quake,” said Steve Capps, one of the designers of the original Macintosh interface, referring to the popular video game. “How long will it be before you come out of the subway and you hold up your screen to get a better view of what you’re looking at in the physical world?”
Increasingly, phones will allow users to look at an image of what is around them. You could be surrounded by skyscrapers but have an immediate reference map showing your destination and features of the landscape, along with your progress in real time. Part of what drives the emergence of map-based services is the vast marketing potential of analyzing consumers’ travel patterns. For example, it is now possible for marketers to identify users who are shopping for cars because they have traveled to multiple car dealerships.
“When I go from point A to point B with my feet, there is something of real value there,” said Tony Jebara, a Columbia University computer scientist who is a co-founder of Sense Networks.
A full-blown map-based, location-aware mobile world would entail rethinking basic American notions of privacy. For a generation of older Americans, exposing their precise location around the clock to an army of little brothers for marketing and advertising purposes is a privacy invasion.
Today the vast majority of cellphone users in the United States still use the devices primarily for just one function: talking. About 10 percent of cellphone users take advantage of map features, according to the market research firm M:Metrics. But the number is growing, the company said. And a survey by another market research firm, LJS, showed that 24 percent of those interviewed wanted GPS mapping capabilities on their next phone, but only 19 percent wanted an Internet connection.
On the other hand, there is a generation of smartphone users in their 20s that has grown up sharing the most intimate details of their lives on MySpace and Facebook. They may have a different point of view.
Recently, for example, Sam Altman, a 23-year-old Stanford University computer science graduate and the founder of Loopt, a pioneering friend-finding service, was having dinner in Palo Alto, Calif., when he noticed from the screen on his phone that his freshman college roommate was having dinner just two restaurants away. The two met after dinner at a bar, where they were joined by another former Stanford student who noticed on his display that they were socializing together.
Mr. Altman said his willingness to display his location was just as valuable in his business dealings. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, he turned on a feature that broadcasts his location and his name. He had more than a dozen business contacts as he traveled around the vast trade show, and he said he was able to kick off four deals from his random contacts.
The map interface even seems to have a biological basis, as suggested by new brain studies showing how the world is represented in brain maps.
“Humans evolved with amazing navigational abilities in our brains from an evolutionary perspective,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. He argues that the correlation between the map on the phone and the internal map in your head is a natural way to navigate all kinds of information.
For example, neuroscientists have discovered that people who have occupations that require them to maintain complex mental maps of the world, like London taxi drivers, have an enlarged hippocampus. What happens when our hand-held computers become extensions of the way we think?
“I have wondered about the fact that we might as a culture lose the skill of mapping our environment, relying on the Web to tell us how to navigate,” said Hugo Spiers, a neurobiologist at University College London. “Thus, it might reduce the growth of cells in the hippocampus, which we think stores our internal maps.”
Among cellphone makers, the map metaphor has been adopted most aggressively by Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones. The company has acquired digital maps of 69 countries and is now rushing to deliver to developers the tools to create software for Nokia phones oriented toward maps and navigation. In many ways this is similar to the tool kit that early computer designers gave programmers to develop Windows applications.
“This is a new metaphor upon which others can build,” said Michael Halbherr, Nokia’s vice president for social location services.
U of C research explains why we feel sick
Study hints at brain link to immune cells
By Shari Roan, Los Angeles TimesFebruary 21, 2009 8:13 AM
"Sickness behaviour" is a term used to describe people when they don't feel well. It's the fatigue, lethargy and loss of interest in life that accompanies a range of illnesses. It's that feeling you get when you can't get out of your jammies and all you can do is watch reruns on TV.
You get the picture.
Now researchers writing in this week's issue of the Journal of Neuroscience say there may be a way to escape feeling sick -- even when you're sick.
The scientists, from the University of Calgary, designed an experiment to understand why sickness behaviour occurs when the brain is designed to be isolated from the immune system.
Scientists have long wondered how the brain senses inflammation or injury in distant parts of the body.
What they found, in a study of mice with liver disease, is that immune cells called monocytes infiltrate the brain.
The liver inflammation triggers brain cells called microglia to produce a chemical that attracts monocytes, which are white blood cells.
Further, the inflammation stimulates cells in the blood to make an immune chemical called TNFa.
When the researchers blocked the signalling of TNFa in their experiment, however, microglia produced less of the chemical that attracts monocytes.
What this meant for the sick mice is that they were more active and social. No reruns for these guys!
"Sickness behaviour significantly impacts quality of life," said the lead author of the study, Dr. Mark Swain, in a news release.
"Our findings further our understanding and may generate potential new avenues for treatment of these often crippling symptoms."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Study hints at brain link to immune cells
By Shari Roan, Los Angeles TimesFebruary 21, 2009 8:13 AM
"Sickness behaviour" is a term used to describe people when they don't feel well. It's the fatigue, lethargy and loss of interest in life that accompanies a range of illnesses. It's that feeling you get when you can't get out of your jammies and all you can do is watch reruns on TV.
You get the picture.
Now researchers writing in this week's issue of the Journal of Neuroscience say there may be a way to escape feeling sick -- even when you're sick.
The scientists, from the University of Calgary, designed an experiment to understand why sickness behaviour occurs when the brain is designed to be isolated from the immune system.
Scientists have long wondered how the brain senses inflammation or injury in distant parts of the body.
What they found, in a study of mice with liver disease, is that immune cells called monocytes infiltrate the brain.
The liver inflammation triggers brain cells called microglia to produce a chemical that attracts monocytes, which are white blood cells.
Further, the inflammation stimulates cells in the blood to make an immune chemical called TNFa.
When the researchers blocked the signalling of TNFa in their experiment, however, microglia produced less of the chemical that attracts monocytes.
What this meant for the sick mice is that they were more active and social. No reruns for these guys!
"Sickness behaviour significantly impacts quality of life," said the lead author of the study, Dr. Mark Swain, in a news release.
"Our findings further our understanding and may generate potential new avenues for treatment of these often crippling symptoms."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Yet more reason to curb embryonic stem cell research
Calgary HeraldFebruary 22, 2009
Before U.S. President Barack Obama rushes to revoke former president George W. Bush's ban on embryonic stem cell research, he would do well to ponder some sobering news from Israel last week. Researchers at Sheba's Cancer Center and Tel Aviv University's Cancer Biology Center have revealed that a boy with a rare disease that results in degeneration of a particular brain area, developed benign tumours in his brain and spinal cord after receiving fetal stem cell injections. Doctors examining the tumour cells determined they contained female chromosomes, an indication the tumours arose from the cells of at least two different fetuses, as the boy would not be carrying any female chromosomes himself.
It should come as no surprise that fetal stem cells could incite tumours to grow. The fetal period is a time of rapid growth when cells are dividing at an unprecedented pace in order that a fully formed infant can emerge from the womb in nine short months. Tumours also involve rapidly growing and dividing cells. That fetal stem cells might simply continue to do what they do--grow and divide at rapid rates--when implanted in a patient's body, would seem to be obvious.
Scientists should focus their efforts on adult stem cells, the use of which promises far greater advancement in treating a variety of medical conditions without the problems associated with fetal cells. Among those successes are a remission in Parkinson's disease by injecting a patient with his own stem cells, and 250 patients in the U. S. and Canada whose Type 1 diabetes was treated with pancreatic islet stem cells from cadavers.Adult stem cell use is not only more promising, but it does not entail the unethical and immoral production and use of embryonic stem cells.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Calgary HeraldFebruary 22, 2009
Before U.S. President Barack Obama rushes to revoke former president George W. Bush's ban on embryonic stem cell research, he would do well to ponder some sobering news from Israel last week. Researchers at Sheba's Cancer Center and Tel Aviv University's Cancer Biology Center have revealed that a boy with a rare disease that results in degeneration of a particular brain area, developed benign tumours in his brain and spinal cord after receiving fetal stem cell injections. Doctors examining the tumour cells determined they contained female chromosomes, an indication the tumours arose from the cells of at least two different fetuses, as the boy would not be carrying any female chromosomes himself.
It should come as no surprise that fetal stem cells could incite tumours to grow. The fetal period is a time of rapid growth when cells are dividing at an unprecedented pace in order that a fully formed infant can emerge from the womb in nine short months. Tumours also involve rapidly growing and dividing cells. That fetal stem cells might simply continue to do what they do--grow and divide at rapid rates--when implanted in a patient's body, would seem to be obvious.
Scientists should focus their efforts on adult stem cells, the use of which promises far greater advancement in treating a variety of medical conditions without the problems associated with fetal cells. Among those successes are a remission in Parkinson's disease by injecting a patient with his own stem cells, and 250 patients in the U. S. and Canada whose Type 1 diabetes was treated with pancreatic islet stem cells from cadavers.Adult stem cell use is not only more promising, but it does not entail the unethical and immoral production and use of embryonic stem cells.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Prehuman footprints similar to our own
By Will Dunham, ReutersFebruary 28, 2009
Footprints found in Kenya that re-semble those left in wet sand by beach goers today show that 1.5 million years ago a human ancestor walked like we do with anatomically modern feet, scientists said on Thursday.
The remains of the footprints found in sedimentary rock near Ileret in northern Kenya most likely were left by a human ancestor called Homo erectus, also known as Homo ergaster, an international team of scientists wrote in the journal Science.
The scientists found a series of footprints, including one apparently left by a child, left by individuals walking on a muddy river bank. Judging from stride length, they estimated the individuals were about 1.75 metres in height.
"It was kind of creepy excavating these things to see all of a sudden something that looks so dramatically like something that you yourself could have made 20 minutes earlier in some kind of wet sediment just next to the site," archaeologist David Braun of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview.
"These could quite easily have been made on the beach today," Braun added.
The footprints show that the individuals had a big toe parallel to the other toes, unlike that of other apes where it is separated in a grasping configuration useful in the trees. The footprints show a characteristic human-like arch and short toes, typically associated with an upright bipedal stance.
The size, spacing and depth of the footprint impressions allowed the scientists to estimate weight, stride and gait, which all were found to be within the range of modern humans. Our species, Homo sapiens, first appeared 200,000 years ago.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
*****
Photo at:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/Technology ... story.html
Fossil skull of giant bird found
Calgary HeraldFebruary 28, 2009
The cranium of a bird from the Pelagornithidae family is seen at Peru's natural history museum in lima. Paleontologists have found the fossil of the head of a bird that lived 10 million years ago in what is now Peru.
Photograph by: Reuters, Mariana Bazo, Calgary HeraldPaleontologists working in Peru have found a fossil from a bird that lived 10 million years ago, scientists said on Friday after returning from the dig site on the country's desert coast.
The species of bird had a wing span of six metres and fed mostly on fish from the Pacific Ocean.
It first appeared 50 million years ago and was extinct about 2.5 million years ago because of climate change, paleontologist Mario Urbina of Peru's Natural History Museum said.
Scientists discovered a rare fossil of the bird's head in Ocucaje, in the Ica region of Peru's southern coast, where an arid climate has preserved many fossils.
"The cranium of the bird, from the Pelagornithidae family, is the most complete find of its kind in the world. Its fossil remains are hard to find," Urbina said.
Old ocean seabeds in the area have been a treasure trove for fossil hunters.
"This site had marine sediments. The fossil was found with other remains from whales, sharks and turtles," Urbina said.
At the time of the bird's death, Peru's coast was hot and rainy, but millions of years later, it turned cool and dry, he said.
Reuters
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
By Will Dunham, ReutersFebruary 28, 2009
Footprints found in Kenya that re-semble those left in wet sand by beach goers today show that 1.5 million years ago a human ancestor walked like we do with anatomically modern feet, scientists said on Thursday.
The remains of the footprints found in sedimentary rock near Ileret in northern Kenya most likely were left by a human ancestor called Homo erectus, also known as Homo ergaster, an international team of scientists wrote in the journal Science.
The scientists found a series of footprints, including one apparently left by a child, left by individuals walking on a muddy river bank. Judging from stride length, they estimated the individuals were about 1.75 metres in height.
"It was kind of creepy excavating these things to see all of a sudden something that looks so dramatically like something that you yourself could have made 20 minutes earlier in some kind of wet sediment just next to the site," archaeologist David Braun of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview.
"These could quite easily have been made on the beach today," Braun added.
The footprints show that the individuals had a big toe parallel to the other toes, unlike that of other apes where it is separated in a grasping configuration useful in the trees. The footprints show a characteristic human-like arch and short toes, typically associated with an upright bipedal stance.
The size, spacing and depth of the footprint impressions allowed the scientists to estimate weight, stride and gait, which all were found to be within the range of modern humans. Our species, Homo sapiens, first appeared 200,000 years ago.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
*****
Photo at:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/Technology ... story.html
Fossil skull of giant bird found
Calgary HeraldFebruary 28, 2009
The cranium of a bird from the Pelagornithidae family is seen at Peru's natural history museum in lima. Paleontologists have found the fossil of the head of a bird that lived 10 million years ago in what is now Peru.
Photograph by: Reuters, Mariana Bazo, Calgary HeraldPaleontologists working in Peru have found a fossil from a bird that lived 10 million years ago, scientists said on Friday after returning from the dig site on the country's desert coast.
The species of bird had a wing span of six metres and fed mostly on fish from the Pacific Ocean.
It first appeared 50 million years ago and was extinct about 2.5 million years ago because of climate change, paleontologist Mario Urbina of Peru's Natural History Museum said.
Scientists discovered a rare fossil of the bird's head in Ocucaje, in the Ica region of Peru's southern coast, where an arid climate has preserved many fossils.
"The cranium of the bird, from the Pelagornithidae family, is the most complete find of its kind in the world. Its fossil remains are hard to find," Urbina said.
Old ocean seabeds in the area have been a treasure trove for fossil hunters.
"This site had marine sediments. The fossil was found with other remains from whales, sharks and turtles," Urbina said.
At the time of the bird's death, Peru's coast was hot and rainy, but millions of years later, it turned cool and dry, he said.
Reuters
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
March 3, 2009
In a Lonely Cosmos, a Hunt for Worlds Like Ours
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Someday it might be said that this was the beginning of the end of cosmic loneliness.
Presently perched on a Delta 2 rocket at Cape Canaveral is a one-ton spacecraft called Kepler. If all goes well, the rocket will lift off about 10:50 Friday evening on a journey that will eventually propel Kepler into orbit around the Sun. There the spacecraft’s mission will be to discover Earth-like planets in Earth-like places — that is to say, in the not-too-cold, not-too-hot, Goldilocks zones around stars where liquid water can exist.
The job, in short, is to find places where life as we know it is possible.
“It’s not E.T., but it’s E.T.’s home,” said William Borucki, an astronomer at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California, who is the lead scientist on the project. Kepler, named after the German astronomer who in 1609 published laws of planetary motion that now bear his name, will look for tiny variations in starlight caused by planets passing in front of their stars. Dr. Borucki and his colleagues say that Kepler could find dozens of such planets — if they exist. The point is not to find any particular planet — hold off on the covered-wagon spaceships — but to find out just how rare planets like Earth are in the cosmos.
Jon Morse, director for astrophysics at NASA headquarters, calls Kepler the first planetary census taker.
Kepler’s strategy is, in effect, to search for the shadows of planets. The core of the spacecraft, which carries a 55-inch-diameter telescope, is a 95-million-pixel digital camera. For three and a half years, the telescope will stare at the same patch of sky about 10 degrees, or 20 full moons, wide, in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. It will read out the brightnesses of 100,000 stars every half-hour, looking for the telltale blips when a planet crosses in front of its star, a phenomenon known as a transit.
To detect something as small as the Earth, the measurements need to be done with a precision available only in space, away from the atmospheric turbulence that makes stars twinkle, and far from Earth so that our home world does not intrude on the view of shadow worlds in that patch of sky. It will take three or more years — until the end of Barack Obama’s current term in office — before astronomers know whether Kepler has found any distant Earths.
If Kepler finds the planets, Dr. Borucki explained, life could be common in the universe. The results will point the way for future missions aimed at getting pictures of what Carl Sagan, the late Cornell astronomer and science popularizer, called “pale blue dots” out in the universe, and the search for life and perhaps intelligence.
But the results will be profound either way. If Kepler doesn’t come through, that means Earth is really rare and we might be the only extant life in the universe and our loneliness is just beginning. “It would mean there might not be ‘Star Trek,’ ” Dr. Borucki said during a recent news conference.
More.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/scien ... ?th&emc=th
In a Lonely Cosmos, a Hunt for Worlds Like Ours
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Someday it might be said that this was the beginning of the end of cosmic loneliness.
Presently perched on a Delta 2 rocket at Cape Canaveral is a one-ton spacecraft called Kepler. If all goes well, the rocket will lift off about 10:50 Friday evening on a journey that will eventually propel Kepler into orbit around the Sun. There the spacecraft’s mission will be to discover Earth-like planets in Earth-like places — that is to say, in the not-too-cold, not-too-hot, Goldilocks zones around stars where liquid water can exist.
The job, in short, is to find places where life as we know it is possible.
“It’s not E.T., but it’s E.T.’s home,” said William Borucki, an astronomer at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California, who is the lead scientist on the project. Kepler, named after the German astronomer who in 1609 published laws of planetary motion that now bear his name, will look for tiny variations in starlight caused by planets passing in front of their stars. Dr. Borucki and his colleagues say that Kepler could find dozens of such planets — if they exist. The point is not to find any particular planet — hold off on the covered-wagon spaceships — but to find out just how rare planets like Earth are in the cosmos.
Jon Morse, director for astrophysics at NASA headquarters, calls Kepler the first planetary census taker.
Kepler’s strategy is, in effect, to search for the shadows of planets. The core of the spacecraft, which carries a 55-inch-diameter telescope, is a 95-million-pixel digital camera. For three and a half years, the telescope will stare at the same patch of sky about 10 degrees, or 20 full moons, wide, in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. It will read out the brightnesses of 100,000 stars every half-hour, looking for the telltale blips when a planet crosses in front of its star, a phenomenon known as a transit.
To detect something as small as the Earth, the measurements need to be done with a precision available only in space, away from the atmospheric turbulence that makes stars twinkle, and far from Earth so that our home world does not intrude on the view of shadow worlds in that patch of sky. It will take three or more years — until the end of Barack Obama’s current term in office — before astronomers know whether Kepler has found any distant Earths.
If Kepler finds the planets, Dr. Borucki explained, life could be common in the universe. The results will point the way for future missions aimed at getting pictures of what Carl Sagan, the late Cornell astronomer and science popularizer, called “pale blue dots” out in the universe, and the search for life and perhaps intelligence.
But the results will be profound either way. If Kepler doesn’t come through, that means Earth is really rare and we might be the only extant life in the universe and our loneliness is just beginning. “It would mean there might not be ‘Star Trek,’ ” Dr. Borucki said during a recent news conference.
More.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/scien ... ?th&emc=th
Montreal researchers discover crucial blindness gene
Charlie Fidelman
Montreal Gazette
Thursday, March 05, 2009
http://www2.canada.com/montreal+researc ... id=1357980
CREDIT: Karen Bleier
eye.jpg
MONTREAL - Amanda Basilio wore glasses at age two, but her vision continued to decline as Montreal eye specialists searched for the cause.
Doctors noted the photo cells in the retina in back of Amanda's eyes seemed functional. So why couldn't the little girl see?
Now Amanda's family has new hope for her restored vision.
An international team of researchers, including Robert Koenekoop, director of pediatric ophthalmology at the MUHC's Montreal Children's Hospital, has discovered a crucial gene involved in such blindness.
Amanda has Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA). About 200,000 people worldwide suffer from this rare and currently untreatable condition that causes a very severe form of childhood blindness.
Koenekoop's team found SPATA7, the 15th gene in the illness. A mutation on this gene disrupts protein transfers within cells, Koenekoop explained.
Published Thursday in the American Journal of Human Genetics, the work is the collaboration of Canadian, U.S. and Dutch scientists.
Researchers believe the SPATA7 gene mutation is a common cause of the eye disease first identified by Theodore Leber in the 19th century.
Because of its function in protein transport, the SPATA7 gene also identifies a new pathway, a cellular mechanism, which opens the door to new treatment possibilities, Koenekoop said.
Efforts are already underway to combat LCA gene mutations, Koenekoop said.
U.S. and British studies of mutated RPE65 gene, which is responsible for about 15 per cent of Leber's blindness, have restored sight in dogs by injecting adenovirus - which causes the common cold - thereby carrying healthy copies of the gene into the cells of the retina.
Results were "spectacular," Koenekoop said.
In June, the same group confirmed similar results in experiments with people.
"We are all very excited about the human trials. . . . Patients reported that they started to see," Koenekoop said.
Gene therapy for LCA is still a thing of the future, Koenekoop said. "We're still looking for 35 per cent of the genes (in this eye disease)."
The SPATA7 discovery "is exciting news," said Jean Bennett, scientist at the F.M. Kirby Centre for Molecular Ophthalmology at Penn University, who was involved in the landmark gene study held with blind adults last year.
"It ratchets the number of genes up to 15, and give us a handle on the way to reverse the blindness in these individuals," said Bennett, who did not participate in the McGill study.
Officials from the Foundation Fighting Blindness, which supported the study with grant funds, said the discovery offers LCA patients hope that gene-based therapies will be developed to restore sight.
For Amanda, who has coped with very little vision since birth, nothing will change in the short term, said her mother, Elizabeth Ramos.
"But now they have a new gene, something they haven't seen before. And that means it's not incurable," - not just for Amanda, but for dozens of children like her, Ramos said.
© Canwest News Service 2009
Charlie Fidelman
Montreal Gazette
Thursday, March 05, 2009
http://www2.canada.com/montreal+researc ... id=1357980
CREDIT: Karen Bleier
eye.jpg
MONTREAL - Amanda Basilio wore glasses at age two, but her vision continued to decline as Montreal eye specialists searched for the cause.
Doctors noted the photo cells in the retina in back of Amanda's eyes seemed functional. So why couldn't the little girl see?
Now Amanda's family has new hope for her restored vision.
An international team of researchers, including Robert Koenekoop, director of pediatric ophthalmology at the MUHC's Montreal Children's Hospital, has discovered a crucial gene involved in such blindness.
Amanda has Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA). About 200,000 people worldwide suffer from this rare and currently untreatable condition that causes a very severe form of childhood blindness.
Koenekoop's team found SPATA7, the 15th gene in the illness. A mutation on this gene disrupts protein transfers within cells, Koenekoop explained.
Published Thursday in the American Journal of Human Genetics, the work is the collaboration of Canadian, U.S. and Dutch scientists.
Researchers believe the SPATA7 gene mutation is a common cause of the eye disease first identified by Theodore Leber in the 19th century.
Because of its function in protein transport, the SPATA7 gene also identifies a new pathway, a cellular mechanism, which opens the door to new treatment possibilities, Koenekoop said.
Efforts are already underway to combat LCA gene mutations, Koenekoop said.
U.S. and British studies of mutated RPE65 gene, which is responsible for about 15 per cent of Leber's blindness, have restored sight in dogs by injecting adenovirus - which causes the common cold - thereby carrying healthy copies of the gene into the cells of the retina.
Results were "spectacular," Koenekoop said.
In June, the same group confirmed similar results in experiments with people.
"We are all very excited about the human trials. . . . Patients reported that they started to see," Koenekoop said.
Gene therapy for LCA is still a thing of the future, Koenekoop said. "We're still looking for 35 per cent of the genes (in this eye disease)."
The SPATA7 discovery "is exciting news," said Jean Bennett, scientist at the F.M. Kirby Centre for Molecular Ophthalmology at Penn University, who was involved in the landmark gene study held with blind adults last year.
"It ratchets the number of genes up to 15, and give us a handle on the way to reverse the blindness in these individuals," said Bennett, who did not participate in the McGill study.
Officials from the Foundation Fighting Blindness, which supported the study with grant funds, said the discovery offers LCA patients hope that gene-based therapies will be developed to restore sight.
For Amanda, who has coped with very little vision since birth, nothing will change in the short term, said her mother, Elizabeth Ramos.
"But now they have a new gene, something they haven't seen before. And that means it's not incurable," - not just for Amanda, but for dozens of children like her, Ramos said.
© Canwest News Service 2009
Wheelchair that reads your brain developed in Italy
Agence France-PresseMarch 6, 2009
http://www.calgaryherald.com/Technology ... story.html
Professor Matteo Matteucci, right, speaks as Ph.d student Bernardo Dal Seno, centre, wearing a skullcap mounted with electrodes and wired to a computer sits on a special wheel chair on Friday at the Politecnico di Milan department in Milan.
Photograph by: Giuseppe Cacace, AFP/Getty Images
MILAN, Italy - Italian researchers have developed a wheelchair that obeys mental signals sent to a computer, they said Friday.
The researchers at Milan's Polytechnical Institute artificial intelligence and robotics laboratory took three years to develop the system, Professor Matteo Matteucci told AFP.
The user is connected to a computer with electrodes on his or her scalp, and sends a signal by concentrating for a few seconds on the name of the desired destination — kitchen, bedroom, bathroom — displayed on a screen.
The computer then guides the wheelchair to the selected room using a preset program.
"We don't read minds, but the brain signal that is sent," Matteucci said.
The chair is equipped with two laser beams that can detect obstacles.
The Milan lab is already in contact with companies that could produce a commercial prototype aimed at quadriplegics, Matteucci said, adding that it could take between five and 10 years.
Such a wheelchair would cost only 10 per cent more than a classic motorised wheelchair, according to the institute.
Research to develop the so-called Brain Computer Interface began in the early 1980s around the world.
Matteucci said a handful of other researchers were working on similar projects to his, including the Federal Polytechnic School in Lausanne, Switzerland.
"Eventually, a research consortium should be set up that will use all these projects as a basis for finding the best approach," he said.
"We've now started work on getting the chair to operate outdoors using a GPS," Matteucci added.
© Copyright (c) AFP
Agence France-PresseMarch 6, 2009
http://www.calgaryherald.com/Technology ... story.html
Professor Matteo Matteucci, right, speaks as Ph.d student Bernardo Dal Seno, centre, wearing a skullcap mounted with electrodes and wired to a computer sits on a special wheel chair on Friday at the Politecnico di Milan department in Milan.
Photograph by: Giuseppe Cacace, AFP/Getty Images
MILAN, Italy - Italian researchers have developed a wheelchair that obeys mental signals sent to a computer, they said Friday.
The researchers at Milan's Polytechnical Institute artificial intelligence and robotics laboratory took three years to develop the system, Professor Matteo Matteucci told AFP.
The user is connected to a computer with electrodes on his or her scalp, and sends a signal by concentrating for a few seconds on the name of the desired destination — kitchen, bedroom, bathroom — displayed on a screen.
The computer then guides the wheelchair to the selected room using a preset program.
"We don't read minds, but the brain signal that is sent," Matteucci said.
The chair is equipped with two laser beams that can detect obstacles.
The Milan lab is already in contact with companies that could produce a commercial prototype aimed at quadriplegics, Matteucci said, adding that it could take between five and 10 years.
Such a wheelchair would cost only 10 per cent more than a classic motorised wheelchair, according to the institute.
Research to develop the so-called Brain Computer Interface began in the early 1980s around the world.
Matteucci said a handful of other researchers were working on similar projects to his, including the Federal Polytechnic School in Lausanne, Switzerland.
"Eventually, a research consortium should be set up that will use all these projects as a basis for finding the best approach," he said.
"We've now started work on getting the chair to operate outdoors using a GPS," Matteucci added.
© Copyright (c) AFP
March 10, 2009
Genetic Tests May Reveal Source of Mystery Tumors
By ANDREW POLLACK
When Jo Symons was found to have cancer, there was an extra complication: doctors could not tell what type of cancer she had.
Tumors were found in her neck, chest and lymph nodes. But those tumors had spread there from someplace else, and her doctors could not determine whether the original site was the breast, the colon, the ovary or some other organ. Without that knowledge, they could not offer optimal treatment.
Such mystery tumors are estimated to account for 2 percent to 5 percent of all cancer, or at least 30,000 new cases a year in the United States, making them more common than brain, liver or stomach cancers. For patients, such a diagnosis can amount to a double agony — not only do they have cancer, but doctors cannot treat it properly.
“You don’t believe that in the 21st century it is possible for the medical profession not to know where the cancer is coming from,” said Ms. Symons’s husband, John.
But now 21st-century medicine may help. New genetic tests may pinpoint the origin of the mystery tumors. The tests, which cost more than $3,000 each, still need to prove their worth better, experts say, though some of them are hopeful.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/healt ... nted=print
Genetic Tests May Reveal Source of Mystery Tumors
By ANDREW POLLACK
When Jo Symons was found to have cancer, there was an extra complication: doctors could not tell what type of cancer she had.
Tumors were found in her neck, chest and lymph nodes. But those tumors had spread there from someplace else, and her doctors could not determine whether the original site was the breast, the colon, the ovary or some other organ. Without that knowledge, they could not offer optimal treatment.
Such mystery tumors are estimated to account for 2 percent to 5 percent of all cancer, or at least 30,000 new cases a year in the United States, making them more common than brain, liver or stomach cancers. For patients, such a diagnosis can amount to a double agony — not only do they have cancer, but doctors cannot treat it properly.
“You don’t believe that in the 21st century it is possible for the medical profession not to know where the cancer is coming from,” said Ms. Symons’s husband, John.
But now 21st-century medicine may help. New genetic tests may pinpoint the origin of the mystery tumors. The tests, which cost more than $3,000 each, still need to prove their worth better, experts say, though some of them are hopeful.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/healt ... nted=print
Valerie Berenyi: Bioethicist probes hot issues of the day
By Valerie Berenyi, Calgary HeraldMarch 23, 2009 8:02 AM
The offspring of a sperm donor wants to meet her daddy. A 60-year-old Calgarian bears twin boys using eggs bought from a young woman in India. An impoverished woman rents her womb.
Reproductive technology allows us to do many things we could never do before, spurring whole new debates about right and wrong.
In her work, Juliet Guichon, a medical bioethicist in the faculty of medicine at the University of Calgary, grapples with the many questions 21st century medicine raises for society and for vulnerable individuals.
The hot topic of reproductive technology--one of Guichon's areas of expertise--has news media frequently calling her for commentary.
Who, I wondered, is this thoughtful person and what exactly does a bioethicist do anyway?
"In bioethics, the job is not to decide anything but whether there is a bioethics issue," she wrote in an e-mail to explain her role.
"And then having decided that there is, to explore the issue by asking a multiplicity of questions, which, hopefully, will illuminate what might be at stake. There is no rule book."
In person, Guichon is a soft-spoken, middle-aged woman with a lively sense of humour and a laserlike intellect.
She is working on a book, The Right to Know One's Origins, about the right of people to know the identity of their progenitors, and therefore their genetic inheritance.
That Guichon advocates for those who often know only half of their history--the children of anonymous sperm or egg donors --is perhaps because she knows so much about her own origins. She comes from two prominent pioneer families, and has benefited from a well-documented, rich heritage.
The fourth of five children, Guichon grew up in a big, happy family. Her parents -- a liberal social worker and a conservative businessman--held completely different views of the world. That was reflected in campaign signs on the front lawn and lively debates in the house, good training for a budding academic.
"I grew up knowing that opposing ideas can coexist, and it can be healthy," Guichon said. "Both of my parents loved ideas and I think that's why I ended up here."
Her father, Urban Guichon, was born on his family's legendary ranch near Merritt, B. C. and did a degree in agriculture. He then served in the Second World War as a senior intelligence officer.
He hardly ever spoke of his war experiences, saying "the best place for a secret is between your ears," but Guichon knew he carried some horrific memories.
After the war, Urban met and married social worker Mary Mc-Cormick, the daughter of Calgary saddlemaker and alderman Eneas McCormick, who co-founded the iconic Riley&McCormick in 1901.
When Eneas suffered a stroke, the couple moved to Calgary to run the family business and Urban changed its focus from saddlemaking to western wear. Today, the retail chain is operated by three of Guichon's siblings.
As a kid, Guichon made bolo ties for the family business.
"I got a penny a tie," she recalls.
Later, as a university student, she ran the Riley&McCormick booth on the Stampede grounds.
She learned a lesson in politics when her mom Mary ran for the federal Liberal Party in the Palliser riding in 1972 and lost to Stanley Schumacher.
Guichon vividly recalls campaigning door-to-door for her mother and being lectured by a woman with a thick accent.
"Take-a da man's job!" she scolded, outraged that a woman would run for office.
"I thought they might not like her ideas, but her sex? I was surprised," said Guichon, who lives with her husband, a business professor at theUof C, their three school-age children and her mother, Mary.
Her father died in 1993. An intensely curious girl,
Guichon went on to excel in the academic world. She did a history degree at Yale University, followed by two degrees in law from Oxford University and a master of arts, also from Oxford.
She spent a year working for a corporate/commercial law firm on Bay Street. While grateful for the experience and the work ethic it engendered, it wasn't what she wanted to do with her life.
"It's sort of devoid of people." She returned to school and
capped her education with a doctorate of law from the University of Toronto on the ethics of assisted human reproduction.
Suffice to say, Guichon has thought long and hard about making babies with technology. And she is concerned that lawmakers, politicians and the public don't have all of the pieces of the puzzle when it comes to making decisions about it.
"At the moment most of the information comes from infertility physicians and people who long to have children but are unable," said Guichon, who presented three times at parliamentary committee hearings on Canada's Assisted Human Reproduction Act, which she feels doesn't go far enough in protecting the vulnerable.
"But what's happening is that the voice of children who then grow up are not well represented. There's no money in it. They are the ones who are the most affected and will be for the longest time. We need an advocate for their cause. The important people are not in the room."
We are in the throes of a massive social and medical experiment, said Guichon, and no one is researching or tracking these people over time to find out how they're doing.
For example, what of the surrogate mom who is implanted with another woman's eggs, asks Guichon. "She gestated, laboured, delivered, lactated . . . Let's hear from her."
And what of the offspring of sperm or egg donors who may develop an inheritable but entirely preventable disease if only they knew about it?
"Most people get the answers right once they know the questions," Guichon has written about her profession. "Bioethics' expertise lies in asking the questions."
We should be grateful she raises those questions on our behalf.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
By Valerie Berenyi, Calgary HeraldMarch 23, 2009 8:02 AM
The offspring of a sperm donor wants to meet her daddy. A 60-year-old Calgarian bears twin boys using eggs bought from a young woman in India. An impoverished woman rents her womb.
Reproductive technology allows us to do many things we could never do before, spurring whole new debates about right and wrong.
In her work, Juliet Guichon, a medical bioethicist in the faculty of medicine at the University of Calgary, grapples with the many questions 21st century medicine raises for society and for vulnerable individuals.
The hot topic of reproductive technology--one of Guichon's areas of expertise--has news media frequently calling her for commentary.
Who, I wondered, is this thoughtful person and what exactly does a bioethicist do anyway?
"In bioethics, the job is not to decide anything but whether there is a bioethics issue," she wrote in an e-mail to explain her role.
"And then having decided that there is, to explore the issue by asking a multiplicity of questions, which, hopefully, will illuminate what might be at stake. There is no rule book."
In person, Guichon is a soft-spoken, middle-aged woman with a lively sense of humour and a laserlike intellect.
She is working on a book, The Right to Know One's Origins, about the right of people to know the identity of their progenitors, and therefore their genetic inheritance.
That Guichon advocates for those who often know only half of their history--the children of anonymous sperm or egg donors --is perhaps because she knows so much about her own origins. She comes from two prominent pioneer families, and has benefited from a well-documented, rich heritage.
The fourth of five children, Guichon grew up in a big, happy family. Her parents -- a liberal social worker and a conservative businessman--held completely different views of the world. That was reflected in campaign signs on the front lawn and lively debates in the house, good training for a budding academic.
"I grew up knowing that opposing ideas can coexist, and it can be healthy," Guichon said. "Both of my parents loved ideas and I think that's why I ended up here."
Her father, Urban Guichon, was born on his family's legendary ranch near Merritt, B. C. and did a degree in agriculture. He then served in the Second World War as a senior intelligence officer.
He hardly ever spoke of his war experiences, saying "the best place for a secret is between your ears," but Guichon knew he carried some horrific memories.
After the war, Urban met and married social worker Mary Mc-Cormick, the daughter of Calgary saddlemaker and alderman Eneas McCormick, who co-founded the iconic Riley&McCormick in 1901.
When Eneas suffered a stroke, the couple moved to Calgary to run the family business and Urban changed its focus from saddlemaking to western wear. Today, the retail chain is operated by three of Guichon's siblings.
As a kid, Guichon made bolo ties for the family business.
"I got a penny a tie," she recalls.
Later, as a university student, she ran the Riley&McCormick booth on the Stampede grounds.
She learned a lesson in politics when her mom Mary ran for the federal Liberal Party in the Palliser riding in 1972 and lost to Stanley Schumacher.
Guichon vividly recalls campaigning door-to-door for her mother and being lectured by a woman with a thick accent.
"Take-a da man's job!" she scolded, outraged that a woman would run for office.
"I thought they might not like her ideas, but her sex? I was surprised," said Guichon, who lives with her husband, a business professor at theUof C, their three school-age children and her mother, Mary.
Her father died in 1993. An intensely curious girl,
Guichon went on to excel in the academic world. She did a history degree at Yale University, followed by two degrees in law from Oxford University and a master of arts, also from Oxford.
She spent a year working for a corporate/commercial law firm on Bay Street. While grateful for the experience and the work ethic it engendered, it wasn't what she wanted to do with her life.
"It's sort of devoid of people." She returned to school and
capped her education with a doctorate of law from the University of Toronto on the ethics of assisted human reproduction.
Suffice to say, Guichon has thought long and hard about making babies with technology. And she is concerned that lawmakers, politicians and the public don't have all of the pieces of the puzzle when it comes to making decisions about it.
"At the moment most of the information comes from infertility physicians and people who long to have children but are unable," said Guichon, who presented three times at parliamentary committee hearings on Canada's Assisted Human Reproduction Act, which she feels doesn't go far enough in protecting the vulnerable.
"But what's happening is that the voice of children who then grow up are not well represented. There's no money in it. They are the ones who are the most affected and will be for the longest time. We need an advocate for their cause. The important people are not in the room."
We are in the throes of a massive social and medical experiment, said Guichon, and no one is researching or tracking these people over time to find out how they're doing.
For example, what of the surrogate mom who is implanted with another woman's eggs, asks Guichon. "She gestated, laboured, delivered, lactated . . . Let's hear from her."
And what of the offspring of sperm or egg donors who may develop an inheritable but entirely preventable disease if only they knew about it?
"Most people get the answers right once they know the questions," Guichon has written about her profession. "Bioethics' expertise lies in asking the questions."
We should be grateful she raises those questions on our behalf.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Scientists move closer to stem cell treatments
By Julie Steenhuysen, ReutersMarch 27, 2009
U. S. researchers said Thursday they have found a safer way to coax human skin cells into becoming powerful embryonic-like stem cells, taking a step closer to their potential use as treatments for diseases.
A team at the University of Wisconsin said they made the so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, from human cells without using viruses or exotic genes, which leave behind genetic material that might pose risks if the cells were used as medical therapies.
The university's James Thomson, whose study appears in the journal Science, said the finding represents the first time researchers have made human induced pluripotent stem cells without inserting potentially problematic new genes into their DNA.
Many teams are working on better ways to get ordinary skin cells to behave like embryonic stem cells, the body's master cells that give rise to all 220 cell types in the human body.
Scientists hope to harness the unique qualities of these cells to create new treatments for a variety of medical conditions.
Induced pluripotent stem cells promise many of the possible therapeutic benefits of embryonic stem cells without the ethics controversy because, unlike embryonic stem cells, they can be created without destroying a human embryo.
But earlier methods of making the iPS cells required the use of viruses as a vehicle, or "vector," to carry genes into the cells and trigger cell reprogramming.
Thomson said the new method uses a circle of DNA called a plasmid, which carries the genes needed to transform a skin cell into an iPS cell.
Over time, the plasmid disappears naturally from the cell population, avoiding the danger posed by using viruses, which can insert harmful genes into the cells' genetic material.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
*****
March 27, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Dead Body of Knowledge
By CHRISTINE MONTROSS
Providence, R.I.
AT the risk of sounding like a fuddy-duddy, I would like to say that sometimes, medical imaging isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
As a resident in psychiatry, I depend on the technology to treat my patients. From countless computers in the hospital’s hallways and at nurses’ stations, I call up images of the people I treat: the black, white and gray CT scans of their skulls, the nuanced M.R.I.’s of their spinal cords and ligaments, the rotating Spect scans that show in three dimensions how well — or how poorly — blood flows through their brains. I can leave the room of an 89-year-old woman who has begun picking imaginary bugs out of the air, look into a screen, and see the tumor that is causing her delirium.
Now however, many medical schools are beginning to argue that imaging technology has improved to the point where it should be used in place of the dissection of human cadavers as the central tool of instruction for young doctors-to-be. This is a mistake. No matter how detailed and versatile they become, computer images can never provide the indelible lessons that novice doctors learn from real bodies.
Nearly every medical student in America begins his career by entering a room full of cadavers and taking one of them apart, layer by layer, piece by piece. Doctors have shared this experience for centuries, ever since Vesalius, Da Vinci and Michelangelo defied religion and government, stole bodies from graves and churches, and dissected by candlelight in an audacious pursuit of knowledge about the human body. The process is what you would expect: messy and smelly, tedious and time-consuming, emotionally and physically difficult. It is at times awe-inspiring, and at other times profoundly upsetting. It is also, for the medical schools, very expensive. Even though cadavers are donated, it can cost more than $2,000 to prepare a body for dissection.
So medical schools are beginning to re-evaluate their anatomy curriculum in the face of the perhaps inevitable argument: Why not reduce, or eliminate altogether, the burdensome cost of dissecting cadavers and replace it with this new and astounding technology? The computers and software — a considerable expense, but one that need be incurred only once — allow students to study images of the body from every angle and on every plane. They can peel away the muscle on a virtual leg to see the bone beneath, then click a different button, reattach the muscle and see how the limb moves.
Computers can show things that still and lifeless cadavers cannot — blood pumping in real time through the heart’s chambers, for instance. And it is far easier to visualize nerves and vessels when they’re color-coded on a computer than it is to pick through the indistinguishable gray-green tangles inside a formalin-embalmed cadaver. Because all of this can be done anywhere on any screen, students can study anatomy in this way in the library, in their apartments or, surely someday if not already, on their iPods and cellphones.
At the end of the academic year, there would be no need for old cadavers to be cremated, for new human donors to be found, for deep cleaning the anatomy lab. Come September, the whole system would simply reboot.
But what kind of doctors will they be, these students who have never experienced human dissection? They would have been denied a safe and more gradual initiation into the emotional strain that doctoring demands.
Someday, they’ll need to keep their cool when a baby is lodged wrong in a mother’s birth canal; when a bone breaks through a patient’s skin; when someone’s face is burned beyond recognition. Doctors do have normal reactions to these situations; the composure that we strive to keep under stressful circumstances is not innate. It has to be learned. The discomfort of taking a blade to a dead man’s skin helps doctors-in-training figure out how to cope, without the risk of intruding on a live patient’s feelings — or worse, his health. We learn to heal the living by first dismantling the dead.
The dissection of cadavers also gives young doctors an appreciation for the wonders of the human body in a way that no virtual image can match. It is awe-inspiring to hold a human heart in one’s hands, to appreciate its fragility, intricacy and strength.
But most important, the cadavers on their stainless steel tables are symbols of altruism to medical students: They are reminders of how great a gift one can give to a stranger in the hopes of healing. Isn’t that the most fundamental lesson we want our doctors to carry to the bedsides of their patients?
Christine Montross, a resident in psychiatry at Brown University, is the author of “Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality From the Human Anatomy Lab.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/opini ... nted=print
By Julie Steenhuysen, ReutersMarch 27, 2009
U. S. researchers said Thursday they have found a safer way to coax human skin cells into becoming powerful embryonic-like stem cells, taking a step closer to their potential use as treatments for diseases.
A team at the University of Wisconsin said they made the so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, from human cells without using viruses or exotic genes, which leave behind genetic material that might pose risks if the cells were used as medical therapies.
The university's James Thomson, whose study appears in the journal Science, said the finding represents the first time researchers have made human induced pluripotent stem cells without inserting potentially problematic new genes into their DNA.
Many teams are working on better ways to get ordinary skin cells to behave like embryonic stem cells, the body's master cells that give rise to all 220 cell types in the human body.
Scientists hope to harness the unique qualities of these cells to create new treatments for a variety of medical conditions.
Induced pluripotent stem cells promise many of the possible therapeutic benefits of embryonic stem cells without the ethics controversy because, unlike embryonic stem cells, they can be created without destroying a human embryo.
But earlier methods of making the iPS cells required the use of viruses as a vehicle, or "vector," to carry genes into the cells and trigger cell reprogramming.
Thomson said the new method uses a circle of DNA called a plasmid, which carries the genes needed to transform a skin cell into an iPS cell.
Over time, the plasmid disappears naturally from the cell population, avoiding the danger posed by using viruses, which can insert harmful genes into the cells' genetic material.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
*****
March 27, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Dead Body of Knowledge
By CHRISTINE MONTROSS
Providence, R.I.
AT the risk of sounding like a fuddy-duddy, I would like to say that sometimes, medical imaging isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
As a resident in psychiatry, I depend on the technology to treat my patients. From countless computers in the hospital’s hallways and at nurses’ stations, I call up images of the people I treat: the black, white and gray CT scans of their skulls, the nuanced M.R.I.’s of their spinal cords and ligaments, the rotating Spect scans that show in three dimensions how well — or how poorly — blood flows through their brains. I can leave the room of an 89-year-old woman who has begun picking imaginary bugs out of the air, look into a screen, and see the tumor that is causing her delirium.
Now however, many medical schools are beginning to argue that imaging technology has improved to the point where it should be used in place of the dissection of human cadavers as the central tool of instruction for young doctors-to-be. This is a mistake. No matter how detailed and versatile they become, computer images can never provide the indelible lessons that novice doctors learn from real bodies.
Nearly every medical student in America begins his career by entering a room full of cadavers and taking one of them apart, layer by layer, piece by piece. Doctors have shared this experience for centuries, ever since Vesalius, Da Vinci and Michelangelo defied religion and government, stole bodies from graves and churches, and dissected by candlelight in an audacious pursuit of knowledge about the human body. The process is what you would expect: messy and smelly, tedious and time-consuming, emotionally and physically difficult. It is at times awe-inspiring, and at other times profoundly upsetting. It is also, for the medical schools, very expensive. Even though cadavers are donated, it can cost more than $2,000 to prepare a body for dissection.
So medical schools are beginning to re-evaluate their anatomy curriculum in the face of the perhaps inevitable argument: Why not reduce, or eliminate altogether, the burdensome cost of dissecting cadavers and replace it with this new and astounding technology? The computers and software — a considerable expense, but one that need be incurred only once — allow students to study images of the body from every angle and on every plane. They can peel away the muscle on a virtual leg to see the bone beneath, then click a different button, reattach the muscle and see how the limb moves.
Computers can show things that still and lifeless cadavers cannot — blood pumping in real time through the heart’s chambers, for instance. And it is far easier to visualize nerves and vessels when they’re color-coded on a computer than it is to pick through the indistinguishable gray-green tangles inside a formalin-embalmed cadaver. Because all of this can be done anywhere on any screen, students can study anatomy in this way in the library, in their apartments or, surely someday if not already, on their iPods and cellphones.
At the end of the academic year, there would be no need for old cadavers to be cremated, for new human donors to be found, for deep cleaning the anatomy lab. Come September, the whole system would simply reboot.
But what kind of doctors will they be, these students who have never experienced human dissection? They would have been denied a safe and more gradual initiation into the emotional strain that doctoring demands.
Someday, they’ll need to keep their cool when a baby is lodged wrong in a mother’s birth canal; when a bone breaks through a patient’s skin; when someone’s face is burned beyond recognition. Doctors do have normal reactions to these situations; the composure that we strive to keep under stressful circumstances is not innate. It has to be learned. The discomfort of taking a blade to a dead man’s skin helps doctors-in-training figure out how to cope, without the risk of intruding on a live patient’s feelings — or worse, his health. We learn to heal the living by first dismantling the dead.
The dissection of cadavers also gives young doctors an appreciation for the wonders of the human body in a way that no virtual image can match. It is awe-inspiring to hold a human heart in one’s hands, to appreciate its fragility, intricacy and strength.
But most important, the cadavers on their stainless steel tables are symbols of altruism to medical students: They are reminders of how great a gift one can give to a stranger in the hopes of healing. Isn’t that the most fundamental lesson we want our doctors to carry to the bedsides of their patients?
Christine Montross, a resident in psychiatry at Brown University, is the author of “Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality From the Human Anatomy Lab.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/opini ... nted=print
March 30, 2009
Editorial Notebook
The Perils of Progress
By EDUARDO PORTER
I was studying physics in college 20 years ago this month, when two chemists at the University of Utah promised that they could unleash the energy of the sun in a test tube at room temperature, and meet the entire world’s energy needs forever with some cooked up water and a couple of electrodes.
The exhilaration at the genesis of the new science of “cold fusion” faded fairly quickly. Scores of scientists around the world tried and failed to replicate the Utah scientists’ wondrous results. Irksome physicists pointed out that the process the chemists described violated several laws of nature.
To me, however, those heady few months bring to mind something more than the hubristic enthusiasm of some overheated men in lab coats. The experience provides a lasting lesson about our faith in technology as the solution to our challenges, and the cover it provides to avoid hard choices on things like, say, conserving energy. It’s a warning about the pitfalls of our unshakeable belief in the limitless promise of our endeavors, regardless of reality’s constraints. It is a lesson about the dangers of our love affair with progress.
This breed of delusion is ubiquitous across American history. In the 1990s it laid the ground from which Pets.com, Kozmo.com and Webvan sprang up to revolutionize capitalism, until they didn’t. It can be found in the trust placed in Bernard Madoff and his unfathomable perpetual 11 percent-plus rate of return. Most damaging, it nurtured the belief that home prices would rise forever.
Contemplating the economic rubble from our most recent paroxysm of enthusiasm, I wonder whether we should do something about our blind passions. I’ve heard the supporting arguments, of course, about how optimism seeds the American Dream, nurturing the entrepreneurial zeal that supports the nation’s prosperity. And it’s true that the Internet bubble bequeathed us the Internet as we know it. I’m told optimism also helps patients recover from coronary bypass surgery.
Still, I can’t help thinking that repackaging the future as a basketful of promise is a con. Recent research from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has found that the son of a poor American father has more than a 40 percent chance of being poor himself — higher odds than in, say, Britain, Norway or Denmark. The income of the typical American household was lower in 2007 than it was in 1999. This aspect of the American Dream seems like a dream only.
I am confident that we shall keep on dreaming, however, regardless of the damage this periodically inflicts. On the anniversary of the “discovery” in Utah 20 years ago, a Navy chemist breathlessly announced to a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Salt Lake City that her lab had nailed it, finally, finding “significant” evidence of cold fusion. Now they call the phenomenon a “low-energy nuclear reaction,” presumably to overcome the stigma.
Editorial Notebook
The Perils of Progress
By EDUARDO PORTER
I was studying physics in college 20 years ago this month, when two chemists at the University of Utah promised that they could unleash the energy of the sun in a test tube at room temperature, and meet the entire world’s energy needs forever with some cooked up water and a couple of electrodes.
The exhilaration at the genesis of the new science of “cold fusion” faded fairly quickly. Scores of scientists around the world tried and failed to replicate the Utah scientists’ wondrous results. Irksome physicists pointed out that the process the chemists described violated several laws of nature.
To me, however, those heady few months bring to mind something more than the hubristic enthusiasm of some overheated men in lab coats. The experience provides a lasting lesson about our faith in technology as the solution to our challenges, and the cover it provides to avoid hard choices on things like, say, conserving energy. It’s a warning about the pitfalls of our unshakeable belief in the limitless promise of our endeavors, regardless of reality’s constraints. It is a lesson about the dangers of our love affair with progress.
This breed of delusion is ubiquitous across American history. In the 1990s it laid the ground from which Pets.com, Kozmo.com and Webvan sprang up to revolutionize capitalism, until they didn’t. It can be found in the trust placed in Bernard Madoff and his unfathomable perpetual 11 percent-plus rate of return. Most damaging, it nurtured the belief that home prices would rise forever.
Contemplating the economic rubble from our most recent paroxysm of enthusiasm, I wonder whether we should do something about our blind passions. I’ve heard the supporting arguments, of course, about how optimism seeds the American Dream, nurturing the entrepreneurial zeal that supports the nation’s prosperity. And it’s true that the Internet bubble bequeathed us the Internet as we know it. I’m told optimism also helps patients recover from coronary bypass surgery.
Still, I can’t help thinking that repackaging the future as a basketful of promise is a con. Recent research from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has found that the son of a poor American father has more than a 40 percent chance of being poor himself — higher odds than in, say, Britain, Norway or Denmark. The income of the typical American household was lower in 2007 than it was in 1999. This aspect of the American Dream seems like a dream only.
I am confident that we shall keep on dreaming, however, regardless of the damage this periodically inflicts. On the anniversary of the “discovery” in Utah 20 years ago, a Navy chemist breathlessly announced to a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Salt Lake City that her lab had nailed it, finally, finding “significant” evidence of cold fusion. Now they call the phenomenon a “low-energy nuclear reaction,” presumably to overcome the stigma.
March 31, 2009
Staying Put on Earth, Taking a Step to Mars
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
MOSCOW — On Tuesday, six people will be voluntarily locked into a cloister of cramped, hermetically sealed tubes woven inside a Moscow research facility the size of a high school gymnasium. They will eat dehydrated food, breathe recycled air and be denied conversation with practically everyone else but one another.
And they must stay inside for 105 days.
In a small step in the direction of Mars, the international crew is embarking on a simulated flight to the planet to test the limits of human tolerance for the isolation and monotony of interplanetary travel.
“It is really like a real space flight without the weightlessness and the danger to our lives,” said Sergei N. Ryazansky, a cosmonaut-in-training who will lead the mission. “On the inside, we will have a lack of incoming information, so it’s the science of sensory deprivation.”
Called Mars-500, the Russian-led project based at the Institute for Biomedical Problems here will culminate in a 520-day simulation beginning early next year of a complete manned mission to the planet — a time frame that incorporates launching to Mars touchdown and back — that scientists hope will edge humanity a little closer to that next giant leap.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/scien ... nted=print
Staying Put on Earth, Taking a Step to Mars
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
MOSCOW — On Tuesday, six people will be voluntarily locked into a cloister of cramped, hermetically sealed tubes woven inside a Moscow research facility the size of a high school gymnasium. They will eat dehydrated food, breathe recycled air and be denied conversation with practically everyone else but one another.
And they must stay inside for 105 days.
In a small step in the direction of Mars, the international crew is embarking on a simulated flight to the planet to test the limits of human tolerance for the isolation and monotony of interplanetary travel.
“It is really like a real space flight without the weightlessness and the danger to our lives,” said Sergei N. Ryazansky, a cosmonaut-in-training who will lead the mission. “On the inside, we will have a lack of incoming information, so it’s the science of sensory deprivation.”
Called Mars-500, the Russian-led project based at the Institute for Biomedical Problems here will culminate in a 520-day simulation beginning early next year of a complete manned mission to the planet — a time frame that incorporates launching to Mars touchdown and back — that scientists hope will edge humanity a little closer to that next giant leap.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/scien ... nted=print
Hey, scientists, watch out for robot rivals
ReutersApril 3, 2009
Watch out, scientists -- you may be replaced by a robot.
Two teams of researchers said on Thursday they had created machines that could reason, formulate theories and discover scientific knowledge on their own, marking a major advance in the field of artificial intelligence.
Such robo-scientists could be put to work unravelling complex biological systems, designing new drugs, modelling the world's climate or understanding the cosmos.
For the moment, though, they are performing more humble tasks.
At Aberystwyth University in Wales, Ross King and colleagues have created a robot called Adam that cannot only carry out experiments on yeast metabolism, but also reason about the results and plan the next experiment.
Their next robot, Eve, will have more brain power and will be put to work searching for new medicines.
King hopes the application of intelligent robotic thinking to the process of sifting tens of thousands of compounds for potential new drugs will be particularly valuable in the hunt for treatments for neglected diseases.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
ReutersApril 3, 2009
Watch out, scientists -- you may be replaced by a robot.
Two teams of researchers said on Thursday they had created machines that could reason, formulate theories and discover scientific knowledge on their own, marking a major advance in the field of artificial intelligence.
Such robo-scientists could be put to work unravelling complex biological systems, designing new drugs, modelling the world's climate or understanding the cosmos.
For the moment, though, they are performing more humble tasks.
At Aberystwyth University in Wales, Ross King and colleagues have created a robot called Adam that cannot only carry out experiments on yeast metabolism, but also reason about the results and plan the next experiment.
Their next robot, Eve, will have more brain power and will be put to work searching for new medicines.
King hopes the application of intelligent robotic thinking to the process of sifting tens of thousands of compounds for potential new drugs will be particularly valuable in the hunt for treatments for neglected diseases.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
April 6, 2009
Brain Power
Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory
By BENEDICT CAREY
Suppose scientists could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain. Could make you forget a chronic fear, a traumatic loss, even a bad habit.
Researchers in Brooklyn have recently accomplished comparable feats, with a single dose of an experimental drug delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory, like emotional associations, spatial knowledge or motor skills.
The drug blocks the activity of a substance that the brain apparently needs to retain much of its learned information. And if enhanced, the substance could help ward off dementias and other memory problems.
So far, the research has been done only on animals. But scientists say this memory system is likely to work almost identically in people.
The discovery of such an apparently critical memory molecule, and its many potential uses, are part of the buzz surrounding a field that, in just the past few years, has made the seemingly impossible suddenly probable: neuroscience, the study of the brain.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/healt ... nted=print
Brain Power
Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory
By BENEDICT CAREY
Suppose scientists could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain. Could make you forget a chronic fear, a traumatic loss, even a bad habit.
Researchers in Brooklyn have recently accomplished comparable feats, with a single dose of an experimental drug delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory, like emotional associations, spatial knowledge or motor skills.
The drug blocks the activity of a substance that the brain apparently needs to retain much of its learned information. And if enhanced, the substance could help ward off dementias and other memory problems.
So far, the research has been done only on animals. But scientists say this memory system is likely to work almost identically in people.
The discovery of such an apparently critical memory molecule, and its many potential uses, are part of the buzz surrounding a field that, in just the past few years, has made the seemingly impossible suddenly probable: neuroscience, the study of the brain.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/healt ... nted=print
Memory gadgets off to the races
New computer technology faster, cheaper
By Eric Scharf, Canwest News ServiceApril 12, 2009 7:44 AM
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 2&sponsor=
Hard drives have become smaller and faster, but they're still susceptible to wearing out due to moving parts.
Photograph by: Herald Archive, AFP-Getty Images, Canwest News Service
Soon your computer and electronic gadgets could be much smaller, faster, cheaper, more reliable and even greener thanks to a new form of computer memory technology called racetrack.
Christopher Marrows, a physicist at England's University of Leeds, says racetrack memory, currently under development at IBM, will be a vast improvement over today's leading computer memory technology--hard disk and flash--which each have serious limitations.
Racetrack is showing to be more reliable than hard disks, making consistent computer crashes, well, a distant memory.
And it's cheaper than flash--perhaps 100 times less expensive.
"This technology will allow you to have the best of both worlds--cheap nano-size with huge memory in 3G phones, MP3 players, camcorders and other devices," says Marrows. "But, more importantly, there will be more sites that will be able to give away storage for free, like YouTube.com and Gmail. and Gmail.com."
Racetrack, as the name implies, is all about speed -- and reliability, since all the parts are static.
Data stored on racetrack moves around on a wire pushed by spiralling magnetics, unlike hard disks in which a motor-operated head, much like a record player, has to move to the data to read it. It's those moving parts that make hard disks, invented by IBM in 1956, susceptible to crashing.
"Hard disks are so good because they are so cheap," says Marrows. "But they are bad because of the moving parts, which wear out or crash."
Flash memory, created by Toshiba in 1980, has its own drawbacks.As a solid-state storage device with no moving parts, it's faster and more reliable than disks, but it has a limited number of erase-write cycles before the memory capacity deteriorates.
The impact of racetrack, which has the durability and speed of flash and the affordability of hard disk, will be enormous, says Stuart Parkin, IBM fellow and inventor of the technology.
"Racetrack will have cheap memory with the possibility of being one million times faster than hard disks without the risk of wearing out," he says.
There is no "seek" time --as with hard disks, which have to search for information --so computers would be able to boot up almost instantly, he suggests.
Furthermore, the technology promises to use much less power than current memory, making it environmentally friendly.
"The tremendous amount of storage, faster performance and reduced energy requirements, make it a nice green and smart technology," says Parkin.
Another difference, says Marrows is that racetrack memory is designed vertically -- unlike current memory -- so it will take up less room on a microchip.
"Think of it like Manhattan-- building very tall skyscrapers in little areas to save space. This will make it a hundredfold cheaper as the price of chips is dictated by the space used,"Marrows said.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
New computer technology faster, cheaper
By Eric Scharf, Canwest News ServiceApril 12, 2009 7:44 AM
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 2&sponsor=
Hard drives have become smaller and faster, but they're still susceptible to wearing out due to moving parts.
Photograph by: Herald Archive, AFP-Getty Images, Canwest News Service
Soon your computer and electronic gadgets could be much smaller, faster, cheaper, more reliable and even greener thanks to a new form of computer memory technology called racetrack.
Christopher Marrows, a physicist at England's University of Leeds, says racetrack memory, currently under development at IBM, will be a vast improvement over today's leading computer memory technology--hard disk and flash--which each have serious limitations.
Racetrack is showing to be more reliable than hard disks, making consistent computer crashes, well, a distant memory.
And it's cheaper than flash--perhaps 100 times less expensive.
"This technology will allow you to have the best of both worlds--cheap nano-size with huge memory in 3G phones, MP3 players, camcorders and other devices," says Marrows. "But, more importantly, there will be more sites that will be able to give away storage for free, like YouTube.com and Gmail. and Gmail.com."
Racetrack, as the name implies, is all about speed -- and reliability, since all the parts are static.
Data stored on racetrack moves around on a wire pushed by spiralling magnetics, unlike hard disks in which a motor-operated head, much like a record player, has to move to the data to read it. It's those moving parts that make hard disks, invented by IBM in 1956, susceptible to crashing.
"Hard disks are so good because they are so cheap," says Marrows. "But they are bad because of the moving parts, which wear out or crash."
Flash memory, created by Toshiba in 1980, has its own drawbacks.As a solid-state storage device with no moving parts, it's faster and more reliable than disks, but it has a limited number of erase-write cycles before the memory capacity deteriorates.
The impact of racetrack, which has the durability and speed of flash and the affordability of hard disk, will be enormous, says Stuart Parkin, IBM fellow and inventor of the technology.
"Racetrack will have cheap memory with the possibility of being one million times faster than hard disks without the risk of wearing out," he says.
There is no "seek" time --as with hard disks, which have to search for information --so computers would be able to boot up almost instantly, he suggests.
Furthermore, the technology promises to use much less power than current memory, making it environmentally friendly.
"The tremendous amount of storage, faster performance and reduced energy requirements, make it a nice green and smart technology," says Parkin.
Another difference, says Marrows is that racetrack memory is designed vertically -- unlike current memory -- so it will take up less room on a microchip.
"Think of it like Manhattan-- building very tall skyscrapers in little areas to save space. This will make it a hundredfold cheaper as the price of chips is dictated by the space used,"Marrows said.
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