11/30/2010 PERMALINK
Scientists discover molecular 'switch' that contributes to cellular aging process. SOURCE : A team of Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) scientists report finding a molecular 'switch' that can 'turn off' some cellular processes that are protective against aging and metabolic diseases.

11/30/2010 PERMALINK
Researchers find 'couch potato effect' from lack of protein PGC-1. SOURCE : Mice without the protein PGC-1 develop normally but are unable to exercise. Obese humans are also deficient in PGC-1.

11/29/2010 PERMALINK
Unconscionable! EU plan forces Ireland to loot Irish pensions to pay for the bailout of Irish bankers and developers. A little noticed clause in the EU's bailout deal with Ireland apparently requires that Ireland to deploy its previously off-limits pension reserves and fully run down all its cash reserves as part of the bailout. Until now Irish and EU law have made it illegal for Ireland to use its pension funds to cover current expenditures. But the new bailout deal simply ignores these laws, requiring Ireland to contribute euro 17.5 billion to its own bailout by looting the money from Irish pensioners. This is Robin Hood in reverse. The enslavement of a people to prevent politically connected developers and international banks from taking the loses that they incurred.

11/29/2010 PERMALINK
A molecular switch found that controls both memory and addiction. SOURCE : Learning and memory formation are based on the creation of new connections between neurons in the brain. Also, behaviors such as nicotine addiction manifest themselves in long-term changes of neuronal connectivity and can – at least in this respect – be viewed as a form of learning. A team around Pierluigi Nicotera, scientific director of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) and collaborating laboratories at the MRC, UK and University of Modena, Italy have now discovered a molecular switch that plays a crucial role in establishing addictive behavior and memory processes. The scientists found that nicotine administration to mice induces the expression of a gene called type 2 ryanodine receptor (RyR2). RyR2 protein is involved in releasing calcium from a cell internal calcium store, the endoplasmic reticulum, thus leading to a long-lasting reinforcement of calcium signaling in a self-sustained manner. This sustained calcium-increase then leads to neuronal plasticity. Specifically, RyR2 is expressed in a number of brain areas associated with cognition and addiction as the cortex and ventral midbrain, suggesting that RyR2 induction plays a pivotal role in these processes. This idea was confirmed in an additional experiment, in which the authors of the study demonstrate that a reduction of RyR2-activation in living animals abolishes behavior associated with learning, memory and addiction. This shows that RyR2 is absolutely required to develop long-term changes in the brain that lead to addiction.

11/29/2010 PERMALINK
The evolution of a new meme for war. SOURCE : Can a more successful war meme be developed? A war meme where a budding future Hitler could be taken out long before he could unleash a holocaust? Could bombs destroy only the guilty, without a single innocent civilian life being lost in the crossfire? Contrast this with the ham fisted use of the traditional war making meme, as practice by the administration of President Bush. Tens of thousands of innocents killed in the cross fire and thousands of American lives lost. Trillions expended that America did not have and could not afford. Borrowing trillions to pay for the occupation of two countries in retaliation for the attack on 9/11. Only to find out later that one of the countries was not even involved in 9/11 and had no weapons of mass destruction as claimed.
So much spending that America's debt levels have now become a bigger national security threat that terrorism. Going to pay for an effort that so dissipating America's extremely limited number of Arab speaking intelligence agents across two fronts, that Bush was never even able to accomplish the main objective of the whole exercise, catching or killing the perpetrator of 9/11, Osama Bin Laden.
But now, perhaps we are seeing a new war meme.
Since the new administration came into office things have been very different. Calls for an invasion of Iran from the neocon nincompoops that formulated Bush's strategy, have been resisted.
But it seems that a third Iranian front has in fact been opened up using a new war meme.
In recent months, several scientists working on Iran's nuclear bomb development have been taken out of action by car bombs so precise, that their wives sitting in the passenger seats next to them were injured but not killed.
While at the same time an incredibly sophisticated computer worm has set back Iran's nuclear bomb development program by years. This worm managed to crawl from computer to computer around the world until it found its way into the computers running the centrifuges refining uranium in secret Iranian nuclear facilities. It then took over these computers and caused the centrifuges to spin erratically in a manner that destroyed both the 'bomb quality' of the uranium being produced and permanently damaged the centrifuges themselves. All accomplished without scientists monitoring the process realizing anything was going wrong.
It seems that a radically new and more sophisticated war making meme is evolving right before our eyes. Perhaps one that could save many innocent lives, but also one that could easily get out of hand and prove to be a fast track to tyranny.

11/29/2010 PERMALINK
Walking slows progression of cognitive decline in both healthy and impaired. SOURCE : Walking may slow cognitive decline in adults with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease, as well as in healthy adults, according to a new study. "We found that walking five miles per week protects the brain structure over 10 years in people with Alzheimer's and MCI, especially in areas of the brain's key memory and learning centers," said Cyrus Raji, Ph.D., from the Department of Radiology at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. "We also found that these people had a slower decline in memory loss over five years."

11/29/2010 PERMALINK
Telomerase reverses ageing process -- dramatic rejuvenation of prematurely aged mice hints at potential therapy. SOURCE : Premature aging can be reversed by reactivating an enzyme that protects the tips of chromosomes, a study in mice suggests. Mice engineered to lack the enzyme called telomerase become prematurely decrepit. But they bounced back to health when the enzyme was replaced. The finding hints that some disorders characterized by early aging could be treated by boosting telomerase activity.

11/28/2010 PERMALINK
Gene therapy developed that prevents memory problems in mice with Alzheimer's disease. SOURCE : Scientists at the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease in San Francisco have discovered a new strategy to prevent memory deficits in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Humans with AD and mice genetically engineered to simulate the disease have abnormally low levels of an enzyme called EphB2 in memory centers of the brain. Improving EphB2 levels in such mice by gene therapy completely fixed their memory problems.

11/24/2010 PERMALINK
A chronic high cholesterol diet produces brain damage. SOURCE : Research from the Laboratory of Psychiatry and Experimental Alzheimers Research at the Medical University Innsbruck demonstrated that chronic high fat cholesterol diet in rats exhibited pathologies similar to Alzheimer's disease.

11/24/2010 PERMALINK
Biologists find that restoring the gene for cancer protein p53 slows spread of advanced tumors. SOURCE : In a new study by MIT cancer biologists shows that restoring the protein p53's function in mice with lung cancer has no effect early in tumor development, but restoring the function later on can prevent more advanced tumors from spreading throughout the body.

11/23/2010 PERMALINK
Scientists engineer the self-assembly of nano-rotors. SOURCE : Scientists from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen have managed to direct the self-assembly of rod-shaped molecules into rotors only few nanometers in size. The tiny systems serve the study of forces that act on molecules on surfaces and in cage-like structures.

11/23/2010 PERMALINK
A new way to create and interpret real-time brain scans could help addicts control their cravings. How to Train Your Own Brain : Technology might not be advanced enough yet to let people read someone else's mind, but researchers are at least inching closer to helping people to read and control their own. Scientists have used a combination of brain-scanning and feedback techniques to train subjects to move a cursor up and down with their thoughts. The subjects could perform this task after just five minutes of training.

11/23/2010 PERMALINK
Want to stay a child for life? Scientists discover the genes that time puberty. SOURCE : Researchers at King's College London's Department of Twin Research have discovered, as part of a large international consortium, 30 new genes that control the age of sexual maturation in women.

11/19/2010 PERMALINK
New study into bladder regeneration heralds organ replacement treatment. SOURCE : Researchers, led by Dr Arun Sharma and Earl Cheng from the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University and Children's Memorial Research Center, have developed a medical model for regenerating bladders using stem cells harvested from a patient's own bone marrow. The research represents another step towards new organ replacement therapies. The research focused on bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) taken from the patient. Previously studies into the regenerative capacity of cells in bladders have focused on animal models, but these have translated poorly in clinical settings.

11/19/2010 PERMALINK
Fixing the problems with the world's economic system. It is our own stupidity that has brought the world's economy low.

We failed to rebel against Richard Nixon, when he introduced yet again to civilization, a very destructive meme called currency debasement or fiat money in 1971.

This meme allows politicos to grab vast amounts of power, for a time, by creating out of thin air, and spending, unlimited amounts of money. Money that is backed by absolutely nothing but the promises to be frugal of a pack of politicos given the power to print and spend as much money as they like.

Human nature is such that this is a bet that will ALWAYS be lost.

Make it easy for your leaders to steal from your pocket by printing unlimited amounts of money, and eventually you will find that there is corruption all around you, you have been impoverished and all your leaders are now thieves.

Since 1971, when America switched away from a gold/silver standard, which forced politicians to be frugal. Else paper dollars would be turned in for gold and silver and Fort Knox would quickly be emptied. In just those four decades since 1971, our politicos have already destroyed 80% of the buying power of the dollars in your pocket and bank account. They have done this by vastly expanding the number of dollars in circulation. Create a lot more of something and each individual item is worth less.

If real wealth could be create by simply printing more money. Then there would be no need for any of us to work. Politicos could just give us all a free income.

The sad truth is that whenever our politicos print a new dollar and spend it, it gets paid for by automatically making all the dollars in your pocket worth a bit less. You pay for their extravagance as the money in your pocket buys less and less.

Now our politicos have put the money presses on overdrive. Soon the remaining 20% of the dollar's value will be destroyed and we will reach the point where commerce and civilizations collapse.

To obscure their theft of value from the money in your pocket, politicos have stopped calling it money printing and started calling the money creation process, 'quantitative easing.' But calling it QE, so that it sounds like a furry little Disney character, changes nothing at all.

It is the same old scam of money debasement that leaders greedy for more power have used to grab it since Roman times.

Look around you and you will see the damage this terrible meme is doing to our civilization. And the longer we allow our politicos to continue with this folly, the more terrible will be the price we are force to pay.

America has encourage every other nation in the world to adopt fiat money, so that when the dollar goes, very likely all the others will be pulled down with it.

Money debasement has destroyed well over a hundred nations and empires, and this, because every nation on earth has adopting this folly, the collapse is likely to be like nothing we've ever seen.

For generations, 60 Roman coins had always contained the same set amount of gold. And in the stability this created, Roman were able to spread their commerce and civilization over a vast area.

But then Romans began to let men rule them that were so greedy for power, that they began to debase the money in Romans' pockets. Soon it took several million Roman coins to equal the same amount of gold and have the same amount of buying power that 60 coins in a Roman's pocket had always had before. And Rome's commerce, stability and empire all collapsed, and Europe sank into a Dark Age.  The recovery took centuries to arrive.

With all the nations of the world following America into the fiat folly, we risk a similar fate.  A worldwide collapse of commerce and civilization that could take decades or centuries to recover from.

To avoid this fate and insure that it never again brings down human civilization, we must banish this terribly destructive meme of currency debase. We must teach our children to hang from the nearest tree any leader that attempts to implement a currency debasement scheme. It is time free our kind from all the pain and suffering inflicted by this powerful destroyer of commerce, lives and civilizations.  We must rid the world of this folly and see that it can never again arise to plague our progeny.

11/19/2010 PERMALINK
Scientists ferret out a key pathway for aging. SOURCE : A team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and their colleagues describe a molecular pathway that is a key determinant of the aging process.

11/18/2010 PERMALINK
The horrible truth starts to dawn on Europe's leaders. SOURCE : If you want to really understand what is going on in Europe click the SOURCE link for an excellent overview from the always brilliant Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.

Friends are sending news about the eurozone leaders panicking, Deutsche Bank traders saying that China is now selling US Treasury bonds 'relentlessly', and I didn't watch it, but evidently Glen Beck must have done his show at 5pm on Fox as scheduled about survival foods. Because the two dealers I know of that usually give discounts and free shipping, now have no discounts, no free shipping and notices of shipping delays up to 3 weeks.

As my most accurate world affairs adviser and favorite Jamaican bartender just told me, 'da crop hittin da fon now mon.'

In case you don't savvy Jamaican, let me paint the scene for you a different way.

We are on a canoeing trip down a river in the deep south and I've just turned around, given you a quizzical look and said, "Is that banjo music that I'm hearing?"

11/18/2010 PERMALINK
Antimatter Breakthrough Could Lead to Starships, Says Scientist. SOURCE : Researchers created 38 atoms of antihydrogen – more than ever has been produced at one time before and were able to keep the atoms stable enough to last one tenth of a second before they annihilated themselves (antimatter and matter destroy each other the moment they come into contact with each other). Since those first experiments, the team claims to have held antiatoms for even longer, though they weren't specific of the duration.

11/18/2010 PERMALINK
Regenerative stem cell therapy offers new hope for treating cardiovascular disease. SOURCE : Northwestern Medicine physician researchers are revolutionizing treatment of cardiovascular disease by utilizing patients' own stem cells to regenerate heart and vascular tissue.

11/17/2010 PERMALINK
The golden hoard of China. SOURCE : The Chinese media and forums are abuzz today about their government's announcement that they have raised their official gold holdings yet again. They are now second only to the USA, and they plan to continue adding.

According to wikipedia's page on official gold reserves, China is now up to 4,216.4 tons of gold vs. 8,133.5 for the USA. Not very long ago China had less than a 1,000 tons, so they have really been dumping a lot of those trillions in dollars they get in trade into something that has a lot more stable value than an American Congressman's promise to be frugal, which is all the dollar is backed by.

I believe the Chinese probably actually own more like 5,000 tons already. Since they have powerful reason to under-report the conversion of their dollar hoard into gold. Admitting the true pace of their gold acquisitions would only spike the gold price and hurt their future ability to trade dollars for gold.

In recent years, every single time gold drops, someone comes in a few days later and starts buying a lot of gold. When trading is highest in Asian markets, is usually the time of day when the gold price begins edging back up. A year or so later, comes another announcement from China that they have bumped up their official gold holdings. I rest my case.

I've been speculating for a couple years now that China is working a secret strategy to make the Yuan the world's reserve currency, which will have the side effect of destroying the dollar's value. This will happen because, were the dollar not used to price oil and other commodities in international trade, foreigners would have no use for the many trillions in dollar denominated paper they now hold, and would dump most of it.

America no longer manufactures much of anything the world wants. So the only reason foreigners hold so much of their wealth in dollars is because of the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency. If oil and so much other international trade not priced in dollars, there would be absolutely no reason for foreigners to hold any more than a very few dollars.

So if you were in charge of a secret Chinese plan to replace the dollar with the Yuan as the world's new reserve currency, how would you do it?

You certainly wouldn't dump all those trillions of dollars China is holding from their trade with America into gold at once. Because if you did, you'd kill the dollar immediately. That would make the rest of your dollar hoard worthless and would serious piss off the nation that spends more on its military than all the other nations of the world combined. You wouldn't mess with a guy on the street that had a gun in his pocket, and a smart nation doesn't mess with another nation that has thousands of nukes and military bases in countries all around your borders.

No, instead you would just keep secretly buying on any gold price weakness, exactly like the Chinese have been doing.

After all, you don't need to push the dollar over the make the yuan king. You can rely on the fiscal insanity of America's own politicos to do it for you. Sooner or later, probably sooner, that insanity is certain to create a worldwide fiscal crisis.

When that crisis comes, you just step forward and announce that you now are the proud owner of a massive gold hoard, and hence forth the yuan will be a fully convertible currency. So the world need not fear the chaos from the collapsing dollar, as China is here to save the day with a new, rock solid alternative for all your international trade.

Chinese friends got me reading Chinese forums many years ago, and I quickly came to appreciate just what a desperate cultural need the Chinese have to see their nation back on top.

Perhaps a quick little history lesson is necessary to explains why this is true.

During all of human history, but for the last 150 years or so, China has ALWAYS been the world's biggest economy and the center of civilization. Then suddenly things changed. An upstart Europe began colonizing the whole world and soon arrive at China's doorstep. The British wanted Chinese silk and they didn't want to give up gold for it. So they just went into China and got millions of Chinese hooked on opium from their colony in India. The Chinese were forced to give up their silk in return for opium, and the Brits got to keep their gold, so that Gordon Brown could sell it off at the absolute historical bottom of the inflation adjusted market. When the Chinese Emperor tried to ban opium, into China went a British army and forced the Emperor to back down.

I wonder how we Americans would feel if we had got so weak that Columbian was able to send an army to Washington and force our President to reopen the border to their cocaine.

It is the kind of humiliating insult that quickly becomes a central pillar of any nation's culture.

Therefore, can we blame the Chinese for really, really, really wanting to see their country back on top of the world's economy again. I don't see how. Fortunately for China, America's Congress is such a worldclass idiocracy at this point in history, that the Chinese are going to get their fondest wish fulfilled far faster than they would have ever dared dream that it was possible.

11/16/2010 PERMALINK
How do neural stem cells decide what to be -- and when? SOURCE : Researchers at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore have uncovered a novel feedback mechanism that controls the delicate balance of brain stem cells. Zif, a newly discovered protein, controls whether brain stem cells renew themselves as stem cells or differentiate into a dedicated type of neuron (nerve cell).

11/16/2010 PERMALINK
Stem cell patch may result in improved function following heart attack. SOURCE : University of Cincinnati researchers have found that applying a stem cell-infused patch together with overexpression of a specific cell instruction molecule promoted cell migration to damaged cardiac tissue following heart attack and resulted in improved function in animal models.

11/16/2010 PERMALINK
Study seeks new way to enhance neuron repair in spinal cord injury. SOURCE : If researchers could determine how to send signals to cells responding to a spinal cord injury, they might be able to stop one type of cell from doing additional damage at the injury site and instead, coax it into helping nerve cells grow. That is the theory behind new research at Ohio State University, where scientists are trying to determine how to simultaneously stop damage and promote neuron growth with a single, targeted signal.

11/16/2010 PERMALINK
Umbilical cord cells may treat arthritis. SOURCE : Umbilical cord stem cells may be useful in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. Animal and in vitro experiments have shown that mesenchymal stem cells taken from umbilical cord blood can suppress inflammation and attenuate collagen-induced arthritis.

11/14/2010 PERMALINK
Embryonic stem cell culturing taken from an art to a science. SOURCE : A team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison reports the development of a fully defined culture system that promises a more uniform and, for cells destined for therapy, safer product.

11/14/2010 PERMALINK
Super cheap DNA sequencing using quantum tunneling. SOURCE : A new technique has been suggested for much more rapidly and cheaply reading DNA code. The technique relies on a fundamental property of matter known as quantum tunneling, which operates at the subatomic scale. New research indicates that single bases inside a DNA chain can indeed be read with tunneling, without interference from neighboring bases, pointing the way to low cost, rapid DNA sequencing.

11/14/2010 PERMALINK
Craig Venter tells NASA to engineer humods designed specifically to live in space SOURCE : What is the right genetic profile for someone who’s going to spend months living on the moon, or years traveling to an asteroid or Mars? Craig Venter has an answer. The biologist told a group of scientists at NASA Ames on Saturday that NASA already does genetic selection when it picks astronauts. He just suggests that the space agency get even more systematic about its process. 'Inner ear changes could allow people to escape motion sickness,' Venter said. '(You could have genes for) bone regeneration, DNA repair from radiation, a strong immune system, small stature, high energy utilization, a low risk of genetic disease, smell receptors, a lack of hair, slow skin turnover, dental decay and so on. If people are traveling in space for their whole lives, they may want to engineer genetic traits for other purposes.'

11/12/2010 PERMALINK
Sleep enhances and organizes your memories. SOURCE : Scientists have found that sleep helps consolidate memories, fixing them in the brain so we can retrieve them later. Now, new research is showing that sleep also seems to reorganize memories, picking out the emotional details and reconfiguring the memories to help you produce new and creative ideas, according to new research by Jessica D. Payne of the University of Notre Dame and Elizabeth A. Kensinger of Boston College.

11/11/2010 PERMALINK
Specialized blood vessel cells found to be essential to jump-starting and sustaining organ regeneration. SOURCE : In a pair of studies that has the potential to change the way researchers think about regenerative medicine, scientists have shown that a previously overlooked group of cells—the endothelial layer of blood vessels—is essential in helping adult stem cells multiply and revitalize damaged tissue. The endothelium is the innermost layer of blood vessels, made up of cells that had largely been assumed to function primarily as delivery vehicles for oxygen and nutrients. But earlier this year, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Shahin Rafii figured out that these endothelial cells also release growth factors that direct bone marrow stem cells to multiply and differentiate into different types of blood cells.

11/11/2010 PERMALINK
People with minor variations in a single gene creates clear differences in susceptibility to acute heat pain and chronic back pain. SOURCE : While it has become clear in recent years that susceptibility to pain has a strong inherited component, very little is known about actual 'pain genes' and how they work. Now, researchers at Children's Hospital Boston and their collaborators report discovery of a gene, minor variations of which, creates clear differences in susceptibility to acute heat pain and chronic back pain.

11/10/2010 PERMALINK
Research reveals that deaf adults see better than hearing people. SOURCE : Adults born deaf react more quickly to objects at the edge of their visual field than hearing people, according to groundbreaking new research by the University of Sheffield. The study has, for the first time ever, seen scientists test how peripheral vision develops in deaf people from childhood to adulthood.

11/10/2010 PERMALINK
Researchers find the neuronal circuits which control your fear response. SOURCE : Fear is a behavioral adaptation which may be innate but can also be a consequence of conditioning. However, until now, the underlying neuronal circuits have remained largely unknown. Now, several Swiss and German teams and a researcher from Neurocentre Magendie have been able to identify, for the first time, distinct neuronal circuits within the central nucleus of the amygdala which are specifically involved in acquisition and control of behavioral fear responses.

11/10/2010 PERMALINK
Stem cell transplants in mice produce lifelong enhancement of muscle mass. SOURCE : University of Colorado at Boulder-led study shows that specific types of stem cells transplanted into the leg muscles of mice prevented the loss of muscle function and mass that normally occurs with aging, a finding with potential uses in treating humans with chronic, degenerative muscle diseases.

11/10/2010 PERMALINK
Your genes determine how loyal you are to social groups. SOURCE : How well a person performs in a coalition is partly hereditary, according to a recent study. Researchers found that how successfully an individual operates in a group is as much down to having the right genetic make-up as it is to having common cultural ties with fellow group members. After assessing nearly 1,000 pairs of adult twins, researchers at the University of Edinburgh found that strong genetic influences have a major impact on how loyal a person feels to their social group.

11/09/2010 PERMALINK
Researchers have discovered a new, inducible pathway for repairing DNA damaged by oxygen radicals. SOURCE : "This new inducible pathway gives cells greater capacity to repair oxidative damage," said Peter Beal, professor of chemistry at UC Davis and senior author of the paper. As part of its inflammatory response, the body's immune system produces oxygen radicals, or reactive oxygen species, to kill bacteria, parasites or tumors. But oxygen radicals are strongly linked to cancer and aging and are also formed during metabolism and upon exposure to environmental toxins and radiation. Understanding more about how this damage can be repaired could lead to a better understanding of the causes of some cancers. Using a cell line derived from nerve cells, the team found no editing of NEIL1 RNA in resting cells. But when the cells were treated with interferon, which is produced during inflammation and to fight off viruses, the cells started making ADAR1 and editing NEIL1.

11/09/2010 PERMALINK
MicroRNA found to control breast development. SOURCE : Hormones, growth factors and several proteins ensure that development occurs in the right way, at the right time. The components that cause breast development in mammals, for example, were thought to be largely known. However, as a team of scientists from Gottingen, Frankfurt and Hanover have now discovered, in the case of breast development, hormones and proteins do not account for the full story. The scientists have shown that tiny ribonucleic acid molecules play a key role in this process.

11/09/2010 PERMALINK
Rogue gene that can hijack your stem cells to cause cancer discovered. SOURCE : A gene thought to be responsible for initiating human cancer has been identified by researchers at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry. The study paves the way for developing early cancer diagnostic tests, and finding new treatments that prevent or stop the spread of cancer cells at an early stage.

11/08/2010 PERMALINK
Bot arms just keep getting sleeker, lighter and more capable. SOURCE : The Kinova Technology JACO Robot Manipulator arm (Academic Edition), developed by Kinova at its state-of-the-art R&D department, is a revolutionary device designed for multiple professional applications. It is a leading product in a new generation of lightweight portable robotic tools that enables users to interact with their environment with complete safety, freedom, and effectiveness. The progress in bot arms over the last few years has been truly amazing. Something this sleek and capable could work for remote bots or remote-presence devices or even prosthetic arms. Add a camera and mobile platform to an arm this capable, and you could employ the services of a capable remote-presence cook and maid with the controller living thousands of miles away.

11/08/2010 PERMALINK
Brain immune cells called microglia also assist in the creation of synapses. hook up surprises researchers. SOURCE : Immune cells known as microglia, long thought to be activated in the brain only when fighting infection or injury, are constantly active and appear to play a central role in one of the most basic, central phenomena in your brain – the creation and elimination of synapses. The findings, publishing next week in the online, open access journal PLoS Biology, catapult the humble microglia cell from its well-recognized duty of protecting the brain to direct involvement in creating the cellular networks at the core of brain behavior. Its apparent role as an architect of synapses – junctions between brain cells called neurons – comes as a surprise to researchers long accustomed to thinking of microglia as cells focused exclusively on keeping the brain safe from threats. The research helps move microglia up into the pantheon of brain cells known to affect brain signaling. Years ago, brain signaling was thought to be the exclusive domain of neurons. During the last two decades, scientists have found that astrocytes also have vast signaling networks. Now, microglia also seem to be an important player in the brain's ability to adapt immediately and constantly to the environment and to shift its resources accordingly. 'When scientists talk about microglia, the talk is almost always about disease,' said Ania Majewska, Ph.D., the neuroscientist at the University of Rochester Medical Center who led the research. 'Our work suggests that microglia may actively contribute to learning and memory in the healthy brain, which is something that no one expected.'

11/08/2010 PERMALINK
A way to bioengineer a road without asphalt or concrete wins IIDA award for 2010. SOURCE : Researchers have found a biological treatment that can turn ordinary sand into hard, durable pavement at a fraction of the cost of asphalt pavement. The processes uses a common bacteria called Bacillus Pasteurii to cement grains of sand with calcium carbonate, biologically inducing the production of a road bed made of sandstone.

11/08/2010 PERMALINK
Another study shows that a properly tweaked personal microbiome is a key to good health. SOURCE : Helicobacter pylori, a common stomach bacterium, reduced the severity of inflammation of the colon caused by Salmonella in mice, according to research from U-M Medical School scientists. More than half the people in the world are infected with H. pylori, although it is very unusual to find it in the United States. 'This research shows there may be an inflammation control benefit to hosting the H. pylori infection,' says Peter Higgins, M.D., Ph.D., M.Sc., lead author of the study. 'If we have evolved to live with certain bugs, maybe there is a reason. This research demonstrates that having H. pylori in your stomach could have beneficial immune effects in other parts of the body.'

11/08/2010 PERMALINK
Your brain's ability to selectively focus/pay attention diminishes with age. SOURCE : A University of Toronto study shows that visual attention -- the brain's ability to selectively filter unattended or unwanted information from reaching awareness -- diminishes with age, leaving older adults less capable of filtering out distracting or irrelevant information. Further, this age-related "leaky" attentional filter fundamentally impacts the way visual information is encoded into memory. Older adults with impaired visual attention have better memory for "irrelevant" information. In the study, a group of young and old men were told to focus on faces not places in pictures. "In young adults, the brain region for processing faces was active while the brain region for processing places was not," says Taylor Schmitz, lead author of the research paper. "However, both the face and place regions were active in older people. This means that even at early stages of perception, older adults were less capable of filtering out the distracting information. Moreover, on a surprise memory test 10 minutes after the scan, older adults were more likely to recognize what face was originally paired with what house." The findings suggest that under attentionally-demanding conditions, such as looking for one's keys on a cluttered table, age-related problems with "tuning in" to the desired object may be linked to the way in which information is selected and processed in the sensory areas of the brain. Both the relevant sensory information -- the keys -- and the irrelevant information -- the clutter -- are perceived and encoded more or less equally. In older adults, these changes in visual attention may broadly influence many of the cognitive deficits typically observed in normal aging, particularly memory.

11/08/2010 PERMALINK
How to power your future bloodstream navigating autodoc nanobots. SOURCE : The power available to microscopic robots (nanorobots) that oxidize bloodstream glucose while aggregated in circumferential rings on capillary walls is evaluated with a numerical model using axial symmetry and time-averaged release of oxygen from passing red blood cells. Robots about 1 μm in size can produce up to several tens of picowatts, in steady state, if they fully use oxygen reaching their surface from the blood plasma. Robots with pumps and tanks for onboard oxygen storage could collect oxygen to support burst power demands two to three orders of magnitude larger. We evaluate effects of oxygen depletion and local heating on surrounding tissue. These results give the power constraints when robots rely entirely on ambient available oxygen and identify aspects of the robot design significantly affecting available power. More generally, our numerical model provides an approach to evaluating robot design choices for nanomedicine treatments in and near capillaries.

11/08/2010 PERMALINK
Time for a celebration as ROS turns three! SOURCE : The open source Robot Operating System just turned three and is it ever getting smarter and more capable. Open source is just so much better suited to the development of extremely complex software than the old order's proprietary model. When everyone with a useful idea can easily add a module, it just keeps getting better. Hit the link to screen all the progress.

11/08/2010 PERMALINK
Astronomer reveals plans for a network of telescopes that could give up to three weeks warning of a city-destroying impact. SOURCE : At about 3am on 8 October last year, an asteroid the size of a small house smashed into the Earth's atmosphere over an isolated part of Indonesia. The asteroid disintegrated in the atmosphere causing a 50 kiloton explosion, about four times the size of the atomic bomb used to destroy Hiroshima. The blast was picked up by several infrasound stations used by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization to monitor nuclear tests. No-one was injured in blast but the incident highlights the threat that planet faces from near Earth asteroids. It's about time. Astronomers expect a strike like this once every 2 to 12 years. It is only a matter of time before one hits the atmosphere at just the right angle at just the wrong place and we lose a city. Wrong city and the event could trigger a nuclear exchange. Our Cosmos is a dangerous neighborhood and preserving our kind should be Meme Uno.

11/08/2010 PERMALINK
Nanogenerator that can provide power to your implants and wearware. SOURCE : A device containing piezoelectric nanowires can now scavenge enough energy to power small electronic devices. Devices that harvest wasted mechanical energy could make many new advances possible—including clothing that recharges personal electronics with body movements, or implants that tap the motion of blood or organs. But making energy-harvesting devices that are compact, flexible, and, above all, efficient remains a big challenge. Now researchers at Georgia Tech have made the first nanowire-based generators that can harvest sufficient mechanical energy to power small devices, including light-emitting diodes and a liquid-crystal display.

11/07/2010 PERMALINK
Scientists discover a method for turning your skin cells into blood cells. SOURCE : Scientists at McMaster University have discovered how to make human blood from adult human skin. The discovery could mean that in the foreseeable future people needing blood for surgery, cancer treatment or treatment of other blood conditions like anemia will be able to have blood created from a patch of their own skin to provide transfusions.

11/07/2010 PERMALINK
If Countrywide's massive fraud pulls down Bank of America, will the Republican House give the broke FDIC the trillion $ necessary to payoff depositors? SOURCE : The head of Britain's central bank recently told a room full of New York bankers, in a nice British way, that the USA needs to fix its fraudulent banking system soon to avoid systemic collapse. For an example of what he was talking about, look no further than America's largest bank. The banksters at Bank of America are actually carrying Countrywide Financial on their books as an asset worth $4.4 billion, $200 million more than they paid for this turkey.
How did they arrive at that?
Well, they paid $4.2 billion in July 2008. Then, shortly after buying it, decided that Countrywide's liabilities actually exceeded its assets by $200 million. So, instead of booking the investment at its actual value at that moment, a negative $200 million. They simply added the $200 million to the $4.2 billion purchase price and booked the value of Countrywide at $4.4 billion, using the theory that the Countrywide brand was worth $4.4 billion. Let me repeat that. The brand of the biggest mortgage fraudster in world history, the company that came closer to destroying the American system than any of our enemies in war every had. That company's soiled, boiled, roiled and foiled brand was worth 4.4 billion dollars. ????
Of course, no one would pay $4.4 billion for Countrywide's worthless brand and the fraudsters at BOA knew this very well. Furthermore, they knew that Countrywide was worth far less than a negative $200 million. They were on the hook for tens of billions in losses from its disastrous purchase of Countrywide. They've been hemorrhaging billions from it ever since.
Think about this a moment. If BOA is so desperate, that they feel the need to carry such an obvious and well know disaster as Countrywide on their books at such a ridiculous over valuation. How much are they overvaluing their less notorious bad assets. Are we look at another Enron here? The Countrywide entry on the Balance Sheet certainly gives the 'BS' abbreviation accountants sometimes use a whole new meaning.
So why would bank regulators let BOA get away with keeping an asset that is actually costing them tens of billions on the book as a $4.4 billion asset?
Because shutting down BOA would require the government to pony up about a trillion dollars to pay off all of BOA's insured depositors. Not to mention that the government would then get stuck with managing BOA's huge, stinking pile of toxic waste assets.
And bureaucratic nightmare of all nightmares, with the FDIC's deposit insurance fund already running on empty, that trillion dollars would have to come directly from our newly gridlocked two party Congress. Depositors could find themselves waiting for months to get their money. Indeed, a trillion dollar bailout of BOA depositors might not even be possible. Since the Fed's new Quantitative Easing already has foreign central banks spooked to the point that they are dumping fists full of dollars. Given the Federal Government weakened financial state, another trillion dollar bailout, at this point in history, could very will precipitate sufficient dollar dumping abroad to crash the value of the dollar completely.
The risk to the dollar is so high, that Congress might well decide that throwing BOA depositors to the wind beats the hell out of a dollar crash. Yes, BOA depositors are a lot of voters, but if the risk of passing another trillion dollar bailout is Congressmen seeing their own and the rest of American's monthly paychecks suddenly become worthless, they might decide to write off the votes of BOA's depositors.
As the head of the Bank of England, Britain's central bank recently pointed out to New York's bankers, this entire mess stems from a bad meme called fractional reserve lending, which allows trillions of dollars to be create out of thin air by banks. His conclusion: "Of all the many ways of organising banking, the worst is the one we have today." Click 'source' above for a PDF of the entire speech. Political money (money backed by nothing but the promise of a nation's politicos) and fractional reserve lending are two very destructive memes that must be corrected for normalcy will return to the world's economy. Both cause economic dislocations that accumulates over time, until the economies using them become wholly dysfunctional.

11/05/2010 PERMALINK
Looking several years older than your age may not be a sign of poor health. SOURCE : Even though most adults want to avoid looking older than their actual age, research led by St. Michael's Hospital shows that looking older does not necessarily point to poor health. The study found that a person needed to look at least 10 years older than their actual age before accurate assumptions about their health can be made.

11/04/2010 PERMALINK
New 3-D model of RNA 'core domain' of enzyme telomerase may offer clues to cancer, aging. SOURCE : UCLA biochemists have produced a three-dimensional structural model of telomerase's RNA 'core domain.' Telomerase is an enzyme that helps maintain telomere DNA -- the DNA found at the very ends of chromosomes -- and plays an important role in aging and cancer.

11/04/2010 PERMALINK
Tweaking neurons optically to see what they do. SOURCE : In the quest to map the brain, many scientists have attempted the incredibly daunting task of recording the activity of each neuron. Gero Miesenboeck works backward -- manipulating specific neurons to figure out exactly what they do, through a series of stunning experiments that reengineer the way fruit flies percieve light.

11/03/2010 PERMALINK
Pinpointing the genes that promote your ability to age without disease, depression, frailty, or loss of mental function. SOURCE : Most researchers look for the genes and mutations that cause disease, but researchers at the University of Miami are taking a different approach, studying the genes that allow people to stay healthy into old age. "We're looking not just to predict how old you'll get, but how well you'll age," says William K. Scott, professor of human genetics at the university's school of medicine. In the first major outcome of this research, Scott's group has found that 15 percent of healthy Amish octogenarians have "haplogroup X," a genetic pattern within the mitochondria, which are the regions of cells that generate energy and help guard against deterioration. Haplogroup X is generally found in only 2 percent of Europeans, from whom the Amish descended and was found in only 3 percent of the control group of Amish people who had made it to 80 but suffered from significant disease or disability. This appears to be a gene variant we should all have engineered into us.

11/02/2010 PERMALINK
Lactate in the brain reveals aging process. SOURCE : Researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have shown that they may be able to monitor the aging process in the brain, by using MRI technique to measure the brain lactic acid levels. Their findings suggest that the lactate levels increase in advance of other aging symptoms, and therefore could be used as an indicator of aging and age-related diseases of the CNS.

11/02/2010 PERMALINK
Study finds that omega-3 containing fish oil supplements do NOT appear to slow cognitive decline. SOURCE : Patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease (AD) who received supplementation with the omega-3 fatty acid docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), believed to possibly reduce the risk of dementia, did not experience a reduction in the rate of cognitive and functional decline, compared to patients who received placebo. Joseph F. Quinn, M.D., of Oregon Health and Science University and the Portland VA Medical Center, Portland, Ore., and colleagues, conducted a randomized, controlled trial to examine whether DHA supplementation would slow the rate of cognitive and functional decline in individuals with Alzheimer's disease. The study, which was conducted between November 2007 and May 2009 at 51 U.S. clinical research sites, included 402 individuals with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease. Participants were randomly assigned to DHA at a dose of 2 grams/day or to identical placebo (60 percent were assigned to DHA and 40 percent were assigned to placebo). Duration of treatment was 18 months. Changes in cognitive and functional abilities were assessed with the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale. "Several studies have found that consumption of fish, the primary dietary source of omega-3 fatty acids, is associated with a reduced risk of cognitive decline or dementia. Some studies have found that consumption of DHA, but not other omega-3 fatty acids, is associated with a reduced risk of Alzheimer disease," the authors write. However, those studies were observational and did not control who received DHA. Animal studies that used DHA showed reductions in Alzheimer-like brain pathology.

11/01/2010 PERMALINK
Microreactor speeds nanotech particle production by 500 times. SOURCE : Engineers at Oregon State University have discovered a new method to speed the production rate of nanoparticles by 500 times, an advance that could play an important role in making nanotechnology products more commercially practical.

11/01/2010 PERMALINK
Scientists uncover a genetic switch that turns immune responses on and off. SOURCE : Scientists have identified a cellular switch, called eye transformer, that controls the flow of information from chemical signals outside of the cell to genes in the cell nucleus. This study demonstrates that when eye transformer is turned off, the information pathway it controls (the "JAK/STAT pathway") hyper-activates. Because this pathway exists in humans and is involved in many conditions such as cancer, severe immune deficiencies, autoimmune diseases, and allergies, this discovery reveals a new and potentially important drug target for treating these conditions.