2/28/2011 PERMALINK
New heart pacemaker is so tiny, it can be implant by injection rather than surgery. Medtronic has used recent advances in microelectronics and chip manufacturing to shrink the heart pacemaker from their current silver dollar size to a device smaller than a tic tac, which can be inserted via catheter, rather than invasive and far more dangerous surgery.

2/28/2011 PERMALINK
Single millimeter scale computer for implant in your eye. University of Michigan researchers have created a new wireless computer sensor only a cubic millimeter in size. The device is designed to be implanted in your eyes should you ever suffer from glaucoma. The device takes pressure readings 24/7 and transmitting the data over the wireless net to your doctor.

2/17/2011 PERMALINK
Controlling your car with a 16 sensor mind control cap. Watch this clip of BrainDriver a 16 sensor cap that allows you to drive your are with direct mind control created by researchers from Autonomos Labs at the Freie Universitat in Berlin.

2/15/2011 PERMALINK
Scientists uncover the 'core pathway' of aging, the root molecular cause of declining health in the old. "What we have found is the core pathway of aging connecting several age-related biological processes previously viewed as independent of each other," said Ronald A. DePinho, senior author of a report posted online by the journal Nature. The first author, Ergun Sahin, is a member of the DePinho Lab and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS). DePinho, who is the director of Dana-Farber’s Belfer Institute for Applied Cancer Science and also a professor of medicine at HMS, said that although the studies were conducted in mice, "The findings bear strong relevance to human aging, as this core pathway can be directly linked to virtually all known genes involved in aging, as well as current targeted therapies designed to mitigate the toll of aging on health."

The scientists found that the basic cause of age-related health decline is malfunctioning telomeres — the end caps on cells' chromosomes that protect them against DNA damage. As cells reach their predetermined limit of times that they can divide, the telomeres become shortened and frayed, making the chromosomal ends vulnerable to increased rates of unrepaired DNA damage.

Faced with this increasing reservoir of injured DNA, cells activate a gene, p53, that sounds an alarm and shuts down the cells' normal growth and division cycle, ordering them to rest until the damage can be repaired or, if not, to self-destruct.

Scientists previously had blamed this emergency shutdown and cell death for age-related deterioration of organs whose cells divide rapidly and are rejuvenated by reserves of adult stem cells. Such tissues include skin, intestinal lining, and blood cells, among others, which generate trillions of new cells each day of life.

However, left unanswered is how cells with less cell division, such as the heart or the liver, sustain equivalent levels of aging. The scientists felt if they could solve this mystery, they might gain new insights into how DNA damage could lead to age-related decline across all organs.

The new findings demonstrate that the telomere dysfunction and activation of p53 also trigger a wave of cellular and tissue degeneration that links telomeres to well-known mechanisms of aging that are not simply related to rapid growth and division. In other words, telomere dysfunction is not just one culprit in the declining health of advanced age. It's the kingpin, according to DePinho and his colleagues.

2/10/2011 PERMALINK
Researchers create a 'thinking cap' that can safely up-mod your creativity by about 300%. Professor Allan Snyder and Richard Chi from Sydney University's Centre of the Mind have engineered a cap that can make you three times as likely to be able to solve a complex problem. It was previously know that brain trauma victims sometimes experience a suppression of the left temporal lobe, which has the effect of removing the governing function that part of your brain normally exercises over the right or creative side of your brain. The scientists found that they were able to duplicate this rare effect sometimes induced by brain trauma, by creating a cap that creates 10-15 minutes of electrical pulses in your brain. These pulses safely and temporarily reduce the activity in your left temporal lobe. Freeing up the creative side of your brain to function at several times your normal levels of creativity. The effect last for about one hour. Then your temporal lobe begins restricting your right brain's creative function as usual, and your level of creative declines back to your norm.

2/10/2011 PERMALINK
Progress towards a nano-computer for your brain-computer interface implant. A team led by Charles Lieber, a professor of chemistry at Harvard, and Shamik Das, lead engineer in MITRE's nanosystems group, has designed and built a reprogrammable circuit out of nanowire transistors. Several tiles wired together would make the first scalable nanowire computer, says Lieber. Such a device could run inside microscopic, implantable biosensors, and ultra-low-power environmental or structural sensors, say the researchers.

2/08/2011 PERMALINK
A summary of the latest research on brain/computer interfaces. Here is a recap of the latest research on brain computer interface, including: Tiny, implantable computers that would restore brain function lost to disease or injury. Volitional control in a variety of neural signals. Continuous operation of a cortical recurrent Brain Computer Interface leads to long-lasting changes in physiological connections. A Recurrent Neural Network Approach to Brain Computer Interfaces. Plasticity at Brain Computer Interfaces.

2/07/2011 PERMALINK
Flu vaccine breakthrough that targets proteins common to ALL strains of flu found effective in trials. A team led by Dr Sarah Gilbert at Oxford's Jenner Institute has developed and successfully tested the first universal flu vaccine engineered to work against all known strains of the illness. Traditional vaccines target an area on the viruses coat that mutates constantly, while this new vaccine targets a part of the flu virus that stays constant over time and across all strains.

2/07/2011 PERMALINK
Modding your body's cells so that you can control their function in real time is a step closer. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital have created tiny internal depots within human mesenchymal adult stem cells, which among other functions are key to the generation of several tissues. These depots can slowly release a variety of agents to influence the behavior of not only the cells containing the depots, but also those close to them and even much farther away. The team demonstrated this by prompting mesenchymal stem cells to differentiate into the cells that make bone. "This work could allow programmable cell therapies where the cell or the agent is the therapeutic," says Jeffrey Karp, leader of the work and co-director of the Center for Regenerative Therapeutics (ReGen Rx) at the Hospital.

2/04/2011 PERMALINK
Unemployment numbers produced by the US gov have now moved into the realm of pure propaganda. The Global Economic Analysis blog has a good explanation of how the latest alterations in the method used by the US government to compute unemployment has turned that metric into one enormous lie-fest. It is nothing but pure propaganda now.

The unemployment rate (based on the household survey), unexpectedly fell from 9.4% to 9.0%. How did that happen? Based on population growth, the labor force should have been expanding over the course of a year by about 125,000 workers a month, a total of 1.5 million workers. Instead, (for the entire year) the BLS reports that the civilian labor force fell by 167,000. Those not in the labor force rose by 2,094,000. In January alone, a whopping 319,000 people dropped out of the workforce. To get the unemployment rate down from 9.8% to 9.0%, you simply do not count two million workers.

While the Feds show a drop in unemployment last month.  The Gallup Poll, which simply polls and reports unadulterated data, shows that unemployment actually increased to 9.8% at the end of January, up from 9.6% at the end of December. Gallup also finds that there are another 9.1% of American workers seeking full-time employment, but currently only able to find part time jobs.

2/04/2011 PERMALINK
Researchers bioengineer human spare parts - shelf-stable blood vessels. Scientists mod human cells to grown shelf-stable blood vessels for spare parts. Their research has demonstrated the capability of tissue-engineered vascular grafts that are immediately available at the time of surgery and are less likely to become infected or obstructed. The bioengineering method of producing veins can produce larger or small diameter vessels for the various types of heart and other transplants surgeons now perform.

2/04/2011 PERMALINK
I think it is starting to dawn on Ben Bernanke how profoundly fracked he is. He shot the nation's wad on trillions in stimulus. Thinking that this would re-inflate real estate prices and bail out the banks. Something that must happen, because banks can only survive for so long on the phantom capital Ben created for them by pressuring the nation's accountants to suspend mark to market rules. This allowed the nation's banks to keep worthless loans on their books at full value, allowing them to avoid bankruptcy by fraudulently making it appear that their lost capital was still intact.

But here we are, with uncounted trillions spent and a big vault at the Fed full of worthless assets, and yet the housing and commercial real estate values are still dropping.

All Ben got for the biggest money creation and spending spree in all of human history was a run up in stock prices and a pop in commodities. And as history shows us, stock bubbles can evaporate in a heartbeat, if unemployment stays this high and real estate prices stay this low. And all a pop in commodities prices does is to force up what we all pay for food and other necessities. And as we've seen in a number of countries lately, rising food prices can get people pretty worked up.

So as both the IMF and Congressional Budget Office recently warned. Ben is staring at a systemic deficit of massive proportions that will continue, said the CBO, all the way out to 2080. It doesn't actually end in 2080. That is just as far out as the CBO felt they could project the deficits.

The systemic annual deficit is so large today. That Congress would have to double all income tax rates and cut all spending by 25% across the board, including social security, to get the budget anywhere near balanced.

Ben knows he's not going to persuade Congress to do that.

Why should they take the heat, when Bernanke has no choice but to print the money to cover the massive deficits they are running?

If Ben stopped soaking up all that new debt with printing money, then private investors would have to be enticed to buy it. And it would require a huge boost in the interest rate paid by the government to get private investors to swallow so much new Federal debt. And because we now owe so much, the increase in interest would mean that Ben would still have to print money to cover the deficit.

Ben's so far in that he has no way out. He has no choice but to keep printing the money to cover Congress's deficits. That is why we are hearing noises about a QEIII being necessary.

But Ben knows that printing so much money will inevitably seriously erode the buying power of American household incomes, and when the anger starts to build, all the accusatory fingers will be pointed at him.

2/02/2011 PERMALINK
Which will it be, inflation or deflation? Maybe neither, maybe a run. Fed Chief Ben Bernanke is know as 'helicopter Ben' for having observed that you can fix any deflation problem by dropping a sufficient amount of freshly printed currency from a helicopter. So clearly, those at the Fed would prefer ramping up a new inflationary bubble to having to suffer through a long, boring, deflationary bust, like Japan. If you look at bubbles popping in fiat money economies, you see very few case where the central bank didn't try to inflate a new bubble. So I'd say that inflation is more likely than deflation, but there's another possibility that could be even more likely still.

The fate of the dollar could be decided by a few cabbies in Jakarta. Because currencies that aren't backed by anything solid, as the dollar once was, before the last of its traditional silver/gold backing was stripped away in 1971, are vulnerable. They are very much like deposits in a bank with no deposit insurance.

Back in the days before deposit insurance, bankers had to seriously worry about depositor confidence. If it dropped too low, like in that old Jimmy Stewart movie, "It's a Wonderful Life," a ruinous run on one or more banks could result.

Could falling confidence in the dollar among foreign investors trigger a run on the dollar? We'd all like to believe that's impossible, but let's think about this for a second.

Never before in human history have so many businesses, so many central banks, so many ordinary banks, so many cab drivers and other hard working folks, in every other country in the world. Held a part of their wealth in a single foreign currency. Dollars are stuffed in cookie jars and mattress in every city on the planet for only one reason. Because the people holding all those trillions of dollars have confidence in the dollar's ability to protect their wealth by retaining its value.

As that confidence erodes, the dollar becomes more and more vulnerable to a loss of confidence run. This is exactly what happened to banks that weren't frugal enough with people's money, back in the days before deposit insurance.

Ironically, the deposit insurance the government offers on most America bank deposits, is one more enormous potential liability that serves to cause foreigners to have less confidence in the dollar itself.

Runs tend to be sudden and devastating. Why did it happen that day, and not the day before or the day after or a week before. Who knows? Confidence is a very odd, easily lost, state of mind, which no one fully understands.

Put just a slight little hint of a smokey smell in the air, and have a few people stand up and run for an exit in a giant sports arena. And the next thing you know you can have hundreds of people getting crushed underfoot as everyone in the arena stampedes for the exits. It doesn't take much to shake confidence.

I have a habit of randomly checking a few newspaper web sites each day from a list of the world's press. And there certainly seems to be a smokey smell around the dollar lately in the foreign press. Is it enough to have primed foreign dollar holders to stampede for the exits? We can't really know, until it happens.

A few too many cabbies line up one day at a currency exchange in Jakarta to dump the dollars they'd long kept stuffed in their mattresses. They get to talking, a few text messages go out to friends. And thanks to today's highly connected world, the next thing you know, the grocery store down the road from you has empty shelves. Some sort of confidence tipping point was crossed in the night, which allowed a few cabbies in Jakarta to trigger a worldwide dump the dollar run.

So next time you hear someone debating if it will be inflation or deflation. You'll have a third option to put on the table.

2/02/2011 PERMALINK
New Kepler exoplanet data reveals 68 Earths, 54 of them in habitable zone. "We went from zero to 68 Earth-sized planet candidates and zero to 54 candidates in the habitable zone - a region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Some candidates could even have moons with liquid water," said William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., and the Kepler Mission’s science principal investigator. "Five of the planetary candidates are both near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of their parent stars."
Remember what your Grandmother told you about keeping all your eggs in one basket? Well, our Cosmos is a dangerous place, and so long as we keep all our eggs on this solitary rock. One rogue asteroid can snuff out the lives of a million future generations of our kind.