3/31/2011 PERMALINK
Tiny sensor implants that monitor health. Michael Cima and his team developed an implantable sensor that uses antibodies attached to nanoparticles to detect cancer related biomarkers. In 2009 Cima showed that he could implant these devices into human tumors in mice and then 'read' the cancer growth using MRI. No biopsies need. Over the past few years, Cima and his team have adapted their work to create a very similar device that measures biomarkers related to heart damage.

3/25/2011 PERMALINK
BrainGate neural interface system reaches 1,000-day performance milestone. An investigational implanted system being developed to translate brain signals toward control of assistive devices has allowed a woman with paralysis to accurately control a computer cursor at 2.7 years after implantation, providing a key demonstration that neural activity can be read out and converted into action for an unprecedented length of time. “This proof of concept — that after 1,000 days a woman who has no functional use of her limbs and is unable to speak can reliably control a cursor on a computer screen using only the intended movement of her hand — is an important step for the field,” said Dr. Leigh Hochberg, a Brown engineering associate professor, VA rehabilitation researcher, visiting associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, and director of the BrainGate pilot clinical trial at MGH.

3/22/2011 PERMALINK
Text bot lets narcissistic guys trick a women into believing they are sweet, loving and caring. Never be feel unappreciated or without loving attention with your own Textboyfriend bot. The web site promise that 'he' will text you 3 times a week with just the perfect amount of sweetness, no overtexting, no drama. He's always fun and cute and he's all about you! Texts are sweet and seem to just be timed right when you need a little lift. You can make your friends jealous with no worries, nothing offensive, it's all sweet. And, it's cheaper than sending yourself flowers! And when you want to dump Textboyfriend, you can unsubscribe by just replying 'STOP' to any message you receive. All for only $1.95 per week. Guys can use it too by signing up and then forwarding the messages. With Using Textboyfriend even the most narcissistic guy can trick a woman into thinking he is sweet, loving and caring.

3/22/2011 PERMALINK
Cyberdyne HAL robotic human exoskeleton demo. Watch a new demo of the Cyberdyne HAL exoskeleton. When a person attempts to move, nerve signals are sent from the brain to the muscles via motoneuron, moving the musculoskeletal system as a consequence. At this moment, very weak biosignals can be detected on the surface of the skin. "HAL" catches these signals through a sensor attached on the skin of the wearer. Based on the signals obtained, the power unit is controlled to move the joint unitedly with the wearer's muscle movement, enabling to support the wearer's daily activities. This is what we call a 'voluntary control system' that provides movement interpreting the wearer's intention from the biosignals in advance of the actual movement.

3/15/2011 PERMALINK
Mistakes made by Tokyo Electric engineers expose fuel rods to the air. When a catastrophe strikes, even well trained people can get raddled and make big mistakes.

The explosion followed an early-morning acknowledgment from Tokyo Electric Power that, because of human error, the fuel rods inside the Unit 2 reactor had been at least partly exposed to air for more than two hours during two separate incidents the previous evening, allowing them to heat up and causing a buildup of explosive hydrogen gas.
Engineers had begun using fire hoses to pump seawater into the Unit 2 reactor — the third at the plant to receive the last-ditch treatment — after the emergency cooling system failed. Company officials said workers were not paying sufficient attention to the process, however, and let the pump stall, allowing the fuel rods to become partially exposed to the air.
Once the pump was restarted and water flow was restored, another worker inadvertently closed a valve that was designed to vent steam from the containment vessel. As pressure built up inside the vessel, the pumps could no longer force water into it and the fuel rods were once again exposed.

But whenever environmentalists succeed in blocking a nuclear plant, a few windmills or solar panels may get put up, but most of the power lost winds up getting generated by increasing use of carbon dioxide spewing plants.
What are needed are intrinsically nuclear power designs, like the one being pushed by Bill Gates. There are a number of ways of generating nuclear power that won't melt down under any circumstances. But the world's regulators refuse to approve any new designs. Only the clunky old designs from a handful of multinational corporations that have long dominated the nuclear industry have any hope of approval. Interestingly, just as happens with the banking industry, there seems to be a revolving door these days, between the 'public service' regulatory jobs and cushy, high-paying jobs in the handful of multinationals that dominate the nuclear industry.

3/14/2011 PERMALINK
Beneficial bacteria can not only prevent digestive diseases, they can also keep flu out of your lungs. A research team led by Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University in New Haven, has found a beneficial bacteria that kick-starts the flu-fighting pathway by activating 'inflammasome' protein complexes in the immune system. The inflammasomes then pushed precursors of the immune protein cytokine interleukin 1-beta into a chemically mature state.

3/13/2011 PERMALINK
Why the nuclear regulatory environment insures catastrophic failures like the one in Japan. In a Scientific American article on the Japanese nuke plant failure, physicist Ken Bergeron, one of America's top nuclear reactor accident simulation experts at Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico said this:

"The probability of this occurring is hard to calculate primarily because of the possibility of what are called common-cause accidents, where the loss of offsite power and of onsite power are caused by the same thing. In this case, it was the earthquake and tsunami. So we're in uncharted territory, we're in a land where probability says we shouldn't be. And we're hoping that all of the barriers to release of radioactivity will not fail."

You are designing a reactor for a country where many active offshore faults are constantly producing earthquakes, which many times in the past have caused tsunamis. So you use an old reactor design on a coast with huge faults just offshore. A design where the backup generators necessary to prevent a meltdown during any earthquake shutdown event are likely to be disabled by a tsunami?
Sheer idiocy on the surface, when their are designs that would be intrinsically safe in an earthquake/tsunami event, but this is the way our current regulatory environment works.
Designs like the one being pushed by Bill Gates, which would be far safer to use in an earthquake zone, are shunned by the world's nuke regulators who strongly prefer the old clunky designs of 50 years ago.
Our current regulatory environment makes innovation anathema to government regulators.
Approval can be obtained for an old complex and expensive design that is sure to fail catastrophically in an earthquake/tsuanmi zone, but not for an intrinsically more safe design that could be located in an earthquake zone safely.
This isn't limited to nuclear regulation. The FDA promotes a similar regulatory environment. For ever life they save by keeping a bad drug off the market, a thousand lives are lost for lack of the many new technologies that would be developed and deployed in a more sane regulatory environment. Approval of a new medical technology today often costs billions and can take as long as ten years. This causes innovative engineers and entrepreneurs to go elsewhere. People are dying by the millions annually today, because of all the lost innovation in the medical field caused by its regulatory environment. There is no outcry for lives lost to the lack of innovation. Regulators pay no price for creating an environment that blocks a thousand life-saving designs, but they can see their careers destroyed for letting one bad innovation make it to market.

3/10/2011 PERMALINK
Ben Bernanke's Hobson's choice. Saudi police firing on protesters in their key oil producing region. Libya sinking into an all out civil war. Half the world's population fast approaching a starvation tipping point as food prices rises rapidly. China and Japan reporting weak exports again. Causing Japan to fall back into GDP contraction again. Spain's debt bubble blowing up, their debt downgraded, causing some investors to dump Eurozone debt in favor of US Gov debt this week. But they will find no safety there, as the US Gov's deficit is just as bad as that of Europe's PIIGS, and getting worse faster.

Despite voting to keep some war spending and the huge loses at Fannie, Freddie and the FDIC off-budget. Congress's deficit spending still hit an all time monthly high of $222.5 billion in February. Add back the concealed items and Congress has in recent years been spending at a rate of roughly $2 for ever $1 they are able to collect in taxes.

Now, the Fed is making noises about stopping the money printing that has prevented the Treasury market from blowing up due to Congress's run away spending. However, to persuade investors to buy $100+ billion more gov debt MONTHLY than they've been willing to buy lately is sure to require a large increase in interest rates. And this will only add hundreds of billions more to the already dangerously high Federal deficit. Which will only cause investors to demand even higher interest rates at the next debt sale. It will also push up mortgage rates, putting the housing market back into a tailspin.

The Fed has two paths open to it: 1. Continuing to printing ever increasing amounts of money to cover the rising Federal deficit. or 2. Stopping the money presses which will force the Treasury to pay constantly incrasing interest rates to persuade enough investors to keep funding their ominously exploding mountain of debt.

Both these paths lead to the same global economic death spiral.

3/08/2011 PERMALINK
'Nano-Velcro' moves us closer to cancer cell removing implants. UCLA researchers have developed a 'nano-Velcro' technology that can capture circulating cancer cellsm. Circulating tumor cells, which play a crucial role in cancer metastasis, have been known to science for more than 100 years, and researchers have long endeavored to track and capture them. Now, a UCLA research team has developed an innovative device based on Velcro-like nanoscale technology to efficiently identify and 'grab' these circulating tumor cells, or CTCs, in the blood. Combining recent microfluidics advances with this new nano-Velcro could some day produce implantable cancer filters for your blood stream.

3/07/2011 PERMALINK
A bionic eye implant now available in Europe. After more than two decades of research and development, the first retinal prosthesis has received European approval for clinical and commercial use. People blinded by degenerative eye disease will have the option of buying an implant that can restore their vision at least partially. And it will only get better from here.

3/07/2011 PERMALINK
New weight loss discovery moves us closer to a pill for curing obesity. An important discovery in mice may make a big difference in people's waistlines says a team of Harvard scientists who found that reducing the function of a transmembrane protein, called Klotho, in obese mice with high blood sugar levels produced lean mice with reduced blood sugar levels. This protein also exists in humans, suggesting that selectively targeting Klotho could lead to a new class of drugs to reduce obesity and possibly Type 2 diabetes for people. 'Our study is a small step toward reducing the sufferings of obese and diabetic individuals to bring back the joy of healthy life,' said researcher M. Shawkat Razzaque, M.D., Ph.D. 'In the dark horizon of obesity and diabetes, Klotho brings a ray of hope.'

3/07/2011 PERMALINK
Anthony Atala shows how human organs can be printed with a device much like your ink jet printer. In a TED talk, scientist Anthony Atala from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine demonstrates an early-stage 3D printer that uses living cells to output a transplantable kidney. One of Dr. Atala's young patients, who received an engineered bladder 10 years ago, is reunited with him on stage.

3/04/2011 PERMALINK
A new interface that allows you to control you laptop with your eye's movements across the screen. A camera over the screen is a standard feature for laptops. But only Lenovo's new model has a pair of cameras below its display to track the movements of a user's eyes. The prototype laptop can be controlled with eye motions, reducing the need to use the mouse and making it faster to navigate through information such as maps or menus.

3/02/2011 PERMALINK
So what scam are the 'to big to fail' banksters up to next? One of our most prescient economist, Nouriel Roubini has announced his agreement with one of our most prescient financial analyst, Meredith Whitney. Both now warn of massive debt defaults by our cities. These were two of a very few voices that warned the world what a horrid mess the mortgage market had become, before that bankster scam blew up and tanked the world's economy.

The banksters then, deftly manipulated the world's politicos into bailing them out. Creating trillions in debts that threaten everyone's future.

The bankster's actions were a classic fraud. First they originated huge numbers of garbage mortgages to people that completely lacked the ability to pay those mortgages. In internal emails, the banksters actually called many of these loans 'liar loans'. They then put lots of these 'liar loans' and other poor quality loans into packages backing bonds. Next they paid rating agencies enormous fees to give these newly created securities the highest possible, AAA ratings.

Morally, this was the equivalent of giving someone cashing a check at one of their branches counterfeit money.

They then foisted these counterfeit bonds off on unsuspecting investors all the world over. Not just to rich investors, but also to people's pension funds, charity and university endowments, they didn't give a damn. The banksters were equal-opportunity looters.

Afterward, they added insult to injury by placing market bets that the fraudulent mortgage packages they had been selling to investors would blow up in their faces and drop precipitously in value. Obviously, they knew what was coming. And why profit only once from your fraud, when you can take a double dip?

But why did they all fell so free to engage in a such massive fraud scheme. Weren't they worried that regulators would catch them and punish them? After all, when similar frauds were perpetrated back during the old Savings & Loan crisis, thousands of banksters were put on trial?

This time around though, the banksters were confident that they would never be asked to pay any price for their horrific crimes. Because they had learned a lesson from that Savings & Loan debacle.

Unfortunately, that lesson wasn't that they should offer their customers honesty and integrity. It was that they should spend billions on buying off Washington's regulators and politicos.

In the years since the S&L debacle, the banksters have made so many campaign donations. Sponsored so many all expense-paid junkets for politicos. Put so many wives and kids of serving politicos and regulators in cushy jobs. Not to mention all the former regulators and politicos they now have on their payrolls. That they were now sure they had the justice system totally bought off. Just like a mobster who goes on trial for murder in front of a paid-off judge. They knew they would suffer no consequences for their massive frauds.

So with Whitney and Roubini now saying that our cities are in deep debt trouble, and will soon be forced to default on many of those debts. What do you suppose our nation's 'to big to fail' banksters are up to right now.

In a complete break with the past, when cities funded large projects with bonds. The banksters are now offering to loan the entire amount needed by cities for all their large project. "Build away, Mr. Mayor, your friendly bankster has all the money you need."

Once again, the banksters will swell their bonuses with the big fees the cities pay up-front for the origination of these loans. And then, in just a few years when it all blows up, the taxpayers will be on the hook for all of the loses.

These banksters that commit these crimes and the regulators and politicos that cover up them up, aren't the entrepreneurs and public servants they pretend to be. They are nothing more than thieves and looters, who know how to work a corrupt system to enrich themselves at the expenses of all our children's futures.

3/01/2011 PERMALINK
Gene mods for curing AIDS. Gene therapy that interferes with co-receptors on the surface of T-cells can protect these cells from HIV infection, representing a potential first step toward achieving a 'functional cure' for AIDS. This was also the first successful use of genetically modified cells from a patients own body being used for treatment. T-cells were filtered from a blood sample, genetically modified, expanded and up 10 to 30 billion genetically modified cells were re-introduced into the patient. The modified cells behaved as regular T-cells. Genetically modifying stem cells could offer longer term and perhaps life long protection.