0 Comments Published by Search on 16-Feb-2008 at 8:23 PM.

In a tiny, darkened room on the Duke University campus, Miguel Nicolelis looks on ' approvingly while a pair of students monitors data streaming across computer screens. The brightly colored dashes and spikes reflect the realtime brain activity of a rhesus macaque named Clementine, who is walking at a leisurely pace on a little treadmill in the next room. Staticky pops coming from a speaker on a back wall are the amplified sound of one of her neurons firing. "This is the most beautiful music you can hear from the brain," Nicolelis declares with a smile.

The run-through is preparation for the next big demonstration of work toward mind-controlled human prosthetics that first garnered worldwide headlines for Nicolelis and his team in 2003. Back then, the group showed that they could listen in on brain signals generated by a monkey using a joystick to play a video game and translate that biological code into commands for a mechanical arm to perform the same motions. Now the group intends to make robotic legs walk under commands from the motor cortex of a monkey strolling along like Clementine. This time the scientists also want to feed sensor data from the robot feet into the monkey's brain, so she can "feel" the mechanical legs' strides as though they were her own. To raise the stakes still further, the monkey will beat Duke in North Carolina, but the robotic legs will be half a world away at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto, Japan.

The complexity of the experiment presents potential obstacles, Nicolelis admits, but satellite transmission delay of the signals traveling to and from Japan is no longer among them. One of the young men in the room, Ian Peikon, found a way to reduce the delay to a negligible 120 milliseconds. "And he's an undergraduate," Nicolelis adds, delighting in the opportunity to illustrate a favorite point-that you don't need a Ph.D. to participate meaningfully in science. The allusion is to a larger personal philosophy that has been driving the 46-year-old neuroscientist's pursuit over the past five years of a very different kind of ambition, perhaps on a par with uploading sensations to the human brain.

Convinced that science is a key capable of unlocking human potential well beyond the rigid hierarchies of academia-and outside the traditional scientific bastions of North America and Europe-his other big project has been nothing less than a quest to transform the way research is carried out in his native Brazil. In the process, he believes, science can also leverage economic and social transformation throughout the country.
The heart of Nicolelis's vision is a string of "science cities" built across Brazil's poorest regions, each centered on a world-class research institute specializing in a different area of science or technology. A web of education and social programs would intimately involve surrounding communities with each institution while improving local infrastructure and quality of life. And the presence of these knowledge-based oases would spark a Silicon Valley-style clustering of commercial scientific enterprise around them, jump-starting regional development.

Nicolelis is used to initial skepticism, even from peers, elicited by the grandeur of the scenario. "Up until a few months ago Brazilian scientists were the biggest doubters of a11," he says. Now many observers in Brazil and abroad acknowledge that the momentum his plan has attained in a short time suggests Nicolelis may be on to something.

By last August the nonprofit foundation that Nicolelis and his partners formed in 2003 to build a proof-of-concept neuroscience institute in northeastern Brazil had raised $25 million, much of it in a large endowment from the widow of billionaire Edmond Safra. On a hilly 100hectare site in the coastal farming town of Macaiba, three core elements of a "campus of the brain" were also complete. The bright white structures include a 25-lab research building, a free clinic specializing in maternal and child health, and a school that will offer twice-weekly science and art classes to 400 local children, aged 11 to 15, in the first quarter of 2008.
In the larger port city of Natal, 20 kilometers away, another science school has been up and running since last February with about 600 students, along with a suite of labs equipped for Nicolelis's Parkinson's disease research using transgenic mice. A third neuroscience lab run by Nicolelis's group, established at the Sirio-Libanes Hospital in the southern city of Sao Paulo in exchange for the hospital's sponsorship of the Macaiba clinic, is focused on clinical application of the prosthetics research.

The Macaiba site itself was donated by the state government of Rio Grande do Norte and still lacks a paved access road, but the foundation already has plans for a 5,000-student school, additional lab space, a larger health center, a sports facility and an ecological park to complete what will be the main campus of the International Institute of Neuroscience of Natal (IINN). The Brazilian federal government pledged $25 million toward finishing the complex after President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva visited the campus in August with his chief of staff and minister of education in tow. Nicolelis had given what he calls "the most important PowerPoint talk of my career" to the president, who is universally known as "Lula," a few weeks earlier.
Back in his spacious office overlooking the leafy Duke campus, Nicolelis recalls that first encounter as feeling slightly surreal. "You know I give lectures all over, but all of a sudden you're talking to the guy who can actually change a lot to boost to the research budget over the next three years.

The president's embrace of science is undoubtedly encouraged by some recent high-profile demonstrations of the fruits of research spending, notes physicist Sergio Mascarenhas de Oliveira, director of the Institute for Advanced Studies of Sao Carlos, part of the University of Sao Paulo. Mascarenhas praises the national agricultural research corporation, Embrapa, in particular for its leadership in developing ethanol and other biofuels as well as staking out tropical agricultural biotechnology as an area where the country can establish expertise. In 2000 a consortium of some 30 Brazilian laboratories produced a genome sequence of Xylella fastidiosa, an important citrus crop parasite, and several other projects to sequence crop plants, such as sugarcane, are under way. "Embrapa is in the process of changing our [nation's] export commodity from raw materials to applied science," Mascarenhas says. "What Brazil still doesn't know how to do is to transform research from the university into products and venture capital," he adds, blaming the weakness in part on an ivory-tower culture in Brazil's largely university-based research community.

Not surprisingly, some of those scientists were dubious of the Natal project, Mascarenhas recalls. Nicolelis's concept of a network of independent research centers, inspired by Germany's prestigious Max Planck institutes, is unusual for Brazil. The AASDAP motto, "The Future of Science in Brazil Starts Here," definitely did not help, Mascarenhas notes. And if the approach alienated some Brazilian scientists, the decision to locate the first institute in the impoverished hinterland of Natal also mystified many of them. Nicolelis thinks that the institute's social and economic influence will be most visible in the communities around Natal and Macaiba, and that the region is exactly where such transformation is most needed.

Moreover, the seaport and an airport that receives nonstop flights from Europe should make the location a promising one for commercial science, he says. The federal government has declared the area a free-enterprise zone, and AASDAP staff is now negotiating the creation of a 1,000- to 2,000hectare biotech park, which Nicolelis hopes will attract businesses focused on products for export, such as pharmaceuticals and biofuels. Meanwhile he is in talks with several other states interested in hosting the next three institutes, whose specialty areas will likely be bioenergy, microelectronics and environmental science.

As a means to promote regional economic development, the strategy of clustering high-tech businesses around major research institutions in the hope of spurring innovation has never been more popular. Local and national governments, especially across Asia, are spending billions to build such science parks and "cities" as they peg their development goals to science.

In 2006 China declared its plan to construct 30 new science cities and to raise its annual research spending to more than $100 billion by 2020. At that point, the government expects 60 percent of the country's economic growth to be based on science and technology. India, where a small number of elite universities have become hubs for technology clusters, as in Bangalore, is also betting on a continued tech boom. Although their approaches differ, what many of these nations have in common is an overt goal of luring a diaspora of scientists trained in the West to bring their expertise back home, notes Marina Gorbis,

Labels: control, mind, prosthetics, robotics

1 Comments Published by Search on at 7:39 PM.

Well some say that if it isn't free or involving unaturally large boobs it doesn't deserve to be on the internet. A phsycolgical survey from the university of Oxford determined that the male mind between the ages of 16-25 only think of sexually related material 89% of the time leaving the brain with 11% " Free Time " . While you might think that this is not as sexually explict behaviour as once thought it is the type of thing you see for the majority of web traffic.

Not to be ruled out it is also found that 15% of the people those people inclined to click on adult related videos or adult images is hands down the best converting advertisment on the internet. What does this say about todays culture? Well to me it says that young males seem to be obsessed with the quest for the perfect set of hooters or knockers or jugs. But at the same time it is also been described as the best " Waste of Time " other than " free flash games.

0 Comments Published by Search on at 3:39 PM.

Radar uses radio waves to enable aircraft, ships and ground stations to see far into their surroundings even at night and in bad weather. The metal antennas behind those waves also strongly reflect radar, making them highly visible to others-a deadly disadvantage during wartime. A new class of nonmetallic radio antennas can become invisible to radar-by ceasing to reflect radio waveswhen deactivated. This innovation, called plasma antenna technology, is based on energizing gases in sealed rubes to fortn clouds of freely moving electrons and charged ions.


When a radio-frequency electric pulse is applied to one end of such a tube (Anderson and Alexeff use fluorescent lamps), the energy from the pulse ionizes the gas inside to produce a plasma. "The high electron density within this plasma makes it an excellent conductor of electricity, just like metal," Anderson says. When in an energized state, the enclosed plasma can readily radiate, absorb or reflect electromagnetic waves. Altering the plasma density by adjusting the applied power changes the radio frequencies it broadcasts and picks up. In addition, antennas tuned to the right plasma densities can be sensitive to lower radio frequencies while remaining unresponsive to the higher frequencies used by most radars. But unlike metal, once the voltage is switched off, the plasma rapidly returns to a neutral gas, and the antenna, in effect, disappears.

0 Comments Published by Search on 15-Feb-2008 at 7:18 PM.

Over the past 35 years, scientists have made several curious discoveries about Huntington's disease. First, individuals with the neurological disorder are less likely than others to suffer from cancer; second, they tend to have more children than average-about 1.24 children for every one child born to unaffected siblings. Although no one yet knows what is behind these seemingly unconnected findings, a group at Tufts University has proposed that they are linked-and that one of the proteins implicated in Huntington's may, ironically, provide patients with subtle health benefits.

0 Comments Published by Search on at 6:37 PM.

On the shores of the Red Sea, near a small fishing village called Thuwal, King Ahduilah of Saudi Arabia is launching a university with the ambition of making it a world leader in science and technology. Not only will the school-called King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)-possess one of the 10 largest university endowments in the world, it will also allow women and men to study side by side. The greatest challenge that the potentially revolutionary school now faces is attracting faculty and Students.

Science once flourished in the Islamic world, a legacy seen today in the West with the use of Arabic numerals and words such as "algebra." After the golden age of Islam ended with the Mongol invasion in the 13th century, this momentum vanished. "It's recognized in several United Nations reports that the Arab and Muslim world now lags behind in science," says Ahmad AI-Khowaiter, interim provost for KAUST.

Such an assessment includes, for instance, the amount of money expended on research relative to the size of a country's economny and the total number of research papers published and patents registered. To initiate world-class research in Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah is personally granting KAUST an endowment of $l0 billion or more-at least as much as that of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which currently ranks among the top half a dozen university endowments in the IJ.S. The graduate-level university will be completely independent of Saudi Arabia's government, granting students and faculty academic freedom seen in universities worldwide-and a freedom unprecedented in the kingdom. "It will not experience the interference a typical government-run university may," Al-Khowaiter insists.
KAUST will enjoy the legal autonomy that is seen in enclaves elsewhere in Saudi Arabia for foreign oil workers-women will be allowed to drive, for instance, and the religious police will be barred from the premises. Although AI-Khowaiter expects some resistance to such freedoms from the rest of the kingdom, he believes that "if we can show that we are able to benefit society, I think that kind of resistance will be overcome. If we do not show benefits, then resistance will have the effect of curtailing research." The nascent university's biggest challenge may be drawing top-rated talent to a geographically isolated
university with no track record. As enticement, KAUST will offer new labs with the best equipment and award grants to scientists. "Researchers won't spend 50 percent of their time chasing after funding," AlKhowaiter says.

KAUST will also endeavor to overcome any isolation researchers might feel by keeping them linked with the rest of the world-allowing scientists to maintain appointments at other universities, for instance, and paying for travel to any meeting across the globe. In addition, KAUST will maintain a presence worldwide by collaborating with leading institutions, such as the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and funding scientists at other universities with up to $1 billion in grants over a period of 10 years.

To attract students, the university will initially offer full scholarships, not only to all graduate students but also to overseas juniors and seniors to cover the remaining
tuition at their current institutions in return for commitments to enroll at KAUST. The point is "to have a stream of students present when the university opens," AIKhowaiter states. KAUST will give out these scholarships for at least its first 10 years.

Unusually, instead of organizing research around the single-discipline departments seen in most universities, KAUST will rely on interdisciplinary centers devoted to specific challenges, including energy research, water availability and sustainable development. "Such centers have been very successful worldwide in attracting scientists to work on big problems that require teams with many different disciplines," AI-Khowaiter says. In the end, KAUST is aiming for a student population made up of roughly 40 percent from Saudi Arabia and other Arab states of the Gulf region, 30 percent from countries stretching between Egypt and India, and
30 percent from the rest of the world. "Given the large fraction of the population of young people in the Arab and Muslim world, there is a huge need for graduate and postgraduate study programs, especially of the quality that KAUST promises to deliver, and it is certainly time to offer such programs," says Ahmed Ghoniem, an M.LT. mechanical engineer who is consulting for KAUST. "There is plenty of native brainpower that, if harnessed, can make a huge impact locally and globally."

Ultimately, King Abdullah wants Saudi Arabia to transform from a kingdom based on oil to a more knowledge-based society, Al-Khowaiter explains. If successful, he adds, other countries in the Arab and Muslim world might follow suit. As Frank Press, president emeritus of the National Academy of Sciences, puts it: "This could be a nation-changing enterprise."

0 Comments Published by Search on at 6:22 PM.

Ten years after introducing the world to Dolly the sheep, the first cloned animal, University of Edinburgh biologist Ian Wilmut announced last November that he was quitting the cloning game. He was not going out on a high note-neither Wilmut nor any of his colleagues had succeeded in cloning an adult human cell by implanting its nucleus into a properly prepared egg, yielding precious embryonic stem cells. Rather his announcement heralded the publication a few days later of a method for directly transforming human skin cells into a form that was essentially equivalent to the embryonic kind. Cloning, Wilmut told reporters, had become obsolete.

In principle, if the products of this transformation-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells-are sufficiently versatile and defect-free, they could relatively quickly become the go-to source of stcm cells for modeling disease more realistically, testing drugs and designing future therapies derived from cell lines matched to a patient's immune system. "All this now becomes much more tractable, and the prospect of not having to use human oocytes for this work is extremely attractive," says biologist Arnold Kriegstein, director of the Institute for Regeneration Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

The existence of Dolly demonstrated that reprogramming is possible; the question was how. An adult cell fused with an embryonic stem cell will adopt the embryonic state, according to a 2005 Science study, implying that some cocktail of gene products initiates the change. The very next year a group led by stern cell biologist Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan published a recipe for rcprogramming mouse fibroblasts, cells found in connective tissue. The method called for inserting four powerful regulatory genes-Oct4, Sox2, c-myc and Klf4-into the cells' DNA, each delivered by its own retrovirus. Called transcription factors, these genes act like power strips, activating many other genes at once. The transformed cells passed a major test for embryonic "sternness," or pluripotency: when injected into a mouse embryo, they continued to develop into all three of the embryo's fundamental tissue layers.

Corroborating reports came earlier last year from the labs of Rudolf Jaenisch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and Konrad Hochedlinger of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. Then, in November, Yamanaka's group and an independent team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, led by James Thomson, published reports in Science extending the technique to human fibroblasts. "I really thought this would be a 20-year problem, and it seems like it's going a lot faster than that," says Thomson, who in 7998 became the first to extract stem cells from a human embryo.
Notably, Thomson and his team created WS cells without using c-myc, a gene that promotes cancer, although they reprogrammed neonatal and fetal cells only, not adult cells. Just a week later Yamanaka and his co-workers reported their own success transforming adult human and mouse 6broblasts without c-ntyc in Nature Biotec6mology. Of 26 mice in Yamanaka's study derived from il'S cells, none died of cancer after 100 days, Compared with six of 37 generated with c-myc.

In further refining the technique, investigators will have to replace the retroviruscs used to deliver the genes. Ketroviruses insert their DNA cargo into the genome at random, potentially interfering with key genes. Indeed it is conceivableif Unlikely-that the retroviruses could
have activated c-myc in Yamanaka's latest iPS cells, says Jacob Hanna, a postdoctoral researcher in Jaenisch's group. One immediate goal of iPS research is to identify small Molecules that could induce reprogramming in place of virusdelivered gencs.

Whatever the source of pluripotent cells, applying them to cure disease is still largely uncharted territory. In a proof of principle for reprogramming, Hanna and others from the Whitehead lab reported in early December that they used iPS cells (with c-rnyc genetically excised) to partly
restore to normal the blood of transgenic mice engineered to bear the human gene variant responsible for sickle-cell anemia.

Thomson and other developers of the new alchemy emphasize that embryonic stem cells remain invaluable research tools and will be crucial for confirming that iPS cells harbor no hidden limitations. Reprogrammed cells "might differ in clinically relevant ways from embryonic stem cells," Thomson notes. "People want to rush and say we don't need embryonic stem cells anymore, and over time that might be true, but right now that's premature."

1 Comments Published by Search on at 6:15 PM.

It's well known that prediction is fraught with Peril, especially when it's about the future. But if the future is past, then analyzing predictions about that past future is like an unwrapped present. (Tense yet?) A friend recently sent me an article from the December 1900 issue of the Ladies' Home journal, in which one John Elfreth Watkins, Jr., listed a series of predictions for the year 2000. (See http://www.tinyurl.com/3yuaxx for the complete list.) Let's look at some of those prognostications now that 2000 is as gone as Watkins.

"There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America." A bit on the high side of our current population of about 304 million. But not a bad estimate, especially given an American population in 1900 of a mere 76 million. Still, Watkins was way off the mark by then predicting that Nicaragua and Mexico would seek admission to the Union after the Panama Canal was finished. Actually, if Mexico did join the U.S. the fence some Americans want to build on the Latin American border could be reduced from about 2,000 miles down to only the approximately 400 border miles that Mexico shares with Guatemala and Belize.
It's called thinking outside the boundaries.

"There will be no C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary." A quixotic notion." Mosquitoes, house-flies and coaches will have been practically exterminated." Unless "practically exterminated" meant pragmatically slamming
a shoe heel on the insects, this one is obviously way off. As is: "Rats and mice will have been exterminated." I didn't even kill the cartoon-cute little house Mouse I found jumping around in my sink a few weeks ago. (I didn't let it move in with me rent-free either.) And if you're ever bored waiting for a New York City subway, you can pass the time playing find-the-rat-on-the-tracks. (Although somebody usually wins inside of 10 seconds.)

"Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of to-day." Correct. "Food will be served hot or cold to private houses in pneumatic tubes or automobile wagons." Partly correct-hot food is delivered cold by automobile wagons. "The meal being over, the dishes used will be packed and returned to the cooking establishments where they will be washed." A bachelor's dream that is, alas, unrealized. Fortunately, in 1904 some genius invented the paper plate." There will be no street cars in our largecities." Mostly true, with the notable exceptions of San Francisco's trolleys and Boston's Green Line. Although anyone actually waiting for a Green Line train might indeed conclude that they no longer exist. "All hurry traffic will be below or high above ground when brought within city limits. In most cities it will be confined to broad subways or tunnels, well lighted and well ventilated." Granted, the lighting and ventilation are good enough to play find-the-rat-on-the-tracks. "Cities, therefore, will be free from all noises." Rendered erroneous by the then unforeseen invention of automobile sound systems with super bass subwoofers. And by legions of pedestrians yelling into cell phones.
"The trip from suburban home to office will require a few minutes only. A penny will pay the fare." For two bucks, I can go the 12 miles between the Bronx and midtown Manhattan during the morning rush in only a little over an hour. ("Hurry traffic" is less a description than a fervent prayer.)

"Automobiles will be cheaper than horses." Mostly true, with the notable exception of FrolicN My Dreams, which became worthless to me by finishing dead last in the sixth race at Aqueduct on December 2."To England in two days." Close enough. Six hours for the flight, plus another two to get to the airport, two more in the security line, and a few more for flight delays. Unless it snows, in which case all bets are off. Which unfortunately was not the case at Aqueduct.
"Oranges will grow in Philadelphia," thanks to technology. Wrong, but might still come true, thanks to global E? wa rm ing. "Everybody will walk ten miles." Eventually.

0 Comments Published by Search on at 3:04 PM.

Keep your database secure, with tardis we have done all the hard work for you ! Our team of engineers have analyzed and experimented with all major data servers to make sure you don't get hacked. Nothing is worst than waking up one morning and find your business server down and costing you thousands of dollars a hour.

0 Comments Published by Search on 14-Feb-2008 at 5:41 PM.

0 Comments Published by Search on at 3:15 PM.

Tardis Data Base systems have just announced their multi million dollar database system release. The project is a top end database system which is designed to revolutionize the banking and brokerage business.

Tardis DB has a variety of data deployment services that might be right for your business with over 256 Wireless Datapoints across North America the ease of access can't be easier with remote deployment of all sorts of applications from banking to trading to press release. The Tardis News release system has a network of servers which will deploy your personal package for a variety of reasons.

Labels: data, management, tardis

0 Comments Published by Search on 12-Feb-2008 at 7:41 PM.

Wow its a matter of you show the world

0 Comments Published by Search on 11-Feb-2008 at 11:55 PM.