#Technology No phone signal in a disaster? Solar network'in a box'to the rescue Pakistani researchers have developed a portable,
solar-powered mobile phone network for use in disasters like floods and earthquakes when regular communications are disrupted often.
Researchers at the Information technology University (ITU) in Lahore, together with a team from the University of California, have developed a prototype escue Base Station (RBS) for Pakistan-the country first emergency telecoms system
that would work on normal cell phones. hen the RBS is installed in a disaster-struck area,
people automatically start receiving its signals on their mobile phones. They can manually choose it and then call
send messages and even browse (internet) data free of charge, said Umar Saif, ITU vice chancellor and an adviser to the project.
The RBS is a lightweight, compact rectangular box fitted with an antenna, a signal amplifier and a battery,
which can be carried easily and even dropped by helicopter in hard-to-reach disaster zones.
It has a solar panel to charge the battery, to keep it working in places without electric power.
An alternative communications system like this could help save lives when disasters strike by connecting survivors with rescue workers and government officials.
The RBS has yet to be deployed on the ground but the ITU expects it to be used in the next six to eight months in partnership with the National Disaster Management Authority and a local telecoms company.
Saif said the RBS signal can be received within a 3 km radius, and people in the area can easily register by sending their name, occupation,
age and blood group to a special number. his helps generate an automatic database of people in distress,
according to official data. Potential users of the RBS system can get the information they need in just a few seconds by sending a text message to specific numbers appearing on their mobile phone.
For example, if a person needs to contact a fire brigade, they text the words ccupation: firefightersto the relevant number.
Saif said RBS teams on the ground plan to collect information about disaster-affected people in a database,
doctors and government departments that can provide assistance. They) can also send weather forecasts and disaster alerts to subscribers,
which operates using open source software, offers all the features provided by regular cellphone companies, he added.
Ghaznavi said it costs around $6, 000 to develop an RBS, and the Pakistan prototype has been funded by a Google Faculty Research Award.
The RBS team is now working with Endaga, a U s.-based company that connects rural communities through small-scale independent cellular networks,
and a local telecoms firm to commercialise the project, he added. The aim of the collaboration is to help phone companies keep their communications systems functioning in a disaster until their regular networks are restored.
Pakistan is a disaster-prone country which needs $6 billion to $14 billion to help it adapt to climate change impacts,
such as unusually heavy rains, droughts and melting glaciers, through to 2050, according to a 2011 study funded by the U n. climate secretariat.
The International Federation of Red cross and Red Crescent Societies developed a customised communications system called the Trilogy Emergency Response Application (TERA) in Haiti
when it was struck by a massive earthquake in 2010. But that system could only send text messages to its subscribers on their mobile phones,
unlike the RBS which allows users to call, send texts and even browse the web for free.
Cutting-edge technologies like the RBS could help save more lives by delivering timely advice to disaster-hit people,
said Pervaiz Amir, country director for the Pakistan Water Partnership. ocal researchers should be encouraged to develop innovative solutions to help people in distress,
especially in remote rural areas of Pakistan where natural disasters regularly disrupt poor communications systems u
#The Rising Costs of Prescription drugs The health care industry is trapped between serving its patients and enabling pharmaceutical innovation.
On back-to-back days in late September, a specialty tuberculosis drug saw its price raised 2, 600 percent,
while a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for life-threatening infectious diseases experienced a 5, 000 percent overnight increase.
Unsurprisingly, these increases were received not well by the general public, or by specialists in specific medical fields.
Rodelis Therapeutics acquired the rights to TB drug cycloserine in August, and subsequently raised the price from $500 for 30 capsules to $10,
800. The day after the price hike, Rodelis agreed to return the drug patent to its former owner, the nonprofit Chao Center for Industrial Pharmacy and Contract Manufacturing,
which is affiliated with the Purdue Research Foundation. Now, the Chao Center will charge $1, 050 for 30 capsules,
which is twice what it charged before, but still far less than what Rodelis was planning to charge.
The foundation president Dan Hasler told The New york times the new price was needed to mitigate losses,
Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager, acquired the infectious disease drug Daraprim in August.
Turing then raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13. 50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
After vehemently defending his company decision for 24 hours, Turing CEO Martin Shkreli announced the company had agreed to lower the price of the drug to a point that is ore affordable,
and will still allow the company to make a profitut a small profit, he urged.
Shkreli did not announce the new price however. Turing price hike on an old drug is indicative of a growing business trend in pharma where new companies buy old,
generic drugs that are mainstays of rare treatments and turn them into high-priced specialty drugs.
and Par pharmaceutical colluded to raise the price of generic Kapvay, a medication for ADHD. According to the FTC, Concordia agreed to stay out of the market for Kapvay in return for a share of Par revenue.
As Turing Shkreli alluded to, pharmaceutical companies sometimes have a hard time recouping all the costsspecially R&d and regulatoryssociated with developing
Multiple studies in the past few years have concluded that only one-third of prescription drugs make a profit for the developing company.
non-life threatening issues (think Viagra) rather than common illnesses like high blood pressure and asthma. The pharmaceutical industry seems to be caught between a rock
The effect on generic drugs Generic drugs are intended to serve as the national policy solution to high prescription drug prices.
Traditionally, when a generic enters the field, drug prices decrease by 80 to 90 percent for oral prescriptions.
prices usually decrease about 60 to 80 percent. In the last five years however, this has not been happening as it has in the past.
According to a recent survey by Consumer Reports, 33 percent of Americans have seen their prescription price rise an average of $39 over the last year.
The cost of medications for asthma, high blood pressure and diabetes went up more than 10 percent each,
the price increases are especially harmful. From 2012 to 2013, the cost of the generic blood pressure medication Captopril climbed more than 2, 700 percent,
the asthma drug Albuterol sulfate went up more than 3, 400 percent and the antibiotic Coxycycline jumped 6, 300 percent.
One out of four people whose prescription drug costs went up said they were unable to pay their medical or medication bills, according to the survey by Consumer Reports.
Seven percent said they missed a mortgage payment, one out of four stopped getting their prescriptions filled
experts place the price blame on aging production facilities, shortages of ingredients and, most importantly, competition.
Professor of Hematology/Oncology at the University of Chicago, there are just not enough players in the generic specialty drug market that have the capability to manufacture these drugs.
and bring prices down. Not only have mergers and acquisitions reduced the number of companies in the market,
Drug shortages not only affect customers and prices but also R&d. If the drug in question is the backbone of a specific therapy,
laboratories need increased access to confirm efficacy and carry out additional analysis. Often, these drugs act as the comparative drugs in clinical trials.
Conti and her team studied the launch price of new oncology drugs from 1996 to 2012.
They concluded that approximately one-fourth to one-third of price increases were related to the quality of drugs becoming better.
As for the rest of the price inflation it a tale as old as time. here is this natural ecology of price where the market appears to be signaling they are willing to pay higher prices,
so even after adjusting for inflation, companies know they can price their drug higher than previous years just
because the ambient mood for process has changed, said Conti. In other wordsupply and demand. Patent protection If supply and demand is the problem,
Given the expense of R&d, that may not be enough time for manufacturers to recoup their costs.
Most health care experts, including those Laboratory Equipment spoke with favor lengthening patent protection, not making it shorter. atent protection is one of the ways government facilitates innovation in drugs,
Professor at Tulane University Freeman School of business. ompetition is great for consumers, but it can limit innovation
because they don get their money worth. This would decrease competition even further and put innovation, safety and efficacy on the ropes.
lower overall costs and create an environment that includes more options for consumers. t definitely a balancing act between how much of the patent protection results in innovation
and giving up competition that would make prices more reasonable, said Schwartz. So, how do we strike that balance?
Schwartz says it all about better pharmacological economics. rugs should get a preferred status from the government
because they are the best medication to serve the population or illness. They will get the premium from that so they don have to gauge consumers.
Ken Holroyd, Assistant Vice chancellor for Research at Vanderbilt University Medical center, agreed that companies would probably feel less pressure
and lower their prices if patent life was longer. But he suggested looking more toward the future than trying to fix the present. e should decrease interest in investing in small molecule chemical drugs
and increase interest in developing biologic drugs, Holroyd told Laboratory Equipment. hat is an area where there is limited competition even
when the drug if off patent because biosimilar pathways are still at an early stage.
The government is encouraging companies to invest in biologics, and they are even being given longer market exclusivity.
Medicare Part D Medicare, specifically Part D, plays a huge role in prescription drug prices. It also one of the most hotly contested issues in the pharmaceutical industry
and not just between politicians, but among scientific experts, as well. Medicare Part D is a federal government program that subsidizes the costs of prescription drugs and insurance premiums for Medicare beneficiaries.
The plan went into effect on Jan 1, 2006. Now, however, it has fallen under scrutiny as drug prices continue to rise across the nation.
The big deal with Medicare Part D is this: it has a noninterference clause that bars the federal government from negotiating prices directly with pharmaceutical companies.
All the negotiations are left to private insurers and drug companies. The United states is the only nation that operates this way.
Most other countries give the government direct saynd most other countries have significantly lower drug prices than the U s. So,
it makes sense that some experts would lean this way. But, according to Kenneth Thorpe, Chair in the Department of health Policy and Management at Emory University, there is more to Medicare Part D than meets the eye.
The drug program which covers 37 million seniors, has come in $350 billion under budget with a 90 percent satisfaction rating.
Monthly premiums for the program are expected to be $32. 50 for 2016 price that has risen barely in the last five years.
In fact, Part D accounts for just 14 percent of Medicare budget but is responsible for 75 percent of its projected savings in the next decade.
if the government was allowed to negotiate prices directly with industry. f government negotiators set prices too low,
denying seniors access to many medicines, said Thrope. nd, artificially low prices could deprive drug companies of future funds to invest in the risky, expensive research that leads to better treatments and cures.
Essentially, government-led negotiations in Part D could stall the pipeline of new drugsne that has benefited highly from the plan previously,
By expanding the number of seniors with prescription drug insurance, an additional source of revenue was opened up to pharmaceutical companies for future devlopment.
For example, before Part D was implemented there were 18 Alzheimer drugs in development. Now, there are 82. Additionally, the number of diabetes drugs in development jumped from 34 to 142,
and 29 arthritis drugs in the pipeline became 92. Thorpe insists that prescription drugs are not just about price. he most useful way to look at
whether we are getting value for our dollar is the actual treatment. With diabetes or hypertension, it important to look at the total medical care costs of treating those conditions,
he said. According to a 2011 study published in JAMA, by helping seniors manage their chronic illness,
Part D has saved Medicare $12 billion annually in costly hospitalizations and nursing home stays. University of Chicago Conti agrees that Medicare Part D has been a success,
and would like to see the model extended to other arms of Medicare. She also agrees that wiping out the noninterference clause
and allowing the government direct negotiations would have disastrous effects. The difference between the U s. and other OCED nations is sizehe U s. is responsible for approximately 50 percent of total drug spend in the world.
No other single nation is even close. Additionally, drug prices around the world are pegged off the U s. price.
If the U s. was to implement a drastic policy change it would have enormous ripple effects worldwide,
harming R&d expenditures the most, Conti says. nce you have a situation where the government is the majority payer,
and say ow we want the lowest price possible for this drug and as your majority purchaser,
whatever price we negotiate is the standard price. It acts as a floor for everyone else.
and the prices have gotten out of control, said Tulane Schwartz. Vanderbilt Holroyd is in favor of direct negotiation by the government,
but for a different reason than other experts. f we can pay for drugs without putting the burden on our children
and grandchildren, should we be spending the money right now on pharmaceuticals? Or should we wait for them to be developed more slowly?
and are borrowing the money from the future. I do think if the government was more involved with that,
#Researchers Use'Avatar'Equipment to Study Locomotion Simple mechanical descriptions of the way people and animals walk, run, jump
Using an"Avatar"-like bio-robotic motor system that integrates a real muscle and tendon along with a computer controlled nerve stimulator acting as the avatar's spinal cord
Despite the complicated physiology involved, NC State biomedical engineer Greg Sawicki and Temple University postdoctoral researcher Ben Robertson show that
co-author of a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that describes the work."
alerting the wearer by turning on a light-emitting diode (LED) light. The researchers, from the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute and Konkuk Univ. in the Republic of korea, coated cotton and polyester yarn with a nanoglue called bovine serum albumin (BSA.
The yarns were wrapped then in graphene oxide sheets. Graphene is an incredibly strong one-atom-thick layer of carbon,
and is known for its excellent conductive properties of heat and electricity. The graphene sheets stuck very well to the nanoglueo much
a pollutant gas commonly found in vehicle exhaust that also results from fossil fuel combustion. Prolonged exposure to nitrogen dioxide can be dangerous to human health,
Exposure of these specially treated fabrics to nitrogen dioxide led to a change in the electrical resistance of the reduced graphene oxide.
The fabrics were three times as sensitive to nitrogen dioxide in air compared to another reduced graphene oxide sensor previously prepared on a flat material.
"This sensor can bring a significant change to our daily life since it was developed with flexible and widely used fibers,
unlike the gas sensors invariably developed with the existing solid substrates, "says Hyung-Kun Lee,
who led this research initiative. The study was published online in Scientific Reports r
#Scientists Create LEDS From Food, Beverage Waste Most Christmas lights, DVD players, televisions and flashlights have one thing in common:
theye made with light emitting diodes (LEDS. LEDS are used widely for a variety of applications
and have been a popular, more efficient alternative to fluorescent and incandescent bulbs for the past few decades.
Two University of Utah researchers have now found a way to create LEDS from food and beverage waste.
In addition to utilizing food and beverage waste that would otherwise decompose and be of no use,
this development can also reduce potentially harmful waste from LEDS generally made from toxic elements.
LEDS are a type of device that can efficiently convert electricity to light. Unlike fluorescent and incandescent bulbs,
which direct 80 percent of the energy consumed to producing heat, LEDS direct 80 percent of the energy consumed to producing light.
This is made possible by the fact that LEDS do not require a filament to be heated as incandescent and fluorescent bulbs do.
LEDS can be produced by quantum dots, or tiny crystals that have luminescent properties. Quantum dots (QDS) can be made with numerous materials, some
of which are rare and expensive to synthesize, and even potentially harmful to dispose of. Some research over the past 10 years has focused on using carbon dots (CDS),
or simply QDS made of carbon, to create LEDS instead. Compared to other types of quantum dots
CDS have lower toxicity and better biocompatibility, meaning they can be used in a broader variety of applications.
Prashant Sarswat, U Metallurgical Engineering Research Assistant professor, and Professor Michael Free, over the past year and a half, have turned successfully food waste such as discarded pieces of tortilla into CDS,
and subsequently, LEDS. The results were published recently in Physical chemistry Chemical Physics, a journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
To synthesize waste into CDS, Sarswat and Free employed a solvothermal synthesis, or one in which the waste was placed into a solvent under pressure
and high temperature until CDS were formed. In this experiment the researchers used soft drinks and pieces of bread and tortilla.
The food and beverage waste were placed each in a solvent and heated both directly and indirectly for anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes.
After successfully finding traces of CDS from the synthesis, Sarswat and Free proceeded to illuminate the CDS to monitor their formation and color.
The pair also employed four other tests, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, Raman and AFM imaging to determine the CDSVARIOUS optical and material properties. ynthesizing
and characterizing CDS derived from waste is a very challenging task. We essentially have to determine the size of dots which are only 20 nanometers or smaller in diameter
so we have to run multiple tests to be sure CDS are present and to determine what optical properties they possess,
said Sarswat. For comparison, a human hair is around 75,000 nanometers in diameter. The various tests Sarswat and Free ran first measured the size of the CDS,
which correlates with the intensity of the dotscolor and brightness. The tests then determined which carbon source produced the best CDS.
For example, sucrose and D-fructose dissolved in soft drinks were found to be the most effective sources for production of CDS.
heated and hardened to solidify the CDS for practical use in LEDS. An environmentally sustainable alternative Currently, one of the most common sources of QDS is cadmium selenide,
a compound comprised of a two toxic elements. The ability to create QDS in the form of CDS from food
as the food and beverages themselves are not toxic. Ds derived from food and beverage waste are not based on common toxic elements such as cadmium and selenium,
which makes their processing and disposal more environmentally friendly than it is for most other QDS.
the use of food and beverage waste as the starting material for QDS allows for reduced waste
In addition to being broken toxic when down, cadmium selenide is also expensivene website listed a price of $529 for 25 ml of the compound. ith food
and beverage waste that are already there, our starting material is much less expensive. In fact, it essentially free,
To be able to use this waste for creating LEDS which are used widely in a number of technologies would be an environmentally sustainable approach.
Looking forward Sarswat and Free hope to continue studying the LEDS produced from food and beverage waste for stability
and to use these LEDS in everyday devices. To successfully make use of waste that already exists, that the end goal,
Niklas Arvidsson, a researcher in industrial economics and management at KTH, says that the widespread and growing embrace of the mobile payment system,
"Cash is still an important means of payment in many countries'markets, but that no longer applies here in Sweden,
"In a country where bank cards are used routinely for even the smallest purchases, there are less than 80 billion Swedish crowns in circulation (about EUR8 billion), a sharp decline from just six years ago,
The rest is socked away in people's homes and bank deposit boxes, or can be found circulating in the underground economy.
The result of collaboration between major Swedish and Danish banks, Swish is a direct payment app that is used for transactions between individuals, in real time.
The service's direct collaboration with Bankgiro and Sweden's national bank, Riksbanken, is a critical factor in its success
. But if Swish starts to be used on a larger scale and grows to include retail transactions and e-commerce,
Arvidsson says it is likely the country's entire payment system infrastructure will have to be revamped. That may not be as prohibitive an idea as it sounds.
Arvidsson says Swish is already revolutionizing the banking system, which itself is no stranger to bold digital projects.
With digital giro systems, early electronic payment services and other advances in online financial services, Swedish banks have been early adopters of advanced IT systems,
"Combined with a strong IT sector, this has led to more competitive financial services in Sweden. The success also depends on the Swedish consumer tradition of welcoming electronic payment services."
"Besides simplicity and lower costs, digital payments also add transparency to the nation's payment system.
Several banks in Sweden already have digitalized 100 percent branches that will simply not accept cash."
"At the offices which do handle banknotes and coins, the customer must explain where the cash comes from,
according to the regulations aimed at money laundering and terrorist financing, "he says. Bank staff are required to file police reports in response to suspicious cash transactions.
In spite of its popularity, Sweden will still have to ensure that all people are able to participate in the new payment system,
Arvidsson says. The transformation would present serious challenges for those who are unfamiliar with computers and mobile phones mainly older people living in rural areas.
Other segments of the population likely to feel the impact are the homeless and undocumented immigrants.
In a society without notes and coins they will be even more at the mercy of government systems to survive.
Whether cashless societies spread beyond Sweden is another question i
#Mobile Eye-test Device Could Lead to Prescription Virtual-reality Screens After five years of development and about 40,000 tests worldwide,
the mobile eye-test device developed by MIT spinout Eyenetra is coming to hospitals, optometric clinics, optical stores,
and even homes nationwide. But on the heels of its commercial release, Eyenetra says it been courting offers from virtual-reality companies seeking to use the technology to develop ision-correctedvirtual-reality displays. s
much as we want to solve the prescription glasses market, we could also help bring virtual reality to the masses,
an associate professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab who co-invented the device.
The device, called Netra, is a plastic, binocular-like headset. Users attach a smartphone, with the startup app, to the front and peer through the headset at the phone display.
Patterns, such as separate red and green lines or circles, appear on the screen. The user turns a dial to align the patterns
and pushes a button to lock them in place. After eight interactions, the app calculates the difference between
what the user sees as lignedand the actual alignment of the patterns. This signals any refractive errors
such as nearsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism. The app then displays the refractive powers, axis of astigmatism,
and pupillary distance required for eyeglasses prescriptions. In July, the startup launched Blink, an on-demand refractive test service in New york,
where employees bring the Netra device to people homes. In India, Eyenetra has launched Nayantara, a similar program to provide low-cost eye tests to the poor and uninsured.
Both efforts used Eyenetra suite of tools, now available for eye-care providers worldwide. According to the World health organization, uncorrected refractive errors are the world second-highest cause of blindness.
Eyenetra originally invented the device for the developing world specifically for poor and remote regions of Africa and Asia, where many people can find health care easily.
India alone has around 300 million people in need of eyeglasses. But the United states has offered the best market,
he says. f youe to play that role of smartphone-based personalized health solutions, then we have an amazing lead over anyone else. ersonalized correction Over the past six months,
is to use the startup technology to develop custom screens to fit a user eyeglass prescription.
Prescription screens could make virtual-reality devices more formfitting for a more immersive and comfortable experience,
If the glasses shift, for instance, optical aberrations disrupt the viewing, potentially causing headache, fatigue, and nausea.
Eyenetra technology measures how a user optical refractive errors will affect how they see patterns on a digital display in an environment very similar to a virtual-reality headset,
Therefore, companies could use these precise measurements to develop screens that are corrected pre to a user specific refraction errors. t personalized correction
says Raskar. our vision correction is built into the headset. Such an approach could be game-changing,
as billions of dollars have recently been invested into virtual-reality technology: In 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus Rift for $2 billion;
Google and other big companies recently backed Magic Leap with more than $540 million; and Microsoft has starting pooling resources into virtual-reality research. n addition to the major business Eyenetra is doing for prescriptions,
it can also disrupt virtual reality, which is an even bigger market, says Raskar. User friendly optics Around 2009, Raskar and some of his Media Lab students developed a prototype of Netra:
A small, plastic device was clipped to a smartphone, and viewers used the phone keyboard to align the patterns.
The device was designed as an inverse of a traditional Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor machine, which shines a laser into the patient eye
and measures the refracted light with a photon sensor to find optical aberrations that affect eyesight.
Essentially, Netra replaces the expensive sensor with a smartphone display. Because the red and green light goes through different parts of the eye,
aligning the two colors similarly demonstrates any optical aberrations. Later that year, Raskar and Eyenetra cofounder and chief technology officer Vitor Pamplona
who co-invented the technology, brought the invention to MAS. 533 (Imaging and Fabrication Ventures),
a class he co-teaches that presents image-based projects for students to further innovate. There, teams of students ran the device through several case studies,
researched markets, and established a network of investors. Over the next few months, Raskar, Pamplona, and other students entered the prototype in MIT IDEAS competition,
where they won a prize, and the MIT $100k Business plan Competition, where they earned a spot as semifinalists.
Then, a grant from the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation officially launched the company in 2010. ut we realized we had to start all over again
Raskar says. This meant a complete redesign of the product and business plan to focus less on the technology and more on market need. s much as we wanted to be disruptive in long run,
the reality of the world was had that we to work with really good partners, he says.
Eyenetra teamed up with the LV Prasad Eye Institute and Lotus Eye Institute and Hospital, among other clinical partners,
About 340 product iterations led to an improved device and better user interface. For instance, around three years ago
the team realized that people didn perform well interacting with the phone. So, for the current design, they moved all buttons and knobs to the actual device.
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