#Whatsapp has Over 800 Million Users, 600 Million are on Android A few months ago the company Whatsapp revealed that it has at least 800 million users.
However, there is a new study that reveals some astonishing figures. Out of the over 800 million people that use this instant messaging app for messaging and voice calling services,
more than three quarters are reported to be using Android devices. This means that at least 600 million people use Whatsapp on Android.
The study was conducted by Globalwebindex (GWI), and it involved about 50,000 active internet users, with Whatsapp segment constituting around 12,606 users from 34 countries across the globe.
According to the findings, 73%of those using Whatsapp use it from Android devices while those using the iphone followed from a distance with 22%of the market share.
This means that the remaining 5%is shared among users of Windows phone, Nokia, and Blackberry devices.
Whatsapp has almost 1 billion usersin January, Whatsapp revealed that it has reached 700 million users.
A few months later on in April, the company revealed that it was sailing on a user base of more than 800 million people.
Based on this growth matrix it is true to say that Whatsapp currently has more than 900 million monthly active users,
a figure that could easily rise to 1 billion by the close of the year 2015.
Whatsapp made a record by becoming only the second non-Google app to achieve the 1 billion downloadsmark on the Google Play Store.
However, as you may have noted from the above stats, this figure does not equal the number of active users of the app.
Nevertheless, when this number of downloadsfigure is placed on the official number of active users of Whatsapp,
it is obvious that Android takes home the lion share, hence the unsurprising nature of the GWI report.
Whatsapp growth is a reflection of global smartphone updatewhatsapp keeps adding more and more users to its user base,
and this can be attributed to the continued number of smartphones in the world markets. The general number of Android smartphones in the handset market is more than any other company;
hence, the huge number of Whatsapp users on this platform. Android is an open source operating system and for sure,
it seems the door to new entrants to the platform won be closing anytime soon.
According to a recent study, there are over 24,000 unique Android manufacturers/devices, an increment of 28%from last year total.
Most of these devices are very cheap, going at $200 or less and are available in most emerging markets.
A research by the IDC revealed that Android is used on more than 78%of devices around the world
while ios only manages 18.3%.%We see the same figures with Whatsapp for Android and Whatsapp for ios respectively e
#Researchers Develop 3d printed Brain tissue The brain is amazingly complex, with around 86 billion nerve cells. The challenge for researchers to create bench-top brain tissue from
which they can learn about how the brain functions, is an extremely difficult one. Researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES) have taken a step closer to meeting this challenge,
by developing a 3d printed layered structure incorporating neural cells, that mimics the structure of brain tissue.
The value of bench-top brain tissue is huge. Pharmaceutical companies spend millions of dollars testing therapeutic drugs on animals
only to discover in human trials that the drug has an altogether different level of effectiveness.
Wee not sure why, but the human brain differs distinctly from that of an animal. A bench-top brain that accurately reflects actual brain tissue would be significant for researching not only the effect of drugs,
but brain disorders like schizophrenia, and degenerative brain disease. ACES Director and research author Professor Gordon Wallace said that the breakthrough is significant progress in the quest to create a bench-top brain that will enable important insights into brain function,
in addition to providing an experimental test bed for new drugs and electroceuticals. e are still a long way from printing a brain
but the ability to arrange cells so as they form neuronal networks is a significant step forward,
Professor Wallace said. To create their six-layered structure, researchers developed a custom bio-ink containing naturally occurring carbohydrate materials.
The custom materials have properties that allow accurate cell dispersion throughout the structure, whilst providing a rare level of protection to the cells.
and developed for use in a standard cell culturing facility without the need for expensive bioprinting equipment.
with those in materials science, to realise a biological outcome, Professor Wallace said. his paves the way for the use of more sophisticated printers to create structures with much finer resolution. 3d printing of layered brain-like structures using peptide modified gellan gum substrates
The brain is an enormously complex organ structured into various regions of layered tissue. Researchers have attempted to study the brain by modeling the architecture using two dimensional (2d) in vitro cell culturing methods.
While those platforms attempt to mimic the in vivo environment, they do not truly resemble the three dimensional (3d) microstructure of neuronal tissues.
Brain-like structures were constructed using a bio-ink consisting of a novel peptide-modified biopolymer,
and developed for use in traditional cell culturing facilities without the need for extensive bioprinting equipment.
The neural cell viability combined with the support of neural network formation demonstrated the cell supportive nature of the matrix.
The facile ability to form discrete cell-containing layers validates the application of this novel printing technique to form complex, layered and viable 3d cell structures.
These brain-like structures offer the opportunity to reproduce more accurate 3d in vitro microstructures with applications ranging from cell behavior studies to improving our understanding of brain injuries and neurodegenerative diseases r
Stony Brook researchers publish experimental findings in the Journal of Neuroscience that show the lateral position more efficiently rids the brain of solutes that may contribute to disease.
and prove to be an important practice to help reduce the chances of developing Alzheimer, Parkinson and other neurological diseases, according to researchers at Stony Brook University.
By using dynamic contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to image the brain glymphatic pathway, a complex system that clears wastes and other harmful chemical solutes from the brain,
Stony Brook University researchers Hedok Lee, Phd, Helene Benveniste, MD, Phd, and colleagues, discovered that a lateral sleeping position is the best position to most efficiently remove waste from the brain.
In humans and many animals the lateral sleeping position is the most common one. The buildup of brain waste chemicals may contribute to the development of Alzheimer disease and other neurological conditions.
Their finding is published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Dr. Benveniste, Principal investigator and a Professor in the Departments of Anesthesiology and Radiology at Stony Brook University School of medicine, has used dynamic contrast MRI for several years to examine the glymphatic pathway in rodent models.
The method enables researchers to identify and define the glymphatic pathway, where cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) filters through the brain and exchanges with interstitial fluid (ISF) to clear waste, similar to the way the body lymphatic system clears waste from organs.
It is during sleep that the glymphatic pathway is most efficient. Brain waste includes amyloid ß (amyloid) and tau proteins,
along with kinetic modeling to quantify the CSF-ISF exchange rates in anesthetized rodentsbrains in three positions lateral (side),
and therefore the assessment of the clearance of damaging brain proteins that may contribute to or cause brain diseases. r. Benveniste and first-author Dr. Hedok Lee,
Assistant professor in the Departments of Anesthesiology and Radiology at Stony Brook developed the safe posture positions for the experiments.
Their colleagues at the University of Rochester including Lulu Xie, Rashid Deane and Maiken Nedergaard, Phd,
used fluorescence microscopy and radioactive tracers to validate the MRI data and to assess the influence of body posture on the clearance of amyloid from the brains. t is interesting that the lateral sleep position is already the most popular in human and most animals even in the wild
therefore adds further support to the concept that sleep subserves a distinct biological function of sleep
Many types of dementia are linked to sleep disturbances, including difficulties in falling asleep. It is increasing acknowledged that these sleep disturbances may accelerate memory loss in Alzheimer disease.
Our findng brings new insight into this topic by showing it is also important what position you sleep in,
#Words That Work Together Stay together How language gives your brain a break. Here a quick task:
1) ohn threw out the old trash sitting in the kitchen. 2) ohn threw the old trash sitting in the kitchen out. ither sentence is grammatically acceptable,
but you probably found the first one to be more natural. Why? Perhaps because of the placement of the word ut,
That means language users have a global preference for more locally grouped dependent words, whenever possible. eople want words that are related to each other in a sentence to be close together,
says Richard Futrell, a Phd student in the Department of Brain and Cognitive sciences at MIT,
a professor of cognitive science and co-author of the paper. e though it was probably true more widely,
the researchers used four large databases of sentences that have been parsed grammatically: one from Charles University in Prague, one from Google, one from the Universal Dependencies Consortium (a new group of computational linguists),
and a Chinese-language database from the Linguistic Dependencies Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania.
The sentences are taken from published texts, and thus represent everyday language use. To quantify the effect of placing related words closer to each other,
Other scholars who have done research on this topic say the study provides valuable new information. t interesting and exciting work,
says David Temperley, a professor at the University of Rochester, who along with his Rochester colleague Daniel Gildea has authored co a study comparing dependency length in English
Gibson, and Mahowald readily note that the study leaves larger questions open: Does the DLM tendency occur primarily to help the production of language, its reception, a more strictly cognitive function,
Peter Dizikes MITIMAGE Credit: The image is credited to Christine Daniloff/MITORIGINAL Research: Abstract for arge-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languagesby Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald,
10.1073/pnas. 1502134112abstractlarge-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languagesexplaining the variation between human languages and the constraints on that variation is a core goal of linguistics.
and practical work, there is not yet large-scale evidence that dependency length is minimized actually in real utterances across many languages;
previous work has focused either on a small number of languages or on limited kinds of data about each language.
which has implications not only for a range of neuropsychiatric disorders such as ADHD, eating disorders and anxiety disorders,
but also for more common problems involving maladaptive daily decisions about drug or alcohol use, gambling or credit card binges.
How the work was done The researchers discovered the importance of this connection by working with rats trained to make choices between stimuli that would result in their receiving different amounts of rewards, after varying periods of time.
The rats were asked to choose between two identical visual shapes by pressing their nose against one of them on a touchscreen (similar to an ipad), in exchange for rewards in the form of sugar pellets.
Like most humans rats have a sweet tooth. With time, rats learned to negotiate a trade-off between a small reward (1 sugar pellet) delivered immediately
lesions to other parts of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, known to be involved in certain aspects of decision-making,
and those with brain disease, said Prof. Yogita Chudasama, of Mcgill Psychology department and the lead researcher on the paper. n some ways this relationship makes sense;
to be a therapeutic target in human patient groups. m
#Brain Friendly Interface Could Change the Way People with Spinal cord Injuries Lead Their Lives Recent research published in the journal Microsystems
& Nanoengineering could eventually change the way people living with prosthetics and spinal cord injury lead their lives.
Instead of using neural prosthetic deviceshich suffer from immune-system rejection and are believed to fail due to a material and mechanical mismatch multi-institutional team,
including Lohitash Karumbaiah of the University of Georgia Regenerative Bioscience Center, has developed a brain-friendly extracellular matrix environment of neuronal cells that contain very little foreign material.
These by design electrodes are shielded by a covering that the brain recognizes as part of its own composition.
Although once believed to be devoid of immune cells and therefore of immune responses, the brain is recognized now to have its own immune system that protects it against foreign invaders. his is not by any means the device that youe going to implant into a patient,
said Karumbaiah, an assistant professor of animal and dairy science in the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental sciences. his is proof of concept that extracellular matrix can be used to ensheathe a functioning electrode without the use of any other foreign
or synthetic materials. mplantable neural prosthetic devices in the brain have been around for almost two decades,
helping people living with limb loss and spinal cord injury become more independent. However not only do neural prosthetic devices suffer from immune-system rejection,
and Mark Allen of the University of Pennsylvania, found that the extracellular matrix derived electrodes adapted to the mechanical properties of brain tissue
and is chair of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical engineering at the Georgia Institute of technology and Emory University,
as well as Allen, who at the time was director of the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology. opefully,
once we converge upon the nanofabrication techniques that would enable these to be clinically translational,
this same methodology could then be applied in getting these extracellular matrix derived electrodes to be the next wave of brain implants,
There is a significant burden in cost of care and quality of life for people suffering from this disability.
The research team is one part of many in the prosthesis industry, which includes those who design the robotics for the artificial limbs,
and developers who design the software that decodes the neural signal. hat neural prosthetic devices do is communicate seamlessly to an external prosthesis,
Charlene Betourney University of Georgiaimage Source: The image is credited to the researchersoriginal Research: Full open access research for mall-Molecule-Driven Direct Reprogramming of Mouse Fibroblasts into Functional Neuronsby Xiang Li, Xiaohan Zuo, Junzhan Jing, Yantao Ma,
Jiaming Wang, Defang Liu, Jialiang Zhu, Xiaomin Du, Liang Xiong, Yuanyuan Du, Jun Xu, Xiong Xiao, Jinlin Wang zhen Chai, Yang Zhao,
and Hongkui Deng in Microsystems & Nanoengineering. Published online June 8 2015 doi: 10.1038/micronano. 2015. 10abstractextracellular matrix-based intracortical microelectrodes:
Toward a microfabricated neural interface based on natural materialsextracellular matrix (ECM)- based implantable neural electrodes (NES) were achieved using a microfabrication strategy on natural-substrate-based organic materials.
Further, it rendered the implants sufficiently rigid for penetration into the target brain region and allowed them subsequently to soften to match the elastic modulus of brain tissue upon exposure to physiological conditions,
#How Chronic Inflammation Can Lead to Cancer Researchers discover how the immune system can create cancerous DNA mutations when fighting off infection.
Chronic inflammation caused by disease or exposure to dangerous chemicals has long been linked to cancer,
but exactly how this process takes place has remained unclear. Now, a precise mechanism by which chronic inflammation can lead to cancer has been uncovered by researchers at MIT a development that could lead to improved targets for preventing future tumors.
In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
the researchers unveil how one of a battery of chemical warfare agents used by the immune system to fight off infection can itself create DNA mutations that lead to cancer.
As many as one in five cancers are believed to be caused or promoted by inflammation. These include mesothelioma,
a type of lung cancer caused by inflammation following chronic exposure to asbestos, and colon cancer in people with a history of inflammatory bowel disease, says Bogdan Fedeles,
a research associate in the Department of Biological engineering at MIT, and the paper lead author.
Innate immune response Inflammation is part of the body innate response to invading pathogens or potentially harmful irritants.
The immune system attacks the invader with a number of reactive molecules designed to neutralize it
including hydrogen peroxide, nitric oxide and hypochlorous acid. However, these molecules can also cause collateral damage to healthy tissue around the infection site:
he presence of a foreign pathogen activates the immune response, which tries to fight off the bacteria,
but in this process it also damages some of the normal cells, Fedeles explains. Previous work by Peter Dedon, Steven Tannenbaum, Gerald Wogan,
and James Fox all professors of biological engineering at MIT had identified the presence of a lesion,
or site of damage in the structure of DNA, called 5-chlorocytosine (5clc) in the inflamed tissues of mice infected with the pathogen Helicobacter hepaticus.
This lesion, a damaged form of the normal DNA base cytosine, is caused by the reactive molecule hypochlorous acid the main ingredient in household bleach
which is generated by the immune system. The lesion 5clc, was present in remarkably high levels within the tissue,
says John Essigmann, the William R. 1956) and Betsy P. Leitch Professor in Residence Professor of Chemistry, Toxicology and Biological engineering at MIT,
who led the current research. hey found the lesions were very persistent in DNA, meaning we don have a repair system to take them out,
Essigmann says. n our field lesions that are persistent, if they are also mutagenic, are the kind of lesions that would initiate cancer,
he adds. DNA sequencing of a developing gastrointestinal tumor revealed two types of mutation: cytosine (C) bases changing to thymine (T) bases,
and adenine (A) bases changing to guanine (G) bases. Since 5clc had not yet been studied as a potentially carcinogenic mutagen,
the researchers decided to investigate the lesion further, in a bid to uncover if it is indeed mutagenic.
The researchers found that, rather than always pairing with a guanine base as a cytosine would,
the 5clc instead paired with an adenine base around 5 percent of the time a medically relevant mutation frequency, according to Essigmann.
when triggered by infection, fires hypochlorous acid at the site, damaging cytosines in the DNA of the surrounding healthy tissue.
This damage causes some of the cytosines to become 5clc. In addition, the researchers hypothesize that the hypochlorous acid also damages cytosines in the nucleotide pool,
he explains. his scenario would best explain the work of James Fox and his MIT colleagues on gastrointestinal cancer.
the researchers replicated the genome containing the lesion with a variety of different types of polymerase,
and causes the same kind of mutations seen within cells, Fedeles says. hat gave us confidence that this phenomenon would in fact happen in human cells containing high levels of 5clc.
What more, the C-to-T mutation characteristic of 5clc is extremely common, and is present in more than 50 percent of mutagenic ignatures,
or patterns of DNA mutations, associated with cancerous tumors. e believe that in the context of inflammation-induced damage of DNA,
many of these C-to-T mutations may be caused by 5clc, possibly in correlation with other types of mutations as part of these mutational signatures,
Yinsheng Wang, a principal investigator in the Department of chemistry at the University of California at Riverside who was involved not in the research,
says the paper provides a novel mechanistic link between chronic inflammation and cancer development. ith a combination of biochemical, genetic,
and structural biology approaches, the researchers have found that 5-chlorocytosine is intrinsically miscoding during DNA replication
and it could give rise to significant frequencies of C-to-T mutation, a type of mutation that is frequently observed in human cancers,
Wang says. Studies of tissue samples of patients suffering from inflammatory bowel disease have found significant levels of 5clc,
Fedeles adds. By comparing these levels with his team findings on how mutagenic 5clc is,
the researchers predict that accumulation of the lesions would increase the mutation rate of a cell up to 30-fold,
who was honored with the prestigious Benjamin F. Trump award at the 2015 Aspen Cancer Conference for the research.
scientists must use electron microscopes. However, the tissue must first be fixed to prepare it for this high magnification imaging method.
The work is published in elife. The shrinking brainrecent years have seen an upsurge of brain imaging, with renewed interest in techniques like electron microscopy,
which allows us to observe and study the architecture of the brain in unprecedented detail.
The brain tissue here was mouse cerebral cortex. The rapid freezing method is able to prevent the water in the tissue from forming crystals,
as it would do in a regular freezer, by also applying very high pressures. Water crystals can severely damage the tissue by rupturing its cells.
But in this high-pressure freezing method, the water turns into a kind of glass, preserving the original structures and architecture of the tissue.
The next step is embed to the frozen tissue in resin. This requires removing the glass-water and replacing it first with acetone
To the researcherssurprise, the data matched, adding even more evidence that cryofixation preserves the real anatomy of the brain. ll this shows us that high-pressure cryofixation is a very attractive method for brain imaging,
and the large number of participants who reflect the general adult population rather than just college students.
The study appears in the journal PLOS Biology. t an impressive demonstration of imaging our feelings,
an assistant professor in Psychological and Brain sciences at Dartmouth. motions are central to our daily lives
The quest to understand the motional brainhas motivated hundreds of neuroimaging studies in recent years.
But for neuroimaging to be useful, sensitive and specific rain signaturesmust be developed that can be applied to individual people to yield information about their emotional experiences,
neuropathology or treatment prognosis. Thus far, the neuroscience of emotion has yielded many important results but no such indicators for emotional experiences.
Chang and his colleagues studied 182 participants who were shown negative photos (bodily injuries, acts of aggression, hate groups, car wrecks, human feces) and neutral photos.
Using brain imaging and machine learning techniques, the researchers identified a neural signature of negative emotion a single neural activation pattern distributed across the entire brain that accurately predicts how negative a person will feel after viewing unpleasant images. his means that brain imaging has the potential to accurately uncover how someone is feeling without knowing anything about them other than their brain activity,
Chang says. his has enormous implications for improving our understanding of how emotions are generated and regulated,
Unlike most previous research, the new study included a large sample size that reflects the general adult population and not just young college students;
used machine learning and statistics to develop a predictive model of emotion; and, most importantly, tested participants across multiple psychological states,
Chang says. s skepticism for neuroimaging grows based on over-sold and-interpreted findings and failures to replicate based on small sizes,
Another surprising finding is that our emotion brain signature using lots of people performed better at predicting how a person was feeling than their own brain data.
four to 10 times the standard fmri experiment we were able to uncover responses that generalized beyond the training sample to new participants remarkably well. i
Scientists find the brain works to minimize loss of vision, other functions. A new study may have unlocked understanding of a mysterious part of the brain with implications for neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer.
The results, published in Translational Vision Science & Technology (TVST), open up new areas of research in the pursuit of neuroprotective therapies.
Glaucoma is a neurodegenerative disease where patients lose seemingly random patches of vision in each eye.
This random pattern of vision loss is in stark contrast to loss from a brain tumor or stroke,
which causes both eyes to develop blind spots in the same location. Scientists have thought long that glaucoma progression is independent of
or uncontrolled by the brain. Last year researchers found evidence that the progression of glaucoma is not random
and that the brain may be involved after all. Specifically, they found patients with moderate to severe glaucoma maintained vision in one eye where it was lost in the other like two puzzle pieces fitting together (a igsaw Effect. his suggests some communication between the eyes must be going on
and that can only happen in the brain, explains the study lead author, William Eric Sponsel, MD, of the University of Texas at San antonio, Department of Biomedical engineering.
In the latest TVST paper, Refined Frequency Doubling Perimetry Analysis Reaffirms Central nervous system Control of Chronic Glaucomatous Neurodegeneration
Sponsel and his research team found that the Jigsaw Effect begins at the earliest stages of glaucoma and discovered clues as to
which part of the brain is responsible for optimizing vision in the face of glaucoma slow destruction of sight.
However, these findings, which challenge longstanding assumptions about glaucoma, have been met with skepticism. Other glaucoma experts challenged the results in a letter to the TVST editor. f the brain controls the distribution of vision loss in glaucoma,
then a patient vision with their two eyes should be better than if you simply ix and matchthe vision of right and left eyes from different patients,
explained letter co-author Paul Artes, Phd, of Plymouth University, Department of Eye and Visual Sciences.
Along with co-author Jonathan Denniss, Phd, University of Nottingham, Visual Neuroscience Group, their letter analyzed a new cohort of glaucoma patients in which hat essentially
what we did. And we did not find any visual advantage in a patient own eyes versus the combined vision in eyes from different patients;
indeed we found the opposite effect. ponsel and co-authors responded to the letter to the editor with their own. ur analysis of the data Artes
and Denniss introduced demonstrated conclusively that the igsaw Effectwas indisputably present in patients we had seen never even.
Moreover, we were able to confirm that the alternative analytical method they proposed could not reliably detect very obvious computer-generated complementary visual field pairs,
Co-author Ted Maddess, Phd, of the Australian National University, Center of Excellence in Vision Science, explains that these patterns mimic structures found at the very back of the brain, known as ocular dominance columns.
The progression of Alzheimer and Parkinson diseases, which have neurodegenerative biology similar to glaucoma, may also be mediated actively by the brain. ur work has illustrated that the brain will not let us lose control of the same function on both sides of the brain
if that can be avoided. It seems likely that the same kind of protective mechanism will be at work with other neurodegenerative disorders,
he says. The investigative team believes that if the brain regulates neurodegeneration that if the brain controls how it loses control then researchers will now be able to look into largely unexplored regulatory processes for opportunities to slow
or stop the progression of these diseases. ee opened up this beautiful new world; there is so much to discover here,
says Sponsel. Additional Information: The letter to the editor xtraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence: Centrally Mediated Preservation of Binocular Visual field in Glaucoma is Unlikelyby Jonathan Denniss
and Paul H. Artes is available here. The response to the above letter efinitive Response to Denniss and Artes:
The Paired Eyes and Brain in One Person Are One Unitby William E. Sponsel; Matthew A. Reilly;
Refined analysis of frequency doubling perimetric data was performed to assess binocular visual field conservation in patients with comparable degrees of bilateral glaucomatous damage,
Case control study of 41 consecutive patients with bilaterally mild to severe glaucoma; each right eye visual field locus was paired with randomly-selected co-isopteric left eye loci,
Refined data analysis of paired Matrix visual fields confirms the existence of a natural optimization of binocular visual function in severe bilateral glaucoma via interlocking fields that could only be created by CNS involvement.
The paired eyes and brain are reaffirmed to function as a unified system in the progressive age-related neurodegenerative condition chronic open angle glaucoma,
Given the extensive homology of this disorder with other age-related neurodegenerations, it is reasonable to assume that the brain will similarly resist simultaneous bilateral loss of paired functional zones in both hemispheres in diseases like
Alzheimer and Parkinson disease. Glaucomatous eyes at all stages of the disease appear to provide a highly accessible paired-organ study model for developing therapeutics to optimize conservation of function in neurodegenerative disorders. efined Frequency Doubling Perimetry Analysis Reaffirms Central nervous system Control of Chronic
Glaucomatous Neurodegenerationby Matthew A. Reilly; Analaura Villarreal; Ted Maddess; and William Eric Sponsel in Translational Vision Science & Technology d
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