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#Apps by the Dashboard Light Starting next month, many car buyers will be getting a novel feature:

Internet connections with speeds similar to those on the fastest smartphonesnd even a few early dashboard-based apps, engineered to be dumbed as-down as possible.

Backseat passengers could get streaming movies and fast Wi-fi connections to smart watches and tablets in (and near) the car.

For drivers, high-resolution navigation maps would load quickly, and high-fidelity audio could stream from Internet radio services.

But the first dashboard apps will be limited, spare versions of familiar ones like the Weather Channel, Pandora, and Priceline.

The first U s. model with the fast wireless connectionnown as 4G LTE around 10 times faster than 3g connectionss expected to be the 2015 Audi a3,

which goes on sale next month for a starting price of $29, 900. Data plans will cost extran average of around $16 a month.

GM says it expects to sell 4g-equipped 2015 Chevrolets and other models starting in June.

Many other carmakers, including Ford and Toyota, are following suit, both in the U s. and worldwide, using partnerships with wireless carriers to deliver the connectivity.

By providing apps, carmakers see an opportunity for product differentiation and steady revenue streams. They also suggest that connectivity can lead to new safety features

and that using these onboard services will be safer than furtively glancing at phones. But when drivers browse the GM Appshop,

they shouldn expect what they get on an iphone or a Galaxy phone. GM expects to provide just 10 apps initially, most of them mapping, news,

and radio services. That partly because the automaker screening process for apps is brutal, says Greg Ross,

director of product strategy and infotainment for GM vehicles. hey go through rigorous safety and security standards,

he says. nd since it pulling data from the car, it locked down before it ever gets into the vehicle.

As a result the technology and interface need to be almost as simple as an analog radio knob,

says Bruce Hopkins, cofounder of BT Software, based in San diego. He is one of a very few developers

whose apps will be available in GM cars. Called Kaliki, BT Software app provides audio readings of storiesone by humans, not text-to-speech softwareulled from mainstream publications such as USA Today and TV Guide,

as well as podcasts from radio and TV STATIONS. Its advantage over the radio? adio has been around for the last eight decades,

and you still can pause it, he says.)Hopkins followed detailed rules from GMO pinch-zoom controls

or tiny icons allowed, for examplend spent two years developing the app, including time in a test facility in Detroit. ne of the terms GM talks a lot about is driver workload,

he says. ou cannot have anything that would require the driver to have several different things they have to think about.

At the end of the day, they want something that works as simple as the regular radio. The apps know

if you are driving. Drivers will never be able to open a erms and conditionsscreenr play a game,

assuming games ever comenless the vehicle transmission is in ark. Despite the hurdles, 4, 000 developers have registered with GM app store,

because the payoff could be large for them: getting their apps included in a car could help them market versions that work on smartphones.

And apps in cars command much more attention if they are among just a few that a driver can choose from while sitting behind the wheel for an hour or two every day.

In the longer term, apps will emerge that draw on data generated by the car, says GM Ross.

This could be useful for maintenance or driving efficiencyr to generate data for insurance discounts.

Apps tapping information from many cars could alert drivers to accidents; signals indicating hard braking

or slipping wheels in other cars could warn of slick roads ahead. Sensors can ultimately help bring about semi-autonomous

or fully autonomous cars (see ata Show Google Robot Cars Are Smoother, Safer Drivers Than You or I. Henry Tirri,

CTO of Nokia, says the potential for apps in cars is given vast the amount of data vehicles produce. he car is already probably the densest sensor hub that an individual owns right now,

he says. See fter Microsoft Deal, What Left of Nokia Will Bet on Internet of things. In Audi case, the service will cost $100 for up to five gigabytes of data over six months,

or $500 for 30 gigabytes over 30 months. GM has announced not pricing except to say that customers can get various plans combining service to their homes, phones, and cars.

Both GM and Audi are using AT&T to provide service (see M and AT&T Blur Line Between Car and Smartphone r

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#Spying Is Bad for Business Following a one-day summit in Brasilia this February, negotiators from Brazil and Europe reached a deal to lay a $185 million fiber-optic cable spanning the 3, 476 miles between Fortaleza and Lisbon.

The cable will be built by a consortium of Spanish and Brazilian companies. According to Brazil president, Dilma Rousseff, it will rotect freedom.

No longer will South america Internet traffic get routed through Miami, where American spies might see it. She not being paranoid.

Documents leaked last June by former U s. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden revealed a global surveillance operation coördinated by the U s. National security agency and its counterpart in Britain

the GCHQ. Among the hundreds of millions of alleged targets of the dragnet: Brazil state oil company, Petrobras,

as well as Rousseff own cell phone. The big question in this MIT Technology Review business report is how the Snowden revelations are affecting the technology business.

Some of the consequences are already visible. Consumers are favoring anonymous apps. Large Internet companies, like Google, have raced to encrypt all their communications.

In Germany, legislators are discussing an all-European communications grid. There is a risk that the Internet could fracture into smaller national networks,

protected by security barriers. In this view, Brazil new cable is akin to China Great Firewall (that country system for censoring Web results

or calls by nationalists in Russia to block Skype, or an unfolding German plan to keep most e-mail traffic within its borders.

Nations are limiting access to their networks. The result, some believe, could be the collapse of the current Internet.

Analysts including Forrester research predict billions in losses for U s. Internet services such as Dropbox and Amazon because of suspicion from technology consumers, particularly in Europe,

in the wake of Snowden revelations. he Snowden leaks have painted a U s.-centric Internet infrastructure,

and now people are looking for alternatives, says James Lewis, director of the strategic technologies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington,

D c. Many nations eavesdrop, each for their own reasons. Some target dissidents with malware to watch their keystrokes.

Others, like China, also bleed companies of intellectual secrets about jet fighters and wind turbines. So pervasive and successful has digital espionage become that in 2012, Keith Alexander,

the Army general in charge of the NSA, described it as he greatest transfer of wealth in history.

He estimated that U s. companies lose $250 billion a year to intellectual-property theft. This is hastening the trend to secure networks

to isolate them, or even to disconnect. In this report, we visit a small energy company for which a network cable might as well be Medusa hair.

The company is frightened so that it keeps its best ideas on computers quarantined from the Internet.

Retrograde technology is winning money and resources. Following the Snowden revelations, Russia secret service reportedly placed an order for $15, 000 worth of typewriters and ribbons.

They said paper was safest for some presidential documents. Security experts have been warning for some time that computer networks are not secure from intruders.

But in 2013 we learned that the mayhem has become strategic. Governments now write computer viruses.

And if they can, they can purchase them. A half dozen boutique R&d houses, like Italy Hacking Team, develop computer vulnerabilities

and openly market them to government attackers. Criminals use common computer weaknesses to infect as many machines as possible.

But governments assemble large research teams and spend millions patiently pursuing narrow objectives. Costin Raiu, who investigates such dvanced persistent threatsas director of research

and analysis for antivirus company Kaspersky Lab, says he logs on to his computer assuming he is not alone. operate under the principle that my computer is owned by at least three governments,

he says. That is a threat mainstream technology companies are grappling with. The U s. government circumvented Google security measures and secretly collected customer data.

British spies scooped up millions of webcam images from Yahoo. In December, on Microsoft official blog, the company top lawyer, Brad Smith, said he had reason to view surreptitious overnment snoopingas no different from criminal malware.

Microsoft, along with Google and Yahoo, has responded by greatly widening its use of encryption. ee living in a very interesting time,

where companies are becoming unwilling pawns in cyberwarfare, says Menny Barzilay, a former Israeli intelligence officer now working in IT SECURITY for the Bank hapoalim Group,

in Tel aviv. In this new context, nobody can say where the responsibilities of a company may end

and those of a nation might begin. Should a commercial bank be expected to expend resources to defend itself

when its attacker is a country? his is not a aybesituation. This is happening right now,

says Barzilay. nd this is just the beginning. If the Internet and its components cannot be trusted,

how will that affect business? Consider the case of Huawei, the Chinese company that last year became the world largest seller of telecom equipment.

Yet its market share in North america is paltry, because the U s. government has claimed long that Huawei gear is a Trojan horse for China intelligence services.

Now American firms like Cisco systems say their Chinese customers are turning away for similar reasons. After all, the Snowden documents suggest how vigorously the NSA worked to insert back doors in gear, software,

and undersea cablesn some cases via what the agency called ensitive, cooperative relationships with specific industry partnersidentified by code names.

Mistrust is also creating business opportunities. In this issue we travel to an old bunker in Switzerland that local entrepreneurs have turned into a server farm,

hoping to do for data what The swiss once did for Nazi gold and billionairesbank accounts. Thanks to its privacy laws and discreet culture, the country is emerging as a hub for advanced security technology.

In Lewis view, these sorts of technological initiatives threaten the American lead in Internet services such as remote data storage. t hasn been long enough to know

if the economic effects are trivial or serious, but the emergence of foreign competitors is a sign that it serious,

he says. There even a shift under way in consumer technology. Consumers have been rushing to download texting apps like Snapchat

where messages disappear. They are posting on anonymous message boards like Whispr and buying ryptophonesthat scramble their calls.

Spy-shop stuff is going mainstream. Phil Zimmerman, a famous privacy advocate, helped create one of the cryptophones,

the $629 Blackphone, launched in February at the big mobile communications conference in Barcelona, Spain.

That is how Edward Snowden is affecting business. People are asking questions about technology products, and technology companies, that they never asked before.

Is it safe to connect? Are you Russian or American? his is changed something that since last June,

when the leaks started, says Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of the Finnish security company F-Secure. efore,

the idea was that the Web had no borders, no countries. This was the naïve utopia.

Now we have woken up

the-scientist.com 2015 00007.txt

#New Antibiotic from Soil Bacteria Many of the most widely used antibiotics have come out of the dirt.

Penicillin came from Penicillium, a fungus found in soil, and vancomycin came from a bacterium found in dirt.

Now, researchers from Northeastern University and Novobiotic Pharmaceuticals and their colleagues have identified a new Gram-positive bacteria-targeting antibiotic from a soil sample collected in Maine that can kill species including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Moreover, the researchers have not yet found any bacteria that are resistant to the antibiotic, called teixobactin.

Their results are published today (January 7) in Nature. hen we saw no resistance to the compound

my first reaction was had that we discovered junk that would be said highly toxic microbiologist Kim Lewis, director of Northeastern Antimicrobial Discovery Center.

But mice treated with teixobactin after lethal doses of either MRSA or Streptococcus pneumonia survived and showed no signs of toxicity pleasant surprise to Lewis and his colleagues.

That the antibiotic can kill M. tuberculosis s a major breakthrough because it is virtually certain to be effective for the multi-resistant strains that are now all but impossible to treat,

said Richard Novick, a microbiologist at New york University Langone Medical center who was involved not in the work.

Although further studies are needed before the antibiotic can be tested in humans animal efficacy models are often predictive of a drug effects in humans,

said Gerard Wright, director of the Institute for Infectious disease Research at Mcmaster University in Hamilton, Canada,

who penned an accompanying editorial. Teixobactin was isolated from a previously unknown Gram-negative bacterium that lives in soil

and cannot be cultured in the lab using standard techniques. So the researchers applied an approach called Ichip,

developed jointly by Lewis and Slava Epstein lab, in which a soil sample is diluted with agar,

and a single bacterial cell is suspended in a chamber surrounded with semipermeable membrane. The researchers pack 96 such chambers into a single device

which they then place in soilllowing the bacteria access to nutrients and growth factors but not to escape.

This cultivation approach is an innovative way to tap into the rich biodiversity that we are currently missing

because only 1 percent of microorganisms can be cultured in the lab, said Wright. his biodiversity is also hiding a lot of chemical diversity that may include other new antibiotics. his is a very clever technique, added Robert Austin,

a physicist at Princeton university who studies the evolution of microbes and was involved not in the current study. he bacteriology community needs to get away from culturing bacteria on agar plates,

because this will not lead to new antibiotics. Rather than targeting a protein whose gene is mutable,

facilitating resistance, teixobactin has two non-protein cell wall targetsighly conserved portions of two precursor polymers of peptidoglycan and cell wall teichoic acid.

Teixobactin binds to a motif that is highly conserved among bacteria and is known not to be modified in the bacterial kingdom,

said Lewis. A related antibiotic, vancomycin, binds to a mutable peptide added to the peptidoglycan precursor.

and others have done shows that bacteria can surprise us with the speed with which resistance can develop in complex environment...

I would caution people to not be overly optimistic until we see what happens in realistic clinical settings. he rate of evolution of large-scale resistance will depend on the dosage and frequency of the antibiotic use, added Princeton microbiologist Julia Bos, a member

drug like this must be reserved for serious diseases and not given to general practitioners to spread around like aspirin

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#One-jab universal flu shot in offing MELBOURNE: Scientists have uncovered how human immune cells remember previously encountered strains of influenza,

a discovery that may pave the way for a single universal flu shot to immunize people for their entire lives.

The"extraordinary breakthrough"shows how'killer'CD8+T cells-the body's'army of hitmen'tasked with taking out new viruses-retain memories of virus strains they encounter.

"University of Melbourne's Associate professor Katherine Kedzierska said.""The virus was infecting more people rapidly

and nobody had immunity. Thankfully, we did manage to contain the virus but we knew we had come face-to-face with a potential pandemic that could kill millions of people around the world

if the virus became able to spread between humans, "she said.""After collecting samples from infected patients we found that people who couldn't make these T cell flu assassins were dying.

These findings lead to the potential of moving from vaccines for specific influenza strains towards developing a protection,

we're talking about a history-altering event on the Spanish flu scale. As it turns out,

"Our extraordinary breakthrough could lead to the development of a vaccine component that can protect against all new influenza viruses, with the potential for future development of a one-off universal flu vaccine shot,

"This work will also help clinicians to make early predictions of how well a patient's immune system will respond to viruses

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#These revolutionary bladeless wind turbines shake to generate electricity WASHINGTON: These bladeless wind turbines can revolutionize the way wind energy is produced.

whose turbines look like stalks of asparagus poking out of the ground, is using pillars that shake back and forth from the vortices created by the movement of air around the structure to generate power, the Verge reported.

but Vortex says it is using magnets to adjust the turbine on the fly to get the most from whatever the wind speeds happen to be.

an alternator in the base of the device then converts the mechanical movement into electricity.

Vortex claims that energy produced by its turbines will cost around 40 percent less than energy made from today's wind turbines

The simpler design also means that manufacturing costs are about half that of a traditional wind turbine (those massive blades are expensive.

As per Vortex, its bladeless design captures around 30 percent less energy than a regular turbine,

while a larger, industrial model is in the works for 2018. WASHINGTON: These bladeless wind turbines can revolutionize the way wind energy is produced.

but Vortex says it is using magnets to adjust the turbine on the fly to get the most from whatever the wind speeds happen to be.

an alternator in the base of the device then converts the mechanical movement into electricity.

Vortex claims that energy produced by its turbines will cost around 40 percent less than energy made from today's wind turbines

The simpler design also means that manufacturing costs are about half that of a traditional wind turbine (those massive blades are expensive.

As per Vortex, its bladeless design captures around 30 percent less energy than a regular turbine,

while a larger, industrial model is in the works for 2018 8

timesofindia.indiatimes.com_home_science 2015 00359.txt.txt

#First hidden, real-time, screen-camera communication created Such applications include smart glasses communicating with screens to realise augmented reality

or acquire personalised information without affecting the content that users are currently viewing. The system also provides far-reaching implications for new security and graphics applications.

The idea is simple: information is encoded into a visual frame shown on a screen, and any camera-equipped device can turn to the screen

and immediately fetch the information, researchers said. Operating on the visible light spectrum band, screen-camera communication is free of electromagnetic interference, offering a promising alternative for acquiring short-range information.

But these efforts commonly require displaying visible coded images, which interfere with the content the screen is playing

and create unpleasant viewing experiences. The team at Dartmouth College studied how to enable screens

and cameras to communicate without the need to show any coded images like QR code,

a mobile phone readable barcode. In the Hilight system, screens display content as they normally do

and the content can change as users interact with the screens. At the same time, screens transmit dynamic data instantaneously to any devices equipped with cameras behind the scene, unobtrusively, in real time.

Hilight supports communication atop any screen content, such as an image, movie, video clip, game, web page or any other application window,

so that camera-equipped devices can fetch the data by turning their cameras to the screen.

Hilight leverages the alpha channel, a well-known concept in computer graphics to encode bits into the pixel translucency change.

Hilight overcomes the key bottleneck of existing designs by removing the need to directly modify pixel colour values.

It decouples communication and screen content image layers.""Our work provides an additional way for devices to communicate with one another without sacrificing their original functionality,

"said senior author Xia Zhou, an assistant professor of computer science and co-director of the Dartnets (Dartmouth Networking and Ubiquitous Systems) Lab."It works on off-the-shelf smart devices.

Existing screen-camera work either requires showing coded images obtrusively or cannot support arbitrary screen content that can be generated on the fly.

Our work advances the state-of-the-art by pushing screen-camera communication to the maximal flexibility, "said Zhou u

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#Antioxidant helps to diagnose Alzheimer: Experts find proof In a major medical breakthrough, scientists at the National Brain Research Centre (NBRC) have reported clinical evidence supporting the role of a novel biomarker in diagnosing Alzheimer's disease.

Glutathione (GSH), the biomarker, is a natural antioxidant that protects the brain from damage. Researchers claim that those suffering from the disease have reduced GSH as compared to the healthy individuals."

"The conventional methods for diagnosis of Alzheimer's depend mostly on clinical symptoms or biopsy which is an invasive procedure.

However, the new biomarker can be assessed by MRI-like imaging tests. Also, it can help predict the disease much before its onset,

"said Dr Pravat Mandal, a professor at NBRC and associate professor (adjunct) at the John Hopkins University, Maryland, USA.

He added, "Several animal studies conducted at NBRC have showed the utility of this biomarker in diagnosing Alzheimer's disease previously also.

But, for the first time, we have reported clinical evidence to the same effect in human. The findings have been accepted by the international journal'Biological Psychiatry'for publication."

"A total 130 people0 Alzheimer's patient, 41 patients suffering from mild cognitive impairment and 49 healthy individualsarticipated in the study.

While the healthy individuals were recruited through advertisements, the patients were recruited through referral from neurologists at AIIMS,

the researchers said. They claimed GSH estimation in Hippocampi, a region of the brain, yielded 100%specificity and sensitivity for distinguishing Alzheimer's disease and healthy controls."

"We propose that estimation of GSH affords a crucial noninvasive measure of Alzheimer's disease progression that could

not only provide clinical insight about the disease's pathophysiology but also expedite the drug development process,

"Dr Mandal said. Dr Kameshwar Prasad, professor and head of neurology at AIIMS, said the findings are preliminary."

"If it succeeds to become a practical solution for early diagnosis of Alzheimer's. Early identification can help in giving drug therapy to slow the degeneration process

and develop strategies to enhance the patient's living environment, "he said. Alzheimer's is one of the common brain disorders that affects nearly 35 million people worldwide.

By 2050, experts said, about one in 85 individuals over the age of 65 years will suffer from the disease s

timesofindia.indiatimes.com_home_science 2015 00405.txt.txt

#Created: First artificial molecular pump WASHINGTON: Scientists have developed the first man-made molecular pump, which transports key proteins that cells need to function,

that could be used to power artificial muscles. The new machine mimics the pumping mechanism of life-sustaining proteins that move small molecules around living cells to metabolize and store energy from food.

The artificial pump draws power from chemical reactions, driving molecules step-bystep from a low energy state to a high-energy state-far away from equilibrium."

"Our molecular pump is radical chemistry-an ingenious way of transferring energy from molecule to molecule,

the way nature does said Fraser Stoddart from the Northwestern University.""The ring-shaped molecules we work with repel one another under normal circumstances,

"said Chuyang Cheng, first author of the study.""The artificial pump is able to syphon off some of the energy that changes hands during a chemical reaction

and uses it to push the rings together, "Cheng said. The tiny molecular machine threads the rings around a nanoscopic chain-a sort of axle-and squeezes the rings together,

with only a few nanometres separating them. At present, the artificial molecular pump is able to force only two rings together,

but researchers believe it won't be long before they can extend its operation to tens of rings and store more energy.

Compared to nature's system the artificial pump is very simple, but it is a start,

researchers say. They have designed a novel system, using kinetic barriers, that allows molecules to flow"uphill"energetically y

timesofindia.indiatimes.com_home_science 2015 00407.txt.txt

#Researchers find new way to treat diabetic blindness WASHINGTON: US researchers said they have found a new way to restore the eyesight in patients who have a blinding eye disease caused by diabetes.

The key is to block a second blood vessel growth protein, along with one that is already well-known,

when it comes to treating and preventing diabetic retinopathy, the most common diabetic eye disease, they reported in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Xinhua news agency reported.

Diabetic retinopathy occurs when the normal blood vessels in the eye are replaced over time with abnormal,

fragile blood vessels that leak fluid or bleed into the eye, damaging the light-sensitive retina and causing blindness.

Forty to 45 percent of Americans with diabetes have diabetic retinopathy, according to the US National Eye Institute.

Laser-sealing eye blood vessels can save central vision, but this often sacrifices peripheral and night vision, according to the researchers at the Johns hopkins university and the University of Maryland.

Several recently developed drugs--bevacizumab, ranibizumab and aflibercept--can help treat these blood vessels by blocking the action of VEGF,

a so-called growth factor released as part of a chain of signals in response to low oxygen levels,

which stimulates the growth of new, often abnormal, blood vessels. But studies have shown that although these drugs slow progression to proliferative diabetic retinopathy,

it does not reliably prevent it, said lead author Akrit Sodhi, an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the Johns hopkins university School of medicine.

To find an explanation, levels of VEGF in samples of fluid from the eye taken from healthy people,

people with diabetes who did not have diabetic retinopathy and people with diabetic retinopathy of varying severity were tested.

While levels of VEGF tended to be higher in those with proliferative diabetic retinopathy some of their fluid had less VEGF than did the healthy participants.

But even the low-VEGF fluid from patients with proliferative diabetic retinopathy stimulated blood vessel growth in lab-grown cells."

"The results suggested to us that although VEFG clearly plays an important role in blood vessel growth,

it's not the only factor, "Sodhi said in a statement. A series of experiments in lab-grown human cells and mice revealed a second culprit,

a protein called angiopoietin-like 4 . When the researchers blocked the action of both VEGF

and angiopoietin-like 4 in fluid from the eyes of people with proliferative diabetic retinopathy, it markedly reduced blood vessel growth in lab-grown cells.

Sodhi suggested if a drug can be found that safely blocks the second protein's action in patients'eyes

it might be combined with the anti-VEGF drugs to prevent many cases of proliferative diabetic retinopathy.

The team is now investigating whether angiopoietin-like 4 might also play a role in other eye diseases, such as macular degeneration,

which destroys the central portion of the retina. WASHINGTON: US researchers said they have found a new way to restore the eyesight in patients who have a blinding eye disease caused by diabetes.