of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and Coventry University, discusses the role smart textiles have to play in remote healthcare in an article for the Guardian's Healthcare Professionals Network.
The ability to remotely monitor patients'conditions as they go about their daily lives could revolutionise healthcare,
Kathryn believes that new research integrating electronics directly into the fabric of clothing could move us a step closer to this smart technology.
Sensors can provide detailed real-time information about a patient, alerting medical professionals if there is a warning sign, for example high blood pressure or swelling.
But we are yet to see sensors that can pick out minor physiological fluctuations, while integrating into everyday life.
Smart textiles, which allow accurate and reliable electronic sensors to be built into everyday clothing, could be the solution.
In the article, Kathryn talks about research she's currently involved in at NPL and Coventry University, printing conductive circuits directly onto the fibres of garments.
The technique first deposits silver nanoparticles onto the individual fibres; copper can then be bound to the nanoparticles
and used to create a conductive layer. This allows complex circuits to be printed onto clothing,
which still perform after stretching and washing. Kathryn writes:""Circuit printing opens up a myriad of possibilities as it allows a network of sensors to be positioned precisely across the area to be monitored,
without being affected by clothes moving on the body.""The technique has been demonstrated successfully on a variety of materials including cotton, polyester and linen.
The next step is to further develop the chemical deposition process on other materials, before scaling the process up for commercialisation.
which brought together NPL's Electronics Interconnection Group and Coventry University's Functional Materials Group to work on smart textiles.
Their work was exhibited recently at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition 2015 5
#Novel Synthetic Biosensor Glows in Response to Conditions that Mimic TB Infection Robert Abramovitch, an MSU microbiologist,
along with graduate student Benjamin Johnson who helped lead the study, have discovered that ethoxzolamide, a sulfa-based compound found in many prescription glaucoma drugs,
actually turns off the bacterium's ability to invade the immune system. The research paper is in the current issue of Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy."
"Basically, ethoxzolamide stops TB from deploying its weapons...shutting down its ability to grow inside certain white blood cells in the immune system,
"Abramovitch said.""We found the compound reduces disease symptoms in mice.""According to Abramovitch, TB may not have eyes and ears,
but it has the uncanny ability to sense certain environmental cues in the body and adapt.
One of these cues includes the infection's ability to detect ph -or acidity levels-which tells the disease it's being attacked by a host immune cell."
"The compound we found inhibits TB's ability to detect acidic environments, effectively blindfolding the bacterium
so it can't resist the immune system's assault, "Abramovitch said. It's estimated that 2 billion people,
globally, carry the infection, but in most cases it lies dormant and the immune system is able to prevent it from spreading in the body."
"It's a standoff however, "he said.""The immune system has difficulty clearing the infection and the TB bacterium is just waiting for the immune system to weaken."
"Abramovitch and his research team screened 273,000 different compounds in hopes of finding one that could possibly stop the disease.
By using a synthetic biosensor that glows green in response to conditions that mimic TB infection,
something he developed earlier in his research, he eventually found the needle in the haystack that turned the bacterium's sensing ability off.
Yet, this elusive compound not only has the potential of preventing the disease from spreading, but Abramovitch suggests that it could help shorten the length of treatment
and slow the emergence of drug resistance, particularly if found to work in conjunction with other existing TB drugs.
Current treatments can last up to six months.""The single biggest reason for the evolution of drug-resistant strains is the long course of treatment,
"Trying to kill TB bacteria isn't the only way of stopping the disease though, Abramovitch added."
#Prototype Ultrasound Sensors Developed for New Improved Breast Screening Technique NHS breast cancer screening in England is conducted currently using X-ray mammography,
NPL, UHB, NBT, Precision Acoustics and Designworks are developing a prototype clinical system for a new breast screening technique-using ultrasound computed tomography (UCT)- that may overcome the problems of diagnosing breast
disease using conventional X-ray mammography and ultrasound scans. The new ultrasound method will be safer and lower cost than currently-used screening techniques,
and patented a novel detection method employing pyroelectric sensors, which convert ultrasonic energy into heat,
generating electrical signals which are used eventually to form the ultrasound image. These large-area thermal sensors should generate far fewer image artefacts than conventional piezoelectric detectors
which are sensitive to the phase of the arriving ultrasound waves. In the new procedure, the patient's breast will be placed in a warm water bath between an ultrasound transmitter and receiver.
Ultrasonic waves are sent through the breast and the amount of energy emerging is measured using the prototype ultrasound sensor.
The ultrasound transmitter array and the receiver are rotated around the breast, and the resulting measurements are combined to produce a 3d image of breast tissue properties.
Different tissue types, including those that are cancerous, can then be identified from this image. The first prototype pyroelectric sensors have been manufactured by Precision Acoustics
and are currently being tested and optimised at NPL. Next the team will develop a platform combining all the project components into a breast screening system ready for clinical evaluation.
#The choking problem of Asia#s air pollution A haze periodically drifts over parts of Asia.
the wealthy city-state known for its tidy streets and clean, green image. But for much of that particular school year, clouds of smoke shrouded the skyline.
The record-setting air pollution, which had begun in 1997 and lasted for months, caused a 30%spike in hospital visits.
Tan, then a 28-year-old financial consultant, was volunteering with the Global Environment Centre,
a Malaysian group that has worked for years to prevent and mitigate haze. He travelled to the heart of neighbouring Indonesia, just after a record-breaking haze episode hit peninsular Malaysia.
But in some villages, fires had destroyed even existing oil palm trees that belonged to multinational companies or local farmers.
coupled with the fire destroying their oil palm crops, had left them penniless and hungry. Until that moment, he had thought mostly of peat blazes as orest fires,
Vehicle and factory emissions have been analysed for decades in high-income countries, but haze smoke, and its impact on health, is understood not well. ot many people have investigated it
even though it a very important phenomenon, said Mikinori Kuwata, an atmospheric chemist at Singapore Nanyang Technological University.
Unlike factory and vehicle emissions, wildfire smoke is regulated not by tailpipe scrubbers, catalytic converters or other pollution-mitigating applications.
The composition of the smoke also varies widely according to the type of material that is burning.
e do not have a very reliable inventoryof the country peatland fire data. Kuwata burns Indonesian peat in his Singapore laboratory to study its chemical properties,
but his work is limited, he said, because he can never be sure whether his experiments mirror reality.
Peat smoke now contributes around 40%of Indonesia overall greenhouse gas emissions. Palm oil is an ingredient in a range of consumer products
Yet it has helped also to give its source country the dubious distinction of being the world third-largest greenhouse gas emitter after China and the US as well as a leading source of hazardous smoke haze.
a farmer in the Riau village of Bungaraya. We were sitting in Riau, at a roadside café flanked by oil palm trees.
Tarsedi told me that oil palm is the crop of choice for Bungaraya farmers because it is more valuable than paddy rice.
typically earns a farmer around 48 million Indonesian rupiah (nearly US$4, 000) per year instead of 40 million rupiah a year for rice.
And they affect both corporate plantations and smallholder farmers. f a fire happens and we can control it,
wel report it, said Maman, a Bungaraya farmer. But sometimes, even helicopters are powerless to stop the burning, he added. nd during the really bad fires,
a lot of the kids cough and end up at the clinic with health problems. In 2009, Indonesia passed a law banning fires on peat plantations.
Farmers in Bungaraya told me that, as a result, they had started to clear peat bogs manually,
without using fire. But Tarsedi said manual clearance is more labour-intensive and requires extra fertilisers.
And that, he said, requires extra time and money that most farmers don want to part with. When the wind blows from the west
smoke can whip east across the Straits of Malacca and into both Singapore and Kuala lumpur (the capital of nearby Malaysia) collectively home to about seven million people.
South East asia is not the only place where the burning of vegetation occurs over large areas;
says Miriam Marlier, an atmospheric researcher at Columbia University, because they occur so close to dense urban centres.
much less how peat smoke chemical properties differ from other kinds of biomass smoke. Yet emerging research offers early clues.
US researchers have found that peat fires in the southern states during the summer of 2008 caused a spike in emergency room visits for heart failure and asthma-related respiratory complications.
published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, estimated that about 339,000 deaths worldwide between 1997 and 2006 were associated with forest, grass and peat fires.
Finer-grained particles are also harder to block with the simple surgical masks that many people in Asian cities have worn traditionally as protection against air pollution.
Some scientists suggest that peat smoke long-term effects on humans may be broadly similar to those of urban air pollution,
Rajasekhar Balasubramanian, an American environmental engineer who studies haze at the National University of Singapore
h, yeah, it a problem that occurs in Indonesiahe told me one afternoon in his office at the National University of Singapore.
For governments and funding bodies, he priority more mitigation: how to mitigate human exposure to this haze issue,
rather than to study the problem itself The task of mitigating pollution is clouded also by politics.
The venue was Zenata modest apartment in a middle-class Singapore neighbourhood. In June 2014, one of Tan hometown newspapers, the Independent, dubbed him ingapore intrepid haze fighter But PM Haze,
with 10 active members and no outside funding, is well behind many established advocacy and research groups that fight air pollution elsewhere in Asia.
For the moment, Tan said, PM Haze is simply trying to learn about the problem, in all its complexity,
and then communicate its findings to the Singaporean public. y personal goal is to stop haze by 2023,
#Graduates in work but earning less Graduates in England have seen a fall in their median salary of more than £1, 000 in the past five years, according to official statistics.
But more are in work than at any time since 2007, suggests Department for Business, Innovation and Skills data.
And graduates still earn almost £10, 000 a year more than people without degrees-though the highest earners are those with postgraduate qualifications.
The figures showed a degree was"an excellent option, "said the government. The figures suggest that in the first three months of this year
graduates typically earned £31, 200, while non-graduates were paid £22, 100, a gap of £9, 100.
But in the same period of 2010, graduates typically earned £32, 396, some £1, 196 more than they do now.
There was better news for those with postgraduate qualifications, whose median salaries rose from £37, 180 to £39, 000 during the past five years,
as well as for non-graduates, whose median salaries went up from £20, 800 to £22, 100, according to the figures.
Some 87.5%of working-age graduates were employed during the three months to March-the highest proportion since the end of 2007
when the rate was 88.3%.%This compares with an employment rate of 69.3%for non-graduates.
The figures also suggest an improving employment market for graduates aged between 21 and 30, with only 3. 9%unemployed, again the lowest for this time of year since 2007,
when it was 3. 5%."Making the leap from university to the'real world'of work is becoming easier,
and graduate employment has recovered now to 2007 levels, "said Andrew Hunter, of recruitment company Adzuna."
"In the last year alone, the unemployment rate among young grads has ticked down 1%year-on-year,
with fewer university leavers stuck in limbo between education and work.""After years of stalemate, with fewer employees moving up or moving out of their positions,
the labour market is now much more liquid, which has opened up opportunities for those new to the workforce."
"However, TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady said the overall prospects of young graduates were worsening."
"While university leavers are paid still better and more likely to have a job than non-graduates of the same age,
today's figures show their prospects are worsening, just as their debts are said soaring, "she.""Many graduates are now finding themselves doing lower-skilled, lower-paid jobs."
"This is in turn pushing young people who don't have a degree out of work altogether.""A spokeswoman for the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills described the figures as"great news for the UK economy"."
""These results demonstrate how higher education is an excellent option for people of all ages seeking to gain employment and a rewarding career,
"she said.""Working-age graduates still benefit from a significant earnings premium of, on average, £9, 000 per year over non-graduates."
"The spokeswoman said higher education was not for everyone, but there were thousands of apprenticeships and courses in further education also leading to"many exciting careers prospects"r
#Schools'new rules on extremism"Extremism has no place in our schools, "said Education secretary Nicky Morgan.
She was speaking the day before schools face new requirements to play a bigger part in counter-extremism.
The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act places a legal duty on schools to"prevent people from being drawn into terrorism".
"But NUT leader Christine Blower said:""Teachers cannot be turned into spies in the classroom.""Head teachers'leader Russell Hobby said schools should see the regulations in terms of"safeguarding"and not"surveillance"."
""Recent events have shown the risks of young people being targeted by radical groups should not be underestimated,
"said Mrs Morgan.""Schools and childcare providers already play an important role in protecting and safeguarding young people including from radicalisation
and extremism,"said the education secretary. A telephone helpline has been offered for teachers, governors and other staff to raise concerns directly with the Department for Education.
The regulations, being introduced on 1 july, set out new responsibilities for"frontline workers"in public bodies, including schools,
to challenge extremism. It follows high profile cases in which young people have left the UK to join militant groups in Syria and Iraq.'
'Nonviolent extremism'The counter-extremism requirements, applying to primary and secondary, state and independent schools, include warnings against"nonviolent extremism"."
""being drawn into terrorism includes not just violent extremism but also nonviolent extremism, which can create an atmosphere conducive to terrorism
Teachers will have to assess the risk of pupils being drawn into extremist ideologies. There will be training for staff to identify children at risk
and"to challenge extremist ideas"."Schools will have to ensure that pupils do not access extremist material online.
Mr Hobby, leader of the National Association of Head teachers, said schools should"see their duties on radicalisation as another safeguarding duty"."
""Schools are used to keeping their students safe from harm and this is a version of that.
This means looking out for students rather than conducting surveillance on them.""It means understanding the risk and acting proportionately.
"But Christine Blower, leader of the National union of teachers, said the"jury is out"on whether such regulations are the best way to get young people to"reject engagement with groups who advocate violence".
"She said that the Prevent counter-extremism strategy was already causing"significant nervousness and confusion among teachers".
"Ms Blower warned that concerns over extremism could"close down"the classroom debates which could encourage democracy and human rights.
The findings, published in Nature Chemical Biology, raise promise for medicine but also concerns about"home-brewed"illegal drugs.
Experts have called for tight control of organisms genetically modified to produce narcotics. If you brew beer at home,
then you are relying on microscopic yeast that turns sugars into alcohol. But by borrowing DNA from plants, scientists have been genetically engineering yeasts that can perform each of the steps needed to convert sugar into morphine.
That has been solved by a team at the University of California, Berkeley, and the scientists say it should now be possible to put all the steps together and"brew"morphine.
Dr John Dueber, a bioengineer at the university, said:""What you really want to do from a fermentation perspective is to be feed able to the yeast glucose,
which is a cheap sugar source, and have the yeast do all the chemical steps required downstream to make your target therapeutic drug."
"With our study, all the steps have been described, and it's now a matter of linking them together
and scaling up the process.""It's not a trivial challenge, but it's doable."
"Morphine plays a vital role in pain relief in many hospitals, but it requires a poppy harvest to manufacture.
Brewed morphine could, eventually, be easier to produce. It could also allow scientists to tweak each of the steps to develop new types of painkiller.
The broad concept of using microscopic organisms to make drugs is not new in medicine.
Insulin for people with diabetes has been made in genetically modified bacteria for decades. But there are concerns these latest advances could allow a DIY drug lord to brew illegal narcotics in their home."
"In principle, anyone with access to the yeast strain and basic skills in fermentation would be able to grow morphine producing yeast using a a home-brew kit for beer-making,
"reads a comment piece in Nature journal. It calls for tight controls on such genetically modified yeasts.
Prof Paul Freemont, one of the directors of the Centre for Synthetic biology and Innovation at Imperial College London, said:"
instead of the many hours needed by traditional self learning systems. The system paves the way for robots to be used in a wide variety of settings,
rescuing earthquake victims or doing housework. Details are in the journal Nature. We marvel at the robots we see in films:
French and US researchers have developed a learning algorithm that enables robots to adapt very quickly
Factory and laboratory robots have predefined a strictly way of operating. So if a component breaks
Most self learning systems that seek alternative ways of continuing with the task are too slow,
Using software that filters out the ineffective strategies, the new system vastly speeds up the process.
Traditional self learning systems would have taken days. According to Dr Jeff Clune of the University of Wyoming, the development represents an important first step toward robots that are able to operate independently, outside of the carefully controlled confines of a laboratory or factory floor."
"Having the kind of intelligent robots you see in the movies is much closer than people realise.
Our algorithm should in principle work on any kind of robot no matter how complex it is told, "he BBC News
our algorithm could help it to deal with unforeseen situations and damage.""The new system uses a computer simulation to filter out all the possible solutions that will not work well.
It then collects the ones that are both effective and different from each other, so that the robot does not waste time testing out similar strategies.
It carries on doing this until it finds a strategy that works. The research points the way to robots that are more robust,
according to senior author Jean-Baptiste Mouret, from Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris."If you have robots in your home they would probably be expensive
"he told BBC News."Robots are used in factories because they are controlled a environment and nothing unexpected can happen to them.
We would like to put these robots outside of factories to help in the outside world,
where anything can happen.""Alongside recent advances in artificial intelligence, such as the self learning system developed by Google's Deepmind Technologies,
this development could see the emergence of new uses for robots.""The things (Deepmind) is working on are amazing,
"says Dr Clune."("Together) we will bring closer a future where robots are helping humans."
or loading and unloading dishwashers. Most of the development of the system was done by Antoine Cully, a Phd student working with Dr Mouret.
He says one of his principal motivations was to help those who are infirm.""I hope we can have robots that are assistants for the elderly,
#Test unravels history of infection US researchers claim to have developed a single test that is able to identify past exposure to every known human virus infection,
The technique decodes the infection history imprinted in our immune response. The scientists hope that the test will eventually provide important insight into how viruses contribute to development of a range of diseases.
The work was published in the journal Science. During a virus infection, your immune system generates antibodies designed to fight the virus. Each antibody recognises a tiny fragment of the virus
and their interaction is very specific-they fit like a lock and key. Virus-specific antibodies can be long-lived;
often persisting many years after an infection has disappeared. So, your antibody repertoire represents a historical record of all of the viruses that have infected you.
This immunological catalogue has been used for years to identify past virus exposure, but the diagnostic tests routinely used have been limited to one,
or at most a few, different virus strains. Discovering connections Prof Stephen Elledge from the Harvard university Medical school US,
who led the research team, told Science in Action that the new technique will overcome this limitation:"
"You can ask questions about all viruses rather than have to do things one at a time, so it allows you to discover connections between different populations or different diseases amongst groups of people."
"Now that we can look at all viruses, it's a complete game-changer.""Researchers have been working out the genetic sequence-the blueprint-of all human viruses for many years.
The team used this information to generate a pool of bacteriophage-viruses that grow easily in the laboratory-with each bacteriophage expressing a tiny fragment of this human-virus blueprint on its surface.
Antibodies present in a drop of human blood could then be used as bait to go fishing in this phage pool-only bacteriophage that express protein fragments recognised by the antibodies in the blood sample will be caught.
The data showed that the number of virus infections detected in people increased during life.
The study also suggested that those living in the US were exposed to fewer infections than people living in South africa, Thailand or Peru."
the sensitivity of the population to infection or practices in the country",commented Prof Elledge.
The greatest number of virus infections that were detected in any single individual was around 25,
professor of virology at the University of Nottingham said:""It is a technology which is applied probably best on a population-basis rather than an individual patient basis
or HIV infection could be massaged up to very respectable levels, I'd be nervous about using it as a diagnostic test to see
if an individual patient has HIV infection.""However, it will be a fabulous tool for looking at virus-disease associations
which are speculative, or even currently unknown. For example, primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC) has been reported, controversially, to arise from viral infection,
so it would be great to compare the virome of PBC patients with those without the disease.
Maybe you'd identify a consistent pattern suggesting a specific viral cause.""Indeed any other disease of unknown aetiology-identifying specific virome reactivity could give a major clue as to a causative agent."
"And the technique might also shed light onto why new treatments-immunotherapies-that are being deployed in the fight against cancers work in some individuals and not in others.
Prof Elledge commented:""It's possible that the people that respond to therapy are responding
because they are taking advantage of existing immune responses to viruses, so we are looking at correlation in these patients to previous viral exposures to see
if exposure to a particular virus makes it more likely to respond
#Sweet source for aviation biofuel Researchers have identified a new way to produce aviation fuel from sugarcane biomass that could deliver substantial cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
The source crops could be grown on marginal land, avoiding displacing food production, the team observed. They added the development of renewable liquid fuels was critical to reduce global reliance on petroleum
and help mitigate climate change. The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Biofuel sweetspot"We've identified a new route of chemistry with its source from sugars in sugarcane plus some of the so-called waste material called bagasse"
said co-author Alexis Bell from the University of California, Berkeley, US.""We show in this paper how we can put these components together to make jet diesel and lubricants."
"The development of a reliable biofuel that can be scaled up to a level that be used by the world's commercial airlines has proved somewhat elusive.
Prof Bell explained that there were a number of understandably strict requirements when it came to aviation fuel."
the reason being that any oxygen you put in decreases the energy density and as space on an aircraft is at a premium,
and you'd like to pack in as much energy in the form of burnable fuel as possible,
the fuel must have the right boiling point distribution, and then it has to have called properties lubricity,
which means it does not cause excessive wear of the turbine components.""It also has to have a very low pour point,
In 2012,2%of all human carbon emissions were result of plane emissions. If air travel continues to grow at the predicted rate,
"Food v fuel In recent years, political support for biofuels has waned as concern grew that global demand for biofuels would result in a switch away from food production to biofuel production, exacerbating food security worries.
Prof Bell acknowledged that certain crops as feedstock for the sugar-derived process would be problematic:"
"If, for example, we were to use sugar beet instead of sugarcane then there would be a potential conflict over fuel versus food."
"By using sugarcane, particularly in Brazil, on land that is not used for agriculture, we escape that conundrum."
"But we are talking about the Amazon basin, and one of the issues there is that if you cleared the land of scrubs
-in order to make it available for growing sugar plantations, and you get rid of that vegetation by burning it then you are putting a big pulse of CO2 into the atmosphere."
"Prof Bell said that the process to make the aviation biofuel outlined in his team's paper would use waste biomass to generate the energy required operate the refinery,
with excess energy being put into the Brazilian grid system m
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