#10000 Steps? New Trackers Go Beyond the Data Dump LAS VEGAS You earned 3, 000 Fuel points!
You walked 8, 755 steps. Your heartbeat was 65. Your sleep efficiency was 60 percent.
As fitness trackers and other wearable devices have flooded the market, a vast amount of data has been produced on everything from how often people tossed
and turned at night to how many steps they walked to the water cooler. But what does it all mean?"
"Lots of data from our wearables and beyond is said just data Dr. Daniel Kraft, a pediatrician and the founding executive director of Exponential Medicine, at a talk here at the 2015 CES."
"The trick is to make this data actionable.""Now, a few companies are trying to go beyond the data dump to pull out useful information and larger trends.
Personalized preferences The early versions of fitness trackers would estimate how many calories a user burned based on weight and height.
They also gave somewhat generic fitness advice, and set goals based on vague and subjective settings such as"moderately active."
"But a few new devices are personalized now more. For example, a wearable device called Stonecrysus, which will be available in February 2015,
says it can calculate people's metabolic rate based on measures like their heart and respiration rates.
It also lets users enter goals for themselves, such as maintaining their body weight, building muscle or controlling chronic health conditions.
Stonecrysus allows users to track the food they're eating with a user friendly picture of their mealthey can place portions of common foods on an image of a plate,
said Dr. David Landers, a cardiologist and cofounder of the Edgewater, N. J.,company that makes the device.
Over time, the device learns people's habits and their body's trends. Had a bad night of sleep?
but past activity monitors haven't really taken advantage of that knowledge. But a new app called Lifeq takes data from wearables, such as movement and heart rate,
and then plugs them into a computer model that uses hundreds of mathematical equations that relates those variables to many others,
such as the oxygen saturation of a person's blood, the metabolic rate, the ratio of fats and carbs being burned and even blood sugar.
and analysis behind the scenes of any wearable device that collects the data. The idea is to get a comprehensive model of human physiology from just a few measurements,
said Franco du Preez, a systems biologist and a founder of Lifeq. Over time, the system can identify qualitative trends such as the difference between someone having a jump in heart rate after a meal
versus while typing at a computer. A small study suggests their system works: In a trial with 10 people exercising to 40 percent of their maximum effort, their model was able to accurately predict heart rate and respiration s
#'Pop-up'3d Structures Can Mimic Brain Circuits By mimicking children's pop-up books, scientists can now make complex microscopic 3d shapes that model brain circuitry and blood vessels,
Naturally curved, thin and flexible 3d structures are common in biology; examples include the circuits of brain cells and networks of veins.
Materials scientist John Rogers, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his colleagues want to create similarly complex devices that can wrap around these biological structures,
potentially supporting or improving their function.""Our focus has been on the brain, heart and skin,
In experiments, the ribbons were as small as 100 nanometers wide, or about 1, 000 times thinner than the average human hair,
"study co-author Yonggang Huang, a professor of mechanical engineering at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said in a statement."
"The researchers generated more than 40 different geometric designs, from single and multiple spirals and rings to spherical baskets, cubical boxes, peacocks, flowers, tents, tables and starfish.
Scientists could even arrange patterns with multiple layers, a bit like multi-floor buildings. This new pop-up technique has many advantages,
inexpensive and can employ many different materials used in electronics today to build a wide variety of microscopic structures.
and schemes provide immediate paths to broad and previously inaccessible classes of 3d micro-and nanostructures in a way that is compatible with the highest-performance materials and processing techniques available,
"We feel that the findings have potential relevance to a wide range of microsystems technologies biomedical devices, optoelectronics, photovoltaics, 3d circuits, sensors and so on."
and it is nearly impossible for these printers to produce semiconductors or single crystalline metals,
springy metal interconnect coils and antennas for soft electronic devices designed to integrate with the human body,
"he said. The scientists detailed their findings online today (Jan 8) in the journal Science n
however, is paralysis on either side of the body, which can cause loss of movement and diminished range of motion in the arms and legs.
Symptoms, Tests and Treatment In an effort to help patients regain movement on the side of their body affected by stroke, my colleagues at The Ohio State university Wexner Medical center and
This can be frustrating for patients who have a stroke that leaves one side of their body weak,
Often, when those impairments have persisted even after completing 3 to 6 months of outpatient therapies,
doctors have not known how to reset the brain back into the state of rapid recovery that we see in the initial months after a stroke.
and we think that using a powerful magnet to enhance brain plasticity prior to therapies may be the solution.
Rebooting recovery Doctors think that part of the problem is that the healthy and injured sides of brains of some stroke patients develop an imbalance over time
either as a direct result of the tissue injury from stroke or through lack of use of the weaker side of the body.
We use the navigated rtms to essentially map the participant's brain like a GPS SYSTEM would
The rtms device is a flat, water bottle-sized magnet that we hold against the patient's scalp while they are reclining comfortably in a chair.
though participants may feel the snap of the magnet pulse against their scalp or the twitch of a muscle in their arm as the device works.
Video game Therapy Proving Powerful for Stroke Patients (Op-Ed) The critical advance of this technology is the navigation tool,
The process helps improve the brain's receptiveness to activity-based therapy. The technology isn't limited solely to motor recovery after stroke in fact,
and arm therapy free of charge. The current Phase III clinical trial was launched in June 2014 and researchers will continue to conduct trials over the next 12 to 18 months.
We hypothesize that pretreatment with carefully dosed magnetic pulses to the motor cortex will predispose participants to make bigger gains with therapy than they would have with 6 weeks of therapy alone.
but we've already encountered some who say everyday tasks like opening the refrigerator and getting around the house are much easier.
Although we don't know for sure if these individuals have received the stimulation or placebo treatment, these indications give us hope that our trial will be successful
yet nonspecific, way of preparing the brain for all types of therapies, and depending on where the magnet is aimed,
can potentially affect many of the brain circuits that are impaired during stroke or other types of brain injuries.
we can vary the location of magnetic stimulation to target the brain regions associated with other neurologic impairments, e g.,
Thus, rtms treatment could be potentially improve aphasia, hemispatial neglect or pain perception resulting from stroke or brain injury.
This bodes well for neurorehabilitation programs in the future shedding light on the possibility that this technology might not be limited to stroke recovery alone a
#New Health Trackers Aim to Prevent Emergencies LAS VEGAS New health trackers aim to prevent health crises before they happen,
From sensors that aim to halt asthma in its tracks, to home monitors that warn the family
several new trackers on display at the 2015 Consumer electronics Show are going far beyond older medical alert systems.
The Best Fitness Tracker Brands Derailing asthma Long before someone has an asthma attack there are warning signs that their respiratory function is going downhill.
"said Salman Bakht, the chief technology officer at Health care Originals, which makes a new asthma monitor called the Adamm.
But children and even adults often don't even realize they are having trouble breathing, especially if they've gotten used to their lungs functioning at a lower level than normal, Bakht,
who has told asthma Live Science. Adamm is a wearable, three-sensor monitor that will hit the market later this year.
It tracks a person's respiration rate and how often they cough. The device detects early signs that a person's breathing is compromised.
and allow that person to email health care providers, so that chances can be made to their daily medicines or lifestyle.
Is Grandma OK? Forget the cliché of dying alone and unnoticed till neighbors notice a funny smell.
or alert caregivers if it happens. For instance, the Evermind device measures when appliances are turned on and off,
Another device, Onköl, integrates data from several sensors, including a heart-rate monitor, sensors that track when someone got out of bed
or made a phone call. The device then sends text alerts to loved ones. The is useful
because many people are OK with family members knowing they aren't feeling 100 percent,
Allergic response Another device, the Veta, made by Aterica, is essentially a smart case for an Epipen,
a name brand injection device that delivers the medication epinephrine to treat the life-threatening allergic response called anaphylaxis.
The Veta is also full of sensors, and can reassure parents that their kids have the lifesaving device on them
if the user has released a standby button, so that an onlooker can help administer it in case the owner of the pen is incapacitated p
#Cholera Bacteria Spear Their Prey to Grab Genes The bacteria that cause cholera grab genes from other organisms in a particularly predatory way, new research finds.
Bacteria often grab genes from other organisms and incorporate that DNA into their own genomes.
But researchers at The swiss Federal Institute of technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, found that cholera (formally called Vibrio cholerae) have a unique way of doing so.
Cholera is usually found in water and it feeds on chitin, the stuff that makes up crustaceans'shells.
which spears out to strike neighboring cells. The spike kills the target cell by releasing other proteins that dissolve cell membranes in a process called lysis.
and the cholera bacterium absorbs the freed genetic material. The 9 Deadliest Viruses On earth Making these spikes in itself isn't that unusual,
This is, however, the first time anyone has observed cholera bacteria or any bacteria using this system to gather up new genes.
Cholera makes people sick when it is ingested. The bacteria gets to the small intestine and then multiplies, producing proteins that are toxic to humans and cause watery diarrhea.
That in turn can cause severe dehydration and an imbalance of electrolytes. Without treatment cholera can be deadly.
Humans can build immunity to some strains of cholera. But sometimes, new strains appear, and the transfer of genes from other species of bacteria (including other kinds of cholera) might be one reason these new strains arrive."
"That's what we think what we see is part of what makes the most virulent strains so virulent,
"said Melanie Blokesch, a co-author of the research and an assistant professor of microbiology at the institute.
Not every kind of cell can contribute DNA to cholera, as there has to be some similarity between the cholera cell and its victim,
Blokesch said. Even so, some genes might alter the outer membrane of the bacteria, for example, making it less visible to the human immune system or tougher for people's stomach acid to kill.
This kind of gene transfer might well have been involved in a cholera epidemic that hit Southeast asia in the early 1990s
Blokesch said. John Mekalanos, a professor of microbiology at the Harvard Medical school who was involved not in the new research,
said the discovery that chitin can induce this kind of activity is an important step.""This is really fascinating for understanding mechanistically another way to acquire genes that encode factors that make it virulent,
"Mekalanos said. Blokesch added that the spearing mechanism might be one more reason the cholera bacterium is so virulent in the human gut.
Cholera might be spearing neighboring cells, killing them and exacerbating the problems it causes. Cholera won't pick up human DNA,
however, because it is too different.)The study appears today (Jan 1) in the journal Science S
#Doomsday Clock Set at 3 Minutes to Midnight The world is"3 minutes"from doomsday.
That's the grim outlook from board members of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Frustrated with a lack of international action to address climate change and shrink nuclear arsenals,
they decided today (Jan 22) to push the minute hand of their iconic"Doomsday Clock"to 11:57 p m. It's the first time the clock hands have moved in three years;
Experts on the board said they felt a sense of urgency this year because of the world's ongoing addiction to fossil fuels,
procrastination with enacting laws to cut greenhouse gas emissions and slow efforts to get rid of nuclear weapons.""We are not saying it is too late to take action
but the window for action is closing rapidly,"Kennette Benedict, executive director of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said in a news conference this morning in Washington,
D c."We move the clock hand today to inspire action.""For instance, if nothing is done to reduce the amount of heat-trapping gasses, such as carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere,
said Sivan Kartha, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Some people might not feel alarmed
Sharon Squassoni, another board member and director of the Proliferation Prevention Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said nuclear disarmament efforts have"ground to a halt"and many nations are expanding, not scaling
India plans to expand its nuclear submarine fleet, and Pakistan has started reportedly operating a third plutonium reactor,
Squassoni said. She said the United states has good rhetoric on nuclear nonproliferation, but at the same time is in the midst of a $335 billion overhaul of its nuclear program.
"The risk from nuclear weapons is not that someone is going to press the button, but the existence of these weapons costs a lot of time, effort and money to keep them secure,
"Squassoni said, adding that there have been troubling safety discrepancies reported in recent years at power plants.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 by scientists who created the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan project
and wanted to raise awareness about the dangers of nuclear technology. The Doomsday Clock first appeared on a cover of the magazine in 1947
. after both the United states and the Soviet union conducted their first tests of the hydrogen bomb. The clock's hands were pushed all the way back to 11:43 p m.,17 minutes to midnight, in December 1991,
which at the time, seemed like a promising move toward nuclear disarmament t
#Greased Lightning! NASA Drone Advances Unmanned Craft A huge, 10-engine drone dubbed"Greased Lightning"successfully completed a series of flight tests recently,
paving the way for new types of unmanned vehicles that could one day carry people. Earlier this spring, NASA ENGINEERS flew the so-called GL-10 (the"GL"stands for"Greased Lightning")prototype drone at a military base located about two hours away from the agency's Langley Research center In virginia.
GL-10 has a 10-foot-long (3 meters) wingspan and 10 engines: eight on the wings and two on the tail.
The 62-lb. 28 kilograms) drone can take off vertically like a helicopter, but in the air it flies more like an airplane.
Future versions of the drone could be used for a variety of applications, the researchers said."
"It could be used for small package delivery or vertical takeoff and landing, and long-endurance surveillance for agriculture, mapping and other applications,"Bill Fredericks, an aerospace engineer at the Langley Research center, said in a statement."
"A scaled-up version much larger than what we are testing now would make also a great one-to four-person-size personal air vehicle."
"Over the course of five flight tests, the drone was able to take off and hover like a helicopter,
Now, the researchers are examining ways to make the drone more aerodynamically efficient, Fredericks said.
The GL-10 drone is the latest in a series of prototypes used to develop the concept.
"We did lose some of the early prototypes to'hard landings'as we learned how to configure the flight control system.
because its engines are powered battery. NASA describes the drone as quieter than a neighbor using a gas-powered-motor lawn mower in the yard next door.
NASA ENGINEERS will continue to tweak the design of the GL-10 drone, according to agency officials,
and earlier this month, the prototype was displayed at the Association for Unmanned vehicles Systems International's 2015 conference, in Atlanta.
when they expect the drone could be ready for use in the field f
#Bionic Arm Taps New Part of Brain for Natural Moves Mind-controlled prosthetic limbs have been a reality for a few years,
smooth motor control that people have over their natural limbs. Now, a team of researchers says the members have solved part of the problem of smooth motor control by connecting an artificial limb to a different part of the brain.
Previous designs for mind-controlled prostheses linked the artificial limb to either the person's motor cortex or the individual's premotor cortex
a professor of neuroscience at the California Institute of technology and one of the researchers who developed the new prosthesis.
to a computer that acted as a kind of artificial motor cortex. The computer used specific signals from the parietal cortex to detect what kind of movement Sorto intended to make,
and then translated that into signals for the robotic arm. Video: Tetraplegic Patient Controls Robotic Limb With His Brain In a video by the researchers, Sorto used the arm to serve himself a beer.
Sorto's ability to sip a brew came from the fact that the signals from the parietal cortex told the computer the general trajectory of the movement Sorto wanted to make,
and the computer could smooth out the movements of the artificial arm so that they resembled those of a real arm.
but in the new prosthesis, the computer looked at the whole picture of what Sorto intended to do just"get the beer,
and use it every day just yet the prosthesis is still resting on a table in the lab for further research.
so that Sorto can use it outside the lab. Andersen is working with two other patients in the United states who also have prostheses that include neural implants.
For the new prosthesis, it isn't clear yet what such perception could"feel like for a user,
because there are many components that go into a person's perception of his or her own body.
you find fine motor control difficult, "he said. Dan Moran, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Washington University in St louis, said he was a bit skeptical that the new prosthesis provided any finer motor control than already-developed methods of connecting with bionic arms through motor and premotor cortexes.
But the new prosthesis was successful in that"they are decoding both the movement's trajectory,
"and the goal of that movement, said Moran, who studies motor control and prostheses but was involved not in the new research.
In the new prosthesis""what is different is used the brain area: posterior parietal cortex versus the premotor,"he said.
Krishna Shenoy, a professor of electrical engineering who studies neural prostheses at Stanford, was enthusiastic about the new prosthesis."
"This is clearly the very first recordings from the posterior parietal cortex in humans in the context of qualifying the signals for use in prostheses,
"he said.""It is important to investigate many brain areas for potential use in prostheses, as different areas may well have different advantages.""
Follow Live Science@livescience, Facebook & Google+.+Originally published on Live Science v
#1 Pinprick Test Could Detect Hundreds of Viruses Doctors often don't have a complete picture of their patients'health histories they only know about past illnesses that a patient remembers
and tells them about, and patients may not know whether they've been exposed to certain diseases.
But now, researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston say they have created a tool that could reveal many of the viruses that have infected a person in the past.
Called Virscan, the test looks for hundreds of viruses at once, and does so at a fraction of the cost of traditional tests,
one of the co-authors of the new research and a graduate student at Harvard Medical school.""It could be a pinprick."
whose genomes had previously been sequenced. The researchers focused on the part of the VIRAL DNA that codes for the proteins that appear on the virus'surfaces,
The Virscan test uses these engineered viruses to look for antibodies to each of these viruses in a sample of a person's blood.
Antibodies are immune system molecules that zero in on the proteins of a virus's coat and stick to it,
They found that the study participants had antibodies to an average of 10 virus species. In two people,
they found antibodies to 84 virus species. To see how well the scan could work as a test,
the group ran the scan on people known to be infected with hepatitis C and HIV.
more often than not, showed antibodies to the same or similar viruses."We thought it would be a lot more individual than that,"
"Maybe antibodies have more similarity than we've been thinking.""Kula said this finding showcased one of the big advantages of this method of testing for a person's viral infection history:
The Virscan allows researchers to see similarities and differences in large populations. This could be helpful in studying conditions for example,
chronic fatigue syndrome that researchers suspect may be caused by a virus but haven't proven for sure to have a viral origin.
if individual viruses are correlated to other diseases, or try to figure out why only a fraction of patients"are helped by certain cancer treatments,
Kula said. Because the new test is relatively cheap Kula noted the chemicals necessary are a few dollars per person,
or perhaps even less it could also help doctors and patients by detecting their exposure to a virus they weren't aware of.
Hepatitis C, Kula said, is detected often not for months or years, because few people think to ask about it.
But there are limits to what Virscan can Do it won't work on newly discovered viruses, or any other virus that researchers have not yet sequenced.
Also, viruses with small genomes may be harder for the test to find, Kula said. The study was funded by the Howard hughes medical institute,
and appears today (June 4) in the journal Science n
#World's Thinnest Light bulb Created from Graphene Graphene, a form of carbon famous for being stronger than steel
and more conductive than copper, can add another wonder to the list: making light. Researchers have developed a light-emitting graphene transistor that works in the same way as the filament in a light bulb."
"We've created what is essentially the world's thinnest light bulb, "study co-author James Hone,
a mechanical engineer at Columbia University in New york, said in a statement. Scientists have wanted long to create a teensy"light bulb"to place on a chip, enabling
what is called photonic circuits, which run on light rather than electric current. The problem has been one of size
and temperature incandescent filaments must get extremely hot before they can produce visible light. This new graphene device,
however, is so efficient and tiny, the resulting technology could offer new ways to make displays or study high-temperature phenomena at small scales,
the researchers said. 8 Chemical elements You've Never Heard Of Making light When electric current is passed through an incandescent light bulb's filament usually made of tungsten the filament heats up and glows.
Electrons moving through the material knock against electrons in the filament's atoms, giving them energy.
Those electrons return to their former energy levels and emit photons (light) in the process.
Crank up the current and voltage enough and the filament in the light bulb hits temperatures of about 5, 400 degrees Fahrenheit (3, 000 degrees Celsius) for an incandescent.
This is one reason light bulbs either have no air in them or are filled with an inert gas like argon:
At those temperatures tungsten would react with the oxygen in air and simply burn. In the new study, the scientists used strips of graphene a few microns across and from 6. 5 to 14 microns in length, each spanning a trench of silicon like a bridge.
A micron is one-millionth of a meter, where a hair is about 90 microns thick.)
An electrode was attached to the ends of each graphene strip. Just like tungsten, run a current through graphene
and the material will light up. But there is an added twist, as graphene conducts heat less efficiently as temperature increases,
Myung-Ho Bae, one of the study's authors, told Live Science trapping the heat in one region makes the lighting more efficient."
"It's also the reason the electrodes at either end of the graphene don't melt.
a professor of physics at Seoul National University, noted that graphene is embedded usually in or in contact with a substrate."
so that it had a flat bottom
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011