#The Pope confirms that the Catholic church wants action on climate change Science and religion rarely get along.
Angry atheist and esteemed biologist Richard Dawkins thinks that religion is for idiots, and philosopher Sam Harris has written that here are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is."
"But Pope Francis just proposed an alliance between reason and faith. In Thursday encyclical (a papal letter to all bishops of the Roman catholic church), the pope made a 98-page plea to stop climate destruction,
"If the simple fact of being human moves people to care for the environment of which they are a part, Christians in their turn ealise that their responsibility within creation,
"With this encyclical, Francis is starting to build a bridge between science and religion on the traditional wedge issue of climate change.
Jeb bush, a Catholic, brushed off the Pope comments, saying don go to mass for economic policy or for things in politics.
"If we are concerned truly to develop an ecology capable of remedying the damage we have done,
it would have gigantic impacts for battling climate change. That would be a game changer for climate scientists and activists
#This new technology lets you change the channel with your mind The BBC is testing a new type of headset that can read a user brainwaves
and use their brain activity to change the channel. Developed with London-based technology group, This Place,
the headset has so far been tested by 10 BBC staff in their homes, using a customised version of BBC's iplayer platform.
but they all managed to get it to work,"Cyrus Saihan, head of business development for the BBC Digital, wrote in a blog post.
The technology works by having iplayer cycle through a bunch of TV SHOWS, and the headset allows the users to pick one using the strength of their brain activity.
Which means they basically just need to concentrate really hard when they want to turn iplayer on,
and then again when they want to select a program. Each program is shown for 10 seconds so the user can
either'tune out'mentally when they see a program theye not interested in, or concentrate when they see one they want to watch.
which will show the user how close they are to successfully selecting a specific program.
If the user wants to switch programs or turn iplayer off halfway through, they will need to concentrate to turn on the iplayer main menu.
Nancy Owano describes the user reactions at Phys. org:""One user, smiling, said, 'It's nuts He was wondering if,
when watching with his son they would be fighting over brain waves to choose the program they could both watch.
Another user, looking puzzled over its being able to work as easily as it did said for her
,'how do you do it? Before anyone gets too excited, this technology isn going to be making its way to your living room anytime soon,
Saihan describing it as"an internal prototype designed to give our program makers, technologists and other users an idea of how this technology might be used in future".
"And while it will take a whole lot of upgrading to get even close to the speed and versatility of a good, old-fashioned TV remote,
it does offer some really interesting potential for people with disabilities. Tim Mildon from the BBC predicted that in the next 10 or 20 years,
the technology will be ready to assist people with severe disabilities and limited movement.""It is part of the BBC's research into how technology might make its services more accessible to people with disabilities,"Stuart Dredge reports at The Guardian.
Gotta start somewhere, right? The future of television is millions of people simultaneously rage quiting Game of Thrones with their minds every time religion burns a child i
#A deep learning machine just beat humans in an IQ TEST For the first time ever, a computer has outperformed humans in the verbal reasoning portion of an IQ TEST.
The machine was programmed by researchers in China using a technique known as deep learning, which involves converting data into a set of algorithms that a computer can make sense of.
Until now, computers have been pretty successful at beating humans in two out of the three parts of a standard intelligence quotient test,
or IQ TEST-the mathematical questions and the logic question-but they'd struggled to master the verbal reasoning portion,
which looks at things like analogies and classifications. You know, those questions that ask you to find the word that doesn't fit in with the others,
or"Which of these words is the opposite of ubiquitous?""This is where the deep learning comes in.
In the past, the furthest programmers had gotten was to build machines that were capable of analysing millions of millions of texts to figure out which words are associated often with each other,
essentially turning words into vectors that could be compared, added and subtracted.""But this approach has a well-known shortcoming:
The researchers, from the University of Science and Technology of China and Microsoft Research in Beijing, tried a different tack-they looked at words
Using an algorithm, they worked out how the words are clustered, and they then looked up the different definitions of each word in a dictionary.
The team helped the computers out further by feeding them multiple examples of questions so that they were able to recognise the question type
They then tested the computer against 200 human participants of various ages and educational backgrounds."
"This is a big step forward for artificial intelligence, and shows just how powerful deep learning can be.
The strategy has also been used to teach computers how to beat us at 49 old-school Atari games,
recognise food calories from a photo and even cook by watching Youtube videos.""With appropriate uses of the deep learning technologies, we could be a further step closer to the true human intelligence,
"the authors write e
#Activating a single gene reverses colon cancer growth in mice in just 4 days A simple genetic tweak can turn colorectal cancer cells in mice back into healthy tissue in a matter of days,
essentially reversing tumour growth, new research has revealed. The scientists are now looking for ways they can use the same approach to develop more effective and less toxic cancer treatments in humans.
According to a press release put out by the journal Cell, where the research was published: he findings provide proof of principle that restoring the function of a single tumour suppressor gene can cause tumour regression
and suggest future avenues for developing effective cancer treatments. ost of the drugs we use to fight cancer are designed to kill cancerous cells.
and the side effects can be intense. reatment regimes for advanced colorectal cancer involve combination chemotherapies that are toxic and largely ineffective,
yet have remained the backbone of therapy over the last decade, "said senior researcher Scott Lowe from the Weill Cornell Medical College in New york
. But his team may have now found a new way to fight the cancer type, by reactivating a gene known as adenomatous polyposis coli (Apc) that turned off in 90 percent of human colorectal tumours.
Testing their approach in mice, the team was able to stop tumour growth and restore normal intestinal function within just four days,
and six months later there were no signs of the cancer coming back. While scientists have looked previously into turning certain genes on or off in animal models in order to fight cancer,
they've struggled to do so without triggering excess gene activity and causing other problems in normal cells.
and reversibly disrupt Apc activity in a mouse with cancerous tumours in its colon. They already knew that the Apc gene was linked closely to an important pathway known as the Wnt signalling pathway,
Even more impressive was the fact that this approach worked on mice with malignant colorectal cancer tumours that contain Kras
and p53 mutations-these two mutations are found in about half of all colorectal tumours in humans.
"It is currently impractical to directly restore Apc function in patients with colorectal cancer, and past evidence suggests that completely blocking Wnt signaling would likely be severely toxic to normal intestinal cells,
"said Lowe.""However, our findings suggest that small molecules aimed at modulating, but not blocking, the Wnt pathway might achieve similar effects to Apc reactivation.
Further work will be critical to determine whether Wnt inhibition or similar approaches would provide long-term therapeutic value in the clinic."
"And while this specific treatment will most likely only work for colon cancer, which kills around 700,000 people worldwide each year,
the team believes that the same approach could be tweaked to suit other cancer types.""If we can define which types of mutations
and changes are the critical events driving tumour growth, we will be equipped better to identify the most appropriate treatments for individual cancers,
said Lukas Dow, one of the researchers. We can't wait to see how the research progresses s
#BMW wants to turn street lights into electric car charging stations A new technology that allows electric car drivers to charge their vehicles directly from street lights has been showcased by the BMW Mini team at the annual Low Carbon Oxford Week event in the UK.
Called'Light and Charge',these prototype street lights combine energy-efficient Light Emitting Diodes (LED) and BMW Chargenow recharging stations,
and can be hooked up to a city electricity mains and installed along the side of any major road.
The plan is to make driving an electric car a whole lot more appealing by making charging stations as accessible and numerous as possible.
if we want to see more electric vehicles on the road in our cities in the future,"Peter Schwarzenbauer, a member of the Board of Management of BMW AG, told the press.
The team announced that it would be testing the Light and Charge system out in Munich, Germany next year,
Theye also got some of the charging lamps installed outside the BMW headquarters in Munich,
drivers can connect a standard charging cable to the street light, and use a control panel on the light to swipe their charge card and register their use.
Any type of electric car, regardless of the model, will work with the technology. All the city needs to provide is enough room on the side of the road for temporary parking.
It no surprise that the German car company has made a commitment to getting more electric cars on the road.
Last year, Germany was named the world most energy-efficient country by the Washington-based American Council for an Energy-efficient Economy (ACEEE
now is now capable of producing at least half of their total energy from solar power. According to Reuters, BMW has funded already software
and applications that help electric car drivers locate nearby parking spots and charging stations, and are reportedly in talks with US competitors Tesla motors about their new street light charging stations. n
#Material with superfast electrons displays mind-blowing magnetoresistance Researchers have found a material that could be used to build smaller and fast electronics in the future.
Known as niobium phosphide, the material's electronic resistance increases dramatically when it's exposed to a magnetic field.
Known as giant magnetoresistance, this property is crucial to achieving the large storage capacity we've come to enjoy in our hard drives,
but up until now had only been demonstrated in complex materials that are expensive to make. Now researchers in Germany have demonstrated the same property in niobium phosphide
a simple compound material that they say could build faster and cheaper electronics. Giant magnetoresistance is so important
because helps computers to quickly read the information that's stored magnetically in hard drives. When materials with giant magnetoresistance are exposed to a magnetic field,
they significantly alter their electronic resistance. And the greater this change in resistance, the faster we can process information.
Which is why the discovery of niobium phosphide is so exciting:""the scientists have observed a rapid increase in resistance by a factor of 10,000 in a non-complex material,
"the press release explains. The material has such incredible magnetoresistance because of another interesting property-its electrons are superfast, with a top speed of around 300 km/s. In a magnetic field,
this makes them vulnerable to a phenomenon known the Lorentz force, which causes an increasing percentage of electrons to flow in the'wrong'direction as the magnetic field becomes stronger."
"The faster the electrons in the material move, the greater the Lorentz force and thus the effect of a magnetic field,"explains Binghai Yan, one of the lead researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids
in Germany. Because of this force, the team observed extremely large magnetoresistance of 250 percent at room temperature.
In comparison, the materials that are used currently in hard drives generally exhibit magnetoresistance of between 40 and 110 percent at room temperature.
the material could be a prime candidate for building faster and more efficient electronics.""The effect that we've discovered in niobium phosphide could certainly be improved by means of skilled material design,
"This material class therefore has enormous potential for future applications in information technology
#Here's how to make carbon nanoparticles with honey and a microwave Carbon nanoparticles can be incredibly useful in the treatment of many types of disease,
as they can evade our natural immune defences and deliver medicine to wherever it's most needed in the body.
They're also relatively easy to track as they move through the system, but so far creating these nanoparticles has been a long and expensive process.
Now researchers at the University of Illinois in the US have found a much easier way to create a certain type of nanoparticle:
using a process that involves plain old honey and a microwave. The resulting particles are less than 8 nanometres thick (a human hair is around 80,000-100,000 nanometres)
so your body's immune system won't try and interfere with them as they deliver their medicine."
"These tiny particles are camouflaged kind of, I would say, "explains bioengineering professor, Dipanjan Pan, who worked on the study alongside his colleague Rohit Bhargava.
But the real beauty of the new procedure is how simple it is-you can even give it a try in your own kitchen."
"If you have a microwave and honey or molasses, you can pretty much make these particles at home,
"says Pan in a press release.""You just mix them together and cook it for a few minutes,
and you get something that looks like char, but that is nanoparticles with high luminescence. This is one of the simplest systems that we can think of.
It is safe and highly scalable for eventual clinical use.""That clinical use involves the carbon spheres being coated with polymer-a polymer that can gradually release drugs into the system to fight cancer and other diseases.
Based on the tests carried out by Pan and his team, the microwave-produced nanoparticles are effective in delivering the drugs where they're needed,
and vibrational spectroscopic techniques were used to monitor how the polymers gradually released their payload. The researchers ran a series of different experiments to check the temperatures required for the drugs to disperse,
as well as the depth at which they did so. Different polymer coatings were tested too as the team works towards getting these'homemade'carbon nanoparticles ready for clinical use."
"This is a versatile platform to carry a multitude of drugs-for melanoma, for other kinds of cancers and for other diseases,"says Rohit Bhargava."
"You can coat it with different polymers to give it a different optical response. You can load it with two drugs,
or three, or four, so you can do multidrug therapy with the same particles.""H/T:
Techrada d
#This new insulin patch could soon replace injections for diabetics A new'smart patch'lined with painless microneedles full of insulin has been developed by researchers in the US in an effort to do away with the uncomfortable injections that have become a part of life for the millions
of type 1 diabetics around the world who need to manually regulate their hormone levels.
The 4-cm patch features more than a 100 of these eyelash-sized microneedles, and not only go they contain enough insulin to provide the same dosage as a single injection,
but they also contain glucose-sensing enzymes that can identify when blood-sugar levels are too high and release the insulin into the blood stream."
"We have designed a patch for diabetes that works fast, is easy to use, and is made from nontoxic,
biocompatible materials,"said one of the researchers, Zhen Gu, from the joint University of North carolina/NC State's Department of Biomedical engineering."
"The whole system can be personalised to account for a diabetic's weight and sensitivity to insulin,
so we could make the smart patch even smarter.""The patch has been tested in mouse models and so far, looks very promising.
According to the paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it was able to regulate the insulin levels of diabetic mice for nine hours straight.
And obviously mice are useless at monitoring their blood-sugar levels the way human diabetics have to right now,
which shows just how hands-off this new system is. This doesn just mean the patch will be a hell of a lot more convenient for its users than the injection system,
it will also be far safer. As one of the team John Buse, points out in the press release,
getting your dosage wrong could lead to some of the worst outcomes you could imagine:"
"Injecting the wrong amount of medication can lead to significant complications like blindness and limb amputations,
or even more disastrous consequences such as diabetic comas and death.""The system inside the patch was built to mimic the body own insulin generators, known as beta cells.
Genius."The hard part of diabetes care is not the insulin shots, or the blood sugar checks,
"If we can get these patches to work in people, it will be a game changer."
#The Gates-backed'toilet of the future'is now being trialled in India and China The winner of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's'Reinvent the Toilet'challenge back in 2012, this solar-powered,
DIY-friendly system is being rolled out in three locations around the world. Developed by researchers from the US-based Caltech Group,
and cheap tablet computers,"Ben Schiller points out at Fast Company, and the team at Caltech isn interested in adding busted loo to that list.
So they've integrated a series of sensors that pick up when something amiss, and alert a designated operator with pictures of the parts
like any product,"lead software developer at Caltech, Cody Finke, told Schiller.""The difference between technology in the developed world and the developing world is that
"Credit: The Caltech Groupcheap, self-cleaning, and easy to install, the Caltech toilet not only recycles the organic waste that runs through it;
the team has integrated also a function that can turn the byproducts of the water sterilising process into useable hydrogen and fertiliser.
This hydrogen can be stored in fuel cells that power the system when the light is too low for the power cells.
but the team says that meets the Gates Foundation recommendation that it put the cost of sanitation at five cents per person per day,
The toilets are currently being trailed in three locations around the wold-the Mahatma Gandhi University in Kerala
"No innovation in 200 years has saved more lives than the toilet,"the Gates Foundation states."
it also reliably restores vision in those who suffer from the degenerative eye disease retinitis pigmentosa.
as the device works in a similar way to the cochlear implant-or'bionic ear'-which has helped restore hearing to hundreds of thousands of people."
"This study shows that the Argus II system is a viable treatment option for people profoundly blind due to retinitis pigmentosa,
"lead researcher Allen C. Ho from the Wills Eye Hospital in Pennsylvania, US, said in a press release."
"The device was created by medical company, Second sight, and works through an electronic device that's implanted onto a patient's retina-the layer of light-sensing cells at the back of the eye.
To stimulate these cells, visual information is captured by a tiny camera attached to the patient's glasses and sent to a pocket-sized computer,
where it's processed into electronic signals. These signals are beamed wirelessly to the patient's implant,
which stimulates the retinal cells with painless electrical pulses. The result is that the patient sees patterns of light
They worked with 30 patients aged between 28 and 77 who had little or no light perception in both eyes as a result of retinitis pigmentosa.
and only 11 adverse events, most of which arose shortly after surgery and were treated successfully. Only one device had to be removed after it became damaged
which have been published in the journal Ophthalmology, will allow them to begin testing the device in an even broader range of subjects,
including treatment for other diseases and eye injuries,"said Ho. We can't wait t
#Paralysed people have learnt to control robots remotely with their thoughts Scientists have developed technology that's given paralysed people the ability control a robot remotely using just their thoughts,
If that all sounds very James cameron's Avatar to you, you're not wrong-the premise here isn't actually that dissimilar.
and combines Skype and basic robotics to create a remote body that allows a patient to feel
Italy and Switzerland were hooked up to an electrode-covered cap, which analyses their brain signals and converts them into electronic instructions for a robot.
These instructions were sent via the Internet to a remote computer hooked up to a simple, wheeled robot.
seeing everything their robot does through Skype. The patient's face also appears on the computer screen."
"Each of the nine subjects with disabilities managed to remotely control the robot with ease after less than 10 days of training,"lead researcher José del R. Millán,
from the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, explained in a press release. You can see the robots in action below:
he's not sure how close we are to achieving this goal, due to the expense of such systems."
"For this to happen, insurance companies will have to help finance these technologies, "said Millán. Let's hope this happens soon,
#This new roof material stays colder than the air around it-even in summer Researchers from the Faculty of science, University of Technology Sydney (UTS Science) have created a material that can stay cooler than the ambient air
And it could help to greatly reduce cooling costs and the environmental impact of air-conditioning. The roofing material is made from stacked polymers on top of a thin silver film,
and only absorbs an incredible 3 percent of sunlight. Impressively, it also radiates heat out at specific infrared wavelengths that aren't absorbed by the atmosphere-allowing it to beam the heat directly into space."
"We demonstrate for the first time how to make a roof colder than the air temperature around it, even under the most intense summer conditions,"one of the lead researchers,
"Roofs heat up by absorbing sunlight, so darker roofs can get very hot. Even white roofs still absorb enough sunlight to warm up by 9 degrees Celsius to 12 degrees Celsius."
"Scientists have been working for years to create increasingly more heat-repellant materials to cover our houses with,
but they've struggled to find anything that approaches 100 percent solar reflectance.""This new surface,
however, stayed 11 degrees or more colder than an existing state-of-the-art white roof nearby,"Smith added.
Infrared image of the new material (purple) on top of a regular white roof. Credit: UTS Scienceeven better, the materials used to create the demo-roof are already commercially available,
which means they could easily be integrated by the construction industry. The team has tested the roof on the top of the UTS Science building in Sydney,
which is on a busy road and has no cover from the hot summer sun. Despite the conditions,
they showed that the roof was able to stay significantly colder than the air around it,
And while its energy saving abilities overall haven't been tested as yet, Smith believes that it could substantially help to reduce the environmental costs of cooling."
"Cool roofing reduces the severity of the urban heat island problem in towns and cities and helps eliminate peak power demand problems from the operation of many air conditioners,
"The added feedback benefits from cool roofs are appreciated not yet widely, but recent reports have shown they are substantial.
Examples include ventilation with cooler air and higher performance of rooftop air-conditioning installations.""We're pretty excited about a world where our homes are kept cool by their roofs,
rather than electricity-guzzling air-conditioners. Someone get the technology commercialised, ASAP. Love science? Find out more about the research happening at UTS Science
#Scientists have built artificial neurons that fully mimic human brain cells Researchers have built the world first artificial neuron that capable of mimicking the function of an organic brain cell-including the ability to translate chemical signals into electrical impulses,
and develop new treatments for neurological disorders, such as spinal cord injuries and Parkinson disease.""Our artificial neuron is made of conductive polymers
and it functions like a human neuron, "lead researcher Agneta Richter-Dahlfors from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden said in a press release.
"This means that artificial neurons could theoretically be integrated into complex biological systems, such as our bodies,
So imagine being able to use the device to restore function to paralysed patients, or heal brain damage."
by adding the concept of wireless communication, the biosensor could be placed in one part of the body,
or possibly a remote control, new and exciting opportunities for future research and treatment of neurological disorders can be envisaged,
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011