#How Scientists Can Turn off Pain Receptors In research published in the medical journal Brain, Saint louis University researcher Daniela Salvemini, Ph d. and colleagues within SLU,
the National institutes of health (NIH) and other academic institutions have discovered a way to block a pain pathway in animal models of chronic neuropathic pain including pain caused by chemotherapeutic agents
and bone cancer pain suggesting a promising new approach to pain relief. The scientific efforts led by Salvemini,
who is professor of pharmacological and physiological sciences at SLU, demonstrated that turning on a receptor in the brain
and spinal cord counteracts chronic nerve pain in male and female rodents. Activating the A3 receptor either by its native chemical stimulator
As an unmet medical need, pain causes suffering and comes with a multi-billion dollar societal cost.
Current treatments are problematic because they cause intolerable side effects, diminish quality of life and do not sufficiently quell pain.
supporting the idea that we could develop A3ar agonists as possible new therapeutics to treat chronic pain,
The above story is provided based on materials by Saint louis University Medical center. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length
whose main use case is letting surgeons physically eelanomalies such as tumors in CT SCANS, could also revolutionize everything from advertising to architecture.
A team at the University of Bristol in Great britain worked on the project, which uses complex ultrasound patterns to create air disturbances
such as feeling the differences between materials in a CT SCAN or understanding the shapes of artifacts in a museum.
is a design element in everything from Android phones to car steering wheels. Because the technology is currently relatively primitive in the mass market,
it mainly used for more day-to-day purposes like simulating the feel of a tactile keyboard on a smartphone
or simulating the shaking of an explosion in a specialized video game controller. Check out Youtube Video Article by Neal Ungerleider Article Source:
#Tesla motors#Destination Charging#:#Fast-growing Network Beyond Superchargers One of the most commonly cited arguments against electric cars is range anxiety.
Tesla motors has been rapidly expanding its Supercharger network in the U s.,Canada, Europe, and Asia to combat this fear of not having a place to charge before your battery quits.
But Tesla plan to solve range anxiety goes beyond its Supercharger network. There is another, less-followed network of a different type of charger Tesla has been quietly rolling out at a rapid clip.
Tesla calls the program Destination Charging. The Destination Charging network Youl find these charging locations on Tesla website
listed as Charging Partners. These charging locations use Tesla Wall Connectors for charging. Tesla confirmed with The Motley Fool that there are about 350 locations in North america and more than 800 worldwide.
Most of these locations have two Wall Connectors, says Tesla spokeswoman Alexis Georgeson. Wall Connectors are popping up at hotels, casinos, ski resorts, restaurants, shopping centers, airports,
and even mobile phone stores. In the U s.,Wall Connectors are showing up at well-known names like Costco, Hyatt, Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton, Best western, and Westin.
Tesla Destination Charging program has exploded out of nowhere with initial efforts in rolling out the program beginning early in second quarter 2014.
Furthermore, much of the growth has occurred in the last few months. One of the last updates on the program was less than five months ago, from The Mercury News;
at the time, Tesla had just 106 Destination Charging locations. The program is still in rapid expansion mode,
with locations being added daily. Wall Connectors give Tesla owners a charge rate of up to 58 miles per hour
when paired with Dual Chargers, which Model S owners can install in their cars for $1, 500 before delivery,
or $3, 600 after delivery. Tesla owners without a second onboard charger can charge with a Wall Connector, too,
but they shouldn expect to charge at a rate higher than 29 miles per hour. Tesla Alexis Georgeson explained to The Motley Fool how the Destination Charging network
and the Supercharger network complement each other in an effort to make traveling in a Tesla as convenient as possible:
or more long enough to get a meaningful charge from a Wall Connector. Like Tesla Supercharger network, these Wall Connectors are free for Tesla owners.
Compelling economics The economics for all parties involved are compelling. The cost of the Wall Connector is minimal;
the company sells the contraption on its website for $650. And the installation of a 240-volt circuit isn expensive probably no more than $3, 000 and as little as $500.
Who pays for the electricity? The charging partners, Georgeson says. When you do the math,
offering free Wall Connector charging is a low-cost way to provide greater customer convenience while also potentially serving as a marketing tool.
Utility companies in the U s.,on average, charge just $0. 12 per kilowatt hour. If the typical Tesla owner needed about a half-charge during their stay at a hotel,
it would only cost the hotel about $5. 15. In the case of a restaurant, a Tesla with a second onboard charger could charge 90 miles in an hour and a half
costing the restaurant just $3. 55 in electricity. And who knows? Assuming Tesla does stick to its 2017 timing for a launch of a lower-cost car,
and that it really can hit its goals of producing 500,000 cars per year by 2020,
there could eventually be a tipping point when not having Wall Connectors could become a slight disadvantage for hotels and restaurants.
While Tesla investors shouldn count on such an optimistic scenario, it is a possibility worth considering.
When you do the math, offering free Wall Connector charging is a low-cost way to provide greater customer convenience
while also potentially serving as a marketing tool. Utility companies in the U s. on average, charge just $0. 12 per kilowatt hour.
If the typical Tesla owner needed about a half-charge during their stay at a hotel,
it would only cost the hotel about $5. 15. In the case of a restaurant, a Tesla with a second onboard charger could charge 90 miles in an hour
and a half, costing the restaurant just $3. 55 in electricity. And who knows? Assuming Tesla does stick to its 2017 timing for a launch of a lower-cost car,
and that it really can hit its goals of producing 500,000 cars per year by 2020,
there could eventually be a tipping point when not having Wall Connectors could become a slight disadvantage for hotels and restaurants.
While Tesla investors shouldn count on such an optimistic scenario, it is a possibility worth considering.
Sure, if electric car sales continue to grow, there will need to be more than two Wall Connectors at Destination Charging locations.
Obviously, the more Tesla cars there are on the road the more demand there will be for charging. But the Supercharger network, with its locations within a Tesla driving range for 80%of the U s. population,
and a network of supplementary charging destinations that is suddenly exploding out of nowhere, showcases the ease of building out the infrastructure needed to support convenient, fully electric driving.
And keep in mind: The fact that Teslas get 208-plus miles of driving range is in and of itself the biggest feat in solving charging infrastructure problems,
since this means owners with home charging only have to charge when traveling long-distance t
#South korea Training Children as Dementia Supporters in One of the Worlds Fastest Aging Countries They were stooped,
hobbled, disoriented, fumbling around the house. They got confused in the bathtub and struggled up stairs that seemed to swim before them. h,
it hurts, said Noh Hyun-ho, sinking to the ground. thought I was going to die,
Alzheimer disease and other dementias. As one of the world fastest-aging countries, with nearly 9 percent of its population over 65 already afflicted, South korea has opened a ar on Dementia, spending money and shining floodlights on a disease that is,
here as in many places, riddled with shame and fear. South korea is training thousands of people,
Besides the aging simulation exercise, they viewed a Powerpoint presentation defining dementia and were trained, in the hall Dementia Experience Center, to perform hand massage in nursing homes. hat did
I do with my phone? It in the refrigerator, said one instructor, explaining memory loss. ave you seen someone like that?
They may go missing and die on the street. In another striking move, South korea is also pushing to make diagnoses early,
despite there being scant treatment. his used to be hiddenand here is still stigma and bias, said Kim Hye-jin, director of senior policy for the Health and Welfare Ministry.
But e want to get them out of their shells, out of their homes and diagnosedto help families adjust
Hundreds of neighborhood dementia diagnostic centers have been created. Nursing homes have tripled nearly since 2008. Other dementia programs
providing day care and home care, have increased fivefold since 2008, to nearly 20,000. Care is subsidized heavily. And a government dementia database allows families to register relatives
and receive iron-on identification numbers. Citizens encountering wanderers with dementia report their numbers to officials, who contact families.
To finance this, South korea created a long-term-care insurance system, paid for with 6. 6 percent increases in people national health insurance premiums.
In 2009, about $1 billion of government and public insurance money was spent on dementia patients.
Still, with the over-65 population jumping from 7 percent in 2000 to 14 percent in 2018 to 20 percent in 2026
dementia is straining the country, socially and economically. t least one family member has to give up workto provide caregiving,
said Kwak Young-soon, social welfare director for Mapo District, one of Seoul 25 geographic districts.
Because South korea encourages people to work well past retirement age, families may also lose dementia sufferersincomes.
Most families no longer have generations living together to help with caregiving, and some facilities have long waiting lists,
but e can keep building nursing homes, Mr. Kwak said. e call it a ghost. It basically eating up the whole house.
Dementia Epidemic South korea is at the forefront of a worldwide eruption of dementia from about 30 million estimated cases now to an estimated 100 million in 2050.
And while South korea approach is unusually extensive, even in the United states, the National Alzheimer Project Act was introduced this year to establish a separate Alzheimer office to create n integrated national plan to overcome Alzheimer.
Supporters of the bill, currently in committee, include Sandra Day Oonnor, whose late husband had Alzheimer.
South korea also worries that dementia, previously stigmatized as host-seeingor ne second childhoodcould ilute respect for elders,
Mr. Kwak said. here a saying that even the most filial son or daughter will not be filial
So the authorities promote the notion that filial piety implies doing everything possible for elders with dementia,
disease of knowledge and the brain which makes adults become babies. But South korea low birth rate will make family caregiving tougher. feel
as if a tsunami coming, said Lee Sung-hee, the South korean Alzheimer Association president, who trains nursing home staff members,
but also thousands who regularly interact with the elderly: bus drivers, tellers, hairstylists, postal workers. ometimes I think I want to run away,
she said. ut even the highest mountain, just worrying does not move anything, but if you choose one area
The Aging-Friendly hall, financed by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy, encourages businesses to enter ilver industries,
and deposit them onto toilets or living room couches. College students visit the hall and don blue 3-D glasses for ementia Experiencevideo journeys following people disoriented on streets or seeking bathrooms.
Throughout South korea, Mrs. Lee leads ementia supportertraining, arguing against longtime practices of chastising or neglecting patients,
and advocating for preserving their skills and self-esteem. One tip: give demented relatives washing pan
he washing machine terrible we need your helpwashing clothes, she told 200 senior citizens interested in nursing home jobs or family caregiving advice.
If patients say, good at making soy soup, but forget ingredients, guide them step by step, she advised.
saying that it destigmatizes dementia and that patients who egress to earlier daysmay ind it easier to relate to young children.
has visited kindergartens, bringing tofu. his is very soft, like the brain, he said, letting it crash down.
and saying, addy, don drink so much because it not good for dementia. At a Dementia March outside the World cup Soccer Stadium, children carried signs promoting Dr. Yang Mapo district center:
ake the Brain Smile! and ow is Your Memory? Free diagnosis center in Mapo. The Mapo Center for Dementia perches at a busy crossroads of old and new, near a university and a shop selling naturopathic goat extracts.
It has exercise machines out front and a van with pictures of smiling elderly people. Even people without symptoms come,
Dr. Yang said. They are ased by hearing, ou do not have dementia and can visit two years later.
Cha Kyong-ho family was wary of getting him tested. ementia was a subject to hide,
said his daughter, Cha Jeong-eun. worried his pride would be hurt going through this kindergarten experience.
But when y mother asked him to get ingredients for curry rice he came back with mayonnaise,
Dr. Yang said. his is the very beginning stages of Alzheimer disease. He suggested that Mr. Cha get a government-subsidized brain M. R i. to confirm the diagnosis,
and said drugs might delay symptoms slightly. He recommended Mapo free programs o stimulate what brain cells he has.
These include rooftop garden loral therapy, art classes making realistic representations of everyday objects, music therapy with bongos sounding ike a heartbeat.
Students as Helpers Schools offer community service credit, encouraging work with dementia patients, whom students call grandmas and grandpas.
Teenage girls do foot massage at the Cheongam nursing home, which is run by Mrs. Lee, the Alzheimer Association president,
for women without sons to care for them. In South korea, sonsfamilies traditionally shoulder caregiving responsibilities. During one massage session, 16-year-old Oh Yu-mi rubbed a patient toes,
saying: doing the heart. The heel is the reproductive system. It will help them excrete better.
Another girl doing foot massage, Park Min-jung, 17, was shaken to realize that dementia could explain why her grandfather recently grabbed a taxi
and circled his old neighborhood seeking his no longer-existent house. e used to be very scary to me,
she said, but training made her feel that can do things for him. A patient wept as the girls left, upsetting 16-year-old Kim Min-joon, the massage group leader.
She said social workers suggested being less effusive to patients so the girlsleaving would be less traumatic:
f there is love or affection of 100 grams, cut it up into 1 gram eachand distribute it over 00 visits, not all at once.
But not good at controlling that, Min-joon said. Even at school, he feeling of their touch remains with me.
A boyshigh school selects top students to help at Seobu Nursing Center, doing art therapy
and attempting physical therapy with dances and alloon badminton (the racket is stretched pantyhose on a frame).
another student said. ome of us look like we don want to do this. For Kim Han-bit, 16, the program is intensely personal.
The dementia caregiving program had made him onder why I wasn able to do that with my own grandma,
#Online education Exploding at Campuses Across the country Like most other undergraduates, Anish Patel likes to sleep in. Even though his Principles of Microeconomics class at 9: 35 a m. is just a five-minute stroll from his dorm,
he would rather flip open his laptop in his room to watch the lecture, streamed live over the campus network.
where Dr. Rush scribbled in chalk, ots of firms and lots of buyers. The curtains were drawn in the dorm room.
The floor was awash in the flotsam of three freshmen clothes, backpacks, homework, packages of Chips Ahoy and Cap Crunch Crunch Berries.
The University of Florida broadcasts and archives Dr. Rush lectures less for the convenience of sleepy students like Mr. Patel than for a simple principle of economics:
1, 500 undergraduates are enrolled and no lecture hall could possibly hold them. Dozens of popular courses in psychology, statistics, biology and other fields are offered also primarily online.
Students on this scenic campus of stately oaks rarely meet classmates in these courses. Online education is known best for serving older,
nontraditional students who can not travel to colleges because of jobs and family. But the same technologies of istance learningare now finding their way onto brick-and-mortar campuses,
especially public institutions hit hard by declining state funds. At the University of Florida, for example
resident students are earning 12 percent of their credit hours online this semester, a figure expected to grow to 25 percent in five years.
This may delight undergraduates who do not have to change out of pajamas to ttendclass.
But it also raises questions that go to the core of a college mission: Is it possible to learn as much
when your professor is a mass of pixels whom you never meet? How much of a student education and growth academic and personal depends on face-to-face contact with instructors and fellow students?
hen I look back, I think it took away from my freshman year, said Kaitlyn Hartsock,
a senior psychology major at Florida who was assigned to two online classes during her first semester in Gainesville. y mom was really upset about it.
She felt like she paying for me to go to college and not sit at home and watch through a computer.
Across the country, online education is exploding: 4. 6 million students took a college-level online course during fall 2008, up 17 percent from a year earlier, according to the Sloan Survey of Online learning.
A large majority about three million were enrolled simultaneously in face-to-face courses, belying the popular notion that most online students live far from campuses,
said Jeff Seaman, co-director of the survey. Many are in community colleges, he said. Very few attend private colleges;
families paying $53, 000 a year demand low student-faculty ratios. Colleges and universities that have plunged into the online field,
mostly public, cite their dual missions to serve as many students as possible while remaining affordable,
as well as a desire to exploit the latest technologies. At the University of Iowa, as many as 10 percent of 14,000 liberal arts undergraduates take an online course each semester,
including Classical mythology and Introduction to American Politics. At the University of North carolina at Chapel hill, first-year Spanish students are offered no longer a face-to-face class;
the university moved all instruction online, despite internal research showing that online students do slightly less well in grammar
and speaking. ou have X amount of money, what are you going to do with it? said Larry king, chairman of the Romance languages department,
where budget cuts have forced difficult choices. ou can be all things to all people. The University of Florida has faced sweeping budget cuts from the State Legislature totaling 25 percent over three years.
That is a main reason the university is moving aggressively to offer more online instruction. e see this as the future of higher education,
said Joe Glover, the university provost. uite honestly, the higher education industry in the United states has not been tremendously effective in the face-to-face mode
if you look at national graduation rates, he added. t the very least we should be experimenting with other modes of delivery of education.
A sampling of Florida professors teaching online found both enthusiasm and doubts. would prefer to teach classes of 50
and know every student name, but that not where we are financially and space-wise,
said Megan Mocko, who teaches statistics to 1, 650 students. She said an advantage of the Internet is that students can stop the lecture
and rewind when they do not understand something. Ilan Shrira, who teaches developmental psychology to 300,
said that he chose his field because of the passion of a professor who taught him as an undergraduate.
But he thought it unlikely that anyone could be inspired so by an online course Kristin Joos built interactivity into her Principles of Sociology course to keep students engaged.
There are small-group online discussions, and students join a virtual classroom once a week using a conferencing software called Wiziq. i, everyone, welcome to Week 9. Hello!
Dr. Joos said in a peppy voice recently to about 60 students who had logged on.
She sat at a desk in her home office; a live video feed she switched on at one point showed her in black librarian glasses and a tank top.
Ms. Hartsock, the senior psychology major, followed the class from her own off-campus home,
her laptop open on the dining room table. As Dr. Joos lectured, a chat box scrolled with studentscomments and questions.
The topic was sexual identity, which Dr. Joos defined as determination made through the application of socially agreed upon biological criteria for classifying persons as females and males.
She asked students for their own definitions. One, bringing an online-chat sensibility to an academic discussion
typed: f someone looks like a chick and wants to be called a chick even though theye not,
now they can be one. Ms. Hartsock, 23, diligently typed notes. A hardworking student who maintains an A average,
she was frustrated by the online format. Other members of her discussion group were not pulling their weight,
she said. The one test so far, online, required answering five questions in 10 minutes a lightning round meant to prevent cheating by Googling answers.
In a conventional class, someone who sits toward the front and shares my thoughts with the teacher
she said. In the 10 or so online courses she has taken in her four years, t all the same,
she said. o comments. No feedback. And the grades are always late. As her attention wandered,
she got up to microwave some leftover rice g
#Student in Kenya Invents Solar Powered Forest fire Detector Efforts to curb forest loss around the world as a means of cutting carbon emissions just got a boost:
A Kenyan student has invented a device to automatically detect forest fire outbreaks. The technology, produced by Pascal Katana, a 24-year-old University of Nairobi engineering student,
uses heat sensors to detect a fire, then automatically relays the information to a forest station through mobile phone technology. he heat sensors are programmed to detect temperatures which are over 45 degrees Celsius,
said the soft-spoken inventor. emperature from the sun does not go beyond this level in terms of heating
and that is why it will be easy to tell that a fire could have been ignited. In a demonstration at the University of Nairobi
Katana altered sensor levels to detect body temperate and then touched the sensor with his finger.
That immediately triggered a call to his mobile phone. his is how the system is expected to work,
he said. nce the forest station receives the alert, the rangers can then marshal reinforcements from the nearby fire station to put out the fire.
DEVICE WORKS ON SOLAR POWER The system is suitable in areas where there is no electricity supply because it can be powered by a simple solar panel that generates five volts of energy,
he said. t is a simple technology because one does not have to be literate to operate it,
the electrical and electronics engineering student said, calling it a lug and playdevice. The device still has to go through a vetting
and trial process before it can be granted patent protection, according to Hussein Said of Kenya National Council for Science and Technology.
But it may offer significant benefits in Kenya, which suffered widespread forest fires last year as a result of prolonged drought. 009 was the worst period for us in terms of fire outbreaks
because it was preceded by a prolonged drought, said Samuel Tokole, an official of the Kenya Wildlife Service,
a government agency that protects and conserves the country biodiversity, and struggled to find enough resources to cope with last year fires. hat is most frustrating is that
I can really say we have need what we in terms of technology and equipment to fight forest fires,
he said. Fires in Kenya last year destroyed 11,370 hectares of bush and forest land.
Thirty-five percent of the already heavily deforested Mau Forest Complex was lost to fire, according to Noor Hassan Noor, an administrator in Kenya Rift valley province.
Noor called the new fire reporting device a potentially useful part of Kenya effort to keep forest fires in check. his is an interesting invention
which the government should support given the damage forest fires do to our ecosystems, he said s
#Wave and Paymobile Phone Payment system Launched in the UK Orange and Samsung have teamed-up with Barclaycard to provide mobile phone payments with the new uick Tappayment technology.
Like the abolition of the £1 note or the introduction of the £2 coin, yesterday was a historic day for British money.
But that wasn thanks to the Royal Mint or the Bank of england. Courtesy of Barclaycard, Orange and Samsung, consumers across the UK can now pay for goods and services with nothing more than a mobile phone.
This technology, much trialled but never launched, will admittedly be used mostly for buying cups of coffee
and snatched lunchtime sandwiches, but when Orange head of mobile payments, Jason Rees, calls it he beginning of a new order he not wrong.
Yougov research, commissioned by digital payments provider Intelligent Environments, says 42 per cent of smartphone users want to use their phones as mobile wallets.
Owners of the Apple iphone are keenest, but significant proportions of Blackberry and Google phone users want to take advantage of it too.
That not because technology built into mobile phones is the way that everything, from cameras to translators, seems to be going.
It down to the fact that this new mobile-based method is quick simpler and crucially, more secure than anything wee got available at the moment.
Barclaycard has quietly been rolling out so-called ontactlesspayment systems across the UK for several years
Now that means there are devices in shops up and down the country that require users, for transactions up to £15,
to simply touch their specially updated credit and debit cards to complete the transaction. Although just a million or so such p (a) in-free transactions have been made in the last twelve months,
the rate is already doubling each year. The advantages of a contactless credit card however, are limited. You still need a card with you,
and because the card itself cannot be authenticated, every five times or so it requires the standard chip
-and-pin payment method. With a mobile phone data connection, however, all transactions can be authorised and completed instantly.
In due course, transactions over £15 will be permitted if a pin is entered on the mobile phone. That, too, is more secure than the traditional keypad.
And the £15 maximum payment will rise steadily over time. This technology is cheaper for banks, shops and customers.
Almost everybody happy. The snag however, is that for now only one phone, one payment provider and one network operator provides this whizzy technology.
So yesterday was a milestone but not a tipping point: Orange customers, with a Barclaycard who took the trouble to buy a specially made Samsung Tocco handset can take advantage of the new systems.
Even though the ear-field communicationstechnology is built into a wide and growing number of phones already,
only this one so far satisfies the complex, long-time-coming security standards. Using an app on the mobile phone,
customers can top up their wave and pay account from a connected credit or debit account by up to £100, to a total of £150.
The app allows a constant, running check on transactions and provides a real, useful and sometimes painful tally of expenditure.
Any losses are limited to that £150 total, but they be borne by Barclaycard rather than the customers anyway.
But to dwell on that disappointment is to miss the point: even if rumours that NFC payments are to be built into the forthcoming iphone turn out to be untrue,
this revolution is inevitable because O2 are already working on their obile walletequivalent, which will launch in the coming months,
Google is working with Mastercard and a host of other manufacturers have similar plans. Indeed, as with almost all significant new technology, the appeal is mainly in the simplicity of NFC.
More secure yet less hassle, it surprising mainly that this technology has been so unpopular in the UK
when it has been ubiquitous in South korea and Japan. Britain however, is finally catching up t
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