because they don t receive their vaccinations on time. Researchers are developing a new system that scans a child sâ fingerprints to track
when vaccinations are due which means parents will need no longer to keep paper documents. In developing countries keeping track of a baby s vaccine schedule on paper is largely ineffective says Anil Jain professor of computer science
and engineering at Michigan State university. aper documents are lost easily or destroyedhe says. ur initial study has shown that fingerprints of infants
and become a part of the vaccine registry system. Once the electronic registry is in place health care workers simply re-scan the child s fingers to view the vaccination schedule.
They know who has been vaccinated for what diseases and when additional booster shots are needed. The new electronic registry system will help overcome the lack and loss of information
which is the primary problem in the vaccine delivery system in developing countries Jain says.
Collecting fingerprints from fidgety infants isn t easy. Another challenge is their small fingerprint patterns have low contrast between ridges
and valleys. he process can still be improved but we have shown its feasibilityjain says. e will continue to work on refining the fingerprint matching software
in addition to tracking vaccinations says Mark Thomas executive director of Vaxtrac a nonprofit organization supporting Jain s research. olving the puzzle of fingerprinting young children will have far-reaching implications beyond health care
#X-rays show live changes in cystic fibrosis New X-ray technology is allowing doctors to see almost instantly
if treatments for cystic fibrosis are working. Cystic fibrosis affects many of the body s systems but most severely the lungs and currently it can take several months to measure how effective treatment is for the early-fatal lung disease.
Lead researcher Kaye Morgan from Monash University says the imaging method allows doctors to look at soft tissue structures for example the brain airways
and lungs which are effectively invisible in conventional x-ray images. At the moment we typically need to wait for a cystic fibrosis treatment to have an effect on lung health measured by either a lung CT SCAN
or breath measurement to see how effective that treatment is Morgan says. However the new imaging method allows us for the first time to non-invasively see how the treatment is working live on the airway surface.
Morgan says this x-ray imaging method would enable doctors and researchers to measure how effective treatments are
and progress new treatments to the clinic at a much quicker rate a key goal of co-authors Martin Donnelley and David Parsons of the CF Gene therapy group at the Women s and Children s Hospital and the University
of Adelaide s Robinson Research Institute. Because we will be able to see how effectively treatments are working straight away we ll be able to develop new treatments a lot more quickly
and help better treat people with cystic fibrosis Morgan says. The new imaging method which was developed using a synchrotron x-ray source may also open up possibilities in assessing how effective treatments were for other lung heart and brain diseases.
The research appears in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. Source: Monash University You are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license e
#Test keeps graphene pure enough for electronics Rice university rightoriginal Studyposted by Mike Williams-Rice on August 18 2014it s easy to accidentally introduce impurities to graphene
One common problem for example is presbyopia a type of farsightedness in which the ability to focus on nearby objects is diminished gradually as the aging eyes lenses lose elasticity.
which was developed at UC Berkeley works by adjusting the intensity of each direction of light that emanates from a single pixel in an image based upon a user s specific visual impairment.
The lasers travel long distances and identify dangerous materials present within powders that commonly act as carriers for explosive nitrates and lethal biological agents such as anthrax and ricin.
but could offer insight into human ailments such as strokes migraines and possibly Alzheimer s and Parkinson s diseases.
Some of the most damaging brain diseases can be traced to irregular blood delivery in the brain.
For now though the technique provides a new technique for studying human cerebral-vascular diseases such as stroke and migraines in animal models.
and Parkinson s diseases might elicit #or be caused in part by#changes in blood flow to certain parts of the brain.
NIR-IIA imaging might offer a means of better understanding the role of healthy vasculature in those diseases Hong says. e could also label different neuron types in the brain with biomarkers
Eventually we might be able to use NIR-IIA to learn how each neuron functions inside of the brain. ther coauthors of the study are from Stanford Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical school.
#Wearable vapor sensor can smell diabetes University of Michigan rightoriginal Studyposted by Catharine June-U. Michigan on August 6 2014.
A wearable vapor sensor could monitor diseases such as diabetes and hypertension by picking up airborne biomarkers exhaled
or released through the skin. ach of these diseases has its own biomarkers that the device would be able to sensesays Sherman Fan professor of biomedical engineering at University of Michigan
. or diabetes acetone is a marker for example. ther biomarkers it could detect include nitric oxide and oxygen abnormal levels
of which can point to conditions such as high blood pressure anemia or lung disease. Fan is developing the sensor with Zhaohui Zhong an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and Girish Kulkarni a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering.
The device is faster smaller and more reliable than its counterparts which today are too big to wear.
Beyond disease monitoring the sensor has other applications. It would be able to register the presence of hazardous chemical leaks in a lab
or a human tumor biopsy#e have to slice the tissue very thin separately image each slice with a microscope
or sparse cell populations such as stem cells or tumor cellsshe says. The new approach builds off a technique known as CLARITY that was developed previously by Gradinaru
The Cell paper focuses on the use of PACT and PARS as research tools for studying disease and development in research organisms.
Using the techniques on a biopsy from a human skin tumor the researchers were able to view the distribution of individual tumor cells within a tissue mass.
In the future Gradinaru says the methods could be used in the clinic for the rapid detection of cancer cells in biopsy samples.
#obbit skull points To down syndrome, not new species New analysis of a 15000-year-old skull and thigh bone shows the original descriptions of the remains may have been skewed.
Instead of the abnormalities marking a new species the bones more likely indicate Down syndrome researchers say.
and according to the researchers contains important features most consistent with a diagnosis of Down syndrome. he skeletal sample from Liang Bua cave contains fragmentary remains of several individualseckhardt says.
and the revised figure falls in the range predicted for a modern human with Down syndrome from the same geographic regioneckhardt says.
But humans with Down syndrome also have diagnostically short thighbones Eckhardt says. Though these and other features are acknowledged unusual he nusual does not equal unique.
The originally reported traits are not so rare as to have required the invention of a new hominin species. nstead the researchers build the case for an alternative diagnosis:
Down syndrome one of the most commonly occurring developmental disorders in modern humans. hen we first saw these bones several of us immediately spotted a developmental disturbancesays Eckhardt ut we did not assign a specific diagnosis
Over the years several lines of evidence have converged on Down syndrome. he first indicator is craniofacial asymmetry a left-right mismatch of the skull that is characteristic of this and other disorders.
Here too the brain size they estimate is within the range expected for an Australomelanesian human with Down syndrome.
LB1 s short thighbones not only match the height reduction seen in Down syndrome Eckhardt says but when corrected statistically for normal growth they would yield a stature of about 1. 26 meters
and not in the other Liang Bua skeletal remains further evidence of LB1 s abnormality. his work is presented not in the form of a fanciful story
Here the signs point rather clearly To down syndrome which occurs in more than one per thousand human births around the world. e
and more resistant to environmental stress in West african environments than Asian varieties Wing says. African rice already has been crossed with Asian rice to produce new varieties under a group known as NERICA which stands for New Rice for Africa.
because many of the genes code for traits that make African rice resistant to environmental stress such as long periods of drought high salinity in the soils
One example would be adding disease resistance genes from all of the wild rice varieties to a species of cultivated rice creating a new super-crop that is resistant to diseases and pests.
which is used now in the medical field to detect biomarkers in the early stages of disease.
The findings show promise for people suffering from posttraumatic stress and other mental anguish, says Gale Lucas, a social psychologist at University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies.
It also presents compelling reasons for doctors to start using virtual humans as medical screeners. The honest answers acquired by a virtual human could help doctors diagnose
and treat their patients more appropriately. Virtual humans For the study, which will appear in Computers in Human Behavior,
a virtual human application that can be used to identify signals of depression and other mental health issues through real-time sensing and recognition of nonverbal behaviors.
or act as roleplaying partners for training health professionals. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the US ARMY funded the research.
#How a missile detector can stop malaria in its tracks Scientists have found a new use for an antitank Javelin missile detector:
published in the journal Analyst, could set a new gold standard for malaria testing. MISSILES AND PARASITES The heat-seeking detector,
a test that can catch malaria at its early stages is critical. ur test detects malaria at its very early stages,
so that doctors can stop the disease in its tracks before it takes hold and kills.
We believe this sets the gold standard for malaria testing, Wood says. here are some excellent tests that diagnose malaria.
However, the sensitivity is limited and the best methods require hours of input from skilled microscopists,
and that a problem in developing countries where malaria is most prevalent, he adds. FOUR-MINUTE COUNT DOWN As well as being highly sensitive,
the new test has a number of advantagest gives an automatic diagnosis within four minutes,
The disease, which is caused by the malaria parasite, kills 1. 2 million people every year. Existing tests look for the parasite in a blood sample.
However the parasites can be difficult to detect in the early stages of infection. As a result the disease is spotted often only when the parasites have developed
and multiplied in the body. Professor Leann Tilley from the University of Melbourne says the test could make an impact in large-scale screening of malaria parasite carriers who do not present the classic fever-type symptoms associated with the disease. n many countries only
people who display signs of malaria are treated. But the problem with this approach is that some people don have typical flu-like symptoms associated with malaria,
and this means a reservoir of parasites persists that can reemerge and spread very quickly within a community,
she says. ur test works because it can detect the malaria parasite at the very early stages
They then assessed the colonies for visual signs of illness and related the illness data with the presence
or absence of parasites or viruses. In the Newfoundland colonies the researchers found the parasite Nosema apis a species that has been displaced by Nosema ceranae elsewhere
and the pathogens black queen cell virus and deformed wing virus. espite the presence of these parasites and pathogens colony losses in Newfoundland are very lowâ##similar to the mortality rates reported in the United states
The team found that the Newfoundland bees which were suffered otherwise healthy from K-wing a descriptive condition of the asymmetrical positioning of the wings that previously was known not to be associated with any identifiable pathogen.
and co-infection in the same bee is common. ccording to Ostiguy the team will continue to investigate the relationships between various pathogens
and pathogens of honey bees. n addition to Ostiguy researchers from Acadia University Forestry and Agrifoods Agency Government of Newfoundland and Labrador Agriculture and Agrifood Canada Dalhousie University and University
And that has held back certain medical therapies. MAGIS: The new method Unlike the calutron, which requires huge amounts of energy to maintain a magnetic field with electromagnets,
cancer therapies, and nutritional diagnostics. The new method also has the potential to enhance our national security.
when diabetics, wounded veterans, or older people are prone to lose their sight. The Braille studies will be presented in Seattle this September at the 18th International Symposium on Wearable computers (ISWC.
and pathogens that can have an environmental impact if not properly managed. While turning the manure into clean water makes environmental sense
That limits their usefulness for applications like weapons and chemical detection and medical imaging and diagnosis, says Jay Guo,
Though ultrasound detectors existncluding those used in medical imaginghe researchers made their own sensitive one in the form of a microscopic plastic ring known as a microring resonator.
which social information processing is disruptedâ##like autism spectrum disorderâ ##and may lead to new strategies for improving social cognition in several psychiatric disorders.
According to study author Larry Young of the department of psychiatry at Emory University this is the first study to demonstrate that variation in the oxytocin receptor gene influences face recognition skills.
He and colleagues point out the implication that oxytocin plays an important role in promoting our ability to recognize one another yet about one-third of the population possesses only the genetic variant that negatively impacts that ability.
which is disrupted in disorders such as autism. Additionally this study is remarkable for its evolutionary aspect.
which was funded by grants from the US National institute of mental health and the Office of Research Infrastructure Programs as well as the Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation and National Alliance for Autism Research.
and medical devices to structural components for the automotive civil and aerospace industries. he cellulose nanocrystals represent a potential green alternative to carbon nanotubes for reinforcing materials such as polymers and concrete.
Such sensors could be used for monitoring in traffic security environmental science health care and infrastructure applications. or the future Wang and his research team plan to continue studying the nanogenerators
#New transistors offer high output at low voltage A new type of transistor could pave the way for fast computing devices that would use very low energy including smart sensor networks and implanted medical devices.
while draining the battery requires frequent replacement surgery. The researchers led by Suman Datta professor of electrical engineering tuned the material composition of the indium gallium arsenide/gallium arsenide antimony
#Rapid TB test could be ready in 18 months A new rapid tuberculosis test shortens diagnosis time on one of the world s deadliest diseases from several weeks to a few hours.
The disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria attacks the lungs or other organs and is spread through the air when an individual with active form of TB coughs or sneezes.
One in ten cases progress to the active disease which presents symptoms such as a chronic cough coughing up bloody sputum (mucus) fever night sweats and weight loss.
If left untreatedâ##a common scenario in developing countries lacking the infrastructure or resources to efficiently screen and follow up with infected patientsâ##a person with active TB has only a 50 percent chance of survival.
Jeffrey Cirillo professor in the Department of Microbial Pathogenesis and Immunology at Texas A&m Health Science Center (TAMHSC) College of Medicine and his team have discovered a new method to spot the bacteria that causes
TB a profound advance in point-of-care diagnosis of the disease. e ve identified a fluorescence substrate that reacts with the bacteriacirillo says. his gives us a very sensitive signal that wouldn t be possible otherwise. nce sputum samples
and deliver the diagnosis. here isn t a diagnostic tool comparable to this in terms of allowing patients to rapidly determine
It has not been previously possible to target a specific TB enzyme as a diagnostic for this disease.
Chemistry has letters of support from the World health organization Doctors Without Borders and the Clinton Health Access Initiative.
There s no reason we can t grow extraordinarily large single crystals in the future using modifications of our techniquesays Mirkin who also is a professor of medicine chemical and biological engineering biomedical engineering and materials science and engineering and director of the university s International Institute for Nanotechnology.
Potential implications of the methodology for human health include for example learning how an infection-induced fever could affect the RNA structures of both humans and pathogens.
or in any living organism. emperature and drought are among the environmental stress factors that affect the structure of RNA molecules thereby influencing how genes are xpressedhow their functions are turned turned on
In their latest paper the team successfully applies this more efficient process to the fabrication of heterogeneous objects that comprise different materials that cure at different rates.
an object of this type. ur goal was to understand all circumstances that resulted in the damaging shock wave that sent over 1200 people to hospitals in the Chelyabinsk Oblast area that daysays Peter Jenniskens meteor astronomer at SETI Institute.
and caused some severe sunburns. The team estimated that about three-quarters of the meteoroid evaporated at that point.
The object broke up 30 kilometers up under the enormous stress of entering the atmosphere at high speed.
which have a wide range of application from membranesâ##for instance for the purification of waterâ##to therapeutic uses including the development of new drug systems. ource:
and disease-resistant stocks of honey beesnino says. The Department of agriculture and the United states-Israel Binational Science Foundation supported this research
they seem to be a computational unit as well. is team plans to explore what this newly discovered dendritic role may play in brain circuitry and particularly in conditions like Timothy syndrome in
A demonstrated neural firing-rate set point opens up a whole new approach to thinking about neurological disorders such as epilepsy in
which the brain is excited too and autism in which the brain is excited not enough. f we can figure out how these set points are built we may be able to adjust them
when it s the wrong timesays Wayne Sossin a neuroscientist at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital at Mcgill University and senior investigator on the paper. his is especially important with nerve cells in the brain as you only want the brain to make precise
For example sophisticated vintners use precise irrigation to put regulated water stress on grapevines to create just the right grape composition for a premium cabernet or a chardonnay wine.
While growers can use the sensors to monitor water in soils for their crops civil engineers can embed the chips in concrete to determine optimal moisture levels as the concrete cures. ne of our goals is to try
he complex Rddm machinery is composed of several proteins that guide the genome in response to growth developmental and stress signals.
so I was just hysterical saying â##Look at these!''n the future Gregg says scientists could hunt for land-based lava pillars near oceans to learn about the height of ancient seas
In medicine such networks could serve as martdrug deliverers or disease detectors at the cellular level.
The new approach isn t ready to be applied in the medical field but future uses could include using this framework to make molecules that self-assemble within cells
These could be embedded in a cell then programmed to detect abnormalities and respond as needed perhaps by delivering drugs directly to those cells.
scanning medical therapy and imaging and research in biology and materials science. ecause it employs commercial lasers
Another possible application is small portable X-ray sources to improve medical care for people injured in combat as well as to provide more affordable medical imaging for hospitals and laboratories.
and found the arthquakesonly within a narrow temperature range that simulates conditions where the real earthquakes occur in Earth. sing synchrotron X-rays to aid our observations we found that fractures nucleate at the onset of the olivine to spinel transitiongreen says. urther these fractures propagate dynamically
and spread diseases such as the ongoing outbreak of Cryptococcus in Canada and the Pacific Northwest of the United states. Though some might disagree most biologists think the purpose of sex is to create diversity among offspring.
The fungi Cryptococcus neoformans is a global pathogen that primarily infects individuals with compromised immune systems such as HIV/AIDS patients.
It causes more than 600000 deaths a year from cryptococcal pneumonia and meningoencephalitis accounting for a third of all AIDS-related deaths.
because it is the only way this fungal pathogen can produce spores to infect its host.
Aneuploidy is well known to be deleterious in humans causing genetic disorders like Down s syndrome or trisomy 21. But having an extra chromosome can actually be beneficial in microbes like Cryptococcus where it has been shown to confer drug resistance to the antifungal fluconazole.
and implantable biomedical devicesgreer says the work could fundamentally shift the way people think about the creation of materials. ith this approach we can really start thinking about designing materials backwardshe says. can start with a property
Dantusâ##initial spark came from a collaboration with Harvard university that developed a laser that could be used to detect cancer
but has the beam output of a simple presentation pointer. hile working on biomedical imaging I began exploring additional applicationsdantus says. e soon learned how effective it was for detecting traces of hazardous substances from distances up to 10 meters away. s described in the journal Applied Physics Letters the bomb-detecting
and coordination difficulties one of the major challenges teachers and occupational therapists come up against time and again is limited the time they have to work one-to-one with each childhill says. n this respect haptic robotic technologies have huge potential efficiency benefits. hey provide a means by which children can receive supported practice at a level
which adjusts to their growing abilities without the need for one-to-one interaction with a therapist. anks of these systems could be used simultaneously by multiple children in a clinic
and is used commonly in muds for oil drilling, in modern construction, in medical applications and as a binder by iron and steel foundries.
and to fire up a response to a pathogen attack. The gene product they discovered breaks down salicylic acid effectively silencing the molecular command to die.
Plants use an expedited hypersensitive process to thwart pathogens by sacrificing infected cells to protect the surrounding healthy tissues.
#Slow-wave sleepspecifically the results of complex experiments performed at Massachusetts General Hospital and then analyzed at Brown show that the improved speed
which could help breeders decision-making Better understanding of genomic imprinting may offer insights into several human diseases.
Mistakes in imprinting genes can impair development spurring genetic problems that can cause gigantism dwarfism neurological failures incomplete sexual development and others.
Fine control over these light beams will enable improvements for on-chip biomedical devices and super resolution imaging. or all these applications,
Leaf rust is a fungal disease that could destroy almost a third of the nation s barley crop,
The discovery will enable selective breeding of barley that will provide genetic protection to the disease.
Hickey says the crop disease could also leave Australian beer drinkers thirsty because the country's primary use of barley was to make beer as well as stock feed.
He says his research also shows that the Rph20 gene had resistance to powdery mildew another devastating barley disease.
These findings may pave the way for new methodologies for understanding anxiety and other emotions as well as substances that alter them.
Ethanol has been shown to influence anxiety-related responses in humans rodents and some species of fish.
and his collaborators conducted two traditional anxiety tests and evaluated whether the results obtained therein were sensitive to ethanol administration.
and the results of the other anxiety tests and the data support that#Porfiri explains.#
The stem rust disease is producing large wheat yield losses throughout Africa and Asia and threatening global food security.
By transferring this gene to commercial wheat varieties wheat breeders will have a distinct advantage in controlling the epidemic the researchers say.
#A new race of a wheat disease called stem rust Ug99 has been spreading over large distances
Previous resistance genes that had proven effective for fighting the disease for 50 years are ineffective against this new race.
They then inserted the gene into a wheat variety that is susceptible to the diseases engineering a resistance to Ug99.#
#This discovery opens the door for biotechnological approaches to fight this devastating disease#says Eduard Akhunov an associate professor at Kansas State university and co-director of the project.
The challenge now is to identify which combination of resistance genes can deliver a more durable resistance against the disease.
Additional researchers from UC Davis Department of Plant sciences the USDA-ARS Cereal Disease Laboratory and Kansas State university also contributed to the study.
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