Wikipedia, Meet Knol

Seven months after Google began testing a service called Knol, a Wikipedia competitor, the company on Wednesday finally rolled it out.

On Knol, articles on various topics are penned by individuals, and in many cases, experts -- not anonymously. Knol authors can choose to benefit from the "wisdom of the crowds" by letting others edit or supplement their articles. But those changes make it into Knol entries only with the author's permission.

'Nanonet' circuits closer to making flexible electronics reality

Researchers at at Purdue University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have overcome a major obstacle in producing transistors from "nanonets" -- networks of carbon nanotubes.



The technology could make it possible to print circuits on plastic sheets for applications including flexible displays and an electronic skin to cover an entire aircraft to monitor crack formation.

'Universal' allergy therapy a step closer (article preview)

Researchers at Cytos Biotechnology have developed a "universal" allergy therapy that makes the immune system stop reacting to harmless allergens (substances that cause allergies).

In trials, the therapy--a series of shots--helped people allergic to house dust mites and cat dander.

An overactive immune system is thought to be the cause of most allergic reactions. The new therapy "distracts" the immune system by giving patients a molecular decoy (CYT003-QbG10) that makes the body behave as if it is under attack by bacteria. The increase in the immune system's anti-microbial response reduces its allergic response.

Existing immunotherapies (desensitization therapies), which give patients tiny doses of the specific substance to which they are allergic, are time-consuming and cannot be given to all patients.

An Eye Test for Diabetes

University of Michigan researchers have found that a snapshot of the retina can detect diabetes and other diseases that affect the retina.

Diabetes interferes with the body's metabolism, which can result in nerve damage, kidney disease, and vision loss. The researchers' system picks up signs of metabolic stress in the retina by detecting fluorescence given off by oxidized proteins in dying cells. They found diabetics have elevated levels of autofluorescence compared to age-matched control subjects.

While the system won't replace blood sugar screening, it could provide an early-warning tool for prediabetes and help monitor diabetic patients. Clinical trials will start in fall 2008.

Making Genetic Testing Useful

In a new $31 million project to connect genetic variations with actual health risks, researchers will combine epidemiological studies (detailed long-term health studies) of tens of thousands of people with those participants' genetic data.

The study, sponsored by the National Human Genome Research Institute, will provide data that genome-wide association studies (GWAS--comparing genetic variations in groups of people with and without a disease) alone cannot provide. GWAS have identified more than 300 genetic variants that boost risk for illnesses such as diabetes, arthritis, and Crohn's disease, but they do not show how the genetic change causes an illness, or what other factors may have played a role.

In contrast, the new study will use four existing epidemiological studies in which scientists have spent years tracking participants' medical information, such as blood pressure, medications, lifestyle, and nutrition. This level of detail will allow researchers to look at gene-environment interactions. For example, some studies link pesticide exposure to Parkinson's disease, but this risk may only be realized in people who possess certain genetic risk factors.

See Also Researchers Detect Variations in DNA That Underlie Seven Common Diseases

Patients and researchers collaborate to find medical cures

Patients suffering with the daily pain of medical conditions now have a place to go share information and resources with other patients and researchers.

CureTogether, a San Mateo, CA startup, plans to announce Thursday a free health research service to bring together patients and researchers to make discoveries in a new, collaborative way.

The first conditions being studied are migraine, endometriosis, and vulvodynia; each affect more than five million Americans. Patients will also be able to share ideas and provide their anonymous medical data to an aggregate database available "open source" to any researcher in the world to study.

"We chose these conditions because they are underfunded, involve daily pain, and have personal meaning for us," said co-founder Alexandra Carmichael. "We saw the suffering of our close family and friends with these chronic conditions, and we wanted to do something to help." So they partnered with the Chandran Family Foundation for Healthcare Research and Education and researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "We may expand to other conditions if enough patients come together to request it," she added.

CureTogether's service reflects an emerging social networking trend to help patients share and understand their data, pioneered by companies like 23andMe, a web-based service that helps you read and understand your DNA; and PatientsLikeMe, which enables people with various diseases to share information about symptoms and treatments.

See also:

Social Networking Hits the Genome

Science 2.0 -- Is Open Access Science the Future?

GM partners with utilities to advance plug-in hybrids

General Motors is teaming up with 30 utilities in 37 states and with the Electric Power Research Institute to develop a charging infrastructure for electric cars.

They aim to fine-tune the technology, safety, and customer experience for car-charging stations by 2010, when the Chevy Volt is due to be produced.

First paper-based transistors

Portuguese researchers have created the first field effect transistors (FET) with a paper interstrate layer.

Possible applications include new disposable electronics devices, such as paper displays, smart labels, bio-applications, and RFID tags.

"Consensus" on Man-Made Warming Shattering

Physics & Society, The journal of the American Physical Society, has published "Climate Sensitivity Revisited," a debate.

"There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution," the paper notes.

"Global mean surface temperature has not risen since 1998 and may have fallen since late 2001. The present analysis suggests that the failure of the IPCC's models to predict this and many other climatic phenomena arises from defects in its evaluation of the three factors whose product is climate sensitivity: radiative forcing delta F; the no-feedbacks climate sensitivity parameter k; and the feedback multiplier f.

The American Physical Society itself has issued a statement: It stands by its belief that human-emitted CO2 is "changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the earth's climate" and notes that Physics & Society is not peer-reviewed.

Tobacco 'could help treat cancer'

Stanford University researchers are using tobacco plants to grow key components of a cancer vaccine, turning the plants into factories for an antibody chemical specific to the cancerous cells that cause follicular B-cell lymphoma, a type of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Once a patient's cancer cells are isolated in the laboratory, the gene responsible for producing the antibody is extracted and added to a tobacco virus. When the virus infects the tobacco, the gene is added to the plants' cells, which start producing large quantities of the antibody. These antibodies are put back into a patient to "prime" the body's immune system to attack any cell carrying them.

Human-frog hybrids aid autism investigations

University of California, Irvine researchers have made human-frog hybrid cells that can be used to directly study neurotransmitter signaling of brain-cell membranes from people who had autism, epilepsy, or other neurological disorders.

Brain cell membranes (taken from brain tissue samples of deceased patients with a particular disease) contain neurotransmitter receptors and channels to let molecules through the membranes. When the membranes are fused with frog eggs, the receptors and channels function again and react to neurotransmitters, creating a measurable voltage.

The combination acts as a surrogate for a living brain with the condition, letting researchers directly observe how human patients' membranes act. The results could help determine if problems with neurotransmitter receptors underlie a disease.

Country, the City Version: Farms in the Sky Gain New Interest

The "vertical farm," a 30-story skyscraper growing hydroponic vegetables, could feed 50,000 people in a city (at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars), proposes Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University.

Hoping Two Drugs Carry a Side Effect: Longer Life

Sirtris, a drug company, has two drugs in clinical trials that it hopes will avert degenerative diseases of aging.

One being tested in diabetic patients is a special formulation of resveratrol that delivers a bloodstream dose five times as high as the chemical alone, to reduce glucose levels.

The other drug is a small synthetic chemical that is a thousand times as potent as resveratrol in activating sirtuin and can be given at a much smaller dose.

The hope is that activating sirtuins in people would, like a calorically restricted diet in mice, avert degenerative diseases of aging like diabetes, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's.

Spinal cord stem cells could be basis of new treatment

A researcher at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory has pinpointed stem cells within the spinal cord that, if persuaded to differentiate into more healing cells and fewer scarring cells following an injury, may lead to a new, non-surgical treatment for debilitating spinal-cord injuries.

MIT news

How the Personal Genome Project Could Unlock the Mysteries of Life

George Church's Personal Genome Project aims to make those correlations between particular genetic sequences and particular physical characteristics, including disease risk and personality, on an unprecedented scale.

Begun last year with 10 volunteers, it will soon expand to 100,000 participants and generate a massive database of genomes, phenomes, and even some omes in between.

Video of ReWalk Exoskeleton System

Argo Medical Technologies' ReWalk exoskeleton system allows people with paralyzed legs to walk.



ReWalk comprises a light wearable brace support suit with DC motors at the joints, rechargeable batteries, an array of sensors and a computer-based control system. It fits the body snugly to detect upper body movements, which are used to initiate and maintain the walking process.

Enough Atoms for a Cannonball? Or Just a Small Splash?

Physicists at the University of California, Berkeley have developed a nanomechanical sensor -- a cantilevered carbon nanotube -- that can weigh an atom, replacing a large mass spectrometer.

The mass is determined by sending a radio-frequency signal to the nanotube and measuring its resonant frequency, which changes when different atoms are stuck to it.

Also see:

An atomic-resolution nanomechanical mass sensor, Nature Nanotechnology, July 20, 2008:

Unlike traditional mass spectrometers, nanomechanical mass spectrometers do not require the potentially destructive ionization of the test sample, are more sensitive to large molecules, and could eventually be incorporated on a chip.

'Snow flea antifreeze protein' could help improve organ preservation

University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania researchers have synthesized an antifreeze protein--snow flea antifreeze protein (sfAFP)--used by Canadian snow fleas to survive sub-freezing winter temperatures.


Protein and mirror form (Brad Pentelute)

Their results may allow large quantities of the protein to be made, allowing for potential medical and commercial uses, such as extending the storage life of donor organs and preventing ice-crystal formation in ice cream and other foods.

A quarter of planet to be online by 2012, and able to understand each's other's language

25 percent of the planet will be connected to the Internet by 2012, according to a Jupiter Research report, with highest growth rate in areas such as China, Russia, India and Brazil.

Many of these users will be able to understand each other's language, says Ray Kurzweil.

He cites current developments in the speed and accuracy of statistical translation systems, which have improved exponentially in the past 10 years, such as Language Weaver's automatic language translation software, which can now translate between 2,000 and 5,000 words per minute on a single CPU, using proprietary statistical translation algorithms. He also cites Apptek's hybrid machine translation (HMT) system, which integrates statistical and rule-based processing.

As The Economist points out in a current article, IBM already has a program for translating Arabic and Chinese television broadcasts into English. The system is used by Critical Mention, a company that tracks what is said in Arabic and Chinese news broadcasts and sells that information as a service to other companies.

Two-way translators are also now available. IBM has provided troops in Iraq with multilingual automatic speech translators that can translate tens of thousands of words between Iraqi Arabic and American English.

Low-cost LED lights?

Purdue University researchers have developed a new fabrication process that promises to make LEDs cost-competitive with compact fluorescent lights, which are four times more efficient than conventional incandescent lights, but contain harmful mercury.

They replaced the expensive sapphire-based substrate with low-cost, metal-coated silicon wafers using a built-in reflective layer of zirconium nitride, while solving its chemical instability problems.

Another advantage of silicon is that it dissipates heat better than sapphire, reducing damage caused by heating, which is likely to improve reliability and increase the lifetime of LED lighting.

LEDs also are expected to be far longer lasting than conventional lighting, lasting perhaps as long as 15 years before burning out.

Incandescent bulbs are about 10 percent efficient; white LEDs range from 47 percent to 64 percent efficient, but LED lights on the market cost about $100.

The researchers expect affordable LED lights to be on the market within two years.

Purdue University news release

Next big VC market: life extension?

Life extension could be the next significant industry targeted by venture capitalists and private investment, says Silicon Valley hedge fund manager and futurist Melanie Swan.

She points out the need for specialist life-extension doctors and suggests a health social network people where patients could share interventions and upload their ongoing bio-marker test data into an aggregated electronic health record.

Super-Resolution X-ray Microscopy unveils the buried secrets of the nanoworld

A novel super-resolution X-ray microscope developed by Paul Scherrer Institut and EPFL researchers combines the high penetration power of x-rays with high spatial resolution with raster scanning, making it possible to non-destructively view the detailed interior composition of sub-hundred-nanometer semiconductor devices or biological samples without requiring a vacuum.

A Book With 90,000 Authors

German publisher Bertelsmann plans to publish a book with the most credited individual authors ever--approximately 90,000: "The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia," containing the 25,000 most popular articles on German Wikipedia.

Energy from Waves

A new device being developed by U.K.-based Checkmate SeaEnergy could help tap a portion of the two trillion watts of electricity that the ocean's waves could generate.


(Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, UK)

The "Anaconda" device would be a 200-meters long, water-filled rubber tube closed at both ends that transmits wave energy to a turbine, capable of generating one megawatt of power at about 12 cents a kilowatt-hour.

Babies use grown-up memory tricks

Johns Hopkins University researchers have found that babies use the same technique as adults to overcome limits in their working memory (memory overload): grouping things into hierarchical categories.

The 14-month-old babies could only remember three things at a time, but those things could include both individual items or groups. The babies used natural groups (two cats or two cars), and would also learn to group items if the researchers presented unfamiliar toys as a group (a shrimp and a tank shown together became a group).

Human blood vessels grown in mice

Harvard Medical School researchers used human progenitor cells (taken from blood or bone marrow, and able to form different cell types) to grow a network of new blood vessels (capillaries) in a mouse.

The harvested cells were mixed with growth-promoting chemicals and then implanted in mice. Within seven days the human cells grew into fully functional blood vessels that joined up with the host animal's blood vessels and started transporting blood.

The research could help treat conditions that involve damage to a tissue's blood supply, such as the damage to the heart after a heart attack. It could also help lab-grown organs to be implanted successfully.

Texas Approves a $4.93 Billion Wind-Power Project

Texas regulators have approved a $4.93 billion wind-power transmission project, providing a major lift to the development of wind energy in the state.

Chemical breakthrough turns sawdust into biofuel

Peking University have developed a lignin breakdown reaction, using near-critical (hot, pressurised) water, that more reliably produces the alkanes and alcohols needed for biofuels.

Invisible nanotube cable could support a human

A nanotube cable one centimeter in diameter with nanotubes separated by 5 microns (more than one wavelength of light) could hold a human while remaining invisible, Nicola Pugno of the Polytechnic of Turin in Italy has calculated.

The Bubble Bursts

A Purdue University nuclear engineer who claimed to have carried out tabletop nuclear fusion is responsible for two instances of scientific misconduct, a report made public today concludes. Both cases centered on efforts by physicist Rusi Taleyarkhan to make experiments carried out by members of his lab appear as independent verification of his work.

Also see:

Sound waves produce nuclear fusion