From IEEE Spectrum:
Several teams of scientists and engineers have been trying for years to produce a practical retinal prosthesis for people afflicted by a progressive loss of photoreceptor cells. One problem all the researchers face is how to get power and data (the image) to a r
From ScienceDaily: Latest Science News:
An ultra-high-resolution imaging technique using X-ray diffraction is a step closer to fulfilling its promise as a window on nanometer-scale structures in biological samples. Researchers report progress in applying an approach to "lensless" X
While in Copenhagen, I spoke with the folks from Fora.tv for a ten minute interview covering a wide range of topics. These included the dysfunctional way in which our culture processes information about science in general, and about climate science in particular; the continuing stream of misinformation about global warming (particularly the bogus claims that we haven’t had any warming in a decade); the increasing allure of the geoengineering option as progress on emission cuts continues to stall; the reasons for heeding climate models, despite their flaws; and the dangerous possibility that the warming we ultimately see could be on the high end of the current projections.
You can watch it all here, and I have also embedded it below:
Another one bites the dust.
The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) is generally a waste of taxpayer money, but they have sponsored several well-designed large trials of popular herbal supplements. And one by one these studies have shown these popular products, such as echinacea for the common cold, to be ineffective.
To add to the list, published in JAMA this week are the results of the largest and longest trial to date of Gingko biloba for the improvement of cognitive function and to treat, prevent, or reduce the effects of Alzheimers disease or other dementia. The results of the study are completely negative.
The study was very rigorous – a consensus trial designed to address all the criticisms of prior smaller studies. It was a direct comparison of Gingko biloba at 120mg twice a day, double blind, randomized, multi-center trial involving 3019 subjects aged 72-96 for a median of 6.1 years. Subjects were followed with standardized tests of cognitive function.
The results are easy to report – every measure showed no difference between G biloba and placebo. There was no difference in cognitive function, risk of developing dementia, rate of progression of dementia or normal cognitive decline with aging. Usually such studies involve some random noise in the results, especially when several outcomes are measured. But with such a large study, random fluctuations should average out, and that is exactly what happened.
Gingko biloba has been used for centuries as a medical herb, and the most popular claim made for its use was to enhance cognitive function. The justification for this claim was always thin – G biloba has a mild blood thinning effect. It was therefore claimed that the herbal drug would enhance blood flow to the brain and improve brain function.
However, this is not a plausible mechanism. The brain exquisitely regulates its own bloodflow, and suboptimal perfusion results in a widening of the blood vessels to increase flow. This autoregulation would not be enhanced by mild blood thinning in a healthy individual.
In someone with severe atherosclerosis or narrowing of the arteries, to the point where autoregulation of blood flow is not able to optimize perfusion of brain tissue, the result is typically stroke-like symptoms. In this situation a blood thinner may improve perfusion, and generally drugs like aspirin are prescribed.
This, of course, implies that if simple blood thinning could improve cognitive function, then aspirin would be more effective at this than G biloba. In any case, this putative mechanism was never very plausible.
More recent studies have found that G biloba has some anti-oxidant effects. However, anti-oxidants as a class have not been found to be effective for cognitive function or any other clinical outcome. So this too lacks plausibility.
It was also found that G biloba can reduce amyloid aggregation. Amyloid plaques build up in the neurons of patients with Alzheimers disease, so this is a plausible mechanism for slowing the progression of some forms of dementia. However, as we now know this does not translate into a measurable clinical effect.
The lessons from this study and the lack of effect for Ginkgo biloba should learned and generalized.
Historical use of an herbal drug is not sufficient evidence for its effectiveness.
Preliminary, small, or poorly designed studies are unreliable, and often result in false positives. Only large definitive trials are reliable.
Finding a potential mechanism for a drug, herbal or otherwise, is not a sufficient basis for a clinical claim – you need clinical trials with actual people to support such claims. Further, if researchers go looking for potential mechanisms to explain a putative action of a drug or supplement, it is not surprising that they will find some. Drugs typically have many biochemical actions in the body, and finding an effect is not surprising. There is also likely confirmation bias and the file-drawer effect at work – favoring the publishing of interesting and positive studies.
In the end – all the ancient wisdom, small studies, and putative mechanisms meant nothing. They were all trumped by a large and impeccably designed study that shows Gingko biloba is of no measurable benefit for cognitive function.
These results call into question the practice in many countries of allowing pharmacological agents like G biloba to be marketed as supplements with health claims prior to being adequately studied. The European and US markets for G biloba are in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year. It will be interesting to see what happens following this study.
The study did find that G biloba was generally safe. However, it should be noted that G biloba, although sold in the US as a supplement, should be considered a drug. It does have an anti-platelet blood-thinning effect and should not be taken prior to surgery. However, because many people think of herbs as supplements and not drugs, patients rarely disclose their supplements to their doctors, and doctors fail to take a supplement history. Safety is therefore still an issue.
Herbs and botanicals have been and can be a valuable source for useful pharmacological agents. However, regulating and using them as supplements has many flaws – as the history of Gingko biloba once again highlights.
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Made from a WWII German fighter plane and Yamaha Wild Star motorbike, this sidecar bike looks like a less-colorful Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. [Henrik Toth via LikeCool]
Traditionally favored by middle-aged women, wallpaper could cut carbon emissions and eliminate the need for light bulbs, with a UK company using OLED technology to create light-emitting wallpaper.
The government-backed Carbon Trust has awarded a £454,000 ($720,000) grant to a company by the name of Lomox, to develop the special wallpaper. Inspired by OLED TVs which use low voltage, Lomox hopes to use some of the same technology for wallpaper that lights up rooms and outdoor areas, believing they can get an affordable product to market by 2012.
Let's just hope they don't stop at Laura Ashley for design influence. [FT]
Image Credit: Country Living
Surge Analysis is advisable for Gas line ? or only for liquid line.
The last time we heard about the antiqued G1 being loaded with 2.1 it turned out to be fake, so we're not holding our breath now. Nonetheless, AndroidSpin user Drizzy is claiming success, with the ROM on its way.
Speculation is also pointing at an official over-the-air 2.0 or 2.1 upgrade for the G1, but considering the G1 is over a year old now and not exactly Google's priority these days, don't go holding out for an official one just yet. [AndroidSpin via RedmondPie]
I am still redoing the brake system on 1948 ford F1, on the rear axel there is a small brass block that the rear brake lines and the main from the master cyl. tie into, I tried to remove it to clean or replace it and found a swivel cap on top of the unit, my question is as follows; is this a balanci
Dave Zatz has an invite to a CES Slingbox event. Neato: New video streaming gear including a touchscreen device.
You'll experience an up close view of Sling's new placeshifting products including WiFi television, ultra-slim Slingboxes, and a next-generation touch screen device.
I just hope it's not mostly echostar-only stuff, since they were acquired. [Zatz]
Every little boy wants to race in the F1 at some point, but does he want to spend $191,500 on a simulator? Cruden's Hexatech simulator can be fully customized for the real F1, NASCAR or WRC experience.
All of the features, including the chassis, wheelbase and track, tire and suspension, engine, gearbox, differentials, aero loading, aero draft, steering, brakes and ABS can be adapted for your personal use, with each simulator coming with three 42-inch TV screens for the racing to be projected onto.
Cruden is claiming it'll last 10 - 15 years, which works out to around $19,150 a year—surely you can spare that from your annual salary? [Cruden via Autoblog]
As Shinnecock Indians returned to their reservation on Long Island after World War II, elders warned that their tribe’s long struggle for survival was once again threatened.
Decent jobs were scarce and many Shinnecock veterans were leaving, draining the reservation of needed hands. ...
Now this small tribe on the eastern end of Long Island is on the verge of sketching a new, perhaps more prosperous chapter. The Obama administration’s recent announcement that the Shinnecocks met the criteria for federal recognition finally paves the way for a casino, generating a bounty of jobs and revenue.
The odd fact raised by this story is that the U.S. pays restitution to Indian Tribes by giving them monopoly rights (within a given state or area) to sell casino gambling services.
Here's a different approach: legalize all gambling. Then have an honest debate about whether, or how much, the U.S. should pay restitution to Native Americans.
PLease provide the hardness values for different material
Once in a blue moon there is one on New Year's Eve. Revelers ringing in 2010 will be treated to a so-called blue moon. According to popular definition, a blue moon is the second full moon in a month. But don't expect it to be blue — the name has nothing to do with the color of our closest celestial neighbor. A full moon occurred on Dec. 2. It will appear again on Thursday in time for the New Year's countdown.
"If you're in Times Square, you'll see the full moon right above you. It's going to be that brilliant," said Jack Horkheimer, director emeritus of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium and host of a weekly astronomy TV show.
The New Year's Eve blue moon will be visible in the United States, Canada, Europe, South America and Africa. For partygoers in Australia and Asia, the full moon does not show up until New Year's Day, making January a blue moon month for them.
However, the Eastern Hemisphere can celebrate with a partial lunar eclipse on New Year's Eve when part of the moon enters the Earth's shadow. The eclipse will not be visible in the Americas.
A full moon occurs every 29.5 days, and most years have 12. On average, an extra full moon in a month — a blue moon — occurs every 2.5 years. The last time there was a lunar double take was in May 2007. New Year's Eve blue moons are rarer, occurring every 19 years. The last time was in 1990; the next one won't come again until 2028.
Blue moons have no astronomical significance, said Greg Laughlin, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
"`Blue moon' is just a name in the same sense as a `hunter's moon' or a `harvest moon,'" Laughlin said in an e-mail.
The popular definition of blue moon came about after a writer for Sky & Telescope magazine in 1946 misinterpreted the Maine Farmer's Almanac and labeled a blue moon as the second full moon in a month. In fact, the almanac defined a blue moon as the third full moon in a season with four full moons, not the usual three.
Though Sky & Telescope corrected the error decades later, the definition caught on. For purists, however, this New Year's Eve full moon doesn't even qualify as a blue moon. It's just the first full moon of the winter season.
In a tongue-in-cheek essay posted on the magazine's Web site this week, senior contributing editor Kelly Beatty wrote: "If skies are clear when I'm out celebrating, I'll take a peek at that brilliant orb as it rises over the Boston skyline to see if it's an icy shade of blue. Or maybe I'll just howl."
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The importance and relevance of the National Geographic magazine can never be argued against, particularly with their nod to the dawn of a new decade in the form of a HDD pre-loaded with every issue ever published.
The 160GB external hard drive has 100GB spare for storing your own travel photos, videos of volcanoes and the like, or perhaps downloading new digital copies of the magazine too, if it goes for another 100 years.
All of the articles, pictures, even adverts are included on the digital copies, and a DVD is also bundled, providing tips, behind-the-scenes videos and interviews. $199.95 may seem like a lot for a HDD, but if you weigh up the cost of what every magazine would've cost you from the past 121 years, you're actually making a saving [National Geographic via Download Squad via Crunchgear]
UPDATE: Or, you could buy each and every issue on a CD, for under $50
Garmin's 450T GPS is their highest end without an integrated camera, and so, the best discreet outdoor GPS they make. It has a barometer, altimeter, waterproofness, tilt-compensated compass and a receiver sensitive enough for quick fixes in canyons and forests.
The 450 has a 3-inch, 240 x 400 pixel screen, 850MB of internal memory and a MicroSD slot. It works off AAs but with lithium or NiMH cells you can get 16 hours of life. There's a $400 450 model (lacking the t, which is $500) that misses the full payload of North American topographical maps, covering "major trails, urban and rural roads, interstates, highways, coastlines, rivers and lakes as well as national, state and local parks, forests and wilderness areas".
I'm all about cheap, internet enabled smartphone GPS apps for walking and turn by turn, but for the serious outdoorsman who doesn't want to risk ruining or running down batteries in their phone, and wants a full payload of maps for when the internet goes down over the north side of that big mountain, this $500 outdoor GPS seems like the one to have. But man, think about how much smartphone and GPS app $500 buys you these days. You'd have to be really, really serious about the outdoors these days to get a device like this. I'm personally on the fence.
[Business Wire, Garmin Blog, Garmin]
Garmin® Grows in Outdoor Recreation, Adding New Oregon® Handhelds, Garmin Connect™ Compatibility and Free Custom Maps Utility
OLATHE, Kan.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Garmin International Inc., a unit of Garmin Ltd. (NASDAQ: GRMN), the global leader in satellite navigation, today announced the Oregon 450t and Oregon 450 touchscreen GPS devices, the newest of Garmin's next-generation outdoor handhelds now compatible with the online community at Garmin Connect as well as Garmin's free Custom Maps utility for transferring paper or digital maps onto your compatible handheld.
"More than ever, Garmin offers intuitive touchscreen options for anyone exploring and enjoying the world around them"
"More than ever, Garmin offers intuitive touchscreen options for anyone exploring and enjoying the world around them," said Dan Bartel, Garmin's vice president of worldwide sales. "Oregon 450t and Oregon 450 provide a bridge between the slimmed-down Dakota™ family and the top-of-line Oregon 550t, all of which work seamlessly with Garmin Custom Maps in planning your adventure and Garmin Connect for reliving the experience and sharing the memories."
Responsive to the touch of a finger, yet resistant to the rigors of nature, Oregon 450t and Oregon 450 simplify navigation through a glove-friendly touchscreen interface. This bright 3" color display is easier than ever to read and use in all conditions. Other key upgrades include user-selectable dashboards, enhanced track navigation, high-speed USB for faster map transfers with your computer, photo navigation and the 3-axis tilt-compensated electronic compass, which shows your heading even when you're standing still, without the need to hold it level. The new dashboards give users the ability to customize the appearance of various pages on your Oregon, including the geocaching, compass, stopwatch and elevation functions. For hikers, cyclists and trail runners, the enhanced track navigation will prove especially useful. When navigating to a destination on an active track, users will see the changes in elevation ahead of them as well as where they've been. Also, waypoints and other key locations along the active route – such as start, end and high and low elevation points – now appear on the map and active route pages. The new Oregon units also include a barometric altimeter, paperless geocaching and wireless exchange of tracks, waypoints, routes and geocaches with compatible Oregon, Dakota, Colorado® and Foretrex® devices.
Both units boast a worldwide shaded relief basemap, and Oregon 450t adds preloaded 100K topographic maps for the entire United States and state-of-the-art 3D elevation perspective. Coverage on the 450t includes major trails, urban and rural roads, interstates, highways, coastlines, rivers and lakes as well as national, state and local parks, forests and wilderness areas. In addition, you can search for points of interest by name or proximity to your location and view descriptive details for terrain contours, topo elevations, summits and geographical points.
Customizing maps for your Garmin outdoor handheld – and downloading your activity afterward - were never easier. Through a few simple steps, Garmin's Custom Maps can bring the details, labels and landmarks of your existing paper or electronic map to a compatible Garmin Oregon, Dakota or Colorado. Compatible with both PC and Mac, this free utility complements the myriad of mapping products already offered for Garmin devices, including City Navigator®, NT for turn-by-turn directions on city streets, Blue Chart® g2, for marine charting, and TOPO U.S. 24K and 100K map software for incredible terrain detail (each sold separately). The power of Custom Maps is exemplified through paper and digital maps labeled for specific events and purposes, such as a college graduation invitation that lists campus buildings; a roadmap of a parade, marathon, 5K or bike race; a park pamphlet showing trailheads; land-management maps of wildlife and game areas; or a historic illustration of an area as it once stood. To walk through the steps, to find and share maps and to join discussions about Garmin Custom Maps, visit http://www.garmin.com/CustomMaps.
Experiences will live on long after the activity has ended, thanks to Garmin Connect's newly announced compatibility with Garmin outdoor handhelds, adding an expansive new product line to the free-to-join online community of more than 17 million activities – with more than 38,000 new activities per day – for sharing, storing, analyzing and enjoying. Outdoor and fitness enthusiasts alike can share activities on Facebook and Twitter, export to Google Earth or relive the activity in table view, calendar view or on a variety of maps including our new embedded Google Earth view.
I'm surprised it's taken this long, to be honest. Microsoft's posted a job offer, seeking a Principle Program Manager, who can "bring Xbox LIVE enabled games to Windows Mobile."
Based at their Redmond HQ, the right person for the job will "focus specifically on what makes gaming experiences "LIVE Enabled" through aspects such as avatar integration, social interactions, and multi-screen experiences."
I imagine to do all that, they'll be needing some top-notch Windows Mobile handsets, and really the Snapdragon-powered HTC HD2 is the only device on the market so far capable of doing it. Not that it at all resembles a device targeted at Xbox gamers. Give me a Zune phone any day of the week. [Microsoft via Engadget and Kotaku]
Image Credit: T3
Joining it's brethren the compass, tape measure and calculator-ruler watch is this flashlight watch. Is it an official Stanley gadget? I dunno. But I still find it inspired: all watches should have built-in LED flashlights.
[Brando]
Dear Friend
As you know some kind of TV antenna rotate by a rotor .the rotor power is supplied by Main antenna wire (the wire that carry sound and image signals).I am looking for a circuit and description to make a board for this problem. How should you lead me?
It will b
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Think those plastic glasses are filled with Daisy's fresh milk? Wrong! The battery-powered white LEDs light up the opaque plastic, fooling everyone into thinking you're drinking nature's own juice. Instead of gin. [
