Stem cell centre proposed for resort

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Xia Jie.

Medical entrepreneur Xia Jie, whose company Health 100 owns the largest chain of health clinics in China, plans to open overseas facilities to cater for wealthy clients.

That could result in an investment of about $20 million in a regenerative treatment centre in the resort, making it a Mecca for health tourism and athlete injury rehabilitation.

''We're now negotiating with the local medical teams,'' Mr Xia said yesterday through an interpreter while on a four-day fact-finding mission to Queenstown.

''Health 100 really wants to find beautiful cities around the world to take Chinese patients to and Queenstown is one of them.

''The vision is to bring the very high-end customers to have special treatment which is not carried out elsewhere in the world,'' he said.

Health 100 would invest with existing firms Queenstown Regenerative Medicine (QRM), run by Marcelle Noble, and the Queenstown Skin Institute.

Both have small premises at Remarkables Park in Frankton.

Queenstown Skin Institute director Dr Hans Raetz said Mr Xia had indicated plans for a much larger centre, with sites in Remarkables Park, Jacks Point or the Five Mile development off Frankton Ladies Mile already earmarked.

''The size depends on Mr Xia, but we've been talking between $10 million and $20 million.

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Stem cell centre proposed for resort

Cell Isolation/Cell Separation Market Worth $5.1 Billion by 2019

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DALLAS, September 24, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --

According to the new market research report "Cell Isolation/Cell Separation Marketby Product (Reagent, Media, Bead, centrifuge), Cell Type (human, stem cell, animal), Technique (Filtration, Surface Marker),by Application (Research, IVD) &by End user (Hospital, Biotechnology) - Forecast to 2019", published by MarketsandMarkets, provides a detailed overview of the major drivers, restraints, challenges, opportunities, current market trends, and strategies impacting the Cell Isolation Market along with the estimates and forecasts of the revenue and share analysis.

Browse 194 market data tables and 53 figures spread through 211 pages and in-depth TOC on"Cell Isolation/Cell Separation"

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/cell-isolation-market-103931479.html Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report.

The global Cell Isolation Market is expected to reach $5.1 Billion by 2019 from $2.5 Billion in 2014, growing at a CAGR of 15.8% from 2014 to 2019.

The report segments this market on the basis of product, cell type, technique, application, and end user. Among various techniques, the centrifugation-based cell isolation technique is expected to account for the largest share in 2014, while surface marker-based cell isolation technique is expected to account for the fastest-growing segment in the cell isolation market, owing to technological advancement due to which new products are being launched in the market. Furthermore, rising usage of surface market-based cell isolation techniques in stem cell and cancer research is another major reason for the growth of this market.

Based on geography, the global Cell Isolation Market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia, and Rest of the World (RoW). North America is expected to account for the largest share of the market by the end of 2014. The large share of this region can be attributed to various factors including increasing government support for cancer and stem cell research and expanding biotechnology and biopharmaceutical industries in this region.

Further Inquiry:http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Enquiry_Before_Buying.asp?id=103931479

Prominent players in the Cell Isolation Market are BD Biosciences (U.S.), Danaher Corporation (U.S.), GE Healthcare (U.K.), Merck Millipore (U.S.), Miltenyi Biotec (Germany), pluriSelect (U.S.), STEMCELL Technologies (Canada), Sigma-Aldrich Corporation (U.S.), Terumo BCT (U.S.), and Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc. (U.S.).

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Cell Isolation/Cell Separation Market Worth $5.1 Billion by 2019

2013 VIFF: Festival offers films that explore spirituality and dignity

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Given the state of the industry, it is more than refreshing to have the Vancouver International Film Festival. And it is even better that VIFF consistently picks impressive films ... with explicit or implicit spiritual themes.

It has become fashionable to trash Hollywood movies. And alas, Im becoming one of the not-so-merry band of trashers. Words cannot convey the emotional and intellectual emptiness I often feel after experiencing most mainstream Hollywood movies.

My cringing is not necessarily in reaction to the artistic quality of the movies, since some are professional and polished. It is mostly a response to their meaning quotient.

So many mainstream American films indulge in cynicism, nihilism, hedonism, escapism, revenge, consumption, or cheap despair. And those movies that actually do try to be positive mostly end up being sentimental.

Would the world be worse off without the likes of Scary Movie 5, G.I. Joe Retaliation, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, or even the clever Bling Ring?

Given the state of the industry, it is more than refreshing to have the Vancouver International Film Festival. And it is even better that VIFF consistently picks impressive films from around the world with explicit or implicit spiritual themes.

VIFF has so far not chosen to go the route of the Cannes, Berlin and Montreal film festivals, which award a so-called ecumenical prize each year, for best movie delving into a spiritual subject. (Recent winners have been The Hunt, Adoration and Babel.)

Still, this years VIFF catalogue counts 15 of the feature films it is showing from Sept. 26 to Oct. 11 in the category of religion, spirituality and myth.

Most of the 15 are about clear religious subjects, like missionaries or the Bahai faith. Which is great. But I maintain there are many other powerful spiritual films in the VIFF catalogue, which deal more subtly with meaning, purpose and the sacred.

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2013 VIFF: Festival offers films that explore spirituality and dignity

No God? No problem, says god-free thinker Sam Harris

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Sam Harris isn't quite the atheist provocateur that Christopher Hitchens was nor the militant that Richard Dawkins is. But he is building his place in the pantheon of god-free thinkers book by book. His latest is "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion." As a California native, he grew up with the Golden State's alternative ideas. His own ideas among them, that morality and spirituality can have a secular, scientific foundation rather than a religious one are rooted in his UCLA neuroscience degree and his years'-long studies of meditation in places such as Tibet and India, including a brief gig on the security team for the Dalai Lama.

You write that you want this book to "pluck the diamond from the esoteric dunghill of religion." What is the diamond of spirituality?

It's the phenomenon of self-transcendence. Introspection is a domain of real discovery and consequential changes in your conscious life. Many people are uncomfortable with the term "spirituality," and frankly I'm uncomfortable with it. I'm not the first atheist to use it somewhat defiantly. Christopher Hitchens and Carl Sagan didn't use it quite the way I do, but they felt it was a word we had to reclaim and strip of its spooky associations.

What do people mean when they say, "I'm spiritual but not religious"?

Many things people mean by "spiritual" are every bit as incredible as religion. I divorce myself from the crazy claims about crystals and Atlantis and the things you find in the spiritual section of a bookstore.

The line between spirituality and religion for me really comes down to the former making claims about the nature of human consciousness and its possibilities, and the latter making claims about the nature of reality the divine origin of certain books or the virgin birth or the way the world is going to end.

If you have an experience of unconditional love, that's a spiritual experience; it tells you about the nature of human experience, about the potential of the human mind and human relationships, but it doesn't tell you anything about the cosmos. You can value it and seek it out, but if you start making claims like "love pervades the universe," then you're just making spooky claims that by their very nature trespass upon the territory of physics and the rest of science.

Many people naturally conflate spiritual and religious feelings.

The problem is, everyone is living in the context of some religious indoctrination, so when they have these experiences, they count them as data in favor of religion. If you're a Christian praying in church and you feel bliss, you're going to start talking about the grace of God. If you're a Hindu praying to Shiva, you're going to have a very different interpretation for the same experience.

There are mental states that people from athletes to writers call "the zone" or "alpha state" that pass for spiritual experiences.

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No God? No problem, says god-free thinker Sam Harris

Star Citizen Sunday – EVA Interactions, Space Station Battles & Ubles More – Video

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Star Citizen Sunday - EVA Interactions, Space Station Battles Ubles More
Keep up with all the news over the past week from CIG #39;s upcoming epic space sim, Star Citizen. In this weeks episode, we hear about 0 grav #39; interactions, PvP...

By: SuperMacBrothers

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Star Citizen Sunday - EVA Interactions, Space Station Battles & Ubles More - Video

SpaceX’s Dragon Cargo Spacecraft Arrives At Space Station | Video – Video

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SpaceX #39;s Dragon Cargo Spacecraft Arrives At Space Station | Video
The private space company #39;s cargo spacecraft delivered supplies, a 3-D printer and more to the International Space Station on September 23rd, 2014. Full Story: http://goo.gl/6A5wcu.

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SpaceX's Dragon Cargo Spacecraft Arrives At Space Station | Video - Video

Sci-fi comedy 'Space Station 76' launches a sendup of '70s design

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Set on an intergalactic ship, the sci-fi comedy "Space Station 76" mixes elements of "The Jetsons" (chore-performing robots, meals that appear at the push of a button) with "Logan's Run" (molded, white plastic living spaces, windows with planetary views) and tosses in a bit of "The Brady Bunch" (wood-paneled walls, shag carpeting, the color brown) for good measure.

"We wanted our space station to be as much inspired by suburban homes of the '70s as it was by sci-fi movies and TV from the '70s," says director Jack Plotnick, who found his own childhood echoed in the sets.

"There's a microwave in the wall of one of the kitchens, just like my family had, and there are couch pillows with the same design as our couch had. And the jewelry box on one of the character's dressers turned out to be the spitting image of the one my mom had that gave me chills!"

"It's like 'Peyton Place' in outer space," offers production designer Seth Reed, who only had four weeks to prep the low-budget film and found inspiration in everything from midcentury architects like Pierre Koenig to the 1971 "The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement" (a few sets are still available on Amazon).

"The thought was that the characters were given anonymous, empty white living capsules when they arrived on the ship, and then they were allowed to choose color schemes and furniture to suit their taste," Reed says. "The unhappy couple [Matt Bomer and Marisa Coughlan] have customized theirs with fake wood paneling and furniture in rusty reds and browns. There are ferns, a flokati rug and a fake electric fireplace."

Their lonely daughter's bedroom, while modular as well, looks like a lot of girls' bedrooms in the mid-'70s: flowered wallpaper and multiple framed pictures of horses all over the walls. "We were trying to embrace that particular '70s style, even amplifying it," Reed says. "We went for irony a lot!"

While the swirling super-graphic featured on the wall in the ship's recreation room and the patterned "tiles" in the captain's (Patrick Wilson) bathroom were painted by the production team, set decorator Kat Wilson sourced most of the movie's groovy furniture smoked acrylic chairs, chrome lighting fixtures, white plastic everything from industry rental houses. "I don't think most of the pieces were originals, merely inspired by designer pieces," she says.

As for what design element from the era most deserves a comeback, Plotnick doesn't hesitate. "Shag carpeting!" he declares. "What's more comforting than walking on shag carpeting? I think we got rid of it because it collects dust, but now that we really live in the future and have Roombas that can spend all day cleaning, please, can we bring them back?"

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Sci-fi comedy 'Space Station 76' launches a sendup of '70s design

New ISERV tool enables rapid view of Earth images from space

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Flipping through online photo albums and social media collections of "selfies" is one thing, but when pictures can show land areas where millions of people live, it can put things in a completely different perspective -- especially for scientists.

One of NASA's newest tools for effective Earth observation has been orbiting our planet for more than 15 years. The International Space Station provides a constant, reliable perspective from which to record changes on the surface of Earth.

A new user-friendly online resource will provide images from a space station camera with nearly two years of images to share. The interface is a world map that links to thousands of images made by the ISERV camera: the International Space Station SERVIR Environmental Research and Visualization System. With the click of a mouse, the public can access the images with the ISERV Viewer.

People can view and download specific ISERV captures from a collection of more than 4,000 Earth images. ISERV scientists plan to expand the database to about 60,000 by summer 2015.

ISERV was installed as a technology testbed in the Window Observational Research Facility (WORF) on the orbiting laboratory in January 2013 and is scheduled to be removed from operation in 2015. The camera receives and acts on commands from the ISERV team to acquire image data of specific areas of Earth's surface as the space station passes overhead.

Images from ISERV are uploaded quickly to the web due to a new automated georeferencing capability, allowing imagery to be processed and published much faster. This is critically important when dealing with a disaster situation. Georeferencing is a process in which points in an image can be associated with geographic locations on a map. Developed by the ISERV ground team, the automated system uses the space station orbit and position data, along with the acquisition time information contained within each image to establish location on Earth and post it on the online map.

The ISERV camera is part of the SERVIR Earth observation program. For 10 years, SERVIR -- an acronym meaning "to serve" in Spanish -- has been a successful collaboration between NASA and the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. The program provides satellite-based Earth observation data and science applications to help developing nations in Central America, Africa and Asia assess environmental threats and the damage from -- and their response to -- natural disasters.

"ISERV has demonstrated the value of Earth observation from the International Space Station for decision makers and disaster responders around the world," says Burgess Howell, ISERV principal investigator at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. "This new image portal will provide public access to a vast array of images over much of the populated area of Earth."

With ISERV, the SERVIR team has pioneered using the space station to support humanitarian relief and disaster support in underserved regions of the globe.

"Nearly 95 percent of the planet's populated area is visible during the station's orbit," said William Stefanov, PhD., associate program scientist for Earth observations in the International Space Station Program Science Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "Imagery captured by ISERV provides valuable information to the scientists and governments around the world to assist in environmental assessments and disaster situations."

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New ISERV tool enables rapid view of Earth images from space