Noel Hinners, a top NASA official, dies at 78

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Noel W. Hinners, a scientist and leader of other scientists who had been a top official at NASA, including director of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and briefly head of the National Air and Space Museum, died Sept. 5 at a hospice center in Littleton, Colo. He was 78.

The cause was complications from basal cell carcinoma, said his wife, Diana Hinners.

From his youth as an aspiring chicken farmer in New Jersey, Dr. Hinners went on to play a leading role in Americas exploration of space, having a guiding hand in programs that explored Mars, launched the Hubble Space Telescope and landed men on the moon.

After the first manned lunar landing, Dr. Hinners specified the spots where later manned lunar missions would touch down. He chaired the committee that decided which sites could provide the most scientific information.

Heading that panel, and reconciling the many competing views on its decisions, exemplified the administrative and leadership abilities that distinguished Dr. Hinnerss career in space science, exploration and education, in government and out.

His Princeton Ph.D. was in geochemistry, but it was probably his knack for getting the best out of other scientists, and of winning federal support for science and space exploration, that earned him some of the highest honors bestowed by the space agency.

Even though I couldnt do the job, I could get others to do it, was the way he once described his talents in a 2010 NASA oral history. My whole career has been built on just surrounding myself with the best people I could find [and] letting them do their job.

But, he could be tough. If his people did not do the job, he directed, Change them out.

An instinct for diplomacy was part of his skill set. When Dr. Hinners headed Goddard from 1982 to 1987, President Ronald Reagan paid a visit. A discussion turned to the possibility of global warming.

As Dr. Hinners recalled it, the president turned out to believe that any warming was likely the result not of man-made carbon dioxide, but rather of organic molecules from trees.

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Noel Hinners, a top NASA official, dies at 78

Russia's Rusnano Seeks Chinese Investment in Nanotechnology

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Nano Medicine Treatments for Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria

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Antibiotic resistance is now a bigger crisis than the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, a landmark report recently warned. The spread of deadly superbugs that evade even the most powerful antibiotics is happening across the world, United Nations officials have confirmed. The effects will be devastating meaning a simple scratch or urinary tract infection could kill.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a scourge that is threatening to get ugly because TB is usually cured by taking antibiotics for six to nine months. However, if that treatment is interrupted or the dose is cut down, the stubborn bacteria battle back and mutate into a tougher strain that can no longer be killed by drugs. Such strains are scaring the heck out of the medical community for good reason. Tuberculosis is highly contagious, holding the potential to wipe out wide swaths of humanity in the case of an epidemic of these drug resistant strains.

Australias first victim of a killer strain of drug-resistant tuberculosis died amid warnings of a looming health epidemic on Queenslands doorstep. Medical experts are seriously concerned about the handling of the TB epidemic in Papua New Guinea after Catherina Abraham died of an incurable form of the illness, known as XDR-TB (extensively drug resistant TB) in Cairns Base Hospital. Of course we always get big scares from the mainstream medical press, who are big cheerleaders of big pharmaceutical companies as our governmental medical officials.

Now medical experts are warning that drug resistant tuberculosis is such a problem in the Asia Pacific region that it could overwhelm health systems.

A drug-resistant TB case did touch off a scare in U.S. We dont know too much about a Nepalese man whos in medical isolation in Texas while being treated for extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB, the most difficult-to-treat kind.

XDR-TB is resistant not only to isoniazid and rifampin but also a class of drugs called fluoroquinolones and one or more potent injectable antibiotics. This is one of the nastiest of all antibiotics, which easily destroys peoples lives by itself.

TB germs become drug-resistant when patients fail to complete a course of treatment. When a partly-resistant strain is treated with the wrong drugs, it can become extensively resistant. There are about 60,000 people with XDR-TB strains like the Nepalese man whos in isolation. That means there are other people with XDR-TB traveling the world at any given time.

China and India Will Spread TB around the World

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Vote: It's SUNY Polytechnic Institute

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It's "Nano" no more.

The College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering that grew out of the University at Albany, along with SUNY IT at Utica/Rome, were officially renamed Tuesday as SUNY Polytechnic Institute.

The merger and name change were set into motion a year ago but just now approved by the State University board of trustees.

"We are thrilled that the SUNY Board of Trustees has unanimously approved our new name," Alain Kaloyeros, CEO and officer in charge of the school, said in a statement.

Kaloyeros essentially built the Nano school and research center starting more than 12 years ago. As well as teaching nanotechnology, or manipulation of materials on the molecular scale, the center hosts corporations such as IBM and Intel that are researching new ways to build and design the latest computer chips.

The Utica IT campus had been in existence since 1966 but had been struggling financially.

In addition to shoring up that campus and expanding education opportunities in the hard-pressed Mohawk Valley, the merger creates a kind of critical mass that could help propel the school forward, officials have said.

With adoption of the ''polytechnic'' name, the Capital Region is now home to two schools Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, or RPI, in Troy; and SUNY Polytechnic Institute, also called SUNY Poly.

RPI officials, when asked if they thought this could lead to confusion, declined comment.

rkarlin@timesunion.com 518-454-5758 @RickKarlinTU

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Moore’s law – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Moore's law is the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The law is named after Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel Corporation, who described the trend in his 1965 paper.[1][2][3] His prediction has proven to be accurate, in part because the law is now used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development.[4] The capabilities of many digital electronic devices are strongly linked to Moore's law: quality-adjusted microprocessor prices,[5]memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras.[6] All of these are improving at roughly exponential rates as well. This exponential improvement has dramatically enhanced the impact of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy.[7] Moore's law describes a driving force of technological and social change, productivity and economic growth in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.[8][9][10][11]

The period is often quoted as 18 months because of Intel executive David House, who predicted that chip performance would double every 18 months (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and their being faster).[12]

Although this trend has continued for more than half a century, Moore's law should be considered an observation or conjecture and not a physical or natural law. Sources in 2005 expected it to continue until at least 2015 or 2020.[note 1][14] However, the 2010 update to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors predicted that growth will slow at the end of 2013,[15] when transistor counts and densities are to double only every three years.

For the 35th anniversary issue of Electronics Magazine which was published on April 19, 1965; Gordon E. Moore, whom was currently working as the Director of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductor, was asked to predict what was going to happen in the semiconductor components industry over the next 10 years. His response was a brief 4 page article entitled, "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits". Within is editorial, he speculated that by 1975 it would be possible to contain as many as 65,000 components on a single quarter-inch semiconductor. His reasoning was a log-linear relationship between device complexity (higher circuit density at reduced cost) and time:[16]

"The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will remain nearly constant for at least 10 years."

-Moore, 1965

In 1975 when Moore saw that his predictions a decade earlier had proven true with the development of a 16k charge-coupled-device (CCD) memory chip which housed nearly 65,000 components, Moore decided to re-evaluate his hypothesis regarding the annual rate of density-doubling. During the 1975 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting he outlined his analysis of the contributing factors to this exponential behavior:[16]

Finally, Moore, reported a re-evaluation of his hypothesis, stating that it was more reasonable to assume that circuit density-doubling would occur every eighteen months.[16]

Shortly after the 1975 IEEEE Meeting, a professor at Caltech by the name of Carver Mead, whom was a pioneer in VLSI as well as an entrepreneur coined the term "Moore's law"[2][17] Predictions of similar increases in computer power had existed years prior. Moore may have heard Douglas Engelbart, a co-inventor of today's mechanical computer mouse, discuss the projected downscaling of integrated circuit size in a 1960 lecture.[18] A New York Times article published August 31, 2009, credits Engelbart as having made the prediction in 1959.[19]

Moore's original statement that transistor counts had doubled every year can be found in his publication "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits", Electronics Magazine 19 April 1965. The paper noted that the number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year from the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 until 1965 and then concluded:

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Jack the Ripper Mystery May Be Solved through DNA Testing

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Author Russell Edwards and Jari Louhelainen, a molecular biology professor at Liverpool John Moores University claim to have solved the 126-year-old mystery surrounding the identity of Jack the Ripper, which is the pseudonym of a serial killer who murdered at least five women in East London in the late 1800s.

Edwards bought a shawl that was found near the body of one of the victims Catherine Eddowes at an auction. He then worked with Louhelainen to conduct a DNA test on the shawl, which was found to contain DNA from the victims blood as well as DNA from the killer. Edwards claims to have found a match with a descendent of Aaron Kosminski, who was an original suspect in the case.

Dan Krane, a DNA analysis expert and professor of biological sciences at Wright State University, quickly pointed out that the case cannot be closed without more information in this USA Today story.

From a criminal law perspective the chain of custody leaves a lot to be desired, Krane said, meaning that for this to stand up in a court of law there would need to be documentation that established where the shawl was at all times and who has had access to it.

While DNA testing may or may not identify the most notorious serial killers of all time such as Jack the Ripper the technology is increasing vital to the criminal justice system. DNA is being used with strong accuracy when biological evidence is available, and clear suspects who are wrongly accused and convicted of crimes.

While there are different types of DNA testing, Louhelainen used mitochondrial DNA testing in this particular case. Mitochondrial DNA can be found within eukaryotic cells that convert energy from food into adenosine triphosphate, which can then be used by cells.

The good news here is that this case raises awareness for DNA technology and its application within the criminal justice system. For more on this story, check out The Daily Mail story.

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Jack the Ripper Mystery May Be Solved through DNA Testing

Molecular Medicine : Feinstein Institute Presents Cerami …

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09/08/2014 | 09:57am US/Eastern

The Cerami award, which includes a $20,000 prize, is conferred semi annually by the peer-reviewed, open-access journal Molecular Medicine published by the Feinstein Institute. A monograph authored by Dr. Hansson, entitled "A Journey in Science: Medical Scientist in Translation," will be published online September 5 in Molecular Medicine.

"The Anthony Cerami Award in Translational Medicine was created to recognize investigators who provided the crucial, early insight and ideas that are the essence of discovery, creating new fields and research trajectories followed by the persistent clinical investigation that ultimately changes how disease is prevented, diagnosed and treated," said Kevin J. Tracey, MD, president of the Feinstein Institute, editor emeritus of Molecular Medicine and Cerami Award committee member. "Professor Hansson's monograph is an inspiring story of genius and persistence that illuminates the discovery of how inflammation causes atherosclerosis, a major killer in the modern world."

"I am obviously very honored to be recognized in this way," said Dr. Hansson. "Being a scientist and having the opportunity to make discoveries is very rewarding in itself. To be selected for the Anthony Cerami Award in Translational Medicine is a wonderful recognition by my peers that the work my colleagues and I are doing contributes to the translation of science into medicine. I am particularly honored to follow in the footsteps of two of my role models in science - Anthony Cerami, after whom the award is named, and Carl Nathan, who received the first Cerami Award."

In the monograph, Dr. Hansson describes his journey in deciding whether to be a clinician or scientist, and notes a patient he met as a resident in internal medicine helped him solve this question. The patient had suffered a major stroke, and at the time there was no treatment available to help him. Hansson writes "The best they could hope for was that the man would die soon. Meeting this patient made me realize the limitations of clinical medicine. As a physician, you can do a lot for your patient -- but not more than the tools of medicine available at the time allow. As a clinician, your hands are tied by the limitations of medicine. As a physician-scientist, you can help stretch those limitations."

The Feinstein Institute is committed to celebrating the stewardship of the scientific process and imparting that perspective to young scientists. The Feinstein Institute also recognizes that the story behind making a discovery in medicine and healthcare is cherished and should be documented. The goal of the Cerami Award and its associated monographs, is to document such innovations and discoveries, so that they endure and inspire future generations of investigators.

In addition to his role at the Karolinska Institutet, Dr. Hansson is secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, director of the Medical Nobel Institute and member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. His research deals with immune and inflammatory mechanisms in atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis is the buildup of fats, cholesterol and other substances in and on artery walls (plaques), which can restrict blood flow. Dr. Hansson discovered that the atherosclerotic plaque is the site of an inflammatory/immune response involving activated T-cells and their cytokines. His work has shown that low-density lipoprotein (LDL) elicits a cellular immune response and that humoral immunity contains atheroprotective activity.

The Anthony Cerami Award in Translational Medicine was made possible made possible by the generosity of the Anthony Cerami, PhD, and Ann Dunne Foundation for World Health. Dr. Cerami's breakthrough translational work includes the identification of anti-TNF's potential to treat a number of inflammatory diseases including rheumatoid arthritis, and the development of the HbA1c Diagnosic Test, currently the gold standard for the diagnosis and control of diabetes. He is currently working on a potential treatment of diabetes as CEO of Araim Pharmaceuticals.

(c) 2014 GlobalData Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info).

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Treatment of ADHD and/or Autism through diet and Chinese medicine – Dr Tseng Seminar Part 7of 9 – Video

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Treatment of ADHD and/or Autism through diet and Chinese medicine - Dr Tseng Seminar Part 7of 9
Dr. Tseng, MD, AOM, neurologist (MD) and renown Chinese Medicine doctor #39;s lecture on treatment of children with ADHD and/or Autism with diet and traditional Chinese medicine (Part 7) at Friends...

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Treatment of ADHD and/or Autism through diet and Chinese medicine - Dr Tseng Seminar Part 7of 9 - Video

Treatment of ADHD and/or Autism through diet and Chinese medicine – Dr Tseng Seminar Part 6 of 9 – Video

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Treatment of ADHD and/or Autism through diet and Chinese medicine - Dr Tseng Seminar Part 6 of 9
Dr. Tseng, MD, AOM, neurologist (MD) and renown Chinese Medicine doctor #39;s lecture on treatment of children with ADHD and/or Autism with diet and traditional Chinese medicine (Part 6) at Friends...

By: fcsn1996org

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Treatment of ADHD and/or Autism through diet and Chinese medicine - Dr Tseng Seminar Part 6 of 9 - Video

InSilico Medicine salutes Calico and AbbVie partnership, paves way for Basel conference

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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

8-Sep-2014

Contact: Michael Petr michael.petr@insilicomedicine.com InSilico Medicine, Inc. http://www.twitter.com/InSilicoMeds

AbbVie and Google-backed Calico announced yesterday that they will co-invest up to $1.5 billion to create a leading R&D facility focused on aging and age-related diseases, including neurodegeneration and cancer. This center will be located in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the amalgamation of the two companies serves as a trailblazer for similar research teams dedicated to eradicating aging and age-related diseases.

Aging research has long been regarded by the pharmaceutical industry as a subject of controversy associated with failed expectations, ineffective remedies, and blatantly false claims. However, the explosion of the research and clinical data, fueled by the drop in sequencing costs and technology convergence, has led to the emergence of projects with credible business models and approaches targeting both the age-related diseases as well as the aging-associated processes. Advances in aging biomarkers and in silico drug screening methods may soon enable the pharmaceutical industry to revisit their business models and reshape the regulatory frameworks.

InSilico Medicine, Inc. is thrilled about this new collaboration and its innovative potential. "InSilico Medicine, Inc. has developed several methods for geroprotector and geroprotector combination discovery and screening that are undergoing pre-clinical validation with multiple publications out, in review, and in the pipeline. We must thank Google for paving the way and setting the trend. After they got involved in this field, it gained a lot of credibility. In our opinion it is not a competitor, it is a bulldozer, which will pave the way for the many innovative companies like us." InSilico Medicine CEO, Alex Zhavoronkov, says. "We salute Calico and AbbVie for spearheading the revolution in aging drug discovery and setting the example for other pharmaceutical companies to follow. These are fantastic news for InSilico Medicine, Inc., Human Longevity, Inc., Retrotope, Pathway Pharmaceuticals and many other companies pursuing age-related diseases and aging itself."

With the MipTec 2014 conference in such close proximity to this notable collaboration, there is a great deal excitement for the experts, industries, and enthusiasts of aging therapies. The conference will host exceptional speakers, elaborate forums, and a variety of sponsors and exhibitors all dedicated to practical applications of aging. The conference serves as a bridge for scientists and the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries to discover the potential for drug screening and discovery platforms for age-related disease. As more companies such as Calico and AbbVie continue to enter the field of aging research, forums like MipTec will increase in popularity and unite partners from a large variety of organizations on an international scale.

###

More information on MipTec 2014 can be found at http://www.agingpharma.org/.

About InSilico Medicine

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India, B'desh sign MoU on traditional medicine

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Dhaka: Bangladesh and India have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for enhanced cooperation in the fields of traditional medicine like Ayurveda and Unani, as World Health Organisation decided to lay an extra focus on the issue as an "important part of healthcare" in the region.

The two countries inked the deal here late yesterday on the sidelines of the WHO's South-East Asia regional conference where the traditional medicine was one of the major issues of discussion of the 11 health ministers, experts and officials.

Bangladesh's health officials said under the deal the two sides agreed to exchange all kinds of traditional medicines alongside the experts and physicians for conducting training.

They said recognised institutions of both the countries would provide scholarships to each other in addition to setting up an 'academic chair'.

Bangladesh's Health Minister Mohammad Nasim and his Indian counterpart Harsh Vardhan, WHO Director-General Margret Chan among others witnessed the signing of the deal shortly after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina opened the regional meet of the UN health organisation.

Officials said the deal was signed days after Bangladesh's cabinet approved the draft.

Talking to PTI on the sidelines of the conference, WHO's South-East Asia director Dr Poonam Khetrapal Singh said that being the directing and coordinating authority for health within the UN system WHO now considers traditional medicine to be an "important part of healthcare" as most countries in the region have their own form of traditional medicine".

"Nine of the 11 countries (of WHO's South-East Asian region) are practising traditional medicine," she said, adding this reality now prompted the UN health organisation harness its potential contribution to health and universal health coverage under its new Tradition Medicine strategy for 2014-2024 period.

Singh said the traditional medicine like Ayurveda, Unani and other herbal treatment systems and homeopathy appeared cheaper, affordable and reliable to many people in the region while WHO regional office planned also to include the yoga as a practice as part of a "composite healthcare system".

"Generally they do not have side effects (unlike allopathic medicines) and many people also think there are some chronic diseases which could be cured only by the traditional medicine," she said.

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India, B'desh sign MoU on traditional medicine