From TreeHugger:
Qingdao, China, is famous for its temperate sea air and "Tsingtao" beer but, during the summer, the gentle coast becomes a fertile bed for massive, smelly, algae blooms. The last major bloom occurred in 2008 and threatened the sailing competitions of the Beijing Ol
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Anyone is aware of a switch which is used on the shaft side of the motor operated damper on outside air intake? This switch is connected to the shaft side of the damper motor. The purpose is to prevent boiler starting if the shaft is broken on the damper side. Govt. regulatory body has asked to prov
Hi, if I have a wye-wye connected transformer and its primary is not earthed solidly while the secondary side is earthed solidly, my question is
In a book I read it says "third and its multiples harmonics can't flow since primary is not earthed"
İs third and multiple harmo
When a person’s cornea is burned it’s not necessarily the splashed chemicals or hot liquids that causes blindness, but the eye’s recovery. Scar tissue, formed from cells in the white part of the eye, can cover the cornea in a cloudy haze. But researchers have found that cells drawn from another part of the body can correct the problem.
A paper published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine brings news of a regenerative stem cell treatment that has had striking success: It restored sight to 82 of 117 eyes with burnt corneas, and worked partially on 14 others. The treatment also seems to have a long-lasting impact; in one patient, the beneficial effect has lasted for ten years and counting.
The treatment offers hope to those who received little benefit from existing therapies–such as artificial cornea replacements, which can also be overpowered and clouded by white-colored cells, or stem cell or cornea transplants from cadavers, which patients can reject.
“[The patients] were incredibly happy. Some said it was a miracle,” said one of the study leaders, Graziella Pellegrini of the University of Modena’s Center for Regenerative Medicine in Italy. “It was not a miracle. It was simply a technique.” [AP]
That technique, first performed in 1995, requires harvesting healthy “limbal stem cells” from the cornea’s border. Stefano Ferrari in Italy then grew these cells into a sheet and grafted them onto the cornea. Since the cells come from the patient and not from a donor, the procedure does not have the risk of rejection present with transplants.
The treatment “is like putting on a biological contact lens,” said Dr. Stephen Pflugfelder, a practicing corneal specialist and professor of ophthalmology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who says the technique works well. A clear cornea–essential to good vision–”is the clear window on the eye,” like a watchglass on a watch, added Pflugfelder, who was not involved with the Italian study but is familiar with its findings. [HealthDay]
For successfully treated patients, vision improved within months, and of those that did not fully regain their sight the treatment still often helped.
Even when not completely effective, the treatment usually alleviated a patient’s sensitivity to light and eye pain, Pellegrini said in a telephone interview. “In any case, the patient has improvement in symptoms,” she said. The researchers were also able to pinpoint which types of cells were more likely to work well. [ABC]
Unfortunately, the technique requires a healthy population of “donor” stem cells from the patient, so it will not work for those who have severely burnt both their corneas (leaving few healthy limbal stem cells). A benefit of the technique is that it requires fewer total stem cells than previous procedures (as ABC reports, about .002 square inches of tissue) since researchers cultivate these sample cells in the lab to make the graft.
Related content:
80beats: Gene Therapy Cures Color Blindness in Monkeys
80beats: The Part of the Brain That Lets the Blind See Without Seeing
80beats: Can Sight Be Restored With Stem Cells Grown on Contact Lenses?
80beats: Brain Reconstruction: Stem-Cell Scaffolding Can Repair Stroke Damage
80beats: Stem Cells Could Regenerate Inner Ear Hairs—and Hearing
Image: New England Journal of Medicine
Fall Amendment Promises To Challenge Healthcare Law WOKV Sponsor and state senator Carey Baker calls it the Healthcare Freedom Act. "An additional Right and that Right is that Floridians will have medical freedom ... |
An image from Opportunity's NavCam taken on May 8, 2010 showing the tracks from a recent drive just before the Winter Solstice. Click for larger. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
A comment in yesterday’s post asked what was going on with the Mars Exploration Rovers — good question. The rover site isn’t updated very often due to it being the Martian winter. The winter Solstice was on May 12 so spring is approaching Mars even if very slowly.
On May 20th the rover Opportunity surpassed the Viking Lander’s longevity record of 6 years 116 days. As the daylight increases Opportunity will beginning to drive more. At the moment drives are worked out so the solar panels are in a favorable position to catch sunlight. The eventual destination for Oppy is the Endeavour crater.
The situation with Spirit isn’t quite so good. You probably know Spirit got stuck on what looks to be a rock, kind of hung up, well, it’s stuck and is now immobile. Being immobile placing the rover in a position to best collect the feeble Martian sunlight was impossible. Spirit is in a hibernation mode. Will it awaken? A question everybody involved is waiting to be answered. If it does and resumes communication, it will get the longevity record since it arrived three weeks before Oppy. Keep your fingers crossed!
The newest rover named Curiosity is well on its way to a late 2011 launch, the robotic arm and associated tools are being tested, two cameras built by Malin Space Science Systems Inc has been delivered. The cameras will be used on the Mast Camera Instrument which will be a workhorse. Finally, the radar system to be used in landing is undergoing rigorous testing. The actual launch date is driven by geometry and communications it’s quite a balancing act between the shortest route and optimal communications. The launch date will be between November 25 and December 18, 2011 for a August 2012 Landing. To learn more about Curiosity, click here.
1. What is the best starting method for 23MW, 11kV induction motor except electronic soft start.
2. Is ther any advantage if I chang the motor to synchronous one.
3. Will the thyristorised soft starter be more expensive than Korndorfer soft starter? If yes by what percentage?
thanks a
Pump prices to hit £1.30 a litre in the UK
Motorists are looking at pump prices of 130ppl by the end of the year, according to RMI Petrol. The organisation's chairman Brian Madderson warned that, while Chancellor George Osborne did not announce any increase in fuel duty in the Emergency Budget
I’ve mentioned before on this blog that I’m not one for arbitrary milestones. I’m OK with birthdays and such, but when it comes to celebrating attaining some certain number of things just because it’s a round number, it seems a bit silly.
Of course, that’s just my rational mind. My emotional mind still squees a little when that nice, round number is achieved.
And here I am, at my 5000th post. This very post, in fact, if you excuse me getting a little meta.
I know that if we evolved to have 8 fingers, or 12, this post wouldn’t be quite the same milestone. But contingent, stochastic processes are what they are, and so here I am, 4999 posts from the first one. That one, published on March 13, 2005, was just a "Welcome to the blog!" kind of thing. But it was the start of a long series of posts about science, astronomy, Doctor Who, skepticism, religion, LOL cats, politics, and just about everything else that’s caught my attention.
Along the way the blog moved to its new home at Discover Magazine (that anniversary is pretty soon, too). And what news has unfolded over this period! Direct pictures of planets orbiting other stars were first taken. Methane was found cycling on Mars. Water on the Moon. Two moons of Pluto discovered. The first private company launched a rocket. MESSENGER headed for Mercury. Two impacts on Jupiter. Lakes on Titan. An asteroid seen before it impacted the Earth. Just to randomly pick out a very few.
And, of course, the fight against antireality, pseudoscience, nonsense: that continues as well. The title of this blog is Bad Astronomy, but that doesn’t limit the content. The forces of darkness will always be with us, and you can count on me to always fight them.
And as for the future, I will always write about what interests me, what makes me happy, and what angers me. But I can’t do it without you. Well, OK, sure, I can, but it’s not as much fun. Since that first post in 2005, nearly a quarter of a million comments have been left here, too. People praising me, insulting me, leaving non sequiturs, links to related material, corrections, stories, discussions, and so much more. It may be my name on the blog, but it’s the community here that keeps it alive.
So, after 5000 posts, consider this one a simple thanks.
Thanks.
[Update (a few hours after posting): I've read all the comments, and, and... I think I have something in my eye. Thanks again everyone.]
The Washington Post’s blogger-journalist Dave Weigel has a post up where he preemptively apologizes for stuff he posted on an “off-the-record” e-list,. Extracts are going to be published by a gossip site. Journalists are the tip of the iceberg; privacy is fast becoming a total fiction, remember that. We’re slowly drifting toward David Brin’s model of a “transparent society”, but it’s happening so fluidly that people aren’t even noticing. And yet as I have noted before, people are resisting the push to merge all their personas into one. Interesting times.
Does anyone remember an audio effects device that preceded the "Echoplex" tape loop?
This device was based on a disk rotating in a viscous fluid containing metallic particles.
A recording head laid the information down and a playback head picked it up.
The fluid was called
Oliver Stone's interviews with seven Central and South American leaders whose personalities, programs, and ideals have been vilified by the U.S. media.
From ScienceDaily: Latest Science News:
A swarm of flying robots soars into a blazing forest fire. With insect-like precision and agility, the machines land on tree trunks and bound over rough terrain before deploying crucial sensors and tools to track the inferno and its effects.
From Popular Science - New Technology, Science News, The Future Now:
If a theoretical force-carrying, subatomic particle were to materialize in the universe and no one were around to hear it, would it make a sound? Existential aspects aside, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider
It would be an advertiser’s dream: knowing the exact location in your brain that indicates whether an ad has worked, and whether you intend to buy that cat food or wear that suntan lotion. Now, some researchers claim they’ve found a region which might predict whether viewers will act on what a commercial tells them.
For a study published yesterday in The Journal of Neuroscience, researchers asked 20 participants to listen to a series of “persuasive messages.” While the test subjects listened, researchers used an fMRI to record the activity in various regions in their brains. The study was small–but researchers say that, with these 20 participants, they could determine many of these listeners’ intentions by looking at a region associated with self-consciousness, called the medial prefrontal cortex.
The subjects listened to messages covering a range of subjects, but the team, lead by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA, was really interested in a public service message about the importance of using sunscreen. Before the brain scans, researchers surveyed the participants about a variety of their behaviors, including their expected sunscreen use for the next week.
After the brain scans were complete, researchers asked about their intentions again and gave participants “goodie bags” that included sunscreen towelettes. But a surprise follow-up phone call a week later revealed that only about half of the participants had lotioned up as often as they said they would.
The researchers then went back to the scans to hunt for hints that might have predicted this “complex real world behavior,” and that’s when they teased out possible predictions in the medial prefrontal cortex. By examining the activity in that area when the listeners heard the sunscreen messages, the researchers say they could predict the real sunblock use of three-quarters of the subjects. Thus, they claim, the brain scans were better predictors of behavior than the subjects’ own projections.
Emily Falk, a coauthor of the paper, told Reuters:
“We are trying to figure out whether there is hidden wisdom that the brain contains.”
Even if their lackluster sunblock use might leave these sunny Californians at risk for skin cancer, they don’t have to worry about brainwashing quite yet. Given the variability of people, the researchers will need probably need to test their tech on more than 20 people before they can use this information to craft the perfect public service announcement, or advertisement.
Related content:
Discoblog: AD4HERE: Digital License Plate Ads May Come to California
Discoblog: Lather Up: New Sunscreen Could Be Inspired By Hippo Sweat
80beats: Neuroscientists Take One Step Closer to Reading Your Mind
80beats: Brain Scans Can Predict When You’re Going to Screw Up
80beats: Mind-Reading Infrared Device Knows If You Want a Milkshake
Image: flickr / candescent
Check this out. It would be a great class project for physics and science classes.
In a lab at Yale University, a rat inhales. Every breath this rodent takes is a sign of important medical advances looming on the horizon, for only one of its lungs comes from the pair it was born with. The other was built in a laboratory.
This transplanted lung is the work of Thomas Petersen and a large team of US scientists. Their technique isn’t a way of growing a lung from scratch. Instead it takes an existing lung, strips away all the cells and blood vessels to leave behind a scaffold of connective tissues, and re-grows the missing cells in a vat. It’s the medical equivalent of stripping a house down to a frame of beams and struts and rebuilding the rest from scratch. The whole process only took a few days and when the reconstituted lung was transplanted into a rat, it worked.
This is important because the lungs are notoriously bad at regenerating and repairing themselves. If a person’s lungs are severely damaged, the only real solution is a lung transplant. But that’s easier said than done. The procedure is expensive, only 20% of patients at most are still alive ten years later, and the demand for donor lungs far exceeds their supply.
Peterson’s ultimate vision is to solve these problems by fitting patients with a transplanted lung grown using their own stem cells. The scaffold would come from a dead donor, or possibly even a primate or pig. Its own cells would be stripped away and the patient’s stem cells would give the scaffold a personalised makeover, seeding it with the various types of cells in the lungs. The whole process should only take around 1-2 weeks. Laura Niklason, who led the study, says, “The value here is that the resultant lung would not reject, which is the key that limits survival of lung transplant patients right now.”
The team’s latest success in rats is a proof-of-concept – it shows that the technique should eventually be possible. But as Petersen notes, there are many technical hurdles to overcome before it could ever used in humans. That achievement is still years of hard work away. “I think that 20 to 25 years is not a bad time frame,” says Niklason. “I previously developed an engineered artery that will be ready for patients next year. It was first published in 1999. If an artery takes 12 years from first report to patients, then a lung will take 20-25.”
First, the team used detergents to strip away all the cells and blood vessels from freshly harvested lungs, leaving behind the ‘extracellular matrix’. This scaffold of connective tissues keeps the lung’s physical properties, as well as its three-dimensional structure. Right down to the microscopic level, every branch was preserved. So were the structures of the alveoli, the little spheres through which our lungs exchange gas with our blood.
The complicated nature of the scaffold explains why the team ruled out the possibility of simply growing a lung from scratch. “We grow arteries from scratch all the time in my group,” says Niklason, “but lungs are harder because of the enormous surface area that is required for adequate gas exchange.” You’d need to provide a template for that surface area and a man-made material is unlikely to do the trick. “That is, technologically, a very tall order.”Other groups have tried this approach and failed to produce anything that can actually exchange gases as a real lung can. For this reason, the team decided to use nature’s template – the lung’s own matrix.
Having exposed the matrix, they marinated it in a cocktail of lung cells taken from newborn rats. The added cells stuck to the matrix in the right places and started reproducing quickly, in a way that they normally struggle to do on standard plastic surfaces. The conditions certainly helped – the team incubated the lung matrix in a ‘bioreactor’ designed to mimic the conditions inside a growing foetus. Different tubes imitated the flow of blood and air into the developing organ, with everything was maintained at just the right pressure. All of these conditions proved to be essential for getting the lungs to re-grow in the right way.
Within just four days, the lungs were once again full of alveoli, blood vessels and small airways, all containing the right types of cells. Then, the big test: Petersen transplanted four of these brand-new lungs (just the left ones) into living rats. Within seconds, the lungs became suffused with blood, which rapidly turned from dark to bright red as it started taking up oxygen. When the team took samples of blood from the major vessels, they confirmed that the new lungs were indeed exchanging gas as they were meant to.
Their biggest challenge now is to find a good source of cells to seed the empty frames they expose. The re-fitted lungs will be immediately rejected by the immune system unless Petersen can grow them using lung stem cells derived from the patients themselves. These aren’t available yet, although techniques that reprogram adult cells into stem-like ones may help to solve this problem in the future. “The stem cell biology will be the biggest hurdle,” says Niklason. “Making the cells and growing them is not so bad, but controlling their fate within the lung matrix will be a substantial issue.”
The team have already shown that the technique works on human lung samples taken from a tissue bank. But even in rats, the results are far from perfect. Chest X-rays revealed that the fresh left lungs were indeed inflating with air but to a lesser extent than the native right ones. There were also signs of minor bleeding into the airways and some clots after a few hours. The matrix had probably become slightly damaged during the process of removing its cells. These leaks will have to be addressed before the procedure can be used in the clinic, but other scientists regard them as a sign that Petersen’s group have rushed ahead too quickly.
Joaquin Cortiella, who works on lung tissue engineering at the University of Texas Medical Branch, says, “I believe that they did not wait long enough with their cultured lung before they implanted it in the animal.” His colleague Joan Nichols agrees. “The big problem with tissue engineering is that because of the clinical need very often researchers have rushed to implant tissues before they had really produced materials worthy of transplantation,” she says.
Nichols’s own own group is working with engineered tissues that are two months old, and they only plan on implanting them into animals in 4-6 months, after careful evaluation. In particular, they want to see if the lung’s blood vessels form a proper junction with the alveoli and the matrix, something that Petersen’s group haven’t established. These junctions are the places where gas exchange takes place. If they aren’t formed properly, gas will probably still diffuse through the blood vessels because the whole organ is sitting in an oxygen-rich environment, but you get blood leaks.
Nonetheless, both researchers say that the technique used to actually produce the lung was “careful, well planned and beautifully presented”. Cortiella says that it “shows the importance of using the organ’s own extracellular matrix”, while Nichols notes that it “advances our view of what a bioreactor needs to look like in order to both grow and mature lung tissue”.
And Nichols is particularly excited about the fact that other researchers are making significant headway in engineering a lung. “It is hard to make headway in a field when so few people have tried to engineer a lung,” she says. “Good science does not take place in a vacuum. You need a critical mass to move the field along.”
Lung engineering may not be a competitive field, but it’s clear that similar approaches are being tested for other organs. Just last week, another team from Massachussetts General Hospital achieved the same trick for livers, stripping them down to a scaffold, re-growing them, and transplanting them back into rats. Again, we’re a long way off from the clinic but the fact that progress is being made at all makes this a very exciting time to be alive.
Reference: Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1189345
More on tissue engineering: Making new heart cells
Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz on a wild and suspenseful ride.
Hello gents,
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I am asking about this kind of tubing N80 if could we used in environment temperature as like flare line in order to burn a gas from oil production well?
For your
