Month: October 2012

LONDON (TIP): Researchers have developed a tiny camera that can be clipped to clothes or worn on a necklace, and takes a picture every 30 seconds, allowing users to record their daily lives.

The camera, called Memoto, is billed as “the world’s smallest wearable camera” has become the latest technological hit on Kickstarter, the “crowd funding” website. As well as a five megapixel digital camera, the device will feature a GPS chip to keep track of owners’ locations and automatically log and organize pictures via a specially-created iPhone and Android app, The Telegraph reported. Memoto makers claims the battery will last two days.

“Many fantastic and special moments become blurred together after a while and it feels like life just rushes by, too fast for us to grasp,” said the Swedish start-up behind the project. Memoto makers describe the project as “lifelogging” technology and plans to ship its first finished cameras in February next year.

“The camera and the app work together to give you pictures of every single moment of your life, complete with information on when you took it and where you were,” they said. “The way this works is that the photos are organized into groups of “moments” on a timeline,” they added .

“On the timeline, you are presented with keyframes (about 30 per day) each representing one moment. You can tap a moment to relive it in a stop-motion like video of all the pictures in that moment,” Memoto makers claimed.

“This enables you to not only browse your life the way you remember it, but to search for specific events of your life: who was it that you met at that party or what did the sunset look like in Lapland in June?” they added.

WASHINGTON (TIP): New vaccines being developed by scientists from the School of Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway may eliminate the need for needles as they can be delivered via a nasal spray, or as on oral liquid or capsule. Lead scientist Professor Simon Cutting, from the School of Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway, has developed the jabs through the use of probiotic spores.

He carried out fundamental studies into the biology of the bacterium Bacillus subtilis that attracted the attention of microbiologists due to its ability to form spores that can last millions of years before germinating under the appropriate environmental conditions. “The mechanisms by which this process occurs have fascinated microbiologists for decades making it one of the most intensively studied bacteria.

Its simple life cycle and ease of use make it an ideal laboratory subject,” Professor Cutting said. Professor Cutting discovered that the Bacillus spores act as ideal vehicles to carry antigens and promote an immune response. “Rather than requiring needle delivery, vaccines based on Bacillus spores can be delivered via a nasal spray, or as on oral liquid or capsule. Alternatively they can be administered via a small soluble film placed under the tongue, in a similar way to modern breath freshners,” he explained.

He added that, as spores are exceptionally stable, vaccines based on Bacillus do not require cold-chain storage alleviating a further issue with current vaccine approaches. As well as eliminating the pain associated with needles, oral vaccines provide greater benefits including being safer to administer, especially in developing countries where HIV is rife, being inexpensive to produce and easier to store and reducing concerns of adverse reactions.

Professor Cutting has carried out pre-clinical evaluation of Bacillusbased vaccines for a number of diseases including Tuberculosis, influenza and tetanus but most recently he has been investigating the potential for use of the vaccines against a disease of particular relevance to the West – Clostridium difficile. “C. difficile, is a gastrointenstinal infection that is commonly picked up following hospital stays and causes around 50,000 infections and 4,000 deaths per year in the UK, mostly in elderly patients. Currently, there is no vaccine against the disease, and although several approaches are currently undergoing clinical trials, none are expected to provide full protection, and new solutions are urgently needed,” said Professor Cutting.

“Bacillus based vaccines offer distinct advantages as unlike other approaches, oral delivery can cause a more specific immune response in the gastrointenstinal tract to fully eliminate C.difficile,” he added. Professor Cutting has recently received private seed investment to form a company, Holloway Immunology, to develop the bacillus vaccine technology and concentrate on three lead vaccines for Tuberculosis, C. difficile infection and influenza (flu). The company is currently looking for investors to help fast track the implementation of these jabs and contribute to the transformation of vaccine delivery around the globe.

Insignificant in visible light, halo stars are big in the infrared background.

When the known galaxies and stars in the right panel are subtracted, what remains is the cosmic infrared background shown at left. Astronomers have determined much of this haze is from stars in the dark matter halos of early galaxies. The search for the earliest galaxies in the Universe is ongoing.

Since these galaxies are far removed from us in time, they are very faint and very red-shifted, making it hard to determine how many there were and where they were distributed. To find these galaxies, some astronomers are looking at the Universe’s infrared background across large patches of the sky. Fluctuations in the temperature of this infrared background are likely indicators of the first galaxies, which heated and ionized much of the gas in the Universe.

A new observation using data from the Spitzer infrared space telescope has found the expected signature of distant, faint galaxies. However, the magnitude of the fluctuations was surprisingly high: these early galaxies appeared bigger and brighter than expected from theory and observations at other wavelengths. In a new Nature paper, Asantha Cooray and colleagues suggest that much of this infrared radiation came from stars in the galactic halos, which were thought to be mostly dark matter. Typical galaxies such as the Milky Way have two basic parts: the luminous portion (which is what we usually think of as the galaxy), and a dark matter halo that envelops it and contains most of the mass. Even though most of a galaxy’s stars are in the luminous portion, the halo does contain a substantial number of stars, although they’re at a much lower density. Recent studies have shown that halo stars contribute more to the total light profile of a galaxy than we previously thought.

The mass of the dark matter halos is thought to have been instrumental in drawing atoms into the first galaxies, a process that left its mark on the early Universe. The first stable atoms formed around 400,000 years after the Big Bang. As electrons joined with protons, they emitted light we now see as the cosmic microwave background. When the first stars and galaxies formed, however, their intense radiation stripped electrons from atoms again, an event known as reionization. According to theory, that is: while the ionized gas has been seen, the stars that drove it are distant and hard to observe. However, the earliest stars and galaxies should contribute to the total infrared glow of the Universe, known as the cosmic near-infrared background (CNIB).

(“Nearinfrared” refers to wavelengths closest to visible light in the electromagnetic spectrum; in this case, the study was in the 1 to 5 micron range.) Much of the haze in the CNIB is from the Milky Way and known galaxies, but a significant portion is not associated with any obvious sources.

Astronomers have postulated it must originate in either to dwarf galaxies (which are too small to be seen at significant distances) or faint galaxies from the early Universe. Until the current study, no survey of the CNIB had sufficient resolution to distinguish between small (but relatively close) galaxies and the first to form in the Universe. The researchers decisively determined the overabundance of infrared emission was originating from an area that is too large to be dwarf galaxies.

LONDON (TIP): Nasa’s Curiosity rover on Mars is apparently littering on the Red planet. Pictures beamed back by the rover show a bright object lying in the Martian dirt, and a closer look suggests the object is a piece of plastic wrapper that has fallen from the robot. The discovery has put a twist on the rover’s current mission to scrub out its soil scoop and take its first sample of Martian dirt for analysis, the ‘New Scientist’ reported. However, more bright specks of unidentified matter in the soil – at first thought to be from Curiosity shedding – may actually be Martian in origin, although what they are is a mystery. Curiosity had been in the midst of preparing to feed soil into its Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument, which bounces thin beams of X-rays off a sample to read its mineral composition. This involved taking scoopfuls of soil, shaking them vigorously and then dumping them back out, to be sure that any lingering traces of Earthly particles didn’t make it into the science equipment. After the first scoop-and-shake revealed the unexpected object, Curiosity took a quick break to examine the find. It then got back on course, taking a second scoop of soil on October 12.

LONDON (TIP): Astronomers have discovered a new intriguing exoplanet about the mass of the Earth, orbiting a star in the Alpha Centauri star system – the nearest to our planet. It is also the lightest exoplanet ever found around a star like the Sun. The planet was detected using the HARPS instrument on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

Alpha Centauri is one of the brightest stars in the southern skies and is the nearest stellar system to our Solar System – only 4.3 light-years away. It is actually a triple star – a system consisting of two stars similar to the Sun orbiting close to each other, designated Alpha Centauri A and B . “Our observations extended over more than four years using the HARPS instrument and have revealed a tiny, but real, signal from a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B every 3.2 days,” says Xavier Dumusque, lead author of the paper.

“It’s an extraordinary discovery and it has pushed our technique to the limit,” Dumusque said. The European team detected the planet by picking up the tiny wobbles in the motion of the star Alpha Centauri B created by the gravitational pull of the orbiting planet. Alpha Centauri B is very similar to the Sun but slightly smaller and less bright. The newly discovered planet, with a mass of a little more than that of the Earth, is orbiting about six million kilometres away from the star. The first exoplanet around a Sun-like star was found by the same team back in 1995 and since then there have been more than 800 confirmed discoveries, but most are much bigger than the Earth, and many are as big as Jupiter.

WASHINGTON (TIP): A new research by UC Davis researchers has discovered that the key chemical process that corrects for potential visual errors in low-light conditions. Understanding this fundamental step could lead to new treatments for visual deficits, or might one day boost normal night vision to new levels. Like the mirror of a telescope pointed toward the night sky, the eye’s rod cells capture the energy of photons – the individual particles that make up light. The interaction triggers a series of chemical signals that ultimately translate the photons into the light we see. The key light receptor in rod cells is a protein called rhodopsin. Each rod cell has about 100 million rhodopsin receptors, and each one can detect a single photon at a time. Scientists had thought that the strength of rhodopsin’s signal determines how well we see in dim light. But UC Davis scientists have found instead that a second step acts as a gatekeeper to correct for rhodopsin errors. The result is a more accurate reading of light under dim conditions. Individual rhodopsin errors are relatively small in magnitude – on the order of a few hundredths of a second – but even this much biological noise can affect how well the signal gets transmitted to the rest of the brain, the researchers said. The gatekeeper protects us from “seeing” more light than is actually there – a misreading that would have endangered an ice-age hunter, as it would a driver at dusk today. The correction may prevent the photon receptor from swamping the intricate chemical apparatus that leads to accurate light perception. “The rhodopsin receptor is the site where physics meets biology – where a photon of light from the physical world must get interpreted for the nervous system,” explained Marie Burns, professor of ophthalmology and vision science at UC Davis School of Medicine and lead author of the study. “Biology is messy. Rhodopsin does a remarkable but not perfect job,” she stated. Burns and her colleagues studied rod cells in the laboratory and discovered that calcium plays the gatekeeper role. They found that rhodopsin activity changed calcium levels in the cells and that over-active rhodopsins changed calcium levels at a faster rate than normal. This faster change led calcium to trigger a series of chemical steps to counter the over-active rhodopsin signal by producing an equal and opposite signal, thereby correcting false information before it gets sent on to the rest of the visual system. They uncovered this fundamental new level of control by measuring how long individual rhodopsin receptors remained active in response to flashes of light, and then determining how much calcium’s gatekeeping function modified the rhodopsin signals. “Basic research like ours often doesn’t translate to immediate clinical treatments for known diseases, but understanding fundamental processes has long-term significance,” Burns said. “In the case of our research, this understanding can prove essential for progress on a range of vision deficits that are currently poorly understood and untreatable,” she added. HARVARD SCIENTISTS SUGGEST MOON MADE FROM EARTH Anew theory put forward by Harvard scientists suggests the moon was once part of the earth that spun off after a giant collision with another body. In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Science, Sarah Stewart and Matija uk said their theory would explain why the earth and moon have similar composition and chemistry.

The earth was spinning much faster at the time the Moon was formed, and a day lasted only two to three hours, they said. With the Earth spinning so quickly, a giant impact could have launched enough of the Earth’s material to form a moon, the scientists said in an explanation published on a Harvard website. www.fas.harvard.edu/~planets /sstewart/Moon.html According to the new theory, the Earth later reached its current rate of spinning through gravitational interaction between its orbit around the Sun and the Moon’s orbit around Earth.

The scientists noted that their proposition differed from the current leading theory, which holds that the Moon was created from material from a giant body that struck the Earth. Stewart is a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Harvard, and UK, an astronomer and an investigator at the SETI Institute, which supports research into the search for extraterrestrial life. The latter was conducting post-doctoral research at Harvard. LONDON (TIP): Nasa’s Curiosity rover on Mars is apparently littering on the Red planet.

Pictures beamed back by the rover show a bright object lying in the Martian dirt, and a closer look suggests the object is a piece of plastic wrapper that has fallen from the robot.

The discovery has put a twist on the rover’s current mission to scrub out its soil scoop and take its first sample of Martian dirt for analysis, the ‘New Scientist’ reported. However, more bright specks of unidentified matter in the soil – at first thought to be from Curiosity shedding – may actually be Martian in origin, although what they are is a mystery.

Curiosity had been in the midst of preparing to feed soil into its Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument, which bounces thin beams of X-rays off a sample to read its mineral composition. This involved taking scoopfuls of soil, shaking them vigorously and then dumping them back out, to be sure that any lingering traces of Earthly particles didn’t make it into the science equipment. After the first scoop-and-shake revealed the unexpected object, Curiosity took a quick break to examine the find. It then got back on course, taking a second scoop of soil on October 12. Is Curiosity littering plastic on red planet

Anew theory put forward by Harvard scientists suggests the moon was once part of the earth that spun off after a giant collision with another body. In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Science, Sarah Stewart and Matija uk said their theory would explain why the earth and moon have similar composition and chemistry. The earth was spinning much faster at the time the Moon was formed, and a day lasted only two to three hours, they said. With the Earth spinning so quickly, a giant impact could have launched enough of the Earth’s material to form a moon, the scientists said in an explanation published on a Harvard website. www.fas.harvard.edu/~planets /sstewart/Moon.html According to the new theory, the Earth later reached its current rate of spinning through gravitational interaction between its orbit around the Sun and the Moon’s orbit around Earth.The scientists noted that their proposition differed from the current leading theory, which holds that the Moon was created from material from a giant body that struck the Earth. Stewart is a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Harvard, and UK, an astronomer and an investigator at the SETI Institute, which supports research into the search for extraterrestrial life. The latter was conducting post-doctoral research at Harvard.