Showing posts with label World. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World. Show all posts

Herbal Viagra actually contains the real thing



































IF IT looks too good to be true, it probably is. Several "herbal remedies" for erectile dysfunction sold online actually contain the active ingredient from Viagra.












Michael Lamb at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania, and colleagues purchased 10 popular "natural" uplifting remedies on the internet and tested them for the presence of sildenafil, the active ingredient in Viagra. They found the compound, or a similar synthetic drug, in seven of the 10 products – cause for concern because it can be dangerous for people with some medical conditions.












Lamb's work was presented last week at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences meeting in Washington DC.












This article appeared in print under the headline "Herbal Viagra gets a synthetic boost"


















































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Smartphone projector breathes life into storybooks



Hal Hodson, technology reporter



Remember your favourite storybook from childhood? Now imagine that the characters that graced its pages didn't only appear in print, but acted out scenes right in front of you, à la magic Harry Potter paintings.


HideOut, a smartphone projector system developed by Karl Willis at Disney Research in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, does exactly that by using invisible-ink markers to guide the projected characters of a storybook through an entire other layer of activities.






The projector also lets the user move a digital, animated character over surfaces in the real world. By passing the camera over another of the hidden patterns - which are visible only in infrared - the character can even seem to interact with physical obstacles, as in the video above.


In a paper describing the system, presented this month at the Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction conference in Barcelona, Spain, Willis laid out how projection will move past games and playing to become an important computer-human interaction technology, freeing digital content from the screens.


Willis writes that future smartphones with embedded projectors will be used to browse digital files projected on any wall or table, to augment theme parks with digital characters, or to make digital board games that jump out of the table. "Enabling projected content to be mapped onto everyday surfaces from mobile devices is an important step towards seamless interaction between the digital and physical worlds."




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The self: Why are you like you are?


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Live hologram reveals moving people trapped in a fire



Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV






Firefighters can see through smoke thanks to thermal imaging helmets
but now, for the first time, they can also make out moving people trapped behind flames.



Created by Pietro Ferraro and colleagues from the National Institute of Optics in Pozzuoli, Italy, the system produces a live holographic movie that reconstructs motion hidden by a fire. In this video, you can see how an infrared camera fails to capture a person blocked by flames because it relies on a lens to produce an image. The holographic view, shown on the right, reproduces the obscured action by shining infrared laser light at it. The technique records information carried by rays reflected by objects or people, which is then decoded in real time to produce the live movie.






The team plans to make a device that houses both the laser and the holographic camera, allowing the system to be fixed inside buildings or tunnels. In addition to its use in fire search and rescue, the technique could also have biomedical applications, for example to monitor breathing or heartbeat.



If you enjoyed this video, see how a plane-mounted camera can detect volcanic ash or check out a holographic video of Princess Leia.




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Curiosity's spills add thrills to the Mars life hunts


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The great illusion of the self


(Image: Darren Hopes)

As you wake up each morning, hazy and disoriented, you gradually become aware of the rustling of the sheets, sense their texture and squint at the light. One aspect of your self has reassembled: the first-person observer of reality, inhabiting a human body.

As wakefulness grows, so does your sense of having a past, a personality and motivations. Your self is complete, as both witness of the world and bearer of your consciousness and identity. You.

This intuitive sense of self is an effortless and fundamental human experience. But it is nothing more than an elaborate illusion. Under scrutiny, many common-sense beliefs about selfhood begin to unravel. Some thinkers even go as far as claiming that there is no such thing as the self.

In these articles, discover why "you" aren’t the person you thought you were.

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New blood test finds elusive fetal gene problem



































A NEW non-invasive blood test for pregnant women could make it easier to catch abnormalities before their child is born.












Human cells should have two copies of each chromosome but sometimes the division is uneven. Existing tests count the fragments of placental DNA in the mother's blood. If the fragments from one chromosome are unusually abundant, it might be because the fetus has an extra copy of that chromosome. But triploidy, where there are three copies of every chromosome, is missed, since the proportion of fragments from each chromosome is the same.












California-based company Natera uses an algorithm to calculate the most likely genotype for the fetus. To do this it looks at single letter variations called SNPs in the parents and compares this to a database of the most common SNPs patterns in the population. This genotype is then compared with placental DNA.












This approach can catch triploidy since the whole fetal genotype is the reference rather than a single chromosome. The method was presented last week at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine in San Francisco.












This article appeared in print under the headline "No hiding place for fetal gene errors"


















































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Amazon to open market in second-hand MP3s and e-books






















A new market for second-hand digital downloads could let us hold virtual yard sales of our ever-growing piles of intangible possessions






















WHY buy second-hand? For physical goods, the appeal is in the price – you don't mind the creases in a book or rust spots on a car if it's a bargain. Although digital objects never lose their good-as-new lustre, their very nature means there is still uncertainty about whether we actually own them in the first place, making it tricky to set up a second-hand market. Now an Amazon patent for a system to support reselling digital purchases could change that.












Amazon's move comes after last year's European Union ruling that software vendors cannot stop customers from reselling their products. But without technical support, the ruling has had no impact. In Amazon's system, customers will keep their digital purchases – such as e-books or music – in a personal data store in the cloud that only they can access, allowing them to stream or download the content.












This part is like any cloud-based digital locker except that the customer can resell previous purchases by passing the access rights to another person. Once the transaction is complete, the seller will lose access to the content. Any system for reselling an e-book, for example, would have to ensure that it is not duplicated in the transaction. That means deleting any copies the seller may have lying around on hard drives, e-book readers, and other cloud services, since that would violate copyright.












Amazon may be the biggest company to consider a second-hand market, but it is not the first. ReDigi, based in Boston, has been running a resale market for digital goods since 2011. After downloading an app, users can buy a song on ReDigi for as little as 49 cents that would costs 99 cents new on iTunes.












When users want to sell an item, they upload it to ReDigi's servers via a mechanism that ensures no copy is made during the transfer. Software checks that the seller does not retain a copy. Once transferred, the item can be bought and downloaded by another customer. ReDigi is set to launch in Europe in a few months.












Digital items on ReDigi are cheaper because they are one-offs. If your hard drive crashes and you lose your iTunes collection you can download it again. But you can only download an item from ReDigi once – there is no other copy. That is the trade-off that makes a second-hand digital market work: the risk justifies the price. The idea has ruffled a few feathers – last year EMI sued ReDigi for infringement of copyright. A judge denied the claim, but the case continues.


















Used digital goods can also come with added charm. ReDigi tracks the history of the items traded so when you buy something, you can see who has owned it and when. ReDigi's second-hand marketplace has grown into a social network. According to ReDigi founder John Ossenmacher, customers like seeing who has previously listened to a song. "It's got soul like an old guitar," he says. "We've introduced this whole feeling of connectedness."












It could be good for business too if the original vendors, such as iTunes, were to support resale and take a cut of the resell price. Nevertheless, Amazon's move bucks the industry trend. Microsoft's new Xbox, for example, is expected not to work with second-hand games.












But the market could change rapidly now that Amazon's weight is behind this, says Ossenmacher. "The industry is waking up."












This article appeared in print under the headline "Old MP3, one careful owner"




















































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Friday Illusion: How to see the past



Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV






Think you're living in the moment? You could actually be experiencing another time.



A brain trick called the flash-lag illusion shows how we don't always perceive the present. This version, created by Eiji Watanabe from the National Institute for Basic Biology in Okazaki, Japan, presents a moving cube occasionally accompanied by a flashing twin. When the second box appears, it's really lined up with the moving cube yet it seems to lag behind. A second example uses a gear animation to show how a flashing piston looks out of sync with another that's shifting up and down.







The illusion was thought to be caused by our brain extrapolating into the future: it can accurately anticipate the position of the moving cube because it follows a predictable path, but it falls short when assessing where the flashing cube is due to the time it takes to process a stimulus.



Recently David Eagleman of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, and colleagues found that our brain is reaching back into the past instead. It waits to see what happens right after the flash before determining the cube's position: changing the trajectory of the moving object after the blinking can influence where it's perceived.



The effect is interesting because it gives insight into our notion of self and whether we exist in the here and now. To find out more, check out our feature, "The self: You think you live in the present?".



If you enjoyed this post, see how to move a dot with your mind or how to affect an object's motion by changing your gaze.




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Flushed with success: Human manure's fertile future


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How was Earth's life kindled under a cold sun?


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Huge telescopes could spy alien oxygen








































Giant telescopes like the Extremely Large Telescope now being built in Chile could hunt for alien life by detecting oxygen on exoplanets – even though they were not designed with that in mind.













On Earth, plants and some bacteria are the only sources of large amounts of atmospheric oxygen. Finding oxygen on an exoplanet would therefore be a tantalising hint of life as we know it.











Current telescopes can look at the light that passes through exoplanet atmospheres and tease out their make-up, based on the substances that absorb particular wavelength bands. "We do this now for Jupiter-sized planets," says Ignas Snellen of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands.













But current telescopes are not sensitive enough to see atmospheres on small, rocky worlds. What's more, observations made from the ground struggle to filter out Earth's own oxygen-rich atmosphere. Space missions intended to hunt for distant oxygen have been cancelled.











Flux buckets












Snellen and colleagues have now calculated that the European Extremely Large Telescope, due to be completed in the next decade on Cerro Armazones, a mountain in Chile, will be big enough to do the job. Boasting a 39-metre main mirror, this telescope is expected to see some of the most distant stars and galaxies in the universe. With its much higher resolution, oxygen from an exoplanet would appear similar to Earth's oxygen, but its wavelength band would be noticeably shifted due to the exoplanet's motion as it orbits its star.













Finding such oxygen would still be a long shot: an exoplanet has to pass in front of its star many times to gather enough data to say for sure whether oxygen is present. Depending on the planet's orbit and the size of its star, that could take between 4 and 400 years.












The team also suggests building an array of "flux buckets", cheap telescopes that collect as much light as possible. These cannot be used to produce detailed images like large observatories, but they would allow the analysis needed to find exoplanet oxygen.












"It's good to have a cheaper alternative to the big space-based missions," says Jack O'Malley-James at the University of St Andrews in Fife, UK. But he cautions that just detecting oxygen will not confirm the presence of life. Other planets with vastly different chemistry might have an alternative source, so space-based observations would still be needed to confirm the full range of chemicals in a planet's atmosphere and show whether it is truly Earth-like.












Journal reference: Astrophysical Journal, doi.org/kh6


















































If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.




































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One-Minute Physics: Are unknowns part of the universe?



Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV






What's part of the universe? You may think of it as incorporating everything that exists - both on Earth and in space - but could it also include the unknown?



In this One-Minute Physics episode, film-maker Henry Reich delves into the notion of the universe as described by physics, distinguishing between the whole universe and what's observable. He looks at the three components of the universe that we are sure of and whether mathematics could be included or not. Then there is the concept of parallel universes that could extend our understanding of space.



If you enjoyed this post, check out our previous animations, to find out, for example, if space is infinite
or why mass has a split personality.






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False memories prime immune system for future attacks









































IN A police line-up, a falsely remembered face is a big problem. But for the body's police force – the immune system – false memories could be a crucial weapon.












When a new bacterium or virus invades the body, the immune system mounts an attack by sending in white blood cells called T-cells that are tailored to the molecular structure of that invader. Defeating the infection can take several weeks. However, once victorious, some T-cells stick around, turning into memory cells that remember the invader, reducing the time taken to kill it the next time it turns up.












Conventional thinking has it that memory cells for a particular microbe only form in response to an infection. "The dogma is that you need to be exposed," says Mark Davis of Stanford University in California, but now he and his colleagues have shown that this is not always the case.












The team took 26 samples from the Stanford Blood Center. All 26 people had been screened for diseases and had never been infected with HIV, herpes simplex virus or cytomegalovirus. Despite this, Davis's team found that all the samples contained T-cells tailored to these viruses, and an average of 50 per cent of these cells were memory cells.












The idea that T-cells don't need to be exposed to the pathogen "is paradigm shifting," says Philip Ashton-Rickardt of Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study. "Not only do they have capacity to remember, they seem to have seen a virus when they haven't."












So how are these false memories created? To a T-cell, each virus is "just a collection of peptides", says Davis. And so different microbes could have structures that are similar enough to confuse the T-cells.












To test this idea, the researchers vaccinated two people with an H1N1 strain of influenza and found that this also stimulated the T-cells to react to two bacteria with a similar peptide structure. Exposing the samples from the blood bank to peptide sequences from certain gut and soil bacteria and a species of ocean algae resulted in an immune response to HIV (Immunology, doi.org/kgg).












The finding could explain why vaccinating children against measles seems to improve mortality rates from other diseases. It also raises the possibility of creating a database of cross-reactive microbes to find new vaccination strategies. "We need to start exploring case by case," says Davis.












"You could find innocuous pathogens that are good at vaccinating against nasty ones," says Ashton-Rickardt. The idea of cross-reactivity is as old as immunology, he says. But he is excited about the potential for finding unexpected correlations. "Who could have predicted that HIV was related to an ocean algae?" he says. "No one's going to make that up!"












This article appeared in print under the headline "False memories prime our defences"




















































If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.









































































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False memories prime immune system for future attacks









































IN A police line-up, a falsely remembered face is a big problem. But for the body's police force – the immune system – false memories could be a crucial weapon.












When a new bacterium or virus invades the body, the immune system mounts an attack by sending in white blood cells called T-cells that are tailored to the molecular structure of that invader. Defeating the infection can take several weeks. However, once victorious, some T-cells stick around, turning into memory cells that remember the invader, reducing the time taken to kill it the next time it turns up.












Conventional thinking has it that memory cells for a particular microbe only form in response to an infection. "The dogma is that you need to be exposed," says Mark Davis of Stanford University in California, but now he and his colleagues have shown that this is not always the case.












The team took 26 samples from the Stanford Blood Center. All 26 people had been screened for diseases and had never been infected with HIV, herpes simplex virus or cytomegalovirus. Despite this, Davis's team found that all the samples contained T-cells tailored to these viruses, and an average of 50 per cent of these cells were memory cells.












The idea that T-cells don't need to be exposed to the pathogen "is paradigm shifting," says Philip Ashton-Rickardt of Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study. "Not only do they have capacity to remember, they seem to have seen a virus when they haven't."












So how are these false memories created? To a T-cell, each virus is "just a collection of peptides", says Davis. And so different microbes could have structures that are similar enough to confuse the T-cells.












To test this idea, the researchers vaccinated two people with an H1N1 strain of influenza and found that this also stimulated the T-cells to react to two bacteria with a similar peptide structure. Exposing the samples from the blood bank to peptide sequences from certain gut and soil bacteria and a species of ocean algae resulted in an immune response to HIV (Immunology, doi.org/kgg).












The finding could explain why vaccinating children against measles seems to improve mortality rates from other diseases. It also raises the possibility of creating a database of cross-reactive microbes to find new vaccination strategies. "We need to start exploring case by case," says Davis.












"You could find innocuous pathogens that are good at vaccinating against nasty ones," says Ashton-Rickardt. The idea of cross-reactivity is as old as immunology, he says. But he is excited about the potential for finding unexpected correlations. "Who could have predicted that HIV was related to an ocean algae?" he says. "No one's going to make that up!"












This article appeared in print under the headline "False memories prime our defences"




















































If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.




































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A computer cosmos will never explain quantum physics


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Do get mad: The upside of anger


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How to use art to help explore other minds



Kat Austen, CultureLab editor

Lead.jpg

Lucky Devil, 2012 (Image: Rosemarie Trockel, DACS 2013, Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin London)

What makes a human mind? Forget all those wet biology descriptors and imagine it’s possible to walk through the forest of someone else’s neurons to see what they see, to explore their consciousness.

Viewing any artwork opens a window into other minds - just a little. But the Cosmos exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London, goes a step further. Spread across seven rooms, it drills into the mind of influential contemporary artist Rosemarie Trockel by collecting her works and showing them with works of other minds that she has picked, chosen for their resonance with what she holds dear.





Jellyfish.jpg

Polyclonia frondosa, circa 1876 (Image: The Natural History Museum, London 2012)

Themes emerge - geology, sexuality, vitality, zoology - but are presented with a randomness and apparent illogic that perfectly reflects the way our minds seem to work. The appearance of a chair in one room - Trockel's Atheismus - layered with tasselled felt, recollects the shapes of valuable glass jellyfish sculptures made by the Blashka family on show in another room (borrowed from the Natural History Museum's Treasures Gallery).

Then there are the multiple layers visible in the multicoloured yarn-encased objects by artist Judith Scott. These recall both lepidopteran cocooning - and there is a butterfly pinned to one of the pieces in another room - and the geological layers evoked by Trockel's own Lucky Devil, a stuffed crab atop a layered stack of fabrics.

To best reflect the mind, then, Trockel's curation is not linear, but rather a web of connections that allows you to free-associate as you walk through her galleries.

And the juxtaposition of the artefacts imbues them with extra meaning, layering on new interpretations. Their arrangement recalls Victorian cabinets of curiosities: take Trockel's As Far As Possible, a cage containing three stuffed birds, animated in such a way as to catch the viewer unawares. A small wren moving behind a log plays on our primal reflex to avoid scurrying creatures.

The piece is placed next to another of the artist's powerful works, Replace Me, which shows a tarantula standing in for a woman's pubic hair. The proximity heightens the connection with the same reflex, which responds to spiders in particular - and, interestingly, is more prevalent in women than men.

Mechanical Reproduction.jpg

Mechanical Reproduction, 1995 (Image: Rosemarie Trockel, DACS 2013, Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin London)

Trockel has included some extraordinarily beautiful and rare pieces in the collection. Among them her own illustrations of poppies spreading their seeds, Mechanical Reproduction, are stunning examples of images from nature, as are those of pioneering natural historian Maria Sibylla Merian, dating from the beginning of the eighteenth century, which have a vibrancy and vitality belying their age.

Not everything in the exhibition is beautiful, but there is a coherence to the whole which is the result of a collection built on wide-ranging but ultimately reflexive choices.

Cosmos is at the Serpentine Gallery, London, until 7 April.



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Gene therapy cures diabetic dogs









































Five diabetic beagles no longer needed insulin injections after being given two extra genes, with two of them still alive more than four years later.











Several attempts have been made to treat diabetes with gene therapy but this study is "the first to show a long-term cure for diabetes in a large animal", says Fàtima Bosch, who treated the dogs at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain.













The two genes work together to sense and regulate how much glucose is circulating in the blood. People with type 1 diabetes lose this ability because the pancreatic cells that make insulin, the body's usual sugar-controller, are killed by their immune system.












Delivered into muscles in the dogs' legs by a harmless virus, the genes appear to compensate for the loss of these cells. One gene makes insulin and the other an enzyme that dictates how much glucose should be absorbed into muscles.











Two genes good













Dogs which received just one of the two genes remained diabetic, suggesting that both are needed for the treatment to work.












Bosch says the findings build on an earlier demonstration of the therapy in mice. She hopes to try it out in humans, pending further tests in dogs.












Other diabetes researchers welcomed the results but cautioned that the diabetes in the dogs that underwent the treatment doesn't exactly replicate what happens in human type 1 diabetes. That's because the dogs' pancreatic cells were artificially destroyed by a chemical, not by their own immune systems.












"This work is an interesting new avenue which may give us a completely new type of treatment," says Matthew Hobbs, head of research at the charity Diabetes UK. "The researchers' plan to test the treatment in a larger number of dogs with naturally occurring [type 1] diabetes is a sensible way to gather stronger evidence that will be needed before this experimental treatment is ready to be tested in humans."












Journal reference: Diabetes, doi.org/kf3


















































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Picasso created masterworks with house paint









































Nanoscale studies of chips of paint have bolstered the notion that Pablo Picasso created some of his surreal masterworks with ordinary house paint. Chemical analysis of the chips may lead to better art conservation techniques.












Historians had suspected that Picasso was one of the first master painters to switch from traditional oil paints to the fast-drying enamel paint normally reserved for household work. Previous analyses were inconclusive because it was not possible to identify individual elements with enough resolution.












In search of a new approach, Volker Rose of the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois teamed up with Francesca Casadio, a conservationist at the Art Institute of Chicago. Using an X-ray nano-probe, a tool for measuring the type and location of chemical elements in a sample, they examined paint from five works.












Rose found that levels of zinc oxide and iron in the paint closely matched samples of 1930s Ripolin (Applied Physics A, doi.org/kf2), a household brand. Picasso's use of house paint marks the birth of a new artistic style.











"We have opened the nanoworld to culture heritage," says Rose, adding that the probe could also inform studies of ageing and deterioration of artworksMovie Camera.





















































If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.




































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