GLIMPSES OF THE
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Emergency Room Heart Doctors May Have Been Killing Heart Attack Victims By Accident It's counter intuitive, by a leading American cardiologist claims that traditional resuscitation techniques for heart attack victims in use all over the world are wrong and that patients are dying unnecessarily. Dr. Sherwin Nuland believes that after a heart stops the body's cells (including brain cells) don't die soon afterwards but go into a 'low oxygen use' mode and virtually shut themselves down, whilst remaining essentially undamaged. Dr Nuland's persuasive argument is that the traditional resuscitation procedure of administering heart stimulation and oxygen to the body then over-shocks those 'shut down' cells and accidentally causes them to die. Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. 'After one hour,' he says, 'we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong. In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.' Biologists are still grappling with the implications of this new view of cell death - not passive extinguishment, like a candle flickering out when you cover it with a glass, but an active biochemical event triggered by 'reperfusion,' the resumption of oxygen supply. If proven, this observation will change how heart attack victims (and other victims whose hearts have stopped) are treated all over the world. It now seems as if revival may be possible (if resuscitation is gently applied) hours after a heart has stopped. A Good Night's Sleep At The Flick Of A Switch? Giulio Tononi, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, has discovered how to stimulate brain waves that characterize the deepest stage of sleep. The discovery could open a new window into the role of sleep in keeping humans healthy, happy and able to learn. During slow wave activity, which occupies about 80 percent of sleeping hours, waves of electrical activity wash across the brain, roughly once a second, 1,000 times a night. Professor Tononi and colleagues, including Marcello Massimini, also of the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, describes the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to initiate slow waves in sleeping volunteers. The researchers recorded brain electrical activity with an electroencephalograph (EEG). Spectacles That Project Digital Subtitles For the Hard-Of-Hearing Here's something that could be a godsend for the hard of hearing who feel they are not getting their money's worth in the cinema. A nifty little idea thought up by some clever people at Madrid's Carlos III University for the Spanish Center for Subtitles and Closed Captions, this gadget fixes onto a person's glasses to give them access to subtitles - even in a screening that doesn't include on-screen subtitles. The technology is simple: a computer in the cinema transmits the subtitles and also deals with their synchronization. A receptor in the glasses captures the signal and projects it onto the microscreen, which fits over the right-hand lens. It's easy as pie to use, it is claimed. One button turns the gadget on and off and another one restarts it. U.S. Soldiers To Get Binoculars Wired Directly Into Their Brains U.S. Special Forces may soon have a strange and powerful new weapon in their arsenal: a pair of high-tech binoculars 10 times more powerful than anything available today, augmented by an alerting system that literally taps the wearer's prefrontal cortex to warn of furtive threats detected by the soldier's subconscious. In a new effort dubbed 'Luke's Binoculars' - after the high-tech binoculars Luke Skywalker uses in Star Wars - the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is setting out to create its own version of this science-fiction hardware. And while the Pentagon's R&D arm often focuses on technologies 20 years out, this new effort is dramatically different - DARPA says it expects to have prototypes in the hands of soldiers within three years. The agency claims no scientific breakthrough is needed on the project - formally called the Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System. Instead, DARPA hopes to integrate technologies that have been simmering in laboratories for years, ranging from flat-field, wide-angle optics, to the use of advanced electroencephalograms, or EEGs, to rapidly recognize brainwave signatures. Nokia Siemens 'Doing The Right Thing' For Developing Countries Nokia Siemens Networks has launched Village Connection, a new low-cost fast-install cellular phone network option for markets in the developing world. Village Connection offers an easy concept-to-build rural connectivity network, village by village, enabling a franchise-based business model between an operator and local village entrepreneurs. A range of value-added services can be added, such as cost-effective Internet services in villages via the Internet protocol link. Your Mobile Phone Can Now Help You Count Calories (Slowly) With cell phones ubiquitous in Japan and rising concern over expanding waistlines, health care providers have put two-and-two together to help the weight-conscious send photos of their meals to nutritionists for analysis. The concept is only on a test run for now, and one little drawback is that dieters have to wait three days to find out how much damage they did by eating the meal they just photographed. (There must be a better way). Public health insurance offices in the Osaka region in western Japan have launched the service on a trial basis. About 100 heart patients signed up in the first year, followed by diabetes and obesity patients in the second.
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Harnessing The Jet Stream For Green, Renewable Energy Scientists are eyeing the jet stream, an energy source that rages night and day, 365 days a year, just a few miles above our heads. If they can tap into its fierce winds, the world's entire electrical needs could be met, they say. The trick is figuring out how to harness the energy and get it down to the ground cost-effectively and safely. Dozens of researchers in California and around the world believe huge kite-like wind-power generators could be the solution. As bizarre as that might seem, respected experts say the idea is sound enough to justify further investigation. The jet stream typically blows from west to east 6 to 9 miles over the northern hemisphere at speeds up to 310 mph. By lofting generators into the upper atmosphere, scientists theorize they could capture the power of the jet stream and transmit the electricity along cables back to Earth. NASA Tests First Methane-Powered Rocket Engine For Deep Space Use Apart from being a potent greenhouse gas, methane is also a ubiquitous gas, being found on Mars, Titan, Jupiter, and many other planets and moons. With fuel waiting at the destination, a rocket leaving Earth wouldn't have to carry so much propellant, reducing the cost of a mission, which is why NASA has built, and is now testing,a methane powered engine. This first series of desert test firings of the 7,500 pound-thrust main engine was a success, but challenges remain before methane rockets will be ready for use in a real mission. 'One of the big questions with methane is its ability to ignite,' says project manager Terri Tramel of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. 'Some rocket fuels ignite spontaneously when mixed with the oxidizer, but methane requires an ignition source. Ignition sources can be hard to make in the outer solar system where planetary temperatures drop to hundreds of degrees below zero.' Tramel and her colleagues at Marshall and Glenn are currently working to assure that the rocket will ignite reliably in all conditions. 'Exercise Pill' Switches On Gene That Tells Cells To Burn Fat By giving adult mice a drug - a synthetic designed to mimic fat - Salk Institute scientist Dr. Ronald M. Evans is now able to chemically switch on PPAR-d, the master regulator that controls the ability of cells to burn fat. Even when the mice are not active, turning on the chemical switch activates the same fat-burning process that occurs during exercise. The resulting shift in energy balance (calories in, calories burned) makes the mice resistant to weight gain on a high fat diet. The great hope, Dr. Evans told scientists attending Experimental Biology 2007 in Washington, DC, is that such metabolic trickery will lead to a new approach to new treatment and prevention of human metabolic syndrome. Sometimes called syndrome X, this consists of obesity and the often dire health consequences of obesity: high blood pressure, high levels of fat in the blood, heart disease, and resistance to insulin and diabetes. Hay Fever? Here's A USB-Powered Face Mask Only in Japan would they think of marketing an anti-hay fever mask which is powered by a computer's USB port. To be fair Japan suffers a major hay fever problem (all that blossom) and the mask is marketed as an add-on to the gauze or cotton surgical masks that are almost ubiquitous in Japan in spring and early summer. The mask's selling point is that it includes two convection fans powered from a PC, which draw cool external air through a filter onto the mouth and nose. Thin People Can Be Fat On The Inside Do you every look at a thin person and imagine that a fat one is trying to get out. No? That's what Dr. Jimmy Bell, a professor of molecular imaging at Imperial College, London sees when he gazes at a bean pole. 'Being thin doesn't automatically mean you're not fat. Or healthy,' he claims. Since 1994, Professor Bell and his team have scanned nearly 800 people with MRI machines to create 'fat maps' showing where people store fat. Bell says people who are fat on the inside are essentially on the threshold of being obese. 'The whole concept of being fat needs to be redefined,' said Bell. Disabled Kids Get Mobility Buggy Designed Specially For Them Disabled children can now get their first taste of self-directed mobility with the Wizzybug, an affordable and fun electric vehicle that looks like a toy car, is happy indoors or in the garden, and is designed to suit a wide range of mobility-impaired children. Different types of controllers, from joysticks to hand and head switches, allow the children to drive and steer the buggies. Engineers at the Bath Institute of Medical Engineering in the School for Health at the University of Bath over three years to develop, and was launched recently at the Naidex exhibition for disability and homecare products . The engineers worked closely with children with disabilities, their parents and occupational therapists from the Royal United Hospital in Bath to make sure the Wizzybug meets their needs. Finally - Is A Cure For Baldness On The Horizon? Over the decades I've often written about so-called 'cures' for baldness which are only a year or two away from being marketed. Then, typically, things have gone quiet. But now, in our post-human-genome-unravelled world, US scientists have found a way to make the skin of laboratory mice give rise to new fully working hair follicles complete with new hair by using a protein that stimulates follicle generating genes in skin cells. They hope this discovery may one day lead to treatments for baldness and abnormal hair growth in humans. 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