terça-feira, 18 de março de 2014

Hero’s 2WD diesel-electric RNT radically rethinks the motorcycle as an all-purpose utility vehicle

 

Hero Motocorp suddenly seems more than capable of replacing Honda's technology, it also se...

Hero Motocorp suddenly seems more than capable of replacing Honda’s technology, it also seems capable of producing machinery better suited for the emerging market it currently serves, but also of producing truly ingenious solutions that existing long term manufacturers with deeply-rooted R&D structures could simply never envisage.

Hero Motocorp’s presentation of the RNT hybrid turbo-diesel-electric motorcycle prototype at Auto Expo in New Delhi last week might well begin a whole new phase in the development of the motorcycle as an all-purpose utility vehicle. Most significantly, the RNT offers a range of life solutions well beyond mobility – it’s designed to pull a plow or a harvester, carry heavy loads safely and adapt to play a practical role, particularly in rural areas and the developing world.

The RNT has an ultra-frugal 13.5 hp, 150 cc diesel engine which produces 35 Nm of torque at just 1600 rpm, with an optional turbocharger which will more than double both those figures. There’s also an optional front wheel hub motor producing 1.3 hp, giving the bike two-wheel drive. Even more significantly, the RNT’s powerful generator can output 1500 W of 230 V electrical power continuously, making it ideal as a portable power source, and the LED headlight unclips to offer a portable and powerful light source. Large flat loading surfaces front and rear plus numerous mounting handles indicate a long overdue rethink of how the scooter is used in many parts of the world.

The low-cost, cheap-to-run, step-thru scooter has become the default family transportation in many developing countries due to its light weight, low running costs and ease-of-use. While the cost of a scooter in these areas often represents many months, sometimes years of wages, it is still a relatively affordable form of transport and has become an enabler in many ways, playing the dual role of family car and all-purpose haulage vehicle for goods.

In many parts of Asia, Africa, South America and India, the scooter represents more than 90 percent of two-wheel sales, with two-wheelers significantly outselling cars, which are the domain of the wealthy elite.

Hence, Hero Motocorp’s ingenious rethink of the scooter form factor offers significantly more practicality than the existing scooters in the marketplace which have, until now, been adapted from their western design for the many needs of the markets they serve.

The 150cc diesel engine is a first in that it uses a commonly available fuel which is much cheaper than petrol in India, and will likely produce remarkable fuel consumption figures in such a small capacity engine, especially when used in a motorcycle weighing just 136 kg. It’s no coincidence that the only diesel motorcycle which has ever been produced in real numbers was produced by Royal Enfield in India.

Hero MotoCorp CEO Pawan Munjal and the RNT prototype. Note that the bike shown did not hav...

The low-grade technology employed by Royal Enfield in making the bikes resulted in noxious halitosis and the model was discontinued some 12 years ago, but the need remains, and with more than a billion people, the Indian Government is in no position to subsidize fuel prices as governments do in the rest of the world. A little known fact is that globally, governments collectively subsidize fuel prices to the tune of half a trillion US dollars annually. This is a machine designed to have a low environmental footprint, not just because it’s good for the planet’s respiratory system, but because as fuel prices rise, it will offer the lowest possible practical running costs.

Diesel engines are also extremely durable and reliable and the very few examples of diesel motorcycles that have made it to commercial production (see prior examples below) are surrounded by tales of ultra-low running costs and extreme high mileage.

Rural roads in developing areas rarely have good surfaces, so speeds beyond 35-40 mph (60-75 km/h) are often impractical or unsafe, and the further you get from big cities, the worse those roads get. So the RNT’s modest 13.5 hp is entirely adequate for these environments, even though it gives the bike a top speed of just 70 km/h. As scooters in such places are often pressed into service for carrying ridiculously heavy loads, the RNT’s diminutive but torquey motor is again ideal, producing 35Nm of torque at just 1600 rpm. That’s a level of torque that sports bikes of double the capacity make at four to five times the RNT’s engine speeds.

 

BigRep ONE 3D printer creates whole pieces of furniture - Mozilla Firefox 2014-02-24 19.30.36

Foods That Pack a Protein Punch

 

 

The average man over the age of 18 needs 56 grams of protein daily, but Americans tend to consume twice the recommended amount. Our guide to foods that pack a protein punch shows you how to get just enough protein—but not too much—with good sources of vegan protein.

 

Foods That Pack a Protein Punch _ Features _ PETA - Mozilla Firefox 2014-03-18 21.11.18

77 facts apparently false but actually true.

 

77 facts that sounds like huge lies but are completely true.

 

77 Facts That Sound Like Huge Lies But Are Actually Completely True - Mozilla Firefox 2014-03-18 19.39.16

Could Stem Cells Breathe New Life into the Field of Blood Substitution?

 

Immature cells' regenerative prowess injects new excitement into the field

Mar 17, 2014 |By Dina Fine Maron

Image: CDC

More than a century after scientists embarked on the quest to find an alternative to the blood coursing through our veins, the dream still will not die. Not after a major study dealt a seemingly fatal blow to the field—determining that the top synthetic blood candidates at the time were all more likely to kill you than to save your life. Not after billions of dollars in public and private investments dried up. And not after multiple companies ran aground.
Starting in 2011, however, the moribund field received yet another revival, this time from a group of French researchers with a new approach to boosting blood supplies. Their principal insight: don’t try to re-create millions of years of evolution. Instead, they proposed to piggyback off of what nature already made by coaxing stem cells into taking on the job.
The appeal of creating blood alternatives is obvious. Certainly after a battlefield trauma or a car accident a ready transfusion of artificial blood that could theoretically work with any blood type and not require refrigeration would be a welcome medical tool. A synthetic product outlasting the typical 42-day shelf life of red blood cells and sidestepping even the miniscule risk of transmitting a blood-borne disease would also be high on the medical wish list. But such a product has not yet been created and proved safe in humans.

It’s not for lack of trying. Although blood cells serve multiple roles in the body and have complex interactions with other cellular materials, most synthetic blood products have aimed to just stick to the bare basics—shuttling oxygen from the lungs to different vital organs and then bringing carbon dioxide back to the lungs to be exhaled. When the red cell count gets low, bodily organs may not get the oxygen they need, making a person weak and eventually resulting in serious health problems. The most popular approach taken to replicate that function has been to create artificial hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers, tapping proteins in red blood cells called hemoglobin that act as oxygen’s transport service, and chemically modifying them to increase oxygen-carrying capacity.
But the new idea is to get the body to grow its own substitute—a product that would not be the same as whole blood but could fit the bill in a pinch.

A Paris-based research group, headed up by Luc Douay, professor of hematology at University Pierre and Marie Curie Faculty of Medicine, has already had some success. They culled stemlike cells from blood circulating through a patient’s body and manipulated them into becoming red blood cells nearly identical to those that normally transport oxygen in the body. The team injected two milliliters of the stem-cell derived blood cells back into the patient—an amount far smaller than would be needed in a typical transfusion. The creations had stored well at refrigerated temperatures and circulated in the body with survival time on par with that of original red cells.
Jackpot. In short, the work—albeit on one person, tapping cells from his own body—proved that it could be done. “It’s a promising approach,” says Harvey Klein, chief of the Department of Transfusion Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. “There is a school of pessimists who believe that because of costs it will never materialize on a practice level, but I’ve heard that all my life about different areas of medicine including bone marrow transplants in the ‘60s.” Still, he and others caution that the field is far from being able to forgo the need for blood donors for day-to-day care. In fact, the market for artificial blood products would likely be limited to people with rare blood types and those who, due to blood diseases, require new transfusions, perhaps every couple months.

It’s an encouraging step forward for a field littered with odd and sometimes cringe-worthy efforts to get at the lifesaving power of blood. Animal to human blood transfusions received a short-lived audition in 1667. But the first human-to-human blood transfusion was not performed until 1818—before we learned about blood types and how and when the body rejects certain transfusions. Blood-product research also included attempts in the late 1800s to hook up ailing patients to infusions of fresh cow’s milk. Milk, like blood, had fats that emulsify in fluid, the reasoning went. Plus, milk would be safer than blood because it would not clot. When patients died, physicians figured it was due to other complications. Needless to say, milk injections, like those from animal blood, never really took off.
In the U.S. there is no shortage of blood products available for most patients, thanks to blood donors. After a healthy person donates blood that fluid is typically whirred in a centrifuge and separated out into several parts. Most commonly, patients receive transfusions of red blood cells, the component of blood that shuttles oxygen to tissues throughout the body. (Patients may also receive infusions of white cells that help fight infection or platelets, the small, colorless cell fragments that help stanch bleeding by clotting.)

Although most people only get transfusions once or twice in their lives (if at all), individuals with conditions like sickle-cell anemia require consistent blood transfusions of red cells. But with each infusion there’s a small risk that the body could develop an infection, reject the foreign blood or form antibodies that will lead to the body rejecting and destroying certain bloods in the future. A key threat, however, is that each transfusion contributes to the risk of iron overload in the body. All red blood cells contain iron, but after the body takes what it needs it has no easy way to dispose of the excess. It gets stored, instead, in organs including the heart, liver and pancreas. That buildup of increased iron with each transfusion can damage the organs and eventually prove fatal.
The French researchers hope that using freshly created blood cells made from stem cells could help alleviate those iron buildup concerns. “We think it could be transfused at least three to five times less each year because of the efficiency of the transfusion,” Douay says.

The secret lies in the age of the red blood cells derived from stem cells. Although red cells from donors have a typical shelf life of 42 days, they are a mix of older and newer cells, which means a number of them may not last long in the body. With stem cell–derived options all of the blood product would be new, which could theoretically give patients more bang for each infusion. The only thing that would appear different to a patient receiving the transfusions, ideally, is that he would be receiving them less often. “If you have brand-new cells, you should be able to increase the intervals between transfusions so you can make it longer, says David Anstee, director of the International Blood Group Reference Laboratory in England. “You might be able to improve the quality of life in those situations.” It’s not a perfect fix because it would likely add months, not years, between transfusions, but it could be a start.
Also, researchers could carefully select which blood types to culture with each batch of stem cells, creating stockpiles of needed blood products for people with extremely rare blood types whose blood cell makeup makes it challenging to find good blood matches for transfusions because they would reject most other types of blood. But so far all this remains theoretical—since that initial breakthrough no new blood product has inched close to regulatory approval in the U.S. or Europe.

The greatest hurdles are arguably more monetary than technical, but the monetary obstacles are massive. To match the current prices of high-quality blood products the process would have to become at least fivefold more cost-effective, Douay notes in a recent study published in Biotechnology Journal. Although the current price tag for an average hospital to create one unit of red blood cells from donor blood comes in at about $225, more expensive, unique stockpiles of red cells, kept for individuals with rare blood needs, can cost anywhere from $700 to $1,200 per unit. By comparison, with Douay’s method the price for equivalent amounts of blood cells (assuming that much product could be made successfully) would likely be around $8,330. It could even cost up to $15,000 per unit if all does not go according to plan, Douay estimates.
Moreover, the idea of using Douay’s earlier process, which involved growing the cells in culture, at a larger scale would be “delusional,” he says. To make just one unit of blood—roughly a pint—it would require growing cells in about 400 flasks that were about 30 centimeters by 20 centimeters, he says. But even with endless space for those flasks it would still be impossible because the constant pH and temperature controls that would be needed would be impossible to maintain. What would be needed, he says, is an automated, stirred large-scale bioreactor (something his team hopes to one day produce themselves). “Even something as seemingly simple as red blood cells that don’t have a nucleus evolved a structure and a function that is much more complicated than we can perceive by looking under the microscope,” says Jason Acker, associate director of development for Canadian Blood Services.
Douay, for his part, is not surprised it has taken more than a century for science to get even to this point, where the future of subbing in stem cells for blood products still remains little more than a reverie. “For years,” he says, “we tried to replace nature and do as well as nature does.” The regenerative powers of stem cells may just yet inject new options into the field
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A Happy Life May not be a Meaningful Life - Scientific American - Mozilla Firefox 2014-02-19 18.42.38

10 Vintage Looks for Spring 2014 from NYFW

 

 

Vintage clothing trends - 10 Vintage looks for spring

 

10 Vintage Looks from NYFW Spring 2014 - Mozilla Firefox 2014-03-18 17.36.56

NSF Distinguished Lecture: Supernovae Reveal an Accelerating Universe by Professor Adam Riess

 

NSF Distinguished Lecture: Supernovae Reveal an Accelerating Universe by Professor Adam Riess NSF Distinguished Lecture in Mathematical and Physical Sciences: Supernovae Reveal an Accelerating Universe Professor Adam Riess, Johns Hopkins University Nobel Laureate Feb. 24, 2014 Credit: NSF

nsf.gov - Multimedia Gallery - US National Science Foundation (NSF) - Mozilla Firefox 2014-03-18 17.09.02

7 Essential Oils For Survival

 

Written by: Patricia Bratianu RN PhD RH-AHG Natural Health February 24, 2014

essential oils healing herbs

Essential oils have been used for centuries to enhance physical, emotional, spiritual and mental wellness. In fact, during the plagues of the Middle Ages, perfumers and tanners were noted to be less susceptible to the disease. This was due to their use of essential oils in their work.

As more microorganisms become antibiotic resistant, it is important to learn as much as possible about essential oils. Essential oils are complex compounds to which germs are unable to become resistant. In fact, some drug manufacturers are adding essential oils to pharmaceuticals to prevent the development of drug resistant organisms. In addition, researchers are finding that many medications are more effective when combined with plant oils.

What do essential oils do?

Essential oils offer a broad array of health-enhancing benefits. Unlike pharmaceuticals, essential oils may be used to promote calmness and energy at the same time. They help protect our bodies from the harmful effects of pollution. Essential oils can even promote healthy regeneration of cells. Essential oils are very effective treatments for mood and stress-related disorders. They can be used to aid concentration and relieve pain. Insomnia may be relieved with the use of essential oils.

Essential oils may be used to promote the health of the entire body. They benefit every organ and the body as a whole. Essential oils are used to prevent and eliminate many kinds of infections. They are used to treat serious infections, such as MRSA, and VRE, which do not respond to antibiotics.

A classic culinary herb, strongly aromatic. Great for cooking, drinks, teas, baking and more.

Specific essential oils and their benefits

Here are seven of the most valuable essential oils to keep in your home. Purchase organic, high quality oils from reputable dealers as quality varies greatly. Store your oils in a dark place out of reach of children.

  1. Lavender: Lavender oil is sometimes considered to be a medicine cabinet in a bottle. Lavender is relaxing. It soothes colicky babies and enhances sleep in adults. I have used it on burns. It relieves pain and fights infections.
  2. Tea Tree: Tea Tree oil is popular for wound care and oral health. It can relieve yeast infections. Tea tree oil is an excellent multi-purpose essential oil.
  3. Peppermint: Peppermint relieves headaches and soothes digestive ills. It improves the circulation of the body. Peppermint is an excellent oil to employ if you are suffering from mental fatigue.
  4. Rosemary: Rosemary aids concentration. It enhances the health of the liver. Rosemary helps to open up clogged breathing passages.
  5. Clary sage: Clary sage is an excellent hormone balancer for women.
  6. Myrrh: An excellent oil for serious infections, myrrh is a terrific oil to use for skin care. It possesses potent anti-aging qualities.
  7. Geranium: Geranium is a great all-purpose oil. Use it for skin care. It has astringent qualities which improve the appearance of the skin. Geranium rids oily skin of excess oil without being too drying.

Using essential oils safely

Essential oils are potent substances. Consult with a knowledgeable practitioner or educate yourself prior to using essential oils. Essential oils should not be taken internally except under the supervision of a qualified aromatherapy expert. Oils may be administered via diffusers, inhalation and topically.

Here are some general guidelines for blending oils.  Grape seed, olive, sesame and avocado oils are all excellent base oils.

  • Everyday use: Combine 10 drops ofan essential oil with one half ounce of a base oil. This is a good concentration to use for hair care and massage.
  • Specific use: Blend 20 drops of an essential oil with one half ounce of a base oil. Use this for backaches or to treat skin irritation.
  • Acute use: Blend 40 drops of an essential oil with one-half ounce of a base oil. Only use this strength locally to treat a specific body part, such as a strained ankle, for a short period of time.
  • Neat use: While most essential oils must be diluted prior to using, a few may be applied directly to the skin for short term use. Lavender essential oil may be used undiluted for burns. Tea tree oil may be applied to the toes, undiluted, for the treatment of athlete’s foot.

The above guidelines are for general use. Some oils are very strong and must be used at much lower concentrations. Learn about each oil prior to using.

In addition to learning about the essential oils, take the time to learn about different base oils. All offer healing benefits, as well. Essential oils may be added to baths. They may be combined with healing clay, honey, aloe juice and a variety of other bases. Tailor your selections to the need at hand.

7 Essential Oils For Survival _ Off The Grid News - Mozilla Firefox 2014-03-18 11.15.27

Teens’ Brain Structure May Be Altered By Smoking

 

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Image Source/Getty Images

 

Early exposure to cigarettes could affect how one responds to and craves nicotine

It’s no surprise that smoking for years can change the way the brain processes nicotine, creating a well-worn pattern of craving and satisfaction that’s difficult to break.

But how soon does this cycle get started? And does nicotine actually alter structures in the brain to make dependence more likely?

In the latest research, published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, Edythe London, a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at University of California Los Angeles, and her team found that young smokers did have differences in a specific brain region compared with non smokers. Even more concerning, these differences emerged with a relatively light smoking habit of one pack or less of cigarettes a day.

MORE: Children Exposed to More Brain-Harming Chemicals Than Ever Before

London and her colleagues focused on a brain region called the insula, since previous studies in animal and adults showed that its size and volume were affected by smoking. Of the regions in the cortical, or memory, awareness and language parts of the brain, the insula contains the most receptors for nicotine. The region is responsible for decision-making and helping to establish a person’s conscious awareness of his internal state. In studies of stroke patients, smokers who lost function of the right insula in the stroke quit smoking, and reported feeling no cravings for nicotine. And in earlier studies London’s team conducted, they found a strong relationship between how much smokers who watched videos of people smoking experienced cravings for cigarettes and the activity of the insula, which lit up on PET scans.

When London’s team looked at the brains of the 18 smoking teens and 24 non-smoking adolescents, aged 16 to 21 years, using structural MRI, they found no differences overall in the insula region. But a closer examination revealed that the right insula of the smokers was thinner than those of the nonsmokers.

MORE: The FDA’s Frightening Anti-Smoking Campaign for Teens Hits Them Where It Hurts

“The brain is still undergoing development when someone is in their late teens,” she says. “It’s possible that smoking during this period could have effects that could alter tobacco dependence later in life, and that the insult could alter the trajectory of brain development.”

While the study doesn’t establish whether the differences in the insula can lead to smoking, or is the result of smoking, London says it highlights the role that the brain region may play in how people respond to nicotine and cigarettes. “I think this is very exciting because it points to a vulnerability, a potential vulnerability factor either to become nicotine dependent or for the effects of smoking to ultimately alter the trajectory of brain development,” she says. That trajectory could affect not only smoking behavior but decision-making in general, since the insula is important in such assessments.

 

Teens’ Brain Structure May Be Altered By Smoking _ TIME.com - Mozilla Firefox 2014-03-18 10.40.12

http://time.com/11386/teens-brain-structure-may-be-altered-by-smoking/