Three-protein biomarker raises possibility of a urine test for pancreatic cancer

 

Scientists have uncovered a new biomarker that suggests a urine test for pancreatic cancer could one day become a reality (Credit: Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund) With a lack of clear symptoms even when the disease is well progressed, more than 80 percent of pancreatic cancer diagnoses come after the cancer has already spread. This has led some researchers to look beyond blood to urine testing, which is a less complex fluid. Among those is a team at the Queen Mary University of London, which has uncovered a three-protein biomarker in the urine of pancreatic cancer sufferers, suggesting a less invasive, early stage test may be on the way. At just three percent, the five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is lower than any form of common cancer. Because it is difficult to detect, sufferers are often diagnosed after it has already spread which rules out surgical removal of the tumor, the only current method of treatment. Adding to the complexity are the difficulties in distinguishing between pancreatic cancer and the inflammatory condition known as chronic pancreatitis. But the Queen Mary researchers say they have made progress in addressing both problems. The scientists gathered a total of 488 urine samples. 192 came from patients with pancreatic cancer, 92 from those with chronic pancreatitis, 87 from healthy volunteers and another 117 from patients with benign and malignant liver and gall bladder conditions. They tallied around 1,500 proteins in the urine samples, but zeroed in on three in particular for a closer look: LYVE1, REG1A and TFF1. The pancreatic cancer sufferers had higher levels of all three proteins than the healthy patients. And in a discovery that could help separate them from those with chronic pancreatitis, the latter group displayed significantly lower levels of these proteins. The researchers say that the combined three-protein signature can help detect stage one and two pancreatic cancer with more than 90 percent accuracy. Stage two detection carries a survival rate of 20 percent, while stage one can see survival rates of up to 60 percent. "This is a biomarker panel with good specificity and sensitivity and we’re hopeful that a simple, inexpensive test can be developed and be in clinical use within the next few years," says lead researcher Dr Tatjana Crnogorac-Jurcevic. From here, the team aims to carry out further tests on people from high risk groups which includes those with obesity, a family history of pancreatic cancer, heavy smokers and people over 50 with new-onset diabetes. They are also hopeful of collecting ongoing samples from volunteers over the next five to ten years. Studying samples of those who went on to develop pancreatic cancer could allow them to establish if the three-protein biomarker is present during the latency period. This refers to the time after the genetic changes take place that cause the cancer develop and before the clinical presentation. The research was published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research. Source: Queen Mary University of London

Bevel brings another dimension to smartphone photography

 

Bevel is a 3D photography attachemnt that works with both iOS and Android devices Image Gallery (7 images) Sticking with what it knows, Toronto-based Matter and Form has created Bevel, an accessory that turns smartphones and tablet into 3D cameras. Unlike the 3D Scanner the team released last year, Bevel isn't specifically intended for creating detailed 3D models of objects for 3D printing or animating, but for capturing everyday events that can then be shared in 3D. Bevel connects to iOS or Android devices via the headphone jack and allows users to capture three-dimensional images without much more effort than taking your standard photograph. The device packs an eye-safe laser which the photographer pans over the subject to capture depth information, while the mobile device's camera takes a photo as normal. The optimum subject distance is currently around 1 m (3.3 ft), the the team is looking to bring the capability to capture buildings and even entire cities in a future release. The resulting image can then be viewed within the Bevel app and the company’s app, Cashew, which allow users to share 3D photos in places like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Images can be rotated within the apps to can get just the right angle and can also be turned into animated GIFs or saved to be used later in an animation or 3D printing project –although the team says it is still ironing out the details on exactly how 3D printing compatibility will work. The choice of device to pair with Bevel will make a difference to image quality, with Matter and Form recommending a device with an accelerometer and a gyroscope, and Kit-Kat or higher for Android devices and iOS or higher for iOS devices. Bevel is powered by its own rechargeable battery so won't drain the mobile device it's connected to. As with its 3D Scanner, Matter and Form has prioritized affordability with Bevel and has gone the crowdfunding route to raise funds to get the device into production. The company has passed US$120,000 on the way to the $200,000 campaign goal, with just over three weeks left to run. The minimum pledge amount to reserve a Bevel, charging cable, calibration card, Bevel app and access to Cashew is $49, with deliveries estimated for early next year assuming all goes to plan. Source: Matter and Form, Kickstarter

Gigantic Street Art Painting on 200 Houses in Mexico

 

Posted: 02 Aug 2015 11:50 AM PDT

Le gouvernement mexicain a demandé au groupement d’artistes baptisé Germen Crew de peindre les façades blanches des maisons de la petite ville de Palmitas dans le but d’unifier les habitants. Le résultat offre une peinture colorée sur 209 maisons transformant le hameau en une gigantesque oeuvre de street art de 20 000 mètres carrés.

Wild Horses Photography

 

Posted: 02 Aug 2015 07:20 AM PDT

Troy Moth est un photographe qui, lorsqu’il avait 6 ans, s’est blessé assez grièvement en pleine séance d’équitation avec son cheval Flicka. Depuis, l’artiste recherche à travers ses clichés pris en Amérique du Nord à capturer toute la beauté des chevaux sauvages, montrant ainsi tout le respect et l’admiration qu’il cultive pour cet animal si cher à ses yeux.

Better together: Graphene-nanotube hybrid switches

 

Mon, 08/03/2015 - 12:00pm Allison Mills, Michigan Technological Univesity. Hair-like boron nitride nanotubes intersect a sheet of graphene to create a digital switch.  Image: Michigan Tech, Yoke Khin Yap Graphene has been called a wonder material, capable of performing great and unusual material acrobatics. Boron nitride nanotubes are no slackers in the materials realm either, and can be engineered for physical and biological applications. However, on their own, these materials are terrible for use in the electronics world. As a conductor, graphene lets electrons zip too fast—there's no controlling or stopping them—while boron nitride nanotubes are so insulating that electrons are rebuffed like an overeager dog hitting the patio door. But together, these two materials make a workable digital switch, which is the basis for controlling electrons in computers, phones, medical equipment and other electronics. Yoke Khin Yap, a professor of physics at Michigan Technological Univ., has worked with a research team that created these digital switches by combining graphene and boron nitride nanotubes. The journal Scientific Reports recently published their work. "The question is: How do you fuse these two materials together?" Yap says. The key is in maximizing their existing chemical structures and exploiting their mismatched features. Nanoscale tweaks Graphene is a molecule-thick sheet of carbon atoms; the nanotubes are like straws made of boron and nitrogen. Yap and his team exfoliate graphene and modify the material's surface with tiny pinholes. Then they can grow the nanotubes up and through the pinholes. Meshed together like this, the material looks like a flake of bark sprouting erratic, thin hairs. "When we put these two aliens together, we create something better," Yap says, explaining that it's important that the materials have lopsided band gaps, or differences in how much energy it takes to excite an electron in the material. "When we put them together, you form a band gap mismatch—that creates a so-called 'potential barrier' that stops electrons." The band gap mismatch results from the materials' structure: graphene's flat sheet conducts electricity quickly, and the atomic structure in the nanotubes halts electric currents. This disparity creates a barrier, caused by the difference in electron movement as currents move next to and past the hair-like boron nitride nanotubes. These points of contact between the materials—called heterojunctions—are what make the digital on/off switch possible. "Imagine the electrons are like cars driving across a smooth track," Yap says. "They circle around and around, but then they come to a staircase and are forced to stop." Yap and his research team have also shown that because the materials are respectively so effective at conducting or stopping electricity, the resulting switching ratio is high. In other words, how fast the materials can turn on and off is several orders of magnitude greater than current graphene switches. In turn, this speed could eventually quicken the pace of electronics and computing. Solving the semiconductor dilemma To get to faster and smaller computers one day, Yap says this study is a continuation of past research into making transistors without semiconductors. The problem with semiconductors like silicon is that they can only get so small, and they give off a lot of heat; the use of graphene and nanotubes bypasses those problems. In addition, the graphene and boron nitride nanotubes have the same atomic arrangement pattern, or lattice matching. With their aligned atoms, the graphene-nanotube digital switches could avoid the issues of electron scattering. "You want to control the direction of the electrons," Yap explains, comparing the challenge to a pinball machine that traps, slows down and redirects electrons. "This is difficult in high speed environments, and the electron scattering reduces the number and speed of electrons." Much like an arcade enthusiast, Yap says he and his team will continue trying to find ways to outsmart or change the pinball set-up of graphene to minimize electron scattering. And one day, all their tweaks could make for faster computers—and digital pinball games—for the rest of us. Source: Michigan Technological University.

sidmelo_blogreen (desde Março de 2014)

 

 

Conforme afirmei certa vez, as publicações do meu blog, consideradas “importadas” pelo Blogger, na verdade não são totalmente “importadas” uma vez que:

1) Preciso selecionar os artigos ou imagens, criteriosamente.

2) Cada postagem  exige uma média de 20 cliques do mouse até que esteja pronta para ser publicada usando-se o editor da Microsoft, Windows Live Writer.

3) Raramente as imagens estão boas para serem publicadas. Antes de inserila-las na postagem eu preciso edita-las. Veja um exemplo na postagem “Wild Horses Photography”. Cada imagem levou cerca de 4 minutos para a edição. Tenho que usar o “aguçar” (sharpen),  brilho e contraste, às vezes como nesse exemplo, colorizar, e por último acrescentar mais vermelho ou mais azul que são as principais.

4) As imagens contidas na maioria das postagens precisam ser dimensionadas da melhor maneira possível.

5) Procuro diversificar o conteúdo das publicações para não torna-las repetitivas e/ou enfadonhas.

6) Posso dizer então, que pelo menos 30% de cada postagem são de minha autoria. Afinal de contas clicar os botões do MOUSE entre 80 a 100 mil vezes durante 16 meses, práticamente todos os dias, começando geralmente entre 2 a 3:00 AM,  tornou-o debilitado, estressado, e neurótico. (o Mouse, não eu, eu estou supimpa !) Ao acordar de manhã verifico a pressão arterial do MOUSE. geralmente está mais ou menos em 18x10. Administro à ele alguns medicamentos e sigo em frente. 

An Eye on Imaging Science

 

Fri, 07/31/2015 - 6:45pm Lindsay Hock, Editor Photo: Kodak Kodak has a dedicated team of scientists working to enhance imaging science Image science and technology attracts researchers from academic and government institutions, as well as practitioners in the imaging industry globally. The diverse research interest and the multidisciplinary characteristics of the imaging field encourage competing ideas to be presented and tested by researchers. This, in turn, prompts imaging technologies to quickly respond to challenges from various scientific disciplines. “An example of this can be seen over the past decade, where the main research interest for printing technologies evolved from 2-D image formation on different paper substrates to 3-D digital fabrication for medical and manufacturing applications,” says Dr. Chunghui Kuo, Senior Image Scientist, Eastman Kodak Co. “All of this was directly attributed to the accelerated advancement of telecommunication and digital display technologies.” However, imaging science is as underappreciated as it is pervasive. People often underappreciate scientific advancements they believe as easy to accomplish. This is regardless of the complexity or difficulty behind the discovery. “For example, identifying a specific person in a crowded room is a difficult task in imaging science; but its value is less likely to be recognized,” says Kuo. “Think about it this way: nearly 50% of the cortex in the human brain is related to visual functions, which indicates the type of technological challenges encountered in imaging science.” Yet, recent advancements in visualization, image understanding and 3-D printing have driven significant interest for many topics imaging science research can tackle. Digital imaging technologies have become indispensable in society and are extending to new scientific frontiers to integrate advancements across several fields, including medicine and engineering. The trends With the importance of imaging science and its impact in various scientific fields, trends are developing. One trend is image deposition. And these technologies have extended into high-precision microscopic additive manufacturing processes in biomedical engineering and 3-D fabrication. Virtual reality is also a trend within imaging science, and this pushes beyond the realms of biological aspects into fields such as aerospace, architecture and energy. “The goal of realizing a virtual world indistinguishable from reality is pushing the envelope,” says Kuo. “Virtual reality requires a thorough understanding of the interaction between the physical surface property of the material and human vision system.” Artificial intelligence is also a trend in imaging, and is a buzzword in R&D, especially in robotics and information technology. The ability to recognize an object and understand the meaning of a natural image is the ultimate goal in this space. “This has led to extensive collaboration between the imaging science and computer engineering research communities to get us there,” says Kuo. Ink-jet printing has also received attention in recent years. “Using ink-jet printing technologies to digitally fabricate biologically active structure with high precision has received attention for its potential applications in the fields of medical and biological science,” says Kuo. As medical research continues to progress, researcher have started to explore the possibility of personalized medicine with individual drug release properties by digitally fabricating drug dosage. “In the frontier of additive manufacturing processes, digital printing technologies have demonstrated the capability of fabricating 3-D microscopic structures, indicating great potentials for future industrial applications, for example printing electronics on flexible substrate,” says Kuo. Furthermore, the rapid development in computational science and engineering has empowered complicated visualization algorithms to support the computer graphic industry, with high expectation of the potential of virtual reality technology in the near future. Yet, improvements still must be made to advance digital fabrication technologies to serve as the driving force for the next industrial revolution. “For example, the ability to guarantee the final quality of a digitally fabrication product is vitally important for medical applications,” says Kuo. Also, the microscopic imaging scanning in a 3-D setting not only poses a challenge in image acquisition, but also creates a massive data set that must be stored and analyzed. “The same obstacle exists in spectral and hyperspectral imaging, where spectrum data is collected at each spatial location and time interval,” says Kuo. The broad imaging future “Imaging science and technology is at a unique point to participate in multiple fundamental R&D activities,” says Kuo. And these activities include digital fabrication, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, all of which are considered major driving forces for the next industrial revolution. “I truly believe that the future for imaging technologies is bright, and with our concerted effort, we will be able to have a significant contribution on the lives of future generations,” says Kuo. source : http://www.rdmag.com/articles/2015/07/eye-imaging-science

Nanotech on Display

 

South Korea’s Samsung leads the race to perfect flat-panel TVs built with carbon nanotubes. Will they be nanotech’s first commercial hit? By Charles C. Mann - 2004  In the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, south of Seoul, South Korea, what looks from a distance like an ordinary 38-inch television plays an endless loop of commercials for James Bond movies. Like the displays increasingly common in American homes, it is a big, flat rectangle of color and motion in a high-tech plastic frame. But unlike the images on an ordinary TV, the ones on this lab model are generated by a layer of carbon nanotubes shooting electrons at a phosphor screen like so many tiny cannonballs. Around the world, television screens are emblems of stodgy domesticity. But this one is in the vanguard of tomorrows nanotechnological revolution: it could be the first commercial product that brings nanoscale electronics into the middle-class home. Researchers around the world are racing to perfect this novel type of display, which should be brighter, sharper, and less power-hungry than current flat-panel TVs. For the moment, though, the Samsung institute appears to have the lead. They are the ones to beat, says Yahachi Saito, lead researcher of a rival group at Nagoya University in Japan. They have moved very quickly. Samsung, and South Korean technology firms in general, are rarely thought of as the leading developers of hot new technologies. This is a stereotype, however, that the company is determined to change. We are still identified, correctly, with low-cost manufacturing, says Young Joon Gil, chief technology officer at the Samsung institute. But as competitors emerge from China and other east-Asian countries, he says, Samsung must gradually move to high-profit, high-risk innovation to survive. Nanotechnology is the most important of the risky disciplines the company hopes to mine for new products, and the nanotube TV screens are its first fruits. Known as field emission displays, they should be in stores, Young says, by the end of 2006, comfortably ahead of the competition. Meeting that prediction will not be easy. Simply taking field emission displays from the laboratory to the retail floor will require solving a host of tough technical problems. Moreover, current flat-panel displays, based on liquid-crystal and plasma technology, are constantly becoming better and cheaper, meaning nanotech researchers will have to work harder just to keep up. Even success would create its own set of problems, since Samsungone of the worlds leading manufacturers of liquid-crystal and plasma displays, as well as ordinary cathode-ray-tube TVswill be competing against itself. Nanotech displays are thus both a harbinger of a technological revolution to come and an example of how a major electronics companywith lucrative, established markets to protectis trying to manage and contain that revolution. We believe we must master this field to grow, Young says. But at the same time we cannot let it wreck our company. We have to watch very carefully. http://www.technologyreview.com/news/403324/nanotech-on-display/page/1/

Blue Moon over Washington

 

Half of the most popular news on Twitter is not covered by traditional news media sources

 

The study, carried out by researchers from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, the IMDEA Networks Institute and NEC Laboratories, has just been published in the journal PLOS ONE. The analysis focuses on the "trending topics" of Twitter because they share some of the same characteristics as news, dealing with subjects that attract the attention of a large number of people. "They are events that a large number of users are interested in and, in this regard, we can say that they are news items selected democratically by Twitter users in a country," the researchers noted. To carry out the study, all the "trending topics" on Twitter were compiled from 35 countries over three months in 2013, and from over 62 countries (the maximum number that the functionality of Twitter allowed) over the same period in 2014. In total, more than 300,000 "trending topics" generated in different countries and at different times were obtained, which makes it possible to study the dissemination of this content among different countries and cultures. "The conclusion we have reached is that the geographic dissemination of news on social networks preserves some of the biases present in the dissemination of traditional news, like the fact that it tends to flow more from rich countries to poor countries," said Rubén Cuevas, a researcher from the UC3M Department of Telematic Engineering. In addition to this socioeconomic conditioning, the study reveals that there is another important bias among countries that speak the same language: a cultural one. "To summarize," he said, "economic power conditions the dissemination of news on social networks among countries with different languages, while in the case of countries that share the same language, the fundamental conditioning factor is cultural similarity." News in the Traditional Media and on Social Networks A new methodology was employed for the second part of the study. Using the Google News service, it detects which "trending topics" appear in traditional media sources. In this case, the analysis focused on four countries (Canada, Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom) representative of the number of users of and activity on Twitter. "Approximately half of the events included in "trending topics" are also reported as news in the traditional media, while the other half are subjects that, despite attracting the attention of a large number of Twitter users, do not appear in the media," said the researchers, who used the on-line version of each country's main newspaper as a reference. In the case of Spain, 55% of the "trending topics" are about events that are reported in the traditional media. The study also analyzes who reports the news first, comparing the publication date of the "trending topics" on Twitter with the related stories that run in the country's main dailies. "If we look at the news that is reported by both sources, more than 60% of it appears first on Twitter, while less than 10% appears first in the traditional media (the rest usually appears the same day)," the researchers remarked. That does not mean, they explained, that there is a "tweet" that contains news, but that the subject attracts the attention of a certain number of users to qualify for the category of "trending topic" on the social network. Of the four cases studied, Spain is the country where Twitter shows the lowest capacity to gather news ahead of the traditional media. Specifically, 60% of the news that becomes a "trending topic" appears first on Twitter, 10% appears first in the main on-line newspapers and the remaining 30% appears the same day on Twitter and in the traditional media. In the other three countries studied, at least 70% of the news appears first on Twitter. Story Source: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Carlos III University of Madrid. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference: Juan Miguel Carrascosa, Ruben Cuevas, Roberto Gonzalez, Arturo Azcorra, David Garcia. Quantifying the Economic and Cultural Biases of Social Media through Trending Topics. PLOS ONE, 2015; 10 (7): e0134407 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0134407