New Delhi: A device to make incessant talkers shut up was named Thursday as a 2012 winner of the Ig Nobel prize.
Dubbed
the SpeechJammer, the portable device can disrupts a person's speech by
repeating his or her own voice at a delay of a few hundred
milliseconds.
The echo effect of the device is just annoying enough to get someone to sputter and stop.
The
device created by Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada is meant to help
public speakers by alerting them if they are speaking too quickly or
have taken up more than their allotted time. "This technology ...
could also be useful to ensure speakers in a meeting take turns
appropriately, when a particular participant continues to speak,
depriving others of the opportunity to make their fair contribution,"
said Kurihara, of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science
and Technology in Japan.
Still, winning an Ig Nobel, an award
sponsored by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine for weird and
humorous scientific discoveries, in acoustics for the device's other
more dubious purpose is cool too.
"Winning an Ig Nobel has been my dream as a mad scientist," he said.
As
usual, the ersatz Nobels were handed out by real Nobel laureates,
including 2007 economics winner Eric Maskin, who was also the prize in
the "Win a Date with a Nobel Laureate" contest.
Other winners
feted Thursday at Harvard University's opulent Sanders Theatre included
Dutch researchers who won the psychology prize for studying why leaning
to the left makes the Eiffel Tower look smaller; four Americans who took
the neuroscience prize for demonstrating that sophisticated equipment
can detect brain activity in dead fish; a British-American team that won
the physics prize for explaining how and why ponytails bounce; and the
U.S. General Accountability Office, which won the literature prize for a
report about reports.
Rouslan Krechetnikov, an engineering
professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, and graduate
student Hans Meyer took home the fluid dynamics prize for research into
the sloshing that goes on in coffee cup as it's carried.
Like many projects that have won Ig Nobels in the past, it started in a casual conversation based on everyday observations.
Krechetnikov
and Meyer were taking a coffee break at a conference last year when
they watched as others milled around trying to prevent staining their
clothes. The science of sloshing liquids has been studied before — in
rocketry, for example, shifting weight can destabilize a missile or
rocket — but no one's ever really studied coffee as it splashes around,
Krechetnikov said.
"It is one of those cases where we were interested in explaining the phenomena, but not changing it," he said.
The reason coffee spills?: A person's walking speed, their mental focus and, surprisingly enough, noise.
Are
there practical applications? You could design a better coffee cup by
using what Krechetnikov calls "a series of annular ring baffles arranged
around the inner wall of the container to achieve sloshing
suppression," although those solutions are impractical.
"We just
wanted to satisfy our curiosity and, given the results, to share what we
learned with the scientific community through peer-reviewed
literature," he said.
The 22nd annual Ig Nobels ceremony, with
the theme "The Universe," featured the usual doses of zaniness,
including the traditional launching of hundreds of paper airplanes and
the world premiere of an opera entitled "The Intelligent Designer and
the Universe," about an insane wealthy man who bequeaths his fortune to
have someone design a beautiful dress for the universe.
"Personally, this goes along with my view of science," Krechetnikov said. "There should be a fun side to it."
(With Agency inputs)
First Published: Friday, September 21, 2012, 10:19
India wants to get ahead in the technological revolution. And just how will it manage this? By building a new supercomputer that aims to be 61 times faster than IBM Sequoia, currently the world’s fastest.
According to reports, Telecom and IT Minister Kapil Sibal has written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh sharing the roadmap to develop “petaflop and exaflop range of supercomputers” at an estimated cost of Rs 4,700 crore over 5 years.
“In his (Sibal’s) letter, he has said that C-DAC has developed a proposal with a roadmap to develop a petaflop and exaflop range of supercomputers in the country with an outlay of Rs 4,700 crore,” a government official said.
India’s attempts at making the world’s cheapest tablet, Aakash might not have been so successful thanks to in-fighting among the manufacturers and government agencies, but the government is clearly not disheartened and has moved on to bigger and more powerful projects.
India wants to win the supercomputer race. Getty Images
So what will India have to beat as far current supercomputers go? The world’s fastest supercomputer is the IBM Sequoia, which has a peak speed of 16.32 petaflops. The computer is based in Livermore, USA and consumes, nearly 7890.0 kW of electricity. According to the Top500 list, the Sequioa is one of the most energy efficient systems in the world.
But does India have a supercomputer in the current top ten list? No, India’s highest ranked supercomputer in the 2012 list is the one at CSIR Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation in Bangalore which is ranked at 58. You can view the entire list of supercomputers for 2012 here.
As far as rivals go, China has 2 supercomputers in the top ten list for 2012. Tianhe — 1A at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin was the world’s fastest super computer in 2010. The other Chinese computer in the 2012 list is Nebulae at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen which is at number 10.
Floating Operations per seconds (Flops or Flop) determines the time used by a computer to make heavy calculations. Exaflops are higher than petaflops and the Indian government claims that its five year project will be enough to build a range of supercomputers with processing speeds in petaflops and exaflops. Click here to know more about petaflops.
Hopefully this one won’t be another failed IT project and India will finally get a supercomputer in the top ten.
BELLA laser. Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Blink and you’ll miss it. Don’t blink, and you’ll still miss it.
Imagine a device capable of delivering more power than all of the world’s electric plants. But this is not a prop for the next James Bond movie. A new laser at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was put through its paces July 20, delivering pulses with a petawatt of power once per second. A petawatt is 1015 watts, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 watts—about 400 times as much as the combined instantaneous output of all the world’s electric plants.
How is that even possible? Well, the pulses at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) are both exceedingly powerful and exceedingly short. Each petawatt burst lasts just 40 femtoseconds, or 0.00000000000004 second. Since it fires just one brief pulse per second, the laser’s average power is only about 40 watts—the same as an incandescent bulb in a reading lamp.
BELLA’s laser is not the first to pack so much power—a laser at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, just an hour’s drive inland from Berkeley, reached 1.25 petawatts in the 1990s. And the University of Texas at Austin has its own high-power laser, which hit the 1.1-petawatt mark in 2008. But the Berkeley laser is the first to deliver petawatt pulses with such frequency, the lab says. At full power, for comparison, the Texas Petawatt Laser can fire one shot per hour.
Simulated image of laser accelerating electrons in a plasma. Credit: Cameron Geddes, LOASIS Program, at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, NERSC
The Department of Energy plans to use the powerful laser to drive a very compact particle accelerator via a process called laser wakefield acceleration, boosting electrons to high energies for use in colliders or for imaging or medical applications. Electron beams are already in use to produce bright pulses of x-rays for high-speed imaging. An intense laser pulse can ionize the atoms in a gas, separating electrons from protons to produce a plasma. And laser-carved waves in the plasma [blue in image at right] sweep up electrons [green], accelerating them outward at nearly the speed of light.
BELLA director Wim Leemans says that the project’s first experiments will seek to accelerate beams of electrons to energies of 10 billion electron-volts (or 10 GeV) by firing the laser through a plasma-based apparatus about one meter long. The laser apparatus itself is quite a bit larger, filling a good-size room [see top photo]. For comparison, the recently repurposed Stanford Linear Accelerator Center produced electron beams of 50 GeV from an accelerator 3.2 kilometers in length.
About the Author: John Matson is an associate editor at Scientific American focusing on space, physics and mathematics. Follow on Twitter @jmtsn.
Researchers Consider Graphene as a Cure for Desalination Woes
Computer simulations indicate graphene desalination membranes could vastly outperform existing reverse-osmosis systems By Larry Greenemeierhare
GOING WITH THE FLOW: Hydrogenated (a) and hydroxylated (b) graphene pores, and (c) side view of the computational system described in this research.Image: Courtesy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.)
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
The earth harbors about 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of water. Unfortunately, the vast majority of that water comes from the sea and is not potable unless treated by expensive, energy-hungry desalination plants. Those problems stem largely from inefficiency in the way salt ions are separated from water molecules, and the solution, says a team of materials scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lies in fundamentally revising that process.
The predominant desalination method today—reverse osmosis (RO)—relies on polymer-based membranes to remove salt and requires great pressure to push water through a semipermeable film.The more pressure applied, the higher the cost. The M.I.T. researchers, led by Jeffrey Grossman and David Cohen-Tanugi, propose that films made of graphene could filter out salt without inhibiting the water flow as much. Graphene, a superstrong sheet of carbon that is only one atom thick, has mostly been seen as a material for improving electronics and optical communications.
Reverse osmosis requires less energy than other desalination approaches—such as thermal distillation—but graphene membranes containing nanoscale pores that are more permeable than the polymers currently used would further cut energy requirements, the researchers reported online last month in Nano Letters.
The idea is to discriminate between water molecules and salt ions based on size. "Reverse osmosis uses size exclusion, except it excludes everything," says Grossman, an associate professor of power engineering.
A graphene membrane would provide well-defined channels that allow water molecules to flow through at lower pressures while blocking salt ions, Grossman says.
Using software simulations, the M.I.T. researchers experimented with different pore sizes to desalinate seawater with a salt concentration of 72 grams per liter, about twice the salinity normally found in the ocean. They found that, theoretically at least, pores 0.7 to 0.9 nanometer in diameter were most effective at passing water molecules while blocking sodium ions. "That's the sweet spot," Grossman says. "If it's bigger, salt's going to flow through. If it's smaller, nothing flows through."
Grossman and his team are trying to determine whether chemical reactions might be used to tweak desalination performance. The researchers programmed their digital graphene pores to be coated with either hydrophobic (water-repelling) or hydrophilic (water-loving) atoms. The former slowed the flow but cut down on the salt ions passing through, while the latter allowed faster flow but blocked fewer salt ions. The type of coating may ultimately depend on conditions at a given facility. Still, the scientists report, simulations indicate that graphene nanopores could reject salt ions with a water permeability two-to-three orders of magnitude higher than RO membranes.
Of course, working with graphene in reality is more challenging than filtering pixilated salt from digital water molecules on a computer. For starters, although chemical etching and ion beams can be used to create holes in graphene, it is difficult to produce holes of a specific size in an even configuration, Grossman acknowledges. Nor does graphene eliminate the quandary of how much leftover brine can be safely returned to the ocean without hurting underwater habitats. Toxicity could also be an important issue, he says, "although there are no real answers right now in terms of [graphene's] potential impact on [the safety of] drinking water."
Grossman does not know when graphene-based desalination might be ready for commercial use. He and his team, though, continue to run simulations and have begun testing actual membranes in the lab to study flow rates and salinity.
Demand for potable water is expected to escalate worldwide in the coming years. Grossman says the key to meeting that need is not necessarily tweaking existing technology. "We looked around at who's working on desalination in the scientific community, and it's mostly mechanical engineers working at the systems level," he says. "Little is being done on the system design side using basic science and working from the bottom up."
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
Black holes don't just pull stuff in—they also give back. In "The Benevolence of Black Holes," adapted from his new book Gravity's Engines, Caleb Scharf of Columbia University explains how these cosmic heavyweights shape the structures around them by spewing matter and radiation outward. In the video below, Scharf talks about some of the ways a black hole can influence its surroundings.
Implantable Devices Could Detect and Halt Epileptic Seizures
Electrical stimulation, brain "cooling" and drug-delivery devices are all being developed as antiseizure tools
STIMULATING: A new generation of implantable "closed-loop" devices are designed to monitor the seizure focus, detect patterns of electrical activity that indicate a seizure is beginning, and quickly respond without external intervention. Image: Courtesy of Henrik Jonsson, via iStockphoto.com
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
Epilepsy affects some 2.7 million Americans—more than Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease) combined. More than half of patients can achieve seizure control with treatment, yet almost a third of people with epilepsy have a refractory form of the disease that does not respond well to existing antiepileptic drugs. Nor are these patients typically helped by the one implanted device—Cyberonics' Vagus Nerve Stimulator (VNS)—that has had U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for treatment of epilepsy since 1997.
Because epilepsy causes repeated, sudden seizures, people with the condition would benefit greatly from a therapy that can detect seizures just as they are starting or, eventually, predict them before they begin and prevent them from happening. A new generation of implantable devices is looking to pick up where medications—and even the VNS—often leave off, at least for people whose seizures routinely begin in one part of the brain (the seizure focus). "Closed-loop" devices are designed to monitor the seizure focus, detect patterns of electrical activity that indicate a seizure is beginning, and quickly respond without external intervention. Such responses could include electrical stimulation, cooling or focused drug delivery—all meant to interrupt the activity and stop the seizure.
Closed-loop devices are considered a new frontier in epilepsy treatment because of their responsiveness. By comparison, the VNS is an open-loop device that stimulates the vagus nerve—a pair of nerves running from the brain stem to the abdomen—to deliver mild electrical pulses (which mitigate the electrical activity of seizures) to the brain on a consistent schedule rather than in response to detected seizure activity. The concept of a closed-loop device for epilepsy comes out of the cardiac world, jumping off from implanted defibrillators that monitor the heart and deliver stimulation in response to an event.
Responsive neurostimulation So far, only one closed-loop device has reached human trials: NeuroPace's Responsive Neurostimulation System (RNS), an electrical-stimulation implant with two leads, each containing four electrodes, placed in the brain at the seizure focus. The RNS detects electrical activity that denotes the start of a seizure and delivers direct electrical stimulation to interrupt the activity and normalize the area. The device is surgically positioned in a section of the skull, can be accessed via outpatient surgery when the battery has to be changed, and is imperceptible to the patient and others—all strong design advantages for patients and doctors. The implant, which is now seeking FDA approval, also records information on electrical activity in the brain throughout the day for later review. The RNS has a laptop-based wand interface for remote patient monitoring.
Results of the RNS trials, which tested the implant in conjunction with medications, have been mixed: seizure frequency was reduced by about half in approximately 50 percent of patients. "For a patient to go though permanent implanting of the device on the skull, and electrodes over the brain, which is what is needed for RNS, you'd want it to eliminate most or all seizures, which isn't the result in most patients," says John Miller, director of the University of Washington School of Medicine's Regional Epilepsy Center at Harborview in Seattle. Possible ways to improve the device's effectiveness, Miller says, could include refining patient selection, improving electrode placement or honing the RNS's detection process so that it can pick up seizure activity earlier.
Work in closed-loop electrical stimulation is also happening at Boston’s Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology, where researchers are effectively attempting to turn the VNS into a closed-loop device by developing a nonimplanted add-on system to detect early seizure activity and automatically fire the VNS in response. The VNS comes with a therapy magnet wristband that allows wearers to stimulate the device if they feel a seizure coming on (a sensation called an aura), but not everyone is physically able to do so once the aura begins. The CIMIT system automates the process, activating the VNS once the start of a seizure is detected through electroencephalogram and electrocardiogram readings.
Cool it Another key area of closed-loop research is focal cooling. Here, an implant—after detecting the onset of a seizure by sensing a rise in brain temperature at the seizure focus, which may slightly precede the start of abnormal electrical activity—rapidly cools the involved region to halt the event. The warming associated with the seizure focus makes thermal detection and cooling a potentially promising technique. One center of focal cooling research is the University of Kansas Medical Center, where Ivan Osorio, professor of neurology, has collaborated with an international research partnership to design a prototype implant with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. Work on cooling is also in progress at other sites, including Yale University and the University of Minnesota.
The European Space Agency's Optical Ground Station on Tenerife in the Canary Islands was used as a receiver in recent quantum teleportation experiments. Credit: ESA
Two teams of researchers have extended the reach of quantum teleportation to unprecedented lengths, roughly equivalent to the distance between New York City and Philadelphia. But don’t expect teleportation stations to replace airports or train terminals—the teleportation scheme shifts only the quantum state of a single photon. And although part of the transfer happens instantaneously, the steps required to read out the teleported quantum state ensure that no information can be communicated faster than the speed of light.
Quantum teleportation relies on the phenomenon of entanglement, through which quantum particles share a fragile, invisible link across space. Two entangled photons, for instance, can have correlated, opposite polarization states—if one photon is vertically polarized, for instance, the other must be horizontally polarized. But, thanks to the intricacies of quantum mechanics, each photon’s specific polarization remains undecided until one of them is measured. At that instant the other photon’s polarization snaps into its opposing orientation, even if many kilometers have come between the entangled pair.
An entangled photon pair serves as the intermediary in the standard teleportation scheme. Say Alice wants to teleport the quantum state of a photon to Bob. First she takes one member of a pair of entangled photons, and Bob takes the other. Then Alice lets her entangled photon interfere with the photon to be teleported and performs a polarization measurement whose outcome depends on the quantum state of both of her particles.
Because of the link between Alice and Bob forged by entanglement, Bob’s photon instantly feels the effect of the measurement made by Alice. Bob’s photon assumes the quantum state of Alice’s original photon, but in a sort of garbled form. Bob cannot recover the quantum state Alice wanted to teleport until he reverses that garbling by tweaking his photon in a way that depends on the outcome of Alice’s measurement. So he must await word from Alice about how to complete the teleportation—and that word cannot travel faster than the speed of light. That restriction ensures that teleported information obeys the cosmic speed limit.
Even though teleportation does not allow superluminal communication, it does provide a detour around another physics blockade known as the no-cloning theorem. That theorem states that one cannot perfectly copy a quantum object to, for instance, send a facsimile to another person. But teleportation does not create a copy per se—it simply shifts the quantum information from one place to another, destroying the original in the process.
Teleportation can also securely transmit quantum information even when Alice does not know where Bob is. Bob can take his entangled particle wherever he pleases, and Alice can broadcast her instructions for how to ungarble the teleported state over whatever conventional channels—radio waves, the Internet—she pleases. That information would be useless to an eavesdropper without an entangled link to Alice.
Physicists note that quantum entanglement and teleportation could one day form the backbone of quantum channels linking hypothetical quantum processors or enabling secure communications between distant parties. But for now the phenomenon of teleportation is in the gee-whiz exploratory phase, with various groups of physicists devising new tests to push the limits of what is experimentally possible.
In the August 9 issue of Nature, a Chinese group reports achieving quantum teleportation across Qinghai Lake in China, a distance of 97 kilometers. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) That distance surpasses the previous record, set by a group that included several of the same researchers, of 16 kilometers.
But a more recent study seems to have pushed the bar even higher. In a paper posted May 17 to the physics preprint Web site arXiv.org, just eight days after the Chinese group announced their achievement on the same Web site, a European and Canadian group claims to have teleported information from one of the Canary Islands to another, 143 kilometers away. That paper has not been peer-reviewed but comes from a very reputable research group.
Both teams of physicists faced serious experimental challenges—sending a single photon 100 kilometers and then plucking it out of the air is no easy task. In practical terms, both groups’ Alices and Bobs needed laser-locked telescopes for sending and receiving their photons, as well as complex optics for modifying and measuring the photons’ quantum states.
But that’s nothing compared to what the physicists have in mind for future experiments. Both research groups note that their work is a step toward future space-based teleportation, in which quantum information would be beamed from the ground to an orbiting satellite.
About the Author: John Matson is an associate editor at Scientific American focusing on space, physics and mathematics. Follow on Twitter @jmtsn.
Coming Soon: Artificial Limbs Controlled by Thoughts
The idea that paralyzed people might one day control their limbs just by thinking is no longer a Hollywood-style fantasy
Brain waves can now control the functioning of computer cursors, robotic arms and, soon, an entire suit: an exoskeleton that will allow a paraplegic to walk and maybe even move gracefully.
Sending signals from the brain's outer rindlike cortex to initiate movement in the exoskeleton represents the state of the art for a number of bioelectrical technologies perfected in recent years.
The 2014 World Cup in Brazil will serve as a proving ground for a brain-controlled exoskeleton if, as expected, a handicapped teenager delivers the ceremonial opening kick.
In 2014 billions of viewers worldwide may remember the opening game of the World Cup in Brazil for more than just the goals scored by the Brazilian national team and the red cards given to its adversary. On that day my laboratory at Duke University, which specializes in developing technologies that allow electrical signals from the brain to control robotic limbs, plans to mark a milestone in overcoming paralysis.
If we succeed in meeting still formidable challenges, the first ceremonial kick of the World Cup game may be made by a paralyzed teenager, who, flanked by the two contending soccer teams, will saunter onto the pitch clad in a robotic body suit. This suit—or exoskeleton, as we call it—will envelop the teenager's legs. His or her first steps onto the field will be controlled by motor signals originating in the kicker's brain and transmitted wirelessly to a computer unit the size of a laptop in a backpack carried by our patient. This computer will be responsible for translating electrical brain signals into digital motor commands so that the exoskeleton can first stabilize the kicker's body weight and then induce the robotic legs to begin the back-and-forth coordinated movements of a walk over the manicured grass. Then, on approaching the ball, the kicker will visualize placing a foot in contact with it. Three hundred milliseconds later brain signals will instruct the exoskeleton's robotic foot to hook under the leather sphere, Brazilian style, and boot it aloft.
This scientific demonstration of a radically new technology, undertaken with collaborators in Europe and Brazil, will convey to a global audience of billions that brain control of machines has moved from lab demos and futuristic speculation to a new era in which tools capable of bringing mobility to patients incapacitated by injury or disease may become a reality. We are on our way, perhaps by the next decade, to technology that links the brain with mechanical, electronic or virtual machines. This development will restore mobility, not only to accident and war victims but also to patients with ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease), Parkinson's and other disorders that disrupt motor behaviors that impede arm reaching, hand grasping, locomotion and speech production. Neuroprosthetic devices—or brain-machine interfaces—will also allow scientists to do much more than help the disabled. They will make it possible to explore the world in revolutionary ways by providing healthy human beings with the ability to augment their sensory and motor skills.
In this futuristic scenario, voluntary electrical brain waves, the biological alphabet that underlies human thinking, will maneuver large and small robots remotely, control airships from afar, and perhaps even allow the sharing of thoughts and sensations of one individual with another over what will become a collective brain-based network.
Thought Machines
The lightweight body suit intended for the kicker, who has not yet been selected, is still under development. A prototype, though, is now under construction at the lab of my great friend and collaborator Gordon Cheng of the Technical University of Munich—one of the founding members of the Walk Again Project, a nonprofit, international collaboration among the Duke University Center for Neuroengineering, the Technical University of Munich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, and the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute of Neuroscience of Natal in Brazil. A few new members, including major research institutes and universities all over the world, will join this international team in the next few months.
The project builds on nearly two decades of pioneering work on brain-machine interfaces at Duke—research that itself grew out of studies dating back to the 1960s, when scientists first attempted to tap into animal brains to see if a neural signal could be fed into a computer and thereby prompt a command to initiate motion in a mechanical device. Back in 1990 and throughout the first decade of this century, my Duke colleagues and I pioneered a method through which the brains of both rats and monkeys could be implanted with hundreds of hair-thin and pliable sensors, known as microwires. Over the past two decades we have shown that, once implanted, the flexible electrical prongs can detect minute electrical signals, or action potentials, generated by hundreds of individual neurons distributed throughout the animals' frontal and parietal cortices—the regions that define a vast brain circuit responsible for the generation of voluntary movements.
Biomarker Predicts Recovery from a Type of Depression
A new study signifies the beginning of the end of psychiatrists' guess-work in figuring out which antidepressants work best for individual patients
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
People who live with clinical depression must also suffer the ‘trial and error’ approach that psychiatrists take when prescribing antidepressants. Now, a study published this week signifies the beginning of the end of guesswork. In it, a blood test predicts who will respond well to a novel treatment for depression, and who might even fare worse.“We haven’t had a test like this in psychiatry before,” says Andy Miller, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University and an author on the study in Archives of General Psychiatry. “There is no brain scan, no physiological measure that tells you whether a patient will respond to one drug more than another.”
The test identifies an inflammatory protein in blood, C-reactive protein or CRP, that indicates internal inflammation. Whereas 62% of depressed participants with high CRP levels responded well to the new treatment, only 33% of participants with low CRP levels did.
The correlation was not entirely unexpected, because the drug suppresses inflammation, and Miller thinks that inflammation underlies depression in some people. To test whether a potent anti-inflammatory could soothe the malady, his team recruited 60 people who had lived with major depression for more than a decade and had received no relief from antidepressants.
Half of the participants received monthly treatments of the rheumatoid arthritis drug, Janssen’s Infliximab, and half received a placebo. Overall, Infliximab did not seem to work. However, when Miller’s team analyzed how the subset of participants with high CRP faired, it turns out they responded well to the drug, with a relief from sadness, suicidal thoughts, anxiety and other symptoms.
Since the late 1980s, researchers have sporadically hypothesized that inflammation can lead to depression. The theory is that depressed behavior might be beneficial in the short term because it reserves an injured animal’s energy for healing rather than romping around in the sunlight. Although the hypothesis has never received widespread support, researchers have found that some depressed patients indeed bear elevated levels of inflammatory proteins.
On the basis of the results from this relatively small study, a biologic drug such as Infliximab might be a better option in the anti-inflammatory realm than Cox-2 inhibitors such as aspirin, which come with unwanted side effects, says Miller. Although he knows of no Infliximab-like drug in development for depression, he says that companies might be encouraged by his team’s results. What’s more, with a biomarker to predict a response, companies will have a better chance of success.
Robert Dantzer, a neuroimmunologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, notes that some of the participants in the low-CRP group fared worse on Infliximab than on placebo. Thus, the CRP test could be as important a tool for excluding depressed patients from taking anti-inflammatory therapies as for predicting responders.
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on September 5, 2012.
Apple Inc's new iPhone 5 goes on sale on Friday with a bigger screen and 4G wireless technology, as the company seeks to safeguard its edge over rivals like Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Google Inc.
The iPhone 5 fulfilled many of the expectations laid out by gadget geeks and technology analysts ahead of its Wednesday unveiling but offered few surprises to give Apple shares -- already near record highs -- another major kick.
"There is not a wow factor because everything you saw today is evolutionary. I do think they did enough to satisfy," said Michael Yoshikami, chief executive of wealth management company Destination Wealth Management.
Other industry analysts speculated about what else was in Apple's product pipeline ahead of the crucial year-end holiday season, especially since the company stayed mum about an oft-rumored TV device or a smaller iPad.
The consumer electronics giant that in 2010 popularized tablet computing with the iPad has given no hints on whether it plans a smaller version to match cheaper tablets from the likes of Google or Amazon.com Inc.
Phil Schiller introduces Apple's new iPhone 5 in San Francisco. Reuters Photo
"We would really like to see the iPad Mini in the product offering for the all-important holiday quarter. They still have time," said Channing Smith, co-manager of the Capital Advisors Growth Fund.
"As soon as we see that, we will have more conviction about the stock heading into the final quarter."
The latest iPhone comes as Apple faces competition beyond current key competitors Samsung and Google.
Late entrant Microsoft Corp is now trying to push its Windows Phone 8 operating system as an alternative to Apple and Android, the most-used smartphone operating system in the world.
Analysts have forecast sales of 10 million to 12 million of the new iPhones in this month alone.
Apple chief executive Tim Cook kicked off the event in San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center but it was marketing chief Phil Schiller who introduced the iPhone 5 and took the audience through the new phone's features.
The iPhone 5 sports a 4-inch "retina" display, can surf a high-speed 4G LTE wireless network, and is 20% lighter than the previous iPhone 4S.
Ceding a lead
It ships Sept. 21 in the United States, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and Britain.
It will hit 100 countries by year's end in the fastest international rollout for an iPhone so far.
Phil Schiller introduces Apple's new iPhone 5 in San Francisco. Reuters Photo
The stakes are high with the iPhone, Apple's marque product, accounting for nearly half its revenue.
The California company has sold more than 243 million iPhones since 2007, when the device ushered in the current applications ecosystem model.
But Samsung now leads the smartphone market with a 32.6% share followed by Apple with 17%, according to market research firm IDC.
Both saw shipments rise compared to a year ago, with Samsung riding its flagship Galaxy S III phone. Apple iPhone 5: Top 5 rumours
Available for pre-order on Friday starting from $199 with a data plan, the iPhone 5 comes with Apple's newest "A6" processor, which executives said runs twice as fast as the previous generation.
It will pack three microphones -- enhancing built-in voice assistant Siri -- and an 8 megapixel camera that can take panoramic views.
It will hitch a ride on the three largest US carriers: Verizon Wireless, AT&T Inc, and Sprint. One popular enhancement was improved battery endurance -- the iPhone 5 can support eight hours of 4G Web browsing, the company said.
While Apple played catch-up on many of the new phone's features -- Samsung and Google's Motorola already have larger and 4G-ready phones -- analysts say the device's attraction is the way its software and hardware work in tandem.
"Where they are pushing the envelope, and where they remain the one to beat, is on the experience those features bring to the consumer," said Carolina Milanesi, Gartner Research analyst.
"While other vendors continue to focus just on the hardware -- delivering the speeds and feeds and bigger batteries -- Apple focuses on pulling the operating system, the hardware and what you can consume on the hardware."
Foo fighters rock
Cook began the event by giving updated metrics on the company's products and then quickly gave up the stage for Schiller to introduce the iPhone 5.
Apple's iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy SIII. Reuters and AFP Photos
The team then moved on to a new lineup of iPods, a redesigned iTunes store and ended with a surprise performance by rock band Foo Fighters.
Apple executives in the front row could be seen rocking their heads to "Times Like These" and other hits.
For the iPhone 5, Apple has done away with the connectors used on previous devices and replaced them with a smaller and more efficient "Lightning" connector.
With the iPhone, it is shipping new "EarPods" audiophones, designed after digitally scanning hundreds of ears.
Shares in Skullcandy, which specializes in stylized earphones, fell 4.5% on Wednesday.
Apple's iPhone 5 showing 3D maps. Reuters Photos
Beyond hardware, Apple telegraphed many of the software changes to expect in iPhone 5 when it debuted iOS 6, its latest mobile operating system, in June.
Upgrades to the software include voice navigation for driving, a feature already available on many Android smartphones, as well as "Passbook" for storing electronic boarding passes, sports tickets and gift cards.
Siri has been improved. In an onstage demonstration, Siri was able to answer questions about the result of a recent pro football game and recite a list of movies playing around town, along with ratings.
Earlier, Cook told the audience that its apps store now has more than 700,000 on tap -- the industry's largest library.
"When you look at each of these, they are incredible industry-leading innovations by themselves. But what sets them apart, and what places Apple way out in front of the competition, is how they work so well together," Cook said toward the end of the two-hour presentation.
Steve Jobs's last words, revealed by his sister Mona Simpson, were 'Oh wow'. Photograph: Jeff Chiu/AP
The last words of the late, much-lauded and much-quoted Steve Jobs have been revealed almost a month after the Apple co-founder died at the age of 56.
Jobs, who once memorably described death as "very likely the single best invention of life", departed this world with a lingering look at his family and the simple, if mysterious, observation: "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow."
"His tone was affectionate, dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us," she writes.
When she arrived, she found Jobs surrounded by his family – "he looked into his children's eyes as if he couldn't unlock his gaze," – and managing to hang on to consciousness she said.
However, he began to deteriorate. "His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before. This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn't happen to Steve, he achieved it."
After making it through one final night, wrote Simpson, her brother began to slip away. "His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude. He seemed to be climbing.
"But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve's capacity for wonderment, the artist's belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.
"Steve's final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.
"Before embarking, he'd looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life's partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.
"Steve's final words were: 'Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.'"
About two million adults in the United States suffer from bipolar disorder, a form of depression characterized by extremely high and low mood cycles. Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation or TMS, is a kind of magnet therapy that is being used to treat depression. Bipolar disorder's low mood cycles of depression can be treated with magnet therapy. TMS is a good way to treat a patient's depression and the effects of bipolar disorder.
In the case of Norma Neal of Charleston, South Carolina, it drove her to attempt suicide after the failure of countless medications and therapies left her feeling hopeless. Then she heard about Dr. Mark George of the Medical University of South Carolina and his experimental work treating depression using magnetic energy in a therapy called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS).
For the first time in her life, according to Norma, she feels as though life is worth living. Below are answers to questions Dr. George is frequently asked about TMS:
Q: What is Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), and how does it help depression? A: TMS activates certain parts of the brain by using electrical energy passed through a coil of wires to create a powerful magnetic field. During the procedure, energy from this magnetic field is transferred into a patient's brain by means of the coil device applied to the head. Unlike direct electrical energy, energy from the magnetic field passes through skin and skull, activating the brain painlessly and without surgery or sedation. We apply TMS to the front area of the brain, an area associated with mood regulation. Not unlike many anti-depressant medications, TMS affects brain functions and chemical activity, effectively "jump -starting" mood regulation structures in the brain, resulting in dramatic improvements in depressed patients.
Q: How long does the procedure take? Does it hurt? A: TMS is a non-invasive procedure that is performed on awake, alert adults with generally no discomfort. The most successful TMS treatments for depression occur when patients undergo TMS every day for about 20 minutes for several weeks. Often, there is no noticeable mood change during the first week, but starting with week two, dramatic positive responses to treatment can be seen in this out-patient procedure.
Q: Will it disrupt other areas of brain functioning or change my personality? A: One of the benefits of TMS is its accuracy. It allows practitioners to target very specific parts of the brain, leaving other areas alone. In fact, by getting rid of the depression, patients' ability to think and function actually improves. TMS patients report that they feel "themselves" again.
Q: Is Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation a permanent cure for depression? A: The effects of TMS on depression over time are currently being studied. Like other treatments for depression, such as medication and electro-convulsive therapy, once TMS is stopped, patients may or may not relapse back into depression. TMS has been shown to yield effective short-term results, but it's unclear how long the effects of TMS continue to work after initial treatment and improvement. Studies using TMS once a week as a maintenance procedure are in progress.
The information expressed on this page is the opinions and perspectives of the individual featured here and is not necessarily endorsed or recommended by Discovery Health Online.
See Hear: The new glasses which double as hearing aids
Glasses can now help you to hear as well as to see. Scientists have developed a pair of battery-powered spectacles which double as hearing aids. They contain tiny microphones that pick up sounds and separate them from background noise.
Nearly nine million people in the UK are deaf or hard of hearing. According to the Royal National Institute for Deaf People, there are two million people in Britain with hearing aids, which work by magnifying sounds that come into the ear, and a further two million could benefit from wearing them.
Traditional hearing aids have a microphone that picks up sound, which is processed electronically in the hearing aid. The resulting signals are then passed to a tiny loudspeaker where they are converted back into louder sounds that the wearer hears.
Many hearing aids simply intensify sounds coming from all directions, with the result that people hear all the noise, and so cannot easily focus on conversations. Many people are also put off wearing hearing aids because they are uncomfortable.
But the new device, launched this month in Holland, is unlike any other hearing aid. In each arm of the glasses is a row of four tiny microphones. They intensify sounds from the front, while dampening surrounding noise.
The output from the micro-phones is relayed to each ear by two tiny, almost invisible tubes. The wearer chooses what they hear by looking in the relevant direction.
"It allows people to hear naturally and clearly in the direction in which they are looking, even in noisy rooms such as cafés or at a party," says audio specialist Martin de Jong, who has been involved in early tests.
The glasses, which cost around £1,700, are available in different designs and colours with either plain or prescription lenses. Developer Varibel hopes they will be available in the UK in 12 months. For more information, call 0031 800 827 4235 or visit www.varibel.nl
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