Eating heavy to live up to 30% longer.

In a back room of New Scientist's offices in London, I sit
down at a table with the Russian biochemist Mikhail Shchepinov. In
front of us are two teaspoons and a brown glass bottle. Shchepinov
opens the bottle, pours out a teaspoon of clear liquid and drinks it
down. He smiles. It's my turn.

I put a spoonful of the liquid in my mouth and swallow. It tastes
slightly sweet, which is a surprise. I was expecting it to be exactly
like water since that, in fact, is what it is - heavy water to be
precise, chemical formula D₂O. The D stands for deuterium,
an isotope of hydrogen with an atomic mass of 2 instead of 1. Deuterium
is what puts the heavy in heavy water. An ice cube made out of it would
sink in normal water.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026841.800-would-eating-heavy-atoms-lengthen-our-lives.html?page=1

Resveratrol based mitochodrial drugs poised to open up the field of longevity.

Cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, heart disease: All have stubbornly resisted billions of dollars of research conducted by the world's finest minds. But they all may finally be defied by a single new class of drugs, a virtual cure for the diseases of aging.

In labs across the country, researchers are developing several new drugs that target the cellular engines called mitochondria. The first, resveratrol, is already in clinical trials for diabetes. It could be on the market in four years and used off-label as an all-purpose longevity enhancer. Other drugs promise to be more potent and refined. They might even be cheap.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/11/two-mice-on-tre.html

Virtual reality - we are actually living it now! The world as we know it keeps fizzing out of the quantum vacuum.

Matter is built on flaky foundations. Physicists have now confirmed that the apparently substantial stuff is actually no more than fluctuations in the quantum vacuum.

The researchers simulated the frantic activity that goes on inside protons and neutrons. These particles provide almost all the mass of ordinary matter.

Each proton (or neutron) is made of three quarks - but the individual masses of these quarks only add up to about 1% of the proton's mass. So what accounts for the rest of it?

Theory says it is created by the force that binds quarks together, called the strong nuclear force. In quantum terms, the strong force is carried by a field of virtual particles called gluons, randomly popping into existence and disappearing again. The energy of these vacuum fluctuations has to be included in the total mass of the proton and neutron.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16095-its-confirmed-matter-is-merely-vacuum-fluctuations.html

In the late '90s, Asim Roy, a professor of information systems at Arizona State University, began to write a paper on a new brain theory. Now, 10 years later and after several rejections and resubmissions, the paper “Connectionism, Controllers, and a Brain Theory” has finally been published in the November issue of IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics – Part A: Systems and Humans.

However, Roy’s controversial ideas on how the brain works and learns probably won’t immediately win over many of his colleagues, who have spent decades teaching robots and artificial intelligence (AI) systems how to think using the classic connectionist theory of the brain. Connectionists propose that the brain consists of an interacting network of neurons and cells, and that it solves problems based on how these components are connected. In this theory, there are no separate controllers for higher level brain functions, but all control is local and distributed fairly equally among all the parts.

In his paper, Roy argues for a controller theory of the brain. In this view, there are some parts of the brain that control other parts, making it a hierarchical system. In the controller theory, which fits with the so-called computational theory, the brain learns lots of rules and uses them in a top-down processing method to operate. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue computer, which famously defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, operated based on countless rules entered by its programmers.

More information: Roy, Asim. “Connectionism, Controllers, and a Brain Theory.” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics – Part A: Systems and Humans, Vol. 38, No. 6, November 2008.

Rumelhart, D. E. and J. L. McClelland, Eds., Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in Microstructure of Cognition, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986, pp. 318–362.

NSF’s summary of the “Open Questions in Both Biological and Machine Learning” http://www.cnl.salk.edu/Media/NSFWorkshopReport.v4.pdf

ANNIE Conference Web site http://annie.mst.edu/annie_2008/ANNIE2008.html


http://www.physorg.com/news146319784.html

TAT2 derived from a traditional Chinese medicinal herb may both be an elixar of youth and fight HIV infections.

A drug extracted from a plant used in Chinese medicine has helped immune cells fight HIV and raises the possibility of slowing the ageing process in other parts of our bodies.

The method hinges upon telomeres - caps of repetitive DNA found at the ends of chromosomes. These get shorter as cells age and are thought to affect the cell's lifespan.

The caps can be rebuilt with an enzyme called telomerase, and some people have suggested it might be possible to extend human life by boosting telomerase production - though this has never been tested.

Now Rita Effros at the University of California in Los Angeles has used a drug that boosts telomerase to enhance the immune response to viruses.

Effros and her colleagues had previously inserted part of the telomerase gene into so-called killer T-cells - immune cells that fight infections including HIV - and found that the cells had stronger anti-viral activity than normal. However, such gene therapy is not a practical way of treating the millions of people infected with HIV.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16035-elixir-of-youth-drug-could-fight-hiv-and-ageing.html

Can evolution be shifted into hyperdrive?

A team of Princeton University scientists has discovered that chains of proteins found in most living organisms act like adaptive machines, possessing the ability to control their own evolution.

The research, which appears to offer evidence of a hidden mechanism guiding the way biological organisms respond to the forces of natural selection, provides a new perspective on evolution, the scientists said.

The researchers -- Raj Chakrabarti, Herschel Rabitz, Stacey Springs and George McLendon -- made the discovery while carrying out experiments on proteins constituting the electron transport chain (ETC), a biochemical network essential for metabolism. A mathematical analysis of the experiments showed that the proteins themselves acted to correct any imbalance imposed on them through artificial mutations and restored the chain to working order.

"The discovery answers an age-old question that has puzzled biologists since the time of Darwin: How can organisms be so exquisitely complex, if evolution is completely random, operating like a 'blind watchmaker'?" said Chakrabarti, an associate research scholar in the Department of Chemistry at Princeton. "Our new theory extends Darwin's model, demonstrating how organisms can subtly direct aspects of their own evolution to create order out of randomness."


http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S22/60/95O56/index.xml?section=topstories

Planaltino, Brazil - As a young soil scientist, Edson Lobato looked out at the vast savanna of central Brazil and imagined fields of soy, corn, and cotton where most saw an inhospitable mass of red earth and tangled trees.

His friends and family urged him to take his agronomy degree elsewhere, somewhere it would make a difference. But he joined Brazil's agricultural and livestock research agency (Embrapa) and relocated to the country's heartland, called the cerrado, where there was, at the time, little besides wooded plains, termites, and deer.

Embrapa then set out to prove that those soils could produce like the most efficient cropland of Idaho. The agency poured millions into research. It sent teams of scientists like Mr. Lobato to the American Midwest to glean as much know-how as possible.

Today his vision has helped turn Brazil into the world's largest exporter of soybeans, beef, chicken, orange juice, ethanol, and sugar.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1112/p01s01-woam.html

Promising finding may offer new therapies for HIV

A carefully selected bone marrow transplant for a leukemia patient appears to have stopped the patient's HIV infection as well--he shows no signs of the virus in his blood nearly two years after the procedure. While it's difficult to draw any conclusions from a single case, the outcome gives hope for new avenues for AIDS treatment.

Some people are genetically resistant to HIV infection, even when they engage in frequent, high-risk behavior, a fact that hematologist Gero Hütter wanted to take advantage of when faced with a 42-year-old patient with both leukemia and HIV. The patient needed a bone marrow transplant, so Hutter searched compatible blood donors for a specific genetic mutation known to protect against most strains of HIV. Doctors then irradiated the patient's immune system, and transfused the donor cells.

The transplant surgeons halted his HIV drugs to give the new cells time to take root. They planned to resume the drugs once HIV was found in the patient's blood. But, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the virus never came back.

Nearly two years later, standard tests haven't detected virus in his blood, or in the brain and rectal tissues where it often hides....Normally when a patient stops taking AIDS drugs, the virus stampedes through the body within weeks, or days.

The treatment is unlikely to be broadly applicable--only about two thirds of cancer patients survive the procedure. But scientists may be able to mimic the effect by re-engineering patients own cells. Doctor's are already testing gene therapy treatments that target the gene that renders some people immune to the virus.

According to the WSJ:

While cautioning that the Berlin case could be a fluke, David Baltimore, who won a Nobel prize for his research on tumor viruses, deemed it "a very good sign" and a virtual "proof of principle" for gene-therapy approaches. Dr. Baltimore and his colleague, University of California at Los Angeles researcher Irvin Chen, have developed a gene therapy strategy against HIV that works in a similar way to the Berlin case. Drs. Baltimore and Chen have formed a private company to develop the therapy.


http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/

Mini-nukes to power homes of the future.

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. 'Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world,' said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. 'They will cost approximately $25m [£13m] each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $250 per home.'

Deal claims to have more than 100 firm orders, largely from the oil and electricity industries, but says the company is also targeting developing countries and isolated communities. 'It's leapfrog technology,' he said.

The company plans to set up three factories to produce 4,000 plants between 2013 and 2023. 'We already have a pipeline for 100 reactors, and we are taking our time to tool up to mass-produce this reactor.'

The first confirmed order came from TES, a Czech infrastructure company specialising in water plants and power plants. 'They ordered six units and optioned a further 12. We are very sure of their capability to purchase,' said Deal. The first one, he said, would be installed in Romania. 'We now have a six-year waiting list. We are in talks with developers in the Cayman Islands, Panama and the Bahamas.'

The reactors, only a few metres in diameter, will be delivered on the back of a lorry to be buried underground. They must be refuelled every 7 to 10 years. Because the reactor is based on a 50-year-old design that has proved safe for students to use, few countries are expected to object to plants on their territory. An application to build the plants will be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission next year.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/09/miniature-nuclear-reactors-los-alamos

UT Dallas Biology Professor Santosh D’Mello and SMU Chemistry Professor Edward R. Biehl tested 45 chemical compounds, four of which were found to be the most potent at protecting brain cells, called neurons.

The synthesized chemicals, called “3-substituted indolin-2-one compounds,” are derivatives of another compound called GW5074, which was shown to prevent neurodegeneration in a past report published by the D’Mello lab. Although effective at protecting neurons from decay or death, GW5074 is toxic to cells at slightly elevated doses, which makes it unsuitable for clinical testing in patients. The newly identified, second-generation compounds maintain the protective feature of GW5074 but are not toxic — even at very high doses — and hold promise in halting the steady march of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

“Sadly, neurodegenerative diseases are a challenge for our elderly population,” D’Mello said. “People are living longer and are more impacted by diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis than ever before — which means we need to aggressively look for drugs that treat diseases. But most exciting now are our efforts to stop the effects of brain disease right in its tracks. Although the newly discovered compounds have only been tested in cultured neurons and mice, they do offer hope.”


http://www.physorg.com/news145285865.html

A new must have tech toy!

Come on, admit it: is there anything more awesome than miniaturization?

The Walkman put a stereo system in your pocket and changed the game forever. A modern digital watch has the computing power of a roomful of 1950s computer gear. And people are watching TV shows these days on iPods about the size of a business card.

Enormous feats of shrinkage like that don’t come along very often, though. So when they do, you sit up and take notice — as you will the first time you see the Optoma Pico Projector ($430 list price). It’s a long-awaited, much-rumored projector about the size of a cellphone: 2 by 4.1 by 0.7 inches, weighing 4.2 ounces.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/technology/personaltech/05pogue.html?pagewanted=1&8dpc&_r=1&adxnnlx=1225969596-R5WtYzbJp%20hA30CL%20rn0aQ

The longevity revolution is upon us!!

A potential longevity-enhancing drug has passed its final animal testing challenge, pushing closer to reality the dream of all-purpose drugs against diseases of aging.

Mice given the new drug, called SRT1720, gorged on high-fat food for four months without gaining weight or developing diabetes, and ran twice as far on a treadmill as their control-group counterparts. Similar drugs are expected to follow down the pipeline.

"If you look at all the things that have fundamentally changed medicine in the last 150 years, washing hands would be one, and antibiotics another. This could be the third," said study co-author Philip Lambert, a pharmacologist at Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, the drug's developer. "If you could keep your health for another 10 or 15 years, that would be amazing."

SRT1720 activates one of several enzymes that regulate the function of mitochondria — cellular power generators that convert glucose into chemical energy. The wearing down of these generators has been linked to heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, cancer and other age-related afflictions.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/11/next-generation.html

Potential treatment for Muscular Dystrophy and methodology to enhance muscular strength, speed and endurance.

Researchers have found a delivery method for gene therapy that reaches all the voluntary muscles of a mouse – including heart, diaphragm and limbs – and reverses the process of muscle-wasting found in muscular dystrophy.

"We have a clear 'proof of principle' that it is possible to deliver new genes body-wide to all the striated muscles of an adult animal. Finding a delivery method for the whole body has been a major obstacle limiting the development of gene therapy for the muscular dystrophies. Our new work identifies for the first time a method where a new dystrophin gene can be delivered, using a safe and simple method, to all of the affected muscles of a mouse with muscular dystrophy," said Dr. Jeffrey S. Chamberlain, professor of neurology and director of the Muscular Dystrophy Cooperative Research Center at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. He also has joint appointments in the departments of medicine and biochemistry.

full article here http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/07/040726083533.htm

While this article focuses on New York, the bottom line advice works everywhere. Live cheap without having to give up that much!!

No matter what your income level, you throw away a lot of money living in New York. Paying brokers to hunt down exorbitantly priced (yet minuscule) apartments, driving the precise route overground in a cab that a subway travels underground, eating out, eating out, eating out. New Yorkers are masters at burning through cash, but we are suddenly thinking a lot more about every dollar. This may bring on a little gloom, but fortunately, it isn’t that difficult to have the same life you had, oh, last November, only with fewer ATM withdrawals. On the following pages, you’ll find ideas for everything from buying a (relatively) affordable apartment to kicking the restaurant habit to getting a sharp-looking $14 haircut. One caveat: This is a micro- , not a macroeconomic exercise. If everyone quit shopping, or eating out, or buying books, the city’s economy would stop dead in its tracks, so don’t take all of our advice all at once. Consider these helpful, grandparentlike tips. Who knows, if you’re like us—given to a bit of guilt now and then—you might even find you enjoy the New Austerity.

---

Grand-Total Annual Savings: $488,180


http://nymag.com/guides/cheap-living/intro/

1. Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This former Wall Street derivatives trader warned of the global banking crisis in 2006 in his book The Black Swan. Last week on Charlie Rose, he said that "The banking system, the way we have it, is a monstrous giant built on feet of clay." Taleb continued: "And if that topples, we're gone. Never in the history of the world have we faced so much complexity combined with so much incompetence and [lack of] understanding of its properties."

2. Nouriel Roubini. The former U.S. Treasury adviser and NYU professor, dubbed Dr. Doom, has been calling the meltdown for over a year now and believes it's far from over. Just a few days ago, Roubini declared that we're "entering a severe two-year recession," up to 500 hedge funds will close within months, the financial markets are "becoming totally unhinged," and if we don't enact a "huge [fiscal stimulus] plan," the economy will likely fall into a "self-fulfilling animal spirit recession that is more severe than otherwise." Still, we can't help but feeling those plaster vulvas on the wall of his apartment are a sign of hopefulness.

3. Bernard-Henri Lévy. The French public intellectual, not one to miss out on a global crisis, ran wild with Roubini's "animal spirit" in the New Republic on Monday when he wrote that we are in a "suspended apocalypse" and then delightfully asked: "Is man a predator of man? Does the fear of this predator slumber within us? An anxiety, formerly concealed by a poorly applied varnish of civilization, about a state of nature that is re-emerging? Consider the princes of finance, once so polite, so complicit, so civilized, who have been facing each other at the edge of the abyss, waiting to see who will be the next to fall; consider that dance of wolves, the ferocious ballet of battered predators sniffing at each other, detecting the scent of death on their neighbors, coveting their remains; consider the tango of white-hot hate that has been discreetly called the 'drying up of interbank credit.'"

4. Suze Orman. You don't have to be a heavyweight analyst to smell the fear. The CNBC financial adviser said last week that the current situation could result in Depression-style "bread lines."

5. Christopher Wood. Wood, a managing director and chief strategist of the brokerage firm CLSA, and author of the influential Greed & Fear newsletter, predicted the subprime crisis back in 2005. ("I was actually too early," he lamented recently.) Now he has turned his jaundiced eye to the dollar, which he thinks is due to lose its standing as the default currency. Wood recently predicted that "the recovery in the U.S. is going to be L-shaped, which is to say a long period of malaise."

6. Marc Faber. The Zurich-born investment analyst publishes a newsletter called "Gloom Boom Doom" and runs a Website by the same name, which features illustrations of skeletons in "The Dance of Death." Faber has been forecasting an economic meltdown since 2005, hates the bailout, and said on October 13, "I guarantee you the U.S. will go bankrupt, it's only a question of time. Sooner or later." We'd be scared if he weren't so adorable.

7. Bill Fleckenstein. This short-seller (and frequent Fast Money call-in shouter, which we mean in the best possible way) isn't impressed by the U.S. government's coordinated rate cuts, buying up of banks' bad assets, and commitment to buy commercial paper. Fleckenstein has said he has "zero confidence" that the moves will help, and believes there's a chance we'll enter a depression.

8. Stephen Roach. Senior executive (formerly chief economist) for Morgan Stanley and a "perennial bear." Predicted an "economic Armageddon" as early as 2004 (and at the time apparently pegged the U.S.'s chance of escaping said disaster at less than 10 percent — obviously the jury's still out there). Roach said last week that the housing recession has "shifted to a full blown consumer recession, which has a much bigger impact on a broad swath of the U.S. economy."

9. Peter Schiff. In May, when asked by U.S. News to "say something positive about the U.S. economy," the president of broker-dealer Euro Capital answered, "There's nothing good to say about our situation." Expects that home prices will fall "a lot more," and told CNN Money yesterday that the government's economic stimulus packages "will effectively hold the firemen at bay while throwing gasoline on the flames."

10. Meredith Whitney. Oppenheimer & Co. analyst Meredith Whitney has been ahead of the meltdown for a year now. She called the credit crisis last fall with a bearish prediction about Citigroup, wrote in May that "what lies ahead will be worse than what is behind us," and in August, told Fortune that "It feels like I'm at the epicenter of the biggest financial crisis in history." Since then, she's turned her all-seeing eye to the bailout, which she deemed not enough (it wasn't), and still reserves a special loathing for Citigroup, whose rating she just changed to "underperform." "We continue to believe outsized expenses and negative operating leverage represent the largest challenge for the company," the Oppenheimer & Co. analyst said. We're scared.

The Internet of Things :: information touching everything

It's called "The Internet of Things" -- at least for now. It refers to an imminent world where physical objects and beings, as well as virtual data and environments, all live and interact with each other in the same space and time. In short, everything is interconnected.

"If we can imagine it, there's a good chance it can be programmed," wrote Vint Cerf, the original Internet evangelist, on the official Google blog.

"The Internet of the future will be suffused with software, information, data archives, and populated with devices, appliances, and people who are interacting with and through this rich fabric."

At the nodes of this all-encompassing web of objects is RFID (Radio Frequency Identity) technology, which allows things to be "read" by an NFC (Near Field Communication) scanner, bar-code-style, as well as to store information about themselves and their relationship with their environment, over time.

The reason why RFID is often called next-generation bar code is that the technology is more accurate, scanners can read more objects with less directional contact, and smaller chips can contain a larger quantity of information.

Bruce Sterling, one of the pioneers of cyberpunk literature in the 1980s and an active sci-fi guru, neologized the term "spime" in 2004 to refer to any object that can define itself in terms of both space and time, i.e. using GPS to locate itself and RFID to trace its own history.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/11/02/digitalbiz.rfid/index.html

Lab-on-a-chip technology, which involves complete chemical laboratories the size of a chip, is on the rise. Many of these mini-laboratories are able to separate mixtures - of biological substances, for instance. This usually occurs with the aid of capillary electrophoresis; that is, a mixture is led through a thin tube over which a high voltage is applied. The voltage causes the components in the mixture to move through the tube. The size, shape and charge of the molecules affect the speed with which they move. The components that move the fastest are the first to reach the end of the tube and can be collected there - separately from the other molecules.

Dawid Zalewski has developed a new form of capillary electrophoresis that can separate substances continuously: synchronized continuous-flow zone electrophoresis. In a quarter of an hour this method can process around five microlitre of liquid. This does not sound like very much, but a regular capillary electrophoresis chip can only process a couple of hundred picolitre of liquid in a cycle. This tiny quantity is not a problem if, for example, you only want to show whether a certain substance is present in a mixture. But if you want to process the pure substance further, this is a fundamental limitation. Zalewski’s chip is not limited in this way and can process 25,000 times as much liquid as a normal chip in a single cycle, in a quarter of an hour.


http://www.physorg.com/news144677460.html

Quiet wind turbine provides partial power for homes at an install cost of roughly $10,000.

Originally designed by Scotland-based Renewable Devices, the Swift wind turbine is being sold in the US by Cascade Engineering of Grand Rapids, Mich.

Unlike many existing small wind turbines, the Swift turbine is designed to reduce noise. At seven feet in diameter, it consists of five thin blades encircled by a ring. The ring reduces vibration and diffuses the noise to a level of less than 35 decibels.


http://www.physorg.com/news144674984.html