Pig Cells Implanted in Diabetics Ray Lilley, Associated Press

A New Zealand biotech company began a trial Thursday of an experimental treatment for diabetes in which cells from newborn pigs will be implanted into eight human volunteers.
Living Cell Technologies hopes the cells may be able to delay the effects of Type 1 diabetes, including blindness, premature coronary illness and limb amputation resulting from poor blood circulation.
Prof. Bob Elliott, medical director of the company, acknowledged that, even in the best-case scenario, the treatment would not eliminate all symptoms.
Some scientists have warned that implanting pig cells has risks. Others say it is too soon to begin testing on humans because no animal trials were conducted.
One risk is that viruses that exist in animals but not in humans could jump species, potentially causing new illnesses and possible new pandemics. Scientists say there are more than 100 pig viruses that could potentially transfer to humans.
Elliott said Thursday that the possibility of a pig endogenous retrovirus -- the virus thought to be most contagious for humans -- infecting humans is largely "theoretical."

From : Discovery Channel

First Panda Born From Frozen Sperm Tini Tran, Associated Press

China announced the first successful birth of a panda cub from artificial insemination using frozen sperm, giving a new option for the notoriously poor breeders, officials said Friday.
Panda females have only three days a year in which they can conceive -- one reason their species is endangered.
Female panda You You (pronounced Yo Yo) gave birth to the new cub Thursday morning at the Wolong Giant Panda Research Center in southwestern Sichuan. It is You You's third baby, and the 10th panda cub born at Wolong this year.
Just after dawn, the pinkish, hairless cub emerged, and its mother licked the baby to clean it, according to footage shown by state broadcaster CCTV.
Panda researchers said Friday that they believe it's the first successful live birth worldwide using frozen panda sperm.
"We did try before but it failed," said Huang Yan, a deputy research technician with the China Panda Preservation Research Center.

From : Discovery Channel

Sudoku Game Inspires Gene Sequencing Solution

Sudoku, logic puzzle that folks are addicted to, is not just for passing the time. It's helping to speed up genetic sequencing.

Geneticists from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have a found a way to use Sudoku to sequence more than a hundred thousand DNA samples.

Until now, only a single DNA sample could be sequenced at a time.

Not only does the new method save time and improve efficiency, but it dramatically cuts cost. A sequencing project that uses conventional methods can cost $10 million. But that figure can be cut to $80,000 or less by using the Soduku method.

From : Discovery Channel

Michael Jackson Had a Patent

The news of Michael Jackson's death threw everyone off. Many people grew up with his music and have many favorite songs which inspired a lot of great artists today. Indeed, He was consider as the "King of Pop". His death was a big surprise, but then this morning, another surprise: Jackson had a patent.

The title: Method and means for creating anti-gravity illusion.

It's a system that consists of a special shoe that has a hitch designed to attach to a projection in a stage. When the shoe engages with the component in the stage, the performer can lean forward beyond his or her center of gravity.

Why did he invent it? According to the patent, he had dance steps in his video performances where he and members of his dance crew would appear to lean forward beyond the center of gravity. This illusion was achieved by using cables attached to each dancer's waist. But the set up required stage hands to help out and was too clumsy for use during live performances.

The solution: The shoes. The video shows the anti-gravity shoes in action, live:



He was an amazing performer. A genius musician and this idea shows that his intelligence and creativity went beyond music.

From : Discovery Channel

New Technology to Make Digital Data (emails, text messages, chat messages, posts, etc.) Self-Destruct

A group of computer scientists at the University of Washington has developed a way to make electronic messages “self destruct” after a certain period of time, like messages in sand lost to the surf. The researchers said they think the new software, called Vanish, which requires encrypting messages, will be needed more and more as personal and business information is stored not on personal computers, but on centralized machines, or servers. In the term of the moment this is called cloud computing, and the cloud consists of the data — including e-mail and Web-based documents and calendars — stored on numerous servers.

The idea of developing technology to make digital data disappear after a specified period of time is not new. A number of services that perform this function exist on the World Wide Web, and some electronic devices like FLASH memory chips have added this capability for protecting stored data by automatically erasing it after a specified period of time.

But the researchers said they had struck upon a unique approach that relies on “shattering” an encryption key that is held by neither party in an e-mail exchange but is widely scattered across a peer-to-peer file sharing system.

Public key cryptography makes it possible for two parties who have never physically met to share a digital secret and as a result engage in a secure electronic conversation sheltered from potential eavesdroppers. The technology is at the heart of most modern electronic commerce systems.

Vanish uses a key-based encryption system in a different way, making it possible for a decrypted message to be automatically re-encrypted at a specified point in the future without fear that a third party will be able to gain access to the key needed to read the message.

The pieces of the key, small numbers, tend to “erode” over time as they gradually fall out of use. To make keys erode, or timeout, Vanish takes advantage of the structure of a peer-to-peer file system. Such networks are based on millions of personal computers whose Internet addresses change as they come and go from the network. This would make it exceedingly difficult for an eavesdropper or spy to reassemble the pieces of the key because the key is never held in a single location. The Vanish technology is applicable to more than just e-mail or other electronic messages. Tadayoshi Kohno, a University of Washington assistant professor who is one of Vanish’s designers, said Vanish makes it possible to control the “lifetime” of any type of data stored in the cloud, including information on Facebook, Google documents or blogs. In addition to Mr. Kohno, the authors of the paper, "Vanish: Increasing Data Privacy with Self-Destructing Data," include Roxana Geambasu, Amit A. Levy and Henry M. Levy.

The potential value of such technology was brought into stark relief last week when a computer hacker stole data belonging to the social media company Twitter and e-mailed it to Web publishing companies in the United States and France.

The significance of the advance is that the Vanish “trust model” does not depend on the integrity of third parties, as other systems do. The researchers cite an incident in which a commercial provider of encrypted e-mail services revealed the contents of digital communication when served with a subpoena by a Canadian law enforcement agency.

The researchers acknowledged that there are unexplored legal issues surrounding the use of their technology. For example, certain laws require that corporations archive e-mails and make them accessible.

The researchers have developed a prototype of the Vanish system based on a plug-in module for the Mozilla Firefox Web browser. Using the system requires that both parties of the communication have a copy of the module, which is one of the limits of the technology. Mr. Kohno said that he did not envision Vanish being used for all communications, but only for sensitive ones.

From : The New York Times
Link By : Discover Channel

Wide Angle: Solar-Powered Swimsuits

The engineers are at it again. Recharge your iPod from your swimsuit. We’ll look into it. Today. On Engineering Works!

One of the biggest problems with portable high-tech equipment like cell phones and iPods is that the batteries keep running down. It’s hard to recharge a fading iPod at the beach.

Some engineers in Germany may have an answer for you. A solar-powered swimsuit, complete with a miniature plug-in for your MP3 player’s power cord. And you can even swim in it.

Engineers at an energy company in Hamburg are working with a German fashion house to design and build a swimsuit with banks of photovoltaic cells to convert all that seaside or poolside sunlight into electricity. You have to let the cells dry off before you plug in after your swim, but it’s the idea that counts.

In case you’ve forgotten, or didn’t know, photovoltaic cells are those little solar cells on the front of your calculator. Bigger versions produce electricity that powers traffic signals and streetlights in some places and satellites in orbit.

Photovoltaic cells use sunlight to produce electricity directly from sunlight. The process works because flat layers of semiconductors in the cells absorb energy from sunlight. This energy knocks loose electrons in the semiconductors and they move around. When they move, we get electricity. Someday maybe enough to run our houses or cars.

Image: iko/flickr.com

From : Discovery Channel

Missing AIDS Link Found in Chimps Seth Borenstein, Associated Press

Scientists believe they have found a "missing link" in the evolution of the virus that causes AIDS. It bridges the gap between the infection that does no harm to most monkeys and the one that kills millions of people. That link is a virus that is killing chimpanzees in the wild at a disturbingly high rate, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature.
Chimpanzees are the first primate besides man shown to get sick in the wild in significant numbers from a virus related to HIV. Chimps are also man's closest relative among primates.
And chimps are already endangered.
But the discovery of the disease killing chimps may help doctors come up with better treatments or a workable vaccine for humans, experts said.
The monkey version of the virus that causes AIDS is called simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), but most apes and monkeys that have it show no symptoms or illness. So "if we could figure out why the monkeys don't get sick, perhaps we could apply that to people," said study lead author Beatrice Hahn, a professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
The nine-year study of chimps in their natural wild habitat at Gombe National Park in Tanzania found chimps infected with SIV had a death rate 10 to 16 times higher than uninfected chimps. And necropsies of dead infected chimps showed unusually low counts of T-cell white blood proteins that are just like the levels found in humans with AIDS, Hahn said in a phone interview.
And when scientists looked at the particular strain, they found that it was the closest relative possible to the virus that first infected humans.
"From an evolutionary and epidemiological point of view, these data can be regarded as a 'missing link' in the history of the HIV pandemic," AIDS researcher Dr. Daniel Douek of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases wrote in an e-mail. Douek was not involved in the Nature study.
Monkeys and apes -- except for chimps -- seem to survive the virus because of some kind of evolutionary adaptation, probably on the cell receptors, Douek wrote. The infection of chimps is more recent so they haven't adapted, he wrote.
Hahn said chimps and people probably caught the virus the same way, by eating infected monkeys. And they both spread it the same way, through sexual activity.
Many factors are causing Africa's chimp population to dwindle, said study co-author Michael Wilson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota and former director of field research at the Jane Goodall Institute in Tanzania. Hunting, loss of habitat and disease are decreasing chimp numbers and it's hard to figure out how much of a factor SIV is, he said.
"It is a concern," Wilson said. "The last thing these chimps need is another source of mortality."
Wilson, who spent years observing chimps in Tanzania as part of the study, said that when researchers realized the virus was fatal and they knew which chimps were infected, it became hard to watch some of their activities in the wild.
He recalled wanting to warn one female chimp, "Don't mate with those guys." Wilson said. "But of course I can't do that."

From : Discovery Channel