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janrinok writes:

Researchers looking at the use of nanoparticles to deliver drugs to precise regions of the body have made a potentially worrying discovery:

A simple change in electric charge may make the difference between someone getting the medicine they need and a trip to the emergency room at least if a new study bears out. Researchers investigating the toxicity of particles designed to ferry drugs inside the body have found that carriers with a positive charge on their surface appear to cause damage if they reach the brain.

These particles, called micelles, are one type of a class of materials known as nanoparticles. By varying properties such as charge, composition, and attached surface molecules, researchers can design nanoparticles to deliver medicine to specific body regions and cell types and even to carry medicine into cells. This ability allows drugs to directly target locations they would otherwise be unable to, such as the heart of tumors. Researchers are also looking at nanoparticles as a way to transport drugs across the blood-brain barrier, a wall of tightly connected cells that keeps most medication out of the brain. Just how safe nanoparticles in the brain are, however, remains unclear.

So Kristina Bram Knudsen, a toxicologist at the National Research Centre for the Working Environment in Copenhagen, and colleagues tested two types of micelles, which were made from different polymers that gave the micelles either a positive or negative surface charge. They injected both versions, empty of drugs, into the brains of rats, and 1 week later they checked for damage. Three out of the five rats injected with the positively charged micelles developed brain lesions. The rats injected with the negatively charged micelles or a saline control solution did not suffer any observable harm from the injections, the team will report in an upcoming issue of Nanotoxicology.

azrael writes:

The BBC reports that a new model of the Raspberry Pi, called the B+, has been released. It features a redesigned video connector, switches from SD to micro-SD, and has improved power management.

The updated version uses less power than its predecessors and will cost about $35 (£20).

Better power management on the B+ will mean it can keep four USB peripherals going without requiring mains power or an external hub.

The Element14 website has a handy comparison chart (account required) to compare Raspberry Pi models.

AnonTechie writes:

Researchers have detailed a series of quickly patched vulnerabilities in five popular password managers that could allow attackers to steal user credentials.

"Critical" vulnerabilities were discovered and reported in LastPass, RoboForm, My1Login, PasswordBox and NeedMyPassword in work described by the University of California Berkeley researchers as a "wake-up call" for developers of web password vaults.

"Our attacks are severe: in four out of the five password managers we studied, an attacker can learn a user's credentials for arbitrary websites," Researchers Zhiwei Li, Warren He, Devdatta Akhawe, and Dawn Song wrote in the paper The Emperor's New Password Manager: Security Analysis of Web-based Password Managers ( http://devd.me/papers/pwdmgr-usenix14.pdf ) (PDF).

janrinok writes:

The ScienceMag site has the following story:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has closed two labs and halted some biological shipments in the wake of several recent incidents in which highly pathogenic microbes were mishandled by federal laboratories. The cases include an accidental shipment of live anthrax; the discovery of forgotten, live smallpox samples; and a newly revealed incident in which a dangerous influenza strain was accidentally shipped from CDC to another lab.

The two cases involving CDC mistakes reveal "totally unacceptable behavior" by staff, said CDC chief Thomas Frieden at a press conference today at CDC headquarters in Atlanta. He announced several actions that CDC is taking to step up safety and security, including a moratorium on shipping highly risky pathogens. "I'm disappointed by what happened and frankly I'm angry about it," he added.

Frieden also revealed that two of six vials of smallpox discovered last week in a cold storage room in a Food and Drug Administration lab at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, have tested positive for live virus when grown in culture. Some smallpox experts had predicted that the 1950s-era samples would no longer be viable. Four samples have yet to be tested; all will then be destroyed, Frieden said.

lhsi writes:

A study has found that using a spoon to measure medicine often leads to more dosing errors (both underdosing and overdosing), compared to measuring out the dose in milliliters (by a syringe for example).

Parents who used spoonfuls "were 50% more likely to give their children incorrect doses than those who measured in more precise milliliter units," said Dr. Alan Mendelsohn, a co-author and associate professor at New York University's medical school.

Incorrect doses included giving too much and too little, which can both be dangerous, he said. Underdosing may not adequately treat an illness and can lead to medication-resistant infections, while overdoses may cause illness or side effects that can be life-threatening. The study doesn't include information on any ill effects from dosing mistakes.

Almost one-third of the parents gave the wrong dose and 1 in 6 used a kitchen spoon rather than a device like an oral syringe or dropper that lists doses in milliliters.

Less than half the prescriptions specified doses in milliliters. But even when they did, the medicine bottle label often listed doses in teaspoons. Parents often assume that means any similar-sized kitchen spoon, the authors said.

lhsi writes:

The BBC reports that the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) says that the UK's broadband target is simply not ambitious enough when compared to other nations and is calling on the government to commit to a minimum of 10Mbps by 2017.

"If small businesses are to thrive and prosper and contribute to a growing economy, they need universal access to what is now considered the fourth utility," concludes an FSB report on the current state of broadband.

The report found that:

• 94% of small business owners consider a reliable internet connection to be critical to the success of their business
• 45,000 UK small businesses are still on dial-up speeds
• Only 15% of firms say they are very satisfied with their broadband provision.

frojack writes:

Millions of anchovies descended on waters off San Diego on Tuesday July 8, darkening the water and baffling scientists. (Photo Gallery).

David Checkley, a professor in the integrative oceanography division at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, studies fish for a living, and even he was at a loss for words when trying to describe swimming with millions of anchovies (YouTube Video) just off the beach at the Scripts Institute Pier.

Its not that Anchovy schools are a rarity in the eastern Pacific. But schools this big so close to shore haven't been seen in 30 years. The fish typically prefer cool water, and San Diego's surf hit 74 degrees Fahrenheit (23 degrees Celsius). Anchovy eat small zooplankton, and Checkley said it's unlikely they were searching for food close to shore. The sheer size of the group also means the fish would have quickly gobbled through any food, he added.

California's anchovy population, which has been low for the past 20 years, is finally on the rise, thanks to cooling ocean temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. A natural climate phenomenon known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is swinging much of the Pacific toward colder temperatures, which the anchovy prefer.

cafebabe writes:

In response to a comment from a previous article about the loom-band craze, I investigated the matter in much more detail and with the objective of creating optimally dithered wristbands. After overcoming several difficulties, such as making anything in an adult size, I definitely believe this craze is wholesome and teaches useful skills to kids.

Most specifically, for a craft that requires all loops to be interlinked, a cursory understanding of directed graphs is essential. Indeed, I find it worrying that there are some five year olds who understand directed graphs more intuitively than some computer scientists.

jackb_guppy writes:

Cray has been hired to build a new supercomputer for the National Nuclear Security Administration.

The above article talks about Cray getting a contract with the US Government to simulate nuclear stock piles, because of its vertically integrated system. Is this really relevant in today's world of parallel-processing on commodity boxes? Is the software not there to handle this problem's sequential nature in parallel-processing?

AnonTechie writes:

With the worldwide proliferation of wind- and solar-generated power, the fickleness of these renewable sources is a problem crying out for a good solution. A Canadian start-up called Hydrostor thinks it has an answer: air-filled bags.

In August, the Toronto company plans to sink several large balloonlike bags into Lake Ontario, and then, using electricity from Toronto Hydro's grid to run a compressor, it will fill the bags with air. Later, when the utility needs electricity, the air will be emptied from the bags and run through a turboexpander, which uses the expanding air to drive a turbine. The result will be the world's first commercial facility for underwater compressed-air energy storage. This animation from Hydrostor explains how its system works.

Using compressed air to store energy is not a new idea. The first such systems emerged back in the 1870s, and these days compressed air is stored in underground caverns, in pipes, and even in small tanks for powering cars and locomotives. Variants of the underwater storage idea have also been floated, so to speak, since at least the 1980s, says Seamus Garvey, a professor of dynamics at the University of Nottingham, in England. Garvey, who's not affiliated with Hydrostor, designed an underwater storage system using Thin Red Line Aerospace's bags and deployed a prototype off Scotland's Orkney Islands, in 2012. "The idea is to put the storage where it matters most, which is where the intermittent energy is being generated from offshore wind", Garvey says.

Popeidol writes:

VIA Technologies, while still selling older models, haven't released a new x86-based processor for years. It looks like they've decided to give it another shot and they're due to release a chip based on their brand-new Isaiah II core in August.

The Quad-core processor clocks in at 2.0GHz, has 2mb of cache, and supports a nice array of modern instruction sets. We don't have a lot of information yet, but when put through its paces it did very well against an Intel Atom Z3770 and AMD Athlon 5350.

dryriver writes:

The BBC reports:

Scientists have patented a new way to make ultra high-res displays that can bend and are thousandths of a mm thick. They used a miniscule layer of a phase-change material, that flips between two chemical states when hit with current. By sandwiching it between transparent electrodes, they made pixels just 300 nanometres across and produced images smaller than the width of human hair.

The design, published in Nature, could be useful in wearable technology, smart contact lenses or foldable screens. According to Prof Harish Bhaskaran, who led the research at Oxford University, it will be "at least five years" before any applications appear. But as far as Prof Bhaskaran is aware, the resolution of the images his team produced is among the highest ever achieved. "I haven't seen any other technology that approaches 100 or 200 nanometre resolution," he told the BBC.

Phase-change materials are commonly used in heat management, because they absorb or release heat in switching between an orderly, crystalline state and a more chaotic "amorphous" state. Because their optical properties change with these states as well, they have also proved useful in data storage, such as rewritable DVDs.

AnonTechie writes:

The US military has been testing in-flight guidance for .50-caliber bullets, turning the projectiles into miniature homing missiles.

DARPA's Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO) bullets have the ability to manoeuvre in flight to hit targets that they're not precisely aimed at, compensating for factors like weather, wind, and target movement.

DARPA explains on its website: "For military snipers, acquiring moving targets in unfavorable conditions, such as high winds and dusty terrain commonly found in Afghanistan, is extremely challenging with current technology. It is critical that snipers be able to engage targets faster, and with better accuracy, since any shot that doesn't hit a target also risks the safety of troops by indicating their presence and potentially exposing their location."

The bullets are the size of a large pen and can be used in both sniper rifles and machine guns. The full EXACTO system comprises of both bullets and a real-time guidance system that tracks and delivers the projectile to the target.

cafebabe writes:

ScienceDaily reports that:

After trapping the wild large-clawed scorpions (Scorpio Maurus Palmatus) in Israel's Negev desert the researchers filled their burrows with molten aluminum to make replica casts. Once solidified, they were unearthed and analyzed by a 3-D laser scanner and software.

The researchers found that the burrows followed a very sophisticated design, beginning with a short, vertical entrance shaft that flattened out a few centimeters below the surface into a horizontal platform. The burrows then turn sharply downwards, descending further below ground to form a dead-end chamber. This cool, humid chamber, where evaporation water loss is minimal, provides a refuge for the scorpions to rest during the heat of the day.

The design was common to all the scorpion burrows studied, which suggests that burrow building in scorpions has evolved by natural selection to meet the animals' physiological needs.

AnonTechie writes:

With the UN calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip an article written by Gary Brecher and first published in 2012 by NSFWCORP (now part of Pando), lessons from Gaza - suggesting that Palestinian durability may beat Israel's high-tech weaponry, remains remarkably relevant today.

What's going on in Gaza is war, but not the kind any commander from the past would understand. On paper, Israel should be winning easily, because they've got the weapons, the numbers, the organization. The weapons Hamas is firing into Israel are primitive things, unguided rocket artillery, the kind that couldn't hit the ground if it wasn't for the law of gravity. On the other side, the Israelis get the best weaponry the US can give them.

But it's not that simple. Israel may win this battle, but it's lost the war already. You see that in the confusion the IDF shows about what to do. They've tried stomping hard on Gaza. In late 2008 through early 2009, "Operation Cast Lead" sent IDF troops and planes smashing into this tiny overpopulated slum. They killed 1400 Palestinians, and it didn't do much but make everybody sick to their stomachs - including even some Israelis, once they got over their initial gloating.