New clue to Alzheimer's found in form of protein

Researchers have uncovered a new clue to the cause of Alzheimer's disease. The brains of people with the memory-robbing form of dementia are cluttered with a plaque made up of beta-amyloid, a sticky protein. But there long has been a question whether this is a cause of the disease or a side effect. Also involved are tangles of a protein called tau; some scientists suspect this is the cause.

Now, researchers have caused Alzheimer's symptoms in rats by injecting them with one particular form of beta-amyloid. Injections with other forms of beta-amyloid did not cause illness, which may explain why some people have beta-amyloid plaque in their brains but do not show disease symptoms.

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Phoenix Mars Lander Confirms Frozen Water On Red Planet

Scientists relishing confirmation of water ice near the surface beside NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander anticipate even bigger discoveries from the robotic mission in the weeks ahead.

The mission has the right instruments for analyzing soil and ice to determine whether the local environment just below the surface of far-northern Mars has ever been favorable for microbial life. Key factors are whether the water ever becomes available as a liquid and whether organic compounds are present that could provide chemical building blocks and energy for life. Phoenix landed on May 25 for a Mars surface mission planned to last for three months.

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3D TV from Philips

Philips's new displays bring the 3D experience without the need for special 3D glasses. Philips' WOWvx displays are now beginning to appear in shopping malls, movie-theater lobbies, and theme parks worldwide. The technology uses image-processing software, plus display hardware that includes sheets of tiny lenses atop LCD screens. The lenses project slightly different images to viewers' left and right eyes, which the brain translates into a perception of depth.

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Microsoft Windows Search 4.0

Microsoft released the latest version of Windows Search on June 3, 2008. When installed on Vista Service Pack (SP) 1 systems, Windows Search 4.0 updates and replaces the existing search files. On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, Windows Search extends the existing search functionality.

According to company officials, among the new features added to Windows Search 4.0:

• Faster querying and indexing (”how much faster depends on the machine and the data,” according to company officials)
• Improved reliability (”system failures won’t get in the way of the indexer and all data will be scanned and available for searches,” according to a spokesperson)
• Broader PC-to-PC searches (a k a “Remote index discovery”)
• More Group Policy controls over aspects of search functionality

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Tomatoes gush from Dizayn's pipe

A private Turkish company known for its successful research and development (R&D) projects has produced a unique type of tomato that grows only in water, which experts claim has no equivalent anywhere in the world.

The Dizayn Group, a prominent actor in the Turkish heating and plumbing sectors, produced the special type of tomatoes that do not need soil to grow at its R&D center in the Mediterranean city of Antalya. The total amount produced in one year is 1,600 kilograms from a single tomato seed. The product will soon be available on the market under the name “Miracle.”

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Monkey Thinks Robot into Action

In a dramatic display of the potential of prosthetic arms, a monkey at the University of Pittsburgh was able to use his brain to directly control a robotic arm and feed himself a marshmallow. The research, published on May 28, 2008 in the journal Nature, is the first to show that an interface that converts brain signals directly into action is sophisticated enough to perform a practical function: eating. Researchers who led the work have just begun human tests of a related technology.

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Colleges see the future: Video games

Academics envision uses beyond Grand Theft Auto.
By Tom Avril

With an odd-looking strip of black foam fastened to his forehead, the young man stared intently at an image of a manhole cover on his computer screen.

Suddenly, without touching the mouse or keyboard, he made the manhole cover rise into the virtual air.

A magic trick?

No, a video game - one that Hasan Ayaz, a Drexel University engineering student, was able to manipulate directly with his brain.

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Improving anxiety treatment with brain imaging

In a new article published in Biological Psychiatry on May 1st, researchers report their findings on the potential use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to match treatments for patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).

Subjects diagnosed with GAD underwent brain scans both before and after treatment with venlafaxine. As hypothesized, the fMRI data predicted who would do well on the drug and who would not.

They found that the larger the prefrontal cortex reaction, and the smaller the amygdala reaction, the more likely it was that the patient had a positive response to the venlafaxine.

There are no current biomarkers for predicting how well a patient will respond to anti-anxiety medicines. Patients often have to go through multiple medications and dosages to find one that works.

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Microsoft Worldwide Telescope

Microsoft Research has released the Spring Beta version of a new powerful web-based application called Worldwide Telescope for exploring the universe.

A researcher at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, Roy Gould gave the first public demo of the World Wide Telescope developed by Curtis Wong and his team at Microsoft.

"While watching the demo, I realized the way I look at the world was about to change."
-Robert Scoble

Here's the demo presentation at TEDTalk:



Related story at nytimes.com

Memristor - Missing Fourth Electronic Circuit Element

In 1971, a University of California, Berkeley, engineer predicted that there should be a fourth element: a memory resistor, or memristor. But no one knew how to build one. Now, 37 years later, electronics have finally gotten small enough to reveal the secrets of that fourth element. The memristor, Hewlett-Packard researchers revealed on April 30, 2008 in the journal Nature, had been hiding in plain sight all along—within the electrical characteristics of certain nanoscale devices. They think the new element could pave the way for applications both near- and far-term, from nonvolatile RAM to realistic neural networks.

HP Labs has made a nano-scale device which stores data, explains previous anomalies in nano-device characteristics, and may be able to act as a synapse in analogue neural networks. It is also the first physical implementation of the memristor, a theoretical partner to resistors, capacitors and inductors invented in 1971.

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