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Jan302008

New Robotics Will Soon Revolutionize Industry And Services World
New Robotics Will Soon Revolutionize Industry And Services World

In the past few years industrial processes have monopolised practically all robotic developments and applications. However, the current tendency is marked by new robotics which will have a great impact in various spheres – from the industrial to services and including entertainment and care assistance for persons, amongst other applications.

This was the main topic analysed at the ‘Robot Business Opportunities’ (RBO) event, held the 24 and 25 January 2008 at Fatronik-Tecnalia Research Centre. This centre, located in the Basque province of Gipuzkoa, organised this event, within its strategy of constantly seeking new business opportunities for the enterprise sector, an event to which a selected number, in a position to form part of the new businesses that will be generated around robotics, were invited.

For the first time in Spain, Fatronik-Tecnalia has brought together the most prestigious experts in robotics worldwide, such as Tatsuo Arai from the University of Osaka, Herman Bruyninckx, co-ordinator of the European Excellence Network for Robotics Research, François Pierrot from the French CNRS or Todd Simonds from the North American company CTC and close collaborator with the North American Carnegie Mellon University, amongst others.

The new robotics

Conventional industrial robotics is a relatively mature market today. There are about 1.2 million industrial robots, in a market that has been going for more than four decades.

However, the industrial robots market is not growing. It dropped by 11% in 2006 and it is estimated that it will not recover for 2007. In reality, industrial robots are being displaced by non-conventional robotics which has three features:

Firstly, the ability of non-conventional robotics to co-exist with persons, services applications and advanced industrial applications in which robots work in direct cooperation with people, or share the same working environment with them. Secondly, its capacity to move around non-structured environments and, thirdly, its low cost.

When its lines of production are in full swing, robotics can reach new markets: robots can help us in cleaning chores, can transport loads within a workshop, can undertake monitoring tasks and can help us to overcome human physical difficulties or limitations. That is, its applications are very varied and numerous and undoubtedly are set to generate great opportunities in many sectors, both industrial and services.

We are beginning to see the first successful applications of robotics outside production lines. For example, the iRobot enterprise has sold more than 2.5 million units of its domestic vacuum cleaner robot while robot toys like Robosapien from WowWee have triumphed with over 2 million sales. Just two examples which, together, come to more than the total number of industrial robots in the world, which indicates that robotics is no longer restricted to the world of the industrial production line.

However, these examples are little more than the tip of the iceberg of an emerging market. According to all indicators, the new Robotics Society is to arrive this decade. Robots will be put on the market at an attainable price with applications in monitoring, construction, refuse and other collection, education, entertainment, personal assistance and much more.

New business opportunity

Given this future, the business world cannot stay still and get left behind. Today Spain is the fourth country in Europe and seventh worldwide with the greatest number of robots installed. Nevertheless, according to the Spanish Robotics Network (HispaRob), in which Fatronik-Tecnalia participates, although Spanish industry is one of the most robotised, it has high indiustrial-technological dependence (most robots installed are in the automobile industry and concentrated in the hands of a small number of multinational companies who have a closed technology and therefore make the incorporation of national technological business to a large extent difficult).

According to the article, “A robot in every home”, by Bill Gates in Scientific American (January-2007), the services robotics market will increase massively over the next few years. In the article Bill Gates argues that there are similarities, between the computers market in the 80s (few had access to it, it was reserved for those with great technical knowledge, it was expensive, and so on) and today’s services robotics market.

Fatronik-Tecnalia has undertaken an important commitment to this new, non-conventional robotics given that, although it is expected that this market will undergo a significant boom, the Gipuzkoa-based technological centre believes it to be fundamental that this field be invested, researched and developed as soon as possible in order to be in a position to take advantage of what it offers. .

Moreover, the new robotics is not only an opportunity for the manufacturers of the robots themselves but also for end users given that, for the first, it will enable the enhancing of their processes and, for the latter, their performances. It is a great opportunity for our industry given that, in order to develop these robotics, it is necessary to have the technological capacity such as our industrial environment has.

Robotics in Fatronik-Tecnalia

One of the work areas at Fatronik-Tecnalia is that of intelligent robotics.

In the industrial sector, examples would be in manufacture, assembly, handling, inspection, analysis, union, cleaning, etc. and applications in various industrial sectors. In the service sector, robotics will be used for entertainment and personal assistance, amongst others.

Examples of developed products at Fatronik-Tecnalia in this new robotics range from autonomous robotised modules aimed at carrying out a concrete task to high-speed handling robots for automating production lines or mobile platforms that work in direct cooperation with persons, or share the same working environment with them.

Admin · 241 views · 5 comments
Categories: Articles, News
Jan302008

New Vaccine Against Deadliest Strain Of Avian Flu Successful In Mice
New Vaccine Against Deadliest Strain Of Avian Flu Successful In Mice

A vaccine against the most common and deadliest strain of avian flu, H5N1, has been engineered and tested by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Vaccine Research and Novavax Inc. The vaccine produced a strong immune response in mice and protected them from death following infection with the H5N1 virus. The vaccine is being tested in humans in an early-phase clinical trial.

Recent outbreaks of avian flu around the world have prompted health officials to warn of its continued threat to global health and potential to trigger a flu pandemic. "While worldwide avian flu control efforts have been mostly successful, avian flu, like seasonal influenza, mutates year to year, creating new subtypes and strains that could easily and quickly spread among humans," said Ted M. Ross, Ph.D., lead author of the study* and assistant professor, Center for Vaccine Research, University of Pittsburgh. "To stem the spread of a potential pandemic, we need stockpiles of vaccines available that can be readily adapted to enhance the immune system's response to new strains."

A future flu pandemic is inevitable because of the virus's ability to continually reinvent itself and the lack of broad immunity in humans, according to Dr. Ross. Influenza pandemics have occurred three times throughout modern history with deadly consequences. The first, the Spanish Flu of 1918, caused more deaths than World War I.

Unlike other avian flu vaccines, which are partially developed from live viruses, the vaccine uses a virus-like particle, or VLP, that is recognized by the immune system as a real virus but lacks genetic information to reproduce, making it a potentially safer alternative for a human vaccine. Given the evolving nature of H5N1, the vaccine was engineered to encode genes for three influenza viral proteins to offer enhanced protection against possible new strains of the virus.

To test the vaccine, researchers administered it to mice in one-dose and two-dose regimens. Mice immunized twice with the vaccine developed protective antibodies against H5N1 and were protected from disease and death when directly exposed to the virus. The researchers also compared modes of vaccine administration by delivering the vaccine to the muscle or the nose. Both methods of vaccine administration were equally effective. However, mice injected with the vaccine through the muscle developed more antibodies in the blood, while mice that received the nasal administration had more antibodies in their lungs.

"VLPs may be advantageous over other vaccine strategies because they are easy to develop, produce and manufacture," said Dr. Ross. "Using recombinant technologies, within ten weeks, we could generate a vaccine most effective towards the current circulating strain of virus, making it a cost-effective counter-measure to the threat of an avian influenza pandemic."

*This study was published in the Jan. 30 issue of PLoS One.

The study was funded by Novavax located in Rockville, Md. Co-authors include Rick A. Bright, Ph.D., Niranjan M. Kumar, Ph.D., Peter Pushko, Ph.D., and Gale Smith, Ph.D., with Novavax; Donald M. Carter, M.S., Corey J. Crevar, B.S., Franklin R. Toapanta, M.D., Ph.D., Jonathan D. Steckbeck, B.S., M.B.A., and Kelly Cole, Ph.D., with the Center for Vaccine Research at the University of Pittsburgh; and Terrence M. Tumpey, Ph.D., with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Admin · 202 views · 2 comments
Categories: Articles, News
Jan302008

How Does The Brain Attend To One Voice In A Noisy Room? New Findings On Selectively Interpreting Sounds
How Does The Brain Attend To One Voice In A Noisy Room? New Findings On Selectively Interpreting Sounds

Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have reported new findings about how the mammalian brain interprets and fashions representations of sound that may help explain how we are able to focus on one particular sound among many in noisy environments such as offices or cocktail parties.

Neurons in the brain’s auditory cortex interpret incoming sound signals and send them to the rest of the nervous system, in the brain and spinal cord. Using rats, the CSHL team discovered that a very small minority of available auditory neurons react strongly when exposed to any specific sound.

“This finding challenges the standard model of sound representations in the auditory cortex, which predicts that neural representations of stimuli often engage a large fraction of neurons,” said Anthony Zador, Ph.D., CSHL professor and corresponding author of a new research paper.*

The researchers used a new technique called “in vivo cell-attached patch clamp recording” which measures the reaction of individual neurons. This recording technique samples neurons in a fair and unbiased way, unlike traditional approaches, which favored the largest and most active neurons. Using this technique, the team found that only 5% of neurons in the auditory cortex had a “high firing rate” when receiving a range of sounds of varying length, frequency, and volume. The experiment included white noise and natural animal sounds.

The team’s objective was to quantify the relative contributions of different sub-populations of neurons in response to the range of sounds. Most of what is known about the auditory cortex of the mammalian brain comes from studies of the anesthetized cortex. The results of the experiments reported today are important partly because they measure the response of neurons in rats that were not anesthetized. In animals that are awake, it’s possible to measure the response over an interval of time to one sound among many that are co-occurring.

This is the approach the Zador lab has taken to explain “selective attention,” or what Dr. Zador calls “the cocktail party problem.” Half of the neurons measured in the reported experiments showed no reaction at all to incoming stimuli. The researchers hypothesize that each neuron in the auditory cortex may have an “optimal stimulus” to which it is particularly sensitized.

“Your entire sensory apparatus is there to make successful representations of the outside world,” said Dr. Zador, who is director of the CSHL Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience. “Sparse representations may make sensory stimuli easier to recognize and remember.” Recognizing the brain’s ability to distinguish “optimal stimuli” could help scientists find ways to improve how sounds are learned. Prior research has already yielded similar results when measuring sight, movement, and smell. This is the first evidence of a correlation between sparse representations and hearing.

“The goal of sensory processing is to take a signal, like a sound or a vision, from your environment and use it to drive behavior,” said Dr. Zador. “The brain needs to recognize and learn about these inputs in order to survive.”

*"Sparse Representation of Sounds in the Unanesthetized Auditory Cortex” appears in Public Library of Science: Biology on January 28. The authors are: Tomáš Hromádka, Michael R. DeWeese, Anthony M. Zador. (doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0060016)

Adapted from materials provided by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Admin · 250 views · 2 comments
Categories: Articles, News
Jan302008

Nucleotide sequence retrival from NCBI - Flash tutorial
Nucleotide sequence retrival from NCBI - Flash tutorial


Download Flash (swf) format

Download Executable format (EXE)

Admin · 154 views · 1 comment
Categories: Tutorials
Jan302008

Genetic material under a magnifying glass
Genetic material under a magnifying glass

The genetic alphabet contains four letters. Although our cells can readily decipher our genetic molecules, it isn’t so easy for us to read a DNA sequence in the laboratory. Scientists require complex, highly sophisticated analytical techniques to crack individual DNA codes. Volker Deckert and his team at the Institute for Analytical Sciences (ISAS) in Dortmund have recently developed a method that could provide a way to directly sequence DNA. Their process is based on a combination of Raman spectroscopy and atomic force microscopy. As reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, Deckert and Elena Bailo have successfully analyzed DNA’s closest relative, RNA.

Direct sequencing means that the letters of the genetic code are read directly, as if with a magnifying glass. A DNA or RNA strand has a diameter of only two nanometers, so the magnification must be correspondingly powerful. Deckert’s team uses an atomic force microscope to achieve this degree of magnification. Steered by the microscope, a tiny, silvered glass tip moves over the RNA strand. A laser beam focused on the tip excites the section of the strand being examined and starts it vibrating. The spectrum of the scattered light (Raman spectrum) gives very precise information about the molecular structure of the segment. Each genetic “letter”, that is, each of the nucleic acids, vibrates differently and thus has a characteristic spectral “fingerprint”.

The direct resolution of individual bases has not been attainable, but is also not necessary. The tip only has to be moved over the RNA strand at intervals corresponding to about the base-to-base distance. Even if the measured data then consist of overlapped spectra from several neighboring bases, the information can be used to derive the sequence of the RNA.

If this method, known as tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (TERS), can be extended to DNA, it could revolutionize the decoding of genetic information. Previous methods for sequencing DNA are highly complex, work indirectly, and require a large sample of genetic material. In contrast, the TERS technique developed by Deckert directly “reads” the code without chemical agents or detours. It also requires only a single strand of DNA. “DNA sequencing could become very simple,” says Deckert, “like reading a barcode at the supermarket.”

Admin · 208 views · 9 comments
Categories: Articles, News
Jan302008

Turning on adult stem cells may help repair bone
Turning on adult stem cells may help repair bone

The use of a drug to activate stem cells that differentiate into bone appears to cause regeneration of bone tissue and be may be a potential treatment strategy for osteoporosis, according to a report in the February 2008 Journal of Clinical Investigation. The study – led by researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) – found that treatment with a medication used to treat bone marrow cancer improved bone density in a mouse model of osteoporosis, apparently through its effect on the mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) that differentiate into several types of tissues.

“Stem cell therapies are often thought of as putting new cells into the body, but this study suggests that medications can turn on existing stem cells that reside in the body’s tissues, acting as regenerative medicines to enhance the body’s own repair mechanisms,” says David Scadden, MD, director of the MGH Center for Regenerative Medicine and HSCI co-director. “Drugs that direct immature cells to become a particular cell type, like in this study, could potentially be very useful.”

The study was designed to examine whether the drug bortezamib (Bzb), which can alleviate bone destruction associated with the cancer multiple myeloma, could also regenerate bone damaged by non-cancerous conditions. In their first experiments, the researchers showed that treating mice with Bzb increased several factors associated with bone formation. Similar results were seen when cultured MSCs were treated with Bzb, but not when the drug was applied to cells that were committed to become particular cell types. Found in the bone marrow, MSCs have the potential to develop into the bone-building osteoblasts and several other types of cells – including cartilage, fat, skin and muscle.

Subsequent experiments supported the hypothesis that Bzb increases osteoblast activity and bone formation by acting on MSCs but not on more differentiated osteoblast precursors. Use of Bzb to treat a mouse model of menopausal osteoporosis produced significant improvements in bone formation and density. Since current treatments for osteoporosis – which target differentiated cells like osteoblasts and the osteoclasts that break down bone – have limitations, the ability to direct differentiation of MSCs could be a promising approach to treating osteoporosis and cancer-associated bone loss, the researchers note.

“If the paradigm displayed in this study holds true for other tissues, we may have options for repairing and regenerating sites affected by injury or disease with medications – that would be pretty exciting.” says Scadden, who is the Gerald and Darlene Jordan Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Admin · 144 views · 1 comment
Categories: Articles, News
Jan302008

Stress Response In The Brain Relies On A Blood-thinning Protein
Stress Response In The Brain Relies On A Blood-thinning Protein

A stressed-out mouse tends to be a bit timid, tentative, even fearful. For that matter, so does a stressed-out human. Our ability to learn from frightening situations is part of what helps us avoid them in the future. When that learning process goes awry, it can lead to depression and a decreased ability to recognize dangerous situations. Now, research by Rockefeller scientists has pinned down a protein in the hippocampus — a part of the brain that controls memory, learning and fear — that’s essential for maintaining this stress response.

The protein tPA (tissue plasminogen activator) is best known for its ability to dissolve blood clots. But more and more studies are showing that it also plays a role in neural plasticity in the brain. Sidney Strickland, head of the Laboratory of Neurobiology and Genetics, and postdoc Erin Norris have taken the research a step further to see whether tPA has anything to do with how stress affects memory, learning ability and anxiety.

Prior research from the Strickland lab had shown that mice lacking tPA also seem to lack fear, a behavior largely dictated by a part of the brain called the amygdala. To determine whether tPA also affects behavior controlled by the hippocampus, Norris and Strickland compared normal mice to tPA-deficient ones. Then they divvied the mice up further: Half of each group they left alone, and the rest they exposed to six hours of painless restraint stress. Once the groups were complete, the researchers placed each mouse — wild-type, stressed wild-type, tPA-deficient and stressed tPA-deficient — into a small chamber, where the rodents were exposed to a sound paired with a small electric shock. The next day they returned the mice to the chamber, but this time left them alone.

All of the non-stressed as well as the stressed wild-type mice appeared to have learned from experience, showing their fear of the chamber in the form of freezing behavior. In comparison, the mice lacking tPA had significantly reduced freezing responses. “So they were either less fearful of their situation, or they just didn’t remember — they didn’t learn from their training,” Norris says. “We could say that if you don’t have tPA and you are in a stressful situation, you don’t have synaptic plasticity changes in the hippocampus.” The wild-type mice were capable of learning because tPA could induce changes in their brains’ neural synapses.

Norris and Strickland believe that the underlying mechanism for this has to do with a receptor that normally resides at the cell membrane but changes its location during stress. They found that, in mice lacking tPA, the receptor stayed anchored at the membrane even during stress. And without the receptor’s change in position, there could be no stress response. Norris has since begun investigating whether tPA could also be an important factor in depression, since stress has been shown to lead to this disorder in humans.

Admin · 147 views · 1 comment
Categories: Articles, News
Jan302008

Smile! You've Been Averaged


Smile! You've Been Averaged



smile


If airports used today's face-recognition technology to ID passengers, they would be wrong a lot of the time. But researchers have found a way to improve the technique: By replacing the standard photo on a person's ID with an image generated by combining several shots of the individual, a team from the University of Glasgow in the U.K. dramatically boosted the technique's accuracy.
Even human beings sometimes have difficulty recognizing people from their photographs, especially if the focus is blurry or the lighting poor. But as a face becomes more familiar, the brain improves at matching it to a photo. To explain this phenomenon, psychologists Rob Jenkins and A. Mike Burton came up with a model of how the mind constructs an image of a face from repeat encounters, distilling the essence of its features into a reliable mental representation. The researchers wondered if applying the model to a face-recognition system would improve its performance.

That's exactly what they found when they tested the idea using a system that a few airports are trying out for small-scale recognition tasks, such as identifying airline crew members. The system is also used by a Web site containing a database of celebrity pictures at which visitors can upload personal photos to find out which celebrities they most resemble. To evaluate the baseline performance of the system, the researchers probed it with 20 different pictures of 25 famous men who were represented in the Web site's database. On average, the system correctly identified the celebrity (by returning a photo of the same celebrity from its own database) 54% of the time.

Using a computer program, the researchers then produced an "average" image for each of the 25 celebrities by merging each person's set of 20 pictures, which had been taken over several decades under various light conditions. When they fed the averages into the system, it recognized the faces with 100% accuracy. The researchers then put the technique to a more difficult test: They constructed the average using only those images of a celebrity that the system had failed to recognize during the baseline performance test. This new average image was recognized correctly 80% of the time. The researchers report their results in this week's issue of Science.

How does it work? "Different photos of the same person can look very different depending on the ambient conditions at the time the picture was taken, the facial expression, and a number of other factors," Jenkins explains. "By averaging these pictures, we're essentially blocking out all that extraneous information." The advantage of the technique is that it would be easy to implement; just swap the standard photos on passports and driver's licenses with an average image. That way, when the airport camera snaps a picture of a passenger, a computer will be able to check whether that photo matches the ID more accurately.

Face-recognition experts say the technique is worth exploring but needs to be tried on larger data sets. "This is too small a test set to make the claim that 100% accuracy has now been achieved," says Anil Jain, a computer science professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

Admin · 201 views · 3 comments
Categories: Articles, News
Jan292008

Viruses for a healthy pregnancy
Viruses for a healthy pregnancy

Sequences of DNA in the human genome that originated from ancient viral infections have some surprising effects on our bodies and are even essential for a healthy pregnancy, according to an article in the February issue of Microbiology Today.

Retrovirus infections represent the most intimate host-pathogen relationship. The virus inserts a copy of its genome into the DNA of the host cell, resulting in an irreversible, stable and sometimes lifelong infection. If a sperm or egg cell is infected, the virus DNA can be passed down generations, permanently fixed in the germ line. As a result, an endogenous retrovirus (ERV) can exist for millions of years.

“Over the course of evolution, retroviruses have invaded the germ-line of our ancestors on numerous occasions. Now, human ERVs (HERVs) make up around 8% of our genome,” say Dr David Griffiths from the Moredun Research Institute and Cécile Voisset from the Faculté de Médecine et des Sciences de la Santé in France.

Although there are no viruses similar to these ancient pathogens currently infecting humans, there are some related viruses in animals. For a retrovirus to become part of the host genome it is usually inactivated by mutation or silencing so it does not express any proteins. An epidemic of neoplastic disease in Australian koalas is giving researchers the rare opportunity to study this process.

“Recent work has provided some tantalizing evidence supporting the roles of HERVs in normal physiology and also in disease,” says Dr Griffiths, “they can be seen as bona fide human genes.” Some HERVs may be crucial for a healthy pregnancy, whereas others have been linked to diseases like MS and cancer.

“It is only recently that the abundance of HERVs has been recognised and we are learning that they can have significant functions,” says Dr Griffiths.

Admin · 138 views · 1 comment
Categories: Articles, News
Jan292008

Microbes as climate engineers
Microbes as climate engineers

We might think we control the climate but unless we harness the powers of our microbial co-habitants on this planet we might be fighting a losing battle, according to an article in the February 2008 issue of Microbiology Today.

Humans are continually altering the atmosphere. “Arrogant organisms that we are, it is easy to view this as something entirely novel in Earth’s history,” says Dr Dave Reay from the University of Edinburgh. “In truth of course, micro-organisms have been at it for billions of years.”

Humans affect the atmosphere indirectly by their activities. Most human-induced methane comes from livestock, rice fields and landfill: in all of these places, microbes are actually responsible for producing the methane, 150 million tonnes a year. Microbes in wetlands produce an additional 100 million tonnes and those that live inside termites release 20 million tonnes of methane annually.

90 billion tonnes of carbon a year is absorbed from the atmosphere by the oceans, and almost as much is released; microbes play a key role in both. On land, a combination of primary production, respiration and microbial decomposition leads to the uptake of 120 billion tonnes of carbon every year and the release of 119 billion tonnes.

“The impact of these microbially-controlled cycles on future climate warming is potentially huge,” says Dr Reay. By better understanding these processes we could take more carbon out of the atmosphere using microbes on land and in the sea. Methane-eating bacteria can be used to catch methane that is released from landfill, Cyanobacteria could provide hydrogen fuel, and plankton have already become a feedstock for some biofuels.

“Microbes will continue as climate engineers long after humans have burned that final barrel of oil. Whether they help us to avoid dangerous climate change in the 21st century or push us even faster towards it depends on just how well we understand them.”

Admin · 113 views · 1 comment
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