May 22, 2013 ? A revelation of how photoreceptive cells in the eye distinguish between different light sources could pave the way for a novel class of optical devices.
Millions of years of evolution have molded our eyes into highly sensitive optical detectors, surpassing even many human-made devices. Now, Leonid Krivitsky and his co-workers at the A*STAR Data Storage Institute and the A*STAR Institute of Medical Biology, Singapore, have shown that the photoreceptor cells found in the retina are even sensitive to the statistical properties of light. This ability could be harnessed in 'bioquantum' interfaces, a novel class of optical devices that use biological systems to detect the quantum nature of light.
Light comprises discrete bundles of energy known as photons. A 40-Watt light bulb, for example, creates more than 1019 (a one followed by 19 zeros) visible photons every second. Nevertheless, attenuated sources that generate light pulses containing just a few photons are also useful. In such ultralow-intensity light pulses, the statistical distribution of photons emitted in a single pulse depends on the light source.
Warm light sources such as light-bulb filaments generate photons in bunches. Lasers, in contrast, create photons randomly -- each is emitted independently of the next. Krivitsky and his co-workers experimentally demonstrated that rod photoreceptor cells in the eye can distinguish between pulses of light from either a laser or a thermal light based only on these differing distributions. "Showing that such cells can assess photon statistics provides hope for accessing the quantum properties of light using biodetectors," says Krivitsky.
Krivitsky and his team trapped a photoreceptor cell from a frog on the end of a suction pipette. Then they fired green-light laser pulses at the cell through an optical fiber. The same device could also imitate a thermal light source when they placed a rotating disk of ground glass and an aperture into the beam path.
They observed that rhodopsin molecules in the cell absorbed the incoming photons, which generated an ion current. The researchers amplified and measured this current as the average number of photons in each light pulse increased. They noticed a much sharper increase in detected current for the laser light than the pseudothermal pulses. This is because, while the average photon number is the same, an individual pseudothermal pulse was more likely to have a low number of photons. The photon distribution of the laser pulses, on the other hand, was much narrower.
The two types of photon emitters investigated in these experiments are examples of 'classical' light sources. "The next step is to investigate quantum light, such as pulses with a fixed number of photons," notes Krivitsky.
The A*STAR-affiliated researchers contributing to this research are from the Data Storage Institute and the Institute of Medical Biology
After previously investing in the company, Google has now acquired Makani Power, a green energy startup that is currently building airborne wind turbines. The acquisition was first reported in Brad Stone’s Businessweek story about Google X, and judging from Stone’s story, the team will join Google X. Google invested $10 million in the Alameda, Calif.-based company in 2006 and another $5 million in 2008. As far as we can see, this also marks the first time Google has acquired a company specifically for its Google X skunkworks. Stone reports that Google CEO Larry Page approved the acquisition, but as Google X’s director Astro Teller notes, Page said that X “could have the budget and the people to go do this, but that we had to make sure to crash at least five of the devices in the near future.? The company was founded by Saul Griffith and Don Montague, a former World Cup windsurfer. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. Google has confirmed this acquisition and provided us with the following statement from Astro Teller, Google X’s “Captain of Moonshots”: Creating clean energy is one of the most pressing issues facing the world, and Google for years has been interested in helping to solve this problem. ?Makani Power?s technology has opened the door to a radical new approach to wind energy. ?They?ve turned a technology that today involves hundreds of tons of steel and precious open space into a problem that can be solved with really intelligent software. ?We?re looking forward to bringing them into Google[x]. Makani says it hopes that this acquisition will provide it with “the resources to accelerate our work to make wind energy cost competitive with fossil fuels.”?The acquisition comes just a week after the company completed the first autonomous flight of its Wing 7 prototype. Here is how TechCrunch columnist Matylda Czarnecka described the project back in 2012: The Makani Airborne Wind Turbines, which resemble mini airplanes, are launched when wind speeds reach 3.5 meters per second. Rotors on each blade help propel it into orbit, and double as turbines once airborne. The blades are tethered to the ground with a cord that delivers power to throw them into the sky and receives energy generated by the turbines to be sent to the grid-connected ground station.
Contact: Jade Boyd jadeboyd@rice.edu 713-348-6778 Rice University
Arranging nanoparticles in geometric patterns allows for control of light with light
HOUSTON -- (May 21, 2013) -- Rice University scientists have unveiled a robust new method for arranging metal nanoparticles in geometric patterns that can act as optical processors that transform incoming light signals into output of a different color. The breakthrough by a team of theoretical and applied physicists and engineers at Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) is described this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Rice's team used the method to create an optical device in which incoming light could be directly controlled with light via a process known as "four-wave mixing." Four-wave mixing has been widely studied, but Rice's disc-patterning method is the first that can produce materials that are tailored to perform four-wave mixing with a wide range of colored inputs and outputs.
"Versatility is one of the advantages of this process," said study co-author Naomi Halas, director of LANP and Rice's Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a professor of biomedical engineering, chemistry, physics and astronomy. "It allows us to mix colors in a very general way. That means not only can we send in beams of two different colors and get out a third color, but we can fine-tune the arrangements to create devices that are tailored to accept or produce a broad spectrum of colors."
The information processing that takes place inside today's computers, smartphones and tablets is electronic. Each of the billions of transistors in a computer chip uses electrical inputs to act upon and modify the electrical signals passing through it. Processing information with light instead of electricity could allow for computers that are both faster and more energy-efficient, but building an optical computer is complicated by the quantum rules that light obeys.
"In most circumstances, one beam of light won't interact with another," said LANP theoretical physicist Peter Nordlander, a co-author of the new study. "For instance, if you shine a flashlight at a wall and you cross that beam with the beam from a second flashlight, it won't matter. The light that comes out of the first flashlight will pass through, independent of the light from the second.
"This changes if the light is traveling in a 'nonlinear medium,'" he said. "The electromagnetic properties of a nonlinear medium are such that the light from one beam will interact with another. So, if you shine the two flashlights through a nonlinear medium, the intensity of the beam from the first flashlight will be reduced proportionally to the intensity of the second beam."
The patterns of metal discs LANP scientists created for the PNAS study are a type of nonlinear media. The team used electron-beam lithography to etch puck-shaped gold discs that were placed on a transparent surface for optical testing. The diameter of each disc was about one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Each was designed to harvest the energy from a particular frequency of light; by arranging a dozen of the discs in a closely spaced pattern, the team was able to enhance the nonlinear properties of the system by creating intense electrical fields.
"Our system exploits a particular plasmonic effect called a Fano resonance to boost the efficiency of the relatively weak nonlinear effect that underlies four-wave mixing," Nordlander said. "The result is a boost in the intensity of the third color of light that the device produces."
Graduate student and co-author Yu-Rong Zhen calculated the precise arrangement of 12 discs that would be required to produce two coherent Fano resonances in a single device, and graduate student and lead co-author Yu Zhang created the device that produced the four-wave mixing -- the first such material ever created.
"The device Zhang created for four-wave mixing is the most efficient yet produced for that purpose, but the value of this research goes beyond the design for this particular device," said Halas, who was recently named a member of the National Academy of Sciences for her pioneering research in nanophotonics. "The methods used to create this device can be applied to the production of a wide range of nonlinear media, each with tailored optical properties."
###
High-resolution IMAGES are available for download at:
http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/0520-FANO-Mix-lg.jpg
CAPTION: Physicists and engineers from Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics have unveiled a robust new method for arranging metal nanoparticles in geometric patterns that can act as optical processors that transform incoming light signals into output of a different color.
CAPTION: By arranging optically tuned gold discs in a closely spaced pattern, Rice University scientists created intense electrical fields and enhanced the nonlinear optical properties of the system. Here a computer model displays the plasmonic interactions that give rise to the intense fields.
CAPTION: Gold discs tuned to capture the energy from two incoming beams of light can produce output of a third color. Here a computer animation shows how the electromagnetic wave (red=positive, blue=negative) from the incoming light propagates through the system as a series of plasmonic waves.
CREDIT: Yu-Rong Zhen/Rice University
A copy of the PNAS paper is available at:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1220304110
This release can be found online at:
http://news.rice.edu/2013/05/21/rice-unveils-method-for-tailoring-optical-processors/
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Contact: Jade Boyd jadeboyd@rice.edu 713-348-6778 Rice University
Arranging nanoparticles in geometric patterns allows for control of light with light
HOUSTON -- (May 21, 2013) -- Rice University scientists have unveiled a robust new method for arranging metal nanoparticles in geometric patterns that can act as optical processors that transform incoming light signals into output of a different color. The breakthrough by a team of theoretical and applied physicists and engineers at Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) is described this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Rice's team used the method to create an optical device in which incoming light could be directly controlled with light via a process known as "four-wave mixing." Four-wave mixing has been widely studied, but Rice's disc-patterning method is the first that can produce materials that are tailored to perform four-wave mixing with a wide range of colored inputs and outputs.
"Versatility is one of the advantages of this process," said study co-author Naomi Halas, director of LANP and Rice's Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a professor of biomedical engineering, chemistry, physics and astronomy. "It allows us to mix colors in a very general way. That means not only can we send in beams of two different colors and get out a third color, but we can fine-tune the arrangements to create devices that are tailored to accept or produce a broad spectrum of colors."
The information processing that takes place inside today's computers, smartphones and tablets is electronic. Each of the billions of transistors in a computer chip uses electrical inputs to act upon and modify the electrical signals passing through it. Processing information with light instead of electricity could allow for computers that are both faster and more energy-efficient, but building an optical computer is complicated by the quantum rules that light obeys.
"In most circumstances, one beam of light won't interact with another," said LANP theoretical physicist Peter Nordlander, a co-author of the new study. "For instance, if you shine a flashlight at a wall and you cross that beam with the beam from a second flashlight, it won't matter. The light that comes out of the first flashlight will pass through, independent of the light from the second.
"This changes if the light is traveling in a 'nonlinear medium,'" he said. "The electromagnetic properties of a nonlinear medium are such that the light from one beam will interact with another. So, if you shine the two flashlights through a nonlinear medium, the intensity of the beam from the first flashlight will be reduced proportionally to the intensity of the second beam."
The patterns of metal discs LANP scientists created for the PNAS study are a type of nonlinear media. The team used electron-beam lithography to etch puck-shaped gold discs that were placed on a transparent surface for optical testing. The diameter of each disc was about one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Each was designed to harvest the energy from a particular frequency of light; by arranging a dozen of the discs in a closely spaced pattern, the team was able to enhance the nonlinear properties of the system by creating intense electrical fields.
"Our system exploits a particular plasmonic effect called a Fano resonance to boost the efficiency of the relatively weak nonlinear effect that underlies four-wave mixing," Nordlander said. "The result is a boost in the intensity of the third color of light that the device produces."
Graduate student and co-author Yu-Rong Zhen calculated the precise arrangement of 12 discs that would be required to produce two coherent Fano resonances in a single device, and graduate student and lead co-author Yu Zhang created the device that produced the four-wave mixing -- the first such material ever created.
"The device Zhang created for four-wave mixing is the most efficient yet produced for that purpose, but the value of this research goes beyond the design for this particular device," said Halas, who was recently named a member of the National Academy of Sciences for her pioneering research in nanophotonics. "The methods used to create this device can be applied to the production of a wide range of nonlinear media, each with tailored optical properties."
###
High-resolution IMAGES are available for download at:
http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/0520-FANO-Mix-lg.jpg
CAPTION: Physicists and engineers from Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics have unveiled a robust new method for arranging metal nanoparticles in geometric patterns that can act as optical processors that transform incoming light signals into output of a different color.
CAPTION: By arranging optically tuned gold discs in a closely spaced pattern, Rice University scientists created intense electrical fields and enhanced the nonlinear optical properties of the system. Here a computer model displays the plasmonic interactions that give rise to the intense fields.
CAPTION: Gold discs tuned to capture the energy from two incoming beams of light can produce output of a third color. Here a computer animation shows how the electromagnetic wave (red=positive, blue=negative) from the incoming light propagates through the system as a series of plasmonic waves.
CREDIT: Yu-Rong Zhen/Rice University
A copy of the PNAS paper is available at:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1220304110
This release can be found online at:
http://news.rice.edu/2013/05/21/rice-unveils-method-for-tailoring-optical-processors/
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Editor's note:?Glenn Solomon?is a partner with GGV Capital. Some of his recent investments include Pandora, Successfactors, Isilon, Domo, Square, Zendesk, Quinstreet, and Nimble Storage. Stanford-born and Seattle-based Tableau Software (DATA) enjoyed a tremendous debut on the public markets on Friday, closing on its first day of trading at over $50/share, up over 60 percent from its $31/share IPO price. The company raised over $250 million through the sale of approximately 14 percent?of the company, and its enterprise value now sits at approximately $2.5 billion.
Last week, when Smith + Gill Architects unveiled its design for Imperial Tower, which will become Mumbai?s tallest building (by a lot!), their description of the project confounded many critics. ?The building,? the architects explained, ?is designed to confuse the wind.? Huh? Curious to know exactly what that meant, I got in touch with the Gordon Gill, one half of the Chicago-based office.
WASHINGTON (AP) ? One more time, with feeling! The Republican-led House voted yet again Thursday to repeal President Barack Obama's health care law, knowing full well that won't stop it.
Only months away from the rollout of coverage for uninsured Americans, it was the 37th attempt in a little more than two years by House Republicans to eliminate, defund or partly scale back the Affordable Care Act. The Democratic-led Senate and the president will simply ignore the House action, which came on a virtual party line vote, 229-195.
But in a Congress where spin often trumps legislation, Republicans see a political advantage to keeping the pressure up as the administration tries to get all the moving parts of the law finally working.
Starting this fall, uninsured people who can't get coverage through their jobs will be able to sign up for government-subsidized insurance that takes effect Jan. 1. The rollout promises to be bumpy because about half the states are still resisting the law, and congressional Republicans won't provide the administration with funds it says are needed for a smooth implementation.
Democrats said the House vote was a pointless exercise. They noted that the ACA ? as the law is known ? has been upheld by the Supreme Court, and millions are already receiving some benefits, from young adults able to stay on a parent's insurance until age 26, to seniors on Medicare whose high prescription drug bills have been reduced.
Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California said the vote was "a waste of the public's time."
Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., called it an "obsession ... bordering on the absurd."
But Republicans see a soft target in a costly program that continues to divide the country.
They're hoping that implementation problems next year will help the GOP take control of the Senate in the midterm congressional elections and build on its House majority. Part of the political strategy behind Thursday's vote was to give freshmen Republicans a chance to vote on full repeal of what they dismiss as "Obamacare."
"Republicans will continue to work to scrap the law in its entirety so we can focus on patient-centered reforms that lower costs and protect jobs," said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.
What that alternative would look like, no one really knows, because Republicans have not presented a plan of their own since Obama's law was debated in Congress more than three years ago.
Boehner said a GOP approach would include medical malpractice reforms, risk pools for people with pre-existing medical problems, and letting individuals buy coverage from out-of-state insurers to spur competition. But nothing has been finalized.
Boehner also pointed out that not even Obama believes the health care law is perfect. On seven previous occasions GOP efforts to scale back parts of the law were eventually accepted by the president and signed into law. They included a Medicaid formula that would have allowed thousands of middle-class people to qualify for nearly free coverage, a long-term care insurance plan likely to go belly-up, and paperwork requirements protested by small businesses. The administration sees those as relatively minor changes.
The House debate got creative. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., compared the health care law both to a looming iceberg and an impending train wreck. Bachmann said there was a point to holding another repeal vote. "It's our job to defend liberty," she said. "And that's why we have to end this horrible piece of legislation." Back home, her political operation teed up an ad to spread word of the vote and her role in it.
Three years after its passage, Americans remain divided over Obama's signature domestic policy achievement. Even the uninsured are confused about whether they will be helped. Many people who have coverage worry it will raise their costs and make it harder for them to see their doctors. Some of the law's underlying goals, such as a ban on insurers turning away people with pre-existing conditions, remain popular. However, the requirement that virtually all Americans carry coverage or face fines is still widely disliked.
Although health insurance premiums have not gone down, as Obama once promised, there's no evidence that the law is breaking the bank. Health care costs have been growing at historically low rates, providing a respite for government programs like Medicare and employer plans as well. Experts say most people with job-based health insurance are unlikely to see major impacts from the law next year.
Less certain is the outlook for people who buy their own coverage and for small businesses. The insurance industry says premiums in the individual market are likely go up by double digits in most states. The administration says part of the reason costs could go up is because the coverage will be more comprehensive. But many people will receive tax credits under the law to offset those costs. Still, the anxiety is building as the law's full implementation draws closer.
On one of its official Twitter accounts, the White House tweeted "It's. The. Law." adding the hashtag (hash)ObamaCareInThreeWords.
___
Associated Press writer Brian Bakst in St. Paul, Minn., contributed to this report.
May 14, 2013 ? An international team of scientists have revealed a new species of ichthyosaur (a dolphin-like marine reptile from the age of dinosaurs) from Iraq, which revolutionises our understanding of the evolution and extinction of these ancient marine reptiles.
The results, produced by a collaboration of researchers from universities and museums in Belgium and the UK and published today (May 15) in Biology Letters, contradict previous theories that suggest the ichthyosaurs of the Cretaceous period (the span of time between 145 and 66 million years ago) were the last survivors of a group on the decline.
Ichthyosaurs are marine reptiles known from hundreds of fossils from the time of the dinosaurs. "They ranged in size from less than one to over 20 metres in length. All gave birth to live young at sea, and some were fast-swimming, deep-diving animals with enormous eyeballs and a so-called warm-blooded physiology," says lead author Dr Valentin Fischer of the University of Liege in Belgium.
Until recently, it was thought that ichthyosaurs declined gradually in diversity through multiple extinction events during the Jurassic period. These successive events were thought to have killed off all ichthyosaurs except those strongly adapted for fast-swimming life in the open ocean. Due to this pattern, it has been assumed that ichthyosaurs were constantly and rapidly evolving to be ever-faster open-water swimmers; seemingly, there was no 'stasis' in their long evolutionary history.
However, an entirely new ichthyosaur from the Kurdistan region of Iraq substantially alters this view of the group. The specimen concerned was found during the 1950s by British petroleum geologists. "The fossil -- a well-preserved partial skeleton that consists of much of the front half of the animal -- wasn't exactly being treated with the respect it deserves. Preserved within a large, flat slab of rock, it was being used as a stepping stone on a mule track," says co-author Darren Naish of the University of Southampton. "Luckily, the geologists realized its potential importance and took it back to the UK, where it remains today," adds Dr Naish, who is based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton.
Study of the specimen began during the 1970s with ichthyosaur expert Robert Appleby, then of University College, Cardiff. "Robert Appleby recognised that the specimen was significant, but unfortunately died before resolving the precise age of the fossil, which he realised was critical," says Jeff Liston of National Museums Scotland and manager of the research project. "So continuation of the study fell to a new generation of researchers."
In the new study (which properly includes Appleby as an author), researchers name it Malawania anachronus, which means 'out of time swimmer'. Despite being Cretaceous in age, Malawania represents the last-known member of a kind of ichthyosaur long believed to have gone extinct during the Early Jurassic, more than 66 million years earlier. Remarkably, this kind of archaic ichthyosaur appears characterised by an evolutionary stasis: they seem not to have changed much between the Early Jurassic and the Cretaceous, a very rare feat in the evolution of marine reptiles.
"Malawania's discovery is similar to that of the coelacanth in the 1930s: it represents an animal that seems 'out of time' for its age. This 'living fossil' of its time demonstrates the existence of a lineage that we had never even imagined. Maybe the existence of such Jurassic-style ichthyosaurs in the Cretaceous has been missed because they always lived in the Middle-East, a region that has previously yielded only a single, very fragmentary ichthyosaur fossil," adds Dr Fischer.
Thanks to both their study of microscopic spores and pollen preserved on the same slab as Malawania, and to their several analyses of the ichthyosaur family tree, Fischer and his colleagues retraced the evolutionary history of Cretaceous ichthyosaurs. In fact, the team was able to show that numerous ichthyosaur groups that appeared during the Triassic and Jurassic ichthyosaur survived into the Cretaceous. It means that the supposed end of Jurassic extinction event did not ever occur for ichthyosaurs, a fact that makes their fossil record quite different from that of other marine reptile groups.
When viewed together with the discovery of another ichthyosaur by the same team in 2012 and named Acamptonectes densus, the discovery of Malawania constitutes a 'revolution' in how we imagine ichthyosaur evolution and extinction. It now seems that ichthyosaurs were still important and diverse during the early part of the Cretaceous. The final extinction of the ichthyosaurs -- an event that occurred about 95 million years ago (long before the major meteorite-driven extinction event that ended the Cretaceous) -- is now even more confusing than previously assumed.
Microsoft and BlackBerry are fighting to become viable alternatives in the mobile market, and while Android and iOS accounted for a majority of smartphone shipments in the first quarter, Windows Phone made some significant moves that propelled it ahead of BlackBerry. Research firm IDC found that Windows Phone shipped 7 million smartphones, accounting for 3.2% of all shipments in the first quarter of 2013, more than double the year-ago quarter. Microsoft was able to overtake BlackBerry, which despite its new BlackBerry 10 operating system, saw smartphone shipments decline from 9.7 million units to 6.3 million units, accounting for 2.9% of global channel sales.
[More from BGR: Google announces ?the end of search as we know it?]
?Windows Phone claiming the third spot is a first and helps validate the direction taken by Microsoft and key partner Nokia,? said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC. ?Given the relatively low volume generated, the Windows Phone camp will need to show further gains to solidify its status as an alterative to Android or iOS.?
[More from BGR: Microsoft uses Google CEO?s own words against him in YouTube app battle]
Android shipments increased from 90.3 million in the first quarter of 2012 to a whopping 162.1 million units in Q1 2013. Google and its vendor partners accounted for 75% of all smartphones shipped in the first quarter, up from 59.1% in Q1 of 2012.
iPhone shipment growth slowed significantly, increasing a mere 6.6% from 35.1 million units to 37.4 million last quarter. Apple?s operating system accounted for 17.3% of shipments, a decrease from 23% in the same quarter of last year.
?Underpinning the worldwide smartphone market is the constantly shifting operating system landscape,? noted Ramon Llamas, research manager at IDC. ?Android and iOS accounted for more than the lion?s share of smartphones in the first quarter, but a closer examination of the other platforms reveals turnaround and demand for alternatives. Windows Phone has benefited from Nokia?s participation, and BlackBerry?s new BB10 devices have already hit a million units shipped in its first quarter of availability.?
May 9, 2013 ? New research reveals that Solanaceae -- a flowering plant family with some species producing foods that are edible sources of nicotine -- may provide a protective effect against Parkinson's disease. The study appearing today in Annals of Neurology, a journal of the American Neurological Association and Child Neurology Society, suggests that eating foods that contain even a small amount of nicotine, such as peppers and tomatoes, may reduce risk of developing Parkinson's.
Parkinson's disease is a movement disorder caused by a loss of brain cells that produce dopamine. Symptoms include facial, hand, arm, and leg tremors, stiffness in the limbs, loss of balance, and slower overall movement. Nearly one million Americans have Parkinson's, with 60,000 new cases diagnosed in the U.S. each year, and up to ten million individuals worldwide live with this disease according to the Parkinson's Disease Foundation. Currently, there is no cure for Parkinson's, but symptoms are treated with medications and procedures such as deep brain stimulation.
Previous studies have found that cigarette smoking and other forms of tobacco, also a Solanaceae plant, reduced relative risk of Parkinson's disease. However, experts have not confirmed if nicotine or other components in tobacco provide a protective effect, or if people who develop Parkinson's disease are simply less apt to use tobacco because of differences in the brain that occur early in the disease process, long before diagnosis.
For the present population-based study Dr. Susan Searles Nielsen and colleagues from the University of Washington in Seattle recruited 490 patients newly diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at the university's Neurology Clinic or a regional health maintenance organization, Group Health Cooperative. Another 644 unrelated individuals without neurological conditions were used as controls. Questionnaires were used to assess participants' lifetime diets and tobacco use, which researchers defined as ever smoking more than 100 cigarettes or regularly using cigars, pipes or smokeless tobacco.
Vegetable consumption in general did not affect Parkinson's disease risk, but as consumption of edible Solanaceae increased, Parkinson's disease risk decreased, with peppers displaying the strongest association. Researchers noted that the apparent protection from Parkinson's occurred mainly in men and women with little or no prior use of tobacco, which contains much more nicotine than the foods studied.
"Our study is the first to investigate dietary nicotine and risk of developing Parkinson's disease," said Dr. Searles Nielsen. "Similar to the many studies that indicate tobacco use might reduce risk of Parkinson's, our findings also suggest a protective effect from nicotine, or perhaps a similar but less toxic chemical in peppers and tobacco." The authors recommend further studies to confirm and extend their findings, which could lead to possible interventions that prevent Parkinson's disease.
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Right on schedule, AT&T has launched its 32GB version of the Samsung Galaxy S4. If you're after a Galaxy S4 with a bit more internal storage -- and after the recent controversy surrounding the S4's available memory, we wouldn't blame you -- it'll set you back $249.99 on a two-year plan. That's $50 more than the base 16GB model, which goes for $199.99. If you're buying it outright, you're looking at a hefty $669.99 price tag.
At the moment it seems AT&T is only stocking the 32GB Galaxy S4 in the "black mist" color option, as the store page for the 32GB model doesn't allow you to pick a color.
Anyone picking up a 32GB GS4 today? Or are there any 16GB buyers out there wishing they'd waited a little longer and paid a bit more? Hit the comments and share your thoughts.
Molten magma erupted onto the seafloor freezes to glass that contains clues to its origin in Earth's deep mantle.
By Becky Iskin LiveScience
Most of Earth's carbon clusters deep beneath the surface, in hot mantle rocks that churn below the planet's thin crust.
"Most people probably don't recognize that the vast majority of carbon ? the backbone of all life ? is located in the deep Earth, below the surface ? maybe even 90 percent of it," Elizabeth Cottrell, a geologist at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History, said in a statement. Cottrell is lead author of a new study examining how the mantle's carbon cycle changes the chemistry of lava that forms new ocean crust.
At mid-ocean ridges, the gaping fractures that criss-cross Earth's ocean floors, lava oozes out directly from the mantle. Studying this lava gives geoscientists clues to what's going on thousands of miles below the surface.
Cottrell and co-author Katherine Kelley of the University of Rhode Island snared seafloor rocks from around the world, then analyzed their chemistry. Ratios of certain isotopes (atoms of an element with different numbers of neutrons), as well as oxidized iron, suggest carbon reservoirs stored for billions of years strongly influence mantle chemistry, the authors reported in the May 2 issue of the journal Science Express.
When the mantle melts and erupts at mid-ocean ridges, it produces a handful of distinct rock chemistries. The reason for the different chemistries could be different sources. For example, the melt could come from ancient, subducted oceanic crust, driven deep into the mantle by plate tectonics, or a deep plume rising from near the core-mantle boundary.
The researchers discovered that one of these handful of rock chemistries, called enriched mantle, tends to carry reduced iron, while another, deemed depleted mantle, matches up with oxidized iron. The pairings make sense, if carbon is playing a role in controlling iron chemistry in the mantle, the researchers said.
"Carbon provides both a mechanism to reduce the iron and also a reasonable explanation for why these reduced lavas are enriched in ways we might expect from melting a carbon-bearing rock," Cottrell said.
Email Becky Oskin or follow her @beckyoskin. Follow us?@OAPlanet, Facebook?and Google+. Original article on LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A bipartisan group of U.S. senators introduced legislation on Wednesday to block Iran's access to billions of dollars worth of foreign currency reserves, the latest step by Congress to try to slow the Islamic Republic's disputed nuclear program.
Lawmakers in Washington say the government in Tehran taps the reserves held in banks around the world, mostly in euros, to get around U.S. and EU sanctions on oil sales that have damaged Iran's economy.
Iran converts the reserves, estimated to be worth $60 billion to $100 billion, into local currencies in order to finance imports and stabilize its budget, the lawmakers say.
The United States and the European Union believe that Iran is enriching uranium to levels that could be used in nuclear weapons. Tehran says the program is intended for producing power and medical supplies.
If passed, the bill introduced by Senators Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican, Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, and three others, would block such currency conversions of the reserves and be retroactive to May 9.
Financial institutions around the world are "on notice" to halt all foreign currency transactions on behalf of blacklisted Iranian banks and sectors "or risk being cut off from the U.S. financial market," the lawmakers said in a statement.
The bill seeks to limit the ability of the Central Bank of Iran and National Iranian Oil Company to conduct transactions in foreign currencies.
The measure is expected to be attached later this month to Iran sanctions legislation in the House of Representatives that was introduced in February by Ed Royce, the chairman of that chamber's foreign affairs committee.
(Reporting by Timothy Gardner and Rachelle Younglai; Editing by Maureen Bavdek and Gunna Dickson)
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) ? Just a few years ago, Gulf Arab women usually only felt comfortable showing off their fashion sense at ladies-only parties or family gatherings. In public, at least in their home countries, the standard all-black abaya ? a simple floor-length covering and accompanying head scarf ? was the only culturally accepted option.
But now, a new generation of abaya designers is giving the traditional garment a twist with choices of fabric, designs and even some expensive bling to allow Gulf women a host of style options.
The basic look of the abaya remains unchanged: black with long sleeves and a flowing form that somewhat conceals the shape of the body. Gulf culture and government directives encourage "national dress" for both sexes: Men wear full-length robes that are mostly white, but include other colors such as beige and blue.
Designers, however, have increasingly recognized the demand for abayas with a bit of extra flair. It can be as subtle as embroidery on the sleeves and hems or as eye-catching as gems stitched into the fabric. Top European fashion houses such as Dior, Nina Ricci and Alberta Ferretti have already put their stamps on abayas in the wealthy Gulf market for local woman, known as khalijiyat, after the Arabic name for the Gulf.
The most expensive abaya so far has been valued at $17.7 million, created by British designer Debbie Wingham and displayed in Dubai in March. It features different colored diamonds including the world's most expensive and rare, the red diamond. There are more than 200,000 stitches in 14-karat white gold thread.
Among the Gulf countries, the United Arab Emirates ? and particularly Dubai ? is the center of the specialty abaya industry with exports going across the Middle East and North Africa and to some African Muslim countries. But since the Arab Spring uprisings, the UAE has sharply reduced visas from countries including Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and Libya.
This has led to a steep drop in sales. Kaleem Khan, a Bangladeshi abaya designer at the Abu Hail Center in Dubai, estimated that sales were down 70 percent because regular buyers cannot get visas to the UAE.
Basara, the "casual" offshoot of the well-renowned old-school ryoriya Aoyagi (Tokushima and Tokyo), has spawned a new branch, on the ground floor of?the massive, freshly-opened Tokyo Square Garden?development in Kyobashi.
As mentioned in my recent Japan Times column, Basara's specialty is its tomato sukiyaki. Even at midday, the full kaiseki banquet is an extensive investment ? both of time and (at ?6,090 or ?10,500) money. Thankfully, there is an abbreviated version that?is not just more affordable but also quite feasible within a standard one-hour lunch break.
What you ask for is the Akebono course (?2,940) with the meat option. Strictly speaking it's not really sukiyaki, as it's not cooked at the table in front of you. Instead, the official name is gyu shigure-ni tomato-sukiyaki shu-tate: beef lightly simmered (like "autumn rain"), prepared in the tomato sukiyaki style. Same difference, really.
The course opens with the impressive kuruma hassun starter tray (as introduced in?this earlier post).
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Next, a small cube of firm/soft tamago-dofu, bathed in a lightly sweetened dashi and adorned with a slice of sudachi.
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And then the main course: the beef. It's made with wagyu ? though not from a name-brand provenance ? from Shizuoka.
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? accompanied by rice, akadashi miso soup, pickles and tea.
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Lest that sound too traditional, dessert was impeccably non-Japanese: a custard pudding with rich caramel sauce, topped with a very booze-infused raisin.
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The main branch of Basara is in Shiba, about halfway between Tokyo Tower and Tamachi. It also has an outpost in Jakarta.?
So far, the new Kyobashi branch does not feature on the official website. But the site for Tokyo Square Garden is here?
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) ? MediaTek Inc., Asia's largest chipset designer, said Monday its first quarter profit grew 51 percent from a year earlier, boosted by China's flourishing smartphone market.
The Taiwanese company's net profit totaled 3.7 billion New Taiwan dollars ($125 million) in the January-March period on revenue of NT$24 billion.
MediaTek helped fuel the sales growth of China's low-cost handsets by providing integrated, customized chipsets that significantly shorten the time and cost of marketing a new product.
It has delivered more sophisticated chipsets over the past year to run entry-level smartphones produced in China.
The company shipped 35 million chipsets that power low- and middle-cost smartphones in the first quarter, accounting for more than 40 percent of overall revenue, said MediaTek President Hsieh Ching-jiang.
Chipset volume is expected to grow to 45 to 50 million in the second quarter with demand for smartphones remaining strong in China and in countries such as India and Indonesia, he said.
The chip designer recently launched a dual-core mobile chip for smartphones. Using the cutting-edge 28 nanometer process to produce, the new chip could help MediaTek maintain its edge over its Chinese rivals, analysts say.
The company is also moving into the tablet computer market. Its processor has been selected by Taiwan's Acer Inc. to power a new 7-inch tablet, codenamed Iconia A1, which will sell for as low as $169.
MediaTek last year announced a $3.8 billion takeover of its Taiwanese rival MStar Semiconductor. Chips designed by the two companies for use in televisions have a 70 percent share of the global market. The deal has yet to get approval from China's antitrust regulators. Taiwanese regulators are investigating alleged insider trading in the deal.
Justin Bieber prides himself on a close relationship with his fans -- but there is such a thing as too close. While Justin was playing Dubai on Sunday, an audience member rushed the stage and grabbed the 19-year-old pop star, knocking over a grand piano in the process. Security quickly intervened, and Justin continued to play the rest of the show -- even the encore. Watch the crazy video below!
(Reuters) - Shares of Jamie DimonInc , which were given a boost last week when the social networking company reported first quarter results that largely met analysts' expectations, may be over valued, financial newspaper Barron's said on Sunday.
Facebook closed at $28.31 on Friday, 60 percent higher than last summer's low-point, but well below its initial public offering price of $38 last May. However, the company is probably worth no more than $25 a share, Barron's said, reiterating a stance it took in February.
Facebook trades for 75 times its 2013 earnings estimate using generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), while Google trades for less than 20 times its 2013 earnings, the article said.
While a sharp rise in mobile ad revenue helped Facebook increase its overall revenues by 38 percent in the quarter versus a year earlier, that mobile ad revenue came at the expense of desktop ad revenue, which was flat, Barron's said.
The paper warned that desktop ad revenue may start to drop, meaning investors are assigning a "hefty" market value to Facebook of $71 billion, based largely on just $1.5 billion in mobile ad revenues. Expenses were up 60 percent in the quarter, it added.
Google has been investing in a range of products, from YouTube, self-driving cars, interactive eye wear, maps and Android software. "Facebook seems more focused on barraging subscribers with ads to meet Street profit expectations," Barron's said.
(Reporting by John McCrank in New York; Editing by Marguerita Choy)
Valve's bid to lure gamers away from Microsoft's platform just got a little sweeter: Left 4 Dead 2 is finally available on Linux. Despite early appearances in early leaks, the game has been absent from Steam's Linux compatible library. The wait might have been worth it -- early ports of the game apparently only ran at six frames per second, but it eventually surpassed its Windows counterpart. Now, Valve is looking towards is community to fine tune the port even further, offering a fully functional beta client to Steam users who already own the game. Although the focus here is Linux compatibility, the company is offering the beta to Windows and Mac users as well, and says that running the game on any system helps with testing. Ready to take down the horde? Fire up Ubuntu and get started. Otherwise, you can check out the company's official announcement at the source link below.
Apr. 30, 2013 ? The atoms that make up ordinary matter fall down, so do antimatter atoms fall up? Do they experience gravity the same way as ordinary atoms, or is there such a thing as antigravity?
These questions have long intrigued physicists, says Joel Fajans of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), because "in the unlikely event that antimatter falls upwards, we'd have to fundamentally revise our view of physics and rethink how the universe works."
So far, all the evidence that gravity is the same for matter and antimatter is indirect, so Fajans and his colleague Jonathan Wurtele, both staff scientists with Berkeley Lab's Accelerator and Fusion Research Division and professors of physics at the University of California at Berkeley -- as well as leading members of CERN's international ALPHA experiment -- decided to use their ongoing antihydrogen research to tackle the question directly. If gravity's interaction with anti-atoms is unexpectedly strong, they realized, the anomaly would be noticeable in ALPHA's existing data on 434 anti-atoms.
The first results, which measured the ratio of antihydrogen's unknown gravitational mass to its known inertial mass, did not settle the matter. Far from it. If an antihydrogen atom falls downward, its gravitational mass is no more than 110 times greater than its inertial mass. If it falls upward, its gravitational mass is at most 65 times greater.
What the results do show is that measuring antimatter gravity is possible, using an experimental method that points toward much greater precision in future. They describe their technique in the April 30, 2013 edition of Nature Communications.
How to measure a falling anti-atom
ALPHA creates antihydrogen atoms by uniting single antiprotons with single positrons (antielectrons), holding them in a strong magnetic trap. When the magnets are turned off, the anti-atoms soon touch the ordinary matter of the trap's walls and annihilate in flashes of energy, pinpointing when and where they hit. In principle, if the experimenters knew an anti-atom's precise location and velocity when the trap is turned off, all they'd have to do is measure how long it takes to fall to the wall.
ALPHA's magnetic fields don't turn off instantly, however; almost 30-thousandths of a second pass before the fields decay to near zero. Meanwhile flashes occur all over the trap walls at times and places that depend on the anti-atoms' detailed but unknown initial locations, velocities, and energies.
Wurtele says, "Late-escaping particles have very low energy, so gravity's influence is more apparent on them. But there were very few late escaping anti-atoms; only 23 of the 434 escaped after the field had been turned off for 20-thousandths of a second."
Fajans and Wurtele worked with their ALPHA colleagues and with Berkeley Lab associates, UC Berkeley lecturer Andrew Charman and postdoc Andre Zhmoginov, to compare simulations with their data and separate gravity's effects from those of magnetic field strength and particle energy. Much statistical uncertainty remained.
"Is there such a thing as antigravity? Based on free-fall tests so far, we can't say yes or no, " says Fajans. "This is the first word, however, not the last."
ALPHA is being upgraded to ALPHA-2, and precision tests may be possible in one to five years. The anti-atoms will be laser-cooled to reduce their energy while still in the trap, and the magnetic fields will decay more slowly when the trap is turned off, increasing the number of low-energy events. Questions physicists and nonphysicists have been wondering about for more than 50 years will be subject to tests that are not only direct but could be definitive.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
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Journal Reference:
C. Amole, M. D. Ashkezari, M. Baquero-Ruiz, W. Bertsche, E. Butler, A. Capra, C. L. Cesar, M. Charlton, S. Eriksson, J. Fajans, T. Friesen, M. C. Fujiwara, D. R. Gill, A. Gutierrez, J. S. Hangst, W. N. Hardy, M. E. Hayden, C. A. Isaac, S. Jonsell, L. Kurchaninov, A. Little, N. Madsen, J. T. K. McKenna, S. Menary, S. C. Napoli, P. Nolan, A. Olin, P. Pusa, C. ? Rasmussen, F. Robicheaux, E. Sarid, D. M. Silveira, C. So, R. I. Thompson, D. P. van der Werf, J. S. Wurtele, A. I. Zhmoginov, A. E. Charman. Description and first application of a new technique to measure the gravitational mass of antihydrogen. Nature Communications, 2013; 4: 1785 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2787
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After previously investing in the company, Google has now acquired Makani Power, a green energy startup that is currently building airborne wind turbines. The acquisition was first reported in Brad Stone’s Businessweek story about Google X, and judging from Stone’s story, the team will join Google X. Google invested $10 million in the Alameda, Calif.-based company in 2006 and another $5 million in 2008. As far as we can see, this also marks the first time Google has acquired a company specifically for its Google X skunkworks. Stone reports that Google CEO Larry Page approved the acquisition, but as Google X’s director Astro Teller notes, Page said that X “could have the budget and the people to go do this, but that we had to make sure to crash at least five of the devices in the near future.? The company was founded by Saul Griffith and Don Montague, a former World Cup windsurfer. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. Google has confirmed this acquisition and provided us with the following statement from Astro Teller, Google X’s “Captain of Moonshots”: Creating clean energy is one of the most pressing issues facing the world, and Google for years has been interested in helping to solve this problem. ?Makani Power?s technology has opened the door to a radical new approach to wind energy. ?They?ve turned a technology that today involves hundreds of tons of steel and precious open space into a problem that can be solved with really intelligent software. ?We?re looking forward to bringing them into Google[x]. Makani says it hopes that this acquisition will provide it with “the resources to accelerate our work to make wind energy cost competitive with fossil fuels.”?The acquisition comes just a week after the company completed the first autonomous flight of its Wing 7 prototype. Here is how TechCrunch columnist Matylda Czarnecka described the project back in 2012: The Makani Airborne Wind Turbines, which resemble mini airplanes, are launched when wind speeds reach 3.5 meters per second. Rotors on each blade help propel it into orbit, and double as turbines once airborne. The blades are tethered to the ground with a cord that delivers power to throw them into the sky and receives energy generated by the turbines to be sent to the grid-connected ground station.![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](http://www.eurekalert.org/images/back2e.gif){kind=small}
Public release date: 21-May-2013
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Editor's note:?Glenn Solomon?is a partner with GGV Capital. Some of his recent investments include Pandora, Successfactors, Isilon, Domo, Square, Zendesk, Quinstreet, and Nimble Storage. Stanford-born and Seattle-based Tableau Software (
