Solar flare could swallow the Earth

By Michelle Starr   |   September 6, 2012   

 

Click for full size.
(Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO)

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has captured a gorgeous image of a massive eruption that could engulf the Earth several times over.
On the night of 31 August, NASA reported, a filament of solar material, which had been in the Sun's atmosphere, erupted at a speed of roughly 1450 kilometres per second.
And, although it didn't erupt directly towards the Earth, it did have an effect. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, came into contact with the Earth's magnetosphere, causing an aurora borealis phenomenon to appear over Canada.
Below, you can see the size of the CME compared to the size of the Earth. You can watch a video of the eruption and see a picture of the aurora here. Spectacular.

(Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO)

http://www.cnet.com.au/solar-flare-could-swallow-the-earth-339341452.htm

Brain damaged patient uses mind to tell neurologists he's not in pain

By Liat Clark

13 November 12

A man thought to be in a permanent vegetative state for the past 12 years has communicated that he is not in any pain using only his brain, causing his neurologist to say the medical textbooks need to be rewritten.
Thirty-nine-year-old Canadian Scott Routley had been completely unresponsive following a car accident and, despite his parents insisting he communicated with them by lifting his thumb or moving his eyes, neurologists said routine physical assessments demonstrated he had a total lack of awareness.
However, using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique developed in 2010 by the University of Cambridge's Medical Research Council, the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre at Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge and the University of Liege, a team of neuroscientists was able to ask Routley a series of questions with yes or no answers, and receive reliable and accurate responses.
"Scott has been able to show he has a conscious, thinking mind," said Adrian Owen, who co-authored the original study and led a team investigating Routley's case at the Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario. "We have scanned him several times and his pattern of brain activity shows he is clearly choosing to answer our questions. We believe he knows who and where he is."
Patients in a vegetative state appear "awake" and exhibit involuntary reflexes such as opening their eyes, but unlike coma patients their non-communicativeness is down to severe brain damage. Owen's research proves this does not necessarily mean they do not have the ability to understand.
Owen's technique involves asking a patient a series of questions while scanning their brain using an fMRI machine, which picks up and tracks the flow of oxygen-rich blood around the brain. By watching this flow in real time, the team could track distinct changes and use this information to formulate a code -- two test scenarios were put to the patients that would eventually be used to represent "yes" or "no". For instance, when asked to imagine playing tennis healthy volunteers would exhibit activity in their premotor cortex (which relates to movement planning), and in their parahippocampal gyrus (which relates to the encoding and retrieval of memories) when asked to imagine walking around their home. If individuals are told to use the first scenario to represent "yes" and the second to represent "no", they can purposefully alter their brain activity to have something of a conversation.
When the technique was first developed, Owen and his team would put the scenarios to patients in a vegetative state to see if their brain activity would change accordingly, and then ask factual questions to see if that brain function was responsive rather than passive. As part of the corresponding study it was shown that one in five of the vegetative patients investigated could use brain function to communicate and, at one hospital, the Royal Hospital for Neurodisability in London, 43 percent of the 60 patients tested had the capacity to communicate.
Two years on, Owen and his team are finally putting this research to its best use: engaging their subjects in a meaningful way. They chose Routley because he responded so clearly to the tennis and walking test scenarios.
"Asking a patient something important to them has been our aim for many years," commented Owen. "In future we could ask what we could do to improve their quality of life. It could be simple things like the entertainment we provide or the times of day they are washed and fed." This is the first time a severely brain damaged patient has ever been able to communicate anything about their medical state. Since his physical condition has not changed however -- he is still unresponsive by technical medical standards -- the medical position on vegetative states will have to be rewritten to include Owen's technique, said his neurologist of ten years, Bryan Young.
"I was impressed and amazed that he was able to show these cognitive responses. He had the clinical picture of a typical vegetative patient and showed no spontaneous movements that looked meaningful."
Steven Graham, another patient involved in the research, proved he had made new memories by responding to say "yes", when questioned if his sister had had a daughter -- Graham's sister gave birth five years after his injury.
Although Routley's responsiveness represents the first time a severely brain damaged patient has ever been able to comment on their own feelings, Owen has so far not gone so far as to ask patients involved if they have had thoughts of ending their lives. Being able to communicate changes in care would certainly present these individuals with a great improvement in their quality of life, but it is difficult to conceive what state of mind a person would be in after being unable to communicate -- despite having the mental faculties to understand -- for over a decade. Watching Routley's response to the question, "are you in pain?" in the BBC programme, however, it is evident how incredibly emotional the outcome is for everyone in involved -- so, similarly, we cannot know what it means to Routley to be able to express this, and to let his family know.
BBC's Panorma has been following Owen and his team, as well as patients at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in Putney, for more than a year as part of a programme airing 13 November at 10.35pm on BBC One, The Mind Reader: Unlocking My Voice.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-11/13/vegetative-man-communicates-with-mind

After Fukushima, neither side sees a nuclear future

EXCLUSIVE

Disaster ... members of a Japanese government panel inspect the damaged building which housed reactor number three at Fukushima in June, 2011. Photo: AFP

FUKUSHIMA's tsunami aftermath has quashed consideration of nuclear power in Australia, with the government's energy white paper arguing there is no compelling economic case and insufficient community acceptance. The Coalition will not contest the conclusion when the long-awaited white paper is released on Thursday, setting policy directions for the next two decades.
The bipartisan reluctance to debate nuclear power comes despite the fact that some senior Labor and Coalition figures privately support the idea.
The Resources Minister, Martin Ferguson, has said it should remain ''a live debate''. The Foreign Affairs Minister, Bob Carr, said before he re-entered politics: ''I support nuclear power because I take global warming so very seriously. [It] should certainly play a role in Australia's future mix of energy sources.''

Backflipped on nuclear power stance ... Coalition leader Tony Abbott. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

The deputy Liberal leader, Julie Bishop, has said it should be considered ''in the mix'' and Senator Barnaby Joyce has said: ''If we are fair-dinkum about reducing carbon emissions … then uranium is where it's going to be.''

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But Labor and the Coalition are formally opposed to domestic use of nuclear power, and the Fukushima tsunami aftermath has reinforced that political judgment. The Greens are opposed to nuclear power and uranium mining.
Labor argues nuclear power is not economically necessary in Australia, since the carbon tax and the renewable energy target are already shifting power generation to renewables.
The Coalition leader, Tony Abbott, once said he believed nuclear power was the only realistic way for Australia to cut emissions, but at the last election he argued the time was not right because Australia still had abundant reserves of coal and gas. The Coalition had ''no policy to promote nuclear power''.
In fact, neither major party has advocated nuclear power since John Howard went to the 2007 election with an in-principle stance in favour and was attacked with a Labor television advertising campaign asking in which marginal seat the nuclear reactors would be built.
A review of nuclear energy for Mr Howard was conducted by Dr Ziggy Switkowski, who still believes Australia will eventually turn to nuclear power. ''Fukushima has certainly delayed a serious debate about nuclear power by quite a few years, but we are basing our hopes for low-emission baseload power on geothermal and carbon capture and storage, neither of which has proven viable, so I think we will have to have the debate eventually,'' he said.
Dr Switkowski said Fukushima appeared to have polarised public opinion about nuclear power.
The draft energy white paper said because of the time needed for plant approval and developing regulations and rules, there would be at least 10 to 15 years between a decision to go ahead with nuclear power and its development.
The paper will also discuss energy market reform, which the government will pursue at next month's meeting with premiers to prevent a repeat of recent steep rises in electricity prices due to ''over-investment'' in electricity networks.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/political-news/after-fukushima-neither-side-sees-a-nuclear-future-20121106-28w57.html

6 billion-dollar hand blows our minds

By Michelle Starr   |   November 6, 2012 

(Screenshot by Michelle Starr/CNET Australia)

The BeBionic 3 is the most advanced bionic hand in the world. Nigel Ackland, who lost his right hand in an accident, shows off what it can do.
When metal smelter Nigel Ackland's right forearm was crushed in an industrial blender, he underwent six months of surgery before deciding that there was nothing to be done, and finally had his limb amputated. Then, he met up with BeBionic, who fitted him with the second version of its bionic hand; and now he's been upgraded to the new third for a four-month trial.
The BeBionic 3 is a myoelectric prosthesis — that is, it interprets voluntary muscle contractions in Ackland's arm to move the fingers and rotate the wrist. The motor control is so fine that Ackland can type, grip keys and credit cards, cook and dress himself with both hands.
Watch him operate the hand in the video below, and visit the BeBionic website to see what it can do.

3D printing of real human tissue

There has been a burgeoning sense of excitement over the past few years about 3D printing. Printing an object as you would a document, albeit slowly, layer-by-layer, has been used to prototype products for awhile now, and 3D printing is entering the consumer marketplace quickly.
With the opening of MakerBot's new brick-and-mortar retail store in NYC, day-to-day use of 3D printing is starting to seem much more grounded in reality -- especially since you can own an actual desktop 3D printer for only a couple grand.
There are also promising applications of 3D Printing for medical treatment. 3D printing technology has already been used to make surgical models, prosthetic limbs, dentures, and hearing aids. Recently, researchers at companies like Organovo have had some sucess with printing actual functional human tissue for use in medical research and regenerative therapies.
We may only be a decade or so away from the ability to print actual human organs, which could possibly be made from cultures of a patient's own tissue. This would be wonderful, because if a patient's own cells can be used to make the replacement organ, it ought to really cut down on organ rejection, and hopefully also cut down on the need for expensive and debilitating anti-rejection drugs.
Type "Bioprinting" into the YouTube search box and you'll be amazed. Prepare to lose an hour or two of your day. Or simply take five minutes to check out a great quick explanation and graphical representation of the technological possibilities in this entertaining YouTube video.



http://www.zdnet.com/3d-printing-of-real-human-tissue-7000006723/