Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days.
Sometimes, here at alt.engadget.com, we're literally on the bleeding edge of technology. We get to explore concepts and ideas that are almost nebular in nature. Not this week though, where there's a distinct utilitarian aroma in the air. The glittery overcoat of future science is replaced by the rolled-up sleeves of good old-fashioned engineering. A bit of sticky tape, a proof of concept omnidirectional bike and a hardware matrix wall. After all that, you'll probably want a beer to wash it down with. Fortunately for you, it's all here. This is alt-week.
Discussion and questions about student financial support arrangements - from government loans and grants to university bursaries. Please use the main Money & Finance forum for more general financial topics.
Any freshers got their student loan yet??
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Re: Any freshers got their student loan yet??
maintenance loan or tuition fee loan?, i don't need the maintenance and my tuition fee's are payed directly from student finance to the uni.
according to the online page the first payments should get to my uni at around November
Re: Any freshers got their student loan yet??
Apparently it can take up to a week after you've registered.
Re: Any freshers got their student loan yet??
I registered last week thursday when i moved in, so its been a week already...
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Trader Peter Mancuso, right, works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange Thursday, Sept. 20, 2012. A batch of worrying economic figures tugged stock markets slightly lower Thursday. Measures of manufacturing and business activity in both China and Europe slumped. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Trader Peter Mancuso, right, works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange Thursday, Sept. 20, 2012. A batch of worrying economic figures tugged stock markets slightly lower Thursday. Measures of manufacturing and business activity in both China and Europe slumped. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
NEW YORK (AP) ? U.S. stocks traded higher Friday, with investors latching on to a few mildly hopeful signs about the economy.
Shortly after noon Friday, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 43 points at 13,640. The Standard & Poor's 500 was up six to 1,466. The Nasdaq composite index was up 16 to 3,192.
Homebuilder KB Home swung to a quarterly profit by selling pricier homes. The stock popped $1.46, or more than 11 percent, to $14.57.
Darden Restaurants, parent of Olive Garden and Red Lobster, also reported a higher profit in its latest quarter. The stock rose $2.47, or more than 4 percent, to $57.19.
Apple, propelled by the frenzy around the release of the iPhone 5, rose $6.12, or just less than 1 percent, to $704.82.
And in Europe, Italy's premier and Greece's prime minister met and repeated their conviction for "the absolute need to safeguard the integrity of the eurozone," according to a statement from the Italian leader's office. Spain appeared near to working out terms for requesting a bailout from Europe.
Both developments points to a Europe that, while still grappling with a heavy debt crisis, is committed to finding a solution.
Still, the market's rise Friday and in recent weeks seems like a paradox against a backdrop of high unemployment, unimpressive economic growth and a looming fiscal cliff, when spending cuts and higher taxes could kick in this year.
That's because the rise has been more about the old adage to not "fight the Fed" rather than hope that the economy is proving.
This week, the Bank of Japan agreed to a new program where it would buy assets to try to prop up the country's market. Last week the Federal Reserve made a similar comment, and before that the European Central Bank did.
But the actions don't mean the economy is improving. In fact, they mean quite the opposite: that the central banks think the economy is bad enough that it can't survive on its own.
Timothy Leach, wealth management chief investment officer for U.S. Bank in San Francisco, described the central banks' actions as positive, but said they're buying time more than fixing underlying fiscal problems.
"But at least they're taking some of the pressure off," Leach said, "allowing policymakers some additional time to try to achieve those real solutions."
Signs of the underlying trouble were abundant.
The Labor Department reported Friday that unemployment rose in 26 states last month. The World Trade Organization cuts its estimates for growth in global trade this year and next.
Darden, despite its higher profits, noted it has to rework the menu to attract customers wary about spending.
Greece still hasn't agreed to a detailed plan to cut spending, which it must do to get the bailout money from Europe. Germany's finance minister argued that Spain doesn't need a second aid program, considering how it already got a bailout for its banks.
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ScienceDaily (Sep. 20, 2012) ? Tiny single-celled algae and nitrogen-fixing bacteria exchange carbon and nitrogen in a mutually beneficial relationship that helps fertilize the oceans
Isotope analysis shows carbon and nitrogen incorporated into cells in a symbiotic partnership. Arrows point to nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterial cells associated with the larger photosynthetic host cells. (Image courtesy of Rachel Foster, MPI)
Scientists have discovered an unusual symbiosis between tiny single-celled algae and highly specialized bacteria. Their partnership plays an important role in marine ecosystems, fertilizing the oceans by taking nitrogen from the atmosphere and "fixing" it into a form that other organisms can use.
Details of the symbiosis, published in the September 21 issue of Science, emerged from the investigation of a mysterious nitrogen-fixing microbe with a drastically reduced genome. First detected in 1998 by Jonathan Zehr, a professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, it now appears to be the most widespread nitrogen-fixing organism in the oceans. The microbe belongs to a group of photosynthetic bacteria known as cyanobacteria, but it lacks the genes needed to carry out photosynthesis and other essential metabolic pathways. Apparently, its association with a photosynthetic host cell makes those genes unnecessary.
"The cyanobacterium is a nitrogen-fixer, so it provides nitrogen to the host cell, and the host cell provides carbon to the cyanobacterium, which is lacking the metabolic machinery to get its own carbon," said Anne Thompson, a lead author of the paper and postdoctoral researcher in Zehr's lab at UC Santa Cruz. Rachel Foster of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology is the other lead author and contributed equally to this work.
Although the partners in the symbiosis have not been grown in the laboratory, Zehr's team and their collaborators have been able to characterize both partners using cell sorting, gene sequencing, and other techniques. The host cell is a type of single-celled algae in a class known as "prymnesiophytes," which are found throughout the world's oceans. In seawater samples sorted by flow cytometry, which separates cells by size and color, the host cells were discovered among the "photosynthetic picoeukaryotes," a mixed population of tiny single-celled algae in the 1- to 3-micron size range.
"Aside from the importance of nitrogen fixation in marine ecosystems, this is such an interesting symbiosis from an evolutionary perspective, because it can be seen as analogous to an early stage in the endosymbiosis that led to chloroplasts," Zehr said.
Chloroplasts, which carry out photosynthesis in all plants, evolved from symbiotic cyanobacteria that eventually became incorporated into their host cells in a process known as endosymbiosis. In the newly discovered nitrogen-fixing partnership, the cyanobacteria are mostly seen in an indentation at one end of the host cell.
"At this point, it's unclear exactly how the cyanobacteria are associated with the host cells. It looks like there may be a little groove in the host cell where the cyanobacteria fits," said Thompson. "The association is robust enough to go through the cell sorter and other preparations, but delicate enough that they separate if they're filtered or frozen and thawed."
In previous work, Zehr's team had studied the cyanobacteria, which they called UCYN-A, in samples processed at sea and brought back to the lab for cell sorting and genetic analysis. Despite being unable to grow it in the lab, they were able to sequence the microbe's complete genome and discover that it was missing the genes for several key metabolic pathways, suggesting that it might live in association with another organism. Thompson said researchers were only able to see the symbiotic partners together when they sorted freshly collected seawater samples on board the ship.
"Our collaborators at the University of Hawaii, Dave Karl and Ken Doggett, put a cell sorter into a portable laboratory, like a lab in a box, so now we can take the machine to sea and sort cells that minutes before were in their natural environment. That's how we found the association," Thompson said.
The exchange of carbon and nitrogen between the two partners was demonstrated using powerful analytic techniques developed and carried out by collaborators from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany. Seawater samples were incubated with stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen, then the cells in the samples were sorted by flow cytometry. A highly specific genetic probe was used to identify the UCYN-A cells among the "photosynthetic picoeukaryotes" separated out by the cell sorting equipment. Another key technique was nanometer-scale secondary ion mass spectrometry (nanoSIMS), which helped identify the associated cells and allowed researchers to quantify and image the carbon and nitrogen isotopes within individual cells.
"This combination of techniques is a great tool for microbiology because it couples phylogenetic identification with metabolic analysis," Thompson said. "We could see that the cyanobacteria were fixing the labeled nitrogen and transferring it to the host cells."
Genetic analysis of the host cell indicates its closest relative is the species Braarudosphaera bigelowii. In many species of prymnesiophytes, including B. bigelowii, the cells form external calcified plates, suggesting that the host cell in the symbiosis may have plates that are easily dislodged during processing of seawater samples. "That would be important, because cells with plates sink faster than other organisms, so the carbon they fix could end up being transported to the deep sea or the seafloor," Zehr said.
Zehr noted that it is very difficult to estimate the contribution of this symbiosis to global carbon and nitrogen cycles. Other algae are more abundant and probably much more important in terms of oceanic carbon fixation than the algal host in this symbiosis. But the cyanobacterial partner probably makes a significant contribution to global nitrogen fixation in the oceans, he said.
"Planktonic symbioses are very understudied and difficult to study, as the associations are often fragile and difficult to keep intact," said Foster. "Here we used multiple tools and kept the relationship integrity, and also identified one of the first examples of a seemingly mutualistic partnership present in the plankton."
Zehr has named the cyanobacterium Candidatus Atelocyanobacterium thalassa. ("Candidatus" indicates a candidate or provisional name, since the rules of bacteriological nomenclature require that a microbe be grown in culture before the name becomes official.)
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California - Santa Cruz. The original article was written by Tim Stephens.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
A. W. Thompson, R. A. Foster, A. Krupke, B. J. Carter, N. Musat, D. Vaulot, M. M. M. Kuypers, J. P. Zehr. Unicellular Cyanobacterium Symbiotic with a Single-Celled Eukaryotic Alga. Science, 2012; 337 (6101): 1546 DOI: 10.1126/science.1222700
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
If you are a homeowner in Appleton, there will be times when you will need to hire home improvement professionals maybe to fix something or to add more beauty to your home. One of the home improvement professionals that will often have to visit you are Appleton plumbing contractors. It is important that you have just one plumber who will attend to the plumbing needs in your home. Changing plumbers as you like could also mean that you will have to replace plumbing fixture frequently. Hence, this are some things that you need to do if you are to hire a good plumber.
It is important for every homeowner in Appleton to establish a plumber-client relationship before they run into trouble. It would definitely save you the stress of looking for a plumber when emergencies come up. Here are some things that you should consider when you are selecting a plumber for your household.
To start with, you should look out for a plumber that is licensed. Usually, every state issues a license to plumbers as a proof that they are qualified to be hired for any plumbing work. Thus, when you find a plumber that you want to select, you should ask him to show you his license. Look out for license number and call the licensing office to confirm that the license is genuine.
Another thing that you want to do before selecting a plumber is to ask for a proof of insurance. Normally, you are not expected to deal with professionals who are not licensed. Apart from the fact that your property is not safe with them, it also shows that they are not serious with their job. At the minimum, the plumber that you want to select should have liability and health insurance coverage.
In addition, you should consider how far the plumber is from your home. If you select a plumber who lives far away from your home and cannot attend to you when there are emergencies, then establishing a relationship with him in the first place was useless. Hence, you should do well to select a plumber that you can reach at anytime.
Moreover, you should ask the plumber whom you want to select for references as always. Ask the plumber to provide you with a list of his clients. Contact some of them to know more about the contractor. You should ask his clients how fast he responds to emergency calls. This will give you an insight as regards what you should expect from him.
However, you should not forgo the place of asking for recommendations. It will save you the stress of running boring background checks. Thus, you may ask your neighbors, colleagues, friends, or relatives to recommend a plumber for you.
You may also seek advice from a real estate agent regarding the plumber that you should select. The nature of their job gives them the opportunity to have a long list of home improvement professionals (plumbers inclusive). Thus, you should be able to get the contact of reliable Appleton plumbing contractors from a real estate broker.
The p53 gene plays a key role in the prevention of cancer, by blocking cell growth and triggering programmed cell death or apoptosis. If, however, p53 has mutated and become defective, the cancer cells can acquire the ability to evade apoptosis and become more resistant to therapy. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden have now obtained results from the first tests using a new substance that can restore the function of defective p53 and activate apoptosis in cancer cells.
The substance is known as APR-246 and has now been tested on humans in a phase I/II study, which was conducted on 22 patients with advanced blood or prostate cancer. Some of the patients came from the Haematology Centre at the Karolinska University Hospital in, Stockholm, where the study's lead investigator, consultant Dr Sren Lehmann is based. The remainder of the patients were from other clinics in Gothenburg, Lund, Uppsala and rebro.
The patients received daily infusions of APR-246 for four days. When the researchers analyzed the cancer cells taken before and after treatment, they saw indications that the p53 gene had been activated to varying degrees, and that this had triggered the suicide program in the cancer cells. Ten patients could be evaluated as regards the development of their cancer, and in two of them there were signs of tumour regression.
However, the study was actually not designed to test the clinical effects but to ascertain how well the substance was tolerated by the body. With the main adverse reactions confined to temporary tiredness, nausea, headache and confusion, their results would suggest that the substance is well tolerated.
"The side-effects were totally different to those produced by conventional chemotherapy, which bodes well for designing combination therapies," says Dr Lehmann. "And it's in precisely this kind of combination that we think the substance has the greatest potential. In previous laboratory studies we've seen that APR-246 has generated synergy gains when used with chemotherapy due to the mutually enhancing effects of both substances."
Defective p53 is considered one of the most common factors behind the development of cancer. In some cancers, such as ovarian cancer, the vast majority of tumours have defective p53. In total, the p53 tumour suppressor gene is mutated in at least half of all tumours.
"In theory, a drug that restores p53 function should be effective against many different kinds of cancer, provided that the individual tumour contains defective p53," says study team member Professor Klas Wiman. "We should keep in mind, however, that tumours are very complex."
APR-246 was discovered by Klas Wiman and colleagues at Karolinska Institutet, and the present study was led from Karolinska University Hospital in association with Aprea AB. Aprea AB's principal shareholder is Karolinska Development, a company listed on the NASDAQ OMX Stockholm exchange. Professor Wiman is co-founder and shareholder of Aprea, and a member of its board.
###
Publication: 'Targeting p53 in vivo: A first-in-man study with the p53-targeting compound APR-246 (PRIMA-1MET) in refractory hematological malignancies and prostate cancer', Sren Lehmann, Vladimir J.N. Bykov, Dina Ali, Ove Andrn, Honar Cherif, Ulf Tidefelt, Bertil Uggla, Jeffrey Yachnin, Gunnar Juliusson, Ali Moshfegh, Christer Paul, Klas G. Wiman and Per-Ola Andersson, Journal of Clinical Oncology, early online publication 10 September 2012, doi: 10.1200/JCO.2011.40.7783.
For further information, please contact:
Sren Lehmann, MD, PhD, Principal Investigator
Centre for Haematology and Regenerative Medicine (HERM), Karolinska Institutet
Haematology Centre, Karolinska University Hospital
Tel: +46 (0)8-58582677 or +46 (0)70-7604882
Email: soren.lehmann@ki.se
Klas G. Wiman, MD, PhD, Professor
Department of Oncology-Pathology, Karolinska Institutet
Tel: +46 (0)8-51779342 or +46 (0)73-9866586
Email: klas.wiman@ki.se
Contact the Press Office and download photos: ki.se/pressroom
Karolinska Institutet is one of the world's leading medical universities. It accounts for over 40 per cent of the medical academic research conducted in Sweden and offers the country's broadest range of education in medicine and health sciences. Since 1901 the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has selected the Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine.
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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.
Hopes that new substance will induce cancer cell suicidePublic release date: 18-Sep-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
The p53 gene plays a key role in the prevention of cancer, by blocking cell growth and triggering programmed cell death or apoptosis. If, however, p53 has mutated and become defective, the cancer cells can acquire the ability to evade apoptosis and become more resistant to therapy. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden have now obtained results from the first tests using a new substance that can restore the function of defective p53 and activate apoptosis in cancer cells.
The substance is known as APR-246 and has now been tested on humans in a phase I/II study, which was conducted on 22 patients with advanced blood or prostate cancer. Some of the patients came from the Haematology Centre at the Karolinska University Hospital in, Stockholm, where the study's lead investigator, consultant Dr Sren Lehmann is based. The remainder of the patients were from other clinics in Gothenburg, Lund, Uppsala and rebro.
The patients received daily infusions of APR-246 for four days. When the researchers analyzed the cancer cells taken before and after treatment, they saw indications that the p53 gene had been activated to varying degrees, and that this had triggered the suicide program in the cancer cells. Ten patients could be evaluated as regards the development of their cancer, and in two of them there were signs of tumour regression.
However, the study was actually not designed to test the clinical effects but to ascertain how well the substance was tolerated by the body. With the main adverse reactions confined to temporary tiredness, nausea, headache and confusion, their results would suggest that the substance is well tolerated.
"The side-effects were totally different to those produced by conventional chemotherapy, which bodes well for designing combination therapies," says Dr Lehmann. "And it's in precisely this kind of combination that we think the substance has the greatest potential. In previous laboratory studies we've seen that APR-246 has generated synergy gains when used with chemotherapy due to the mutually enhancing effects of both substances."
Defective p53 is considered one of the most common factors behind the development of cancer. In some cancers, such as ovarian cancer, the vast majority of tumours have defective p53. In total, the p53 tumour suppressor gene is mutated in at least half of all tumours.
"In theory, a drug that restores p53 function should be effective against many different kinds of cancer, provided that the individual tumour contains defective p53," says study team member Professor Klas Wiman. "We should keep in mind, however, that tumours are very complex."
APR-246 was discovered by Klas Wiman and colleagues at Karolinska Institutet, and the present study was led from Karolinska University Hospital in association with Aprea AB. Aprea AB's principal shareholder is Karolinska Development, a company listed on the NASDAQ OMX Stockholm exchange. Professor Wiman is co-founder and shareholder of Aprea, and a member of its board.
###
Publication: 'Targeting p53 in vivo: A first-in-man study with the p53-targeting compound APR-246 (PRIMA-1MET) in refractory hematological malignancies and prostate cancer', Sren Lehmann, Vladimir J.N. Bykov, Dina Ali, Ove Andrn, Honar Cherif, Ulf Tidefelt, Bertil Uggla, Jeffrey Yachnin, Gunnar Juliusson, Ali Moshfegh, Christer Paul, Klas G. Wiman and Per-Ola Andersson, Journal of Clinical Oncology, early online publication 10 September 2012, doi: 10.1200/JCO.2011.40.7783.
For further information, please contact:
Sren Lehmann, MD, PhD, Principal Investigator
Centre for Haematology and Regenerative Medicine (HERM), Karolinska Institutet
Haematology Centre, Karolinska University Hospital
Tel: +46 (0)8-58582677 or +46 (0)70-7604882
Email: soren.lehmann@ki.se
Klas G. Wiman, MD, PhD, Professor
Department of Oncology-Pathology, Karolinska Institutet
Tel: +46 (0)8-51779342 or +46 (0)73-9866586
Email: klas.wiman@ki.se
Contact the Press Office and download photos: ki.se/pressroom
Karolinska Institutet is one of the world's leading medical universities. It accounts for over 40 per cent of the medical academic research conducted in Sweden and offers the country's broadest range of education in medicine and health sciences. Since 1901 the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has selected the Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine.
[ | 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.
Want to have more fun eating popcorn? Skip the movies and head to the offices of?Popcorn Indiana?and say ?pop? when you spy the red gumball-like dispenser filled with popped kernels. It will raise its gun in your general direction and fire a piece your way.
?When you?re shooting a piece of popcorn, there?s only so accurate you can get it; you might have to maneuver a little bit to catch it,? an electrical engineer with the company?explains in the video below.
But shifting a little to the left or right to land the kernel is a small price to pay for the joy of snacking on command.
The Popinator, as the dispenser is called, is billed as ?a fully automated, voice activated launching machine that is triggered by the word ?pop,?? he says.?
It uses what?s called a binaural microphone system which operates akin to our human ears, calculating the location of the person asking for a kernel based on small differences in the arrival time of sound waves and their reflections.
The contraption appears to be a big hit around the Indiana Popcorn offices. No word yet on when or if a version will be available for consumers. For the sake of our movie theater enjoyment, though, perhaps it?s better if the device is never mass produced.
???via Gizmag
John Roach is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.
If you are a homeowner in Appleton, there will be times when you will need to hire home improvement professionals maybe to fix something or to add more beauty to your home. One of the home improvement professionals that will often have to visit you are Appleton plumbing contractors. It is important that you have just one plumber who will attend to the plumbing needs in your home. Changing plumbers as you like could also mean that you will have to replace plumbing fixture frequently. Hence, this are some things that you need to do if you are to hire a good plumber.![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](http://www.eurekalert.org/images/back2e.gif){kind=small}
Public release date: 18-Sep-2012
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