GEN-ERIC News

A biomedical engineer at Purdue University has developed a new method to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation that promises to be more effective than standard CPR because it increases nourishing blood flow through the heart by 25 percent over the current method. A new technique is desperately needed because conventional CPR has a success rate of 5 percent to 10 percent, depending on how fast rescuers are able to respond and how well the procedure is performed. For every one minute of delay, the resuscitation rate decreases by 10 percent. “In other words, at 10 minutes, the resuscitation is absolutely ineffective,” said Leslie Geddes, Showalter Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Purdue’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering. “Any medical procedure that had that low a success rate would be abandoned right away. But the alternative is not very good, either: Don’t do CPR and the person is going to die.”

Shops in Germany have begun installing new check-out systems that allow customers to pay via their fingerprints. Supermarkets, hardware stores and pubs across the country say the system, which scans customers’ fingerprints and deducts the bill from their bank accounts, has been a massive success. To use the scanning machines, which cost 2,000 euros each and are supplied by German firm IT Werke, customers must have their fingerprints taken and leave their addresses and banking details with the shop.

Airline passengers and crews who gripe about poor cabin air quality could have a new culprit to blame: the oils on their skin, hair and clothing. A study in the current issue of ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology suggests interactions between body oils and ozone found in airplane cabins could lead to the formation of chemical byproducts that might worsen nasal irritation, headaches, dry eyes and lips, and other common air traveler complaints. In simulated flights lasting four hours, American and Danish researchers placed two groups of 16 volunteers in a mockup of an airline cabin and then exposed them to varying levels of ozone and air flow, including levels typically experienced in real flights. Consistently, ozone in the cabin increased production of identifiable chemical byproducts including nonanal and decanal, a pair of aldehyde compounds associated with headaches, nasal irritation and with other symptoms of “sick building” syndrome. More than half of the byproducts were the result of reactions with skin, hair and clothing, according to Charles Weschler, Ph.D., the study’s lead author, who is with University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. These oxidative byproducts are produced when ozone reacts with squalene, oleic acid and other compounds in natural skin oils, he said.

Scientists used light to establish what’s called “entanglement” between two atoms, which were trapped a meter apart in separate enclosures (think of entangling like controlling the outcome of one coin flip with the outcome of a separate coin flip). David Moehring, the lead author of the paper who did this research as a U-M graduate student, says the most important feature of this experiment is the distance between the two atoms. In this experiment, the researchers used two atoms to function as qubits, or quantum bits, storing a piece of information in their electron configuration. They then excited each atom, inducing electrons to fall into a lower energy state and emit one photon, or one particle of light, in the process. The atoms, which were actually ions of the rare-earth element ytterbium, are capable of emitting two different types of photon of different wavelengths. The type of photon released by each atom indicates the particular state of the atom. Because of this, each photon was entangled with its atom. By manipulating the photons emitted from each of the two atoms and guiding them to interact along a fiber optic thread, the researchers were able to detect the resulting photon clicks and entangle the atoms.

Scientists at New Jersey’s Rutgers University and in other labs are developing edible films and powders that kill E.coli and Salmonella. The films could line bags of fresh spinach to kill E. coli, while a powder might be sprinkled on packages of chicken to stop salmonella, The New York Times reported Wednesday. The films are basically a thin edible wrap that can be infused with molecules from cloves, thyme or other foods that can keep unhealthy bacteria from growing, the newspaper said.

Your brain might be your next videogame controller. That might sound pretty awesome, but the prospect of brain-controlled virtual joysticks has some scientists worried that games might end up controlling our brains. Several makers of brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs – devices that facilitate operating a computer by thought alone – claim the technology is poised to jump from the medical sector into the consumer gaming world in 2008. Companies including Emotiv Systems and NeuroSky say they’ve released BCI-based software-development kits. Gaming companies may release BCI games next year, but many scientists worry that users brains’ might be subject to negative effects. For example, the devices sometimes force users to slow down their brain waves. Afterward, users have reported trouble focusing their attention.

“The biggest difference between time and space is that you can’t reuse time.”

2001: Evidence provided for black hole theory
At a scientific conference in Washington, D.C., this day in 2001, scientists described an observation of energy flares that provided strong evidence of the theorized black hole at the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy.

1975: Lynette (“Squeaky”) Fromme attempted to assassinate U.S. President Gerald R. Ford.

1972: Palestinian terrorists attacked the Olympic Village in Munich, West Germany, during the Summer Olympic Games, taking hostage and eventually killing 11 members of the Israeli team.

1836: Sam Houston was elected president of the Republic of Texas.

“Everybody was familiar with the concept of women’s biological clock, but when we introduced ‘male’ to the equation, the reaction was ‘What are you talking about? Men can have children at any age,’” recalls urologist Harry Fisch, director of the Male Reproductive Center at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City and author of The Male Biological Clock. “It became a social issue. Men do not like to be told they have a problem.” Nonetheless, a virtual tidal wave of recent research has made it irrefutable: Not only does male fertility decrease decade by decade, especially after age 35, but aging sperm can be a significant and sometimes the only cause of severe health and developmental problems in offspring, including autism, schizophrenia, and cancer. The older the father, the higher the risk. But what’s truly noteworthy is not that infertility increases with age—to some degree, we’ve known that all along—but rather that older men who can still conceive may have such damaged sperm that they put their offspring at risk for many types of disorders and disabilities.

The mayor of a Siberian oil town has ordered his bureaucrats to stop using expressions such as “I don’t know” and “I can’t.” Or look for another job. Alexander Kuzmin, 33, who is mayor of Megion, has banned these and 25 other phrases as a way to make his administration more efficient, his spokeswoman said Tuesday. “It’s a suggestion to the staff that they should think before saying something,” Oksana Shestakova said by telephone. “To say ‘I don’t know’ is the same as admitting your helplessness.” To reinforce the ban, a framed list of the banned expressions has been hanging on the wall next to Kuzmin’s office for the past two weeks, Shestakova said. Some of the other prohibited phrases are “What can we do?” “It’s not my job,” “It’s impossible,” “I’m having lunch,” “There is no money,” and “I was away/sick/on vacation.”