GEN-ERIC News

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Jay Levy says he has been stung by Apple’s iPhone pact with AT&T after he took an Iphone on a Mediterranean cruise. They didn’t use their phones, but when they got back they had a 54-page monthly bill of nearly $4,800 from AT&T Wireless. The problem was that their three Iphones were racking up a bill for data charges using foreign phone charges. The Iphone regularly updates e-mail, even while it’s off, so that all the messages will be available when the user turns it on.

Previously, researchers thought that, when reading, both eyes focused on the same letter of a word. But a UK team has found this is not always the case. In fact, almost 50% of the time, each of our eyes locks on to different letters simultaneously. At the BA Festival of Science in York, the researchers also revealed that our brain can fuse two separate images to obtain a clear view of a page. Sophisticated eye-tracking equipment allowed the team to pinpoint which letter a volunteer’s eyes focused on, when reading 14-point font from one metre away. Rather than the eyes moving smoothly over text, they make small jerky movements, focusing on a particular word for an instant and then moving along the sentence. Periods when the eyes are still are called fixations.

Jatropha, an ugly, fast-growing and poisonous weed that has been used as a remedy for constipation, may someday power your car. The plant, resilient to pests and resistant to drought, produces seeds with up to 40 per cent oil content that when crushed can be burned in a diesel car while the residue can be processed into biomass for power plants. Although jatropha has been used for decades by farmers in Africa as a living fence because its smell and taste repel grazing animals, the New York Times reports that jatropha may replace biofuels like ethanol that require large amounts of water, fertilizer, and energy, making their environmental benefits limited. Jatropha requires no pesticides, little water other than rain and no fertilizer beyond the nutrient-rich seed cake left after oil is pressed from its nuts. Poor farmers living close to the equator are planting jatropha on millions of acres spurred on by big oil companies like British Petroleum that are investing in jatropha cultivation.

Your computer could one day track your movements around the house by monitoring the electrical noise made by household appliances as you switch them on and off. Such a system could be cheaper and simpler to operate than the suite of sensors that researchers currently envisage for “smart homes". Scientists and visionaries have long imagined smart homes that could cater to our every whim. But their ideas all rely on cameras, microphones or other sensors in every room to track the locations of the occupants. The new method relies on a device plugged into a single standard wall socket that monitors noise in the electrical supply caused by electrical devices being switched on and off. A computer monitoring the device can then infer that a person must be in that location.

Dutch scientists have found that frequent use of mobile phones leads to slower brain activity but that their capability to focus on specific issues increases, it was reported on Monday. The study on the long-term effects of mobile phone usage was published in the September edition of International Journal of Neuroscience. The study was conducted by the Radboud University of Nijmegen and Brainclinics Diagnostic, a group of independent Dutch scientists doing individual brain research and applied scientific functional brain research. The phenomenon of decreased brain activity among mobile phone users resembles the process that occurs in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients, the researchers say.

The glue is made up of polyelectrolytes, which are polymers that are electrically charged and can change their shape in response to their environment. A polyelectrolyte can either stretch out, when at one pH level, or roll into a ball at another pH. The researchers, led by Dr Mark Geoghegan in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Sheffield, showed that if oppositely charged polyelectrolytes are brought together in water they stick tightly. This was widely known, but until now the strength of this bond and the fact that the process can be reversed and repeated was a mystery. The study showed that the adhesion was nearly as strong as epoxy glue. Not only that, but when the water was made acidic, the two materials came apart. The separation of the two could also be reversed by immersing them again in water. The work is expected to have applications in nanotechnology where changes in pH levels can be used to control the not as yet invented nanoscale machines of the future. It is also thought it could aid in drug delivery.

In the cerebral cortex, the brain’s powerful central processing unit responsible for higher functions, specialized subdivisions known as areas are laid out like a map, but little is known about the genetic forces that shape the geography of our brains. In this week’s advance online edition of Nature Neuroscience, an international collaboration between researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine in Italy reports the discovery of a novel function for a factor that negotiates the borders between areas and balances their sizes and positions relative to each other. The factor, COUP-TF1, ensures that the frontal areas don’t claim too much cortical real estate. Without COUP-TF1 keeping the frontal areas in check, they undergo massive expansion squeezing and pushing neighboring sensory areas literally to the back of the brain. The findings show how the cortex is properly parceled into “frontal” areas that control higher functions related to emotions and the movements of our bodies versus areas that interpret our sensory environment and allow us to see, hear and feel. Because primary areas in humans differ by two-fold or more in the normal population, these findings may explain these size differences, which appear to account, at least in part, for differences between individuals in behavior and skills.

A NASA-supported study has introduced a new way to detect lightning outbreaks inside a hurricane from thousands of miles away, giving forecasters new insight into just how powerful an oncoming storm will be. As a result, researchers can now investigate with greater accuracy how the rate of lightning strikes produced within a hurricane’s eyewall is tied to the changing strength of the hurricane. A hurricane’s eyewall is the inner heat-driven region of the storm that surrounds the eye, where the most intense rainfall and most powerful winds occur. By monitoring the intensity of lightning near a hurricane’s eye, scientists will be able to improve their forecasts of when a storm will unleash its harshest conditions.

“You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.”