GEN-ERIC News

What if you could avoid the flu and other viruses simply by getting dressed? That’s the idea behind two garments that are part of the “Glitterati” clothing line designed by Olivia Ong, a senior design major at Cornell University. It’s not the casually stylish appearance of the dress and jacket that has attracted attention from clothing manufacturers, tech blogs and even military research labs, but rather something that can’t be seen: a sprinkling of nanoparticles intended to protect the wearers of these garments from invisible threats to their health. The upper part of the dress is made from cotton coated with silver nanoparticles that deactivate bacteria and viruses. The jacket’s hood, sleeves and pockets contain palladium nanoparticles that act like tiny catalytic converters to break down harmful components of air pollution. The dress and jacket are known as “functional clothing”—garments that do more than just make you look cool—and they are growing in popularity. Already on the market are shirts with bug repellent, antimicrobial underwear and stain-resistant trousers. But Ong’s creations are among the first to qualify as genuine nanotextiles, fabrics in which the active particles are evenly distributed and less than 100 nanometers in diameter, or about one thousandth the thickness of cotton fibers.

The MIT libraries has a web page up of an old entrance exam as required for freshman to enter the institute. subjects include english, geometry, algebra, and arithmetic.

A cancer patient says she was left alone in a CT scanner for hours after a technician apparently forget about her. When she finally crawled out of the device she found herself locked inside the closed clinic. Elvira Tellez, 67, of Tucson said she called her son in a panic, and he told her to call 911. Pima County sheriff’s deputies arriving at the oncology office had guided her in unlocking the office door to let them in, said Deputy Dawn Hanke, a department spokeswoman. The deputies contacted the office manager, who was not aware of the situation. Tellez was taken to a hospital as a precaution, then released early the next day.

A computer program that emulates the human brain falls for the same optical illusions humans do. It suggests the illusions are a by-product of the way babies learn to filter their complex surroundings. Researchers say this means future robots must be susceptible to the same tricks as humans are in order to see as well as us. For some time, scientists have believed one class of optical illusions result from the way the brain tries to disentangle the colour of an object and the way it is lit. An object may appear brighter or darker, either because of the shade of its colour, or because it is in bright light or shadows. The brain learns how to tackle this through trial and error when we are babies, the theory goes. Mostly it gets it right, but occasionally a scene contradicts our previous experiences. The brain gets it wrong and we perceive an object lighter or darker than it really is – creating an illusion.

Patients showing signs of heart disease are at nearly double the risk of also having colon cancer, perhaps because unhealthy habits and inflammation are at the root of both, researchers said on Tuesday. The association between heart disease, the single leading cause of death in industrialized countries, and the second most common type of cancer was confirmed in a study of more than 600 patients evaluated at the University of Hong Kong. Previous studies have noted the increased likelihood of heart disease and colon cancer in the same patients, the study said. The two illnesses share several risk factors: smoking, high-fat diet, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and sedentary lifestyle. “Both colorectal (tumors) and (coronary artery disease) probably develop through the mechanism of chronic inflammation,” study author Dr. Annie On On Chan of the University of Hong Kong wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Equipment powering the internet accounts for 9.4% of electricity demand in the U.S., and 5.3% of global demand, according to research by David Sarokin at online pay-for-answers service Uclue. Worldwide, that’s 868 billion kilowatt-hours per year. The total includes the energy used by desktop computers and monitors (which makes up two-thirds of the total), plus other energy sinks including modems, routers, data processing equipment and cooling equipment.

Astronomers who stumbled upon a powerful burst of radio waves said on Thursday they had never seen anything like it before, and it could offer a new way to search for colliding stars or dying black holes. They were searching for pulsars – a type of rotating compacted neutron star that sends out rhythmic pulses of radiation – when they spotted the giant radio signal. It was extremely brief but very strong, and appears to have come from about 3 billion light-years away – a light-year being the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles.

Dramatic daily variations in the cockroach’s learning ability were discovered by a new study performed by Vanderbilt University biologists and published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “This is the first example of an insect whose ability to learn is controlled by its biological clock,” says Terry L. Page, the professor of biological sciences who directed the project. The few studies that have been done with mammals suggest their ability to learn also varies with the time of day. For example, a recent experiment with humans found that people’s ability to acquire new information is reduced when their biological clocks are disrupted, particularly at certain times of day. Similarly, several learning and memory studies with rodents have found that these processes are modulated by their circadian clocks. One study in rats associated jet lag with retrograde amnesia. In the current study, the researchers taught individual cockroaches to associate peppermint – a scent that they normally find slightly distasteful – with sugar water, causing them to favor it over vanilla, a scent they find universally appealing. The researchers trained individual cockroaches at different times in the 24-hour day/night cycle and then tested them to see how long they remembered the association. They found that the individuals trained during the evening retained the memory for several days. Those trained at night also had good retention. During the morning, however, when the cockroaches are least active, they were totally incapable of forming a new memory, although they could recall memories learned at other times.