GEN-ERIC News

Cell phones are increasingly sophisticated – sporting such features as cameras, music players, games, video clips, Internet access and, lest we forget, the capability to phone someone – but these features come at a price: memory. Now computer engineers at Northwestern University and NEC Laboratories America, Inc. are the first to do what many thought impossible – they have developed technology that doubles the usable memory on cell phones and other embedded systems without any changes to hardware or applications. The improvement was made in the operating system software alone. This innovation, the result of two years of close collaboration between researchers at Northwestern and NEC Labs, is featured in millions of new smartphones, the NEC-manufactured FOMA N904i, which first hit shelves in Japan this summer. “All the things you do with a cell phone or personal digital assistant require memory,” said Robert P. Dick, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science in Northwestern’s Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. “The technology we’ve developed automatically takes data and reduces it to less than half its original size without losing any information while the embedded system is running. It is like putting twice as much memory in the phone without increasing its cost or power consumption.”

As policy makers debate what levels of ozone in the air are safe for humans to breathe, studies in mice are revealing that the inhaled pollutant impairs the body’s first line of defense, making it more susceptible to subsequent foreign invaders, such as bacteria. While it has long been known that exposure to ozone, a major component of urban air pollution, is associated with increased cardiovascular and pulmonary hospitalizations and deaths, the actual mechanisms involved remain unclear. New studies by Duke University Medical Center pulmonary researchers on the effects of ozone on the innate immune system, the body’s “tripwire” for foreign invaders, may provide part of the answer. The Duke-led team found that ozone exposure in mice at levels approximating unhealthy levels for humans appears to enhance lung injury in response to bacterial toxins, but more importantly, it also appears to enhance programmed cell death in critical innate immune system cells that gobble up foreign invaders, keeping the airways clear. “Small amounts of inhaled foreign material can be relatively harmless, since they stimulate an appropriate innate immune response that protects the lungs,” said John Hollingsworth, M.D., pulmonologist and lead author of study whose results appear Oct. 1 in the Journal of Immunology. “However, it appears that ozone causes the innate immune system to overreact, killing key immune system cells, and possibly making the lung more susceptible to subsequent invaders, such as bacteria.”