Collider creates mini big bangs, and we're all still here

Reuters - 3.30.10 (by Robert Evans)

GENEVA, March 30 (Reuters) - Physicists smashed sub-atomic particles into each other with record energy on Tuesday, creating thousands of mini-Big Bangs like the primeval explosion that gave birth to the universe 13.7 billion years ago.

Scientists and engineers in control rooms across the sprawling European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva burst into applause as the $9.4 billion project to probe the origins of the cosmos scored its first big success.

"This opens the door to a totally new era of discovery," said CERN's director of research Sergio Bertolucci. "It is a step into the unknown where we will find things we thought were there and perhaps things we didn't know existed."

Read entire story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

Robots in the wild

NYT - 3.29.10 (by Nick Bilton)

Yuriko Nakao/Reuters - A robot named Robovie-II moves around a grocery store during an assisted shopping experiment. This happy little robot greets shoppers at the entrance of a grocery store and then follows them while holding a grocery basket. It can also remind people of items on a shopping list.

I’ve always wanted a robot. I often fantasized as a child about my own personal robot that could carry my backpack to school for me or stay up late and help me with my homework.

Robots haven’t advanced that far — yet. But they still can do amazing things. Below, you can see a selection of robots currently “in the wild” or in research labs. There’s everything from the Okonomiyaki robot, which makes pancakes, to everyday robots that build cars or help the military on the battlefield.

Read entire story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

How to live beyond 100 (Dan Buettner at TED)

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

Flexible displays only a few years away

PhysOrg.com - 3.25.10 (by John Messina)

Current flexible displays use a batch cookie cutter process for manufacturing. A new production method called Self-Aligned Imprint Lithography (SAIL) will streamline production and reduce cost.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The Flexible Display Center, at Arizona State University, hopes to have flexible displays ready for test trials in approximately three years. The possibilities of using flexible displays are endless and one day will be used in many portable devices such as e-readers, cell phones, and tablets.

The people at hardware.info recently saw one of HP’s flexible screens rolled up and placed into a poster tube. HP’s CTO, Phil McKinney states that the flexible display is not designed to be rolled up. The display would only survive being rolled up about six times before it would start to malfunction. The screens are printed on flexible plastic sheets of Mylar material and could be easily rolled during the manufacturing process.

Read entire story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

Nano-electrode attached to neurons

American Friends of Tel Aviv University - 3.22.2010

Two rat neuronal cells bound to a rough carbon nanotube mat.

Television's Six Million Dollar Man foresaw a future when man and machine would become one. New research at Tel Aviv University is making this futuristic "vision" of bionics a reality.

Prof. Yael Hanein of Tel Aviv University's School of Electrical Engineering has foundational research that may give sight to blind eyes, merging retinal nerves with electrodes to stimulate cell growth. Successful so far in animal models, this research may one day lay the groundwork for retinal implants in people.

But that's a way off, she says. Until then, her half-human, half-machine invention can be used by drug developers investigating new compounds or formulations to treat delicate nerve tissues in the brain. Prof. Hanein's research group published its work recently in the journal Nanotechnology.

Read entire article>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

Seeking to identify dark matter virtually

MSNBC - 3.24.10 (by Clara Moskowitz)

Researchers created a 3D map of dark matter in a large portion of the universe by combining gravitational lensing data from more than half a million galaxies scattered across a range of distances from Earth. The three axes of the box (bottom) correspond to sky position, and distance from Earth, increasing from left to right.

Scientists think they've found a virtual way to hunt for dark matter in the lab by studying real-world materials that may behave similarly to the elusive cosmic stuff.

Dark matter is the name given to the mass that seems to make up much of the universe, but remains frustratingly difficult to detect.

Some theories suggest dark matter is actually composed of tiny particles that don't interact with light or regular matter, except through gravity. One candidate for what dark matter might be made of is a never-before-seen particle called the axion that has a small mass and no charge.

Read entire story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

Humans - We're living longer and staying healthier

PhysOrg.com - 3.24.10

People in developed nations are living in good health as much as a decade longer than their parents did, not because aging has been slowed or reversed, but because they are staying healthy to a more advanced age.

"We're living longer because people are reaching old age in better health," said demographer James Vaupel, author of a review article appearing in the March 25 edition of Nature. But once it starts, the process of aging itself -- including dementia and heart disease -- is still happening at pretty much the same rate. "Deterioration, instead of being stretched out, is being postponed."

The better health in older age stems from public health efforts to improve living conditions and prevent disease, and from improved medical interventions, said Vaupel, who heads Duke University's Center on the Demography of Aging and holds academic appointments at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, and the institute of Public Health at the University of Southern Demark.

Over the past 170 years, in the countries with the highest life expectancies, the average life span has grown at a rate of 2.5 years per decade, or about 6 hours per day.

Read full story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

The universe is a giant quantum computer

New Scientist - 3.22.10 (by Seth Lloyd)

WHAT is the universe made of? Matter or energy? Particles or strings? According to physicist Vlatko Vedral's appealing new book, it is made, at bottom, of information.

In other words, if you break the universe into smaller and smaller pieces, the smallest pieces are, in fact, bits.

With this theme in mind, Vedral embarks on an exuberant romp through physics, biology, philosophy, religion and even personal finance. By turns irreverent, erudite and funny, Decoding Reality is - by the standard of books that require their readers to know what a logarithm is - a ripping good read. A bit is the tiniest unit of information. It represents the distinction between two possibilities: yes or no, true or false, zero or one. The word "bit" also refers to the physical system representing that information: in your computer's hard drive, for example, a bit is registered by a minuscule magnet whose north pole can point up or down.

Read entire story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

The "global workspace" theory of consciousness

New Scientist - 3.22.10 (by Anil Ananthaswamy)

Brain chat (Image: Studio Tonne/Agency Rush.com).

STEVEN LAUREYS will always remember the 21-year-old woman who had had a stroke. She had been taken to a hospital in Liège, Belgium, where her condition worsened rapidly. She soon lost all motor movement, even the ability to open her eyes. Her prognosis looked bleak, so her doctors turned to Laureys, a neurologist, for a final opinion before turning off her ventilator.

By recording her brain activity as she was asked to respond to simple tasks, such as counting the number of times her name was spoken in a random string of first names, Laureys confirmed that the woman was aware of her surroundings, and so she remained on life support (Neurocase, vol 15, p 271). Clearly that was the right decision: a year later she had recovered enough to be discharged from hospital. "It was only technology that permitted us to show that she was conscious," says Laureys of the University of Liège.

There had, however, been another clue to the patient's active mental state - too tentative to hold any weight in the diagnosis, but nevertheless significant. Laureys had observed a signature of coordinated neural activity, present in the resting patient, which seems to appear in the brain of anyone who is conscious. While such readings may one day provide a better diagnosis of coma patients, their ultimate implications may be even more profound, providing evidence for a 30-year-old theory that claims to explain consciousness itself.

Read entire story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

Quantum effects brought into the naked eye world!

New Scientist - 3.17.10 (by Richard Webb)

There and not there (Image: Baoba Images/Getty).

Does Schrödinger's cat really exist? You bet. The first ever quantum superposition in an object visible to the naked eye has been observed.

Aaron O'Connell and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, did not actually produce a cat that was dead and alive at the same time, as Erwin Schrödinger proposed in a notorious thought experiment 75 years ago. But they did show that a tiny resonating strip of metal – only 60 micrometres long, but big enough to be seen without a microscope – can both oscillate and not oscillate at the same time. Alas, you couldn't actually see the effect happening, because that very act of observation would take it out of superposition.

"We talk about quantum weirdness and things being in two places at once, but it all involves atoms and molecules, stuff we don't normally interact with," says O'Connell, who presented the results at the March meeting of the American Physical Society in Portland, Oregon, today.

Read entire story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

They won't fly, but future cars will compute like mad

CNet - 3.18.10 (by Daniel Terdiman)

A Ford screenshot showing the current state of the art when it comes to in-car technology. Over the next five years, though, hardware and software are likely to be integrated, making a wide variety of cloud- and sensor-based applications possible. But safety must still come first. (Credit: Ford).

I have seen the future of computing technology in cars, and it's not coming any time soon.

It is coming, though, and when it arrives, it may very well change the way we deal with information while we're driving. But because the auto industry moves at a truly snail's pace when it comes to innovation, it's likely to be at least five years before this vision comes to pass.

My view into this future came from a conversation I had at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival with T.J. Giuli, a vehicle software systems engineer in Ford's Infotronics Research and Advanced Engineering division.

Read full story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

Augmented reality coming to your car's windshield

Technology Review - 3.17.10 (by Kristina Grifantini)

A new "enhanced vision system" from General Motors could help drivers by highlighting landmarks, obstacles and road edges on the windshield in real-time. Such a system can point out to drivers potential hazards, such as a running animal, even in foggy or dark conditions, GM says.

Head-up displays (HUDs) are already used to project some information--like a car's speed or directions--directly in front of the driver, through the windshield, or even through a side view mirror. These sorts of displays have started appearing in high-end cars, and typically work by projecting light to create an image on part of the windshield.

Read entire story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

These babies build themselves!

MIT News - 3.16.10 (by Larry Hardesty)

MIT researchers coaxed tiny, chainlike molecules to arrange themselves into complex patterns, like this one, on a silicon chip. Previously, self-assembling molecules have required some kind of template on the chip surface — either a trench etched into the chip, or a pattern created through chemical modification. But the MIT technique instead uses sparse silicon “hitching posts.” The molecules attach themselves to the posts and spontaneously assume the desired patterns. Image: Yeon Sik Jung and Joel Yang.

The features on computer chips are getting so small that soon the process used to make them, which has hardly changed in the last 50 years, won’t work anymore. One of the alternatives that academic researchers have been exploring is to create tiny circuits using molecules that automatically arrange themselves into useful patterns. In a paper that appeared Monday in Nature Nanotechnology, MIT researchers have taken an important step toward making that approach practical.

Read entire story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

True neural computers on the horizon?

NewScientist - 3.15.10 (by Paul Marks)

Coming soon to a CPU near you (Image: Patrick Landmann/SPL).

WHEN the "missing link of electronics" was finally built in 2008, it was the vindication of a 30-year-old prediction. Now it seems the so-called memristor can behave uncannily like the junctions between neurons in the brain.

A memristor is a device that, like a resistor, opposes the passage of current. But memristors also have a memory. The resistance of a memristor at any moment depends on the last voltage it experienced, so its behaviour can be used to recall past voltages.

Now memristors are being used in a US military-funded project trying to make brain-like computers, says Wei Lu, who led the team at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor that demonstrated the new behaviour (Nano Letters, DOI: 10.1021/nl904092h).

The memristor's existence was predicted in 1971, when Leon Chua of the University of California, Berkeley, spotted a gap in the capabilities of basic electrical components. But it was not until 2008 that Stanley Williams at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California, made the first memristor from a speck of titanium dioxide, the pigment in most white paint.

Read full story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

Your next trainee could be a robot

Wired Science - 3.12.10 (by Emmet Cole)

Robots of the future will be capable of learning more complex behaviours than ever before if a new, pan-European research project succeeds in its goal of developing the world's first architecture for advanced robotic motor skills.

If successful, the four-year AMARSi (Adaptive Modular Architecture for Rich Motor Skills) project (which started this month) could see a manufacturing world filled with autonomous, intelligent humanoid worker bots that can learn new skills by interacting with their co-workers. It could also see a society with personal carer bots capable of quickly adapting to complex environments and changing human needs.

If the researchers are successful, the 7 million euro, EU-funded project will enable humanoid (and quadruped) bots to autonomously learn and develop motor skills in open-ended environments in the same way humans do -- by learning from the data provided by movement and essentially rewiring their circuits to process and store the new knowledge they've acquired.

Read entire story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

Appraising the Singularity - An intriguing panel discussion

The Singularity: An Appraisal from Michael Johnson on Vimeo.

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

My atom is bigger than your atom

LiveScience - 3.12.10 (by Clara Moskowitz)

Heavy elements like atomic number 118 were created by smashing calcium-48 ions into americium-243 target atoms, shown in this illustration. Credit: Thomas Tegge, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

A quest is underway to create larger and larger atoms with more protons and neutrons than ever before.

By building these super-heavy elements, scientists are not just creating new kinds of matter – they are probing the subatomic world and learning about the mysterious forces that hold atoms together.

"Of course discovering something new is always very interesting, but the main motivation is, we don’t understand how nuclei work out in these extreme limits," said Dawn Shaughnessy, a chemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.

The scientists are also working toward a tantalizing goal: They hope to discover a theoretical "island of stability" where ultra-large elements all of a sudden become easier to make. While most extremely heavy atoms disintegrate in fractions of a second, theory predicts that once elements reach a magic number of protons and neutrons, they become relatively stable again. Finding these magic numbers could also provide revealing clues about how atoms work.

Read entire story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

Long live Moore's Law!

IBM - 3.9.10

Some laws are made to be broken, and others are made to be followed. A team of IBM Researchers in collaboration with two Swiss partners are looking to keep one law in particular alive and well for another 15 years: Moore's Law. The law states that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit will double every 18 months. More than 50 years old, this law is still in effect, but to extend it as long as 2020 will require a change from mere transistor scaling to novel packaging architectures such as so-called 3D integration, the vertical integration of chips.

Read full story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

The coming Superphone

Gigaom - 3.10.10 (by Stacey Higginbotham)

The future of media will be information consumed on superphones while on the go, said Rob Glaser, chairman of RealNetworks, today in his first public speech since stepping down from his CEO position. In the speech, given in Seattle at a Mobile Broadband Breakfast event, he forecast that by 2013 the installed base of smart and superphones (see chart for Glaser’s definition of each) will exceed the installed base of PCs, and those web-surfing devices will be mobile. In this world he sees five big opportunities:

Read on>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

Fi-Wi - Ultrafast wireless for short range coming

PhysOrg.com - 3.9.10 (by Lisa Zyga)

A mm-wave Fi-Wi network. An optical fiber backbone (red) provides broadband connections between the central offices and antenna base stations. Then, the base stations wirelessly transmit 5-mm-wave (60 GHz) signals to customers. Within buildings and homes, the short-range wireless signals can provide high-speed connectivity (faster than 1 Gb/s) for a variety of wireless, high-bandwidth communication devices. Credit: Lim, et al.

(PhysOrg.com) -- By looking at the latest electronic communication devices that have emerged over the past few years, it's clear that the trend of smaller, portable devices is strong and expected to continue. Yet while all these notebooks, netbooks, and tablet PCs are becoming more and more popular, their explosive growth also poses a problem: these wireless devices are hogging the already congested lower microwave frequency region of the wireless spectrum.

This congestion problem was not unanticipated by electrical engineers, who, for the past two decades, have been developing new wireless technologies that use different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Specifically, these wireless technologies are exploiting the large, unused bandwidths of extremely high frequency (EHF) microwaves in the millimeter-wave (mm-wave) frequency region. One particular area of interest is the unlicensed 60 GHz frequency band, which has 5-mm wavelengths. (In contrast, the heavily burdened lower microwave regions have frequencies of 2-4 GHz, corresponding to wavelengths of 7.5-15 cm.)

Read entire story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

X-Ray Vision - The dream of every adolescent boy

PhysOrg.com - 3.8.2010

Knowing enough about the way light is scattered through materials would allow physicists to see through opaque substances, such as the sugar cube on the right. In addition, physicists could use information characterizing an opaque material to put it to work as a high quality optical component, comparable to the glass lens show on the left. Credit: American Physical Society

New experiments show that it's possible to focus light through opaque materials and detect objects hidden behind them, provided you know enough about the material.

Materials such as paper, paint, and biological tissue are opaque because the light that passes through them is scattered in complicated and seemingly random ways.

A new experiment conducted by researchers at the City of Paris Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution (ESPCI) has shown that it's possible to focus light through opaque materials and detect objects hidden behind them, provided you know enough about the material. The experiment is reported in the current issue of Physical Review Letters, and is the subject of Viewpoint in APS Physics by Elbert van Putten and Allard Moskof the University of Twente.

Read entire article>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

Top 7 Theories of Everything

NewScientist - 3.4.10 (by Michael Marshall)

The "theory of everything" is one of the most cherished dreams of science. If it is ever discovered, it will describe the workings of the universe at the most fundamental level and thus encompass our entire understanding of nature. It would also answer such enduring puzzles as what dark matter is, the reason time flows in only one direction and how gravity works. Small wonder that Stephen Hawking famously said that such a theory would be "the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God".

But theologians needn't lose too much sleep just yet. Despite decades of effort, progress has been slow. Rather than one or two rival theories whose merits can be judged against the evidence, there is a profusion of candidates and precious few clues as to which (if any) might turn out to be correct.

Here's a brief guide to some of the front runners.

Read full article>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

We're too predictable, people! - Cell phone study reveals

Live Science - 3.5.10 (by Susan Cosier)

Humans are unpredictable, movers and shakers — or so we might think. Yet new research that used cell phones to track people reveals the patterns of our movements and where we can be found, day or night, are predictable as much as 93 percent of the time, no matter how far we travel.

"The most surprising thing to us is the lack of variability in predictability across the population, meaning that most all the users have same degree of predictability," regardless of their gender, age, or language spoken, lead researcher Chaoming Song, a physics doctoral student at Northeastern University, told LiveScience.

Read entire story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

Dispense with all the wires!

Purdue Newsroom - 3.3.10

The wireless house of the future might use a system being developed at Purdue University that could eliminate wires for communications in homes, businesses and cars. The researchers designed and built a miniature device capable of converting ultra fast laser pulses into bursts of radio-frequency signals using innovative "microring resonators." Such an advance could enable all communications, from high-definition television broadcasts to secure computer connections, to be transmitted from a single base station. (Purdue University, Michael Esposito).

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue University researchers have developed a miniature device capable of converting ultrafast laser pulses into bursts of radio-frequency signals, a step toward making wires obsolete for communications in the homes and offices of the future.

Such an advance could enable all communications, from high-definition television broadcasts to secure computer connections, to be transmitted from a single base station, said Minghao Qi, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.

"Of course, ideas about specific uses of our technology are futuristic and speculative, but we envision a single base station and everything else would be wireless," he said. "This base station would be sort of a computer by itself, perhaps a card inserted into one of the expansion slots in a central computer. The central computer would take charge of all the information processing, a single point of contact that interacts with the external world in receiving and sending information."

Read entire report>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

Free will not real? You choose.

PhysOrg.com - 3.3.10 (by Lisa Zyga)

When biologist Anthony Cashmore claims that the concept of free will is an illusion, he's not breaking any new ground. At least as far back as the ancient Greeks, people have wondered how humans seem to have the ability to make their own personal decisions in a manner lacking any causal component other than their desire to "will" something. But Cashmore, Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, says that many biologists today still cling to the idea of free will, and reject the idea that we are simply conscious machines, completely controlled by a combination of our chemistry and external environmental forces.

In a recent study, Cashmore has argued that a belief in free will is akin to religious beliefs, since neither complies with the laws of the physical world. One of the basic premises of biology and biochemistry is that biological systems are nothing more than a bag of chemicals that obey chemical and physical laws. Generally, we have no problem with the “bag of chemicals” notion when it comes to bacteria, plants, and similar entities. So why is it so difficult to say the same about humans or other “higher level” species, when we’re all governed by the same laws?

Read entire story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

Haptics - You feel me?

Technology Review - 3.3.10 (by Duncan Graham-Rowe)

Forget putting your phone on vibrate. A novel "high-definition" touch-feedback display can give a touch screen the feel of a textured surface. The technology was developed for mobile devices by the San Jose CA-based company Immersion, and is a step toward mimicking the feel of physical buttons on flat screens.

Simple haptic interfaces have been used in cell phones for years, to create silent alerts or provide limited tactile feedback when an onscreen button has been pressed. But such interfaces typically rely on elliptical vibration motors to create a shaking sensation, an approach that is slow and imprecise. Immersion believes this can be greatly improved by switching to a piezoelectric actuator.

Piezeoelectric materials produce mechanical stress in response to an applied voltage, or vice versa. They do this at great speed, which means piezoelectric actuators can respond quickly when a screen is being touched, says Steve Kingsley-Jones, Immersion's director of product management.

Read entire story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

What the Internet Looks Like

NYT - 3.1.10 (by John Markoff)

Photo credit: Peter Morance.

SAN FRANCISCO — In a dimly lit chamber festooned with wires and hidden in one of California’s largest data centers, Tim Pozar is changing the shape of the Internet.

He is using what Internet engineers refer to as a “meet-me room.” The room itself is enclosed in a building full of computers and routers. What Mr. Pozar does there is to informally wire together the networks of different businesses that want to freely share their Internet traffic.

The practice is known as peering, and it goes back to the earliest days of the Internet, when organizations would directly connect their networks instead of paying yet another company to route data traffic. Originally, the companies that owned the backbone of the Internet shared traffic. In recent years, however, the practice has increased to the point where some researchers who study the way global networks are put together believe that peering is changing the fundamental shape of the Internet, with serious consequences for its stability and security. Others see the vast increase in traffic staying within a structure that has remained essentially the same.

Read full story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...

Drug-resistant germs on the rise

NYT - 2.26.10 (by Andrew Pollack)

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A minor-league pitcher in his younger days, Richard Armbruster kept playing baseball recreationally into his 70s, until his right hip started bothering him. Last February he went to a St. Louis hospital for what was to be a routine hip replacement.

By late March, Mr. Armbruster, then 78, was dead. After a series of postsurgical complications, the final blow was a bloodstream infection that sent him into shock and resisted treatment with antibiotics.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think my dad would walk in for a hip replacement and be dead two months later,” said Amy Fix, one of his daughters.

Not until the day Mr. Armbruster died did a laboratory culture identify the organism that had infected him: Acinetobacter baumannii.

Read entire story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read more...