Author Archives: billycuts

About billycuts

Billycuts spends his time split between studying anthropology and perfecting the art of turntablism.

Fidel Castro Resigns as Cuba’s President

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Fidel Castro stepped down Tuesday morning as the president of Cuba after a long illness. The announcement was made in a letter to the nation written by Mr. Castro and published early Tuesday morning on the Web site of Granma, the official publication of the Cuban Communist Party.

The resignation ends one of the longest tenures as one of the most all-powerful communist heads of state in the world.

In late July 2006, Mr. Castro, who is 81, handed over power temporarily to his brother, Raúl Castro, 76, and a few younger cabinet ministers, after an acute infection in his colon forced him to undergo emergency surgery. Despite numerous operations, he has never fully recovered but has remained active in running government affairs from behind the scenes.

Now, just days before the national assembly is to meet to select a new head of state, Mr. Castro resigned permanently, and signaled his willingness to let a younger generation assume power. He said his failing health made it impossible to return as president.

“I will not aspire to neither will I accept — I repeat I will not aspire to neither will I accept — the position of President of the Council of State and Commander in chief,” he wrote in the lette

He added: “It would betray my conscience to occupy a responsibility that requires mobility and the total commitment that I am not in the physical condition to offer.”

NY Times

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Dean Kamen’s ‘Luke Arm’ Prosthesis Readies for Clinical Trials

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Dean Kamen’s “Luke arm”—a prosthesis named for the remarkably lifelike prosthetic worn by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars—came to the end of its two-year funding last month. Its fate now rests in the hands of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funded the project. If DARPA gives the project the green light—and some greenbacks—the state-of-the-art bionic arm will go into clinical trials. If all goes well, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gives its approval, returning veterans could be wearing the new artificial limb by next year.

The Luke arm grew out of DARPA’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, which was created in 2005 to fund the development of two arms. The first initiative, the four-year, US $30.4 million Revolutionizing Prosthetics contract, to be completed in 2009, led by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., seeks a fully functioning, neurally controlled prosthetic arm using technology that is still experimental. The latter, awarded to Deka Research and Development Corp., Kamen’s New Hampshire–based medical products company (perhaps best known for the Segway), is a two-year $18.1 million 2007 effort to give amputees an advanced prosthesis that could be available immediately “for people who want to literally strap it on and go.” Kamen’s team designed the Deka arm to be controlled with noninvasive measures, using an interface a bit like a joystick.

IEEE

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Breaking the Drug Taboo: Group of Traumatized Veterans Get Ecstasy Treatment

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An experimental study that treats PTSD veterans with the drug MDMA could make life after war a lot more livable.

“We need to be positioning ourselves now to provide the assistance that our veterans need,” said House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs chairman Bob Filner (D-CA) during a hearing, called “Stopping Suicides: Examining the Mental Health Challenges Facing the Department of Veterans Affairs,” held in December 2007. “Not only for those brave men and women who are returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, but also for our veterans from previous conflicts. We cannot afford to put this issue off.”

Filner’s choice of words is instructive, as are his sentiments: With upwards of 25 million veterans in the United States, not counting those overseas in the morally murky theater of Iraq and Afghanistan who may return home sometime after the 2008 presidential election, that’s a lot of assistance and funding needed to head off what he called a “rate of veteran suicide [that] has reached epidemic proportions,” to the point that it has doubled the suicide rate of civilians. Safeguards already put into place have failed, for a variety of reasons, and given the severity of the mental and physical problems carried by returning soldiers, some daring out-of-the-box thinking is not only desperately needed, but required.

Enter the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and its currently funded trials using 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methamphetamine—otherwise known as MDMA, or ecstasy—to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although the U.S. Army had carried out lethal dose studies of MDMA back in the 1950s, work which was not classified until the close of the 1960s, it was only centered on animals and was mixed in with a variety of other compounds. At the closure of that research, MDMA languished in clinical obscurity until its rise as a club drug in the ‘80s and ‘90s brought it the kind of attention that dooms better drugs to Schedule I classifications—that is, illegality—and lesser drugs to approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But MAPS founder and president Rick Doblin became aware of MDMA in 1982, and since then has been convinced of its therapeutic uses. Accordingly, his organization has coordinated and/or funded recent studies into MDMA treatment of PTSD and has its eyes set on a higher goal.

“We’re looking to make MDMA into a prescription medication in the United States, United Kingdom and elsewhere,” he explained by phone.

Entheology

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Fiber-based nanotechnology in clothing could harvest energy from physical movement

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Nanotechnology researchers are developing the perfect complement to the power tie: a “power shirt” able to generate electricity to power small electronic devices for soldiers in the field, hikers and others whose physical motion could be harnessed and converted to electrical energy.

The February 14 issue of the journal Nature details how pairs of textile fibers covered with zinc oxide nanowires can generate electrical current using the piezoelectric effect. Combining current flow from many fiber pairs woven into a shirt or jacket could allow the wearer’s body movement to power a range of portable electronic devices. The fibers could also be woven into curtains, tents or other structures to capture energy from wind motion, sound vibration or other mechanical energy.

“The fiber-based nanogenerator would be a simple and economical way to harvest energy from physical movement,” said Zhong Lin Wang, a Regents professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “If we can combine many of these fibers in double or triple layers in clothing, we could provide a flexible, foldable and wearable power source that, for example, would allow people to generate their own electrical current while walking.”

EurakAlert

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Wireless Monitoring Of People And Things: Future Of Social Networking?

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If you need information, the Internet offers a wealth of resources. But if you’re hunting down a person or a thing, a computer’s not much help. That may soon change. Electronic tags promise to create what some call the “Internet of things,” in which objects and people are connected through a virtual network.

To see what this future world would be like, a pilot project involving dozens of volunteers in the University of Washington’s computer science building provides the next step in social networking, wirelessly monitoring people and things in a closed environment. Beginning in March, volunteer students, engineers and staff will wear electronic tags on their clothing and belongings to sense their location every five seconds throughout much of the six-story building. The information will be saved to a database, published to Web pages and used in various custom tools. The project is one of the largest experiments looking at wireless tags in a social setting.

The RFID Ecosystem project aims to create a world that many technology experts predict is just on the horizon, said project leader Magda Balazinska, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. The project explores the use of radio-frequency identification, or RFID, tags in a social environment. The team has installed some 200 antennas in the Paul Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering. Early next month researchers will begin recruiting 50 volunteers from about 400 people who regularly use the building.

“Our goal is to ask what benefits can we get out of this technology and how can we protect people’s privacy at the same time,” Balazinska said. “We want to get a handle on the issues that would crop up if these systems become a reality.”

Science Daily

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Geneticist sentenced in art case

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A geneticist was sentenced to one year of unsupervised release (no jail time) and a $500 fine for supplying bacteria to an artist, according to the Buffalo News, bringing to an end a well-publicized case that began more than three years ago.

Robert Ferrell, based at the University of Pittsburgh, pled guilty in October to a misdemeanor, after he supplied Steven Kurtz with bacteria for use in biotechnology art projects.

The men were originally charged with mail and wire fraud in connection with Ferrell’s purchase of samples of two common bacteria, Serratia marcescens and Bacillus atrophaeus, for Kurtz.

Ferrell and Kurtz were indicted in June, 2004.

The Scientist

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Scientists breed world’s first mentally ill mouse

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Scientists have created the world’s first schizophrenic mice in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the illness.

It is believed to be the first time an animal has been genetically engineered to have a mental illness. Until now they have been bred only for research into physical conditions such as heart disease. It will allow researchers to study the disease and develop treatments using a limitless supply of laboratory animals.

Times Online via TechnoOccult

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Blind taught to ‘see’ like a bat

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Blind British children are to be taught a pioneering bat-style echolocation technique to visualise their surroundings.

The children are learning how to build up detailed images of the world around them by clicking their tongue and interpreting the sound as it echoes back.

The technique is used by animals such as bats, dolphins and whales to navigate and hunt in the dark.

Bats are able to manoeuvre around caves and catch tiny insects on the wing by emitting short bursts of high-pitched noise and reading the sound waves as they bounce back to their highly evolved ears.

There is emerging evidence that blind people can harness their sense of hearing – which is often more acute – to interpret reflected sound and create detailed mental images of their surroundings, including the distance, size and density of objects.

The technique is being piloted in Glasgow, where 10 children aged five to 17 are being taught by staff from Visibility, one of the city’s oldest charities for the blind. The children are learning how to make the clicking sound and how to use the technique even in noisy urban areas, including the underground system.

Blind people in America, where human echolocation was pioneered, have learnt to differentiate between people, trees, buildings and parked cars by interpreting the pitch and timbre of the echo they produce. Practitioners say they can determine the height, density and shape of objects up to 100ft away.

Times Online

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Changes on the horizon

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Just a quick update. I changed over the template to K2 and will be redesigning the site over the next couple of weeks before I head out to Peru. Since I’ll be in the jungle on and off over the next 6 months, and the good Doctor Quickbeam is in Nepal, posting will probably slow to a crawl. However, if there’s anyone who wants to post articles or even write original content for the site, get a hold of me – admin at nerdshit.com

Hearing The Sound Of Quantum Drums

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Forty years ago, mathematician Mark Kac asked the theoretical question, “Can one hear the shape of a drum?”

If drums of different shapes always produce their own unique sound spectrum, then it should be possible to identify the shape of a specific drum merely by studying its spectrum, thus “hearing” the drum’s shape (a procedure analogous to spectroscopy, the way scientists detect the composition of a faraway star by studying its light spectrum).

But what if two drums of different shapes could emit exactly the same sound? If so, it would be impossible to work backward from the spectrum and uniquely surmise the physical structure of the drum, because there would be more than one correct answer to the question.

It took until the 1990s for mathematicians to prove that, in fact, two drums of different shapes could produce the same sound. In other words, you can’t hear the shape of a drum. That outcome, which was physically verified in one instance with vibrations on the surface of soap bubbles, raised theoretical questions about spectroscopy.

“This revolutionized our conception of the fundamental connections between shape and sound, but also had profound implications for spectroscopy in general, because it introduced an ambiguity,” according to Stanford physicist Hari Manoharan.

Science Daily

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With Mini in vivo Robots, Anyone Can do Surgery

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By attaching a millimeter-sized camera robot to a tether, scientists have designed a way to allow individuals with non-medical backgrounds to perform minimally invasive surgery in almost any location. Unlike room-size and expensive surgical robots, mini in vivo robots are inexpensive and mobile enough to support emergency surgeries almost anywhere, from the battlefield to outer space.

The University of Nebraska researchers hope that the inexpensive version of the da Vinci surgical robot system will make the advantages of robotic-assisted surgery more widely available, and open the doors for telesurgeries that were previously impossible. In a recent study, the team evaluated the ease of use and time required to perform simple abdominal surgeries with the in vivo camera robots. Their results are published in a recent issue of IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine.

“A new area of surgical robotics focuses on placing robots entirely inside the patient,” wrote Mark Rentschler et al. in their study. “In vivo robots are small, inexpensive, and easily transported, making it more likely that this technology can be more widely adopted. . . . The use of these robots can potentially reduce patient trauma in traditional medical centers, while the size of the robots makes them ideal for transportation to and use in remote or harsh environments.”

PhysOrg

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Cruising the Amazon

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Life is everywhere in the upper Amazon wilderness. Life that creeps, life that crawls, life that slithers, sprouts, burrows, scurries and slinks—and dies. The dank odors of alternating rot and genesis rise from the mulching forest floor. My Deet-fortified insect spray battles swarms of blood-mad mosquitoes to a draw. The air is fat with syrupy humidity, and I am sweating like an icicle in the sun.

Nature is on fast-forward here. Trees—palms, laurels, kapoks, mahoganies, bamboos, acacias, figs, balsas, cedars—jostle each other in the search for a share of the sunlight; they grow to enormous heights and spread their foliage like a green umbrella at the top. Lianas, tropical climbing plants, wind themselves like boa constrictors around the tree trunks and arch themselves in great loops as they, too, struggle upward for a glimpse of light. The trees become parasites, and giant orchids seed themselves in branches 60 feet from the ground. The general effect is of a an impenetrable fecund, living wall.

Amid this vast assortment of life, creatures use stunts and flim-flam to befuddle or repel predators, lure prey, seduce mates and gobble food. Caterpillars masquerade as snakes, plants imitate the smell of rotting meat to attract flies as pollinators, and trees rely on fish to distribute their seeds when the rivers flood.

It’s a jungle out here.

Chicago Tribune

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Our diets made us different from apes

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Humans and Apes may share common ancestors and have 99 per cent of identical genes, but our diet has made us what we are today.

Dietary patterns of human beings have played a key role in their evolution, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said.

Humans consume a distinct diet compared to other apes. Not only do we consume much more meat and fat, but we also cook our food, they said.

Daily News and Analysis

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Chavez hardens tone in dispute with Colombia

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Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez hardened his tone on Saturday in a diplomatic dispute with Colombia, which he accuses of plotting an invasion, and warned any attack would be met with force.

Chavez, a former soldier, repeated a claim that Colombia was planning to invade neighbouring Venezuela and said he would soon test the firepower of Russian-built fighter jets.

“We don’t want to hurt anybody, but don’t make mistakes with us,” he said during an address to the country to mark nine years since he took office. “They would regret it for 100 years.”

Chavez is in a diplomatic dispute with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe that has dragged bilateral relations to their lowest level in years. Last week, he accused his neighbour of plotting with the United States to launch an attack.

The U.S. State Department has denied the existence of a plot to invade Venezuela.

On Saturday, he toughened his tone, saying his army was trained and warning he would soon test the weaponry of a fleet of 24 Russian Sukhoi fighter jets he bought in 2006.

“Don’t even think about it, Colombian oligarchs, you would run into the soldiers of Bolivar,” he said. “Soon we will fire the Sukhoi. I want to go to the first launch. The Sukhoi missile travels 200 kilometres (124 miles).”

Reuters

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R.I.P. Tony Silver (Director of Style Wars)

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Just caught this on MetaFilter:

Tony Silver, the director of the groundbreaking hip-hop documentary Style Wars passed last night. He was a family friend of mine, and had been sick for several years with a irreversible brain condition. Style Wars is considered by some to be the best hip-hop film ever made, and by everyone to be the first. It was shot at the very start of the 1980s, when graffiti was still hip-hop’s dominant form, and the idea of graffiti as art was brand new.

Condolences to his family and friends.

If you haven’t seen his excellent film, check it out here –