October 10, 2011

Good Morning,

Those of you in the medical field may be excited about this announcement: An iPhone app currently being created will turn your phone into a "sophisticated medical monitor." Each year, the new apps that come out never fail to amaze me. Check out the details in the third article.

Until Next Time,
Erin

Questions? Comments? Email me at: mailto:gizmo@gophercentral.com
Email your comments

P.S. You can discuss this issue or any other topic in the new Gizmorama forum. Check it out here...
http://gizmorama.gophercentral.com
------------------------------------------------------------

Universe's 'element factories' studied

TEL AVIV, Israel - Exploding supernovas provide windows into the history of the universe and Israeli astronomers say they've observed a record-breaking number of them. Tel Aviv University researchers uncovered 150 supernovas in an area of the sky known as the Subaru Deep Field and say 12 of them were the most distant and ancient ever observed, a TAU release said Wednesday. The research was done in collaboration with teams from a number of Japanese and American institutions and used the Japanese Subaru Telescope in Hawaii on the 14,000-foot summit of the extinct Mauna Kea volcano. Supernovas are called nature's "element factories," as every element in the universe heavier than oxygen was created in the nuclear reactions occurring in supernova explosions. Elements formed in those cosmic explosions were flung into interstellar space where they served as raw materials for new generations of stars and planets -- and everything else. "These elements are the atoms that form the ground we stand on, our bodies, and the iron in the blood that flows through our veins," TAU astronomer Dan Maoz said. Astronomers say by tracking the frequency and types of supernova explosions back through cosmic time they can reconstruct the universe's history of element creation.


Study: Brain may beat nose in smelling

EVANSTON, Ill. - Before our noses detect a familiar smell, our brains may already be preparing our sensory system to set up an expectation of a scent, U.S. researchers say. Northwestern University scientists say evidence suggests the brain uses predictive coding to generate "predictive templates" of specific smells in the olfactory cortex of the brain where the sense of smell is housed before our noses confirm them. The researchers say predictive coding is important because it provides a behavioral advantage allowing animals -- including humans -- to react more quickly and more accurately to stimuli in the surrounding environment, a Northwestern release said Thursday. Researcher Christina Zelano says while it may not be obvious predictive templates give us a behavioral advantage, people often overlook the power of the sense of smell. "If somebody hands you a bottle of milk and asks, 'Is this milk rotten?' there may not be any visual clues to help you accurately determine if the milk has spoiled, so you rely on your sense of smell," Zelano says. "Our study indicated that if your brain can successfully form a template of a rotten milk smell, then you would more accurately determine whether that milk is rotten and therefore you are less likely to get sick. "These predictive templates can give us an important advantage," she said.


App turns smartphone into medical monitor

WORCESTER, Mass. - U.S. researchers say they're working on turning smartphones into sophisticated medical monitors able to capture and transmit vital physiological data. A team at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts has developed a smartphone application that can measure not only heart rate, but also heart rhythm, respiration rate and blood oxygen saturation, using the phone's built-in video camera, a WPI release Wednesday. Researchers said the app could provide vital signs as accurate as standard medical monitors now in clinical use. The application analyzes video clips recorded while the patient's fingertip is pressed against the lens of the phone's camera. As the camera's light penetrates the skin, it reflects off of pulsing blood in the finger -- and the application is able to correlate subtle shifts in the color of the reflected light with changes in the patient's vital signs. Research leader Ki Chon and his colleagues say they're working on developing a version of the mobile monitoring technology for use on video-equipped tablets like the iPad. "Imagine a technician in a nursing home who is able to go into a patient's room, place the patient's finger on the camera of a tablet, and in that one step capture all their vital signs," Chon said.


Crab Nebula emissions surprise astronomers

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - An exploding star that dazzled sky-gazers in 1054 still intrigues U.S. astronomers by pumping out radiation at higher energies than expected, they say. The explosion witnessed by observers in North America and China centuries ago left behind a gaseous remnant known as the Crab Nebula, which emits gamma rays with energies a million times that of medical X-rays, a release from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said Thursday. "If you asked theorists a year ago whether we would see gamma-ray pulses this energetic, almost all of them would have said, 'No.' There's just no theory that can account for what we've found," Harvard-Smithsonian researcher Martin Schroedter said. The gamma rays are coming from an extreme object at the Crab Nebula's center known as a pulsar, the collapsed core of a massive star that has become a small but incredibly dense spinning neutron star, astronomers said. Nepomuk Otte, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was involved in the observations said some researchers had told him he was crazy even to look for pulsar emissions at this energy level. "It turns out that being persistent and stubborn helps," Otte said. "These results put new constraints on the mechanism for how the gamma-ray emission is generated." Several theories have been put forward to explain the unexpectedly high energy levels observed but it will take more data to understand thoroughly the mechanisms behind the gamma-ray pulses, astronomers said.


Ozone found in atmosphere of Venus

PARIS - A spacecraft orbiting Venus has detected ozone in the planet's atmosphere, similar to layers surrounding Earth and Mars, European astronomers say. The European Space Agency's Venus Express orbiter made the discovery while observing stars seen right at the edge of the planet through its atmosphere. Instruments measured the characteristic fingerprints of gases in the atmosphere as they absorbed starlight at specific wavelengths, an ESA release said Thursday. The finding may help in the search for life on other planets, astronomers said. Ozone, a molecule containing three oxygen atoms, has only previously been detected in the atmospheres of Earth and Mars. It is of vital importance on Earth because it absorbs much of the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays. The build-up of oxygen, and consequently ozone, in Earth's atmosphere began 2.4 billion years ago. Scientists theorize microbes excreting oxygen as a waste gas must have played an important role in the process. As a result, some astrobiologists say the simultaneous presence of carbon dioxide, oxygen and ozone in an atmosphere could be used to tell whether there could be life on a planet. Although scientists agree there is no life on Venus, the detection of ozone there brings it a step closer to Earth and Mars, as all three planets have an ozone layer. "It is yet more evidence of the fundamental similarity between the rocky planets, and shows the importance of studying Venus to understand them all," Hakan Svedhem, ESA Project Scientist for the Venus Express mission, said.

------------------------------------------------------------
Check out Viral Videos on the Net at EVTV1.com
http://www.evtv1.com/
EVTV1.com