Manipulating the information: a dangerous strategy.

Alongside my dearest friend Luis Bustos, we have created a Brainshark presentation how different a scientific research could be covered by two types of publication: a scientific magazine and a news website.

You could get to the video from this link: http://goo.gl/Pu7bc

We invite you to comment and share our video, and we hope that you would like it.

What about recycling...?

Millions of monitors and flat-screen TVs will be soon at the end of their useful life or maybe they will become obsolete, so they would become a threat to the environment. This situation brings a very serious problem to the world, because we already have mountains and mountains of technological waste in the world. However, there is a group of researchers that are developing a set of tools to help recycling these devices in an efficient way. The LCDs that were created before 2009 use fluorescent lighting cold cathode bulbs to light the screens. These screens also contain mercury, and that is why it is so difficult to incinerate them or just throw them to a rubbish dump. During the following years, is estimated that billions of these screens will be retired of service every year. A professor at the Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana in the United States, called Fu Zhao, who is also one of the researchers, warns that if those screens are not properly treated, they may cause a serious damage in the environment. Furthermore, Fu Zhao and some of his students are elaborating a system to help the recycling industry to provide an appropriate treatment to these screens. The objective is to produce the tools and the equipment specially designed to disassemble LCDs within an acceptable labor cost and, at the same time, to recover the most expensive materials included in the screens to reduce the environmental risks.

When I knew about this research and the tools that are being created to reduce the environmental damage that these screens produce, I was very surprised to know that these screens have a useful life of only 4 or 5 years. This is something that we are not told of when we are buying them. I also think that this kind of technology should not be allowed to be created, because we have to take care of the environment and of course these TV are not helping to protect it. Do you have one of these TVs? If so, what will you do with it when it becomes useless?

Draw a hear and print it

The dream of creating organs to be transplanted is near. Many of you might remember the movie "Bicentennial man" and how he created organs and saved many lives. This might be possible now, thanks to the 3D printers and the huge progress they bring.

I know it might sound like a sci-fi movie but printing three dimensional organs such as a hearts, livers and kidneys is something that a lot of researchers all over the world had been working on for a long time.

One of this teams has been able to use the 3D printers technology to actually print human tissue. This team from San Diego, California is directed by Keith Murphy and they work at Organovo. Their final objective is to be able to print complete organs, to be transplanted.

In simple words, the printer has two heads. On one side they put the cells and on the other side they put the gel. The work is very precise and this two components together to create a three dimensional tissue.

The biological 'inc' is made of stem cells or bone marrow. They are kept on test tubes and cultivated there.

They create the form they want to give to the tissue, on the computer but then it is nature itself that does the work. Cells organize themselves to form the tissue.

The advantages of this advancement is that the organisms of the patients would never reject the new tissue because it would come from them.

In the future they expect to be able to create new organs that patients cannot reject and to save millions of lives, because the wait for a new organ would not exist.

For further information you can watch this video: Video (It is in spanish)

Faster wireless connection

Nowadays, we are able to capture every moment of our life with cameras, cellphones and mp4 recorders, yet these files could be to difficult to transfer to our laptops because of their size. Some of these files can be several gigabytes in size and it takes to much time to finally get to see them on your computer, and even more time if you transfer them wirelessly.

This is how a new technology was created. It is a speedy alternative called 'multi-gigabit communication module” and it is six times faster than a USB cable. Other advantage is that carrying a USB cable can be annoying for some people and it is easy to forget at home, but with this technology you don't need to.

Frank Deicke, a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS in Dresden, took 'wireless' to another level. “It transfers data at a rate of 1 gigabyte per second (Gbit/s). To put this into context, one e-mail character has a size of eight bits. The infrared module is able to transfer 125 million characters per second,” Deicke said.

In general, cable connections between electronic devices are faster than wireless ones but in this case it is the other way around because the “multi-gigabit communication module” is six times faster than a USB2 cable.

What is more impressive is that when compared to a conventional wireless connection, like Wi-Fi, the IPMS solution is 46 times faster and when compare to other Bluetooth connections, the result was even more impressive. It is 1430 times faster!

For the conventional devices it takes more time because the process is too long. In simple words, when you need to transfer something, the data needs to be packed and unpacked but before that, the file needs to be converted into a radio signal and then the receiving device needs to convert it back into the file itself.

The researcher and his team had to build a small infrared module with fast-working hardware and software. 
  “We achieved this ultimately through a clever combination of different technical solutions,” said Deicke.

They used a transceiver, an optical component which is able to send and receive light signals simultaneously. The transceiver is very small and manages to fit in a laser diode to send light pulses and a photo detector to detect them. The decoders that receive and translate the encoded data are also crucial.

In the future this technology is expected to improve, going from 3 Gbits to 10Gbits per second and allowing us to connect any laptop to any camera without problems.

A war has started, this time on Twitter.

I suppose and hope that all of you are informed about the military attacks that have been launched between the Israeli Military Force and Hamas (armed group from Palestine), and how dangerous and tense is the atmosphere these days, because of the alarm of a new big scale armed conflict between those two groups.

Nonetheless, apart from all the missiles and mortars that Israel and Hamas are shooting to each other, there is another kind of response to the attacks: Twitter, the incredibly popular site of the “40 words”, has been used by the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) and the Alqassam Brigades (military wing of Hamas) to publish statements regarding the conflict, some accomplishment like the murder of a Palestine leader (Ahmed Jabari) or to call on justice for the killings of 40 civilians in Gaza.

These are the polemic tweets that the IDF and Hamas had posted these recent days:

As you can see social media could be a determine factor in this conflict, because will not only inform about all the news regarding this armed conflict, but also be THE way how the rest of the world is going to create their bias about the struggle. All the tweets posted by these two military forces, apart from been used to show off their goals, killings and strategies; they will be the direct pieces of information about how these battle is lived and fought by Israelis and Palestinians.

Love is in the air !

Have you ever think why some people are more attractive when you smell them? The pheromone is a biochemical signals which can impact in other people without even noticing. As in the animal kingdom, sex pheromones can indicate us the range of attraction to different people. This is a kind of mechanism that we all have that influences, unconsciously, our decision about attraction. 

Scientists have begun to figure it out why the odor of some people influences the sexual attraction. Even though people can consciously appreciate some smells, pheromones are not consciously perceived. According to some studies, scientists believe that we have a gland, in the top of our nose, which is called veromonasal organ. This is supposed to be the responsible of detecting the sexual pheromones in other people, but some other scientists reject this idea. If indeed we have that gland in our nose, our brain couldn't be able to decode these signals. 

We have to be aware that as we belong to the animal kingdom, all our responses are, at the end, natural and primitive. Obviously that in contrast to animals, our main sense to feel attraction to other people is our sight, but we have to know that a good reception of pheromones can make a difference in our future relationships. Do you believe that our brain can detect the pheromones? What would happen if as we smell the perfumes, we can also smell and feel our pheromones?

If you want to know more about this, please check this site:

http://www.ehow.com/info_8206153_human-attraction-types-pheromones.html

Ready to reach the stars?

The American multinational corporation Google, has launched a new project that will allow users travel through the space like every kid has always imagine. This experiment has been called “100.000 Stars”, and the reason for this name is really simple: with help from NASA, the European Space Agency and other sources alongside the technology used in Chrome, Google’s creative lab is creating a magnificent display of the one hundred thousand nearest stars in relation to our Sun.

 And that’s not everything of course, apart from the possibility of zooming in or out the site, or literally navigate through our cosmos, with the assistance of the Virtual Encyclopedia Wikipedia, users are able to acquire information about every star shown on the display, and get a digital image of the celestial body. The site starts with a short explanation of itself, and then the user will gain full control of it; either he could begin a followed tour through the site or just explore our part of universe by himself, like a real astronomer could do.

This last application of Google join the vast group of services that the successful corporation had integrated into our daily life – Gmail, Chrome, Google Maps, Google+, among others -, but after using for a few minutes, you’ll start realizing that more than a service, is a beautiful tool that could not only amaze or entertain, but also enlighten the young minds of future scientists.

Smart anti-theft fabric

Imagine you and your family left the city for the weekend and you came back only to find that your house had been robbed. You start thinking that things would have gone completely different if you had had an alarm and or better security system. Now, that is not a problem!

A new anti-theft system has been created, a woven based fabric that triggers an alarm when is penetrated or cut by an intruder. This new and revolutionary fabric allows the exact point of the break-in to be identified and is cheaper than many other anti-theft systems. 

A very important characteristic of this fabric is that it can be hidden anywhere so it acts as an invisible way trick robbers into thinking that you don't have an alarm and can be used in protecting entire buildings. But this fabric incorporates, in fact, a fine web of conductive threads connected to a microcontroller that detects warning signals emitted when the fabric is cut, and triggers an alarm.

The smart fabric was developed by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM in Berlin in collaboration with the Technische Universität Berlin and ETTLIN Spinnerei und Weberei Produktions GmbH. IZM project manager Erik Simon said, “The fabric could be used to implement an entirely novel, invisible security system for buildings,”. 

The fabric along with other materials like concrete or integrated to the rafters of the roof, could be the perfect solution for banks, museums and jeweler's shops. Researchers say that it could also be used with floor materials in combination with pressure sensors, to turn on the alarm if someone enters the room. This would not represent any danger for animals nor humans.

This technology is also very cheap because of the materials with which it is made of. They used standard materials and components such as silver-coated conductive threads and a signal evaluation system. 

Erik Simon also explains that this conductive thread can be incorporated in the polyester substrate and the result would be: a fabric that can be trimmed to any length and any surface size.

What do you think about it? Would you have it in your house?
 

One more pro to Facebook

Last week Remi and Evelyn Urbano, two small kids from Newton, Massachusetts, posted the following picture in their mom’s Facebook account:

What do you think it happened? The kids got more than 118,000 likes on that image and after a quick visit to the Ellen M. Gifford Cat Shelter, Hairryette (they wanted to name their cat Hairy Pawturrr, but it turned out being a female) got a new family and the kids’ dream was fulfilled thanks to the social network created my Mark Zuckerberg.

Every single day, thousands of campaigns are launched or ‘shared’ through Facebook and well, a lot or maybe most of them are just frauds or swindles but there are others that show real efforts of people, trying to accomplish some things they really want. It could be a little cat wanted by two American children or a young man in Chile trying to find support to a cause, both cases demonstrate the powerful tool that Facebook could be in order to get what you might want; all you need is a good image and catchy statement.

Facebook, formed with a social purpose in a college institution in the U.S., nowadays has tended to be a lot more than that – Businesses, politics campaigns, games, relationships, even criminal investigations had seen the light through this website, turning the term social much more complete, perfected and inclusive.

I really believe that Mark Zuckerberg never even dreamed about creating a platform where almost every aspects of human social life could have a place.

What are your thoughts related to Facebook’s growth in terms of applications or actions that we could do with it?

Is the male contraceptive pill a good idea?

For decades the woman has been in charge of taking a contraceptive pill in order to prevent undesired pregnancy…until now. Scientists are working on a new pill that it is going to be used by men. The recent tests on mice have shown positive results; decrease in sperm count and temporary infertility. But the effects on humans are yet unknown. Parallel to this some doctors affirm that there is a need for such pill because “the lack of it has contributed to the number of unplanned pregnancies.” (read full piece of News here!)

The investigation, however, does not refer to the STDs (Sexually Transmitted Diseases). It may be the case that a man who’s taking the pill has sexual intercourse with a woman who has AIDS and he does not wear a condom trusting that avoiding pregnancy is more important. In this hypothetical case taking a simple pill will not prevent him from getting that STD.

For this reason I think that it will be necessary to educate men about the use of the pill before marketing it. Men will have to be aware that the pill will keep you from having a baby, but not from getting a STD. Both condom and pill will be recommended, don’t forget!

Control a robot with your mind!

Incredible, is it not? Some researchers from France and Japan have recently developed a robot that can be manned using nothing but your own thoughts! They were able to invent this technology based on the mapping and translation of brain signals into commands which the robot can interpret and perform.  Firstly this invention was created to help paralyzed people, but the scientist say that soon enough everyone will be using it. (read the article here!)

I think we are coming closer and closer to the time we will cut the bounds of real human interaction, this new invention is prove of this! It may come the day in which robots will perform all of our chores; the only thing they won’t be able to do is eating for us! Inventions like this one have both good a bad sides; it can be used to disarm bombs and to work under extreme conditions which the human body cannot endure, but also it restricts the senses and the interaction, because is not the same to go to the beach than manning a robot to go for you.

No matter how advanced the inventions are or will be, they will never replace the connection that the human mind has with its own body. Do you think this is an improvement or a deterioration for the human race?

A touchscreen-everywhere future

Nowadays, we are all familiar with what the term 'touchscreen' means. We also know that smartphones are the ones that made this technology famous and that this has been transferred to other types of technology as well. Take, for example, the new cameras, laptops and even smart TVs that are in the market. But time changes everything and it was time itself, that brought us the 'moultiTouch' technology.

In simple words, the difference between a simple touchscreen and a moultiTouch screen is that the former does not allow you to use more than one finger in different points on the surface that you are using and the latter, of course, does.

However, this moultiTouch surfaces in the existing technologies are not capable of detecting the posture, identity or handedness of the user and that is how the Extended MoultiTouch was born.

Extended moultiTouch is a technology that is able to recognize your hand posture, gestures and the distance from your hand to the screen. But that is not all. You are able to use this technology on any surface because it acts as a projector.

You might be thinking this must be super expensive but if you think about it, you already have walls in your house.

Extended moultiTouch system also allows more than one person to use a surface at the same time and  enables people to use both hands, distinguishing between the right and left hand.

This new system was developed by a team of researchers at the Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Niklas Elmqvist and Karthik Ramani, among some others.

In an interview, the assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering Niklas Elmqvist said, "Imagine having giant iPads everywhere, on any wall in your house or office, every kitchen counter, without using expensive technology"

I bet all of you are thinking the same right now.

Researchers say that the system is 98% accurate, thanks to the use of the Microsoft Kinect camera, which senses three-dimensional space.

The image shows the system senses the gesture, postures and distance. You can also see how it allows multiple users.(Purdue University image)

If until now you are not convinced of how great this is, here I give a link where you can see how life would be in the near future if this technology is taken to another level.

For further information I also give you the link to the abstract of this research and a demo video. Click Here.

The impact of hormones on human's relationship

As you know, hormones are always playing an important role in our relationship with the "opposite sex".
For instance, when we were teenegers we experienced an hormone disorder and disbalance which most of the cases provoked a sudden and unexpected change in  our behaviour, affecting the relationships with our family and beloved ones. Appart from that, the growth and drop of hormones provoke women irritability  and sensitivity during their threatening period, causing a hard headache on their poor partners.

 But not all the hormones effects are that damaging, there are some positive ones which make us keep a better relationship with the opposite sex. For instance, the hypotalamus which controls the endocrine system ( in charge of controlling the flow of hormones) makes men calm down quicker than girls. That can be helpul in order not to carry on an argument with your significant other.

On the other hand, women have approximately 13 % more linguistic neurons than men, which give them an increased ability to describe in detail their emotions. As you might now, it is always important to know each other feelings to avoid future marital problems and it is also important for men  given that they might predict future women's weird behaviour.
Keep in mind that our brains and way of thinking are different. So in order to have a peaceful and successful relationship with the love or your life, it is vital to understand each other hormonal proccess. Be supportive with him/her instead of being controversial. Take advantage of your hormonal sexual features described above, your partner will be grateful...
For further reading have a look at Dr. Leaf's Blog

Now, a short interesting interview on  The role of hormones in Sexual Attractiveness

Science-Fiction and technology: a mutual exchange of ideas?

Have you ever thought how the great ideas are conceived?  It is undoubtedly that imagination plays a very important role when talking about both science-fiction and technology, but who influences who?

At first we may think it is obvious that technology influences the literary trend, but in order for technology to keep on developing new ideas should arise! This is where Sci-fi takes action. Many writers throughout time have written novels based on non-existent technology, an excellent example of this is Jules Verne; he wrote “De la Terre à la Lune” (From the earth to the moon) in 1865, and almost a hundred years later in 1961 the first man, Yuri Gagarin, was sent outer space and in 1969 the man finally reached the moon. Here we can see how the fiction influences reality. Technology influences science-fiction as well, we have the example of computers and the movie “The Matrix” of 1999. We can see here how the invention of a real object helped to develop an unreal story or a science-fiction story.

As a conclusion we can say that even when there is no direct connection between them, science-fiction and technology do influence each other. Can YOU think in other examples? Or tell me your opinion on the subject! 

SANGUINARIA

Regarding the extended period I’ve been alone—I split up with someone a couple of years ago and since then I’ve never dated nobody in a formal way--I’ve decided to do something about it in order change my love life situation, which has always been a complete disaster, I must say. For that reason, my mom—the greatest heroine of all times—has encouraged me to try with alternative medicine—Yes, again!— to improve my physical appearance and see if someone become interested in me…again. 

Needless to say, my mother has always been used to try with alternative medicine in order to provide a solution to everything since she had been taught to do it by my grandmother when she was a child. As they lived in the farm, they used to be surrounded by different kinds of herbs, flowers and thousands of thousands of trees. But, as my mom told me, there was one among all of these species that had some secret healing and beauty properties I find very interesting to share with you—just in case you attempt to find someone as I do!

According to some researches, SANGUINARIA (Bloodroot), the name in Spanish of this herb, grows in the spring and summer months, producing a red sap that has been used in herbal medicine for centuries. It affects, chiefly, the mucous membranes, especially of the respiratory tract. It has also marked vaso-motor disturbances, as seen in the circumscribed redness of the cheeks, flashes of heat, determination of blood to head and chest, distention of temporal veins, burning in palms and soles, and has been found very applicable to climacteric disorders.

Taking into account my mom’s opinion, she also sustains that if someone made a mix of SANGUINARIA with other herbs, it would be a very effective laxative—I really have a strong possibility to lose weight! Moreover, there is a component inside of its leaves which provides a significant amount of antimicrobial activity and may be an ingredient in some herbal toothpastes and mouth rinses—Now I understand why I have white teeth and a shiny smile!

Let’s see if someone could resist to my new sex-appeal after taking it for a while!

Have a look on this video and see how the real herb looks like! 

Would you try to take this herb? Do you like some of the properties it's got?

Atacama Solar Challenge...!!

During this week, I´ve been thinking of the possibility and the necessity of start using clean, renewable and for-free energy from the sun. Yes, again. I think it is time for we to change our mind and start using the sun as source of energy in all respects. Furthermore, our planet is asking us to stop being so cruel to it. So let´s give it a break! Well, that is why I think that the authorities should create conscious within the society. Specially, if we consider that in Chile we have the driest desert in the world. Although we all know that there are few possibilities for that to happen, there is a small hope at the end of the tunnel. Yes, because there is a group of people who are telling us that we have to be conscious about our planet, but what is the best of it, is the way in which they are saying it.

In order to demonstrate how useful the solar energy might be, these people created an event in which the participants had to compete in a race using cars fueled only by solar energy! This event is called "Carrera Solar en Atacama" and is being held since last Thursday in Humberstone, Atacama, 1700 km from Santiago, and it is supposed to be finished this coming Monday, the winner of the race will receive a U$ 30000 prize and majority of the competitors are students from Chilean, Indian, Venezuelan and Argentinean universities. In regarding to the aims of the race, Mauricio Zanotti, one of the producers, said that their main purposes with the race are both to award the wit of the competitors to create a fast, light and innovative car and to promote the use of solar energy in the world. However, I think that this kind of events are not enough to make people conscious about clean energies. I also think that the event should have a better and more complete media coverage so people from everywhere the world could know that a lots of activities are possible thanks to the solar energy. Finally, I would like to add the fact that it is very necessary to stop harming our planet with other kinds of fuels such as oils and hydroelectric companies. I´d also like to know what you think about this. Do you think it is possible to make a change like this within the society? If so, how much time would it take to do it? Considering that most of the cars are fueled by gasoline, do you think that it is possible to use only cars fueled by solar energy?

In this link you can find some pictures of the event... have a look at it!

http://www.emol.com/mundografico/?G_ID=24268

Here is the video of the race!

Talking through scan!

A vegetative men in Canada showed to his doctors that we was not suffering any pain by monitoring his brain activity while a scanner test.

This discovery showed up that Scott Routley had brain activity, that he has a concious and thinking brain and that he is not just “a plant” lying in a bed.

It is believed that this descovery is going to revolutionize the medicine and a lot of things and theories are going to be changed. With this new information now doctors are going to be able to improve vegetable pacients’s life by providing medicines for the pain that they may be suffering without the doctor’s knowledge.

It is hard to imagine our lives like that. With no possibilities of moving a hand or to speak with your family. If you were in ths condition, would you like to be tested to discover if you need something? Would you like to be leaved in peace with no more tests? Or would you like to be killed (with euthanasia) just to end up your suffering?

For more information about Scott Routley please click here or here 

Would you clone yourself?

This will be a reality in a not so distant future, scientific and medical discoveries and improvements will allow us to clone ourselves and the question is “would YOU do it?”

There are lots of reasons for you to want to clone yourself; having an identical heir, an evil twin or even for organ transplantation. But of course you have to look at the ethical and moral barriers that this action would imply. For instance, some religious perspectives consider the hypothetical clone to be a soulless, empty, and synthetic body. Also, you would have to take into account that you would need a woman’s womb to fully create your clone. Money could also be a problem, because this may not be a very cheap procedure at first.

If the scientists really want to make human cloning possible I think they will have to look for a very good reason to do it other than “because we can”.  That is not an excuse to give life to a copied person, how would you explain that he or she is not an authentic human being? That is just an unnatural person? The questions remain open and someone in the future will have to answer.

For detailed information on the subject of human cloning, please visit this web page http://www.humancloning.org/

Fluoride water Lowers Children’s IQ / Adolfo and Daniela's presentation.

In this last presentation, Daniela and I will introduce you to a really interesting topic related to a chemical that maybe you don’t even care about.

Have you ever wondered what are you drinking when you turn on the tap in your kitchen? What would you react if I told you that there were some chemical particles, such as fluoride, that are damaging your health and lowering your children’s IQ?

Recent independent research by scientists not associated with dental trade organizations has shown how fluoride contained in “fluoride water” can damage  our health causing cancer, changes bone structure and strength, impairs immune system, provoking different diseases such as, osteoarthritis, suppresses thyroid function,  birth defects and perinatal deaths, and it also can lower our children’s IQ. However since we were little kids, we grew up believing that fluoride was beneficial for our health as it prevents tooth decay.

Many independent researchers, organizations, holistic healthcare experts and a growing number of dentists are warning their patients to avoid fluoridated water and fluoridated toothpaste and to definitely not give children any fluoride since they appear to be more susceptible to the neurological toxicity from fluoride. Fluoridation is not legal, so why we are still using it?

As a point of information, do you know that in the 8th region of our country, the water is not fluoridated, because the population sued the water treatment plant that existed in 2005, requiring water without fluoride?

Do you think that is time that the population starts concerning about their risks that our health is facing in front of these toxic chemicals?

Here you can find more information about this issue:
"Breaking: Major Harvard Study Published in Federal Govt Journal Confirms Fluoride Lowers IQ"

I got three skulls...

Quick pregnancy test; quick paternity test; and know… quick HIV test. Yes, now for less than 40 bucks you can know whether you got AIDS.

OraQuick, an at-home oral HIV Test kit was release under the approval of U.S. Food and Drug Administration for being sold in any pharmacy, supermarket and gas station, as any pregnancy test, with a retail price of $39.99. It seems to be a huge step in HIV spread prevention, giving the opportunity to test yourself confidentially at home in almost 20 minutes, using a small sample of cheek swab.   

This home test could prevent 4.000 new transmissions every year, mostly by people who feel embarrassed or insecure to go to public hospital and clinics to take the traditional blood test.  This test is also quicker than the traditional one, which needs 2 weeks to get results. Although there are other tests in the market, this new one is more accurate, easier—the previous one needed to send a blood example to the laboratory—and cheaper.

   A recent study found that 84% of gay and bisexual men say they would administer a self-test if a proper kit were available, so the company OraSure Technologies, Inc. developed this kit for them.

As any other take-home test, the results need to be confirmed by a doctor, and it is not 100% accurate, so what happen if someone is misdiagnosed? And more important than that, when you receive the new that you have a deathly disease (cancer, HIV) you need a professional to support you to bear with it, but in home you will be all alone. How many people would commit suicide at the moment of knowing they are infected?

(Source http://hivplusmag.com/case-studies/prevention/2012/10/01/home-rapid-hiv-test-oraquick-now-available and  http://www.oraquick.com/)