Technion Scientists Create Breath Test for Cancer Detection

 

by Maayana Miskin

 

Scientists at the Technion in Haifa have created a device that they hope will be able to detect cancer with a simple breath test. In an initial trial, the “breathalyzer” test was able to detect lung cancer with 86 percent accuracy.

The new device was revealed this week in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Researchers hope the test will provide a simple, cost-effective and non-invasive method of detecting cancer. In addition, the test is capable of detecting cancers that are not yet large enough to show up on X-rays or CT scans, allowing for earlier diagnosis that could save lives.

The system works by testing for chemicals that tend to be present in lungs affected by cancer but not in healthy lungs. The Technion team decided to test for four such chemicals: ethylbenzene, decane, heptanol and trimethylbenzene.

Patients’ breath is sent over a circuit made of silicon embedded with gold nanoparticles. If the breath contains the organic compounds common to cancer sufferers, the circuit’s electrical resistance will change.

The research team was led by Hossam Haick. The team had developed a similar test in the past, using carbon nanotubes. The silicon-gold combination was found to be superior, they said. Unlike the device that used carbon nanotubes, the latest development is not sensitive to the water vapor found in lungs.

In addition, the latest version of the test works even on patients who have recently ingested alcohol, food, coffee or tobacco. Previous versions required patients to abstain before the test in order to avoid false results.

Haick and his team have patented their device, but will continue to work to perfect it. The device must pass further clinical trials before being put to use, at which point scientists will face the challenge of creating versions of the test that are simple and inexpensive enough to be used in day-to-day practice in hospitals and clinics.

Artificial brain ’10 years away’

 

 

 A detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years, a leading scientist has claimed.Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, has already simulated elements of a rat brain.

 

  

 

 

By Jonathan Fildes
Technology reporter, BBC News, Oxford

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8164060.stm

 

 

He told the TED Global conference in Oxford that a synthetic human brain would be of particular use finding treatments for mental illnesses.

Around two billion people are thought to suffer some kind of brain impairment, he said.

“It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years,” he said.

“And if we do succeed, we will send a hologram to TED to talk.”

 

‘Shared fabric’

The Blue Brain project was launched in 2005 and aims to reverse engineer the mammalian brain from laboratory data.

In particular, his team has focused on the neocortical column – repetitive units of the mammalian brain known as the neocortex.

“It’s a new brain,” he explained. “The mammals needed it because they had to cope with parenthood, social interactions complex cognitive functions.

“It was so successful an evolution from mouse to man it expanded about a thousand fold in terms of the numbers of units to produce this almost frightening organ.”

And that evolution continues, he said. “It is evolving at an enormous speed.”

Over the last 15 years, Professor Markram and his team have picked apart the structure of the neocortical column.

“It’s a bit like going and cataloguing a bit of the rainforest – how may trees does it have, what shape are the trees, how many of each type of tree do we have, what is the position of the trees,” he said.

“But it is a bit more than cataloguing because you have to describe and discover all the rules of communication, the rules of connectivity.”

The project now has a software model of “tens of thousands” of neurons – each one of which is different – which has allowed them to digitally construct an artificial neocortical column.

Although each neuron is unique, the team has found the patterns of circuitry in different brains have common patterns.

“Even though your brain may be smaller, bigger, may have different morphologies of neurons – we do actually share the same fabric,” he said.

“And we think this is species specific, which could explain why we can’t communicate across species.”

  

World view

To make the model come alive, the team feeds the models and a few algorithms into a supercomputer.

“You need one laptop to do all the calculations for one neuron,” he said. “So you need ten thousand laptops.”

Instead, he uses an IBM Blue Gene machine with 10,000 processors.

Simulations have started to give the researchers clues about how the brain works.

For example, they can show the brain a picture – say, of a flower – and follow the electrical activity in the machine.

“You excite the system and it actually creates its own representation,” he said.

Ultimately, the aim would be to extract that representation and project it so that researchers could see directly how a brain perceives the world.

But as well as advancing neuroscience and philosophy, the Blue Brain project has other practical applications.

For example, by pooling all the world’s neuroscience data on animals – to create a “Noah’s Ark”, researchers may be able to build animal models.

“We cannot keep on doing animal experiments forever,” said Professor Markram.

It may also give researchers new insights into diseases of the brain.

“There are two billion people on the planet affected by mental disorder,” he told the audience.

The project may give insights into new treatments, he said.

The TED Global conference runs from 21 to 24 July in Oxford, UK.

Creating a Time Machine

When Ronald Mallett’s father died at age 33 of a heart attack he experienced such a profound sense of loss that it resulted in a lifelong obsession. At the age of 10 he decided to create a time machine so that he could travel back in time to save his father. This hugely ambitious idea must have seemed a fantasy to the little boy born in Roaring Spring, Pennsylvania on March 3rd, 1945 and growing up in the Bronx, New York City. However, inspired by a comic book version of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine his ambition became less of a fantasy when in 1973, he received a Ph.D. in Physics from Pennsylvania State University and the Graduate Assistant Award for Excellence in Teaching the same year. In 1975, he was appointed by the University of Connecticut as an Assistant Professor, in 1980 as an Associate Professor and finally in 1987 as a full Professor. He has received two grants and many other distinctions and is a member of both the American Physical Society and the National Society of Black Physicists. During his time at the University of Connecticut his research has include work in general relativity, quantum gravity, and time travel.
For many years Dr Mallett has been working on creating a real time machine. The foundation for the theories on which Dr Mallett hopes to build a time machine is based on creating a circulating cylinder of light that will cause of time space gravity pool through which tiny sub-atomic particles can pass through time. This technology would be based upon Einstein’s Theory of Relativity which supports the idea that both matter and energy can create a gravitational field. The energy of a light beam can produce a gravitational field. A spinning neutral particle when placed in a continuously circulating beam of light will be dragged around by the resulting gravitational field.
Dr Mallett stated that:
“For the strong gravitational field of a circulating cylinder of light, I have found new exact solutions of the Einstein field equations for the exterior and interior gravitational fields of the light cylinder. The exterior gravitational field is shown to contain closed timelike lines. The presence of closed timelike lines indicates the possibility of time travel into the past.”
His project is now known as The Space-time Twisting by Light (STL) project.
A paper by Olum and Everett finds problems with Mallett’s theory. One of their objections is that the spacetime which Mallett used in his analysis contains a singularity and is not the spacetime that would be expected to arise naturally if the circulating laser were activated in previously empty space. In the original experiment light is bent when travelling through an optical fiber or a photonic crystal. The light circulates around rather than moving in a straight line. As a substitute for light moving in a straight line he included a type of one-dimensional singularity called the “line source”. This would bend spacetime so that the light would circulate around on a helix-shaped path in a vacuum. Dr Mallett notes that closed timelike curves are present in a spacetime containing both the line source and the circulating light. But they are not present in a spacetime containing only the line source. The closed loops in time had been produced by the circulating flow of light, and not by the non-moving line source. Dr Mallett does not explain why closed timelike curves would appear in a different spacetime where there is no line source, and where the light is caused to circulate due to passing through a physical substance like a photonic crystal rather than circulating in a vacuum due to the curved spacetime around the line source.
A second objection by Olum and Everett is that the energy required to twist spacetime sufficiently would be huge, and that with lasers of the type in use today the ring would have to be much larger in circumference than the observable universe.
Although not a physisist I tend to think Dr Mallett is on to something. For those that know me what I am notable for is my ability to see the future exactingly and clearly as if I were watching the TV. Granted much of what I’ve seen has little relevance, although a few of my premonitions have come to pass with world noteriety. This ability is something I’ve always had. More intense during an intense illness, but always there. It is neither miraculous nor magical but the result of nature and some aspect of the laws of physics occuring in the universe. I experience what I experience because something is going on in nature allowing information from the future to be received and processed by the human brain, my brain in particular, along with many others. I personally believe this information is travelling backwards through time, but the question is how. For any theory on time travel I think scientist should look at what happens in nature and what is possible in nature. Is what professor Mallett propossing possible in nature? Is this how energy or particles naturally travel back in time carrying information that gets intersected by my brain and then processed and presented as a premonition?

Wi Fi Navigation

The only worldwide sat nav constellation currently in service is the American Global Positioning Service (GPS), funded by the US military. The unencrypted, free-to-use GPS civil signal is used by the vast majority of satnav kit worldwide. America retains the option of denying GPS service at places and times of its own choosing.
Now there is a prospective competitor to sat nav with Skyhook’s hybrid positioning system (XPS). This is a Wi-Fi based, software only, navigation system. It does the same thing as a GPS system such as tom tom, but is not dependent on sattelite navigation. WI-FI (wireless hifidelity) uses high frequency radio signals to transmit and receive data. It requires a wireless card in a PC or laptop and a wireless transmitter, known as a wireless access point. XPS allows any mobile device with Wi-Fi, GPS or a cellular radio (GSM/CDMA) to determine its position with an accuracy of 10 to 20 meters. Unlike other hybrid location solutions, XPS uses land-based Wi-Fi access points, GPS satellites and cellular towers to determine location information. To pinpoint location, XPS uses a massive reference network comprised of the known locations of tens of millions of Wi-Fi access points and cellular towers. To develop this database, Skyhook has deployed drivers to survey every single street, highway, and alley in tens of thousands of cities and towns worldwide, scanning for Wi-Fi access points and plotting their precise geographic locations.
Skyhook has mapped the location of tens of millions of access points worldwide with extensive coverage in North America, Europe and Asia.
While GPS works well in rural areas, it is completely ineffective in urban areas with tall buildings, since it requires an unobstructed view of the sky in order to produce a reliable location fix. Cellular tower triangulation, while having extensive coverage, does not result in accurate location information. XPS combines the strengths of both of these with the world’s leading Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS), resulting in a location-platform that works in -all- environments, suburban, urban and indoors or outdoors.
In congested environments GPS and network location is severely degraded by the phenomenon of multi-path: signals bouncing off of various surfaces and reaching the receiving antenna by two or more paths. While extremely accurate out in the open, it varies widely in congested urban settings. Networked-based systems often do not work outside of home areas.
XPS consistently produces more accurate positioning data in these environments than any other system and is the most responsive positioning system available: it can determine a user’s exact location from a cold start within seconds, even without network assistance. No other system produces an accurate location from a cold start as fast as XPS.
XPS is a software-only system that obviates the need to embed specialized chipsets on the device, or install hardware components at the cellular base-station. Using existing mobile devices and network infrastructure, operators can add LBS applications – such as social networking or gaming – to such devices as smart phones or media players. Unlike any other positioning system, XPS can be either installed at production time or downloaded later wirelessly.
For more information http://www.skyhookwireless.com/ where you can add your Wi Fi address to their data base if you want.