Category: Kebmodee

Televised sunrise in Beijing due to persistently heavy smog

On By A.P.In Beijing, China, Kebmodee, Pollution, smog, Tiananmen SquareLeave a comment

sunrise
This LED screen displays the rising sun in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, which is shrouded in heavy smog on Jan. 16, 2014.

Air pollution in the Chinese capital reached new, choking heights on Thursday. Those who still felt the urge to catch a glimpse of sunlight were able to gather around the city’s gigantic LED screens, where this glorious sunrise was broadcast as part of a patriotic video loop.

Read more: Beijing’s Televised Sunrise | TIME.com http://world.time.com/2014/01/17/beijing-smog-combatted-with-televised-sunrises/#ixzz2qmuRRoma

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Rising home prices send China’s ‘Rat Race’ scurrying underground

On By A.P.In Beijing, China, Kebmodee, living underground1 Comment

A general view of buildings in Beijing

Zig-zagging left and right through a maze of dark, narrow corridors in a high-rise’s basement, 35-year-old kitchen worker Hu has joined the many thousands of Chinese fleeing fast-rising property prices by heading down – down underground.

Hu lives here beneath an affluent downtown apartment building, in a windowless, 4 square-meter (43 square-foot) apartment with his wife. For 400 yuan ($65.85) a month in rent, there’s no air-conditioning, the only suggestion of heat is a pipe snaking through to deliver gas to the apartments above and the bathroom is a fetid, shared toilet down the hall.

“I can’t afford to rent a house,” said Hu as he showed off his meager appointments. Living in basement apartments isn’t illegal in China, but like anywhere else it is nothing to brag about and Hu, who guts fish for 2,500 yuan a month at a popular Sichuanese hotpot restaurant on the street above, declined to provide his given name. “If I weren’t trying to save money, I wouldn’t live here,” he said.

Locals have dubbed Hu and his fellow subterranean denizens the “rat race” – casualties and simultaneously emblems of a housing market beyond the government’s control.

Despite efforts to discourage property speculation and develop affordable housing, a steady stream of job-seekers from the countryside and a lack of attractive investment alternatives have kept prices soaring. Residential property prices rose 10 percent in November from the same month of 2012, according to data released last week, and have been setting new records every year since 2009. Prices in Beijing are rising even faster – 16 percent a year – with rents climbing 12 percent a year.

That’s pushing more and more newly arrived urbanites underground. Of the estimated 7.7 million migrants living in Beijing, nearly a fifth live either at their workplace or underground, according to state news agency Xinhua. Beijing’s housing authority refuted this statistic, saying in an email to Reuters that a government survey last year found only about 280,000 migrants living in basements and that only a small percentage of Beijing’s basements were being used as dwellings.

Last month, authorities sealed Beijing’s manhole covers after local media discovered a group of people living in the sewers below, with one, a 52-year-old car washer, reported by the local media to have been living there for at least a decade. The sewer dwellers were relocated and those not from Beijing sent back home.

Surging residential prices are both boon and bane to the government. China’s booming property sector accounts for roughly 15 percent of GDP and heavily indebted local governments rely on land sales – selling land earns them roughly three times what they collect from taxes.

But rising prices are putting home ownership farther out of reach for most Chinese, worsening the gap between rich and poor and breeding social discontent.

“Some people can buy several homes, some people can’t even buy one,” said Mao Yushi, co-founder and honorary president at the Unirule Institute of Economics, an independent think tank in Beijing. “There will be an impact on society.”

The government has responded by restricting home purchases and boosting the supply of low-cost public housing. In Beijing, the total floor space of public housing rose 20 percent in the first 11 months of 2013 from the year before.

But with the promise of employment and education beckoning in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, the problem appears likely to only get worse. Beijing saw another 316,000 migrants arrive in 2012, lifting its population to 19.6 million.

That has made housing in Beijing more expensive relative to average incomes than in many developed countries. The median price for residential property in Beijing is over $4,500 a square meter, according to property developer Soufun, with rents running at $9.50 per square meter – in a nation where the average annual income is just over $6,000.

That makes Beijing homes almost three times as expensive for Chinese as buying a home in New York City is for Americans, according to Reuters calculations based on data from the World Bank and San Francisco-based property website Trulia. Renting a 1,000 square-foot apartment in China’s capital would cost almost double the average citizen’s monthly income.

Not surprisingly, public opinion polls routinely rank rising home prices as one of the biggest sources of anxiety among Chinese adults. A 2012 survey by the Hong Kong media website Phoenix found that couples in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen spend on average 42 percent of their combined monthly income on mortgages. Chinese have invented the term “housing slave” to describe those struggling to make hefty monthly mortgages payments.

But with Beijing home prices having risen six-fold in the past decade, according to Soufun, even cheap public housing can be beyond the reach of many, forcing them to seek less attractive alternatives.

In a basement below a block of apartments in downtown Beijing, residents walk stooped to avoid pipes hanging from the ceilings. “This is better than other basements in the area,” said one 26-year-old resident.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/05/us-china-property-basement-idUSBREA040GD20140105

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the It’s Interesting community.

New nerve stimulation treatment for sleep apnea

On By A.P.In Kebmodee, Medicine, Sleep, sleep apneaLeave a comment

Machines that you strap on at night, appliances you wear in your mouth, even surgeries to remove throat tissue — all measures people have resorted to because of sleep apnea.

Kathy Gaberson has sleep apnea, which left her sleepy and forgetful during the day. The snoring and other symptoms even kept her husband awake.

“I would wake up, and he would be leaning over me, with eyes wide open, and I would say, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘You’re not breathing.’ Well, you are now, but you weren’t,” said Gaberson.

She used the strapped-on pressure machine, or CPAP, for years. But it hurt her nose, made turning in bed more complicated, and was hard to travel with.

She saw an ad for a study at UPMC, an alternative for people who have had trouble putting up with CPAP.

Researchers were studying an implanted device to keep the airway open. It stimulates the nerve to the tongue.

More than 100 people participated, mostly men, average age 57.

The device is put in surgically in the upper chest with sensors for breathing and a stimulator wire to the tongue. This is activated by the person at night with a remote.

After a multi-step evaluation, Kathy qualified for the study. In fact, based on a test that looked at her throat during sleep, she was ideal.

“My tongue moved back and blocked my airway,” she says.

The device keeps the tongue out of the throat. This is timed with breathing.

“If you close your mouth, and try to stick out your tongue, that’s what it feels like. These muscles here contract,” she says.

With the device, episodes of apnea, or breathing stoppages, go down 70 percent. It is not yet FDA approved and widely available to patients.

It was a one-day procedure. She had very little pain, and was back to her usual activity days later with only a lifting restriction.

She is disappointed she had to have the device removed because of an unrelated bloodstream infection, and she’s back to using CPAP.

“I was not falling asleep during the day. My memory improved. I felt much more energetic,” she says. “It gave me a better sleep quality than the CPAP ever did.”

The study, funded by the device-maker, is in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine.

http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2014/01/09/new-implantable-device-helping-sleep-apnea-patients/

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Samantha West – robot telemarketer that denies it’s a robot

On By A.P.In Kebmodee, Michael Scherer, Robot, robot telemarketer, Samantha West, telemarketer, The FutureLeave a comment

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The phone call came from a charming woman with a bright, engaging voice to the cell phone of a TIME Washington Bureau Chief Michael Scherer. She wanted to offer a deal on health insurance, but something was fishy.

When Scherer asked point blank if she was a real person, or a computer-operated robot voice, she replied enthusiastically that she was real, with a charming laugh. But then she failed several other tests. When asked “What vegetable is found in tomato soup?” she said she did not understand the question. When asked multiple times what day of the week it was yesterday, she complained repeatedly of a bad connection.

Over the course of the next hour, several TIME reporters called her back, working to uncover the mystery of her bona fides. Her name, she said, was Samantha West, and she was definitely a robot, given the pitch perfect repetition of her answers. Her goal was to ask a series of questions about health coverage—”Are you on Medicare?” etc.—and then transfer the potential customer to a real person, who could close the sale. You can listen for yourself to some of the reporting here: http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/12/10/meet-the-robot-telemarketer-who-denies-shes-a-robot/

If you want, you can call her too. Her number is (484) 589-5611. This number, if you Google it, is the subject of much discussion online as other recipients of Samantha West calls complain on chat boards about the mysteriously persistent lady who keeps calling them. “A friendly sounded woman on the other end claimed I requested health insurance information,” writes one mark. “She doggedly refused to deviate from her script.”

After answering her questions, one TIME reporter was transferred to an actual human who did not promptly end the call, as others had when asked about Samantha. Asked for the company’s website, the real human on the other end of the line said it was premierhealthagency.com, the website of a Ft. Lauderdale company. “We’re here to help. . . because we care,” is the company motto on its homepage. A TIME reporter called the company directly, identified himself and said TIME was doing a story about the robot who calls people on the company’s behalf. “We don’t use robot calls, sir,” said the person who answered the phone, before promptly hanging up the phone.

When the number was called a second time, a real live employee of Premier Health Plans Inc., who gave his name as Bruce Martin, answered the phone. He said he was not sure if Samantha West’s phone number, mentioned above, was one of the company’s numbers. “First of all, we use TV, we use radio, we use Internet,” said Martin. He described the company as selling life insurance, health insurance and dental insurance. He asked that TIME publish the name of his company, the website and phone number in the article. “If you are going to publish this in the magazine, I’d like to get something out of it,” he said. The TIME reporter agreed to do just that.

Martin also said he would inquire internally about whether Samantha West worked for the company, but would not be able to respond to the request Monday night. TIME will update the story with any additional information he provides.

UPDATE: As of Dec. 11, one day after this story published, the phone number listed above was no longer answered by Samantha West. Rather, it diverted callers to a busy signal. Also the website, premierhealthagency.com, had been taken offline.

Read more: Samantha West The Telemarketer Robot Who Swears She’s Not a Robot | TIME.com http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/12/10/meet-the-robot-telemarketer-who-denies-shes-a-robot/#ixzz2nSpfusYd

Nobel winner Randy Sheckman declares boycott of top science journals

On By A.P.In Kebmodee, Nobel PrizeLeave a comment

2013nobelmedicinewinners

Randy Schekman says his lab will no longer send papers to Nature, Cell and Science as they distort scientific process.

Leading academic journals are distorting the scientific process and represent a “tyranny” that must be broken, according to a Nobel prize winner who has declared a boycott on the publications.

Randy Schekman, a US biologist who won the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine this year and receives his prize in Stockholm on Tuesday, said his lab would no longer send research papers to the top-tier journals, Nature, Cell and Science.

Schekman said pressure to publish in “luxury” journals encouraged researchers to cut corners and pursue trendy fields of science instead of doing more important work. The problem was exacerbated, he said, by editors who were not active scientists but professionals who favoured studies that were likely to make a splash.

The prestige of appearing in the major journals has led the Chinese Academy of Sciences to pay successful authors the equivalent of $30,000 (£18,000). Some researchers made half of their income through such “bribes”, Schekman said in an interview.

Writing in the Guardian, Schekman raises serious concerns over the journals’ practices and calls on others in the scientific community to take action.

“I have published in the big brands, including papers that won me a Nobel prize. But no longer,” he writes. “Just as Wall Street needs to break the hold of bonus culture, so science must break the tyranny of the luxury journals.”

Schekman is the editor of eLife, an online journal set up by the Wellcome Trust. Articles submitted to the journal – a competitor to Nature, Cell and Science – are discussed by reviewers who are working scientists and accepted if all agree. The papers are free for anyone to read.

Schekman criticises Nature, Cell and Science for artificially restricting the number of papers they accept, a policy he says stokes demand “like fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags.” He also attacks a widespread metric called an “impact factor”, used by many top-tier journals in their marketing.

A journal’s impact factor is a measure of how often its papers are cited, and is used as a proxy for quality. But Schekman said it was “toxic influence” on science that “introduced a distortion”. He writes: “A paper can become highly cited because it is good science – or because it is eye-catching, provocative, or wrong.”

Daniel Sirkis, a postdoc in Schekman’s lab, said many scientists wasted a lot of time trying to get their work into Cell, Science and Nature. “It’s true I could have a harder time getting my foot in the door of certain elite institutions without papers in these journals during my postdoc, but I don’t think I’d want to do science at a place that had this as one of their most important criteria for hiring anyway,” he told the Guardian.

Sebastian Springer, a biochemist at Jacobs University in Bremen, who worked with Schekman at the University of California, Berkeley, said he agreed there were major problems in scientific publishing, but no better model yet existed. “The system is not meritocratic. You don’t necessarily see the best papers published in those journals. The editors are not professional scientists, they are journalists which isn’t necessarily the greatest problem, but they emphasise novelty over solid work,” he said.

Springer said it was not enough for individual scientists to take a stand. Scientists are hired and awarded grants and fellowships on the basis of which journals they publish in. “The hiring committees all around the world need to acknowledge this issue,” he said.

Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief at Nature, said the journal had worked with the scientific community for more than 140 years and the support it had from authors and reviewers was validation that it served their needs.

“We select research for publication in Nature on the basis of scientific significance. That in turn may lead to citation impact and media coverage, but Nature editors aren’t driven by those considerations, and couldn’t predict them even if they wished to do so,” he said.

“The research community tends towards an over-reliance in assessing research by the journal in which it appears, or the impact factor of that journal. In a survey Nature Publishing Group conducted this year of over 20,000 scientists, the three most important factors in choosing a journal to submit to were: the reputation of the journal; the relevance of the journal content to their discipline; and the journal’s impact factor. My colleagues and I have expressed concerns about over-reliance on impact factors many times over the years, both in the pages of Nature and elsewhere.”

Monica Bradford, executive editor at Science, said: “We have a large circulation and printing additional papers has a real economic cost … Our editorial staff is dedicated to ensuring a thorough and professional peer review upon which they determine which papers to select for inclusion in our journal. There is nothing artificial about the acceptance rate. It reflects the scope and mission of our journal.”

Emilie Marcus, editor of Cell, said: “Since its launch nearly 40 years ago, Cell has focused on providing strong editorial vision, best-in-class author service with informed and responsive professional editors, rapid and rigorous peer-review from leading academic researchers, and sophisticated production quality. Cell’s raison d’etre is to serve science and scientists and if we fail to offer value for both our authors and readers, the journal will not flourish; for us doing so is a founding principle, not a luxury.”

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/09/nobel-winner-boycott-science-journals?CMP=twt_fd

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Uruguay becomes first nation to legalize of all aspects of marijuana trade

On By A.P.In Drugs, Jose Mujica, Kebmodee, marijuana, South America, UruguayLeave a comment

pot

Uruguay’s Senate, on Tuesday, approved the legalization of marijuana in the country—including the growing, sale and smoking—making it the first nation to sanction all aspects of the pot industry. Previously, the use of marijuana was legal in the South American country, but cultivation and sale of the drug were not.

The newly passed, government-backed bill will now provide for government regulation of all aspects of the marijuana trade with an eye on “wresting the business from criminals,” according to Reuters. “The bill gives authorities 120 days to set up a drug control board that will regulate cultivation standards, fix the price and monitor consumption.” Uruguayan president Jose Mujica is a supporter of a legal national market for marijuana, but the measure has yet to win over a majority of the 3-plus million people in the country. A recent poll, Reuters reports, found that 58 percent of Uruguayans are opposed to legalization.

Here’s more from Reuters on what the law will look like on the ground once it goes into effect:

Cannabis consumers will be able to buy a maximum of 40 grams (1.4 ounces) each month from licensed pharmacies as long as they are Uruguayan residents over the age of 18 and registered on a government database that will monitor their monthly purchases. When the law is implemented in 120 days, Uruguayans will be able to grow six marijuana plants in their homes a year, or as much as 480 grams (about 17 ounces), and form smoking clubs of 15 to 45 members that can grow up to 99 plants per year. Registered drug users should be able to start buying marijuana over the counter from licensed pharmacies in April.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/12/10/uruguay_sets_up_a_national_marketplace_for_marijuana_the_world_s_first.html

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Electric brain stimulation in a specific area discovered to induce a sense of determination

On By A.P.In aMCC, anterior midcingulate cortex, brain, Depression, determination, epilepsy, Josef Parvizi, Kebmodee, motivation, neural activity, neural prosthetics, neurologist, Neurology, Neuron, neuroplasticity, neuroprosthetic device, Neuropsychiatric Disease, Neuropsychopharmacology, Neuroscience, neuroscientist, neurosurgeon, neurosurgery, neurotransmitter, neurotrophin, Stanford, The FutureLeave a comment

Doctors in the US have induced feelings of intense determination in two men by stimulating a part of their brains with gentle electric currents.

The men were having a routine procedure to locate regions in their brains that caused epileptic seizures when they felt their heart rates rise, a sense of foreboding, and an overwhelming desire to persevere against a looming hardship.

The remarkable findings could help researchers develop treatments for depression and other disorders where people are debilitated by a lack of motivation.

One patient said the feeling was like driving a car into a raging storm. When his brain was stimulated, he sensed a shaking in his chest and a surge in his pulse. In six trials, he felt the same sensations time and again.

Comparing the feelings to a frantic drive towards a storm, the patient said: “You’re only halfway there and you have no other way to turn around and go back, you have to keep going forward.”

When asked by doctors to elaborate on whether the feeling was good or bad, he said: “It was more of a positive thing, like push harder, push harder, push harder to try and get through this.”

A second patient had similar feelings when his brain was stimulated in the same region, called the anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC). He felt worried that something terrible was about to happen, but knew he had to fight and not give up, according to a case study in the journal Neuron.

Both men were having an exploratory procedure to find the focal point in their brains that caused them to suffer epileptic fits. In the procedure, doctors sink fine electrodes deep into different parts of the brain and stimulate them with tiny electrical currents until the patient senses the “aura” that precedes a seizure. Often, seizures can be treated by removing tissue from this part of the brain.

“In the very first patient this was something very unexpected, and we didn’t report it,” said Josef Parvizi at Stanford University in California. But then I was doing functional mapping on the second patient and he suddenly experienced a very similar thing.”

“Its extraordinary that two individuals with very different past experiences respond in a similar way to one or two seconds of very low intensity electricity delivered to the same area of their brain. These patients are normal individuals, they have their IQ, they have their jobs. We are not reporting these findings in sick brains,” Parvizi said.

The men were stimulated with between two and eight milliamps of electrical current, but in tests the doctors administered sham stimulation too. In the sham tests, they told the patients they were about to stimulate the brain, but had switched off the electical supply. In these cases, the men reported no changes to their feelings. The sensation was only induced in a small area of the brain, and vanished when doctors implanted electrodes just five millimetres away.

Parvizi said a crucial follow-up experiment will be to test whether stimulation of the brain region really makes people more determined, or simply creates the sensation of perseverance. If future studies replicate the findings, stimulation of the brain region – perhaps without the need for brain-penetrating electrodes – could be used to help people with severe depression.

The anterior midcingulate cortex seems to be important in helping us select responses and make decisions in light of the feedback we get. Brent Vogt, a neurobiologist at Boston University, said patients with chronic pain and obsessive-compulsive disorder have already been treated by destroying part of the aMCC. “Why not stimulate it? If this would enhance relieving depression, for example, let’s go,” he said.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/05/determination-electrical-brain-stimulation

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Trapped in an Underwater Air Bubble for Three Days

On By A.P.In air bubble, Aristotle, Brooklyn Bridge, California, Chevron, diving bell, Harrison Okene, Henry’s law, Kebmodee, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Maxim Umansky, Nigeria, ocean, Phlebas the Phoenician, PoseidonLeave a comment

Being buried alive is usually near the top of any worst-ways-to-die list. But how about being buried alive 100 feet below the ocean surface in a tiny pocket of air? For Harrison Okene, a 29-year-old Nigerian boat cook, this nightmare scenario became a reality for nearly three grueling days.

The story began on May 26 at about 4:30 a.m., when Harrison Okene got up to use the restroom. His vessel, a Chevron oil service tugboat called the AHT Jascon-4, swayed in the choppy Atlantic waters just off the coast of Nigeria. What caused the tugboat to capsize remains a mystery, though a Chevron official later blamed a “sudden ocean swell.”

Okene was thrown from the crew restroom as the ship turned over. Water streamed in and swept him through the vessel’s bowels until he found himself in the toilet of an officer’s cabin. As the ship settled on the ocean floor, the water stopped rising. For the next 60 hours, Okene—who was without food, water, or light—listened to the sounds of ocean creatures scavenging through the ship on his dead crewmates. Like a living Phlebas the Phoenician, he recounted his life’s events while growing more resigned to his fate.

Unbelievably, Okene survived his underwater ordeal long enough to be rescued. Basic physics, it turned out, was on Okene’s side the whole time—even if Poseidon wasn’t.

When Maxim Umansky, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, read about Okene’s miraculous rescue, his interest was piqued. “For a physics question, it’s an interesting problem,” said Umansky. “Of course, I’m also glad the man survived and happy with the ending of his story.”

Umansky began conducting his own calculations to quantify the factors responsible for Okene’s survival. He also posed a question to a physics Web forum: How large does a bubble have to be to sustain a person with breathable air?

Okene’s salvation—the air bubble—was trapped because the overturned boat acted as a sort of diving bell, the cup-shaped chambers that have transported explorers and workers into the depths for centuries. In the fourth century B.C., Aristotle described the contraptions as enabling “the divers to respire equally well by letting down a cauldron, for this does not fill with water, but retains the air, for it is forced straight down into the water.” Years later, diving bells called caissons helped 19th-century workers construct the Brooklyn Bridge (though many died in the process).

Whether in a bell or boat, trapped air rises to the top of a concave chamber. The only way it can escape is by diffusing through the water itself, one molecule at a time. Eventually this would happen, but Okene would have succumbed to thirst, hypothermia, or asphyxiation long before his air bubble diffused into the ocean.

Fans of horror movies will note that asphyxiation typically claims victims of live burial. Carbon dioxide accounts for about 0.03 percent of normal air. If someone is trapped in an enclosed space, however, exhaling CO2 with every breath, the proportion of oxygen steadily decreases while the level of carbon dioxide increases. It’s the deadly CO2, not the lack of oxygen, that ultimately kills a person. Once the air reaches around 5 percent CO2, the victim becomes confused and panicked, starts hyperventilating, and eventually loses consciousness. Death follows. In an enclosed coffin, a person may produce deadly levels of carbon dioxide within two hours or so.

But Okene didn’t asphyxiate despite being trapped in a small, sealed space for 60 hours. How was this possible?

The water encapsulating his air bubble may have played a small role in his survival. Carbon dioxide, more so than oxygen or nitrogen, readily dissolves into water—especially cold water. The rate at which this occurs follows Henry’s law, a physics rule that states that the solubility of gas in a liquid is proportional to the pressure of the gas above the liquid. Disturbing the water’s surface, which increases its surface area, likewise increases the rate of transport of gaseous CO2 into the liquid. But if the volume of gas were too small to begin with—in other words, if deadly CO2 built up faster than it could diffuse away—that process wouldn’t have made much of a difference for Okene.

Humans require 10 cubic meters of air per day. So for Okene to continue breathing for 60 hours, he needed 25 cubic meters of air. (Even if his metabolism changed in the cold water, Umansky says, this is still a safe estimate). But Okene was breathing at 100 feet, or 30 meters, below the surface of the water. For every 10 meters a person descends, one atmosphere of pressure is added. This compresses gas and makes it denser, according to Boyle’s law.

Since Okene was trapped at 30 meters below the surface, his air supply became denser by a factor of four. This means he needed only 6 cubic meters of air to survive rather than 25 cubic meters. A space of about 6 feet by 10 feet by 3 feet would be sufficient to supply that amount of air. The press reported that Okene’s chamber was only about 4 feet high, and Umansky speculates that it must have been connected to another air pocket under the hull of the boat. “That’s the most reasonable explanation for this miraculous survival,” he said.

In a lively discussion on the physics forum, about a dozen participants offered their own calculations and observations. One user, Anna V., came up with a slightly larger figure for the bubble’s required size, about 10 feet by 25 feet by 25 feet. An enclosure of this size “is a reasonable one on a tugboat,” she writes. “He was just lucky the air siphoned where he was trapped.”

Other people have survived short periods underwater breathing trapped air. In 1991 diver Michael Proudfoot reportedly spent two days in an air pocket on a sunken ship off the coast of California after he accidentally smashed his scuba gear. Okene likely holds the new record for most time spent trapped underwater. After his rescue, he had to spend another 60 hours in a decompression chamber to rid his body of excess nitrogen, and some of his skin peeled off from soaking in salt water for so long. As one of his friends understatedly wrote on Okene’s Facebook wall, “I feel sorry for u that happened man.” Dozens of other friends and family members thank God and Jesus for looking out for Okene, though perhaps a hat tip to physics is in order, too.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/06/harrison_okene_s_shipwreck_air_bubble_how_could_he_survive_underwater_for.html

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Computer Software Mines Science Papers to Make New Discoveries

On By A.P.In Baylor College of Medicine, Cancer, discovery, Kebmodee, kinase, Lawrence Hunter, Medicine, Olivier Lichtarge, p53, phosphatase, Science, Ying ChenLeave a comment

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Software that read tens of thousands of research papers and then predicted new discoveries about the workings of a protein that’s key to cancer could herald a faster approach to developing new drugs.

The software, developed in collaboration between IBM and Baylor College of Medicine, was set loose on more than 60,000 research papers that focused on p53, a protein involved in cell growth implicated in most cancers. By parsing sentences in the documents, the software could build an understanding of what is known about enzymes called kinases that act on p53 and regulate its behavior; these enzymes are common targets for cancer treatments. It then generated a list of other proteins mentioned in the literature that were probably undiscovered kinases, based on what it knew about those already identified. Most of its predictions tested so far have turned out to be correct.

“We have tested 10,” Olivier Lichtarge of Baylor said Tuesday. “Seven seem to be true kinases.” He presented preliminary results of his collaboration with IBM at a meeting on the topic of Cognitive Computing held at IBM’s Almaden research lab.

Lichtarge also described an earlier test of the software in which it was given access to research literature published prior to 2003 to see if it could predict p53 kinases that have been discovered since. The software found seven of the nine kinases discovered after 2003.

“P53 biology is central to all kinds of disease,” says Lichtarge, and so it seemed to be the perfect way to show that software-generated discoveries might speed up research that leads to new treatments. He believes the results so far show that to be true, although the kinase-hunting experiments are yet to be reviewed and published in a scientific journal, and more lab tests are still planned to confirm the findings so far. “Kinases are typically discovered at a rate of one per year,” says Lichtarge. “The rate of discovery can be vastly accelerated.”

Lichtarge said that although the software was configured to look only for kinases, it also seems capable of identifying previously unidentified phosphatases, which are enzymes that reverse the action of kinases. It can also identify other types of protein that may interact with p53.

The Baylor collaboration is intended to test a way of extending a set of tools that IBM researchers already offer to pharmaceutical companies. Under the banner of accelerated discovery, text-analyzing tools are used to mine publications, patents, and molecular databases. For example, a company in search of a new malaria drug might use IBM’s tools to find molecules with characteristics that are similar to existing treatments. Because software can search more widely, it might turn up molecules in overlooked publications or patents that no human would otherwise find.

“We started working with Baylor to adapt those capabilities, and extend it to show this process can be leveraged to discover new things about p53 biology,” says Ying Chen, a researcher at IBM Research Almaden.

It typically takes between $500 million and $1 billion dollars to develop a new drug, and 90 percent of candidates that begin the journey don’t make it to market, says Chen. The cost of failed drugs is cited as one reason that some drugs command such high prices (see “A Tale of Two Drugs”).

Lawrence Hunter, director of the Center for Computational Pharmacology at the University of Colorado Denver, says that careful empirical confirmation is needed for claims that the software has made new discoveries. But he says that progress in this area is important, and that such tools are desperately needed.

The volume of research literature both old and new is now so large that even specialists can’t hope to read everything that might help them, says Hunter. Last year over one million new articles were added to the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s Medline database of biomedical research papers, which now contains 23 million items. Software can crunch through massive amounts of information and find vital clues in unexpected places. “Crucial bits of information are sometimes isolated facts that are only a minor point in an article but would be really important if you can find it,” he says.

Lichtarge believes that software like his could change the way scientists conduct and assess new research findings. Scientists currently rely in part on the reputation of the people, institutions, and journals involved, and the number of times a paper is cited by others.

Software that gleans meaning from all the information published within a field could offer a better way, says Lichtarge. “You might publish directly into the [software] and see how disruptive it is,” he says.

Hunter thinks that scientists might even use such tools at an earlier stage, having software come up with evidence for and against new hypotheses. “I think it would really help science go faster. We often waste a lot of time in the lab because we didn’t know every little thing in the literature,” he says.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/520461/software-mines-science-papers-to-make-new-discoveries/

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.