Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/305176342?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Monday, May 13, 2013
Sunday, May 12, 2013
New 3-D technology to treat atrial fibrillation
May 11, 2013 ? Researchers at the Intermountain Heart Institute at Intermountain Medical Center have developed a new 3-D technology that for the first time allows cardiologists the ability to see the precise source of atrial fibrillation in the heart -- a breakthrough for a condition that affects nearly three million Americans.
This new technology that maps the electronic signals of the heart three dimensionally significantly improves the chances of successfully eliminating the heart rhythm disorder with a catheter ablation procedure, according to a new study presented at the Heart Rhythm Society's National Scientific Sessions in Denver on Saturday, May 11, 2013.
Atrial fibrillation occurs when electronic signals misfire in the heart, causing an irregular, and often chaotic, heartbeat in the upper left atrium of the heart.
Symptoms of atrial fibrillation include irregular or rapid heartbeat, palpitations, lightheadedness, extreme fatigue, shortness of breath or chest pain. However, not all people with atrial fibrillation experience symptoms.
"Historically, more advanced forms of atrial fibrillation were treated by arbitrarily creating scar tissue in the upper chambers of the heart in hopes of channeling these chaotic electrical signals that were causing atrial fibrillation," said researcher John Day, MD, director of the heart rhythm specialists at the Intermountain Heart Institute at Intermountain Medical Center. "The beauty of this new technology is that it allows us for the first time to actually see three dimensionally the source of these chaotic electrical signals in the heart causing atrial fibrillation."
Previously, cardiologists were able to map the heart in 3-D to enhance navigation of catheters, but this is the first time that they've utilized 3-D imaging technology to map the heart's specific electronic signals. Armed with this information, cardiologists can now pinpoint exactly where the misfiring signals are coming from and then "zap" or ablate that specific area in the heart and dramatically improve success rates.
With this new technology, cardiologists will now be able to treat thousands of more patients who suffer from advanced forms of atrial fibrillation and were previously not felt to be good candidates for this procedure.
"The capabilities of the new technology can be compared to a symphony concert," said Jared Bunch, MD, medical director for electrophysiology research at the Intermountain Heart Institute at Intermountain Medical Center. "During the concert, you have many different instruments all playing different parts, much like the heart has many frequencies that drive the heartbeat. This novel technology allows us to pinpoint the melody of an individual instrument, display it on a 3-D map and direct the ablation process."
The research team used the new 3-D mapping technology on 49 patients between 2012 and 2013 and compared them with nearly 200 patients with similar conditions who received conventional treatment during that same time period.
About one year after catheter ablation, nearly 79% of patients who had the 3-D procedure were free of their atrial fibrillation, compared to only 47.4% of patients who underwent a standard ablation procedure alone without the 3-D method.
"This new technology allows us to find the needles in the haystack, and as we ablate these areas we typically see termination or slowing of atrial fibrillation in our patients," says Dr. Day.
All of the patients in the study had failed medications and 37 percent had received prior catheter ablations. The average age of study participants was 65.5 years old and 94 percent had persistent/chronic atrial fibrillation.
Previous research has shown that the incidence of atrial fibrillation increases with age. A report from the American Heart Association shows the median age for patients with atrial fibrillation is 66.8 years for men and 74.6 years for women.
If untreated, atrial fibrillation can lead to blood clots, stroke and heart failure. In fact, people with atrial fibrillation are five times more likely to have a stroke than people without the condition.
Intermountain Medical Center is the flagship facility for the renown Intermountain Healthcare system.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/sO2VxivmqZw/130511194906.htm
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Google Documents Are Gone - Business Insider
UPDATE:?Google Docs are back!
EARLIER:?It looks like Google Drive, the service that stores your Google Documents, is having some problems. Many users are reporting on Twitter and elsewhere that their documents have disappeared.?
In our tests, as long as you have the URL for a document you can still access it. It appears that the main menu is just empty for users.?We are also able to access our documents using the Google Drive smartphone app.
Those are great signs. It's likely that your documents haven't been deleted, but have temporarily disappeared from the desktop version of Google Drive.
The Google Apps status page still lists Google Drive as "orange," which confirms it is experiencing a service disruption.
Google's apps status dashboard.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-documents-are-gone-2013-5
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Sifting through atmospheres of far-off worlds
May 10, 2013 ? Gone are the days of being able to count the number of known planets on your fingers. Today, there are more than 800 confirmed exoplanets -- planets that orbit stars beyond our sun -- and more than 2,700 other candidates. What are these exotic planets made of? Unfortunately, you cannot stack them in a jar like marbles and take a closer look. Instead, researchers are coming up with advanced techniques for probing the planets' makeup.
One breakthrough to come in recent years is direct imaging of exoplanets. Ground-based telescopes have begun taking infrared pictures of the planets posing near their stars in family portraits. But to astronomers, a picture is worth even more than a thousand words if its light can be broken apart into a rainbow of different wavelengths.
Those wishes are coming true as researchers are beginning to install infrared cameras on ground-based telescopes equipped with spectrographs. Spectrographs are instruments that spread an object's light apart, revealing signatures of molecules. Project 1640, partly funded by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., recently accomplished this goal using the Palomar Observatory near San Diego.
"In just one hour, we were able to get precise composition information about four planets around one overwhelmingly bright star," said Gautam Vasisht of JPL, co-author of the new study appearing in the Astrophysical Journal. "The star is a hundred thousand times as bright as the planets, so we've developed ways to remove that starlight and isolate the extremely faint light of the planets."
Along with ground-based infrared imaging, other strategies for combing through the atmospheres of giant planets are being actively pursued as well. For example, NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes monitor planets as they cross in front of their stars, and then disappear behind. NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will use a comparable strategy to study the atmospheres of planets only slightly larger than Earth.
In the new study, the researchers examined HR 8799, a large star orbited by at least four known giant, red planets. Three of the planets were among the first ever directly imaged around a star, thanks to observations from the Gemini and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, in 2008. The fourth planet, the closest to the star and the hardest to see, was revealed in images taken by the Keck telescope in 2010.
That alone was a tremendous feat considering that all planet discoveries up until then had been made through indirect means, for example by looking for the wobble of a star induced by the tug of planets.
Those images weren't enough, however, to reveal any information about the planets' chemical composition. That's where spectrographs are needed -- to expose the "fingerprints" of molecules in a planet's atmosphere. Capturing a distant world's spectrum requires gathering even more planet light, and that means further blocking the glare of the star.
Project 1640 accomplished this with a collection of instruments, which the team installs on the ground-based telescopes each time they go on "observing runs." The instrument suite includes a coronagraph to mask out the starlight; an advanced adaptive optics system, which removes the blur of our moving atmosphere by making millions of tiny adjustments to two deformable telescope mirrors; an imaging spectrograph that records 30 images in a rainbow of infrared colors simultaneously; and a state-of-the-art wave front sensor that further adjusts the mirrors to compensate for scattered starlight.
"It's like taking a single picture of the Empire State Building from an airplane that reveals a bump on the sidewalk next to it that is as high as an ant," said Ben R. Oppenheimer, lead author of the new study and associate curator and chair of the Astrophysics Department at the American Museum of Natural History, N.Y., N.Y.
Their results revealed that all four planets, though nearly the same in temperature, have different compositions. Some, unexpectedly, do not have methane in them, and there may be hints of ammonia or other compounds that would also be surprising. Further theoretical modeling will help to understand the chemistry of these planets.
Meanwhile, the quest to obtain more and better spectra of exoplanets continues. Other researchers have used the Keck telescope and the Large Binocular Telescope near Tucson, Ariz., to study the emission of individual planets in the HR8799 system. In addition to the HR 8799 system, only two others have yielded images of exoplanets. The next step is to find more planets ripe for giving up their chemical secrets. Several ground-based telescopes are being prepared for the hunt, including Keck, Gemini, Palomar and Japan's Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
Ideally, the researchers want to find young planets that still have enough heat left over from their formation, and thus more infrared light for the spectrographs to see. They also want to find planets located far from their stars, and out of the blinding starlight. NASA's infrared Spitzer and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) missions, and its ultraviolet Galaxy Evolution Explorer, now led by the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, have helped identify candidate young stars that may host planets meeting these criteria.
"We're looking for super-Jupiter planets located faraway from their star," said Vasisht. "As our technique develops, we hope to be able to acquire molecular compositions of smaller, and slightly older, gas planets."
Still lower-mass planets, down to the size of Saturn, will be targets for imaging studies by the James Webb Space Telescope.
"Rocky Earth-like planets are too small and close to their stars for the current technology, or even for James Webb to detect. The feat of cracking the chemical compositions of true Earth analogs will come from a future space mission such as the proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder," said Charles Beichman, a co-author of the P1640 result and executive director of NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech.
Though the larger, gas planets are not hospitable to life, the current studies are teaching astronomers how the smaller, rocky ones form.
"The outer giant planets dictate the fate of rocky ones like Earth. Giant planets can migrate in toward a star, and in the process, tug the smaller, rocky planets around or even kick them out of the system. We're looking at hot Jupiters before they migrate in, and hope to understand more about how and when they might influence the destiny of the rocky, inner planets," said Vasisht.
NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute manages time allocation on the Keck telescope for NASA. JPL manages NASA's Exoplanet Exploration program office. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
A visualization from the American Museum of Natural History showing where the HR 8799 system is in relation to our solar system is online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDNAk0bwLrU .
More information about exoplanets and NASA's planet-finding program is at http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov .
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/QG7gpFtIIQY/130510192835.htm
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Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Israel groups say PM halts new settlement building
JERUSALEM (AP) ? Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stopped approving new construction in West Bank settlements, two prominent Israeli activist groups said Tuesday, in what could be an attempt to clear the way for renewed peace talks with the Palestinians.
Anti-settlement group Peace Now, which monitors all new Israeli settlement construction, said Netanyahu has not approved new tenders or announcements of new building plans in the settlements since he won a new term in January elections.
"It seems that Netanyahu took it upon himself to follow a policy of restraint," Peace Now said in a statement. It said Netanyahu was likely trying to avoid colliding with the U.S. at a time when Secretary of State John Kerry is attempting to restart peace negotiations.
The group said it did not know how long the freeze on new settlement building would hold, and noted that previously started settlement building is proceeding.
The Yesha settlers council, which promotes settlement construction, also claimed a freeze was in place. Yigal Dilmoni, a Yesha official, said Netanyahu's office confirmed to him that the prime minister has stopped approving housing tenders.
"This does not help anything, and it is discriminatory," Dilmoni said. "We are severely against this."
Peace talks broke down in 2008 and have remained stalled in large part because of Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. The Palestinians claim both areas, captured by Israel in 1967, as parts of a future independent state and have insisted that Israel halt settlement construction before peace talks to resume. Israel says the talks should take place without preconditions.
Following President Obama's visit to the region in March, Kerry has been shuttling between the two sides to try to break the deadlock. Last week, after some prodding by Kerry, Arab leaders renewed a decade-old comprehensive peace offer, with softer language to appeal to Israel, to help restart talks. Israel has not responded to the offer. Kerry is scheduled to meet with Israeli and Palestinian representatives in Rome this week.
Last September, the Palestinians won upgraded status at the United Nations. Netanyahu responded by announcing plans to build hundreds of new homes in settlements. But those plans never moved forward.
Israeli Housing Minister Uri Ariel, a pro-settler hard-liner, met with Netanyahu recently. He asked Netanyahu to push forward the housing tenders, but Netanyahu refused, Dilmoni claimed.
The minister refused to comment on the reported settlement freeze in an Army Radio interview on Tuesday.
"I do not confirm things that I do with the Prime Minister. Therefore I cannot comment on this," Ariel said.
Netanyahu's office had no immediate comment.
Nabil Abu Rdeneh, spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said the U.S. is exerting efforts to "create the needed atmosphere" for new talks, but that he was unaware of any Israeli construction freeze.
"We should hear this officially from the Israeli government," he said.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/israel-groups-pm-halts-settlement-building-124648397.html
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How would you change Lenovo's IdeaTab S2109?
When we reviewed Lenovo's IdeaTab S2109, one quote sums up the essential frustration of this particular device. "There's no one huge, glaring reason to stay away; no, it's the combination of a middling CPU, unimpressive battery life and design quirks [...] that adds up to an experience that leaves us wanting more." So let's talk about why this device inspires so much apathy? If you bought it, what about it made it so unspectacular, and what do you think Lenovo could have done differently?
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Want to see some of the new features coming to Photoshop CC and the rest of the Creative Cloud? Here are the videos!
Earlier today Adobe announced that they were axing their old Creative Suite apps and going all-in on Creative Cloud. As part of that initiative, they've released a series of videos starting with the one above that tries to dispel common myths associated with Creative Cloud. Others address how Creative Cloud will help various professionals, like designers, web pros, and video editors, as well showcasing some of the new features and technologies coming our way this June in apps like Photoshop CC. And I'd be remiss if I didn't point out the incredibly Mac-centric nature of the videos. But then, who could blame them? Here's what we've got...
- Photoshop CC includes a new Smart Sharpen, new upsampling, re-editable rounded rectangles (yes!) and multiple path editing, better matched Mac and Windows anti-aliasing, and 3D engine for painting on models and flattened textures.
- The designers video talks about various apps like Photoshop and Illustrator, as well as Muse, and shows off Kuler for iPhone being used to capture color palettes while you're out and about. Illustrator gets new character-based font manipulations, as well as TypeKit access. InDesign 64bit support will help with large files, and its more consistent interface will help with cross-Cloud suite familiarity. Muse will let clients make minor design changes in the browser, and parallax support will let you make trendy websites like the cool kids made last year.
- The web pros video talks about both visual and code view editing. Illustrator is getting the same CSS extraction feature Photoshop got last year. Dreamweaver CC gets better, live CSS editing. Site definitions are now sync-able as well, and responsive site design has been made easier. CSS and HTML5 based animation is now better supported in Edge Animate. Phone Gap is used for cross-platform app web-based app development. Edge Reflow uses the WebKit engine to let you visually design web pages in CSS. In addition to TypeKit, Adobe Edge Web Fonts are accessible. Edge Code rounds out the offering. It's a new app for making and editing CSS, HTML, and JavaScript in code view.
- Video editors can get started with Adobe Story Plus, where you can write scripts collaboratively, set shooting schedules, and get ready for production. Premiere can link Story Plus dialog with the spoken words from ingested video. Adobe Premiere Pro is making it easier to switch platforms with key remapping and project import. After Effects is getting Photoshop-like refined edge tolls for rotoscoping. There's also better third party integration for 3D objects. The new color grading options are also now available in After Effects, and all settings sync via the Creative Cloud.
I've been a Creative Cloud user since the service launched, and I like it quite a bit. There does seem to be way to many separate apps -- I started drifting and eventually lost consciousness as they rattled off all of them -- and a lot of round-tripping involved in the workflows, but I'll save final judgement on that until they ship.
In the meantime, watch the videos that interest you and let me know, will you be going to the Cloud? And if so, which features make it most compelling for you?
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/zU8SMjoCKWg/story01.htm
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