Software is currently being developed at Ohio State University that will one day help scientists operate big-budget research instruments, such as high-powered microscopes and telescopes, over the Internet. The need for such capability, which is being driven by the high cost of doing research, is growing rapidly. By using the Internet, it would be possible for research partners located some distance apart to run their own experiments on shared instruments without leaving home, thereby reducing expenses.

The only problem with that plan, according to experts, is the same problem every Web surfer encounters sooner or later – traffic congestion. Congestion on the Internet can make remote operation of expensive instrumentation slow, frustrating, and in some cases, dangerous. At worst, it could possibly cause moving parts of an instrument to collide with each other, necessitating costly repairs.

The software being developed to alleviate this problem is called RICE, which is short for Remote Instrumentation Collaboration Environment. According to its developers, RICE will look very familiar to anyone who has used Internet videoconferencing software or an Internet chat program. There’s a window that lists the names of researchers who are logged in and another window for text messaging. A third window shows a video feed of the object being studied, along with buttons to control the instrument. Despite the fact that RICE’s video feed requires 10-30 megabytes per second of bandwidth, it had no negative effect on the rest of the network. The software will eventually be made public.

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The John H. Glenn Research Center introduces the Portable Unit for Metabolic Analysis (PUMA), an instrument that measures quantities indicative of human metabolic function. The PUMA makes time-resolved measurements of temperature, pressure, flow, and the partial pressures of oxygen and carbon dioxide in breath during inhalation and exhalation.
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The Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center has developed a process for engineering multicellular tissues by the controlled enzymatic degradation of polymeric beads in a low-fluid-shear bioreactor. The polymeric beads serve as temporary scaffolds to support the cell assemblies in a tissue-like 3D configuration. Engineered tissues could be grown in weeks or days instead of months.
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NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has developed a system of electronic hardware that noninvasively tracks the direction of a person’s gaze in real time. The system operates at a frame rate of several kilohertz and thereby offers enhanced capability for applications that involve human-computer interactions.
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Abdominal obesity is a known independent risk factor for heart disease. Based on results of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer cohort study (Epic-Norfolk), researchers have found that using the waist-hip ratio rather than waist measurement alone is a better predictor of heart disease risk.

The research was based on 24,508 men and women ages 45 to 79 in the United Kingdom who participated in the EPIC-Norfolk, which is based at the University of Cambridge. Researchers measured participants’ weight, height, waist circumference, hip circumference, and other heart disease risk factors such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol from 1993 to 1997. They followed up with participants for an average 9.1 years.

During the follow-up, 1,708 men and 892 women developed heart disease. The men and women were divided into groups according to waist-hip ratio, and those with the highest waist-hip ratio had the highest heart disease risk. Women in the highest waist-hip ratio group were 91 percent more likely to develop heart disease than women in the smallest waist-hip ratio group. Having a large waist with comparably large hips was preferable to a large waist with small hips.

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A company is seeking a powder slurry coating technology, where substrates are coated with powder slurry in an organic binder and then heat treated to diffuse the coating onto the substrates. Any proposed powder slurry coating technology should involve a powder composition based on Co-based or Ni-based alloys. It should be a water-based, environmentally friendly binder suitable for use on Fe-based alloy substrates. The technology should result in dense, crack-free, and metallurgically bonded coatings.
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A company is looking for reflective polymer or plastic substrate sheets. The solution should measure no more than 24 x 30 cm, and have a planarity of less than 0.7 mm. There should be no pitts or hills on the product’s surface and the color should be homogenous with more than 70% reflection. X-ray transmission should be over 60%. The solution should have no change in shape upon storage, and an operating temperature range of -25 degrees to 55 degrees C.
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Researchers from Johns Hopkins and the University of Pennsylvania have uncovered another reason why the Myc protein – one of the most commonly activated proteins in cancer – is so dangerous. Myc can stop the production of at least 13 microRNAs, small pieces of nucleic acid that help control which genes are turned on and off.

A research team led by Joshua Mendell, assistant professor at the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine, previously found that Myc could turn on one particular group of growth-promoting miRNAs in lymphoma cells. His team, along with Andrei Thomas-Tikhonenko’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania, recently analyzed over 300 miRNAs in human and mouse lymphoma cells.

Tsung-Cheng Chang, lead author of the latest study, said he was surprised to find that “lots of Myc turns everything off, not on.” His team also found that Myc was directly attaching to the lymphoma cell DNA at the miRNA genes – further evidence that the decrease in miRNA levels was due to Myc. Thomas-Tikhonenko’s team also re-introduced repressed miRNAs into Myc-containing cancer cells, which suppressed tumor growth in mice. This raises the possibility that a gene therapy approach could be effective in treating certain cancers.

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