World's Shortest Man Dies

 

The world’s shortest man, as verified by the Guinness Book of Records, has died of an undisclosed illness in American Samoa, a hospital spokeswoman said Friday.
111-Year-Old New Yorker Is World’s Oldest Man
Nepal’s Chandra Bahadur Dangi, who was 21.5 inches tall (54.6 cm), died late Thursday at the Lyndon B. Johnson Tropical Medical Center in Pago Pago.
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The 75-year-old lived in a remote village around 400 kilometers (248 miles) from Kathmandu but traveled the world after he was officially declared the world’s smallest man, posing for a photograph with world’s tallest man Sultan Kosen in 2013.

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Nobel Prize for Medicine Winners Announced

 

A trio of scientists earned the 2015 Nobel Prize for Medicine on Monday for unlocking revolutionary treatments for malaria and roundworm, helping to roll back two parasitic diseases that blight millions of lives.
Tu Youyou of China won half of the award for her work in artemisinin, a drug based on ancient Chinese herbal medicine, the Nobel jury announced. She is the first Chinese woman national to win a Nobel prize in science.

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Irish-born William Campbell and Satoshi Omura of Japan shared the other half for an anti-roundworm treatment dubbed avermectin, derived from soil-dwelling bacteria.
"These two discoveries have provided humankind with powerful new means to combat these debilitating diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people annually," the Nobel committee said.
"The consequences in terms of improved human health and reduced suffering are immeasurable."
Tu, 84, has been chief professor at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine since 2000.
She conducted research in the 1970s, at the height of China's Cultural Revolution, that led to the discovery of artemisinin, a drug that has slashed the number of malaria deaths.
The treatment is based on traditional medicine -- a herb called sweet wormwood or Artemisia annua.
Artemisinin-based drugs are now the standard combination for treating malaria since the mosquito-transferred Plasmodium parasite developed resistance to other drug types like chloroquine.

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According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there were about 198 million malaria infections in 2013 and 584,000 deaths -- most of them African children.
The other half of the prize honoured Omura and Campbell for "a new class of drugs with extraordinary efficacy against parasitic diseases," the Nobel statement said.
Registered drugs derived from avermectin "have radically lowered" the incidence of river blindness and elephantiasis, both caused by parasitic worms, it added.
River blindness, also known as onchocerciasis, is caused by a worm transmitted to humans through the bites of infected blackflies. Its symptoms include disfiguring skin conditions and visual impairment, including permanent blindness.

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Robotic Limb System Learns From Its Mistakes

 

The science of brain-machine interface, or BMI, has made enormous leaps in the last few decades. For patients with significant motor impairments, BMI tech allows the use of artificial limbs by way of electrodes connected to the brain. With training, patients can move and control their arms or legs again, literally by thinking about it.
It’s life-changing technology, to be sure, but the training involved is arduous, inefficient and it doesn’t work for everyone. New research coming out of Europe may change all that, ushering in a new generation of BMI systems.
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In a study published today in Nature Scientific Reports, researcher Jose Millán of the Center for Neuroprosthetics at EPFL unveiled a new kind of artificially intelligent BMI system that learns from its mistakes.
It works like this: Existing neuroprostheses require the user to generate specific brainwave activities for particular motions — “extend left arm,” for instance. The brain activity is then picked up through an electroencephalogram and translated into instructions for the prosthetic limb. If the triggering brain activity isn’t precisely correct, the desired action fails and the brain emits an electrical signal signifying the failure.
Millán’s team has found a way to make use of those error signals by teaching the machine itself to learn from mistakes. When the neuroprosthetic system detects the error message from the brain, it understands that the action was unsuccessful and adjusts movements accordingly.
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If a patient is trying to grasp an object, for example, the intelligent prosthesis will make adjustments and increase precision on its own until no error messages are generated and the goal is achieved.
“The paradigm shift lies in the use of these signals to relieve the subject from the tedious task of learning,” according to the press materials issued by EPFL. “This new approach could be the source of a new generation of intelligent prostheses, able to learn a wide range of movements. Indeed … it is theoretically possible to learn and master quickly enough a multitude of motor movements, even the most complex ones.”

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3-D Mini-Brains Created for Biotech Experiments

 

In the lab, drug testing, neural tissue transplants and brain experiments involving stem cells are usually performed on lab rats.
Now researchers from Brown University have developed a method that gets around animal testing. They created a simple and inexpensive way to grow tiny balls of living neurons that form networks and are electrically active.
Rat Limb Grown In The Lab
The living “mini-brains” are excellent testbeds for neuroscience research. What’s more, a small sample of living tissue from a single rodent can make thousands of these brain balls for about 25 cents each.
“We think of this as a way to have a better in vitro model that can maybe reduce animal use,” said graduate student Molly Boutin, co-lead author of the new paper in the journal Tissue Engineering: Part C.
The mini-brains, about a third of a millimeter in diameter, are made by isolating and concentrating the desired cells and then adding them like seeds to a culture in a spherical mold. It takes about two to three weeks for the cells to grow into a complex 3-D neural network.
According to the press release, the mini-brains are not the first or the most sophisticated clump of brain tissue out there, but they’re grown in fewer steps and cost just pennies to develop.
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The study’s senior author Diane Hoffman-Kim, associate professor of molecular pharmacology, said that her team will use the mini-brains to test methods for treating Parkinson’s disease and Boutin will use them to study how adult neural stem cells develop.

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Strange New World Discovered: The 'Mega Earth'

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The Hunt for a Second Earth

NASA's Kepler telescope was launched to find other planets just like Earth -- and now, scientists think they may have found not just one, but three! Trace shows us where they are in the solar system and why the discovery is so important.

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First spotted by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, the planet is about 2.3 times larger than Earth. Computer models showed planets that big would be more like Neptune or the other gas planets of the outer solar system because they would have the gravitational heft and time to collect vast amounts of hydrogen and helium from their primordial cradles.
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But follow-up observations of the planet, designated as Kepler-10c, show it has 17 times as much mass as Earth, meaning it must be filled with rock and other materials much heavier than hydrogen and helium.
“Kepler-10c is a big problem for the theory,” astronomer Dimitar Sasselov, director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, told Discovery News. “It’s nice that we have a solid piece of evidence and measurements for it because that gives motivations to the theorists to improve the theory,” he said.
Scientists aren’t sure how mega-Earths, or their diminutive cousins, super-Earths, form, nor why our solar system has nothing in between the largest rocky planet, Earth, and the smallest gas giant, Neptune.

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Age of Discovery

 

The Age of Discovery is an informal and loosely defined European historical period from the 15th century to the 18th century, marking the time in which extensive overseas exploration emerged as a powerful factor in European culture. It was the period in which global exploration started with the Portuguese discovery of the Atlantic archipelago of the Azores, the western coast of Africa, and discovery of the ocean route to the East in 1498, and the trans-Atlantic Ocean discovery of the Americas on behalf of the Crown of Castile (Spain) in 1492. These expeditions led to numerous naval expeditions across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, and land expeditions in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia that continued into the late 19th century, and ended with the exploration of the polar regions in the 20th century.
European overseas exploration led to the rise of global trade and the European colonial empires, with the contact between the Old World, Europe, Asia and Africa, and the New World, the Americas, producing the Columbian Exchange: a wide transfer of plants, animals, food, human populations (including slaves), communicable diseases and culture between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. This represented one of the most-significant global events concerning ecology, agriculture, and culture in history. European exploration allowed the global mapping of the world, resulting in a new world-view and distant civilizations coming into contact.

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