Huawei Ascend D Quad: Release Date, Specs and Price

Huawei Ascend D Quad Features:

The Ascend D quad is Huawei's first true attempt at competing with the android big boys like Samsung, HTC and Motorolla. The device is being billed as the "world's fastest quad-core smartphone" with the company's own K3V2 CPU, clocked at 1.5GHz with 16 GPU cores, powering the unit which is said to be 49 percent faster in purely CPU-powered tasks and uses 30 percent less power than its competitors . It's built around a 4.5-inch IPS+ display rocking a 720p (1280x720 pixels) HD resolution ,330 ppi pixel density, 8 megapixel rear camera, Dolby 5.1 surround sound, support for LTE and an 1,800mAh battery supported by a proprietary energy management software that they claims will last for up to two days. The actual hardware design is similar to Nokia's Lumia 800, with a screen that blends into the device's edges, creating an "infinity feel." Huawei claim the display is sunlight legibility which is awesome.

Huawei Ascend D Quad Specs:

• 1.5 GHz Quad-Core Huawei K3V2 Processor.
• 1 GB Ram.
• 4.5-inch IPS+ LCD 720 x 1280 pixels ( 330 ppi ).
• 8MP Auto-Focus with Dual LED Flash Camera (1080p Video Recording).
• Front Facing 1.3MP Camera (720p).
• Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS.
• 8GB Storage with MicroSD up to 32GB.
• microUSB port with MHL.
• Wifi 802.11 a/b/g/n and Bluetooth v3.0.
• 1,800mAh battery.
• Dimensions 129 x 64 x 8.9 mm.
• Weight 178 g.

Huawei Ascend D Release Date and Price:

As of now, there’s no clear info on the phone’s exact date of release. Although it will be made available sometime within the second quarter of this year. The phone will be initially released in China before it gets released in Australia, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Middle East, North and South America. Most importantly, the smartphone will cost 20 to 50 percent cheaper than its high-end competitors.

Azerbaijan Set to Claim The World's Tallest Building

The Azerbaijan Tower would be 3,445 ft (1,050 m) high and form the centerpiece of the Khazar Islands development (Image: Architizer)

The Burj Khalifa, which has held the title of world's tallest building with a height of 2,717 ft (828 m) since its completion in 2010, may have its crown stolen by a new building proposed for an artificial archipelago under construction on the shores of the Caspian Sea southwest of the Azerbaijan capital, Bakou. The proposed Azerbaijan Tower would reach 3,445 ft (1,050 m) into the sky, making it even taller than Saudi Arabia's proposed Kingdom Tower by 164 ft (50 m).

According to News.Az, the Azerbaijan Tower would boast 189 floors and be built by Avesta Consern as part of the Khazar Islands development. The tower would form the centerpiece of the development, which will consist of 41 artificial islands spread over an area of 2,000 hectares (2,942 acres). The tower alone is expected to cost US$2 billion, while the city, which is designed to house one million residents and will contain everything a modern city needs - plus a Formula One racetrack - is estimated to cost $100 billion.

The announcement might come as a bit of a surprise given the current world economic climate.

Avesta plans to begin construction of the Azerbaijan Tower in 2015 with a planned 2018 - 2019 completion date. The entire Khazar Islands are due for completion by 2022.

A video from Avesta showing how the Khazar Islands development will look upon completion can be viewed below.

Source: Gizmag

Samsung Galaxy Note: Release Date, Specs and Price (Update)

After such success of the galaxy lineup for samsung specially the galaxy S and galaxy S2 it is no wonder that samsung wants to enhance the galaxy line up and seeing as the trend is going towards bigger and more powerful smart phones Samsung has announced the Galaxy Note a 5.3-inch handset with a pen for notetaking and drawing. It blurs the line between a phone and a tablet. Already many are regretting buying a galaxy S2 after seeing this phone. At this time Samsung has only officially announced the black color Samsung Note but i expect the company will also release a White Galaxy Note after some time just like they did with the White Galaxy S2.

Galaxy Note Features and Specs:

Samsung Galaxy Note will run Android OS most probably OS v2.3 at the time of release as Android Ice Cream Sandwich v4.0 will not be available at the time of release. It will come with TouchWiz on top of Android thus having seven home screens and a touch optimized interface dubbed "S Pen" designed to take advantage of that pen. These include S Planner, a native calendar and to-do list app, from which you can drag and drop appointments, changing time slots without having to open an entry. S Memo for note-taking, meanwhile, accepts voice, photo, text and handwritten input. Samsung also says that it's releasing S pen SDK to third party developers and it's hoping for more apps for note taking, organizing photos and drawing as well as other things.

Specs:

• 1.4GHz Dual-Core ARM Cortex-A9 processor.
• Mali-400MP GPU
• Samsung Exynos Processor
• 5.3-inch Super AMOLED Display 1280x800.
• 8 Megapixel LED Flash Camera with HD 1080p videos recording Back.
• 2 Megapixel Camera Front.
• LTE and HSPA+.
• Removable 2,500mAh battery.
• Dimensions 146.9 x 83 x 9.7 mm.
• Weight 178 g.

Samsung Galaxy Note Release Date:

According to sources the release date of Samsung Galaxy Note will be Late November 2011 in UK. Rest of the places around the world will probably be getting it around the same time as well however if you are in US looking at how long it took Galaxy S2 to reach there its not sure when it will be available there.

Samsung Galaxy Note Price:

According to the source the Galaxy Note will have an approximate price of £500 ($773) + VAT in UK. So other places around the world will also have a similar price.

Update:


Samsung has just announced the official release date for the Galaxy Note at the Battersea Powerstation in London. The Galaxy Note will start its roll-out from Germany on October 29 with the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK and France following in the next few days. By the end of November most of Europe should have already received the Gingerbread-running tablet-slash-phone.

Samsung also announced that there will be a white version of the Galaxy Note, complete with a white S Pen. The company will also be releasing a bunch of nice accessories for the Note, including a cool-looking leather carrying case.

‘Breakthrough’ Immunotherapy Method Cures Advanced Cancer

Killer T-Cell

A breakthrough therapy to modify T-cells into potent tumor-killing agents wiped out leukemia in three patients and allowed two of them to stay cancer-free for a year, US researchers said Wednesday.

The findings are the first to show how gene transfer therapy can create specialized T-cells, which guard the body from infection, that attack cancerous tumors in advanced cases of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL).

The technique helped three elderly male patients who otherwise had little hope of survival, said the research published simultaneously in the New England Journal of Medicine and Science Translational Medicine.

Further studies are needed, but the advances offer hope to people who suffer from other cancer types such as ovarian, lung, myeloma and melanoma.

"Within three weeks, the tumors had been blown away, in a way that was much more violent than we ever expected," said senior author Carl June of the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

"It worked much better than we thought it would."

Scientists removed a sample of the patients' T-cells and genetically modified them to attack all cells that express a certain kind of protein, CD19, which includes tumor cells.

They also engineered the T-cells to start triggering other T-cells to multiply as soon as they attached to a cancer cell, bringing on a faster death for the tumor but avoiding the side-effects of cancer drugs.

"We saw at least a 1,000-fold increase in the number of modified T-cells in each of the patients. Drugs don't do that," said June, describing the infused T-cells as "serial killers."

"On average, each infused T-cell led to the killing of thousands of tumor cells -- and overall, destroyed at least two pounds of tumor in each patient."

One patient's case, described in the New England Journal of Medicine, involved a 64-year-old man whose blood and marrow were "replete with tumor cells."

He saw little change for the first two weeks after treatment, but then started experiencing nausea, chills and fever. Test showed he was undergoing a huge rise in T-cell count. By day 28, his blood showed no evidence of leukemia.

A 65-year-old patient saw similar results, with no trace of tumor after a year, but the 77-year-old patient saw a slight recurrence of cancer after he was treated with steroids. However his tumor load remains far from what it was before the treatment.

"Most of what I do is treat patients with no other options, with a very, very risky therapy with the intent to cure them," said co-principal investigator David Porter.

"This approach has the potential to do the same thing, but in a safer manner."

Bone marrow transplants are typically the only treatment for leukemia patients, but they carry a minimum 20 percent risk of dying from the procedure and cure rates hover at around 50 percent.

It remains unknown how long the treatment may keep cancer at bay.

"The doctors have found evidence that months after infusion, the new cells had multiplied and were capable of continuing their seek-and-destroy mission against cancerous cells throughout the patients' bodies," said the study.

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia is the second most common type of adult leukemia after acute myeloid leukemia, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The researchers intend to study similar approaches in children whose leukemia has resisted standard treatment.

They are also looking to see if the approach could target non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and acute lymphocytic leukemia, mesothelioma cancer cells, ovarian and pancreatic cancer cells.

NASA Picks Seven Commercial Spaceships for the Next Generation of Suborbital Science Missions

Virgin SpaceShip

The new post-shuttle NASA has said it aims to work more cooperatively with private space industry and outside sources of innovation in writing the next chapter in space exploration and science, and the agency is putting its money where its mouth is. After selecting 30 future technology proposals for funding earlier this week, NASA has now inked a number of much larger contracts with seven private space companies--including Virgin Galactic--to integrate and fly various technology payloads aboard their suborbital spacecraft.

We single out Virgin because its SpaceShipTwo is the furthest spacecraft along, development-wise, which means it could soon be ferrying scientific payloads into suborbital space, making it the first commercial company to take that role over from NASA in the post-shuttle era. SpaceShipTwo is already undergoing flight tests and could begin commercial operation as soon as next year.

That’s a big deal, because it’s a stepping stone toward fulfilling NASA’s vision of opening up space to more scientists and technology developers, and doing it on someone else’s less-expensive spacecraft. And Virgin isn’t the only company with a dog in this hunt: the other companies splitting the $10 million in contracts are Armadillo Aerospace, Near Space Corp., Masten Space Systems, Up Aerospace Inc., Whittinghill Aerospace LLC, and XCOR.

Many of these companies are looking to carry tourists into space, but the overarching idea of the Flight Opportunities Program (that’s the NASA funding initiative) is to cultivate a variety of ways for researchers to get their experiments--manned or unmanned--into space as well. There’s a lot of benefit to be spread around in doing so.

For one, it opens up suborbital space to groups that couldn’t afford it or simply couldn’t make the manifest on prior NASA missions (which were quite selective and pricey per pound of cargo). It also supports the private space industry by opening up another revenue stream for the Virgins and XCORs and Mastens of the world. But perhaps most importantly for NASA it means a proliferation in space science and technology development, and technologies that fall out of this program just might become part of NASA’s next-gen space transportation model.

Source: SPACE

New Drug Can Treat Almost Any Viral Infection

In the left set, rhinovirus (the common cold virus) kills untreated human cells (lower left), whereas DRACO has no toxicity in uninfected cells (upper right) and cures an infected cell population (lower right). Similarly, in the right set, dengue hemorrhagic fever virus kills untreated monkey cells (lower left), whereas DRACO has no toxicity in uninfected cells (upper right) and cures an infected cell population (lower right). MIT

A new broad-spectrum treatment for viruses could be as effective as antibiotics fighting bacteria, MIT researchers report. The method uses cells’ own defense systems to induce invaded cells to commit suicide, preventing the spread of the virus. In lab tests, the new drug completely cured mice that had been infected with influenza.

Viruses work by inserting themselves into a cell and hijacking its machinery for its own use. The invaded cell then creates more copies of the virus, which involves creating long strings of double-stranded RNA — which contains the virus’ genetic material, like DNA contains ours.

When the virus is done copying itself, its hostage cell usually dies, from the virus bursting through its walls (lysis), changes to the cell’s outer membrane, and from apoptosis, or programmed cell death.

Human cells have plenty of defenses against viral invasion, including proteins that attach to the double-stranded RNA, preventing the virus from replicating itself after successful invasion.

This new drug therapy combines those dsRNA proteins with a protein that induces apoptosis. It’s called a DRACO, Double-stranded RNA Activated Caspase Oligomerizer.

When one end of the DRACO binds to dsRNA, it signals the other end of the DRACO to induce cell suicide, an MIT News article explains. In this way, the cell is killed before the virus can take over and eventually kill it anyway. If there is no dsRNA, the healthy cells are left alone.

“In theory, it should work against all viruses,” said Todd Rider, a senior staff scientist at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory who invented the new technology.

A handful of drugs can target specific viruses by interfering with their replication process, through addition of modified DNA building blocks or the blocking of enzymes the viruses need to stimulate the replication process. But viruses are wily bugs, and they can evolve to resist these treatments.

The DRACO therapy could be effective because it targets the host cell, not just the virus.

Rider and colleagues are testing DRACO against more viruses in mice, according to MIT. Rider hopes to license the technology for trials in larger animals and for eventual human clinical trials, too.

Source: MIT News

Second Huge Solar Plant In California

Solar Panels

BrightSource Energy, the California startup that is building the first large-scale solar thermal power plant to break ground in the United States in 20 years, on Friday filed a license application with California regulators to build a second huge solar complex that features new technology.

The 500-megawatt Hidden Hills Solar Electric Generating System would be built in two 250-megawatt phases on 5.12 square miles of privately owned Mojave Desert land in California’s Inyo County on the Nevada border. The site is 45 miles west of Las Vegas and north of BrightSource Energy’s Ivanpah facility now under construction on the California side of the border.


The project is the first to seek approval from the California Energy Commission since regulators rushed to approve nine large solar thermal power plants last year so their developers could qualify for billions of dollars in federal loan guarantees. The loan guarantee program is set to sunset on Sept. 30 and Hidden Hills will test financiers’ appetite for such projects absent such a subsidy.

BrightSource, which is backed by French energy giant Alstom, Morgan Stanley, Google, Chevron and NRG Energy, filed for a $250 million initial public offering in April and has signed contracts to deliver 2,610 megawatts of electricity to utilities Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison.

The company deploys vast fields of mirrors called heliostats to focus the sun’s rays on a water-filled boiler that sits atop a tower. The resulting steam drives an electricity-generating turbine.

In a sign that solar technology is unlikely to stand still for long in the race to bring more efficient power plants online, BrightSource has increased the height of its “power tower” at the Hidden Hills project to 750 feet from the 459-foot height of those being built at Ivanpah. Each tower at Hidden Hills would be surrounded by a field of 85,000 heliostats.

“The new, higher, 750-foot solar power tower allows the heliostat rows to be placed closer together, with the mirrors at a steeper angle,” the company stated in its license application. “This substantially reduces mirror shading and allows more heliostats to be placed per acre. More megawatts can be generated per acre and the design is more efficient overall.”

BrightSource on Wednesday announced it would incorporate molten salt storage in its power plants to extend their operating hours past sunset. No mention of such a system was made in the Hidden Hills application but its addition would most likely depend on a request from the utility that purchases the complex’s electricity.

The company has set out an ambitious construction schedule, stating that it anticipates ground would be broken by the third quarter of 2012 and Hidden Hills would begin generating electricity in 2015.

In contrast, it took more than three years for state and federal regulators to approve the Ivanpah project, which is being built on land managed by the Interior Department.

BrightSource will largely avoid the feds involvement by building on land leased from a private owner. The company also apparently hopes to sidestep disputes over the impact of its power plants on the imperiled desert tortoise, a controversy that has dogged the Ivanpah project.

According to its license application for Hidden Hills, initial surveys found only two desert tortoises on the project site.

Saudi Arabia Set to Own Title of World's Tallest Building

Kingdom Tower Adrian Smith & Gordon Gill Architecture

The design, by Chicago-based Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, pairs radical developments in skyscraper technology with a sleek, tapered aesthetic inspired by the folded fronts of young desert plant growth.

Saudi Arabia is set to shatter the record for the tallest building in the world, with a slender, asymmetrical spire that'll rise at least 3,280 feet in the air. That's more than twice the size of the Willis Tower, the tallest building in the United States, and 568 feet taller than the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world.

The $1.2 billion Kingdom Tower will be built in north Jeddah, the major urban center of western Saudi and an historic gateway to Mecca just off the shores of the Red Sea. The building, by Chicago-based Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (Smith also designed the Burj Khalifa while at SOM), pairs new developments in skyscraper technology with a sleek, “three-petal” form inspired by the folded fronts of young desert plant growth. “The way the fronds sprout upward from the ground as a single form, then start separating from each other at the top, is an analogy of new growth fused with technology,” Gill says.

The tower’s got a slick, aerodynamic shape with tapering wings that’ll help slash structural loading caused by wind. A high-performance facade is expected to drastically reduce energy consumption, and notches in each of the skyscraper’s three “petals” will create pockets of shade, shielding occupants from the harsh desert sun and providing outdoor terraces with views of Jeddah and the Red Sea. Kingdom Tower will include a Four Seasons hotel and apartments, luxury condominiums, and Class A offices spread over roughly 3.5-million square feet. It'll also have a sky terrace on the 157th floor (the 157th floor!) and the highest observatory in the world.

Kingdom Tower is the linchpin of a larger, $20 billion waterfront development venture for Jeddah -- part of the Saudi monarchy’s ambitious efforts to diversify its economy beyond crude oil. (Financing for the Kingdom Tower results from a deal between the investment firm of Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and the Saudi Binladin Group, a construction conglomerate founded by the father of you know who.) The proposed Kingdom Tower Waterfront District -- the master plan of which is also designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill -- will include residential and commercial buildings, a shopping mall, outdoor spaces, and other amenities.

World's Smallest Battery Yet is About as Thick as a Human Hair

Nanotechnology promises to enable tiny, intricate circuits powering devices on any surface. But unless they’re harvesting energy from something like a heartbeat, the devices can only be as small as the smallest battery.

Now researchers at Rice University have combined the two, packing an entire lithium-ion battery into a single nanowire. The developers say it’s as small as such a device can possibly get.

Researchers led by Rice professor Pulickel Ajayan built a hybrid energy storage device, which serves as a battery and a supercapacitor. The first version sandwiched an electrolyte between a nickel/tin anode and a cathode made of a polymer called polyaniline. The cathode also served as a supercapacitor, storing lithium ions in bulk, as this writeup by Rice University explains. The prototype proved that lithium ions would move through the electrolyte and into the cathode.

Then Ajayan and colleagues incorporated this structure into a single nanowire, through a complicated process of etching and chemical washing. The goal is to make nanowires with ultra-thin separation between electrodes, so the device can remain as small as possible.

The completed wire-batteries are about 50 microns tall, which is roughly the diameter of a human hair, according to Rice.

For now, they can only charge and discharge about 20 times before they die, but researchers are trying to optimize them to last longer. The research is published in the journal ACS Nano Letters.

[Popsci via PhysOrg]

White Samsung Galaxy S2: Release Date, Specs and Price

The white version of best selling Samsung Galaxy S2 has been hinted for a September 2011 release in the UK. White Samsung Galaxy S2, functionally identical to the existing black Galaxy S2, which hit the market 85 days ago, and has already racked up 5 million sales record with Samsung. The new White Samsung Galaxy S2 model means another 5 million units sale, which seems to be a very smart move on the foot print of Apple.

White Samsung Galaxy S2 Features and Specs

It does appear that white is the only difference from the black version with no change to specs. The White Samsung Galaxy S2, like its Samsung Galaxy S2 black version, is Worlds Thinnest Smartphone, loaded with Android mobile operating system. The Samsung Galaxy S2 is the successor to the critically acclaimed Samsung Galaxy S, featuring:

• 1.2 GHz Dual-Core SoC Processor
• Samsung Exynos Processor (GT-I9100 model) or Nvidia Tegra 2 Processor (GT-I9103 model)
• 1GB RAM
• 10.9 Centimetre (4.3 inches) WVGA Super AMOLED Plus Display
• 8 Megapixel LED Flash Camera with HD 1080p videos recording
• USB Host (OTG) Function Support
• Upgraded version of Android, officially known as TouchWiz 4.0
• Enhanced Accessibility with Multi Touch Gestures and Clean Widget Arrangements
• It also supports Mobile High-definition Link (MHL), which allows up to 1080p uncompressed video output with HDMI while charging the device at the same time.

White Samsung Galaxy S2 Release Date

The incoming White Samsung Galaxy S2 variant was first previewed by a UK retailer earlier in the week, though the original product page suggested an August 15 launch and has since been taken down.

Since, Samsung Galaxy S2 is going to be released for sale in the US, in August 2011 through Verizon. Its white version, Samsung White Galaxy S2 Release Date is expected to be somewhere in late September or October 2011.

White Samsung Galaxy S2 Price

Right now it appears one can only pick White Samsung Galaxy S2 at full retail price, between £410 and £500 ($669 to $800 USD) depending on ones country.

White Samsung Galaxy S2 Price is listed at for an unlocked, SIM-free model, though Samsung UK tells us that the white version will be made available through carriers as well, so iTechWhiz expect some easy cheap subsidized deals and offers.

A Transparent Battery to Power Next-Gen See-Through Gadgets

Stanford researcher Yi Cui looked across the field of transparent electronics and saw that all was not equal. While all other major electronics components--things like transistors, displays, and other circuitry--have been made transparent, no one had taken the time and effort to create a transparent power source. And you can’t have a fully transparent device without a transparent battery. So Cui made one.

There are a few ways to make an electronic component transparent. One is to make it so thin that it doesn’t register with the human eye. Or you can make the component take the form of a pattern whose features are so small they are invisible. Some battery components are easy to render transparent by shrinking them, but electrodes are particularly difficult to make thin. A super-thin electrode isn’t energy dense, and therefore it doesn’t store up enough power to be useful in any realistic way.

So Cui opted for the second approach. He and his team figured that if you can pattern the electrode into a superfine mesh, you can still build an energy dense battery. With enough electrode material distributed across the mesh, a battery can still hold a significant charge.

So using a relatively straightforward lithography method, they built a framework for the mesh in a soft, clear, spongy material called PDMS. To make a complete battery, they simply need two of these layers filled with electrode material--in this case, they used the makings of a standard lithium-ion battery--with a gel electrolyte (also clear, of course) sandwiched in between. Encase the whole thing in plastic, and you’ve got a see-through battery.

In the lab, the batteries have been used to power a small LED light (which can be viewed straight through the battery itself). Cui thinks the batteries should be roughly half as energy dense as a equally-sized regular battery. So right now the prototype is about as powerful as a NiCad battery, but Cui says he and his team should be able to improve that by an order of magnitude by reducing inefficiencies in the prototype design and layering batteries one atop the other. Depending on how it scales, the Stanford team thinks such transparent batteries could be commercialized in just two to four years.

[via popsci]

First Windows "Mango" Phone Unveiled

The first smartphone based on the new "Mango" edition of Microsoft's Windows Phone platform was unveiled on Wednesday in Tokyo. The phone is the first of several handsets due over the next few months, that Microsoft hopes will signal its return to the smartphone market as a serious player. (Video of the new phone and its launch is available on YouTube.) If that wish sounds familiar, it is. This time last year the company was hoping the first version of the Windows Phone 7 would accomplish the same thing. Far from boosting its market share, the introduction of the new operating system saw Microsoft lose share.

But a year earlier during the first quarter of 2010, its market share was 7.1 percent, the market research company said. In terms of handsets shipped, those with Windows Phone 7 or Windows Mobile fell from 3.9 million to 2.8 million phones in the two periods. Mango, officially Windows Phone 7.5, adds some 500 improvements to the Windows Phone 7 platform, according to the company. Built by Fujitsu Toshiba Mobile Communications, the phone will be available in September or after. The company is one of several partners Microsoft is working with on Mango handsets.

The Finnish cell phone maker threw its weight behind Windows Phone 7 earlier this year when it announced a wide ranging agreement with Microsoft to collaborate on future handsets and technologies. Nokia is losing market share to aggressive competitors, but it remains one of the world's largest manufacturers of smart phones, so it has the potential to help Microsoft shift the market. The launch of the phone came just hours after Microsoft signed off on the operating system and declared it ready to be installed in consumer handsets. That should mean additional phones will get launched in the coming weeks. Bluetooth and WiFi are included in the CDMA-based phone.

Artificial Lung Created !

Researchers have created an artificial lung that uses air as a ventilating gas instead of pure oxygen - as is the case with current man-made lungs, which require heavy tanks of oxygen that limit their portability. The prototype device was built following the natural lung's design and tiny dimensions and the researchers say it has reached efficiencies akin to the genuine organ. With a volume roughly the same as a human lung, the device could be implanted into a person and even be driven by the heart.

The artificial lung is filled with breathable silicone rubber versions of the blood vessels that branch down to a diameter less than one-fourth of human hair. It was created by first building a mould with miniature features and then layering on a liquid silicone rubber that solidified into artificial capillaries and alveoli. They air and blood channels were then separated with a gas diffusion membrane.

By making the parts of the artificial lung on the same scale as the natural lung, the researchers say they were able to create a very large surface-area-to-volume ratio and shrink the distances for gas diffusion compared to the current state-of-the-art. In comparison to current artificial lung systems that require pure oxygen due to their inefficient oxygen exchange, tests of the new artificial lung using pig blood showed a three to five times improvement in oxygen exchange efficiency over current devices. It is this efficiency that enables the new artificial lung to use plain air instead of pure oxygen as the ventilating gas.

Blood is injected into the device's fluid inlet, while air is fed into the gas inlet. Oxygen molecules diffuse across the gas exchange membrane into the blood on the way to the blood outlet, while carbon dioxide in the blood fed into the device would diffuse across the membrane to be released through the air outlet.

"Based on current device performance, we estimate that a unit that could be used in humans would be about 6 inches by 6 inches by 4 inches tall, or about the volume of the human lung. In addition, the device could be driven by the heart and would not require a mechanical pump," said Joe Potkay, a research assistant professor in electrical engineering and computer science at Case Western Reserve University.

Potkay says the device is a major step towards an easily portable and implantable artificial lung and the team envisions patients using the technology while allowing their own diseased lungs to heal, or implanting one while awaiting a lung transplant.

Potkay's team, which includes Brian Cmolik, MD, an assistant clinical professor at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, and Michael Magnetta and Abigail Vinson, biomedical engineers and third-year students at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, is now collaborating with researchers from Case Western Reserve's departments of biomedical engineering and chemical engineering to develop a coating to prevent clogging in the narrow artificial capillaries and on construction techniques needed to build a durable artificial lung large enough to test in rodent models of lung disease.

The Case Western Reserve University researchers expect to have human-scale artificial lungs in use in clinical trials within a decade.

Source: Gizmag

Mac Os X Lion The Major NEW Features you need to know

The world has changed greatly for Apple in the past few years. As of their earnings statement released Monday, three quarters of all income comes from the iPhone and iPad and the number of users of iOS is already at least four times that of Mac users. After the under-the-hood tweaks and rationalizations of previous operating system update Snow Leopard, the mission for Mac OS X Lion was clear - make the Mac OS comfortable and familiar to the new Apple mobile user audience without putting off established Mac veterans. Can they pull it off?

Installation

So how do you install? You hop on a bus to the Apple Store, buy the Lion upgrade box, get home, take out the enclosed discs and... No you don't. Never again. You log in to the Mac App Store, pay your US$29 and start downloading. Some hours later (it's a 3.74 GB download) you have an 'Install Mac OSX Lion' application in your Applications folder and on the Dock. Apple is pretty laid back about what you do with that installer and you can copy it to any qualifying machines in your household. As per usual there is no serial number or DRM of any kind.

There are some interesting processes going when you double-click on the installer - Apple is creating an invisible partition on your main disk on the fly, installing a clean backup copy of Lion in that partition and then installing your new system Lion from there. It will migrate over all your applications and settings as in previous upgrades but will leave behind any applications that aren't compatible - which basically means apps that rely on Rosetta, Apple's PowerPC translator. From our experience and the reports coming in, the process seems to be robust and free from problems at this time.

The usual warnings apply however. This is the 'point-oh' release and there are bound to be glitches somewhere. Do not install on a 'mission critical' machine for the moment and in particular do not install on your music studio machine because, as seems to be the case with every single upgrade, third-party audio workstation plug-ins are breaking under Lion. Adobe has also reported that there are some issues with pretty well all of their applications including, surprise, surprise, Flash.

Scrolling/Gestures

The iOS influence from the iPhone/iPad family hits you in the face, or at least in the fingers, from the get-go. Lion scrolls the other way. That's right - if you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, a touch pad or indeed the Apple touch-sensitive Magic Mouse, pages on your screen will now scroll in the opposite direction. How you feel about this depends very much on how used to using the iPhone or iPad you are. Like those devices, you are now grabbing the page itself and moving it up and down, rather than the window on the page. Shock two - no scrollbars - or rather scroll bars that only pop into existence when active or when you roll over the edge of the page. When a new window is opened that has hidden scrollable content the bars pop into existence just to let you know and then fade away into the background.

Apple insists that within a few days you will be fully comfortable with this new behavior and won't want to go back. We tend to agree with them. However in the Lion System Preferences you have great control over these aspects of the interface plus the host of new tapping and swiping gestures that are now available and its possible to revert completely to the behavior of the good-old-days (two days ago).

Launchpad

Many inexperienced Mac users apparently have problems finding their applications and if they are not permanently in the Dock will forget where they are. Launchpad is an attempt to mitigate this and is a straight copy of the home screen from iOS. Launched from the Dock or via a hot-key Launchpad displays on screen every launchable app in the applications folder. Just like on iOS you can arrange your apps and pull them together to create folders that can be named. You can also delete apps that you bought in the App Store.

Just like on iOS it actually becomes quite a chore re-arranging your apps into a logical system if you have built up a reasonable collection. If you are a Mac veteran it becomes impossible since your applications folder will be full of all sorts of big apps, little apps, Applescript droplets and various bit and bobs that you just know you will use one day. Launchpad is one of those Apple things that works great for a new user for a couple of months and then is never seen again.

Full Screen

One of the surprising pleasures of the iPad is the fact that applications are always fullscreen. The device becomes the software and vice versa. Lion now brings this capability to the Mac for developers who wish to use the appropriate programming hooks. Most of the Apple apps now have this capability (check your updates) and it works great in apps like iPhoto, Garageband and the new Mail program - i.e. apps that already use a single multi-paned window. It makes little sense for apps that use multiple windows or where the content simply doesn't need the full width of the screen (looking at you Safari). On multiple monitors it only uses one screen and the others are left blank (or at least just showing the new ubiquitous grey linen background texture). It would be nice to see this developed a bit to allow an app per screen for example. The mode is invoked simply by clicking an icon on the top right of the window. In full screen mode mousing to the top of the screen will roll down the menu bar and it can exited from there.

Auto Save/Versions/Resume

Have you ever lost work on your computer? Of course you have. Everybody has. After years and years of being told to keep backups and to keep hitting save while we work, stuff still gets lost or written over by a file we didn't mean to save, or by logging out and not saving open documents. Apple aims to make this a thing of the past by autosaving the changes to every document and then allowing you to browse back in time the different versions of that document, very much in the manner of the now-familiar Time Machine interface.

If the software developer decides to use Apple's updated document model (and they would be crazy not to) the user will never again have to think about saving a document. In addition, when you quit an application the placement and content of all open windows is stored (including where the cursor was and any selections) and then re-stored when the app is launched the next time. In fact, after shutting down, the computer will restart with all open documents and applications as they were before. Very cool.

If this whole idea make you nervous you can still manually save a new version, create a duplicate or chose to lock a document. One suspects however that this new facility will be seen as a significant turning point in document management - once every developer has embraced it of course.

Mission Control

Mission Control is one of the few new headline features in Lion that doesn't seem directly influenced by its mobile iOS brother. Its purpose is to simplify and bring together Exposé, Spaces and Dashboard functionality since many people are apparently still not using these useful screen management functions.

Invoking Mission Control (via the Dock, a Hot Key or touch panel gesture) makes the present desktop recede a little and get overlaid by a row of virtual Spaces desktops - including any full-screen apps and a separate Dashboard Widgets desktop - plus representations of all document windows in use together with icons of their parent application. From here you can quickly get to any window or virtual desktop. You can also drag windows into different desktops and create new ones. It's quicker and more easily understood than the previous arrangements so hopefully more users will be using it to zip between their open documents.

Mail

One application that most people spend a great deal of time in is Mail and it's received a lot of love from Apple in this update with a brand new layout. Messages are at long last to the right of the message list and not below. This makes so much more sense on widescreen monitors. The message list can show a preview of the message (up to five lines) and you can optionally show a sender's thumbnail image if they are in your Address Book file. The default viewing of messages is in a 'conversation' mode where every related message is shown and numbered making it very easy to follow an email thread. This mode also automatically hides all the redundant quoting though you can reveal it if really necessary (with a fun animation).

The familiar mailbox and folder sidebar is available but you can drag any of the item therein to a toolbar above the message window and close the sidebar to increase real-estate. There are a number of often-used commands in that toolbar plus text formatting controls when in email composing mode. Search has been greatly improved using Spotlight's new functionality with search items being quickly auto-suggested. Plus, after one search term has been defined, auto-suggestions for a second term come up making it much quicker to drill down to the message you are searching for. It's easier to use than describe and feels really slick. Fun feature - email flags can now be one of seven colors, not just red. The new Mail is a great improvement.

iCal/Address Book

The iCal and Address Book applications have also received attention in Lion but unfortunately this is one area where the iOS influence is unwelcome. Apple has maintained a deeply skeuomorphic design for both that is perfectly logical in the context of the iPhone/iPad but makes no sense at all on the non-touch vastness of a desktop monitor. They both work as expected with some additional features but the leather, cloth and torn paper appearance is taken to silly levels.

It would be nice if one day Apple provided us with the more powerful general purpose database and time-management tools that Address Book and iCal could become. Unfortunately it seems we are stuck with them as 'apps'. Address Book now has fields for Twitter and 'Profiles' (Facebook, LinkedIn etc.) and iCal does have the nice new feature of a yearly view where your busiest days are represented as red or amber 'hot spots' and your free days in white. Nice touch.

AirDrop

AirDrop is potentially a very useful little feature in a busy office environment. Click on the AirDrop folder in the Finder sidebar and every nearby Mac with Wi-Fi on will pop up. They don't even need to be on the same network. You drag a file onto the Mac you want to send it to and a dialogue asking for permission to receive it pops up on their desktop. Genius.

Security

Something that won't get a lot of press but has clearly been a priority for Apple is the greatly improved security of the operating system to protect against crashing and the malicious hacking of data. the 'sandboxing' (separation of the privileges of each process so that it cannot not be coerced into something else and crash the app) of the System itself has been going on since Leopard. Now it is available for use by developers and will in the future be mandatory for applications to be sold in the Mac App Store. FileVault now encrypts at high speed at the disc level rather than file level and can encrypt whole Time Machine back-ups which is a great improvement. Don't lose that password.

Every Mac OS upgrade has its quirks and caveats but Lion 10.7 feels like it has moved the game along significantly. As always, it will take the developers time to fully embrace the new technologies available to them (er, Adobe?) but Apple has made great efforts with its own apps to show what is possible. It's only US$29 and a million people have already downloaded it in its one day since release. Now bring on iOS5 and iCloud so we can close this circle.

Source: Gizmag