Other Benefits of Pepper, Chilly ....

Pepper and Chillies not only help us with Immunity, they help us in other ways too.

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Hot peppers contain a substance called capsaicin that not only adds spice to our food but can actually cause our body to heat up. Evidence suggests that the heat generating power of peppers can help shed those extra inches.

Researchers assume that plants evolved to contain capsaicin because it protected them from being eaten by insects and other pesky predators.

But they are learning that there is more than meets the eye when it comes to peppers.

In fact, there is growing evidence that the body heat generating power of peppers might even lend a hand in our quest to lose those extra inches accumulating around our waistline.

And fortunately for those of us who don't eat hot peppers, a version of capsaicin called dihydrocapsiate (DCT) could have the same benefits as peppers without the pungency.

University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) nutritionists set out to document its ability to increase heat production in human subjects who were on a weight-loss diet.

Led by David Heber, professor of medicine and public health, they recruited men and women who were willing to consume a very low-calorie liquid meal replacement product for 28 days.

The researchers then randomised the subjects to take either placebo pills or supplements containing the non-burning DCT pepper.

Two dosage levels of DCT were tested. At the beginning and end of the study, body weight and body fat were assessed, and the researchers determined energy expenditure (heat production) in each subject after he or she consumed one serving of the test meal.

Their data provided convincing evidence that, at least for several hours after the test meal was consumed, energy expenditure was significantly increased in the group consuming the highest amount of DCT.

In fact, it was almost double that of the placebo group. This suggests that eating this pepper-derived substance that doesn't burn can have the same potential benefit as hot peppers at least in part by increasing food-induced heat production, said a UCLA release.

They were also able to show that DCT significantly increased fat oxidation, pushing the body to use more fat as fuel. This may help people lose weight when they consume a low-calorie diet by increasing metabolism.

Heber and his team presented their results at the Experimental Biology 2010 meeting in Anaheim, California.

Tiniest Maps Possible now! Thanks to IBM's Pathbreaking Technology

Anoraneeyaan

IBM scientists have created a 3D map of the earth so small that 1,000 of them could fit on a single grain of salt.

They accomplished this through a new, breakthrough technique that uses a tiny, silicon tip with a sharp apex - 100,000 times smaller than a sharpened pencil point - to create patterns and structures as small as 15 nanometre at greatly reduced cost and complexity.

A nanometre is a billionth of a metre. This patterning technique opens new prospects for developing nanosized objects in fields such as electronics, future chip technology, medicine, life sciences, and optoelectronics.

To demonstrate the technique's unique capability, the team created several 3D and 2D patterns, using different materials for each one.

A 25-nanometre-high 3D replica of the Matterhorn, a famous Alpine mountain that soars 4,478 metres (14,692 feet) high, was created in molecular glass, representing a scale of 1:5 billion.

Complete 3D map of the world measuring only 22 by 11 micrometre was "written" on a polymer.

At this size, 1,000 world maps could fit on a grain of salt. A kilometre of altitude corresponds to roughly eight nanometre.

It is composed of 500,000 pixels, each measuring 20 square nanometre, and was created in only 2 minutes and 23 seconds.

A 2D nano-sized IBM logo was etched 400-nm-deep into silicon, demonstrating the viability of the technique for typical nanofabrication applications.

The core component of the new technique is a tiny, very sharp silicon tip measuring 500 nanometre in length and only a few nanometres at its apex.

"Advances in nanotechnology are intimately linked to the existence of high-quality methods and tools for producing nanoscale patterns and objects on surfaces," explains physicist Armin Knoll of IBM Research, Zurich.

"With its broad functionality and unique 3D patterning capability, this nanotip-based patterning methodology is a powerful tool for generating very small structures," said Knoll, according to an IBM release.

The tip, similar to the kind used in atomic force microscopes, is attached to a bendable cantilever that controllably scans the surface of the substrate material with the accuracy of one nanometre.

By applying heat and force, the nano-sized tip can remove substrate material based on predefined patterns, thus operating like a "nanomilling" machine with ultra-high precision.

These findings were published in Science and Advanced Materials.

Soft Drink Experiment for Enthusiasts - Fodder for thought??

A Small Experiment by Brazillian Teens, with popular condiment Mentos (Polo) and Coca- Cola. 

(I have not seen it myself, but informed by a friend. Since it is not that expensive, any one may try this to verify the authenticity of the 4 year old experiment). 

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(On the net, Some one even reported a fatality of one child there, with the consumption of these two in a combination...) 

Just think, again before you want to guzzle a pint of Soft Drinks .........;  Especially, with this type of combination.

Indians, second largest set of English Speakers

 Do not be apologetic, when you want to introduce your own Indian words into English. Because, a language (especially English) transforms itself, with the patterns of usage by its speakers. When 23 Crores of People, speak a word in the same context, it has to be that.

That is how, many acronyms have become standards in English. Read on the statistics, about patterns of English Speaking Nations.
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There are 251,388,301 English speakers in the United States, and India on the other hand has 232,000,000. Although a vast majority of those who speak English in India speak it as a second language or a third.
The number (232 Million) is nearly four times the number of English speakers in the United Kingdom. U.K is ranked 4th with 59.6 Million English speakers, behind US, India and Nigeria.
The rest of the top 10 in order are:
#5 Philippines
#6 Germany
#7 Canada
#8 France
#9 Australia
#10 tie between Italy and Pakistan

Divine Creation versus Human Creation - A comparison between cat brain and super computer

A cat can recognise a face faster and more efficiently than a supercomputer. That's one reason a feline brain is the model for a biologically-inspired superfast computer project.

 Today's most sophisticated supercomputer can accomplish certain tasks with the brain functionality of a cat, but it's a massive machine with more than 140,000 central processing units and a dedicated power supply. And it still performs 83 times slower than a cat's brain.

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University of Michigan (U-M) computer engineer Wei Lu has taken a step toward developing this revolutionary type of machine that could be capable of learning and recognising, as well as making more complex decisions and performing more tasks simultaneously than conventional computers can.

Lu previously built a "memristor," a device that replaces a traditional transistor and acts like a biological synapse, remembering past voltages it was subjected to.

Now, he has demonstrated that this memristor can connect conventional circuits and support a process that is the basis for memory and learning in biological systems.

"We are building a computer in the same way that nature builds a brain," said Lu, an assistant professor in the U-M Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

"The idea is to use a completely different paradigm compared to conventional computers. The cat brain sets a realistic goal because it is much simpler than a human brain but still extremely difficult to replicate in complexity and efficiency," he said.

Lu wrote that in a conventional computer, logic and memory functions are located at different parts of the circuit and each computing unit is only connected to a handful of neighbours in the circuit.

As a result, conventional computers execute code in a linear fashion, line by line, Lu said. They are excellent at performing relatively simple tasks with limited variables.

But a brain can perform many operations simultaneously, or in parallel. That's how we can recognise a face in an instant, but even a supercomputer would take much, much longer and consume much more energy in doing so.

The next step is to build a larger system, Lu said. His goal is to achieve the sophistication of a supercomputer in a machine the size of a two-litre beverage container. That could be several years away.

Lu said an electronic analog of a cat brain would be able to think intelligently at the cat level. For example, if the task were to find the shortest route from the front door to the sofa in a house full of furniture, and the computer knows only the shape of the sofa, a conventional machine could accomplish this.

But if you moved the sofa, it wouldn't realise the adjustment and find a new path. That's what engineers hope the cat brain computer would be capable of, said a U-M release.

These findings were published online in Nano Letters and are slated to appear in the its forthcoming edition.

Meditation or Coffee?

Recent Study established at the former is more effective. 

... Read on.!

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Some need regular amounts of coffee or other chemical enhancers to be cognitively sharper. A new study suggests a brief bit of meditation would prepare us just as well.

Cognitive activity refers to getting involved in a conscious intellectual task such as thinking, reasoning or remembering.

New research suggests that the mind may be easier to cognitively train than had been previously believed.

The experiment involved 63 student volunteers, 49 of whom completed the experiment.

Psychologists studying the effects of a meditation technique known as "mindfulness" found that meditation-trained participants showed a significant improvement in their critical cognitive skills (and performed significantly higher in cognitive tests than a control group) after only four days of training for only 20 minutes each day.

"In the behavioural test results, what we are seeing is something that is somewhat comparable to results that have been documented after far more extensive training," said Fadel Zeidan, a post-doctoral researcher at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

He is a former doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where the research was conducted.

"Simply stated, the profound improvements that we found after just four days of meditation training - are really surprising," Zeidan noted.

"It goes to show that the mind is, in fact, easily changeable and highly influenced, especially by meditation."

The study appears in the April 2 issue of Consciousness and Cognition.

Easier way Found, to culture human stem cells for Treatment

American scientists have claimed to have found an "easy" way to culture human stem cells in a laboratory which could make it possible to repair damaged tissue.

In a solution to a decade-old problem of fragile human embryonic stem cells, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute discovered two novel synthetic small molecule drugs — Thiazovivin and Pyrintegrin — that each individually prevent the death of these cells.

"Scientists have been puzzled by why human embryonic stem cells die at a critical step in the culture process. In addition to posing a question in fundamental biology, this created a huge technical challenge in the lab," said senior author professor Sheng Ding.

The new study, published in journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), provides elegant solutions to both aspects of this problem.

It also unravels the mechanisms by which the compounds promote stem cell survival, shedding light on a previously unknown aspect of stem cell biology.

With this development the researchers hope that it will soon be possible to use stem cells, which possess the ability to develop into many other distinct cell types such as nerve, heart or lung cells to repair damaged tissue from any number of diseases from Type 1 diabetes to Parkinson's.

The notorious fragility of human embryonic stem cells is the biggest hurdle in this field. In the process of growing stem cells in culture, scientists must split off cells from their cell colonies but these cells die unless the scientists take extraordinary care.

"The current techniques to keep these cells alive are tedious and labour-intensive," Ding said, adding "keeping the cells alive is so difficult that some people are discouraged from entering the field. It is very frustrating experience for everyone."

He said, mysteriously, mouse embryonic stem cells, which share much basic biology with human embryonic stem cells—do not pose the same difficulties in the laboratory. They can usually be split off from a colony and go on to survive and thrive.

To address these issues, the scientists decided to start with a screen of a library of chemical compounds to see if they could find any small molecules that could be added to the human embryonic stem cell culture that would promote the cells' survival.

When the scientists examined their results, they were elated to find Thiazovivin and Pyrintegrin that both worked to dramatically protect the cells, promoting human embryonic stem cell survival by more than 30 fold.

"Basically, this solved this cell survival problem that has been plaguing scientists for more than 10 years," said Ding.

Ocean energy to power Underwater vehicle

A robotic underwater vehicle that is powered entirely by natural, renewable, ocean thermal energy has been developed, holding out promise of almost indefinite monitoring of the ocean depths for climate and marine life studies.

Researchers have successfully demonstrated the Sounding Oceanographic Lagrangrian Observer Thermal RECharging (SOLO-TREC) autonomous underwater vehicle that uses a novel thermal recharging engine, powered by the natural temperature differences found at different ocean depths.

Scalable for use on most robotic oceanographic vehicles, this technology breakthrough could usher in a new generation of autonomous underwater vehicles.

Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), Pasadena, California and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, completed the first three months of an ocean endurance test of the prototype vehicle off the coast of Hawaii in March.

"People have long dreamed of a machine that produces more energy than it consumes and runs indefinitely," said Jack Jones, a JPL principal engineer and SOLO-TREC co-principal investigator.

"While not a true perpetual motion machine, since we actually consume some environmental energy, the prototype system demonstrated by JPL and its partners can continuously monitor the ocean without a limit on its lifetime imposed by energy supply," added Jones.

"Most of Earth is covered by ocean, yet we know less about the ocean than we do about the surface of some planets," said Yi Chao, JPL principal scientist and SOLO-TREC principal investigator.

"This technology to harvest energy from the ocean will have huge implications for how we can measure and monitor the ocean and its influence on climate," Chao added, according to a JPL release.

So far, SOLO-TREC has completed more than 300 dives from the ocean surface to a depth of 500 meters (1,640 feet). Its demonstration culminates five years of research and technology development by JPL and Scripps and is funded by the Office of Naval Research.

T-Shirts (Bullet Proof) made of Boron Carbide - the third Hardest Material on this Planet - A reality soon?

Hard and sturdy is presumed to be rigid. But, flexibility is likely to be the special feature along with inherent strength. Read on.... 

Believe it or not, an ordinary cotton T-shirt could be converted into a flexible full-body armour which will protect not only from bullets but also from radioactive materials.
A team led by researchers at the University of South Carolina have turned cotton T-shirts into a tough lightweight fabric of boron carbide, the same material used to protect tanks, that could lead to more comfortable body armour.
To create the material, they combined the carbon in the cotton with boron and said it could even be used to produce lightweight and fuel efficient cars and aircraft.
"The current boron carbide armour is strong, but its not flexible and it is very heavy," said co-author Xiaodong Li.
"We tried to solve this problem but with a different approach. In our approach, we used cotton T-shirts," Li wrote in the journal Advanced Materials.
Boron carbide is the third hardest material on earth, after diamond and another boron-based material. In bulletproof vests and tanks, thick, heavy ceramic plates of dark grey boron carbide protect soldiers and police.
The team took cotton T-shirts and cut them into thin strips and dipped those white cotton strips into a black solution of boron.
After an hour, the strips were removed from the solution and baked in at oven at more than 1,000 degrees Celsius for an hour. The heat stripped away anything that wasn't carbon or boron and combined these two elements into boron carbide, the study said.
The resulting fabric is very different than the original materials that at the start of the process. It's lighter, stronger, tougher and stiffer than the original cotton, but it can still be bent, unlike normal boron carbide armour plates.
The physical properties of the new fabric are still being tested, said Li, but "from our preliminary results we can say the test have been very, very promising."
"We expect that the nanowires can capture a bullet," said Li.
The former T-shirt can also block other hazards as well, such as cancer-causing ultraviolet light from the sun and even life-threatening neutrons emitted by decaying radioactive materials, said Li.
Body armour is just one potential application of the new research. Covering cars or aircraft with cotton-based boron carbide, instead of the metal used today, would make these vehicles significantly lighter and more fuel efficient.