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Monday, May 14, 2012
Panasonic racks up a record loss for 2012, looks forward to profits and a partner for OLED TVs
Panasonic's yearly earnings are in and the red ink added up to a record $9.7 billion net loss for 2011. Number one on incoming president Kazuhiro Tsuga's list is turning around the company's TV division, where its heavy investments in both plasma and LCD manufacturing resulted in heavy losses. Currently the company expects a better result in both next year after 2011's write downs and restructuring, although its projections see total sales falling from 17.3 million last year to 15.5 million. Panasonic is expected to follow Samsung and LG into large screen OLED HDTV production and outgoing prez Fumio Ohtsubo mentioned it would likely look for a partner there. Sumitomo has been rumored as a potential ally in the past, though a preference for run-flat tires could not be confirmed at press time.
Panasonic racks up a record loss for 2012, looks forward to profits and a partner for OLED TVs originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 13 May 2012 06:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Saturday, May 12, 2012
Friday, May 11, 2012
NDS' Surfaces turns your wall into a TV, or a TV into a wall... one of those two
Remember the wall that was also a television in Total Recall? That's the inspiration behind Surfaces -- a concept device produced by British cable mavens NDS. Abandoning the idea of a single screen, the company mounted six displays into a wall that offers up TV and internet content when on, and blends into your wallpaper when off. The setup will even control your room's lighting for those particularly emotive X Factor performances and you control the whole thing with your iPad (while tweeting, bitchily about the show). However, before you storm the company's Staines headquarters looking to buy one, there are a few obstacles you should know about. Firstly, this amazing setup cost over $30,000 and secondly, it only really works if you've got plenty of content filmed in 4K -- but don't worry, Peter Jackson's working on it.
[Image Credit: Jon Snyder / Wired]
NDS' Surfaces turns your wall into a TV, or a TV into a wall... one of those two originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 May 2012 09:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Procedure offers hope in type 1 diabetes
New strategy proves curative in more than half of mice tested
Web edition : 2:44 pm
A three-pronged strategy ? to knock out renegade immune cells, replace them and revitalize other cells that make insulin ? might reverse type 1 diabetes. Scientists report in the May 9 Science Translational Medicine that seven of 12 diabetic mice treated with this combination were cured even after having lost the ability to make insulin for several weeks, the equivalent of a human patient who has needed insulin injections for a couple of years.?
Type 1 diabetes often strikes at an early age and relegates a person to a lifetime of blood sugar tests and insulin shots. The condition results when one?s own immune cells kill insulin-making cells called beta cells housed in the pancreas. A few of these beta cells usually survive, but don?t produce adequate insulin to process sugars.
In the new study, researchers used specially designed antibodies and other drugs in the mice to first wipe out rogue beta-cell killers from the immune system called CD3 and CD8 T cells.
The mice then received a mismatched bone marrow graft to replace the immune cells. The mismatch seems necessary to prevent the newly developing T cells from targeting beta cells, says study coauthor Miao Wang, an endocrinologist at the City of Hope Beckman Research Institute in Duarte, Calif. Recipient mice also got stripped-down T cells from the spleens of the mismatched donor mice. These cells may prevent a backlash effect called graft-versus-host disease in which transplanted tissue attacks its new host.
To restore insulin production by beta cells, the mice received hormone and growth-factor injections for 60 days.
The seven mice cured of type 1 diabetes regained about 20 percent of their normal supply of beta cells, which made enough insulin to fend off high blood sugar. The beta cells were a mix of old cells that began to multiply after treatment and new beta cells with mysterious origins. ?We believe there are pre-existing beta-cell progenitors inside the pancreas,? and these developed into new beta cells, says Wang.
The seven animals remained free of diabetes 150 days after treatments ended.
Currently in humans, the only cure for type 1 diabetes is a transplant of pancreatic ?islets? containing beta cells. ?It has many limitations,? Wang says. A single transplant typically requires multiple donors, and recipients need immune-suppressing drugs indefinitely, she says. Also, a 2006 report showed that two-thirds of islet transplant recipients were back on insulin injections within two years of the operation.
?If our therapy could successfully translate to humans,? Wang says, ?I think it could be a replacement for islet transplantation.?
Anita Chong, an immunologist at the University of Chicago, says the researchers might need to test the therapy in nonhuman primates to show that the first step will knock out the rogue CD3 and CD8 T cells. Also, scientists will need to ascertain whether the beta-cell boosters will work without adverse effects, she says.Found in: Biomedicine and Body & Brain
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Thursday, May 10, 2012
How Telerobotics Could Help Humanity Explore Space
GREENBELT, Md. ? Advances in telerobotics are in high gear here on Earth, enabling scientists to plumb the deepest oceans, extract resources from dangerous mines and even carry out high-precision surgery from thousands of miles away.
Now researchers are considering ways to adopt and adapt telerobotics for more far-reaching duties ? in outer space. The ability to extend human cognition to the moon, Mars, near-Earth objects and other accessible bodies remotely could curb the challenges, cost and risks of deep-space exploration, some scientists say.
Astronauts, robotics experts and space scientists and engineers discussed such possibilities in the first-of-its-kind Exploration Telerobotics Symposium, held here May 2-3 at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
Extending human cognition and dexterity
The idea is that future space exploration crews could teleoperate systems deployed on planetary bodies from some distance away. Tucked inside a high-tech habitat circling a planet or perched in a module at a Lagrange point, astronauts can use high-quality telepresence to conduct surface operations on other worlds, including scouting out and mining valuable resources. [Gallery: Asteroid Mining Idea Takes Off]
While landing humans on these surfaces may be an eventual ambition, extending human cognition and dexterity to these locales via telepresence might be achieved on a shorter timescale and at a more modest cost, researchers said.
Establishing on-orbit proximity telerobotic control for the surface of the moon could be a good place to start, they added, with more far-flung destinations perhaps following later.
Credible strategy
The symposium underscored for the space community the meaning and potential importance of telepresence as "a credible exploration strategy," said astronomer Dan Lester of the University of Texas in Austin, who was a key organizer of the meeting.
"Space is big, and the speed of light is small enough by comparison that we often don?t feel much 'presence' with our sensory extensions we send out into space in the form of robots," Lester told SPACE.com. As such, we really don't have any experience with space telepresence, even for such relatively close bodies as the moon and asteroids, he added.
Lester said that there are countless lessons to be learned from the terrestrial telerobotics experts who attended the meeting. They brought a wide range of experience, from looking for oil and gas reserves in the oceans to performing telerobotic surgery and mining operations.
"That's all happening right now, in a big way, and space exploration has a lot to learn from those endeavors," Lester said. "They don't use space-qualified hardware, but their operations management and protocols have important lessons for us."
Terrestrial teachings
Similar in outlook is James Garvin, the chief scientist at NASA Goddard who helped chair the recent meeting.
Garvin's personal view is that the growing body of terrestrial experience with telerobotics in medicine, sea-floor exploration, mining and unmanned aircraft offers many fundamental lessons. That knowledge and know-how, he told SPACE.com, can be extended both to near-space locales like the International Space Station and to deep-space destinations, to the advantage of science and engineering capabilities.
"My general feeling is that low-latency telerobotics is a critical capability that must be investigated," Garvin said, "so that future human-robotic scientific activities can open up new frontiers in our scientific understanding of Mars, the moon, asteroids, Venus" and other locations.
Experience gap
"Clearly, there are local settings and environments where human field explorers on other worlds should never go," Garvin emphasized. And in such places, even very local telerobotic operations with machines there and people in nearby safe havens could be essential, he said.
Garvin did point out that, on the science side, there is a profound lack of real experience with low-latency telepresence here on Earth in geological field situations.
"This experience gap limits our understanding of how to develop the required engineering and technology capabilities to use low-latency telepresence in deep-space field science, on the moon, Mars, asteroids or beyond," Garvin said. More work needs to be done in this area, he added.[Future Visions of Human Spaceflight]
Brain power
The computational crunching power of robots was addressed by Brian Wilcox, manager of Space Robotics Technology at NASA?s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
"Moore's law has been operating for 50 years, with about an order of magnitude increase in computational throughput every five years," Wilcox said.
This means that the throughput per wafer ? at a roughly constant fabrication cost of under $10,000 ? has increased from about the equivalent of one neuron on a 1.5-inch wafer using 1965 fabrication technology, to about 10 billion neurons using 2015 fabrication technology on an 18-inch wafer. Those wafers are just now going into production around the world, he said.?
Wilcox observed that 10 billion neurons is about the equivalent of the human brain.
"Today, a game console, about the most capable consumer product in terms of throughput, has about the equivalent performance of the best invertebrate animal, the octopus," Wilcox said. "Within the next 10 to 15 years, we will likely witness robot performance marching through all of vertebrate evolution, up to and including humans."
Redefining 'exploration'
A key and perhaps overriding issue, Lester concluded, is the extent to which the public and Congress can buy in to an exploration strategy that does not involve humans going all the way to an exploration site.
In many respects, Lester added, what telepresence is making us do is redefine what we mean by the word "exploration."
"We should understand that it is precisely the explosion of technological capability that even allows us to talk about doing telepresence," Lester said.
"Forty years ago, when we wanted to put human cognition on the moon, there was exactly one way to do it ? putting people there ? boots on the ground. That's what we did. But it's no longer the only option," he added.
Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is a winner of last year's National Space Club Press Award and a past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines. He has written for SPACE.com since 1999.
Copyright 2012 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.chomp national enquirer kate gosselin helicopter crash matt jones whitney houston in casket photo resolute
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
A Camping Lighter That Puts Fire at Your Beck and Call [Daily Desired]
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