RxPG News : Technology

See the heart beating on this new MRI system!

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 18:30:53 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) London, April 21 - In a major stride in cardiac research, German scientists have developed one of the world's most powerful magnetic resonance imaging - systems - nearly 150,000 times as strong as the earth's magnetic field - to provides the sharpest and clearest images of the beating heart ever recorded in medical history.

The new MRI procedure will radically advance the capabilities of cardiac research by helping diagnose, treat and monitor cardiac malfunctions at a much earlier stage, the Journal for Magnetic Resonance Imaging reports, citing a statement of the the Max Delbruck Centre for Molecular Medicine.

For such sharp cardiac imaging, new versions of multi-channel transmit and receive antennas, called radio-frequency coils, were developed at the Berlin Ultrahigh Field Facility - located at Campus Buch in Germany.

A joint collaboration among Charite, the Max Delbruck Centre, the German Metrology Institute and Siemens Healthcare was initiated for this purpose, the statement said.

'We correlated the image exposure with the heartbeat,' explains the study investigator Prof Thoralf Niendorf.

'Our procedure is immune to interference with strong magnetic fields so that we can compensate for the motion of the heart which results in high image quality free of cardiac motion induced blurring and artifacts,' he added.

Scientists develop technique to trace alien life

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 16:02:28 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Washington, April 24 - Researchers may be able to find extraterrestrial life even before it leaves its home planet -- by looking for left or right-handed light.

The technique they have developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology - for detecting life elsewhere in the universe will not spot aliens directly.

Rather, it could allow spaceborne instruments to see a tell-tale sign that life may have influenced a landscape: a preponderance of molecules that have a certain 'chirality,' or handedness.

A right-handed molecule has the same composition as its left-handed cousin, but their chemical behaviour differs.

Because many substances critical to life favour a particular handedness, Thom Germer physicist and his colleagues at NIST think chirality might reveal life's presence at great distances, and have built a device to detect it.

'You don't want to limit yourself to looking for specific materials like oxygen that earth creatures use, because that makes assumptions about what life is,' said Germer. 'But amino acids, sugars, DNA -- each of these substances is either right- or left-handed in every living thing.'

Many molecules not associated with life exhibit handedness as well. But when organisms reproduce, their offspring possess chiral molecules that have the same handedness as those in their parents' bodies.

'If the surface had just a collection of random chiral molecules, half would go left, half right,' Germer said. 'But life's self-assembly means they all would go one way. It's hard to imagine a planet's surface exhibiting handedness without the presence of self assembly, which is an essential component of life.'

Because chiral molecules reflect light in a way that indicates their handedness, the research team built a device to shine light on plant leaves and bacteria, and then detect the polarized reflections from the organisms' chlorophyll from a short distance away. The device detected chirality from both sources, said a NIST release.

Nanotechnology centre to come up in AMU

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:08:44 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Aligarh, Oct 9 - The Aligarh Muslim University - will set up a state-of-the-art Nanotechnology centre to facilitate advanced research and studies in material sciences, a university official said Thursday.

'For setting up the centre, the Department of Science and Technology -, governed by the Government of India has just allocated over Rs.24 million,' AMU spokesperson Rahat Abrar told IANS.

'At present, there are only 20 seats in the Nanotechnology course which is being offered by AMU at the postgraduate level. With the setting up of the centre, the varsity would be able to enrol more students in the course,' Abrar added.

Nanotechnology, the science of understanding the structure and behaviour of materials at atomic or molecular level, is an emerging field across the globe, varsity officials said.

Indian science could gain from open access push

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 10:17:46 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Bangalore, April 12 - Indian academic institutions are finding it 'exceedingly expensive' to have a well-stocked library of science journals. New ways to access research is needed, a prominent science journal has said.

Bangalore-published Current Science, India's prominent fortnightly journal of research, has editorially argued for 'the idea of open, institutional archives' and called for it to be 'vigorously promoted in India'.

Open access is free, immediate, permanent, full-text, online access for any user web-wide to digital scientific and scholarly material, especially research articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Explains Wikipedia, the collaboratively crafted online encyclopaedia: 'Open access means that any user, anywhere, who has access to the internet, may link, read, download, store, print-off, use, and data-mine the digital content of that article. An OA article usually has limited copyright and licensing restrictions.'

Libraries in India are facing growing costs, specially to sometimes maintain both print and on-line subscriptions and issues related to 'perpetual' electronic access to back-files.

Current Science, in the signed editorial titled 'Science Journals: Issues of Access', called the open access movement a 'new wind' blowing over the 'turbulent world of science publishing'.

Open access campaigners point out that science is most often paid for by public funds. Therefore, they say, the results of research must be freely available to anyone who wishes to read. This, argued the Current Science editorial, would 'presumably enhance the worldwide reach of science'.

Sometimes, authors even pay the publisher to get their article published with funding coming out of their research grant. This allows reading to remain free.

'With internet search engines becoming ever more powerful, with every passing day, open archives may indeed lead to greater visibility and higher citation rates for publications; an outcome that is most desirable for both individual scientists and their institutions,' the April 10, 2008, issue of the magazine said.

Editor P. Balaram noted that scientific literature was globally exploding and publishing was an increasingly profitable enterprise.

'The frenzy to judge scientific output in terms of numbers of publication is now exploited by publishers, who are rapidly expanding their stable of journals,' the editorial added.

It suggested new laws to vest copyright with institutions, when research was publicly funded.

Current Science cited pressures on libraries worldwide to 'prune their subscriptions in the face of mounting costs'.

It said Bangalore's Indian Institute of Science -, probably India's largest holding of science and engineering journals, was thinking of trimming the library's subscriptions.

Journals that the IISc faculty did not publish for a few years, which were not cited by IISc authors and also did not cite papers emerging from this Bangalore institution, were listed. This list could save Rs.10 million - by way of subscriptions.

'Surprisingly, when the list was circulated there were strong pleas for retention of journals in which no one seemed to publish and there seemed little evidence for readership,' said the editorial in the Current Science.

It hinted that the relationships between readers, writers, editors, publishers and buyers are extremely complex in the world of academia; sometimes bordering on the incestuous.

'Large publishing houses like - Elsevier Science and Springer-Verlag are beginning to monopolise the world of science journals; a situation that promotes a seller's market. Efforts to contain bloating library budgets meet with resistance at every step,' said the editorial.

Current Science, founded in 1932, is published in collaboration with the Indian Academy of Sciences. It aims to serve as a medium for communication and discussion of important issues that concern science and scientific activity.

World's first Text Mining service to benefit British academics

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 21:19:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A new £1 million initiative to help academics with their struggle against data deluge was launched on 21 March at Manchester Town Hall.

Search engines return thousands of documents, but the difficulty for the user is to find those which are most personally relevant. Most of these searches have little concept of the meaning of words that is gained from the context of a sentence. By using natural language processing, text mining can discover this meaning and focus on specific needs of the user.

Detailed abstracts can then be compared and contrasted using data mining to discover patterns and associations that the human eye is more likely to miss. This has proved to be particularly useful in the fields of drug discovery and predictive toxicology.

Initially focusing on providing a service for the fields of biological and biomedical science, the Centre will also serve the broader needs of the academic community through the provision of text mining tools, advice and ongoing research.

Strong contacts will be forged by the Centre with business and government sectors to achieve long term sustainability for the service.

Presenters at the launch will include Dr Anne Trefethen (Deputy Director, e-Science Core Programme) and Professor Margaret King (University of Geneva), Professor Ray Larson (University of California, Berkeley), Professor Regan Moore (San Diego Supercomputer Center) and Professor Junichi Tsujii (University of Tokyo). All are leaders in the field of informatics and computing.

Professor John Keane from the Universitys School of Informatics, and Co-Director of the National Centre for Text Mining commented: The potential of text mining is virtually endless. In the future, databases could be populated with accurate, valid, exhaustive, rapidly updated data where users find what they want all the time; where drug discovery costs and development time are slashed and animal experimentation is reduced through early identification of unpromising paths.

Curriculum Committee to Revise the Medical Curriculum in India

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 20:32:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) The Central Government in India is to set up a Curriculum Committee to revise the medical curriculum in the next one or two years.

This was stated by the Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare, Dr. Anbumani Ramadoss in response to certain suggestions by private and Government medical and dental college representatives in a meeting here today. He pointed out that there was a need to revise the curriculum not only to include newer courses and more practical oriented education but also to make it socially oriented and rural oriented.

In the first meeting of its kind, the Health and Family Welfare Ministry today invited more than 200 representatives of medical and dental college management to discuss issues relating to medical education.

Reacting to a suggestion that the retirement age of teachers in medical colleges should be raised from 65 to 70, he said the matter will be looked into. In order to boost medical healthcare on availability in rural areas, the Minister said that they are deliberating a proposal to make a rural stint necessary before either getting a Graduation Certificate or before applying for a Post-Graduate course.

The Health Minister exhorted the participants to increase medical colleges in backward areas. He said, of the 229 medical colleges in the country, 143 were in the four southern states and Maharashtra and Gujarat. Of the 229 medical colleges, 104 were in the private sector.

Reacting to a suggestion for regulating pay structures of doctors, the Minister said that the Government was planning to set up a Medical Grants Commission on the lines of the University Grants Commission. He said, there was a need to start courses on family medicines and public health and in order to maximize the technical experience, there was a need to network. He said, the Pharmaco Vigilance Committee which was set up recently was a network of 229 pharma departments across the country and was done with the aim to maximize the available resources and even explore possibilities of funding research. The Minister said that a stringent view will be taken of excess admission in the colleges as well as proxy teachers.

The Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare, Smt. Panabaka Lakshmi said that the aim of the meeting was to bring quality education into the medical arena. She said that the Government was committed to transparency and any participant was welcome to come to the Ministry to discuss any grievance.

Indian State Governments Authorised to Authenticate Educational Certificates

Mon, 28 Mar 2005 23:07:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) People going abroad for jobs or for higher studies can now get their educational certificates authenticated within their State itself by the authorized officials of the State Government and need not travel to Delhi for the same.

The Ministry of Human Resource Development in consultation with Ministry of External Affairs has already delegated the power to authenticate educational certificates to the State Governments. The State Governments are required to authorize nominated officials to authenticate educational certificates. Although not all foreign governments insist on for authentication, this is required by a few West Asian countries.

Databasing the Brain

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 21:03:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Understanding the structure, function, and development of the brain in health and disease represents one of the great scientific challenges of our time. The emerging field of neuroinformatics integrates neuroscience with informatics to create unique databases and analytical tools for the large variety of neuroscience data types, applying them to brain research and linking them with databases within neuroscience and other fields such as genomics and proteomics. "Databasing the Brain: From Data to Knowledge (Neuroinformatics)" (Wiley; February 2005; $135.00; Paper; 0-471-30921-4) is the first book to comprehensively cover neuroinformatics, from relevant computational science and modeling issues to its diverse applications.

Expertly edited by two pioneers in this growing discipline, the text covers the basic principles and specific applications across a range of problems in brain research. Extensively illustrated throughout, this book discusses the state-of-the-art informatic tools and models and how they are being applied to clinical and basic research. In addition to presenting new ways to acquire, store, visualize, analyze, integrate, synthesize, and share data, this comprehensive overview demonstrates how data obtained using different species, levels of biological organization, and methods can be integrated.

"Databasing the Brain" Offers:

* A solid foundation for the application of computer science in order to build databases, tools, and workflow environments in neuroscience
* An analysis of neuronal systems in a quantitative context
* Specific applications in neuroscience that reflect present and future information infrastructures

"Databasing the Brain" is an invaluable resource for students entering this interdisciplinary area, as well as for researchers wanting to cross-train between neuroscience and informatics.

CBI FILES CHARGESHEETS FOR IMPERSONATION IN AIIMS PARAMEDICAL COURSE EXAMINATION

Fri, 26 Mar 2004 22:35:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Central Bureau of Investigation has filed two chargesheets in two separate cases against S/Sh. Jalaj Kumar and Rajesh Kumar both residents of Bihar in the court of Metropolitan Magistrate, Karkardooma, Delhi for adopting unscrupulous means to obtain admission in the B.Sc (Hons.) Paramedical Course conducted by All India Institute of Medical Sciences on 27-6-2001. In similar five other cases CBI had already filed chargesheets.

The then Director of AIIMS in his letter dated 14-8-2001 addressed to the Director, CBI had intimated about eight instances of impersonation from among the 410 candidates who appeared in the tests. The impersonations were detected by the counseling committee of AIIMS. AIIMS had requested CBI to investigate into the case of impersonation. Following this, CBI had registered eight different cases with its Special Crime Branch on 27-8-2001. So far, chargsheets have been filed in seven cases out of the eight. In connection with these eight cases CBI has so far arrested 16 people.

CBI ARRESTS A MEDICAL STUDENT FOR IMPERSONATION IN PARAMEDICAL ENTRANCE EXAMINATION OF AIIMS

Wed, 04 Feb 2004 22:32:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) The Central Bureau of Investigation has arrested Shri Abhishek Kumar Aman, then an MBBS student at Medical College, Calcutta, who had impersonated as a candidate in the B.Sc.(Hons) Paramedical Entrance Examination,2001 conducted by All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

The accused appeared in the said examination on behalf of another candidate, Shri Shabda Kumar and stood first in the merit list. The examination was conducted by All India Institute of Medical Sciences on 27.06.2001 and a total number of 480 candidates had appeared. CBI registered the case on the complaint of then Director, AIIMS, New Delhi on 27.8.2001. Candidate Shabda Kumar and the middleman Jitendra Kumar @ Bhola were earlier arrested during March, 2002 and October, 2002 respectively. Accused Abhishek Kumar Aman was absconding since registration of the case. The arrested accused is being produced in the court of the Metropolitan Magistrate, Karkardooma Courts, Shahadra, Delhi.