Saturday, July 30, 2005
Stem Cells Mend Spinal Cords
Genetically engineered stem cells can help rats’ severed spinal cords grow back together, according to a study published Tuesday.
Rats given the treatment, using stem cells taken from rat embryos, could move their legs again after their spines were severed in the lab, said the researchers’ report in the Journal of Neuroscience.
The scientists hope the approach, which generated a new fatty cover for the spinal cord cells called the myelin sheath, also could be shown to work in people.
The key is using the right stem cells and then stimulating them correctly, said the researchers, who were led by Scott Whittemore of the University of Louisville School of Medicine in Kentucky.
"These findings suggest the possibility that transplantation therapy using a subset of neural stem cells and neurotrophic factors might improve functional recovery in human spinal cord injury," said Dr. Michael Selzer, a professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center in Philadelphia.
Spinal cord injuries can be caused by accidents or infections and affect 250,000 people a year in the United States alone, costing $4 billion annually, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders.
Whittemore’s team took specific cells from rat embryos called glial restricted precursor cells — a kind of stem cell or master cell that gives rise to nerve cells.
They genetically engineered these cells to do a little extra work by producing a compound called a growth factor — in this case, a new one called multineurotrophin. It was designed to coax immature neural stem cells to mature and become specialized cells called oligodendrocytes.
Oligodendrocytes help myelin grow onto nerve fibers, which cannot grow or function without this fatty protective coating.
Two-thirds of the rats in the study regained some hind limb movement, the researchers said.
source:http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,68331,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_14
Revenge of the Nerds
Google and Yahoo! are hiring away hundreds of top engineers from high tech's most prestigious firms
Some call it the "giant sucking sound" emanating from Silicon Valley. For others, it's a migraine in the making. But whatever they're calling the hiring binge at Google (GOOG ) and Yahoo! (YHOO ), just about everyone is a bit astonished at the fearsome force swallowing up some of tech's best and brightest.
"High-profile researchers are now flocking to the search engines," says Marti Hearst, associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley's school of information management and systems.
STOLEN SUPERSTARS. The migration of software-engineering talent to Google and Yahoo is a testament to how high these search companies have risen in the tech firmament. Coveted talent from academia, startups, and venerable tech companies that a decade ago would have flocked to Microsoft Corp. (MSFT ) or Sun Microsystems (SUNW ) are now more than willing to switch teams and join Google or Yahoo.
In the second quarter alone, Google snapped up about 230 engineers. Recent additions include software superstars Louis Monier, director of eBay (EBAY ) advanced technology research, and Kai-Fu Lee, a top-flight researcher at Microsoft -- which prompted the software giant to sue Google and Lee to keep him from going to work there right away.
Yahoo, meanwhile, has recently hired dozens of top engineers, including Larry Tesler, former vice-president for shopping experience at Amazon.com (AMZN ) And the company is expected to announce on July 28 that its new head of research is Prabhakar Raghavan, former chief technology officer at search-software outfit Verity (VRTY ) and an authority on algorithms.
INTERNET FOCUS. What's behind this talent raid? Another dot-com gold rush it's not. Eager investors already value these businesses at a combined $130 billion, up from about $63 billion last August when Google went public. That means the share prices reflect much of the companies' promise, suggesting stock options could be in for a slower climb from here.
Of course, these top-level search engineers are still among the most well-compensated techno-nerds out there. But there's more than money at work here. These guys -- and they are truly mostly men -- are also attracted to the massive, unsolved technical challenges facing search companies, which affect hundreds of millions of people daily.
In years past, PCs, operating systems, and databases were viewed as core technologies where engineers could work on problems and change people's lives. Today, more techies view search on the Internet as among the most important services.
"The Internet is touching everyone's life," says Usama Fayyad, chief data officer and senior vice-president at Yahoo, who joined the company last December. "A new science is being defined in an area that will take over much of what we do commercially and socially."
LAYING FOUNDATION. Indeed, Google -- and, to a lesser degree, Yahoo -- has become what Microsoft used to be: a young, vibrant company working on the bleeding edge of the day's vexing technical issues. Before the Internet became the phenomenon it is now, Microsoft was a magnet for top talent interested in solving the toughest tech problem: making personal computing easy.
Today, though, the gravitational force at the center of techdom is no longer the PC -- it's the Net. And while MSN holds its own with Google and Yahoo in terms of worldwide use, its engineers can't develop products that would undermine Microsoft's monopoly businesses, Windows and Office. Some researchers say privately that restricts creativity.
If Google and Yahoo are able to maintain their position on the crest of innovation, their current hiring push could lay the foundation for the next generation of corporate labs, following in the footsteps of companies such as Xerox (XRX ), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ), IBM (IBM ), and Microsoft. Sure, these members of the tech establishment boast research and development budgets several times larger than those at Google and Yahoo. But the Internet companies are just starting to ramp up their research efforts, while some incumbents, such as HP, are downsizing their labs. "IBM and HP have some very interesting projects," says Yahoo's Raghavan. "But there's an undeniable sense of excitement here that other vendors can't match."
ZANY CULTURE. Once top talent starts to move, it can be a force unto itself. At Google, for instance, staffers marvel at passing in the hallways such luminaries as Rob Pike, one of the creators of the Unix operating system; Adam Bosworth, a pioneer of the XML programming language; or Monier, who helped create AltaVista, one of the Web's most popular search engines in the 1990s. The chance to work alongside tech gurus, who in some cases authored the textbooks that young employees studied in college, can be a powerful draw.
That's half the story. At Google, much of the magnetism is also generated by a zany culture perfectly synced to the geek lifestyle. Engineers are encouraged to spend the equivalent of one day per week on their own pet projects. When they're not staring into their computer monitors, Google employees will often gather for roller-hockey games in the underground garage or race remote-control blimps through their cavernous offices.
Free perks range from gourmet meals at the company cafeteria to bathrooms equipped with digital toilets, where the seat temperature and bidet pressure can be controlled with a remote. "They have created a Willy Wonka effect," says James E. Pitkow, CEO of Moreover Technologies, whose former company, Outride Inc., was purchased by Google in 2001. "Engineers want to work on the coolest problems with the smartest people."
TALENT DRAIN. Yahoo also carries substantial geek cred. Each day the company generates 10 terabytes of data -- equivalent to all the print collections in the Library of Congress. By sorting this unrivaled data pile, engineers quickly can begin to discern how products and features are used as well as how people behave online. Adjustments, then, can be made in a matter of minutes, with improvements quickly felt by the company's 400 million monthly users. "I saw an opportunity to take the user interface to a new level for a huge number of people," says Yahoo's Tesler, who joined in May to spearhead the company's Web design.
While the Internet leaders snatch up top tech talent, that creates headaches elsewhere. Some startups, for instance, say the talent drain has made their own hiring more difficult. Joe Kraus, a co-founder of early portal Excite and now the CEO of collaborative software startup JotSpot, says Google has been especially tough to go up against. "If you're talking to someone great, they're invariably talking to Google, and they often have an offer."
It can be equally difficult for technology mainstays, including Microsoft. Not only has the software giant lost several top minds to Google in recent years, the Redmond (Wash.) company is also facing tougher competition for talent coming out of universities, even in its own backyard. Oren Etzioni, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington in Seattle, says Google has hired most of the top one-third of his search class in each of the past two years.
MICROSOFT'S CHALLENGE. Microsoft is hardly standing still. With both boundless cash and massive industry influence, the software giant can pay what it needs to hire the leading lights of industry. But clearly, it's feeling stung -- as evidenced by the suit against Google and Kai-Fu Lee for allegedly breaching a noncompete clause in Lee's contract with Microsoft. Google has filed a countersuit against Microsoft. Neither company would comment on the legal battle.
Clearly, Microsoft's motives reach far beyond Lee. Although it is not the only company feeling the hiring pinch of its search competitors, it desperately needs to hire and retain top talent if it wants to gain ground on Google and Yahoo. The company's recently released search technology has been met with praise.
But with only about 15% of the U.S. search market, Microsoft badly trails its rivals. It needs to come up with innovations to set itself apart from the pack. By going after Google and Lee, it may help deter other talented techies with similar ideas.
Such moves appear to be stopgap measures at best. With torrid growth and booming profits, Google and Yahoo clearly have the cachet to keep their hiring momentum going. Frustrated rivals shouldn't expect that sucking sound to abate anytime soon.
source:http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2005/tc20050728_5127_tc024.htm?campaign_id=topStories_ssi_5
Scientists Get Better Look at Dinosaur Development
The embryo, a Massospondylus, belongs to a family of dinosaurs called prosauropods. Distantly related duckbill dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous period, 99 million to 65 million years ago, also seemed to have cared for their young.
Scientists have cracked open a 190-million-year-old egg to reveal the oldest known dinosaur embryo.
The finding, reported today in the journal Science, gives paleontologists new insights into the physical development of dinosaurs. Examination of the fetal skeleton also suggests the hatchling would have required parental care to survive. This would be the earliest evidence of nurturant behavior, more than 100 million years earlier than previous examples.
"It's a very exciting prospect that means this is the oldest example of parental care," says lead researcher Robert Reisz, paleontologist at the University of Toronto at Mississauga.
Since the 4.7-inch-long skeleton fills the slightly round 2.4-inch-long egg, it appears the dinosaur was near hatching.
The egg containing the embryo was discovered in 1978 in South Africa, but it was too tiny and delicate to be dissected. Using a special microscope Reisz created and miniature excavation tools, researchers were able to expose the skeleton from the surrounding rock and eggshell. Reisz says it is "superbly preserved."
The embryo, a Massospondylus, belongs to a family of dinosaurs called prosauropods. Distantly related duckbill dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous period, 99 million to 65 million years ago, also seemed to have cared for their young, but according to Thomas Holtz Jr., vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Maryland, "duckbills are mental giants" compared with the prosauropods.
The most significant aspect, Holtz says, is that "even very primitive dinosaurs were showing fairly sophisticated parental behavior."
James Clark, professor of biology at George Washington University, is not convinced. He says the actual ability of the baby dinosaur "is something that is really hard to know." What he finds more impressive in the study are "the changes that they documented going from the embryos up through the adults. It looks like they were changing their body posture."
Adult prosauropods were about 16.4 feet long, primarily walked on their hind limbs and might have looked a bit like Fred Flintstone's pet Dino, Holtz says.
The tiny embryo has a large head and larger forelimbs, suggesting it would have initially walked on all four legs. It appears the forelimbs grew more slowly than the hind limbs, leading the prosauropod to change its gait.
The skeleton also may provide insight into an evolutionary mystery. Prosauropods are precursors to sauropods, a family that includes large dinosaurs such as the Apatosaurus, also known as brontosaurus. Some features of the embryo resemble adult sauropods, so sauropods may have evolved through paedomorphosis, a process where young traits are retained in adulthood.
source:http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=37548
Opening up challenges to Microsoft
The announcement that the next version of Windows will be called Vista has singularly failed to set the computing world on fire.
Despite the fact that well over half of us are likely to be running it by the end of next year, only diehard tech heads seem to be interested in "the operating system formerly known as Longhorn".
But Microsoft is facing a much bigger problem than lack of interest in its new OS, a problem that cannot easily be solved by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a marketing campaign or signing up a well-known band to promote it as the Rolling Stones did with Windows 95.
The problem is GNU/Linux, a beast they cannot destroy and cannot seem to tame, a beast that is encroaching on their markets by offering an alternative to the closed development and licensed software model that has made Microsoft rich.
Stuck on you
One benefit of open source tends to be better support for open international standards, a difference that becomes clear when you compare the Firefox browser with Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
In the past Microsoft's approach to standards was simple, and went by the mantra "embrace and extend".
You tell your customers you are supporting the standard but slip a few extras into your implementation.
Once people are using "your" version of the standard they are effectively stuck with you because they have come to rely on the bells and whistles you supplied.
So what would it mean for Microsoft to try to "embrace and extend" Linux? It might go something like this. 
Crucially, however, it does not listen to what Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond and the other leaders of the free and open source software movement are saying 
The Linux kernel, the GNU environment and tools, and many other free software products are made available under the GNU General Public License.
Anyone can take the source code needed to compile the program, run it, distribute it, and modify it.
If they distribute their changed version then it has to be under the same licence, so you cannot improve a program and then keep the improved version unless you only use it internally and privately.
But anyone who wants to can "fork" the code by taking a version and beginning their own development path.
They are obliged to release any changes they make to versions they distribute but, crucially, they are not obliged to accept any changes they do not want: the code, although not "owned" by them, can be managed by them in whatever ways they desire.
This is the situation with the GNU/Linux distributions from people like Red Hat and Ubuntu. Each takes the code base - kernel, development environment, applications - that it wants and enhances and packages it, before giving it away and, at least for most, selling support contracts to customers.
So what if Microsoft looks around, chooses the most stable, least buggy, most useful set of open source software it can find and takes it all in-house?
Common critics
They allocate a billion dollars worth of programmers to shine and polish it for a year, improving its compatibility with Windows Server technologies, donating parts of the Windows and Office code bases under the GPL and turning it into the world's best operating system.
It is common to criticise Microsoft's programmers along with their software, but most of the team working on new versions of Windows or Office are talented, committed and in many cases brilliant.
A team of Microsoft's best coders working on a project they all believed in could, I am sure, do great stuff.
What will happen when Microsoft releases its new Linux distribution: Micrix (pronounced mick-rix)? It is everything you want. 
It is completely cross-compatible with Windows, other versions Linux and the Mac OS. Microsoft indemnifies you against lawsuits from companies like SCO who claim Linux infringes their copyright.
If you are running Microsoft software already then it is supported as part of that licence, and even home users get free telephone support.
The 24/7 hotline costs another $1bn a year, but that is small change when you are talking about changing a culture and establishing hegemony.
Another $2bn goes into ongoing development and donations to any of the third party open source applications that were included in the core distribution, just to ensure that they continue to flourish.
Anyone who wants to can take Micrix and distribute it themselves, of course, and Microsoft does accept submissions for the code base from the community and looks carefully at what is happening back in Linux world, although it prefers to make its own fixes rather than just take code from the old world.
Crucially, however, it does not listen to what Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond and the other leaders of the free and open source software movement are saying.
While its code is available for inclusion in "old-style" Linux, the many improvements in the Micrix kernel made before it was released make it very hard for Linux to keep up.
Open choices
Eventually Micrix is simply better for most purposes that Linux, OpenSolaris, FreeBSD or any of the other Unix derivatives.
When someone spots Richard Stallman running it on his laptop, the game is over, and the old Linux community gathered around Linus Torvalds falls apart as third party developers move to Micrix as a preferred platform.
Of course, by then few home users even know whether their desktop is running on Windows or Micrix, and even fewer care.
The net's core architecture moves over too, with Micrix on the DNS root servers, and even Google migrates the Googleplex's servers, simply because the support environment is better and patches are rolled out more efficiently and with fewer errors.
Even Apple aficionados are dumping Mac OS for Micrix on their Powerbooks.
Microsoft is not an open source company, even at this stage: at the application level Microsoft Office is still proprietary, but it runs seamlessly on Micrix as well as Windows.
OpenOffice, the open source alternative, is still out there but its largely volunteer developers find it hard to keep up with Microsoft and many Micrix users, now getting their operating system for free, do not mind paying out for a word processor.
At which point Microsoft makes the biggest decision of its existence: which OS does it cancel? Windows or Micrix.
Of course, all of this is a fantasy for the summer holidays. I have absolutely no reason to believe that such a future could come to pass.
Nobody at Microsoft tells me anything, I have not heard any rumours and I do not know nothing. I am just indulging in a bit of imaginative thinking. 
source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4727267.stm
Danes want talks in land fight
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 Canadian Forces Northern Area troops raise a Canadian flag on Hans Island. Nunavut on July 13. (CP PHOTO/HO/DND/Cpl David McCord) |
OTTAWA (CP) - The Danish government has offered to reopen formal negotiations with Canada in an effort to resolve the decades-old tug of war over a tiny Arctic island.
Both countries have avoided the contentious question for three decades but, as global warming opens up the Arctic to shipping and mining, the Danes say the time is now to settle the ownership rights to Hans Island. "We are communicating," said Poul Erik Dam Kristensen, Denmark's ambassador to Ottawa.
"This is just a small irritant that we very much suggest we get aside.
"(We'd do it) by having experts from the two sides sit together and resume the consultations we had back in the '70s."
The dispute has flared up again this summer and made international news on websites from Britain and the U.S., to Asia.
A quick helicopter visit to the barren island by Defence Minister Bill Graham without prior notification to the Danes provoked the latest salvo in the simmering dispute last week. Canadian soldiers also planted a Maple Leaf flag and erected an Inuit stone marker earlier this month.
That prompted the Danish government to call in the Canadian ambassador. The outraged Danes sent a protest letter to Ottawa and a senior official in Copenhagen called Graham's visit "an occupation."
The Canadian government appeared to shrug off the Danish offer of negotiations. A Foreign Affairs official said Ottawa would examine any formal request but was in no hurry to reopen talks.
The Danes say the countries' history of friendly relations should not be subjected to periodic squabbles over a frigid rock barely larger than a football field just south of the North Pole.
"We still believe it is a very minor thing," said Kristensen. "But if it is, in between, popping up like it is well then it's getting time to sit down and try to solve it."
The countries agreed in 1973 to draw a border halfway between Greenland - a semi-autonomous Danish territory - and Canada's Ellesmere Island.
They could not agree on who should claim Hans Island and decided to resolve the issue at some later date.
The dispute crept into cyberspace Wednesday using the popular Google website as the battleground.
A quick search of "hans island" revealed a paid advertisement with the banner headline: "Hans Island is Greenland. Greenland natives have used the island for centuries."
The ad was linked to the Danish government's foreign affairs web page with the letter condemning Graham's visit.
The advertisement was not a Danish government initiative and whoever placed it was acting alone, Kristensen said.
But that didn't stop one Internet expert - and patriotic Canuck - from striking back.
Toronto resident Rick Broadhead placed a Google ad and said the Canadian government needs to get with the times.
With Ottawa prepared to spend billions to boost its military presence in the Arctic over the coming years, he said an Internet campaign is a dirt-cheap way to spread Canada's argument.
"Eight cents per click - or $200 a month - is money well spent to assert our sovereignty in the North," said Broadhead, who has written extensively about the Internet.
"Political battles are not fought solely in the press these days. They're fought on the Internet as well."
Broadhead's website includes a fluttering Maple Leaf flag and outlines Canada's traditional argument that Hans Island belonged to the British and became Canada's in 1867.
The Danes say it is closer to Greenland than Canada and is therefore Danish soil.
The Opposition Conservatives weighed into the debate and said the federal government only has itself to blame if it loses sovereignty over the Arctic.
The Tory defence critic said the military was so depleted over the 1990s that Canada can't sustain a strong northern presence.
"There is speculation the Danes will once again send an ice-breaking frigate to the island. But how is Canada prepared to match this show of muscle?" Gordon O'Connor said in a statement.
"Will it send one of its frigates or aging destroyers, neither of which is capable of effectively operating in arctic climates?
"Canada requires a major military investment to back Canada's sovereignty."
Ottawa has promised to make arctic patrols a priority and has earmarked $13 billion for military investment over five years.
On the web:
Http://www.rickbroadhead.com/hans.htm
Http://www.um.dk/en/servicemenu/News/FrontPageNews/HansIslandDani shNoteToCanadianAmbassador.htm
source: http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2005/07/27/pf-1149854.html
