All Things Considered, May 17, 2007 · Researchers have found a way to encourage new hair growth in mice, and they’re hoping something similar can be done with humans. Hair comes from a complex mini-organ in the skin called a hair follicle. According to traditional thinking, new hair follicles only form in junior mammals. Once you’re an adult, and you lose some hair follicles, you’re out of luck in the hair department. Now it’s a funny thing about dogma, it tends to color the way you look at the world. Jonathan Vogel is a dermatologist at the National Institutes of Health. He says scientists who study how wounds heal relied on dogma to explain something they always see. ‘We know when we make wounds in mice that eventually that area is replaced with hair,’ Vogel says. ‘It’s not like the mice typically go round with large patches of skin without hair. But I guess we assumed that that was not new hair.’ Instead, it was thought that areas that previously had hair migrated in as the wound healed. But as George Cotsarelis reports in the current issue of Nature, that explanation appears to be wrong. Cotsarelis […]
SEATTLE — The next generation of wireless Internet products certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance is expected to hit shelves this summer, even though a final standard for the technology isn’t due for another year, the industry group says. The Wi-Fi Alliance was announcing Wednesday that it will begin certifying wireless routers, networking cards, microchips and other so-called ‘Draft N’ products in June. The products, which take their name from the upcoming 802.11n technical standard, are expected to reach retail stores shortly thereafter. Wi-Fi comes in several flavors — ‘b,’ ‘a,’ ‘g,’ and soon ‘n’ — referring to the subsection of the technical guidelines issued by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a technical professional organization. The ‘n’ version is expected to be about five times faster than the widely used ‘g’ variety, though in practice, speeds rarely reach what’s listed on the box. Draft N products are said to offer better reach through walls and into dead spots and will use multiple radios to send and receive data, making them better at handling big video files. Gear rated to handle n-level wireless already is being sold. But the Wi-Fi Alliance said certified Draft N items […]
The idea of ditching ‘digital rights management’ for music downloads is rapidly changing from dream to business reality– and faster than anybody might have hoped. Amazon said yesterday that it would open an online store that only stocks MP3 music files without copying restrictions. That would be huge news, except that Amazon is only catching up with Apple, which announced in early April that it would offer DRM-free downloads by the end of this month. Both stores have the public backing of EMI, one of the four big record labels, which yesterday also said it would sell unrestricted music downloads at some European sites. This should delight customers, who will no longer have to worry about being able to listen to their song files on their next music player or their computer. But it must unsettle many music industry executives. Abandoning the copy-control systems meant to stop people from sharing a new digital purchase on the Internet– but which also keep buyers from listening to these downloads on unauthorized hardware or software– remains heresy in much of Hollywood. But when the biggest music download store, one of the biggest CD retailers and a Big Four […]
BRUSSELS — A three-week wave of massive cyber-attacks on the small Baltic country of Estonia, the first known incidence of such an assault on a state, is causing alarm across the western alliance, with Nato urgently examining the offensive and its implications. While Russia and Estonia are embroiled in their worst dispute since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a row that erupted at the end of last month over the Estonians’ removal of the Bronze Soldier Soviet war memorial in central Tallinn, the country has been subjected to a barrage of cyber warfare, disabling the websites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks, and companies. Nato has dispatched some of its top cyber-terrorism experts to Tallinn to investigate and to help the Estonians beef up their electronic defences. ‘This is an operational security issue, something we’re taking very seriously,’ said an official at Nato headquarters in Brussels. ‘It goes to the heart of the alliance’s modus operandi.’ Alarm over the unprecedented scale of cyber-warfare is to be raised tomorrow at a summit between Russian and European leaders outside Samara on the Volga. While planning to raise the issue with the Russian authorities, EU and […]
While regular multivitamin use is not linked with early or localized prostate cancer, taking too many multivitamins may be associated with an increased risk for advanced or fatal prostate cancers, according to a study in the May 16 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Millions of Americans take multivitamins because of a belief in their potential health benefits, even though there is limited scientific evidence that they prevent chronic disease. Researchers have wondered what impact multivitamin use might have on cancer risk. Karla Lawson, Ph.D., of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., and colleagues followed 295,344 men enrolled in the National Institutes of Health-AARP Diet and Health Study to determine the association between multivitamin use and prostate cancer risk. After five years of follow-up, 10,241 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer, including 8,765 with localized cancers and 1,476 with advanced cancers. The researchers found no association between multivitamin use and the risk of localized prostate cancer. But they did find an increased risk of advanced and fatal prostate cancer among men who used multivitamins more than seven times a week, compared with men who did not use multivitamins. The association was strongest in […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
