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Friday, May 17, 2013

Bacterium counteracts 'coffee ring effect'

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Ever notice how a dried coffee stain has a thicker outer rim, while the middle of the stain remains almost unsoiled? This 'coffee ring effect' also occurs in other materials. Researchers from the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry at KU Leuven have now discovered how to counteract coffee rings with 'surfactants', i.e. soap. The key to the discovery was not a kitchen towel, but a bacterium that counteracts the coffee ring effect at the microscopic level. The findings were published in a recent edition of the leading journal Nature Communications.

When a coffee ring dries, its edges become noticeably darker and thicker. This occurs because the coffee particles move toward the edge of the stain while the water in the liquid evaporates. At a microscopic level, this coffee ring effect can also be seen in liquids with particles of other materials such as plastic and wood.

In various industrial applications ? applying an even coat of paint or varnish, for example ? the coffee ring effect can be particularly troublesome and scientists have long been seeking ways to counteract it. Raf De Dier and Wouter Sempels (Departments of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry) have now described a solution based on examples found in nature. De Dier and Sempels carried out experiments and calculations on nanomaterials as well as on a particularly promising bacterium, Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a dangerous bacterium that can cause infections in open wounds. "A Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria colony wants to find as large a breeding ground as possible. To avoid overconcentration on the edges of a wound when spreading itself during the drying-out process, the bacterium produces substances that counteract the coffee ring effect."

These surface-tension-disrupting substances are called surfactants. Detergents such as soap are also surfactants. "Add soap to a stain ? a coffee stain or any other stain ?and you will still get a coffee ring effect. But at the same time the soap causes a counterflow from the edge back towards the centre of the stain in such a way that the small particles ? material or bacteria ? end up in a kind of whirlwind. In this way, you get a more uniform distribution of particles as evaporation occurs."

"If we genetically modify the bacteria so they can no longer produce surfactants, the coffee ring effect remains fully intact. Our findings on Pseudomonas aeruginosa also apply to other bacteria. For the biomedical sector, this study contributes primarily to our understanding of a biological system." But surfactants could also potentially be added to nanomaterials, and that makes De Dier and Sempels' findings interesting for industry. "Surfactants are inexpensive. It won't be long before we start seeing them turn up in industrial applications."

###

KU Leuven: http://www.kuleuven.be

Thanks to KU Leuven for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

This press release has been viewed 46 time(s).

Source: http://www.labspaces.net/128264/Bacterium_counteracts__coffee_ring_effect_

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Thursday, May 16, 2013

Model-actress Marine Vacth a Cannes rising star

CANNES, France (AP) ? Cannes has been the birthplace of many a star, and the latest candidate to shine is Marine Vacth, who plays a teenager confronting the complexities of adolescent sexuality in Francois Ozon's "Jeune et Jolie" ("Young and Beautiful.")

The 23-year-old French model fully lives up to the film's title as Isabelle, a 17-year-old the film follows across four seasons ? from a fleeting summer fling to work as an emotionally detached Parisian prostitute.

It's an enigmatic character study, with frequent nudity and plenty of sex. Ozon ? who is known for his rapport with actresses including Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier ? said he knew Vacth was right for the challenging role despite her lack of acting experience.

"In her eyes I could see there was a whole inner world, a mystery, and that is exactly what I was looking for in my film," he told reporters Thursday.

"Marine didn't have much experience ... but she also was a model and that helped her for the nude scenes. She was quite free. Often actresses are ill at ease in those scenes."

Vacth, who has modeled for Yves Saint Laurent, Chloe and Ralph Lauren, said she enjoyed the experience of making the film, but is loath to call herself an actress.

"I didn't feel there was any major transition moving from model to actress," she said. "It was more complex than that.

"I have never really viewed myself as a model. I have a problem with being given a kind of status. I have no idea what 'actress' even means, even though I enjoy acting a great deal."

"Jeune et Jolie" premiered at Cannes Thursday to warm applause from French journalists and a hint of puzzlement from some others.

Ozon ? who has won a wide international audience with films including "Swimming Pool," ''Potiche" and "In The House" ? said he wanted to counteract the "highly idealized" depiction of adolescence in many movies and show the complex reality.

But in its copious nudity, lingering glances at young female sexuality and soundtrack of 1960s Gallic pop, it seemed to some Anglo audience members archetypally and bafflingly French ? too French, perhaps, to take the top prize when the Cannes jury, headed by Steven Spielberg, hands out its awards on May 26.

It comes as no surprise that Isabelle's first, disappointing lover is not a Frenchman, but a young German she meets on the beach.

Originally, he was to have been from a country with an even lower amorous reputation in France.

"In the screenplay it was an Englishman, because it's a bit of a cliche, a stereotype, for a French girl to sleep with an English boy," Ozon said.

In the end, he became German ? "but I'm sure the English boy would have been just as bad a lover."

___

Jill Lawless can be reached at http://Twitter.com/JillLawless

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/model-actress-marine-vacth-cannes-rising-star-143714921.html

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Computer scientist publishes new algorithm cluster to data mine health records

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

The time may be fast approaching for researchers to take better advantage of the vast amount of valuable patient information available from U.S. electronic health records. Lian Duan, an NJIT computer scientist with an expertise in data mining, has done just that with the recent publication of "Adverse Drug Effect Detection," IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (March, 2013).

The article spotlights a new and promising way of using a combination of commonly used existing algorithms to root out more information about adverse drug reactions within electronic health records available to the researchers. The new pattern, which when compared against the most commonly used existing sole algorithm, showed an almost 25 percent improvement in outcome. Although the idea could theoretically be applied beyond electronic health records, this paper focuses only on using them to find adverse medical reactions to a drug therapy.

"Large collections of electronic patient records have long provided abundant, but under-explored information on the real-world use of medicines. But when used properly these records can provide longitudinal observational data which is perfect for data mining," Duan said. "Although such records are maintained for patient administration, they could provide a broad range of clinical information for data analysis. A growing interest has been drug safety."

In this paper, the researchers proposed two novel algorithms?a likelihood ratio model and a Bayesian network model?for adverse drug effect discovery. Although the performance of these two algorithms is comparable to the state-of-the-art algorithm, Bayesian confidence propagation neural network, by combining three works, the researchers say one can get better, more diverse results.

Since the actual adverse drug effects on a given dataset cannot be absolutely determined, the researchers made use of a simulated observational medical outcomes partnership dataset. They constructed this "dataset" with the predefined adverse drug effects to evaluate their methods.

Experimental results show the usefulness of the proposed pattern discovery method on the simulated dataset by improving the standard baseline algorithm?chi-square?by 23.83 percent.

Duan, whose innovative research on large-scale data mining has applications in the business world as well as many industries, including marketing, social networking and bioinformatics. Whereas most data mining experts search for correlation pairs, he focuses on correlated sets of arbitrary size. His research focuses on correlation search, community detection, and density-based clustering and outlier detection.

Duan holds two doctorates-- one in computer science from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, and the other in information systems with an emphasis on data mining from the University of Iowa.

###

New Jersey Institute of Technology: http://www.njit.edu

Thanks to New Jersey Institute of Technology for this article.

This press release has been viewed 33 time(s).

Source: http://www.labspaces.net/128268/Computer_scientist_publishes_new_algorithm_cluster_to_data_mine_health_records

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Sony announces pricing for 55- and 65-inch 4K TVs in the UK, pre-order now, in-stores June

Fancy some of the 4K magic from Sony, but are living over in the UK? Well you can get one step closer by pre-ordering today. The Bravia X9 -- as it's known over there -- comes in two sizes (55- and 65-inch) both of which will land in bricks and mortar stores in mid-June. The price? Well, £4,000 and £6,000 respectively. That outlay will get you upscaling on all your media, and Sony's 4K X-Reality PRO enginge handling the full-resolution stuff. Still not convinced? Well there is NFC and plus a TV SlideView app for Android and iOS if that sweetens the deal?

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD, Sony

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/15/sony-announces-pricing-for-uk/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

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Wednesday, May 15, 2013

US, Russia and Iran work to save Olympic wrestling

UNITED NATIONS (AP) ? In Iran, Olympic wrestling champion Jordan Burroughs felt like Justin Bieber, LeBron James and Tom Brady all rolled into one.

Not so much in his home country, though the New Jersey native was greeted by more than a dozen television cameras Tuesday when the American team arrived at the United Nations for a news conference with the Iranian and Russian squads.

Wrestling's leaders hope sports fans do a double-take when they see those three countries in the same sentence ? to prove a point about the sport's universality. The International Olympic Committee has recommended that wrestling be dropped starting with the 2020 Games, a decision that has a lot of people talking about the sport.

"It was like a double-edged sword. It's bittersweet," Burroughs said. "We're fighting for our lives, but in retrospect, we're getting more attention than we've ever received. Walking in here and seeing all these cameras, you're like, 'What the heck's going on?' It's not a lot of times we get this much press."

The United States will face fellow wrestling powers Iran and then Russia in exhibitions Wednesday at Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal. It's not the first time a wrestling meet has sprung up at a famed New York City locale ? this is the fourth straight year such an event has been held to raise money for wrestling nonprofit Beat the Streets, with the last two in Times Square.

And it's not the first time the Iranians have competed in the U.S., though they hadn't been back since the world championships in this same city a decade ago. But February's unexpected IOC decision changed everything, and the organizers' goal is for "The Rumble on the Rails" to be much more than just another charitable event or international exhibition.

They hope the IOC is watching and notices the symbolism.

"I think they are. They have to. Three superpowers in the world are telling them to put it back in," said Kyle Dake, who will be competing in his first major senior-level international event after becoming the first wrestler to win NCAA titles in four weight classes.

Wrestling is now one of eight sports seeking to fill one spot in the 2020 Olympics. The IOC board will meet May 29 in Russia to recommend a short list, with the final decision in September.

Wednesday's meet is one of many events around the world this month to promote the sport. The Iranians will also wrestle the Americans in Los Angeles on Sunday.

All these efforts to publicize the sport are among the lessons of the IOC's decision. Wrestling leaders are rethinking everything from their governance structure to their rules.

There's a sense the sport will emerge stronger from these tribulations ? if it emerges as an ongoing part of the Olympics.

"It's a weird feeling," said U.S. freestyle coach Zeke Jones. "Wrestling's not going away. It's what humans do; it's innate in mankind. But you have this feeling of, 'Man, we're getting better right now when we might not be in the Olympic Games.'"

Staying in the Olympics is a matter of national pride in Iran and Russia. Rasoul Khadem, Iran's technical manager, explained it this way through a translator: "Where I come from, wrestling is not just a sport; it is a part of culture and history."

Days after the IOC announcement, Burroughs and the U.S. team competed at the World Cup in Tehran. The Iranian fans kept asking for his T-shirts. Burroughs and other teammates shook hands with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a gesture of goodwill.

Burroughs said he saw the movie "Argo," about the 1979 hostage crisis, about a week later and was glad he didn't watch it before the trip because "I would've been freaking out." Now he feels he has a more nuanced view of the country.

Whether Iranians' opinions of the U.S. have been affected by wrestling's show of unity is unclear. Iran's state media did not report much on the arrival of the American wrestlers, which may stem from the official anger over the sanctions that have hit Iran's critical oil exports and blacklisted the country from international financial networks. The attention was much greater in 1998 when U.S. wrestlers competed in Iran for the first time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which cut ties between the countries.

Dake, the former Cornell star, hears from friends: "Are you really wrestling Iran? That is amazing. That has bigger implications than just wrestling. That has huge political implications."

But to wrestling veterans like Jones, a 1992 Olympic silver medalist, the Iranians are just friendly rivals. He's visited their homes, dined with their families.

"U.S. and Iran have this tension publicly. Really, I sit down and have dinner with them all the time," Jones said. "Kind of sounds odd, right?"

Khadzhimurad Magomedov, one of the Russian coaches and a 1996 Olympic gold medalist, also finds that events like this week's feel like reunions.

"We are eager to show here how friendly the wrestlers are to each other," he said through a translator.

Russia's contingent includes 2009 world silver medalist Rasul Dzhukaev at 163 pounds. Iran is led by two-time world champion Mehdi Taghavi Kermani at 145? pounds and Olympic bronze medalists Ehsan Lashgari at 185 pounds and Komeil Ghasemi at 264? pounds.

Burroughs, the reigning Olympic gold medalist at 163 pounds, promises some big throws and high-flying takedowns for the fans who bought tickets to Wednesday's event. Rich Bender, USA Wrestling's executive director, expects some serious passion from the wrestlers considering the stage and the stakes. The Iran match will be on NBC Sports Network, with the Russia match on Universal Sports.

"It's their canvas," he said. "It's their opportunity to articulate to people the good in wrestling."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/us-russia-iran-save-olympic-wrestling-180904996.html

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Fastest-growing baby names: Would you consider them?

The fastest growing baby names for boys, King and Messiah, suggest great power, while the fastest-growing baby name for girls, Arya, comes from a fierce princess in 'Game of Thrones.'

By Stephen Ohlemacher,?Associated Press / May 13, 2013

Luggage tags with children's names are displayed in East Montpelier, Vt. Jacob and Sophia top the list of most popular baby names again, but King and Arya are the fastest-growing baby names.

Toby Talbot / AP

Enlarge

Talk about high expectations for a newborn: King and Messiah are among the fastest-rising?baby?names?for American boys.

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They're just a little behind Major, the boy's?name?that jumped the most spots on the Social Security Administration's annual list of popular?baby?names.

Jacob is the most popular for boys ? again ? and Sophia is the top?name?for girls, according to the list released Thursday.

It was Jacob's 14th straight year at the top. Next were Mason, Ethan, Noah and William. Liam cracked the top 10 for the first time, coming in at No. 6. Daniel slipped out of the top 10 for the first time since 1998, to No. 11.

It was Sophia's second year in a row at the top for girls. Next were Emma, Isabella, Olivia and Ava.

But what about those rising boys'?names?

Typically, says Laura Wattenberg, author of "The?Baby?Name?Wizard" and founder of Babynamewizard.com, "You don't get a lot of Messiahs. You can have a lot more Majors."

"I have no doubt Major's rising popularity as a boy's?name?is in tribute to the brave members of the U.S. military, and maybe we'll see more boys?named?General in the future," said acting Social Security Commissioner Carolyn W. Colvin.

Wattenberg said Americans have long given their children "aggrandizing?names." She noted that Noble and General were on the list of popular boys'?names?for much of the 20th century, though neither ever cracked the top 100.

"We've pretty much run out of presidential?names, all the Jeffersons and Jacksons and Madisons, so we're moving on to the aristocracy, I guess, or to the military."

Jennifer Moss, author of "The One-in-a-Million?Baby?Name?Book" and founder of Babynames.com, says she discourages parents from giving children "expectation?names, like Justice and Chastity."

"We feel that it kind of puts an undue pressure on the child when you use those kinds of grandiose or puritynames," Moss said.

Chastity was in the top 1,000 for more than two decades before dropping off the list in 1994. Justice was on the list in 1880 but then fell off for more than 100 years. The?name?reappeared in 1992 and was No. 518 last year.

Jacob's popularity endures because the?name?has much of what parents look for in a boy's?name, said Moss.

"It's easy to pronounce, and it's easy to spell. It's a solid manly?name," she said. "It's a biblical?name, and biblical?names?are always in style."

On the girls' side, Sophia first cracked the top 100 in 1997. Isabella dropped off the list from 1949 to 1990.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/ESfpjh_7GD4/Fastest-growing-baby-names-Would-you-consider-them

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Dennis Rodman to Kim Jong-un: 'Do me a solid' and free Kenneth Bae (+video)

US basketball star Dennis Rodman recently hung out with North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un - now he's tweeted a request?that the American sentenced to 15 years' hard labor be released.

By Ryan Lenora Brown,?Correspondent / May 9, 2013

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (l.) and former NBA star Dennis Rodman watch North Korean and US players in an exhibition basketball game at an arena in Pyongyang, North Korea, in February. Rodman is tapping his friendship with Kim Jong-un when he tweeted a request 'to do me a solid' and free Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American man detained in the North.

Jason Mojica/VICE Media/AP/File

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When Dennis Rodman spent a week touring North Korea in February, he had nothing but glowing words for the country?s leader, Kim Jong-un.

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Correspondent

Ryan Brown edits the Africa Monitor blog and contributes to the national and international news desks of the Monitor. She is a former Fulbright fellow to South Africa and holds a degree in history from Duke University.?

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