Day: 06/02/2015

Apple’s Siri has new role in new ‘smart’ home systems

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Hey Siri, turn off the kitchen light.

The first “smart” home gadgets that can be controlled by Apple’s voice-activated digital assistant are going on sale this week, just days after rival tech giant Google announced it’s building its own software for Internet-connected home appliances and other gadgets.

The could be an important step forward for the emerging industry of “smart” or “connected” homes, where appliances, and even door locks contain computer chips that communicate wirelessly. While a number of companies are working on similar products, analysts say Apple could persuade more consumers to try them by making it easy to control different products from a familiar device, such as the iPhone.

Apple announced its “HomeKit” software project a year ago, but isn’t making the new products. Instead, other companies have been working to make devices that meet Apple’s criteria for compatibility and security. Two manufacturers are now selling products and three more are accepting online “pre-orders” or plan to begin selling in coming weeks.

HomeKit-certified products hitting the market Tuesday include wireless hubs from two companies, Insteon and Lutron Electronics. The hubs, about the size of a small home router or cable TV box, act as the central controller for lights and other gadgets. The hubs in turn can be managed with a smartphone app.

Lutron Electronics, for example, is selling a $230 starter kit that includes its “Caseta Wireless Smart Bridge” hub and two dimmer units—either wall switches or plug-in units for lamps—controlled by the hub. Insteon says its hub will work with compatible lights, power switches and thermostats. Three other companies say they expect to start selling HomeKit thermostats, power plugs and climate sensors in coming weeks.

You can already buy similar products from these companies, which have their own smartphone apps to control them. The tie-in with Apple means a user can control those apps with Siri, the voice-activated digital assistant on Apple’s iPhones and iPads. Users must link with an Apple TV box to control from outside the home.

Apple also says products using HomeKit software must meet standards for compatibility, so they work with HomeKit made by other manufacturers, and for encryption, which keeps hackers from taking over a system or stealing user information.

While Apple wants Siri to play a leading role in “smart” homes, its biggest rivals want in, too. Google announced last week that it’s creating software called Brillo as a common platform for Internet-connected gadgets in the home or in commercial settings. Microsoft and Samsung are also promoting software to control home systems.

How Too Much Caffeine Drove One Woman to Become Manic .

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Coffee is one heck of a drug. It’s addictive and, as most of us know, when some people don’t get their daily dose of Joe, they get irritable. But what happens when you get too much of that morning motivator? Caffeine intoxication.

Agata Blaszczak Boxe from Braindecoder reported on an interesting case of a woman who became manic after consuming quite a bit of caffeine. Dr. Julia Tatum Krankl, a psychiatrist at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, and her team of researchers wrote a paper on the 2013 case, which was published in this month’s issue of The American Journal of Addictions. They write that they observed “multiple episodes of caffeine-induced mania with psychotic features and met criteria for caffeine use disorder.”

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM-5) originally defined the temporarily self-induced mental disorder, caffeine intoxication, back in 2013. The list of symptoms is quite long, ranging from restlessness, nervousness, excitement, and rambling speech to muscle twitching, sleeplessness, and irregular heartbeat.

Coffe_sitting_on_table

For a 69-year-old woman in the summer of 2013, the issues began when she started pounding down 32 ounces of coffee per day. In the fall, researchers say she upped that dose to around 840 mg of caffeine per day — more than twice as much as the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee deemed safe in their recent and first report that included a discussion on coffee.

Days after going on this coffee bender, in the hopes that it would help regulate her stress, she landed in the hospital with symptoms of mania, as reported by researchers. They observed fluctuations in her mood, restlessness, and rapidity in her speech.

Krankl explained how they ruled out any other possibilities:

“The reason why we thought that the cause of her mania was caffeine was that, as she increased her caffeine use, the mania symptoms started and got worse. And as she decreased her caffeine use, her mania symptoms went away.”

The researchers report, however, after she was discharged, she began her coffee-drinking habits again, though, to a lesser extent. They estimate that she consumed 526 mg of caffeine a day. Her mental health began to deteriorate once more, becoming paranoid of the doctors trying to help her regulate.

The woman did eventually get a hold of her issue, reducing her consumption to around 95 mg of caffeine per day with the help of addiction counseling.

The researchers believe that “[this] case supports evidence that caffeine use disorder should be considered for inclusion in future diagnostic manuals as a potential drug of abuse pending additional research.”

Caffeine plays with our internal chemistry, affecting the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain and playing with parts of us that cause us to go for “just one more cup.” I know if I don’t regulate, I begin to become anxious and restless myself.

Missing link found between brain, immune system — with major disease implications

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Maps of the lymphatic system: old (left) and updated to reflect UVA’s discovery. Credit: University of Virginia Health System

Implications profound for neurological diseases from autism to Alzheimer’s to multiple sclerosis

In a stunning discovery that overturns decades of textbook teaching, researchers at the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Medicine have determined that the brain is directly connected to the immune system by vessels previously thought not to exist. That such vessels could have escaped detection when the lymphatic system has been so thoroughly mapped throughout the body is surprising on its own, but the true significance of the discovery lies in the effects it could have on the study and treatment of neurological diseases ranging from autism to Alzheimer’s disease to multiple sclerosis.

“Instead of asking, ‘How do we study the immune response of the brain?’ ‘Why do multiple sclerosis patients have the immune attacks?’ now we can approach this mechanistically. Because the brain is like every other tissue connected to the peripheral immune system through meningeal lymphatic vessels,” said Jonathan Kipnis, PhD, professor in the UVA Department of Neuroscience and director of UVA’s Center for Brain Immunology and Glia (BIG). “It changes entirely the way we perceive the neuro-immune interaction. We always perceived it before as something esoteric that can’t be studied. But now we can ask mechanistic questions.”

“We believe that for every neurological disease that has an immune component to it, these vessels may play a major role,” Kipnis said. “Hard to imagine that these vessels would not be involved in a [neurological] disease with an immune component.”

New Discovery in Human Body

Kevin Lee, PhD, chairman of the UVA Department of Neuroscience, described his reaction to the discovery by Kipnis’ lab: “The first time these guys showed me the basic result, I just said one sentence: ‘They’ll have to change the textbooks.’ There has never been a lymphatic system for the central nervous system, and it was very clear from that first singular observation – and they’ve done many studies since then to bolster the finding – that it will fundamentally change the way people look at the central nervous system’s relationship with the immune system.”

Even Kipnis was skeptical initially. “I really did not believe there are structures in the body that we are not aware of. I thought the body was mapped,” he said. “I thought that these discoveries ended somewhere around the middle of the last century. But apparently they have not.”

‘Very Well Hidden’

The discovery was made possible by the work of Antoine Louveau, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in Kipnis’ lab. The vessels were detected after Louveau developed a method to mount a mouse’s meninges – the membranes covering the brain – on a single slide so that they could be examined as a whole. “It was fairly easy, actually,” he said. “There was one trick: We fixed the meninges within the skullcap, so that the tissue is secured in its physiological condition, and then we dissected it. If we had done it the other way around, it wouldn’t have worked.”

After noticing vessel-like patterns in the distribution of immune cells on his slides, he tested for lymphatic vessels and there they were. The impossible existed. The soft-spoken Louveau recalled the moment: “I called Jony [Kipnis] to the microscope and I said, ‘I think we have something.'”

As to how the brain’s lymphatic vessels managed to escape notice all this time, Kipnis described them as “very well hidden” and noted that they follow a major blood vessel down into the sinuses, an area difficult to image. “It’s so close to the blood vessel, you just miss it,” he said. “If you don’t know what you’re after, you just miss it.”

“Live imaging of these vessels was crucial to demonstrate their function, and it would not be possible without collaboration with Tajie Harris,” Kipnis noted. Harris, a PhD, is an assistant professor of neuroscience and a member of the BIG center. Kipnis also saluted the “phenomenal” surgical skills of Igor Smirnov, a research associate in the Kipnis lab whose work was critical to the imaging success of the study.

Alzheimer’s, Autism, MS and Beyond

The unexpected presence of the lymphatic vessels raises a tremendous number of questions that now need answers, both about the workings of the brain and the diseases that plague it. For example, take Alzheimer’s disease. “In Alzheimer’s, there are accumulations of big protein chunks in the brain,” Kipnis said. “We think they may be accumulating in the brain because they’re not being efficiently removed by these vessels.” He noted that the vessels look different with age, so the role they play in aging is another avenue to explore. And there’s an enormous array of other neurological diseases, from autism to multiple sclerosis, that must be reconsidered in light of the presence of something science insisted did not exist.

Physicists make first observation of the pushing pressure of light

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For more than 100 years, scientists have debated the question: when light travels through a medium such as oil or water, does it pull or push on the medium? While most experiments have found that light exerts a pulling pressure, in a new paper physicists have, for the first time, found evidence that light exerts a pushing pressure.

The scientists suggest that this apparent contradiction is not a fundamental one, but can be explained by the interplay between the light and the fluid medium: if the light can put the fluid in motion, it exerts a pushing force; if not, it exerts a pulling force.

The researchers, Li Zhang, Weilong She, and Nan Peng at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China, and Ulf Leonhardt at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, have published a paper on the first evidence for the pushing of light in a recent issue of the New Journal of Physics.

Minkowski vs. Abraham

The debate on the nature of the pressure, or , of light goes back to 1908, when Hermann Minkowski (best known for developing the four-dimensional “Minkowski spacetime” used in Einstein’s theory of relativity) predicted a pulling force. In 1909, physicist Max Abraham predicted the exact opposite, that light exerts a pushing force.

“Scientists have argued for more than a century about the momentum of light in materials,” Leonhardt told Phys.org. “Is it Abraham’s, is it Minkowski’s? We discovered that momentum is not a fundamental quantity, but it is made in the interplay between light and matter, and it depends on the ability of the light to move the material. If the medium does not move, it is Minkowski’s, and if it moves, Abraham’s. This was not understood before.”

(a) Minkowski’s momentum of light: the surface bulges out, indicating that light is pulling on the medium. This regime occurs when the light is not able to put the fluid in motion (the light is too focused or the container of fluid too shallow). (b) Abraham’s momentum of light: the surface bends inward, indicating a pushing force. This regime occurs when the light is able to move the fluid. In both figures, the surface deformations are exaggerated for making them visible. Credit: Zhang, et al.

The two different types of pressures can be experimentally distinguished by illuminating the surface of a liquid with a light beam and seeing whether the liquid rises or falls. If the liquid’s surface bulges out, then the light is pulling the liquid in agreement with Minkowski’s theory. If the surface bends inward, the light is pushing in agreement with Abraham’s theory. While the predictions of the two theories agree in empty space (which has a refractive index of 1), they differ in any medium with a refractive index greater than 1.

In the new study, the scientists showed that they could make the surface bend inward, corresponding to the pushing pressure, by using a relatively wide light beam and a relatively large container—two factors that cause the light to create a flow pattern in the fluid. The researchers demonstrated this pushing force in both water and oil, which have different refractive indices, in agreement with Abraham’s theory.

In previous experiments, which found that light exhibits a pulling pressure, researchers had used narrower light beams and smaller containers than those in the current experiment, so the researchers here modified their original experiment by using a narrower beam. Their results in this new regime now revealed a pulling pressure, in agreement with the experiments from previous studies, suggesting that the nature of the pressure depends not only on the light, but on the fluid as well.

Light and snooker balls

Taking a step back, we might ask, why does light have momentum in the first place? Leonhardt explains that the momentum of light is slightly different than its energy, and can be understood as a pressure that causes motion, in analogy to snooker (i.e., billiards) balls.

The momentum of light (along with the solar wind) creates the tails of comets by pushing material off the comets. Credit: European Southern Observatory

“Imagine a snooker game,” he explained. “The player kicks one ball and this ball kicks another one. In all these kicks, the momentum the player initially gives to the cue stick is setting things in motion. Light may kick materials as well, just like the snooker balls, but these kicks are minuscule. In some circumstances, however, the kicks of light make a dramatic appearance. One example is the tail of a comet. Johannes Kepler speculated a long time ago that comet tails are caused by light pushing material off the comets, because they always point away from the Sun; we know now that he was partly right (the rest of the pushing is done by the solar wind). The ability of setting mechanical objects into motion is called momentum. It is not the same as energy, but often closely related to it.”

He went on to explain that the controversy of the pushing vs. pulling nature of light’s momentum only concerns situations in which light is not completely reflected off an object, but at least partially transmitted through the material.

“There is no conceptual problem with the momentum of light if the light is reflected, for example from a mirror or the dust particles of a comet, because here the momentum balance is very simple: twice the incident momentum causes motion, the incident and the reflected one,” Leonhardt said. “If, however, part of the light is transmitted, then the transmitted light in the material needs to be taken into account. There it matters whether the Abraham or Minkowski momentum is carried by the transmitted light, as it affects the net balance of momentum, whether it is positive or negative. In Abraham’s case the net balance leads to a push, in Minkowski’s to a pull.”

The findings have both fundamental and practical significance. Fundamentally, the results help scientists gain a better understanding of the nature of light. While it has long been known that light carries both energy and momentum, and that the energy of a photon is quantified by its frequency f times Planck’s constant h, the momentum of light has not been so easy to describe. Does the momentum increase or decrease as the of the medium increases? The results here suggest that the answer depends on whether or not the light can put the fluid into motion: if it can, its momentum decreases and it exerts Abraham’s pushing force; otherwise, its momentum increases and it exerts Minkowski’s pulling force.

This distinction may prove very useful, as scientists have recently begun to develop applications that take advantage of light’s momentum, or pressure. One such application, called inertial confinement fusion, uses the power of light’s momentum to ignite nuclear fusion. Physicists can also use the momentum exchange between light and an oscillating mirror to cool the mirror to its quantum-mechanical ground state. Optical manipulation techniques, such as optical tweezers, use the gentle pressure of light to hold and manipulate cells for biomedical and nanoengineering applications. The researchers here hope that a better understanding of the momentum of will contribute to these developments.

Shocking Secrets of the Processed Food Industry

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You’ve probably heard that avoiding processed foods is one of the keys to staying healthy, but do you understand why, exactly?

Scottish author Joanna Blythman has written a behind-the-scenes exposé book,Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets, that delves into the details of what makes processed food the antithesis of a healthy diet.

If you have any concerns about the food you’re eating, this is a must-read book. It will radically increase your appreciation of just how processed your food really is and enlighten you to many of the deceptive tricks the industry uses to fool you.

It’s quite challenging to avoid processed foods as nearly all of us eat at restaurants occasionally. The only question is how much? After you read this book, I guarantee your motivation to avoid processed food will skyrocket.

Joanna is an award-winning investigative journalist, and that background served her well as she literally went undercover to get the inside scoop on what’s really going on in the processed food industry. She actually carefully worked her way in and became an insider able to attend many of the member-only conferences.

“I have been writing about food for over two decades,” Joanna says. “I’ve written six other books. They’ve dealt with the production side of food: how and what goes on in fields, what goes on in farms, how to tell a good chicken from a bad chicken, that kind of thing.

But I just knew that we weren’t getting the full story. It wasn’t about the production end. It was at the processing end.

We know quite a lot about how chickens are reared for our tables, but we don’t know very much, or anything really, about how chickens nuggets are produced in a factory. I knew that we had to get to this information about processed food.”

Going Undercover…

Getting such information is easier said than done, considering how the food industry has created a near-impenetrable wall of security around its manufacturing activities.

Companies hide behind the rationale that processing methods are trade secrets, and that they’re merely protecting proprietary information from competitors.

“They’ve gotten away with that for years. What that means is that unless you’re a food industry insider, you’re just not going to know what’s happening behind the scenes,” Joanna says.

So, to get the inside scoop, Joanna assumed a fake identity and managed to convince a smaller food manufacturer to provide her with a professional cover. Using that cover, she got an inside look into the “core” of the food manufacturing industry. And what she learned was surprising to say the least.

For starters, what non-insiders do not know is that there are a multitude of chemicals used in food that do not have to be in any way disclosed, as they’re considered “processing aids.” So besides preservatives, emulsifiers, colors, and flavors, which are generally listed, there are any number of others that you’ll never find out the details about.

“I realized that there’s so much going on behind the scenes of food manufacturing. Most consumers, we haven’t got a clue, and we are not allowed to know. You can’t even trust things that would seem to be the healthy choice,” she says.

This is disconcerting, as many health conscious consumers now take the time to carefully read food labels. But what Joanna’s research reveals that there’s anarray of additives that will never make it onto the label.

Surprising Truths the Processed Food Industry Hides from You

Do you eat processed meats like hamburgers, thinking you’re eating mostly real beef? Chances are you’re way off in your assumption. One type of meat process involves soaking butchered carcasses in hot water with added enzymes. This has the effect of releasing about another five percent of meat-like substance from the carcass.

This is then added into cheap burgers, sausages, and other processed meat products. Enzyme-treated blood products are also routinely added to lower-end processed meat products.

“What really got me were the things that seemed to be really natural… For example, I was amazed to find that there is a kind of coloring known as the cloudifier. It makes your juice look as though it’s got more real fruit juice in it because it creates that hand-pressed, natural look,” she says.

Enzymes are used in a number of different ways in food processing. For example, when eggs are pasteurized, they lose their color. An enzyme is therefore added that brings back the color of the egg.

There are at least 150 enzymes being used in food manufacturing, and they’re rarely ever listed on the label. According to Joanna, there’s typically at least one enzyme-modified ingredient in every processed food. Breads usually have five enzyme-modified ingredients.

Enzymes by themselves aren’t intrinsically toxic. They’re merely functional proteins composed of natural amino acids. But what they do is they mask and deceive you about the underlying process, fooling you into believing that you’re buying something that you really aren’t.

“The classic one is a mature cheese flavor. If you matured cheese the proper way, then you have cheese. You keep it for three months or six months, even longer, to develop that nice, mature flavor. But you can do that in a few days with an enzyme. You can create a fake flavor.”

Most Processed Food Is an Imitation of the Real Thing

The goal of food technologists is to reduce the amount of real ingredients by finding cheap substitutes that mimic the authentic food. In doing so, chemicals and processes are used that turns the end product into something that looks, smells, and tastes like “good food,” but really is anything but. Rarely is real butter used for example, because it’s expensive. So they use additives that make the food taste like butter, but at a fraction of the cost.

“But they will still put in enough butter that they can put on the ‘made with butter’ label,” Joanna notes. “Another thing I discovered is that most processed food wouldn’t look at all attractive if it didn’t have colorings added. It would be gray and beige…

Flavorings do two jobs in processed food. They cover up the unpleasant taste that comes as a result of processing. Flavor masking is one of the main reasons why food industries use flavorings. But they also use flavorings to try and give food flavor when it’s been through a manufacturing process that has totally stripped it of flavor.

They have to try and add back something that sort of resembles the flavors that have gotten lost. Because food processing is high temperature and high pressure. Something has to be done to them to make them taste better again. That’s the logic of flavoring and coloring.”

What You Need to Know About the Clean Label Concept

She also exposed the industry concept of “Clean Label.” The food industry realizes that consumers don’t like long chemical-sounding names on the ingredients list. These names are known as “label polluters.”

To avoid having to list the chemical names of additives, they invented a Clean Label concept, which is aimed at removing all the old additives and long chemical names, and replacing them with ingredients that sound better. “Carrot concentrate” instead of “coloring” is one example of a Clean Label swap.

A related issue is the extraction methods used for these healthy-sounding extracts. While antioxidants are healthy, plant-derived antioxidants are typically extracted from the whole food using toxic organic solvents like hexane, which you cannot remove. Those solvents remain in the ingredient, and they’re not required to disclose any of this.

Perception Is Everything

The processed food industry is primarily driven by the perception of wholesomeness. The moment the food industry finds out that a labeled ingredient is perceived poorly, they will either rename it, or find an alternative that may be just as bad, or worse, that doesn’t have that negative association.

“Perception is a really good word for understanding what the food manufacturing industry is up to,” Joanna says. “They have this thing called perceived naturalness. Their whole job is to try give you ingredients that sound natural, but actually aren’t the same as natural. Another one is fresh-like quality. The industry doesn’t talk about fresh any longer. They talk about a fresh-like quality. 

There are number of technologies that they can use behind the scenes and mainly on labels that will give products this fresh-like quality. Everything [related] to naturalness and freshness is being manipulated constantly.On my desk, at the moment, I have some chocolate chip muffins that I bought six weeks ago. I’ve got them on my desk and they have not changed in any way. They look identical. I’m keeping them as a sort of science project to see how they eventually, if they ever, change.”

There’s actually a whole section in the book dedicated to processed baked goods. Many grocery stores now have bakeries, where fresh bread is baked every day. But what many do not realize is that nothing is baked from scratch.

As Joanna says, these bakeries are little more than “tanning salons” for processed frozen products pre-cooked in factories thousands of miles away. Another factoid: When baked goods are sold loose this way, they do not require an ingredient label. So that’s another way they can get away with not disclosing what the ingredients are.

“One of the reasons I started writing the book is because I knew that if I made a muffin at home, it didn’t taste anything like a bought one. I wanted to find out why. It’s really interesting to find out why because the ingredients are completely different and the processes are completely different. And these are great lies perpetuated by food manufacturers—that what goes on in the factory is just a scaled up fraction of home cooking. But that really is a lie. It’s quite a different activity.”

The Foxes Are Watching the Hen House

If you’re like most people, you probably think there’s someone somewhere looking out for the consumer’s best interest. If something is sold as food, it surely cannot be hazardous. Can it? In truth, it just might be… More often than not, government oversight committees are usually manned by members of the industry, who have a vested interest in commercializing these chemical ingredients; or they’re academics who appear on first glance to be independent but actually, in their day job, are getting a lot of funding from food companies.

Most of the research used to establish safety is also done by the industry itself, which structures the research to show that its products are safe. What’s worse, no one is really looking at the health effects of exposure to toxins from processed foods.

“What happens to people who eat large quantities of processed food, maybe people who really based their diets on that? No one is doing any research on that,” Joanna says. “There are all these assumptions that chemicals are fine in small quantities, but that’s not really looking at the cocktail effect for people, particularly children, who are obviously more prone to being affected by chemical overload. No one is looking at that at the moment.”

More Information

Avoiding processed foods is one of the most important changes you can make if you want to improve your health or prevent or address disease. If there’s any question in your mind at all as to the reasons for reverting back to whole, minimally processed foods, I strongly encourage you to pick up a copy of Joanna’s book, Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets as it will radically increase your understanding, and secondarily your motivation and desire to avoid these toxic foods.

As an undercover insider, Joanna reveals details about the food processing industry that you simply cannot get anywhere else. Read it, and pass it around. Create awareness that will eventually, hopefully, inspire more people to make the switch to a more wholesome, health-preserving diet. If we don’t buy these foods, food manufacturers will have to stop producing it, and healthier whole foods will again become the norm.

As Joanna says, “we’ve got to catch up with the industry because they really bypass our comprehension of what they’re doing to our food. The take home message for me is that, in Europe, we have this idea that processed food is getting better. Everything is going a little bit not more natural, and actually, that’s wrong.

And we really can’t trust our regulators to get it right. We have to adopt our own, what I call PPP: Personal Precautionary Principle. You are the only person who’s going to really bother to think about these issues to deal with your food. You can’t rely on anyone else doing it for you.”

In the future, Joanna is considering writing another book on food processing, delving into newer processing technologies and synthetic biology, called SynBio. The use of completely artificial biology is also disconcerting, and an area that is as unregulated as the old Wild West.

Synthetic biology is basically like an extreme form of genetic engineering, which obviously carries a number of unknown risks. And, like genetically engineered foods, most people have no idea synthetic biology is even used, or that they may be eating it on a regular basis.