Intel Takes on ARM with New ‘Oak Trail’ Atom Platform

April 12th, 2011

Intel’s roll out of its “Oak Trail” Atom platform is the first move in an aggressive strategy to take on ARM-based chips in the highly lucrative smartphone and tablet markets.

After more than a year of saber-rattling, Intel officials have taken a significant step in their push into the mobile device space and in ramping up the competition with ARM Holdings, whose chip designs are found in most smartphones and tablets.

At the Intel Developer Forum in China April 11, Intel officials unveiled its “Oak Trail” Atom platform, including the new Atom Z670. They also gave attendees a peak at the next Atom platform, dubbed “Cedar Trail,” a 32-nanometer platform that will extend Intel’s reach into a market that the giant chip maker has little if any presence.

The officials said the Oak Trail chips will begin appearing in tablets in May, and that in all, more than 35 designs will start appearing from OEMs like Lenovo, Fujitsu, Evolve III, Motion Computing and Razer, running a variety of operating systems, including Windows, Android and MeeGo.

Executives from Intel, the world’s largest chip maker and the long-time dominant vendor in the server and PC markets, hopes that Oak Trail and later Cedar Trail will help the company fulfill the promise of President and CEO Paul Otellini, who said during the IDF in September 2010 that Intel would become a major player in the burgeoning tablet space. Read the rest of this entry »

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Microsoft, Google tussle over government contract

April 12th, 2011

Microsoft fired a broadside at Google in a battle over a US government contract, accusing its rival of issuing misleading claims.

Google rejected the charges by the Seattle-based software giant in the legal tussle over a nearly $60 million contract with the US Department of Interior.

Microsoft said documents unsealed in the court case showed that “Google Apps for Government,” Google’s Internet-based suite of office tools, had not been certified under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).

“Given the number of times that Google has touted this claim, this was no small development,” Microsoft deputy general counsel David Howard said in a blog post. “It’s time for Google to stop telling governments something that is not true.”

FISMA lays out the security standards for information management systems such as email.

Google and Onix Networking Corp., a reseller of Google products, filed suit against the US government last year claiming the terms for the Department of Interior contract favored Microsoft. Read the rest of this entry »

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Students in Japan to return to MTSU

March 18th, 2011

The ongoing nuclear threat that followed a 9.0 magnitude earthquake in Japan led MTSU officials on Thursday to request nine undergraduate students studying abroad to return home, according to the university.
At least one of the students has returned already.

“We are always going to be sensitive to the response and welfare of our students and make sure they are safe wherever they are in the world,” said Brad Bartel, MTSU provost. “We have reached a point where we urge these students to come home for their own good.”

Suggested by Bartel and fully supported by university President Sidney A. McPhee, MTSU plans to provide funds for airfares of the students who agree to return as soon as they can book a flight.

MTSU students have been attending Kansai Gaidai University in Hirakata, Nagoya Gakuin University, Saitama University, Seinan Gakuin University in Fukuoka and Tokyo University in Tokyo. Eight of nine students had a year-long commitment.

Rhonda Waller, director of the Education Abroad and Student Exchange Office at MTSU, said eight study-abroad students from Japan at MTSU this semester have indicated their immediate family members are OK. She said her office has been communicating with the MTSU students and their families by phone, e-mail and Facebook.

The move is necessary for safety concerns, according to Michael D. Allen, vice provost for research and dean of the College of Graduate Studies at MTSU. Read the rest of this entry »

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Universities Will Compete to Build a Campus on City Land

March 18th, 2011

The next engineering school in New York City could be a satellite campus of a university in Finland, South Korea or California, judging by the responses city officials received to their call for ideas on how to raise New York’s profile in the realm of technological innovation.

On Thursday, the city announced that it had received 18 expressions of interest in establishing a research center from universities and corporations around the world. Struggling to compete with Silicon Valley, Boston and other high-tech hubs, officials charged with developing the city’s economy have identified several city-owned sites that might serve as a home for the research center for applied science and engineering that they hope to establish.

The list of institutions that responded includes the Abo Akademi University in Finland, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, as well as schools in England, India and Switzerland. American schools as far away as California and as close by as Manhattan and Hoboken, N.J., also indicated that they were interested. Read the rest of this entry »

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HIV Care System Is Getting Swamped

March 18th, 2011

The U.S. HIV care system is being swamped by a rising tide of new patients, an Institute of Medicine (IOM) report warns.

As HIV treatment continues to improve, people with HIV are living much longer. Meanwhile, the CDC’s universal HIV screening program is bearing fruit, identifying more people who are infected with the AIDS virus.

The result is a widening gap between the number of Americans with HIV and the resources available to treat them.

“Our system is getting stretched,” IOM panel chair Paul D. Cleary, PhD, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, tells WebMD. “There is going to be a dramatic change in the number of people with HIV detected and cared for. When we start treating this many more people … we find there are barriers to getting them into available treatment facilities.”

Over 20% of the 1.1 million Americans with HIV don’t know they are infected. Learning they have HIV is good for the individual, as earlier treatment means better health. It’s also good for society, as people who know they carry HIV are less likely to infect others — and treatment actually makes a person less infectious.

“There is a moral imperative that if we do testing, we have to get people who test positive into care,” Michael Saag, MD, tells WebMD.

But there’s a raft of problems with actually providing this care, notes Saag, director of AIDS research at the University of Alabama, Birmingham and immediate past president of the HIV Medicine Association.

Saag’s state-of-the-art AIDS clinic is a prime example. In 2000, the clinic was caring for 750 patients. Now the same clinic, with pretty much the same funding and same staff level, is caring for 1,800 patients. Read the rest of this entry »

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CDC Urges New HIV Testing for Donors

March 18th, 2011

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending hospitals test living donors for the virus that causes AIDS no more than seven days before their organs are removed and transplanted, following the first documented U.S. case of HIV transmission from a live organ donor in more than two decades.

According to an investigation by the CDC and New York city and state health officials, a kidney transplant recipient contracted the virus from a donor in an unnamed New York City hospital in 2009. The male donor acknowledged that he had engaged in unprotected sex with another man after he was screened for HIV, but before he donated the organ. The New York hospital tested the donor 79 days before transplant, when he showed no evidence of infection, but did not re-test him closer to the surgery that removed the organ.

The centers’ 1994 guidelines for organ-donor screening, which are being revised, did not address the timing of screening tests.

The CDC is also recommending the use of a test that detects the virus within eight to 10 days of infection.

Of the three major transplant centers serving the city, Mount Sinai Medical Center said the event did not occur there; a spokesman for another, New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, said, “We don’t have any information about this.” New York University Langone Medical Center said that it would be “inappropriate” to comment. Read the rest of this entry »

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Gene therapy treats Parkinson’s disease

March 18th, 2011

Treating Parkinson’s disease with gene therapy has been shown to be successful in clinical trials for the first time, say US researchers.

The illness causes uncontrolled shaking, stiffness and slow movement as part of the brain dies.

The small study in The Lancet Neurology used a virus to add genes to brain cells, which resulted in reduced symptoms for half of patients.

Parkinson’s UK welcomed the study, but said further research was needed.

The disease affects 120,000 people in the UK, mostly in the over-50s.

There is no cure, although drugs and deep brain stimulation have been shown to reduce symptoms.

Gene treatment
Patients with Parkinson’s have reduced levels of a chemical – GABA – in part of the brain known as the subthalamic nucleus.

The researchers created a virus which “infects” cells with a gene to increase GABA production.

In the trial, 22 patients had the virus injected into their brains while 23 patients had “sham surgery”, to make them think they had the virus injected. Read the rest of this entry »

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University of Michigan won’t tap endowment to recoup state aid cuts

March 3rd, 2011

The University of Michigan will not tap its $6-billion endowment to help make up an estimated $47-million cut it is expected to receive in state aid next year, U-M President Mary Sue Coleman said today.

However, Coleman, speaking outside a state House subcommittee hearing on public university budgets, declined to say whether the university will raise tuition to make up for the cuts. She said that decision was still under consideration.

Coleman was one of four university presidents who spent today before House and state Senate appropriations committees explaining the impact the cuts proposed by Gov. Rick Snyder would have on their institutions.

Oakland University President Gary Russi told a Senate subcommittee that previous budget cuts resulted in higher tuition hikes than he would have liked. “We’ve done a lot with what resources we have,” he said. “It is getting harder to address financial aid.”

The presidents argued against further cuts. “You’re going to make heart-wrenching decisions,” Ferris State University President David Eisler said. The state has made a “decade-long disinvestment in students,” he said.

The governor’s proposed budget would cut 15% from each university’s state appropriation. It would also shift funding from the general fund to the school aid fund. Read the rest of this entry »

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Scientists try to determine whether life on Earth is quickly heading toward extinction

March 3rd, 2011

Life on Earth is hurtling toward extinction levels comparable with those after the dinosaur-deleting asteroid impact of 65 million years ago, propelled forward by human activities, according to scientists from UC Berkeley.

This week, scientists announced that if current extinction rates continue unabated, and vulnerable species disappear, Earth could lose three-quarters of its species as soon as three centuries from now.

“That’s a geological eyeblink,” said Nicholas Matzke, a graduate student at UC Berkeley and author of a paper describing the doom-and-gloom scenario. “Once you lose species, you don’t get them back. It takes millions of years to rebound from a mass extinction event.”

This means that not too far in the future, backyards might not be buzzing with bees, bombarded by seagulls or shaded by redwood trees. And while that might seem far off, species already are disappearing on a global scale. In recent history, we’ve lost the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon, the Javan tiger and the Japanese sea lion, and now, maybe the eastern cougar — declared extinct by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Wednesday. Amphibians, mammals, plants, fish — none are immune to going the way of the dinosaurs, courtesy of the human impact on fragile ecosystems.

Such enormous losses have only occurred five times in the past half-billion years, during events known as “mass extinctions.” The best-known of these events occurred 65 million years ago — a “really bad day,” according to paleontologists — when an asteroid collided with Earth, sending fiery dust into the atmosphere and rapidly cooling the planet. These “Big Five” events set the extinction bar high: to reach mass-wipeout status, 75 percent of all species need to disappear within a geologically short time frame, meaning that Earth is currently on the brink of the sixth mass extinction. Read the rest of this entry »

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Scientists Spot Another Gene Behind Type 2 Diabetes

March 3rd, 2011

Finding might someday lead to targeted treatment, researchers say

Scientists have identified a gene variant present in some people of white European descent who have type 2 diabetes.

Although it’s not yet clear how the gene works, it may prove a future target for treatments, among other benefits, say the authors of a study published March 2 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

As with so many gene studies, however, these findings aren’t likely to translate into anything clinically meaningful soon.

“This shows an association between this gene and an increased risk of diabetes compared to the general population,” said Dr. Steven D. Wittlin, clinical director of the endocrine-metabolism division and director of the Diabetes Service at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

“If we can find out how this gene is associated with diabetes from a pathophysiological point of view, then we can figure out how to intervene, but that’s a lot of ifs, and right now we have 92.5 percent of people with diabetes who don’t have this gene,” said Wittlin, who was not involved in the study. Read the rest of this entry »

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