Medical devices designed to reside in the stomach have a variety of applications, including prolonged drug delivery, electronic
The post New material opens possibilities for super-long-acting pills has been published on Technology Org.
On CBS's Face the Nation last Sunday, Tom Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said he is "very concerned" about the possibility of a massive, sustained outbreak of measles in the United States. A growing number of parents are deciding not to vaccinate their children, resulting in 100 cases of measles in 14 states in the latest outbreak. Frieden argued that it is extremely important to prevent measles from re-establishing itself as an endemic disease, after it was eradicated at great expense and effort around the year 2000.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) chose the very next day to downplay the threat, a reply of sorts to President Obama, who strenuously recommended vaccination in an interview. At a press conference in England, part of a trip that is widely considered to be a rehearsal for a presidential run, Christie said that while he has vaccinated his own children, he did not expressly recommend vaccination for others. Instead, people "should have some measure of choice." (The libertarian Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) went further, saying of vaccines, "Most of them ought to be voluntary.")
After criticism, Christie amended his statement to emphasize that "there is no question kids should be vaccinated," while still maintaining that the danger of vaccine-preventable illnesses should be "balanced" against the supposed risks of vaccines. But it still doesn't wash, given the 2009 letter he wrote saying he would "stand with" vaccine-refusenik parents.
Christie is utterly mistaken on the science. But his comments exemplify a typically American selfishness, one that in this case is not just morally odious, but incoherent.
It's true that an individual case of measles is a lot less threatening than one of Ebola, for which Christie — again acting against the best advice of medical scientists — last year briefly enacted a forcible quarantine for health-care workers who had treated Ebola in Africa. By this reasoning, it is worth curtailing individual liberty for very deadly diseases, but not so with less dangerous ones.
But just because a disease is not as bad as Ebola does not mean it isn't still worth eradicating. Furthermore, the measles vaccine is extremely safe for healthy people: though there is a tiny risk, as there is with every activity, it is far smaller than getting measles itself. Only the very young, and those with compromised immune systems or allergies, have an actual reason to avoid it.
And make no mistake, measles is still a very serious illness. A quarter-million people worldwide got it last year, mostly children in the developing world; more than half died (though that death rate can be reduced to about 1 to 2 out of 1,000 with modern medicine). Long-term complications can include deafness, pneumonia, encephalitis, and a degenerative nerve disease. It's also incredibly contagious, "probably the most contagious infectious disease known to mankind," as a CDC specialist told NPR. Back in the pre-vaccine days, each person who caught it infected 17 new ones — as opposed to less than two for Ebola.
More broadly, this entire argumentative frame misses the greatest benefit of vaccines: herd immunity. A population vaccinated to a high enough level becomes largely impervious to the disease by sheer statistics, and that protects the vulnerable ones who can't be vaccinated, or those whose vaccines didn't take root. Vaccines are not just about preventing personal illness, but stopping them from spreading. Done systematically enough, it can eradicate diseases completely. The elimination of smallpox, which killed something like 300 million people in the 20th century alone, ranks high on the list of human accomplishments.
That is why this is as much a moral issue as a scientific one. The appalling selfishness inherent in the idea of "vaccine choice" was starkly illustrated in a recent CNN story. After the measles outbreak at Disneyland, CNN talked to a family whose 10-month-old baby had contracted the disease. They're terrified he'll pass it on to their 3-year-old daughter, who has leukemia and can't get the vaccine — but might be killed by the disease. Here's the response of a refusenik parent:
CNN asked Wolfson if he could live with himself if his unvaccinated child got another child gravely ill. "I could live with myself easily," he said. "It's an unfortunate thing that people die, but people die. I'm not going to put my child at risk to save another child." [CNN]
In other words, it's okay to cause the death of another child if your kid wants to go to Disneyland. And that's leaving aside the risk to Wolfson's own kids, who are put at risk by his atrocious parenting.
Every person depends on society to function. From public roads to sanitation to clean water to the very economic system itself — your day is made possible by millions of other people doing their small part to maintain our civilization. When it comes to violently contagious diseases, it is not possible to speak meaningfully of choice divorced from the needs of those people.
Herd immunity, like many of the great public goods, is literally an issue of life and death. As such, Christie's parental "choice" is a gross infringement of others' basic rights.
Veatch's own story is remarkable, but even more remarkable is that even in this extremely connected world with satellites and a survivor to guide the search teams, it still took days to find the crash site.
All planes are required to have Emergency Locator Transmitters (ELTs), according to the Washington State Department of Transportation. In the days following the wreck, search teams flew over great swaths of wilderness listening for beacon signals. They eventually found the plane in “extremely rugged and vertical” terrain in the words of the Skagit County Sheriff's Office. It's unclear whether the plane's ELTs contributed to its discovery.
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An international team led by Princeton University scientists has discovered an elusive massless particle theorized 85 years ago.
The post After 85-year search, massless particle with promise for next-generation electronics discovered has been published on Technology Org.
A new procedure devised by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists to extract lunasin from soybean seeds could
The post New Technique for Mining Health-conferring Soy Compounds has been published on Technology Org.
Conformal transfer of graphene on a prepatterned substrate is a viable technology for reproducible fabrication of graphene devices. Such is the conclusion of a recent study by a team of scientists from Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Saudi Arabia.
Reliable fabrication of graphene devices for electronics has been a technological challenge for the graphene community for years. Large area high quality graphene, required for high-tech applications, is typically grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on metal foils. Following growth, the graphene film is transferred to an electronically useful substrate, which is commonly SiO2 on Si. Standard procedure follows these steps up with photolithographic patterning of devices and evaporation of gold contacts.
Image: Reliable wafer scale production of graphene devices.
In the past, this sequence of steps failed to result in devices of consistently high quality, as each fabrication step introduced unpredictable defects. The film growth was the first step to be perfected by a global network of busy scientists. Graphene transfer was in parallel mastered by the Spanish company Graphenea, a participant of this most recent breakthrough, as evidenced by their patent award earlier this year. Still, lithography and evaporation would cause film breaks, cracks and wrinkles, which were unpredictable and which lowered the quality of the final devices. Now, researchers have turned the fabrication upside down by performing lithography and contact evaporation prior to graphene transfer. The result is a reliable method for wafer-scale fabrication of graphene devices.
The paper, recently published in Applied Materials & Interfaces (a publication of the American Chemical Society), starts by considering the values reported in literature for contact and sheet resistance obtained with the standard graphene fabrication and transfer method. Focusing on graphene grown by CVD, the researchers find that there is significant scatter in the reported values, spanning nearly an order of magnitude. The scientists then performed the standard procedure themselves, finding that the resulting graphene sheet is inhomogeneous, with defects appearing in random places.
Following the improved process, in which the contact patterning and metal deposition are performed prior to the transfer, yields a much better result. The graphene sheet is smooth and uniform across the wafer, conformally covering the electrode structures. Electrical measurements indicate good device reproducibility, with sheet resistance low enough to consider using these graphene devices in radio frequency electronics. The potential application of the graphene channels is additionally confirmed by steady device performance over a wide range of applied current, up to 0.5 A. The careful fabrication led to devices that support the highest current density ever reported in transferred CVD graphene.
Over 600 devices were tested, showing a very narrow spread in the measured parameters. Such statistical similarity not only opens a gate to mass production of graphene devices for radio frequency applications, but immediately allows the testing of fundamental device physics of monolayer materials.
In the approach to perihelion over the past few weeks, Rosetta has been witnessing growing activity from Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, with one dramatic outburst event proving so powerful that it even pushed away the incoming solar wind.
