The Mac Pro might have been worthy of the "One More Thing" kinds of reveals that Steve Jobs used to do at Apple events. Despite being foreshadowed by Tim Cook as a product the company was going to make in the US, it was virtually carted in from left field at an event that focused broadly on new operating systems before a crowd of developers that could appreciate its power. That said, it will likely require OS X Mavericks, a thematically fitting release for a product that represents a new wave in Apple's design.
Some have said that iOS 7 may be the company's New Coke. The Mac Pro, though, is the new can. Its cylindrical form represents a new design for Apple, albeit one that jibes with the company's affinity for simple, rounded, iconic shapes. Like the new AirPort Extreme, it has a significant vertical profile, but is a fraction of the size of its predecessor designed to accommodate multiple optical drives and hard drives.
On demand TV service YouView is to add popular UKTV channels Dave,?Yesterday?and?Really to its?catch-up services this summer.
The three UKTV channels are currently available to watch online and on iOS devices, but will arrive alongside the likes of BBC iPlayer, ITV Player and 4oD in the on-demand section of the YouView library.
The agreement marks the first time UKTV has offered a catch-up service that is purpose-built for TV.
UKTV's home of witty banter, Dave will be the first of its free-to-air channels to launch a seven day catch-up service in July with programming accessible through a Dave-branded on demand portal and through YouView's scroll back programme guide.
This is the first time that UKTV will provide a service to viewers directly through YouView and hit shows such as Dara O Briain: School of Hard Sums, Ross Noble Freewheeling, Dave Gorman Modern Life is Goodish, Alexander Armstrong's Big Ask, Storage Hunters, Lizard Lick Towing, and Russell Howard's Good News will be available to all YouView customers.
YouView also announced today that their app for Android is out now allowing you to record the latest telly from your phone and tablet - from anywhere in the world.?
The Android app is free, and shows you TV listings for the next 7 days, with a Now and Next episode guide across all channels.?Those with phones and tablets running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean should also be able to make use of TalkBack to set recordings with your voice.
Whether your Android phone or tablet is connected to WiFi or 3G/4G, you'll be able to access the remote record feature.?
PRISM: The surveillance story that started with four leaked slides from the Washington Post, today gets a bit clearer. The publication has revealed four more annotated slides about the once-secret NSA operation, along with detailing the various levels of scrutiny from the FBI and NSA that happen before, during and after approved wiretaps take place. It seems that many of the measures make sure the warrantless data mining of US citizens occurs to the smallest extent possible and that FISA rules are followed.
Detailing the process further, NSA analysts perform checks with supervisors to be certain intended targets are foreign nationals who aren't on US soil; approval is provided by way of "51-percent confidence" in assessments. During a "tasking process" search terms are entered, dubbed "selectors," which can tap into FBI gear installed within the private properties of participating companies -- so much for those denials. For live communications, this data goes straight to the NSA's PRINTAURA processing system, while both the FBI and NSA scan pre-recorded data independently. Notably, live surveillance is indeed possible for the likes of text, voice and and instant message-based conversations, according to a slide that details how cased are notated.
PRINTAURA is an overall filter for others, with names like NUCLEON for voice communications and MAINWAY for records of phone calls. Beyond that, another two layers, called CONVEYANCE and FALLOUT provide further filtering. Again, all of these checks apparently fine-tune results and help make sure they don't match up with US citizens. Results that return info about those in the US get scrapped, while results on foreigner targets get stored for up to five years -- this includes those that have US citizens' info in them, but restrictions are in place to limit the their exposure. A total number of 117,675 active targets were listed as April 5th, but the paper notes that this does not reflect the number of data that may also have been collected on American citizens in the process. It's likely that even more will be revealed in the coming weeks -- so if you haven't already, now might be a great time to catch up on this whole PRISM fiasco to learn about how it might affect you. You'll find all the new slides at the source link.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. ? Developing a cosmic cash system to meet the needs of future space tourists and interplanetary settlers is a complicated task that will take several years to complete, leaders of the new project say.
On Thursday (June 27), online-payment company PayPal and the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute unveiled PayPal Galactic, an initiative that aims to figure out the best way to process financial transactions beyond Earth.
This is much easier said than done, with many big questions demanding attention right off the bat, officials said. [9 Ways to Stay Safe Using PayPal]
"What will be our standard currency up there? How will the banking system need to adapt?" PayPal president David Marcus said here at the SETI Institute during the project's unveiling on Thursday. "How will risk and fraud management evolve? IP address from space? That's not a country for us; how are we going to deal with that?"
It's also unclear at the moment how off-world banking transactions will be regulated, and which bodies here on Earth would do the regulating, Marcus added, stressing that such issues will take a while to work out.
"We will focus on answering those questions and inviting everyone around the table who wants to participate ? scientists and the industry as well," Marcus said. "We're really, really looking forward to having the conversation for the next couple of years."
It's important to start this lengthy and involved process now, Marcus said, because private spaceflight is set to open the final frontier up to the masses soon.
Indeed, Virgin Galactic?and XCOR Aerospace may begin commercial flights to suborbital space within the next year or so. These companies are currently charging $250,000 and $95,000, respectively, for seats aboard their spaceships, but Marcus sees the price coming down dramatically before much longer.
"Futurists expect space travel to follow what happened to air travel," he said, adding that a roundtrip plane ticket from New York to Los Angeles cost $4,500 in 1935 ? the equivalent of $80,000 today.
So it's not hard to imagine that Virgin's $250,000 ticket price could come down to just a few thousand dollars in a decade or so, enabling large numbers of people to fly to space, Marcus said.
While brief suborbital flights can easily be booked and paid for here on Earth, Marcus and others see bigger things following in their wake that call out for a new off-planet monetary system ? orbiting hotels, luxury "space yachts" for the megarich and, eventually, outposts on the moon and Mars.
"The time is right," Marcus said. "Space tourism is taking off."
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter?@michaeldwall?and?Google+.?Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook?or Google+. Originally story at?SPACE.com.
Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Rosneft and the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs have signed a Cooperation Agreement.
The Agreement aims to strengthen the cooperation between the parties, including the measures to reduce the crime rate in the regions where the Company operates, assist the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs in its exercise of powers to identify, prevent, combat, disclose and investigate crimes in the fuel and energy sector.
The preparation of the draft Agreement included the establishment of inter-agency working groups and the development of plans for joint activities aimed at improving the effectiveness of measures to decriminalize the situation around the Companys facilities.
The launched cooperation has already resulted in the success of a number of arrangements followed by instituted criminal proceedings. A recent example is the prevention of theft at a Samaranefteproduct gasoline station, which has been carried out in cooperation with the local authorities of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Federal Security Service of Russia in the Samara region.
Rosneft will continue to focus on strengthening the systematic cooperation with law enforcement authorities to ensure the respect for law and order in the regions where the Company operates.
Intel's newest processing hardware has finally reached the marketplace, and the fourth-generation processors (codenamed Haswell) are appearing in gaming desktops, where cutting edge components are leveraged for a competitive edge. The Digital Storm Virtue does just that, pairing the newest Intel Core i7 processor and Nvidia graphics to become one of the more potent mid-range gaming PCs we've seen.
Design & Features
The Digital Storm Virtue is a mid-tower gaming PC, done up in black brushed metal. While it's not as stunning as the brightly painted Maingear F131, the basic black look still works, and a large window makes up most of the left side of the tower, showing of all the hardware inside. The case itself measures 17.25 by 8.1 by 17.75 inches (HWD), making it small enough to fit under a desk, but not prohibitively small when you need to get inside for maintenance and upgrades.
On the front of the tower you'll find an Asus Blu-ray player/DVD Writer, two USB 3.0 ports, and jacks for headphones and microphone. The front panel also pops off (with two press-to-release catches) revealing a large vent and dust filter, making filter removal quick and easy.
On the back of the system, you'll find four more USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, and three video outputs: DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort, along with connections for 8-channel audio. A single Gigabit Ethernet port provides network connectivity, which you'll need at all times since there's no Wi-Fi. You do, however, get Bluetooth 4.0 + HS, for connecting a wireless gaming headset or other peripherals.
The side panels are easily removed, secured with thumb-friendly screws?no tools necessary. Open up the case and you'll find some impressive hardware inside, starting with Intel's latest, a fourth generation Haswell Core i7-4770K processor and 16GB of RAM. Equally impressive is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 with 3GB of dedicated VRAM. The whole thing is kept cool?and quiet?thanks to a Corsair H100i Liquid CPU Cooler.
There's also plenty of room to grow as you update the system in the future. The installed 1050W Corsair Pro Silver 1050HX power supply offers more than enough power for the included components, and there are several expansion slots available: Two DIMM slots for an additional 16GB of RAM, one unoccupied PCIe x16 slot, one unoccupied optical drive bay and four total empty drive bays (two 3.5-inch HDD bays, two 2.5-inch SSD bays).
Already installed are two drives, a 120GB Corsair Neutron GTX solid-state drive (SSD) paired with a 1TB 7,200rpm Western Digital Caviar hard drive, providing plenty of storage with the hard disk and zippy performance with the SSD. While there are systems available with larger overall storage capacity?the HP Envy Phoenix h9-1320t, for example, has a 2TB hard drive?the combination of spinning drive and SSD will offer better performance. The only software Digital Storm includes on the Virtue is a copy of Windows 8 (64-bit) along with drivers for the various hardware. Digital Storm covers the Virtue with a three-year limited warranty and lifetime customer care.
Performance
Armed with one of the first fourth-generation (a.k.a. Haswell) processors on the market, the Virtue offers strong processing performance, aided by the included 16GB of DDR3 1600MHz memory. The 3.5GHz Core i7-4770K is also unlocked for overclocking. The new processor offers powerful performance, completing PCMark 7 with a score of 7,042 points and a Cinebench score of 9.59 points, topping almost every competitor from the previous generation, and blowing past the Editors' Choice HP Envy Phoenix h9-1302t (4,033 points).
In terms of graphics performance, there was a drastic difference between the single-card Virtue and the likes of the Falcon Northwest Mach V (Triple Titan), which boasts not one or even two, but three of Nvidia's top-of-the-line GPUs. That said, the visual performance of the Digital Storm Virtue is still stunning, producing frame rates of 83fps (Aliens vs. Predator) and 75fps (Heaven 3.0) at 1,920-by-1200 resolution and high detail settings. While it may not match the triple digit scores of the Falcon Northwest Mach V (Triple Titan), it's high enough for any current game to play at full 1080p and still deliver high performance.
For a single-card mid-tower desktop with a halfway reasonable price tag, the Digital Storm Virtue offers seriously fierce performance and heart-pumping graphics. Though not as inexpensive as our Editors' Choice HP Phoenix h9-1320t, the Digital Storm Virtue is still relatively affordable. Even when stacked against tricked out top performers, like the Maingear F131 Super Stock (GTX Titan) and the Falcon Northwest Mach V (Triple Titan), the Digital Storm Virtue stands out, and is a definite contender for top mid-range gaming rig.
There's about a million people crammed into Spotify's NYC headquarters because Mayor Mike is in the house! They're blasting NYC jams. Everyone's all aflutter. What's he doing here? Announcing his Spotify account of course! It's supposed to be a secret! Well here we are, spoiling the surprise ahead of the announcement.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ? Backed by rainbow flags and confetti, thousands celebrated in California's streets after U.S. Supreme Court rulings brought major advances for gay marriage proponents in the state and across the country.
Though wedding bells may be weeks away, same-sex couples and their supporters filled city blocks of San Francisco and West Hollywood on Wednesday night to savor the long-awaited decisions as thumping music resounded.
"Today the words emblazoned across the Supreme Court ring true: equal justice under law," said Paul Katami, one of the plaintiffs who challenged California's gay marriage ban, as he celebrated in West Hollywood.
In one of two 5-4 rulings, the high court cleared the way for gay marriages to resume in California, holding that the coalition of religious conservative groups that qualified a voter-approved ban for the ballot did not have the authority to defend it after state officials refused. The justices thus let stand a San Francisco trial court's ruling in August 2010 that overturned the ban.
In the other, the court wiped away part of a federal anti-gay marriage law, the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, putting legally married gay couples on equal federal footing with all other married Americans, allowing them to receive the same tax, health and pension benefits.
The court sidestepped the larger question of whether banning gay marriage is unconstitutional, and states other than California and the 12 others where gay couples already have the right to wed were left to hash out the issue within their borders.
As the sun set on San Francisco, a crowd surged from hundreds to several thousand in the city's Castro neighborhood, with rainbow flags and confetti filling the air.
James Reynolds, 45, was among the revelers, saying he had been married to his partner of 23 years several times, including once in California.
"It's been taken away from us," Reynolds said as he stood in a crosswalk near the barrier blocking off the street for the celebration. "But we'll be married again."
In Southern California, an all-day celebration in West Hollywood grew to hundreds by night, including many gay couples dressed in red, white and blue and one sign that read "Today we are American."
Brendan Banfield, 46, stood on the very spot under a tree in West Hollywood Park where in 2008 he married his partner, Charles, becoming one of an estimated 18,000 couples that got married during the 4? four months when gay marriage was legal in California.
"I want to cry," Banfield said. "It's been a long journey. I'm grateful I'm alive to see it."
It remained unclear, however, when California's gay marriages might start again. Backers of the ban known as Proposition 8 have 25 days to ask the Supreme Court to reconsider. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also must lift a hold it placed on the lower court order before the state can be free to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Still, state officials moved quickly. Gov. Jerry Brown said he had directed the California Department of Public Health to start issuing licenses as soon as the hold is lifted, and state Attorney General Kamala Harris went even further, publicly urging the appellate court to act ahead of the final word from the Supreme Court.
In the DOMA decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by the four liberal justices, said the purpose of the federal law was to impose a disadvantage and "a stigma upon all who enter into same-sex marriages."
Justice Antonin Scalia issued a pungent dissent, predicting that the ruling would be used to upend state restrictions on marriage, reading aloud in a packed courtroom that included two couples who sued for the right to marry in California.
"It takes real cheek for today's majority to assure us, as it is going out the door, that a constitutional requirement to give formal recognition to same-sex marriage is not at issue here," Scalia read.
President Barack Obama praised the ruling, labeling DOMA "discrimination enshrined in law."
"It treated loving, committed gay and lesbian couples as a separate and lesser class of people," Obama said in a statement. "The Supreme Court has righted that wrong, and our country is better off for it."
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said he was disappointed in the outcome case and hoped states continue to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
Without offering any specifics about their next move, lawyers for Proposition 8 sponsors insisted state officials remained obligated by the California Constitution to enforce the ban, and that the ruling only legalized marriage for the two couples who sued to overturn it.
"What was sought in this lawsuit was a 50-state mandate or to establish there is a fundamental right to same-sex marriage, which the Supreme Court did not rule today," said Austin Nimiocks, senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom.
California's same-sex marriage California has been in overdrive since then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom began issuing marriage licenses to gay couples in 2004. Resulting lawsuits spurred the California Supreme Court to overturn the state's man-woman marriage laws in 2008.
But opponents responded by qualifying Proposition 8 for the ballot, and it passed with 52 percent of the vote.
Katami, the Proposition 8 co-plaintiff, said he and longtime partner Jeff Zarrillo were seeking status only a legal wedding could provide.
"There was something about that word marriage and what it meant," Katami said. "Something about the celebration and the right, the language and the association across the globe that comes with the word marriage."
___
Associated Press writers Mihir Zaveri in San Francisco and Sarah Parvini in West Hollywood contributed to this report.
COLLEGE STATION -- Scientists using sophisticated imaging techniques have observed a molecular protein folding process that may help medical researchers understand and treat diseases such as Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig's and cancer.
The study, reported this month in the journal Cell, verifies a process that scientists knew existed but with a mechanism they had never been able to observe, according to Dr. Hays Rye, Texas A&M AgriLife Research biochemist.
"This is a step in the direction of understanding how to modulate systems to prevent diseases like Alzheimer's. We needed to understand the cell's folding machines and how they interact with each other in a complicated network," said Rye, who also is associate professor of biochemistry and biophysics at Texas A&M.
Rye explained that individual amino acids get linked together like beads on a string as a protein is made in the cell.
"But that linear sequence of amino acids is not functional," he explained. "It's like an origami structure that has to fold up into a three-dimensional shape to do what it has to do."
Rye said researchers have been trying to understand this process for more than 50 years, but in a living cell the process is complicated by the presence of many proteins in a concentrated environment.
"The constraints on getting that protein to fold up into a good 'origami' structure are a lot more demanding," he said. "So, there are special protein machines, known as molecular chaperones, in the cell that help proteins fold."
But how the molecular chaperones help protein fold when it isn't folding well by itself has been the nagging question for researchers.
"Molecular chaperones are like little machines, because they have levers and gears and power sources. They go through turning over cycles and just sort of buzz along inside a cell, driving a protein folding reaction every few seconds," Rye said.
The many chemical reactions that are essential to life rely on the exact three-dimensional shape of folded proteins, he said. In the cell, enzymes, for example, are specialized proteins that help speed biological processes along by binding molecules and bringing them together in just the right way.
"They are bound together like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle," Rye explained. "And the proteins -- those little beads on the string that are designed to fold up like origami -- are folded to position all these beads in three-dimensional space to perfectly wrap around those molecules and do those chemical reactions.
"If that doesn't happen -- if the protein doesn't get folded up right -- the chemical reaction can't be done. And if it's essential, the cell dies because it can't convert food into power needed to build the other structures in the cell that are needed. Chemical reactions are the structural underpinning of how cells are put together, and all of that depends on the proteins being folded in the right way."
When a protein doesn't fold or folds incorrectly it turns into an "aggregate," which Rye described as "white goo that looks kind of like a mayonnaise, like crud in the test tube.
"You're dead; the cell dies," he said.
Over the past 20 years, he said, researchers have linked that aggregation process "pretty convincingly" to the development of diseases -- Alzheimer's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease, Huntington's disease, to name a few. There's evidence that diabetes and cancer also are linked to protein folding disorders.
"One of the main roles for the molecular chaperones is preventing those protein misfolding events that lead to aggregation and not letting a cell get poisoned by badly folded or aggregated proteins," he said.
Rye's team focused on a key molecular chaperone -- the HSP60.
"They're called HSP for 'heat shock protein' because when the cell is stressed with heat, the proteins get unstable and start to fall apart and unfold," Rye said. "The cell is built to respond by making more of the chaperones to try and fix the problem.
"This particular chaperone takes unfolded protein and goes through a chemical reaction to bind the unfolded protein and literally puts it inside a little 'box,'" Rye said.
He added that the mystery had long been how the folding worked because, while researchers could see evidence of that happening, no one had ever seen precisely how it happened.
Rye and the team zeroed in on a chemically modified mutant that in other experiments had seemed to stall at an important step in the process that the "machine" goes through to start the folding action. This clued the researchers that this stalling might make it easier to watch.
They then used cryo-electron microscopy to capture hundreds of thousands of images of the process at very high resolutions which allowed them to reconstruct from two-dimensional flat images a three-dimensional model. A highly sophisticated computer algorithm aligns the images and classifies them in subcategories.
"If you have enough of them you can actually reconstruct and view a structure as a three-dimensional model," Rye said.
What the team saw was this: The HSP60 chaperone is designed to recognize proteins that are not folded from the ones that are. It binds them and then has a separate co-chaperone that puts a "lid" on top of the box to keep the folding intermediate in the box. They could see the box move, and parts of the molecule moved to peel the chaperone box away from the bound protein or "gift" in the box. But the bound protein was kept inside the package where it could then initiate a folding reaction. They saw tiny tentacles, "like a little octopus in the bottom of the box rising up and grabbing hold of the substrate protein and helping hold it inside the cavity."
"The first thing we saw was a large amount of an unfolded protein inside of this cavity," he said. "Even though we knew from lots and lots of other studies that it had to go in there, nobody had ever seen it like this before. We can also see the non-native protein interacting with parts of the box that no one had ever seen before. It was exciting to see all of this for the first time. I think we got a glimpse of a protein in the process of folding, which we actually can compare to other structures."
"By understanding the mechanism of these machines, the hope is that one of the things we can learn to do is turn them up or turn them off when we need to, like for a patient who has one of the protein folding diseases," he said.
Rye collaborated on the research with Dong-Hua Chen and Wah Chiu at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Damian Madan and Zohn Lin at Princeton University, Jeremy Weaver at Texas A&M and Gunnar Schrder at the Institute of Complex Systems in Germany.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Scientists view 'protein origami' to help understand, prevent certain diseasesPublic release date: 28-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
COLLEGE STATION -- Scientists using sophisticated imaging techniques have observed a molecular protein folding process that may help medical researchers understand and treat diseases such as Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig's and cancer.
The study, reported this month in the journal Cell, verifies a process that scientists knew existed but with a mechanism they had never been able to observe, according to Dr. Hays Rye, Texas A&M AgriLife Research biochemist.
"This is a step in the direction of understanding how to modulate systems to prevent diseases like Alzheimer's. We needed to understand the cell's folding machines and how they interact with each other in a complicated network," said Rye, who also is associate professor of biochemistry and biophysics at Texas A&M.
Rye explained that individual amino acids get linked together like beads on a string as a protein is made in the cell.
"But that linear sequence of amino acids is not functional," he explained. "It's like an origami structure that has to fold up into a three-dimensional shape to do what it has to do."
Rye said researchers have been trying to understand this process for more than 50 years, but in a living cell the process is complicated by the presence of many proteins in a concentrated environment.
"The constraints on getting that protein to fold up into a good 'origami' structure are a lot more demanding," he said. "So, there are special protein machines, known as molecular chaperones, in the cell that help proteins fold."
But how the molecular chaperones help protein fold when it isn't folding well by itself has been the nagging question for researchers.
"Molecular chaperones are like little machines, because they have levers and gears and power sources. They go through turning over cycles and just sort of buzz along inside a cell, driving a protein folding reaction every few seconds," Rye said.
The many chemical reactions that are essential to life rely on the exact three-dimensional shape of folded proteins, he said. In the cell, enzymes, for example, are specialized proteins that help speed biological processes along by binding molecules and bringing them together in just the right way.
"They are bound together like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle," Rye explained. "And the proteins -- those little beads on the string that are designed to fold up like origami -- are folded to position all these beads in three-dimensional space to perfectly wrap around those molecules and do those chemical reactions.
"If that doesn't happen -- if the protein doesn't get folded up right -- the chemical reaction can't be done. And if it's essential, the cell dies because it can't convert food into power needed to build the other structures in the cell that are needed. Chemical reactions are the structural underpinning of how cells are put together, and all of that depends on the proteins being folded in the right way."
When a protein doesn't fold or folds incorrectly it turns into an "aggregate," which Rye described as "white goo that looks kind of like a mayonnaise, like crud in the test tube.
"You're dead; the cell dies," he said.
Over the past 20 years, he said, researchers have linked that aggregation process "pretty convincingly" to the development of diseases -- Alzheimer's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease, Huntington's disease, to name a few. There's evidence that diabetes and cancer also are linked to protein folding disorders.
"One of the main roles for the molecular chaperones is preventing those protein misfolding events that lead to aggregation and not letting a cell get poisoned by badly folded or aggregated proteins," he said.
Rye's team focused on a key molecular chaperone -- the HSP60.
"They're called HSP for 'heat shock protein' because when the cell is stressed with heat, the proteins get unstable and start to fall apart and unfold," Rye said. "The cell is built to respond by making more of the chaperones to try and fix the problem.
"This particular chaperone takes unfolded protein and goes through a chemical reaction to bind the unfolded protein and literally puts it inside a little 'box,'" Rye said.
He added that the mystery had long been how the folding worked because, while researchers could see evidence of that happening, no one had ever seen precisely how it happened.
Rye and the team zeroed in on a chemically modified mutant that in other experiments had seemed to stall at an important step in the process that the "machine" goes through to start the folding action. This clued the researchers that this stalling might make it easier to watch.
They then used cryo-electron microscopy to capture hundreds of thousands of images of the process at very high resolutions which allowed them to reconstruct from two-dimensional flat images a three-dimensional model. A highly sophisticated computer algorithm aligns the images and classifies them in subcategories.
"If you have enough of them you can actually reconstruct and view a structure as a three-dimensional model," Rye said.
What the team saw was this: The HSP60 chaperone is designed to recognize proteins that are not folded from the ones that are. It binds them and then has a separate co-chaperone that puts a "lid" on top of the box to keep the folding intermediate in the box. They could see the box move, and parts of the molecule moved to peel the chaperone box away from the bound protein or "gift" in the box. But the bound protein was kept inside the package where it could then initiate a folding reaction. They saw tiny tentacles, "like a little octopus in the bottom of the box rising up and grabbing hold of the substrate protein and helping hold it inside the cavity."
"The first thing we saw was a large amount of an unfolded protein inside of this cavity," he said. "Even though we knew from lots and lots of other studies that it had to go in there, nobody had ever seen it like this before. We can also see the non-native protein interacting with parts of the box that no one had ever seen before. It was exciting to see all of this for the first time. I think we got a glimpse of a protein in the process of folding, which we actually can compare to other structures."
"By understanding the mechanism of these machines, the hope is that one of the things we can learn to do is turn them up or turn them off when we need to, like for a patient who has one of the protein folding diseases," he said.
Rye collaborated on the research with Dong-Hua Chen and Wah Chiu at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Damian Madan and Zohn Lin at Princeton University, Jeremy Weaver at Texas A&M and Gunnar Schrder at the Institute of Complex Systems in Germany.
###
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
A high pressure system hanging over the West this weekend is expected to bring temperatures that are extreme even in a region used to baking during the summer. The National Weather Service called for 118 in Phoenix, and 117 in Las Vegas on Sunday ? a mark reached only twice in Sin City.
It was only a few months ago that Maker Studios co-founder Danny Zappin stepped down from the CEO role, replaced by Endemol veteran Ynon Kreiz. Well it turns out that he didn't "step down," so much as he was "pushed out." And now he's taking the company to court over his ouster.
BERLIN (AP) ? A seasonal pickup in job creation has helped push Germany's unemployment rate down to 6.6 percent in June from 6.8 percent the previous month.
The Federal Labor Agency said Thursday that 2.865 million people were registered as unemployed, a drop of 72,000 over the month.
When adjusted for seasonal factors, unemployment fell by 12,000 but the rate was steady at 6.8 percent.
Europe's biggest economy has enjoyed a period of relatively low unemployment in contrast to many of the other European Union countries that use the euro. Spain and Greece for example have unemployment rates above 25 percent.
The majority of small employers ? about 60 percent ? believe climate change and extreme weather events are an urgent problem that can disrupt the economy and harm businesses, according to a scientific opinion poll.
The poll, conducted by Public Policy Polling on behalf of Small Business Majority, found four in 10 strongly believe this (see chart). It also found a third of American small businesses have seen extreme weather impact their business or someone around them.
Small businesses want to know the government is equipped to help them rebuild from future extreme weather events, the poll found. Forty-two percent of respondents believe the Small Business Administration should track small business claims related to extreme weather events as a way to increase the amount of aid the government provides small businesses. Meanwhile, 21 percent said they weren?t sure if the SBA should track claims and 37 percent said it shouldn?t.
Small Business Authority notes that the political affiliation of the poll?s respondents was varied, with 37 percent identifying as Republican, 30 percent as Democrat and 33 percent as independent.
Last month, Small Business Majority released additional polling that found a majority of small businesses support the EPA regulating carbon emissions and setting standards for existing power plants, refineries and other major emitters.
Extreme weather events like last summer?s drought and Hurricane Sandy affected businesses and exposed the US? economic vulnerability to climate change, according to the 500 firms including Nike and GM that have signed Ceres? Climate Declaration. The declaration calls upon federal policymakers to address climate change as an economic opportunity.
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KUWAIT CITY (AP) ? Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday that he's set no ad hoc deadline for making concrete progress in talks between Israel and the Palestinians that he's continuing this week, but that long before September there needs to be some kind of progress shown.
The U.N. General Assembly, which reconvenes in September, voted overwhelmingly in November to upgrade the Palestinians from U.N. observer to non-voting member state. The Palestinians have said that if attempts at reaching an accord between the two sides fail, they would pursue a strategy of international recognition on their own, which would make finding peace in the decades-long conflict more elusive.
Kerry spoke during a news conference with Kuwait's emir, Sheik Sabah Al Ahmed Al Sabah. Later Wednesday, he was heading to Amman, Jordan, which he will use as a base for diplomacy with Jordanian, Israeli and Palestinian officials. It is Kerry's fifth visit to the region since becoming secretary of state earlier this year.
"The time is getting near where we need to make some judgments. Last time, I was here, I said it's time for leaders to make some hard decisions," Kerry said. "That stands. It is time. Why is it urgent? It's urgent because time is the enemy of a peace process."
"I don't want to trap myself or any of the principals in this with arbitrary ? or somewhat ad hoc time limits," Kerry said.
But he added: "Long before September we need to be showing some kind of progress in some way. ... That's why I'm here for this visit and I hope it can be productive."
Kerry has been shuttling between the Israelis and the Palestinians in search of a formula to restart talks. So far, there have been no signs of a breakthrough.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is being propelled toward a stark choice that could come as soon as next week, define his legacy and set the course for his people in their conflict with Israel. Abbas' aides fear he's being pushed by the U.S. into dropping his conditions for negotiating with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
Israeli settlements are at the heart of the heart of the nearly five-year impasse in Mideast peace efforts. The Palestinians say they will not negotiate while Israel continues to construct settlements in territory they seek for a future state. Netanyahu says the fate of the settlements should be resolved in negotiations, and talks should resume immediately without any preconditions. The Palestinians claim the West Bank and east Jerusalem, which were captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war, as parts of a future state.
"We come at this carefully. We have been working towards, hopefully an understanding that allows everybody to move forward, notwithstanding the difficulties that people face in the politics of their own countries," he said. "Why am I confident that something can be done? Because I believe peace is understood by them ? both of them ? to be urgent."
On Syria, Kerry acknowledged that getting a transitional government set up was a "hard lift."
But he painted a dire picture of the alternative to convening an international conference to reach a political resolution to the two-year civil war.
"The people of Syria are suffering ... the prospect a long, continued war, which is very possible, means not only will many, many people die, many more homes will be destroyed, cities be destroyed," he said. "Not only will you have more atrocities, more violations of human rights, even some small evidence here and there of some ethnic cleansing."
"Not only will you have all that, but you may ultimately have complete destruction of the state of Syria so that the army and the institutions will fall apart and you will have a complete sectarian breakdown," he said, "and that becomes far more dangerous for all of the region because it will empower extremists as well as create ongoing sectarian strife" in the region.
Kerry reiterated his called for Iran and the Hezbollah fighters, which are bolstering Assad's forces, to leave Syria ? a move he said would make it easier for a political resolution to be reached.
Rachel Jeantel, the witness that was on the phone with Trayvon Martin just before he died, gives her testimony to the prosecution during George Zimmerman's trial in Seminole circuit court in Sanford, Fla. Wednesday, June 26, 2013. Zimmerman has been charged with second-degree murder for the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin.(AP Photo/Orlando Sentinel, Jacob Langston, Pool)
Rachel Jeantel, the witness that was on the phone with Trayvon Martin just before he died, gives her testimony to the prosecution during George Zimmerman's trial in Seminole circuit court in Sanford, Fla. Wednesday, June 26, 2013. Zimmerman has been charged with second-degree murder for the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin.(AP Photo/Orlando Sentinel, Jacob Langston, Pool)
Rachel Jeantel, the witness that was on the phone with Trayvon Martin just before he died, gives her testimony during George Zimmerman's trial in Seminole circuit court in Sanford, Fla., Wednesday, June 26, 2013. Zimmerman has been charged with second-degree murder for the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin.(AP Photo/Orlando Sentinel, Jacob Langston, Pool)
George Zimmerman glances back at the courtroom during his trial in Seminole circuit court in Sanford, Fla. Wednesday, June 26, 2013. Zimmerman has been charged with second-degree murder for the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin. (AP Photo/Orlando Sentinel, Jacob Langston, Pool)
Rachel Jeantel, the witness that was on the phone with Trayvon Martin just before he died, gives her testimony during George Zimmerman's trial in Seminole circuit court in Sanford, Fla., Wednesday, June 26, 2013. Zimmerman has been charged with second-degree murder for the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin.(AP Photo/Orlando Sentinel, Jacob Langston, Pool)
George Zimmerman, right, talks to attorney Don West during his trial in Seminole circuit court in Sanford, Fla. Wednesday, June 26, 2013. Zimmerman has been charged with second-degree murder for the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin. (AP Photo/Orlando Sentinel, Jacob Langston, Pool)
SANFORD, Fla. (AP) ? A friend of Trayvon Martin's who was on the phone with him shortly before his fatal fight with George Zimmerman testified Thursday that she thought the encounter was racially charged.
Rachel Jeantel testified for the second day in a row, saying she thought race was an issue because Martin told her he was being followed by a white man.
"He was being followed," Jeantel said.
Her answer came in response to questioning from defense attorney Don West about why she had given differing accounts about what she had heard over the phone when Martin first encountered Zimmerman on a rainy night on Feb. 26, 2012, at the Retreat at Twin Lakes townhome complex.
West suggested in his cross-examination that 18-year-old Jeantel had raised the racial issue in some accounts but not others. In some accounts, West implied, Jeantel said Zimmerman responded one way when he first encountered Martin, but in other accounts she said he responded another way. Jeantel gave her version of events in a deposition, in a letter to Martin's mother and in a recorded interview with an attorney for the Martin family.
Jeantel is one of the prosecution's most important witnesses because she bolsters the contention that Zimmerman was the aggressor. She was on the phone with Martin moments before he was fatally shot.
Jeantel testified Wednesday that her friend's last words were "Get off! Get off!" before the phone went silent. But on Thursday, under cross-examination, she conceded that she hadn't mentioned that in her account of what happened to Martin's mother, Sybrina Fulton.
Jeantel recounted to jurors on Wednesday how Martin told her he was being followed by a man as he walked through the Retreat at Twin Lakes townhome complex on his way back from a convenience store to the home of his father's fiancee.
She testified that Martin described the man following him as "a creepy-ass cracker" and that he thought he had evaded him. But she said Martin told her a short time later the man was still behind him, and she told him to run.
Martin said Zimmerman was behind him and she heard Martin ask: "What are you following me for?"
In one account, according to West, she said Zimmerman responds, "What are you doing around here?" In another account, according to West, she says Zimmerman said, "What are you talking about?"
She then heard what sounded like Martin's phone earpiece dropping into wet grass, and she heard him say, "Get off! Get off!" The phone then went dead, she said.
Later, she bristled and teared up when West asked her why she didn't attend Martin's funeral and about lying about her age. She initially told Martin's parents she was a minor when she was 18. She said she didn't want to get involved in the case.
The exchanges also turned testy, including one moment when she urged West to move on to his next question: "You can go. You can go." And she gave him what seemed like a dirty look as he walked away after he had approached her on the stand to challenge her on differences between an initial interview she gave to Martin family attorney, Benjamin Crump, and a later deposition with the defense. Jeantel explained it by saying she "rushed" the interview with Crump because she didn't feel comfortable doing it.
And when the judge asked if both sides wanted to break for the day, prosecutors said they'd like to continue, believing the testimony could take another two hours, to which Jeantel reacted with surprise, repeating, "Two hours?" Instead, the judge decided to continue the cross examination Thursday, carefully instructing Jeantel to return at 9 a.m. and not discuss her testimony with anyone.
Jeantel's testimony was more subdued on Thursday and West took note of her calmer demeanor.
Zimmerman, 29, could get life in prison if convicted of second-degree murder. Zimmerman followed Martin in his truck and called a police dispatch number before he and the teen got into a fight.
Zimmerman has said he opened fire only after the teenager jumped him and began slamming his head against the concrete sidewalk. Zimmerman identifies himself as Hispanic and has denied the confrontation had anything to do with race, as Martin's family and their supporters have claimed.
___
Follow Kyle Hightower on Twitter at http://twitter.com/KHightower
Follow Mike Schneider on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MikeSchneiderAP
NEW YORK (AP) ? Even as they celebrate a momentous legal victory, supporters of gay marriage already are anticipating a return trip to the Supreme Court in a few years, sensing that no other option but a broader court ruling will legalize same-sex unions in all 50 states.
In the meantime, as one gay-rights leader said, there will be "two Americas" ? and a host of legal complications for many gay couples moving between them.
Wednesday's twin rulings from the high court will extend federal recognition to same-sex marriages in the states where they are legal, and will add California ? the most populous state ? to the 12 others in that category. That will mean about 30 percent of Americans live in states recognizing same-sex marriage.
But the court's rulings have no direct effect on the constitutional amendments in 29 states that limit marriage to heterosexual couples. In a handful of politically moderate states such as Oregon, Nevada and Colorado those amendments could be overturned by ballot measures, but that's considered highly unlikely in more conservative states.
"It would be inefficient to try to pick off 30 constitutional amendments one by one," said Fred Sainz of the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay-rights group. "Eventually this will have to be settled by the Supreme Court."
The Human Rights Campaign's president, Chad Griffin, told supporters outside the Supreme Court building that the goal would be to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide within five years.
To sway the justices in such a time frame, activists plan a multipronged strategy. In addition to possible ballot measures in a few states, they hope lawmakers will legalize same-sex marriage in states which now offer civil unions to gay couples, notably New Jersey, Illinois and Hawaii.
There also will be advocacy efforts in more conservative states, ranging from expansion of anti-discrimination laws to possible litigation on behalf of sex-couples there who are denied state recognition even though they married legally in some other jurisdiction.
The Supreme Court's decisions "underscore the emergence of two Americas," Griffin said. "In one, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) citizens are nearing full equality. In the other, our community lacks even the most basic protections."
Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, suggested that efforts to end that division would not be easy, given that many states have electorates that seem solidly opposed to gay marriage.
"The fight is far from over," Rauch wrote in a commentary. "By refusing to override those majorities, the court green-lighted the continuation, probably for a decade or more, of state-by-state battles over marriage."
In Florida, where voters approved a ban on gay marriage with 62 percent support in 2008, the gay-rights group Equality Florida called on its supporters to "get engaged and fight" for recognition of same-sex marriage.
The high court rulings "are a major step forward for the country, but for Floridians they fall far short of justice," said the group's executive director, Nadine Smith. "The Supreme Court has said we can go states like Minnesota or Iowa and get married, but we return to Florida legal strangers in our home state."
Florida State Rep. Joe Saunders, a Democrat from Orlando and one of the state's first openly gay lawmakers, said "every strategy is on the table" as activists ponder ways to eliminate the 2008 ban, including warnings of economic consequences.
"If 13 other states provide protections to gay and lesbian families, what does that mean for our ability to keep those families here in Florida?" he said. "Until we can promise them the same basic protections, we're going to be economically disadvantaged."
Increasingly, political swing states like Florida, as well as more solidly Republican states, could become gay-marriage battlegrounds.
One example of the forthcoming strategy: The American Civil Liberties Union announced Wednesday that it has hired Steve Schmidt, former communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee and adviser to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to build support among GOP state politicians for striking down gay-marriage bans.
"For a full civil liberties victory, we need broad-based support from coast to coast," the ACLU's executive director, Anthony Romero, said.
On the conservative side, there was deep dismay over the Supreme Court rulings, but little indication of any new strategies or initiatives.
"The debate over marriage has only just begun," said Austin Nimocks, senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which staunchly opposes same-sex marriage, called upon Americans "to stand steadfastly together in promoting and defending the unique meaning of marriage: one man, one woman, for life."
Lee Badgett, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, predicted that the ruling on federal recognition would prompt thousands of gay couples to get married, now that there were additional financial incentives to so.
This group could include couples in states which don't recognize same-sex marriage but who are willing to travel to a state that does recognize such unions.
However, Rea Carey of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force said many gay couples either would be hard pressed to afford such trips or would forgo them out of principle.
"Many people in this country, straight or gay, want to get married in their own state, their own backyard," she said.
While gay-rights activists pursue their ultimate goal of nationwide recognition of same-sex marriage, the short-term legal situation for many gay couples could be complicated.
Peter Sprigg of the conservative Family Research Council said the court ruling on federal recognition "raises as many questions as it answers."
"Will recognition be based on the law in the state where the marriage was celebrated or the state in which the couple resides?" he said. "The doors may now be wide open for whole new rounds of litigation."
The National Conference of State Legislatures said the situation was clear for married gay couples in the 13 states recognizing same-sex marriage: They will be eligible for all federal marriage benefits.
"Outside of these states, federal marriage benefits become more complicated, as many commonly thought-of federal benefits, such as jointly filing on federal income taxes, are tied to a married couple's place of residence," the conference said.
Gay-rights activists immediately began lobbying the Obama administration and other federal officials to extend as many benefits as possible on the basis of where a gay couple's wedding took place, not on the state where they live.
"The Obama administration can make clear, through regulation, that the federal government will recognize those marriages and not participate in state-sponsored discrimination," said Suzanne Goldberg, a professor at Columbia Law School.
Evan Wolfson of Freedom to Marry, one of the groups most active in building support for same-sex marriage, urged the administration to adopt a "clear and consistent" standard that would apply equally to all married gay couples, regardless of their state of residence.
"Marriage should not flutter in and out like cellphone service," he said. "When it comes to federal programs, even if states are discriminating, the federal government should not."
Wolfson, like many of his allies, was already looking ahead to another rendezvous with the Supreme Court, confident that public support for same-sex marriage would continue to increase.
"We have the winning strategy," he said. "We win more states, we win more hearts and minds, and we go back to the Supreme Court in a matter of years, not decades, to win the freedom to marry nationwide."
___
Follow David Crary on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/craryap
A telescope for the eye: New contacts may improve sight for macular degeneration patientsPublic release date: 27-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Angela Stark astark@osa.org 202-416-1443 The Optical Society
Slimmed-down telescopic contact lens switches between magnified and normal vision using a modified pair of liquid crystal eyeglasses
WASHINGTON, June 27, 2013Contact lenses correct many people's eyesight but do nothing to improve the blurry vision of those suffering from age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of blindness among older adults in the western world. That's because simply correcting the eye's focus cannot restore the central vision lost from a retina damaged by AMD. Now a team of researchers from the United States and Switzerland led by University of California San Diego Professor Joseph Ford has created a slim, telescopic contact lens that can switch between normal and magnified vision. With refinements, the system could offer AMD patients a relatively unobtrusive way to enhance their vision. The team reports its work today in the Optical Society's (OSA) open-access journal Optics Express.
Visual aids that magnify incoming light help AMD patients see by spreading light around to undamaged parts of the retina. These optical magnifiers can assist patients with a variety of important everyday tasks such as reading, identification of faces, and self-care. But these aids have not gained widespread acceptance because they either use bulky spectacle-mounted telescopes that interfere with social interactions, or micro-telescopes that require surgery to implant into the patient's eye.
"For a visual aid to be accepted it needs to be highly convenient and unobtrusive," says co-author Eric Tremblay of the cole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. A contact lens is an "attractive compromise" between the head-mounted telescopes and surgically implanted micro-telescopes, Tremblay says.
The new lens system developed by Ford's team uses tightly fitting mirror surfaces to make a telescope that has been integrated into a contact lens just over a millimeter thick. The lens has a dual modality: the center of the lens provides unmagnified vision, while the ring-shaped telescope located at the periphery of the regular contact lens magnifies the view 2.8 times.
To switch back and forth between the magnified view and normal vision, users would wear a pair of liquid crystal glasses originally made for viewing 3-D televisions. These glasses selectively block either the magnifying portion of the contact lens or its unmagnified center. The liquid crystals in the glasses electrically change the orientation of polarized light, allowing light with one orientation or the other to pass through the glasses to the contact lens.
The team tested their design both with computer modeling and by fabricating the lens. They also created a life-sized model eye that they used to capture images through their contact lens-eyeglasses system. In constructing the lens, researchers relied on a robust material commonly used in early contact lenses called polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA). The team needed that robustness because they had to place tiny grooves in the lens to correct for aberrant color caused by the lens' shape, which is designed to conform to the human eye.
Tests showed that the magnified image quality through the contact lens was clear and provided a much larger field of view than other magnification approaches, but refinements are necessary before this proof-of-concept system could be used by consumers. The researchers report that the grooves used to correct color had the side effect of degrading image quality and contrast. These grooves also made the lens unwearable unless it is surrounded by a smooth, soft "skirt," something commonly used with rigid contact lenses today. Finally, the robust material they used, PMMA, is not ideal for contact lenses because it is gas-impermeable and limits wear to short periods of time.
The team is currently pursuing a similar design that will still be switchable from normal to telescopic vision, but that will use gas-permeable materials and will correct aberrant color without the need for grooves to bend the light. They say they hope their design will offer improved performance and better sight for people with macular degeneration, at least until a more permanent remedy for AMD is available.
"In the future, it will hopefully be possible to go after the core of the problem with effective treatments or retinal prosthetics," Tremblay says. "The ideal is really for magnifiers to become unnecessary. Until we get there, however, contact lenses may provide a way to make AMD a little less debilitating."
###
Paper: "Switchable telescopic contact lens," E. Tremblay et al., Optics Express, Vol. 21, Issue 13, pp. 15980-15986 (2013). (http://www.opticsinfobase.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-21-13-15980)
EDITOR'S NOTE: Images are available to members of the media upon request. Contact Angela Stark, astark@osa.org.
About Optics Express
Optics Express reports on new developments in all fields of optical science and technology every two weeks. The journal provides rapid publication of original, peer-reviewed papers. It is published by the Optical Society and edited by Andrew M. Weiner of Purdue University. Optics Express is an open-access journal and is available at no cost to readers online at http://www.OpticsInfoBase.org/OE.
About OSA
Uniting more than 180,000 professionals from 175 countries, the Optical Society (OSA) brings together the global optics community through its programs and initiatives. Since 1916 OSA has worked to advance the common interests of the field, providing educational resources to the scientists, engineers and business leaders who work in the field by promoting the science of light and the advanced technologies made possible by optics and photonics. OSA publications, events, technical groups and programs foster optics knowledge and scientific collaboration among all those with an interest in optics and photonics. For more information, visit http://www.osa.org.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
A telescope for the eye: New contacts may improve sight for macular degeneration patientsPublic release date: 27-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Angela Stark astark@osa.org 202-416-1443 The Optical Society
Slimmed-down telescopic contact lens switches between magnified and normal vision using a modified pair of liquid crystal eyeglasses
WASHINGTON, June 27, 2013Contact lenses correct many people's eyesight but do nothing to improve the blurry vision of those suffering from age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of blindness among older adults in the western world. That's because simply correcting the eye's focus cannot restore the central vision lost from a retina damaged by AMD. Now a team of researchers from the United States and Switzerland led by University of California San Diego Professor Joseph Ford has created a slim, telescopic contact lens that can switch between normal and magnified vision. With refinements, the system could offer AMD patients a relatively unobtrusive way to enhance their vision. The team reports its work today in the Optical Society's (OSA) open-access journal Optics Express.
Visual aids that magnify incoming light help AMD patients see by spreading light around to undamaged parts of the retina. These optical magnifiers can assist patients with a variety of important everyday tasks such as reading, identification of faces, and self-care. But these aids have not gained widespread acceptance because they either use bulky spectacle-mounted telescopes that interfere with social interactions, or micro-telescopes that require surgery to implant into the patient's eye.
"For a visual aid to be accepted it needs to be highly convenient and unobtrusive," says co-author Eric Tremblay of the cole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. A contact lens is an "attractive compromise" between the head-mounted telescopes and surgically implanted micro-telescopes, Tremblay says.
The new lens system developed by Ford's team uses tightly fitting mirror surfaces to make a telescope that has been integrated into a contact lens just over a millimeter thick. The lens has a dual modality: the center of the lens provides unmagnified vision, while the ring-shaped telescope located at the periphery of the regular contact lens magnifies the view 2.8 times.
To switch back and forth between the magnified view and normal vision, users would wear a pair of liquid crystal glasses originally made for viewing 3-D televisions. These glasses selectively block either the magnifying portion of the contact lens or its unmagnified center. The liquid crystals in the glasses electrically change the orientation of polarized light, allowing light with one orientation or the other to pass through the glasses to the contact lens.
The team tested their design both with computer modeling and by fabricating the lens. They also created a life-sized model eye that they used to capture images through their contact lens-eyeglasses system. In constructing the lens, researchers relied on a robust material commonly used in early contact lenses called polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA). The team needed that robustness because they had to place tiny grooves in the lens to correct for aberrant color caused by the lens' shape, which is designed to conform to the human eye.
Tests showed that the magnified image quality through the contact lens was clear and provided a much larger field of view than other magnification approaches, but refinements are necessary before this proof-of-concept system could be used by consumers. The researchers report that the grooves used to correct color had the side effect of degrading image quality and contrast. These grooves also made the lens unwearable unless it is surrounded by a smooth, soft "skirt," something commonly used with rigid contact lenses today. Finally, the robust material they used, PMMA, is not ideal for contact lenses because it is gas-impermeable and limits wear to short periods of time.
The team is currently pursuing a similar design that will still be switchable from normal to telescopic vision, but that will use gas-permeable materials and will correct aberrant color without the need for grooves to bend the light. They say they hope their design will offer improved performance and better sight for people with macular degeneration, at least until a more permanent remedy for AMD is available.
"In the future, it will hopefully be possible to go after the core of the problem with effective treatments or retinal prosthetics," Tremblay says. "The ideal is really for magnifiers to become unnecessary. Until we get there, however, contact lenses may provide a way to make AMD a little less debilitating."
###
Paper: "Switchable telescopic contact lens," E. Tremblay et al., Optics Express, Vol. 21, Issue 13, pp. 15980-15986 (2013). (http://www.opticsinfobase.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-21-13-15980)
EDITOR'S NOTE: Images are available to members of the media upon request. Contact Angela Stark, astark@osa.org.
About Optics Express
Optics Express reports on new developments in all fields of optical science and technology every two weeks. The journal provides rapid publication of original, peer-reviewed papers. It is published by the Optical Society and edited by Andrew M. Weiner of Purdue University. Optics Express is an open-access journal and is available at no cost to readers online at http://www.OpticsInfoBase.org/OE.
About OSA
Uniting more than 180,000 professionals from 175 countries, the Optical Society (OSA) brings together the global optics community through its programs and initiatives. Since 1916 OSA has worked to advance the common interests of the field, providing educational resources to the scientists, engineers and business leaders who work in the field by promoting the science of light and the advanced technologies made possible by optics and photonics. OSA publications, events, technical groups and programs foster optics knowledge and scientific collaboration among all those with an interest in optics and photonics. For more information, visit http://www.osa.org.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Armed with one of the first fourth-generation (a.k.a. Haswell) processors on the market, the Virtue offers strong processing performance, aided by the included 16GB of DDR3 1600MHz memory. The 3.5GHz Core i7-4770K is also unlocked for overclocking. The new processor offers powerful performance, completing PCMark 7 with a score of 7,042 points and a Cinebench score of 9.59 points, topping almost every competitor from the previous generation, and blowing past the Editors' Choice HP Envy Phoenix h9-1302t (4,033 points).
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Public release date: 28-Jun-2013
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