higgs boson ipad 3 release date apple store down apple live blog ohio primary cell phone jammer sandra fluke
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
How a bizarre ocean current could create coral refuges
Warming in the Pacific could lead to new currents that create islands of refuge for corals, new research suggests.?
Global warming is expected to have devastating effects on coral reefs, but recent research points to a few exceptions.
Skip to next paragraphWarming in the equatorial Pacific may actually create refuges for corals around a handful of islands, even as it bleaches, or kills, corals elsewhere, suggests new research that predicts increased upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water in these places.
"These little islands in the middle of the ocean?can counteract global trends?and have a big impact on their own future, which I think is a beautiful concept," said study researcher Kristopher Karnauskas, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist, in a press release issued by the institution.
If predictions made by Karnauskas and colleague Anne Cohen are accurate, warming around the Gilbert Islands will be slower than elsewhere, giving the corals and their symbiotic algae a better chance to adapt. Perhaps these refuges could eventually become a source of new corals and other species that could recolonize reefs damaged by warming, Karnauskas said.
Corals are animals that host tiny plants, or algae, that feed them using photosynthesis. The reefs corals build provide important habitat for many species. Warming water can cause corals to expel their algae, a?phenomenon called bleaching, which turns the corals white and puts them under great stress and at risk of death. ?
Global climate models predict the central tropical Pacific will warm by about 5.0 degrees Fahrenheit (2.8 degrees Celsius) by the end of the century. To get a better idea of how conditions might play out on a small geographic scale, the researchers used the global models in combination with a fine-scale regional model.
The low-lying coral atoll islands, part of?the nation of Kiribati, are as small as 1.54 square miles (4 square kilometers).
As a result of other changes?caused by warming, their work predicts the deep equatorial undercurrent (EUC), an eastward flowing current at the equator, will strengthen by 14 percent; this strengthening would create habitat for corals to flourish alongside the islands by bringing cooler water and nutrients to the surface. Though the EUC is an east-to-west current, when it hits an island, water gets deflected upward.
"Our model suggests that the amount of upwelling will actually increase by about 50 percent around these islands and reduce the rate of warming waters around them by about 1.25 degrees F (0.7 degrees C) per century," Karnauskas said.
The research appears in the April 30 issue of the journal Nature Climate Change.
You can follow?LiveScience?senior?writer Wynne Parry on Twitter?@Wynne_Parry.?Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter?@livescience?and on?Facebook.
Copyright 2012?LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
gabby marcel the shell with shoes on ecu john wooden tanuki mirror mirror trailer bob knight
Simons Foundation Chooses U.C. Berkeley for Computing Center
[unable to retrieve full-text content]The Simons Foundation plans to announce on Tuesday that the University of California, Berkeley, will be the home of a new center that combines computing theory with fields like biology or economics.
constitution day coachella 2012 dolly parton stephen colbert running for president richard threlkeld moonrise kingdom coachella lineup
Scaling-up production of biopolymer microthreads
ScienceDaily (Apr. 30, 2012) ? Development of new therapies for a range of medical conditions -- from common sports injuries to heart attacks -- will be supported by a new production-scale microthread extruder designed and built by a team of graduate students and biomedical engineering faculty at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI).
The new microthread extrusion system is in the final stages of testing and validation, and will soon be manufacturing thousands of hair-like biopolymer threads a day at WPI's Life Sciences and Bioengineering Center at Gateway Park.
"The use of these microthreads is spreading across labs here at WPI, and to our collaborators around the country," said Glenn Gaudette, associate professor of biomedical engineering at WPI, who oversaw the development of the new extrusion system. "So we needed greater quantities of the microthreads and a system to standardize and control the production process."
The idea for using microthreads as a basis for tissue engineering was developed in the laboratory of George Pins, associate professor of biomedical engineering at WPI, who was looking for a better way to repair the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in the knee. The current surgical treatment for ACL tears or ruptures, which affect an estimated 100,000 people in the United States each year, involves removing a section of healthy tendon from another part of the body and grafting it into the knee to replace the ACL. While surgery is often required to help patients regain full use of the knee, the current approach is not considered ideal because it injures one part of the body to repair another.
"The ACL, like other ligaments and tendons, is a fibrous cable-like structure," Pins said. "So the original idea was to use thin collagen threads, bundled into cables that mimic the natural structures in the body, as a scaffold for the tissue engineering that would be used to replace the ACL."
Collagen is the main structural protein of the body. It's the building block for skin and connective tissues such as tendons, ligaments, muscle, and cartilage. So Pins and his lab team theorized that thin threads of collagen would be well-tolerated by the body. As the work continued, the team also began making microthreads from fibrin, which is the main protein in blood clots; since clotting is an early response to injury Pins believed that fibrin threads could become useful scaffolds for wound-healing applications.
Initially, Pins and his lab team made each thread by hand, using a large syringe to push out a bead of collagen or fibrin, draw it into a bath of solution, then lift it out by hand to dry suspended over the edges of a cardboard box. "I always looked for the student with the steadiest hands to draw out the threads," Pins said, noting that it was difficult to get the threads to be consistent in diameter and length.
While the hand-drawn method demonstrated the promise of the concept, Pins challenged several of his undergraduate students to develop an automated system for making the threads in a consistent manner. Two Major Qualifying Project (MQP) teams tackled the challenge over the course of two years. Working collaboratively with WPI faculty members in mechanical engineering and robotics engineering, they developed a working bench-scale prototype that automated most of the thread production process. "The prototype worked well, and produced more consistent threads," Pins noted.
By early 2010, interest in the microthreads had expanded beyond Pins's lab, as colleagues at WPI saw opportunities to use them in their own areas of research. With demand for new threads growing, Paul Vasiliadis, a member of one of the MQP teams, began planning to take microthread production to the next level. After earning his bachelor's degree in 2010, Vasiliadis joined Gaudette's lab as a graduate student and became the lead developer of the production-scale extrusion system now being commissioned. Computer-controlled, the new system is capable of continuous extrusion with a range of specified thread diameters and quantities.
"I think this project shows the importance of bringing together multidisciplinary teams, focused on the biology and the engineering, to create solutions that will meet real clinical needs," Gaudette said.
The Pins lab continues to develop the microthread technology for use as potential ligament and tendon scaffolds while also working to optimize the composition and mechanical properties of the threads. For example, they are experimenting with ways to control the tensile strength of the threads, and to control the rate at which the threads dissolve once implanted in the body. They have also developed new technologies to tailor the surface topographies and biochemistries of the microthreads to provide specific signaling cues that they predict will direct cell-mediated tissue responses.
In Gaudette's lab, the threads are being used as biological sutures to deliver bone marrow-derived adult stem cells known as human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) to cardiac tissue damaged by disease or trauma. Studies by Gaudette and others have shown that when hMSCs are delivered to damaged hearts, they moderately improve cardiac function. A major challenge in these studies, however, is getting sufficient numbers of hMSCs to engraft into the damaged heart tissue. Prior methods of injecting the cells into the bloodstream, or directly into the heart muscle, yielded low results, with 15 percent or fewer of the cells injected actually surviving and attaching to the heart muscle. Using the microthreads to deliver cells to the heart has changed that dynamic.
"The early studies are very promising," Gaudette said. "We have developed ways to seed and grow the stem cells on the microthreads, and deliver them directly to the area needed, with more than 60 percent of those cells successfully engrafting. That's a major improvement."
Other researchers at WPI are using fibrin-based microthreads as a platform to restore muscle tissue that was damaged by traumatic injury. In those studies, the microthreads do double duty: they are seeded with new cells that could regenerate muscle tissue, and they serve as a muscle-like scaffold to promote the body's own healing and regenerative processes.
"This is becoming a platform technology, growing in ways we hadn't imagined when we first began this line of research," Pins said. "It's exciting to see the clinical potential for this technology accelerating. And, as an educator, it's gratifying to know how fundamentally important the students' contributions have been to this work."
With testing, validation, and operator training now under way, the new extrusion system is expected to be supplying WPI labs with research-grade microthreads later this spring.
Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:
Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
franklin graham jambalaya taylor swift and zac efron basketball wives manny ramirez bachelor easter 2012
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Ideas For Pay Per Click [PPC] Advertising ? globaldailychronicle.com
The two most successful procedures for enhancing your on line picture are: search engine optimization, and pay per click advertising campaigns.
Essentially it really is all about helping prospects come across your web page and business enterprise. A pay per click on marketing marketing campaign is easy to start. You open up an account and deposit some revenue as a beginning balance together with the online search engine business which you are marketing with. You enter your site?s Url, title and description and bid on pertinent key phrases. A site promoting wine could possibly bid on keywords such as ?wine?, ?red wine?, ?wine club? and so on.
When somebody searches for ?wine club? the specifics of the web page appear, in the kind of a lookup result together with the Url, title and description you entered. When they then click on in your listing, your account is debited the amount you might have bid on that keyword.
Pay for each click on presents a substantial level of assurance that your campaign is reaching the correct target. What tends to make them so efficient is the fact that somebody that has searched for the product is currently qualified once they appear to your web site, that is selling the item or program they?re trying to find. Spend for every click on campaigns, having said that, are not ideal. Without continuous checking, you from time to time threat incurring marketing expenses that will spiral from control, focusing on phrases that do not change properly for the product or services or lose out during a bidding war.
It?s important that your search phrases are relevant and hyperlink for the page that consists of details concerning that keyword. Bidding on key phrases is usually expensive. An alternative approach would be to bid on connected keyword phrases which no-one else is bidding on. You could then be #1 in the rankings, monopolizing the site visitors for all those searches and only must pay the minimal amount for every click through. Related key phrases and phrases can involve synonyms, incorrect spellings, substitute words and phrases, closely related words/phrases, and so forth.
Then, possibly most importantly of all, you need a ?landing page?: (a) distinct page(s) produced for guests referred from advertising campaigns to maximise conversion. Landing pages could be a sequence of connected pages inside an current web-site framework or they can become a microsite, which can be specifically set up to get a marketing campaign, usually with its personal campaign Url ? an illustration is Norwich Union?s (faintly irritating?) quotemehappy
There are distinctive varieties of landing pages that work greatest determined by the marketing campaign goals -a landing web page integrated into the internet sites structure or possibly a landing page particularly made for the marketing campaign.
Built-in pages may well not work so well when it comes to conversion. Bespoke landing pages have a tendency to create greater conversion prices however it calls for more effort and maintenance. So you?ll want to work out no matter whether the cost of creating this type of page is offset from the probably greater conversion rates and much better campaign results.
Some easy recommendations for powerful PPC are preserve advertisements and landing pages relevant; present enough detail for a decision; seize the audience?s imagination and their information as swiftly as possible; forget the guru?s page length, graphics and menu options kind arguments and Discover WHAT Works, as in all direct promoting check, test, check.
Seek good value Wayne Gretzky Jersey from recognized Marian Gaborik Jersey Outlet right away with Swift Shipping, Secure Payment & Wonderful Customer Support at www.rangersjerseysproshop.com.
jerry angelo work it amy chua iowa gop meteor shower tonight annie oakley edc
Search for missing 6-year-old crosses into Mexico
Tuscson, Ariz. police continue to search for a missing 6-year-old girl. NBC's Miguel Almaguer reports and NBC's Ann Curry talks with criminologist Dr. Casey Jordan about the case.
By Becky Bratu, msnbc.com
As the search for a missing Arizona 6-year-old spills into Mexico, police say one of the men captured on surveillance video leaving a club near Isabel Celis' home could be a key witness in the investigation.
According to ABC News, police already?have spoken with a few of the five people seen leaving the club around 1:30 a.m. on the night Isabel went missing. The club is?just a block from Isabel's house in Tucson, and police want to know whether the group noticed anything unusual.?
The girl was last seen around 11 p.m. on April 20 as?she was getting ready for bed. Her father reported her missing the next morning, when he noticed Isabel was not in her bedroom at 8 a.m. and saw the window was open and the screen had been removed.
ABC reports that the search has crossed into Mexico, where U.S. marshals asked local authorities for assistance in the search for Isabel in the town of Sonora.
"The idea that somebody crossed and picked up Isabel and then went back into Mexico is actually realistic," former FBI agent Brad Garrett told?ABC.
KVOA-TV reported that local artists recorded a song to raise awareness about Isabel's disappearance."If anything ever happened to my little girl I would want the community to go out and basically do what ever they can to bring her home," artist Yung Joe told KVOA.
More content from msnbc.com and NBC News:
Follow US News on msnbc.com on Twitter and Facebook
jessie james osu basketball dale sveum jets broncos thursday night football johnny jolly johnny jolly
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)