• Audi presents the A8 with new LTE mobile communications technology
• Michael Dick, Audi Board Member for Technical Development: “We’re getting automotive LTE technology ready for series production”

Audi unveils an A8 wired for broadband with LTE technology. Developed in collaboration with Alcatel-Lucent, the car’s mobile broadband connection can transfer data faster than conventional 3G-technology and modern DSL connections.

Audi A8 L W12 quattro

When people in their 60’s were born there were no computers. The Internet was merely an idea on the mind of some of the science fiction writers of the time and daily life took place on the street: shopping, banking, human relationships, etc. However, over the last 30 years technology has invaded our personal lives, helping us better manage our daily tasks. Children born in recent years are part of the first generation to have literally grown up digital. In contrast, previous generations have had to adapt to this new environment, with all the problems this poses for seniors.

90% of Internet users over 60 are male and spend more than five hours a week online, mostly checking their email (98%), looking for information on leisure activities (67%), reading the news (64%) or banking online (58%). These are some of the results of the Internet usage survey conducted by Panda Security, The Cloud Security Company, within its “Internet in Safe Hands” security awareness campaign available at http://protectyourfamily.pandasecurity.com.

The study, carried out between November and December 2010, surveyed 16,850 Internet users over 60 about their favorite Web activities as well as the main problems they face to adapt to this new digital environment.

Using social networks or actively participating on forums or blogs are not among senior citizens’ favorite activities, as they see them as tools for younger people. They massively prefer email to talk to friends and family (98%) rather than social networking sites (only 28% use them), forums or blogs (11%).

66% of elderly people claim to have average Internet knowledge, whereas 74% feel safe when surfing the Web. 22% use online training resources to increase their technological knowledge.

Also, 54% of users over 60 shop online, with travel packages as the preferred purchase option (62%). Second come software (56% of cases) and music, movies, etc (46%). Food is the least purchased item (10% of cases only).

Internet: An elder-friendly place?

When asked about the main problems they experience shopping online, the most common answer was how difficult it is for them to identify safe, trusted sites to buy from (64%); The second difficulty is to create strong, easy-to-remember passwords (51%), followed by using payment platforms for online shopping (44%). 41% of silver surfers say they use the same password for all their online accounts due to the difficulty of remembering various credentials.

The fourth most important problem is actually finding the information they look for (27%), together with filling out online forms (33%). Other difficulties have to do with website usability (font size and style), connectivity problems, slow broadband connections and the definition of some of the products and services offered on websites.

As for the most dangerous threats on the Web, the most common answer is virus infections (92%); followed by identity theft (83%), more precisely, theft of email credentials and banking data. Spam is also a source of concern for them (57% of cases), as well as the security of banking transactions (50%). Oddly enough, 30% of senior citizens are worried about contacting strangers and 11% are scared of cyber-bullies.

When asked whether they know how to protect themselves from Internet dangers, 59% of them say they are not too sure about it, although they do take some precautionary measures to increase their safety. Avoiding visiting unfamiliar websites (26%), and having an up-to-date antivirus are two of the top good practices they put in place (but only in 15% of cases). 4% say they have a firewall installed and enabled, and 6% browse the Web for the latest security news, tips and recommendations.

Grandchildren on the Web + Grandparents’ Computers = Danger

The hectic rhythm of daily life sometimes makes parents leave children with their grandparents. 13% of seniors over 60 acknowledge the fact that minors use their home computers. When questioned whether they know their grandchildren’s online activities, 42% acknowledge to doing so whereas 39% only know them partly and 18% know almost nothing about them.

45% of kids using their grandparents’ computers do it for chatting, a circumstance known to them. 53% of them even know who children are chatting with.

“Internet in Safe Hands” Campaign

Panda Security’s “Internet in Safe Hands” campaign aims to educate and raise awareness on Internet security as well as protecting the whole family. The campaign focuses on increasing the safety of teenagers, parents and silver surfers by enhancing their knowledge through simple, easy-to-understand contents.

Each area of the website deals with the main difficulties, threats and risks posed to each age group on the Web. Our simple tips aim to increase Internet users’ confidence. The website also contains resources to help users understand the concept of online security and protect themselves, like free courses on viruses and other computer threats, guides in PDF format ready to print and download, etc.

More information at http://protectyourfamily.pandasecurity.com

The challenge is over. Watson, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter concluded their final round of Jeopardy! and the winner was… resoundingly, humankind. After a three night marathon on the quiz show Jeopardy, Watson accumulated $77,147 (£47,923) versus Mr Jennings’ total of $24,000 (£14,907) and Mr Rutter’s $21,600 (£12,416).

Watson’s advances in deep analytics and its ability to process unstructured data and interpret natural language will now be applied to humanity’s most vexing problems. If we can teach a computer to compete on Jeopardy! what could it mean for science, finance, healthcare and the future of society?

Watch the video and see how Watson has the potential to transform industries.

Watson was designed to further the science of natural language processing by competing against the most successful Jeopardy! champions. This white paper explains Watson’s workload optimized system design based on IBM DeepQA software and POWER7® processor-based servers.

Download now

More couples are living together than ever before, but the reasons men give for cohabiting-and the concerns they express about it-differ markedly from women’s, a new study shows.

The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Family Issues, is based on in-depth personal interviews and focus group sessions with 192 young people in their late twenties. Approximately half the participants were men, half were women, and there were approximately equal numbers of white, Black, and Hispanic participants.

Topics included positive and negative aspects of cohabitation, reasons couples might decide to move in together rather than date or marry, reasons not to cohabit, and the kinds of changes that might occur when a couple first moves in together.

“Men and women expressed very different expectations for cohabiting relationships,” said Pamela Smock, a sociologist who directs the University of Michigan Population Studies Center, part of the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). “We found that responses varied by gender much more than they did by race or ethnicity, suggesting a substantial gender gap in the perceived role of cohabitation in the union formation process.”

Smock conducted the study with Penelope Huang of the University of California Hastings College of the Law, Wendy Manning of Bowling Green State University, and Cara Bergstrom-Lynch of East Connecticut State University. The research was supported by grants from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Overall, three key reasons for living together emerged: wanting to spend more time with one’s partner, wanting to share life’s financial burdens, and wanting to test compatibility. But the way men and women talked about these three broad reasons was very different.

Women volunteered “love” as a reason to live together three times as often as men did, while men cited “sex” as a reason to live together four times as often as women did.

Both men and women saw cohabitation as a temporary state in which to gauge compatibility, but major gender differences emerged in the underlying goals of living together. Women saw it as a transitional arrangement preceding marriage, while men tended to see it as a convenient, low-risk way to see if a relationship had longer-term potential, using terms like “test drive” to describe the arrangement.

But the strongest gender differences emerged in the perceived disadvantages of cohabitation. Women believed that living together meant less commitment and legitimacy than marriage, while men saw the greatest disadvantage as a limitation on their freedom.

Despite the gender mismatches in motives and expectations, Smock notes that young adults appear to see cohabitation as an expected part of life. “Ultimately, the clearest message was that living together is very much taken for granted. As a result, the upward climb in the proportion of young adults who cohabit is likely to continue for some time,” she said.

Source: University of Michigan, Institute for Social Research (ISR)

Scientists at Duke University Medical Center have uncovered clues to memory and learning by exploring the function of a single gene that governs how neurons form new connections. The finding may also provide insights into a form of human mental retardation.

In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the scientists explored the gene WRP’s functions in the brain cell (neuron) and then demonstrated how acutely memory and learning are affected when WRP is missing in mice.

“Human genomics studies have opened the floodgates of information that will benefit people with many different diseases,” said Scott Soderling, an assistant professor in the Duke Department of Cell Biology. “But it is impossible to correct something without knowing what the exact underlying problem is.”

The researchers knew from earlier human research into the genetics of one individual that when WRP is disrupted, there might be a possible link with severe mental retardation.

The group conducted experiments using neuronal cells in a lab dish which showed that cells enriched with WRP went on to form many filopodia, finger-like protrusions that neurons use to connect with one another.

Without WRP, neurons ultimately were defective in making filopodia, which meant they could not make the correct number of connections, called synapses.

In studies on mice with and without the WRP gene, the researchers were able to see behavior differences.

In one experiment, they tested normal and WRP-deleted mice for their behavior in recognizing a previously unseen toy versus a familiar toy.

A mouse with the gene will typically spend less time investigating a toy it has seen before, but the knockout mice spent the same amount of time with each toy, suggesting they don’t remember the toy they saw yesterday.

“There was a striking difference between the groups of mice,” said Soderling, who is part of the Neonatal Perinatal Research Institute. “The mice without WRP had difficulty learning and didn’t display typical memory ability in several experiments.”

“Because the excitatory synapses that we are studying form their connections right after birth in humans, we think these specific pathways may even provide an opportunity for early intervention after birth,” Soderling said. “Abnormalities in these types of synapses have been linked to mental retardation, and also to schizophrenia and fetal alcohol syndrome, where there are abnormalities that could later affect learning and memory.”

“What surprised me most is that we had a preconceived notion that WRP would be part of a process that helped the neuronal cell surface fold inward,” said lead author Benjamin Carlson, a graduate student in the Soderling lab. “Eventually we figured out it was just the opposite. When we placed the WRP protein on the inside of the neurons, we could see these buds forming out of the neurons, which then became the longer filopodia and synapses. It is rewarding when you finally think through the possibilities and take a different approach that turns out to yield something valuable.”

Soderling credits his collaborators in the Duke Transgenic Mouse and Bacterial Recombineering Core Facility, which helped to produce the right type of mouse for the research.

Other authors include Krissey E. Lloyd, Allison Kruszewski, Il-Hwan Kim, Clifford Heindel and William C. Wetsel of the Duke Departments of Cell Biology and Neurobiology and the Neonatal Perinatal Research Institute; and Wetsel, Ramona M. Rodriguiz and Marika Faytell of Duke Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Faytell is also with the Mouse Behavioral and Neuroendocrine Analysis Core Facility at Duke. Serena M. Dudek is with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, NC.

This work was supported by National Institutes of Health Grant, March of Dimes Grant Basil O’ Connor Starter Scholar Research Grant, Dana Foundation Grant, and by the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Grant.

Source: Duke Medicine News and Communications

NASA’s Stardust spacecraft returned new images of a comet showing a scar resulting from the 2005 Deep Impact mission. The images also showed the comet has a fragile and weak nucleus.

This pair of images shows the before-and-after comparison of the part of comet Tempel 1 that was hit by the impactor from NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Maryland/Cornell

The spacecraft made its closest approach to comet Tempel 1 on Monday, Feb. 14, at 8:40 p.m. PST (11:40 p.m. EST) at a distance of approximately 178 kilometers (111 miles). Stardust took 72 high-resolution images of the comet. It also accumulated 468 kilobytes of data about the dust in its coma, the cloud that is a comet’s atmosphere. The craft is on its second mission of exploration called Stardust-NExT, having completed its prime mission collecting cometary particles and returning them to Earth in 2006.

The Stardust-NExT mission met its goals, which included observing surface features that changed in areas previously seen during the 2005 Deep Impact mission; imaging new terrain; and viewing the crater generated when the 2005 mission propelled an impactor at the comet.

“This mission is 100 percent successful,” said Joe Veverka, Stardust-NExT principal investigator of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. “We saw a lot of new things that we didn’t expect, and we’ll be working hard to figure out what Tempel 1 is trying to tell us.”

Several of the images provide tantalizing clues to the result of the Deep Impact mission’s collision with Tempel 1.

“We see a crater with a small mound in the center, and it appears that some of the ejecta went up and came right back down,” said Pete Schultz of Brown University, Providence, R.I. “This tells us this cometary nucleus is fragile and weak based on how subdued the crater is we see today.”

Engineering telemetry downlinked after closest approach indicates the spacecraft flew through waves of disintegrating cometary particles, including a dozen impacts that penetrated more than one layer of its protective shielding.

“The data indicate Stardust went through something similar to a B-17 bomber flying through flak in World War II,” said Don Brownlee, Stardust-NExT co-investigator from the University of Washington in Seattle. “Instead of having a little stream of uniform particles coming out, they apparently came out in chunks and crumbled.”

While the Valentine’s Day night encounter of Tempel 1 is complete, the spacecraft will continue to look at its latest cometary obsession from afar.

“This spacecraft has logged over 3.5 billion miles since launch, and while its last close encounter is complete, its mission of discovery is not,” said Tim Larson, Stardust-NExT project manager at JPL. “We’ll continue imaging the comet as long as the science team can gain useful information, and then Stardust will get its well-deserved rest.”

Stardust-NExT is a low-cost mission that is expanding the investigation of comet Tempel 1 initiated by the Deep Impact spacecraft. The mission is managed by JPL for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft and manages day-to-day mission operations.

The latest Stardust-Next/Tempel 1 images are online at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stardust/multimedia/gallery-index.html

More information about Stardust-NExT is at: http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov .

Blocking a factor that can activate the human immune response against intestinal bacteria or certain foods could prevent the development of celiac disease in those most at risk, researchers report in the journal Nature.

The study, to be published early online Feb. 9, points to two chemical signals—interleukin 15 and retinoic acid, a derivative of vitamin A—as triggers for the inflammatory response to gluten, a protein found in many grains that causes celiac disease.

“We found that having elevated levels of IL-15 in the gut could initiate all the early stages of celiac disease in those who were genetically susceptible, and that blocking IL-15 could prevent the disease in our mouse model,” said Bana Jabri, associate professor of medicine and pathology, co-director of the Digestive Disease Research Core Center and a member of the Celiac Disease Center and Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Chicago.

“It also demonstrated that in the treatment of inflammatory intestinal diseases, vitamin A and its retinoic acid metabolites are likely to do more harm than good,” she said.

Celiac disease, which affects about one out of 100 people, is a digestive disorder triggered by the protein gluten, found in wheat, barley and rye. Gluten can trigger an autoimmune reaction in the intestines of genetically susceptible people. This prevents the proper absorption of food and nutrients, and causes a variety of gastrointestinal and extra-intestinal symptoms.

The current treatment for celiac disease is a gluten-free diet. However, many patients improve only partially on a gluten-free-diet, and this diet is difficult to follow, costly and inconvenient. There is a growing interest in finding alternative therapies, such as a vaccine that could prevent disease development in genetically susceptible individuals.

Celiac disease is also associated with autoimmune disorders such as type-1 diabetes and autoimmune thyroiditis. Understanding celiac disease may speed the development of new therapies for these autoimmune disorders.
Finding underlying cause for food allergies

For this study, Jabri and colleagues combined insights and data from celiac disease patients who had been cared for at the University of Chicago’s Celiac Disease Center with experiments using a mouse model of the disease developed in her lab.

Moving back and forth between “human data, where we develop our ideas, and mouse experiments, where we test them,” was extremely helpful, said Jabri. “In turn, the mouse model gave us insights into the human disease.”

They knew that many patients with this disease had high levels of Interleukin 15 in their intestines. When the researchers increased the levels of this signaling molecule in mouse intestines, the mice developed all the early symptoms of celiac disease. Adding retinoic acid to the mix only made the symptoms worse.

“In a stressed intestinal environment,” the authors note, “retinoic acid, which was thought to lessen inflammation in the intestine, acted as an adjuvant that promoted rather than prevented inflammatory cellular and humoral responses to fed antigen.”

This pro-inflammatory effect in a stressed intestine also may help explain the connections between Accutane—a vitamin A metabolite given for the treatment of severe acne—and the onset of inflammatory bowel disease.

When researchers blocked IL-15, however, the diseased mice reverted to normal, and were once again able to tolerate gluten.

Clinical trials of medications that block IL-15 are already under way for patients with rheumatoid arthritis, another inflammatory disorder. Early results have been encouraging. Blocking IL-15 or IL-15 signaling may be a way to restore oral tolerance to gluten and allow effective responses to vaccines aimed at preventing development of celiac disease, Jabri said.

This study is the first to identify an abnormal pathway leading to loss of tolerance to dietary antigens. It suggests that a “dysregulated intestinal environment may be the underlying cause for food allergies,” Jabri said. What type of dysregulation is responsible for other food allergies, such as to peanuts, is not yet known.

Although the IL-15 plus retinoic acid combination leads to inflammation and tissue damage in those at risk for celiac disease, the authors suggest that for those who are less genetically susceptible, the same combination could help enhance vaccines against several bacterial infections that cause diarrheal diseases. Children in developing countries often lack vitamin A. But vaccination with selected bacterial proteins plus vitamin A, instead of using live viruses, may be able to decrease the risks and increase the protective response.

The Digestive Disease Research Core Center at the University of Chicago, the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health funded this research. Additional authors include R.W. DePaolo, V. Abadie, F. Tang, H. Felhner-Peach, W. Wang, C. Semrad, S. Kupfer and S. Guandalini of the University of Chicago; J.A. Hall and Y. Belkaid of the NIAID; E.V. Marietta and J.A. Murray of the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine; D.D. Kasarda of the U.S. Department of Agriculture; and T.A. Waldman of the National Cancer Institute.

Source: The University of Chicago

A British scientific expedition has discovered the world’s deepest undersea volcanic vents, known as ‘black smokers’, 3.1 miles (5000 metres) down in the Cayman Trough in the Caribbean. Using a deep-diving vehicle remotely controlled from the Royal Research Ship James Cook, the scientists found slender spires made of copper and iron ores on the seafloor, erupting water hot enough to melt lead, nearly half a mile deeper than anyone has seen before.

Mapping the seafloor with multibeam sonar (schematic by British Antarctic Survey)

Deep-sea vents are undersea springs where superheated water erupts from the ocean floor. They were first seen in the Pacific three decades ago, but most are found between one and two miles deep. Scientists are fascinated by deep-sea vents because the scalding water that gushes from them nourishes lush colonies of deep-sea creatures, which has forced scientists to rewrite the rules of biology. Studying the life-forms that thrive in such unlikely havens is providing insights into patterns of marine life around the world, the possibility of life on other planets, and even how life on Earth began.

The expedition to the Cayman Trough is being run by Drs Doug Connelly, Jon Copley, Bramley Murton, Kate Stansfield and Professor Paul Tyler, all from Southampton, UK. They used a robot submarine called Autosub6000, developed by engineers at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) in Southampton, to survey the seafloor of the Cayman Trough in unprecedented detail. The team then launched another deep-sea vehicle called HyBIS, developed by team member Murton and Berkshire-based engineering company Hydro-Lek Ltd, to film the world’s deepest vents for the first time.

“Seeing the world’s deepest black-smoker vents looming out of the darkness was awe-inspiring,” says Copley, a marine biologist at the University of Southampton’s School of Ocean and Earth Science (SOES) based at the NOC and leader of the overall research programme. “Superheated water was gushing out of their two-storey high mineral spires, more than three miles deep beneath the waves.” He added: “We are proud to show what British underwater technology can achieve in exploring this frontier – the UK subsea technology sector is worth £4 billion per year and employs 40,000 people, which puts it on a par with our space industry.”

The Cayman Trough is the world’s deepest undersea volcanic rift, running across the seafloor of the Caribbean. The pressure three miles deep at the bottom of the Trough – 500 times normal atmospheric pressure – is equivalent to the weight of a large family car pushing down on every square inch of the creatures that live there, and on the undersea vehicles that the scientists used to reveal this extreme environment. The researchers will now compare the marine life in the abyss of the Cayman Trough with that known from other deep-sea vents, to understand the web of life throughout the deep ocean. The team will also study the chemistry of the hot water gushing from the vents, and the geology of the undersea volcanoes where these vents are found, to understand the fundamental geological and geochemical processes that shape our world.

“We hope our discovery will yield new insights into biogeochemically important elements in one of the most extreme naturally occurring environments on our planet,” says geochemist Doug Connelly of the NOC, who is the Principal Scientist of the expedition.

“It was like wandering across the surface of another world,” says geologist Bramley Murton of the NOC, who piloted the HyBIS underwater vehicle around the world’s deepest volcanic vents for the first time. “The rainbow hues of the mineral spires and the fluorescent blues of the microbial mats covering them were like nothing I had ever seen before.”

“Our multidisciplinary approach – which brings together physics, chemistry, geology and biology with state-of-the-art underwater technology – has allowed us to find deep-sea vents more quickly than ever before,” adds oceanographer Kate Stansfield of the NOC.

The team aboard the ship includes students from the UK, Ireland, Germany and Trinidad. “This expedition has been a superb opportunity to train the next generation of marine scientists at the cutting edge of deep-sea research,” says marine biologist Paul Tyler of SOES, who heads the international Census of Marine Life Chemosynthetic Ecosystems (ChEss) programme.

The expedition will continue to explore the depths of the Cayman Trough until 20th April. The team are posting daily updates on their expedition website at http://www.thesearethevoyages.net/, including photos and videos from their research ship. “We look forward to sharing the excitement of exploring the deep ocean with people around the world,” says Copley.

In addition to the scientists from Southampton, the team aboard the ship includes researchers from the University of Durham in the UK, the University of North Carolina Wilmington and the University of Texas in the US, and the University of Bergen in Norway. The expedition members are also working with colleagues ashore at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Duke University in the US to analyse the deep-sea vents.

The expedition is part of a research project funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council to study the world’s deepest undersea volcanoes. The research team will return to the Cayman Trough for a second expedition using the UK’s deep-diving remotely-operated vehicle Isis, once a research ship is scheduled for the next phase of their project.

The scientists will be posting updates about their progress live from the ship at www.thesearethevoyages.net

Source: National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (UK).

New research from the University of Cambridge sheds light on how fleas jump, reaching speeds as fast as 1.9 meters per second.

In 1967, a scientist by the name of Henry Bennet-Clark discovered that fleas store the energy needed to catapult themselves into the air in a pad made of the unique ‘elastic’ protein resilin. However, in the intervening years, debate raged about exactly how fleas harness this explosive energy. Scientists came up with competing hypotheses, but it wasn’t until recently that the technology necessary to record and analyse the data became available.

Using high-speed recording equipment and sophisticated mathematical models, Professor Malcolm Burrows and Dr Gregory Sutton from the University’s Department of Zoology, were able to prove that fleas use their toes to push off and propel themselves into the air, resolving the 44 year old mystery. Their findings are published today, 10 February, in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

“We were concerned about how difficult it would be to make the movies because we are used to filming locusts, which are much bigger than fleas,” admits Sutton.

But he and Burrows realised that the fleas stayed perfectly still in the dark and only jumped when the lights went on. Focusing the camera on the stationary insects in low light, the duo successfully filmed 51 jumps from 10 animals. This was when they got their first clue as to how the insects jump.

In the majority of the jumps, two parts of the flea’s complicated leg – the tarsus (toe) and trochanter (knee) – were in contact with the ground for the push off, but in 10% of the jumps, only the tarsus (toe) touched the ground. If 10% of the jumps didn’t use the trochanter (knee), was it really necessary, or were the fleas using two mechanisms to get airborne?

Analysing the movies, the scientists could see that the insects continued accelerating during take-off, even when the trochanter (knee) was no longer pushing down. And the insects that jumped without using the trochanter (knee) accelerated in exactly the same way as the insects that jumped using the trochanter (knee) and tarsus (toe). Also, when Burrows and Sutton looked at the flea’s leg with scanning electron microscopy, the tibia (shin) and tarsus (toe) were equipped with gripping claws, but the trochanter (knee) was completely smooth, preventing it from getting a good grip to push off.

Sutton and Burrows suspected that the insects push down through the tibia (shin) onto the tarsus (toe). Using a mathematical model that could reproduce the flea’s trajectory, the scientists were able to confirm that the insects transmit the force from the spring in the thorax through leg segments acting as levers to push down on the tarsus (toe), solving the 44 year old mystery.

Source: University of Cambridge