Tool

New programming environ for kids ??
http://scratch.mit.edu/

--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Email service worth paying for. Try it for free

Robotics for kids :
http://www.usfirst.org/

--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Or how I learned to stop worrying and
love email again

Do you really know all your Facebook "friends"?

Your private details on Facebook are at risk: Study

Do you really know all your Facebook "friends"? Beware, if your answer
is 'No', as researchers say you could be putting your private details at
risk every time you say 'Yes' to an unknown friend request.

A team at the University of British Columbia in Canada found a worrying
way to evade Facebook's security measures entirely and harvest
information from the popular social networking site.

They created a team of "fake" Facebook users who were able to harvest
tens of thousands of email addresses and private information from
unsuspecting users, without human input, the Daily Mail reported.

Such basic information is often sufficient to launch an identity theft
attack or launch a "phishing" attack to pilfer somebody's bank details,
said lead researcher Yazan Boshmaf.

"An attacker could do many things with this data."

According to the researchers, the fake Facebook users, known as
Socialbots, were software agents that function almost like a social
computer virus and can manipulate a Facebook account, pretending to be a
human being.

The 'Socialbots' created by the team began sending friend requests to
random users. Each was armed with a profile picture and name -- but were
totally unknown to their new "friends".

The team found that one in five users accepted the friend requests, even
without knowing them. The figure rose when the 'Bots' attempted to
befriend the friends of the "friends" they already had on the network.

Because the 'Bots' seemed to be friends of friends, 60 per cent of
people accepted the requests.

The team unleashed 102 Socialbots on the network. Within weeks, they had
made 3,000 friends, they reported in New Scientist.

According to the researchers, many people's privacy settings 'shield'
private data such as email addresses or their physical address from the
public -- but leave the data open to friends.

The team of Socialbots were able to harvest 46,500 email addresses and
14,500 physical addresses from users' profiles.

The attack launched by Boshmaf's team was small scale -- and Facebook's
defences could pick up on large numbers of socialbots.

But if the software were "cleverer" than the basic models used by
Boshmaf, then Facebook's protection would be rendered useless, the
researchers added.

--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Or how I learned to stop worrying and
love email again

Arre bhai ( behen, aur pitaji ) Nikal ke aao ghar say.. :--)

Remain outdoors to reduce nearsightedness

More time spent outdoors is likely to stave off the risk of myopia or
nearsightedness in children and adolescents, new research says.

In parts of Asia, more than 80 percent of the population is nearsighted,
more so than in the 1970s, says the study.

These findings are based on analysis of eight studies on outdoor time
and myopia in children and adolescents, representing 10,400 participants
in total.

Justin Sherwin's team from the University of Cambridge concluded that
for each additional hour spent outdoors per week, the chance of myopia
dropped by approximately two percent.

Nearsighted children spent on average 3.7 fewer hours per week outdoors
than those who either had normal vision or were farsighted, according to
a statement from the university.

"Increasing children's outdoor time could be a simple and cost-effective
measure with important benefits for their vision and general health,"
said study co-author Anthony Khawaja.

These findings were presented at the 115th Annual Meeting of the
American Academy of Ophthalmology.

--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Does exactly what it says on the tin

How to lower pancreatic cancer risk

There are two main ways to reduce one's risk of getting pancreatic
cancer.

* Quit smoking

Smoking is the single biggest known risk factor for developing
pancreatic cancer. It accounts for 40 per cent of all pancreatic cancers
in the U.S.

* Reduce intake of sugary soft drinks

A US research study on 60,000 Singapore Chinese men and women over a
14-year period has pointed to intake of soft drinks as a risk factor for
pancreatic cancer.

*****
Follow :

1) a plant-based diet, at least 5 servings of fruits and vegetables a
day,
2) whole meal foods, less red meat, less fats especially from animals
3) less alcohol
4) be active 30min a day for most days of the week;
5) maintaining an ideal body weight
6) Avoid preserved foods with preservatives

*****
Avoid excess salt/sugar/oil

*****
Avoid processed foods

--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Does exactly what it says on the tin

Prime Number Hide and Seek: How the RSA Cryptograhic Cipher works

"This text explains the mathematics behind RSA -- how and why it works.
The intended audience is just about anyone who is interested in the
topic and who can remember a few basic facts from algebra: what a
variable is, the difference between a prime number and a composite
number, and the like."

Read this ==> http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/rsa.html

/A

Relativity Theory explained

From: http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html

============
**Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity**

In Words of Four Letters or Less

[ 0 ]

So, have a seat. Put your feet up. This may take some time. Can I get
you some tea? Earl Grey? You got it.

Okay. How do I want to do this? He did so much. It's hard to just dive
in. You know? You pick a spot to go from, but soon you have to back up
and and go over this or that item, and you get done with that only to
see that you have to back up some more. So if you feel like I'm off to
the side of the tale half the time, well, this is why. Just bear with
me, and we'll get to the end in good time. Okay?

Okay. Let's see....

[ I ]

Say you woke up one day and your bed was gone. Your room, too. Gone.
It's all gone. You wake up in an inky void. Not even a star. Okay, yes,
it's a dumb idea, but just go with it. Now say you want to know if you
move or not. Are you held fast in one spot? Or do you, say, list off to
the left some? What I want to ask you is: Can you find out? Hell no. You
can see that, sure. You don't need me to tell you. To move, you have to
move to or away from ... well, from what? You'd have to say that you
don't even get to use a word like "move" when you are the only body in
that void. Sure. Okay.

Now, let's add the bed back. Your bed is with you in the void. But not
for long -- it goes away from you. You don't have any way to get it
back, so you just let it go. But so now we have a body in the void with
you. So does the bed move, or do you move? Or both? Well, you can see as
well as I that it can go any way you like. Flip a coin. Who's to say?
It's best to just say that you move away from the bed, and that the bed
goes away from you. No one can say who's held fast and who isn't.

Now, if I took the bed back but gave you the sun -- just you and the sun
in the void, now -- I'll bet you'd say that the sun is so big, next to
you, that odds are you move and not the sun. It's easy to move a body
like ours, and not so easy to kick a sun to and fro. But that isn't the
way to see it. Just like with the bed, no one can say who's held fast.

In a word, you can't find any one true "at rest". Izzy was the one who
told us that. Izzy said that you can't tell if you move or are at rest
at any time. You can say that you go and all else is at rest, or you can
say that you are at rest and all else goes. It all adds up the same both
ways. So we all knew that much from way back when.

Aha, but now wait! The sun puts off rays! So: why not look at how fast
the rays go past you? From that you'd see how fast you move, yes? For
you see, rays move just the same if what puts them off is held fast or
not. (Make a note of that, now.) Izzy had no way to know that, back
then, but it's true. Rays all move the same. We call how fast that is:
c. So, you can see how fast the rays go by you, and how far off that is
from c will tell you how fast you move! Hell, you don't even need the
sun for that. You can just have a lamp with you -- the one by your bed
that you use to read by. You can have that lamp in your hand, and see
how fast the rays go by you when you turn it on. The lamp will move with
you, but the rays will move at c. You will see the rays move a bit more
or less than c, and that will be how fast you move. An open-and-shut
case, yes?

Well, and so we went to test this idea out. Hey, you don't need to be in
a void to do this test. We move all the time, even as we sit here. We
spin, in fact. So they shot some rays off and took note of how fast they
went east, and how fast they went west, and so on. Well, what do you
know? The rays went just as fast both ways. All ways, in fact. They all
went at c, just the same. Not an iota more or less.

To say that we were less than glad to find that out is to be kind. It
blew the mind, is more like it. "What is up with that?" we said. And
here is when old Al came in.

[ II ]

Old Al, he came out the blue and said, "Not only do rays move at c if
what puts them out is held fast or not: they move at c even if you are
held fast or not." Now that may not look like such a big deal on the
face of it, but hold on. What this says is that you can move as fast or
as slow as you want, and rays will go by you at c all the time. You can
have a pal run past you and when you both look at a ray go by at the
same time, you will both see the same ray go by at c! That is a bit
wild, no? You, back in that void, you just can not say if you move or
not -- with the lamp or no. Not that you can't tell: it can't be said.
It's moot!

But for that to be true, then time also has to get in on the act. For
you and your pal to see the same ray go by at the same clip, her idea of
time must be off from your idea of time!

I can hear you say, "No way. That can't be!" But I tell you it is. Old
Al said so. He said, here, I'll show you. Get a load of this. We have
Bert and Dana. Take a bus, and put Bert on the bus. The bus goes down
the road. Dana, she sits here, on the side of the road. He's in the bus
and she's on her ass. And now take a rock off of the moon, and let it
fall at them. It hits the air and cuts in two. The two bits burn, and
then land just as Bert and Dana are side by side. One hits the dirt up
the road a ways, and one hits down the road a ways. Dana sees each rock
at the same time, but Bert sees one rock and then sees the next rock.
Now: if Bert and Dana both see Dana as the one who is "at rest", they
both will say that the two bits came down at the same time. Dana will
say, "I am 'at rest', and I saw them both land at the same time, so they
both did, in fact, land at the same time." And Bert will say, "I move
away from the rock down the road, so when I add that fact in, I can see
that if I were 'at rest', I'd have seen both land at the same time. So
it must be the case that they did land at the same time." Okay, but what
if Bert and Dana now see Bert as the one who is "at rest"? Eh? You get
to pick who is "at rest" and who isn't, no? So make Bert be "at rest".
Now Bert will say, "I am 'at rest', so the one up the road beat the one
down the road, on the way to the dirt, just the way I saw it." And Dana
will say, "I saw them land at the same time, but I move away from the
rock up the road, so when I add that fact in, I can see that the rock up
the road must have beat the one down the road."

So you see, when you give up on the idea of a one true "at rest", then
you have to give up on the idea of a one true time as well! And even
that is not the end of it. If you lose your one true way to see time,
then you also lose your one true way to see size and your one true way
to see mass. You can't talk of any of that, if you don't also say what
it is you call "at rest". If you don't, then Bert or Dana can pick an
"at rest" that isn't the same as what you used, and then what they will
get for time and size and mass won't be the same.

What a snag, eh? I hope you can see how that gave some of them the fits,
back when old Al told us that one. But even so, that ain't the half of
it. I mean, most of us know that if old Al had got hit by a bus at age
ten, we'd have got this far on our own in good time. No, it was what
came next that was the real slap in the face.

[ III ]

Now, I've said a lot here on how to see (or how not to see) how fast you
"move". What I need to tell you now is just what I mean by that word
"move". When I say "move", I also mean that you don't slow down or get
sped up at any time, and that you don't veer to one side at all. When
you move, you just keep all that the same as you go. How we say it is,
you don't have any "pull". Why do I make a big deal out of that, you
ask? Okay, let me tell you.

Cast your mind back to Ari, from way way back when. He's the one who
said that if you are at rest, you tend to stay at rest, and if you move,
you tend to come to rest. He was off, you know, as he had no way to know
that it was the air that has you come to rest. We had to wait a long
time for Izzy to come by and say, "No, Ari: if you move, you tend to
just go on and on. To come to rest, you need to have a pull." The air
will give you a pull, a pull that has you come to rest. Then we also
have the big pull, the one that says what is down and what is up, the
one that has all of us in its grip. Izzy saw that this pull was the same
pull that has the moon in its grip, too. I said that a pull can be a
veer, yes? That is what the pull on the moon does. The moon has to veer
all the time for it to stay with us. Were it not for that pull, it'd
just go off in a line -- no veer -- and we'd just sit here and wave bye
bye. Same with us and the sun. We veer, each hour, or else we'd get real
cold real fast.

But then, see, Izzy had to deal with the way that the pull acts. If a
body has more mass, then it also has more pull, yes? That is why the sun
is the axis we spin upon, and we are not the axis for the sun. But then
why can't it go both ways? You take your ball of lead and your ball of
wood and drop them, they land at the same time. But the lead ball has
more mass, so it must get more pull. Izzy said, "Well, see, a body has
one more kind of pull. This pull is such that it will want to stay put
all the time. And the more mass it has, the more it will want to stay
put. That pull is the 'a body at rest will tend to stay at rest' part of
the deal. So you see, that pull and the big pull are in a tug-of-war,
and they work out so that any mass will fall just as fast."

I call it a "new kind of pull", but it isn't so new: you feel it all the
time. Get in a car and step on the gas -- you feel a pull back into your
seat. Let up on the gas a bit, and the pull goes away. Make a left, and
you feel a pull to the side. Stop, and you feel a pull out of your seat
as you slow down. Or, go to the fair and get on a ride. As you spin, you
feel a pull out, away from the ride. You spin: that is to say you veer,
and veer and veer and veer, just like the moon. If you had no seat belt,
you'd fly off the ride, and you'd fly off in a line. (Well, that is to
say, you'd fly off in a line as a bird sees it. To be fair you'd also
arc down at the same time. But put that to one side.)

Okay but now, see, old Al's big idea did not work when you look at pull.
Go back to when you were lost in the void. You can't say if you move or
not, yeah, but you sure can say if you have a pull on you or not. If you
did, you'd feel it, no? Sure. So then you have no one true "at rest", no
one true way to look at time, or mass, or size, but you do have one true
way to look at a pull? Old Al said, "Erm. I don't buy that." We all
said, "Aah, why not? Just give it a rest, Al." You can see why Al did
not want to give it a rest, I bet. But this one was not such an easy
nut.

[ IV ]

Izzy once said, Look here: say you have a disk that can spin, and so you
put a pail of milk on it and you make it spin. You will see the milk go
up the side of the pail, and fly over and out onto the disk. No big
deal, eh? The spin will make a pull. But now what if you said that the
pail of milk is your "at rest"? Then you have you and the sky and all
that in a big huge spin, and the disk with its pail of milk is the only
body that is "at rest", yes? How can you say then why the milk goes up?
What can make the at-rest milk fly out of the pail like that?

This is why Izzy came to say: Yes, we have no one true "at rest", and
when you move, some may say you do move and some may say you don't, and
that is okay -- but not so with a pull! A pull is a pull, damn it.

But old Al's mind was set. And he had a big clue that that was not the
full tale. I told you that Izzy put a new kind of pull next to the old
kind. Well, even he felt that this new pull was a tad bit odd. Not to
put it down, mind you -- just that this new kind of pull was so much
like the old kind of pull in a lot of ways. You know? Say I put you in a
box, and then put that box out in a void. (But this time I don't need to
have you in a true void. I just want you to be well away from any pull.
You can have a star or two, or as many as you like, as long as you keep
them far off. Okay?) Now, say I tied a rope from the box to a ship, and
then I got in that ship and sent it up, so that it went fast, and more
fast, and more fast ... I just burn up fuel as long as I have any left.
As long as I see to it that you get sped up all the time, and at the
same rate, you will feel a pull that will feel just like the pull you'd
feel if you were back here, at home. If you have a ball of lead and a
ball of wood in that box with you, you can drop them and they will both
land at the same time. That is a bit odd, no? Puts a bug in your ear,
yes? You can bet it put bugs in our ears. But no one had come up with a
good way to say why that was so. Not yet.

Old Al, he took that ball and ran with it. He went off for a year, and
then ten more. Yep. That long. This was no walk in the park, let me tell
you. In fact, some of us said that it was more like a walk off the deep
end! For you see, when old Al came back, he said, "This 'new' pull that
Izzy gave us, it is just the old pull. Not just like it. It is it. The
two are one and the same. And from this, you will then see that we have
no 'one true pull'."

Do you see what he said, here? When you are in that box with the rope on
the ship, the pull you feel won't just act like the pull back home: it
is in fact the same kind of pull! So when you say, "Hey! What if I want
this box to be my 'at rest', huh? What then? Why does this ball fall
down if I'm at rest and all?" -- old Al will say back at you, "Well, you
see, you have this big old void that goes by, and gets sped up all the
time, and that has a pull on you and your box." You'd say, "Get out of
here! The mass in this void is too far away to give me that big of a
pull!" But old Al'd say, "Nope. You don't get it. How much mass you have
in your void is moot. It's the fact that it's all the mass in the void.
All of it but you and your box, that is."

Same with the milk in the pail. If you say that the pail is at rest,
then old Al will say that the spin of all else will pull on the milk,
and make it jump out over the side.

So here is what we get when we boil it all down. Izzy said that you
can't tell if you move or are at rest at any time. You can say that you
go and all else is at rest, or you can say that you are at rest and all
else goes. It all adds up the same both ways. But old Al then said not
only that, but that you can't even tell if you have a pull on you or
not. So, at no time, in no way, can you act so that you can't be seen as
"at rest". You can go this way or that way or jump up or down or what
have you: even so, you can say that you are at rest -- and it will all
add up just the same.

This was the big one for old Al. He'd like to jump for joy, it all came
out just so. But the rest of us, well, we felt more like it was time to
lock Al up, what he said was so wild.

[ V ]

So some of us said, "Al, you are mad. Look here: you want to make this
pull, this pull that we need to keep next to the sun -- you want to make
this very real pull into some kind of fake pull! I mean, what kind of
pull is it that can go away and come back as you pick what to call your
'at rest'? That is no way for a pull to act." And old Al said, "Yeah,
you hit the nail on the head. It is a fake pull." And we said, "Okay,
that is it. You, Al, have lost it." And old Al said, "Feh. Read this and
weep." And we read it, or we gave it a try, more like. It was a real
mess. Some of us got it, but most of us just went, "Huh?" And some of us
said that even if it was true, we'd just as soon stay with the old lie,
Al's idea was so hard to make head or tail of.

But Herb -- what? No, Herb isn't his real name, but I like to call him
that -- But so then Herb was one of the ones who got it, and he went in
with old Al and his new idea, and what they came up with goes like this.

You know all the ways you can move, here. You have your up-and-down, and
you have your east-and-west, and you have your fore-and-back. Well, Herb
had said, we want to add one more way here: time. Yeah, time as just one
more way to move in. Four ways, all told. And now Herb and old Al said,
"Let's take a look at what we can do when we look at here as a four-way
here. Like, what if this four-way here can be bent? We don't mean that
what is in a four-way spot gets bent: what if the very spot gets bent?"
Some of us said, "You two have got bent, is more like it." But they
said, "Ha. Get a load of this."

They said, what if mass puts a bend in this four-way here of ours? The
more mass you have in one spot, the more bent that spot gets. So now
pick out a spot A and a spot B, one on each side of some mass, and each
at its own time. What does it look like when a body goes from A to B?
You will say: A line. Well, yes and no. It is a line, but it's also
bent, as it goes past the bent spot. You see, this line will only look
like a line if you can see all four ways! If you can't see one of the
ways, if for you the way you can't see is what you call time, then you
will see it as a line with a big old veer in it, half way in. Now, take
a lot of mass, as much as our sun has, and pick spot A and spot B to be
near the mass, and to be the same spot but for the time. Well, when you
do that, the line from A to B in the four-way here will be an arc to you
and me! An arc that will spin on and on, with that mass as the axis!

"You see?" old Al said. "You say that the sun has a pull, but when we
spin with the sun as our axis, in the bent-up four-way here we just move
in a line! We don't veer off at all! That is why I say that your pull is
a fake pull. You don't need any pull if you just want to stay on a
line!"

A few more of us got it, then. But most of us just said, "What are you
two on? Put down the bong and get real! This is way too wild to be
true." But they just said, "Just try and see if it isn't true."

So we came up with ways to test old Al's idea, and each time Al hit the
gold. His idea had the sun's rays a tiny bit more red than what Izzy
said. They were. His idea put Mars a tiny bit off from how Izzy had
Mars. It was.

The big one, the one that got told over and over, was the one with the
dark-at-day time. You know, when the moon gets in the way of the sun. At
that time you can get a real good look at a star when it's up next to
the sun. (Next to it in the sky, that is. Not next to it for real. You
know what I mean.) They went off and got a good look at a star that was
very near the sun, and then they used a book to see just what spot that
star was in. You see, the rays from the star pass so near the sun that
they get bent, on the way to us. Old Al, his idea said just how much the
rays get bent. With Izzy, the rays get bent, too, but only by half as
much. So they took a look at the star, and they took at look at the big
book, and ... well, I'll bet you can tell me as well as I can tell you
just how far off that star was.

A-yup.

And then all of us, we all just sat back and said: "Whoa."

And then we all went back to old Al and said to him, "Al, you must have
some kind of head on you, to pull an idea like that out of thin air." We
said, "Why don't you quit this dumb job you have here and come with us?"
We said, "You know what, Al? We like you."

[ end ]

And that is just the way it was. (Well, that is to say, more or less.)
Oh dear me, look at the time! Sigh. I do know how to run on, don't I? It
must be well past time to turn in. Let me show you out. It was very nice
to have you over, and I hope I was of help.

And y'all come back now, hear?

Note: "Herb" actually refers to Hermann Minkowski. (And "Izzy" and "Ari"
are, of course, Isaac Newton and Aristotle.)

Brian Raiter
Muppetlabs
============
/A

http://www.openculture.com/2009/01/the_whole_earth_catalog_is_now_online.html

http://www.wholeearth.com/issue-electronic-edition.php?iss=1010

--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Or how I learned to stop worrying and
love email again

Python Tutorials from "The New Boston"

http://youtube.com/user/TheNewBoston

/A

Steve Jobs's speech

http://www.sify.com/finance/Steve-Jobs-on-staying-hungry-and-staying-foolish-imagegallery-technology-klrnRqdjbei.html

/A

Body suit may soon enable the paralyzed to walk

In a busy lab at Duke University, Dr. Miguel Nicolelis is merging brain
science with engineering in a bid to create something fantastical: a
full-body prosthetic device that would allow those immobilized by injury
to walk again.

On Wednesday, Nicolelis and an international group of collaborators
declared that they had cleared a key hurdle on the path toward that
goal, demonstrating they could bypass the body's complex network of
nerve endings and supply the sensation of touch directly to the brains
of monkeys.

Nicolelis and his collaborators — engineers, neuroscientists and
physiologists from Brazil, Switzerland, Germany and the United States —
are working toward an ambitious objective: On the opening day of the
2014 World Cup soccer tournament in Brazil, they hope to send a young
quadriplegic striding out to midfield to open the games, suited up in
the "prosthetic exoskeleton" they aim to build.

Nicolelis, a Brazilian-born physician and neuroscientist with a
tinkerer's bent, calls that goal a "Brazilian moon shot." And as with
moon shots of the past, his team has recruited a monkey — in fact, two
female rhesus monkeys named Mango and Nectarine — to go first.

The latest experiment of the nonprofit consortium showed that electrical
messages conveying sensation could be sent directly to the monkeys'
brains — in enough detail that both animals could distinguish among
three identical circles by virtually "feeling" their differing textures.

Those sensations did not come from the animals' fingers, but from
specially coded electrical currents delivered straight to each monkey's
sensory cortex by four filaments the breadth of a hair.

Although no one really knows (and the monkeys are unlikely to tell us)
whether one circle felt like sandpaper and another felt as smooth as
glass, Mango and Nectarine quickly learned to discern one circle from
another to complete a task and get their reward: a sip of juice.

The experiment was reported Wednesday in a letter published by the
journal Nature.

For a person with a spinal cord injury, sending such orchestrated bursts
of electrical information to the brain could do more than allow a
patient who has lost sensation to experience the pleasures of touch
again. It could provide the necessary sensory feedback for the user of a
prosthetic walker to navigate uneven terrain and steer clear of dangers
such as hot or slippery surfaces.

The group's latest effort builds upon an earlier accomplishment, in
2003, in which monkeys learned to move a cursor to designated targets on
a computer screen using thought alone.

In another experiment, first described in 2008, Nicolelis' team at Duke
showed that monkeys could learn to initiate movement with their thought
patterns and command a robotic device across the world in a Japanese
robotics lab to walk in real time.

That development was a key step in creating a prosthetic device that
could be controlled by a person incapable of voluntary movement below
the neck. Now, by adding sensory feedback, the latest experiment creates
a loop of command and control that could make the complex act of walking
possible.

Dr. Bruce Volpe, a professor of neurology at Weill Cornell Medical
College who is not involved in the consortium — which its members have
dubbed the Walk Again Project — praised the latest advance. He called it
a "remarkable use of sensory information" that "opens novel ...
possibilities" for patients who have lost movement and sensation to
injury or illness.

Following injury or stroke, patients' recoveries are often hampered by
the "noisy, unresponsive or absent sensory information" making its way
to their brains, said Volpe, who studies and develops interactive
robotic training devices for the rehabilitation of such patients.

"These data suggest new options for generating that missing and
crucially informative sensory information," he said.

The Walk Again Project is one of many research efforts aimed at
restoring movement and repairing tissue in those who have suffered
grievous spinal cord injury. Though much of that work has focused on the
use of stem cells to regenerate nerve and muscle fiber, advances in
neuroscience have made the idea of "neural prosthetics" keenly
attractive.

UCLA physiologist V. Reggie Edgerton, who was not involved in Nicolelis'
work but has pioneered the use of electrical stimulation to initiate
movement in paralyzed patients, said that the brain's innate flexibility
— its ability to take in electrical signals and learn to attach meaning
to them — makes approaches like that of the Walk Again Project highly
promising.

Although the information conveyed to the monkeys' brains in Nicolelis'
lab was not fine-grained, the experiment demonstrated that "sensory
feedback and brain control devices can be combined in real time and in a
useful way," said Kip Ludwig, who directs the program on brain repair
and plasticity at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and
Stroke, which has funded some of Nicolelis' work. "Before, they've
always been separate."

"Ideally, the long-term goal would be a prosthetic that would send all
the sensory information — touch, position, temperature — to the arm that
goes into, say, drinking a cup of coffee," Ludwig added. "This is an
important step, but there's a lot of work yet to be done."

In demonstrating the feasibility of their ideas on nonhuman primates
first, Nicolelis said the team is starting with approaches that are
fundamentally simple. He added that when the experiments move to a
human, he or she will not only learn quickly how to initiate and repeat
movements using thought alone, but the prosthetic should interface so
seamlessly with the intelligent human brain that the patient will begin
to see the prosthetic as a natural extension of himself or herself.

"We are trying to provide the patient a new body, and we believe the
patient's brain will assimilate the new body as part of the sense of
self of the patient," Nicolelis said. "It would be just like a car …
only a little tighter."

melissa.healy@latimes.com

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HTC Android vulnerability

See this
http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/10/01/massive-security-vulnerability-in-htc-android-devices-evo-3d-4g-thunderbolt-others-exposes-phone-numbers-gps-sms-emails-addresses-much-more/

/A