It's a scene football fans will see over and over during the bowl and NFL playoff seasons: a player, often the quarterback, being slammed to the ground and hitting the back of his head on the landing.
Sure, it hurts, but what happens to the inside of the skull? Researchers and doctors long have relied upon crude approximations made from test dummy crashes or mathematical models that infer – rather loosely – what happens to the brain during traumatic brain injury or concussion.
But the truth is that the state of the art in understanding brain deformation after impact is rather crude and uncertain because such methods don't give any true picture of what happens. Now, mechanical engineers at Washington University in St. Louis and collaborators have devised a technique on humans that for the first time shows just what the brain does when the skull accelerates.
What they've done is use a technique originally developed to measure cardiac deformation to image deformation in human subjects during repeated mild head decelerations. Picture, if you will, a mangled quarterback's occipital bone banging the ground, then rebounding. The researchers have mimicked that very motion with humans on a far milder, gentler, smaller scale and captured the movement inside the brain by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

New technique puts brain-imaging research on its head

A vegetated rooftop recycling system has been developed that allows water to be used twice before it is flushed into the communal waste water system.
The Green Roof Water Recycling System (GROW) uses semi-aquatic plants to treat waste washing water, which can then be reused for activities such as flushing the toilet.
GROW is the brainchild of Chris Shirley-Smith, whose company Water Works UK is collaborating with Imperial College London and Cranfield University. The researchers are funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
So-called grey water from washbasins, baths and showers is pumped up to the GROW system, which is constructed on the roof of an office or housing block. It consists of an inclined framework of interconnected horizontal troughs. Planted in these troughs are rows of specially chosen plants that gently cleanse the grey water. Trickling through the GROW framework, the plants' roots naturally take up the dissolved pollutants, leaving 'green water'. Green water is not drinkable and will be dyed with a vegetable colour to signify this, but it can be used to flush toilets or water the garden.

GROWing the next generation of water recycling plants

The next advance in cameras is becoming a reality at the University of Rochester. Imaging chips revolutionized the photography industry, and now the chips themselves are being revolutionized. A pair of newly patented technologies may soon enable power-hungry imaging chips to use just a fraction of the energy used today and capture better images to boot—all while enabling cameras to shrink to the size of a shirt button and run for years on a single battery. Placed in a home, they could wirelessly provide images to a security company when an alarm is tripped, or even allow mapping software like Google's to zoom in to real-time images at street level. The enormous reduction in power consumption and increase in computing power can also bring cell-phone video calls closer to fruition.

Breakthrough Chip Delivers Better Digital Pictures For Less Power

Working hard and being employed may no longer be enough to ward off poverty, according to a study released today by the Sodexho Foundation and Brandeis University's Institute on Assets and Social Policy. The study finds that the U.S. has a large contingency of working poor who do not have sufficient resources to support their families at a minimum economic standard.
The future might be more promising, however. The study shows that new state policies are enabling more low-income households to move from poverty to the middle class by rewarding work effort, enhancing job-related earnings and providing ways to encourage the accumulation of assets such as savings and home ownership.
The study, Innovative State Policies to Reduce Poverty and Expand the Middle Class: Building Asset Security Among Low-Income Households, examines a new domestic policy framework called "asset building." The framework is based on the concept that helping people develop financial assets provides stability and an opportunity to move into the middle class.

American dream, in peril, is successfully pursued through state programs

A standard Internet protocol that checks errors made during email transmissions has now inspired a revolutionary method to transform DNA microarray analysis, a common technology used to understand gene activation. The new method, which blends experiment and computation, strengthens DNA microarray analysis, according to its Carnegie Mellon University inventor, who is publishing his findings in the December issue of Nature Biotechnology with collaborators at the Hebrew University in Israel.
The innovative method combines a new experimental procedure and a new algorithm to identify gene activation captured by DNA microarray analysis with greater sensitivity and specificity. The work holds great promise for vastly improving research on health and disease, according to Ziv Bar-Joseph, assistant professor of computer science and biological sciences at Carnegie Mellon.

Carnegie Mellon U. transforms DNA microarrays with standard Internet communications tool

Most people can rather efficiently walk and chew gum at the same time, but when it comes to more complicated "multi-tasking" – like driving and talking on a cell phone – there is a price to pay.
And no one, it seems, is immune.
"There is a cost for switching from one task to another and that cost can be in response time or in accuracy," said
Mei-Ching Lien, an assistant professor of psychology at Oregon State University. "Even with a seemingly simple task, structural cognitive limitations can prevent you from efficiently switching to a new task."
Psychologists who study multi-tasking have argued for years about whether these "information bottlenecks" occur because people are inherently lazy, or because they have a fundamental inability to switch from one task to another. New studies by Lien and her colleagues at the NASA Ames Research Center in California suggest it is the latter.
Results of their study have been published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Cell phones, driving don't mix

"There is not a complete and optimised 4K [high quality]-workflow for the world of digital cinema, particularly for the effective and seamless handling of film data from acquisition to post-production and transmission. Data compression is the key to achieving this,” says Dr Siegfried Foessel at Fraunhofer IIS and coordinator of the IST-funded project WORLDSCREEN.
The demands for high quality digital cinema applications require huge amounts of data that cannot be effectively handled. The WORLDSCREEN consortium is addressing these challenges by using layered scheme data compression (LSC) algorithms, while at the same time preserving the highest quality possible.
“Our aim is to develop viable compression systems for digital cinema workflows and data,” Dr Foessel says. “At the same time, we are considering the economic aspects of the value chain for LSC D-Cinema, E-Cinema and rich media archives.” (E-Cinema is lower resolution and poorer quality than D-Cinema. It is primarily used for art house content, independent films at live events, streaming applications and in-cinema games and advertising. Hollywood studios demand D-Cinema, the highest quality digital cinema.)

Welcome to the new world of digital cinema

Picture a teaspoon of powdered sugar. As fine a substance as it is, there still are tremendous differences in the sizes of its individual particles. Some are so small, they move around randomly and are invisible to the naked eye.
Now, let's say you wanted to choose only particles of a certain size from those in the spoon. Traditional technology and scientific techniques can separate quantities of particles of different sizes down to a few microns, but beyond that, it's not currently possible to perform this operation at the submicron level. Being able to do so would allow for the production of certain types of drugs that are most effective when inhaled.
How small is a submicron? Consider that a micron is a mere 0.00004 of an inch. Yet unlocking the mystery of how to manipulate, measure and separate very tiny particles has tremendous applications for the pharmaceutical industry and could change how some medications are delivered and how effective they are.

Magnet lab researcher exploring science behind commercial applications of liquid helium

In a keynote address delivered this morning to the U.S. IPv6 Summit in Reston, Va., IEEE-USA President Gerard A. Alphonse urged participants to raise widespread adoption of the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) by Japan, China, Korea and other Asian countries as an issue in the current national policy discussion on U.S. competitiveness and innovation policy.
"Despite its importance, breadth, and all the potential services it will enable worldwide, the current high-level debate has not identified IPv6 as an innovation opportunity of national significance," Dr. Alphonse said. He added: "That's unfortunate because we know that Asian, European and other nations are working very diligently on IPv6, or are even seeking dominance in setting its standards."
While praising a recent government directive requiring federal agencies to adopt IPv6 implementation plans, the IEEE-USA president cautioned: "We shouldn't kid ourselves that the Office of Management and Budget's directive is the same as a national vision, mission and action plan for the United States, and equivalent to the plans already in place in Japan, China and Korea."

IPv6 transition should be part of national innovation debate says IEEE-USA President Gerry Alphonse

Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have discovered a vast network of neurons in the brain of mice that governs reproduction and controls the effects of reproductive status on other brain functions.
In their studies, the researchers found neural circuits that coordinate a complex interplay between neurons that control reproduction and brain areas that carry the neural signals triggered by odorant molecules and those triggered by pheromones, chemical signals produced by animals. The researchers characterize their findings as an initial step in understanding the far-reaching influence that odors and pheromones may have on reproduction and other behaviors.

The brain is broadly wired for reproduction