Bionic eyes for the blind to see

Scientists develop bionic eye intelligent and elegant. Glasses, says that could soon be on sale and help hundreds of thousands of blind people in the world, experience the gift of sight. The "intelligent glasses", developed by a team of scientists from Oxford University in the UK, uses cameras and a small handheld device to notify the owners of the objects and people to come.

Cheap, lightweight

The cheap and lightweight glasses, which could be on sale by 2014 following successful trials, would make it easier for the blind to navigate roads in busy neighborhoods and even read bus numbers, the researchers said.

Elderly people with age-related macular degeneration are likely to be the biggest beneficiaries, the Daily Mail reported.

Past technological endeavours to create such a device have resulted in large dark spectacles accompanied by clunky cameras and bulky computers.

But advances in technology mean it should be possible to create bionic spectacles that look almost indistinguishable from standard glasses.

Importantly, a price tag of less than a thousand pounds should make them affordable, the researchers told the Royal Society's Summer Science Exhibition.

“It is satisfying to think that we will be able to produce this at a cost that is going make it available to the people who will benefit the most,” according to Dr Stephen Hicks, who has completed the basic research and is now working on prototype spectacles.

He envisages transparent glasses with lenses studded with small light-emitting diodes and cameras the size of a pinhead at the outside top corners of the frame.

The cameras will photograph the information the eyes should see and send the images through a cable to a mobile phone-sized computer which could be placed in the wearer's pocket.

The computer will process information and to simplify it into a dot pattern. Light-emitting diodes in the lenses so bright up in the scheme which gives important information about the wearer ahead.

Eat dirt to protect against toxins, parasites

A new study has given the most likely explanation for the man geophagia - eating earth - it protects the stomach against toxins, parasites and pathogens. The first written mention of the man comes geophagia Hippocrates over 2,000 years, said Will Young, a researcher at Cornell University and lead author of the study.

Since then, consumption of soil have been reported on every inhabited continent and in almost all countries. Despite its ubiquity, scientists have so far been unable to definitively explain why people crave the field. Several hypotheses have been considered as plausible.

Some researchers have theorized that the Earth has a protective effect, working as a shield against the ingestion of parasites, pathogens and plant toxins. The study analyzed the youth and his colleagues reports of missionaries, doctors planting, explorers, anthropologists and compile a database of more than 480 cultural geophagia. The database contains much information as possible about the circumstances in which the Earth has been consumed and by whom. Overall, the Cornell researchers found the hypothesis of protection adapted to better data.

Database shows that geophagia been documented for most women in the stages of pregnancy and in pre-adolescent children. The two categories of people are particularly susceptible to pests and pathogens, according to Young and his colleagues. 

In addition geophagia most common in tropical climates, where food-borne microbes are abundant.

Finally, the database shows that people often eat dirt during episodes of gastrointestinal stress. Further study would be useful to confirm the hypothesis of protection, but the data available at that time clearly supports further explanation, the researchers said. The study will be published in the June issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology.

adulterated tea powder sold in Goa: FDA

Panaji, May 13 (PTI) Goa Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said that chemistry experiments with tea bags from Calcutta and Assam based companies have confirmed that 'adulterated tea powder' was sold Goa. Authorities said today that tests on the powder seized from suspects tea wholesaler, revealed that it had been dyed. colors soluble in oil was found in the tea powder, said assistant controller drugs, RY Arlekar, PTI. Adding color is prohibited under the Food Adulteration Act legislation, 1964. Arlekar said the department would now continue wholesaler and perhaps also the manufacturers of powdered tea. When a raid on May 3, 580 bags of five kilograms each brand Ruby Kolkata and Assam-based tea powder Sona brand were seized from a storage facility in the village of USGAO.

The wife too tired for sex? Blame it on faster sleeping cycle

LONDON: Women who say they are simply too tired for sex may be the truth, not just fantasy. They operate on a biological clock sleep different for men and the need to go to bed earlier because of it, according to a new Harvard study.

Circadian rhythms of women who held six minutes faster than men, making them much more likely that early risers rather than night owls.

Jeanne Duffy, study co-author from Harvard, said: "What we found was that the cycle length of the biological clock in women was shorter on average than it was in men. The average difference was about six minutes." 
Researchers from insomnia in women 50% more often than their male counterparts, especially the kind early morning when they wake up and can not fall asleep again, the Daily Mail But women can become chronic lack of sleep because they try to fight their sleep cycles and increasing too fast at night, before being awakened early in the light.


The results were published in the Harvard researchers at Brigham and Women;s Hospital, which is based on the results obtained with 157 people who have spent eight weeks to sleep in a windowless laboratory in Boston. They were completely isolated from the time signals from the outside world, so their body clocks to return to the natural circadian rhythm