Sleep gets better with age

Article first published as Older Adults Get Better Sleep on Technorati.

Researchers have found that sleep gets better with age. Although, people in their 40's feel some difficulty in sleeping, sleep actually improves, when people pass their 50's.

"This flies in the face of popular belief," says Dr. Michael Grandner, lead author of the study. "These results force us to re-think what we know about sleep in older people — men and women."

Researchers from Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology at the University of Pennsylvania surveyed more than 150,000 older people on telephone. They have asked them about their sleep. They have also asked them about the education, depressed mood, race, income and general health.

Researchers have observed that sleep may be affected by poor health but old age is not the single factor affecting the sleep. They found in the survey that sleep problems decrease with age and the least complaints about sleep were found in the people with more than 70 years of age.

Researchers have concluded that advancing age was not associated with increased self-reported sleep disturbance or self-reported tiredness/lack of energy. These results suggest that the often-reported increase in sleep problems with age is a nonlinear phenomenon, mediated by factors other than physiologic aging.

Flu medicine is found to be helpful in serious brain injury

Article first published as Severe Brain Injury Can Be Rapidly Treated With a Flu Medicine on Technorati.

Researchers have successfully confirmed that a flu medicine, amantadine, is efficient in treating the brain injury.

Their findings are consistent with observational reports suggesting the acceleration of recovery in patients who are receiving amantadine and the deceleration or loss of function after treatment is discontinued.

Researchers worked on 184 patients, who were in minimal conscious state for 4-16 weeks after severe brain injury. They divided the patients in two groups, one receiving the drug, amantadine, while the other received the dummy medicine i.e. placebo, for 4 weeks. Researchers have found that the group, which received the flu drug showed rapid improvement. They were better able to follow commands and reliably saying yes or no. They were also better able to use a spoon or hairbrush.

Researchers have discovered that very few, i.e. 17% of, patients of amantadine group remain in the “vegetative state” as compared to the other group, in which 32% remain in “vegetative state”.

Researchers have also given directions for future studies. Future research should focus on determining the pathophysiological characteristics of patients who have a response to amantadine, the most effective dosage and duration of treatment and timing of its initiation, and the effectiveness of amantadine in patients with nontraumatic brain injuries.

This research has been published online in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Zynga has rolled out on a new platform

Article first published as Zynga’s New Individual Platform for Social Gaming on Technorati.

Zynga, the leading provider of social games on Facebook, has announced a separate platform for the social gaming.

The new platform is Zynga.com, which according to the company will allow “new ways to play and more people to play with”. The new platform will also allow the third party developers to make the games to be played by the players of Zynga.

“We built Zynga.com to give our players more ways to connect with each other and play great social games whether built by Zynga or other talented developers,” said Mark Pincus, founder and CEO, Zynga. “Together with our platform partners, we look forward to bringing more play to the world on our platform.”

Although, Zynga gets 96% of its revenue from the world No. 1 social networking site through the sale of virtual goods to its customers on games such as CityVille, FarmVille and MafiaWars, but now it has planned to develop a separate identity.

Zynga will allow the players to login through Facebook ID and play games with not only their existing friends but also with other players, i.e. zFriends.

“Zynga.com was created based on listening to players and understanding what they want and need to make their play time more fun and meaningful,” said Manuel Bronstein, general manager of Zynga.com. “We are excited to give players a way to connect with other people who love to play the same games in a destination that is all and only about games. We will continue to listen to player feedback and provide even better ways for them to connect and play together.”

Further Reading:

Zynga

Arctic sea ice is removing rapidly

Researchers from different countries including Son Nghiem of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., U.S. have found that the rapid removal of prennial Arctic Sea Ice is the result of mercury accumulation in  fish.

Researchers have found that the removal of perennial sea ice leads to accumulation of saltier ice, leading to bromine reaction resulting in the change of gaseous mercury to a toxic pollutant.

"Shrinking summer sea ice has drawn much attention to exploiting Arctic resources and improving maritime trading routes," Nghiem said.

"But the change in sea ice composition also has impacts on the environment," he said. "Changing conditions in the Arctic might increase bromine explosions in the future.”

From SayPeople,

Researchers are trying to find out the reason of the Arctic’s loss of one million square kilometers of perennial sea ice over the past decade. It has been suggested that this is due to the changing wind patterns over that time period. 

It has been found that in March 2008, there was a 50 year low record of year-round perennial sea ice, shrinking by an area equivalent to the combined size of Arizona and Texas. 

Ngheim said that the bromine explosion could be increased, “if sea ice continues to be dominated by younger saltier ice, and Arctic extreme cold spells occur more often”.

Further Reading:
SayPeople

AMD has taken SeaMicro

Article first published as AMD Acquires SeaMicro, Enhances Cloud Based Computation on Technorati.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Inc. announced yesterday that it has reached an agreement to acquire SeaMicro for $334 million, of which $281 million will be paid in cash.

The strategy behind this acquisition is to improve cloud based computation while using the energy efficient and high bandwidth microservers of SeaMicro.

“By acquiring SeaMicro, we are accelerating AMD’s transformation into an agile, disruptive innovator capable of staking a data center leadership position,” said Rory Read, president and CEO, AMD.  “SeaMicro is a pioneer in low-power server technology.  The unmatched combination of AMD’s processing capabilities, SeaMicro’s system and fabric technology, and our ambidextrous technology approach uniquely positions AMD with a compelling, differentiated position to attack the fastest growing segment of the server market.”

AMD has reported that a range of different processors and platforms will be launched, by combining the technologies of both the companies helping to reduce the cost consumption, energy utilization, and data center complexity while enhancing the performance. First AMD Opteron processor-based solutions combined with SeaMicro technologies will be revealed in the second half of this year.

IDC predicted that cloud data centers would be the fastest growing part of the server market through 2015 and SeaMicro technologies give pronounced benefits in cloud environments and large data centers.

“Cloud computing has brought a sea change to the data center--dramatically altering the economics of compute by changing the workload and optimal characteristics of a server,” said Andrew Feldman, SeaMicro CEO, who will work as general manager of AMD’s newly created Data Center Server Solutions business. “SeaMicro was founded to dramatically reduce the power consumed by servers, while increasing compute density and bandwidth.  By becoming a part of AMD, we will have access to new markets, resources, technology, and scale that will provide us with the opportunity to work tightly with our OEM partners as we fundamentally change the server market.”

Further Reading:

AMD

New privacy policy by Google

Article first published as New Privacy Policy by Google; Views From Around the World on Technorati.

Google is moving to the new privacy policy from March 1, 2012. In this privacy policy, Google would combine 60 privacy policies for different services into one and the data collected from one Google service will be shared to its other services, websites and products such as Gmail, YouTube and Blogger. Moreover, users will be able to make a comprehensive profile with this new privacy policy.

Fox News has reported that the new privacy policy will allow the company to get even more personal information of its 1 billion users around the world. However, that information will help the search giant to develop more powerful search engine and to improve many other features by the company.

Allan Chiang Yam-wang, Privacy Commissioner in Hong Kong, said that although the new privacy would help Google to get better advertising by understanding the internet users’ web browsing habits but users should have a choice to share their data.

"There is no problem them enhancing the efficiency of their advertising service, but they also need to maintain the autonomy of individual customers" he said. "For example, if I do not want to combine all my data in your services, is there any convenient means for me to opt out?"

Last week privacy commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, in Canada, told Google to explain clearly the privacy issues as there may be some defects in the policy, which must be considered. In a letter to Stoddart, Google has reported that users have not to worry about the new privacy policy.

European regulators warned Google on Tuesday that the new privacy policy by the company is violating the privacy rules and they told them to delay the launch of the privacy policy. France’s data protection agency (CNIL) officials said on behalf of European Union members to the Google chief executive Larry Page,reported that it will investigate the new policy and would send questions by mid-March. “Google’s new policy does not meet the requirements of the European Directive on Data Protection.” The CNIL has

In all these circumstances, users are searching for something to be protected, so Abine may give some solution to the internet users around the world. It is a browser add-on to control privacy online. Moreover, Google has also reported how to keep the data security online.

Fleas were very large in size in Jurassic era

Researchers have found the fossils fleas of Jurassic era in China and have found that those were very large as compared to the present day fleas.

The present day fleas are of the size of 1-10 mm but the primitive fleas of Jurassic and Cretaceous era were 8-21 mm long. They have no jumping specializations and were lacking in smooth jaws of modern fleas as they were armored with saw-like projections in siphoning mouthparts.

“The mouthparts are certainly overkill for piercing the hides of early mammals and birds,” says Engel. “It really appears as though they were specialized for working their way into some heavy hides, such as those on dinosaurs.”

George Poinar, a palaeoentomologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, agrees that without jumping legs, the fleas “would have to crawl or run to find a host”. He adds that “they could have attacked dinosaurs or possibly pterosaurs”.


Further Reading:
SayPeople