Other News
Wireless Wizards Scoop UK's Biggest Innovation Prize
CSR plc, the Cambridge-based wireless silicon company, has won this year's Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award for its single chip BlueCore™ family, the revolutionary devices which have fuelled the inexorable rise of Bluetooth wireless products, from mobile phones to medical devices.
The five-strong team of engineers, CEO John Hodgson, Commercial Director Dr Phil O'Donovan, Technical Director James Collier, Sales Director Glenn Collinson and VP of Operations Chris Ladas, receive a tax-free prize of £50,000 between them plus a gold medal for the company from HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, at Buckingham Palace on Monday 6 June 2005. Prince Philip is the Academy's Senior Fellow and has presented the MacRobert Award every year since its inception in 1969.
CSR's key technology breakthrough in the late 1990s was to pioneer a silicon chip with an integral radio transmitter.
Critically, CSR's outstanding innovation performance has been matched by commercial success. They floated on the London Stock Exchange in March 2004 and entered the FTSE 250 just four months later. Since 1999 they have designed over 30 different BlueCore™ chips, which are manufactured in Taiwan, and the company is now ranked number one in every Bluetooth market segment. CSR has shipped more than 100 million chips since its foundation, covering 60 per cent of all qualified Bluetooth enabled products, to customers which include industry leaders such as Nokia, Dell, Panasonic, Sharp, Motorola, IBM, Apple, NEC, Toshiba, RIM and Sony using BlueCore™ chips in their range of Bluetooth products.
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Scientists Discover Possible Titan Volcano
A recent flyby of Saturn's hazy moon Titan by the Cassini spacecraft has revealed evidence of a possible volcano, which could be a source of methane in Titan's atmosphere.
Images taken in infrared light show a circular feature roughly 30 kilometers (19 miles) in diameter that does not resemble any features seen on Saturn's other icy moons. Scientists interpret the feature as an "ice volcano," a dome formed by upwelling icy plumes that release methane into Titan's atmosphere. The findings appear in the June 9 issue of Nature.
Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is the only known moon to have a significant atmosphere, composed primarily of nitrogen, with 2 to 3 percent methane. One goal of the Cassini mission is to find an explanation for what is replenishing and maintaining this atmosphere. This dense atmosphere makes the surface very difficult to study with visible-light cameras, but infrared instruments like the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer can peer through the haze. Infrared images provide information about both the composition and the shape of the area studied.
The highest resolution image obtained by the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer instrument covers an area 150 kilometers square (90 miles) that includes a bright circular feature about 30 kilometers (19 miles) in diameter, with two elongated wings extending westward. This structure resembles volcanoes on Earth and Venus, with overlapping layers of material from a series of flows. "We all thought volcanoes had to exist on Titan, and now we've found the most convincing evidence to date. This is exactly what we've been looking for," said Dr. Bonnie Buratti, team member of the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer at JPL.
In the center of the area, scientists clearly see a dark feature that resembles a caldera, a bowl-shaped structure formed above chambers of molten material. The material erupting from the volcano might be a methane-water ice mixture combined with other ices and hydrocarbons. Energy from an internal heat source may cause these materials to upwell and vaporize as they reach the surface. Future Titan flybys will help determine whether tidal forces can generate enough heat to drive the volcano, or whether some other energy source must be present. Black channels seen by the European Space Agency's Huygens probe, which piggybacked on Cassini and landed on Titan's surface in January 2005, could have been formed by erosion from liquid methane rains following the eruptions.
Scientists have considered other explanations. They say the feature cannot be a cloud because it does not appear to move and it is the wrong composition. Another alternative is that an accumulation of solid particles was transported by gas or liquid, similar to sand dunes on Earth. But the shape and wind patterns don't match those normally seen in sand dunes.
The data for these findings are from Cassini's first targeted flyby of Titan on Oct. 26, 2004, at a distance of 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) from the moon's surface.
The visual and infrared mapping spectrometer instrument can detect 352 wavelengths of light from 0.35 to 5.1 micrometers. It measures the intensities of individual wavelengths and uses the data to infer the composition and other properties of the object that emitted the light; each chemical has a unique spectral signature that can be identified.
Forty-five flybys of Titan are planned during Cassini's four-year prime mission. The next one is Aug. 22, 2005. Radar data of the same sites observed by the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer may provide additional information.
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Dolphin Mothers Teach Their Kids to Sponge
The first evidence that marine mammals teach each other to use tools in the wild has been observed in Western Australia among female bottlenose dolphins who use marine sponges as foraging tools.
This behavior appears to have descended from a single 'Sponging Eve', according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay have been observed wearing sea sponge on their snouts since the late 1980s. Its exact purpose is unclear but it seems that sponge feeding aids dolphins when they forage for prey on the sea floor.
"Dolphins use other foraging techniques such as sonar and cooperative hunting but 'sponging' is the only technique to involve tool-use," says Dr Michael Krützen, a former UNSW postdoctoral research fellow and study author. "It seems to be largely passed down from mother to daughter as a form of culture.
"In sponging, a dolphin breaks a marine sponge off the sea floor and wears it over its closed rostrum to apparently probe crevices and the sea floor for fish and other prey," Dr Krützen says.
Sponging has been observed in 15 of 141 known mothers and seven offspring in the Shark Bay population.
Both males and female offspring learn foraging skills from their mother but sponging is selectively taught to females, according to UNSW marine biologist, Professor Bill Sherwin.
The team found that sponging appeared to be passed on mostly within a single family line from mother to daughter. The spongers also showed significant genetic relatedness, suggesting a single, recent ancestor.
The researchers have ruled out ecological and genetic explanations for how sponging is passed between generations of dolphins.
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World Health Organization Drives Efforts to Boost Antimalarial Drug Supply
A three-day conference aimed at ensuring a reliable supply of artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs), the most effective antimalarial medicines currently available, opened in Arusha this week. A dependable supply of ACTs is crucial for preventing hundreds of thousands of deaths each year from falciparum malaria, the deadliest form of the disease. Falciparum malaria causes as many as 400 million infections a year and at least a million deaths, some 80 per cent of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
The meeting, convened by the World Health Organization (WHO), brings together growers of Artemisia annua – the plant containing artemisinin, the raw material needed to manufacture ACTs – with representatives of international and non-governmental organizations, government agencies and companies engaged in making these medicines available to malaria patients and officials from the ministries of health and agriculture of Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda and the ministry of trade of Tanzania.
This is the first time actors involved in every step of the ACT production chain – from seed planting to the processing of artemisinin to manufacturing of finished pharmaceuticals – will meet together.
Since 2001, 51 countries, 34 of them in Africa, have followed WHO’s recommendation that they adopt ACTs as the first-line treatment for malaria. Eighteen countries adopted them in 2004 alone. The resulting surge in demand – from 2 million treatment courses in 2003 to 30 million courses in 2004 and a projected 70 million treatment courses for 2005 – led to a shortfall of artemisinin and ACTs, which WHO announced in November 2004. Participants at the meeting will seek to develop strategies to avert any future shortage.
One key strategy is stepping up cultivation of Artemisia annua; and sights have turned towards East Africa, where it grows well.
Participants in the meeting will review the status of ACT supply and anticipated demand in the light of experiences over the past two years; pinpoint technical questions that need to be addressed by research and identify sources of financial, marketing and technical support for the production of Artemisia annua, artemisinin and WHO-approved ACTs. They will also examine strategies to create a sustainable market so as to reduce the price of these vital medicines.
ACTs are at least 10 times more costly than chloroquine and other commonly used malaria drugs, which are no longer effective in many regions because the malaria parasite has become resistant to them. Twenty-five African countries have received funding for ACT procurement from the Global Fund to Fight TB, AIDS and Malaria, which makes it economically feasible at present for them to purchase these medicines for use in public health facilities.
