http://www.kurzweilai.net/23andme-granted-authorization-by-fda-to-market-first-direct-to-consumer-genetic-test

Millions of people across the world take statins to lower their cholesterol level and reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke. Statin use, however, may not reduce the risk of Parkinson’s disease, reveals a new study.

Previous research studies suggested that the use of statins also helped in lowering the risk of Parkinson’s disease. However, a joint study conducted by researchers at the National Institute of Environmental Health Science and Penn State College of Medicine showed that statins may not actually protect a person from Parkinson’s disease.

Xuemei Huang, a professor of neurology at the Penn State College of Medicine, who is also the vice chair of the research, cited the findings of prior studies and suggested that low levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or bad cholesterol, are linked with reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease. However, previous studies did not take into consideration the cholesterol level of patients prior to statin use.

The researchers took into account the level of blood cholesterol, Parkinson’s disease status and medication taken by the patients from an ongoing and long-term Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities study.

Levels of cholesterol were noted every three years after 1987 to 1989, right before statin started to be used widely.

The researchers observed that levels of total cholesterol and bad cholesterol were linked to Parkinson’s disease. However, statin use did not reduce Parkinson’s disease, but instead increased the risk for the ailment in the long term.

Even though the analysis was based on a small number of Parkinson’s disease cases, the researchers claimed, the preliminary findings contradict that statins provide a protection against Parkinson’s disease. Statin may be beneficial for the heart, but it does not benefit the brain.

“One possibility is that statin use can be a marker of people who have high cholesterol, which itself may be associated with lower PD risk. This could explain why some studies have found an association between use of these medications and low incidence of PD. Most importantly, this purported benefit may not be seen over time,”said Huang.

More than 1 million Americans suffer from Parkinson’s disease and it also affects between 4 million and 6 million people across the globe. The actual cause of the disease is unknown and it does not have a cure. However, medicines are given to patients to control the symptoms of the disease.

The findings of the latest study was published in the journal Movement Disorders.

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/34497/20150222/statins-do-not-lower-risk-of-parkinsons-disease-study.htm

A brain area, long recognised as the command centre for human speech, actually shuts down when we talk, scientists have found.

Broca’s area of the brain has been recognised as the command centre for human speech, including vocalisation.

Scientists at University of California, Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University in Maryland have now challenged this long-held assumption after they found that Broca’s area actually switches off when we talk out loud.

The discovery has major implications for the diagnoses and treatments of stroke, epilepsy and brain injuries that result in language impairments.

“Every year millions of people suffer from stroke, some of which can lead to severe impairments in perceiving and producing language when critical brain areas are damaged,” said study lead author Adeen Flinker, a post-doctoral researcher at New York University who conducted the study as a UC Berkeley PhD student.

“Our results could help us advance language mapping during neurosurgery as well as the assessment of language impairments,” Flinker said.

Flinker said that neuroscientists traditionally organised the brain’s language centre into two main regions: one for perceiving speech and one for producing speech.

“That belief drives how we map out language during neurosurgery and classify language impairments,” he said.

“This new finding helps us move towards a less dichotomous view where Broca’s area is not a centre for speech production, but rather a critical area for integrating and coordinating information across other brain regions,” he said.

Flinker and fellow researchers found that Broca’s area – which is located in the frontal cortex above and behind the left eye – engages with the brain’s temporal cortex, which organises sensory input, and later the motor cortex, as we process language and plan which sounds and movements of the mouth to use, and in what order. However, the study found, it disengages when we actually start to utter word sequences.

“Broca’s area shuts down during the actual delivery of speech, but it may remain active during conversation as part of planning future words and full sentences,” Flinker said.

The study tracked electrical signals emitted from the brains of seven hospitalised epilepsy patients as they repeated spoken and written words aloud.

Researchers followed that brain activity – using event-related causality technology – from the auditory cortex, where the patients processed the words they heard, to Broca’s area, where they prepared to articulate the words to repeat, to the motor cortex, where they finally spoke the words out loud.

The findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• Feb 20, 2015 6:14 AM

Google isn’t the only company furiously adding improvements to iPad apps. Microsoft recently announced a major feature update to OneNote for Apple’s slate, adding a standard feature found on OneNote’s other platforms: digital pen support. The latest version of OneNote for iPad brings handwriting and drawing, allowing you to make sketches on your slate or just doodle during Physics 101.

All handwriting and drawing operations are kept under the Draw tab, which is available in each note. Just hit that tab and you can annotate notes, highlight text, or draw over an image. Microsoft offers sixteen different pen colors for compulsive color coders.

The iPad’s new drawing feature also has palm rejection for anyone who likes to put their palm to pad when writing or drawing. To customize this feature to your writing style, click the hand icon in the upper right corner under the Drawtab. You’ll have six choices (three each for righties and lefties) for how you hold a pen to help OneNote adapt to you.

For anyone opposed to the use of a stylus, you can also draw, highlight, and annotate with your finger—although results may be a bit messier than with a pen.

If you want to scroll through a note, remember to go back to another tab such as Home or View, as the Draw tab is all about scribbling around the content currently on-screen.

Beyond handwriting for the iPad, Microsoft says optical character recognition is now available across its entire range of OneNote apps from Office Online to iOS. Just snap or scan a picture that includes some text, give Microsoft’s cloud a few minutes, come back to your image, and the text should be fully searchable.

The impact on you at home: The updates to the iPad and widening OCR to all of Microsoft’s apps makes it much easier to pick-up where you left off on the device of your choosing. That’s especially true for handwriting, which is a popular use case for Microsoft’s note-taking app. It also shows that Microsoft is serious about cross-platform development, ensuring its software works just as well on an iPad as on a Microsoft device like the Surface Pro 3 or a Lumia phone.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2886664/microsoft-onenote-gets-handwriting-support-on-the-ipad-ocr-everywhere.html

February 20, 2015 09:57 PM

LONDON, Feb 20 — It’s no secret that smartphones and other screens can be addictive, but a recent survey of US and UK smartphone owners sheds some light on the extent of this dependency. Conducted by the Apigee Institute and the Sandford University Mobile Innovation Group, the study places a particular emphasis on the importance of the device in users’ social lives.

In order to explore the effects of smartphones on those who use them the most, researchers honed in on “top app users,” a category defined in the study as the top 25 per cent of smartphone owners based on their frequency of use of apps in 12 different categories. The signs of dependency were especially strong within this group of heavy users.

There’s no denying that Facebook and Twitter have become important vectors of 21st-century social life, but some of the survey findings are nonetheless surprising. Twenty-one percent of top app users said they would be unable to maintain a relationship with a significant other without the apps on their phone, while 19 per cent said they would not be able to make new friends.

The smartphone has become a familiar companion for top app users, 55 per cent of whom say they check at least one app hourly or more, even if it gets in the way of face-to-face social interactions. A majority of them even admit to engaging with their phones “nearly all the time,” including when they are having dinner with others.

Far from wanting to curb their screen time, 90 per cent of the users in this category say they intend to download just as many apps next year as they did over the past 12 months, while 45 per cent expect to download even more.

The authors of the study suggest that top app users described as “a sharp tip to the mobile use spear” exhibit behaviors that are likely to extend to all smartphone owners over time. They note that 30 per cent of all users surveyed said they plan to increase their smartphone usage in 2015, while 32 per cent said they plan to download a higher number of apps than in the previous year.

For now, it is clear that smartphones have already modified a number of their owners’ social behaviors: 92 per cent of people surveyed say the device has changed the way they connect with their friends, while 49 per cent said it has changed the way they date. But other aspects of everyday life are also affected: 58 per cent of respondents say smartphone apps have led them to manage their health differently, while 84 per cent say the device has changed the way they shop.

On a related note, the study found that the majority of smartphone users expect many of the businesses and organisations they interact with to offer “key products and services” through apps over the next two years. Smartphone owners are particularly likely to expect this from banks (92 per cent), restaurants (91 per cent), grocery stores (90 per cent), educational institutions (86 per cent) and even doctors (75 per cent).

The study is based on a survey of 1,000 US and UK smartphone owners carried out between September 30 and October 7, 2014. — AFP-Relaxnews

http://www.themalaymailonline.com/tech-gadgets/article/new-study-reveals-mobile-phone-dependency-issue-with-users#sthash.ecszRTeD.dpuf

LISA EADICICCO0FEB 21, 2015, 11.06 PM

Apple flooded us with information about what its first smartwatch will be able to do when it announced it back in September.

It will be able to share your heartbeat, prompt you to stand up when you’ve been sitting all day, and, of course, show you the time in a bunch of different ways.

But, one of its most interesting capabilities is a somewhat minor one that’s easily overlooked.

Apple’s industrial design chief Jony Ive talked about the company’s upcoming watch in a recent interview with The New Yorker.

Ive described how the Apple Watch’s screen will be different than that of a phone – it won’t light up the same way the iPhone’s display does when it turns on.

According to Ive, the screen for the watch uses deeper blacks than that of the iPhone. Ive thinks that an entire display, especially for something as small as a watch, shouldn’t have to light up. Rather, the screen should only highlight the specific thing you’re looking at.

“The whole of the display comes on,” he said to The New Yorker in reference to the iPhone 6. “That, to me, feels very, very old.”

But since the Apple Watch’s screen shows deeper and darker blacks than the iPhone’s, it’ll make the screen look like it has very little, if any, frames surrounding it. The New Yorker cited the neon jellyfish images Apple showed on the watch during its launch as an example. Since the display would be so dark and it would blend into the bezels, it would make it seem like the jellyfish is suspended in space rather than just being pictured on a screen.

Apple

Here’s how The New Yorker described it:

On a current iPhone screen, a jellyfish would be pinned against dark gray, and framed in black, and, Ive said, have “much less magic.”

It’s a small detail, but an interesting one, and it’s something that could differentiate the Apple Watch from its competitors.

Throughout the smartwatch category in general, there’s been some question as to whether or not a small screen on your wrist could serve any real purpose. It’s unclear whether or not the Apple Watch will answer that question, but based on Ive’s words it at least seems like Apple is trying by thinking about screens differently on watches versus phones.