What causes coronary heart disease?

Our heart is a always pump the size of a fist that sends oxygen-rich blood around our body. The blood travels to the organs of our body through blood vessels known as arteries, and then returns to the heart through veins.

Our heart needs its own blood supply to keep working. Heart disease occurs when the arteries that carry this blood, known as coronary arteries, start to become blocked by a build-up of fatty deposits.

The inner lining of the coronary arteries gradually becomes furred with a thick, porridge-like sludge of substances, known as plaques, and formed from cholesterol. This clogging-up process is known as atherosclerosis.

The plaques narrow the arteries and reduce the space through which blood can flow. They can also block nutrients being delivered to the artery walls, which means the arteries lose their elasticity. In turn, this can lead to high blood pressure, which also increases the risk of heart disease. This same process goes on in the arteries throughout the body, and can lead to high blood pressure which puts further strain on the heart.

If our arteries are partially blocked you can experience angina - severe chest pains that can spread across our upper body - as our heart struggles to keep beating on a restricted supply of oxygen. You are also at greater risk of a heart attack.

Some people have a higher risk of developing atherosclerosis due to genetic factors - one clue to this is a family history of heart disease in middle-age. Lifestyle factors that increase the risk include an unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, diabetes, high blood pressure and, most importantly, smoking.

However, in the past couple of decades deaths from coronary heart disease have nearly halved, thanks to better treatments.

What happens during a heart attack?

A heart attack happens when one of the coronary arteries becomes completely blocked. This usually happens when a plaque, which is already narrowing an artery, cracks or splits open. This triggers the formation of a blood clot around the plaque, and it is this blood clot that then completely blocks the artery.

With their supply of oxygen completely blocked, the heart muscle and tissue supplied by that artery start to die. Emergency medical intervention is needed to unblock the artery and restore blood flow. This may consist of treatment with drugs to dissolve the clot or thrombus, or a small operation done through the skin and blood vessels to open up the blocked artery.

The outcome of a heart attack hinges on the amount of the muscle that dies before it is corrected. The smaller the area affected, the greater the chance of survival and recovery.

While a heart attack will always cause some permanent damage, some areas may be able to recover if they are not deprived of blood for too long. The sooner a heart attack is diagnosed and treated, the greater the chance of recovery.

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Genepeeks firm to offer 'digital baby' screen for sperm donors

New York start-up Genepeeks will initially focus on donor sperm, simulating before pregnancy how the genetic sequence of a female client might combine with those of different males.
Donors that more often produce "digital children" with a higher risk of inherited disorders will be filtered out, leaving those who are better genetic matches.

Everything happens in a computer, but experts have raised ethical questions.
"We are just in the business right now of giving prospective mothers, who are using donor sperm to conceive, a filtered catalogue of donors based on their own underlying genetic profile," Genepeeks co-founder Anne Morriss told BBC News.
"We are filtering out the donor matches with an elevated risk of rare recessive paediatric conditions."
Ms Morriss, an entrepreneur, gave a presentation on the company at the Consumer Genetics Conference in Boston last week.

Advancing technology
She was motivated in part by her own experience of starting a family. Her son was conceived with a sperm donor who happened to share with Morriss the gene for an inherited disorder called MCADD.
MCADD (medium-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency) prevents those affected from converting fats to sugar. It can be fatal if it is not diagnosed early. Luckily, in Ms Morriss's case, the condition was picked up in newborn screening tests.
"My son has a pretty normal life," Ms Morriss said, "but about 30% of children with rare genetic diseases don't make it past the age of five."
Genepeeks has formalised a partnership with a sperm bank - the Manhattan Cryobank - and has a patent pending on the DNA screening technology.
The start-up benefits from the rapid pace of change in genetic technology.
Indeed, six months ago, Genepeeks' founders decided it was able to use a superior system for DNA analysis (called "targeted exon sequencing") than the one originally envisaged - a result, says Anne Morriss, of falling costs and increased flexibility.
For couples planning babies, other companies already screen one or both partners for genes that could cause disease if combined with a similar variant - so-called "carrier screening".

Digital filter
One academic who studies the use of genetic technology commented: "This is like that, but ramped up 100,000 times."
Ms Morriss's business partner, Prof Lee Silver, a geneticist and expert on bioethics at Princeton University, New Jersey, told BBC News: "We get the DNA sequence from two prospective parents. We simulate the process of reproduction, forming virtual sperm and virtual eggs. We put them together to form a hypothetical child genome.
"Then we can look at that hypothetical genome and - with all the tools of modern genetics - determine the risk that the genome will result in a child with disease. We're looking directly for disease and not carrier status. For each pair of people that we're going to analyse, we make 10,000 hypothetical children."
The process will be run for the client and each potential donor one by one, scanning for some 600 known single-gene recessive conditions. In this way, the highest-risk pairings can be filtered out.
Anne Morriss added: "At this stage our clients won't be receiving any genetic information back. We're very much focused on the practical utility of helping prospective parents who want to protect their future kids, giving them the option of additional analysis to what is currently being offered in the industry."
But the company's founders have plans to expand the screening beyond single-gene recessive disorders to more complex conditions in which multiple genes play a part.
Indeed, going to the trouble of simulating thousands of digital children deliberately lays the ground for this: "[It's] impossible to get towards an accurate risk calculation in any other way," said Anne Morriss.
And in a video produced by the company, Prof Silver says: "My hope for the future is that any people who want to have a baby can use this technology to greatly reduce the risk of disease being expressed in their child."

Donor ethics

To some, such a prospect might appear like a step towards designer babies - until now the preserve of science fiction literature and films such as Gattaca, which envisaged a future of genetic "haves" and "have-nots".
Bio-ethicists approached by the BBC said Genepeeks was a logical outcome of the increasing demand for more information when making reproductive decisions.
However, some raised potential concerns about risk communication and the expansion of screening beyond rare single-gene disorders. But they suggested there were few, if any, regulatory barriers.
One ethicist told BBC News: "The biggest question for me, just from the outset, is the understanding of uncertainty. Even people who have been doing genomics for years still have a hard time figuring out exactly what a risk for a particular genetic predisposition really means for a family.
"Gene-environment interactions can lead to people either having disease or not having disease."
Dr Ewan Birney, associate director of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, UK, echoed the point: "It's good that they're focusing on the carrier status of these rare Mendelian disorders where it's potentially more clear-cut. That said, these things are more complex than they first seem," he said.
"I'm sure the scientists appreciate that complexity. But when transmitting that complexity to everyday people, these things can sound more absolute than they really are."
He added: "The thing I would want to stress here is just how complex this is. It's great that people are thinking of using this technology in lots of different ways, but our knowledge gap is very large."
Risk communication to clients was, said Anne Morriss, "absolutely critical to anyone in this industry".
"We have to be crystal clear about what we're testing for, what risks we're helping to reduce; that there's no guarantee you won't give birth to a sick child," she said.
Prof Mildred Cho, associate director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics in California, raised questions over whether the sperm donor should also receive information about their genome gleaned from the screening process.
"Unlike hair colour, occupation or family history - those are things, presumably, the donor already knows - the thing that's different about this that I see is it could create information that the donor doesn't already have. It also has implications for the donor's other biological family members," Prof Cho told BBC News.

This week it also emerged that California-based consumer genetics company 23andMe had submitted the patent on a DNA analysis tool for planning a child.

Source bbc science news

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Dell Announces Android and Windows Tablets

On Wednesday, Dell launched a slew of new devices, including tablets, laptops, and even a tablet/laptop hybrid. At a press event in New York City, the company showed off its Venue 7 and Venue 8 Android slates, Venue 8 Pro and Venue 11 Pro Windows 8.1 tablets, its newly refreshed XPS 15 and XPS 13 laptops, and its foldable ultrabook called the XPS 11.

The Venue 7 and Venue 8 tablets came as a bit of a surprise reveal, as Dell dipped back into the Android market it appeared to have left behind. Neither slate is particularly mighty, though: Both run Android 4.2.2 (upgradeable to KitKat) and are powered by Intel Atom processors. The 7 features a 1.6 GHz dual-core CPU while the 8 is driven by a 2.0 GHz dual-core processor. Ostensibly, Dell is aiming to satisfy the budget-conscious Android fan with this offering, judging from the way the rest of its (middling) specs read.

Both the Venue 7 and Venue 8 feature 1280 x 800 pixel IPS displays, USB 3.0, a battery life of 8 hours, and rather lackluster cameras (a 3-MP rear camera and VGA front-facing camera for the Venue 7, and a 5-MP rear camera and 2-MP front-facing camera for the Venue 8). The Venue 7 comes with 16GB of internal memory, and you can choose between 16 or 32 GB versions for the Venue 8. If that's not enough, the devices are expandable via a microSD slot. The 7 and 8 will be available on October 18, at $150 and $180 respectively.

Dell also dropped a couple of Windows 8 tablets at the event: the Venue 8 Pro and the Venue 11 Pro. With the launch of these two slates, the company officially moves away from Windows RT. The Venue 8 Pro, a pocketable 8-inch device with a 1280 x 800 IPS display and pen input, is one of the only competitors in the space of sub-10-inch Windows tablets. The slate includes Intel's new quad-core Bay Trail CPU, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, and 10 hours of battery life. It's scheduled to go on sale on October 18 in the U.S., priced at $300.

The Venue 11 Pro, conversely, is a real rival for the Microsoft Surface Pro 2. It features a 1920 x 1080 HD IPS display, and can be powered either by Intel's quad-core Bay Trail processor or a fourth-generation Haswell CPU that goes up to Core i5. With its specs maxed out, the Venue 11 Pro can support 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, and it includes WiDi, NFC, a full-size USB port, HDMI port, and a microSD slot. Also worthy of note, the Venue 11 Pro's battery is removable—so in an emergency, users can swap it out with a fully charged one (if they're away from their charger).

In the realm of laptops, Dell refreshed its reliable XPS 13 and XPS 15 models, endowing both of them with Intel's Haswell processors. The XPS 15 got the drastic upgrade, as it now flaunts a truly impressive quad HD+ IGZO display; it's 3200 x 1800 pixels, higher even than the Retina MacBook Pro (2880 x 1800). It also boasts Nvidia graphics, 1TB of hard drive space in addition to a 32GB solid state drive (you can also opt for a single 512GB SSD), NFC, and voice features. Meanwhile, the Dell XPS 13 has gotten upgraded to sport a 1080p touchscreen, and improved graphics and battery life. The XPS 15 comes out on October 15 and goes for a $1500 starting price tag, while the XPS 13 will arrive in November, starting at $1000.

Finally, Dell revealed more details about its XPS 11 foldable Ultrabook: It'll feature a Haswell processor, solid state storage, and a Gorilla Glass touch display flaunting a dense 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution. There's a keyboard too, of course, which folds around the XPS 11's back at 180 degrees. The XPS 11 costs $1000 and will be available this November.

Source: popularmechanicsdotcom

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Google accused of illegal Gmail wiretapping

Washington: Google has been reportedly accused of illegally wiretapping Gmail content of its users to send them targeted ads.

The search giant has been accused by plaintiffs and privacy rights advocates over the years and the lawsuits have been merged into two separate cases, questioning the extent to the company's wiretapping via its emailing service and its Street View mapping project.

However, Google defending its methods has struggled to persuade overseers and its users that it protects consumer data, while arguing that the law is stuck in the past and has failed to keep up with new technologies, the New York Times reports.

The wiretapping rulings could have broad effects on Google's service, because nearly half a billion people worldwide use it and if it is a certified class action, the fines would be enormous and could have long-term consequences for all other e-mail services.

The plaintiffs have accused the search giant of scanning their email content violating state and federal anti-wiretapping laws, in order to provide targeted ads .

Judge Lucy H. Koh has denied Google's motion in the 43-page order and dismissed the company's argument that Gmail users consented to the interception and that non-Gmail users who communicated with Gmail users also knew that their messages could be read.

Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law said that the ruling has the potential to really reshape the entire e-mail industry.
Source : zeenewsindia

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Google unveils major upgrade to search algorithm

Google search expert Amit Singhal outlines his vision

Google has unveiled an upgrade to the way it interprets users' search requests.

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Chinese man has new nose grown on forehead

 A man from China's Fujian province has had a new nose grown on his forehead following a traffic accident last year.

The 22-year-old man suffered severe nasal trauma and his subsequent treatment caused his nasal cartilage to corrode. Surgeons came up with the idea of growing a nose on his forehead.

After nine months of growth, surgeons say that the the nose is in good shape and the transplant will be performed soon.

Source: BBC news

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Jim Armitage: Cracking the code is the way to business success

Outlook A footnote from a meeting with Wonga's chief executive earlier this week. I know, I know: to many readers, Errol Damelin is the epitomy of all that's wrong with British capitalism. But when it comes to tech, the veteran of three different start-up firms knows his stuff.

And he says British schools are badly letting down our kids when it comes to IT training. All the hours spent teaching them how to use Powerpoint, Word and Excel are "totally useless", he says.

Anyone can teach themselves how to use those kinds of programs in their own time.

What our children really need to learn is how to write computer code. It is smart coders who will create and build the next generation of businesses.

Coding really needs proper teaching, and British schools are way behind other countries.

It is, says Mr Damelin "a major deficit in skills for the UK".

What's more, he adds, if taught in the right way, kids really love doing it. Who wouldn't want to be able to say: "There's an app for that. I wrote it!"

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Scientists Use DNA to Assemble a Transistor from Graphene

Graphene is a sheet of carbon atoms arrayed in a honeycomb pattern, just a single atom thick. It could be a better semiconductor than silicon -- if we could fashion it into ribbons 20 to 50 atoms wide. Could DNA help?

DNA is the genetic meterial which is also known as blueprint for life. Could it also become the template for making a new generation of computer chips based not on silicon, but on an experimental material known as graphene?
That's the theory behind a process that Stanford chemical engineering professor Zhenan Bao reveals in Nature Communications.
Bao and her co-authors, former post-doctoral fellows Anatoliy Sokolov and Fung Ling Yap, hope to solve a problem clouding the future of electronics: consumers expect silicon chips to continue getting smaller, faster and cheaper, but engineers fear that this virtuous cycle could grind to a halt.

Why has to do with how silicon chips work.
Everything starts with the notion of the semiconductor, a type of material that can be induced to either conduct or stop the flow of electricity. Silicon has long been the most popular semiconductor material used to make chips.

The basic working unit on a chip is the transistor. Transistors are tiny gates that switch electricity on or off, creating the zeroes and ones that run software.

To build more powerful chips, designers have done two things at the same time: they've shrunk transistors in size and also swung those gates open and shut faster and faster.

The net result of these actions has been to concentrate more electricity in a diminishing space. So far that has produced small, faster, cheaper chips. But at a certain point, heat and other forms of interference could disrupt the inner workings of silicon chips.

"We need a material that will let us build smaller transistors that operate faster using less power," Bao said.

Graphene has the physical and electrical properties to become a next-generation semiconductor material -- if researchers can figure out how to mass-produce it.

Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb pattern. Visually it resembles chicken wire. Electrically this lattice of carbon atoms is an extremely efficient conductor.

Bao and other researchers believe that ribbons of graphene, laid side-by-side, could create semiconductor circuits. Given the material's tiny dimensions and favorable electrical properties, graphene nano ribbons could create very fast chips that run on very low power, she said.

"However, as one might imagine, making something that is only one atom thick and 20 to 50 atoms wide is a significant challenge," said co-author Sokolov.

To handle this challenge, the Stanford team came up with the idea of using DNA as an assembly mechanism.

Physically, DNA strands are long and thin, and exist in roughly the same dimensions as the graphene ribbons that researchers wanted to assemble.

Chemically, DNA molecules contain carbon atoms, the material that forms graphene.

The real trick is how Bao and her team put DNA's physical and chemical properties to work.

The researchers started with a tiny platter of silicon to provide a support (substrate) for their experimental transistor. They dipped the silicon platter into a solution of DNA derived from bacteria and used a known technique to comb the DNA strands into relatively straight lines.

Next, the DNA on the platter was exposed to a copper salt solution. The chemical properties of the solution allowed the copper ions to be absorbed into the DNA.

Next the platter was heated and bathed in methane gas, which contains carbon atoms. Once again chemical forces came into play to aid in the assembly process. The heat sparked a chemical reaction that freed some of the carbon atoms in the DNA and methane. These free carbon atoms quickly joined together to form stable honeycombs of graphene.

"The loose carbon atoms stayed close to where they broke free from the DNA strands, and so they formed ribbons that followed the structure of the DNA," Yap said.

So part one of the invention involved using DNA to assemble ribbons of carbon. But the researchers also wanted to show that these carbon ribbons could perform electronic tasks. So they made transistors on the ribbons.

"We demonstrated for the first time that you can use DNA to grow narrow ribbons and then make working transistors," Sokolov said.

The paper drew praise from UC Berkeley associate professor Ali Javey, an expert in the use of advanced materials and next-generation electronics.

"This technique is very unique and takes advantage of the use of DNA as an effective template for controlled growth of electronic materials," Javey said. "In this regard the project addresses an important research need for the field."

Bao said the assembly process needs a lot of refinement. For instance, not all of the carbon atoms formed honeycombed ribbons a single atom thick. In some places they bunched up in irregular patterns, leading the researchers to label the material graphitic instead of graphene.

Even so, the process, about two years in the making, points toward a strategy for turning this carbon-based material from a curiosity into a serious contender to succeed silicon.

"Our DNA-based fabrication method is highly scalable, offers high resolution and low manufacturing cost," said co-author Yap. "All these advantages make the method very attractive for industrial adoption."

The experiment was supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the Stanford Global Climate and Energy Program.

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Tribhuvan University published the results of B.Sc Third year-2069

Tribhuvan University office of the controller of examination Balkhu today (september-6-2012 )

 published the results of Bachelor of Science (B.Sc) Third year-2069. The examination of B.Sc third year was held six months ago in Magha-Falgun 2069.

Result statistics for B.Sc third year-2069

• Total number of students appeared for B.Sc third year exam: 4,966
• Total number of students who passed B.Sc third year result: 2,867
• Pass percentage in B.Sc third year exam result: 57.73%
• Total number of students expelled during B.Sc third year exam: Nine (9)

Students can view the results of B.Sc third year result here

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Subisu CAN SofTech 2013

Around 59,000 people have visited the different stalls at Subisu CAN SofTech 2013 on the first two days of the event. According to Computer Association of Nepal (CAN), the number of spectators was recorded at 34,211 on Wednesday -- the first day of the event, while 24,722 people visited the event on Thursday.

The sixth edition of four-day long event being held at Bhrikuti Mandap Exhibition Hall with 120 stalls of different software solution companies and internet service providers is underway in the capital with an expectation of around 100,000 visitors according to the organizers.

CAN said the number of visitors can even extend the level of expectation as the event this year has more than double the stalls than previous times with more number of company´s participating. Previously until the fifth edition of the event, the stalls were limited to 40 at the DECC Hall in Tripureswor.
According to officials at CAN, the event solely aims to promote the ICT industry of the country and plays a crucial role to decrease the gap of digital divide between those who have access to information technology and those who don´t have.

“ICT industry can play a significant role in the competitiveness invited by open-market concept,” said Binod Dhakal, president of CAN. However, Dhakal emphasized the need to systematize the growing use of technology in the country bringing in use suitable policy for ICT industry by government.
Meanwhile, Uma Kant Jha, the minister of Science, Technology and Environment, talking at the inaugural ceremony on Wednesday, assured of suitable policy for the ICT industry in Nepal in near future.

Software solutions, internet service providers and telecom operators, among others, are showcasing various software related to education, cyber security, banking, information management, account management, anti-virus, security solutions, wireless solutions, printing solutions and power solutions amid the event.
The four-day long event concludes on Saturday.

Source : myrepublica

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