HIV test performed on USB stick

The device, created by scientists at Imperial College London and DNA Electronics, uses a drop of blood to detect HIV, and then creates an electrical signal that can be read by a computer, laptop or handheld device.

The disposable test could be used for HIV patients to monitor their own treatment.

Furthermore, the technology could enable patients with HIV to be managed more effectively in remote locations.

New research, published in the journal Scientific Reports, shows the device is not only very accurate, but can produce a result in under 30 minutes.

The new technology monitors the amount of virus in the bloodstream. This is crucial to monitoring a patient's treatment.

Current tests to detect the amount of virus take at least three days, often longer, and involves sending a blood sample to a laboratory. In many parts of the world, particularly those with the highest number of HIV infections, such testing does not exist at all.

The current treatment for HIV, called anti-retroviral treatment, reduces virus levels to near zero.

However, in some cases the medication may stop working -- perhaps because the HIV virus has developed resistance to the drugs. The first indication of this would be a rise in virus levels in the bloodstream.

Furthermore, regularly monitoring of viral levels enables healthcare teams to check a patient is taking their medication. Stopping medication fuels HIV drug-resistance, which is an emerging global problem.

Viral levels cannot be detected by routine HIV tests, which use antibodies, as these can only tell whether a person has been infected.

Dr Graham Cooke, senior author of the research from the Department of Medicine at Imperial explained: "HIV treatment has dramatically improved over the last 20 years -- to the point that many diagnosed with the infection now have a normal life expectancy.

"However, monitoring viral load is crucial to the success of HIV treatment. At the moment, testing often requires costly and complex equipment that can take a couple of days to produce a result. We have taken the job done by this equipment, which is the size of a large photocopier, and shrunk it down to a USB chip."

Dr Cooke added that this technology, although in the early stages, could allow patients to regularly monitor their virus levels in much the same way that people with diabetes check their blood sugar levels.

The technology could be particularly powerful in remote regions in sub-Saharan Africa, which may not have easy access to testing facilities. Finding out quickly if a patient, particularly a baby, is infected with the virus is crucial to their long term health and survival.

The device, which uses a mobile phone chip, just needs small sample of blood. This is placed onto a spot on the USB stick. If any HIV virus is present in the sample, this triggers a change in acidity which the chip transforms into an electrical signal. This is sent to the USB stick, which produces the result in a programme on a computer or electronic device.

In the latest research, the technology tested 991 blood samples with 95 per cent accuracy. The average time to produce a result was 20.8 minutes.

The team are also investigating whether the device can be used to test for other viruses such as hepatitis. The technology was developed in conjunction with the Imperial spinout company DNA Electronics which is using the same technology to develop a device for detecting bacterial and fungal sepsis and antibiotic resistance.

Professor Chris Toumazou, DNAe's Founder, Executive Chairman and Regius Professor at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial added: "This is a great example of how this new analysis technology has the potential to transform how patients with HIV are treated by providing a fast, accurate and portable solution. At DNAe we are already applying this highly adaptable technology to address significant global threats to health, where treatment is time-critical and needs to be right first time."

Quantum processing: Coherence vs. Control

If you're building a quantum computer with the intention of making calculations not even imaginable with today's conventional technology, you're in for an arduous effort. Case in point: You're delving into new problems and situations associated with the foundational work of novel and complicated systems as well as cutting-edge technology.

Such is life for the scientists of the Martinis Group at UC Santa Barbara and Google, Inc., as they explore the exciting but also still somewhat counter-intuitive world of quantum computing. In a paper published in the journal Nature Physics, they and colleagues at Tulane University in New Orleans demonstrate a relatively simple yet complete platform for quantum processing, integrating the control of three superconducting qubits.

"We're probing the edge of our capability," said the paper's lead author, Pedram Roushan. There have been quite a few efforts to build and study individual parts of a quantum processor, he explained, but this particular project involves putting them all together in a basic building block that can be fully controlled and potentially scaled up into a functional quantum computer.

However, before a fully practicable quantum computer -- with all its potential for vast, rapid and simultaneous calculations -- can be made, various and sometimes unpredictable and spontaneous circumstances arise that have to be understood as the researchers pursue greater control and sophistication of their system.

"You're dealing with particles -- qubits in this case -- that are interacting with one another, and they're interacting with external fields," Roushan said. "This all leads to very complicated physics."

To help solve this particular many-body problem, he explained, their fully controllable quantum processing system had to be built from a single qubit up, in order to give the researchers opportunities to more clearly understand the states, behaviors and interactions that can occur.

By engineering the pulse sequences used to manipulate the spins of the photons in their system, the researchers created an artificial magnetic field affecting their closed loop of three qubits, causing the photons to interact strongly with not only each other, but also with the pseudo-magnetic field. Not a small feat.

"Naturally most systems where there is good control are photonic systems," said co-author Charles Neill. Unlike electrons, charge-less photons generally tend not to interact with each other nor with external magnetic fields, he explained. "In this article we show that we can get them to interact with each other very strongly, and interact with a magnetic field very strongly, which are the two things you need to do to get them to do interesting physics with photons," Neill said.

Another advantage of this synthetic condensed-matter system is the ability to drive it into its lowest-lying energy state -- called the ground state -- to probe its properties.

But with more control comes the potential for more decoherence. As the researchers strove for greater programmability and ability to influence and read the qubits, the more open their system was likely to be to error and loss of information.

"The more control we have over a quantum system, the more complex algorithms we would be able to run," said co-author Anthony Megrant. "However, every time we add a control line, we're also introducing a new source of decoherence." At the level of a single qubit, a tiny margin of error may be tolerated, the researchers explained, but even with a relatively small increase in the number of qubits, the potential for error multiplies exponentially.

"There are these corrections that are intrinsically quantum mechanical, and then they start to matter at the level of precision that we're getting at," Neill said.

To combat the potential for error while increasing their level of control, the team had to reconsider both the architecture of their circuit and the material that was being used in it. Instead of their traditionally single-level, planar layout, the researchers redesigned the circuit to allow control lines to "cross over" others via a self-supporting metallic "bridge." The dielectric -- the insulating material between the conducting control wires -- was itself found to be a major source of errors.

"All deposited dielectrics that we know of are very lossy," Megrant said, and so a more precisely fabricated and less defective substrate was brought in to minimize the likelihood of decoherence.

Progress is incremental but solid, according to the researchers, who continue to explore the true potential of their quantum system. Add to that delicate dance speed, which is essential for the kind of performance they want to see in a fully operational quantum computer. Slow speeds reduce control errors but make the system more vulnerable to coherence limits and defects imposed by the materials. Fast speeds avoid the influence of defects in the material but reduce the amount of control the operators have over the system, they said.

With this platform, however, scaling up will be a reality of the not-too-distant future, they said.

"If we can control these systems very precisely -- maybe at the level of 30 qubits or so -- we can get to the level of doing computations that no conventional computer can do," Roushan said.

Unlocking big genetic datasets

On simulated data sets of 10,000 individuals, TeraStructure could estimate population structure more accurately and twice as fast as current state-of-the art algorithms, the study said. TeraStructure alone was capable of analyzing 1 million individuals, orders of magnitude beyond modern software capabilities, researchers said. The algorithm could potentially characterize the structure of world-scale human populations.

"We're excited to scale some of our recent machine learning tools to real-world problems in genetics," said David Blei, a professor of computer science and statistics at Columbia University and member of the Data Science Institute.

The cost of genetic sequencing has fallen sharply since the first complete mapping of the human genome in 2003. More than a million people now have sequenced genomes, and by 2025 that number could rise to 2 billion.

The technology to put this data into context, however, has lagged and remains one of the barriers to tailoring healthcare to an individual's DNA. To identify disease-causing variants in a genome, one of the goals of personalized medicine, researchers need to know something about his or her ancestry to control for normal genetic variation within a subpopulation.

"We can run software on a few thousand people, but if we increase our sample size to a few hundred thousand, it can take months to infer population structure," said Kai Wang, director of clinical informatics at Columbia's Institute for Genomic Medicine, who was not involved in the study. "This new tool addresses these limitations, and will be very useful for analyzing the genomes of large populations."

The researchers' algorithm, called TeraStructure, builds on the widely used and adapted STRUCTURE algorithm first described in the journal Genetics in 2000. The STRUCTURE algorithm cycles through an entire data set, genome by genome, one million variants at a time, before updating its model to both characterize ancestral populations and estimate their proportion in each individual. The model gets refined after repeated passes through the data set.

TeraStructure, by contrast, updates the model as it goes. It samples one genetic variant at one location, and compares it to all variants in the data set at the same location across the data set, producing a working estimate of population structure. "You don't have to painstakingly go through all the points each time to update your model," said Blei.

STRUCTURE is mathematically similar to a topic-modeling algorithm Blei developed independently in 2003 that made it possible to scan large numbers of documents for overarching themes. Blei's algorithm and its underlying LDA model have been used, among other things, to analyze published research in the journal Science to understand the evolution of scientific ideas and review regulatory meeting transcripts for insight into how the U.S. Federal Reserve sets interest rates.

More recently, Blei has experimented with statistical techniques to extend probabilistic models to massive data sets. One technique, stochastic optimization, developed in 1951 by statistician Herbert Robbins just before arriving at Columbia, uses a small, random subset of observations to compute a rough update for the model's parameters.

Continuously refining the model with each new observation, stochastic optimization algorithms have been enormously successful in scaling up machine learning approaches used in deep learning, recommendation systems and social network analysis.

In a 2010 paper, Online Learning for LDA, Blei and his colleagues applied stochastic optimization to Blei's earlier LDA model. In a later paper, Stochastic Variational Inference, they showed that stochastic optimization could be applied to a range of models. As Matthew Hoffman, a coauthor of both papers, now a senior research scientist at Adobe Research explains, "Stochastic optimization algorithms often find a good solutions before they've even analyzed the whole dataset."

In the Nature Genetics study, they apply these ideas to the STRUCTURE method. In their analysis of two real-world data sets -- 940 individual genomes from Stanford's Human Genome Diversity Project and 1,718 genomes from the 1000 Genomes Project -- they found that TeraStructure performed comparably to the more recent ADMIXTURE and fastSTRUCTURE algorithms.

But when they ran TeraStructure on a simulated data set of 10,000 genomes, it was more accurate and two to three times faster at estimating population structure, the study said. The researchers also showed that TeraStructure alone could analyze data sets as large as 100,000 genomes and 1 million genomes.

Matthew Stephens, a genetics researcher at University of Chicago who helped develop the STRUCTURE algorithm, called TeraStructure's performance impressive. "I think these results will motivate future applications of this kind of algorithm in challenging inferences problems," he said

The study also received praise from other researchers working with big genetic data sets. "We now have the technology to create the data," said Itsik Pe'er, a computational geneticist at Columbia Engineering who was not involved in the study. "But this paper really allows us to use it."

social media impacts consumer spending

"A neutral or even negative social media post with high engagement will impact sales more than a positive post that draws no likes, comments or shares," says study co-author Ram Bezawada, PhD, associate professor of marketing in the UB School of Management. "This is true even among customers who say their purchase decisions are not swayed by what they read on social media."

The researchers studied data from a large specialty retailer with multiple locations in the northeast United States. They combined data about customer participation on the company's social media page with in-store purchases before and after the retailer's social media engagement efforts. They also conducted a survey to determine customers' attitudes toward technology and social media. The study also found that businesses' social posts significantly strengthen the effect of traditional television and email marketing efforts. When social media is combined with TV marketing, customer spending increased by 1.03 percent and cross buying by 0.84 percent. When combined with email marketing, customer spending increased by 2.02 percent and cross buying by 1.22 percent. Cross buying refers to when a customer purchases additional products or services from the same firm.

"The clear message here is that social media marketing matters, and managers should embrace it to build relationships with customers," says Bezawada. "Developing a community with a dedicated fan base can lead to a definitive impact on revenues and profits."

Bezawada collaborated on the project with Ashish Kumar, assistant professor of marketing at Aalto University; Rishika Rishika, clinical assistant professor of marketing at the University of South Carolina; Ramkumar Janakiraman, associate professor of marketing at the University of South Carolina; and P.K. Kannan, the Ralph J. Tyser Professor of Marketing Science at the University of Maryland.

headphones jack news

Since it first hit the market, the iPhone, just like all of Apple’s products, has gone through many changes and improvements. Some of those advancements were in the areas of size, weight, speed, processor, storage, camera, and antenna. The iPhone 7 came along with the most controversial change to date with the removal of the 3.5mm headphone jack.     When this was first introduced to consumers, Apple’s Phil Schiller said they were moving Apple’s earpods over to the lightning cable because the lightning was oriningally designed to be “a great digital audio connector.” Schiller further noted that there are now over 900 millions lightning enabled devices in the world making the lightning port the largest digital audio connectioin in the world.  This opens up the market for a wide variety of lightning speakers and devices to take advantage of the port. Apple highlighted the JBL Reflex Aware Workout headphones as an example of headphones that could make good use of the lightning port. The Reflex Aware provides active noise cancellation and has an app that allows you to program the headphones directly over the lightning port.   Photo Source: Apple   The Need for Space There is a lot of tech packed into the iPhone 7 models.  As people want more and more, space is probably a constant design issue.  Every new physical tech needs a spot on the iPhone landscape. Removing the headphone jack allowed space for a barometric vent, which allows the barometer to work so the iPhone can sense altitude changes (like climbing a flight of stairs) without permitting water into the phone. The iPhone 7 is the first iPhone to have stereo speakers.  (one on the bottom and one on the top. These speakers are much larger and fully enclosed. - See more at: http://www.dailytech.com/Heres+why+Apple+removed+the+iPhone+Headphone+Jack/article37761.htm#sthash.U5tmgglj.dpuf

Flexible keyboard computer in market

The Vensmile K8 is not just a keyboard.  You might say that it is a keyboard computer.  By now, we have all heard of all-one-on computers.  This is probably the first all-in-one keyboard.



Vensmile K8 is very flexible with rubber keys that allow for rolling the keyboard and packing it away when need be. The keyboard has an attached base that works as a computer.
With a price tag of $199.99, this flexible keyboard computer contains the following specs;

1.    Windows 10 Home
2.    Intel Atom x5-Z8300 Cherry Trail processor – The Intel Atom Cherry Trail processor is a quad-core 1.4 GHz processor that is capable of 1.84GHz burst.


Intel Atom x5-Z8300 Processor
Photo Source: Tablet-News


3.    4GB of DDR3 RAM, 64GB of eMMC flash memory storage.
4.    Dual-band Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n) and Bluetooth 4.0
5.    HDMI and VGA ports – Simply connect to a monitor or HDMI ready TV, compatible projector.


Photo Source: Techspot

6.    USB 3.0 port and USB 2.0port
7.    Expansion card slot
8.    3.5mm headphone jack

This product is available via pre-order and is shipping now.

keyboard and mouse usually tech

  Logitech has been a popular brand in keyboarding for many years now.  They have put together an excellent product in this solar powered keyboard and mouse combo.  The MK750’s keyboard charges from any light source including light from your desktop and stays charged up to 3 months. The Marathon M705 mouse has a high-performance laser and offers 3-years battery life.     Video: Logitech MK750 Wireless Solar Keyboard & Marathon Mouse M705       2.   Microsoft Desktop 3000 Wireless Keyboard and Mouse   Photo Source: Amazon   If you are prone to spilling liquids on your keyboard, then this spill-resistant keyboard is for you.  The Microsoft Desktop 3000 features integrated water channels that drain liquid away. It also, offers Digital Media Access and customizable keys that allow you to bring up photos files, folders and frequent web pages. The mouse has BlueTrack Technology that works on more surfaces than an optical or laser mouse. (Works on granite countertops, carpet, and rough wood tables)   Photo Source: Amazon     3.   Anker CB310 Full-Size Ergonomic Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Combo   Photo Source: Amazon   Anker delivers with their keyboard and mouse combo.  The CB310 keyboard features water resistance to protect against spills. The ergonomics palm rest and angled tilt helps to reduce hand fatigue as your type on the whisper-quiet keys.  The smart optical mouse can be adjusted with the press of a button to 3 DPI levels (1000/1500-2000). This allows tracking of movements faster or slower as your need.   - See more at:

http://www.dailytech.com/3+Special+Wireless+Keyboard++Mouse+Combos+under+10000/article37771.htm#sthash.PMQEpDh8.dpuf