To create a deep link, append the following to the end of a YouTube video URL: #t=1m15s. This says to link to the time 1:15 - you can replace the numbers before the ‘m’ and the ’s’ with anything you like.

As an additional bonus, if you mention a specific time in a video comment, e.g. “haha 1:14 is funny”, this will become a hyperlink. Viewers can simply click on the time and the video will automatically jump to the point you are referencing. Pretty cool huh? 

NOW WE CAN WRITE THE FOLLOWING CODE TO ACCESS THAT PART AND USE THAT PART ONLY 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2c2_inNre4#t=0m28s

Rather than the regular link of :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2c2_inNre4

This feature should be mostly useful to those who wish to show certain parts of videos to others, particularly if they want them to see what was intended rather than risk the receiving party losing interest before they get to the good part (nothing against Joe’s theatrics or this video. It’s just an example). This should prove to be a very efficient way to link to videos when trying to make a point.

In subject jargon it is called data mining: looking for interesting relationships within large quantities of data. Many data-mining programs produce a flood of potentially interesting patterns: as a user, how can you then find what you are looking for? Furthermore, the files are not always set up for such search actions, as is the case on the Internet or for instance in bioinformatics. It usually concerns semi-structured files: they often contain, for example, hyperlinks to other files, and contain (partial) information in a range of formats, such as text, images and sound.

MISTA project

Edgar de Graaf and Jeroen De Knijf both worked within the NWO-funded MISTA project (Mining in Semi-Structured Data) on methods to find patterns more quickly and effectively within large quantities of semi-structured data. De Graaf discovered that some patterns are interesting because they occur in quick succession. Other patterns are striking because, for example, they occur weekly. According to De Graaf, this time aspect merits further investigation.

The patterns can best be presented visually so that the user can find the information sought at a single glance. To realise this De Graaf described various ways of presenting different types of information.

Wikipedia compressed

De Knijf demonstrated that the number of patterns can be drastically reduced by allowing the user to indicate in advance the minimum requirements that a pattern must satisfy. This allows the data-mining program to find the interesting patterns much faster.

A second method De Knijf devised to reduce the number of results is the compression of the entire collection of documents (for example, Wikipedia pages) into a single document. By building accurate models that only make use of the compressed document, De Knijf was able to demonstrate that this summary does indeed contain the essential information from the entire collection.

source: eurekalert.org

Using Envisat radar altimeter data, scientists from the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at University College London (UCL) measured sea ice thickness over the Arctic from 2002 to 2008 and found that it had been fairly constant until the record loss of ice in the summer of 2007. Unusually warm weather conditions were present over the Arctic in 2007, which some scientists have said explain that summer ice loss. However, this summer reached the second-lowest extent ever recorded with cooler weather conditions present.

Dr Katharine Giles of UCL, who led the study, said: “This summer’s low ice extent doesn’t seem to have been driven by warm weather, so the question is, was last winter’s thinning behind it?”

The research, reported in Geophysical Research Letters, showed that last winter the average thickness of sea ice over the whole Arctic fell by 26 cm (10%) compared with the average thickness of the previous five winters, but sea ice in the western Arctic lost around 49 cm of thickness.

Giles said the extent of sea ice in the Arctic is down to a number of factors, including warm temperatures, currents and wind, making it important to know how ice thickness is changing as well as the extent of the ice.

“As the Arctic ice pack is constantly moving, conventional methods can only provide sparse and intermittent measurements of ice thickness from which it is difficult to tell whether the changes are local or across the whole Arctic,” Giles said.

“Satellites provide the only means to determine trends and a consistent and wide area basis. Envisat altimeter data have provided the critical third dimension to the satellite images which have already revealed a dramatic decrease in the area of ice covered in the Arctic.”

The team, including Dr Seymour Laxon and Andy Ridout, was the first to measure ice thickness throughout the Arctic winter, from October to March, over more than half of the Arctic.

“We will continue to use Envisat to monitor the evolution of ice thickness through this winter to see whether this downward trend will continue,” Laxon said. “Next year we will have an even better tool to measure ice thickness in the shape of ESA’s CryoSat-2 mission which will provide higher resolution data and with almost complete coverage to the pole.”

Source : Eurekalert !

“People haven’t looked at how stress affects decision making, even though so many of our decisions are made under stress,” explained Mara Mather of USC Davis School of Gerontology, lead author of the study. “There’s very little information about this whole topic, and, when you get to age differences, there’s even less.”

Mather and her colleagues Marissa Gorlick, of the USC Emotion and Cognition Lab, and Nichole Kryla-Lighthall, a USC doctoral student, exposed young adults (18 to 33) and older adults (65 to 89) to a stressful event, in this case, holding a hand in ice-cold water for three minutes.

Participants were then asked to play a driving game correlating to a real-life situation in which taking a small amount of risk is common: whether to go for it on a yellow light. Participants started at a green light, and points were awarded for every second spent driving during a yellow, but lost if the light turned red while driving. The length of time for the yellow lights was determined randomly.

In other words, Mather explained, participants had to decide to take some risk — driving during a yellow light — to score any points at all.

“This is the way life is, quite often. To make more money in your investments, you have to take risk. To end up dating someone, you have to take the risk of going up and saying hello,” Mather said. “When there’s a potential payoff, most of the time you have to take some risk.”

In the control group, which was not exposed to ice-cold water, older adults were actually better drivers than younger adults, the researchers found, scoring higher on the game.

However, in the stressed group, older adults were not only more cautious but were also jerkier drivers, braking and restarting almost three times as much as their calmer peers.

The differences in the effects of stress were consistent even when the researchers accounted for gender, level of education, mood and health self-ratings.

“The everyday commute can be stressful: someone cuts you off, you’re late already. Are you more likely to try and take a risk than if you weren’t stressed out?” Mather asks. “Our results indicate that stress changes older adults’ strategies.”

The exposure to ice-cold water caused a rise in levels of the hormone cortisol, measured in saliva. Cortisol levels increased significantly (and about the amount) among stressed younger and older adults, but did not change significantly from pre-test levels for the control group, which was not exposed to ice-cold water.

As Mather explained: “The brain regions that are involved in and activated by stress overlap quite a lot with the brain regions that are involved in decision making and, in particular, in decisions about risk.”

source:Eurekalert !

Past research shows that extrinsic values undermine both personal well-being (mood and satisfaction) and collective well-being (cooperation and congeniality). Sheldon, a professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Science, found Republicans to be consistently higher on the extrinsic value of financial success and lower on the intrinsic value of helping others in need. Closer examination showed that only non-religious Republicans (presumably economic conservatives) differed from Democrats on the value of helping those in need. However, even religious Republicans exceeded Democrats in valuing financial success. Religious and non-religious Democrats did not differ in their values.

Sheldon also wondered whether the primarily economic-oriented values of Republican politicians can allow them to work for large changes that seem needed, such as shifting to an alternative and sustainable energy economy in the face of increasing climate change, or shifting toward greater inclusiveness in the face of increasing racial diversity. These challenges may require more intrinsic values, in which connection and cooperation are emphasized rather than wealth and consumption.

“The one thing that struck me the most was that the value differences were rather small – really, people were more alike than different, in that almost everybody favored intrinsic values more than extrinsic values,” Sheldon said. “It was just a small relative difference between the two parties. Still, these data suggest that economic conservatives have been ‘drafting’ on the values of religious conservatives, using conservative Christians’ willingness to care for less fortunate others as a cover for their own willingness to exploit the situation.”

Source:Eurekalert !

According to the Royal Swedish Academy, this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry rewards the initial discovery of GFP and a series of important developments that have led to its use as a tagging tool in bioscience. By using DNA technology, researchers can now connect GFP to other interesting, but otherwise invisible, proteins. This glowing marker allows them to watch the movements, positions and interactions of the tagged proteins.

Researchers can also follow the fate of various cells with the help of GFP: nerve cell damage during Alzheimer’s disease or how insulin-producing beta cells are created in the pancreas of a growing embryo. In one spectacular experiment, researchers succeeded in tagging different nerve cells in the brain of a mouse with a kaleidoscope of colors.

Commenting on Tsien’s work, HHMI President Thomas R. Cech, said, “Roger is an excellent scientist and he has provided key tools for researchers around the world to light up proteins in living cells. This work is both beautiful and important.” Tsien has been an HHMI investigator at UCSD since 1989.

Tsien’s fascination with colors has revolutionized the fields of cell biology and neurobiology by allowing scientists to peer inside living cells and watch the behavior of molecules in real time.

He is renowned for developing colorful dyes to track the movement of calcium within cells and has genetically modified molecules that make jellyfish and corals glow, creating fluorescent colors in a dazzling variety of hues. Scientists worldwide use these multicolored fluorescent proteins to track where and when certain genes are expressed in cells or in whole organisms.

Tsien has always been drawn to pretty colors. “Your science should ideally feed the deeper parts of your personality, to provide some intrinsic pleasure to tie you over the inevitable periods of discouragement,” he says.

He grew up in Livingston, New Jersey, among a number of engineers in his extended family, and even from a young age he seemed destined for a career in science. Tsien’s father was a mechanical engineer. His mother’s brothers were engineering professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tsien, who calls his own work molecular engineering, says, “I’m doomed by heredity to do this kind of work.”

Childhood asthma often kept Tsien indoors, where he spent hours conducting chemistry experiments in his basement laboratory and was first exposed to the chemistry of pretty colors. At 16, he won the top prize in the nationwide Westinghouse Talent Search. He later attended Harvard College on a National Merit Scholarship, graduating at age 20 with a degree in chemistry and physics.

As a graduate student at the University of Cambridge, Tsien worked to develop a better dye to track the levels of calcium inside cells. Calcium plays a critical role in numerous physiological processes, including the regulation of nerve impulses, muscle contraction, and fertilization. At that time, measuring intracellular calcium was a laborious process and typically involved injecting a calcium-binding protein through the cell membrane, a technique that often damaged the very cells being studied. Using techniques of chemistry, Tsien developed organic dyes that twist when they bind calcium, dramatically changing the dyes’ fluorescence. He found a way to masquerade the dyes so they could pass through the cell membrane without having to be injected.

In the early 1990s, Tsien borrowed from jellyfish a molecule that glows, green fluorescent protein, and reengineered it to emit colors ranging from blue to yellow. The fluorescent proteins can be tagged to certain genes or to specific proteins of interest. Using a light microscope, scientists can easily determine by their glow when and where the genes are activated or the proteins are expressed.

Over the years, Tsien has expanded the color palette of fluorescent proteins - adding a dazzling array of hues, including cherry, strawberry, tangerine, tomato, orange, banana and honeydew. He has also developed a way to monitor the interactions of two proteins, each tagged with different hues of fluorescent proteins. “As a whole, fluorescent proteins have had a huge impact on many areas of biological sciences because they gave [scientists] a direct link from genes and DNA to something you can see inside a cell or inside any organism,” Tsien says, while also acknowledging that other scientists initially discovered and cloned fluorescent proteins.

In 2004, Tsien’s group, fascinated by the efficient way the human immune system generates a rapid response to create a near-infinite variety of antibodies, “hijacked” that machinery and used it to evolve a new type of fluorescent protein. The mutation process, called somatic hypermutation (SHM), normally acts on immunoglobulin genes, producing a large array of antibodies necessary to attack microbes and other foreign substances that the immune system may never have encountered before.

By demonstrating that SHM can be widely adaptable for research use, Tsien and his colleagues opened the way for enormously faster mutation of genes to produce proteins with useful new properties, including research tools and disease therapeutics. For example, Tsien’s team used SHM to evolve a red fluorescent protein — which is used to track molecules inside cells — with improved stability and color emission properties beyond that which the researchers could create on their own. The properties of the new fluorescent protein make it a useful indicator of gene activity or protein trafficking when protein is attached to a specific gene in a living cell.

Tsien has also set his sights on the imaging and treatment of cancer. He and his colleagues have built U-shaped peptide molecules to carry a payload—an imaging molecule or chemotherapy drug. The peptides are substrates for certain proteases, protein-cleaving enzymes that are exuded from tumor cells but rarely appear on normal cells. When the protease cleaves the bottom of the U, the two arms of the U are separated, unleashing one arm to drag the payload portion of the peptide into a neighboring cancer cell. “I’ve always wanted to do something clinically relevant in my career, if possible, and cancer is the ultimate challenge,” Tsien says.

Moreover, and equally important, our study shows that a single-walled carbon nanotube-modified DNA probe, which targets a specific mRNA inside living cells, has increased self-delivery capability and intracellular biostability when compared to free DNA probes. Therefore, this new conjugate provides significant advantages for basic genomic studies in which DNA probes are used to monitor intracellular levels of molecules.

Ozone is a protective atmospheric layer found in about 25 kilometres altitude that acts as a sunlight filter shielding life on Earth from harmful ultraviolet rays, which can increase the risk of skin cancer and cataracts and harm marine life. This year the area of the thinned ozone layer over the South Pole reached about 27 million square kilometres, compared to 25 million square kilometres in 2007 and a record ozone hole extension of 29 million square kilometres in 2006, which is about the size of the North American continent.

The depletion of ozone is caused by extreme cold temperatures at high altitude and the presence of ozone-destructing gases in the atmosphere such as chlorine and bromine, originating from man-made products like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were phased out under the 1987 Montreal Protocol but continue to linger in the atmosphere.

Depending on the weather conditions, the size the Antarctic ozone hole varies every year. During the southern hemisphere winter, the atmosphere above the Antarctic continent is kept cut off from exchanges with mid-latitude air by prevailing winds known as the polar vortex – the area in which the main chemical ozone destruction occurs. The polar vortex is characterized by very low temperatures leading to the presence of so-called stratospheric clouds (PSCs).

As the polar spring arrives in September or October, the combination of returning sunlight and the presence of PSCs leads to a release of highly ozone-reactive chlorine radicals that break ozone down into individual oxygen molecules. A single molecule of chlorine has the potential to break down thousands of molecules of ozone.

Julian Meyer-Arnek of the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), which monitors the hole annually, explained the impact of regional meteorological conditions on the time and range of the ozone hole by comparing 2007 with 2008.

“In 2007 a weaker meridional heat transport was responsible for colder temperatures in the stratosphere over the Antarctic, leading to an intensified formation of PSCs in the stratosphere,” Meyer-Arnek said. “Therefore, we saw a fast ozone hole formation in the beginning of September 2007.”

“In 2008 a stronger-than-usual meridional heat transport caused warmer temperatures in the Antarctic stratosphere than usual, reducing the formation of PSCs. Consequently, the conversion of chemically inactive halogens into ozone-destroying substances was reduced. As a result in the beginning of September 2008, the ozone hole area was slightly smaller than average,” he continued.

“Since the polar vortex remained undisturbed for a long period, the 2008 ozone hole became one of the largest ever observed.”

Minimum values of the ozone layer of about 120 Dobson Units are observed this year compared to around 100 Dobson Units in 2006. A Dobson Unit is a unit of measurement that describes the thickness of the ozone layer in a column directly above the location of measurement.

DLR’s analysis is based upon the Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Cartography (SCIAMACHY) atmospheric sensor onboard ESA’s Envisat, the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME) aboard ESA’s ERS-2 and its follow-on instrument GOME-2 aboard EUMETSAT’s MetOp.

Scientists say that since the size and precise time of the ozone hole is dependent on the year-to-year variability in temperature and atmospheric dynamics, the detection of signs of ozone recovery is difficult.

“In order to detect these signs of recovery, a continuous monitoring of the global ozone layer and in particular of the Antarctic ozone hole is crucial,” Meyer-Arnek said.

In order to train the next generation of atmospheric scientists to continue the monitoring, students at ESA’s Advanced Atmospheric Training Course, held 15???? September at University of Oxford, UK, were given the task of analysing this year’s ozone hole with Envisat sensors.

Studying the Envisat data, the students’ findings were in line with atmospheric scientists that the south polar vortex was more concentric in 2008 than in 2007, leading to a relatively late onset of ozone depletion, and that the size of this year’s hole is similar to previous years.

“This exercise led us to realise that although many questions have been answered and much has been learned about the stratospheric chemistry and atmospheric dynamics driving ozone hole behaviour, many new questions must be raised especially concerning ozone hole recovery,” said Deborah C Stein Zweers, a post-doc satellite researcher from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) who attended the course.

“We want to know when the ozone hole will recover, how its recovery will be complicated by an environment with increasing greenhouse gases and how atmospheric dynamics will shape future ozone holes. These and many other questions will attract the attention of our generation of scientists for the next several decades.”

Source : European Space Agency via EurekAlert !

“We believe that understanding blood-vessel dysfunction in diabetes is critical because the progression of vascular diseases may be significantly reduced if dysfunction is corrected,” said Cuihua Zhang, an investigator in the Dalton Cardiovascular Research Center and associate professor of internal medicine in the MU School of Medicine. “The results of our studies may provide new approaches for the treatment of blood-vessel diseases and disorders in type 2 diabetes, such as the possible use of antibodies that work to stop the proteins responsible for inflammation.”

Zhang and other researchers tested their hypothesis that tumor necrosis factor-? (TNF-?), a signaling protein involved in inflammation, was responsible for blood-vessel dysfunction in type 2 diabetes. They observed that diabetic mice had elevated levels of TNF. When diabetic mice lacked TNF, their blood vessels functioned normally. They also observed that advanced glycation end products and their receptors (AGE/RAGE), which are proteins and lipids that are thought to contribute to various blood vessel complications, amplified TNF production in diabetes. In patients with diabetes, AGEs accumulate more quickly than normal in the blood and arteries.

“We found that the overproduction of AGE and RAGE contributes to blood-vessel dysfunction in type 2 diabetes,” Zhang said. “Changes in the blood vessels caused by these proteins cause oxidative stress and vascular dysfunction that leads to diseases such as heart disease and stroke.”

source : University of Missouri-Columbia via  EurekAlert !