Antibacterial resistance a cause for major concern, cystic fibrosis experts say

World-leading cystic fibrosis experts, from Queen's University Belfast, have called for greater research to address the major concern of antibacterial resistance.

Professor Stuart Elborn, an international authority on respiratory medicine, said that more funding and further research are required into antibiotic resistance in order to improve patient outcomes for people with Cystic Fibrosis.

In his paper, Infections in chronic lung diseases 2, which was recently published in The Lancet, Professor Elborn reviews current research into infections in chronic lung diseases. Professor Elborn and his colleagues state that while not all resistance found in bacteria is caused by antibiotics, the increasing resistance to antibiotics is proving a major problem in treating people with Cystic Fibrosis.

Speaking about his research Professor Elborn, Dean of the School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences at Queen's, said: "Our review of current research has found a need for further investigation into antibacterial resistance. While antibiotic treatment has undeniably resulted in increased life expectancy for patients with Cystic Fibrosis during the past 50 years, the emergence of antimicrobial resistance is a cause for major concern.

"We need more research into how to improve cystic fibrosis patient outcomes while reducing antibiotic resistance. We need to look at the use of compounds that may work against bacteria in a way that helps our current antibiotics to be more effective. Such compounds are readily available for treatment of other conditions. At Queen's we are leading the way and are working on developing some of these compounds.

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The above story is based on materials provided by Queen's University, Belfast . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Tech Time Warp of the Week: This Tech Giant Saw the Future. Then Google Put It Out of Business

Before Uber and Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter, Google and Yahoo, DEC saw the future of the internet.

Take a gander at the video above, a classic from the year 1994 in which the mighty computer maker lays out the next twenty years of internet revolution in a mere three minutes of screen time.

“A global electronic mall is under construction,” the company tells the world’s businesses, by way of an oh-so-’90s narrator. “This means a new array of risks and opportunities. In the future, you’ll be forced to compete with distant companies you never encountered before, and you’ll be able to expand to new markets at low cost. Here, new business models will evolve quickly, with new kinds of partnerships and collaboration—new ways of working together and serving customers and making money.”

How’s that for digital prescience? He even mentions WIRED—though we’re most impressed by the bit about making money, which our narrator delivers with some extra oomph.

OK, the prediction doesn’t resonate quite as well if you pay attention to the graphically challenged webpages that bounce around as our narrator narrates. And then there’s the bit where he describes these webpages as “attractive” and “easy to use.” And the bit about reading DEC whitepapers. And the bit about DEC helping build the future it predicts.

Poor DEC. It did see the future—or at least part of it—and then it slipped away.

Founded in the 1950s, the Digital Equipment Corporation spent decades making big, beefy computing systems. Then, in the ’90s, it launched the first major web search engine. It was called AltaVista, and it ran on one of those big, beefy DEC computing systems. But soon, companies like Google came along, and they realized that, in order to keep up with the ever-growing internet, you needed a new kind of algorithm—and a very different kind of hardware. As it turns out, the best way to run a search engine is with lots and lots of small machines, not one big one.

The likes of Google were so successful, the machines built by the likes of DEC eventually faded into irrelevance. The company vanished into computer maker Compaq, which then vanished into HP. But, to be fair, DEC still played a very important role in the rise of the modern internet. All its best engineers jumped to Google, where they did help build the future.

Gadget Lab Podcast: We Dig Deep Into the Bendy iPhone Controversy

Alex Washburn / WIRED

Your favorite technology talk show returns after a three week hiatus—we had to move the studio, and we were out on vacation last week, and there was one week where we just weren’t around, OK? Mat and Mike discuss the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus, both of which were reviewed on WIRED this week. Also: the strange bendability of the new iPhone 6 Plus, and whether this is a pocket-sized controversy overblown by the zealous media, or in fact a really big problem Apple needs to fix, stat. The hosts also weigh in on Ello, the new social network on the block, and whether it stands a snowball’s chance in Guam. At the end of the show, we all learn a rich, personal detail about Mat: he’s really, really into birds.

Programming note: This episode was recorded on Thursday while #bendgate was still unraveling, and the guys weren’t yet privy to the new arguments that emerged Friday about how the structural makeup of the iPhone 6 Plus is causing some of the devices to bend.

Listen to this week’s episode or subscribe in iTunes.

Send the hosts feedback on their personal Twitter feeds (Christina Bonnington is @redgirlsays, Michael Calore is @snackfight) or to the main hotline at @GadgetLab.

Game|Life Podcast: You and Me Could Write a Bird Romance

Mediatonic/Hato Moa

A special treat for longtime fans of the Game|Life podcast: WIRED contributor Laura Hudson returns this week for a special guest appearance!

We talk Hatoful Boyfriend , the bird dating simulator that has hearts aflutter. And Destiny‘s dear departed Loot Cave. And Hyrule Warriors, and Smash Bros.. There’s a lot of talk.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://ift.tt/1rquB8H"]

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Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Just Released a New Album on BitTorrent

Continuing the trend of “Surprise!” album releases that his band Radiohead pretty much started seven years ago, Thom Yorke just up and released an album on BitTorrent today. It’s called Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes and it’ll cost you $6.

The eight-track record, which Yorke made with longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, also heralds the arrival of a new feature for BitTorrent Bundles: paygates. The paygates mean that Bundles, which have been used by artists ranging from Madonna to De La Soul to release new projects, can now be monetized. An artist puts a price on their work, and then fans can pay for it through BitTorrent (sounds weird, right?) using a credit card or PayPal.

“It’s an experiment to see if the mechanics of the system are something that the general public can get its head around,” Yorke and Godrich said in a statement. “If it works well it could be an effective way of handing some control of internet commerce back to people who are creating the work.”

This almost feels like déjà vu. Back in 2007, seemingly unconcerned with piracy or making money, Radiohead released In Rainbows through its website and let fans pay whatever they wanted for it. In the years since, scores of artists have dropped albums out of the blue and/or with alternate payment options on a number of sites/services/Samsung apps. Even Beyoncé air-dropped her last self-titled record without warning—it was on iTunes, not BitTorrent, but it was still a big “bye, Felicia” to the traditional ways massive pop stars release records. (Though, considering the reaction to that “Surprise!” U2 album Apple unceremoniously infused into everyone’s iTunes library, it’s not a tactic without risk.)

There’s no word on what the Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes release means for the new Radiohead record that the band is reportedly working on. (Perhaps the band will just release that through its app?) In the meantime, we hear Kanye West has a new album already in the can, so we’re just going to monitor GitHub until it drops.

Which Technologies Will Dominate in 2022?

manoftaste.de/Flickr

Predicting the future is hard and risky. But predicting the future in the computer industry is even harder and riskier due to dramatic changes in technology and limitless challenges to innovation. At the beginning of my term as 2014 president of IEEE Computer Society, with help from more than a dozen technology leaders, we set out to survey 23 potential technologies that could change the landscape of computer science and industry by the year 2022.

With the IEEE CS 2022 Report, we created a comprehensive document that outlines future disruptive technologies, helps scientists and researchers understand the impact of technologies in the future, and provides the general public with an idea of how technology is evolving, along with its implications for society.

At the foundation of the report is our understanding that by 2022, we will be well into a phase where intelligence becomes seamless and ubiquitous to those who can afford and use state-of-the-art information technology. At the heart of the “seamless intelligence” revolution is seamless networking, where the transition from one network device to another is transparent and uninterrupted. To achieve seamlessness and realize logical end-to-end connectivity, we’ll need communications to run independently on top of any form of physical networking, regardless of device or location.

Through virtualized end-to-end connectivity, total integration of all the ecosystem devices that cater to our specific needs can be achieved. This new world will require sophisticated intelligent coordination software; voice, image, and motion recognition will transform human-computer interfaces into a seamless interaction between the user and all the computing devices in that person’s life.

The report represents insights from a strong community of technology leaders from around the world. Hasan Alkhatib of SSN Services LLC; Paolo Faraboschi of HP Labs, Spain; Eitan Frachtenberg of Facebook; Hironori Kasahara of Waseda University; Danny Lange of Microsoft; Phil Laplante of Pennsylvania State University; Arif Merchant of Google; Karsten Schwan of Georgia Tech; and myself conceived the report and wrote many sections. Mohammed AlQuraishi of Harvard Medical School; Angela Burgess of IEEE Computer Society; David Forsyth of Cornell University; Hiroyasu Iwata of Waseda University; Rick McGeer of Communications and Design Group, SAP America; and John Walz, formerly of Lucent/AT&T, all contributed some of the individual sections.

In the future that we envision, multicore will allow us to recharge our smartphones just once a month. The Internet of Things will let us dress in clothes that monitor all our activities. Nanotechnology will enable lives to be saved by digestible cameras and machines made from particles 50,000 times as small as a human hair. And amid the exponential growth of large data repositories will be increasing concerns about balancing convenience and privacy.

The potential for quantum computing is staggering since it’s constrained only by the laws of physics. Universal memory replacements for DRAM will cause a tectonic shift in architectures and software. 3D printing will create a revolution in fabrication, with many opportunities to produce designs that would have been prohibitively expensive.

We predict that machine learning will play an increasingly important role in our lives, whether by ranking search results, recommending products, or building better models of the environment. And medical robotics will lead to many lifesaving innovations, from autonomous delivery of hospital supplies to telemedicine and advanced prostheses.

With energy consumption increasing along with the world’s population, electric cars, LEDs, smart grids, smart cities, dark silicon, new battery technology, and new ways of cooling data centers are some areas where advances in sustainability are expected. Silicon photonics will address bandwidth, latency, and energy challenges, and developments at all levels of the network stack will continue to drive research and the Internet economy. In the area of software-defined networks, OpenFlow and SDN will make networks more secure, transparent, flexible, and functional.

Read the report here and share your thoughts: Which technologies do you think will dominate in 2022?

Dejan Milojicic is President of the IEEE Computer Society, and founding Editor-in-Chief of IEEE ComputingNow.

When a Giant Asteroid Impact Created Its Own Magma

Landsat 8 image of the Sudbury Basin in Ontario, taken in September 2013. Photo by USGS/NASA

There are many ways we can form magma on Earth. Most of these processing involve the motion of the mantle and crust of the planet, creating places where hot mantle rock can decompress, like at a mid-ocean ridge, or where water coming off a piece of oceanic crust that is diving into the mantle lowers the melting point of rock, like in a subduction zone. These two processes — decompression and flux melting — are the main modes of generating the magma that drives volcanoes. However, occasionally very rare events like massive asteroid impact can cause the rocks of the Earth’s crust to melt and even cause volcanoes and magma bodies to form that may have lasted over 50,000 years.

One of the best examples on Earth for this kind of cataclysmic volcanism in found in Canada. The Sudbury Basin in Ontario (see above) contains the remnants of a massive asteroid impact that occurred ~1.8 billion years ago. Today, the remains of the crater are perched up against some of the oldest rocks on Earth, namely the Canadian Shield, where the rocks are 2-2.6 billion years old. It is into these ancient rocks that the Sudbury asteroid slammed, creating what is though to be a crater at least 200 kilometers across. All that remains today is an elliptical sequence of rocks ~50 kilometers across as most of the impact features have been long since eroded. However, this scar on the Earth’s surface might also be one of its most valuable, with over $500 billion worth of nickel, copper, platinum-group and other rare metals in its deposits.

Last week, our Denison University Geosciences field trip visited the Sudbury Basin and I got to see for the first time these results of this massive impact. You can find evidence for this impact in the rocks that surrounded the old impact structure. Namely, you can find “shatter cones” (see below) — areas in the rock that surrounded the impact crater that were suddenly and catastrophically fractured by the pressure wave released during the impact. The shatter cones around Sudbury vary from only a few centimeters to half a meter long (at least where we saw them). One cool feature is the sharp part of the cone points back towards the location of the impact (once you rotate the rocks to their original orientation). These shatter cones are some of the most important structures to support the hypothesis that the Sudbury rocks are formed from a massive impact.

Shatter cones found in the rocks surrounding the Sudbury impact structure. I’ve added some lines to help see the cones in this image. Photo by Erik Klemetti

The shatter cones are cool, but what I was most interested in seeing was one of the most astonishing products of the impact: magma and volcanoes. Now, most impacts aren’t going to produce much in the way of magma (melt). We do find small blebs of melt in the deposits from other impacts, but by volume, they are an insignificant part of the impact. However, at Sudbury, it seems that the force of the eruption was enough to create hundreds of cubic kilometers (if not more) of magma. Most of this magma stayed in the ground and formed what we call a large igneous intrusion. These features, like the Stillwater Complex in Montana, are one of the few times we see direct evidence of that “magma chamber” that is (incorrectly) envisioned beneath a volcano. The magma body caused by the Sudbury impact was large enough to stay hot for sufficient time to allow minerals to crystallize and separate (fractionate) in the chamber. That’s a little bit more into the gory details that I want to get, but one of the ramifications of all this melted crust is that you suddenly had volcanoes where there weren’t any mere moments before the impact!

Impact melt in the Sudbury Basin. You can see lighter grey chunks of the shattered crust into which the dark black impact melt/magma intruded. Click to see a larger version. Photo by Erik Klemetti

Most of the evidence of these volcanoes has been eroded away in the intervening 1.79 billion years, but we can still find some features that betray the presence of these impact-induced magmas and their volcanic products. First are places where magma squeezed into the now-shattered crust. In these areas, you might a dark black impact melt (see above and below). At the time it formed, it would have been glassy, but now it is finely crystalline (volcanic glass breaks down quickly). This magma is the molten remains of the crust that sat under the impact site. Now, it didn’t melt due to the heat of impact (at least not entirely), but rather thanks to the rapid decrease in pressure it felt after the shockwave of the impact passed. We know that this magma formed during impact because we find it associated with rocks shattered during the impact — we also know it had to be formed by melting the crust because isotopically, the impact melt is the same as what the crust is isotopically (rather than the mantle or the asteroid). The fact that the impact melt is found in dikes all over the Sudbury Basin means it was likely migrating to the surface and that likely means we can active volcanoes formed from this melt.

A dike of impact melt (dark black) cutting through the crust near the Sudbury impact site. Notice the small chunks of crust in the dark impact melt: evidence for melting the crust. Click to see a larger version. Photo by Erik Klemetti

Now, as I said, much of the evidence of the impact volcanism has been erased by erosion. However, there are some very strange rocks that could be best described as “astroclastic”. What do I mean by that? Remember, “pyroclastic” rocks are generated from a fluidized flow of how volcanic debris and rocks during an explosive eruption. In the Sudbury area, we find “impact breccia” (a term for broken debris with a finer material) that consists of blocks of crust, blobs of impact melt and even accretionary lapilli (raindrops coated with ash) that formed as the initial explosion caused by the impact fell back into the crater. The composition of the “astroclastic” material (see below) really does sound like a true hybrid between impact fallout and volcanic eruptions.

The impact breccia (“astroclastic”) material from the Sudbury impact, with chunks of crust, pieces of impact melt and ash. The deposit itself looks remarkably like a volcanic pyroclastic flow deposit. The piece is roughly 30 cm across. Click to see a larger version. Photo by Erik Klemetti.

The Sudbury impact structure and the resulting magmatic intrusions (and volcanism) is a one-of-a-kind deposit on Earth. If you’re a geologist or geology enthusiast, it is definitely worth taking the trek up to Ontario to see it. There is even an incredibly in-depth (and free) field guide to the area with road stops to see some of these same features. Geologists have tried to attribute any number of grand events to the Sudbury impact, everything from the oxygenation of the oceans to the reworking of all the Earth’s crust. Even without these grand claims, anyplace where you can see volcanoes potentially formed by a massive asteroid impact, it is a place you have to go.