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Blog – Page 11324

Pitch black darkness and silence may help some people drift off at night, but others fall asleep better with music, TV or a fan on in the room. For the latter group, a white noise machine or app can be a handy bedside companion, but Cambridge Sound Management claims it has a better option with the Nightingale, a new Internet of Things-enabled system that uses two speakers in a room to create a “sound blanket” that is designed to blend into the background and block disruptive sounds.

Devices like the Snooz are designed to sit by the bed while they give off their comforting soundscapes, but according to CSM, when sound is coming from a single source a listener’s brain can pinpoint it, making it less effective at helping people switch off and drift off. To counter this apparent shortcoming, the Nightingale system comes in pairs, and placing them in different parts of the room creates a more uniform blanket of white noise that the brain can’t precisely locate.

Each unit contains two speakers, and when plugged into an outlet – actually two outlets –, outputs ambience from a selection of 15 different types of soundscapes. The company says the layout of the room is taken into account, and the devices will work even when plugged in behind furniture. Electrical outlet real estate is valuable, so the front of each unit contains two more outlets, to replace the ones it’s hogging.

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For the first time, scientists have observed the formation of quasiparticles — a strange phenomenon observed in certain solids — in real time, something that physicists have been struggling to do for decades.

It’s not just a big deal for the physics world — it’s an achievement that could change the way we build ultra-fast electronics, and could lead to the development of quantum processors.

But what is a quasiparticle? Rather than being a physical particle, it’s a concept used to describe some of the weird phenomena that happen in pretty fancy setups — specifically, many-body quantum systems, or solid-state materials.

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China is already well on the way to establishing its own version of America’s GPS network with its Beidou satellite constellation, but now it is seeking to take navigation and timing to stellar levels.

In November China will launch the X-ray pulsar navigation satellite — XPNAV-1 — a satellite that will conduct the world’s first test of the possibilities of using the regular emission of X-ray signals from pulsars for spacecraft navigation.

The spacecraft will attempt to triangulate its position relative to the Sun using the highly regular emissions from pulsars.

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More than 20,000 women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year in the United States, most of whom have advanced disease. Although chemotherapy can put the disease into remission, it often recurs and the treatment’s effectiveness tends to wane over time. As a result, ovarian cancer is the fifth most-common cause of cancer death in women.

On Saturday, a team of researchers including Stanford oncologist Jonathan Berek, MD, presented the results of an international, multi-center phase-3 clinical trial of a new oral medication called niraparib in 553 women with advanced, recurrent ovarian cancer at the annual meeting of the European Society for Molecular Oncology in Copenhagen. Berek, the Laurie Kraus Lacob Professor and director of the Stanford Women’s Cancer Center, supervised Stanford’s involvement in the trial.

The aim of the study was to see whether niraparib could prolong the length of remission, also known as “progression-free survival,” in the women when compared to treatment with a placebo. As Berek described the niraparib treatment for me in an phone call, “This is a daily oral treatment with relatively low toxicity. Importantly, women don’t have to go to the hospital for regular infusions and are unlikely to experience significant hair loss.”

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