Author: David Bradley

Cornell University Researchers Redux

Last year, I reported how scientists at Cornell University were working on ways to improve P2P systems. In case you didn’t know, P2P (peer to peer) are infamous as a major route for software, music, and movie piracy.

Anyway, they’re at it again, although this time researchers at Cornell have cracked the codes for Europe’s GPS (global positioning system) so that anyone could access its data for free.

Members of GPS Laboratory have cracked the so-called pseudo random number (PRN) codes despite efforts to keep the codes secret. It means anyone with a sat-nav device, including handheld receivers and in-car systems which need PRNs to listen to satellites, can get the info they need for free. The codes and the methods used to extract them were published in the June issue of GPS World.

The navigational satellite, GIOVE-A (Galileo In-Orbit Validation Element-A), is a prototype for 30 satellites that by 2010 will compose Galileo, a $4 billion joint venture of the European Union, European Space Agency and private investors. Galileo is Europe’s answer to the United States’ GPS.

In late January, Mark Psiaki, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell and co-leader of Cornell’s GPS Laboratory, requested the codes from Martin Unwin at Surrey Space Technologies Ltd., one of three privileged groups in the world with the PRN codes. “In a very polite way, he said, ‘Sorry, goodbye,'” recalled Psiaki. Next Psiaki contacted Oliver Montenbruck, a friend and colleague in Germany, and discovered that he also wanted the codes. “Even Europeans were being frustrated,” said Psiaki. “Then it dawned on me: Maybe we can pull these things off the air, just with an antenna and lots of signal processing.”

Within one week Psiaki’s team developed a basic algorithm to extract the codes. Two weeks later they had their first signal from the satellite, but were thrown off track because the signal’s repeat rate was twice that expected. By mid-March they derived their first estimates of the code, and — with clever detective work and an important tip from Montenbruck — published final versions on their Web site (http://gps.ece.cornell.edu/galileo) on April 1. The next day, NovAtel Inc., a Canadian-based major manufacturer of GPS receivers, downloaded the codes from the Web site and within 20 minutes began tracking GIOVE-A for the first time.

Galileo eventually published PRN codes in mid-April, but they weren’t the codes currently used by the GIOVE-A satellite. Furthermore, the same publication labeled the open source codes as intellectual property, claiming a license is required for any commercial receiver. “That caught my eye right away,” said Psiaki. “Apparently they were trying to make money on the open source code.”

Afraid that cracking the code might have been copyright infringement, Psiaki’s group consulted with Cornell’s university counsel. “We were told that cracking the encryption of creative content, like music or a movie, is illegal, but the encryption used by a navigation signal is fair game,” said Psiaki. The upshot: The Europeans cannot copyright basic data about the physical world, even if the data are coming from a satellite that they built.

“Imagine someone builds a lighthouse,” argued Psiaki. “And I’ve gone by and see how often the light flashes and measured where the coordinates are. Can the owner charge me a licensing fee for looking at the light? No. How is looking at the Galileo satellite any different?”

I’m fairly sure that things won’t be quite so clear cut once the lawyers get involved. After all there’s a whole world of difference between looking at a lighthouse to make sure your ship doesn’t hit the rocks and doing a full spectral analysis of the light source to determine the customer reference number for the lighthouse owner’s electricity bill!

Domo Aragato Kenkyusha

Old friend Michael Engel, who works for a Japanese chemical company, emailed to tell me that help is available, the form of a discussion group on Yahoo! for foreign researchers presently in Japan, who have been in Japan or are planning to come, or who have otherwise contact with Japan.

The list is called kenkyusha (meaning researcher) and can be accessed here.

Scientific organizations in Japan and around the world are encouraged to post information about
bilateral research and/or exchange programs, scholarships, research programs in general, and other relevant information for international researchers in Japan. The list operates in English, but Japanese speakers can post in Japanese if they like but with an English preface to their post.

The site was set up on June 27 and at the time of writing has 16 members and rising.

Nitroglycerine and Sex

Nitroglycerine is best known for being the explosive substance you daren’t drop if you’re in a 1950s B movie. But, it also has several medical applications including acting as a vasodilator in the treatment of angina. It was in searching for novel and patentable drugs with similar activity that led to the discovery of Viagra, an experimental drug originally destined for the heart, which found itself pumping blood in an altogether different physiological venue.

Now, nitrogylcerine, or glycerine trinitrate as The Times (London) referred to it yesterday, is set to enter clinical trials as a topical alternative to Viagra and other impotence treatments.

Topical, you say? Doesn’t that mean it has to be rubbed in?

Indeed, Futura Medical in collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline, hope to market a gel that would be applied directly to the penis, cause vasodilation, and that blood pumping we mentioned earlier. The trials will also investigate the effects the gel has on women who share the experience of topical application with a male partner. Why the ladies don’t get their own separate trial The Times does not say. Of course, nitroglycerine is well known for causing headaches, so there’s a little, or big, wedge of irony in any such trial, surely?

Futura and GSK expect the new product codenamed MED2002, for some odd reason, to pass muster with the regulators in 2008 (so why didn’t they call it MED2008?) and be marketed soon thereafter as an over-the-counter, or maybe under-the-counter-in-a-brown-paper-bag, product.

In the meantime, we now have another product for the spammers to add to their list of fake Rx sales, so watch out for spams with subject lines containing – MED2oo2, M@d2002, Medd2002, etc etc, ad infinitum.

Chemical panacea

Could researchers in Australia have developed a pharmaceutical panacea to beat all those herbal remedies offered in a multitude of spam emails and websites that claim to cure everything. They are working pre-clinical models of a new class of drug that could treat a range of problems from inflammation and cancer to eye and heart disease.

Certain types of skin cancers, age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and diabetic retinopathy are likely to be among the first uses for the drug, which has already shown efficacy in pre-clinical models.

“This may be a ‘one-size fits all’ therapy, because it targets a master regulator gene called c-Jun which appears to be involved in all of these diseases,” explains Levon Khachigian, of the Centre for Vascular Research (CVR), at the University of New South Wales. “c-Jun is an important disease-causing gene,” adds Khachigian. “It stands out because we don’t see much of it in normal tissue but it is highly expressed in diseased blood vessels, eyes, lungs, joints, and in the gut — in any number of areas involving inflammation and aggressive vascular growth.

The experimental drug they are testing goes by the enigmatic name of Dz13, and with equal enigma behaves like a secret agent finding its target, c-Jun, and killing it point blank. “It is a specific, pre-programmed ‘molecular assassin’,” says Khachigian.

He and colleagues report full details in Nature Biotechnology this month. The next step will be to test the drug in a small human trial on non-melanoma skin cancers. “If such a trial were successful, it would be a significant development given the high rates of skin cancer and because the main treatment currently is surgical excision, which can cause scarring,” said Khachigian.

A cooling hot drink

cup of tea

The current heatwave in England has had countless old wives, and a few elderly husbands, calling for a nice cup of tea to cool them down. And, when I say tea, I’m not talking none of that chilled variety that comes in peach and lemon and all sorts of other gawdy flavours, I mean a nice cup pored from a cosy-covered pot, with a splash of semi-skimmed milk and a couple of lumps of sugar (ten if you’re a builder or plumber, of course). So, what’s going on? Why drink a hot drink when it’s hot and you want to cool down.

Physically, it’s an illogical thing to do, Captain. Add something hot to a body at a lower temperature and the cooler body will absorb heat energy from that hot something and its temperature will rise, surely?

Physiologically, things might not be so clear-cut. Drink a hot drink, and yes, the temperature of your stomach’s contents will rise, but this will also cause a slight hastening of the heart, expanding blood vessels across the skin, and an increase in sweating as the brain switches on the various feedback-controlled temperature regulators.

It’s that word ‘feedback’ that provides a possible clue as to why a cup of hot tea might have gained its reputation among English old wives as a good coolant. Feedback loops always have a time delay. So, the instant burst of heat that comes from sipping on a nice cup of tea will inevitably bring you out in a bit of a sweat, raise your heart rate etc, but those compensatory measures take time to be reversed, possibly more time than it takes for the contents of your gut to reach ‘body temperature’ again. So, their cooling effect may just last a little longer than is actually needed to get you back to normal temperature and so you may end up a little cooler than when you started.

All that said, I don’t think our temperature feedback systems are that tardy. The real reason that old wives perceive a hot cup of tea to have a cooling effect is probably more to do with interrupting whatever activity it was that made them hot in the first place, partaking of the cup-of-tea creation ceremony, and sitting down in a darkened room with their feet up to drink it.

I could be wrong, and now that the storms are on their way this atypical English weather is likely to be replaced with the more usual wet and grey with which visitors become so familiar.

Now, where did I put those teabags…?

Full-text literature searching

A neat search engine string allows you to pull in the abstracts from a large section of the scientific literature based on a full text search. It’s analogous to checking only the “journals” box when using Elsevier’s Scirus.com but allows you to search across publications offered by American Physical Society, Cambridge University Press, Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry, Karger, Nature Publishing Group, Wiley, and many others.

You can give it a try on the full-text literature search page at ChemSpy.com

I’ll also be adding it to the Sciencebase search toolbox when I update those to take account of the imminent Intute launch.

Top 5 scientist blogs

technorati ranking

I suspect some scientists, like some science writers, you might say, have toooo much time on their hands. Nature’s Declan Butler trawled the Technorati blog directory for blogs written by scientists and found that of the 45 million or so blogs it lists at least five scientists’ blogs that make it into the top 3,500.

“There is little agreement about how to rank blogs,” Butler says, “no method is perfect.” He adds that given the huge number of blogs, there will no doubt be omissions. The exercise is, he says, best viewed as “a rough snapshot”. Nevertheless, the results demonstrate (somehow, the press release doesn’t say) that there has been a rapid increase in popularity of scientists’ blogs, and reveal several lessons for science bloggers hoping to get noticed.

I asked Butler about his motive for assessing science blogs in this way, “My idea was really just to get some idea of where science blogs stood in the blogosphere, and also draw attention to the issue of blogging in science,” he told me.

Anyway, here are the Top 5 Science Blogs according to Butler’s Technorati analysis:

179th Pharyngula http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula

1,647th The Panda’s Thumb http://www.pandasthumb.org

1,884th RealClimate http://www.realclimate.org

2,174th Cosmic Variance http://cosmicvariance.com

3,429th The Scientific Activist http://scienceblogs.com/scientificactivist

Intriguingly, at least two of those Top 5 science blogs is aimed at quashing the pseudoscience claptrap spouted by the extremists in the intelligent design, creationist and reactionary religious movements. All five of those discussed appear to provide a sensible view of various issues with which science is concerned and provide beacons that might see us out of the dark ages of the present anti-science stance many bloggers are taking today.

(Just for the record your very own sciencebase.com comes in at a rather respectable 852nd, although it was about 605th a couple of weeks ago, so not sure how valid their trackback algo really is, to be honest).

Chronic fatigue diagnosis

The cause of CFS, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), post-viral fatigue syndrome (PVFS), is not yet known and its symptoms are broad, ranging from fatigue, pain, muscle weakness, and depression to digestive disturbances, immune system weakness, and breathing problems. Moreover, there is no simple diagnostic test for the disease and patients often rely on a sympathetic physician to recognise the problem, but who, nevertheless, does not necessarily have the tools to offer a definitive answer nor an effective treatment. An objective clinical diagnostic test would make understanding and treating this disease far easier. Japanes researchers have now used a type of infra-red spectroscopy to distinguish between plasma from CFS patients and healthy volunteers. They reckon a non-invasive test will be available soon.

More…

Smartening Raman

Raman spectroscopy can provide elegant views of even the most mixed of materials at the sub-microscopic scale, even picking out chemical bonds. And, because it is sensitive to the lightweight elements found in covalent bonds it can provide detailed information that is inaccessible to sophisticated X-ray techniques. However, Raman is yet to be widely adopted because it suffers from potentially debilitating resolution issues and takes too long for all but the most patient of laboratories.

Now. French researchers have found a way to create a map of the incident laser beam used in Raman spectroscopy which brings it up to speed and could make it a more accessible technique.

More in the latest issue of SpectroscopyNOW.com