Severe headache sufferers will be given a gadget rather than pills to alleviate the pain, the head of NHS England announced on Wednesday.
Cluster headaches, which are often mistaken for migraines, are one of the most debilitating conditions known to medical science, with women often describing the pain as worse than childbirth.
Now sufferers will be offered a hand-held device that delivers mild electrical stimulation to the vagus nerve to block the pain signals that cause the headaches.
The red meat or white meat debate is a draw: Eating white meat, such as poultry, will have an identical effect on your cholesterol level as eating red beef, new research indicates.
The long-held belief that eating white meat is less harmful for your heart may still hold true, because there may be other effects from eating red meat that contribute to cardiovascular disease, said the University of California, San Francisco researchers. This needs to be explored in more detail, they added.
Non-meat proteins such as vegetables, dairy, and legumes, including beans, show the best cholesterol benefit, according to the new study published Tuesday in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
How might future changes in the structure of business and the nature of work impact the environment?
While governments around the world are wrestling with the potential for massive on-rushing technological disruption of work and the jobs market, few are extending the telescope to explore what the knock-on impacts might be for the planet. Here we explore some dimensions of the issue.
Although replacing humans with robots has a dystopian flavor, what, if any positives are there from successive waves of artificial intelligence (AI) and other exponentially developing technologies displacing jobs ranging from banker to construction worker? Clearly, the number of people working and the implications for commuting, conduct of their role and their resulting income-related domestic lifestyle all have a direct bearing on their consumption of resources and emissions footprint. However, while everyone wants to know the impact of smart automation, the reality is that we are all clueless as to the outcome over the next twenty years, as this fourth industrial revolution has only just started.
There is a dramatic variation in views on the extent to which automation technologies such as AI, robotics and 3D / 4D printing will replace humans or enable wholly new roles. For example, A 2016 McKinsey automation study reported that, with current technologies, about a third of most job activities are technologically automatable, affecting 49% of the world economy, an estimated 1.1 billion employees and $12.7 trillion in wages. China, India, Japan, and USA account for more than half of these totals. The report concluded it would be more than two decades before automation reaches 50% of current activities.
The growing interest in cannabis and cannabis-derived products has sparked uncertainty and concern over the industry’s lack of regulations. On Thursday, the FDA held a hearing that looked deeper into the science and safety concerns that surround marijuana and CBD.
Medical Marijuana Inc (MJNA) CEO Stuart Titus is optimistic about the effects that cannabis-derived products have on humans.
“We have a very large self-regulatory system in our human bodies called the internal or the endogenous cannabinoid system,” Titus told YFi AM (video above). “And basically since cannabis has been removed from our diets for the past 80-plus years, many of us are cannabinoid deficient, and thus we start taking a nice supplementary-size serving of CBD. Many people are moving to a much higher level of overall health and wellness.”
It appears that the animation lag when using a Pixel Slate in tablet mode is vastly improved in Chrome OS 75. I snapped this short video on my Slate showing how much better it works.
Researchers have found a way to accelerate antimatter in a 1000x smaller space than current accelerators, boosting the science of exotic particles.
The new method could be used to probe more mysteries of physics, like the properties of the Higgs boson and the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and provide more sensitive testing of aircraft and computer chips.
The method has been modelled using the properties of existing lasers, with experiments planned soon. If proven, the technology could allow many more labs around the world to conduct antimatter acceleration experiments.
This paper analyses the evolution of the institution of patent by examining the normative meaning of business method patents. A business method is defined as a process of converting abstract data to useful information, to be applied in business activities. A business method patent is a patent whose claims are directed to a business method, regardless of the claim format. In recent years, the patenting of business methods in the US, Japan and in Europe has generated a global claim of controversy. Business method patenting is often seen as an example of subject matter expansion, by which process the institution of patent accommodates challenges brought forth by the increased quantity of potential subject matter. As the subject matter expansion begs the question of what is the proper boundary of the patent law, this paper attempts to answer this question by examining relevant statutes and cases, the administrative examination guidelines of the patent offices, and the claims of business method patents issued in Japan, the US and Europe. Specifically, the thesis questions whether business method patenting signifies something more than a mere accretion of a subject matter, and is a reconfiguration of patent eligible subject matter; and whether this can be justified with the instrumentalism. The paper suggests that to include business methods as a patent-eligible subject matter, courts and patent offices in the US, Japan and Europe have commonly redefined the meaning of invention of technology, from the context of physical instantiation, i.e., physical transformation, to the level of conceptual instantiation, i.e., useful information. Although they are varying in their extensiveness, as a result, the practical definitions of patent-eligible subject matter in all three regions, understood from the issued patents, court decisions and examination guidelines, reflects this change. This thesis argues that this could signify the reconfiguration of patent-eligible subject matter.
In laser facilities in the UK, Imperial physicists are testing an 84-year-old theory which was once thought impossible to prove.
The theory of the Breit-Wheeler process says it should be possible to turn light into matter by smashing two particles of light (photons) together to create an electron and a positron. However, past attempts to do this have required the addition of other high-energy particles.
Physicists from Imperial College London, led by Professor Steven Rose, came up with a way of testing the theory that did not rely on these added extras in 2014, and today an experiment is running in the hope of turning light directly into matter for the first time.
