Category: Technology

Advantages to Synthetic DNA Molecules

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Written by: The Midland Certified Reagent Company

Summary: Working with the human genome has enormous potential for the future.

Along with the ability to decode the human gene pool is the process to create synthetic segments of DNA. Synthetic oligos are perfect for testing because they simulate human DNA and can give scientists accurate results to demonstrate how a potential vaccine might affect the body. The ability to work with our gene pool will greatly enhance the understanding of medical science in the future.

Synthesizing a Reaction

The first step in creating a cure is isolating the genes involved in the disease, and how they affect the body. Once we understand more about the disease itself, we can work on testing drugs that will cause a certain reaction. For instance, if we wanted to cure cancer we might want to attack the gene that causes cancer cells to endlessly reproduce. We would need to identify the cancer gene responsible, and then see how to safely destroy or deactivate that gene without interfering with others.

This would be too difficult to test in living subjects, mostly because conditions are hard to duplicate. It’s now possible to perform DNA synthesis under precise lab conditions, which completely removes the need for a live subject until a cure has been defined and substantially tested.

Future Prospects

Soon, it may be possible for scientists to utilize RNA synthesis for their own aims. One method already tested involves using RNA to write code to DNA and turn molecules into storage devices. Maybe someday we’ll be able to write entirely new genetic code to existing DNA.

IT Training Is More Important than Ever

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Written by Brand College

It’s no secret that the last seven years or so have not been great for our economy. Many people are still worried that we’re not actually out of it yet and that the next handful could be just as bad. Whatever the case, you still need a job. Hopefully, the recession has also made it clear that you need a job which will actually deliver a sufficient paycheck and that this means one you can depend on for the foreseeable future. Whether you don’t have a degree or the one you currently have isn’t working, consider getting into information technology training in Los Angeles.

There are countless ways you could do this. Right now, for example, Cisco training in Los Angeles is very popular. Learning about information services, software design and server management are all great options too.

The point is that you want your paycheck to be tied to the digital world. It clearly isn’t going anywhere any time soon. If anything, it’s getting more and more important. With the right training, you could land a job practically anywhere in the world.

For that, consider Brand College. It’s located at 529 Hahn Ave. Suite 101, Glendale, CA 91203-1052, so just a stone’s throw from LA. They have a history that shows they understand this important field and know how to pass it on to others too.

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Are you hoping to take a plus training Los Angeles? If so, you can do much better than entrusting Brand College with your needs. Their reputation and staff speak for themselves.

Discovering New Cures for Age Old Diseases

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Cancer has been a problem humans have been dealing with for ages, and it’s a continual thorn in our collective side. It’s a disease with a high mortality rate, and we understand a lot about what it does but not how to stop that process. While medical science works hard on cracking that puzzle, we’ve made progress on other diseases that have been problems for ages.

Understanding Disease

HPLC purification is a crucial process in forensic science, telling us more about how a disease has affected someone on a molecular level. We can use this process to test reactions of potentially harmful toxins, in order to isolate exactly how a disease affects the body. Once the reaction is observed, and repeated, it becomes something scientists can test for.

Understanding what a disease does is the first step in curing, killing or deactivating it.

How Cures Work

Going deeper, we can even use these synthetic strands to test for the presence of something. Phosphorothioate oligonucleotides, for instance, are “anti-sense” particles used in genetic therapy. These drugs basically deactivate whatever strand of DNA would otherwise cause the harmful genetic disorder to crop up.

We can also test for these chemicals and toxins in real-time, which means a diagnosis is much faster than it was even ten or twenty years ago. That’s made a significant difference in response times and diagnoses for patients in places like Africa, a region beset with malaria outbreaks. Testing has sped up results and that means doctors have more time to prescribe life saving medication to patients. The costs are also lower, so testing is feasible in poorer nations.

 

Bio: The Midland Certified Reagent Company can manufacture phosphorotioate oligonucleotides, as well as purification modalities used in a variety of testing processes.

Are Medical Device Coatings Safe for the Body?

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Written by: Denton Vacuum, LLC

Summary: Are medical device coatings actually safe for the body?

As medical science evolves, the need to put objects into a patient’s body increases. There are more gadgets that do more to keep patients alive and comfortable for longer periods of time. Consider just how much tubes like the catheter have changed. They are still not a pleasant experience, but aqueous coatings have made them easier to slip in and out of the patient’s body.

These chemicals bring up important questions about the safety risks posed to your body. Are these device coatings actually making patients safer?

Consider the Device

There are several kinds of anti-reflective coating possible for eye glasses. Each is good for a specific kind of user. Index-matching, for instance, functions like tarnishing a lens. So it is with coatings, each coating being suited to a specific purpose and carrying out a specific duty. Anti-microbial coatings, for instance, are designed to fend off bacterial infections that can seep through open wounds created by tubes into the skin.

Without these devices, patients still need a catheter or eye glasses, but their site or comfort levels may be diminished. In some cases, their health is jeopardized as they are at risk for infection.

Alterations to the Device

If the coating inhibits the device from doing its job, the coating is ineffective. That’s why medical manufacturers utilize a thermal evaporation system when applying coatings to a device. The finish is thin-film, often only micrometers in thickness, which presents almost no difference to the patient.

Thin film is a little different from the effect yo get with UHV sputter deposition. This process acts more like a spray can, and can give a smooth surface but it more often used to metalize something. You might find metalized plastic in joint replacements or acting as anti-static shielding for medical equipment in the patient’s room.

Improving Productivity In The Workplace Through Software

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Written by Allied Time

Technology when used at work, contributes to boosting the efficiency of organizations and allow their employees to remain focused on value adding activities. Several productivity software target businesses particularly and provide these organizations with the adequate tool to perform their day-to-day tasks effectively. Through the automation of certain processes, communication is also enhanced.

Virtual Team Connections

Teams now perform well even at a distance. This is because they are connected via web portals, apps and software. These allow teams to share feedbacks and projects across different functions and branches. The quick sharing and access of information facilitates problem-solving and team working. People are able to show collaboration and partake their experiences and knowledge while being comfortably seated at their desks, and sometimes without even having to speak through the phone. All this is achieved through remote desktop sharing and email software.

Open and Communicative Environment

Software that are specifically designed to be used in the workplace aim mainly to break communication barriers. Even though email is a powerful tool, they tend to be more private and rarely constitute of a sharing tool. Collaborative tools are more appropriate for knowledge-sharing across multiple cross-functional teams, departments and branches.

Motivate Employees

Online time clock systems are used to monitor the attendance and working hours of employees. This data serves in the construction of effective reward systems. Some fingerprint time clocks allow people to consult their data online. This would help employees in knowing how they could improve performance and attendance rates.

Allied Time has operated since 1967. The company’s main line of products include employee time clocks and biometric systems.

Newly-restored version of “The Wizard of Oz” hits theaters, shelves

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For most people, a slide and negative scanner can be used to preserve family memories. But in Hollywood, they are using tools more advanced than the average 35mm slide scanners to save memories of a different kind: film classics.

In late September, a newly-restored version of “The Wizard of Oz” debuted on DVD on Blu-Ray. In addition, movie theaters around the country screened the new version of the 1939 family classic to packed houses. The new version was done to commemorate the film’s 70th anniversary.

According to the Los Angeles Times, restoration work involved a pin-registered digital film scanner scanning three separate film negatives at 8k, a much higher resolution than was previously possible.

“In finding the 1939 nitrate Technicolor print, we got a different look for the film than we previously had,” says Ned Price, vice president of mastering at Warner Bros. Technicolor Operations. “The information allowed us to get not only finer picture detail but much better grain capture.”

Improving Medical Device Coatings

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One of the greatest benefits that advanced manufacturing techniques have brought to the field of medicine is in the form of medical device coatings. Patients that must wear devices are susceptible to a variety of problems, the least of which is discomfort. Infection is a huge issue for these patients, so coatings are an important part in stopping the spread of disease. Here are some medical device coatings, and some thoughts on how they have changed the world of medicine.

Lubricants

A sputter deposition system can be used to apply a lubricant to medical devices to slip into a patient’s body with ease. A catheter is the most obvious example for the type of device that might benefit from this kind of coating. The lubricant is designed to reduce the kinetic friction that comes from wearing a device for long periods, which means the patient barely feels anything.

Antimicrobial Coatings

When devices come into contact with bodily fluids, patients run the risk of infection. Antimicrobial coatings help to fight the bacteria that can invade a patient’s body through the insertion of a device. Without this coating, external bacteria would invade the body and cause harm to the patient.

Hydrophillic Coatings

Some devices function best when they get wetter, so hydrophilic coatings are useful when a device needs to conduct fluids. These coatings are also subject to FDA standards governing how they can be used.

Conclusions

Device coatings help shorten recovery times and improve the outlook of patients with serious medical conditions. As this technology becomes cheaper to produce, it will help a wider variety of parients world wide.

Bio: Denton Vacuum, LLC is a manufacturer of devices for vacuum metallization, which is used to apply a diamond like carbon coating to many kinds of devices.

3 Ways to Take Notes Using your iOS or Android Phone

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Almost all of us have found ourselves in a situation where we’ve come up with brilliant thoughts but have never been able to jot them down anywhere.

It happens to the best of us.

However, just so that this never happens again, here are 3 ways by which you can record these thoughts:

#1: Ask Siri to take notes

If you’ve got an iPhone or iPad, you can easily use Siri to capture your thoughts. All you have to do is press and hold the Home key, tap Settings and  Passcode Lock . After this, activate Siri while it is locked and say ‘Note to self’.

#2: Google Now (Android)

Google Now is an excellent Android app that follows voice commands. However, what makes this even better is that you can use this app even though your phone is locked. Just be careful to not leave your phone vulnerable to smartphone thieves as they can look through your messages and contacts quite easily. Of course, once it transcribes your your thoughts, it will save on the note-take app that you prefer.

#3: A video selfie should do the trick

An unorthodox way of recording your thoughts would involve taking a video selfie using your iPhone. Best part: You won’t have to unlock your iOS device either. All you have to do is swipe the camera shortcut in the corner of the screen and after which you tap the Record button. Now say what you have to and tap the button again.

3 Benchmarking Tools You Can Use to Test Your Android Phone

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How much do you know about your Android phone? Apart from its name, price tag and the applications it can run?

In order to know more, you can use this to run benchmarks that will not only tell you how how fast your phone but will also show you it fares against older phones or those in the marketplace.

That said, here are 3 benchmarking tools that you can use:

#1: Basemark OS II and Basemark OS X

Basemark is one of the most sophisticated benchmarking suites available that cover both gaming as well as OS separately. That said, Basemark OS II, in particular, works to check for OS performance while Basemark OS X tests for gaming performance.

#2: Antutu 5

Antutu’s fifth version will test for gaps in GPU and CPU performance. With this new version, single-core CPU performance is also included now that software can be written for the rising core counts. Even the GPU benchmark also gets a facelift where complexity has been added along with the addition of the Havok Vision Engine. With support for ART and Lollipop as well as new 64-bit hardware such as Nvidia and Qualcomm, Antutu is ready enough for the latest hardware.

#3: Ookla

Ookla is an internet speed meter that runs latency and bandwidth tests to particular servers that you can specify. This could be across a region or even a particular city as well. One good reason why it is a good idea to use this benchmarking your Android phone is because carrier performance and phone location works just as well.

Metallizing Plastic

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Written by: Denton Vacuum, LLC

Summary: The metallization of plastic has completely revolutionized the costs associated with manufacturing.

Plastic is a great material to use for manufacturing, but its uses are limited when it is left in its original state. But, what if we could metalize it and change its properties entirely? That’s no longer in the realm of “what if.” Through the process of vacuum metallization, manufacturers are able to fundamentally alter the makeup of plastic, turning a simple plastic piece into a high-performance metal piece without adding significantly to the cost of production.

How it Works

The vacuum metalizing process takes place in two phases. The first phase involves superheating the materials used in coating. Typically, these materials include items like copper or aluminum. The heating would damage the substrate, so the piece is inserted only after the metal has been converted into gaseous form. The chamber is cooled as the substrate is put inside, creating the perfect conditions for materials to settle on the face of the substrate and coat t evenly. The particulates bounce off the walls of the chamber as the interior is cooled to a specific temperature. Occasionally, other apparatuses are used to rotate the substrate, making sure it receives an even coating on all sides.

Applications

Vacuum deposition systems aren’t just for making plastic into metal, although the aerospace industry benefits greatly from these advancements. The same process is also used in the construction of joint replacement devices, creating a more durable piece that lasts longer. Optometrists and manufacturers also utilize this same technique, replacing the metal with chemicals, to create lenses with scratch resistance.

Related Story: Using E-Beam Evaporation for Medical Technology

Related Story: How to Metallize Plastic