Iran Proposes Theories For Bioactive Material Delivery

Iranian scientists have proposed new theories for using nano nutrient delivery technology in the delivery of bioactive materials to preserve these materials and deliver them to desired areas by gathering information from more than 112 scientific references and analyzing them.
The research was carried out Researchers at Iran National Standard Organization and National Nutrition and Food Technology Research Institute (NNFTRI) in order to acquire information about the achievements and researches carried out in the field of applying nanotechnology to food industry, Fars News Agency reported.
Regulations and limitations in the application of nanotechnology in food industry were also investigated by referring to more than 112 scientific references in the world.
For example, it was found in the research that nanotechnology can help the provision of a tool for the determination of pathogens in foodstuff, systems for the transportation of antibiotics, intelligent packaging of food products, and the transportation of bioactive compounds to the desired place.
On the other hand, the application of nanotechnology in food systems provides a new tool to increase the safety and nutritive value of the food products. The results of the recent progress in the application of nanotechnology in food science and technology explain the new laws and regulations in the field of nanotechnology-based nutrition.
The use of nano-capsules and nanoparticles for preserving vitamins, antioxidants and nutritious materials is among the most important objectives in a majority of similar researches.

Coconut-Flavored Pineapple Developed

In what is believed to be a world first, Queensland researchers have created a new variety of pineapple with a coconut flavor.
According to Ubergizmo, the Department of Agriculture’s research station on the state’s Sunshine Coast has been working on the new breed of pineapple for more than a decade.
Senior horticulturalist Garth Senewski says the AusFestival pineapple is now in the final stages of production.
“It’s currently being multiplied by our commercial development partner,” he said.
“It usually takes about 10 years to commercialize a new variety.”
Senewski says its unique taste should prove popular with consumers.
“Taste tests tell us that AusFestival is a winner--it has this lovely coconut flavor, which you won’t find in any other pineapple in Australia,” he said.
“It’s sweet, low acid, very juicy.”
But he says researchers did not set out to create a coconut flavor.
“When we’re doing the breeding, we’re not actually looking for a coconut-flavored pineapple or any other particular flavor,” he said.
“We’re looking for a nice flavored pineapple. We’re looking for a variety that is sweet, low acid and aromatic.”

Iranian Patents High Security Software

Typing a password into your smartphone might be a reasonable way to access the sensitive information it holds, but a startup called EyeVerify thinks it would be easier--and more secure--to just look into the phone’s camera lens and move your eyes to the side.
EyeVerify’s software identifies you by your ‘eyeprints,’ the pattern of veins in the whites of your eyes, TechnologyReview said.
Everybody has four eye prints, two in each eye on either side of the iris. The company claims that its method is as accurate as a fingerprint or iris scan, without requiring any special hardware.
The Kansas-based company plans to roll out its software in the first half of next year. CEO and Founder Toby Rush envisions a range of uses for it, including authenticating people who want to use smartphones to access their online medical records or bank accounts.
Rush says phone manufacturers are interested in embedding the software into handsets so that many applications can use it for authenticating people, though he declined to name any prospective partners.
The technology behind EyeVerify comes from Reza Derakhshani, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Derakhshani, the company’s chief scientist, was a co-recipient of a patent for the eye-vein biometrics behind EyeVerify in 2008.

How It Works
On the user’s end, EyeVerify seems pretty simple (though somewhat awkward in its prototype stage). To access data on a smartphone that’s locked with EyeVerify, you would look to the right or the left, enabling EyeVerify to capture eyeprints from each of your eyes with the camera on the back of the smartphone.
“Eventually, EyeVerify expects to take advantage of a smartphone’s front-facing camera, but for now the resolution is not high enough on most of these cameras,” Rush says.
EyeVerify’s software processes the images, maps the veins in your eye and matches that against an eye print stored on the phone.
Rush says the software can tell the difference between a real person and an image of a person. It randomly challenges the smartphone’s camera to adjust settings such as focus, exposure and white balance. It also checks whether it receives an appropriate response from the object it’s focused on.
The look of the veins in your eyes changes over time, and you might burst a blood vessel one day. But Rush says long-term changes would be slow enough that EyeVerify could ‘age’ its template to adjust. And the software only needs one proper eyeprint to authenticate you, so unless you bloody up both eyes, you should be able to use EyeVerify after a bar fight.

Stem Cell Contact Lens Restores Sight

A contact lens loaded with stem cells could be a way to naturally repair or retain sight.
Scientists hope the biodegradable implant loaded with stem cells that then multiply will allow the body to heal the eye naturally, Daily Mail wrote.
Stem cells are the building blocks of tissue growth. They can transform into any other type of cell the body is built from and so should be able to repair everything from the brain to the heart.
The scientists at the University of Sheffield who developed the implant now hope the new technique could help millions of people across the world retain or even regain--their sight.
The technology has been designed to treat damage to the cornea, the transparent layer on the front of the eye, which is one of the major causes of blindness in the world.
With the new implant, by mimicking structural features of the eye, the researchers have developed a new method for producing very delicate thin membranes to help graft stem cells onto the eye itself.
Using a series of complex techniques, the researchers are able to make a disc of biodegradable material that can be fixed over the cornea. The disc is loaded with stem cells that then multiply, allowing the body to heal the eye naturally.
Standard treatments for corneal blindness are corneal transplants or grafting stem cells onto the eye using a donated human membrane as a temporary carrier to deliver these cells to the eye.
But for some patients, the treatment can fail after a few years as the repaired eyes do not retain these stem cells, which are required to carry out repair of the cornea.
A key feature of this new disc is that it contains small pockets to house and protect the stem cells, to keep them in the eye and also grouped together.
“The disc has an outer ring containing pockets into which stem cells taken from the patient’s healthy eye can be placed,” said Dr. Ilida Ortega Asencio, from Sheffield’s Faculty of Engineering.

Packaging Can Boil Your Egg in 2 Minutes

If you’ve ever tried to peel a hard-boiled egg only to find it’s definitely more suited to soldiers, help is at hand.
Designers have invented a clever cardboard box that cooks the egg inside perfectly--without a saucepan in sight, The Sun said.
The packaging contains a chemical layer which, when triggered, generates heat and cooks the raw egg in just two minutes.
It means even the busiest of workers--and the most amateur of cooks--will once again be able to “go to work on an egg”.
The “Gogol Mogol”, named after a Russian egg dish, was created by a Russian team of inventors known as KIAN, and designed by Evgeny Morgalev.
The outer layer is made from the sort of paperboard traditionally used to make egg boxes.
Beneath this there are three more layers. One is infused with calcium hydroxide and other chemicals, and the other is a “smart layer” containing water.
Between these two inner layers is a membrane which is removed by pulling a cardboard tab. Once this is taken out, the calcium hydroxide reacts with the water in the smart layer to generate enough heat to cook the egg inside.
The technology has been used in the past to create self-heating cans of sausages and beans, which are popular with campers.
But this is the first time that designers have been able to apply the chemical heat generation, known as an exothermic reaction, to an egg.
Although the egg is cooked after just two minutes, the heating process inside the packaging will continue for up to three minutes.
Depending on when they decide to twist off the cardboard cap, users can go for a runny or hard-boiled yolk.
Either way, it’s a fraction of the time it takes to boil a pan of water then wait four minutes for it to cook.
The Gogol Mogol cannot be reused and must be thrown away after a single use, but has been created out of recycled materials to reduce waste.
It won its designers an award from the European Packaging Design Association.
A spokesman for KIAN said the product is just a usual egg in an unusual package, possessing unique product properties. Other information revealed by the spokesman was as follows:

Joint Vaccine Production With Syria

Tehran and Damascus are due to sign a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on the production of vaccine for foot-and-mouth disease in Syria.
“Fortunately, we managed to go through the final stages of preparing a draft MoU for launching a site to produce foot-and-mouth disease’s vaccine by Iran in Syria and the MoU will be signed by relevant Iranian and Syrian officials tomorrow,” Syrian Deputy Agriculture Minister Hussein Salih Al-Suleiman said during a visit to Iran’s Razi Vaccine and Serum Research Institute in Tehran on Saturday, Fars News Agency reported.
“Based on the MoU, Iran’s Razi institute will launch the production of 10 million doses of foot-and-mouth vaccine annually in Syria,” he added.
In recent years, Iran has taken wide strides in science and technology, particularly in medical and medicinal fields.
In 2011, Mostafa Qanei, the head of Iran’s Pasteur Institute, had announced that the institute plans to produce human vaccines for rabies and hemophilia diseases.
“The center (Pasteur Institute), in cooperation with its affiliated knowledge-based companies, has started a project to produce rabies and hemophilia human vaccines,” Qanei told FNA at the time.
He expressed hope that his institute would start mass production of the vaccines in the next 2-3 years, adding that the products will be sold in domestic and foreign markets.
Also, Iranian Health Minister Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi praised the country’s astonishing progress in producing medical tools, equipment and drugs, saying that Iran ranks first in synthesizing different medications in the region.
“Iran certainly ranks first in the region in producing medical equipment and medicine, and those who stand behind us cannot be compared with Iran at all,” Dastjerdi said, addressing the inaugural ceremony of the International Exhibition on Medical, Dentistry and Laboratory Equipments in Tehran in 2011.
The minister noted that Iran exports medical tools and equipment worth $12 billion each year and domestically meets 96 percent of its medical needs, adding that the country also produces 70 percent of its needed pharmaceutical raw materials domestically.

Escape Belt Releases When Submerged Underwater

For most of us, chances are that we will never be in a car that plunges into the water.
However, if you consider yourself “at risk” for that sort of eventuality--say, if you’re a rally driver or Jason Bourne--you might be interested in the Escape Belt, IdeaConnection wrote.
It automatically releases your seat belt when exposed to water.
The Escape Belt--which isn’t actually a belt--is attached by the user to their car’s existing seat belt buckle (the part with the button that the belt’s tongue plugs into). Like some types of auto-inflating life jackets, it incorporates a salt pill that dissolves when submerged. When that pill disintegrates due to water gushing into the car, the device responds by causing the buckle to release the belt.
According to Fijen TMLS, the Dutch company that makes the product, things like beverage spills won’t accidentally trigger the Escape Belt. The cartridge containing the pill, however, does need to be replaced every couple of years.
Many people who find themselves in sinking cars do manage to release their seat belts themselves. Still, in a situation like that, anything that makes things easier would no doubt be hugely appreciated.

Too Little Sleep Spurs Appetite-Boosting Hormones

Getting more sleep may help reduce overeating, a small new study suggests.
The researchers also found that the hormonal process through which sleep affects eating is different for men and women, HealthDay said.
The study included 27 normal-weight men and women, aged 30 to 45, who were studied under two sleep conditions: short sleep (four hours) and normal sleep (nine hours). Short sleep led to increased levels of the hunger-stimulating hormone ghrelin in men but not in women. But short sleep reduced levels of the satiety (feeling of fullness) hormone GLP-1 in women but not in men.
The findings suggest that the common problem of wanting to overeat due to a lack of sleep is related to increased appetite in men and reduced feelings of fullness in women, according to the study in a recent issue of the journal Sleep.
“Our results point to the complexity of the relationship between sleep duration and energy balance regulation,” study principal investigator Marie-Pierre St-Onge, of the New York Obesity Nutrition Research Center, St. Luke’s/Roosevelt Hospital, and the department of medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University in New York City, said in a journal news release.
“The state of energy balance, whether someone is in a period of weight loss or weight gain, may be critical in the metabolic and hormonal responses to sleep restriction.”
The findings support the idea that amount of sleep has a direct effect on eating and weight control, the researchers said.
However, while the study found an association between sleep duration and hunger, it did not prove a cause-and-effect relationship.

Sleep-Diabetes Link

Getting more sleep may help reduce teens’ future risk of developing diabetes, according to a new study.