The Neural Mechanisms of Self-Control

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Saying No to Yourself: The Neural Mechanisms of Self-Control

To do or not to do? We ask ourselves this question constantly, and our answers shape the quality and even the length of our lives. Try to make it through the yellow light? Tell the boss what you really think of that new haircut? Turn on the tube while your spouse is talking to you? These quick, go/no-go decisions can have lasting consequences. Yet while much recent neuroscience has examined the neural dynamics underlying choices between alternate actions (Take Action X or Action Y), few studies have looked at brains as people decide whether to take or cancel a particular action they've already planned or considered (that is: Take Action A or not). The paper reviewed below considers exactly this. As reviewer Martha Farah describes, the study found that the ability to halt a considered action -- to cancel that urge to gun the engine, laugh out loud, or turn on the boob tube -- depends at least partly on a band of cortex that works better in some of us than others. The implications run from the practical to the philosophical.

Just Say No to Yourself: The Neural Mechanisms of Self-Control

Martha J. Farah
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience
University of Pennsylvania

Back in the early 1980s, I remember telling a smart, exceedingly self-assured Harvard University philosopher about the seminal work of the cognitive psychologist Saul Sternberg, who had shown how mental operations could be analyzed into their elementary components by measuring people's reaction times in laboratory tasks. Sternberg's approach, which formed the methodological basis for much of the "cognitive revolution" in psychology, did not impress this lover of complexity and ambiguity; the philosopher denied that any mental process as simple as Sternberg's lab task -- deciding whether or not a single digit was included in a small "target set" of digits -- could help us understand human thought.

I thought of this fellow when I read a recent paper titled "To Do or Not to Do: The Neural Signature of Self-Control," by Marcel Brass and Patrick Haggard, in a recent Journal of Neuroscience. What he would think of the idea that having someone decide whether to push a button while lying in a scanner could tell us something about self control? I have a feeling he'd conclude that cognitive neuroscientists are just as deluded as cognitive psychologists. And, as I did in the 1980s, I would disagree with him. Science often makes progress by simplifying; think of Galileo and his frictionless planes.

To Push or to Not Push

Brass and Haggard's simplification of self-control involved a very simple act (pressing a button) and a very simple form of control (foregoing the button press). On each trial of the fMRI study, subjects were given three seconds to initiate a button press. They decided when to press while watching a simple clockface with a sweep second hand measuring the passing time. They were allowed to press the button at any time during this three seconds, but they were asked to note the position of the clock hand when they decided to press. This method gave Brass and Haggard a voluntary, subject-initiated action that could be localized in time, allowing them to make a functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI) of brain activity associated with the decision to act; that is, they could focus on the brain activity recorded at the time the subjects decided to press the button.

In some trials, the subjects were also asked to withhold the action (that is, to not push the button), stopping themselves at the last possible instant. Brass and Haggard hypothesized that taking an fMRI during this halted action would reveal a difference in brain activity between the straightforward voluntary action trials and the trials in which the subjects exercised self-control. The idea, as Haggard and Brass put it in their paper, was to investigate the neural underpinnings of "an important but neglected aspect of intentional action," which is the simple decision, once an act is contemplated, whether or not to perform it.

In this study, as in previous ones cited by Brass and Haggard, the initiation of a voluntary action activated the supplementary motor area (SMA) of the prefrontal cortex. The SMA, which is associated with the planning of movement, was activated during trials in which subjects decided to press and did press, and it was also activated during trials when subjects decided to press and then stopped themselves. This confirmed the researchers' assumption that the SMA was recruited, and the action planned, in both the go and the no-go trials.

Of course, the big news is what happened on self-control trials. What was activated when people stopped themselves from pressing after mentally initiating the button press, compared with when they went ahead and pressed? Halting the action activated the dorsal fronto-medial cortex, or dFMC (also known as Brodmann Area 9), which is further forward in the brain than the SMA, as well as insular cortex. The authors concluded that the dorsal medial frontal cortex was the source of the inhibitory signal, supporting this contention with two different correlational analyses. First, they found that the more a subject was able to activate this region, the more often he or she was able to inhibit the initially intended action. Second, they found that the more activated this frontal region was on a given trial, the less activated was the motor region involved in executing the actions.

And what about the insula, which also activated during the self-control trial? The insula has previously been associated with bodily experiences of emotion. In this case Brass and Haggard suggest that the insular activation reflects the visceral sense of frustration or "let-down" that accompanies the last-minute cancellation of the action.

Thinking on a Higher (or at Least More Frontal) Plane

Brass and Haggard point out that the area associated with self-control in their study, the dorsal front-medial cortex, is different from areas associated with initiating actions and from areas associated with inhibiting more automatic responses to stimuli, such as blinking or flinching at sudden movement. This difference is important. Consider a paradigm case in which self control is needed: someone who is trying to kick his heroin habit thinks about grabbing his wallet, putting on his coat, and walking to the corner where the drug dealers do business. Pressing a button may seem very simple and inconsequential compared to these actions. But both are voluntary, self-initiated actions; and inhibiting or deciding against either, this study suggests, requires adequate activation of the dorsal medial frontal cortex. If this dFMC activation is indeed required, then one's ability to control impulses would depend partly on how robustly that area responds to or aids in any effort to control the impulse.

Implications

Why is it important to know what brain systems underlie self control? Many neuropsychiatric disorders, from substance dependence to personality disorders to attention deficit disorder, involve impairments of self control. Basic research such as this study may eventually lead to a better understanding of the systems responsible for these disorders, as well as for differences in people's ability to control our less constructive impulses, such as the urge to say or do something ugly. As Brass and Haggard put it in their introduction, "[The] decision whether to act often has critical consequences. For example, there is a clear distinction between intending to hit someone and actually hitting them."

The research also touches on the age-old problem of free will. If physical processes in the brain cause our actions, then how can there be free will? How can we be held responsible for our behavior? Can't we just all plead "my brain made me do it"? Brass and Haggard's results do not solve this puzzle, but they do reveal some important new features of the puzzle. Their results illuminate a very important aspect of the brain's control of behavior -- the ability to hold off doing something after you've developed the intention to do it , which one might call "free won't" as opposed to free will. From the broader perspective of reconciling our identity as free moral agents with our identity as physical brains, this discovery of an area apparently associated with "free won't" makes the "brain" side of the equation a little more interesting and nuanced. Our brains don't just "make us do it"; they also have specialized systems for stopping us from doing it.

Technorati : Self-Control

New research explores using atoms and molecules to pack more data storage and computing capabilities into smaller spaces.

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IBM researchers announced they've made major strides in nanotechnology by studying how to build storage and other computing devices out of components no bigger than a few atoms or molecules.

Researchers at the company's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., report in Science that magnetic anisotropy could eventually be used to store information in individual atoms, paving the way to pack as much as 150 trillion bits of data per square inch, 1,000 times more than current data storage densities. In other words, the ability to store data in individual atoms could lead to devices capable of storing the equivalent of 30,000 movies in a device the size of an iPod.

Anisotropy measures how far a magnet's pull reaches in any single direction. "Every atom has a magnet inside," says Cyrus Hirjibehedin, a researcher at the Almaden lab, noting that the magnetic orientation of an atom is called its "spin." "We want to understand the properties of an atom and were able to measure the anisotropy for a single atom in a particular environment."

IBM Almaden researchers used the company's scanning tunneling microscope to manipulate individual iron atoms and arrange them with atomic precision on a specially prepared copper surface; scientists previously were unable to measure the magnetic anisotropy of a single atom. IBM used the microscope to determine the orientation and strength of the magnetic anisotropy of each iron atom.Now we have a means for understanding anisotropy," says Andreas Heinrich, manager of Almaden's Scanning Tunneling Microscopy lab. The next step, he says, is fashioning a system in which the atom's spin is stable enough to be used for data storage--something that scientists may achieve in several years or, Heinrich says, may not even be possible. "Our job is to jump ahead," he adds. "We hope to make a drastic change rather than incremental improvements."

Another Science report describes research by scientists at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland on ways to use a single molecule to perform many of the same functions now carried out by silicon. The study indicates that it's possible to turn a single molecule into a switch without disrupting its outer shell--a significant step toward building computing elements at the molecular scale that are vastly smaller and faster, and use less energy than today's computer chips and memory devices.

Switches inside computer chips turn the flow of electrons on and off and, when put together, form the logic gates that make up the electrical circuits of the computer processors. Having ever-smaller switches allows the circuits to be shrunk to ever-tinier sizes, making it possible to crowd more circuits into a processor, boosting speed and performance.

Researchers at IBM and elsewhere previously demonstrated switching within single molecules, but the molecules would change their shape when switched, making them unsuitable for building logic gates for computer chips or memory elements.

Next up for the Zurich research team: building a series of these molecules into a circuit, and then figuring out how to link them to make a molecular chip.

Technorati : nano Chip

IBM researchers arrange 60-nanometer gold particles to re-create a work of Renaissance art

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Science and humanity,

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New Negatively-Charged Molecule Discovered

Astronomers using data from the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have found the largest negatively-charged molecule yet seen in space. The discovery of the third negatively-charged molecule, called an anion, in less than a year and the size of the latest anion will force a drastic revision of theoretical models of interstellar chemistry, the astronomers say.

"This discovery continues to add to the diversity and complexity that is already seen in the chemistry of interstellar space," said Anthony J. Remijan of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). "It also adds to the number of paths available for making the complex organic molecules and other large molecular species that may be precursors to life in the giant clouds from which stars and planets are formed," he added.

A team of scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) found negatively-charged octatetraynyl in a cold, dark cloud of molecular gas. A second team headed by Remijan found octatetraynyl in the envelope of gas around an old, evolved star. In both cases the molecule, a chain of eight carbon atoms and one hydrogen atom, had an extra electron, giving it a negative charge.

About 130 neutral and about a dozen positively-charged molecules have been discovered in space, but the first negatively-charged molecule was not discovered until late last year. The largest previously-discovered negative ion found in space has six carbon atoms and one hydrogen atom.

Ultraviolet light from stars can knock an electron off a molecule, creating a positively-charged ion. Astronomers had thought that molecules would not be able to retain an extra electron, and thus a negative charge, in interstellar space for a significant time. "That obviously is not the case," said Mike McCarthy of the CfA. "Anions are surprisingly abundant in these regions."

"Until recently, many theoretical models of how chemical reactions evolve in interstellar space have largely neglected the presence of anions. This can no longer be the case, and this means that there are many more ways to build large organic molecules in cosmic environments than have been explored," said Jan M. Hollis of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).

Remijan and his colleagues found the octatetraynyl anions in the envelope of the evolved giant star IRC +10 216, about 550 light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo. They found radio waves emitted at specific frequencies characteristic of the charged molecule by searching archival data from the GBT, the largest fully-steerable radio telescope in the world.

Another team from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics found the same characteristic emission when they observed a cold cloud of molecular gas called TMC-1 in the constellation Taurus. These observations also were done with the GBT. In both cases, preceding laboratory experiments by the CfA team showed which radio frequencies actually are emitted by the molecule, and thus told the astronomers what to look for.

"It is essential that likely interstellar molecule candidates are first studied in laboratory experiments so that the radio frequencies they can emit are known in advance of an astronomical observation," said Frank Lovas of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Both teams announced their results in the July 20 edition of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"With three negatively-charged molecules now found in a short period of time, and in very different environments, it appears that many more probably exist. We believe that we can discover more new species using very sensitive and advanced radio telescopes such as the GBT, once they have been characterized in the laboratory," said Sandra Bruenken of the CfA.

"Further detailed studies of anions, including astronomical observations, laboratory studies, and theoretical calculations, will allow us to use them to reveal new information about the physical and chemical processes going on in interstellar space," said Martin Cordiner, of Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

"The GBT continues to take a leading role in discovering, identifying and mapping the distribution of the largest molecules ever found in astronomical environments and will continue to do so for the next several decades," said Phil Jewell of NRAO.

In addition to Hollis, Lovas, Cordiner and Jewell, Remijan worked with Tom Millar of Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Andrew Markwick-Kemper of the University of Manchester in the UK.

Bruenken worked with McCarthy, Harshal Gupta, Carl Gottlieb, and Patrick Thaddeus, all of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

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Astronomers have detected negatively charged molecules in space for the first time, suggesting the molecules may be more common than previously thought.

Previously, about 130 different neutral molecules and 14 positively charged molecules had been identified in space - but no negatively charged molecules were found.

Conventional wisdom held that these were rare because ultraviolet radiation from starlight would tend to strip away extra electrons, leaving behind only positive ions.

Now, astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, have found a negatively charged molecule in two nearby regions within the Milky Way. Composed of six carbon atoms, a hydrogen atom, and an extra electron, it is called a hexatriyne anion, or C6H-.

Curiously, the anion was found in two very different environments - a gas shell around the dying, red giant star IRC+10216 and the cold molecular cloud TMC-1, both of which lie about 500 light years from Earth.

Unknown cause

It is not yet clear what physical process actually led to the molecule's formation in those locations. "That's the point we're desperately eager to find out," says team member Patrick Thaddeus of the CfA.

The molecule may have formed in these gaseous regions after an extra proton was bumped off the neutral molecule hexatriyne, C6H2, or by an electron attaching to the neutral molecule C6H. The anion is present in both sources at a level of between 1% and 5% that of the neutral molecule C6H.

One clue to its formation may come from its size; C6H- is composed of more atoms than many of the neutral molecules that have been found in space.

"It was considered crazy that the first negatively charged molecule we found in space would be such a big molecule," Thaddeus says.

This large size may increase the molecule's stability. Previous research suggests electrons can attach themselves quite efficiently to carbon molecules when the molecules are composed of at least six carbon atoms.

Lurking undetected

To make the find, the CfA astronomers pored over data collected 11 years ago by Kentarou Kawaguchi at Okayama University in Japan. Kawaguchi's team found a series of spectral lines that could not be assigned to any known molecule in IRC+10216.

Back in the lab, the CfA team found the spectral lines matched C6H-. They then used the Green Bank Telescope to verify that the molecule was present in the red giant and in TMC-1.

The find suggests other negatively charged molecules are lurking in space and have not been detected because previous searches have focused on more diffuse gas clouds where the anions are not concentrated enough to produce a signal.

"This is a whole area of astrochemistry that we've just kind of been missing," says Robert McMahon, a chemist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, US, who was not involved in the study.

Team member Michael McCarthy of the CfA says the researchers will search them out by first studying the spectral signatures of large anions, like C6H-, in the laboratory.

They have already found C4H- and C8H- in the lab and are now trying to find the molecules' signatures in space. The team says they may find these anions in IRC+10216 and TMC-1, since neutral or positively charged variations of these molecules have already been observed in the regions.

Technorati : Discovered, Molecule, Negatively-, New

Scientists Find Elusive Waves in Solar Corona

This image shows elusive Alfven waves in the solar corona, captured by a new instrument known as the Coronal Multi-channel Polarimeter instrument, or CoMP.

Scientists for the first time have observed elusive oscillations in the sun's corona, known as Alfvén waves, that transport energy outward from the surface of the sun. The discovery may give researchers more insight into solar magnetic fields, eventually leading to a better understanding of how the sun affects Earth's atmosphere and the entire solar system.

The research, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and led by Steve Tomczyk of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., is being published this week in the journal Science.

By tracking the speed and direction of the waves, researchers will be able to infer basic properties of the solar atmosphere, such as the density and direction of magnetic fields. The waves may provide answers to questions that have puzzled physicists for generations, such as why the sun's corona is hundreds of times hotter than the surface.

'Alfvén waves may provide us with a window into processes that are fundamental to the workings of the sun and its impacts on Earth,' Tomczyk says.

'What makes the solar corona so hot is still a mystery, but these views of Alfven waves provide important new clues,' says Paul Bellaire, program director in NSF's Division of Atmospheric Sciences, which funded the research. 'This discovery may lead to new ways of detecting the onset of solar storms.'

Solar storms that spew thousands of tons of charged particles into space are linked with Alfven waves. They sometimes cause geomagnetic storms on Earth that disrupt sensitive telecommunications and power systems,

'Our observations allowed us to identify these as Alfvén waves,' says co-author Scott McIntosh of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder. 'The waves are visible all the time and they occur all over the corona, which was surprising.'

Alfvén waves are fast-moving perturbations that emanate outward from the sun along the pathways of magnetic fields, transporting electrodynamic energy. Although they had been detected beyond the sun, they had never before been viewed within the corona, the outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere.

To observe the waves, Tomczyk and his co-authors used an instrument developed at NCAR. The coronal multichannel polarimeter, or CoMP, uses a telescope with a lens roughly eight inches in diameter to gather and analyze light from the corona, which is much dimmer than the Sun itself. It tracks magnetic activity around the entire edge of the Sun and collects data with unusual speed, making a measurement as frequently as every 15 seconds.

By learning more about such magnetic activity and resulting solar disruptions, scientists may be able to better protect astronauts from potentially dangerous levels of radiation in space.

'If we want to go to the moon and Mars, people need to know what's going to happen on the sun,' Tomczyk said.

In addition to Tomczyk and McIntosh, the research team included scientists from the National Solar Observatory, University of Notre Dame, Framingham High School in Massachusetts, and University of Michigan.

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Insights into the Sun

By tracking the speed and direction of the waves, researchers will be able to infer basic properties of the solar atmosphere, such as the density and direction of magnetic fields. The waves may provide answers to questions that have puzzled physicists for generations, such as why the Sun's corona is hundreds of times hotter than its surface.

The research also can help scientists better predict solar storms that spew thousands of tons of magnetized matter into space, sometimes causing geomagnetic storms on Earth that disrupt sensitive telecommunications and power systems. By learning more about solar disruptions, scientists may be able to better protect astronauts from potentially dangerous levels of radiation in space.

"If we want to go to the moon and Mars, people need to know what's going to happen on the Sun," Tomczyk says.

A powerful instrument

To observe the waves, Tomczyk and his coauthors turned to an instrument developed at NCAR over the last few years. The Coronal Multichannel Polarimeter, or CoMP, uses a telescope at the National Solar Observatory in Sacramento Peak, New Mexico, to gather and analyze light from the corona, which is much dimmer than the Sun itself. It tracks magnetic activity around the entire edge of the Sun and collects data with unusual speed, making a measurement as frequently as every 15 seconds.

The instrument enabled the research team to simultaneously capture intensity, velocity, and polarization images of the solar corona. Those images revealed propagating oscillations that moved in trajectories aligned with magnetic fields, and traveled as fast as nearly 2,500 miles per second.

In addition to Tomczyk and McIntosh, the research team included scientists from the National Solar Observatory, University of Notre Dame, Framingham High School in Massachusetts, University of Michigan, and NCAR.

Technorati : Corona, Elusive, Find, Scientists, Solar, Waves

New Mass Extinction Asteroid Theory

The impactor believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs and other life forms on Earth some 65 million years ago has been traced back to a breakup event in the main asteroid belt. A joint U.S.-Czech team from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and Charles University in Prague suggests that the parent object of asteroid (298) Baptistina disrupted when it was hit by another large asteroid, creating numerous large fragments that would later create the Chicxulub crater on the Yucatan Peninsula as well as the prominent Tycho crater found on the Moon.

The team of researchers, including Dr. William Bottke (SwRI), Dr. David Vokrouhlicky (Charles University, Prague) and Dr. David Nesvorny (SwRI), combined observations with several different numerical simulations to investigate the Baptistina disruption event and its aftermath. A particular focus of their work was how Baptistina fragments affected the Earth and Moon.

At approximately 170 kilometers in diameter and having characteristics similar to carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, the Baptistina parent body resided in the innermost region of the asteroid belt when it was hit by another asteroid estimated to be 60 kilometers in diameter. This catastrophic impact produced what is now known as the Baptistina asteroid family, a cluster of asteroid fragments with similar orbits. According to the team's modeling work, this family originally included approximately 300 bodies larger than 10 kilometers and 140,000 bodies larger than 1 kilometer.

Once created, the newly formed fragments' orbits began to slowly evolve due to thermal forces produced when they absorbed sunlight and re-radiated the energy away as heat. According to Bottke, 'By carefully modeling these effects and the distance traveled by different-sized fragments from the location of the original collision, we determined that the Baptistina breakup took place 160 million years ago, give or take 20 million years.'

The gradual spreading of the family caused many fragments to drift into a nearby 'dynamical superhighway' where they could escape the main asteroid belt and be delivered to orbits that cross Earth's path. The team's computations suggest that about 20 percent of the surviving multi-kilometer-sized fragments in the Baptistina family were lost in this fashion, with about 2 percent of those objects going on to strike the Earth, a pronounced increase in the number of large asteroids striking Earth.

Support for these conclusions comes from the impact history of the Earth and Moon, both of which show evidence of a two-fold increase in the formation rate of large craters over the last 100 to 150 million years. As described by Nesvorny, 'The Baptistina bombardment produced a prolonged surge in the impact flux that peaked roughly 100 million years ago. This matches up pretty well with what is known about the impact record.'

Bottke adds, 'We are in the tail end of this shower now. Our simulations suggest that about 20 percent of the present-day, near-Earth asteroid population can be traced back to the Baptistina family.'

The team then investigated the origins of the 180 kilometer diameter Chicxulub crater, which has been strongly linked to the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Studies of sediment samples and a meteorite from this time period indicate that the Chicxulub impactor had a carbonaceous chondrite composition much like the well-known primitive meteorite Murchison. This composition is enough to rule out many potential impactors but not those from the Baptistina family. Using this information in their simulations, the team found a 90 percent probability that the object that formed the Chicxulub crater was a refugee from the Baptistina family.

These simulations also showed there was a 70 percent probability that the lunar crater Tycho, an 85 kilometer crater that formed 108 million years ago, was also produced by a large Baptistina fragment. Tycho is notable for its large size, young age and its prominent rays that extend as far as 1,500 kilometers across the Moon. Vokrouhlicky says, 'The probability is smaller than in the case of the Chicxulub crater because nothing is yet known about the nature of the Tycho impactor.'

This study demonstrates that the collisional and dynamical evolution of the main asteroid belt may have significant implications for understanding the geological and biological history of Earth.

As Bottke says, 'It is likely that more breakup events in the asteroid belt are connected in some fashion to events on the Earth, Moon and other planets. The hunt is on!'

The article, 'An asteroid breakup 160 Myr ago as the probable source of the K/T impactor,' was published in the Sept. 6 issue of Nature.

The NASA Origins of Solar Systems, Planetary Geology and Geophysics, and Near-Earth Objects Observations programs funded Bottke's and Nesvorny's research; Vokrouhlicky was funded by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic.

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"The theory that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid impact, the K-T extinction, is well known and supported by fossil and geological evidence. Asteroid impact theory does not apply to the other fluctuations in biodiversity, however, which follow an approximate 62 million-year cycle. As reported in Science, a new theory seems to explain periodic mass extinctions. The new theory found that oscillations in the Sun relative to the plane of the Milky Way correlate with changes in biodiversity on Earth. The researchers suggest that an increase in the exposure of Earth to extragalactic cosmic rays causes mass extinctions. The original paper describing the findings is available online."

Technorati : Asteroid, Extinction, Mass, New, Theory

NASA Technology Helps Detect and Treat Heart Disease and Strokes

NASA space technology is helping doctors diagnose and monitor treatments for hardening of the arteries in its early stages, before it causes heart attacks and strokes.

Hospitals and doctors around the country are using ArterioVision software initially developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., along with a standardized, painless, non-invasive ultrasound examination of the carotid artery, which carries blood from the heart to the brain.

A standard carotid ultrasound measures plaque and blood flow within the artery. When an ultrasound is used with the software, the test measures the thickness of the inner two layers of the carotid artery - the intima and media. Medical Technologies International, Inc. (MTI) of Palm Desert, Calif., patented the ArterioVision software.

Arterial thickening provides the earliest evidence of atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, the beginning stage of a disease process that leads to heart disease and stroke. Doctors can use this carotid intima media thickness (CIMT) measurement to calculate the age of the patient's arteries, which does not always match the patient's calendar age.

"You may look and feel one way on the outside, but your arteries actually could be much older than one realizes," said Dr. Howard N. Hodis of the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. "Once patients see how thick their arteries are, there is much more incentive for them to change their lifestyle with dietary modification and exercise," he said. "Physicians also can use the test to monitor and change current medications."

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the new diagnostic tool, called the ArterioVision CIMT procedure. Robert Selzer, MTI chief engineer, worked in JPL's Image Processing Laboratory for 15 years, where the technology was developed that ultimately led to the software used in ArterioVision.

"This is such a precise method of examining the carotid artery. It can distinguish between 256 shades of gray at a subpixel level," Selzer said. "You need that kind of detail to help catch heart disease as early as you can, often before there are any outward symptoms."

During the test, a patient lies on an examination table while a technician applies gel to the neck to image the carotid arteries, located on both sides of the neck near the skin's surface. The technician uses an ultrasound machine while following a patented protocol to capture specific images of the carotid artery wall. Using the ArterioVision software, the physician generates a CIMT measurement and a report that identifies the patient's risk profile when compared to people of the same gender and age.

JPL's Image Processing Laboratory was created in 1966 to receive and make sense of spacecraft imagery. In the lab, the NASA-invented Video Imaging Communication and Retrieval software has been used to process pictures from numerous space missions, including the Voyagers and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Periodic upgrades of the imaging software have enabled greater accuracy and improved knowledge of our solar system, and have laid the groundwork for understanding images of all kinds.

The ArterioVision test was developed with JPL's Innovative Partnerships Program, designed to bring benefits of the space program to the public. "It is exciting to see this NASA-funded technology grow in sophistication over the years and help in the battle against one of the nation's leading health issues," said Ken Wolfenbarger, Innovative Partnerships Program manager at JPL. The American Heart Association says heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, while strokes are third, behind all forms of cancer.

Gary F. Thompson, chairman and chief executive officer of MTI, says the test is near and dear to his heart - literally and figuratively. "I was the first male in my family to reach 50, so I decided to celebrate by running the Los Angeles marathon, but I had a heart attack halfway through it and couldn't finish," Thompson said. "None of the non-invasive tests that I had prior to the marathon detected my silent heart disease, and I knew there had to be something better out there."

The California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, which manages JPL for NASA, licensed the ArterioVision device to MTI.

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Astronauts who spend extended periods in space often experience weakening of their hearts and blood vessels. As doctors and researchers work to understand why this happens, many of their findings can be applied to heart disease. In the month of February, when people's attention turns to matters of the heart, and in recognition of American Heart Month, NASA today highlighted how its research and technology has led to breakthroughs in the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of heart disease -- the number one killer of American men and women.

I am proud that NASA research is helping doctors treat heart disease," said NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin. "This is a fascinating time for medical science, when the developments of our aeronautics and space programs can be applied to a disease that affects so many here on Earth."

Some startling facts:

* Heart disease is the leading cause of death of both men and women in the United States.

* About 60 million Americans have high blood pressure. If left untreated, it can lead to heart attacks, stroke and other medical problems.

* Until very recently, heart disease has not been recognized as a major risk for women. Since 1984, more women than men have died of heart disease.

Whether researching ways to keep astronauts healthy in space or transferring aerospace technologies to industry, America's space program has helped revolutionize the practice of medicine. NASA's research on the cardiovascular system is leading to many breakthrough discoveries, testing procedures and treatments. Many are less painful, less costly, and less traumatic to patients. A few of today's space-derived improvements include blood pressure monitors, self-adjusting pacemakers, EKGs, exercise equipment and ultrasound images. The technology of tomorrow will include microwave surgery, tissue replacement, heart pumps, low radiation imaging, and fetal imaging.

"Who would have dreamed that lasers used to measure Earth's ozone layer could be used to unclog arteries," Goldin continued. "If the past is our guide, our future in space will continue to advance medical science."

NASA is working with the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, dozens of hospitals, researchers and private companies. These collaborations have resulted in successful new programs to diagnose and treat heart disease.

Technorati : Disease, Heart, NASA, Strokes, Technology, Treat

NTU, Rice To Tackle Computer Chip Power Problems

Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Houston-based Rice University said they would form a research organization dedicated to resolving the power, heat, and current leakage issues that affect computer chips.

The Institute for Sustainable Nanoelectronics will focus on developing "next generation" integra that consume less than a hundredth of the energy that current models consume and will also be cheaper to conceptualize and produce.

NTU plans to contribute $2.6 million over the next two years to the Institute, which will be directed by Rice University computer science professor Krishna Palem.

NTU intends the Institute to "radically change the approach to chip design and evolve a design methodology that is platform-independent," Palem said.

"A major goal of this collaboration is to exploit the exponential rate at which the size of electronic components have been shrinking," he said. "The key is tying the costs for design, energy consumption and production to the value that the computed information has for the user."

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A New Design for Computer Chips

Today, MIT spinoff Tilera announced that it's shipping a computer chip with 64 separate processors whose design differs drastically from that of the chips found in today's computers. The new chip, called Tile64, avoids some of the speed bottlenecks inherent in today's chip architecture, and it can operate at much lower power, says Anant Agarwal, founder and chief technology officer of Tilera, based in Santa Clara, CA. Initially, Tile64 will be used in video applications such as videoconferencing systems, and in network hardware that monitors traffic to reduce e-mail spam and viruses.

Chips with multiple processing units, or "cores," are nothing new. But by allowing the cores to communicate directly with each other, Tilera has addressed a widespread concern about the viability of adding more cores to microprocessors. "Every processor in the market today is a multicore," says Agarwal. "The hope of the industry is to double the number of cores every 18 months. My prediction is, by 2014, we will have 1,000-core architectures. But the problem is, [current] architectures don't scale."

In existing multicore chips, each core communicates with the others via a set of wires called a bus. Performance doesn't necessarily suffer when two or four cores share a bus, but when 16 or more cores try to use it simultaneously, data can get backed up. Agarwal explains that Tilera's chip has no central bus. Instead, each core is connected to all the others. Also on each core is a full-featured processor, which can run an operating system, and memory caches, which hold data that needs to be quickly accessed.

In effect, the Tile64 has a mesh structure that's similar to that of the Internet, a network in which there are many decentralized nodes. One reason the Internet is able to pass around data so quickly is that packets of information are sent through a vast network and can avoid traffic jams. If everyone's e-mail had to go through a central server, there would undoubtedly be delays. Tilera's microprocessor, says Agarwal, "is very much like the Internet on a chip." And like the Internet, Tilera's chip can be scaled up gracefully; it doesn't need to be redesigned each time new cores are added.

The idea of using mesh architecture for multicore chips has been explored for at least a decade, in research labs at MIT, Stanford, and the University of Texas, Austin. And recently, Intel announced a prototype 80-core chip based on a mesh. But Tilera is the first company to offer a product that uses the new architecture.

"Having a lot of cores is good, but they must be able to communicate with each other at high data rates," says Jerry Bautista, codirector of Intel's terascale-computing research program. "There are advantages to using a mesh ... You can deal with traffic jams pretty easily." Bautista says that Intel researchers are trying to find the best way to implement mesh architectures--among other experimental designs--in future chips. But he also cautions that making massively multicore systems work efficiently isn't as simple as redesigning the hardware.

We believe that to really get the most use out of these many-core systems, there's going to be quite a significant modification to the way people program today," Bautista says. The cores can handle many different instructions at once, he says, and software engineers will have to learn new programming techniques to take full advantage of the added computational capacity.

Tilera's Agarwal says that his company has addressed that concern by providing a software environment that helps customers gradually upgrade, debug, and optimize their applications to work on the 64-core system--even applications designed to run on a single core.

The company's technology is being presented this week at the Hot Chips symposium at Stanford, in Palo Alto. Nathan Brookwood, founder of Insight64, an analysis firm, says that many people at the conference are excited about Tilera's work, mainly because it could have immediate applications, such as expanding the capacity of videoconferencing systems and analyzing network traffic in routers. "I think they have a potential winner here," says Brookwood.

Intel's Bautista says the marketplace may be ready for a chip with more computing power, but it would need to be low power and easily programmed. He says that Intel will keep an eye on Tilera, as it does on many startups that are first to market with new technologies, to see how customers respond and which aspects of the technology could be improved. "We use companies like this to help us test the waters," he says.

Technorati : Chip, Computer, NTU, Power, Problems, Rice, Tackle

Prions May Activate Retroviruses In Infected Brain Cells

This micrograph of brain tissue reveals the cytoarchitectural histopathologic changes found in bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

In work originating from the Bavarian Research Cooperation Prions (FORPRION), which ended in 2007, a team led by the scientist Prof. Dr. Christine Leib-Mösch has been able to show that prion proteins may activate endogenous retroviruses in infected brain cells.

In the Institute of Molecular Virology of the GSF - National Research Center for Environment and Health in Neuherberg/Munich (Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres) the group is continuing to search for cellular components whose make-up is changed as a result of a prion infection. In collaboration with colleagues from the Technical University of Munich and the University of Heidelberg, the group used micro-array technologies - micro-arrays are chips with thousands or tens of thousands of DNA or protein probes - and could demonstrate that the expression of endogenous retroviruses is influenced by infectious prion proteins in tests with mouse cells.

Prions - an abbreviation for proteinaceous infectious particles - work as a trigger to a set of diseases of the brain and nervous system, the so-called spongiform encephalopathies. These include BSE in cattle, scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt Jakob's Disease in humans. Prions are structural variants of a normal protein found in healthy tissues - especially in the brain.

The devastating effect of infectious prions is that, once they have entered the organism, they can modify the normal "healthy" prion proteins to create more infectious prions, and thus cause the illness to progress. However, as yet, little is known about the molecular mechanisms of pathogenesis, the role of co-factors and the interaction of prion proteins with cellular components.

Retroviruses insert their genetic information into the genome of host cells. In the case of endogenous retroviruses, this involves retroviral infections from long ago, which were transmitted through many generations by means of the germ line. Nearly ten percent of the genome of mice and humans consists of endogenous retroviral sequences that have accumulated during the course of evolution. Indeed, most structural genes of endogenous retroviruses are inactive, but many regulatory elements, such as binding sites for transcription factors, often remain active and can influence neighbouring cellular genes.

The GSF scientists infected mouse neural cells kept in culture with infectious prion proteins and subsequently analysed the expression patterns of endogenous retroviruses. The results showed that the expression of a set of endogenous retroviral sequences is influenced by the prion infection: in comparison with uninfected cells, the expression partly increased but also partly decreased - depending on the cell line and the type of endogenous retroviruses. These effects could be suppressed by pentosan-polysulphate, an anti-prion drug, which means that the influence of the expression can be attributed to the prions and not to some secondary effects.

These observations suggest that prion proteins may stimulate the production of retroviral particles by activation of endogenous retroviruses. Subsequently, these retrovirus-like particles could transport prion proteins from cell to cell, and thus spread the infection.

These studies were carried out within the scope of the "Bavarian Research Cooperation Prions" (FORPRION) in the Association of Bavarian Research Cooperations. FORPRION was founded in 2001 following the appearance of the first BSE cases in Bavaria and was financed equally from the budgets of the Bavarian State Ministry for Science, Research and Art, and the Bavarian State Ministry of Health Food and Consumer Affairs.

Through basic and applied research the consortium aims to make progress in the diagnosis and therapy of human and animal prion diseases, as well as in the field of preventive consumer protection. FORPRION linked up 25 projects, based at five Bavarian universities and in institutes of the Max Planck Society. The financial support of the Bavarian Research Cooperation Prions FORPRION ended in June, 2007.

MORE NEWS......

A team led by the scientist Prof. Dr. Christine Leib-Mösch of the Bavarian Research Cooperation Prions (FORPRION), which ended in 2007, has confirmed that prion proteins may activate endogenous retroviruses in infected brain cells.

Prions - an abbreviation for proteinaceous infectious particles - work as a trigger to a set of diseases of the brain and nervous system, the so-called spongiform encephalopathies. These include BSE in cattle, scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt Jakob's Disease in humans. Prions are structural variants of a normal protein found in healthy tissues - especially in the brain.

The devastating effect of infectious prions is that, once they have entered the organism, they can modify the normal "healthy" prion proteins to create more infectious prions, and thus cause the illness to progress. However, as yet, little is known about the molecular mechanisms of pathogenesis, the role of co-factors and the interaction of prion proteins with cellular components.

Retroviruses insert their genetic information into the genome of host cells. In the case of endogenous retroviruses, this involves retroviral infections from long ago, which were transmitted through many generations by means of the germ line.

Nearly ten percent of the genome of mice and humans consists of endogenous retroviral sequences that have accumulated during the course of evolution. Indeed, most structural genes of endogenous retroviruses are inactive, but many regulatory elements, such as binding sites for transcription factors, often remain active and can influence neighbouring cellular genes.

The GSF scientists infected mouse neural cells kept in culture with infectious prion proteins and subsequently analysed the expression patterns of endogenous retroviruses. The results showed that the expression of a set of endogenous retroviral sequences is influenced by the prion infection: in comparison with uninfected cells, the expression partly increased but also partly decreased - depending on the cell line and the type of endogenous retroviruses. These effects could be suppressed by pentosan-polysulphate, an anti-prion drug, which means that the influence of the expression can be attributed to the prions and not to some secondary effects.

These observations suggest that prion proteins may stimulate the production of retroviral particles by activation of endogenous retroviruses. Subsequently, these retrovirus-like particles could transport prion proteins from cell to cell, and thus spread the infection.

These studies were carried out within the scope of the "Bavarian Research Cooperation Prions" (FORPRION) in the Association of Bavarian Research Cooperations. FORPRION was founded in 2001 following the appearance of the first BSE cases in Bavaria and was financed equally from the budgets of the Bavarian State Ministry for Science, Research and Art, and the Bavarian State Ministry of Health Food and Consumer Affairs.

Through basic and applied research the consortium aims to make progress in the diagnosis and therapy of human and animal prion diseases, as well as in the field of preventive consumer protection. FORPRION linked up 25 projects, based at five Bavarian universities and in institutes of the Max Planck Society. The financial support of the Bavarian Research Cooperation Prions FORPRION ended in June, 2007.

Technorati : Activat, Brain, Cells, Infected, Prions, Retroviruses

GREENE STEERS ONCE-OBSCURE START-UP INTO HUGE IPO,VMware's gutsy skipper

Today, Greene, at 52, is best known for navigating VMware, a company that might best be likened to a nuclear submarine.

For years VMware operated in the obscure depths of computer science, gradually developing the know-how and market for its esoteric "virtualization" software. When VMware debuted on Wall Street last month, its stock took off like a Polaris missile, with a trajectory that has pushed its market capitalization to $25.8 billion. It is America's third most highly valued software maker, after Microsoft and Oracle.

Greene has been VMware's chief executive since its 1998 launch as a mom-and-pop start-up. She brought business acumen to an idea that was hatched in the computer science lab of her husband, Stanford University Professor Mendel Rosenblum. Three colleagues were also co-founders.

Silicon Valley insiders credit Greene for her skill in skippering VMware, staring down Microsoft's aggressive tactics and forging alliances on its unorthodox path to the valley's biggest initial public offering since Google.

"I think sailboat racing taught me a lot," Greene said. Racing and running a company, she explained, require preparation, organization and "the right team." It requires a keen awareness of shifting
conditions and the ability to weigh all the factors, including rivals: "What are the other boats doing?"
A profile in a trade journal in 2005 described Greene as "humble" and "unassuming." She is variously described as "an engineer's engineer," "a supermom" and "a reluctant celebrity." She is credited for fostering an open, collegial culture in VMware.

"She's certainly not the typical CEO," said Dan Warmenhoven, chief executive of Network Appliance. NetApp is a rival to storage giant EMC, which acquired VMware in 2004 and has profited handsomely by allowing it spin out its own stock.

Even in the lobby of VMware's handsome new campus in Palo Alto, Greene makes a disarming impression. At 5 feet, 2 inches, she'd make the short list of short CEOs. There is no power suit. Her smile is warm, her manner personable.

"I always go out and greet my guests," she said later, "and I can't tell you how many times they thought my admin was greeting them."

Female CEOs are rare in corporate America and Silicon Valley. Within that small sorority, Greene makes a different impression from the likes of eBay CEO Meg Whitman or former Hewlett-Packard leaders Carly Fiorina and Pattie Dunn. Stock phrases like "assertive" and "hard-charging" don't seem to fit.

Founders don't have to worry about the proverbial glass ceiling. But even in her previous jobs - at Sybase, Tandem Computer and Silicon Graphics - Greene said she never thought gender limited her opportunities. As a female engineer, "I've always been in the minority, and it's something I just didn't notice," she said.

In business dealings, she suggested, her background helps her interact with technologists and perhaps overcome latent bias related to gender. Greene said she has noticed one tangible benefit of being a woman.

"Amazingly talented women tend to gravitate toward VMware. People I know just peripherally will call me and say, gee, I'm interested in joining VMware," she said, adding that women fill more roles as engineers, executives and managers than at other valley companies.

Greene comes across less as a valley mogul than the protective mother that she is. She is guarded about her privacy, and requested that questions about her family be off limits.

When she started to tell a story about crabbing in the Chesapeake with her children, she abruptly cut herself off. Inside her compact office, she turned over framed pictures of her children, lest they be captured by a photographer's lens. She is said to have a rule against business interfering with family dinner.

Greene's persona may serve as camouflage for an intense competitor who has won sailing and windsurfing races. "I just engage myself in whatever I'm doing," she said.

A fascination with computer models used in hydrodynamics prompted her to leave Hawaii to study computer science at the University of California-Berkeley. Future husband Rosenblum was a fellow student; they've been together since 1985.

While Rosenblum pursued an academic career, Greene joined the valley workforce. Before VMware, she was involved in two other start-ups, as CEO of Vxtreme, a video-streaming company, and as a consultant on AdForce, a Web advertising venture.

Rosenblum and some colleagues, meanwhile, were revisiting "virtualization," an idea pioneered by IBM in the 1960s, but of limited use at the time. Virtualization involves complex software that enables servers to run multiple operating systems, thus enhancing efficiency and lowering costs and energy use. VMware derives its name from the phrase "virtual machine."

VMware offered its first product as a free download, wowing techies who were suddenly able run Windows and Linux simultaneously. Greene smiled, recalling one fan's e-mail: "Your brains must be bigger than Volkswagens."

In 2002, as VMware started to gain traction, Microsoft decided to get into the virtualization business. It made a memorable bid for VMware.

Veritas founder Mark Leslie, who then served on VMware's board of directors, disparagingly called it "a standard Microsoft offer letter" that included an unreasonably low price and a thinly veiled threat - that if not accepted, mighty Microsoft would become a direct foe. When VMware declined, Microsoft instead bought virtualization rival Connectix.

Greene's account is more diplomatic: "We couldn't reach terms."

With the virtualization market heating up and the Microsoft rivalry brewing, VMware soon had several suitors. In late 2003, VMware's board agreed to an acquisition by EMC for a price that, according to Leslie, was $680 million. The offer, he said, provided a safe harbor from Microsoft's competitive threat. With tech stocks and the IPO market still in doldrums, Leslie said, EMC's offer was attractive.

Given VMware's current value, EMC scored a fabulous bargain. That's also why some observers now suggest VMware should have passed on EMC's offer and held out longer to do its own IPO. Greene might count herself among them: "I can't say that my husband and I thought it was ideal, but it would have been selfish not to follow the consensus."

Because 85 percent of VMware was owned by employees and founders, the deal enabled many people to cash in stock options. "It was a life-changing event for a lot of people, so we said OK," Greene said.

VMware customers Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell - all of which compete with EMC in storage - expressed concern about the deal, Greene said. She and EMC chief Joe Tucci agreed to a hands-off approach that would allow VMware considerable autonomy. Spinning off its own stock has proven to be another smart move.

One benefit is that VMware now has a war chest to make more acquisitions. At VMworld last week in San Francisco - a three-day virtualization powwow that drew more than 10,500 attendees - VMware announced the acquisition of Dunes Technology, a Swiss software firm.

VMware is now recognized as the dominant firm in a growing field, validating the founders' vision that virtualization would broadly enhance information technology.

Early on, Leslie said, VMware had many skeptics among companies that underestimated the virtues of virtualization. Some executives weren't sure whether to regard VMware as a friend or a foe, or whether it would succeed or fail. Today, it's credited for turning a promising notion into an industry.

Strategizing in that industry, Greene said, has a strong parallel to racing sailboats - "the upwind phase and the downwind phase."

So, is VMware now heading downwind?

"Oh no, there's always a mix. With any growth there's a lot of challenges," Greene said. Later she added: "In many ways we're still at the start of the opportunity."

DNA 'Barcodes' Database

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To help shoppers avoid mislabeled toxic pufferfish and pilots steer clear of birds, federal agencies are starting to tap into an ambitious project that is gathering DNA "barcodes" for the Earth's 1.8 million known species.

A consortium of scientists from almost 50 nations is overseeing the building of a global database made from tiny pieces of genetic material. Called DNA barcoding, the process takes a scientist only a few hours in a lab and about $2 to identify a species from a tissue sample or other piece of genetic material.

David Schindel, a Smithsonian Institution paleontologist and executive secretary of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life, said the purpose is to create a global reference library — "a kind of telephone directory for all species."

"If I know that gene sequence, I can submit it as a query to a database and get back the telephone number," he said. "I can get back the species name."

The government's interest in the project stems from a variety of possible uses.

The Food and Drug Administration has begun eyeing it as a tool to ferret out hazardous fish species and to confirm a type of leech used in some surgery. In May, the FDA used it to warn that a shipment labeled monkfish from China might actually be a type of pufferfish that could contain a deadly toxin if not prepared properly.

The Federal Aviation Administration and Air Force hope it will help them identify birds prone to collide with aircraft. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sees it as a means to track commercial fish and reduce killing of unwanted species also caught by nets.

A growing collection of feathers and other remains of birds that collided with planes has provided "operational" information for the FAA, said Scott Miller, a scientist at the Smithsonian Institution who chairs the consortium's executive committee.

"They have an almost complete reference database for the North American bird species," Miller said. "It is a routine tool that they use."

Elsewhere, the Environmental Protection Agency is testing species barcoding to identify insects and other invertebrates that indicate how healthy rivers and streams are. The Agriculture Department is contributing genetic data it has compiled on fruit flies in an effort help farmers control pests.

Among the agencies experimenting with the database, EPA has found that as it grows in size it is becoming "more and more useful as a practical tool for identifying species," EPA spokeswoman Jessica Emond said.

Scientists call it barcodes to compare it to the supermarket scanner codes that are indecipherable except to machines. But with plants and animals, the scanners look at the specific order of the four basic building blocks of DNA to identify the species.

Users gain free access to a repository of archival genetic material run jointly by U.S., European and Japanese facilities.

About 30,000 species have been logged in the database so far, but scientists hope to reach 500,000 within five years. A two-year goal is to have sequenced 2,800 — or about 80 percent — of the 3,500 different species of mosquitoes.

Yvonne-Marie Linton of the Natural History Museum in London, said efforts to reduce mosquito populations blamed for up to 500 million human malaria cases and 1 million annual deaths each year are consistently hindered by misidentifying the species responsible.

Linton, who heads a project to barcode the mosquito species, said correctly identifying and controlling those carriers of malaria and other mosquito-borne illnesses like dengue fever and the West Nile virus are the "key to disease management."

Miller said barcoding is "basically going to revolutionize the way that mosquito survey and monitoring is done."

The consortium is sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History. It grew out of 2003 research paper in which geneticist Paul Hebert at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, proposed a database of DNA barcodes for identifying all species. Now, the Smithsonian and university share in the barcoding work.

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Blog content tracking firm is owning by YAHOO

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Yahoo, looking to attract visitors and advertisers to its online news pages, purchased BuzzTracker, a site that ranks stories based on their popularity among bloggers.

Sunnyvale-based Yahoo acquired the Web company's technology and staff from Chicago-based Participate Media, BuzzTracker said Friday on its blog. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

BuzzTracker ranks more than 1,000 topics on more than 90,000 blogs, displaying the most-read and discussed stories of the day, according to its Web site. The technology will add to Yahoo's news pages and help it fend off competition from Google and sites such as Digg.com.

"As anyone playing in the online media space understands, online media is all about scale," Warms said on the blog.

Yahoo's news page attracted 35.2 million users in June, the most among similar sites in the United States, according to comScore. Google was sixth with 9.28 million, the Reston, Va.-based research firm said.

The acquisition includes "substantially all of Participate's assets," Warms said in an interview. The company has four employees.

The Wall Street Journal's Kara Swisher reported Friday on her blog that the BuzzTracker purchase price was $5 million, citing sources close to the company.

Warms and Yahoo spokeswoman Bahareh Ramin declined to confirm the price.

Locals make Yahoo! news Participate Media, a two-year-old Internet software and publishing company based in Lake View, was acquired by Yahoo for an undisclosed amount, and its owner, Alan Warms, was named general manager of Yahoo! News.
Participate Media developed BuzzTracker software that aggregates news, blog postings and other forms of Internet-based content from more than 90,000 sources. Publishers license the software, which can rank content according to what is most blogged or recently posted.

The four-person company also operates the Web site BuzzTracker.com.

Warms, 41, a Chicago-based serial entrepreneur, was named a Yahoo! vice president, and will move to Santa Monica, Calif. The company's employees will also relocate and work from the Yahoo! News headquarters. Yahoo.com is the most-visited Web site in the world.

"Anything in Internet media and advertising involves the ability to scale," Warms said. "We think we have the opportunity to bring in millions of users and thousands of advertisers."

Warms previously ran political news aggregator RealClearPolitics.com, which he sold in January. RealClearPolitics is a content partner of Yahoo, and technology developed for that Web site laid the groundwork for BuzzTracker. Accordingly, Yahoo management was familiar with the technology and in the process of negotiating a licensing agreement with BuzzTracker when it elected to acquire the company.

"This is very congruent with our strategy to make Yahoo an open platform," said Scott Moore, Yahoo senior vice president for news and information. "BuzzTracker augments our ability to search for the best of blogs and mainstream media by topic."

Warms founded his first company, Participate.com, in Chicago in 1997. That company, separate from his most recent venture, raised several million dollars in venture capital, and nearly went public before the dot-com crash in April 2000. Later named Participate Systems, it was sold in November 2004 to Boston-based OutStart Inc.

A native of New Jersey, Warms moved to Chicago in the mid-1990s to attend the Kellogg Business School at Northwestern University.

Warms said Yahoo was an opportunity he couldn't pass up.

"They are the biggest player in news," he said. "If you have the chance to join the New York Yankees you have to do it."

Technorati : YAHOO