www.inhandnetworks.com

A new study from the University of Copenhagen revealed that eating a diet rich in antioxidants may actually counteract many of the health benefits of exercise, including reduced blood pressure and cholesterol in older men.

In older men, a natural antioxidant compound found in red grapes and other plants – called resveratrol – blocks many of the cardiovascular benefits of exercise. This is the surprising result from a research project from the University of Copenhagen published today in The Journal of Physiology.

The research unusually suggests that eating a diet rich in antioxidants may actually counteract many of the health benefits of exercise, including reduced blood pressure and cholesterol.

Resveratrol has received widespread attention as a possible anti-aging compound and is now widely available as a dietary supplement; much has been made of its role in explaining the cardiovascular health benefits of red wine, and other foods.

In contrast to earlier studies in animals in which resveratrol improved the cardiovascular benefits of exercise, this study in humans has provided surprising and strong evidence that in older men, resveratrol has the opposite effect.

New view on antioxidants

What is emerging is a new view that antioxidants are not the fix for everything, a Vending Telemetry  nd that some degree of oxidant stress may be necessary for the body  UMTS router  to work correctly. This pivotal study suggests that reactive oxygen species, generally thought of as causing aging and disease, may be a necessary signal that causes healthy adaptations in response to stresses like exercise. So too much of a good thing (like antioxidants in the diet) may actually be detrimental to our health.

“We studied 27 healthy, physically inactive men around 65 years old for 8 weeks. During the 8 weeks all of the men performed high-intensity exercise training and half of the group received 250 mg of resveratrol daily, whereas the other group received a placebo pill (a pill containing no active ingredient). The study design was double-blinded, thus neither the subjects nor the investigators knew which participant that received either resveratrol or placebo”, says Ph.D. student Lasse Gliemann, University of Copenhagen, who was one of the researchers in the study.

He continues: “We found that exercise training was highly effective in improving cardiovascular health parameters, but resveratrol supplementation attenuated the positive effects of training on several parameters including blood pressure, plasma lipid concentrations and maximal oxygen uptake.”

“We were surprised to find that resveratrol supplementation in aged men blunts the positive effects of exercise training on cardiovascular health parameters, in part because our results contradict findings in animal studies”, adds professor Ylva Hellsten, the leader of the project, and she continues: “It should be noted that remote secure networking   the quantities of resveratrol given in our research study are much higher than what could be obtained by intake of natural foods.

This research adds to the growing body of evidence questioning the positive effects of antioxidant supplementation in humans.

Publication: Lasse Gliemann, et al., “Resveratrol Blunts the Positive Effects of Exercise Training on Cardiovascular Health in Aged Men,” The Journal of Physiology, 2013; doi:10.1113/jphysiol.2013.258061

Image: Red Wine & Grapes from Shutterstock

www.inhandnetworks.com

Electron microscope image of a prototype chip using a ring of coupled oscillators to generate terahertz radiation. Silicon cannot oscillate in the terahertz range, but the design focuses most of the energy in a high harmonic. The signal radiates on the axis of the ring and can be aimed. Provided/Ehsan Afshari

A recently published paper describes how scientists at Cornell University developed a new method of generating terahertz signals using the familiar and inexpensive CMOS chip technology, generating power levels high enough for some medical applications.

Cornell researchers have developed a new method of generating terahertz signals on an inexpensive silicon chip, offering possible applications in medical imaging, security scanning and wireless data transfer.

Terahertz radiation, the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and infrared light, penetrates cloth and leather and just a few millimeters into the skin, but without the potentially damaging effects of X-rays. Terahertz scanning can identify skin cancers too small to see with the naked eye. Many of the complex organic chemicals used in explosives absorb terahertz radiation at particular frequencies, creating a “signature” that detectors can read. And because higher frequencies can carry more bandwidth, terahertz signals could make a sort of super-Bluetooth that could transfer an entire high-definition movie wirelessly in a few seconds.

Current methods of generating terahertz radiation involve lasers, vacuum tubes and special circuits cooled near absolute zero, often in room-sized apparatus costing thousands of dollars. Ehsan Afshari, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, has developed a new method using the familiar and inexpensive CMOS chip technology, generating power levels high enough for some medical applications. With further research, higher power will be possible, Afshari said, enabling such devices as handheld scanners for law enforcement.

Afshari and graduate students Yahya Tousi and Vahnood Pourahma describe the new approach in the June 8 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

Schematic of a ring of oscillators (gray circles) coupled to generate terahertz frequencies. Coupling circuits (blue triangles) shift the phase of the oscillations to recellular router wifiinforce the fourth harmonic. Provided/Ehsan Afshari

The ability of solid-state devices to generate high frequencies is limited by the characteristics of the material — basically, how fast electrons can move back and forth in a transistor. So circuit designers make use of harmonics — signals that naturally appear at multiples of the fundamental frequency of an oscillator. That fundamental frequency is usually set by a circuit that uses a variable capacitor called a varactor, but at terahertz frequencies varactors don’t tune sharply. Afshari has come up with a new way of tuning by coupling several oscillators in a ring, producing what engineers call a high-quality signal, where all the power goes into a very narrow frequency band.

Connect two springs and set one vibrating, and the other will begin to vibrate as well, and eventually they will settle to an equilibrium. A ring of electronic oscillators does the same, and the circuits coupling the oscillators can set the frequency at which they will lock in. In Afshari’s device the couplers also shift the phase of the signals, that is, how the peaks and valleys of the waves line up. With the right adjustment, the peaks  Industrial VPN router  and valleys cancel each other out at several harmonics but reinforce each other at one — in this case the fourth — channeling most of the power there.

In early experiments, the researchers fabricated chips that generated signals with about 10,000 times the power level previously obtained at terahertz frequencies on a silicon chip. The signal emerges along the axis of the ring, and what the researchers called an intriguing possibility is that by adjusting the couplers separately they could aim the output, making it possible to scan large areas with a narrow, high-powered beam.

The power could be increased by adding more oscillators to the ring or using multiple rings, and Afsha digital signage  ri is working with Cornell experts on gallium nitride, a chip material that can handle both higher frequencies and higher power. But Afshari said he wants to focus on less-expensive silicon. “The goal is to make a complete device on one CMOS chip,” he said. “I can envision a tiny thing you could put in a cell phone.”

The research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the Semiconductor Research Corp., a consortium supported by private industry and the Defense Advanced Projects Research Administration.

Images: Provided/Ehsan Afshari; Cornell Chronicle

www.inhandnetworks.com

This art cellular router icle was originally published by International Business Times.

ClearMacro CEO Mike Simcock, who has 25 years of professional asset management experience, says he started the company to help investment managers that were drowning in a deluge of data.

There has been a massive explosion in data sources, many offering the prospect of mo IoT gateway re timely information and more impactful signals.

But the big data revolution is actually compounding a problem that was already there, says Simcock. "If you are a chief information officer or a portfolio manager, not only have you got all of the traditional data sets to evaluate, but you have all of these new entrants coming in from satellites, Google trends, all different sources."