Researchers seem cautious to bill the treatment as a replacement for sleep, as it is not clear that adjusting brain chemistry could have the same physical benefits of real sleep in the long run. The drug is aimed at replacing amphetamines used by drowsy long-haul military pilots, but there would no doubt be large demand for such a remedy thanks to its apparent lack of side-effects.The monkeys were deprived of sleep for 30 to 36 hours and then given either orexin A or a saline placebo before taking standard cognitive tests. The monkeys given orexin A in a nasal spray scored about the same as alert monkeys, while the saline-control group was severely impaired. The study, published in the Dec. 26 edition of The Journal of Neuroscience, found orexin A not only restored monkeys' cognitive abilities but made their brains look "awake" in PET scans. Siegel said that orexin A is unique in that it only had an impact on sleepy monkeys, not alert ones, and that it is "specific in reversing the effects of sleepiness" without other impacts on the brain.
Last week's announcement by Shai Agassi, a former SAP executive based in Palo Alto, that he's raised $200 million for a company that will try to revolutionize the electric car industry is the latest sign of this region's growing role in one of the hottest sectors of the automotive industry.
The most important question a CPU designer must ask himself or herself is, what is the purpose of the CPU? Most people in the business will immediately answer that the purpose of the CPU is to execute sequences of coded instructions. Sorry, this is the wrong answer. This definition is precisely what got us in the mess that we are in. Read full article.
The functional programming language Erlang is rightfully touted by its supporters as being fault-tolerant. COSA shares all the fault tolerance qualities of Erlang but this is where the similarities end. The COSA philosophy is that nothing should fail, period. There are software applications where safety is so critical that not even extreme reliability is good enough. In such cases,
Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter