Gastric Ulcer caused by bacteria

Australian scientists Barry Marshall and Robin Warren have won this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for proving that stomach ulcers are caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori. Despite initial resistance from fellow members of the medical community, their discovery has revolutionized the treatment of ulcers.

Plain-speaking Barry Marshall has been a hero for years in his native Perth, in Western Australia. But in the years after his 1982 discovery he was dismissed as a young upstart, pushing a hypothesis that lacked credibility.

At the time, ulcers were treated with drugs to curb acid secretion in the stomach. The drugs worked well, and acidity was thought to be central to the condition - patients had previously been advised to drink milk and take antacids. But Warren, the more retiring of the duo, had noticed the presence of spiral-shaped bacteria in biopsy samples from ulcered stomachs, and saw that they were always accompanied by signs of inflammation. Warren recruited the young medical intern Marshall to work with him at the Royal Perth Hospital, in an attempt to isolate and culture the bacteria. The bacteria looked like Campylobacter, a newly discovered family known to cause gut infection in poultry. Marshall's repeated attempts to culture it early in 1982 failed, however - until the Easter holidays, when the culture plates were accidentally left in the incubator over a four-day break. This did the trick.

The problem, it turned out, was that H. pylori grows exceptionally slowly, and earlier attempts had simply been abandoned too early. The bacteria was then shown not to be Campylobacter at all, but an entirely new genus.

Marshall and Warren went on to show that patients with ulcers could be successfully treated with antibiotics. And unlike patients treated with acid-suppressing drugs, their ulcers did not return.
Fellow gastroenterologists nevertheless continued to resist the idea. Francis M?graud, a bacteriologist at the University of Bordeaux II in France, remembers attending the 1988 Pan American Congress of Gastroenterology and hearing physicians on the bus discussing the idea in tones of outrage. "They seemed insulted, saying, 'We are being asked to treat stomach ulcers with antibiotics, as if it were gonorrhoea!'," he recalls. "It was really hard for them to accept that the disease could be a simple infection."

Drug companies profiting from the lucrative anti-ulcer drug market also resisted the idea, says M?graud, who is also secretary of the European Helicobacter pylori Study Group. Even some bacteriologists were at first suspicious - the highly acidic stomach seemed too hostile an environment to host bugs.

In frustration, Marshall even undertook the ultimate cause-and-effect experiment. He swallowed a solution containing the bacteria, and a week later suffered an aggressive attack of the kind of gastritis that leads to ulcer.

डाक्टर ज्यू हरुलाई मेरो एउटा genuine प्रश्न है (मलाई नै recently परिराखेको - र अरु पनि साथीहरु भुक्तभोगि होलान र धेरै ज्ञानगुनका कुराहरु पनि जान्न पाईएला भनेर generic रुपमा नै सोधेको नि, अनि educative धागो लागेर अगाडि बढाउन पनि मन लाग्यो के यो धागोलाई )

what is the maximum/minimum/optimum time that one should be snoring since after sleeping (let me rephrase it, ...one should be sleeping since after lying down and pulling the blanket over- यसरी भन्नु पर्ने हो कि ) ? is there any such time-bracket kind of thing, and if yes - is that a serious health-issue?

केही दिन भयो जहिले पनि राति-राति लेट बस्ने अनि दिउसो दिउसो सुत्ने - उल्लु (लाटोकोसेरो) जस्तो भईयो है, केही रमाईलो उपाय थियो कि फेरि मान्छे जस्तै हुने ? internet-factor पनि दोषी छ, अझ मुख्य गुन्डा त साझा नै हो । राति निद्रै नलाग्ने, दिउसो dizzy भई राख्ने । आफ्नो body-clock नै reset भए जस्तो छ, बेटरी हाल्नी खाले भए जस्तो पनि मान्दिन बेटरी फेरम् भन्नलाई पनि, पहिले पहिले को एचएमटी बटारेर चाबी दिने खाले भए जस्तो पनि मान्दिन :) औटमिटिङ्ग नै हुन पर्ने होईन र?

Keep rolling...

आच्! नि ओ, हाम्रो सिरी को समस्या त सारो गहिरो पो र छ, के हि गर्नु परो ।

shree, once in a blue moon bhanchan ni tyo ke naam chari gym tira chihaune gare, thakaile bhutukka parcha- ma ta mero agadi ko suteko cha ni thaha paunna :P

DC_Girl,
हवस्, जान्छु अब म पनि जीमखाना ....

Keep rollling...

How does Google Earth work?
Short cuts bring the globe to your screen without crashing your computer. by Declan Butler
The globe-imaging software Google Earth has become a cult web product since its release last June. Using the web-based tool, users can fly around the globe and zoom in on both natural features and whole worlds of information added by other users (see 'The web-wide world').
But how is it possible for you to zoom in from outer space to a point somewhere above the rooftop of your house without bringing your desktop computer to a grinding halt?
The main obstacle to a convincing three-diménsional skydive is data transfer. If one were to download over the Internet a one-metre resolution image of the entire world it would take 69 years with a 10-megabit-per-second Internet connection, and 12,400 years with a standard 56K modem.
To slash the amount of data they have to transmit across the Internet, virtual globes such as Google Earth approximate the sphere of the planet's surface with a polygon made up of flat tiles. The further away your viewpoint is from the surface, the fewer tiles are needed to create the illusion of roundness, and the lower the resolution of these tiles can be.

As you zoom in, the computer explodes each tile into smaller sub-tiles, each with higher resolution, and re-forms the polygon into a ball. The process continues as you zoom. This means that the virtual globe only has to download high-resolution data when the viewer is actively zooming towards it. Virtual globes also use another trick to speedthings up further: a disk cache. Images for places you have already looked at are stored locally on your hard drive, so when you fly over this area again the software does not need to re-download the images, but instead quickly calls them up from your hard disk. Google Earth was designed by Keyhole, a software company that Google bought in 2004. Many of the tricks it uses aren't unique: the tiling idea has been used by climate modellers, for example. But with good software and the speed of Google's enormous supercomputing platform, the results are impressive.
"I think Keyhole did a very good job," says Michael Goodchild, a geographer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "There are some elegant design decisions in there."

2038 bug - a threat bigger than Y2K
The year-2038 bug is a threat similar to the Y2K bug in that it involves a time wrap not handled by programmers. In the case of Y2K, many older machines did not store the century digits of dates, hence the year 2000 and the year 1900 would appear the same.
Of course we now know that the prevalence of computers that would fail because of this error was greatly exaggerated by the media. Computer scientists were generally aware that most machines would continue operating as usual through the century turnover, with the worst result being an incorrect date. This prediction withstood through to the new millennium. Effected systems were tested and corrected in time, although the correction and verification of those systems was monumentally expensive.
There are however several other problems with date handling on machines in the world today. Some are less prevalent than others, but it is true that almost all computers suffer from one critical limitation. Most programs use Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to work out their dates. Simply, UTC is the number of seconds elapsed since Jan 1 1970. A recent milestone was Sep 9 2001, where this value wrapped from 999'999'999 seconds to 1'000'000'000 seconds. Very few programs anywhere store time as a 9 digit number, and therefore this was not a problem.
Modern computers use a standard 4 byte integer for this second count. This is 31 bits, storing a value of 231. The remaining bit is the sign. This means that when the second count reaches 2147483647, it will wrap to -2147483648.
The precise date of this occurrence is Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038. At this time, a machine prone to this bug will show the time Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901, hence it is possible that the media will call this The Friday 13th Bug.
Solution:
Our 32-bit root servers currently use the FreeBSD 4.7 operating system. As with all Unix and Unix-like operating systems, time and dates in FreeBSD are represented internally as the number of seconds since the UNIX Epoch, which was the 1st of January 1970 GMT.
32-bit systems can only store a maximum of 231 non-negative seconds (2,147,483,648 seconds or about 68 years). Which means that 32-bit UNIX systems won't be able to process time beyond 19 Jan 2038 at 3:14:07 AM GMT.
One of the common solutions will be to switch to 64-bit architecture systems that can store a maximium of 263 non-negative seconds (9,223,372,036,854,775,808 [9.2 Quintillion] seconds or about 292.27 Billion years), which is about 22 times the estimated age of our universe!
For the curious: A switch to 128-bit architecture systems would yield a maximum of 2127 non-negative seconds (170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303,715,884,105,728 [170 Undecillion] seconds), or about 18.4 Quintillion times as many as 64-bit systems

font size="+2"> 2038 bug - a threat bigger than Y2K

A

Punditji prawachan khoi?