A student using the smartpen with a Sewell Raised Line Drawing Kit that allows the visually impaired to feel the shapes that they have drawn.

Subjects like physics, calculus and biology are challenging for most students, but imagine tackling these topics without being able to see the graphs and figures used to teach them.
A new smartpen and paper technology that works with touch and records classroom audio aims to bring these subjects to life for blind students, ScienceDaily said.
“Mainstream approaches to teaching STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) courses all rely strongly on diagrams, graphs, charts and other figures, putting students with visual disabilities at a significant disadvantage,“ Andy Van Schaack, lecturer in Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of education and human development, said.
“Our goal is to enable students and teachers to produce and explore diagrams and figures through touch and sound using a smartpen and paper technology that is low-cost, portable and easy to use.“
Van Schaack and colleague Joshua Miele, a researcher at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute who is blind, have received a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to apply the new technology, created by technology company Livescribe, to this effort. Van Schaack is Livescribe’s senior science adviser.
“My area of expertise is instructional technology. I spend a lot of my time trying to figure out how to use technology to make teaching and learning more effective, efficient and accessible,“ Van Schaack said.
“A new world of possibilities has opened for the rapid creation of portable, low-cost, high-quality accessible graphics enhanced with audio. For example, a visually impaired psychology student could learn neuroanatomy by exploring a diagram of the brain, with each lobe, gyrus and sulcus’s name spoken as the smartpen touches it.“
The Livescribe smartpen recognizes handwritten marks through a camera inside its tip that focuses on a minute pattern of dots printed on paper. It captures over 100 hours of audio through a built-in microphone and plays audio back through a built-in speaker or 3D recording headset. Files are uploaded from the pen to a computer using a USB connection.
The technology will be much more affordable and portable than previous products used for this purpose--students can just put it in their backpacks with the rest of their books and notebooks.
Van Schaack and Miele will be using a prototype of the Livescribe smartpen and a Sewell Raised Line Drawing Kit, a Mylar-like film that is deformed when a student writes on it with a pen, creating raised drawings. Students will be able to touch a hand-drawn figure with their smartpen to hear audio explanations of its features.

Adding antibiotics to standard drug therapy may slow down the progress of multiple sclerosis, research suggests.
Patients showed fewer symptoms, and fewer signs of tissue damage when they took the antibiotic doxycycline alongside the MS drug beta interferon, BBC reported.
Louisiana State University researchers believe the antibiotic may block the action of enzyme that destroys certain cells in the nervous system.
Archives of Neurology reports the study involving 15 patients on its website.
However, UK experts warned the study was small, and no comparison was made with patients who did not take doxycycline.
The 15 patients who took part in the study all had relapsing-remitting MS--the most common form of the disease.
Typically, this causes attacks of symptoms such as muscle weakness and spasms, followed by periods of remission.
The attacks result from damage inflicted on the body by its own immune system, which turns in on itself, attacking the nervous tissue.
It is thought that these attacks may be triggered by an inappropriate response to viral or bacterial infections, or another potentially disease-causing agent.
They are certainly very unpredictable, and symptoms come and go, often seemingly randomly.
Many patients with relapsing-remitting MS take the drug interferon, which helps to suppress the immune system, and keep it working more normally.
However, they are still prone to attacks which cause damage to the tissue of the brain.
The study focused on patients who had been taking interferon for at least six months, and who were still experiencing symptoms, and developing new tissue damage in the brain.
For four months the patients took 100mg a day of doxycycline alongside their regular dose of interferon.
At the end of this period brain scans revealed that brain tissue damage was reduced by at least 25 percent in nine of the patients.
There were also signs that disability levels had improved.
The researchers believe that doxycycline, a member of the tetracycline family of antibiotics, may block an enzyme which destroys nerve cells, thus protecting the brain and increasing the effectiveness of the immune system.
Dr Laura Bell, of the MS Society, said: “Antibiotics are cheap and easily available, which would make them an attractive treatment for MS if they were shown to be beneficial.“
However this study is very early stage in only 15 people with MS and no firm conclusions can be drawn at this stage, she added.

NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft has found that the solar system is not round but is dented by the local interstellar magnetic field of deep space, space experts said.
According to AP, the data was gathered by the craft on its 30-year journey into the edge of the solar system when it crossed into a sweeping region called the termination shock, they said.
It showed that the southern hemisphere of the solar system’s heliosphere is being pushed in or ’dented.’
Voyager 2 is the second spacecraft to enter this region of the solar system behind Voyager 1, which entered the northern region of the heliosheath in December 2004.
The termination shock is a turbulent area far beyond Pluto’s orbit where the solar winds emanating from the sun are significantly slowed as they run up against the thin gas of interstellar space.
Solar winds blow in all directions from our sun, and shape what was once thought to be a bubble around the solar system called the heliosphere.
“Voyager 2 entered the termination shock almost 1 billion miles closer within the southern hemisphere of the heliosphere of the solar system than Voyager 1 previously had,“ said Voyager Project scientist Edward Stone of the California Institute of Technology.
Voyager 2’s data is scientifically exciting for a number of reasons, NASA said. The spacecraft has a working plasma instrument that can directly measure the velocity, density and temperature of the solar wind. A similar instrument on Voyager 1 stopped functioning long ago.
Voyager scientists had expected the temperatures within the termination shock to be about 1,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit (555,500o C) as material normally slows down and is heated up when it encounters an obstacle in a normal shock wave.
But according to Edward Stone of California Institute of technology, the temperatures registered were much lower, at around 200,000 degrees F (111,100o C). Also, Voyager 1 made only one crossing into the termination shock while Voyager 2 has made at least five shock crossings over several days which allowed them to collect more data.
Scientists believe Voyager 2 will reach interstellar space within seven to 10 years and estimate that the spacecraft has enough power to last until 2020.

Carbon dioxide increasing in the atmosphere may affect the microbial life in the sea, which could have an impact on a major food source, warned Dr Ian Joint at a Science Media Center press briefing on Dec. 10.
Dr Joint is sequencing the DNA of different ocean bacteria to find out how they will respond to an increase in carbon dioxide. “So far from one experiment we have sequenced 300 million bases of DNA, about one tenth the size of the human genome, Physorg.com reported.
We are analyzing this ’ocean genome’ to see if changes might affect the productivity of the sea.“
Worldwide, fish from the sea provide nearly a fifth of the animal protein eaten by man. If microscopic plants that fish eat are affected by carbon dioxide, this may deplete a major food source.
“Bacteria still control the world“ said Dr Joint from Plymouth Marine Laboratory. “They ensure that the planet is fertile and that toxic materials do not accumulate.“
The carbon dioxide produced by humans is turning the oceans into weak acids. This century, the seas will be more acidic than they have been for 20 million years.
“There are many millions of different bacteria in the ocean. They control the cycling of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and sulfur; microbes in the sea generate half of the oxygen produced globally every year.“
So the atmosphere could also be affected by ocean acidification. “Bacteria made the earth suitable for animals by producing oxygen nearly 2 billion years ago.
We want to find out if human activities will have a major impact on microbial life in the seas and if this is likely to be a problem for mankind in the future.“

Meats are both sources of saturated fat and iron, which have independently been associated with carcinogenesis.

People who eat a lot of red meat and processed meats have a higher risk of several types of cancer, including lung cancer and colorectal cancer, US researchers reported.
The work is the first big study to show a link between meat and lung cancer. It also shows that people who eat a lot of meat have a higher risk of liver and esophageal cancer and that men raise their risk of pancreatic cancer by eating red meat, Reuters said.
“A decrease in the consumption of red and processed meat could reduce the incidence of cancer at multiple sites,“ Dr. Amanda Cross and colleagues at the US National Cancer Institute wrote in their report, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine.
The researchers studied 500,000 people aged 50 to 71 who took part in a diet and health study done in conjunction with the AARP, formerly the American Association for Retired Persons.
After eight years, 53,396 cases of cancer were diagnosed.
“Statistically significant elevated risks (ranging from 20 percent to 60 percent) were evident for esophageal, colorectal, liver, and lung cancer, comparing individuals in the highest with those in the lowest quintile of red meat intake,“ the researchers wrote.
The people in the top 20 percent of eating processed meat had a 20 percent higher risk of colorectal cancer--mostly rectal cancer--and a 16 percent higher risk for lung cancer.
“Furthermore, red meat intake was associated with an elevated risk for cancers of the esophagus and liver,“ the researchers wrote.
These differences held even when smoking was accounted for.
“Red meat intake was not associated with gastric or bladder cancer, leukemia, lymphoma, or melanoma,“ added the researchers.
Red meat was defined as all types of beef and lamb. Processed meat included red meat sausage, poultry sausage, luncheon meats, cold cuts and most types of hot dogs including turkey dogs.
Meats can cause cancer by several routes, the researchers noted. “For example, they are both sources of saturated fat and iron, which have independently been associated with carcinogenesis,“ the researchers wrote.
Meat is also a source of several chemicals known to cause DNA mutations, including N-nitroso compounds (NOCs), heterocyclic amines (HCAs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).
Jeanine Genkinger of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and Anita Koushik of the University of Montreal said the findings fit in with other research.