wire - news in brief

Selective neutralization of APP-C99 with monoclonal antibodies reduces the production of Alzheimer's Aβ peptides.

Gaëtan Girardin, researcher in nuclear engineering, gives us the key to understanding nuclear reactor safety.

Mimicking Phosphorylation at Serine 87 Inhibits the Aggregation of Human α-Synuclein and Protects against Its Toxicity in a Rat Model of Parkinson's Disease. Several lines of evidence suggest that phosphorylation of α-synuclein (α-syn) at S87 or S129 may play an important role in regulating its aggregation, fibrillogenesis, Lewy body formation, and neurotoxicity in vivo.

How do you go about setting up a business? Hervé Lebret, start-up specialist and head of the Innogrant program at EPFL, answers a few questions.

Inventors with which type of education generate broader patents? Scientists or Engineers? Marc Gruber's latest paper to be published in Management Science explores the issue. Abstract: Building on the seminal work of Allen (1977), we contribute to the emerging micro-level theory of knowledge recombination by examining how individual-level characteristics of inventors affect the breadth of their technological recombinations.

News and Views The quest for a non-volatile memory technology that offers high storage density, high read and write speeds, and low power consumption has triggered intense research into new materials, mechanisms and device architectures. Among the successful memory technologies to emerge from these efforts have been the atomic switch, the resistive RAM and the magnetic tunnel junction.

Malaria remains a scourge of mankind, and the protozoan parasite responsible for the most virulent form of the disease, Plasmodium falciparum, is developing resistance against even the most recent molecules in the antimalarial arsenal.

A group of Chinese scientists have come to the EPFL to participate in a workshop on the water management of a 1'808'500 km2 catchment basin, 43 times the surface area of Switzerland.

Are you a student, doctoral, post-doctoral, with a diploma from EPFL, from the University of Lausanne, or from any other Swiss university? If you dream of launching your own company, or if you want to get your project off the ground, we give you a hand-up over six months or in only 54 hours.

Targeting Sirtuin 1 to Improve Metabolism: All You Need Is NAD+? (Review) Sirtuin 1 (SIRT1) is an evolutionarily conserved NAD+-dependent deacetylase that is at the pinnacle of metabolic control, all the way from yeast to humans.

Silicon Filaments in Silicon Oxide for Next-Generation Photovoltaics. The group of Christophe Ballif (PV-LAB - Photovoltaics and Thin Film Electronics Laboratory ) demonstrate, on the basis of advanced TEM techniques, a new, mixed phase Si/SiO2 material, which they call filamentous SiOx.

Cultural System or norm circles? An exchange. This article takes the form of a debate between the two authors - Margaret S. Archer (CDH - Centre for Social Ontology ) and - Dave Elder-Vass (Loughborough University, UK) on the social ontology of propositional culture.

Researchers have given pinewood the hardness and smooth touch of precious wood. L'EPFL+ECAL Lab presents the first objects made of this new material in Helsinki today.

News in brief Boris Grot from the Parallel Systems Architecture Laboratory (PARSA) has been published in the last IEEE Micro's special issue; Top Picks from Computer Architecture Conferences. His paper "Kilo-NOC: A Heterogeneous Network-on-Chip Architecture for Scalability and Service Guarantees" has been written with collaborators from the University of Texas, NVIDIA and Carnegie Mellon University.

RNA profiling and ChIP-Sequencing reveal that PTF1a stabilizes pancreas progenitor identity via the control of MNX1/HLXB9 and a network of other transcription factors.

A guide to analysis of mouse energy metabolism.

The group of Carl Petersen (LSENS - Laboratoire de traitement sensoriel ) investigated the impact of thalamus on ongoing cortical activity in the awake, behaving mouse.

Sustained expression of PGC-1α in the rat nigrostriatal system selectively impairs dopaminergic function.

Large-Scale Simulations of a-Si:H: The Origin of Midgap States Revisited. Large-scale classical and quantum simulations are used to generate a-Si:H structures.

A cobalt complex redox shuttle for dye-sensitized solar cells with high open-circuit potentials. Dye-sensitized solar cells are a promising alternative to traditional inorganic semiconductor-based solar cells.

Modelling cholera epidemics: the role of waterways, human mobility and sanitation.

Jean-Louis Scartezzini, head of EPFL's Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory, is passionate about Minergie—a Swiss label for energy consumption in buildings and the most widely applied building energy standard in the world with almost 20,000 buildings.

Rather than just fixing corroding concrete infrastructure, Professor Eugen Brühwiler and his team of engineers have shown that it can be improved using ultra-high performance fiber reinforced concrete.

Babak Falsafi, Pascal Fua and Emre Telatar have been elevated to IEEE Fellows this year. This brings the number of IC professors who are IEEE Fellows to ten, a quarter of the faculty.

EPFL mathematicians have shown that the risk of extreme climate events is largely underestimated. They are developing a model for better understanding the impact of climate change.

Live-Cell dSTORM of Cellular DNA Based on Direct DNA Labeling. Super-resolution (SR) fluorescence imaging relies on specially adapted microscopes and analysis software, but equally important are the fluorescent probes used to label biological proteins and molecules of interest.

PARK9-associated ATP13A2 localizes to intracellular acidic vesicles and regulates cation homeostasis and neuronal integrity.

Benzothiazinones Are Suicide Inhibitors of Mycobacterial Decaprenylphosphoryl-β-d-ribofuranose 2′-Oxidase DprE1.

Using a heating system, physicists have succeeded for the first time in preventing the development of instabilities in an efficient alternative way relevant to a future nuclear fusion reactor.

Clearing the Clouds: A Study of Emerging Workloads on Modern Hardware. The emergence of global-scale online services has galvanized scale-out software, characterized by splitting vast datasets and massive computation across many independent servers. In a paper appearing in ASPLOS 2012, Profs.

Genetics - Variable Outcome of Mutations. Why do some mutations produce a particular trait or disease, whereas others only increase the likelihood of such an outcome? One explanation is that other variations in the DNA sequence strengthen or weaken the effect of a given mutation, although environmental factors may also have an impact.

Microdrop Printing of Hydrogel Bioinks into 3D Tissue-Like Geometries.

Too much, or.. too little! Many companies need to work on improving their supply chains. EPFL researchers have analyzed the best strategies and proven that good supply chain coordination can result in significant savings.

Interactive Multiview System with Low Complexity Decoder, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Interactive multiview video system with non-complex navigation at the decoder Thomas Maugey and

4 papers accepted for publication at IEEE ICASSP 2012. Recent LTS4 works about distributed detection with GT, distributed quantized consensus averaging, joint reconstruction of correlated compressed signals and dictionary learning on graphs have been accepted at IEEE ICASSP 2012. More info.

Scale-invariant features and novel descriptors for omnidirectional images accepted for publications in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. Scale Invariant Features and Polar Descriptors in Omnidirectional Images Zafer Arican and Pascal Frossard We propose a method to compute scale invariant features in omnidirectional images.

Learning of Pattern Transformation Manifolds, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

Stem cells, infectious diseases or genetic quirks are some of the subjects explored by students at the School of Life Sciences. Here is a selection of this year's headlines. FEBRUARY - Reprogrammed stem cells hit a roadblock Is there a future for stem cell therapies that don't use embryonic stem cells? An international study involving EPFL has raised doubts by showing that "reprogramming" adult stem cells leads to genetic aberrations.

A new tool to calculate the orientation of a satellite with respect to the Earth, developed by EPFL students, will be on board a European Space Agency rocket scheduled to launch in March 2012.

Dominique Foray will share his expertise in the "Innovation for Growth" group to support the Europe 2020 strategy.

Talk by Eric Klopfer, professor at MIT January 27th 2012, 10:00, room BC 410 ABSTRACT: Playing and Making Location Based Learning Games - Over the last ten years, The Education Arcade @ MIT has been working on location-based "Augmented Reality" learning games.

Roberto Gargiani unveils a different vision of Switzerland's most famous architect - Le Corbusier. Published at EPFL Press.

A talk by Nadir Weibel from the University of California San Diego Monday January 30th 2012, Room RLC D1 761 Access to information is one of the most crucial aspects of everyday life.

Parameter extraction and classification of three cortical neuron types reveals two distinct adaptation mechanisms. Cortical information processing originates from the exchange of action potentials between many cell types. In order to capture the essence of these interactions it is of critical importance to build mathematical models that reflect the characteristic features of spike generation in individual neurons.

Peak concentrations of biocides from house paint prove prevalent in urban river basins. Anti-fungal and anti-bacterial additives in house paint are present in dangerous quantities in the Vauchère river basin in the city of Lausanne, says a study to be presented the 9th of December, at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference in San Francisco.