List of speech editing software

(geekkeep)-voice editing software has become tools that people has come to work with. The military, hackers, hosts, animators , up to an ever increasing list of people has come to rely on for achieving their aims.

 Animating studios has come to use these applications in productions of character lines without relying on hiring voice artists( this has become beneficial to rising studios)In this age the security of some units uses bio scans, speech recognition units is prey common and that brings the downside. Agents, buggers, military infiltration rely on speech editing software to bypass these systems hence gaining unauthorized access to the units.

you must have seen the ever rising artificial intelligence struggle in the tech market or hubs. AI like Deep-mind, Cortana,Clever bot, Virtual Assistant Denise,    Verbots,    MadomaVirtual Assistant,

DesktopMates,     Braina,      Syn Virtual Assistant   uses these speech recognition softwares to make the voice of these assistants or artificial intelligence.

lists of speech recognition software are

 WavePad audio editing software                                                                                                            This audio editing software is a full-featured professional audio and music editor for Windows and Mac. It lets you record and edit music, voice and other audio recordings. When editing audio files, you can cut, copy and paste parts of recordings, and then add effects like echo, amplification and noise reduction. WavePad works as a wav or mp3 editor, but it also supports a number of other file formats including vox, gsm, wma, real audio, au, aif, flac, ogg, and more.               

 free audio editor

Free Audio Editor can digitize sound recordings of your rare music cassette tapes, vinyl LPs and videos, creating standard digital sound files. Timer and input level triggered recording are included. There is a button to activate the system Windows Mixer without visiting the control panel. The recording can be directly loaded into the waveform window for further perfection.

You can edit audio using the traditional Waveform View or the frequency-based Spectral Display that makes it easy to isolate and remove unwanted noise. Intuitive cut/copy/paste/trim/mute and more actions can be performed easily. The selection tools make the editing operations performed with millisecond precision.Enhance your audio with more than 30 native signal and effects processing engines, including compression, EQ, fade in/out, delay, chorus, reverb, time stretching, pitch shifting and more. It significantly increases your audio processing capabilities. The real-time preview enables you to hear the results before mixing down to a single file.This free audio editor supports a large amount of input formats including MP3, WMA, WAV, AAC, FLAC, OGG, APE, AC3, AIFF, MP2, MPC, MPGA, M4A, CDA, VOX, RA, RAM, ARW, AIF, AIFC, TTA, G721, G723, G726 and many more as source formats. Any audio files can be saved to the most popular audio formats like MP3, WMA, WAV, OGG, etc. Furthermore, it is available to control the output quality by adjusting the parameters & our software also prepares many presets with different combinations of settings for playback on all kinds of software applications and devices.

Audacity  

Audacity can record live audio through a microphone or mixer, or digitize recordings from other media. With some sound cards, and on any recent version of Windows, Audacity can also capture streaming audio.

• Device Toolbar manages multiple recording and playback devices.
• Level meters can monitor volume levels before, during and after recording. Clipping can be displayed in the waveform or in a label track.
• Record from microphone, line input, USB/Firewire devices and others.
• Record computer playback on Windows Vista and later by choosing “Windows WASAPI” host in Device Toolbar then a “loopback” input.
• Timer Record and Sound Activated Recording features.
• Dub over existing tracks to create multi-track recordings.
• Record at very low latencies on supported devices on Linux by using Audacity with JACK.
• Record at sample rates up to 192,000 Hz (subject to appropriate hardware and host selection). Up to 384,000 Hz is supported for appropriate high-resolution devices on Windows (using WASAPI), Mac OS X, and Linux.
• Record at 24-bit depth on Windows (using Windows WASAPI host), Mac OS X or Linux (using ALSA or JACK host).
• Record multiple channels at once (subject to appropriate hardware).

Power Sound Editor

Power Sound Editor Free is a visual audio editing and recording software solution, which supports many advanced and powerful operations with audio data.
You can use Power Sound Editor Free to record your own music, voice, or other audio files, edit it, mix it with other audio or musical parts, add effects like Reverb, Chorus, and Echo, and burn it on a CD, post it on the World Wide Web or e-mail it.

mp3DirectCut

mp3DirectCut is a fast and extensive audio editor and recorder for compressed mp3. You can directly cut, copy, paste or change the volume with no need to decompress your files for audio editing. Using Cue sheets, pause detection or Auto cue you can easily divide long files.

Music Editor Free

Music Editor Free (MEF) is a multi-award winning music editor software tool. MEF helps you to record and edit music and sounds. It lets you make and edit music, voice and other audio recordings. When editing audio files you can cut, copy and paste parts of recordings and, if required, add effects like echo, amplification and noise reduction.

Wavosaur

Wavosaur is a free sound editor, audio editor, wav editor software for editing, processing and recording sounds, wav and mp3 files. Wavosaur has all the features to edit audio (cut, copy, paste, etc.) produce music loops, analyze, record, batch convert. Wavosaur supports VST plugins, ASIO driver, multichannel wav files, real time effect processing. The program has no installer and doesn’t write in the registry. Use it as a free mp3 editor, for mastering, sound design.

Traverso DAW

Traverso DAW is a GPL licensed, cross platform multitrack audio recording and editing suite, with an innovative and easy to master User Interface. It’s suited for both the professional and home user, who needs a robust and solid DAW. Adding and removal of effects plugins, moving Audio Clips and creating new Tracks during playback are all perfectly safe, giving you instant feedback on your work!

Ardour

Ardour is a digital audio workstation. You can use it to record, edit and mix multi-track audio. You can produce your own CDs, mix video soundtracks, or just experiment with new ideas about music and sound. Ardour capabilities include: multichannel recording, non-destructive editing with unlimited undo/redo, full automation support, a powerful mixer, unlimited tracks/busses/plugins, timecode synchronization, and hardware control from surfaces like the Mackie Control Universal. If you’ve been looking for a tool similar to ProTools, Nuendo, Pyramix, or Sequoia, you might have found it.

Rosegarden

Rosegarden is a well-rounded audio and MIDI sequencer, score editor, and general-purpose music composition and editing environment. Rosegarden is an easy-to-learn, attractive application that runs on Linux, ideal for composers, musicians, music students, and small studio or home recording environments.

Hydrogen

Hydrogen is an advanced drum machine for GNU/Linux. It’s main goal is to bring professional yet simple and intuitive pattern-based drum programming.

Sound Engine

SoundEngine is the best tool for personal use, because it enables you to easily edit a wave data while it has many functions required for a mastering process.

Expstudio Audio Editor

Expstudio Audio Editor is a visual music file editor that has many different options and a multiple functionality to edit your music files like editing text files. With a given audio data it can perform many different operations such as displaying a waveform image of an audio file, filtering, applying various audio effects, format conversion and more.

DJ Audio Editor

DJ Audio Editor is easy-to-use and well-organized audio application which allows you to perform various operations with audio data. You can create and edit audio files professionally, also displaying a waveform image of audio file makes your work faster.

Eisenkraut

Eisenkraut is a cross-platform audio file editor. It requires Java 1.4+ and SuperCollider 3. It supports multi-channel and multi-mono files and floating-point encoding. An OSC scripting interface and experimental sonagramme functionality are provided.

FREE WAVE MP3 Editor

Free Wave MP3 Editor is a sound editor program for Windows. This software lets you make and edit voice and other audio recordings. You can cut, copy and paste parts of recording and, if required, add effects like echo, amplification and noise reduction.

Kangas Sound Editor

Fun Kangaroo-themed program that allows the user to create music and sound effects. It uses a system of frequency ratios for pitch control, rather than conventional music notation and equal temperament. It allows instruments, both musical and percussion, to be created.

Ecawave

Ecawave is a simple graphical audio file editor. The user-interface is based on Qt libraries, while almost all audio functionality is taken directly from ecasound libraries. As ecawave is designed for editing large audio files, all processing is done direct-to-disk. Simple waveform caching is used to speed-up file operations. Ecawave supports all audio file formats and effect algorithms provided by ecasound libraries. This includes JACK, ALSA, OSS, aRts, over 20 file formats, over 30 effect types, LADSPA plugins and multi-operator effect presets.

Audiobook Cutter

Audiobook Cutter splits your MP3 audio books and podcasts in a fast and user friendly way. The split files can easily be used on mobile MP3 players because of their small-size. Their duration allows smooth navigation through the book. The split points are determined automatically based on silence detection.

Jokosher

Jokosher is a simple yet powerful multi-track studio. With it you can create and record music, podcasts and more, all from an integrated simple environment.

LMMS

LMMS is a free cross-platform alternative to commercial programs like FL Studio, which allow you to produce music with your computer. This includes the creation of melodies and beats, the synthesis and mixing of sounds, and arranging of samples. You can have fun with your MIDI-keyboard and much more; all in a user-friendly and modern interface.

Mp3Splt

Mp3Splt-project is a utility to split mp3 and ogg files selecting a begin and an end time position, without decoding. It’s very useful to split large mp3/ogg to make smaller files or to split entire albums to obtain original tracks. If you want to split an album, you can select split points and filenames manually or you can get them automatically from CDDB (internet or a local file) or from .cue files. Supports also automatic silence split, that can be used also to adjust cddb/cue splitpoints. You can extract tracks from Mp3Wrap or AlbumWrap files in few seconds.

Qtractor

Qtractor is an Audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application written in C++ with the Qt4 framework. Target platform is Linux, where the Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK) for audio, and the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) for MIDI, are the main infrastructures to evolve as a fairly-featured Linux desktop audio workstation GUI, specially dedicated to the personal home-studio.

ReZound

ReZound aims to be a stable, open source, and graphical audio file editor primarily for.

Sweep

Sweep is an audio editor and live playback tool for GNU/Linux, BSD and compatible systems. It supports many music and voice formats including WAV, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, Speex and MP3, with multichannel editing and LADSPA effects plugins.

Wavesurfer

WaveSurfer is an Open Source tool for sound visualization and manipulation. It has been designed to suit both novice and advanced users. WaveSurfer has a simple and logical user interface that provides functionality in an intuitive way and which can be adapted to different tasks.

Researchers show how a targeted drug overcomes suppressive immune cells

Jedd Wolchok is the Director of the Ludwig Collaborative Laboratory at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Credit: Ludwig Cancer Research

A Ludwig Cancer Research study shows that an experimental drug currently in clinical trials can reverse the effects of troublesome cells that prevent the body's immune system from attacking tumors. The researchers also establish that it is these suppressive cells that interfere with the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors. This class of immunotherapies lifts the brakes that the body imposes on the immune system's T cells to unleash an attack on cancer cells.

"Though checkpoint inhibitors have durable effects when they work, not all patients respond to the treatment," says Taha Merghoub, an investigator at the Ludwig Memorial Sloan Kettering Collaborative Laboratory who led the study with Director Jedd Wolchok. "Part of the reason for this is that some tumors harbor tumor-associated myeloid cells, or TAMCs, that prevent T cells from attacking tumor cells."
In a study published online today in Nature, Merghoub and his team used mouse models of cancer to show that the effects of TAMCs can be reversed by an appropriately targeted therapy.
To show that TAMCs were indeed involved in resistance to checkpoint blockade, the researchers used a specific growth stimulant to increase their number in melanoma tumors to create a suitable model for their studies. They found that this made the tumors less susceptible to checkpoint blockade.
"We were able to make a tumor that was not rich in immune suppressing myeloid cells into one that was," says Merghoub.
Having established a link between TAMCs and checkpoint inhibitor resistance, the researchers next set out to test the hypothesis that blocking immune suppressor cell activity would improve immunotherapy response. To do this, they used an experimental drug manufactured by Infinity Pharmaceuticals called IPI-549. The drug, which is available for clinical use, blocks a molecule in the suppressor cells called PI3 kinase-gamma. Blocking this molecule changes the balance of these immune suppressor cells in favor of more immune activation.
"We effectively reprogrammed the TAMCs, turning them from bad guys into good guys," Merghoub said.
IPI-549 dramatically improved responses to immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) therapy for tumors with high concentrations of TAMCs. When checkpoint inhibitors were administered to mice with suppressed tumors, only 20% of the animals underwent complete remission. When the same drugs were administered with IPI-549, that number jumped to 80%. IPI-549 provided no benefit to tumors lacking the suppressor cells.
Merghoub and his team also showed that tumors that were initially sensitive to checkpoint inhibitors were rendered unresponsive when their TAMC concentrations were boosted with growth stimulants.
Taken together, these results indicate that TAMCs promote resistance to checkpoint inhibitors and that IPI-549 can selectively block these cells, thereby overcoming their resistance.
Merghoub said the findings help pave the way for a precision medicine approach to immunotherapy that will allow cancer treatments to be tailored to a patient's particular tumor profile. "We can now potentially identify patients whose tumors possess immune suppressor cells and add a drug to their treatment regimen to specifically disarm them," he added.
IPI-549 is currently undergoing a Phase I trial in the United States to assess its safety when administered alone and in combination with the FDA-approved checkpoint inhibitor drug nivolumab (Opdivo).

Tasting and chewing explored in virtual reality

Virtual reality technology has you thinking you are doing many things, but there is much uncharted territory in eating virtually.

Imagine what the tourism industry could do with VR technology extending sensory stimulation beyond the eyes and ears. Imagine inviting prospective restaurant clients in virtual reality mode to the meat, fish and chicken specialties, pizza or chocolate cakes. Imagine any number of applications where the sensory experience in virtual reality expands.
Scientists are focusing on VR technology that can fool you into thinking you are tasting food that is not of course really there. Researchers from Singapore and another team from Japan have their own studies that explore the realm of tasting and even chewing.
Vlad Dudau, Neowin, said these explorers managed to replicate the tastes and textures of different foods.
A recent conference in Japan on user interface was given much "food" tech for thought.
The work titled "Virtual Sweet: Simulating Sweet Sensation Using Thermal Stimulation on the Tip of the Tongue," explored what it is like to be tasting sweet food virtually.
"Being a pleasurable sensation, sweetness is recognized as the most preferred sensation among the five primary taste sensations. In this paper, we present a novel method to virtually simulate the sensation of sweetness by applying thermal stimulation to the tip of the human tongue. To digitally simulate the sensation of sweetness, the system delivers rapid heating and cooling stimuli to the tongue via a 2x2 grid of Peltier elements. To achieve distinct, controlled, and synchronized temperature variations in the stimuli, a control module is used to regulate each of the Peltier elements. Results from our preliminary experiments suggest that the participants were able to perceive mild sweetness on the tip of their tongue while using the proposed system."
Nimesha Ranasinghe and Ellen Yi-Luen Do of the National University of Singapore are the two explorers. This is a device where changes in temperature serve to mimic the sensation of sweetness on the tongue.
Victoria Turk in New Scientist wrote about what their technology does: "The user places the tip of their tongue on a square of thermoelectric elements that are rapidly heated or cooled, hijacking thermally sensitive neurons that normally contribute to the sensory code for taste."

MailOnline described it as a "virtual sweetness instrument" which makes use of "a grid of four elements which generate temperature changes of 5°C in a few seconds. "When applied to the tip of the tongue, said the report, "the temperature change results in a virtual sweet sensation." A 9V battery is put to use. Results: Out of 15 people, eight registered a very mild sweet taste, said MailOnline.

Applications could include a taste-enhancing technology for dieters. Dr Ranashinghe told MailOnline: 'We believe this will especially helpful for the people on restricted diets for example salt (hypertension and heart problems) and sugar (diabetics)."
New Scientist said Ranasinghe and Do could see a system like this embedded in a glass or mug to make low sugar drinks taste sweeter.
Another group from the University of Tokyo is using electrodes to stimulate the jaw muscles. Tokyo Researchers Arinobu Niijima and Takefumi Ogawa are reporting results from an electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) test of jaw movements in chewing.
"We propose Electric Food Texture System, which can present virtual food texture such as hardness and elasticity by electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) to the masseter muscle," said the researchers in a video posted last month on their work, "Study on Control Method of Virtual Food Texture by Electrical Muscle Stimulation."
Dudau in Neowin described their experiment, where "scientists attached electrodes to jaw muscles and managed to simulate the sensation of biting into different materials. For example, by varying the electrical stimulation, users reported that while eating a real cookie, it felt like biting into something soft, or chewing something hard alternatively."
Turk in New Scientist also talked about the Tokyo team who presented "a device that uses electricity to simulate the experience of chewing foods of different textures. Arinobu Niijima and Takefumi Ogawa's Electric Food Texture System also uses electrodes, but not on the tongue, instead they place them on the masseter muscle – a muscle in the jaw used for chewing – to give sensations of hardness or chewiness as a user bites down. 'There is no food in the mouth, but users feel as if they are chewing some food due to haptic feedback by electrical muscle stimulation,' says Niijima."
Getting into technical details, MailOnline said "By delivering short pulses of between 100 to 250 Hz they were able to stimulate the masseter muscles, used to chew solid foods."
So if the 'sugar' researchers were looking at taste sensation, these researchers were looking at food texture. They said, "In this paper, we investigated the feasibility to control virtual food texture by EMS."
The researchers said on their video page, "We conducted an experiment to reveal the relationship of the parameters of EMS and those of virtual food texture. The experimental results show that the higher strength of EMS is, the harder virtual food texture is, and the longer duration of EMS is, the more elastic virtual food texture is."
If at higher frequency, the sensation was that of eating tougher, chewy food but a longer pulse simulated a more elastic texture.

Statistics in to the quantum domain

In the quantum change point problem, a quantum source emits particles that are received by a detector. At some unknown point, a change occurs in the state of the particles being emitted. Physicists have found that global measurement methods, which use quantum repeaters, outperform all classical measurement methods for accurately identifying when the change occurred. Credit: Sentis et al. ©2016 American Physical Society

(Phys.org)—The change point problem is a concept in statistics that pops up in a wide variety of real-world situations, from stock markets to protein folding. The idea is to detect the exact point at which a sudden change has occurred, which could indicate, for example, the trigger of a financial crisis or a misfolded protein step.

Now in a new paper published in Physical Review Letters, physicists Gael Sentís et al. have taken the change point problem to the quantum domain.
"Our work sets an important landmark in quantum information theory by porting a fundamental tool of classical statistical analysis into a fully quantum setup," Sentis, at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, told Phys.org.
"With an ever-growing number of promising applications of quantum technologies in all sorts of data processing, building a quantum statistical toolbox capable of dealing with real-world practical issues, of which change point detection is a prominent example, will be crucial. In our paper, we demonstrate the working principles of quantum change point detection and facilitate the grounds for further research on change points in applied scenarios."
Although change point problems can deal with very complex situations, they can also be understood with the simple example of playing a game of Heads or Tails. This game begins with a fair coin, but at some unknown point in the game the coin is switched with a biased one. By statistically analyzing the results of each coin toss from the beginning, it's possible to determine the most likely point at which the coin was switched.
Extending this problem to the quantum realm, the physicists looked at a quantum device that emits particles in a certain state, but at some unknown point the source begins to emit particles in a different state. Here the quantum change point problem can be understood as a problem of quantum state discrimination, since determining when the change in the source occurred is the same as distinguishing among all possible sequences of quantum states of the emitted particles.
Physicists can determine the change point in this situation in two different ways: either by measuring the state of each particle as soon as it arrives at the detector (a "local measurement"), or by waiting until all of the particles have reached the detector and making a measurement at the very end (a "global measurement").

Although the local measurement method sounds appealing because it can potentially detect the change point as soon as it occurs without waiting for all of the particles to be emitted, the researchers found that global measurements outperform even the best local measurement strategies.
The "catch" is that global measurements are more difficult to experimentally realize and require a quantum memory to store the quantum states as they arrive at the detector one by one. The local measurement methods don't require a quantum memory, and instead can be implemented using much simpler devices in sequence. Since global detection requires a quantum memory, the results show that change point detection is another of the many problems for which quantum methods outperform all classical ones.
"We expected that global measurements would help, as coherent quantum operations tend to exploit genuinely quantum resources and generally outperform local operations in many information processing tasks," Sentis said. "However, this is a case-dependent advantage, and sometimes sophisticated and clever local strategies are enough to cover the gap. The fact that here there is a finite performance gap says something fundamental about change point detection in quantum scenarios."
The results have potential applications in any situation that involves analyzing data collected over time. Change point detection is also often used to divide a data sample into subsamples that can then be analyzed individually.
"The ability to accurately detect quantum change points has immediate impact on any process that requires careful control of quantum information," Sentis said. "It can be considered a quality testing device for any information processing task that requires (or produces) a sequence of identical quantum states. Applications may range from probing quantum optical fibers to boundary detection in solid state systems."
In the future, the researchers plan on exploring the many applications of quantum change point detection.
"We plan on extending our theoretical methods to deal with more realistic scenarios," Sentis said. "The possibilities are countless. A few examples of generalizations we are exploring are multiple change points, noisy quantum states, and detection of change points in optical setups."

Researchers discover way to inhibit major cancer gene

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have identified a new way to block the action of genetic mutations found in nearly 30 percent of all cancers.

Mutations in genes for the RAS family of proteins are present in nearly 90 percent of pancreatic cancers and are also highly prevalent in colon cancer, lung cancer and melanoma, the most dangerous kind of skin cancer.
The group of proteins include three members, K-RAS, H-RAS and N-RAS.
The prevalence of RAS mutations in human cancers and the dependence of tumors on RAS for survival has made a RAS a prime target for cancer research and drug discovery. Scientists and drug developers have long studied RAS oncogenes hoping to find a new treatment for cancer, but they have not yet been able to identify drugs that safely inhibit the oncogene's activity.
John O'Bryan, associate professor of pharmacology in the UIC College of Medicine, led a team of researchers that took a different approach to studying RAS, and discovered that a synthetic binding protein they call "NS1 monobody," which they created in the lab, can block the activity of the RAS proteins.
"We did not look for a drug or specifically for an inhibitor," said O'Bryan, who is also a member of the University of Illinois Cancer Center and holds an appointment at the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center in Chicago. "We used monobody technology, a type of protein-engineering technology, to identify regions of RAS that are critical for its function."
Unlike conventional antibodies, monobodies are not dependent on their environment and can be readily used as genetically encoded inhibitors, O'Bryan said.
"The beauty of the technology is that when a monobody binds a protein, it usually works as an inhibitor of that protein," he said.
Monobodies were developed by Shohei Koide, a co-author on the study who is professor of biochemistry and molecular pharmacology at New York University. They have been used to target a diverse array of proteins that include enzymes and receptors.
The researchers found that the NS1 monobody binds to an area of the RAS protein molecule that was not previously known to be important for its oncogenic activity. NS1 strongly inhibits oncogenic K-RAS and H-RAS function by blocking the ability of the protein to interact with an identical one to form a molecular pair. NS1 does not affect N-RAS.
O'Bryan says the findings, published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, provide important insight into long-standing questions about how RAS proteins function in cells. These insights may help guide the development of new therapeutic approaches to treating cancer by interfering with mutant RAS function in cancer cells.
"Development of effective RAS inhibitors represents a 'holy grail' in cancer biology," O'Bryan said. "We now have a powerful tool we can use to further probe RAS function. While future studies and trials are needed before these findings can be leveraged outside the lab, this study provides new insight into how we can potentially inhibit RAS to slow tumor growth."

Pulsar wind nebulae

The Crab Nebula seen in the optical by the Hubble Space Telescope. The Crab is an example of a pulsar wind nebula. Astronomers have modeled the detailed shape of another pulsar wind nebula to conclude, among other things, that the pulsar’s spin axis is pointed almost directly towards us. Credit: NASA/ Hubble Space Telescope

Neutron stars are the detritus of supernova explosions, with masses between one and several suns and diameters only tens of kilometers across. A pulsar is a spinning neutron star with a strong magnetic field; charged particles in the field radiate in a lighthouse-like beam that can sweep past the Earth with extreme regularity every few seconds or less. A pulsar also has a wind, and charged particles, sometimes accelerated to near the speed of light, form a nebula around the pulsar: a pulsar wind nebula. The particles' high energies make them strong X-ray emitters, and the nebulae can be seen and studied with X-ray observatories. The most famous example of a pulsar wind nebula is the beautiful and dramatic Crab Nebula.

When a pulsar moves through the interstellar medium, the nebula can develop a bow-shaped shock. Most of the wind particles are confined to a direction opposite to that of the pulsar's motion and form a tail of nebulosity. Recent X-ray and radio observations of fast-moving pulsars confirm the existence of the bright, extended tails as well as compact nebulosity near the pulsars. The length of an X-ray tail can significantly exceed the size of the compact nebula, extending several light-years or more behind the pulsar.
CfA astronomer Patrick Slane was a member of a team that used the Chandra X-ray Observatory to study the nebula around the pulsar PSR B0355+54, located about 3400 light-years away. The pulsar's observed movement over the sky (its proper motion) is measured to be about sixty kilometer per second. Earlier observations by Chandra had determined that the pulsar's nebula had a long tail, extending over at least seven light-years (it might be somewhat longer, but the field of the detector was limited to this size); it also has a bright compact core. The scientists used deep Chandra observations to examine the nebula's faint emission structures, and found that the shape of the nebula, when compared to the direction of the pulsar's motion through the medium, suggests that the spin axis of the pulsar is pointed nearly directly towards us. They also estimate many of the basic parameters of the nebula including the strength of its magnetic field, which is lower than expected (or else turbulence is re-accelerating the particles and modifying the field). Other conclusions include properties of the compact core and details of the physical mechanisms powering the X-ray and radio radiation.
 

Oracle buy NetSuite

The software giant Oracle said that its proposed $9.3 billion acquisition of the cloud storage company NetSuite would move forward, after more than half of eligible NetSuite shareholders backed the bid.

Oracle said in a statement on Saturday that holders of 53 percent of unaffiliated NetSuite shares agreed to tender their shares by the deadline of Friday. The deal will be completed on Monday, Oracle said.

Oracle offered to buy NetSuite in July for $109 a share in response to challenges from rival enterprise software companies like Workday and Salesforce that have popular cloud-based software products.

The investment manager T. Rowe Price, NetSuite’s second-largest shareholder after Oracle’s chief executive, Lawrence J. Ellison, had objected that Oracle’s offer was too low and said it would not tender its shares. T. Rowe sent a letter last week to Oracle suggesting that the company raise its offer to $133 a share.

As of July, T. Rowe owned 12.2 million NetSuite shares.

NetSuite’s chief executive, Zachary Nelson, has worked at Oracle and is close to Mr. Ellison.

NetSuite shares went on a roller-coaster ride ahead of Oracle’s offer deadline on Friday. A day earlier, NetSuite shares jumped by more than 6 percent before trading was temporarily halted. NetSuite shares fell 3.8 percent on Friday, closing at $90.34.

According to terms of the Oracle agreement, a majority of NetSuite’s 40.8 million unaffiliated shares, or shares not tied to Mr. Ellison and other insiders, had to be tendered to complete the deal.

Lab creates open-source optogenetics hardware, software

Rice University’s low-cost, open-source Light Plate Apparatus can easily be used by nonengineers and noncomputer programmers and can be assembled by a nonexpert in one day from components costing less than $150. Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University

Nobody likes a cheater, but Rice University bioengineering graduate student Karl Gerhardt wants people to copy his answers. That's the whole point.

Gerhardt and Rice colleagues have created the first low-cost, easy-to-use optogenetics hardware platform that biologists who have little or no training in engineering or software design can use to incorporate optogenetics testing in their labs.
Rice's Light Plate Apparatus (LPA) is described in a paper available for free online this week in the open-access journal Scientific Reports. The LPA, which was created in the lab of Jeffrey Tabor, assistant professor of bioengineering, uses open-source hardware and software. The apparatus can deliver two independent light signals to each well in a standard 24-well plate and has sockets that accept LEDs of wavelengths ranging from blue to far red. Total component costs for the LPA are less than $400—$150 for labs with a 3-D printer—and each unit can be assembled and calibrated by a nonexpert in one day.
"Our intent is to bring optogenetics to any researcher interested in using it," said Tabor, whose students created the LPA. In doing so, they found ways to make most of its parts with 3-D printers and also created software called Iris that uses simple buttons and pull-down menus to allow researchers to program the instrument for a wide range of experiments.

Rice bioengineers Karl Gerhardt (left) and Jeffrey Tabor with the Light Plate Apparatus, a low-cost, open-source optogenetics platform. Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University

Optogenetics, which was developed in the past 15 years, involves genetically modifying cells with light-sensing molecules so that light can be used to turn genes and other cellular processes on or off. Its most notable successes have come in neuroscience following the invention of brain-implantable optical neuro interfaces, which have explored the cells and mechanisms associated with aggression, parenting, drug addiction, mating, same-sex attraction, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorders and more.
"Over the past 5-10 years, practically every biological process has been put under optogenetics control," said Gerhardt, who works in Tabor's lab. "The problem is that while everyone has been developing the biological tools to do optogenetics—the light-sensing proteins, gene-expression systems, protein interactions, etc.—outside of neuroscience, no one has really developed good hardware that makes it easy to use those tools."

To demonstrate the broad applicability of LPA, Tabor, Gerhardt and co-authors used the system to perform a series of optogenetics tests on a diverse set of model organisms, including gut bacteria, yeast, mammalian cells and photosynthetic cyanobacteria.
Gerhardt didn't come to Rice intending to invent the world's first easy-to-use optogenetics research platform. A biochemist by training, he initially was interested in simply creating something that would allow him to incorporate optogenetics in his own research. In early 2014, Gerhardt was studying the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. Evan Olson, another Ph.D. student in Tabor's group, had just created the "light tube array," or LTA, an automated system for doing optogenetics on up to 64 test tubes at a time.

Rice University graduate students Karl Gerhardt (left) and Sebastián Castillo-Hair prepare cell cultures for optogenetics testing with the Light Plate Apparatus, an open-source system they developed with colleagues in the laboratory of Rice’s Jeffrey Tabor, assistant professor of bioengineering. Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University

Unfortunately for Gerhardt, D. discoideum, which biologists commonly call "dicty," prefers to grow on flat surfaces, like Petri dishes and flat-bottomed well plates. Dicty is also sensitive to vibrations and movement. Like dicty, many organisms commonly studied in biology labs, including many animal cell lines and virtually all human cells, require similar conditions.
"I couldn't culture dicty in the LTA, so I built a sort of plate-based version, and I used it for a couple of experiments, but it didn't work very well," Gerhardt said. "Then, some other people in our lab who had training in electrical engineering and Evan, with his physics background, said, 'We can take this version and make it a lot better.'"
Gerhardt said the group kept innovating and coming up with new versions of the hardware. For example, to make it easy to change the wavelength of light, the team incorporated standard sockets so it would be easy to swap out different colored LEDs. They also added a low-cost microcontroller with an SD card reader, drivers capable of producing more than 4,000 levels of light intensity and millisecond time control.
"We got more and more ambitious in terms of the features we wanted to add, and now we're on version three or four of the hardware," he said. "Then Lucas (Hartsough), Brian (Landry) and Felix (Ekness), members of our group who had expertise in programming and website design, said, 'We'll make the software,' and that's where Iris came from."

Rice University graduate student Sebastián Castillo-Hair conducts tests with the Light Plate Apparatus, an open-source optogenetics research platform developed in the laboratory of Rice’s Jeffrey Tabor, assistant professor of bioengineering. Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University

Iris makes use of a graphical user interface to allow people without specialized computer training to easily program experiments for the LPA.
"Programming is a major barrier for some biologists who want to work with this kind of hardware," Gerhardt said. "Optogenetics hardware, most of the time, requires someone with programming experience who can go into the command line and write code. We wanted to eliminate that barrier."
To simplify the process for getting started with LPA, Tabor and Gerhardt have published all the software, design files and specifications for the system on GitHub, a site that caters to the do-it-yourself community by making it easy to create, share and distinguish different versions of software and files for open-source platforms like LPA.
Gerhardt said at least a half-dozen research groups began making LPAs after an early version of the paper was posted on a biology preprint server, and he hopes many more begin using it now that the Scientific Reports paper has been published.
"I hope this becomes the standard format for doing general optogenetics experiments, especially for people on the biology end of the spectrum who would never think about building their own hardware," Gerhardt said. "I hope they'll see this and say, 'OK. We can do optogenetics now.'"