HM International Blog

Soon, every senator and representative must decide where they stand. Lobbyists will be racing to each office, trying every trick in the book to derail the President’s plan. In fact, just this week, the insurance lobby released a self-serving report falsely claiming that reform would increase costs. Journalists called it “deceptive” and said “something doesn’t smell right here.” A prominent M.I.T. economist described the study as “deeply flawed.”

It’s a blatant scare tactic designed to frighten voters and bully Congress — and it’s just the beginning. We need to speak out right away to show Congress that their constituents are watching closely, and we’re counting on them to say “no” to the lobbyists and “yes” to reform.

Send a message urging Congress to stand with voters, not D.C. lobbyists, and pass real reform.
It’s becoming clear that the insurance companies will do whatever it takes to stop progress: The New York Times is reporting that special interests are spending $1.4 million every day to kill reform — and even commissioned their own slanted analysis of the Finance Committee’s legislation in an effort to defeat it. But today, after widespread criticism, the company that produced the report issued a statement saying that it analyzed only part of the bill because that’s exactly what the insurance industry paid them to do!

And we just got word that insurance companies are spending $1 million on a misleading ad to scare seniors out of supporting reform. The ad falsely declares that reform will cause cuts in Medicare, even though reform is crucial to ensuring the long-term survival of the program and preserving the care that millions of seniors depend on.

Now that all five congressional committees have passed reform legislation, we’re sure to see attacks that are even more extreme. It’s up to us to make sure that ordinary Americans continue to be heard louder than the Washington lobbyists.

The Megaframe project scored a staggering number of breakthroughs to create the world’s first 1024 pixel, photon-resolution, million-frame-per-second CMOS camera that puts Europe firmly in the lead for ultra-high speed video cameras.

Their work has pushed the boundaries of CMOS (a type of semiconductor) miniaturisation and sophistication. But it is in the application of their technology that the most stunning impacts of the Megaframe project will be seen, particularly in medical applications.

That is because the camera can detect a single photon at a million times a second, and so it can record molecular processes in unprecedented detail. “We need this sort of detail because biomedical scientists are studying processes at the intra-cellular and molecular levels,” underlines Edoardo Charbon, coordinator of the EU-funded Megaframe project.

Ingenious
Scientists have developed extremely ingenious ways to infer or deduce what is happening at the molecular level, and Megaframe could make that process even more detailed. Essentially, scientists use a variety of emissive materials to see what is happening in microscopic biomedical processes.

Take Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging Microscopy (FLIM). Here, a fluorescent material is introduced to the area of interest. Fluorescence has some interesting properties, for example a particular spectrum of emission and a rate of decay.

One particular fluorophore, Oregon Green Bapta (OGB-1), decays at a rate proportionate to the presence of calcium. Interestingly, calcium is an important indicator of neuron activity.

“So it is possible, for example, to go inside neurons and look at their ion channels. These are the channels that allow neurons to communicate with other neurons. And you can basically see the amount of calcium that is present. You can probe optically how neurons communicate with other neurons just by looking at the concentrations of calcium in real time,” explains Charbon.

So scientists can use the OGB-1 to indicate the presence and concentration of calcium, and the whole process can be recorded in ultra-fine detail thanks to single-photon detectors, such as the ones present in the Megaframe camera. The camera is recording at the speed of thought.

“Biomedical scientists could in principle use this microscopic information about calcium to learn about macroscopic conditions like Parkinson’s, or Alzheimer’s or epilepsy,” Charbon stresses.

But that’s just the beginning. Megaframe could have a significant impact on any medical science that uses visible light emissive scanning technologies like FLIM. But it can even have an impact where visible light is not present.