Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Now Control Your Home with Apple's HomeKit : Promise comes True in June


A year ago, Apple announced it would make your home a lot smarter with its Siri-controlled HomeKit.
iOS 8 introduces HomeKit, a high-level device connectivity framework enabling apps to interact with physical accessories in the world around us.

App Developers

If your iOS app is primarily designed to provide home configuration or home automation services such as turning on a light or opening a garage door. HomeKit APIs used for communicating with HomeKit accessories.
Apple announced to make it soon. Now, it seems that promise is coming true in just a few weeks. Third-party devices enabled with HomeKit are slated to come to market in June, an Apple spokesman told the newspaper.
The HomeKit app works off of iOS and a remote control for operating home gadgets such as thermostats, garage doors, lights and cameras.
The comments from the Apple spokesman contrast with a report on Thursday that stated HomeKit would be delayed until September.
HomeKit is a framework in iOS 8 for communicating with and controlling connected accessories in a user’s home. You can enable users to discover HomeKit accessories in their home and configure them, or you can create actions to control those devices. Users can group actions together and trigger them using Siri.

Hardware Developers

If you’re interested in creating a HomeKit-enabled hardware accessory, you need to be an MFi licensee to access the resources for manufacturing hardware that integrates HomeKit technology. MFi licensees receive:
HomeKit technical specificationsMFi Logos and Identity GuidelinesHardware technical support
To join the MFi Program, you will need to create or register a business Apple ID, submit an enrollment form, complete a credit review, and execute an MFi License.

APPLE'S HOMEKIT TO CONTROL YOUR HOME

Image: 3Dme Creative Studio / Shutterstock.com

Potential new vaccine blocks every strain of HIV

A new drug candidate is so potent against all strains of HIV, researchers think it could work as a new kind of vaccine.

Developed by researchers from more than a dozen research institutions and led by a team at the Scripps Research Institute in the US, the drug is effective against doses of HIV-1, HIV-2 and SIV (simian immunodeficiency virus) that have been extracted from humans or rhesus macaques - including what researchers consider to be the ‘hardest-to-stop’ variants. It worked against doses of HIV that are way higher than what would be transmitted between humans, and works for at least eight months after injection.

"Our compound is the broadest and most potent entry inhibitor described so far,” lead researcher Michael Farzan from the Scripps Institute said in a press release. "Unlike antibodies, which fail to neutralise a large fraction of HIV-1 strains, our protein has been effective against all strains tested, raising the possibility it could offer an effective HIV vaccine alternative.”

While traditional vaccines work by delivering a tiny, weakened dose of a virus to train your immune system to thwart an actual attack, this drug does something quite different. The way HIV infects a person is by targeting their T lymphocytes - a very specialised type of white blood cell - and injecting its own genetic material inside to transform them into HIV-producing machines. So, quite literally, it turns our immune systems against us. 

But what Farzan’s team has discovered is that a particular type of protein found on the surface of white blood cells can actually bind to the surface of the HIV virus in two different places simultaneously, which means that not only does the virus no longer have a chance to change the position of its receptors to escape, it’s also being blocked from entering the T lymphocyte cells.

"When antibodies try to mimic the receptor, they touch a lot of other parts of the viral envelope that HIV can change with ease,"said one of the team, Matthew Gardner, from the Scripps Institute. "We've developed a direct mimic of the receptors without providing many avenues that the virus can use to escape, so we catch every virus thus far.”

According to James Gallagher at BBC News, the vaccine would be delivered via a weak, harmless type of virus that would introduce a section of DNA to a patient’s healthy muscle cells, containing instructions for how to produce this HIV-blocking protein. The protein would then be pumped out into the bloodstream over and over, protecting the patient from being infected over several months. The team reported inNature that the effects of the drug lasted for at least 34 weeks in their monkey subjects, but they think they could get it to last for years, perhaps even decades.

"We are closer than any other approach to universal protection, but we still have hurdles, primarily with safety for giving it to many, many people,” Franzen told the BBC. One such concern is that no one really knows what the long-term implications would be for a person who is having an anti-HIV response being pumped around their body non-stop. The team will be looking into this when they get their human trials underway.

"In the absence of a vaccine that can elicit broadly protective immunity and prevent infection, and given the lack of major breakthroughs on the horizon to provide one, the idea of conferring potent, sustained vaccine-like protection against HIV infection through gene therapy is certainly worth strong consideration,” Nancy Haigwood from the Oregon Health & Science University in the US, who wasn’t involved in the study, told the BBC

Source: BBC News

New Vaccine For HIV

 
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