.:NEWS:. Why LED lights cost more up front: Overall, LED lights are far less expensive to own and operate than incandescent lights. Still, many consumers are frustrated at the up-front cost. It's tough to fit a $100 light bulb into a tight budget. I share that concern, and I wish these lights were a lot less expensive to manufacture, but the fact is that quality LED components cost more. The copper, aluminum alloys and lenses that go into our LED lights are quality components, not cheap disposable parts like you normally find in an incandescent light. Building a quality LED light costs a lot more money than building a cheap light that you toss into landfill after a thousand hours of wasting electricity before burning out. LED component prices are falling each year, however, and the future will no doubt bring more affordable LED lights to the marketplace. We anticipate that retail prices will fall 10 percent per year for quality LED lights, and we will of course work to bring down the prices of our own LED lights as quickly as we can. A less expensive light means increased affordability by a greater number of consumers, and that means a greater impact on saving energy and halting global warming. If we could sell these lights for one dollar and not go broke doing so, you can bet we'd be selling them for that dollar!LED lights will never be as cheap as incandescent light bulbs. However, they will always pay you back in significant savings over time. And as electricity costs continue to rise, LED lighting makes even more economic sense. As a consumer, you see, you're really buying hours of light, not just the bulbs that produce the light. The cost of the bulb is the smallest part of the equation. You'll find a similar situation with inkjet printers and inkjet cartridges. The printer might only cost $49 up front, but you might spend several hundred dollars in ink cartridges in a single year in order to operate the printer. Thus, the Total Cost of Ownership of the inkjet printer must take into the account the cost of the ink. Uses for LED lights: Many consumers are wondering where they can use LED lights around their homes or businesses. Can they replace lights in room lamps? Ceiling fans? Desk lamps? Recessed lights? To answer this question, remember that LED lights are really spotlights. They shine light in a specific direction with a certain beam angle. A wide beam angle shines light wider from side to side, while a narrow beam angle shines light in a narrow cone with extreme brightness. Thus, LED lights do NOT shine light in all directions like a typical incandescent light. This makes them the wrong choice for room lamps with lampshades or any light socket requiring "ambient" light in all directions. What LED lights are great at is shining light straight down onto a surface or straight up to bounce off a ceiling (like a Torchiere light setup). Our high-end LED lights are fantastic in desk lamps, as they offer extreme brightness and outstanding light clarity that's useful for any work or study situation. They're also perfect for recessed lighting and down lights. I'm actually writing this article with the help of a 10-watt LED light in a small desk lamp that's aimed at my wall. It bounces white light across the entire room, illuminating my keyboard and computer. (It also stays cool enough to touch, since it doesn't waste much electricity as excess heat.) LED lights are also great for porch lights, garages, sheds or any application where you need to leave the light on all night. That's because LED lights will use only 1/10th the electricity of incandescent bulbs, saving you big dollars on electricity. Even our 3-watt LED light is sufficient for nighttime use where you just want to "leave the light on" around your property. All of our LED lights produce no UV radiation or IR radiation, making them perfect for use in museums, hospitals, offices or areas where UV radiation might degrade the surroundings (such as illuminating valuable artwork or photographs). The fact that they run remarkably cool also means they greatly reduce the fire hazard normally associated with the use of lights. LED lights will make incandescent and fluorescent lights obsolete: I will offer a prediction right here: LED lights will render both incandescent light bulbs AND compact fluorescent lights obsolete. Many countries are already banning incandescent lights, and four U.S. states are considering their ban. Compact fluorescent lights will eventually be abandoned as the public learns the truth about their mercury content. Only LED lights offer energy efficiency and environmental friendliness at the same time. That's why LED lighting technology represents the future for both residential and commercial lighting. Philips says it will even stop manufacturing incandescent lights by 2016, but most consumers will have switched long before then. Within a few years, only the most financially-ignorant consumers will even consider using incandescent light bulbs. Burning a light that wastes 95% of the electricity it consumes is sort of like driving a car that gets a fuel economy of one mile per gallon. No consumer in their right mind would continue to throw away their cash (and destroy the environment) when a sensible, efficient alternative is readily available.And LED lights will get even brighter, better and less expensive in the coming years. Through EcoLEDs.com, I'm making an effort to bring these lights to eco-conscious consumers around the world. Within a few years, we hope to have lights exceeding 500 lumens of light output that will cost under $50 at retail. The trends are already in place, and U.S. LED component manufacturers are gearing up their factories for higher volumes. LED components will follow price trends of PC components: The LED light industry today is much like the PC industry was in the 1980's. Remember what it cost you to buy a lousy 4.77mHz PC with a floppy disk drive and 64k of RAM in 1981? It was about four thousand dollars -- and it didn't even have color! I remember the first hard drives for Apple computers cost about five thousand dollars... and they only stored only 10 megabytes!By comparison, you can now by a 4 gigabyte SD memory card for under a hundred bucks at retail! That's a massive reduction in cost as these electronics became cheaper to manufacture and widely accepted by consumers. LED components have been following a similar path. A single component that cost $10 today would have cost $1000 just a few years ago. And a few years from now, it might only cost 10 cents. Prices are falling by 50% a year on LED components, which means LED light bulbs will get increasingly affordable with each passing year. Even right now, buying LED lights makes great economic sense. They pay you back in 1-2 years in electricity costs alone (depending on how much you pay for electricity), not to mention the benefits of protecting the environment from more CO2 and mercury emissions. That's an environmental cost that consumers rarely factor into their monthly electricity bill, but it's a very real cost associated with wasting electricity. What is the value of preventing the release of 10,000 pounds of CO2 into the air? What is the value of preventing the release of a kilogram of mercury from a power plant? You see, nobody has really put a price figure on these things because polluting the environment continues to be seen by most American consumers and politicians as a revenue-neutral event when, in reality, it is a huge hidden cost against future economic productivity. Every gram of mercury and every pound of carbon dioxide released into the air places an unknown future cost on the national economy. With this in mind, consider the REAL cost of burning incandescent lights. It's not just what you waste in paying for electricity, it's also what future costs you indirectly impose upon the environment.  ***MW*** Being out in the sun can help boost your immune system as it tries to heal wounds, a recent study by the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine shows. The key is a healthy level of vitamin D3, generated from UV irradiation in sunlight. Study researcher Richard L. Gallo, M.D., Ph.D., said that wounds cause the immune system within skin cells to call up an increased production of vitamin D3. The genes controlled by vitamin D3 then promote further creation of an antimicrobial peptide called cathelicidin that the immune system uses to fight infections. "Our study shows that skin wounds need vitamin D3 to protect against infection and begin the normal repair process," Gallo said in a UCSD press release. "A deficiency in active D3 may compromise the body's innate immune system which works to resist infection, making a patient more vulnerable to microbes." Gallo is the chief of UCSD's Division of Dermatology and the dermatology section of the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System Consumer and health advocate Mike Adams said that this helps show that sunlight offers essential nutrients for the body. "Yet again, we see more evidence supporting the near-miraculous healing power of Vitamin D, a nutrient that is available free of charge by enjoying sunlight on your skin," said Adams, the author of The Healing Power of Sunlight and Vitamin D. Adams also discourages the use of sunscreen. "Using sunscreen actually promotes vitamin D deficiencies, which boost the profits of drug companies by keeping people in a state of sickness and disease," he said. One other finding is that blacks are not able to absorb vitamin D as well as other ethnicities, which the study correlates to an increased risk of infection. The next step in researching the effects of vitamin D will be to conduct clinical trials experimenting with oral and topical vitamin D3. The study will be published in the March issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. As previously reported on NewsTarget, moderate exposure to sunlight spurs on vitamin D, which helps fight against skin cancer and breast cancer.  ***MW***  SanDisk, a leading manufacturer of flash memory products, has released its latest foray into the MP3 player market with the Sansa e280, an 8GB, flash-memory-based player which hopes to compete with Apple Computer's similar iPod Nano. The SanDisk player already has a significant advantage over its Apple contemporary, as it comes standard with 8GB of memory that can be expanded to 10GB through the use of SanDisk's 2GB MicroSD cards, and the company says cards with greater capacities are in the works. This level of storage capacity is a leap beyond the flash-memory driven Nano's 4GB capacity for the same $249 price tag. The e280 also comes standard with a digital FM tuner, which consumers can record to their flash memory; a microphone that lets the MP3 player double as a voice recorder; and the ability to play any MP3 or WMA file, along with Microsoft PlaysForSure and Rhapsody To Go formats, through its nonproprietary digital rights management system. SanDisk's Sansa line doesn't merely try to outperform Apple's product features, however, as the company has announced it will be dropping the prices of its 2GB, 4GB and 6GB models significantly below their Apple counterparts. Still, it is unlikely Apple's position at the top of the totem pole is in imminent danger. Apple has broken away from most of its immediate competitors within the digital music player market, but Ted Schadler, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, said SanDisk was in the best position to challenge Apple. He noted that the e280 was not a break in the MP3 market, but it was an indication of SanDisk's "relentlessness" as a company. "(SanDisk) gets memory cheaper than anybody, and they have tremendous distribution reach because they have their SD cards everywhere," he said. "Because they have a tremendous retail presence already with their memory cards, they can bring these products to those same retailers and get shelf space, and that's a huge advantage. "Three things make a difference: price, quality of the product -- which is steadily getting better -- and their reach. SanDisk has all those coming together now."  ***MW***   Adopted from : www.newstarget.com قرص‌هاي سلنيوم براي مبارزه با ويروس ايدز موثر هستند  * تحقيقات نشان مي‌دهد: مصرف روزانه مكمل‌هاي سلنيوم مانع از توليد ويروس اچ آي وي در خون بيماران مبتلا به ايدز مي‌شود.محققان دانشگاه ميامي در اين پژوهش دريافتند كه بار ويروسي اچ آي وي در بيماراني كه به مدت 9 ماه از مكمل‌هاي سلنيوم مصرف كرده‌اند، ‌كاهش يافته است.همچنين اين پژوهش نشان داده است كه اين ماده مغزي مي‌تواند عملكرد سيستم ايمني بدن را تقويت كند.مصرف داروهاي ضد بازگشت ويروسي براي بيماران ايدزي تاثير قابل ملاحظه‌اي در افزايش طول عمر اين بيماران دارد اما در عين حال خطر اثرات جانبي ناشي از مصرف اين داروها نيز وجود دارد.از اين رو دانشمندان به دنبال درمانهاي جايگزيني هستند كه روند فعاليت ويروس ايدز را تحت كنترل داشته باشند.محققان مي‌گويند كه هنوز مكانيسم دقيق تاثير سلنيوم بر روي ويروس ايدز ناشناخته است.با اين حال برخي محققان مي‌گويند سلنيوم مي‌تواند نقش حمايت كننده‌اي در كنار درمان با داروهاي ضد بازگشت ويروسي داشته باشد اما به خودي خود يك روش درمان نيست***MW*** بر اساس يک پژوهش:روغن زيتون نوعي مسكن است  * نوع مرغوب روغن زيتون داراي ماده‌اي شيميايي طبيعي است كه مانند داروي مسكن كار مي‌كند. به نقل از پايگاه اينترنتي بي بي سي، نتيجه تحقيقات انجام شده حاكي از آن است كه 50 گرم روغن زيتون فرآوري نشده، معادل يك دوز داروي ايبوپروفن اثر دارد.پژوهشگران مي‌گويند: تأثير ماده‌اي كه در روغن زيتون وجود دارد يعني اولئوكانتال مانند داروي ضد التهاب مي باشد. اين در حالي است كه اين ماده تا آن حد قوي نيست كه براي تسكين سردرد از آن استفاده شود، ولي نشان دهنده منافع رژيم‌هاي غذايي كشورهاي حوزه دريايي مديترانه است     ***MW*** مصرف زياد لبنيات احتمال ابتلا به پاركينسون را در مردان افزايش مي‌دهد  * براساس آخرين يافته‌هاي پزشكي، مصرف مقادير زيادي از محصولات و فرآورده‌هاي لبني خطر ابتلا به بيماري پاركينسون را در مردان افزايش مي‌دهد اما علت اين امر هنوز ناشناخته است.‌اين پژوهش بر اساس اطلاعات جمع آوري شده از بين57 هزار و 689 شركت كننده مرد و 73 هزار و 175 شركت كننده زن كه در پژوهش پيشگيري از سرطان شركت كرده‌ بودند، صورت گرفته است.در اين پژوهش 9 ساله، 250 مرد و 138 زن مبتلا به پاركينسون در اين گروه شناسايي شدند.نتايج مطالعات نشان داد: مرداني كه به مقدار زياد لبنيات مصرف مي كنند60 درصد بيشتر از ساير مردان در معرض ابتلا به پاركينسون قرار دارند.دكترهونگلي چن از محققان موسسه ملي علوم بهداشت محيط زيست در كارولينا در اين باره گفت: هنوز مشخص نشده است كه مصرف لبنيات چه تاثيري بر روي زنان در زمينه ابتلا به اين بيماري ممكن است داشته باشد و به علاوه علت رابطه مصرف زياد اين فراورده‌ها با افزايش خطر ابتلا به پاركينسون در مردان نيز هنوز مشخص نيست.به گفته اين محقق، براي مشخص كردن موارد فوق انجام مطالعات بيشتري مورد نياز است ***MW*** برگرفته از سایت : www.pezeshkan.ir