Apple refreshes iTunes software, updates iPods

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Sep 1, 8:45 PM (ET)

By JESSICA MINTZ and JORDAN ROBERTSON

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Users of Apple Inc.’s iTunes software will now be able to see what songs their friends are buying and where their favorite bands are playing next.

These social features are part of Ping, a new Apple service akin to Facebook, Twitter and other popular social networks.

People can sign up, then find friends, acquaintances and public figures to “follow.” As with Facebook and Twitter, Ping will deliver a stream of updates, showing friends’ iTunes purchases and other information. Ping will also generate a personalized top-10 music chart based on what friends buy or listen to.

Apple says Ping is an optional service; people can choose to keep their music purchases and other iTunes actions private.

Ping doesn’t have to rival Facebook or Twitter in popularity to be a success, Forrester analyst James McQuivey said. He said Ping just needs to help Apple sell a few more songs.

The social feature is the first obvious sign that Apple is integrating technology from the music startup Lala.com, which it bought last year.

Lala also gave members a peek at what music friends were playing. And it had developed – but never introduced – an iPhone app that would have allowed users unlimited streaming of songs for 10 cents each.

Apple, however, gave no indication Wednesday that it might be working on a Lala-inspired streaming music service, which might let people access their vast iTunes music libraries remotely instead of having to download and store them individually.

Other companies are set to benefit from Ping, including Live Nation Entertainment Inc., which powers the concert listings of the new Ping music discovery tool. CEO Michael Rapino said in a statement he was “thrilled” to take part in the plan, which he said will help sell tickets through LiveNation.com and Ticketmaster.com.

At a media event in San Francisco, Jobs also showed off a line of revamped iPods. Among them was a smaller, button-free iPod Nano that people control with swipes across its touch screen.

Apple also added a front-facing video camera to the iPod Touch so that people can use it for video chats using Apple’s FaceTime software, which was previously available only on the iPhone 4. The iPod Touch also got a new, sharper screen and a camera on the back for taking photos and recording video.

A new iPod Shuffle brings back buttons that Apple did away with in the most recent version.

Jobs also said Apple is updating the software that runs iPhones, the iPod Touch and the iPad. Next week, iPhone and iPod Touch users can get the free iOS 4.1, which adds the ability to upload high-definition video over Wi-Fi and improves the quality of photos taken with the devices.

The iPad, which currently runs an older version of iOS, will catch up to its siblings in November. It will get multitasking and other features Apple introduced in iOS 4, plus features such as wireless printing from the tablet. Apple had been criticized for making a powerful device but hobbling it by not including any ports for USB devices such as printers or thumb drives.

—

Mintz reported from Seattle. AP Business Writer Ryan Nakashima in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium

If Barack Obama were to marshal America’s vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor
Published: 6:55PM BST 29 Aug 2010

181 Comments

Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal

We could then stop arguing about wind mills, deepwater drilling, IPCC hockey sticks, or strategic reliance on the Kremlin. History will move on fast.

Muddling on with the status quo is not a grown-up policy. The International Energy Agency says the world must invest $26 trillion (£16.7 trillion) over the next 20 years to avert an energy shock. The scramble for scarce fuel is already leading to friction between China, India, and the West.

There is no certain bet in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have barely begun to crack the potential of solar power.

Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday – produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.

Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. “It’s the Big One,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.

“Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels,” he said.

Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.

After the Manhattan Project, US physicists in the late 1940s were tempted by thorium for use in civil reactors. It has a higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed. It does not require isotope separation, a big cost saving. But by then America needed the plutonium residue from uranium to build bombs.

“They were really going after the weapons,” said Professor Egil Lillestol, a world authority on the thorium fuel-cycle at CERN. “It is almost impossible make nuclear weapons out of thorium because it is too difficult to handle. It wouldn’t be worth trying.” It emits too many high gamma rays.

You might have thought that thorium reactors were the answer to every dream but when CERN went to the European Commission for development funds in 1999-2000, they were rebuffed.

Brussels turned to its technical experts, who happened to be French because the French dominate the EU’s nuclear industry. “They didn’t want competition because they had made a huge investment in the old technology,” he said.

Another decade was lost. It was a sad triumph of vested interests over scientific progress. “We have very little time to waste because the world is running out of fossil fuels. Renewables can’t replace them. Nuclear fusion is not going work for a century, if ever,” he said.

The Norwegian group Aker Solutions has bought Dr Rubbia’s patent for the thorium fuel-cycle, and is working on his design for a proton accelerator at its UK operation.

Victoria Ashley, the project manager, said it could lead to a network of pint-sized 600MW reactors that are lodged underground, can supply small grids, and do not require a safety citadel. It will take £2bn to build the first one, and Aker needs £100mn for the next test phase.

The UK has shown little appetite for what it regards as a “huge paradigm shift to a new technology”. Too much work and sunk cost has already gone into the next generation of reactors, which have another 60 years of life.

So Aker is looking for tie-ups with the US, Russia, or China. The Indians have their own projects – none yet built – dating from days when they switched to thorium because their weapons programme prompted a uranium ban.

America should have fewer inhibitions than Europe in creating a leapfrog technology. The US allowed its nuclear industry to stagnate after Three Mile Island in 1979.

Anti-nuclear neorosis is at last ebbing. The White House has approved $8bn in loan guarantees for new reactors, yet America has been strangely passive. Where is the superb confidence that put a man on the moon?

A few US pioneers are exploring a truly radical shift to a liquid fuel based on molten-fluoride salts, an idea once pursued by US physicist Alvin Weinberg at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee in the 1960s. The original documents were retrieved by Mr Sorensen.

Moving away from solid fuel may overcome some of thorium’s “idiosyncracies”. “You have to use the right machine. You don’t use diesel in a petrol car: you build a diesel engine,” said Mr Sorensen.

Thorium-fluoride reactors can operate at atmospheric temperature. “The plants would be much smaller and less expensive. You wouldn’t need those huge containment domes because there’s no pressurized water in the reactor. It’s close-fitting,” he said.

Nuclear power could become routine and unthreatening. But first there is the barrier of establishment prejudice.

When Hungarian scientists led by Leo Szilard tried to alert Washington in late 1939 that the Nazis were working on an atomic bomb, they were brushed off with disbelief. Albert Einstein interceded through the Belgian queen mother, eventually getting a personal envoy into the Oval Office.

Roosevelt initially fobbed him off. He listened more closely at a second meeting over breakfast the next day, then made up his mind within minutes. “This needs action,” he told his military aide. It was the birth of the Manhattan Project. As a result, the US had an atomic weapon early enough to deter Stalin from going too far in Europe.

The global energy crunch needs equal “action”. If it works, Manhattan II could restore American optimism and strategic leadership at a stroke: if not, it is a boost for US science and surely a more fruitful way to pull the US out of perma-slump than scattershot stimulus.

Even better, team up with China and do it together, for all our sakes.

The iPhone could replace the stethoscope as millions of doctors across the world are signing up for a free app created by University College London.

Published: 7:45AM BST 31 Aug 2010

iStethoscope Pro app Photo: PETER BENTLEY

Inventor of the iStethoscope Pro Peter Bentley uses the app with his iphone Photo: PETER BENTLEY

The view on the iPhone’s screen of a heartbeat Photo: PETER BENTLEY

Peter Bentley invented the iStethoscope application which monitors heartbeat through sensors in the phone as just a bit of fun.

But it took off and now 500 apps are being downloaded everyday after a free version was introduced last week.

“Everybody is very excited about the potential of the adoption of mobile phone technology into the medical workplace, and rightly so,” said Bentley.

“Smartphones are incredibly powerful devices packed full of sensors, cameras, high-quality microphones with amazing displays,” he said

In the furture it could be possible for people to conduct their own ultrasounds or monitor blood pressure through smartphones.

Hemp drives green vehicle prototype

By Kim Guttormson, Calgary Herald August 24, 2010 Comments (24)

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Calgary’s Motive Industries announced it will introduce an electric car whose bio-composite body is made from cannabis.

Photograph by: Handout, Motive Industries

Nathan Armstrong envisions a day when drivers will be rolling up to the curb in a car powered by an electric motor and covered with a body made from hemp.

The green vehicle’s design will be unveiled next month at the Electric Mobility trade show in Vancouver, but the Kestrel is part of a bigger plan by a Canadian consortium — including Armstrong’s Calgary-based Motive Industries — to build an environmentally friendly car in this country.

“It’s a design program that will put all the good eggs we’ve been thinking about into one basket,” said Armstrong, Motive’s president.

Project Eve, as the currently nameless group is called, isn’t starting from scratch.

Motive had been working on an entry for the Progressive Automotive X Prize competition, which will pit vehicles that get mileage of 2.4 L/100 km or better against each other in a race.

Motive’s entry included exploring the use of a hemp-fibre composite that’s as strong as fibreglass, but lighter and less expensive.

The material will be used to replace other metal components, Armstrong said, except for the structural frame.

Steve Dallas, president of Toronto Electric, has already built a prototype two-seater electric car called the A2B that he drives to meetings.

TM4, the Quebec-based maker of electric drivetrains, is another of the 15 companies signed up to the project.

Armstrong says the first Kestrel prototype — a four-seater and the vanguard of a three-year plan that would see five models built, including a passenger van and a commercial vehicle — should be finished this year, with 20 following next year. Red Deer College would build the bodies, while SAIT would assemble the vehicles, he said.

“The idea behind it was that we weren’t just going to develop a single vehicle, we’re going to develop technologies and an architecture that would be suitable for different vehicle platforms,” Armstrong said, adding they hope to have 50 companies on board by the end of the year. “To essentially create a philosophy where we can build vehicles in Canada, but not using the very expensive business model that’s been in place for the last 20 years.”

“The core focus of the company isn’t to develop the Kestrel or other vehicles, but develop advanced transportation technologies,” Armstrong said.

John Wolodko, advanced material program manager for Alberta Innovates Technology Futures, which has developed the hemp composite using plants grown near Vegreville, said producing the hemp mats, which are then fused with plastics, uses far less energy than more traditional car parts.

While the obvious jokes about a hemp car abound — hemp is cannabis but contains negligible amounts of THC — Armstrong points out that Henry Ford built a car with a hemp body in 1940.

“It’s not a direct replacement,” Armstrong said of swapping the hemp for existing materials.

“You have to design the cars differently, which is where we come in.

“The real savings are in the manufacturing. When you look at the big picture, the big (factors) to consider are manufacturing costs and energy requirements.”

He added that because the hemp composite would already be processed, it could be exported to the United States.

Dallas says the idea of electric cars is gaining momentum.

“Everybody wants to know more,” he added.

Enmax, for example, has launched a three-year pilot project to replace 10 of its vehicles and another 10 City of Calgary vehicles with electric cars.

kguttormson@theherald.canwest.com

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald

Building Wood Boats Is Very Rewarding

29.08.2010 | Author: Zafar | Posted in Boating

Building a wood boat, using plans, by yourself is a quite a difficult, and yet very rewarding undertaking. Once you have acquired all of the necessary tools that are required to build the boat, the perfect amount of space to build it in, and, of course, the time on your hands needed to do it, you can start on putting together your own hand made boat. Making a boat is a labor of love. A boat is an object in which you put much of yourself into and the ending result is a functional masterpiece of art. The following is an introduction which will tell you the important information which you will need to make your project.

The first step in constructing your own wooden boat is research. You may search the Internet in order to find information on how to build a boat. Many ideas exist and you can decide which of these ideas will be included into your boat. You can also look at books on the subject at the library or book store. These may help you decide the size of the boat you want to build as well as what tools you need to do this.

If you have never built a boat before, a solid plan is extremely important. You might want to look for plans which are as clear and simple as possible. Since you will ultimately be the one who will be reading the instructions you will need to be able to comprehend and follow them explicitly. These plans are basically blueprints for your boat and are needed in order to know the proper measurements. However if these plans are too confusing for you then you might consider continuing to look for plans.

For your consideration, you could build a smaller boat or if this is your first project you could possibly purchase a boat kit. Several plans exist for a build it yourself boat from small eight foot hydros to canoes to sail boats. There are plans for small boats which are even offered for free. These are the best ways to start your new found hobby. Included with these kits are introductions into the tools and skills needed to complete your boat while at the same time learning a lot of useful information which will be vital for your larger future projects.

Once you make the decision to build a wooden boat while using your own plans you have just made a commitment to yourself to create a masterpiece which will not only be beautiful and functional, but will be very personal to you. If you take the time to learn the correct information, materials, plans, and tools which are required to be successful, you will be able to celebrate your new boat. These are the first baby steps which you need to take in order to get to the satisfying feeling of being prideful of the resulting masterpiece of your labor. If the boat is made by your hands then it is worth more to you than any other boat that you could ever buy in any store at any price and you can hold your head up high as you sail the ocean, sea, or even lake with your own boat.

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Scarphing Plywood

I have to admit I was hesitant about taking on this project of building a boat.  The feeling was similar to entering cold water prior to a swim (and I don’t like being cold).  My strategy was to just jump in whole hog and absorb the full shock immediately; so that, I could spend the rest of the time enjoying myself.  It’s too early to tell if the strategy is valid, but here was the first plunge.For some reason I felt most uncertain about these things called scarph joints, particularly for plywood, and most particularly for thick sheets of plywood.  That being said, I felt if I attempted scarphing the 3/4″ hull bottom first, then the rest would be downhill.

The hull of the boat is longer than the 8′ plywood panels that is composed of.  So in order to get longer panels, or planks for that matter, two pieces of wood are bonded together at a scarph joint.  Or so I had read, since I certainly hadn’t tried one before starting this build.

Did I mention this log should  be looked at as a cautionary tell?  Learn by not following my example.  I’m pretty sure I broke some kind of record – the most time & effort spent on a scarph joint with fairly ugly results.

So one option would have been to order oversized panels.  Another option would have been to order standard panels that were pre-scarphed.  Other options would have been to purchase a circular saw scarphing jig, or maybe a power planer, or a belt sander.  But no, I decided to do this the hard way with primarily just a block plane.

The plane I chose was Standley’s bottom of the line low-angle hand plane; even for bottom of the line, it still cost $50.  Since this is the only plane I’ve ever been this intimate with, I don’t know how it compares to other planes.  I’m satisfied with the plane, and very glad I didn’t step-up to the Standley sweetheart addition, since I accidently dropped this one on the concrete floor of my garage within 30 minutes of use.  Well that forced me to learn how to tune it.  And after hours and hours and hours and more hours of use, me and the box plane became friends.

Planing the scarph joints for the 3/4″ panels took so long, I decided to go another route for the 1/2″ side panels.  That time saver, which still took an amazingly long time, was to crosscut a series kerfs in the plywood with a circular saw.  A separate cut was done each millimeter.  The depth of each cut was changed ever so slightly each time.  Also I had to remeasure and align the guide for the saw every time.  Fortunately my neighbor (Thanks Gary!) let me borrow this fantastic metal guide that clamped to the outside edges of the panels.  This method would not have been practical without that guide.  I don’t even think I saved much time this way versus just using the hand plane, but the depths across the panels were more uniform, and the straight glue stripes seem to confirm this.  The joints on the 1/2″ panels have very straight glue stripes as opposed to the 3/4″ panels.

One thing I did, which in hindsight I would do again, was to use resorcinol glue instead of epoxy.  Again, time will tell if this was a good choice.  Thanks to Larry Pardey for this decision.  There is an appendix in his book Details of Classic Boat Construction that discusses the pros and cons of various adhesives.  Also, I’m glad Matt Layden noted it as an option on his Paradox plans.  It sparked me to investigate further.

I really had to go out of my way to buy resorcinol.  I believe it is actually the glue used to bond plywood laminates together in marine and exterior grade panels.  So it is widely used by lumber companies, but it was very hard for me to acquire on a small scale as an amateur builder.  I tried a few local hardware stores and lumber yards; they couldn’t even order it.  Eventually I heard about a few (very few) websites where I could order it in the U.S.  A couple of these sites were geared toward amateur wooden airplane builders, and I’m not talking about model airplanes.  Apparently there are not only amateur plane builders, but there are actually people who will get in and fly in a plane built out of wood by an amateur.  Not me brother - I can swim if this amateur screws up, but I can’t fly – no thank you.  The site I ordered from was a chemical company out of Ohio called CP Adhesives (product CP-0900).  It appears to have been made and shipped from New Jersey.

To me the resorcinol appears to be easy to use.  Store it below 70 degrees Fahrenheit to maintain a good shelf life.  Use it at above 70 degrees for curing.  The hardener looks similar to brown flour.  Prior to adding the hardener, the glue looks like a dark red wine.  After mixing in the hardener it gradually goes from a wine/grape juice consistency to a sticky jam substance; it doesn’t have a hot flash like epoxy.  I applied it with a paint brush.  It doesn’t require very much glue.  I used gloves, safety goggles, and a respirator as recommended, but just for the few minutes to mix and apply.  There was no indication of any vapors.  Drips were easily cleaned up.  The brush and mixing bowl rinsed out with just water. [The water used to rinse the bowl and brush was then used to irrigate a small section of my yard, to prevent the direct runoff from possibly affecting the next town's water supply.]  The irony of this stuff is that it dilutes easily with water until it cures.  Once it cures, it is waterproof.  After curing it became a dark rusty brown color.  One thing I would like to note, is that the instructions recommend an enormous amount of clapping pressure, which I did not come close to achieving, but the bonds appear strong.  Again, only time will tell.

The weather was in my favor.  We had about a month of 100+ degree days.  Plenty warm for the glue to cure.  The batteries in my circular saw didn’t respond well to the heat.  Fall is just around the corner though, then winter (my least favorite weather); maybe we’ll get lucky and have some Indian summers.  Bring on the global warming baby.

Posted by Okie Bob at 9:13 PM

James Delingpole

James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including Welcome To Obamaland: I’ve Seen Your Future And It Doesn’t Work, How To Be Right, and the Coward series of WWII adventure novels. His website is www.jamesdelingpole.com.

My holiday is being ruined by global cooling. But try telling that to the ‘scientists’

By James Delingpole Environment Last updated: August 26th, 2010

531 Comments Comment on this article

The beaches of the future, thanks to global cooling

I’m writing this in Salcombe, Devon on a rainy, miserable summer’s day which, I fear, may be all too symptomatic of the climatic rubbish we can all expect for the next 30 years as – thanks to changes in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation combined with a solar minimum – we enter a period of global cooling. Let’s hope I’m wrong, eh?

Well, among those who seems to be hoping just that is an amiable fellow called Sir Paul Nurse, the Nobel prize winning geneticist and president-to-be of the Royal Society, who came round to my house last week to film part of a BBC Horizon documentary on why it is that people are losing their faith in scientists.

I told him people aren’t losing their faith in “scientists”. Just the “scientists” who are behind the junk science being advanced in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s four increasingly tendentious and misleading assessment reports.

Over the next three hours, Sir Paul and I had a long, friendly, on-camera argument in which he tried to make a distinction between “scepticism” [good] and “denialism” [bad] – an entirely specious distinction, in my book – while I tried to focus on the details of the Climategate emails because it’s only on details that an arts graduate journalist is ever going to win a debate like this with a (feisty, bright, delightful but not a little combative) Nobel genetics laureate.

A trick I noticed Sir Paul trying to perform throughout our debate was to move away from specifics to the general. So, for example, he would keenly assert that “the majority” of the world’s scientists agreed with a thing called a “consensus” on man-made global warming, and whenever I got down to grimy and tedious detail suggestive of the contrary – eg Ben Santer’s outrageous rewriting of the Summary for Policy Makers in the Second Assessment Report, which seriously exaggerated the unanimity of scientific opinion on AGW – he’d either politely brush it off as if it were far too involved to be of much interest or he’d airily cite the three whitewash enquiries into Climategate as “proof” that the scientists had done nothing wrong.

Perhaps he was just playing devil’s advocate. The impression I got that Sir Paul is a thoroughly decent, very clever man who wants to be as open-minded as possible on the whole AGW debate. But the impression I also got is that, as you would entirely expect of a future president of the Royal Society (which for years has been one of the great cheerleaders for AGW theory, even to the point of writing an official letter to Exxon demanding that it cease funding “deniers”) is that Sir Paul’s view of what is reasonable and balanced has been heavily coloured by that of the scientific Establishment. And, unfortunately, the scientific Establishment’s views on AGW are about as neutral and unbiased and reliable as, say, the BBC’s are about Israel. Or the European Union. Or, indeed, “Man Made Global Warming.”

Cairn confirms Greenland oil find

• Cairn says well has found gas and oil-bearing sands in Arctic
• Greenpeace ship already in area protesting against drilling

The Greenpeace ship Esperanza has already been in confrontation with a Danish warship enforcing a 500-metre exclusion zone around Cairn Energy’s wells Photograph: Will Rose/AFP/Getty Images

Cairn Energy has confirmed that it has discovered gas and oil-bearing sands off the coast of Greenland in a move that will heighten fears of environmental campaigners that the Arctic is set to become the scene of the world’s last great dash for oil.

Greenpeace‘s ship Esperanza is already in the area, protesting against the actions of Cairn Energy, the first company permitted to drill for oil in the sensitive environment. Earlier this week it was challenged by a Danish warship whose captain is enforcing a 500-metre exclusion zone around the two wells.

Environmental campaigners fear that drilling in the previously untouched Arctic area raises the risk of an environmental disaster on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The oil industry, however, will welcome Cairn Energy’s announcement as confirming their suspicions that the Arctic harbours one of the world’s last remaining major reserves of oil.

In a statement accompanying its half-year results, Cairn Energy said one of its two exploration wells in Baffin Bay, which is of a similar scale to the North Sea, has found “gas in thin sands” which “is indicative of an active hydrocarbon system”. The well in question – T8-1 – has not yet reached its target depth. Cairn Energy has plans for four wells in its current drilling programme. The company is also carrying out 10,000 kilometres-worth of seismic surveying.

“I am encouraged that we have early indications of a working hydrocarbon system with our first well in Greenland,” said chief executive Sir Bill Gammell, “confirming our belief in the exploration potential. We look forward to assessing the results of the remainder of the 2010 drilling programme.”

Cairn announced the discovery alongside news that revenues in the six months to end June rose 311% to $333m (£216m) and the company swung from a $15m loss last year to a profit of $94m.

Cairn last week announced plans to sell its 51% stake in Cairn India to Vedanta Resources for £5bn in order to help fund its exploration in Greenland. Three Indian government-owned firms, however, are reported to be interested in making rival offers for the stake.

Revealed: how vitamin D can protect us from cancer

Scientists discover how substance controls actions of genes

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

Tuesday, 24 August 2010

ALAMY

Vitamin D is produced naturally by the skin but only in the presence of sunlight

Vitamin D protects the body against a range of serious illnesses by binding to the DNA of the body’s cells and directly controlling the genes implicated in diseases such as multiple sclerosis, diabetes and cancer, a study suggests.

It is the first time that scientists have found direct evidence to suggest that the “sunshine vitamin”, which is made by the skin in the presence of sunlight, directly controls a network of genes linked with a wide variety of serious disorders.

Although previous studies have linked vitamin D deficiency with a growing list of illnesses, especially the autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and type-1 diabetes, until now scientists have not been able to show how it could trigger so many different disorders.

The latest study suggests a possible mechanism by showing that vitamin D binds directly to parts of the human genome that house the genes known to be linked with these serious autoimmune disorders, which result from a person’s immune system attacking the body’s own tissues.

“A surprisingly large number of genes that have been highlighted by gene-associated studies in autoimmunity and cancer seem to be regulated by vitamin D,” said Professor George Ebers, a clinical neurologist at the Radcliffe hospital in Oxford.

“This is indirect, but intriguing evidence that vitamin D will prove to be a major player in the key gene-environment interactions that expose us to diseases,” Professor Ebers said.

It is estimated that a billion people in the world could be suffering from deficiencies in vitamin D, which can be ingested in the diet in small amounts but is primarily produced by the skin when exposed to direct sunlight, so the findings could have major health implications for people living in northern latitudes with low levels of sunlight.

The researchers, funded by the Wellcome Trust, analysed human cells that had been stimulated by the active form of vitamin D. They found that the vitamin D receptor protein bonded to a total of 2,776 sites along the DNA of the genome. They also found that the vitamin had a significant effect on altering the activity of 229 genes located near to these sites.

“We screened the whole genome and found all the sites where vitamin D binds. The evidence is now quite solid that not only is there binding but we’ve been able to show that it actually affects the functioning of the gene. It’s not just sticking to that region, it’s actually altering gene expression,” Professor Ebers said.

“We show there’s an excess of genes that are associated with a bunch of autoimmune conditions that seem to have the vitamin D regulation feature. I don’t think we can say [this is] cause and effect, but it’s not a coincidence. It is clearly not there by chance. There’s a very substantial bias among these genes that have been highlighted as playing a role in these autoimmune conditions, and that have turned out to be regulated by vitamin D,” he explained.

If the study, published in the journal Genome Research, is supported by further research it could explain why vitamin D plays such an important role in a wide spectrum of diseases and why people who are native to northern latitudes have over many generations evolved a white skin, which absorbs sunlight more efficiently than darker skin.

“Vitamin D status is potentially one of the most powerful selective pressures on the genome in relatively recent times. Our study appears to support this interpretation and it may be we have not had enough time to make all the adaptations we have needed to cope with our northern circumstances,” Professor Ebers said.

Sreeram Ramagopalan, of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford University, said the findings suggest vitamin D supplements may be important. “Vitamin D supplements during pregnancy and the early years could have a beneficial effect on a child’s health in later life,” he said.

Three ways to get your fix

*Vitamin D is produced naturally by the skin but only in the presence of sunlight. Sunshine contains ultraviolet light B (UVB) which converts a ubiquitious precursor substance in the skin, called 7-dehydrocholesterol, into vitamin D3. This can then be converted by the liver and kidneys into the biologically active form of vitamin D.

The vitamin is also present in relatively high amounts in fish and shellfish, and in lower amounts in eggs and dairy produce. By far the easiest and best way of delivering enough vitamin D to the body is to expose unprotected skin to direct sunlight for a few minutes each day. But light-skinned people are advised not to burn their skin.