Changing View on Viruses: Not So Small After All - New York Times

Chantal Abergel and Jean-Michel Claverie

Electron microscopy image of a Pandoravirus particle. The virus is 1,000 times bigger than the flu virus and has nearly 200 times as many genes.

There was a time not that long ago when it was easy to tell the difference between viruses and the rest of life. Most obviously, viruses were tiny and genetically simple. The influenza virus, for example, measures about 100 nanometers across, and has just 13 genes.

Those two standards, it's now clear, belong in the trash. Over the past decade, scientists have discovered a vast menagerie of viruses that are far bigger, and which carry enormous arsenals of genes. French researchers are now reporting the discovery of the biggest virus yet. The pandoravirus, as they've dubbed it, is 1,000 times bigger than the flu virus by volume and has nearly 200 times as many genes — 2,556 all told.

Making the discovery all the more startling is the fact that, of all the genes that pandoraviruses carry, only six percent match any gene known to science.

"We believe we're opening a Pandora's box – not so much for humanity but for dogma about viruses," said Dr. Jean-Michel Claverie of the University of Mediterranée, co-author of the paper that was published online Thursday in the journal Science. "We believe we're touching an alternative tree of life."

Giant viruses would be important enough simply for the way they have blurred the line between viruses and the rest of life. But they excite scientists for another reason. Utterly unknown a decade ago, they turn out to be everywhere, including in our own bodies. What effect they have on the world's ecosystem — or our own health — is anyone's guess right now.

It was the very giant-ness of giant viruses that allowed them to be overlooked for so long. Scientists first discovered viruses in the late 1800s when they were puzzled by a disease that beset tobacco plants. They mashed up wilted tobacco leaves with water and passed the mixture through fine porcelain filters that trapped bacteria and fungi. The clear liquid could still make healthy tobacco leaves sick. The Dutch botanist Martinus Beijerinck dubbed it "a contagious living fluid."

In the 1930s, the invention of powerful microscopes finally allowed scientists to see viruses. They found that viruses were unlike ordinary cells: they didn't generate their own fuel; they didn't grow or divide. Instead, viruses invaded cells, hijacking their biochemistry to make new copies of themselves. Being small and simple seemed like part of the viral way of life, allowing them to replicate fast.

It wasn't until 2003 that a team of French researchers discovered the first giant virus. They had been puzzling over sphere-shaped objects that were the size of bacteria but contained no bacterial DNA. Eventually they realized that they were looking at a monstrously oversized virus, containing 979 genes.

Those first giant viruses were isolated from amoebae living in water from a cooling tower. Once scientists realized that viruses could be so large, they changed their search parameters and started finding other species in all manner of places, from swamps to rivers to contact lens fluid.

And along the way the biggest viruses got bigger. In 2011, Dr. Claverie and his colleagues set a new record with megaviruses, a type of giant virus with 1,120 genes they discovered in sea water off the coast of Chile. They then dug into the sediment below that sea water and discovered pandoravirsues, with more than twice as many genes.

Dr. Claverie speculates that pandoraviruses and other giant viruses evolved from free-living microbes that branched off from other life several billion years ago. "The type of cells they may have evolved from may have disappeared," he said.

The idea that giant viruses represent separate branches on the tree of life is a controversial one that many other experts aren't ready to embrace. "They provide no evidence for that notion, so it seems a distraction to me," said T. Martin Embley, a professor of evolutionary molecular biology at Newcastle University.

Despite those reservations, Dr. Embley and other researchers hail pandoraviruses as an important discovery. "I think it's wonderful that such crazy and divergent lifeforms continue to be discovered," said Tom Williams, Dr. Embley's colleague at Newcastle University.

The new study also drives home the fact that giant viruses are far from rare. Shortly after discovering pandoraviruses in sea floor sediment, Dr. Claverie and his colleagues found them in water from a lake in Australia, 10,000 miles away. "It definitely indicates that they must not be rare at all," said Dr. Claverie.

Giant viruses may be so common, in fact, that they may be hiding inside of us, too. In a paper published online on July 2 in The Journal of Infectious Diseases, French researchers offered evidence that giant viruses dwell in healthy people. They isolated a new giant virus from blood donated by a healthy volunteer, and then found antibodies and other signs of the virus in four other donors.

Giant viruses may lurk harmlessly in our bodies, invading the amoebae we harbor. Whether they can make us sick is an open question. "I don't believe we have the proof at the moment that these viruses could infect humans," said Dr. Claverie.

"But again," he added, "never say never."

That's wise advice when it comes to giant viruses.

Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/science/changing-view-on-viruses-not-so-small-after-all.html

Vitamin D deficiency may lead to physical problems in older age - CBS News

Not getting enough vitamin D may lead to problems with completing everyday tasks later on in life.

A new study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism revealed that older people with vitamin D deficiencies were more likely to have at least one functional problem, such as getting around the house independently, compared to people with healthy levels of the vitamin.

"Seniors who have low levels of vitamin D are more likely to have mobility limitations and to see their physical functioning decline over time," lead author Evelien Sohl, a researcher with VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, said in a press release. "Older individuals with these limitations are more likely to be admitted to nursing homes and face a higher risk of mortality."

The authors pointed out that as much a 90 percent of older individuals are vitamin D deficient. Vitamin D helps build bone and muscle, and can help prevent the effects of bone diseases like osteoporosis. The sun can help the body produce vitamin D, and it is found naturally in foods like fish-liver oils, fatty fishes, mushrooms, egg yolks, and liver. Vitamin D is often added to milk as well.

CBS medical correspondent Dr. Holly Phillips said that part of why doctors are noticing people are vitamin D deficient is because they're more aware of this health problem and are testing for it.

"One of the reasons we're so vitamin D deficient is we're avoiding the sun and wearing sun screen," Phillips added. "That's great for skin cancer prevention, not such good news for our vitamin D levels."

Researchers looked at an older group of 762 people between ages 65 to 88 and also recruited a younger group of 597 people between 55 to 65. The subjects were tracked for six years as part of the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam. Participants were asked about their abilities to perform normal activities like sitting down, standing up from a chair or walking outside for five minutes without stopping. Blood tests revealed their vitamin D levels, and participants were divided into three groups in order of vitamin D levels.

For the older group, people who reported the lowest vitamin D levels were 1.7 times more likely to have limitations with one physical activity than those with the highest levels. When looking at the younger group, those with the least Vitamin D were two times more likely to have difficulty with at least one everyday task than those who were in the group with the highest levels.

Additional problems were more likely to develop after three years in the most vitamin deficient older group, and after six years in the most vitamin deficient younger group.

"The findings indicate low vitamin D levels in older individuals may contribute to the declining ability to perform daily activities and live independently," Sohl said. "Vitamin D supplementation could provide a way to prevent physical decline, but the idea needs to be explored further with additional studies."

Dr. Michael Holick, a professor of medicine, physiology and biophysics at Boston University School of Medicine, said that this study showed there was a necessity to look further into whether taking supplements could help with vitamin D deficiencies. He was not involved in the study.

"It would be very nice to have a vitamin D intervention study so that you could actually demonstrate that those that were vitamin D deficient, if you made their blood level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D above 30 ng/mL, which is what is in fact recommended by the Endocrine Society practice guidelines, ... that you could improve neurocognitive function, as well as muscle function, and improve overall health and welfare of people as they're aging," he said to Medpage Today.

The National Institutes of Health's Office of Dietary Supplements recommends adults 51 to 70 years old get 600 IUs of vitamin D each day and those 70 and older get 800 IUs daily.

For reference, three ounces of cooked salmon contain about 450 IUs of vitamin D, milk contains between 115 and 124 IUs, and a bowl of fortified cereal contains about 40 IUs of vitamin D.

Source : http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57594393/vitamin-d-deficiency-may-lead-to-physical-problems-in-older-age/

'iKnife' device analyzes surgical smoke to ID cancers - Los Angeles Times

A new device that analyzes the smoke that arises when an electrosurgical tool slices through or cauterizes flesh may help physicians determine, during a surgery, whether tissues they're removing are cancerous or not.

Using mass spectrometry to determine the components of the aerosolized tissue, chemist Zoltan Takats and colleagues at the medical school at Imperial College London and other institutions found that they could tell if tissues were cancerous or not in a matter of seconds. Lipid components in the smoke created from different types of tissues had characteristic signatures. 

Takats and his team wrote about their intelligent knife, or "iKnife," in a study published online Wednesday by the journal Science Translational Medicine.

If the tool and technique work well in clinical trials and can get regulatory approval, Takats said, it could speed surgeries considerably.

Sometimes, during the course of surgery to remove a tumor, an operating team will have questions about whether the tissues they encounter are cancerous or normal.

Today, surgeons must take a break from the operation to send a tissue sample to a pathology lab for analysis. It can take a half an hour or more to get a read back from the lab, Takats said -- time during which the patient must remain under anesthesia while the operating team waits.

A surgeon using an intelligent knife could know what kind of tissue he or she was dealing with almost instantaneously, and make decisions about how to proceed on the spot.

"One can sample a bit of tissue and the result is displayed on the screen in a second. It allows fast analysis and more sampling points," Takats said.

Seeking to show in the current study that the intelligent-knife technology worked, the team analyzed several thousand cancerous and normal samples from 302 patients, constructing a database of tissue signatures.

Then they gave intelligent knives to surgeons, who recorded data from the smoke generated during 91 operations. Analyzing the signatures, the researchers found that they were able to tell the difference between cancerous and normal tissue, and between different types of cancers.

The samples were also analyzed using traditional pathology techniques; the iKnife findings matched those with 100% accuracy, the team reported.

"We proved that it is at least as good as the currently accepted technology," Takats said.

The intelligent knife doesn't work perfectly in all cases. For instance, Takats said, it's hard for it to analyze smoke from tissues that are harder to evaporate, including skin and bone. But when cancers originating in skin and bone spread to other parts of the body, they too can be easily identified, he said.

Dr. Joseph Kim, a cancer surgeon at City of Hope in Duarte, Calif., said he thought the study was interesting, but that he wasn't sure the new technology would be useful in his own work.

"It's forcing you to burn tissues in areas where you wouldn't burn," he said. "The type of operations I do, I'm not sure I'd want to change." 

For instance, Kim, who performs surgeries on gastrointestinal cancers, said he wouldn't use an electrosurgical tool to cut a colon in half. But he said the intelligent knife might be useful for surgeons who use the cutting-and-cauterizing equipment more, such as breast cancer surgeons.

Kim said he and his colleagues had long joked about the smoke that's created during surgeries, figuring that it's probably dangerous to inhale. 

"We've all thought of the smoke in a different way, but perhaps it has another potential use," he said.

Return to Science Now.

Source : http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-iknife-cancer-smoke-20130717,0,7398624.story

Health officials across North Texas seek source of parasite outbreak - WFAA

by JANET ST. JAMES

WFAA

Posted on July 19, 2013 at 9:47 PM

McKINNEY -- Health officials confirm even more patients have been sickened this week by the food-borne parasite cyclospora.

Counties across North Texas have confirmed there are currently 45 patients as of Friday night:

• Dallas County: 13
• Tarrant County: 11
• Collin County: 14
• Denton County: 7

Health officials from the counties are working non-stop to narrow down the source of the outbreak.

Patients who test positive for cyclospora are given a 16-page questionnaire developed by the CDC that asks about where they've eaten and where they purchased certain vegetables and fruits.

"We'll get detailed," said Peggy Wittie, an epidemiologist for Collin County. "We'll ask them what they've eaten over a prolonged period of time, what restaurants you went to. If the person only cooked their own food, 'where do you get your own food?'"

Epidemiologists in Collin, Dallas, Tarrant and Denton counties  are working together to find the common link among the North Texas cyclospora cases. Collected data is passed on to state and federal investigators with the CDC and FDA.

"If they see clear linkages or bits of clear linkages from the different health departments involved then they try to track down the sources for where they got that particular item o r items," Wittie said.

Cyclospora infections mimic more common stomach and intestinal viruses. Symptoms include watery diarrhea, fatigue and nausea. Cases that go untreated can linger for months.

Many people with food-borne illness don't report it because the symptoms go away. Health authorities urge anyone with symptoms for more than three days to see a doctor. People who are sick should not prepare food for anyone else.

Washing fresh produce before eating it can reduce the chance of getting cyclospora infection. Cooking it should also kill the parasite.

E-mail jstjames@wfaa.com

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Source : http://www.wfaa.com/news/health/Cyclospora-Search-216209721.html

Overweight? Maybe You Really Can Blame Your Genes - New York Times

Boston Children's Hospital

The mouse at left is missing a gene that controls how quickly calories are burned. The two other mice are its siblings.

The mice were eating their usual chow and exercising normally, but they were getting fat anyway. The reason: researchers had deleted a gene that acts in the brain and controls how quickly calories are burned. Even though they were consuming exactly the same number of calories as lean mice, they were gaining weight.

So far, only one person — a severely obese child — has been found to have a disabling mutation in the same gene. But the discovery of the same effect in mice and in the child — a finding published Wednesday in the journal Science — may help explain why some people put on weight easily while others eat all they want and seem never to gain an ounce. It may also offer clues to a puzzle in the field of obesity: Why do studies find that people gain different amounts of weight while overeating by the same amount?

Scientists have long thought explanations for why some people get fat might lie in their genes. They knew body weight was strongly inherited. Years ago, for example, they found that twins reared apart tended to have similar weights and adoptees tended to have weights like their biological parents, not the ones who reared them. As researchers developed tools to look for the actual genes, they found evidence that many — maybe even hundreds — of genes may be involved, stoking appetites, making people voraciously hungry.

This rare gene-disabling mutation, though, is intriguing because it seems to explain something different, a propensity to pile on pounds even while eating what should be a normal amount of food. Investigators are now searching for other mutations of the same gene in fat people that may have a similar, but less extreme effect. The hope is that in the long term, understanding how this gene affects weight gain might lead to treatments for obesity that alter the rate at which calories are burned.

"The history of obesity for many many years has been one of blaming people for lack of self control," said Dr. Joseph Majzoub, chief of endocrinology at Boston Children's Hospital and lead author of the new paper. "If some of it is due to a slow metabolism, that would completely change the perspectives of parents and patients. It really would change the way we think of the disease."

In their paper, Dr. Majzoub and his colleagues describe figuring out how the gene they deleted, known as MRAP2, acts in the brain to control weight. They discovered that it is a helper gene. It normally acts in the brain to signal another gene already known to be involved in controlling appetite. So they developed a hypothesis. If the helper gene was deleted, the brakes should come off the gene that controls appetite. Animals should eat voraciously.

The first thing they noticed was that the mice got fat, ending up weighing twice as much as their normal siblings, with most of that extra weight due to fat accumulation.

"During the mouse equivalent of childhood and adolescence they were becoming rapidly obese," Dr. Majzoub said.

The surprise came when the researchers figured out why. When the mice were young, they had normal appetites. The researchers measured what they and their normal siblings ate and determined they were eating the same amount of food. Yet the mice with the deleted gene still gained weight. The only way the obesity-prone mice could be kept slim was to be fed 10 to 15 percent less than their siblings.

But as adults, the mice with the missing gene developed monstrous appetites. Given a chance, they ate much more than their siblings, exacerbating the effects of their tendency to turn food into fat.

That led the researchers to ask if the same genetic phenomenon could be making people obese. They contacted Dr. Sadaf Farooqui of the University of Cambridge, whose group has been mapping the genes of massively obese children, and studied the data on 500 of the children, searching for mutations that disabled the same gene they had deleted in mice.

One child clearly had a gene-disabling mutation and three others had mutations that the investigators suspect might render the gene nonfunctional. None of the normal-weight children who served as controls had a mutation in the helper gene.

"From a basic science point of view, this is really interesting and exciting," said David Allison, an obesity researcher at the University of Alabama in Birmingham who was not involved in the study. Any discovery that helps fill in the details of how the brain controls eating and weight gain is important, he added.

Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at Rockefeller University, who also was not involved in the study, said, "It is another piece in a very important puzzle."

The work fascinates Claude Bouchard, a genetics researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., because it might offer insight into an intriguing finding: there are genetic controls not just of how much people want to eat but also how much of what they eat turns into fat or is burned off and not used by the body. Although the common mantra is that a calorie is a calorie and 3,500 extra calories eaten equals a pound of fat on the body, that is not what happens in real life, he found.

For example, in one of his studies, Dr. Bouchard enlisted 12 pairs of lean identical twins to live in an enclosed area for 120 days so their food and exercise could be monitored while they ate 1,000 calories a day more than needed to maintain their weight. The twins in each pair gained about the same amount of weight, but the amount gained varied threefold among the pairs. Those who gained the most put on as much as 29 pounds while those who gained the least put on 9 ½ pounds.

"It is not a freak finding," Dr. Bouchard said, adding that about 20 studies found the same threefold range in weight gain in response to excess calories. But it also is not clear why this occurs. The intriguing possibility, he said, is that the newly discovered gene might be among those involved. The level of its activity might help determine how quickly calories are burned.

Dr. Majzoub and his colleagues are now trying to determine whether additional mutations in the gene they discovered — ones that hinder its function but do not completely disable it — might explain why some people gain weight.

"All we can do is hope," Dr. Majzoub said.

Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/19/health/overweight-maybe-you-really-can-blame-your-metabolism.html?pagewanted=all

Giving McDonald's eaters calorie guides did not curb bad eating habits - CBS News

Educating people on the number of calories they should eat may not help them make better choices.

A new study published July 18 in the American Journal of Public Health showed that providing people with calorie guidelines did not help them make better food choices, even when calorie counts for each item were available on the menu.

Several states and cities in the U.S. require that chain restaurants reveal calorie information for their items. Congress has already passed legislation to develop a national calorie labeling system in order to aid health care reform.

However, previous studies have shown that listing calories hasn't exactly helped Americans trim down their waistlines. It hasn't helped that fast food and restaurant food still remain calorie-laden. A 14-year study showed that fast food restaurants have only made minimal improvements to the nutritional value of their items, and 25 percent of Americans eat fast food two or more times a week.

"The general inability of calorie labeling to result in an overall reduction in the number of calories consumed has already been pretty widely shown," study author Julie Downs, an associate research professor of social and decision sciences in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, said to HealthDay. "So that's nothing new. But in the face of that, there has been the growing thought that perhaps the problem is that people don't know how to use the information without some framework, some guidance."

To see if teaching people how many calories they should eat would help, 1,094 consumers aged 18 and older at two New York McDonald's locations were provided information on recommended calorie intake before they ordered. New York is one of the cities that requires caloric information about each item to be posted on menus.

19 Photos

BBQ calories: How to burn off that hot dog

A third of the customers were given a flyer that said women and men should limit their calorie consumption to 2,000 and 2,400 calories per day respectively; another third got a flyer saying a single meal should contain between 650 and 800 calories; and a third were not given any information at all.

After they ordered, researchers looked at the customers' food receipts and had them fill out a post-meal survey.

Women who ate lunch bought an average of 824 calories, while the men purchased a meal containing 890 calories on average. This meant that women consumed 27 percent more calories than recommended in one meal, and men ate 11 percent more than the guidelines recommended.

The researchers discovered that giving people calorie guidelines did not make a significant difference in how they read and used the calorie listings on menus. In fact, people who were given calorie guidelines ate 49 more calories on average than those who did not get guidelines at all.

Downs hypothesized that people might see an item -- like a Big Mac, which has 550 calories -- and think to themselves that it sounds reasonable and below their meal and daily calorie limit. However, they'll still order a side and a drink to go with the burger.

"And then all of a sudden they're up over 1,100 calories for the meal. Each one item may seem OK, but it adds up," she noted.

"In the end the bigger issue is that asking people to do math three times a day every day of their lives is a lot," Downs added. "Because it's not like we make a decision about what to eat just once. It's a lot of decisions. And if you add a cognitive [mental] burden on top of that it's a lot to ask."

Studies have shown that if you want to slim down, you might want to avoid restaurants entirely. A May study in JAMA Internal Medicine revealed that a single meal from an independent or small chain restaurant contained on average 66 percent of an adult's estimated daily caloric intake. Another study on sit-down restaurants in the same issue revealed that a single meal contained about 56 percent of the daily recommended calories in a single meal.

On solution may be to tell people how much they have to work out to burn off their meal. Research presented at the Experimental Biology 2013 meeting in Boston suggested that listing how much exercise time instead of calories may work better. People who saw the time it would take to get rid of the calories tended to order 100 fewer calories than those who just saw the calorie counts.

Source : http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57594536/giving-mcdonalds-eaters-calorie-guides-did-not-curb-bad-eating-habits/

Moto X: What we know so far - CNET

Google's Eric Schmidt has been seen using the Moto X.

(Credit: Getty Images)

Though we have an invitation to the official Moto X unveiling, Motorola and Google haven't revealed any official specs yet. Still, there's plenty we know about the device -- and even more that we don't. Here's a sampling of what's certain and what's still up in the air.

August 1 reveal date
Official invitations have been sent; Motorola will introduce the long-rumored handset on August 1.

In stores by October
Motorola first confirmed that the Moto X is real and that it would arrive before October.

Motorola has officially switched on a sign-up page for the Moto X, giving interested readers an opportunity to learn more about the phone as the launch approaches.

(Credit: Motorola)

It will come in black and white
The Motorola invitation shows these two hues, but there's a possibility we'll see more colors emerge.

It's curvy
The first few images of the Moto X to pop up showed a more gentle approach to Motorola's recent tough, edgy form factor. Gone are the angular shoulders and Kevlar coating, replaced with a curvy back and what looks like a plain, soft-touch finish.

The official Moto X invitation confirms that we'll see rounded edges and slight bevels.

The Moto X will be customizable
Motorola's Guy Kawasaki threw the Android faithful into a tizzy when he hinted at the possibility of customized smartphones.

It isn't clear which components exactly will be customizable: the color, the capacity, the apps, custom back plates, or the finish. But here's some of what we'd like to see.

It will be contextually aware
Various members of the Google and Motorola teams played coy over the last couple of months, alluding to features in the upcoming device. Talk centered mostly around battery life, durability, and contextually aware settings.

"Contextually aware" can mean a lot of things that involve location, sensors for light and spatial positioning, incline, and so on. If the phone senses you're outside at night, for instance, it may turn on night settings. If it detects you're traveling, the phone could line up some transportation and dining tips.

Motorola hasn't given any indications that this is what it means in terms of the Moto X, but when we think of Google Now's personal assistance capabilities, we get the sense of what a phone could do.

Read also: Smartphone innovation: Where we're going next

Google Now is always listening
A recently leaked (and subsequently pulled) YouTube video, allegedly from Canadian carrier Rogers Wireless, gave a few hints as what's in store for the phone. Among the details in the short clip were an always-listening Google Now experience that can be activated by saying "OK, Google Now." Additionally, the phone was shown to have onscreen notifications called Active Updates.

Quicker camera launching
Another feature of this YouTube video was waking up the phone into the camera app. A simple flick of the wrist may be all it takes to launch the app from your pocket.

In stores by August
Even though we know for sure we'll see the Moto X before October, a recently leaked Verizon road map points to an August 23 sales date. Considering that Google's own Eric Schmidt has been spotted out and about with a Moto X we might expect it that it's mostly retail-ready.

A few of the rumored color cases for the Moto X smartphone.

(Credit: Nowhereelse.fr)

Hardware details
We have to remain skeptical about the Moto X's leaked specifications, which seem lower than they should be for Moto's comeback hopeful.

If rumors are correct, the comparatively lackluster midrange feature set could include a 720p HD AMOLED display (we'd guess a 4.5- or 4.7-inch screen with that resolution), a 1.7GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8960 Pro processor, and a 10-megapixel camera.

The phone could also come with 16GB internal storage and 2GB of RAM. Motorola's Droid Razr series is completely embedded, which means there's no removable battery, but there is an expansion slot. If the Moto X is the same, users with high storage needs should be happy.

Android version
While early rumors pointed to an Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean build, recent chatter indicates that Google could have 4.3 ready to go. Google is announcing something on July 24, and we've got our money on Android 4.3. That timing would put the Moto X in line to be the first phone on the market to ship with the new OS.

Camera specifics
Whatever the megapixel and sensor size, the Moto X's camera might have its own special sauce. Rather than implementing your standard run-of-the-mill digital camera lens in the Moto X, customers could see a new sensor with technology known as Clear Pixel.

Kodak apparently uses the technology to improve the way that a sensor captures light when taking a photograph, making photos clearer and less dark. There don't seem to be any other sources to substantiate the claim, but it's an interesting idea.

Interestingly enough, Motorola recently toyed with Twitter followers on the camera front, saying "Either this kid is really fast, or today's phones are really slow."

Sales model
Rumors suggest that the Moto X will be offered through multiple carriers, not just through Verizon as with the company's Droid line of phones. Should that be the case, we may look for standard color and finishes at retails stores.

There's also been talk of Google selling the smartphone direct to consumers through the Google Play store. What remains unclear is whether customers will be able to buy the custom designs through either channel. With rumors of 16 colors (translate) and multiple finishes, either Motorola or Google could run the e-tail show from their Web sites.

Cost
Since most of today's top phones still hover at the $200 mark on contract, there's a good chance that the Moto X will slide in around that range or slightly under. At the end of the day, it'll all depend on the specs we see.

We think there could be a surcharge for custom phones, especially if they involve engravings, etchings, or harder-to-manufacture designs.

Motorola's Moto X event kicks off August 1 in New York. CNET will be there on the ground to cover the whole thing live.

Source : http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/motorola-moto-x/4505-6452_7-35823022.html