ITS NOT A "REPOST " ITS A REMAINDER

..... i can't see more..!!!

Can u see it..? ? ?

Lets redefine our thinking
Child labour is a curse to humanity

adopt one child and pay for his education.

Bio Jet Fuel

Small molecules can starve cancer cells

 by Biomechanism 

CANCER RESEARCH: All cells in our body have a system that can handle cellular waste and release building blocks for recycling. The underlying mechanism is called autophagy and literally means “self-eating”. Many cancer cells have increased the activity of this system and the increased release of building blocks equip the cancer cells with a growth advantage and can render them resistant towards treatment.

“We have discovered a small molecule that can block autophagy in different cancer cells and specifically, this molecule can increase the sensitivity of breast cancer cells towards one of the most commonly used treatments for breast cancer,” says Professor Anders H. Lund, at BRIC, University of Copenhagen. 

Our own anti-cancer molecule
The molecule that the researchers have studied is called microRNA-101 and is found naturally in our cells. In cancer research, there is currently a large focus on both autophagy and microRNA molecules, which can control our genes and both mechanisms are known to play an important role for cancer development.

“We have shown that microRNA-101 can turn off specific genes and thereby inhibit autophagy in cancer cells. The fact that microRNA molecules can regulate autophagy is quite new and our results disclose a large and interesting field within cancer research” says researcher Lisa Frankel, who has been leading this research project in Anders H. Lund’s laboratory.

Breast cancer treatment
MicroRNA-101 is often lost in liver cancer, prostate cancer and breast cancer. By controlling the level of microRNA-101 in cells of different cancer types, the researchers from BRIC show that microRNA-101 regulates autophagy. In addition, the researchers have shown that breast cancer cells become more sensitive towards treatment with the anti-hormone Tamoxifen, when they via microRNA-101 turn off the autophagy system.

“This result has a clear clinical relevance, as resistance against tamoxifen is a large problem in the treatment of breast cancer,” says Anders H. Lund.

The next step of the researchers is to investigate whether other microRNA molecules are involved in the regulation of autophagy in cancer cells. Further, they will take a closer look at the role of microRNA-101 in normal development of our organism and in the development of cancer.

-Latest Cancer Research on Biomechanism.com 

Homeland Security Application Monitors Crowds' Faces, Races, and Eye Movements to Detect Would-Be Criminals

By Sean Kane

FAST Crime Department of Homeland Security

The Department Homeland Security is developing a system designed to apprehend you before you commit a crime. The Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST, is designed to analyze whether a person is likely to commit a crime, using a long list of factors. Some are akin to lie detection, such as breathing and heart rate, but the system also measures body movements, voice pitch changes, blink rate, breathing patterns, eye movements, body heat changes and prosody (changes in speech rhythm and intonation). The "prototype screening facility" is built to "detect cues indicative of mal-intent" using these algorithms. The system also analyzes factors like ethnicity, gender, age and profession.

The DHS has already conducted a FAST field test at an undisclosed location in the northeast. "It is not an airport, but it is a large venue that is a suitable substitute for an operational setting," says DHS spokesman John Verrico.

The department views FAST as a tool for airport security, but it has other potential uses as well. A DHS document suggests a mobile version "could be used at security checkpoints such as border crossings or at large public events such as sporting events or conventions."

The development of FAST has raised some eyebrows, including those of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research center in Washington, D.C. EPIC has obtained multiple documents, including one detailing the field test (PDF).

[via CNET]

A Treasure Trove of Undiscovered Life: Raw Sewage

By Rebecca Boyle

Bubbling Wastewater Kristian Bjornard/Wikimedia Commons

Raw sewage is apparently a gold mine for virologists in search of new quarry — it contains thousands of previously unknown virus species, according to a new study. Hopefully this unique finding will justify the nasty task of sifting through sewage for science.

Microbiologists at the University of Pittsburgh, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Barcelona have been searching for novel ways to find new viruses. About 3,000 different viruses have been described so far, but this is probably a small fraction of the species that exist, the authors say. In a hunt for new examples, they explored sewage samples from sites in Africa, Europe and North America.

They used deep sequencing methods to explore viruses with various types of nucleic acids — single-stranded DNA, double-stranded DNA, positive-sense RNA and double-stranded RNA. This method of metagenomics, studying everything in an entire sample population, had been used before to study bacteria and viruses — but not from a a raw sewage sample.

The researchers found a few that they recognized, including human papillomavirus and norovirus, and a suite of plant and animal viruses. They also found bacteriophages, which makes sense because raw sewage also contains plenty of bacteria. In all, there were 234 known viruses from 26 distinct families — by itself, this makes raw sewage the most bountiful reserve of viruses ever found, according to a news release from Pitt.

But the vast majority of genetic sequences had little or no relation to known viruses, the researchers said. Most of them couldn’t even be placed into specific taxa.

“These results show that the vast majority of the viruses on Earth have not yet been characterized,” the authors write.

Uncovering new viruses will help microbiologists understand how viruses evolve and emerge, they added. Apparently raw sewage is a great place to look.

[ScienceDaily]

How To Spot Circulating Tumour Cells

Cancer cells that have broken away from the main tumour can spread the disease. Now scientists are developing better ways to find them

KFC 

One way that cancer spreads through the body is through circulating tumour cells. These are cancer cells that have broken away from the main tumour and begun to circulate in the blood. A new tumour can form if they become embedded elsewhere in the body and begin to grow.

So spotting circulating tumour cells is an important goal in the treatment of cancer.

Here's the problem though. Circulating tumour cells are extremely difficult to find. In a single millilitre of blood there are usually several billion red blood cells, several million white blood cells but fewer than ten circulating tumour cells.

And there is the only one way to find them. The cells can be made to look different from normal blood cells. So you need a highly trained cell biologist with a microscope and plenty of time. The words needle and haystack don't do this task justice.

Various groups are looking for better ways to find circulating tumour cells and their efforts fall essentially into two categories. The first is biochemical: trapping the cells using antibodies that bond to them. The second is mechanical: filtering them out.

Both of these methods have drawbacks. Antibodies can only bond to the cells if they can get close enough. And although circulating tumour cells are bigger than red blood cells, they are about the same size as white blood cells so filters have limited success..

Today, Markus Gusenbauer at St. Poelten University of Applied Sciences in Austria and a few buddies make some progress in this area. These guys have developed a computer model of the way blood flows through a bed of magnetic beads.

When a magnetic field is applied to such a bed, the beads line up into strings that together form a filter with a specific gap size. Whether a cell can pass through depends on its size and also its flexibility.

The Austrian team's model takes into account the size and flexibility of both red blood cells and circulating tumour cells to show how this kind of switchable filter could catch the bad guys.

The idea here is that the beads would also be covered in an antibody that latches onto the circulating tumour cells, keeping them trapped even when the magnetic field is switched off. This method uses both of the current techniques to overcome their drawbacks.

The plan would be to store the beads in a chamber in a microfluidic lab-on-a-chip device. A blood sample containing a handful of circulating tumour cells but billions of other types is pumped into the chamber and the magnetic field switched on.

This causes the beads to line up in a filter that traps the biggest cells. The antibodies on the beads then latch on to their targets, trapping them for later study.

That's the theory anyway. In reality, these guys have a lot more work to do before such a system can be made to work. For a start, circulating tumour cells come in a number of different flavours and the mechanical characteristics of each will need to be worked out.

More serious is the problem with white blood cells. Being a similar size to circulating cancer cells means they could easily clog these kinds of filters.

But the reality is that this kind of problem can only be solved by understanding what's going on on the level of individual cells and engineering a solution that works on this scale. That's why this kind of simulation is a useful first step.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1110.0995: A Tunable Cancer Cell Filter Using Magnetic Beads: Cellular And Fuid Dynamic Simulations

'I Loved What I Did'

Visionary: Apple chief executive Steve Jobs is silhouetted in the Apple logo at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Monday, June 28, 2004.
AP Photo/Susan Ragan

COMPUTING

'I Loved What I Did'

What we can learn from the legacy and life of Steve Jobs.

• BY JASON PONTIN

Audio »

It's tolerably well known that newspapers and magazines bank the obituaries of the ailing famous. When Steve Jobs died last Wednesday, the encomia appeared with unsurprising haste. But I had nothing prepared. Ever since Jobs announced in 2004 that he had had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his pancreas, editors had urged me to get something down. (Only last week, an editor at Technology Review proposed that I might review Jobs's life as if it were a book or a tablet computer.) But I always demurred. It seemed ghoulish. Besides, I wanted Steve to live forever, because I loved him.

I had grown to love him even though our relationship (such as it was) had always been chilly. On at least two occasions, I know I pissed him off.

Steve Jobs was the first person I interviewed in Silicon Valley. It was 1994, and he was chief executive of NeXT Computer and exiled from Apple. The late Tom Quinlan, hardware editor ofInfoWorld, had given me a page of questions I did not understand, and, chuckling, dispatched me to NeXT's headquarters. It turned out to be a low, modernist building in Redwood City, down the road from Oracle's futuristic drums. The founder and CEO, when I met him, was intimidating and impatient. In a conference room that I can still remember was striped with shadows from the blinds on its windows, I peered at Quinlan's questions and nervously asked Jobs why he had no loyalty to his customers. (NeXT had just announced it would abandon its black-box computers and focus on developing software.) I think I asked why he made beautiful, expensive machines that only enthusiasts wanted. Jobs said, "Fuck you. I created the Mac and it's still the best. What have you done?" and was gone.

Well, he had a point, although I couldn't hear it at the time. Five years later, after he had returned to Apple, when I was editor of Red Herring, a magazine popular during the dot.com boom, I wrote a callow, facile column in the form of a letter to Jobs. It began, "Dear Steve, you've saved Apple. Good for you! I don't care." I argued that Microsoft had a near-monopoly in the market for personal computer software, and therefore controlled computing. Jobs wrote to my boss, Red Herring's chief executive, Tony Perkins: "I'll tell you who doesn't matter: Red Herring, so long as Jason is the editor." My final e-mail from Apple's founder, sent this July, was a terse two-word rejection ("No thanks!"). It seems a fitting terminus to our history.

But like millions on the planet, I felt I knew Jobs much better than I did. It was a natural delusion: I'd seen him on stage or on television many times, and I had studied the primary literature—the long, soul-baring 1985 interview in Playboy, for instance—and read the biographies and company histories. I knew the meters of his speech, how he would pause, without embarrassment, when answering a question that caught his searching intelligence. With the rest of the world, I watched him get old and sick. It was affecting to see a world-historical individual so nakedly human.

But, mostly, I loved Steve Jobs because of the products he created and the method by which he worked. The extraordinary success of his method and products made nonsense of the wised-up cynicism which Quinlan and I were peddling: Jobs made hundreds of millions of people into enthusiasts for Apple's personal technology. Today, the company enjoys near-monopolies in tablet computers and music players; and its iPhone outsells all other smart phones. Perhaps most surprisingly, sales of its computers have outpaced Windows PCs for years.

More than anyone else, Jobs shaped the forms of the machines of the digital revolution, and with those machines, the texture of modernity. He was responsible for six creations of unrivaled influence—successively, the Apple II, the Macintosh, the movie studio Pixar, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad—and they all bear the stamp of his obsessions and values. The products he oversaw were simple, elegant, and genuinely novel.

How did he do it? It's a paradox that has been endlessly worried over that Jobs's preoccupation with delighting consumers was accompanied by confidence that there was no point in asking what they wanted. A 1989 interview in Inc magazine contains the best account of his working method. After hedging that his process was "hard to explain," he offered up: "Customers can't anticipate what the technology can do. They won't ask for things that they think are impossible." But, he continued, "If it takes a long time to pull out of customers what they really want ..." it also "takes a long time to pull out of technology what it can really give." 

He elaborated:

"Sometimes the technology just doesn't want to show you what it can do. You have to keep pushing on it and asking the engineers over and over again to explain why we can't do this or that—until you truly understand it. A lot of times, something you ask for will add too much cost to the final product. Then an engineer might say casually, 'Well, it's too bad you want A, which costs $1,000, instead of B, which is kind of related to A. Because I can do B for just 50¢.' And B is just as good as A. It takes time to work through that process—to find breakthroughs but not wind up with a computer no one can afford."

In his obituaries, Jobs was called a visionary. The word is justified: he had visions, and he convinced cofounders, investors, employees, and, finally, customers to share them. Yet the word "visionary" suggests mysterious powers, and as the Inc interview shows, Jobs's approach wasn't so very strange. He pulled at consumers, and pushed at the technology, and merged the two. But if the method was not mysterious, the details were laborious. Jobs was not an engineer, and never wrote code, and so he was forced to work through others. He combined and refined borrowed ideas (from Xerox PARC most famously, but variously: from typesetters, industrial designers, and the counterculture). He ignored vulgar consensus, took risks, and killed unsatisfactory projects. He loved excellence; anything that was substandard, hurried, cluttered, or dumb pained him, and he rejected it. He concerned himself with the smallest details of products, so that, for example, the circuit board of the Apple II had to be flawlessly soldered and classically proportioned, though almost no one would ever see it. He hired the best designers and engineers, and by persuasion and bullying, inspired them to build his insanely great machines.  

Apple (and by extension Jobs) existed, he always said, at the intersection of the liberal arts and technology. As an artist, his medium of expression was computing. He wanted to excite passionate fandom from his customers, because he was himself technology's biggest fan. And like all real artists, he didn't create his artifacts to get rich (although the validation must have been nice to a poor boy from Mountain View); he did it for the absorbing love of his chosen craft.

During a justly famous speech at the 2005 Stanford University Commencement (the core text for understanding the man), Jobs spoke about getting fired from Apple. He said, "I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me—I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over."

Jobs insisted that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to him: "The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again ... It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." During the next five years, he founded NeXT and Pixar and got married. NeXT led to his return to Apple, and he saw the technology he created at NeXT at the heart of the Macintosh operating system.

Jobs concluded:

"I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple ... I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do."

Sad that he is dead, disappointed that I will never see the machines he might have created. I hope, in my small way, to imitate Steve.

Jason Pontin is the editor in chief of Technology Review.