I'm reminded of the menacing cyborg in the movie "T2," which when blown into bits of liquid metal, oozes back together. This robot is not liquid. It's blocky, a little slow, and not very menacing. But you can see where this is going, right?
Human papilloma virus (HPV) and the measles virus have been found in lung tumors, report scientists at a recent European conference.
The researchers caution that while measles and HPV were found in tumors, it doesn't necessarily mean the viruses caused the tumors.
Researchers from Israel examined tumor samples from 65 lung cancer patients and found the measles virus in about half of the samples. Other researchers in Kentucky examined 23 lung cancer patients and found HPV in five samples. Other studies have found HPV in lung cancers but, as with the recent study, had a small sample size.
The idea of catching cancer isn't a new one. HPV causes certain kinds of cervical cancer. Helicobacter pylori, a bacteria, can cause stomach cancer. Hepatitis-B and -C viruses cause liver cancer.
Overall, about 20% of all cancers in the world can be linked with some kind of infection.
There has been a lot of ink recently about a new study where researchers used gene therapy to restore sight to patients suffering from a rare form of congenital blindness known as Leber congenital amaurosis.
LCA is a condition that slowly damages light receptors in the retina in childhood, causing total blindness in the 20's or 30's. About 2,000 people in the US suffer from LCA, which is caused by a defective gene. There is no other treatment for the condition.
The researchers, from Pennsylvania, Italy and Britain, injected a virus containing the correct version of the gene directly into the eyes of the patients.
Patients reported improved vision two weeks after the injection.
The results were modest. One man in the US study went from detecting hand movements to reading lines on an eye chart. Other patients didn't improve according to an eye chart, but their vision improved on other measures of vision.
None of the patients reported any side effects, opening the way for more trials. Researchers hope that treating the condition earlier in life might provide a cure for LCA.
The research was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at a medical conference in Florida.
Women who eat breakfast cereal before they conceive are more likely to have boys, says a new study by British researchers. 59% of women who ate breakfast cereal every day gave birth to boys, compared to 43% of woman who rarely or never ate breakfast.
While breakfast cereal was the most striking example, eating more calories, even as much as an extra banana a day, increased the odds of having a baby boy to 56%
Eating more food raises blood glucose levels and tiny baby boys grow better with more glucose. The researchers speculate that higher glucose levels in the uterus may help baby boys grow once the embryo is implanted in the uterine lining. The researchers also point that it makes theoretical sense, since many animals, including animals, produce more males when there is plenty of available food.
More calories does usually mean more weight, but the researchers excluded obese women from the study due to the complications that often arise during their pregnancies.
The single more important determinate of a child's sex is still the intrepid and speedy sperm that reaches the egg, delivering that all important X or Y chromosome.
This study, which appears in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, looked at the environment the embryos grew up in and how likely it was to bring them full-term.
First there was the Ansari X Prize, which awarded $10 million to the development of private spaceflight. Then the Archon Genomics X Prize, which will award $10 million to the first team who can successfully sequence 100 anonymous human genomes in 10 days at a recurring cost of no more than $10,000 per genome. It would follow that there'd soon be the Progressive Automotive X Prize, which will award millions to the team that can build a 100 mpg vehicle. And not to be out done, Google is behind the Lunar X Prize, which will offer $20 million to the first team to land a rover on the moon, rove it more than 500 meters and transmits back high-def images and video.
How could you top it?
The million dollar chicken, that's how. In the spirit of the X Prize tradition (but without affiliation), PETA is offering a $1 million reward to anyone who can make laboratory meat without killing any animals. Such meat would use "animal stem cells that would be placed in a medium to grow and reproduce. The result would mimic flesh and could be cooked and eaten."
The attitude seems to be, if you can't beat 'em...one-up 'em. As someone who has recently given up eating most meat (I'm about ankle-deep in vegetarianism), I applaud this idea. I think it's exactly the kind of thing to get the creative juices grilling. But who would eat it? Meat eaters love their meat. And veg eaters love their carrots. And lots of people are up in arms about genetically engineered food already. Would they bit the chickenstein? What do you think?
Image: PETA
Much ado has been made over the announcements about the longevity effects of dietary restrictions. But when I'm hungry I don't think that well and make mistakes, which theoretically reduces my life.
When cells are hungry they make mistakes as well. But some how those mistakes actually make cells live longer.
Hungry cells do a lot of things wrong, but perhaps their biggest mistakes is in producing one particular protein, production is an enzyme called TOR. Previous research has shown that less TOR means fewer proteins and longer cell life.
Scientists have made drugs that decrease TOR, but since TOR has many jobs the side effects of completely shutting down TOR are too severe.
Now University of Washington scientists have found a way to achieve the anti-aging effects of less TOR without the powerful side effects, at least in yeast cells.
The scientists decreased the amount of proteins inside a cell in two ways that both screwed up ribosomes, which help make proteins.
The scientists initially noticed that yeast cells with mutations in a specific part of ribosomes decreased protein production.
A drug, diazaborine, messes with the same part of the ribosome that the mutated yeast cells had, so the scientists treated the yeast cells with diazaborine and found that those cells lived 50% longer than normal and untreated cells.
Nanobacteria are tiny organisms many times smaller than normal bacteria, are blamed in several diseases and found in Martian meteors.
But new research says that the tiny 'creatures' are chemical, not biological, resulting in what are essentially tiny deposits of chalk laced with protein.
To generate the nanobacteria chemically the researchers incubated human serum with limestone and came away with tiny particles that lacked both DNA and RNA. They then bombarded the particles with huge amounts radiation to annihilate anything that remained, and the particles looked exactly the same.
The researchers think that carbon dioxide and calcium carbonate, both of which are found dissolved in blood, initially create the nanobacteria. Later tiny bits of protein attach to the otherwise jagged edged nanobacteria and smooth the particles out. These proteins are what lead some people to suspect that they may have once been alive, say the researchers, Jan Martel of Taiwan's Chang Gung University and John Young of Rockefeller University in New York.
The research was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The sense of smell has been compared to a Rube Goldberg machine, an overly complicated device with too many steps to achieve a simple objective. In terms of smell, that objective is to open an ion channel that triggers a nerve impulse that informs the brain.
New research in Nature shows that insects might have independently developed a different kind of nose that directly opens an ion channel.
When virtually everything (except apparently insects) on this planet gets a whiff, the scent molecules travel up the nose and attaches onto a G-protein coupled odorant receptor on the cell surface, starting of a chain reaction that ultimately sends information to the brain.
The newly discover insect olfactory receptors, according to the researchers, don't look like anything on Earth. It's actually two parts, the olfactory receptor and an ion channel, working together.
The ion channel is of this Earth. But the olfactory receptor will open when any positively charged ion is detected, without all the bells and whistles that usually accompany the detection of a scent.
You know the ol' maxim about the camel, right? It's a horse designed by committee. I think that's going to be the result out of a new, tongue-in-cheek Wiki-like site launched to give people a chance to design their own US presidential candidate.
The WikiCandidate campaign site looks like a real campaign site, but like Wikipedia, it allows anyone to edit content, in this case details such as biography, statements on major issues, and news from the campaign trail.
It will be interesting to see what emerges, but it won't be pretty. The imaginary candidate evolved (and continues to evolve) from a version of comedian, Stephen Colbert, of the Colbert Report. And my guess is that the contributors, with longings of fame and comedian status, will do their darnedest to one-up the professionals. And the result? As funny as a camel.
It's now possible to use a web site without Internet access. Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have created software that allows one Facebook user to talk to another. The software is called WiPeer, dubbed so because it uses a wireless signal in the computer or laptop and peer-to-peer networking—also called an ad-hoc network. This kind of network doesn't require an Internet connection or a hot spot or any other web access point. You just need the software and a wireless signal in your computer (and so do the other people you want to communicate with).
Using WiPeer's Peersonalizer feature in Facebook, you can do things like share files between computers, plays games, and chat.
When might you use Peersonlizer? Don't be fooled by the graphic...it's not just white guys in suits that can use it. Let's say you...
If you're on Facebook, test it out and let me know what you think.
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