Federal regulators today approved the first drug for people with advanced forms of basal cell carcinoma, the most common kind of skin cancer as well as the most common cancer in general in the United States.
The drug, made by South San Francisco’s Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss drug giant Roche, is designed for patients whose basal cell cancer has spread either locally or to other parts of the body. While basal cell carcinoma is generally considered curable, it can spread in some patients and in some cases cannot be treated with surgery or radiation.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the drug, which is called Erivedge, after an expedited six-month review and in advance of the March 8 approval deadline.
“For patients with disease that has metastasized, these patients have no other treatment option,” said Dr. Jennifer Low, global development leader for the drug. “This disease can be very devastating and in some cases life threatening and I think the FDA realized that.” …
Google, Facebook and other big tech companies are jointly designing a system for combating email scams known as phishing.
Such scams try to trick people into giving away passwords and other personal information by sending emails that look as if they come from a legitimate bank, retailer or other business. When Bank of America customers see emails that appear to come from the bank, they might click on a link that takes them to a fake site mimicking the real Bank of America’s. There, they might enter personal details, which scam artists can capture and use for fraud.
To combat that, 15 major technology and financial companies have formed an organization to design a system for authenticating emails from legitimate senders and weeding out fakes. The new system is called DMARC – short for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. …
A man in Dorset has been left mystified after tiny blue spheres fell from the sky into his garden.
Steve Hornsby from Bournemouth said the 3cm diameter balls came raining down late on Thursday afternoon during a hail storm.
He found about a dozen of the balls in his garden. He said: “[They're] difficult to pick up, I had to get a spoon and flick them into a jam jar.”
The Met Office said the jelly-like substance was “not meteorological”.
Mr Hornsby, a former aircraft engineer, said: “The sky went a really dark yellow colour.
“As I walked outside to go to the garage there was an instant hail storm for a few seconds and I thought, ‘what’s that in the grass’?”
‘No smell’
Walking around his garden he found many more blue spheres were scattered across the grass.
He said: “The have an exterior shell with a softer inner but have no smell, aren’t sticky and do not melt.”
Mr Hornsby said he was keeping the balls in his fridge while he tried to find out what they were.
Josie Pegg, an applied science research assistant at Bournemouth University, speculated that the apparently strange phenomena might be “marine invertebrate eggs”.
“These have been implicated in previous ‘strange goo’ incidents,” she said. “I’d have thought it’s a little early for spawning but I suppose we’ve had a very mild winter.
“The transmission of eggs on birds’ feet is well documented and I guess if a bird was caught out in a storm this could be the cause.” …
For nearly a century now, most scholars have agreed that the ancestors of Native Americans likely hailed from Siberia, trekking across the Bering Strait to Alaska via a long-gone land bridge. But certain aspects of the historic migration—including the settlers’ specific region of origin, when exactly they left it and what drove them to seek new lands—remain matters of debate to this day. A new DNA-based study published today in the American Journal of Human Genetics offers new insight into these questions.
Russia’s mountainous Altai Republic borders China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan. Inhabited since the Paleolithic, the region is barely larger than Maine but served as a vital gateway to Siberia and the cradle of widespread human lineages found across northern Eurasia. “It’s a place where people have been coming and going for thousands and thousands of years,” said study co-author Theodore Schurr, an anthropology professor at the University of Pennsylania. According to one prevailing theory, it is also the area where ancestral Native Americans lived before peopling the New World.
Schurr and his team took blood samples from Altai residents and examined their mitochondrial DNA, which is maternally inherited, and Y-chromosome DNA, which passes from father to son. Their analysis showed genetic distinctions between northern and southern Altaians, who also differ from one another both linguistically and culturally. The team then looked for markers known to exist in Native American populations, including a mutation known as Q that is “seen ubiquitously across all the Americas,” Schurr said. “Our goal in working with these communities was to explore their own history in relation to each other but also to other Siberians, as well as the possible links of these groups to Native American population,” he explained.
The results revealed genetic ties linking Native Americans to all Altaians, with a significantly stronger relationship connecting the migrants to residents of southern Altai. The researchers also dated the last common genetic ancestor shared by Native Americans and southern Altaians to between 20,000 and 25,000 years ago, an indication of when the New World’s earliest settlers left their homeland and headed for the Beringian landmass. “We were able to better define the founding lineages of native Americans,” said Schurr, who hypothesized that the settlers’ arrival in what is now Alaska took place some time later, between 15,000 and 20,000 years ago.
This timeline for ancestral Native Americans’ departure adds to a growing body of evidence that humans colonized the Americas earlier than previously thought. …
NOTHING sits still. Even at absolute zero, when the thermal jiggling of matter is frozen, all things must still buzz to the tune of quantum mechanics. Now this subtle jittering has been detected in a small silicon bar, the first solid object ever to reveal its quantum vibrations.
This phenomenon, called zero-point fluctuation, is a consequence of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which says that we can never pin down the precise position and motion of any object. So far zero-point energy has only been seen directly in single atoms or small collections of particles.
The new experiment uses a silicon bar about 12 micrometres long and less than a micrometre across. Oskar Painter at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and colleagues cooled the bar to within half a degree of absolute zero and then used a laser to detect its motion.
Some photons from this laser got a shift in energy when they hit the vibrating bar. Ordinary thermal vibrations can either boost or reduce photon energy, but the zero-point quantum vibration is different. Because it is the lowest energy state possible, it can only absorb energy. Painter’s group detected this bias towards lower-energy scattered light, a clear signature of a quantum twang (Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.108.033602).
Image: This is a shot depicting all 1,235 potential alien planets located by the Kepler space probe to date. The planets are actually just the tiny black dots though, the big balls are the stars they orbit, to scale. – link
NASA announced on Friday that its Kepler telescope has discovered 11 new planetary systems that include 26 confirmed alien planets.
The new planets vary in size from one-and-a-half times the radius of Earth to bigger than Jupiter. Their orbital periods range from six to 143 days, and they all orbit closer to their stars than Venus does to our sun.
The discoveries nearly double the number of alien worlds — or “exoplanets” planets — found by Kepler outside our solar system and help astronomers better understand how planets form. However, scientists still have to determine the make-up of the planets, such as whether their surfaces are rocky or gaseous.
“Prior to the Kepler mission, we knew of perhaps 500 exoplanets across the whole sky,” Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement. “Now, in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates. This tells us that our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits.”
Two judges attempted to speed matters up by listing it for a hearing in July.
They acted after hearing that the Home Secretary is ”considering afresh” whether Asperger’s sufferer McKinnon should be extradited to the US to face trial for hacking into top secret US military computers in 2002.
Edward Fitzgerald QC, appearing for McKinnon, told the judges it was hoped Theresa May would now block US government extradition moves so there would be no more need for court action.
The evidence of medical experts before her showed McKinnon, 45, was ”suffering from a serious mental disorder and there is a serious risk of suicide if extradited”.
Mr Fitzgerald said of the marathon case: ”We hope it will never come back to court.”
McKinnon, from Wood Green, north London, claims he was looking for evidence of UFOs when he hacked into 97 Nasa and Pentagon computers from his flat.
Just before Christmas, his mother Janis Sharp called for her son to be tried in Britain and said attempts to remove him to America had “destroyed” his life.
She said he was facing his 10th Christmas since his arrest and suffering severe depression amid predictions that he could receive a sentence of 60 years for hacking into top secret US military computers in 2002.
American officials have demanded that he is tried in the US despite expert opinions obtained by McKinnon’s legal team warning that his mental condition could lead him to commit suicide.
Ms Sharp said in her latest media interviews: “Our argument is to try Gary here and to be given a proportional sentence.”
Another argument is that his removal should be delayed until his current treatment programme for his medical condition is completed.
On January 23, 2012, the Municipal Public Security Forces of Mexicali were called into action due to reports of a UFO spotted in the skies above Mexicali, Baha California, Mexico. Hundreds of witnesses saw and reported the large bright unidentified flying object that appeared at approximately 7:43 p.m.
According to the website UFOs On Earth, Martin Ruelas, supervisor of the east area of the Dirección de Seguridad Pública Municipal (DSPM) observed that there were flashing blue and yellow lights affixed to the glowing white object. The DSPM is a police and public safety unit in Mexico.
Authorities were unable to identify the UFO, and the movements of the object made it impossible for police to determine its location or final destination. The UFO was recorded by urban security cameras in Mexico, and the video has been made available to the public.
The video shows that the UFO hovered motionless for quite some time when it first appeared on camera even though reports said it was moving too quickly to be followed. From the images on the video, it is clear that this UFO appeared in a heavily populated area.
It isn’t surprising that the witnesses numbered in the hundreds given the UFO’s prime location. Even though this UFO sighting was seen by hundreds and caught on camera, the quality of the video makes it unlikely that the object will ever be identified.
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A man in Dorset has been left mystified after tiny blue spheres fell from the sky into his garden.
For nearly a century now, most scholars have agreed that the ancestors of Native Americans likely hailed from Siberia, trekking across the Bering Strait to Alaska via a long-gone land bridge. But certain aspects of the historic migration—including the settlers’ specific region of origin, when exactly they left it and what drove them to seek new lands—remain matters of debate to this day. A new DNA-based study published today in the American Journal of Human Genetics offers new insight into these questions.
NOTHING sits still. Even at absolute zero, when the thermal jiggling of matter is frozen, all things must still buzz to the tune of quantum mechanics. Now this subtle jittering has been detected in a small silicon bar, the first solid object ever to reveal its quantum vibrations.
Two judges attempted to speed matters up by listing it for a hearing in July.
