Experts propose ‘cyber war’ on cancer

In the face of mounting evidence that cancer cells communicate, cooperate and even engage in collective decision-making, biophysicists and cancer researchers at Rice University, Tel Aviv University and Johns Hopkins University are suggesting a new strategy for outsmarting cancer through its own social intelligence.

“We need to get beyond the notion that cancer is a random collection of cells running amok,” said Herbert Levine, co-director of Rice’s Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP) and co-author of the cover article in this week’s Trends in Microbiology that pulls together dozens of recent discoveries about the social behavior of cancer cells. “These cells lead sophisticated social lives.”

Article co-author Eshel Ben-Jacob, a senior investigator at CTBP, said, “Cancer is a sophisticated enemy. There’s growing evidence that cancer cells use advanced communications to work together to enslave normal cells, create metastases, resist drugs and decoy the body’s immune system.”

Ben-Jacob, Levine and Donald Coffey, a noted cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins, suggest in the article that cancer researchers act like modern generals and go after their enemy’s command, control and communication capabilities. The article is in volume 20, issue 9, pages 403-410 of the journal.

“It’s time to declare a cyber war on cancer,” said Ben-Jacob, who, along with Coffey, is speaking today at a workshop titled “Failures in Clinical Treatment of Cancer” at Princeton University.

Ben-Jacob said cancer cells have been shown to cooperate to elude chemotherapy drugs, much like bacteria that communicate and act as a team to resist attacks from antibiotics. He said some cancers appear to sense when chemotherapy drugs are present and sound an alarm that causes cells throughout a tumor to switch into a dormant state. Similar signals are later used to sound the “all clear” and reawaken cells inside the tumor.

“If we can break the communication code, we may be able to prevent the cells from going dormant or to reawaken them for a well-timed chemotherapeutic attack,” Ben-Jacob said. “This is just one example. Our extensive studies of the social lives of bacteria suggest a number of others, including sending signals that trigger the cancer cells to turn upon themselves and kill one another.”

The article cites numerous examples of similarities between the behavior of bacterial colonies and cancerous tumors.

“The parallels between the communal behaviors of bacteria and cancer cells suggest that bacteria can serve as a valuable model system for studying cancer,” said Coffey, professor of urology, oncology, pathology and pharmacology and molecular sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “We believe this approach could be particularly valuable for investigating intractable problems like metastasis, relapse and multiple drug resistance.” …

via Experts propose ‘cyber war’ on cancer.

Cancer is a natural protective response by the body. The cyber war needs to be on the real causes of cancer such as carcinogenic chemicals which have a protected status in today’s industry-profit-ruled world, and on the junk food that damages our immune systems.

Even healthy people have thousands of cancer cells. They show up during cell reproduction due to errors in DNA replication. They are found and destroyed by a heathy immune system.

UFO ‘Secrets’ To Be Revealed In September, Says National Atomic Testing Museum

In just a few weeks, some kind of UFO-related secrets will be revealed at a Smithsonian Institution affiliated museum.

That’s the implied promise in the title of a special lecture coming up at the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas on Sept. 22.

The secrets haven’t yet been revealed, but the players involved certainly present the potential for something intriguing to emerge from this one-night event that’s part of the museum’s ongoing Area 51 lecture series.

Watch this promo for the upcoming UFO lecture at the National Atomic Testing Museum. …

At the Sept. 22 lecture, Pope will speak of the similarities between how the U.K. and U.S. governments had similar UFO study groups and why both countries officially got out of the UFO business.

“In both instances, the bottom line was that we wanted Joe Sixpack off our backs. Strip out all the mistaken sightings of weather balloons and dump all the crazies, and we might just have something worth looking at,” Pope told HuffPost in an e-mail.

“But you can’t do that in a public UFO project, because it’s a kook magnet,” he said. “The trick is to highlight all the crazy stuff in the media, so the subject becomes a joke, pull the plug, then run the whole thing covertly. Now I’m not saying this is exactly what happened, but if an Air Force pilot sees something unusual and it’s tracked on military radar, does anyone seriously think we wouldn’t be interested?” …

via UFO ‘Secrets’ To Be Revealed In September, Says National Atomic Testing Museum.

Geological Basis for North American Flood Myths

original.jpg (JPEG Image, 1000 × 624 pixels).

Samuel Arbesman’s Milky Way Transit Authority Map

 

Our galaxy is unimaginably vast, and we really have no idea what is out there. We are discovering new planets in other star systems all the time, learning new facts about the galactic core, and even learning about whole new portions of the galaxy. This map is an attempt to approach our galaxy with a bit more familiarity than usual and get people thinking about long-term possibilities in outer space. Hopefully it can provide as a useful shorthand for our place in the Milky Way, the ‘important’ sights, and make inconceivable distances a bit less daunting. And while convenient interstellar travel is nothing more than a murky dream, and might always be that way, there is power in creating tools for beginning to wrap our minds around the interconnections of our galactic neighborhood. …

via Samuel Arbesman | Milky Way Transit Authority.

Stem cells bring back feeling for paralysed patients

For the first time, people with broken spines have recovered feeling in previously paralysed areas after receiving injections of neural stem cells.

Three people with paralysis received injections of 20 million neural stem cells directly into the injured region of their spinal cord. The cells, acquired from donated fetal brain tissue, were injected between four and eight months after the injuries happened. The patients also received a temporary course of immunosuppressive drugs to limit rejection of the cells.

None of the three felt any sensation below their nipples before the treatment. Six months after therapy, two of them had sensations of touch and heat between their chest and belly button. The third patient has not seen any change.

“The fact we’ve seen responses to light touch, heat and electrical impulses so far down in two of the patients is very unexpected,” says Stephen Huhn of StemCells, the company in Newark, California, developing and testing the treatment. “They’re really close to normal in those areas now in their sensitivity,” he adds.

“We are very intrigued to see that patients have gained considerable sensory function,” says Armin Curt of Balgrist University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland, where the patients were treated, and principal investigator in the trial.

The data are preliminary, but “these sensory changes suggest that the cells may be positively impacting recovery”, says Curt, who presented the results today in London at the annual meeting of the International Spinal Cord Society. …

via Stem cells bring back feeling for paralysed patients – health – 03 September 2012 – New Scientist.

Hackers claim 12 million Apple IDs from FBI

Hackers claim 12 million Apple IDs from FBI

The incident raises question over why the FBI had held the details of consumers of Apple products [AP]
A hacker group has claimed to have obtained personal data from 12 million Apple iPhone and iPad users by breaching
a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) computer, raising concerns about government tracking.

The group called AntiSec, linked to the hacking collective known as Anonymous, posted one million Apple user identifiers on Monday purported to be part of a larger group of 12 million obtained from an FBI laptop.

In the posting, AntiSec said the original file “contained around 12,000,000 devices” and that “we decided a million would be enough to release”.

The group said it “trimmed out other personal data as, full names, cell numbers, addresses, zipcodes, etc”.

Contacted by AFP news agency, FBI spokeswoman Jenny Shearer said: “We’re not commenting.”

It also raises question over why the FBI had held the details of consumers of Apple products.

Apple also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

One website set up a database to help users determine if their device was on the hacked list of Apple unique device IDs (UDIDs).

“Quite why the FBI was collecting the UDIDs and personal information of millions of iPhone and iPad users is not yet clear – but it’s obvious that the data (and the computer it was apparently stored on) was not adequately secured,” said Graham Cluley of the British security firm Sophos.

The hacker group said it posted the information to draw attention to Apple’s practices which allow users to be tracked.

“We never liked the concept of UDIDs since the beginning indeed. Really bad decision from Apple,” it said.

‘Very worrying’

Hacker and computer security expert, Jason Moon told Al Jazeera: “I think we should be very concerned”.

He said: “If the intelligence agencies are going to spy on their own citizens and retain this kind of personal information it’s very worrying that hacker can get their hands on”.

“Our enemies can get their hands on it just as easily then…So it’s kind of like doing the spying for our enemy in a sense”, he added.

“If they are going to be this negligent with the way the information is secured keeping it all in one place in the manner that they did, it’s really disturbing.”

The cyber incursion set social networking sites aflutter with technology bloggers questioning consumer privacy.

Peter Kruse, an e-crime specialist with CSIS Security Group in Denmark, confirmed on Twitter that the leak “is real” and that three of his own devices had been included.

He tweeted: “Also notice that they claim to have full name, addresses, phone numbers etc… Big ouch!”

A security expert with Tata Communications, Eric Hemmendinger, said: “The question is not whether it’s accurate, it is why did the feds have the information and why did they not take due care to secure it”.

“If you work in cybersecurity and your machine gets hacked, that’s a pretty embarrassing scenario,” he added. …

http://pulse.me/s/cYbWx

There is a web site you can use to see if your ID was one of the million released by the hackers, but then you are giving your UDID to some web site. I’d rather check for myself, so I found the file and this detail from the hackers on how they got the file:

During the second week of March 2012, a Dell Vostro notebook, used by Supervisor Special Agent [*** Name remove ***] from FBI Regional Cyber Action Team and New York FBI Office Evidence Response Team was breached using the AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability on Java, during the shell session some files were downloaded from his Desktop folder one of them with the name of “NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv” turned to be a list of 12,367,232 Apple iOS devices including Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), user names, name of device, type of device, Apple Push Notification Service tokens, zipcodes, cellphone numbers, addresses, etc. the personal details fields referring to people appears many times empty leaving the whole list incompleted on many parts. no other file on the same folder makes mention about this list or its purpose.

via http://pastebin.com/nfVT7b0Z

Obvious question from this… What is NCFTA?

The NCFTA functions as a conduit between private industry and law enforcement with a core mission to identify, mitigate and neutralize cyber crime. In an effort to streamline intelligence exchange, the NCFTA will often organize SME interaction into threat-specific initiatives. Once a significant online scheme is realized and a stakeholder consensus defined, an initiative is developed wherein the NCFTA manages the collection and sharing of intelligence with the affected parties, industry partners, appropriate law enforcement, and other SMEs. …

If you are interested in learning more about how the NCFTA can help your organization or would like to become a partner, please contact us.

2000 Technology Drive
Suite 450
Pittsburgh, PA 15219

Phone: 412.802.8000

via http://www.ncfta.net/

Thanks for the warrant-less release of our personal data, Apple. I’m sure you were just doing what you thought was profitable, I mean morally correct. *cough* *cough* *lawsuit* *cough* I checked (by downloading the file and doing a search against it) and none of my three iPhones UDIDs are in the million released.  Tip, use the free app eMonster UDID to email your UDID from your iPhone to yourself for reference. I also recommend securely wiping the files after you download them to check for yours. You’ll need a serious text editor like TextPad (windows) to open the large file. Windows Notepad will probably just hang. Use a free program like Eraser (windows) to wipe the files and you can be better than Apple at protecting people’s Apple IDs.

According to one web site, there are over 187 million devices:

I have always wondered how many devices I am targeting and finally I have close to an answer:

iPod Touch: 60 million
iPhone: 108 million
iPad: 19 million

See http://thisismynext.com/2011/04/19/apple-sues-samsung-analysis/ for more information

That’s 187 million devices.

Does the FBI have all 187 million? I have no idea, but why would they have only 12 million? What’s special about those?

P.S. Patch your Java, people!

MITs Next Mars Space Suit

Video: The New Space Suit

Dava J. Newman is a Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems, Director of Technology and Policy Program and MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT. Throughout the history(pdf) of NASA space suits, astronauts had to deal with bulky, hard to move in, non-mobile suits that hindered their work flow as opposed to helped them achieve their tasks and jobs.That is, until Dava and her crew designed a snug fitting space suit that would allow astronauts to move freely. As you can see from the image below, the suit is significantly smaller than NASA’s Mark III space suit. This will allow wearers of the suit to fit into tighter spaces and work with their hands more freely than ever before.

Dava’s suit would be a huge leap forward in terms of construction as well. They’ve enlisted the expertise of Dainese, an Italian manufacturer of motorcycle racing “leathers”—leather and carbon-fiber suits designed to protect racers traveling at up to 200 mph.

The suit would be a degree safer than current space suits. While a puncture or scrape in a traditional space suit would cause a dramatic decrease in pressure and would be tramatic, even deadly The “biosuit” could be patched with a high tech ace bandage. The wearer would wrap it around the punctured area to stop the leak almost instantly. Pressure loss would be minimal and the astronaut would be able to continue working and finish his or her task. …

via MITs Next Mars Space Suit | Space Industry News.

 

Thor Sighted at Stonehenge

FILM crews have been at Stonehenge this morning – and rumour is they were working on upcoming Hollywood blockbuster Thor: The Dark World.

The film, starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddlestone, Stellan Skarsgård and Anthony Hopkins, is to be the eighth instalment in the Marvel Comic adaptations which have been proving a hit with cinemagoers worldwide, as well as a sequel to 2011 film Thor, directed by Kenneth Branagh.

The set at the historic monument was shrouded in secrecy on Wednesday morning but reliable sources state the location shoot for the blockbuster was being done under the film’s working title of Thursday Morning.

Australian heartthrob Hemsworth played Thor in the first film as well as in the recent Avengers movie, and also appeared in The Cabin in the Woods and Snow White and the Huntsman this year as well as 2009’s Star Trek.

Thor: The Dark World continues the adventures of Thor as seen in The Avengers, and is set to be released in November next year.

Filming on the Alan Taylor-directed production has been taking place at various locations in the UK, thought to include London and Bourne Wood near Farnham.

It is not known if any more action is due to take place at Stonehenge.

via Film being shot at Stonehenge (From Salisbury Journal).

Is Alzheimer’s Brain diabetes? Ultimate food scare

Big trouble lies ahead if Alzheimer’s is proven to be a form of diabetes

THE human brain evolved to seek out foods high in fat and sugar. But a preference that started out as a survival mechanism has, in our age of plenty, become a self-destructive compulsion.

It is well known that bad diets can trigger obesity and diabetes. There is growing evidence that they trigger Alzheimer’s disease too, and some researchers now see it as just another form of diabetes (see “Food for thought: Eat your way to dementia”).

If correct, this has enormous, and grave, implications. The world already faces an epidemic of diabetes. The prospect of a parallel epidemic of Alzheimer’s is truly frightening, in terms of human suffering and monetary cost.

This outcome will not be easily averted. Few people need to be told that too much high-fat, high-sugar food is a health hazard. And yet sales of fast food remain healthy (or should that be hefty?). Part of the reason is “future discounting”, another evolved feature of the human brain that makes us value short-term rewards over long-term risks.

What can be done? One option is to call in the lawyers. Some moderately successful attempts have already been made to sue food companies for their role in creating the obesity epidemic. If a causal link between fatty, sugary food and Alzheimer’s can be established, it is highly likely that more lawsuits will follow. Such actions have their place, but this is a laborious and expensive way to enact change.

Nor do the policy levers at our disposal appear promising. Public awareness campaigns have been of limited use in reversing the tide of obesity. Will the added threat of dementia prove harder to ignore? “Sin taxes” on unhealthy foods may work – Denmark and a handful of other countries are experimenting with them – but it is not yet clear whether they make any real difference. What’s more, they raise questions about personal responsibility and nanny-statism.

We may be left with only the option of medically blocking either the craving for fast food, or its consequences. That has its own complications, and sidesteps the problem rather than addressing it. But the human brain also evolved to find ingenious solutions to intractable problems. It may yet come to its own rescue.

via Brain diabetes: the ultimate food scare – opinion – 03 September 2012 – New Scientist.

Diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease are connected in ways that still aren’t completely understood. While not all research confirms the connection, many studies indicate that people with diabetes — especially type 2 diabetes — are at higher risk of eventually developing Alzheimer’s disease. – mayoClinic

High levels of the hormone insulin, brought on by a bad diet, may harm the brain in the same way that the muscle, liver and fat cells are affected by type two diabetes. Exposing the brain to too much insulin could cause it to stop responding to the hormone, hampering our ability to think and create new memories and ultimately leading to permanent damage, researchers said.

A diet high in fat and sugar has long been linked to a higher risk of Alzheimer’s, while studies of health among large populations have shown that a healthy Mediterranean diet may offer some protection. In type two diabetes, eating too much fatty and sugary food raises our insulin levels to such a consistently high degree that our muscles, fat and liver cells are no longer affected by the hormone.

This means that the amount of glucose and fat in our blood is allowed to increase unchecked, forcing the pancreas to produce even more insulin to try to cope. Ultimately it becomes exhausted and production drops to very low levels. A small-scale trial on human patients at Washington University found that those who were given a nasal spray containing insulin were better at remembering details of stories, had longer attention spans and were more independent.

A further trial on 240 volunteers showing early signs of dementia will provide further clues as to whether the spray can protect memory and learning ability and keep track of brain changes in patients. A study on rats by experts from Brown University suggest that a similar process could affect the brain, which relies on insulin to regulate nerve signals related to memory and learning and to produce energy from glucose.

Researchers found that blocking insulin from rats’ brains made them disorientated and unable to find their way out of a maze because they could not remember where they were. Examination of their brains showed the same pattern of deterioration seen in Alzheimer’s patients, including increased levels of the amyloid plaque which is a key hallmark of the condition.

If the theory is correct, it means eating more healthy foods and exercising more could reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s, and potentially reverse or slow down the memory loss in patients with the condition.

via Telegraph

 

Windows XP no longer most popular desktop system

Windows 7 is now the world’s most popular desktop operating system, according to the August report from Net Applications.In August, Windows 7 had a 42.76% market share, a fraction of a point more than Windows XP’s 42.52%. Windows XP was released in 2001.The much-maligned Windows Vista sits at third place with a 6.15% market share, followed by Mac OS X 10.7 and Mac OS X 10.6 with 2.45% and 2.38%, respectively.All in all, older versions included, Microsoft controls some 92% of the market.It took three years for Windows 7 to become the world’s most popular OS. Microsoft’s desktop operating system, which was launched in October 2009, will soon be replaced by a newer version — Windows 8.

via Finally! Windows XP no longer most popular desktop system – CNN.com.

Here are the OS stats from a few different sources:

Source	Date	Microsoft Windows				Apple		Linux kernel based		Other[a]
		7	Vista	XP	All versions	OS X[b]	iOS[c]	GNU/Linux	Android
Net Market Share[14][15]	July 2012	38.85%	5.9%	38.49%	83.55%	6.23%	5.9%	0.97%	1.81%	1.54%
StatCounter Global Stats[16]	July 2012	51.14%	8.12%	29.1%	88.85%	6.92%	2.64%	0.84%	0.4%	0.35%
W3Counter[17][d]	July 2012	44.12%	6.95%	27.06%	78.13%	8.66%	7.09%	1.75%	2.49%	1.88%
Webmasterpro[18][e]	July 2012	44.6%	10.3%	24.0%	79.7%	6.6%	7.7%	1.5%	3.9%	0.60%
Wikimedia[1][f]	July 2012	38.16%	7.34%	22.20%	69.15%	7.55%	10.67%	1.53%	5.04%	6.06%
Average	July 2012	43.37%	7.72%	28.17%	79.88%	7.19%	6.80%	1.32%	2.73%	2.09%