Posts

Glioblastoma is one of the deadliest cancers — an illness that responds to few treatment options, and often poorly. But a single case study that uses an experimental immunotherapy to treat these brain tumors might give oncologists a new way to approach the disease. The therapy, called CAR-T, is controversial and has faced hurdles in clinical trials. It has shown great promise in treating blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma — but has proven challenging in treating other forms of the disease, including solid tumors....

Yet another reason for women to make sure they eat right, exercise and get proper medical care while pregnant: The 3 to 8 percent slice of pregnant women in the U.S. who each year develop gestational diabetes not only have a higher risk of developing related health problems and having abnormally large infants (requiring C-sections or potentially dangerous natural deliveries) but, according to new research, also have a greater chance of birthing babies that will become obese between the ages of five and seven...

PARIS (Reuters) - France wants to gradually phase out the use of diesel fuel for private passenger transport and will put in place a system to identify the most polluting vehicles, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on Friday. Next year, the government will launch a car identification system that will rank vehicles by the amount of pollution they emit, Valls said in a speech. This will make it possible for local authorities to limit city access for the dirtiest cars....

Advances in gene therapy over the past 15 years are finally allowing investigators to safely treat a growing number of carefully selected patients with a broad range of defective or missing genes, as reported by Ricki Lewis in the March issue of Scientific American. One of the biggest obstacles researchers have learned to overcome is the immune system’s propensity to over-react when thousands of copies of the stripped-down viruses carrying normal genes are injected into the body, mistakenly treating them as foreign invaders....

A NASA review board has concluded that human error led to the failure of the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft last November. NASA officials announced at a press conference late Friday afternoon that an overlooked mistake in a June 2006 update to the craft’s computer system initiated a chain of events that ultimately caused it to lose battery power. They said that mission staff had followed standard operating procedures, but that the procedures were insufficient to catch the error....

When Deidre Ramos moved with her infant son to the Parker Street section of New Bedford, Mass., little did she know that her new neighborhood was toxic. Today, a decade later, Ramos is worried about the health of her two sons growing up in a community contaminated by an old burn dump containing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). “What will be the long-term effects on my children?” asked Ramos. Now new research conducted in New Bedford suggests that these industrial chemicals, which were first linked to learning problems in children more than two decades ago, may play a role in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), too....

As long as people have engaged in private conversations, eavesdroppers have tried to listen in. When important matters were discussed in parlors, people slipped in under the eaves—literally within the “eaves­drop”—to hear what was being said. When conversations moved to telephones, the wires were tapped. And now that so much human activity takes place in cyberspace, spies have infiltrated that realm as well. Unlike earlier, physical frontiers, cyberspace is a human construct....

By Kanupriya Kapoor PIDIE JAYA, Indonesia, Dec 7 (Reuters) - Nearly 100 people were killed and hundreds injured in Indonesia on Wednesday when a magnitude 6.5 earthquake hit its Aceh province and rescuers used earth movers and bare hands to search for survivors in scores of toppled buildings. Medical volunteers rushed in fading evening light to get people to hospitals, which were straining to cope with the influx of injured. The Aceh provincial government said in a statement 93 people had died and more than 500 were injured, many seriously....

Treatment: RTS,S/AS02A Maker: GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative Stage: Phase IIb, may enter phase III trials in 2008. Why It Matters Malaria is responsible for the deaths of more than two million people every year, more than half of whom are children in sub-Saharan Africa. No vaccine against the parasite is currently available commercially. How It Works RTS,S/AS02A fuses a cell surface protein found during the malaria parasite’s infectious stage with a surface protein from hepatitis B, to help increase its ability to stimulate an effective immune response....

Look up from this page and scan the scene in front of you. Your eyes dart around, bringing different objects into view. As you read this article, your eyes jump to bring every word into focus. You can become aware of, and even control, these large movements of the eyes, which scientists call saccades. But even when your eyes are apparently fixed on something—say, on a tree, face or word—they are moving imperceptibly, underneath your awareness....

New photos of several Apollo moon landing sites were released today (Sept. 6), showing extraordinary new details about three areas on the lunar surface that were visited by humans. The images include the sharpest views yet of tracks left by the astronauts and their lunar rovers. “The images look very spectacular, as you can see for yourself,” Mark Robinson, an Arizona State University, Tempe scientist, who is the principal investigator of LRO’s camera, said in a news briefing today....

Pluto has nitrogen glaciers flowing down from its distinctive, icy heart. And the dwarf planet’s thin atmosphere may have begun to freeze out onto its surface—a change long expected, as Pluto moves farther away from the Sun, but never before seen. Scientists with NASA’s New Horizons mission unveiled the findings, and a raft of new images, at a press conference on July 24, just ten days after the spacecraft flew by Pluto....

Have you ever met someone who was glad they had pneumonia? I have. And no, this was not someone who wanted to be sick. It was a father, telling me about a time after his baby was born. His work gave him no paternity leave. But because he was sick, he could stay home. He couldn’t get close to his baby for fear of spreading the illness, but at least he could be in the house, where he knew his wife and newborn were safe and well....

By Laura Zuckerman (Reuters) - Pesticides may be linked to a spike in cases involving breathing difficulties and skin rashes in central Washington state, health officials said on Monday. Washington health department spokeswoman Kelly Stowe said the illnesses could be tied to 15 separate incidents of spraying pesticides in commercial orchards. Roughly 60 people have been sickened in the agricultural region since March, including agricultural workers, neighbors to orchards and a utility crew working near fruit farms....

“What is that?” planetary scientist Barbara Cohen gasped, marvelling at the latest images of Pluto released on September 24. Cohen, of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, is not alone. It is a question nearly every planetary specialist is asking with each release of pictures from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which flew past Pluto and its moons in July. The latest images—the most-detailed colour shots yet downlinked to Earth—show a bizarre ‘snakeskin’ terrain, wrinkled with ridges and smudged with rust-coloured material....

A quantum microscope that uses a sensor built from diamonds could allow researchers to study such nanoscale mysteries as how DNA folds in a cell, why drugs work or how bacteria metabolize metals. Crucially, the microscope can image individual ions in a solution and reveal biochemical reactions as they occur—without interfering in the process. The team behind the system described the results in a February 14 preprint on the arXiv server....

What is science revealing about the nature of the criminal mind? Adrian Raine, a professor at the university of Pennsylvania, is an expert in the expanding field of “neurocriminology.” He has written The Anatomy of Violence, a sweeping account of crime’s biological roots, including genetics, neuro-anatomy and environmental toxins like lead. He spoke with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. Gareth Cook: The study of the links between biology and violence has a controversial and somewhat unsavory past....

Picture, if you will, your typical sleep apnea sufferer. Chances are he is middle-aged and overweight and snores like a freight train. Note the male pronoun. Twenty-five years ago experts believed that the condition, in which breathing is disrupted during sleep, was about 10 times as common in men as in women. Better-quality studies have since reduced that ratio to roughly three to one, but as more data come to light, it is becoming clearer that sleep apnea—and the broader category known as sleep disordered breathing—simply looks a little different in women....

From elite sprinters to ordinary fruit flies, body symmetry has long been linked to good health, physical strength and reproductive success. But the reasons for that correlation have been difficult to pin down. Is overall body symmetry a marker of genetic fitness? Or does symmetry of specific body parts—eyes, knees or nostrils—confer unique and specific functional advantages? New findings from a long-term study of Jamaican athletes, including some of the fastest sprinters in the world, offer fascinating clues....

PROFILE NAMESBrittany Wenger TITLEHighschool senior LOCATIONLakewood Ranch, Fla. How did you feel when you heard you had won not only your age category but also the grand prize at the July 23 awards ceremony? I was just so excited. It was a surreal experience walking up there. I don’t even know how I got up there. Tell me about your project. I taught the computer how to diagnose breast cancer so it could determine whether a breast mass is malignant or benign....