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Cancer 'cure' in mice to be tested in humans

Scientists at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center are about to embark on a human trial to test whether a new cancer treatment will be as effective at eradicating cancer in humans as it has proven to be in mice.

The treatment will involve transfusing specific white blood cells, called granulocytes, from select donors, into patients with advanced forms of cancer. A similar treatment using white blood cells from cancer-resistant mice has previously been highly successful, curing 100 percent of lab mice afflicted with advanced malignancies.

Zheng Cui, Ph.D., lead researcher and associate professor of pathology, will be announcing the study June 28 at the Understanding Aging conference in Los Angeles.

The study, given the go-ahead by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, will involve treating human cancer patients with white blood cells from healthy young people whose immune systems produce cells with high levels of cancer-fighting activity.

The basis of the study is the scientists' discovery, published five years ago, of a cancer-resistant mouse and their subsequent finding that white blood cells from that mouse and its offspring cured advanced cancers in ordinary laboratory mice. They have since identified similar cancer-killing activity in the white blood cells of some healthy humans.

"In mice, we've been able to eradicate even highly aggressive forms of malignancy with extremely large tumors," Cui said. "Hopefully, we will see the same results in humans. Our laboratory studies indicate that this cancer-fighting ability is even stronger in healthy humans."

The team has tested human cancer-fighting cells from healthy donors against human cervical, prostate and breast cancer cells in the laboratory – with surprisingly good results. The scientists say the anti-tumor response primarily involves granulocytes of the innate immune system, a system known for fighting off infections.

Granulocytes are the most abundant type of white blood cells and can account for as much as 60 percent of total circulating white blood cells in healthy humans. Donors can give granulocytes specifically without losing other components of blood through a process called apheresis that separates granulocytes and returns other blood components back to donors.

In a small study of human volunteers, the scientists found that cancer-killing activity in the granulocytes was highest in people under age 50. They also found that this activity can be lowered by factors such as winter or emotional stress. They said the key to the success for the new therapy is to transfuse sufficient granulocytes from healthy donors while their cancer-killing activities are at their peak level.

For the upcoming study, the researchers are currently recruiting 500 local potential donors who are 50 years old or younger and in good health to have their blood tested. Of those, 100 volunteers with high cancer-killing activity will be asked to donate white blood cells for the study. Cell recipients will include 22 cancer patients who have solid tumors that either didn't respond originally, or no longer respond, to conventional therapies. The study will cost $100,000 per patient receiving therapy, and for many patients (those living in 22 states, including North Carolina) the costs may be covered by their insurance company. There is no cost to donate blood. For general information about insurance coverage of clinical trials, go to the American Cancer Society's web site at www.cancer.org/docroot/ETO/content/ETO_6_2x_State_Laws_Regarding_Clinical_Trials.asp.)

For more information about qualifications for donors and participants, go to www.wfubmc.edu/LIFT (Web site will be available the evening of 6/27.) Cancer-killing ability in these cells is highest during the summer, so researchers are hoping to find volunteers who can afford the therapy quickly.

"If the study is effective, it would be another arrow in the quiver of treatments aimed at cancer," said Mark Willingham, M.D., a co-researcher and professor of pathology. "It is based on 10 years of work since the cancer-resistant mouse was first discovered."

Volunteers who are selected as donors – based on the observed potential cancer-fighting activity of their white cells – will complete the apheresis, a two- to three-hour process similar to platelet donation, to collect their granulocytes. The cancer patients will then receive the granulocytes through a transfusion – a safe process that has been used for more than 30 years. Normally, the treatment is used for patients who have antibiotic-resistant infectious diseases. The treatment will be given for three to four consecutive days on an outpatient basis. Up to three donors may be necessary to collect enough blood product for one study participant.

"The difference between our study and the traditional white cell therapy is that we're selecting the healthy donors based on the cancer-killing ability of their white blood cells," said Cui. The scientists are calling the therapy Leukocyte InFusion Therapy (LIFT).

The goal of the phase II study is to determine whether patients can tolerate a sufficient amount of transfused granulocytes for the treatment. Participants will be monitored on a regular basis, and after three months scientists will evaluate whether the treatment results in clear clinical benefits for the patients. If this phase of the study is successful, scientists will expand the study to determine if the treatment is best suited to certain types of cancer.

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MIT-led team finds language without numbers

Amazonian tribe has no word to express 'one,' other numbers

An Amazonian language with only 300 speakers has no word to express the concept of "one" or any other specific number, according to a new study from an MIT-led team.

The team, led by MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences Edward Gibson, found that members of the Piraha tribe in remote northwestern Brazil use language to express relative quantities such as "some" and "more," but not precise numbers.

It is often assumed that counting is an innate part of human cognition, said Gibson, "but here is a group that does not count. They could learn, but it's not useful in their culture, so they've never picked it up."

The study, which appeared in the June 10 online edition of the journal Cognition, offers evidence that number words are a concept invented by human cultures as they are needed, and not an inherent part of language, Gibson said.

The work builds on a study published in 2004, which found that the Piraha had words to express the quantities "one," "two," and "many." The MIT researchers observed the same phenomenon when they asked Piraha speakers to describe sets of objects as they were added, from one to 10.

However, the MIT team decided to add a new twist--they started with 10 objects and asked the tribe members to count down. In that experiment, the tribe members used the word previously thought to mean "two" when as many as five or six objects were present, and they used the word for "one" for any quantity between one and four.

This indicates that "these aren't counting numbers at all," said Gibson. "They're signifying relative quantities."

He said this type of counting strategy has never been observed before, although it may also be found in other languages believed to have "one," "two," and "many" counting words.

The paper is part of a larger project that investigates the relationship between Piraha culture and their cognition and language, testing some claims by Daniel Everett, a linguist at Illinois State University, in a 2005 issue of Current Anthropology.

One other discovery of the project is that the Piraha can perform exact matching tasks as long as there is no memory component to them, but once there is a memory component, they approximate their matches. This suggests that language is a cognitive technology that aids humans in memory tasks.

Lead author of the paper is Michael Frank, a graduate student in Gibson's lab. Other authors are Evelina Fedorenko, a postdoctoral associate at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, and Everett.

massachusetts institute of technology

The Bizaar Land Exploring Fish - Terranaut

I think all that needs to be said here is, nice invention but could do with being a bit faster!

Geologists Discover Signs of Volcanoes Blowing their Tops in the Deep Ocean

Evidence of Violent Eruptions on Gakkel Ridge in the Arctic Defies Assumptions about Seafloor Pressure and Volcanism

A research team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has uncovered evidence of explosive volcanic eruptions deep beneath the ice-covered surface of the Arctic Ocean. Such violent eruptions of splintered, fragmented rock—known as pyroclastic deposits—were not thought possible at great ocean depths because of the intense weight and pressure of water and because of the composition of seafloor magma and rock.

Researchers found jagged, glassy rock fragments spread out over a 10 square kilometer (4 square mile) area around a series of small volcanic craters about 4,000 meters (2.5 miles) below the sea surface. The volcanoes lie along the Gakkel Ridge, a remote and mostly unexplored section of the mid-ocean ridge system that runs through the Arctic Ocean.

“These are the first pyroclastic deposits we've ever found in such deep water, at oppressive pressures that inhibit the formation of steam, and many people thought this was not possible,” said WHOI geophysicist Rob Reves-Sohn, lead author and chief scientist for the Arctic Gakkel Vents Expedition (AGAVE) of July 2007. “This means that a tremendous blast of CO2 was released into the water column during the explosive eruption.”

The paper, which was co-authored by 22 investigators from nine institutions in four countries, was published in the June 26 issue of the journal Nature.

Seafloor volcanoes usually emit lobes and sheets of lava during an eruption, rather than explosive plumes of gas, steam, and rock that are ejected from land-based volcanoes. Because of the hydrostatic pressure of seawater, ocean eruptions are more likely to resemble those of Kilauea than Mount Saint Helens or Mount Pinatubo.

Making just the third expedition ever launched to the Gakkel Ridge—and the first to visually examine the seafloor--researchers used a combination of survey instruments, cameras, and a seafloor sampling platform to collect samples of rock and sediment, as well as dozens of hours of high-definition video. They saw rough shards and bits of basalt blanketing the seafloor and spread out in all directions from the volcanic craters they discovered and named Loke, Oden, and Thor.

They also found deposits on top of relatively new lavas and high-standing features—such as Duque’s Hill and Jessica’s Hill--indications that the rock debris had fallen or precipitated out of the water, rather than being moved as part of a lava flow that erupted from the volcanoes.

Closer analysis has shown that the some of the tiny fragments are angular bits of quenched glass known to volcanologists as limu o Pele, or “Pele's seaweed.” These fragments are formed when lava is stretched thin around expanding gas bubbles during an explosion. Reves-Sohn and colleagues also found larger blocks of rock—known as talus—that could have been ejected by explosive blasts from the seafloor.

Much of Earth’s surface is made up of oceanic crust formed by volcanism along seafloor mid-ocean ridges. These volcanic processes are tied to the rising of magma from Earth’s mantle and the spreading of Earth’s tectonic plates. Submerged under several kilometers of cold water, the volcanism of mid-ocean ridges tends to be relatively subdued compared to land-based eruptions.

To date, there have been scattered signs of pyroclastic volcanism in the sea, mostly in shallower water depths. Samples of sediment and rock collected on other expeditions have hinted at the possibilities at depths down to 3,000 meters, but the likelihood of explosive eruptions at greater depths seemed slim.

One reason is the tremendous pressure exerted by the weight of seawater, known as hydrostatic pressure. More importantly, it is very difficult to build up the amount of steam and carbon dioxide gas in the magma that would be required to explode a mass of rock up into the water column. (Far less energy is needed to do so in air.) In fact, the buildup of CO2 in magma in the sea crust would have to be ten times higher than anyone has ever observed in seafloor samples.

The findings from the Gakkel Ridge expedition appear to show that deep-sea pyroclastic eruptions can and do happen. “The circulation and plumbing of the Gakkel Ridge might be different,” said Reves-Sohn. “There must be a lot more volatiles in the system than we thought.” The research team hypothesizes that excess gas may be building up like foam or froth near the ceiling of the magma chambers beneath the crust, waiting to pop like champagne beneath a cork.

“Are pyroclastic eruptions more common than we thought, or is there something special about the conditions along the Gakkel Ridge?” said Reves-Sohn. “That is our next question.”

Support for the Arctic Gakkel Vents Expedition and for vehicle development was provided by the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs; the NSF Division of Ocean Sciences; the Gordon Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems, an NSF Engineering Research Center; the NASA Astrobiology Program; and the WHOI Deep Ocean Exploration Institute.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, independent organization in Falmouth, Mass., dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, its primary mission is to understand the oceans and their interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the oceans’ role in the changing global environment.

Pictures of volcanoe eruptions

Source

Fantastic video showing sound resonance with rice.

Just a quick warning, If you have sound on for this video turn it down a little bit as the frequancy gets very high and can hurt your ears >.<, It hurt mine!

Found this on Hollowmarked's Blog

Brian Cox Discusses the Large Hadron Collider at CERN

I was recently contact by a gentleman from that was involved in an interview with Brain Cox. The Interview is really long so I have put some highlights from the interview below! Thanks Tim at Oreilly.com

For a video of Brian Cox at the TED conference check out an earlier post I made

Brian Cox on CERN's supercollider

TO: Is there any real disagreement? Are there camps that have developed?

BC: Oh absolutely; there's a huge disagreement because this is--it's truly a leap into the unknown. I mean you hear that a lot about scientific experiments but this one really is a big jump. The most powerful accelerator at the moment is in Chicago actually; the Tevatronat Fermilab where I've worked. I worked there before I moved onto the LHC. And the LHC is an order of magnitude pretty much--increase in energy and it's a huge increase in the number of proton/proton collisions we can have every second, so it--in a sense I was going to say all bets are off. It's not quite true; I mean we know some things that we're going to discover so we will discover the origin of mass in the universe, the mechanism that generates the mass for the fundamental particles.

TO: And that would be the Higgs Boson?

BC: Well yeah it would be. I mean the correct thing to say is whatever does that job we should see. I mean I would say actually we will see; as long as the machine functions properly we'll see it. It could be the Higgs; yes--in a sense the most likely and that it's a theory that works and--but it could be something else and you will find people who don't--certainly don't believe in the so-called standard model Higgs. There--there are many different Higgs theories; there's the--or Higgs manifestations of the Higgs mechanism. One of the--the standard model of the Higgs at the [simplest] you find one Higgs particle covers standard model Higgs, but there are so-called sleeper symmetric theories that many people think are actually possibly more likely. And in some of those theories, the [simplest] you get five Higgs particles. You know so--so even the Higgs--you can have different camps as to how many Higgs particles you'll find. It's fascinating times to be a particle physicist.

TO: So the existence of the Higgs was suggested in the early '90s in Chicago; is that true?

BC: No; it was the--we've got no direct experimental evidence for the Higgs particle. We've got--we've got indirect evidence in that the standard model of which it starts, which our best theory of particle physics at the moment--works and as far as--and you can--we tested it to immense precision in Chicago at Tevatron and experiments at CERN and at SLAC for that matter in San Francisco and elsewhere. And it always--it works beautifully well and the Higgs is a part of that. So you can claim it as indirect evidence but you can evade that indirect evidence actually very easily in the theories. So the correct thing to say is it might not exist; it might be something else that we haven't thought of yet.

TO: It's called the Large Hadron Collider but I've heard you say protons.

BC: Yeah.

TO: Was the reasoning behind calling it the Large Hadron Collider is it going to be colliding other things besides protons?

BC: Well you can actually yes; it can collide nuclei so there is a program at the LHC to collide gold nuclei which is what RHIC does--the Relative Heavy Iron Collider--at Brookhaven in New York. And so it can--it can collide different things. The proton program is kind of the you know--the lead program in a sense because that's how you get the most amount of energy to the smallest amount of space, so you can try to look at things like Higgs particles. But there's a whole program--clan within a detector called Alice which is dedicated to heavy iron collisions, the nucleus collisions and they look at these things called quark gluon plasmas, which that's the way the universe was believed to be let's say a millionth of a second after it began--it's a big soup of quarks and gluons. So it can bang together other things, but--yeah; maybe it's just--I don't know why you'd call it--you could have called it the Large Collider I suppose. I don't know why it's called the LHC; I'd have to ask--Lyn Evans is one of the LHC Project Leaders. It's a good question; I'm going to ask him that.

TO: So it's not a large particle per se; it's just a "large Collider"? It could be called the "Hadron Collider"?

BC: Yeah, yeah; no large just means big 27-kilometer in circumference ring, so [Laughs] yeah. I mean--although it's got to be said actually that protons are pretty big things compared to the things we're looking for, the elementary particles of matter.

Some questions excluded

TO: In the circle and the protons travel in some sort of perfect vacuum? I mean how do they--

BC: Yes; there are actually two pipes for most of the LHC, so two beam pipes and they're about you know what--10-centimeters maybe across you know--they're not very big pipes, so one going one way and one going the other way and those pipes are in a--in what we call a cryostat so which is where the magnets are as well and that's I'm told one yard across--. Now that's not me being quaint in English. It's the only imperial measurement in the LHC and it's there because that's the diameter of a standard oil pipe. This is what I'm told, so it's cheaper to make things one-yard across. So basically you've got a big pipe--one yard across with all the magnets and the beam pipes embedded in it and that's the thing that's down at the--at minus 271-degrees. And then as you say the beams are in beam pipes and those bean pipes emerge into one pipe at the interaction point so at the places where you cross the beams through each of the--so you get the collision and that happens inside the four detectors of the LHC.

TO: There are four main test points on the circle?

BC: Yeah; basically--that's right.

TO: And these are--what have these machines like--if you look at something called the Atlas or the CMS, these are at each of the points and that's what you work on?

BC: Yes; so Atlas is a--you think of a digital camera. It really is except that it's 40-meters long and 20-meters high; it's a big cylinder. It's in a cavern 100-meters below the ground. It's bigger than the nave of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. So it's an immense structure but its job is to sit around the point where you pass the beams through each of them so you collide the protons together and it's in those collisions that you--one way of thinking about it is recreating the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began--for a fraction of a second and it's in those conditions that you hope to reveal the earth--I suppose the underlying simplicity of the universe.

TO: Two protons, two positively charged particles each made up of three quarks a piece--what do you get when you bang those together?

BC: Well what you do is you get a big mess is the answer. [Laughs] And what happens I mean protons are actually full of stuff. The three quarks is a simple view; there's other things called gluons in there. There are more quarks that are not in there in a sense so it's a big bag of particles and what you actually do is you collide two of the constituents together so let's say two gluons bump into each other. The rest of the protons fly out in the direction in which they came as a big cloud of debris really. So typically you'll bang two gluons together and it's that--that you're interested in. Those two gluons could produce a Higgs particle let's say and then the Higgs particle will decay into other particles and you'll collect that debris as well. So you're interested--the protons are really energy deliverers. All you're doing is trying to get energy into this small space and out of that energy you would hope to make new particles that you've never seen before.

For more of the interview please check the whole thing over at Oreilly

Scientists get online news aggregator

Canadian researcher launches science version of Google News. 

A Canadian graduate student dissatisfied with science coverage on online sites such as Google News and Yahoo News has created a news aggregator especially for scientists.

Michael Imbeault, an HIV researcher at the Université Laval in Quebec, launched his fully automated site called e! Science News (http://esciencenews.com) last month. It has already attracted 300,000 different users, and averages 5,000 visits a day, he says.

News aggregators display headlines and snippets from other media sources, but don't produce their own content. Of the top five online US news sites, three are aggregators — Google News, AOL News and Yahoo News — and only two — CNN.com and MSNBC.com — generate original content. Yahoo and AOL use human editors and source almost all science stories from wire agencies, such as Reuters. Google News uses computer algorithms to aggregate headlines from thousands of news sources, ranking them by how often and on which sites stories appear. Science and technology coverage on Google News, for example, is notoriously devoid of basic science.

Imbeault's site indexes science news sites, clusters similar articles together on the basis of the frequency of word co-occurrence, and then uses Bayesian statistics to automatically assign articles to topics such as astronomy, health and climate. It then ranks them using factors such as timeliness, and the number of sites reporting the same news, which indicates the story's importance. At present, it is limited to around 40 news sources — including Nature News, The New York Times science section and institutional news sites such as NASA, which offer free content for at least a period — but this will be increased, he says.

Imbeault built the site on top of the Drupal open-source content management software. He says that his aggregator will also be improved by moving to semantics-based techniques that better capture the meaning of a text.

Source

Marijuana Has Anti-Inflammatory That Won't Get You High

A compound in marijuana may be a potent anti-inflammatory agent that won't get people high, scientists say.

The finding could be a boon to sufferers of arthritis, cirrhosis, and other diseases. Existing drugs can be less effective for some people and can carry side effects, from stomach ulcers to increased risk of heart attacks.

Marijuana supporters have long argued that the plant's active ingredients, known as cannabinoids, are safe and effective treatments for pain, nausea, and other ailments. y 2015.

The most active cannabinoid—delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC—is known to have anti-inflammatory properties. But it is also responsible for the plant's psychotropic effects.

Now researchers say that another cannabinoid, called beta-caryophyllene, or (E)-BCP, helps combat inflammation without affecting the brain. (E)-BCP is already part of many people's daily diets, the researchers note. Foods that are particularly high in the compound include black pepper, oregano, basil, lime, cinnamon, carrots, and celery.

Essential oils from cannabis plants whose leaves and flowers are used to make the marijuana drug contain up to 35 percent (E)-BCP.

But even after decades of cannabis research, scientists hadn't previously known that the compound had anti-inflammatory properties. Jürg Gertsch of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology said "This is because the focus was on the classical cannabinoids [rather than (E)-BCP],"

Lone Receptor
Cannabinoids in marijuana are known to primarily affect two of the many molecular receptors in the human body. The CB1 receptor is found in the brain and central nervous system and is responsible for the high people experience when they smoke pot.

The other receptor, called CB2, is found in tissues in the rest of the body and triggers a cascade of biochemical reactions that can help combat inflammation.

"Our interest is to exploit the pharmacological nature of the CB2 receptor," because it does not have psychotropic side effects, Gertsch explained in an email.

"Targeting the CB2 receptor could be a therapeutic strategy to prevent or treat diseases like Crohn's disease (inflammation of the intestinal tract), liver cirrhosis, osteoarthritis, and therosclerosis."

THC activates both receptors, so it won't alleviate inflammation without also making people high.

But (E)-BCP affects only the CB2 receptor, according to the new study, which appeard in yesterday's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As part of their research, the scientists engineered a strain of mice that lacked the CB2 receptor. The team then fed the modified mice and normal mice a diet rich in (E)-BCP. When the scientists induced inflammation with chemicals, normal mice experienced an anti-inflammatory effect while the genetically engineered mice did not.

"This experiment shows that the anti-inflammatory effects are mediated via the CB2 receptor," Gertsch said.

Drug Building Block?
Stephen Safe, director of the Texas A&M University's Center for Environmental and Genetic medicine, said he is impressed by the team's results both in mouse cells and in live mice.

"They did a good study," said Safe, who was not involved in the research.

He also noted that a lot of other studies have been finding that fat-soluble chemicals from plants activate many receptors in the body.

"A lot of these [come from plants that] have been used in traditional medicine," he said. "This is another example of that—but a bit of a sexy one."

In this case, he noted, Gertsch's team has identified some "petty good" activators of the CB2 receptor.

"Can they be further developed and modified into better anti-inflammatory drugs?" he asked. "Maybe. [(E)-BCP] could be a new model [compound] for drug design."

National Geographic