A personalised blood test that can identify tumour DNA could be the first step towards a long-promised revolution in the way cancer is treated. |
| In the short term, the test |
| could be used to spot cancer
recurrence before tumour growth shows up on scans, meaning that
treatment could be started earlier. |
| Doctors already classify cancers by some of the genes that get switched on by the disease, and use this to guide treatment in some cases. For example, breast cancers are often divided into those that express oestrogen receptors on their surface and are therefore likely to respond to the drug tamoxifen, and those that don’t.Read more at www.newscientist.com |
| Lesch-Nyhan syndrome causes compulsive self-mutilation. Children eat their lips or fingers, and stab their faces with sharp objects. They feel the pain, but they cannot stop themselves. Why would a loving, all-powerful creator allow anyone to be born with such an awful disease? |
| Lesch-Nyhan is just one of the tens of thousands of genetic disorders discovered so far. At least a tenth of people have some kind of debilitating genetic disease, and most of us will become sick at some point during our lifetime as a result of mutations that cause diseases such as cancer. |
The human genome, Avise concludes, offers no shred of comfort for those seeking evidence of a loving, all-powerful creator who had a direct hand in designing us, as not just creationists but many believers who accept evolution think was the case. If some entity did meddle with life on Earth, it either did not know what it was doing or did not care, or both. |
 1865: Gregor Mendel reads his first paper on genetics to the local scientific organization. It will be decades before Mendel’s intellectual seeds take root in the fertile grounds of Darwinism and grow a scientific revolution.
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| he grew 28,000 pea plants during the period from 1856 to 1863. He kept careful records of his crossbreeding experiments and recorded each individual plant’s height, pod shape, flower location and color, and seed shape and color. |
Mendel presented the results of his research at sessions of the Nature Research Society of Brünn on Feb. 8 and March 8, 1865. Mendel’s papers introduced the concepts of dominant and recessive “factors.” He also explained his data by postulating his two laws of heredity: |
| The Law of Segregation. Even though an organism inherits two factors from its parents, it contributes only one of them to its offspring. |
| The Law of Independent Assortment. The factors for different traits are sorted separately from one another.Read more at www.wired.com |
| Candidates for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize include a Russian human rights group, a Chinese dissident and an inanimate object: the Internet, people who made the nominations said Tuesday. |
As the submission deadline for the coveted award closed, the Nobel Committee maintained its tradition of giving no hints — the contenders are kept secret for 50 years. But some nominations were announced by those who made them. |
The Internet was proposed by the Italian version of Wired magazine, which cited its use as a tool to advance “dialogue, debate and consensus through communication” and to promote democracy. Organizers said signatories to its petition backing the nomination include 2003 peace laureate and exiled Iranian activist Shirin Ebadi — which would make it a legitimate entry. Read more at www.boston.com |
 Everyone is familiar with the traditional EKG – you lie in the hospital bed, the leads connected to your body, as a machine is recording your heart rate and other vital statistics. But what if it was all wireless? What if you didn’t need to be in the hospital stuck in bed to be monitored?
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The Japanese website Nikkei’s Tech-On! reports that engineers are developing a small, portable, and most importantly, wireless EKG system. Designed to run approximately 3 days on a charge, the device will communicate wirelessly using either a wifi or cellular connection. Read more at www.crunchgear.com |
Qosmo used augmented reality to share information about the N Building using an iPhone App. You can read the tweets of people inside. |
| Japanese company Qosmo, along with Terada Design have transformed the N Builing in Tokyo into an augmented reality display. Using a limited release iPhone application, people walking through Tachikawa Station can view the pixelated designs on the building’s windows and obtain up to date shop information, or even read the tweets of the people inside. |
| Those designs, called QR codes, are a common augmented reality technique that allow the viewing device to know which information to retrieve for the object being viewed. According to the blog of Qosmo CEO Nao Tokui, however, you can get the same information using the building’s natural features instead of the QR codes. |
The average American consumes about 34 gigabytes of data and information each day — an increase of about 350 percent over nearly three decades — according to a report published Wednesday by researchers at the University of California, San Diego. |
According to calculations in the report, that daily information diet includes about 100,000 words, both those read in print and on the Web as well as those heard on television and the radio. By comparison, Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” contains about 460,000 words. |
The researchers, who built their work on previous studies of information consumption, found that Americans take in data through various channels, including the television, radio, the Web, text messages and video games. Most of this time is spent in front of screens watching TV-related content, averaging nearly five hours of daily consumption. Read more at www.nytimes.com |
The first time I saw this thing I thought, “Holy crap! An iPod mated with an X-ray machine.” General Electric (NYSE: GE) CEO and Chairman Jeff Immett debuted a pocket sized ultrasound scanner a few weeks ago at the Web2.0 conference in San Francisco. The Vscan is aimed at enhancing the level of diagnostic power of the average doctor, helping detect dangerous conditions before they get worse. Check out the introductory video from GE Reports after the break.
Ultrasound has a wide range of uses from examining fetuses to checking on the heart. It’s non-invasive, provides relatively quick results, and costs less than other examinations. The Vscan puts all of those advantages in the palm of your doctor’s hand. GE hopes that the device will become as common as the stethoscopes doctors rely upon today. |
| DNA has been found to have a bizarre ability to put itself together, even at a distance, when according to known science it shouldn’t be able to. Explanation: None, at least not yet. |
Scientists are reporting evidence that contrary to our current beliefs about what is possible, intact double-stranded DNA has the “amazing” ability to recognize similarities in other DNA strands from a distance. Somehow they are able to identify one another, and the tiny bits of genetic material tend to congregate with similar DNA. The recognition of similar sequences in DNA’s chemical subunits, occurs in a way unrecognized by science. There is no known reason why the DNA is able to combine the way it does, and from a current theoretical standpoint this feat should be chemically impossible. Read more at www.dailygalaxy.com |
Artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence after 2020, predicts Vernor Vinge, a world-renowned pioneer in AI, who has warned about the risks and opportunities that an electronic super-intelligence would offer to mankind. “It seems plausible that with technology we can, in the fairly near future,” says scifi legend Vernor Vinge, “create (or become) creatures who surpass humans in every intellectual and creative dimension. Events beyond such an event — such a singularity — are as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm.” |
| While the definitions of the Singularity are as varied as people’s fantasies of the future, with a very obvious reason, most agree that artificial intelligence will be the turning point. Once an AI is even the tiniest bit smarter than us, it’ll be able to learn faster and we’ll simply never be able to keep up.Read more at www.dailygalaxy.com |
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