41057801
submission
parallel_prankster writes:
Augmented immune cells have made an impressive impact on the survival of people with leukemia. Thirteen people with a form of the cancer called multiple myeloma were treated with genetically engineered T-cells, and all improved. Cancers often develop because T-cells have lost their ability to target tumour cells, which they normally destroy. To retune that targeting, a team led by Aaron Rapoport at the University of Maryland in Baltimore engineered T-cell genes that coded for a receptor on the cell's surface. They extracted T-cells from each person, then inserted the engineered genes into these cells and re-injected them. The souped-up cells were better able to recognise proteins called NY-ESO-1 and LAGE-1, found on myeloma cells but not healthy ones. All 13 people also had the standard treatment for multiple myeloma, which boosts white blood cell count.
Three months after the injection, 10 of the 13 were in remission or very close to it – a 77 per cent response rate – and the others showed drastic reduction in their cancer. Standard treatment alone gives a response rate of between 33 and 69 per cent. The original paper is available here . The work is encouraging, but a trial that does not include the standard therapy is needed, says Holger Auner, a myeloma specialist at Imperial College London.
38560837
submission
parallel_prankster writes:
NYTimes has an interesting article about how patents are really stiffling inovation in the tech industry. Today, almost every major technology company is involved in ongoing patent battles. Of course, the most significant player is Apple, industry executives say, because of its influence and the size of its claims: in August in California, the company won a $1 billion patent infringement judgment against Samsung. Former Apple employees say senior executives made a deliberate decision over the last decade, after Apple was a victim of patent attacks, to use patents as leverage against competitors to the iPhone, the company’s biggest source of profits. At a technology conference this year, Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, said patent battles had not slowed innovation at the company, but acknowledged that some aspects of the battles had “kind of gotten crazy.” It is a complaint heard throughout the industry. The increasing push to assert ownership of broad technologies has led to a destructive arms race, engineers say. Some point to so-called patent trolls, companies that exist solely to sue over patent violations. Others say big technology companies have also exploited the system’s weaknesses. “There are hundreds of ways to write the same computer program,” said James Bessen, a legal expert at Harvard. And so patent applications often try to encompass every potential aspect of a new technology. When such applications are approved, Mr. Bessen said, “the borders are fuzzy, so it’s really easy to accuse others of trespassing on your ideas.” The number of patent applications, computer-related and otherwise, filed each year at the United States patent office has increased by more than 50 percent over the last decade to more than 540,000 in 2011. Google has received 2,700 patents since 2000, according to the patent analysis firm M-CAM. Microsoft has received 21,000.
35867565
submission
parallel_prankster writes:
In it's legal fillings for the case against Apple Corp. Samsung has shown that it was considering putting to market in the summer of 2006, six months before the unveiling of the iPhone, a number of phone designs that have been claimed by Apple as stolen from the Iphone. It extends to more than just the hardware — Samsung was also working on interfaces that looks remarkably like iOS (actually, that look remarkably like PalmOS) — in the summer and fall of 2006. Again, before the iPhone was released. Samsung is being accused of stealing, even thought the company was clearly working on what it supposedly stole before the iPhone was even released. Samsung's phones bear more resemblance to its own pre-iPhone designs than to the iPhone, yet Apple and its supporters still insist Samsung is a thief. Another article on this is available here .
34628777
submission
parallel_prankster writes:
NYTimes reports that etched into the base of Google’s new wireless home media player that was introduced on Wednesday is its most intriguing feature. On the underside of the Nexus Q is a simple inscription: “Designed and Manufactured in the U.S.A.” The Google executives and engineers who decided to build the player here are engaged in an experiment in American manufacturing. “We’ve been absent for so long, we decided, ‘Why don’t we try it and see what happens?’ ” said Andy Rubin, the Google executive who leads the company’s Android mobile business. The project will be closely watched by other electronics companies. It has become accepted wisdom that consumer electronics products can no longer be made in the United States. During the last decade, abundant low-cost Chinese labor and looser environmental regulations have virtually erased what was once a vibrant American industry. Since the 1990s, one American company after another, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Apple, has become a design and marketing shell, with production shifted to contract manufacturers in Shenzhen and elsewhere in China.
Now that trend may be showing early signs of reversing. It’s a trickle, but some American companies are again making products in the United States. While many of those companies have been small, like ET Water Systems, there have also been some highly visible moves by America’s largest consumer and industrial manufacturers. General Electric and Caterpillar, for example, have moved assembly operations back to the United States in the last year. (Airbus, a European company, is said to be near a deal to build jets in Alabama.)
34516075
submission
parallel_prankster writes:
NYTimes reports that the Supreme Court on Monday rejected much of Arizona’s tough new immigration law but allowed one key provision to stand, saying federal law did not pre-empt the state's instruction to its police to check the immigration status of people they detain. Several other important provisions of the law conflicted with federal laws, the court found, rejecting provisions that made it a state crime for immigrants not to register with the federal government or to seek or hold jobs without proper documents, and allowing warrantless arrests of some people suspected of being deportable. But on the question of allowing the status checks, the court was unanimous. “The court correctly held that federal immigration law trumps most of Arizona’s controversial immigration law," Stephen W. Yale-Loehr, who teaches immigration law at Cornell University and is co-author of a treatise on the subject, said. "But by upholding Arizona’s ‘check your papers’ provision, at least for now, the court has given other states a green light to try to enact similar immigration laws."
Even after the Supreme Court’s ruling that one key provision was not automatically pre-empted, immigration groups will be able to challenge it based on an argument that the court was not considering: that the law discriminates on the basis of race and ethnic background.
34030049
submission
parallel_prankster writes:
NY Times reports that Nokia said on Thursday that it would slash 10,000 jobs, or 19 percent of its work force, by the end of 2013 as part of an emergency overhaul that includes closing research centers and a factory in Germany, Canada and Finland, and the departures of three senior executives.
The company also warned investors that its loss was likely to be greater in the second quarter, which ends June 30, than it was in the first, and that the negative effects of its transition to a Windows-based smartphone business would continue into the third quarter.Nokia, based in Espoo, Finland, posted a loss of €929 million, or $1.2 billion, in the first quarter as sales plummeted 29 percent. Once the undisputed global leader in the mobile phone business, Nokia has been outcompeted by Apple, as well as by Samsung and other makers of handsets running Google’s Android operating system.
33211225
submission
parallel_prankster writes:
New York Times reports that a judge in New Jersey has sentenced Dharun Ravi to 30 days in jail Monday for using a webcam to spy on his Rutgers University roommate having sex with a man, in a case that galvanized concern about suicide among gay teenagers but also prompted debate about the use of laws against hate crimes. The case drew wide attention because his roommate, Tyler Clementi, jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge in September 2010, a few days after learning of the spying. A jury convicted Mr. Ravi in March of all 15 counts against him, which included invasion of privacy and bias intimidation. The relatively light sentence — he faced up to 10 years in prison — surprised many who were watching the hearing, as it came after the judge spent several minutes criticizing Mr. Ravi’s behavior.
33104001
submission
parallel_prankster writes:
Older adults who drank coffee — caffeinated or decaffeinated — had a lower risk of death overall than others who did not drink coffee, according to a study by researchers from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, and AARP. Coffee drinkers were less likely to die from heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, injuries and accidents, diabetes, and infections, although the association was not seen for cancer. These results from a large study of older adults were observed after adjustment for the effects of other risk factors on mortality, such as smoking and alcohol consumption. They also found that the association between coffee and reduction in risk of death increased with the amount of coffee consumed. Relative to men and women who did not drink coffee, those who consumed three or more cups of coffee per day had approximately a 10 percent lower risk of death. Researchers caution, however, that they can't be sure whether these associations mean that drinking coffee actually makes people live longer. The full paper is available only for subscribers at the New England Journal of Medicine webpage .
32914561
submission
parallel_prankster writes:
Bloomberg reports that Eduardo Saverin, the billionaire co- founder of Facebook Inc. (FB), renounced his U.S. citizenship before an initial public offering that values the social network at as much as $96 billion, a move that may reduce his tax bill.
Facebook plans to raise as much as $11.8 billion through the IPO, the biggest in history for an Internet company. Saverin’s stake is about 4 percent, according to the website Who Owns Facebook. At the high end of the IPO valuation, that would be worth about $3.84 billion. Saverin, 30, joins a growing number of people giving up U.S. citizenship, a move that can trim their tax liabilities in that country.
Saverin won’t escape all U.S. taxes. Americans who give up their citizenship owe what is effectively an exit tax on the capital gains from their stock holdings, even if they don’t sell the shares, said Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, director of the international tax program at the University of Michigan’s law school. For tax purposes, the IRS treats the stock as if it has been sold.
32865009
submission
parallel_prankster writes:
In recent years researchers have made great strides in their theoretical understanding of how "Invisibility Cloaks" work and consequently built increasingly complex and impressive devices. But these devices generally work in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum, where wavelengths are measured in centimetres. Enter Arseniy Kuznetsov at the Data Storage Institute in Singapore and a few pals. These guys say they've found an alternative to split ring resonators that work well at optical frequencies, with few losses. This alternative is silicon nanospheres between 100 and 200 nm in diameter. It turns out that these spheres behave just like split ring resonators in the sense that they allow for the same kind of magnetic resonances when they interact with light. This magnetic resonance can also be tuned to match any part of the visible spectrum simply selecting spheres of a specific size. That's important because it opens up an entirely new way make invisibility cloaks that operate in the visible region. "These optical systems open up new perspectives for fabrication of low-loss optical metamaterials and nanophotonic devices," they say. The trouble of course is making these spheres.
32506837
submission
parallel_prankster writes:
Physicists have, for the first time, demonstrated in an experiment that the decision whether two particles were in an entangled or in a separable quantum state can be made even after these particles have been measured and may no longer exist. Entangled particles exhibit correlations which are stronger and more intricate than those allowed by the laws of classical physics. If two particles are in an entangled quantum state, they have perfectly defined joint properties at the expense of losing their individual properties. This is like having two dice which have no orientation until they are subject to measurement, upon which they certainly show the same (random) side up. In contrast, so-called separable quantum states allow for a classical description, because every particle has well-defined properties on its own. Two dice, each one of them with its own well-defined orientation, are in a separable state. Now, one would think that at least the nature of the quantum state must be an objective fact of reality. Either the dice are entangled or not. Zeilinger's team has now demonstrated in an experiment that this is not always the case. Free abstract along with the choice to pay for the full paper can be found on the nature website
32334769
submission
parallel_prankster writes:
Eugene Kaspersky, the CEO of security firm Kaspersky Lab, says Apple is headed for a rough patch. However, this one's in the world of computer security, and he says Apple is already getting into the thick of it. Kaspersky said that when it comes to computer security, Apple's Mac platform was a decade behind Microsoft's, and that it's got some things to learn from its rival. "They will have to make changes in terms of the cycle of updates and so on and will be forced to invest more into their security audits for the software. That's what Microsoft did in the past after so many incidents like Blaster and the more complicated worms that infected millions of computers in a short time," he added. "They had to do a lot of work to check the code to find mistakes and vulnerabilities. Now it's time for Apple [to do the same]."
31678945
submission
parallel_prankster writes:
Researchers Professor Ping Koy Lam, Dr Thomas Symul and Dr Syed Assad from the ANU ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology have developed the fastest random number generator in the world by listening to the 'sounds of silence'. Vacuum was once thought to be completely empty, dark, and silent until the discovery of the modern quantum theory. Since then scientists have discovered that vacuum is an extent of space that has virtual sub-atomic particles spontaneously appearing and disappearing. It is the presence of these virtual particles that give rise to random noise.
The researchers have tuned their very sensitive light detectors to listen to vacuum — a region of space that is empty. Professor Lam said " This 'vacuum noise' is omnipresent and may affect and ultimately pose a limit to the performances of fibre optic communication, radio broadcasts and computer operation." The random number generator is online and can be accessed from anywhere, anytime around the world here
31424001
submission
parallel_prankster writes:
Scientists at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering said they have developed a robotic device made from DNA that could potentially seek specific cell targets and deliver important molecular instructions, such as telling cancer cells to self-destruct. The technology may some day be used to program immune responses to treat various diseases, they wrote in today’s issue of Science. Using the DNA origami method, in which complex three-dimensional shapes and objects are constructed by folding strands of DNA, the researchers created a nanosized robot that looks like an open barrel with its halves connected by a hinge. The DNA barrel, which acts as a container, is held shut by special DNA latches that can recognize and seek out combinations of cell-surface proteins, including disease markers. When the latches find their targets, they reconfigure, causing the two halves of the barrel to swing open and expose the contents or “payload.” The container can hold various types of payloads, including certain molecules with encoded instructions that can interact with specific cell surface signaling receptors. “We can finally integrate sensing and logical computing functions via complex, yet predictable, nanostructures—some of the first hybrids of structural DNA, antibodies, aptamers and metal atomic clusters—aimed at useful, very specific targeting of human cancers and T-cells,” George Church, a Wyss faculty member and principal investigator on the project, said in a statement.
31191961
submission
parallel_prankster writes:
Researchers in MIT are developing tiny robots that can assemble themselves into products and then disassemble when no longer needed. "A heap of smart sand would be analogous to the rough block of stone that a sculptor begins with. The individual grains would pass messages back and forth and selectively attach to each other to form a three-dimensional object; the grains not necessary to build that object would simply fall away. When the object had served its purpose, it would be returned to the heap. Its constituent grains would detach from each other, becoming free to participate in the formation of a new shape." To attach to each other, to communicate and to share power, the cubes use 'electropermanent magnets,' materials whose magnetism can be switched on and off with jolts of electricity. Another discussion for this paper can be read here
