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Submission + - Cancer researcher vanishes with tens of millions of dollars (goerie.com)

jd writes: Steven Curley, MD, who ran the Akesogenx corporation (and may indeed have been the sole employee after the dismissal of Robert Zavala) had been working on a radio-frequency cure for cancer with an engineer by the name of John Kanzius.

Kanzius died, Steven Curley set up the aforementioned parallel company that bought all the rights and patents to the technology before shuttering the John Kanzius Foundation. So far, so very uncool.

Last year, just as the company started aproaching the FDA about clinical trials, Dr Curley got blasted with lawsuits accusing him of loading his shortly-to-be ex-wife's computer with spyware.

Two weeks ago, there was to be a major announcement "within two weeks". Shortly after, the company dropped off the Internet and Dr Curley dropped off the face of the planet.

Robert Zavala is the only name mentioned that could be a fit for the company's DNS record owner. The company does not appear to have any employees other than Dr Curley, making it very unlikely he could have ever run a complex engineering project well enough to get to trial stage. His wife doubtless has a few scores to settle. Donors, some providing several millions, were getting frustrated — and as we know from McAfee, not all in IT are terribly sane. There are many people who might want the money and have no confidence any results were forthcoming.

So, what precisely was the device? Simple enough. Every molecule has an absorption line. It can absorb energy on any other frequency. A technique widely exploited in physics, chemistry and astronomy. People have looked into various ways of using it in medicine for a long time.

The idea was to inject patients with nanoparticles on an absorption line well clear of anything the human body cares about. These particles would be preferentially picked up by cancer cells because they're greedy. Once that's done, you blast the body at the specified frequency. The cancer cells are charbroiled and healthy cells remain intact.

It's an idea that's so obvious I was posting about it here and elsewhere in 1998. The difference is, they had a prototype that seemed to work.

But now there is nothing but the sound of Silence, a suspect list of thousands and a list of things they could be suspected of stretching off to infinity. Most likely, there's a doctor sipping champaign on some island with no extradition treaty. Or a future next-door neighbour to Hans Reiser. Regardless, this will set back cancer research. Money is limited and so is trust. It was, in effect, crowdsource funded and that, too, will feel a blow if theft was involved.

Or it could just be the usual absent-minded scientist discovering he hasn't the skills or awesomeness needed, but has got too much pride to admit it, as has happened in so many science fraud cases.

Comment Re:projecting UV images from below liquid resin? (Score 1) 95

Thank you. I just couldn't understand it; although clearly the clues were there and you interpreted them correctly.

So the UV light goes through the bottom window, through the oxygen-rich zone that will not polymerize. When the light gets through that zone, it polymerizes the resin. The polymerized resin must block the light from going deeper into the liquid resin.

If you have a thick part, though, I wonder if this could work? New unpolymerized resin would have to flow into the gap between the hardened part and the window, and this 'dead zone' is only microns thick. Now, I do believe that most 3D printed parts aren't solid blocks; but this could be a limitation.

Still, looks quite cool. I am sure that I'm not alone wanting to build stuff with it!

Comment How can this work? Even with 4000 satellites? (Score 2) 115

The area of the earth is 4,000^2xpi square miles, so even with 4,000 satellites there is one for every 12,000 square miles. OK, perhaps the very high latitudes don't need to be covered, and you can get that down to 10,000 square miles. For the United States, the average population density means that on average, you'd have 500,000 people covered by one satellite. Europe, Japan, China, Indonesia, and many other countries or regions have significantly higher population density. For cities, this is just a non-starter.

Now, Musk is not a stupid guy, but I just can't see how this works.

Comment Re: stop the pseudo-scientific bullshit (Score 1) 88

The Great Extinction, caused by Siberia becoming one gigantic lava bed (probably after an asteroid strike), was a bit further back in time. Geologically, Siberia is old. You might be confusing the vestiges of Ice Age dessication (which was 10,000 years ago) but which involves the organics on the surface with the geology (aka rocks).

Regardless, though, of how the craters are forming, the fact remains that an awful lot of greenhouse gas is being pumped into the air, an awful lot of information on early civilization is being blasted out of existence, and a lot of locals are finding that the land has suddenly become deadly.

Comment Re: Authority (Score 2, Interesting) 234

That is a good question. The last time the courts ruled on this, the ruling was that the FCC had ceded power and couldn't claim it back without the will of god. Or Congress, or something.

Personally, I'm all in favour of Thor turning up to the Supreme Court, but he probably wouldn't be allowed in on account of not having a visa.

Comment Yes and no (Score 1) 309

First, the complexity of the engine shouldn't matter. You will never get the bulk of users out there to use, or care about, the real power of the engine. They don't want to mess with the engine. The engine should be under the hood, in a black box, whatever engineering metaphor you want. Users just want things that work.

I remember way back when I was at university. There were various absolute rules for good software engineering. The first was that the user should be presented with a must-read manual no longer than one paragraph. Tips and tricks could be more extensive, but that one paragraph was all you needed.

The second was that the user absolutely must not care about how something was implemented. In the case of encryption, I take that to mean, in the case of e-mail, that the engine should not be visible outside of configuration. A supplied key should trigger any behind-the-scenes compatibility mode or necessary configuration to talk to that user. If the keys the user has aren't suitable to correspond with that person, the system should ask if one is needed and tie it to that protocol.

There should be no extra controls in e-mail, except at an advanced user level. If a key exists to correspond with a user, it should be used. If a key exists for inbound e-mail, the key should be applied. The process should be transparent, beyond getting passwords.

Any indexes (particularly if full indexes) should be as secure as the message, good security practices on both will take care of any issues.

Ideally, you want to have the same grades of authentication as for the early certification system, adapted to embed the idea that different people in the web of trust will have done different levels of validation and will be trusted to different degrees. The user should see, but not have to deal with, the level of trust.

Last, GnuPG is probably not the system I'd use. Compatibility cruft needs to be as an optional layer and I'm not confident in implementation.

There should be eight main libraries - public key methods, secret key methods, encryption modes, hashes (which encryption modes will obviously pull from), high level protocols, key store, index store and lacing store. (Lacing is how these are threaded together.) The APIs and ABIs to those libraries should be standardized, so that patching is minimally intrusive and you can exploit the Bazaar approach to get the best mix-n-match.

There should also be a trusted source in the community who can evaluate the code against the various secure and robust programming standards, any utilized theorum provers and the accepted best practices in cryptography. Essentially replicate the sort of work NIST does, but keeping it open and keeping it free of conflict of NSA interest.

Comment Translation (Score 2) 449

US businesses are as incompetent and insecure as Sony, but can be provoked into taking absolutely minimal action when their profits are under direct threat by sufficiently powerful financial organizations. You mean nothing, you never have, you never will. You have no say, you have no power, you have no rights, you cannot walk away. You aren't the customer, merely the product. Easily replaced if damaged.

You aren't getting security because security matters. You aren't getting security because you matter. You're getting it because two vendors and a trading bloc said so.

Comment Re:Molecularly interesting, applications not so mu (Score 1) 64

It's not particularly uncommon for an article about a scientific breakthrough to be almost satirically misleading.

If this really works, for instance, it could be a revolution in television design; far better than the quantum dot technology that people are adapting now. But, if the article was about TVs then it the responses would all go in a million directions (comparisons to plasma, talking about energy star ratings, whatever).

Back in the 50's, it was pretty common for scientists doing nuclear weapons research to talk about things that would happen in stars of unconventional configurations; when they were really broadcasting to the USSR that the US scientists had solved problems with hydrogen bombs that put them far ahead.

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