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Supermassive Black Hole Is Thrown Out of Galaxy 167

Posted by samzenpus from the moving-to-better-quarters dept.
DarkKnightRadick writes "An undergrad student at the University of Utrecht, Marianne Heida, has found evidence of a supermassive black hole being tossed out of its galaxy. According to the article, the black hole — which has a mass equivalent to one billion suns — is possibly the culmination of two galaxies merging (or colliding, depending on how you like to look at it) and their black holes merging, creating one supermassive beast. The black hole was found using the Chandra Source Catalog (from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory). The direction of the expulsion is also possibly indicative of the direction of rotation of the two black holes as they circled each other before merging."
Biotech

FDA Approves Vaccine For Prostate Cancer 194

Posted by timothy from the where-you-can-stick-it dept.
reverseengineer writes "The US Food and Drug Administration has given its first first approval for a therapeutic cancer vaccine. In a clinical trial 'involving 512 men, those who got Provenge (sipuleucel-T) had a median survival of 25.8 months after treatment, while those who got a placebo lived a median of 21.7 months. After three years, 32 percent of those who got Provenge were alive, compared with 23 percent of those who got the placebo. ... "The big story here is that this is the first proof of principle and proof that immunotherapy works in general in cancer, which I think is a huge observation," said Dr. Philip Kantoff, chief of solid tumor oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and the lead investigator in Dendreon's largest clinical trial for the drug. "I think this is a very big thing and will lead to a lot more enthusiasm for the approach."'"

Comment Correlation is not causation, but causation is. (Score 2, Funny) 271

by neonleonb (#31750106) Attached to: Look At Sick People To Give Your Immune System a Boost

Why the dickens are people tagging this "correlationisnotcausation"? It was a controlled experiment, so there weren't any hidden causes to explain away the causation. It's like people don't actually understand what "correlation is not causation" means... but I'd hoped that at least here on Slashdot folks would be cleverer than that.

Comment *Quickly changing* magnetic fields (Score 2, Informative) 586

by neonleonb (#31675912) Attached to: Magnetism Can Sway Man's Moral Compass

TMS works by using quickly-changing magnetic fields to induce electric fields and neural firing. After 25 minutes of this, the neurons in that region are thoroughly worn out and don't function right for a while (see research on "temporary lesions").

This isn't about magnetic fields in general, just about very strong, quickly-changing ones applied to this one spot for a long time. This is among the most sensational writeup I've ever seen, and it totally misrepresents the point.
Cellphones

Memory Cards of 3,000 Phones Infected By Malware 63

Posted by kdawson from the speak-clearly-so-the-botnet-can-hear dept.
itwbennett sends us a few links from IT World tracing a story about infected microSD cards in Vodaphone-supplied mobile phones. "The original report came on March 8 after an employee of Panda Security plugged a newly ordered HTC Magic phone from Vodafone into a Windows computer, where it triggered an alert from the antivirus software. Further inspection of the phone found the device's 8GB microSD memory card was infected with a client for the now-defunct Mariposa botnet, the Conficker worm, and a password stealer for the Lineage game. At that point it was at thought to be an issue with a specific refurbished phone. On Wednesday another phone surfaced with traces of the Mariposa botnet. And now Vodafone is saying that as many as 3,000 HTC Magic phones may be affected."

Comment Re:Priceless (Score 1) 678

by neonleonb (#31368212) Attached to: Ubisoft's New DRM Cracked In One Day
You can get into someone's apartment without breaking the lock. Maybe you break the window, or the door, or something else. The same can be true about computer code. The grandparent made a comment about which piece the crackers modified--it looks to him like they went around the internet connection part, rather than breaking it itself.
Image

NHS Should Stop Funding Homeopathy, Says Parliamentary Committee 507

Posted by samzenpus from the how-am-I-going-to-align-my-chakras-now dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Homeopathic remedies work no better than placebos, and so should no longer be paid for by the UK National Health Service, a committee of British members of parliament has concluded. In preparing its report, the committee, which scrutinizes the evidence behind government policies, took evidence from scientists and homeopaths, and reviewed numerous reports and scientific investigations into homeopathy. It found no evidence that such treatments work beyond providing a placebo effect." Updated 201025 19:40 GMT by timothy: This recommendation has some people up in arms.

Submission + - Natural carbon crystals found--harder than diamond (msn.com)

Submitted by
HikingStick
HikingStick writes: "The science desk at MSNBC.com just published a report that a new, naturally occurring form of carbon has been found in a meteorite fragment. From the article:

"researchers were polishing a slice of the carbon-rich Havero meteorite that fell to Earth in Finland in 1971. When they then studied the polished surface they discovered carbon-loaded spots that were raised well above the rest of the surface — suggesting that these areas were harder than the diamonds used in the polishing paste...graphite layers were shocked and heated enough to create bonds between the layers — which is exactly how humans manufacture diamonds, Chen explained.

"Ferroir's team took the next step and put the diamond-resistant crystals under the scrutiny of some very rigorous mineralogical analyzing instruments to learn how its atoms are lined up. That allowed them to confirm that they had, indeed, found a new "phase" or polymorph of crystalline carbon as well as a type of diamond that had been predicted to exist decades ago, but had never been found in nature until now.""

Comment Re:Could happen (Score 1) 691

by neonleonb (#29737097) Attached to: The LHC, the Higgs Boson, and Fate
But can't you measure whether the particle is in a distributed state or is in a single state? For instance, with diffraction, you can get a particle's distribution to interfere with itself, but that interference doesn't happen if you collapse the distribution by observation. If something similar could be done with spin, then you could test whether or not the other entangled particle has been collapsed, thereby passing information. Not that I'm convinced that logic is right, just that I don't understand why it's wrong.

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