Good catch on the RNA vs. DNA. However, this would not effect how quickly a vaccine could be made with this technique nor its efficacy, as it is just training the plasma cells to recognize a folded conformation and produce antibodies to bind that 3d conformation, allowing the immune system to clear it after the virus is bound (opsonized).

As a future healthcare provider, I certainly hope that vaccines like these will be proven safe and effective. Their promise lies in the ability for the production of vaccines against the dominant strains in a much quicker manner. If we had these methods approved for the current flu season, the industry wouldn't have been caught with its pants down when the H1N1 strain became dominant and hit much more quickly than planned. The vaccines were targeted to be ready for about a month or two from now, and the virus has hit much harder much sooner than anticipated. If these techniques take off, hopefully this situation can be mostly avoided in the future.

The only case where you need these relays is if the Sun is between Mars and Earth (or close enough to a direct line to make a hash of radio communications between Mars and Earth)

The idea isn't exactly new, you know. George O. Smith wrote a series of stories about a relay station in the L4 point of Venus, The Venus Equilateral series, back in the '40s. It was a communications hub for the entire Solar System, and a hotbed of technological innovation. Great stories, still worth reading.

Although I didn't explicitly state earlier, I'm actually using an iPod touch 3rd gen, which is essentially an iPhone without the cell radio. Therefore, all my data usage comes from WiFi. Hence, no worries about the outrageous data fees that cell companies charge; it would be hard to justify those prices given that 99% of the time I'm within range of WiFi. And yes, mobile Safari would be essentially a desktop browser (which would be very useful) if it could support a few critical plugins such as Flash that seem to be increasingly popular for viewing web content.

Why don't you stop being a dick and RTFA, as in the article it clearly talks about how Flash Player is still not properly supported etc. My comment was clearly relevant to the article and the continuing issues surrounding Flash on the iPhone, and it's obvious you either didn't read the article (and just stuck with reading the summary as most do) or you have serious issues with reading comprehension and understanding critical commentary of the article's content.

Yes, I do know that, and I thought it was clear from my comment that I wanted either the option for Flash on the iPhone or for current online video providers to move away from Flash so I could use their content...neither of which is a solution with the current announcement of Flash 10.1. Effectively, that's the whole point of my comment: this announcement has nothing to do with my desire for Safari to either support Flash or for websites to ditch it, and that sucks.

It is extremely frustrating to have a very capable mobile browser and not be able to watch online video content, such as Hulu, ESPN etc. Flash games would potentially be a side benefit of the technology, but I care less about games than I do viewing online video content. I really wish either the content providers would ditch Flash as their delivery method or Apple would get on board with Flash 10.1 so I don't have some web content effectively gimped. Either would be fine with me, although I imagine ditching Flash as the delivery method would be better as I don't particularly care for annoying Flash ads and Adobe's current Flash version for Mac doesn't lead me to believe their iPhone implementation would be stable or have smooth playback. I really do wonder how good Flash can be on all the other mobile platforms it is being ported to...

I definitely believe that this research is more promising than most; however, I've see so many case reports and findings that simply didn't translate into humans. When I see positive data in patients that already have different forms of cancer in a clinical setting, then I think that would be a much more exciting result. Until then I expect this to turn out as most cancer research does: an interesting result or correlation that simply can't make a real-world impact on the extremely complex and variable disease process that underlies cancer.

That is purely correlational; until proven otherwise, their lower incidence of cancer could be due any number of factors that are unknown to the researchers. Correlation is not causation.

Heaven forbid you have to read something longer than one line. My bad. I'll try to keep you from having to read or think next time. You almost must not have been around Slashdot for a while. Next time try adding something to the discussion instead of being a jackass.

I think we shouldn't get overexcited yet; these results have only been shown in a mouse xenograft model i.e. a mouse that has human tissue transplanted. Normally these mouse models are completely immunodeficient or else they wouldn't be able to accept a human transplant. Translating these results into some meaningful treatment for normal adults is highly likely to face a lot of roadblocks and complexities. The human immune system alone is much more complex than the mouse immune system, so you have to remember that animal models more often than not don't translate into meaningful human results. Sometimes they do, and that why model organisms exist, but I'm not putting my eggs in this basket just yet; when I see double blind randomized controlled human trials show positive results then I might believe this has potential to work.

To summarize for those who don't want to wade through the wikipedia article, achromatopsia is color blindness resulting from damage to the cortex, the outer layer of the cells in the brain that are generally responsible for all the higher-order processing of the sensory information our nervous system collects. Essentially, this means that your eyes are still functioning normally, but your brain is no longer able to interpret the signals properly; this is normally due to brain damage as result of loss of blood flow, often from a traumatic injury or stroke etc, although there are many other causes, some of which are unknown (idiopathic). This is certainly a different cause of color blindness, but I'm unsure as of why it's being discussed here because the treatments talked about in the article would only correct defects on the functional components of the eye. Correcting a problem in the cortex through a medical treatment is something that is most likely a good ways into the future; it's much more likely that your brain will spontaneously reroute the functional processing to a different undamaged part of the cortex and as a result recover full or partial color vision. If that doesn't happen, which often it doesn't, then it's unlikely that the problem will be fixed.

These are quite exciting developments obviously, especially in regards to the treatment of the myriad of other visual pathologies this approach is applicable to treating. However, the FDA and other relevant medical procedure approving bodies are notoriously against the use of viruses to treat conditions in humans, at least in the US. This is largely due to the nature of viruses; they can mutate rapidly and easily, can quickly become pathogenic, as well as migrate to and interfere with other cells and tissues. I would be somewhat surprised to see a treatment like this based on a viral vector approved even in the medium-term future; most likely the same team or other researchers will develop a different vector that can be proven to be safe and has the ability to more specifically target retinal cells using some sort of CD marker or other retinal-cell specific protein marker. Hopefully this work will be done expeditiously, as these treatments would be a godsend to people suffering from eye pathologies that don't fall within the typical poor eyesight treated by vision correction and/or Lasik.