This is a cool variation on a basic idea that's been used before, and will make a great payload for cancer treatment. However, killing cancer cells is not all that difficult; rather targeting cancer cells is hard. It's all about the therapeutic index, i.e. the ratio of damage done to cancer cells against damage done to healthy tissue.

Talking about cancer as "a disease" is a big misnomer; at best it's a huge family of diseases (really nice explanation in this comic). Patterns do emerge -- certain tissues tend to have similar patterns of gene expression between people and therefore tend to give rise to similar cancers -- but each cancer that arises comes about in a different way, and evolves in response to different selective pressures within the body. The biggest of these pressures are fairly obvious like the need for neutrients (so "successful" cancers are the ones that evolve the ability to encourage blood vessels to grow around them) and evading the immune system. So, almost by definition, the outside of a cancer cell is forced to look as similar as possible to the outside or a healthy cell in the same tissue, to avoid detection.

There are some exploitable internal differences. Most cancers (but by no means all, or even close to all) express hTERT, a gene responsible for repairing the telomeres, whose degradation would otherwise limit the cells' replication. So some researchers (including my former lab) are working on techniques to exploit that e.g. viruses that can only kill cells expressing hTERT. The downside is that some legitimate cells also express hTERT, most notably your stem cells (bone marrow, some other tissues).

Another popular method is just targeting all cells that are highly metabolically active. Cancer cells tend to be working unusually hard (most cells in your body just sit there gently ticking over most of the time), so some cancer therapies target any cells that are burning through a lot of glucose (e.g. radiolabelled glucose is used as a source for imaging techniques like Positron Emission Tomography) or that are doing a lot of DNA replication as part of cell division. Again, though, this targets many cells in your body which are working this hard as a normal part of their programmes.

So, yeah, this is a cool payload but targeting is the hard part. If we knew what ligands to tie these particles to for targeting and how to persuade these huge particles to move against a pressure gradient and through a dense, disorganised extra-cellular matrix, cancers wouldn't be half the problem that they actually are. We could be using targeted viruses (piece of piss to do if you know what you're targeting and the surrounding tissue isn't too dense), metal nanoparticles, targeted liposomes (little hollow balls of fat) containing toxins or toxin precursors, modified antibodies to alert the immune system to the cancer cells, etc, etc.

Curing a cancer would be pretty easy: throw enough researchers and resources at one patient's specific tumour and we'll come up with a damn fine treatment. But curing all cancers -- different tumours arising from different tissues in different patients -- is seriously hard. We'll see fantastic advances in treating specific cancer types, but I seriously doubt that "a cure for cancer" is possible within our lifetimes. Although, heh, if you prove me wrong I won't be too upset :).

Given the choice, all scientists would probably publish their research freely; it's actually pretty common practice in physics and maths. However, in other fields -- including biology -- this isn't realistically possible.

A scientist's career and a department's funding are entirely dependent on their reputation, which is almost completely dependant on getting your work published in high profile (a.k.a "high impact factor") journals. In order for these journals to accept amd publish your work, you have to sign over copyright to the publishing company, and agree that you won't distribute the article for free.Scientists get completely shafted in this system: We raise money, do the work, write the article, sign over copyright to the publisher then pay for the privilige of them selling our work for their own profit. Then we're contractually forbidden from passing on copies of our work to interested colleagues (or potential employers, etc), much less the wider world.

There are some exceptions to this. In the UK, certain funding bodies and research charities insist that all work funded by their money must be made freely available, either at time of publication or, more commonly, after a delay of half a year or more. In the USA, work funded by the NIH must be made freely available. This is still generally restricted to the researcher's own version of the paper (i.e. without the journal's professional typesetting), but at least the information gets out.

Scientists hate this system, but an individual scientist simply doesn't have the bargaining power. You want to negotiate with a journal? They'll simply refuse your paper and run one of the tens or hundreds of others competing for your spot. Want to make a principled stand and only submit to open-access journals? You can, but you can basically kiss your career and funding prospects goodbye. So it's simple pragmitism: not many people are willing to risk throwing their careers away in the fight to let non-professionals (and a huge number of cranks, if you've ever read the Nature comments boards) read their article for free.

I use saved tabs as a sort of transient, rolling favourites folder for sites that I'll need next session but probably not after that. For example:

1) Today I installed OpenSuse for the first time. I've had lots of tabs open on wikis, FAQs and HowTos while sorting out various issues (Take pity, I'm a n00b). Every time I reboot or log out then log back in, all of those tabs re-open and scroll down to where I was last reading them. Very handy.

2) In work I need to read a lot of scientific papers. My normal pattern is to run a few searches and open up all the likely-looking articles in new tabs, then screen them for the articles that I actually have access to. Finally, when I have the relevent articles for the points I want to write about (10-30 tabs), I start reading them one by one. When I get to the end of the day I need to shutdown the computer but don't want to lose all my latest searching/screening results. I could store them as favourites but I'll probably never need 99% of them again; saving the session is ideal as it'll remember all the tabs, what order they were in, where I'd scrolled to and which one I had open. It's perfect for the way I work, analogous to leaving my textbooks, printouts and notes open on my desk for the next morning.

This is something I've been wondering about for a while with devices that receive software updates. People base their purchasing decisions on the list of features announced for the devices, the payoff of what features you get against the price. Then, as part of an upgrade, the manufacturer deliberately cripples part of the device and removes some functionality. This removal of support for third-party storage is a good example, or Amazon pushing an "update" to remove the text-to-speech feature for many (all?) books.

There are all sorts of arguments made about software because we're typically sold licences, not an actual copy of the software. But in cases like this, we've actually bought a physical object. It's now ours, not the manufacturer's. So do they really still have the legal right to reach out an remove features? They advertised a function, which it now doesn't have. It feels like a sort of retroactive false advertising. A lot of Xbox owners will now need to spend extra money simply to restore the original functions; if they'd known this was necessary before purchase they might only have been willing to buy the XBox at a correspondingly lower price, if at all. So as MS have changed their end of this bargain, surely their customers should have the right to change theirs? A partial refund (to represent a lower original price) or the option of a full refund both seem fair to me,

I know people can, in principle, unplug their XBox to avoid accepting this update but then, again, they're losing the functionality that was originally advertised and that they originally paid for. Does this seem fair to anyone? Does it seem legal?

Of courres not.

sudo apt-get cure-for-cancer

Here in the UK, we have our very own Creationist Zoo that markets itslf to local schools as fulfilling curriculum requirements but pushes a strong and consistent creationist adgenda.

Meanwhile, a recent survey says that half of Britons either don't believe in evolution or say they're too confused to have an opinion.

This does sound like a cool project and I'll keep an eye on it, but I worry about the consequences of lauding Darwin and his work too much. Creationists, IDers and other crackpots often attack evolution by attacking errors or omissions that Darwin made, ignoring almost two centuries of refinements and advancements since his work. They also love to strawman scientists and other people who accept the evidence for evolution by referring to them as "Darwinists", implying that it's a simple case of "faith in God" vs. "faith in Darwin", rather than a matter of evidence.

Darwin certainly deserves to be remembered and respected for the amazing groundwork and insights he gave us. But I think there's a danger of looking too fixated on one personality and his centuries-old pronouncements at the expense of modern and more solid results. It sucks that we have to consider stuff like this, but like it or not there is an ideological battle going on. Because IDers and creationists are basing their arguments on emotion and strawmen, we have to consider what attacks we're exposing ourselves to, even (or especially) if they're unfair and totally illogical.

It does look like the ship will be packed with modern research equipment; hopefully the media they put out will heavily emphasise the modern data supporting evolution and acknowledging where Darwin's work has been improved upon, emphasising the success of the scientific method over the hero-worship.

When it's good PR and doesn't cost the politicians any time, effort or deviation from their current plans.

I live in the UK and I'm astonished that you even have to do this. I bought my first mobile phone in 2002; from that one onward, I've never owned a phone for which I couldn't tell it to play an arbitrary music file (mp3, midi and other supported formats) for ringtones or message tones. Note that these have never even been top of the line phones. Today, I doubt that I could go into a phone shop and buy one without this ability even if I wanted to. My current LG Viewty (well over a year old) has fairly basic video capability so it also lets me set a divx video as a ringtone if I want.

I understand that US networks have higher overheads due to your country's lower population density, but I'm amazed that they get away with crippling such basic features of the phones' designs. I half expect to hear next that you can't use arbitrary pictures for wallpapers or contact pics...

There seems to be evidence in both directions. For example, on study showed that it's not as bad as alcohol, but far worse than sober drivers:

Source

A computer that learns from its opponent to get better every time it plays the game...

Is it any good at Gloabal Thermounuclear War?

It's a common reagent in molecular biology labs, so it's probably just that they had some handy and could buy more, ready-purified, very cheaply.

The reason it's so common in labs is that it's extracted from salmon sperm, which is produced in colossal quantity at salmon farms, and the excess sold to scientists. Extracting DNA from sperm is much easier than, say, grinding up a whole fly. Once you've decided that you're after sperm, fish pump their sperm out into the water anyway so you don't need to "milk" it in the way that you'd need to if you wanted e.g. bull sperm.