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Comment Petri dishes aren't going anywhere. (Score 4, Informative) 43

by TheClockworkSoul (#38049468) Attached to: Plasma-Filled Bags Could Replace the Petri Dish

This seems more like marketing hyperbole than anything else. They're just sterile bags (though the pictures of the plasma sterilization are kind of cool). You don't need plasma to sterile a bag: if we really wanted to use bags for tissue culture, we would have had them 30 years ago.

As a graduate student in the field, I can tell you that the humble petri dish has FAR too may uses, and is far too easy to use, to ever be replaced by something as awkward as a bag for pretty much anything. I suppose that the bags could perhaps be used for some function that's currently being served by the (also enclosed and sterile) flasks that we usually use for tissue culture tissue culture, but bags are harder to stack in an incubator, where space can often be in short supply.

Whiz-bang hyperbole aside, plasma-sterilized bags will probably find a niche use in which it would be handy to culture in a container that can be easily cut away, tissue engineering comes to mind, but to assert that petri dishes are going the way of the dodo is patently absurd.

Submission + - Girl gamers more hard core than guys (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by TheClockworkSoul
TheClockworkSoul writes: Scientific American reports on a study published this month in the Journal of Communication, which found that women who engage in a role-playing game online actually commit more time on average than the guy players do. The authors surveyed 7,000 logged in to EverQuest II, and found that the average age of the gamers surveyed was 31, and that playing time tended to increase with age. Interestingly, however, the female gamers not only tended to log more time online (29 hours a week, versus 25 for the males), but were more likely to lie about how much they really play.
Image

Zombie Pigs First, Hibernating Soldiers Next 193

Posted by samzenpus from the fattening-up-on-brains dept.
ColdWetDog writes "Wired is running a story on DARPA's effort to stave off battlefield casualties by turning injured soldiers into zombies by injecting them with a cocktail of one chemical or another (details to be announced). From the article, 'Dr. Fossum predicts that each soldier will carry a syringe into combat zones or remote areas, and medic teams will be equipped with several. A single injection will minimize metabolic needs, de-animating injured troops by shutting down brain and heart function. Once treatment can be carried out, they'll be "re-animated" and — hopefully — as good as new.' If it doesn't pan out we can at least get zombie bacon and spam."

Comment Re:p16 is not new (Score 1) 118

by TheClockworkSoul (#29893569) Attached to: Discovery of "Cancer-Proof" Rodent Cells
While it's certainly true that p16 is not only known, but a major focus of cancer research, this paper isn't announcing its discovery, it's describing an impressive property of naked mole rat cellular biology (namely, its resistance to cancerous transformation), which they traced to the naked mole rat's version of the p16 protein (which is homologous to human p16).

Like a previous poster said, I would be more convinced had the researchers transfected a human cell with the mole rat p16 and showed it to be resistant to cancerous transformation, but that being said, this is likely to be a pretty big discovery. Considering the central role that p16 plays in oncogenesis, this can potentially lead to new insights about that process.

Submission + - Nigerian "Scam Police" shut down 800 web sites\

Submitted by
Sooner Boomer
Sooner Boomer writes: "Nigerian police in what is named Operation "Eagle Claw" have shut down 800 scam web sites, and arrested members of 18 syndicates behind the fraudulent scam sites. Reports on Breitbart.com, and Pointblank give details on the busts. The investigation was done in cooperation with Microsoft, to help develop smart technology software capable of detecting fraudulent emails. From Breitbart "When operating at full capacity, within the next six months, the scheme, dubbed "eagle claw" should be able to forewarn around a quarter of million potential victims.". So maybe Microsoft does a little bit of good after all."
Biotech

Submission + - Virus-Like Particles May Mean Speedier Flu Vacines (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As the world struggles to produce enough H1N1 vaccine, Technology Review reports on two human trials involving so-called virus-like particles (VLP) vaccines, which promise to be much faster to churn out. VLP vaccines use a protein shells, grown in either plants or insect cells, that look just like real viruses to the body's immune system but that contain no influenza RNA genetic material. A company called Medicago grows its VLPs in transgenic tobacco plants, while another, called Novavax, uses a "immortalized" cells taken from caterpillars. Providing they pass safety regulations both techniques should be able to produce an influenza vaccine more quickly than current methods, using just the DNA of the virus.
Science

Submission + - Scientists write memories directly into fly brains (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by TheClockworkSoul
TheClockworkSoul writes: The BBC reports that researchers at the University of Oxford have devised a way to write memories onto the brains of flies, revealing which brain cells are involved in making bad memories.

The researchers said that in flies just 12 brain cells were responsible for what is known as "associative learning". They modified these neurons by adding receptors for ATP, so that the cells activate in the presence of the chemical, but since ATP isn't usually found floating around a fly's brain, the flies generally behave just like any other fly. Most interestingly, however, is that the scientists then, injected ATP into the flies' brains, in a form that was locked inside a light-sensitive chemical cage. When they shined a laser on the fly brains, the ATP was released, and the "associative learning" cells were activated. The laser flash was paired with an odor, effectively giving the fly a memory of a bad experience with that odor that it never actually had, such that it then avoided that odor in later experiments.

This research, says Professor Gero Miesenböck, the lead investigator of the study, has begun to unravel how animals and humans learn from mistakes and how "error signals" drive animals to adapt their behavior.

They describe their findings in the journal Cell.
Medicine

Submission + - Nanotech used to detect early-stage cancer (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Stanford University researchers have used nanotechnology and magnetics to create a biosensor that they said should be able to detect cancer in its early stages. The sensor, which sits on a microchip, is 1,000 times more sensitive than cancer detectors used clinically today, say scientists at Stanford. The researchers announced this week that the sensors have been effective in finding early-stage tumors in mice, giving them hope that it can be equally successful in detecting elusive cancers in humans. "In the early stage [of a cancer], the protein biomarker level in blood is very, very low, so you need ultra-sensitive technology to detect it," said Shan Wang, professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford. "If you can detect it early, you can have early intervention and you have a much better chance to cure that person." Nanotech is on a roll lately, going from science fiction to fact. Futurist Ray Kurzweil said recently that nanotech could make humans immortal by 2040, with major chronic diseases like diabetes possibly cured using the technology.
Security

Submission + - Sneaky Microsoft add-on puts Firefox users at risk (computerworld.com) 2

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: An add-on that Microsoft silently slipped into Mozilla's Firefox last February leaves that browser open to attack, Microsoft's security engineers acknowledged earlier this week. One of the 13 security bulletins Microsoft released Tuesday affects not only IE, but also Firefox, thanks to a Microsoft-made plug-in pushed to Firefox users eight months ago. "While the vulnerability is in an IE component, there is an attack vector for Firefox users as well," admitted Microsoft engineers in a post to the company's Security Research & Defense blog on Tuesday. "The reason is that .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installs a 'Windows Presentation Foundation' plug-in in Firefox." The Microsoft engineers described the possible threat as a "browse-and-get-owned" situation that only requires attackers to lure Firefox users to a rigged Web site.
Medicine

Submission + - Facial Bones Grown from Fat-derived Stem Cells (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by TheClockworkSoul
TheClockworkSoul writes: Stem cells so far have been used to mend tissues ranging from damaged hearts to collapsed tracheas. Now the multifaceted cells have proved successful at regrowing bone in humans. In the first procedure of its kind, doctors at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center replaced a 14-year-old boy's missing cheekbones–in part by repurposing stem cells from his own body.

To create the new bones, which have become part of the patient's own skull structure and have remained securely in place for four and a half months, the medical team used a combination of fat-derived stem cells, donated bone scaffolds, growth factors, and bone-coating tissue. The technique, should it be approved for widespread use, could benefit some seven million people in the U.S. who need more bone–everyone from cancer patients to injured war veterans.
Privacy

FBI Bringing Biometric Photo Scanning To North Carolina, Via DMV 221

Posted by timothy from the if-you-have-nussink-to-hide dept.
AHuxley writes "The FBI is getting fast new systems to look at local North Carolina license photos via the DMV. As the FBI is not authorized to collect and store the photos, they use the North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles. The system takes seconds to look at chin widths and nose sizes. The expanded technology used on millions of motorist could be rolled out across the USA. The FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System is also getting an upgrade to DNA records, 3-D facial imaging, palm prints and voice scans."

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