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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.

Submission + - Google Street View Now Going Off Road with a Tricy (techfragments.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google is taking suggestions for where you'd like to see the new Street View Trike go. Your favorite park, hiking trail, zoo, school campus hangout or outdoor mall could be going online thanks to Google Street View's new 250 pound tricycle, complete with camera and GPS. According to the press release: "The Street View trike began as a 20% project by Daniel Ratner, a Senior Mechanical Engineer on the Street View team. "I began thinking about building a bicycle-based Street View system after realizing how many interesting places around the world — ranging from historic landmarks to beautiful trails to shopping districts — aren't accessible by car," says Dan. "When I'm riding the trike, so many people come up to me and ask where it's off to next or how they can get imagery of their favorite spot, so I can't wait to see what our users come up with.""
Space

Submission + - Giant Ribbon Discovered at the Edge ofthe Solar Sy (nasa.gov) 2

Submitted by beadwindow
beadwindow writes: NASA's IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) spacecraft has made the first all-sky maps of the heliosphere and the results have taken researchers by surprise. The maps are bisected by a bright, winding ribbon of unknown origin:
"This is a shocking new result," says IBEX principal investigator Dave McComas of the Southwest Research Institute. "We had no idea this ribbon existed--or what has created it. Our previous ideas about the outer heliosphere are going to have to be revised."

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