World News Today, Current News, Breaking News, Business News
World News Today, Current News, Breaking News, Business News, Moon and Mars, Shopping Tips, Beauty Tips and Fashion news

'Universal' cancer vaccine developed

Category: By News Updates
A vaccine that can train cancer patients' own bodies to seek out and destroy tumour cells has been developed by scientists. 
cancer vaccine
cancer vaccine
The therapy, which targets a molecule found in 90 per cent of all cancers, could provide a universal injection that allows patients' immune systems to fight off common cancers including breast and prostate cancer.
Preliminary results from early clinical trials have shown the vaccine can trigger an immune response in patients and reduce levels of disease. 

The scientists behind the vaccine now hope to conduct larger trials in patients to prove it can be effective against a range of different cancers. 

They believe it could be used to combat small tumours if they are detected early enough or to help prevent the return and spread of disease in patients who have undergone other forms of treatment such as surgery. 

Cancer cells usually evade patient's immune systems because they are not recognised as being a threat. 

While the immune system usually attacks foreign cells such as bacteria, tumours are formed of the patient's own cells that have malfunctioned. 

Scientists have, however, found that a molecule called MUC1, which is found in high amounts on the surface of cancer cells, can be used to help the immune system detect tumours. 

The new vaccine, developed by drug company Vaxil Biotheraputics along with researchers at Tel Aviv University, uses a small section of the molecule to prime the immune system so that it can identify and destroy cancer cells. 

A statement from Vaxil Biotheraputics said: "ImMucin generated a robust and specific immune response in all patients which was observed after only 2-4 doses of the vaccine out of a maximum of 12 doses. 

"In some of the patients, preliminary signs of clinical efficacy were observed." 

The results are still to be formally published but if further trials prove to be successful the vaccine could be available within six years. 

As a therapeutic vaccine it is designed to be given to patients who are already suffering from cancer to help their bodies fight off the disease rather than to prevent disease in the first place. 

Cancer cells contain high levels of MUC1 as it is thought to be involved helping tumours grow. Healthy human cells also contain MUC1, but have levels that are too low to trigger the immune system after vaccination. 

When a vaccinated patient's immune system encounters cancer cells, however, the far larger concentration of MUC1 causes it to attack and kill the tumour. 

As MUC1 is found in 90 per cent of all cancers, the researchers believe it could be used to combat the growth and spread of a wide range of cancers. 

In a safety trial at the Hadassah Medical Centre in Jerusalem, ten patients suffering from multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer, have now received the vaccine. 

Seven of the patients have now finished the treatment and Vaxil reported that all of them had greater immunity against cancer cells compared to before they were given the vaccine. 

Vaxil added that three patients are now free of detectable cancer following the treatment. 

The findings support research published in the journal Vaccine, which showed the treatment induced "potent" immunity in mice and increased their survival from cancer. 

Cancer charities have given the vaccine a cautious welcome, but warned further testing was needed before it could be approved for widespread use. 

There are currently a number of other therapeutic vaccines against cancer being tested, but they have met with limited success. 

Dr Kat Arney, science information manager at Cancer Research UK, said: "There are several groups around the world investigating treatments that target MUC1, as it's a very interesting target involved in several types of cancer. 

"These are very early results that are yet to be fully published, so there's a lot more work to be done to prove that this particular vaccine is safe and effective in cancer patients."

0 Comment
 

Virus hits half a million Macs: How to protect yourself against malware

Category: , By News Updates
All right, Mac users - the day of reckoning has come. 

Thanks to a well-documented flaw that Apple didn't patch for three months , a nasty piece of malware called Mac Flashback seems to have infected nearly 600,000 Macs worldwide (according to Russian security firm Dr. Web ). 

Here are three things you need to do today: 

- Check to see whether your Mac is infected by Mac Flashback. The social-networking news site Mashable has created a script that will do so for you. The instructions are on the Mashable website.
If the script does find an infection, which can be at either or both of two different places in the Mac OS X file system, removal is a bit complicated. 

You'll have to go into the Terminal app and take the Mac Flashback removal steps detailed by Finnish security firm F-Secure. 

- Update OS X with the latest security patches from Apple. Apple patched OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and OS X Lion earlier this week, but it just updated the patch for Lion Thursday, April 5.
If you're on a PowerPC-chip-based Mac running OS X 10.5 Leopard, Apple no longer cares about you (see below). 

- Take a deep breath and say to yourself, "Steve Jobs is dead and my Mac is not immune to malware." Then install a solid anti-virus product. Today, right now, ASAP. 

The weak anti-virus software that Apple bundles into OS X 10.7 Lion doesn't cut it, and neither will the half-hearted Gatekeeper feature in the upcoming OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. 

Take a look at the paid products reviewed by our sister site TopTenReviews, or go to the website of the British security firm Sophos and download and install their free Mac anti-virus software . 

Additionally, there are two things you probably should do: 

- Disable the Java run-time engine, if you're not using it. 

Java, the platform-independent environment used to run Web apps and perform other tasks, has too many flaws to justify its use unless it's absolutely necessary. (Apple tacitly acknowledged this when it didn't bundle Java into OS X 10.7 Lion.) Open the Java Preferences utility in Mac OS X, uncheck all selections and reboot. 

Unfortunately, some software, such as the applications in Adobe's Creative Suite, including Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, requires that Java be enabled. 

In that case, you'll just have to trust Apple once more, even though it was remarkably late about riding to the rescue in this instance. The Java flaw that Mac Flashback exploited was patched two months ago for Windows and Linux. 

- If you're still using a PowerPC Mac, it's time to move on. 

Apple's excellent hardware means there are millions of perfectly good PowerPC machines still out there and running well, some of them built as recently as 2006. But Apple no longer supports or releases security patches for them. It wants you to upgrade, and now you don't have a choice in the matter. 

source: http://www.securitynewsdaily.com/
0 Comment
 

Millions at risk as effect of anti-malaria drugs weakens

Category: , , By News Updates
Millions at risk as effect of anti-malaria drugs weakens

A deadly form of malaria has developed a resistance to the most powerful drugs used to treat the disease, putting the lives of millions of people around the world at risk. 

Tests by a team of British and Thai scientists over a 10-year period found the most dangerous species of malaria parasites, spread by mosquitoes, are becoming more resistant to the most effective treatments containing artemisinin, a drug derived from the sweet wormwood shrub. 

They discovered that Plasmodium falciparum, which was first reported in 2009 in western Cambodia, is now being found 500 miles (805 kilometers) away on the border of Thailand and Burma. 

The details of their findings and research, published in The Lancet medical journal, showed that between 2001 and 2010, the average time taken to reduce the number of parasites in the blood by half following treatment rose from 2.6 hours to 3.7 hours. 

The proportion of slow-clearing infections increased during the same period from six to 200 out of every 1,000 cases. 

Study leader Professor Francois Nosten, director of Thailand's Shoklo Malaria Research Unit, warned of a "race against time" to halt the spread of the potentially untreatable malaria. 

"We have now seen the emergence of malaria resistant to our best drugs, and these resistant parasites are not confined to western Cambodia," he said.
0 Comment
 

Becoming human

Category: , , By News Updater
Climate may have influenced the evolution of humans and other humanlike species

A reconstructed partial skull (right) from a Chinese cave displays a peculiar mix of ancient and modern traits (seen in illustration, left), indicating that these late Stone Age people interacted little with nearby, modern-looking humans. Credit: D. Curnoe; Peter Schouten
If you were to trace human evolution backward in time and space, you’d eventually end up in Africa. There, millions of years ago, animal species evolved to walk upright on two legs and spend more of their lives on the ground than in the trees. Homo sapiens, the species you belong to if you’re reading this article,had appeared on the continent by 200,000 years ago. Your ancestors weren’t alone: Other upright, humanlike species were also around — at least for a while.

Scientists agree on Africa as a starting place because the oldest human bones have been found there. Eventually, ancient humans and other species moved to every other continent except Antarctica and the Americas. But how they evolved, or changed over time, once they left Africa isn’t entirely clear. Eventually, every cousin in the sprawling human family — except H. sapiens — became extinct. Online-biology-degree.com should be able to help you understand human and non-human primate cognition from the perspective of human evolutionary biology.


Climate may have played an important part in the evolution of ancient people. Two new studies suggest that during ice ages, steep drops in temperature may have sent ancient species moving to more temperate, or mild, areas. As a result, these species would have been isolated from other populations.

One of the new studies looks at bones found in caves in southwestern China. A team of scientists report that the bones came from an ancient species that looked a lot, but not exactly, like H. sapiens. Either this type of H. sapiens looked different than others, or they belonged to a previously unknown humanlike species.

Darren Curnoe, who studied the bones from China, told Science News that he suspects a new species could have formed when early humans left Africa 120,000 years ago and evolved in isolation for tens of thousands of years. Anthropologists study humankind, and Curnoe, an anthropologist from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, studies human evolution.

On the other hand, those bones may represent a new species that arose when two others interbred, Christopher Stringer told Science News. Stringer, an anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, worked on the other study. He suggests the bones came from a group of ancient H. sapiens that moved into the area and reproduced with a humanlike species called the Denisovans.

In their paper, Stringer and ecologist Jon Stewart from the Bournemouth University in England show how changes in climate have controlled the migration of different types of animals. Studies suggest, for example, that polar bears were once brown bears that became isolated in the north and adapted to the cold conditions.

They Stringer and Stewart argue that changes in climate have had a major impact on the evolution and survival of humans and humanlike species, too. Ice age conditions may have driven the H. sapiens in what is now China to live and reproduce with the Denisovans.

Stringer and Stewart also suggest that the Neandertals, another species, may have evolved from an isolated humanlike population in western Asia during ice ages. In addition, the so-called “hobbits,” a short species known to scientists as Homo floresiensis, may also have evolved from other isolated humanlike species.
Not all scientists agree with the idea that dramatic changes in climate drove human migration — and then human evolution — in the way that Stringer and Stewart have outlined. Anthropologist Rick Potts from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., told Science News that ancient species had to handle a wide range of environments. They probably could have adapted to the extremes brought on by the ice age and may not have needed to seek safer areas.

POWER WORDS (adapted from the New Oxford American dictionary)

anthropology The study of humankind.

ecology The branch of science that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their environments.

evolve To change gradually over successive generations.

species A group of living organisms consisting of similar individuals.

Neandertal An extinct species of human with a receding forehead and prominent brow ridges that was widely distributed in ice-age Europe between about 120,000 and 35,000 years ago.

ice age A time during a past geological period when temperatures dropped and glaciers formed.
0 Comment
 

Golf is an Extremely Challenging Sport

By News Updater
As far as major professional sports go, golf is perhaps the most mentally challenging (NASCAR drivers might have something to say about that). 18 holes of golf might involve all of 5 minutes of actual club-in-hand, hitting the ball time, while the other 4 hours is devoted to pondering the mysteries of the universe, specifically, the mysterious and unpredictable flight of your golf ball coming off the tee. So why is golf so challenging? A golfer has all the time in the world to get there stance set. The ball is right there and it's not going anywhere. There is no opposition to you hitting the ball however you want to hit it, unless your golf partners are feeling a bit rambunctious. As such, why golf so hard? Consider the following.

The golf swing. Swinging a long club at a small ball is not easy. If you do not believe it, then go to a driving range and try to do it. Assuming you hit the ball, where did it go? Was it a groundball or did you slice it across the driving stalls? Professional golfers make it look easy but it is certainly not. Driving a golf ball 300+ yards down the center of a narrow fairway requires an exquisite mix of power, precision, and controlled focus. Sports management colleges can also teach you how to play golf and improve your golf swings.

Controlling frustration. Golf is a civil sport riddled with century-old etiquette; however, it is also the most frustrating sport known to man. True, every sport has a measure of frustration attached, but most sports allow for expression of that frustration, either through a bone-crunching block in the backfield or a hard slide into second base. In golf, you have hours upon hours to sit and stew, which may be better than having a partner around to talk to. Happy Gilmore or no, it's not acceptable to get in a fist-fight on the back nine. Sometimes it's better to be thankful that golf does not generally require a sports medicine specialist.
Cost. Not all sports cost as much as golf does. Take soccer for example. All you really need is a ball. In golf, you need MANY balls, a full set of clubs, nice clothes, golf shoes, and a club to play at. The cost of playing golf adds up quickly, and unless you have the disposable income to spend playing and practicing, your tax bracket could very well determine how good you get. This fact plays into the frustration aspect dealt with above: it's just not fair!

Good golf weather exists regularly in Arizona. Admittedly, golf does not require too much physical activity. This is good in some ways, but bad in others. Other sports are played in terrible weather. But these sports require lots of motion, which warms the athlete up. Golfers get colder as the round goes on. Being cold will either contribute to the golfer's mounting frustration, or quash the good mood resulting from great play. Beyond the tropical locales that the professionals get to play at, most golfers are stuck where they are. To all you Seattle golfers out there, good luck to you. Long underwear may not be a bad idea.

Practice, practice, practice. A former high-school quarterback will still be able to throw a spiral pass when he is 35 despite not picking up a football for 10 years. A basketball player will similarly be able to hit a jumper from the top of the key. With golf, if you have not picked up a driver for 10 years, and you decide to go play a round, do not expect such good results. In fact, warn your partners. If you want to be a good golfer, you are going to have to keep up with it.

Sources

golfgooroo.com 

deadspin.com

0 Comment
 

Older Posts | Newer Posts