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Scientists discover how to change human leukemia cells into harmless immune cells. “B-cell leukemia cells are in many ways progenitor cells that are forced to stay in an immature state,” Majeti said. So he, McClellan and student Christopher Dove, an MD/PhD student and the paper’s other lead author, did more experiments and confirmed that methods shown to have altered the fate of the mouse progenitor cells years ago could be used to transform these human cancer cells into macrophages, which can engulf and digest cancer cells and pathogens.

There’s big-time interest in differentiation therapies for cancer. Majeti and his colleagues have some reason to hope that when the cancer cells become macrophages they will not only be neutralized, but may actually assist in fighting the cancer. Like a bloodhound owner who gives the dog a sniff of an object that was associated with the person or animal he wants to track, macrophage cells present recognizable bits of abnormal cells to other immune cells so that they can launch an attack. The hope for a therapy. Low Birth And Death Rates Should Have Killed Natural Selection, But Didn't. ShareTweetShareSendLink Most people think we’ve beaten evolution. Perhaps once, unfit people died while the fittest survived to propagate their stellar genes. But nowadays modern medicine cures the unhealthiest members of society, and widespread use of contraception means that even so-called “fit” people are having fewer kids than ever.

By all accounts, modern proclivities should have shut down natural selection, once and for all. And yet, according to a recent study, Darwinian evolution is alive and well. Researchers examined 10,000 genealogical records dating back to the 1700s. They found that anywhere from 4 to 18 percent of the variation between individuals is still due to genetics, even in modern times. From the paper: Scientists aren’t sure why modern medicine and contraception haven’t stopped evolution in its tracks.

James Harrison (blood donor) James Harrison, OAM, also known as the Man with the golden arm, is a blood plasma donor[1] from Australia whose unusual plasma composition has been used to make a treatment for Rhesus disease. He has made over 1000 donations throughout his lifetime, and these donations are estimated to have saved over two million unborn babies from the condition.[1][2][3] James Harrison was born in 1936. At the age of 13, he underwent major chest surgery, requiring 13 litres of blood.[2] After surgery, he was in the hospital for three months.

Realizing the blood had saved his life, he made a pledge to start donating blood as soon as he turned eighteen, the then-required age.[2] Harrison started donating in 1954 and after the first few donations it was discovered that his blood contained an unusually strong and persistent antibody called Rho(D) Immune Globulin. As blood plasma, in contrast to blood, can be donated as often as every 2–3 weeks, he was able to reach his 1000th donation in May 2011. On the Origin of Circuits. In a unique laboratory in Sussex, England, a computer carefully scrutinized every member of large and diverse set of candidates. Each was evaluated dispassionately, and assigned a numeric score according to a strict set of criteria. This machine’s task was to single out the best possible pairings from the group, then force the selected couples to mate so that it might extract the resulting offspring and repeat the process with the following generation. As predicted, with each breeding cycle the offspring evolved slightly, nudging the population incrementally closer to the computer’s pre-programmed definition of the perfect individual.

The candidates in question were not the stuff of blood, guts, and chromosomes that are normally associated with evolution, rather they were clumps of ones and zeros residing within a specialized computer chip. Dr. Dr. He cooked up a batch of primordial data-soup by generating fifty random blobs of ones and zeros. Dr. Biggest Virus Yet Found, May Be Fourth Domain of Life? Scientists have found the biggest viruses known, and these pandoraviruses have opened up entirely new questions in science—even suggesting a fourth domain of life, a new study says.

Each about one micron—a thousandth of a millimeter—in length, the newfound genus Pandoravirus dwarfs other viruses, which range in size from about 50 nanometers up to 100 nanometers. A genus is a taxonomic ranking between species and family. In addition to being huge, pandoraviruses have supersize DNA: 2,500 genes as compared with 10 genes in many viruses.

(Get a genetics overview.) Microbiology was similarly upturned about ten years ago when scientists found the genus Mimivirus—the first large virus of its kind at about 0.7 micron. So the pair and their colleagues began hunting for more giant viruses in water sediments, where other big viruses have been found due to the abundance of amoeba prey. Why haven't scientists found pandoraviruses before? How are pandoraviruses different than other viruses? The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Near-Death Experiences. By Kevin Williams The Tibetan Book of the Dead, whose actual title is "The Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Intermediate State" or "Bardo Thodol", is traditionally believed to be the work of the legendary Padma Sambhava in the 8th century A.D. The book acts as a guide for the dead during the state that intervenes death and the next rebirth.

He is considered to be one of the first persons to bring Buddhism to Tibet. The Bardo Thodol is a guide that is read aloud to the dead while they are in the state between death and reincarnation in order for them to recognize the nature of their mind and attain liberation from the cycle of rebirth. The Bardo Thodol teaches that once awareness is freed from the body, it creates its own reality as one would experience in a dream. The following is a description of the bardo realms that one travels through after death. 1. The first bardo comes at the very moment of death, when there dawns the Clear Light of the Ultimate Reality. 2. 3. How to Take a Detox Bath: 10 Steps.

Default password for roadside LED signs - Boing Boing Gadgets. Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science eBook: Michael Brooks: Kindle Store. The Sleep Schedules Of 27 Of History's Greatest Minds. The science of sleep and its glorious effects on creativity, productivity, and sanity gets a lot of press these days. That said, the sleep habits of some of your favorite writers, musicians, and artists may surprise you a little. The bedtimes and rising times of history’s greatest minds are inventively illustrated in this New York infographic based on Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.* The infographic seems to debunk the myth that geniuses stay up through the wee hours working manically, and that you're more creative when you're tired—most of these 27 luminaries got a wholesome eight hours a night. Unfortunately, the infographic doesn’t yield any sleep-related tricks for unleashing your own latent genius, other than following the boring eight-hour rule.

You could try rolling like Balzac, a prodigious coffee-drinker who slept from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. and then napped mid-morning, but he was likely creative in spite of rather than because of his schedule. Tasker. Total Automation, From Settings to SMS. * Triggers: App, Time, Day, Location, Hard/Soft State, Event, Shortcut, Widget, Timer, Plugins* Actions: 200+ built-in, plugin support* Tasks: loops, variables, conditions* Scenes: design your own screen overlays* App Creation: create your own standalone apps to share or sell! (Android 2.3+) Trial: Guides: Problems: see Menu / Info / Support in-app It's not possible to fix problems reported via Play Store Comments... ***** Plugin Support Petition ***** If you have an app you want to automate with Tasker, support this user-organised petition: ****** Actions By Category ****** [not all actions available on all devices] ****** States ****** ****** Events ****** ‘Imagination gap’: We need more radical science fiction to inspire future technology.

By Oscar Williams Radical sci-fi ideas are key to predicting and shaping the future of technology but technology might be outpacing our imaginations, warned Philip Byrne and Jed Hallam yesterday. Byrne, creative director at BuzzFeed UK and Hallam, head of social at Mindshare UK, told a Mindshare Huddle that sci-fi had become less imaginative over the past 20 years and they were worried that a fear of the internet and the future of technology could be to blame.

The duo pointed to the similarities between 2001: A Space Odyssey’s Hal 9000 and Apple’s Siri, the retinal scanners, touchscreens and insectoid robots featured in Minority Report and the 70 predictions made in 1984 that have now been realised. But both Byrne and Hallam suggested that more recent sci-fi film and literature have been less ambitious and suggested this could hamper future innovation. During the presentation, Byrne charted examples of innovation inspired by radical art. App That Discourages Smartphone Use Wins Prize for Singapore Students. Weeks after winning a Nobel Prize for his microscope, Eric Betzig just revolutionized microscopy again. This video was produced using data obtained via a new imaging platform. The lattice light sheet microscopy was developed by the 2014 Nobel laureate in chemistry, Eric Betzig, at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus.

The video shows an interaction between a T-cell (orange) and a target cell (blue). T-cells are a key part of the human body’s immune response system. (Betzig Lab, HHMI/Janelia Research Campus, Lippincott-Schwartz Lab, National Institutes of Health/Science) Earlier this month Eric Betzig shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on high-resolution microscopes -- specifically the one he'd designed and built on a friend's living room floor. But when Betzig, a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, got news of his win, his best work yet was still a few weeks away from being published. "Again, I just started to understand the limits of the technology," Betzig said. Relativity of simultaneity. On spaceships, map-clocks may look unsync'ed. Event B is simultaneous with A in the green reference frame, but it occurred before in the blue frame, and will occur later in the red frame.

Events A, B, and C occur in different order depending on the motion of the observer. The white line represents a plane of simultaneity being moved from the past to the future. If we imagine one reference frame assigns precisely the same time to two events that are at different points in space, a reference frame that is moving relative to the first will generally assign different times to the two events. This is illustrated in the ladder paradox, a thought experiment which uses the example of a ladder moving at high speed through a garage. A mathematical form of the relativity of simultaneity ("local time") was introduced by Hendrik Lorentz in 1892, and physically interpreted (to first order in v/c) as the result of a synchronization using light signals by Henri Poincaré in 1900. Spacetime diagrams[edit] 3-D-printed bacteria may unlock secrets of diseases.

Don't expect to see woolly mammoths walk the earth again anytime soon, but don't write off the mammoth revival project as a Pleistocene pipe dream, either: That's the message from a new TV documentary about efforts to re-create the long-extinct species with genetic trickery. "It's all very much up in the air still," Tori Herridge, a paleobiologist at London's Natural History Museum, told NBC News. "As usual, the pace at which science can progress is at odds with the pace at which a TV documentary is made. " The hourlong show, titled "How to Clone a Woolly Mammoth," premieres in the United States on the Smithsonian Channel on Nov. 29. A slightly different version will air on Nov. 23 on Britain's Channel 4 with the title "Woolly Mammoth: The Autopsy.

" The documentary team, with Herridge as a scientific guide, had exclusive access to the Russian and South Korean scientists who recovered a frozen woolly mammoth from Siberia's permafrost last year. Renegade Pictures. This is how you melt metal with magnets. It takes a lot of heat to melt metal, normally requiring some kind of heavy-duty torch to get the job done manually. However, with a bit of electricity and wire, you can melt a chunk of metal with a magnetic field, and suspend in it mid-air so it looks cool during the process. The setup is more simple than you likely imagined, as it uses induction heating to melt the metal chunk without having to strap on a visor and break out a blowtorch. In order to make the metal float, it needs to be suspended in the middle of a magnetic field. So, rather than search online for a very specific magnetic housing, you can simply make one by passing an electric current through a wire. If you twist the wire into a coil, the rig will focus its magnetic field toward the center of the housing.

This method, as Science-Based Life reminds, is the basic way in which electromagnets are created. If you toss some metal inside that coil, the metal helps generate an electric current inside the field. Restoring surgeons’ sense of touch during minimally invasive surgeries. By David Salisbury | Posted on Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2013 — 2:32 PM A small, wireless capsule has been developed that can restore the sense of touch that surgeons are losing as they shift increasingly from open to minimally invasive surgery. During open surgery, doctors rely on their sense of touch to identify the edges of hidden tumors and to locate hidden blood vessels and other anatomical structures: a procedure they call palpation.

But this practice is not possible in minimally invasive surgery where surgeons work with small, specialized tools and miniature cameras that fit through small incisions in a patient’s skin. Palpation capsule allows surgeons to measure tissue stiffness during minimally invasive surgery. (John Russell / Vanderbilt) Once in the body, the surgeon can grip the capsule with the jaws or wire loop on the end of the laparoscope he or she is using for the surgery and press the end of capsule against the target tissue. Pinch of platinum gives white organic LEDs › News in Science (ABC Science) News in Science Monday, 7 October 2013 Darren OsborneABC Bright light A team of scientists have developed a plastic-like polymer that emits white light more efficiently than current organic LEDs. In recent years household lighting has moved from the incandescent light bulb to the compact fluorescent, and more recently to LEDs.

But to create white light manufacturers cluster red, green and blue LEDs, or use blue LED light, some of which is converted to yellow, and then mixing the two colours to create white light. Organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) use polymer chains that glow when they are stimulated with an electrical current or light.

Professor Valy Vardeny of the University of Utah and colleagues have combined polymer chains with heavy atoms to create a new type of OLED that they believe could create white light much more simply. Their results appear online in the Nature journal Scientific Reports. Singlet and triplet states Highly versatile Tags: chemistry, physics. Space Engine - Home page.