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Anti-Matter's Potential in Treating Cancer
eldavojohn writes "The BBC is taking a look at how atomic physicists are developing cancer treatments. A step past radiotherapy, the CERN institute is publishing interesting results: 'Cancer cells were successfully targeted with anti-matter subatomic particles, causing intense biological damage leading to cell death.' The press release from last year is finally sparking interest in the medical community."
Because setting off miniature broad-spectrum emp blasts inside your body it a GOOD thing.
There are a lot of things that kill cancer cells. It's finding the things that kill exclusively cancer cells that's the hard part.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Sounds too newfangled and high tech for me.
I'd prefer it if they used they did what they did back in my great-great-grandfather's time: the Shotgun Method
The doctor/vet/farmboy would place the muzzle of the shotgun to the tumour and blast it out. Sure, there's some peripheral damage and blood loss but it's tried and true. Sucks if you use it to treat testicular cancer, but a light 410 load of birdshot, some frozen peas and you'd be back on your feet in 8 months.
That you need Dilithium crystals and a Scottish engineer to make it work effectively. ...or am I mixing up TV with reality again? :-)
(either that or you need to reverse the polarity of something or other and channel the output through the main sensor grid)
TDz.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
A complete set of mirror image subatomic particles. The antimatter analogue to the electron is the positron, etc.
No you can't hold it. It annihilates matter when it comes into contact with it, releasing a burst of energy.
Theoretically the Big Bang created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, but we're wondering where the antimatter is...maybe whole galaxies are composed of it? There's no way to tell from the light - photons are the same whether generated by matter or antimatter.
Short of that, small amounts are created in particle accelerators and in the upper atmosphere, I believe.
As usual, Wikipedia is helpful.
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Demented But Determined.
...antimatter beings have just discovered that cancer may be treatable with particles of ordinary matter.
Can someone please explain what Anti-matter actually is?
It is kind of like negative Mod points. They anialate your Karma.
Table-ized A.I.
Antimatter is... just as it sounds. The opposite of matter.
"Matter" in ordinary parlance has various important properties: solidity, resistance to motion (otherwise known as mass) and so on.
Anti-matter has every single one of these properties, so it is not particularly helpful to say it is "the opposite of matter" because it is not.
Anti-matter is simply matter that consists of anti-particles, as correctly indicated by the article you link. Anti-particles are just like ordinary particles except that they have the opposite charge, parity or magnetic moment (in the case of neutrons). This minor change results in a fairly large cross-section for mutual annihilation when an anti-particle scatters off of its corresponding particle.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Wrong.
No, that's what he said.
Your failure to grasp his words does not invalidate them, it merely illuminates your own poor understanding of the topic.
Let's put it another way: if there was an anti-sun with an anti-solar system, exactly like Earth but with every particle the inverse of our Earth, they would be exactly the same. (Even when they eventually met and obliterated each other -- matter blows up antimatter just as well as antimatter blows up matter.)
I believe what you're thinking about black holes Antimatter annihilates anything it touches along with itself in a 1:1 ratio releasing E=MC^2 amount of energy. PS I guess that makes using antimatter to remove a 1 lb tumor the equivalent of setting off a nuke then?
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
You mean like this...
If only treatments like these were ready in 2005... My wife of 20 years was diagnosed with a brain tumor (GBM) Thanksgiving 2005 and died in January 13, 2006. Nothing is special any more...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
What we get then is actually a great example of an "exotic atom" - the two mirror particles form an unstable "atom" called positronium which is extremely short-lived and which decays into two photons going at 180 degrees to each other. This is important because that is the only way you can detect such an annihilation taking place. At any rate, my point is that this is hardly a "high-energy" application as so many science hacks have sneeringly pointed out here so far. Radiology is an established field of medicine and one reason it is so is because radioisotopes can be made so damn selective (tracers anyone? :P).
First off, heavy ion beams make sense as a way of treating cancer. The reason is that when a heavy ion passes through matter, it decelerates along a straight-line path, and deposits a very large percentage of its energy near the very end of its path. If you compare with x-rays as a radiation treatment, x-rays deposit energy in an exponential-decay pattern, so if you're treating a brain tumor with a pencil beam of x-rays, the tissue that gets hit with the most radiation is the skin, followed by the skull, followed by the good parts of the brain, followed by the tumor. Now in reality you don't use a pencil beam, you use a focused beam, so it's not quite that bad, but focusing also works with heavy ion beams (I believe you actually rotate the patient, not the beam). So with heavy ion beams, you get energy concentrated near the tumor for two different reasons: (a) focusing, and (b) the pattern of energy loss, which is peaked at the end of the trajectory.
OK, now about antimatter. An amazing number of posters apparently (a) haven't read the article, (b) haven't understood the article, or (c) don't know enough physics to make heads or tails of any of this.
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They introduce the antitumor and it annihilates the tumor.
Although they have to be careful not to damage the surrounding tissue. This means avoiding use of antimuscles, anticonnective tissue, antibones, antilivers, and antibrains.
It just dawned on me: the solution to curing cancer is to cross it with anti-cancer!
Table-ized A.I.