You can imagine functionalizing the surface of these nanoparticles with a) a precursor the cancer needs either uniquely or at much higher rate than normal cells to grow, or b) a binding antibody specific to the cancer. These could promote preferential nanoparticle binding or uptake, after which you apply the alternating B field for the local temperature increase.
I think I need one of those in my lab. But for now, I'll pass on the s**tburgers. I could get over the aesthetics, but TFA didn't convince me that viruses are eliminated from the raw materials.
"If they stopped giving a shit about protecting civilians and only protected themselves, answered all attacks with massive force, terrified the civilians into cooperating with them rather than Al-Quaeda you'd see costs plummet and profits soar."
IIRC, these tactics didn't work out so well for the Soviets in Afghanistan....
A novel form of deadly drug-resistant bacteria that hides from a standard test has turned up in Europe. Researchers found the so-called MRSA strain in both dairy cows and humans in the United Kingdom, suggesting that it might be passed from dairies to the general population. But before you toss your milk, don't panic: The superbug isn't a concern in pasteurized dairy products.
MRSA, short for meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is a drug-resistant form of the widespread and normally harmless S. aureus bacteria. Many people walk around with MRSA in their noses or on their skin yet don't get sick. But in some hospital patients and people with weakened immune systems, MRSA thrives, and it is blamed for about 19,000 hospital deaths a year in the United States.
Mark Holmes of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and colleagues stumbled upon the new strain while studying mastitis, or infected udders, in U.K. dairy cows. Some milk samples from sick cows contained S. aureus bacteria that grew in the presence of antibiotics, which is one test for MRSAs. Yet the same samples turned up negative for the drug-defying bacterium when the team used PCR, a DNA amplification technique, to detect a gene called mecA, which is found in all MRSA strains.
The PCR test doesn't always pick up variants of the gene it's meant to detect, however. To check this, the researchers sent a cow S. aureus sample to the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, which sequenced the bacterium's entire genome. "Lo and behold, there was a mecA gene there," one whose sequence overlapped with the better-known mecA by a surprisingly low 60%, Holmes said today in a press conference.
The researchers then looked for this mecA gene in people. They tested 74 samples of S. aureus isolated from people from the United Kingdom and Denmark that were drug resistant in the antibiotic growth test but not in the PCR test—most from carriers but some from patients who were sickened by MRSA. They found the new mecA in about two-thirds of the samples, they report today in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. A nearly identical mecA gene has also now been reported in human samples from Germany and Ireland.
The strain is still relatively rare—it probably makes up less than 1% of all detected MRSA cases, the U.K. team says. But its prevalence appears to have risen in the past decade. "More likely it's been around in the environment for a long time, and it's just getting into the human population," says University College Dublin microbiologist David Coleman, whose team reports on the Irish samples today in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.
The new superbug probably isn't leading to missed infections, at least in the United Kingdom, because hospitals that suspect a patient is infected with an MRSA nearly always use the antibiotic growth test in addition to PCR, Holmes says. (Patients with a confirmed infection then receive antibiotics that work on MRSAs.) However, many hospitals in continental Europe are moving toward using only PCR tests; this is a warning that those tests need to be modified to test for the new mecA gene, Holmes says.
The study also points to dairy cows as a possible reservoir for the bug, just as pigs seem to pass MRSA to humans in the Netherlands. The bug probably doesn't get to humans through the milk supply, because almost all milk in the United Kingdom and Denmark is pasteurized, a process that kills bacteria. But workers who come into contact with infected dairy cows could be carriers. Holmes's team reports "circumstantial evidence" for this, such as the fact that genetic subtypes of the human and cow samples from the same geographical areas were nearly identical. "The main worry would be that these cows represent a pool of the bacteria" that farm workers spread into the human popula
Well, fair enough and point taken. I misconstrued the quoted sentence as happytalk intended to minimize the hazards of a new MRSA strain and conflated it with my long-standing concerns with the near-universal use of antibiotics in raising animals in the meat and dairy industries.
Right. As if the only route by which this organism could get to humans is through dairy products. Scenario: dairy worker, gets scratched and infected with superbug at work, sees doctor for treatment (unsuccessful), enters hospital for treatment, infection spreads, becomes one more nocosomial infection we have to deal with.
TFA says the viscosity reduction lasts for a couple of hours. I wonder if it would be possible to establish a strong field using, say, a wearable Halbach array on an arm or a leg, with the reduced viscosity blood then circulating into the rest of the body? This would provide a chronic treatment effect and reduce the need for an expensive whole body 1T machine. It's pretty easy and cheap to get a 1T field in an arm-sized crossection by Halbaching some rare earth magnets.
At 6pm local Saturday, my wife and I will be hoisting a glass (or six [ or ten]) with many others in celebration of a friend and next-door neighbor who died in February. I doubt very much the Rapture will haul me off to an encounter with said departed (he was rather a rascal as well as an atheist, and as I understand it the Rapture is a tramway to Heaven, which is unlikely to be my friend's abode in the mythical afterlife...) but I'll play along until sunset, at which time I'll look about for evidence of the End of the World. If I don't see it, we'll party on for a few hours and then walk across the street to home for a good night's sleep. I'll check the Web Sunday morning to see what Mr. Camping is up to, but I'm not anticipating fire, brimstone, locusts, cats & dogs living together, or any other signs that it was a mistake to have bought green bananas at Whole Foods on Wednesday. Just another lazy Sunday in NoCal.
For me, a critical distinguishing point between science and (religious) faith is that the outcomes of science are independent of one's religious faith. It doesn't matter whether you're a Catholic, Shiite, Jew, or godless Commie, if you implosion-squeeze the plutonium sphere with a neutron source at the center, you *will* get an atomic explosion. Even if you 'don't believe in atoms'.
Similarly, if you administer the neutralized polio virus to your population as directed by the scientists, your children *will* be largely free of polio, regardless of whether you're a virologist, or whether you believe that disease is a Karma consequence, or that disease results from 'bad humours' or angry gods.
I don't know of a religion with such reliable, faith-neutral outcomes. Science wins.
Big capacitors required. I mean, BIG capacitors required. Using the 80KWHr energy storage in an earlier post, and assuming a 2KV capacitor operating voltage at full charge, we're looking at about 144 Farads (that's Farads, not microFarads) of capacitance required to store this energy. To my (admittedly incomplete) awareness, there's not a capacitor technology even in the laboratory development stage that could hope to provide this combination of high voltage operation and high capacitance in a package small enough to fit in a vehicle for a price that consumers would be willing to pay. I think we'll be using chemistry (combustible fuels, batteries) as the energy storage medium in vehicles for a long time to come.
E = (CV^2)/2 = 80 KWHr = 288,000,000 Joules. C = 2E/V^2 = (2*288,000,000)/4,000,000 = 144 Farads.
Well, sure, I've come across lots of people with that POV as well. But here's one comparison that keeps me away from Fox and continuing to check in with NPR and PBS - When I've listened to Fox, they reliably do three things: they highlight only one POV (very little diversity of outlook among sources); they disparage sources that are inconsistent with the Fox corporate paradigm (which btw isn't a proper attribute of journalism); and when I listen carefully to their editorial messaging, it's mostly aimed at inducing fear in their audience.
In contrast, when I listen to NPR, I get to hear the left-wing bleeding hearts as well as the right-wing nutjobs, and often several POVs in between. It's not that they're perfect, but I perceive that they're trying to do give me genuine journalism rather than trying to make me think as they do. That's valuable to me.
Well, fair enough...I've watched Fox news, albeit not very regularly, I admit, but I've found that the level of bias and omission of diverse viewpoints is just too high for me. It's a signal/noise problem, and I get better value from other sources. It's laborious to integrate and evaluate information, and pulling information from Fox makes me feel like I'm spending a lot of pointless effort compensating for obvious and deep bias.
Regardless of your political persuation, you can make better decisions with more accurate information than with propoganda. From NPR/PBS, you will get information with a certain degree of accuracy. From sources like Fox, you will get nothing that will help you make a better decision - there is no journalism at Fox, just right wing, "money=merit", fear-based propoganda. From NPR/PBS, I get information that is at least in the realm of an honest effort at journalism, and that gives me value as I try to figure out the complex issues under discussion. I'm totally happy with the tiny fraction of my tax $ that go to Public Broadcasting. I get value for that tax every single day. Wish I could say the same about the rest of my taxes.
Sorry to say, we left the Constitution behind quite some time ago. In earlier times (like when I was sitting in my constitutional law class @ Boalt), you're right, it would have been ex post facto and prohibited. No more. Stuff that I would have bet my life I'd not see in the USA (warrantless wiretaps, indefinite detention without trial, etc.) is now just doin' business. No constitutional amendments needed. Just aquiescence by all concerned.
No, it's for real...People have been making active devices from diamond (usually CVD synthetic diamond film) for quite awhile. By and large, the devices live up to the potential implied by diamond's electronic and thermal properties. Around a decade back, I saw a diamond FET that demonstrated the material's potential for high temperature devices. It was running at about 750C, and you could read by the emitted thermal glow! Pretty impressive.
There's been lots of work on diamond detectors for hard rad environments. Google diamond radiation detectors and you'll find bunches of papers. There are diamond rad detector arrays in use at the LHC and elsewhere. They are far more radiation resistant than Si devices, have more stable dose/response properties and last much longer.
The main thing holding back development of diamond electronics is the lack of a way to grow single-crystal wafers of the stuff. The CVD wafer material is polycrystalline (and has excellent electronic properties), but the best devices come from monocrystalline material, which isn't available so far except in chunks that have to be slabbed and polished. Not good enough for volume device manufacture with existing fab infrastructure.
Yep, with the 5.5eV band gap you surely can turn a diamond device off. And it does have really great (the best, actually) thermal properties. But...it's really hard to get a useful n-type material (gotta boron-dope it first - which is easily done and makes a diamond p-type semiconductor - then expose it to a deuterium - yes, deuterium, not hydrogen - plasma, to passivate the boron acceptors and form some shallow donors); and there's no convenient native oxide like Si has; and etc....Diamond will take as much R&D to be useful in common electronics as will graphene. But diamond is sexier than graphene, that's for sure.
I have been interviewed as part of a sibling's TS/SCI clearance renewal. The questions were for the most part as you characterize. I was, however, extremely surprised to field questions about my then-new girlfriend who was a foreign national...given that I had met her less than ten or so days before the interview and had told nobody about her.
through being trapped in storm-associated updrafts. These can rapidly reach high altitudes and cold temperatures (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/594363/thunderstorm/49573/Updrafts-and-downdrafts).
I'm curious...Mach 8 is somewhere around 2700 m/sec. I understand there's a rule of thumb that says the gas shock temperature in K in front of a projectile is roughly equal to the projectile speed in m/sec.
2700K should heat the forward surface of the projectile quite a bit, and it would only have to get to around 800C to glow in the visible spectrum. Is the flight time just too short for heating to visible radiation temperatures? Anybody know why the projectile isn't glowing? Inquiring minds want to know....
Slashdot Mirror
You can imagine functionalizing the surface of these nanoparticles with a) a precursor the cancer needs either uniquely or at much higher rate than normal cells to grow, or b) a binding antibody specific to the cancer. These could promote preferential nanoparticle binding or uptake, after which you apply the alternating B field for the local temperature increase.
I think I need one of those in my lab. But for now, I'll pass on the s**tburgers. I could get over the aesthetics, but TFA didn't convince me that viruses are eliminated from the raw materials.
"If they stopped giving a shit about protecting civilians and only protected themselves, answered all attacks with massive force, terrified the civilians into cooperating with them rather than Al-Quaeda you'd see costs plummet and profits soar."
IIRC, these tactics didn't work out so well for the Soviets in Afghanistan....
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/06/new-superbug-found-in-cows-and-p.html?ref=hp
A novel form of deadly drug-resistant bacteria that hides from a standard test has turned up in Europe. Researchers found the so-called MRSA strain in both dairy cows and humans in the United Kingdom, suggesting that it might be passed from dairies to the general population. But before you toss your milk, don't panic: The superbug isn't a concern in pasteurized dairy products.
MRSA, short for meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is a drug-resistant form of the widespread and normally harmless S. aureus bacteria. Many people walk around with MRSA in their noses or on their skin yet don't get sick. But in some hospital patients and people with weakened immune systems, MRSA thrives, and it is blamed for about 19,000 hospital deaths a year in the United States.
Mark Holmes of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and colleagues stumbled upon the new strain while studying mastitis, or infected udders, in U.K. dairy cows. Some milk samples from sick cows contained S. aureus bacteria that grew in the presence of antibiotics, which is one test for MRSAs. Yet the same samples turned up negative for the drug-defying bacterium when the team used PCR, a DNA amplification technique, to detect a gene called mecA, which is found in all MRSA strains.
The PCR test doesn't always pick up variants of the gene it's meant to detect, however. To check this, the researchers sent a cow S. aureus sample to the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, which sequenced the bacterium's entire genome. "Lo and behold, there was a mecA gene there," one whose sequence overlapped with the better-known mecA by a surprisingly low 60%, Holmes said today in a press conference.
The researchers then looked for this mecA gene in people. They tested 74 samples of S. aureus isolated from people from the United Kingdom and Denmark that were drug resistant in the antibiotic growth test but not in the PCR test—most from carriers but some from patients who were sickened by MRSA. They found the new mecA in about two-thirds of the samples, they report today in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. A nearly identical mecA gene has also now been reported in human samples from Germany and Ireland.
The strain is still relatively rare—it probably makes up less than 1% of all detected MRSA cases, the U.K. team says. But its prevalence appears to have risen in the past decade. "More likely it's been around in the environment for a long time, and it's just getting into the human population," says University College Dublin microbiologist David Coleman, whose team reports on the Irish samples today in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.
The new superbug probably isn't leading to missed infections, at least in the United Kingdom, because hospitals that suspect a patient is infected with an MRSA nearly always use the antibiotic growth test in addition to PCR, Holmes says. (Patients with a confirmed infection then receive antibiotics that work on MRSAs.) However, many hospitals in continental Europe are moving toward using only PCR tests; this is a warning that those tests need to be modified to test for the new mecA gene, Holmes says.
The study also points to dairy cows as a possible reservoir for the bug, just as pigs seem to pass MRSA to humans in the Netherlands. The bug probably doesn't get to humans through the milk supply, because almost all milk in the United Kingdom and Denmark is pasteurized, a process that kills bacteria. But workers who come into contact with infected dairy cows could be carriers. Holmes's team reports "circumstantial evidence" for this, such as the fact that genetic subtypes of the human and cow samples from the same geographical areas were nearly identical. "The main worry would be that these cows represent a pool of the bacteria" that farm workers spread into the human popula
Well, fair enough and point taken. I misconstrued the quoted sentence as happytalk intended to minimize the hazards of a new MRSA strain and conflated it with my long-standing concerns with the near-universal use of antibiotics in raising animals in the meat and dairy industries.
"... in pasteurized dairy products."
Right. As if the only route by which this organism could get to humans is through dairy products. Scenario: dairy worker, gets scratched and infected with superbug at work, sees doctor for treatment (unsuccessful), enters hospital for treatment, infection spreads, becomes one more nocosomial infection we have to deal with.
TFA says the viscosity reduction lasts for a couple of hours. I wonder if it would be possible to establish a strong field using, say, a wearable Halbach array on an arm or a leg, with the reduced viscosity blood then circulating into the rest of the body? This would provide a chronic treatment effect and reduce the need for an expensive whole body 1T machine. It's pretty easy and cheap to get a 1T field in an arm-sized crossection by Halbaching some rare earth magnets.
At 6pm local Saturday, my wife and I will be hoisting a glass (or six [ or ten]) with many others in celebration of a friend and next-door neighbor who died in February. I doubt very much the Rapture will haul me off to an encounter with said departed (he was rather a rascal as well as an atheist, and as I understand it the Rapture is a tramway to Heaven, which is unlikely to be my friend's abode in the mythical afterlife...) but I'll play along until sunset, at which time I'll look about for evidence of the End of the World. If I don't see it, we'll party on for a few hours and then walk across the street to home for a good night's sleep. I'll check the Web Sunday morning to see what Mr. Camping is up to, but I'm not anticipating fire, brimstone, locusts, cats & dogs living together, or any other signs that it was a mistake to have bought green bananas at Whole Foods on Wednesday. Just another lazy Sunday in NoCal.
Collecting solar energy with antennas - LLL seems to have done this in 2007.
https://inlportal.inl.gov/portal/server.pt?open=514&objID=1269&mode=2&featurestory=DA_101047
"egregariously" - wonderful! In the same league as "misunderestimate" and "refudiate"! Thanks for the chuckle!
For me, a critical distinguishing point between science and (religious) faith is that the outcomes of science are independent of one's religious faith. It doesn't matter whether you're a Catholic, Shiite, Jew, or godless Commie, if you implosion-squeeze the plutonium sphere with a neutron source at the center, you *will* get an atomic explosion. Even if you 'don't believe in atoms'.
Similarly, if you administer the neutralized polio virus to your population as directed by the scientists, your children *will* be largely free of polio, regardless of whether you're a virologist, or whether you believe that disease is a Karma consequence, or that disease results from 'bad humours' or angry gods.
I don't know of a religion with such reliable, faith-neutral outcomes. Science wins.
Can't stop the signal, Mal.
Yep, screwing with the air data ports can cause some nasty accidents. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_B-2_Spirit#Accident for a $1.4 billion (that's 'B') crash caused by water in the air data ports.
Big capacitors required. I mean, BIG capacitors required. Using the 80KWHr energy storage in an earlier post, and assuming a 2KV capacitor operating voltage at full charge, we're looking at about 144 Farads (that's Farads, not microFarads) of capacitance required to store this energy. To my (admittedly incomplete) awareness, there's not a capacitor technology even in the laboratory development stage that could hope to provide this combination of high voltage operation and high capacitance in a package small enough to fit in a vehicle for a price that consumers would be willing to pay. I think we'll be using chemistry (combustible fuels, batteries) as the energy storage medium in vehicles for a long time to come.
E = (CV^2)/2 = 80 KWHr = 288,000,000 Joules. C = 2E/V^2 = (2*288,000,000)/4,000,000 = 144 Farads.
Well, sure, I've come across lots of people with that POV as well. But here's one comparison that keeps me away from Fox and continuing to check in with NPR and PBS - When I've listened to Fox, they reliably do three things: they highlight only one POV (very little diversity of outlook among sources); they disparage sources that are inconsistent with the Fox corporate paradigm (which btw isn't a proper attribute of journalism); and when I listen carefully to their editorial messaging, it's mostly aimed at inducing fear in their audience.
In contrast, when I listen to NPR, I get to hear the left-wing bleeding hearts as well as the right-wing nutjobs, and often several POVs in between. It's not that they're perfect, but I perceive that they're trying to do give me genuine journalism rather than trying to make me think as they do. That's valuable to me.
Well, fair enough...I've watched Fox news, albeit not very regularly, I admit, but I've found that the level of bias and omission of diverse viewpoints is just too high for me. It's a signal/noise problem, and I get better value from other sources. It's laborious to integrate and evaluate information, and pulling information from Fox makes me feel like I'm spending a lot of pointless effort compensating for obvious and deep bias.
Regardless of your political persuation, you can make better decisions with more accurate information than with propoganda. From NPR/PBS, you will get information with a certain degree of accuracy. From sources like Fox, you will get nothing that will help you make a better decision - there is no journalism at Fox, just right wing, "money=merit", fear-based propoganda. From NPR/PBS, I get information that is at least in the realm of an honest effort at journalism, and that gives me value as I try to figure out the complex issues under discussion. I'm totally happy with the tiny fraction of my tax $ that go to Public Broadcasting. I get value for that tax every single day. Wish I could say the same about the rest of my taxes.
Sorry to say, we left the Constitution behind quite some time ago. In earlier times (like when I was sitting in my constitutional law class @ Boalt), you're right, it would have been ex post facto and prohibited. No more. Stuff that I would have bet my life I'd not see in the USA (warrantless wiretaps, indefinite detention without trial, etc.) is now just doin' business. No constitutional amendments needed. Just aquiescence by all concerned.
that way, you can confirm your observation.
No, it's for real...People have been making active devices from diamond (usually CVD synthetic diamond film) for quite awhile.
By and large, the devices live up to the potential implied by diamond's electronic and thermal properties. Around a decade back, I saw a diamond FET that demonstrated the material's potential for high temperature devices. It was running at about 750C, and you could read by the emitted thermal glow! Pretty impressive.
There's been lots of work on diamond detectors for hard rad environments. Google diamond radiation detectors and you'll find bunches of papers. There are diamond rad detector arrays in use at the LHC and elsewhere. They are far more radiation resistant than Si devices, have more stable dose/response properties and last much longer.
The main thing holding back development of diamond electronics is the lack of a way to grow single-crystal wafers of the stuff. The CVD wafer material is polycrystalline (and has excellent electronic properties), but the best devices come from monocrystalline material, which isn't available so far except in chunks that have to be slabbed and polished. Not good enough for volume device manufacture with existing fab infrastructure.
Yep, with the 5.5eV band gap you surely can turn a diamond device off. And it does have really great (the best, actually) thermal properties. But...it's really hard to get a useful n-type material (gotta boron-dope it first - which is easily done and makes a diamond p-type semiconductor - then expose it to a deuterium - yes, deuterium, not hydrogen - plasma, to passivate the boron acceptors and form some shallow donors); and there's no convenient native oxide like Si has; and etc....Diamond will take as much R&D to be useful in common electronics as will graphene. But diamond is sexier than graphene, that's for sure.
I have been interviewed as part of a sibling's TS/SCI clearance renewal. The questions were for the most part as you characterize. I was, however, extremely surprised to field questions about my then-new girlfriend who was a foreign national...given that I had met her less than ten or so days before the interview and had told nobody about her.
through being trapped in storm-associated updrafts. These can rapidly reach high altitudes and cold temperatures (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/594363/thunderstorm/49573/Updrafts-and-downdrafts).
to work here in the US?
I'm curious...Mach 8 is somewhere around 2700 m/sec. I understand there's a rule of thumb that says the gas shock temperature in K in front of a projectile is roughly equal to the projectile speed in m/sec.
(http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Atmospheric_reentry)
2700K should heat the forward surface of the projectile quite a bit, and it would only have to get to around 800C to glow in the visible spectrum. Is the flight time just too short for heating to visible radiation temperatures? Anybody know why the projectile isn't glowing? Inquiring minds want to know....