Watch Amory Lovin's TED talk. Buying energy is more expensive than saving energy. We don't need to radically shift to more costly energy sources like solar to avert the risk of climate change. Regardless of whether the effects we see today are of human origin, the fact is that continuing to burn fossil fuels at current rates is not environmentally sound policy. The pollution produced has a tangible and real impact on peoples' health, the energy infrastructure in place motivates a great deal of humanitarian damage around the world and the continued release of massive amounts of acidifying CO2 and other greenhouse gases will eventually cause massive problems with the global climate, problems which we may or may not be observing yet, although the vast majority of the data out there does support the conclusion that we are indeed seeing the results of human activity. Investing in sane nuclear power (India, France and Russia build power plants at less than a third of the price-per-kW of new proposals in the US and severely mitigate the waste problem by reprocessing in fast breeders), wind power where it makes sense, biofuels from non-food crops in regions where the land use will not interfere with agriculture, all of these combined with investments in energy efficiency (many investments of this sort are being made privately without a government mandate because, again, its cheaper to save energy than buy energy!) and efficient infrastructure, gentle government policies to encourage these developments through feebates and R&D investment we can completely revolutionize the American economy, become a technology exporter again instead of an importer, create millions of jobs, make ludicrous profits and prevent long-term damage to the environment regardless of whether you believe climate change is currently occurring (mountaintop removal, smog, freshwater pollution etc are real issues that face people worldwide already).
This year, the Chinese government limited fossil fuel burning before the Olympics with apparently stunning results. When I was in Beijing for nearly a month 10 years ago, smog was a daily occurance. Even miles outside the city at Badaling (the Great Wall), it was hard to see for more than a mile. Smog is considered to be the third most important greenhouse gas by the IPCC. Evidence that we are changing our own atmosphere by fossil fuel emission is obvious just by looking.
This kind of trend can be seen on a daily cycle in New Delhi. Overnight, the smog over the city disperses but returns over the course of the day (typically by 11am) only to dissipate again as the city slows down for the night.
This is a political question that's long been discussed in India. Civil disobedience led to the formation of the country and has been used repeatedly in the past to unseat unfavorable governments at the State level. There are two schools of thought, one that believes that civil disobedience is always an acceptable response and another that believes the constant reliance on civil disobedience will lead to a tyranny of the minority as long as enough of the minority becomes vocal or active enough. This second group (the Indian historian Ramachandra Guha is a good example) believe that in the presence of a democratic system where it is possible to reform the government, regardless of how difficult it may be the system must be reformed through democratic means. This is not to say that western systems of government are purely democratic, there is certainly an argument to be made for the forces that exist which impede true democracy. Civil disobedience is a very slippery slope and should only be considered a last resort against ceaseless effort to reform the system currently in place. For anyone to espouse civil disobedience without working, campaigning, building a majority consensus and the political will to reform and failing is just taking the easiest way out.
He's not arguing that it didn't work, he's arguing that they essentially ran a simulation of a large Artificial Neural Network, a relatively trivial task as long as you have a big enough computer behind it. ANNs are essentially points that connect to each other and learn by assigning weights to these various connections- this is essentially the simplest possible way to simulate the behavior of a neuron. The argument is being made that to claim an ANN, regardless of its size, approaches the capabilities of any mammalian brain is simply wrong, and that a true attempt to create such a simulation would need to factor in the stochasticity of ion channels, branchings in neurons and various other biological phenomena that have a tremendous impact on how our brains work.
Without reading more details on the original work, I'm inclined to say that he has a very valid point if they were indeed only running a large ANN model.
Except that Apple isn't citing damage here, they're citing safety. I agree that smoking households can be very damaging to computers and is willful damage, but this isn't the excuse Apple is using. The only reason they're using a BS excuse like safety is because if they tried to argue that the problems were caused by willful damage from smoking they'd be sued for not informing their users that smoking can damage their computers and would have to pay for it anyways.
Its a similar situation with warrantied computers that have been vomited or urinated upon, having been to a university where all students who bought a computer received accidental damage coverage, if one of these things were to happen, Lenovo simply replaced the computer and disposed of the "contaminated" one. If Apple is making a stand on the safety of their workers they should honor the warranty and replace the computer.
Looking through their paper they show diffraction patterns that are roughly 4 pixels across on a sensor with 9 micron pixels (36 microns) for red blood cells which are 5 microns. This implies roughly 7.2x magnification, which means their actual field-of-view is about 18 mm^2 or 1/55th of their claimed field of view.
There's some serious issues with their idea of cost, too. Most field clinics in India (I have a brother who works as a malaria epidemiologist there) use microscopes that cost around $100-150, to claim replacing that with a $300+ camera phone (admittedly, the whole cell phone things looks like a huge marketing gimmick since they just use a high-end kodak interline CCD anyways) is "inexpensive" is more than a little disingenuous.
I've ranted before on the science behind the LUCAS system before, so I'll try not to repeat myself, but the utility of such as system would be limited primarily to RBC/WBC counts which are typically done either in counting chambers on a microscope or in an automated system measuring light scatter (both are called hemocytometers). While I can believe that they could very well do what an automated hemocytometer does using a lower cost instrument, applications in screening for disease causing agents such as malaria parasites and mycobacteria are doubtful except at very high parasitemia (when a high enough density of parasites are present to scatter a detectable quantity of light) or at very high concentrations of bacteria in sputum (same story) at which point microscopy would be easier and cheaper to detect the objects. When objects start getting down to the 1 micron size-scale, it becomes exceedingly difficult to scatter light with them. Even looking at their published results, some of their diffraction patterns are already barely above background with cells in the 5-10 micron range. Trying to detect a minute variation inside one of those diffraction patterns (from a malaria parasite within an RBC, for example) while perhaps possible would not be very clinically reliable when you have no control over what might be in your samples.
Its a good thing the DoD is taking a stronger, more positive stance towards open source software. I guess the next logical step would be open source hardware.
It should be noted that this kind of "personalized medicine" as it tends to be called is mostly only relevant to cancer treatments that inhibit certain receptors or enzyme, as tamoxifen does. Typically there are cancer subtypes that, while they may look alike, are actually caused by a different mutation than the one that the anti-cancer drug targets.
All organisms have these kinds of tumor suppressor genes whether they act to inhibit cell proliferation or promote cell death, in fact most cancers have to have mutations that inhibit these suppressor genes as well as mutations which enhance genes that promote cell growth and proliferation. What would be more interesting than simply identifying the suppressor gene(s) believed to be the cause of the absence of naked mole rat cancers would be in identifying the mechanisms that have protected that(those) gene(s). I wonder if the researchers in question also considered alternate explanations for the absence of cancers in naked mole rats- its very possible that their subterranean environment simply doesn't contain as many mutagens as we are exposed to and as such having a naked mole rat with a mutated (inhibited) tumor suppressor AND a mutated (enhanced) tumor promoter is such a rarity that we simply haven't been able to find one.
This is not a longer patent period. What this is an extension of the period that a pharma company can retain exclusive access to its clinical trial data. Without this data, a generics manufacturer couldn't get a drug to market because they would have to repeat all of the original clinical trials- something which would be extremely cost prohibitive. This bill would extend the time during which the FDA would not release the raw data from the trials to the public so that even though the patent on a drug may have expired, no generics could enter the market. This is in essence granting a 12 year extended monopoly to biologics manufacturers because they whined (and spent) enough despite that their principal justification for the extension (generics are more expensive to develop than small molecules and thus warrant a longer monopoly) has been shown to be false.
It depends on what aspect of development you refer to. This report obviously refers to the kind of development the middle classes of countries such as India, China and Brazil are looking at. They've come out of poverty, have food, safe water, housing and security. They are literate (both technically and otherwise), mostly college educated and now need opportunities to engage the international marketplace in a more meaningful manner as well as the infrastructure to support access to a more democratized version of entrepreneurship that we see in the developed world.
Yes, these countries still have tremendous poverty and inequality, thank you for pointing that out for the umpteenth billion time. But the reality is that in addition to the poverty is a middle class that is literally several times the size of the entire United States that is discovering that their aspirations and capabilities are starting to strain the infrastructure available to them to do something more productive and more fundamentally satisfying. Empowering and inspiring this group of people will do far more for poverty and corruption in the developing world than the direct aid or paternalistic development the western world typically engages in. This is the key demographic that will create jobs and drive growth in their own countries. Couple this with a strong and free press (from personal experience I at least know India has this), increasing social awareness and an increase in financial means and you have a very powerful recipe to subsequently help bring additional hundreds of millions out of poverty.
I'm not a cancer researcher per se, but a lot of technologies I work with have applications in cancer research / are demonstrated with applications in cancer research. Personally, I agree with that view. Biomarkers are great for detecting foreign organisms like tuberculosis, malaria, etc. but are likely not going to be a very good solution for detecting malignant tumors since most of their secretions (hormones and proteins) are usually (but not always, hence why some biomarkers exist) not distinguishable from those secreted by healthy cells- except in quantity. Personally, I believe high resolution imaging (MR/CT/optical) combined with genomic and proteomic strategies for cancer sub-typing will end up being the most powerful tools we have for early diagnosis of potentially malignant tumors. There's a lot of great work being done identifying mutations that give rise to cancerous cell lines which enable simple PCR assays to detect the presence of those mutations in biopsy samples. Even more exciting, in my opinion, are new assays for quantifying cell signaling activity in live cells from biopsies (I work in a lab that does a lot of this, so I may be biased) because we can look for cancerous phenotypes (for example, which specific signal pathways in a cell are over/under activated) which are a lot easier to associate with a tumor and don't change as quickly as cancerous genotypes. A combination of those two would give a physician all the information he/she needs to prescribe the treatment which has the best shot at knocking the cancer out.
Also this may just be splitting hairs, but putting "helps detect early stage cancer" in the headline implies that they, well, actually helped detect an early stage cancer in a patient. A laboratory proof of concept for a protein biomarker assay is very, very far away from actually "help[ing to] detect early stage cancer".
After reading some of the Stanford press out there on this, I've gotta say I'm really sick of 'science' journalists. Saying their test can detect cancer with 1,000 times the sensitivity and specificity has very different meanings than what they intended in diagnostics. It sounds like they're claiming 1,000-fold improvements in false negative (sensitivity) and false positive (specificity) rather than assay sensitivity based on concentrations. Their claim is also inaccurate. ELISA assays are commercially available with sensitivities as high as 1 part per 10 billion, while their claim is for a sensitivity of 1 part per 100 billion. ELISA assays have also been reported (and a couple are commercially available) with sensitivities of 1 part per 100 billion.
and not a pile on nonsensical garbage, the wang group page has a good description of the project.
Essentially they're using magnetic nanoparticles covered with antibodies to detect the binding of some tumor biomarkers. While the idea is interesting, there's no indication (yet) that its more sensitive than other biomarker assays, although it very well may be. Fluorescence techniques can get down to the tens of molecules level of sensitivity (which is insanely impressive). If they can get even lower, I'd be extremely impressed, but I can't find any published data on their immunoassays. Their comments about capturing and sorting out cancer cells is a bit odd. If you're looking to isolate whole cells based on recognizing protein biomarkers, I can't see any advantages of their tech over standard fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS), unless their assays are really more sensitive.
Really, the only thing of interest in this work is using the magnetic properties of their nanoparticles to detect binding. I would be really curious to see if this could supplant technologies like quartz crystal microbalances that look for changes in the vibrational modes of a crystal to detect surface binding events as being simpler and less prone to disruption by temperature fluctuations, doors opening or people walking by. The biomarker assay is interesting but by no means genuinely new technology- only the detection method is truly novel. Not bashing the work done here, the binding assay is really cool, the application looks like it was mostly thought of to get grant money.
The signers*: Michael Arcuri (NY-27), Joe Baca (CA-43), John Barrow (GA-12), Sanford Bishop (GA-2), Tim Bishop (NY-1), Dan Boren (OK-2), Leonard Boswell (IA-3), Allen Boyd (FL-2), Robert Brady (PA-1), Bobby Bright (AL-2), G.K. Butterfield (NC-1), Dennis Cardoza (CA-18), Russ Carnahan (MO-3), Christopher Carney (PA-10), Travis Childers (MS-1), Donna Christensen (VI), William Lacy Clay (MO-1), Emanuel Cleaver (MO-5), Jim Costa (CA-20), Joseph Crowley (NY-7), Henry Cuellar (TX-28), Elijah Cummings (MD-7), Kathleen Dahlkemper (PA-3), Danny Davis (IL-7), Lincoln Davis (TN-4), Steve Driehaus (OH-1), Chaka Fattah (PA-2), Bill Foster (IL-14), Marcia Fudge (OH-11), Charlie Gonzalez (TX-20), Al Green (TX-9), Gene Green (TX-29), Parker Griffith (AL-5), Debbie Halvorson (IL-11), Alcee Hastings (FL-23), Baron Hill (IN-9), Tim Holden (PA-17), Sheila Jackson,Lee (TX-18), Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX-30), Hank Johnson (GA-4), Suzanne Kosmas (FL-24), Frank Kratovil (MD-1), Rick Larsen (WA-2), Daniel Maffei (NY-25), Michael McMahon (NY-13), Gregory Meeks (NY-6), Charlie Melancon (LA-3), Michael Michaud (ME-2), Walt Minnick (ID-1), Dennis Moore (KS-3), Glenn Nye (VA-2), Ed Pastor (AZ-4), Solomon Ortiz (TX-27), Ed Perlmutter (CO-7), Nick Rahall (WV-3), Jared Polis (CO-2), Silvestre Reyes (TX-16), Mike Ross (AR-4), Loretta Sanchez (CA-47), Kurt Schrader (OR-5), Allyson Schwartz (PA-13), David Scott (GA-13), Heath Shuler (NC-11), Albio Sires (NJ-13), Zachary Space (OH-18), John Spratt (SC-5), John Tanner (TN-8), Bennie Thompson (MS-2), Paul Tonko (NY-21), Ed Towns (NY-10), Peter Welch (VT), Charlie Wilson (OH-6)
I was under the impression that the problem most users have with touchscreens isn't feedback after clicking, but before. I can touch-type on my blackberry, which lets me go a lot faster than on smooth touchscreens because I can tell my finger is on the right button by feel.
Sorry, a slight error there. Smithies won the Nobel for incorporating genetic alterations into mice using embyronic stem cells- not knockout mice, although he did invent that technique at the same time as Mario Capecchi. For that work they shared the Lasker Award along with Martin Evans.
Slashdot Mirror
Watch Amory Lovin's TED talk. Buying energy is more expensive than saving energy. We don't need to radically shift to more costly energy sources like solar to avert the risk of climate change. Regardless of whether the effects we see today are of human origin, the fact is that continuing to burn fossil fuels at current rates is not environmentally sound policy. The pollution produced has a tangible and real impact on peoples' health, the energy infrastructure in place motivates a great deal of humanitarian damage around the world and the continued release of massive amounts of acidifying CO2 and other greenhouse gases will eventually cause massive problems with the global climate, problems which we may or may not be observing yet, although the vast majority of the data out there does support the conclusion that we are indeed seeing the results of human activity. Investing in sane nuclear power (India, France and Russia build power plants at less than a third of the price-per-kW of new proposals in the US and severely mitigate the waste problem by reprocessing in fast breeders), wind power where it makes sense, biofuels from non-food crops in regions where the land use will not interfere with agriculture, all of these combined with investments in energy efficiency (many investments of this sort are being made privately without a government mandate because, again, its cheaper to save energy than buy energy!) and efficient infrastructure, gentle government policies to encourage these developments through feebates and R&D investment we can completely revolutionize the American economy, become a technology exporter again instead of an importer, create millions of jobs, make ludicrous profits and prevent long-term damage to the environment regardless of whether you believe climate change is currently occurring (mountaintop removal, smog, freshwater pollution etc are real issues that face people worldwide already).
Anyone who would have the world cripple itself economically
[Citation needed]
Amory Lovins, Paul Krugman and many, many, many others would disagree with you on that point.
This year, the Chinese government limited fossil fuel burning before the Olympics with apparently stunning results. When I was in Beijing for nearly a month 10 years ago, smog was a daily occurance. Even miles outside the city at Badaling (the Great Wall), it was hard to see for more than a mile. Smog is considered to be the third most important greenhouse gas by the IPCC. Evidence that we are changing our own atmosphere by fossil fuel emission is obvious just by looking.
This kind of trend can be seen on a daily cycle in New Delhi. Overnight, the smog over the city disperses but returns over the course of the day (typically by 11am) only to dissipate again as the city slows down for the night.
This is a political question that's long been discussed in India. Civil disobedience led to the formation of the country and has been used repeatedly in the past to unseat unfavorable governments at the State level. There are two schools of thought, one that believes that civil disobedience is always an acceptable response and another that believes the constant reliance on civil disobedience will lead to a tyranny of the minority as long as enough of the minority becomes vocal or active enough. This second group (the Indian historian Ramachandra Guha is a good example) believe that in the presence of a democratic system where it is possible to reform the government, regardless of how difficult it may be the system must be reformed through democratic means. This is not to say that western systems of government are purely democratic, there is certainly an argument to be made for the forces that exist which impede true democracy. Civil disobedience is a very slippery slope and should only be considered a last resort against ceaseless effort to reform the system currently in place. For anyone to espouse civil disobedience without working, campaigning, building a majority consensus and the political will to reform and failing is just taking the easiest way out.
"(i) generate excessive amounts of email or other Internet traffic;"
So what exactly is an excessive amount of email or other Internet traffic?
Wouldn't NASA administrators have the power to require certain safety levels in any grants or contracts they award?
Which is why the critique in TFA was penned by someone from the blue brain project...
He's not arguing that it didn't work, he's arguing that they essentially ran a simulation of a large Artificial Neural Network, a relatively trivial task as long as you have a big enough computer behind it. ANNs are essentially points that connect to each other and learn by assigning weights to these various connections- this is essentially the simplest possible way to simulate the behavior of a neuron. The argument is being made that to claim an ANN, regardless of its size, approaches the capabilities of any mammalian brain is simply wrong, and that a true attempt to create such a simulation would need to factor in the stochasticity of ion channels, branchings in neurons and various other biological phenomena that have a tremendous impact on how our brains work.
Without reading more details on the original work, I'm inclined to say that he has a very valid point if they were indeed only running a large ANN model.
Except that Apple isn't citing damage here, they're citing safety. I agree that smoking households can be very damaging to computers and is willful damage, but this isn't the excuse Apple is using. The only reason they're using a BS excuse like safety is because if they tried to argue that the problems were caused by willful damage from smoking they'd be sued for not informing their users that smoking can damage their computers and would have to pay for it anyways.
Its a similar situation with warrantied computers that have been vomited or urinated upon, having been to a university where all students who bought a computer received accidental damage coverage, if one of these things were to happen, Lenovo simply replaced the computer and disposed of the "contaminated" one. If Apple is making a stand on the safety of their workers they should honor the warranty and replace the computer.
A pony would be nice as well!
It was indeed 9 pixels. They were using a large area interline CCD sensor from kodak, the KAI-11002.
Looking through their paper they show diffraction patterns that are roughly 4 pixels across on a sensor with 9 micron pixels (36 microns) for red blood cells which are 5 microns. This implies roughly 7.2x magnification, which means their actual field-of-view is about 18 mm^2 or 1/55th of their claimed field of view.
There's some serious issues with their idea of cost, too. Most field clinics in India (I have a brother who works as a malaria epidemiologist there) use microscopes that cost around $100-150, to claim replacing that with a $300+ camera phone (admittedly, the whole cell phone things looks like a huge marketing gimmick since they just use a high-end kodak interline CCD anyways) is "inexpensive" is more than a little disingenuous.
I've ranted before on the science behind the LUCAS system before, so I'll try not to repeat myself, but the utility of such as system would be limited primarily to RBC/WBC counts which are typically done either in counting chambers on a microscope or in an automated system measuring light scatter (both are called hemocytometers). While I can believe that they could very well do what an automated hemocytometer does using a lower cost instrument, applications in screening for disease causing agents such as malaria parasites and mycobacteria are doubtful except at very high parasitemia (when a high enough density of parasites are present to scatter a detectable quantity of light) or at very high concentrations of bacteria in sputum (same story) at which point microscopy would be easier and cheaper to detect the objects. When objects start getting down to the 1 micron size-scale, it becomes exceedingly difficult to scatter light with them. Even looking at their published results, some of their diffraction patterns are already barely above background with cells in the 5-10 micron range. Trying to detect a minute variation inside one of those diffraction patterns (from a malaria parasite within an RBC, for example) while perhaps possible would not be very clinically reliable when you have no control over what might be in your samples.
Its a good thing the DoD is taking a stronger, more positive stance towards open source software. I guess the next logical step would be open source hardware.
It should be noted that this kind of "personalized medicine" as it tends to be called is mostly only relevant to cancer treatments that inhibit certain receptors or enzyme, as tamoxifen does. Typically there are cancer subtypes that, while they may look alike, are actually caused by a different mutation than the one that the anti-cancer drug targets.
All organisms have these kinds of tumor suppressor genes whether they act to inhibit cell proliferation or promote cell death, in fact most cancers have to have mutations that inhibit these suppressor genes as well as mutations which enhance genes that promote cell growth and proliferation. What would be more interesting than simply identifying the suppressor gene(s) believed to be the cause of the absence of naked mole rat cancers would be in identifying the mechanisms that have protected that(those) gene(s). I wonder if the researchers in question also considered alternate explanations for the absence of cancers in naked mole rats- its very possible that their subterranean environment simply doesn't contain as many mutagens as we are exposed to and as such having a naked mole rat with a mutated (inhibited) tumor suppressor AND a mutated (enhanced) tumor promoter is such a rarity that we simply haven't been able to find one.
This is not a longer patent period. What this is an extension of the period that a pharma company can retain exclusive access to its clinical trial data. Without this data, a generics manufacturer couldn't get a drug to market because they would have to repeat all of the original clinical trials- something which would be extremely cost prohibitive. This bill would extend the time during which the FDA would not release the raw data from the trials to the public so that even though the patent on a drug may have expired, no generics could enter the market. This is in essence granting a 12 year extended monopoly to biologics manufacturers because they whined (and spent) enough despite that their principal justification for the extension (generics are more expensive to develop than small molecules and thus warrant a longer monopoly) has been shown to be false.
It depends on what aspect of development you refer to. This report obviously refers to the kind of development the middle classes of countries such as India, China and Brazil are looking at. They've come out of poverty, have food, safe water, housing and security. They are literate (both technically and otherwise), mostly college educated and now need opportunities to engage the international marketplace in a more meaningful manner as well as the infrastructure to support access to a more democratized version of entrepreneurship that we see in the developed world.
Yes, these countries still have tremendous poverty and inequality, thank you for pointing that out for the umpteenth billion time. But the reality is that in addition to the poverty is a middle class that is literally several times the size of the entire United States that is discovering that their aspirations and capabilities are starting to strain the infrastructure available to them to do something more productive and more fundamentally satisfying. Empowering and inspiring this group of people will do far more for poverty and corruption in the developing world than the direct aid or paternalistic development the western world typically engages in. This is the key demographic that will create jobs and drive growth in their own countries. Couple this with a strong and free press (from personal experience I at least know India has this), increasing social awareness and an increase in financial means and you have a very powerful recipe to subsequently help bring additional hundreds of millions out of poverty.
Its particularly odd that they would strip the browser citing costs when mobile internet access outside of the US is so much cheaper!
I'm not a cancer researcher per se, but a lot of technologies I work with have applications in cancer research / are demonstrated with applications in cancer research. Personally, I agree with that view. Biomarkers are great for detecting foreign organisms like tuberculosis, malaria, etc. but are likely not going to be a very good solution for detecting malignant tumors since most of their secretions (hormones and proteins) are usually (but not always, hence why some biomarkers exist) not distinguishable from those secreted by healthy cells- except in quantity. Personally, I believe high resolution imaging (MR/CT/optical) combined with genomic and proteomic strategies for cancer sub-typing will end up being the most powerful tools we have for early diagnosis of potentially malignant tumors. There's a lot of great work being done identifying mutations that give rise to cancerous cell lines which enable simple PCR assays to detect the presence of those mutations in biopsy samples. Even more exciting, in my opinion, are new assays for quantifying cell signaling activity in live cells from biopsies (I work in a lab that does a lot of this, so I may be biased) because we can look for cancerous phenotypes (for example, which specific signal pathways in a cell are over/under activated) which are a lot easier to associate with a tumor and don't change as quickly as cancerous genotypes. A combination of those two would give a physician all the information he/she needs to prescribe the treatment which has the best shot at knocking the cancer out.
Also this may just be splitting hairs, but putting "helps detect early stage cancer" in the headline implies that they, well, actually helped detect an early stage cancer in a patient. A laboratory proof of concept for a protein biomarker assay is very, very far away from actually "help[ing to] detect early stage cancer".
After reading some of the Stanford press out there on this, I've gotta say I'm really sick of 'science' journalists. Saying their test can detect cancer with 1,000 times the sensitivity and specificity has very different meanings than what they intended in diagnostics. It sounds like they're claiming 1,000-fold improvements in false negative (sensitivity) and false positive (specificity) rather than assay sensitivity based on concentrations. Their claim is also inaccurate. ELISA assays are commercially available with sensitivities as high as 1 part per 10 billion, while their claim is for a sensitivity of 1 part per 100 billion. ELISA assays have also been reported (and a couple are commercially available) with sensitivities of 1 part per 100 billion.
and not a pile on nonsensical garbage, the wang group page has a good description of the project.
Essentially they're using magnetic nanoparticles covered with antibodies to detect the binding of some tumor biomarkers. While the idea is interesting, there's no indication (yet) that its more sensitive than other biomarker assays, although it very well may be. Fluorescence techniques can get down to the tens of molecules level of sensitivity (which is insanely impressive). If they can get even lower, I'd be extremely impressed, but I can't find any published data on their immunoassays. Their comments about capturing and sorting out cancer cells is a bit odd. If you're looking to isolate whole cells based on recognizing protein biomarkers, I can't see any advantages of their tech over standard fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS), unless their assays are really more sensitive.
Really, the only thing of interest in this work is using the magnetic properties of their nanoparticles to detect binding. I would be really curious to see if this could supplant technologies like quartz crystal microbalances that look for changes in the vibrational modes of a crystal to detect surface binding events as being simpler and less prone to disruption by temperature fluctuations, doors opening or people walking by. The biomarker assay is interesting but by no means genuinely new technology- only the detection method is truly novel. Not bashing the work done here, the binding assay is really cool, the application looks like it was mostly thought of to get grant money.
The signers*: ,Lee (TX-18), Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX-30), Hank Johnson (GA-4), Suzanne Kosmas (FL-24), Frank Kratovil (MD-1), Rick Larsen (WA-2), Daniel Maffei (NY-25), Michael McMahon (NY-13), Gregory Meeks (NY-6), Charlie Melancon (LA-3), Michael Michaud (ME-2), Walt Minnick (ID-1), Dennis Moore (KS-3), Glenn Nye (VA-2), Ed Pastor (AZ-4), Solomon Ortiz (TX-27), Ed Perlmutter (CO-7), Nick Rahall (WV-3), Jared Polis (CO-2), Silvestre Reyes (TX-16), Mike Ross (AR-4), Loretta Sanchez (CA-47), Kurt Schrader (OR-5), Allyson Schwartz (PA-13), David Scott (GA-13), Heath Shuler (NC-11), Albio Sires (NJ-13), Zachary Space (OH-18), John Spratt (SC-5), John Tanner (TN-8), Bennie Thompson (MS-2), Paul Tonko (NY-21), Ed Towns (NY-10), Peter Welch (VT), Charlie Wilson (OH-6)
Michael Arcuri (NY-27), Joe Baca (CA-43), John Barrow (GA-12), Sanford Bishop (GA-2), Tim Bishop (NY-1), Dan Boren (OK-2), Leonard Boswell (IA-3), Allen Boyd (FL-2), Robert Brady (PA-1), Bobby Bright (AL-2), G.K. Butterfield (NC-1), Dennis Cardoza (CA-18), Russ Carnahan (MO-3), Christopher Carney (PA-10), Travis Childers (MS-1), Donna Christensen (VI), William Lacy Clay (MO-1), Emanuel Cleaver (MO-5), Jim Costa (CA-20), Joseph Crowley (NY-7), Henry Cuellar (TX-28), Elijah Cummings (MD-7), Kathleen Dahlkemper (PA-3), Danny Davis (IL-7), Lincoln Davis (TN-4), Steve Driehaus (OH-1), Chaka Fattah (PA-2), Bill Foster (IL-14), Marcia Fudge (OH-11), Charlie Gonzalez (TX-20), Al Green (TX-9), Gene Green (TX-29), Parker Griffith (AL-5), Debbie Halvorson (IL-11), Alcee Hastings (FL-23), Baron Hill (IN-9), Tim Holden (PA-17), Sheila Jackson
*List retrieved from:
http://www.precursorblog.com/content/72-house-democrats-letter-urges-fcc-avoid-tentative-conclusions-which-favor-government-regulation
I was under the impression that the problem most users have with touchscreens isn't feedback after clicking, but before. I can touch-type on my blackberry, which lets me go a lot faster than on smooth touchscreens because I can tell my finger is on the right button by feel.
Sorry, a slight error there. Smithies won the Nobel for incorporating genetic alterations into mice using embyronic stem cells- not knockout mice, although he did invent that technique at the same time as Mario Capecchi. For that work they shared the Lasker Award along with Martin Evans.