by Christopher Paul on June 30, 2014 Just going by the title, you might think scientists are looking at using toxins found in scorpion venom to kill cancel cells. In fact, they’re using one compound — called chlorotoxin — to give cancer cells a fluorescent green glow when exposed to ultraviolet light. Glowing cancer cells are much easier to spot so surgeons can remove more tumor cells than through traditional MRIs. The discovery alone is amazing but the story of Dr. Jim Olsen and his use of crowdfunding to move it through trials is a worthy read:
…Olson’s audience stays rapt as he goes on to describe a decade-long quest to solve one of the most vexing problems in oncology: the fact that a tumor’s precise boundaries are nearly impossible to define during surgery. A preoperative MRI provides only a rough guide to a tumor’s fuzzy edges; the scans often miss slivers of cancer that seamlessly blend into the surrounding tissue. Surgeons often face a brutal catch-22: Either cut out any suspicious tissue, an approach that can lead to debilitating side effects, or risk leaving behind malignant cells that will eventually kill the patient.
…
…His laboratory at the renowned Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, located just down the road by Seattle’s Lake Union, has developed a compound that appears to pinpoint all of the malignant cells in a patient’s body. It gives those cells a bright fluorescent sheen, so that surgeons can easily spot them in the operating room. Olson calls the product Tumor Paint, and it comes with a surprising twist: The compound’s main ingredient is a molecule that is found in the stinger of Leiurus quinquestriatus, a potent little animal more popularly known as the deathstalker scorpion.
The poison is modified to carry a florescent compound which is injected into the patient before surgery. Cancer cells have a receptor that healthy cells don’t and the chlorotoxin binds to it and releases the dye into the cancerous cell for illumination during the procedure.
An amazing discovery that, if it gets past trials, will be another weapon in the war against our body’s self destruction.
Wired via Longreads
by Christopher Paul on June 27, 2014 New York’s Subway cars used to be covered in graffiti – it was as much a part of the city as Times Square. But since the late ’80s, they’ve been free of vandalism:
Systemically, train line by train line, Gunn took the subways off the map for graffiti writers. While they were fixing it, they didn’t allow any graffiti on it. If graffiti artists “bombed” a train car, the MTA pulled it from the system. Even during rush hour.
They still get vandalized but with increasing fines and how quickly they get cleaned, the "art" is dying.
via
by Christopher Paul on June 26, 2014 This quick reflection on DOS games hits home for me. And while I’m going to date myself, I remember going through similar experiences to get the games on my computer to work well.
I remember my father buying an extra 128K of RAM (which we already had 640K) just to get the DAC to work for Wing Commander II — all for about 30 seconds of audio at in one of the title sequences. I also remember playing around with physical IRQ jumpers and switches and setting COM port baud rates just to get feedback from the screen.
I was fortunate to have a 20MB hard drive on our first computer and didn’t have to worry about boot disks and the like. But I do remember having to copy dozens of floppy disks on to it just to run some of the Sierra Adventure games my brothers and I played.
Messing with config.sys and autoexec.bat files developed critical thinking, problem solving, and creative skills that I use everyday even though I’m not in the tech world.
Having lived through that era of computing, I wasn’t amazed at what it could do (and I’m not really amazed at what tech can do today either). I’m amazed it worked at all. Then, everything was a hassle — a puzzle — but it was normal. Now, it feels like the dark ages.
via
by Christopher Paul on June 25, 2014 These days. Millenials tend to avoid voicemail as a method of communication.:
In a memorable scene from the 1996 comedy “Swingers,” Jon Favreau’s romantically inept protagonist, Mike, deluges the answering machine of a woman he’s just met at a bar with a spate of excruciatingly self-sabotaging messages.
If the movie were remade today, Mike would have to find another outlet for his miscues. The concept of leaving (and checking) voice mail is, to millennials, as obsolete as swing-dancing and playing NHL ’94 on Sega Genesis. That red number on their iPhones announcing how many voice mail messages are waiting? Ignored. The recording? Instantly deleted. Mike’s oral-to-aural disaster? Averted.
I have to say, voicemails are one of my most hated forms of communication. Sure, they can be useful but only as a last resort when email and txt hasn't accomplished the job. Voicemail seems so unidirectional and can add reciprocating feedback if needed. Emails, txts, tweets, etc can be one to one, one to many, but with an immediate and opposite response.
by Christopher Paul on June 24, 2014 Paul Greenberg has a book coming out which will get into the absurdity of fishing practices in the US:
In 1982 a Chinese aquaculture scientist named Fusui Zhang journeyed to Martha’s Vineyard in search of scallops. The New England bay scallop had recently been domesticated, and Dr. Zhang thought the Vineyard-grown shellfish might do well in China. After a visit to Lagoon Pond in Tisbury, he boxed up 120 scallops and spirited them away to his lab in Qingdao. During the journey 94 died. But 26 thrived. Thanks to them, today China now grows millions of dollars of New England bay scallops, a significant portion of which are exported back to the United States.
As go scallops, so goes the nation. According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, even though the United States controls more ocean than any other country, 86 percent of the seafood we consume is imported.
But it’s much fishier than that: While a majority of the seafood Americans eat is foreign, a third of what Americans catch is sold to foreigners.
The seafood industry, it turns out, is a great example of the swaps, delete-and-replace maneuvers and other mechanisms that define so much of the outsourced American economy; you can find similar, seemingly inefficient phenomena in everything from textiles to technology. The difference with seafood, though, is that we’re talking about the destruction and outsourcing of the very ecological infrastructure that underpins the health of our coasts.
Fish sticks have destroyed cod supplies in the Atlantic, farmed salmon is imported from Canada but wild salmon from Alaska is exported, processed, and imported back to the US, and local oysters have been replaced by shrimp farmed across the globe. The essay that is derived from Greenberg’s book is both fascinating and disturbing. I’m tempted to read it but I don’t want to be utterly disgusted with the realities of our fish consumption.
via Kottke