Genetic key to some breast cancers found

POLLY CURTIS
CANCER SPECIALISTS announced recently that they have discovered a gene, which may hold the key to a treatment for up to 10 per cent of all breast cancers. The development could — in time — lead to treatments that would make chemotherapy unnecessary.

Scientists at the Institute of Cancer Research in the UK have found that one in 10 breast cancers — including many lobular cancers, which are among the hardest to treat and fastest increasing — are linked to an overactive gene called FGFR1.

The gene provides the blueprint for a cancer-fuelling protein. The scientists reported in the journal Clinical Cancer Research that when the gene's activity was blocked, tumour growth was reduced.

First stage of trials

Using a compound targeted at FGFR1, scientists reduced the growth of cells in laboratory tests and are now planning the first stage of clinical trials.

The discovery raises the hope of a `targeted' therapy which could lead to a sophisticated new age of treatments for women who test positive for FGFR1 and spare them chemotherapy, with its devastating side-effects.

Jorge Reis-Filho, of the molecular pathology laboratory at the Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Centre at the institute, said: "Breast cancer is a complex disease made up of many sub-types. Currently, most breast cancers are treated similarly but we'd like to be able to tailor treatment for each type.

"To do this, it is important that we find new targets for drug development. The discovery of FGFR1 is the first step on the road to tailoring treatment for the 10-15 per cent of women diagnosed with lobular breast cancer.

"The identification of FGFR1 in this sub-group of breast cancers is a very promising finding and although we are a few years away from clinical trials we are moving closer towards our vision of a future free from the fear of breast cancer."

Some 44,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancers every year and 10-15 per cent of those have lobular cancers. FGFR1 is present in half of this subset of cancers, as well as in around 10 per cent of all breast cancers, he said. The research echoes the work that led to the development of the breast cancer drug Herceptin.

Herceptin can be prescribed for women whose cancer is HER2 positive — around 20 per cent of those diagnosed. The FGFR1 discovery, which is similar to the discovery of HER2, could lead to a therapy for women who are diagnosed with breast cancers that are HER2 negative but positive for FGFR1.

Separately, the same scientists are carrying out the first trials of a drug called a PARP inhibitor, which could be beneficial for other women who have a family history of breast cancer and have developed it themselves.

Results promising

The first trial of 50 women is nearing completion, the drugs are not showing signs of toxicity in patients, and the results are "very promising."

"In the future we hope to be able to provide several targeted therapies which will improve survival rates.

"It's an optimistic view and we couldn't say when it would happen, but this is heading in the direction of chemotherapy-free treatments," he said.

The new research comes shortly after a study published in the journal Science recently, which found that a chemical used in the abortion pill also prevented the growth of breast and ovarian cancers. The drug Mifepristone is used to terminate early pregnancies, but by shutting down the hormone progesterone in breast tissue cells, the drug can also prevent tumours from forming. — Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
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THE UK Health Protection Agency (HPA) is assisting the London Metropolitan Police in investigating the death of one Alexander Litvinenko, an ex-Russian spy who was poisoned with polonium-210 in a bizarre incident.

Polonium-210 (Po-210) is radioactive and occurs in nature in trace quantities. It has a half-life of nearly 138 days. It emits alpha particles and very low intensity gamma rays. Since there are sensitive instruments to detect very tiny traces of radioactivity, HPA could trace the movement of the victim and spread of contamination at several places.
Such low levels of contamination do not pose any significant risk. Large quantities of Po-210 may be prepared by irradiating bismuth-209 in a nuclear reactor.
How Litvinenko got poisoned with such a large quantity of Po-210 continues to be a mystery. He freely moved in the city and frequented many places till November 17, when he got admitted to London's University College Hospital.
He suffered loss of hair, dehydration, and vomiting. He had very low white blood cell count. These symptoms indicated severe radioactive poisoning.
On 23rd of November, just before dying of heart failure, the 43-year-old Litvinenko claimed that someone poisoned him in a London restaurant, which he visited on November 1, this year.
"To poison someone, polonium would most likely have been chemically combined in some type of dissolvable salt, for example polonium nitrate," New Scientist quoted experts in the field. "In this form, the material could easily have been added to his food and ingested", the journal clarified.
Soluble polonium-210 gets dispersed in soft tissue. Kidney and bone marrow will receive high doses.

Roger Cox, director of the U.K.'s Centre for Radiation, Chemical and Environmental Hazards told New Scientist that the fatal dose would have to be above five grays (gray is a measure of the amount of radiation absorbed by the body tissue). "The quantity of Po-210 involved in the present case may be a few millicuries or a few tenths of a microgram."


Cancer threat
An alpha particle from Po-210 has a range of about 35 microns (A micron is 0.0001centimetre) in tissue. Three or four cells will stop it. Radiation, interacting with cells may kill a few of them. Some of the cells may survive. The surviving cells have the potential to become cancerous as they may lose their precisely set growth control mechanisms.
The UK HPA found small quantities of Po-210 in a few areas at the Itsu sushi restaurant at 167 Piccadilly, London, and at Mr Litvinenko's home in Muswell Hill.

Traces located
They located traces of radioactivity at two more London locations, one of them at the offices of exiled Russian oil tycoon Boris Berezovsky, the United Press International (UPI) reported on November 28th... They found Po-210 at the offices of the private Erinys security firm, which guards oil installations. Police tried to trace Litvinenko's movements, who he met and where.
HPA asked anyone who was in the Itsu restaurant or who was in the Pine Bar or in the restaurant of the Millennium Hotel on 1st November to contact NHS (National Health Services) on a specified number for further advice. HPA found contamination in three British Airways (BA) planes flying between London and Moscow. After an overall assessment, the agency declared that the passengers who travelled on any of these planes over the last month were not at risk.
Two British Airways (BA) planes flying between London and Moscow and other European routes tested positive. "... .the risk of having exposed to this substance remains low. It can only represent a radiation hazard, if it is taken into the body — by breathing it in, by taking it into the mouth, or if it gets into a wound," the Agency reassured the public.

Precautionary measure
Since 25th November, until midnight of 28th November, HPA received 1,325 phone calls. The Agency followed up 68 people who it decided to investigate further. In addition, the Agency referred 21 persons as a precautionary measure to a specialist clinic, set up by it for possible radiological exposure evaluation.
Besides these, HPA asked 52 out of 162 healthcare staff and 105 staff or visitors to the various locations under police investigation to provide urine samples. From November 1, the body fluids (sweat, saliva, urine etc) of the victim contained polonium-210. Anyone who came into physical contact with the victim may have received traces of polonium.
It will not pose any significant risk so long as it is outside the body. Those present while carrying out autopsy on the body of the victim at the Royal London Hospital wore special protective clothing, to prevent contamination of their body with polonium.
The denial
The origin of the substance, which claimed its victim, remains unknown. According to Associated Press, Sergei Kiriyenko, director of the Russian nuclear agency, Rosatom, denied that the polonium, could have been stolen from a nuclear facility in Russia.
Kiriyenko revealed that Russia exports 8 grams of polonium-210 monthly, all of it to the United States. That is a whopping amount; what do they do with it? He said there had been no exports to Britain in five years. The HPA reports are reassuring. The incident did not pose significant risks to anyone, other than the victim.
K.S. PARTHASARATHY
Former Secretary, AERB (ksparth@yahoo.co.uk)
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Industry leaders need to join in the global quest for a single open document standard...
IT IS one of the ironies of the computer revolution, now a quarter century old, that automation, far from decreasing the dependence on paper has vastly escalated it. First they spoke of the `paperless office'; when that proved to be almost unachievable, they rephrased it as `less-paper' office. We may no longer maintain vast godowns of paper files and records at corporate level; but in our individual capacities we tend to generate, exchange and download a lot more information — a large chunk of it not critical to our work.

Sitting on a gold mine
What is more, we have become choosy: We want to print a document exactly as it was sent — which is why companies like Adobe, who developed the Portable Document Format (PDF) to do just this and created a tool called Acrobat to transport such files on the Internet, are sitting on a gold mine.
This month, the latest — 8th — version of Adobe Acrobat has been released in India. As it proclaims on the cover, it is not just a vehicle to send and receive documents but a collaboration and communication tool.
A single click accesses a separate service called Connect that enables real-time Web-based collaboration on a document. This is aimed at professional verticals like the construction and engineering industry.
Legal beagles, marketing mavericks, publishing pundits...these are some of the professional groups, Adobe has set its sights on. In fact multiple documents can be bundled as a single PDF file — and collaborators can post their marginal comments much as they would stick `PostIT' memos on a real document.

Bloated the product
Now the level of automation has been made smarter. A new feature allows users to selectively hide sensitive information.
All these have bloated the product beyond a simple PDF reader-creator. The Acrobat 8.0 Professional version costs Rs. 25,000 while the Acrobat 8.0 Standard is available at Rs. 17,000.
On his first visit to the land of his birth recently, after steering the mega merger with technology company Macromedia, Shantanu Narayen, President and Chief Operating Officer of San Jose, California (U.S.)-based Adobe Systems, took time off last month to brief The Hindu about his Net-enabled road map for the future.
A new technology `combo' codenamed `Apollo', will enable a digital work flow that is aimed at embracing both designers and developers simplifying the process from project conception to completion, Mr Narayen explained. It will leverage Adobe's flagship product Acrobat and the Connect feature.
Naresh Gupta, Managing Director of Adobe's Bangalore-based R&D Centre added that Indian engineers were the brains behind critical features of another element of the new Apollo initiative: the Web publishing tool `Contribute.'
For its fourth and latest edition, the Bangalore engineers had added features to Contribute, that simplified the process of creating blogs — or web logs — allowing tight integration with Microsoft's Office and enabling bloggers to include Flash animation in their postings.
What about the rest of us who look for a simple way to send a document by email so that it is received with the look and feel of the original? While the Acrobat reader continues to be free, the full product that enables one to create a PDF file, has been priced out of the reach of lay users.

Many alternatives
No wonder so many alternatives have sprung up on the Web. A free-to-download PDF creator PDF creator from any Windows platform is available at Source Forge : http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator
Foxit 2.3 ( http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php ) is the latest version of a fast PDF Reader that occupies just 1.5 MB.
It allows you to draw graphics, highlight and type text and make notes on a PDF document and then print out or save the annotated document.
You may convert the whole PDF document into a simple text file. The basic version is free to download.
Microsoft's next Windows version, Vista will allow document creation as a PDF file or in its own challenge to ODF called XPS. The Save as PDF and XPS download is available at http: // http://www.micro/ soft.com /downloads.
The Open Document Format Alliance (http://www.odfalliance.org/) has seen dozens of IT players, nations and states coming together under the ODF flag (ODF was initially a creation of OpenOffice.org).
Indian members include the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Pune, the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai and the National Institute for Smart Government, Hyderabad.
The Delhi government has opted for ODF for its commercial tax department.
There will always be a market for compelling corporate document collaboration solutions — like Acrobat's latest avatar. But the Adobes and Microsofts of the world need to nurture the aspirations of the millions of lay users of the Net by joining in the global quest for a single open document standard.

Original Story

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I Bloody well knew She had got it from her mom. Says my Dad too.

WASHINGTON:
The chance that infidelity will intrude on a romantic relationship may be written in the couple's genes, a study has found. The results suggest a DNA test could tell a man the rough chances his female partner will cheat on him, though it wouldn't necessarily work the opposite way. Researchers focused on a set of genes that past studies have implicated in a link between sexual attraction and genetic similarity. The cluster of genes is termed the major histocompatibility complex, or MHC.
The researchers studied 48 male-female couples who were either dating "exclusively" or married or living together. As the proportion of MHC genes the couple shared increased, "women's sexual responsivity to their partners decreased, their number of outside] sexual partners increased, and their attraction to men other than their primary partners increased," the researchers wrote in a paper describing their findings.
Two quantities were almost equal on average, according to Christine Garver-Apgar, the study' author: the fraction of MHC genes shared, and the woman's number of extra partners. In other words, if the man and woman had half the genes in common, the woman would have on average nearly half a lover on the side. But these tendencies were found only for women; men's attraction and likelihood of cheating appeared unrelated to the genes, they wrote.
This may also explain past studies suggesting that humans and animals prefer mates with dissimilar MHC genes, according to scientists. Such a preference might help assure that offspring have a wide range of immunity genes in the holster, giving them an edge over pathogens.

Infidelity touches about half of all couples, married or not, according to infidelity researcher Shirley Glass. Last year, scientists also found one in 25 dads may be raising another man's child.

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A little wave that pushed Cat Stevens to Islam
WASHINGTON:
Yusuf Islam, formerly the pop star Cat Stevens, said that a small wave literally washed him ashore and pushed him towards Islam. Islam, who recently released his first commercial album in nearly three decades, An Other Cup said that he got caught in a current off Malibu beach in California in 1975 and prayed for help. "Suddenly I was petrified. I thought this might be it," he said. "I said, ‘God, if you save me, I'll work for you.'" "And then a little wave, you know, came behind me," he said. "It wasn't very big. But it was that miraculous moment when suddenly the tide was going in my favour." The singer, now 58, said he was already on a spiritual quest, but that the frightening swim gave him a push. He read a copy of the Koran given to him by his brother. Two years later he converted to Islam, changed his name and ended his career as a pop singer. Islam made headlines in 2004 when a US-bound plane he was in was diverted due to post-September 11 security measures. As Stevens, he hadsinger had several hits in the '70s, like "Wild World".

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A crisis is staring us in the face, it is not just down the road somewhere.

PENGUINS IN PERIL: The number of emperor penguins has dropped from 300 breeding pairs to just nine in the western Antarctic Peninsula.

ANIMAL AND plant species have begun dying off or changing sooner than predicted because of global warming, a review of hundreds of research studies contends.
These fast-moving adaptations come as a surprise even to biologists and ecologists because they are occurring so rapidly.
At least 70 species of frogs, mostly mountain-dwellers that had nowhere to go to escape the creeping heat, have gone extinct because of climate change, the analysis says.
Here and real
It also reports that between 100 and 200 other cold-dependent animal species, such as penguins and polar bears are in deep trouble.
"We are finally seeing species going extinct," said University of Texas biologist Camille Parmesan, author of the study. "Now we've got the evidence. It's here. It's real. This is not just biologists' intuition. It's what's happening."
Trends reported
Her review of 866 scientific studies is summed up in the journal Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics.
Parmesan reports seeing trends of animal populations moving northward if they can, of species adapting slightly because of climate change, of plants blooming earlier, and of an increase in pests and parasites.
Parmesan and others have been predicting such changes for years, but even she was surprised to find evidence that it is already happening; she figured it would be another decade away.
Just five years ago biologists, though not complacent, figured the harmful biological effects of global warming were much farther down the road, said Douglas Futuyma, professor of ecology and evolution at the State University of New York in Stony Brook.
"I feel as though we are staring crisis in the face," Futuyma said.
"It's not just down the road somewhere. It is just hurtling toward us. Anyone who is 10 years old right now is going to be facing a very different and frightening world by the time that they are 50 or 60."
While over the past several years, studies have shown problems with certain species, animal populations or geographic areas, Parmesan's is the first comprehensive analysis showing the big picture of global-warming induced changes, said Chris Thomas, a professor of conservation biology at the University of York in England.
While it is impossible to prove conclusively that the changes are the result of global warming, the evidence is so strong and other supportable explanations are lacking, Thomas said, so it is "statistically virtually impossible that these are just chance observations."
Early springs' effect
The most noticeable changes in plants and animals have to do with earlier springs, Parmesan said.
The best example can be seen in earlier cherry blossoms and grape harvests and in sixty five British bird species that in general are laying their first eggs nearly nine days earlier than thirty five years ago.
Parmesan said she worries most about the cold-adapted species, such as emperor penguins that have dropped from three hundred breeding pairs to just nine in the western Antarctic Peninsula, or polar bears, which are dropping in numbers and weight in the Arctic.
The cold-dependent species on mountaintops have nowhere to go, which is why two-thirds of a certain grouping of frog species has already gone extinct, Parmesan said.
Better adaptation
Populations of animals that adapt better to warmth or can move and live farther north are adapting better than other populations in the same species, Parmesan said.
"We are seeing a lot of evolution now," Parmesan said. However, no new gene mutations have shown themselves, not surprising because that could take millions of years, she said. — AP
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Sunita all set to become 2nd Indian origin woman in space
Sunita Williams is all set to become the second woman of Indian origin after Kalpana Chawla to blast off on a space mission and spend six months at the International Space Station where US shuttle Discovery will leave her on completion of a 12-day repair job. Sunita, 41, the daughter of Deepak and Bonnie Pandya, arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a final stretch of training and preparations for Friday's shuttle mission STS-116, the first night launch since the 2003 Columbia disaster.
The spaceflight is scheduled to lift off at 8:05 IST on Friday (Thursday, 9:35 pm US time) will take along the most rookie crew since 1988 as five of the seven members have never flown in space before.
Besides Sunita, the crew includes mission commander Mark Polansky, pilot William Oefelein, mission specialists Joan Higginbotham; Nicholas Patrick; lead spacewalker Bob Curbeam; and the European Space Agency's Christer Fuglesang, who will become the first Swede in space.
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Pakistan duo win drugs ban appeal
REUTERS
RAWALPINDI, Dec 5:
An appeals tribunal appointed by the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) has exonerated fast bowlers Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammad Asif of doping offences and lifted their long-term bans. Akhtar had been banned for two years and Asif for one year in early November after testing positive for the banned steroid nandrolone. The Chairman of the tribunal, Justice Fakhruddin G Ebrahim announcing the decision in Karachi said that now it was up to the Pakistan Cricket Board to decide if they could play in the ongoing one-day series against the West Indies. Akhtar and Asif were recalled from the Champions Trophy in India in October after they tested positive in out-of-competition tests conducted by the PCB.

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HP EDGELINE PRINTHEAD



In 1987, HP introduced the Paintjet, the first colour inkjet printer, while QMS launched the first colour laser printer, ColourScript Laser 1000 in 1993. Epson has created an alternative to the heated bubble inkjet process using the piezo-electric effect

The 1990s and the early years of this century have seen little by way of innovation with the possible exception of Canon's development of ink droplets as small as a picolitre (1 trillionth of a litre) — and PictBridge, a new standard to directly connect digital cameras to printers.

But HP announced a new breakthrough technology for ink-based printers that promises to make them not only as fast as laser printers but as the best copiers available today.

Lyra Research, an independent U.S.-based analyst hosted a global Webcast where it carefully evaluated the claims made by HP about EDGELINE and concluded that this might just turn out to be an inflection point where printers challenge the colour copier industry by matching their speed, performance and what is called TCO: the total cost of ownership.

The technology is called Edgeline and it is in some ways quite radical: In the inkjet printers of today, a small matchbox-sized print head, moves across the width of the printer, inking a line at a time. Once a line is printed, the carriage advances the paper by the width of a line and the print head prints the next line.

Edgeline simplifies this drastically — by using a print head that is as wide as the width of the paper. This way, the entire page width is inked at one go — and only the paper advances from line to line, leaving the print head stationary.

By cutting the moving elements by half, the printer saves on mechanical complexity and allows pages to be printed at speeds up to 70 pages per minute (ppm) — and up to 100 ppm in light production models. Additionally the number of nozzles in this much-wider print head can be increased to over 10,000, producing a laser-like sharpness.

Lyra's senior analyst Steve Reynolds mentions that the Kodak and Olympus-Riso have similar wide-print head solutions for the high-end ink based printers — but he sees the real disruption from Edgeline coming in the copier arena.

HP has deployed Edgeline in the printers at the back of the Photosmart Express Station digital printing kiosks in the U.S. — though the width is just enough for a 4 x 6 inch print.

In early 2007, it is expected to unveil the first photo printers and standard width multi function printers using Edgeline — and eventually the technology may allow it to challenge the light production printer/copier market.

Imaging innovation

If as promised, the TCO of an Edgeline printer is indeed significantly lower, it might be time to take back what we said about the dearth of innovation in the imaging business.

(Lyra's webcast can be viewed offline using a link from www.lyra.com while HP has created a 5- minute video and a white paper that can be found on a special Edgeline site that can be located by using the keyword search at www.hp.com) .

Source ( Both Story And Image): The Hindu
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Towards a quantum computer

IN A computer, with three bits, there are eight possible combinations of 1 or 0. But three bits in a digital computer can store only one of those eight combinations at a time.

Quantum computers, would be based on the strange principles of quantum mechanics, in which the smallest particles of light and matter can be in different places at the same time.

In a quantum computer, one `qubit' - quantum bit - could be both 0 and 1 at the same time. So with three qubits of data, a quantum computer could store all eight combinations of 0 and 1 simultaneously.

That means a three-qubit quantum computer could calculate eight times faster than a three-bit digital computer.

A University of Utah physicist Christoph Boehme and colleagues took a step toward developing a superfast computer based on the weird reality of quantum physics by showing it is feasible to read data stored in the form of the magnetic `spins' of phosphorus atoms.

`Spin' simplified

A simplified way to describe spin is to imagine that each particle contains a tiny bar magnet, like a compass needle, that points either up or down to represent the particle's spin.

Down and up can represent 0 and 1 in a spin-based quantum computer, in which one qubit could have a value of 0 and 1 simultaneously. In the new study, Boehme and colleagues used silicon doped with phosphorus atoms.

By applying an external electrical current, they were able to "read" the net spin of 10,000 of the electrons and nuclei of phosphorus atoms near the silicon surface.

A real quantum computer would need to read the spins of single particles But previous efforts, which used a technique called magnetic resonance, were able to read only the net spins of the electrons of 10 billion phosphorus atoms combined.

Personal computers today calculate 64 bits of data at a time. A quantum computer with 64 qubits would be 2 to the 64th power faster, or about 18 billion billion times faster.

Souce: The Hindu

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Exotic relatives of protons and neutrons discovered

The finds help in understanding the forces that bind quarks into matter

SUB-ATOMIC PARTICLES called `quarks' are the building blocks of matter. Named `Sigma-sub-b' particles, two exotic and incredibly quick to decompose particles have been discovered by a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University.

"These particles are members of what we call the `baryonic' family, so-called for the Greek word `barys,' which means heavy," team leader Petar Maksimovic, assistant professor of physics and astronomy in the university's Krieger School of Arts and Sciences said. "Baryons are particles that contain three quarks, which are the fundamental building blocks of matter." The simplest baryons are the proton and neutron, which make up the nuclei of atoms of ordinary matter.

Unstable, ephemeral

"These newest members of that family are unstable and ephemeral, but they help us to understand the forces that bind quarks together into matter," Maksimovic said.

Containing the second-heaviest quark — called "the bottom quark" — the new particles are the heaviest baryons found yet: heavier even than a complete helium atom, which has two protons, though lighter than a lithium atom, which has three, according to a Johns Hopkins University press release.

The team combed through a hundred trillion proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, to find about 240 Sigma-sub-b candidates, Maksimovic said.

The new particles are extremely short-lived, decaying within a tiny fraction of a second.

"Little by little, we are compiling an ever-clearer picture of how quarks build matter and how subatomic forces hold quarks together and tear them apart," said Maksimovic.

While the matter around us is constructed with only up and down quarks, exotic matter contains other quarks as well, according to Maksimovic.

Six types

There are six different types of quarks: up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top (u, d, s, c, b and t). One of the new baryons discovered by the team is made of two up quarks and one bottom quark (u-u-b), the other of two down quarks and a bottom quark (d-d-b). For comparison, protons are u-u-d combinations, while neutrons are d-d-u. The Tevatron accelerates protons and antiprotons close to the speed of light and makes them collide. In the collisions, energy transforms into mass, according to Einstein's famous equation E = mc{+2}.

The odds of producing bottom quarks — which in turn transform into the Sigma-sub-b, according to the laws of quantum physics — are extremely low.

But scientists were able to beat the low odds by producing billions of collisions in the Tevatron each second.
Source: The Hindu

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