Immune therapies finally working against cancer

First there was surgery, then chemotherapy and radiation. Now, doctors have overcome 30 years of false starts and found success with a fourth way to fight cancer: using the body's natural defender, the immune system.
The approach is called a cancer vaccine, although it treats the disease rather than prevents it.

At a cancer conference Sunday, researchers said one such vaccine kept a common form of lymphoma from worsening for more than a year. That's huge in this field, where progress is glacial and success with a new treatment is often measured in weeks or even days.

Experimental vaccines against three other cancers — prostate, the deadly skin disease melanoma and an often fatal childhood tumor called neuroblastoma — also gave positive results in late-stage testing in recent weeks, after decades of struggles in the lab.

"I don't know what we did differently to make the breakthrough," said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld of the American Cancer Society.

Instead of a single "A-Ha!" moment, there have been many "ah, so" discoveries about the immune system that now seem to be paying off, said Dr. John Niederhuber, director of the National Cancer Institute.

It's way too soon to declare victory. No one knows how long the benefits will last, whether people will need "boosters" to keep their disease in check, or whether vaccines will ever be a cure. Many vaccines must be custom-made for each patient. How practical will that be, and what will it cost?

Those are all good questions — but there are no answers yet, said Dr. Richard Schilsky, a University of Chicago cancer specialist who is president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Several vaccine studies were reported over the weekend at the oncology group's annual meeting in Florida.

A big problem has been getting the immune system to "see" cancer as a threat, said Dr. Patrick Hwu, melanoma chief at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Viruses like the flu or polio are easily spotted by the immune system because they look different from human cells.

"But cancer comes from our own cells. And so it's more like guerrilla warfare — the immune system has trouble distinguishing the normal cells from the cancer cells," he said.

To help it do that, many cancer vaccines take a substance from a cancer cell's surface and attach it to something the immune system already recognizes as foreign — in the lymphoma vaccine's case, a shellfish protein.

"It's a mimic to what you're trying to kill, a training device to train the immune system to kill something," Hwu explained.

To make the attack as strong as possible, doctors add a substance to put the immune system on high alert.

Dr. Stephen Schuster of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine led a study testing BiovaxID, an experimental vaccine against follicular lymphoma developed by the National Cancer Institute. Rights to it are now held by Biovest International Inc. of Worcester, Mass., and some of his co-researchers have financial ties to the company.

To be in the study, patients had to have achieved a remission for at least six months with standard chemo. This often occurs with this type of lymphoma, but the disease usually comes back.

Researchers gave 41 patients the shellfish protein and an immune booster; 76 other patients were given those plus the vaccine. After nearly five years of followup, the average time until the cancer worsened was 44 months in the vaccine group and 30 months in the others.

Big gains also were seen with a neuroblastoma vaccine developed by the cancer institute. In a study of 226 patients, 86 percent of vaccine recipients were still alive after two years versus 75 percent of others not given the vaccine. Results were released by the oncology society two weeks ago.

The benefits from a melanoma vaccine developed by the cancer institute were more modest. It extended the time until patients relapsed — three months versus one and a half for those not given the vaccine.

Hilde Stapleton, 53, of suburban Houston, is one of the lucky ones it helped. Still, she found what many other vaccine recipients have learned: The vaccine had few side effects, but the immune system boosters were "like the worst case of flu you've ever had," she said.

The prostate cancer vaccine, Provenge, is farthest along. Its maker, Seattle-based Dendreon Corp., is seeking federal Food and Drug Administration approval for it. A study last month found that it extended survival by four months in men with very advanced disease.

Doctors unconnected with these experiments are cautiously optimistic.

"We've raised so many false hopes in the past," said Lichtenfeld of the Cancer Society. "What's different this time is we have the science reports to back up improvements."

Obama Buy Hamburger For Staff In White House

The Moment That The Fighter Breakthrough Sound Barrier

O'Reilly sure has thin skin about 'personal attacks' -- mebbe because his whole show is built around them

Click Here To watch the video
Yes, Bill O'Reilly, it really is a crappy thing when major public figures -- or pissant ankle-biters -- can outrageously smear other public figures as "racist" and do so with impunity and repeatedly. That's what BillO was on about last night, anyway.
But no, he wasn't talking about Sonia Sotomayor. She's just a minor figure, after all. O'Reilly was talking about his own august self. Of course.
It was really quite the stomach-churning whinefest. He started off ranting that "my civil rights" and "my rights as an American" had been violated because he's been branded a "racist" on numerous occasions, which he claims is "libel." Then he indulged one of his periodic bully-the-women routines ("My rights were violated here!"), where he had on two female lawyers who proceeded to explain to him that he was full of crap. This, of course, did not sit well with O'Reilly, who ended up shaking his finger at them and accusing them of enabling the destruction of America.
Along the way, he managed to emit some momentous howlers:
If I were a minority, they couldn't do this to me. You know it. You know it, Tonia. If I were African-American like you are, and they started to do all this kind of stuff, I could kill 'em. And that's my point now. White Americans, Miss California, their rights are being violated, at least the spirit of their rights, by these unbelievable attacks, personal attacks.
...
They're attacking people who disagree with them in very personal ways. That's what they're doing. Don't dodge it.
Then, when they pointed out that the same could be said of his own behavior, he flew into a barely contained rage:
Wait a minute! Hold it! Tonia, keep quiet. I don't dish it out, madam. I don't do that stuff. Don't sit here and say I do. ... We don't do that here. Ever.
And then, at the end of the show? His usual segment of "Pinheads and Patriots." The "Pinheads" segment featured Barbra Streisand:
On the Pinhead front, Barbra Streisand's gonna write a book -- about design. It's gonna tell us all about her mansion in Malibu. I just can't wait for that, can you? No truth to the rumor she'll be concentrating on designs in ... Red Square!
That, of course, is only a sampling of the nonstop flow of "attacking people who disagree with them in very personal ways" on The O'Reilly Factor. Indeed, his whole show is built around it.
Every single night on his show, O'Reilly demonizes liberals. It's what he does. His critics are all "far-left loons" and "haters" who he himself has compared on a regular basis to Nazis and the Klan. Guess he doesn't much care for it when the shoe's on the other foot.
Especially when, as in the case of Joanne Ostrow of the Denver Post -- who O'Reilly claims "libeled" him as a racist for noting that he was indeed spewing racist bile during that infamous dust-up with Geraldo Rivera -- there's more than abundant evidence to back up her charges. There's a reason O'Reilly hasn't filed a libel suit, and it's not merely because he's a public figure.
The crazy thing about this is: Not only have O'Reilly's "rights" not been violated, but he is doing to Charlize Theron and Joanne Ostrow and the L.A. Times' Ann Powers (who also recently criticized him) and all of the countless parade of targets who populate his newscasts every night exactly the thing he is accusing them of doing.
He's trying to shut them up. By claiming they're trying to shut him up. And it isn't hard to figure out who started the to-and-fro in the first place.
What set him off, apparently, was this remark from Charlize Theron in response to the Prop 8 ruling:
I don't agree with homophobia or discrimination of any kind. I will continue to fight this fight for equality and speak up for the basic civil rights of all Americans.
O'Reilly asks:
"Does that include the rights of Americans who sincerely do not believe in gay marriage the right NOT to be called homophobes?"
Sorry, Bill, but no such "right" exists. Otherwise, there would be a similar "right" not to be called a "pinhead" or "Nazis" by Bill O'Reilly. And trying to claim that it does exist is in fact every bit as much an attempt to suppress the free-speech rights of the people Bill O'Reilly is criticizing.

Drinking too much Mountain Dew? Then the Soda Bottle Wave might just be the project for you--Used Soda Bottles Find a New Lease of Life

Drinking too much Mountain Dew? Then the Soda Bottle Wave might just be the project for you. Reuben Margolin, an Emeryville, California- based artist had strung together a 20-feet tall installed created out of 612 used one-liter soda bottles.
“Think of it as a curtain of undulating plastic bottles,” says Margolin of the project on display at the Maker Faire DIY festival.
Margolin took about six months to create it. That includes about 80 hours spent on cleaning the bottle, steaming out the labels and sterilizing them. He then drilled holes into the bottle caps and hooked them up together using a steel clips with each junction linking to four bottles. The entire installation hangs on a circular handle about 12-inches in diameter.
And no, Margolin didn’t drink all that soda. He and a friend visited two recycling centers in the area to get what all the used bottles they wanted.

Mini 10v Unboxing,cracked wide open, fitted with OS X

It's a quick gallery of a few shots (I haven't even looked at them myself). Essentially, it's the unboxing, some of the teardown for the RAM upgrade, then the initial parts of the OS X install. The OS X install is still going as of the time of this typing, and I know I'll be redoing it shortly anyway cause I need to get Windows 7 on there as well.

Not that Dell's other Mini machines aren't perfect candidates for creating your own hackintosh, but it's stellar to know that the outfit's newest member is as well. After going on sale earlier this month, the Mini 10v has been procured, unboxed and dissected, all in the name of unabashed discovery. Interestingly, it seems as if the RAM slot requires that the keyboard and motherboard be lifted for access, but for even the mildly seasoned computer user, that's absolutely nothing they can't handle. If you're into hardcore, uncensored splayings of newfangled netbooks, the read link is where you need to be, holmes.

Iraq-born teen cracks maths puzzle

A 16-year-old Iraqi immigrant living in Sweden has cracked a maths puzzle that has stumped experts for more than 300 years, Swedish media reported on Thursday.
In just four months, Mohamed Altoumaimi has found a formula to explain and simplify the so-called Bernoulli numbers, a sequence of calculations named after the 17th century Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, the Dagens Nyheter daily said.
Altoumaimi, who came to Sweden six years ago, said teachers at his high school in Falun, central Sweden were not convinced about his work at first.
"When I first showed it to my teachers, none of them thought the formula I had written down really worked," Altoumaimi told the Falu Kuriren newspaper.
He then got in touch with professors at Uppsala University, one of Sweden's top institutions, to ask them to check his work.
After going through his notebooks, the professors found his work was indeed correct and offered him a place in Uppsala.
But for now, Altoumaimi is focusing on his school studies and plans to take summer classes in advanced mathematics and physics this year.
"I wanted to be a researcher in physics or mathematics; I really like those subjects. But I have to improve in English and social sciences," he told the Falu Kuriren.

Legalize Pot!

What do you think of this can?

When you’ve got beer cans like this, the only logical way to drink is via double fisting.

Chart: Star Trek Movie Quick Recognition

Just The Facts

1:Ron Howard is a former child actor who has directed some of the most financially successful and critically acclaimed films of the past 10 years.
2:His critically acclaimed movies are usually inspirational
3:His blockbusters, 'How the Grinch Stole Christmas' ($260 million), 'The Davinci Code' ($217 million) and 'Angels & Demons' ($155 million world wide this weekend) rely on a much stranger secret formula.





Ron Howard's Loose Grasp of 'True Stories'





While we've already pointed out the liberties that A Beautiful Mind and Frost / Nixon took with the truth, the historical boxing drama, Cinderella Man, is perhaps his greatest up-yours to historical accuracy. In the film, a down on his luck blue-collar boxer named James Braddock has to fight a terrifying heavyweight champion named Max Baer.
The movie is basically Rocky meets the Great Depression meets Rocky IV. There are of course a few key differences from the Rocky franchise, in addition to the Depression setting. For instance, Braddock is a down on his luck Irish city dweller, not a down on his luck Italian guy. And unlike in Rocky IV, his opponent unapologetically kills two people in the ring, not just one. Also, Cinderella Man probably isn't quite as historically accurate as Rocky IV.
Sure, Braddock fought Baer, and yes Baer killed a man in the ring. But he did it accidentally, and felt so bad about it that he spent the rest of his life donating the money he made fighting to the guy's widow and family.
In Cinderella Man, Howard makes Baer approximately as repetant as Jason Vorhees. Outside the ring, Howards version of Baer is basically a high school bully from an 80s movie with less emotional complexity, and worse hair. Sort of a dick move, since the guy was reportedly kind and charismatic, and spent his entire life trying to make amends for the accidents.
In fact, a tortured super star who spends the rest of his life trying to make up for his in-ring brutality might have been a more interesting character to make a movie about. But that would of course require subtlety, which isn't Mr. Howard's strong suit.