Month: September 2009

HUGE geysers on Saturn’s moon Enceladus may be fed by a salty sea below its surface, boosting the odds of extraterrestrial life in our own Solar System, according to a study released on Wednesday.

Researchers in Europe detected salt particles in the volcanic vapour-and-ice jets that shoot hundreds of kilometres (miles) into space, the strongest evidence to date of a liquid ocean under the moon’s icy crust.

Scientists already knew that tiny Enceladus, only 500 kilometers across, had two of the three essential ingredients for the emergence of life.

One is an energy source, produced in this case by ‘tidal warming’ driven by the shifting gravitational tug of its parent planet during the moon’s lopsided orbit, and perhaps by other forces too.

The Cassini spacecraft circling Saturn since 2004 has also found a potentially life-sustaining mix of organic chemicals in Enceladus’ plumes, ejected from a quartet of 120-kilometer long fractures – known as ‘tiger stripes’ – aligned on the moon’s south pole.

That left the third critical ingredient: liquid water.

Since their discovery in 2005, the giant geysers have fueled intense speculation on the presence of a subterranean ocean, and the new discovery goes a long way toward resolving one of the most hotly debated topics in planetary science.

A team led by Frank Postberg of the University of Heidelberg studied data from Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer, and tested their findings in laboratory experiments.

Their results, published in the British journal Nature, show that ice grains in the Enceladus plumes contain substantial quantities of sodium salts, and that the moon’s hidden sea – if there is one – could be as salty as Earth’s oceans.

‘The abundance of various salt components in the particles … exhibit a compelling similarity to the predicted composition of a subsurface Enceladus ocean in contact with its rock core,’ the researchers conclude. — AFP

[From Saturn moon may contain life]

THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, causes brain cancer cells to undergo a process called autophagy in which cells feed upon themselves, according to a study conducted by Guillermo Velasco and colleagues at Complutense University in Spain. Using mice designed to carry human brain cancer tumors, the researchers found that the growth of the tumors shrank when the animals received THC. The study also involved two patients with glioblastoma multiforme, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer. Both patients had been enrolled in a clinical trial designed to test THC’s potential as a cancer therapy. The researchers used electron microscopes to analyze brain tissue taken before and after a 26- to 30-day THC treatment regimen. They found that THC eliminated the cancer cells while leaving healthy cells intact. In addition, in what they described as a “novel discovery,” the specific signalling route by which the autophagy process unfolds was isolated.

“These results may help to design new cancer therapies based on the use of medicines containing the active principle of marijuana and/or in the activation of autophagy,” says Velasco. The findings were published in the April 2009 issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

According to Dr. John S. Yu, co-director of the Comprehensive Brain Tumor Program in the Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, “The findings were not surprising. There have been previous reports to this effect as well. So this is yet another indication that THC has an anti-cancer effect, which means it’s certainly worth further study.”

Dr. Yu warns cancer patients that they should not consider marijuana a potential cure for cancer and urges that people “not start smoking pot right away as a means of curing their own cancer.” However, Dr. Paul Graham Fisher, the Beirne Family director of Neuro-Oncology at Stanford University, says that’s precisely what many brain cancer patients are doing. “In fact, 40 percent of brain tumor patients in the U.S. are already using alternative treatments, ranging from herbals to vitamins to marijuana,” says Dr. Fisher. “But that actually points out a cautionary tale here, which is that many brain cancer patients are already rolling a joint to treat themselves, but we’re not really seeing brain tumors suddenly going away as a result, which we clearly would have noticed if it had that effect.”

News Release: Marijuana chemical may fight brain cancer www.webmd.com
News Release: Active ingredient in marijuana kills brain cancer cells www.forbes.com

[From THC initiates brain cancer cells to destroy themselves – WorldHealth.net]

This small yet cosy house is situated by the coast of the north of Zealand, Denmark. It is one of the two houses on the one site which share a common garden and some other spaces. The house’s area is only 75 square meters but with a up-to-date oak-clad and smart design it is the great place for contemporary family. During its latest redesign “sky-boxes” were added to provide space and air so it usually filled with natural light. The large glazed openings and double-height ceiling at some parts of the roof also help with that. Large sliding doors lets the in- and outside melt together. Facade is made of oak lists treated with iron sulfate. [primus arkitekter]

[From Small Oak House in Denmark | DigsDigs]

Providers need the location information to efficiently route calls, but the data also reveals the whereabouts of customers, something they might not choose to support, say researchers from the University of Konstanz in Germany. They presented their research at the recent Sigcomm conference in Barcelona.

In the United States, the Department of Justice has sought permission to look at mobile-phone tracking information without a warrant.

To combat this type of surveillance, the German researchers have developed PathForge, a scheme for cell phones to swap their identities with each other until it becomes necessary to send or receive a call. The phones revert to their original identities for the duration of time they use the network, then swap them again when they are done.

To be effective, each phone would swap identities several times to make it that much harder to sort through location records to deduce the movements of a given phone.

When a call comes through for a phone, the network would try to reach the phone that holds that phone ID. At the initial contact with the network, that phone would reveal the current identification of that phone so the network can route the call to the correct handset. The network and the correct handset would authenticate to each other to make sure calls arrive at the right place.

The researchers are developing an architecture for carrying this out but don’t have a working model yet. They plan more research into getting rid of the need to reveal position at all.

[From Keep Big Brother off Your Cell Phone – PC World]