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Picture this: you're sat down for the Football World Cup final, or a long-awaited sequel to the "Sex and the City" movie and you're watching all the action unfold in 3-D on your coffee table.
It sounds a lot like a wacky dream, but don't be surprised if within our lifetime you find yourself discarding your plasma and LCD sets in exchange for a holographic 3-D television that can put Cristiano Ronaldo in your living room or bring you face-to-face with life-sized versions of your gaming heroes.
The reason for renewed optimism in three-dimensional technology is a breakthrough in rewritable and erasable holographic systems made earlier this year by researchers at the University of Arizona.
Dr Nasser Peyghambarian, chair of photonics and lasers at the university's Optical Sciences department, told CNN that scientists have broken a barrier by making the first updatable three-dimensional displays with memory.
"This is a prerequisite for any type of moving holographic technology. The way it works presently is not suitable for 3-D images," he said.
The researchers produced displays that can be erased and rewritten in a matter of minutes.
To create television sets the images would need to be changing multiple times each second -- but Peyghambarian is very optimistic this can happen.
He said the University of Arizona team, which is now ten-strong, has been working on advancing hologram technology since 1990 -- so this is a major step forward. He believes that much of the difficulty in creating a holographic set has now been overcome.
"It took us a while to make that first breakthrough, but as soon as you have the first element of it working the rest often comes more rapidly," he said. "What we are doing now is trying to make the model better. What we showed is just one color, what we are doing now is trying to use three colors. The original display was four inches by four inches and now we're going for something at least as big as a computer screen."
There are no more great barriers to overcome now, he said.
The breakthrough has made some long-time researchers of the technology believe that it could now come to fruition.
Tung H. Jeong, a retired physics professor at Lake Forest College outside Chicago who had studied holography since the 1960s told NJ.com; "When we start talking about erasable and rewritable holograms, we are moving toward the possibility of holographic TV ... It has now been shown that physically, it's possible."
And what might these holographic televisions look like?
According to Peyghambarian, they could be constructed as a screen on the wall (like flat panel displays) that shows 3-D images, with all the image writing lasers behind the wall; or it could be like a horizontal panel on a table with holographic writing apparatus underneath.
So, if this project is realized, you really could have a football match on your coffee table, or horror-movie villains jumping out of your wall.
Peyghambarian is also optimistic that the technology could reach the market within five to ten years. Peyghambarian is also optimistic that the technology could reach the market within five to ten years. He said progress towards a final product should be made much more quickly now that a rewriting method had been found.
However, it is fair to say not everyone is as positive about this prospect as Peyghambarian.
Justin Lawrence, a lecturer in Electronic Engineering at Bangor University in Wales, told CNN that small steps are being made on technology like 3-D holograms, but, he can't see it being ready for the market in the next ten years.
"It's one thing to demonstrate something in a lab but it's another thing to be able to produce it cheaply and efficiently enough to distribute it to the mass market," Lawrence said.
Yet, there are reasons to be optimistic that more resources will be channeled into developing this technology more quickly.
The Japanese Government is pushing huge financial and technical weight into the development of three-dimensional, virtual-reality television, and the country's Communications Ministry is aiming at having such technology available by 2020.
Peyghambarian said there are no major sponsors of the technology at present, but as the breakthroughs continued, he hopes that will change.
Even if no major electronics company commit themselves, there is hope that backers could come from outside of the consumer electronics industry, he said.
"It could have some other applications. In training it's useful to show people three-dimensional displays. Also it would be good to show things in 3-D for defense command and control and for surgery," he said.
The world's biggest physics experiment has succeeded in its first major test as a beam of protons was successfully fired all the way around a 17-mile tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border.
The protons traveled the full length Wednesday of the $3.8 billion Large Hadron Collider that scientists hope is the next great step to understand the makeup of the universe. There were a series of trial runs.
Two white dots flashed on a computer screen indicating that the protons reached the final point of the world's largest particle collider.
Scientists hope to see what the components of atoms are made of by smashing them together. The startup had been eagerly awaited by 9,000 physicists around the world who will conduct experiments here.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
GENEVA (AP) — Scientists fired the first beam of protons around the world's largest particle collider on Wednesday in science's next great step to understand the makeup of the universe.
The Large Hadron Collider — built since 2003 at a cost of $3.8 billion — provides scientists with much greater power than ever before to smash the components of atoms in a bid to see how they are made.
"The beam is the size of a human hair," Paola Catapano, a spokeswoman for the host European Organization for Nuclear Research said after the protons were fired into the accelerator below the Swiss-French border at 9:32 a.m. (3:32 a.m. EDT).
The organization, known by its French acronym CERN, is firing the protons — a type of subatomic particle — around the tunnel in stages, several miles at a time.
Once the beam has successfully been tested in clockwise direction, CERN will send it counterclockwise. Eventually the two beams will be fired in opposite directions with the aim of smashing together protons to see how they are made.
The startup — eagerly awaited by 9,000 physicists around the world who will conduct experiments here — comes over the objections of some skeptics who fear the collisions of protons could eventually imperil the earth.
The skeptics theorize that a byproduct of the collisions could be micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.
"It's nonsense," said James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN, before Wednesday's start.
CERN is backed by leading scientists like
Gillies told the AP that the most dangerous thing that could happen would be if a beam at full power were to go out of control, and that would only damage the accelerator itself and burrow into the rock around the tunnel.
And full power is probably a year away.
"On Wednesday we start small," said Gillies. "What we're putting in to start with is one single low intensity bunch at low energy and we thread that around. We get experience with low energy things and then we ramp up as we get to know the machine better."
He said a good result for Wednesday would be to have one beam going all the way around the tunnel in a counterclockwise direction. If that works, the scientists will then try to send a beam in the other direction.
"A really good result would be to have the other beam going around, too, because once you've got a beam around once in both directions you know that there is no show stopper," Gillies said. "It's going to work."
However, if there is some blockage in the machine, experts will have to go in and fix the problem, and that could take time.
The LHC, as the collider is known, will take scientists to within a split second of a laboratory recreation of the big bang, which they theorize was the massive explosion that created the universe.
The project organized by the 20 European member nations of CERN has attracted researchers of 80 nationalities. Some 1,200 are from the
The collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the tunnel.
Smaller colliders have been used for decades to study the makeup of the atom. Less than 100 years ago scientists thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of an atom's nucleus, but in stages since then experiments have shown they were made of still smaller quarks and gluons and that there were other forces and particles.
The CERN experiments could reveal more about "dark matter," antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. It could also find evidence of the hypothetical particle — the Higgs boson — believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.
Some scientists have been waiting for 20 years to use the LHC. But even their younger colleagues are excited that startup has finally arrived.
"I think it's a very important project," said Katie McAlpine, 23, a
"It's mostly out of scientific curiosity, what is the universe made of? How does it work? What are the rules? That's very exciting and it's important to advance our knowledge," she told Associated Press Television News.
She said she was surprised by the success of the video, which has had more than a million views on YouTube and which has received approval from CERN for its scientific accuracy, especially in its success with young people.
"I was really hoping that this would get taken into classrooms," McAlpine said. "I don't imagine that elementary school and most middle school children will understand it very well, but a lot of parents have e-mailed me, saying I have a 9-year-old or a 7-year-old and showed them your rap and they really love it.
"If elementary kids can get excited about it, too, that's just great." >>>>
Scientists fired the first beam of protons around the world's largest particle collider on Wednesday in science's next great step to understand the makeup of the universe.
The Large Hadron Collider — built since 2003 at a cost of $3.8 billion — provides scientists with much greater power than ever before to smash the components of atoms in a bid to see how they are made.
"The beam is the size of a human hair," Paola Catapano, a spokeswoman for the host European Organization for Nuclear Research said after the protons were fired into the accelerator below the Swiss-French border at 9:32 a.m. (3:32 a.m. EDT).
The organization, known by its French acronym CERN, is firing the protons — a type of subatomic particle — around the tunnel in stages, several miles at a time.
Once the beam has successfully been tested in clockwise direction, CERN will send it counterclockwise. Eventually the two beams will be fired in opposite directions with the aim of smashing together protons to see how they are made.
The startup — eagerly awaited by 9,000 physicists around the world who will conduct experiments here — comes over the objections of some skeptics who fear the collisions of protons could eventually imperil the earth.
The skeptics theorize that a byproduct of the collisions could be micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.
"It's nonsense," said James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN, before Wednesday's start.
CERN is backed by leading scientists like
Gillies told the AP that the most dangerous thing that could happen would be if a beam at full power were to go out of control, and that would only damage the accelerator itself and burrow into the rock around the tunnel.
And full power is probably a year away.
"On Wednesday we start small," said Gillies. "What we're putting in to start with is one single low intensity bunch at low energy and we thread that around. We get experience with low energy things and then we ramp up as we get to know the machine better."
He said a good result for Wednesday would be to have one beam going all the way around the tunnel in a counterclockwise direction. If that works, the scientists will then try to send a beam in the other direction.
"A really good result would be to have the other beam going around, too, because once you've got a beam around once in both directions you know that there is no show stopper," Gillies said. "It's going to work."
However, if there is some blockage in the machine, experts will have to go in and fix the problem, and that could take time.
The LHC, as the collider is known, will take scientists to within a split second of a laboratory recreation of the big bang, which they theorize was the massive explosion that created the universe.
The project organized by the 20 European member nations of CERN has attracted researchers of 80 nationalities. Some 1,200 are from the
The collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the tunnel.
Smaller colliders have been used for decades to study the makeup of the atom. Less than 100 years ago scientists thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of an atom's nucleus, but in stages since then experiments have shown they were made of still smaller quarks and gluons and that there were other forces and particles.
The CERN experiments could reveal more about "dark matter," antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. It could also find evidence of the hypothetical particle — the Higgs boson — believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.
Some scientists have been waiting for 20 years to use the LHC. But even their younger colleagues are excited that startup has finally arrived.
"I think it's a very important project," said Katie McAlpine, 23, a
"It's mostly out of scientific curiosity, what is the universe made of? How does it work? What are the rules? That's very exciting and it's important to advance our knowledge," she told Associated Press Television News.
She said she was surprised by the success of the video, which has had more than a million views on YouTube and which has received approval from CERN for its scientific accuracy, especially in its success with young people.
"I was really hoping that this would get taken into classrooms," McAlpine said. "I don't imagine that elementary school and most middle school children will understand it very well, but a lot of parents have e-mailed me, saying I have a 9-year-old or a 7-year-old and showed them your rap and they really love it.
"If elementary kids can get excited about it, too, that's just great."
Talk about an extreme makeover: Scientists have transformed one type of cell into another in living mice, a big step toward the goal of growing replacement tissues to treat a variety of diseases.
The cell identity switch turned ordinary pancreas cells into the rarer type that churns out insulin, essential for preventing diabetes. But its implications go beyond diabetes to a host of possibilities, scientists said.
It's the second advance in about a year that suggests that someday doctors might be able to use a patient's own cells to treat disease or injury without turning to stem cells taken from embryos.
The work is "a major leap" in reprogramming cells from one kind to another, said one expert not involved in the research, John Gearhart of the
That's because the feat was performed in living mice rather than a lab dish, the process was efficient and it was achieved directly without going through a middleman like embryonic stem cells, he said.
The newly created cells made insulin in diabetic mice, though they were not cured. But if the experiment's approach proves viable, it might lead to treatments like growing new heart cells after a heart attack or nerve cells to treat disorders like ALS, formerly Lou Gehrig's disease.
Douglas Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and a researcher with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, cautioned that the approach is not ready for people.
He and his colleagues report the research in a paper published online Wednesday by the journal Nature.
Basically, the identity switch comes about by a reprogramming process that changes the pattern of which genes are active and which are shut off.
Scientists have long hoped to find a way to reprogram a patient's cells to produce new ones. Research with stem cells, and similar entities called iPS cells that were announced last year, has aimed to achieve this in a two-step process.
The first step results in a primitive and highly versatile cell. This intermediary is then guided to mature into whatever cell type scientists want. That guiding process has proven difficult to do efficiently, especially for creating insulin-producing cells, Gearhart noted.
In contrast, the new method holds the promise of going directly from one mature cell type to another. It's like a scientist becoming a lawyer without having to go back to kindergarten and grow up again, Melton says.
So, he says, someday scientists may be able to replace dead nerve or heart cells in people by converting some neighboring cells. At the same time, he stressed that it's still important to study embryonic stem cells and iPS cells.
The Melton team started its work with pancreas cells that pump out gut enzymes used in digestion and turned them into pancreatic "beta" cells, which make insulin.
The researchers destroyed beta cells in mice with a poison, giving the mice diabetes. Then they injected the pancreas with viruses that slipped into the enzyme-making cells. These viruses delivered three genes that control the activity of other genes.
Just three days later, new insulin-secreting cells started to show up. By a week after that, more than a fifth of the virally infected cells started making insulin. That shows "an amazingly efficient effect," commented Richard Insel, executive vice president of research at the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
Scientists found evidence that the newcomers were converts from mature enzyme-making cells. They identified the new cells as beta cells by their detailed appearance and behavior, and Melton said they've continued functioning for months.
The new cells didn't fully replenish the insulin supply, but maybe there were too few of them, or they were hampered by not forming clusters like ordinary beta cells do, researchers said.
The work brings "more excitement to the idea of using reprogramming as a way to treat diabetes," said researcher Mark Kay of
Christopher Newgard, who studies beta cells at
Melton, who began his diabetes research in 1993 when his infant son was diagnosed with the illness, said he's obsessed with trying to find a new treatment or cure for Type 1 diabetes, in which beta cells are destroyed.
"I wake up every day thinking about how to make beta cells," he said.
Melton said he hopes drugs can replace the virus approach because of concern about injecting viruses into people.
As for converting other kinds of cells, scientists noted that the two cell types in the mouse experiment are closely related, and it remains to be shown whether the trick can be achieved with more distant combinations. In any case, scientists would have to deliver different reprogramming signals to other kinds of cells, Melton said.
Harvard scientists say they have created stems cells for 10 genetic disorders, which will allow researchers to watch the diseases develop in a lab dish.
This early step, using a new technique, could help speed up efforts to find treatments for some of the most confounding ailments, the scientists said.
The new work was reported online Thursday in the journal Cell, and the researchers said they plan to make the cell lines readily available to other scientists.
Dr. George Daley and his colleagues at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute used ordinary skin cells and bone marrow from people with a variety of diseases, including Parkinson's, Huntington's and Down syndrome to produce the stem cells.
The new cells will allow researchers to "watch the disease progress in a dish, that is, to watch what goes right or wrong," Doug Melton, co-director of the institute, said during a teleconference.
"I think we'll see in years ahead that this opens the door to a new way to treating degenerative diseases," he said.
The new technique reprograms cells, giving them the chameleon-like qualities of embryonic stem cells, which can morph into all kinds of tissue, such as heart, nerve and brain. As with embryonic stem cells, the hope is to speed medical research.
Research teams in
Melton said the new disease-specific cell lines "represent a collection of degenerative diseases for which there are no good treatments and, more importantly, no good animal models for the most part in studying them."
A new laboratory has been created to serve as a repository for the cells, and to distribute them to other scientists researching the diseases, Melton said.
"The hope is that this will accelerate research and it will create a climate of openness," said Daley.
He expects stem cell lines to be developed for many more diseases, noting, "this is just the first wave of diseases." Other diseases for which they created stem cells are Type 1, or juvenile, diabetes; two types of muscular dystrophy, Gaucher disease and a rare genetic disorder known as the "bubble boy disease."
Daley stressed that the reprogrammed cells won't eliminate the need or value of studying embryonic stem cells.
"At least for the foreseeable future, and I would argue forever, they are going to be extremely valuable tools," he said.
The reprogramming work was funded by the National Institutes of Health and private contributions to the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.
Scientists have created the world's thinnest balloon, made of a single layer of carbon just one atom thick.
The fabric that the balloon is made of is leakproof to even the tiniest airborne molecules. It could find use in "aquariums" smaller than a red blood cell, through which scientists could peer at molecules, researchers suggested.
The balloon is made of graphite, as found in pencils, which is made of atom-thin sheets of carbon stacked on top of each other known. The sheets are known as graphene.
Graphene is highly electrically conductive, and scientists are feverishly researching whether it could find use in advanced circuitry and other devices.
"We were studying little graphene trampolines, and by complete accident, we made a graphene sheet over a hole. Then we started studying it, and saw that it was trapping gas inside," said researcher Paul McEuen, a physicist at
By experimenting further with bubbles made of graphene, McEuen and his colleagues found the membranes were impermeable to even the smallest gas molecules, including helium.
"It's amazing that something only an atom thick can be an impenetrable barrier. You can have gas on one side and vacuum or liquid on the other, and with a wall only one atom thick, nothing would go through it," McEuen told LiveScience.
In terms of applications, McEuen suggested one possibility which he called miniature aquariums for molecules. "You could have instruments on one side of the membrane, in vacuum or air, and on the other side you would have DNA or proteins suspended in liquid," he explained. "And then you could get right up close to image the molecules, within a few angstroms," or widths of an atom.
Other potential applications include hyper-fine sensors and ultra-pure filters.
"Once you have a membrane that won't let anything past, the most interesting thing is to then poke a hole in it. Then you can detect what leaks through that hole with high sensitivity, or make sure only what you want leaks through that hole," McEuen said.
The only way gas leaked out from inside the balloons was through the glass that the bubbles were anchored on, McEuen explained.
"We need to build a better base that's more impenetrable, such as single crystal silicon. I'm confident we can make a leakproof version," McEuen said.
The scientists will detail their findings in the Aug. 13 issue of the journal Nano Letters.
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There may be a second life for Iressa, AstraZeneca's once-promising cancer drug that came to symbolize the hype surrounding a new generation of targeted cancer treatments. Iressa won U.S. Food & Drug Administration approval for lung cancer in 2003 amid much fanfare, labeled by some as a "miracle drug." Two years later, AstraZeneca (NYSE:AZN - News) was forced to stop marketing the drug in the
Doctors continued to experiment with the drug, however, which is how researchers at
The study, presented June 1 at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in
Score One for Targeted Treatments
The breast cancer study holds larger significance. Targeted cancer drugs, meant to zero in on tumor cells without damaging healthy tissue, typically work for only a quarter of the patients that receive them. But as doctors continue to test such targeted drugs as ImClone's (NasdaqGS:IMCL - News) Erbitux, Genentech's (NYSE:DNA - News) Avastin, and Tarceva, developed jointly by Genentech and OSI Pharmaceuticals (NasdaqGS:OSIP - News), they are getting better at figuring out which patients will -- and won't -- respond.
Much of the news out of this year's ASCO conference came from studies meant to determine more precisely how targeted therapies should be used. Such discoveries could save the health-care system considerable sums because drugs that cost tens of thousands of dollars would no longer be wasted on patients whose tumors don't contain the right receptive cells.
Such studies may also revive failed drugs, as appears to be the case with Iressa. The drug blocks a protein called epidermal growth factor (EGF) that allows tumor cells to grow and spread uncontrollably. The FDA gave Iressa conditional approval in 2003 after it proved able to shrink tumors in about 10% of lung cancer patients. Far from a home run, but given that there are few options for victims of lung cancer, there was tremendous enthusiasm for the drug in the cancer community. The approval was conditioned on AstraZeneca later proving that the drug could not only shrink tumors but extend life. But a large-scale trial found no statistical difference on survival between Iressa and standard treatment. The company agreed to stop selling Iressa in the
Better-Than-Expected Results
Intriguingly, however, Iressa proved more effective in certain subgroups of patients -- women, smokers, and most of all, Asians. That gave a number of researchers reason to keep experimenting with the drug, in the hopes that they could figure out who might respond.
Cristofanilli's breast cancer study enrolled 93 women at 30 centers across the U.S. and Latin America, all with metastatic breast cancer, and all resistant to standard treatment with Arimidex, a hormone-based therapy also made by AstraZeneca. He had noted in animal studies that hormone resistance was strongly associated with an overabundance of EGF, and hoped Iressa might do some good for women.
The researchers were looking for some slight delay in the spread of the cancer, but were stunned by the actual results. Women who received both Iressa and Arimidex went 14.5 months before their cancer spread, compared with 8.2 months in the Arimidex-only patients, a 45% reduction in risk. Additionally, 47% of the women taking the combination had stable disease for more than 24 weeks, compared with 22% on Arimidex alone.
Identifying Patients Who Could Benefit
The breast cancer study comes just a week after the Journal of Clinical Oncology published research from
Dr. Alan Barge, head of clinical oncology for AstraZeneca, says the company has filed for approval of Iressa in
The downside of such an approach for the company is that it could greatly limit the market size of a particular drug. However, says Barge, he would rather capture 80% of those patients who will actually respond to a drug, than 20% of a larger patient population who may or may not see their cancer improve.
Some people have a mutation that makes them amazingly resistant to HIV -- and now, scientists may have found a way to give that immunity to anyone.
Viruses enter cells and take them over, but to get inside, they need a handhold. HIV pulls itself in by grabbing onto a protein called CCR5, which decorates the surface of T-cells, which are one of the two major types of white blood cells and play an important role in helping the body fight infections. Back in the 1990's, researchers took interest in a handful of promiscuous gay men who were able to engage in sexual relations with their HIV-positive partners with impunity. Most of them had a mutation that kept their cells from producing normal CCR5 protein.
Armed with that knowledge, scientists have developed several tactics to block the production of CCR5 or perturb its shape so that the HIV virus can't grab onto it during the first step of its hijacking attempt. The strategy is much akin to cutting your hair before a wrestling match: It gives your opponent one less thing to grab onto.
In the latest version of this defense, Carl June and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania used a highly engineered protein, called a zinc finger nuclease, to clip the CCR5 gene out of some T-cells. Left without the recipe for that protein, the cells are nearly impenetrable. His report appeared on the Nature Biotechnology website yesterday.
June tested the procedure on cultured T-cells and mice -- not humans -- so it should be a source of guarded optimism, because it's not certain the technique would work in humans. In theory, AIDS doctors could take some T-cells out of an infected person, edit their genomes, and stick them back into their patient. Once they have returned to the body, each resistant cell will thrive and multiply in spite of the disease. This trick would not eliminate the virus, but it might be able to permanently raise the T-cell counts of AIDS patients, increasing their ability to resist secondary infections and remain healthy.
A technique called molecular breast imaging appears to be about as accurate as MRI for detecting breast cancers, but is less costly.
The findings were reported by Dr. Carrie Beth Hruska of the Mayo Clinic in
"Molecular breast imaging is available only at the Mayo Clinic right now, but it will become more widely available soon," Hruska said.
Molecular breast imaging, or MBI, uses injection of a radiotracer. "It has a high affinity for cancer cells," Hruska explained, and any hot spot can be picked by a gamma camera.
She and her colleagues performed MBI and MRI in 48 women being evaluated for breast cancer, 42 of whom had suspicious areas on previous examination and 6 who were at high risk for breast cancer. A total of 54 cancers were diagnosed in 32 patients.
MRI 53 detected cancers in 31 patients, while MBI revealed 51 cancers in 30 patients. One cancer was not detectable on MRI, MBI, mammography or ultrasound.
Sixteen patients were negative for cancer after MRI and MBI. There were nine true negative findings on MRI and eight true negatives on MBI.
Because the majority of patients in this study had a high suspicion of having breast cancer, results might be different in screening average-risk women, Hruska cautioned.
"This was a retrospective look at patients who were not served well by mammography," Hruska commented in an interview with Reuters Health after her meeting presentation.
MBI was comparable to MRI, she said. "As MRI is being used more and more, cost will become a major factor. MBI costs four-to-six times less than MRI."
The technology still needs to be improved and larger studies are needed, but this is a promising, cost-effective method that may be useful for screening for breast cancer, she concluded.
3-D mammograms, cameras may improve breast exams
Remember peeking through a View-Master? Scientists are using the same concept behind the classic kids' toy to try to see mammograms in 3-D.
The goal: A better way to check for breast cancer in women with breasts too dense for today's mammograms to give a clear picture.
Radiologists donning 3-D glasses isn't the only potential aid. The Mayo Clinic in
Both technologies still are experimental. But the research is being watched closely because the need is so great: Half of women younger than 50 and a third of women over 50 are estimated to have dense breasts.
In addition to a harder time viewing any brewing tumors, women with dense breasts have a higher risk of getting breast cancer, too.
Only a mammogram can tell if your breasts are made up more of dense or easier-to-examine fatty tissue. But if a doctor warns that you have dense breasts, there's little good advice on how to get a better cancer check today.
"It's a major issue in the field now, more and more, how to address the imaging needs of women with significant breast density," says American Cancer Society screening specialist Robert Smith. "We and women and everyone else is kind of left wondering what would be best under what circumstances."
But, "we can do better than we're doing," predicts Dr. Mary S. Newell, assistant breast-imaging chief at Emory University in Atlanta, who is testing the 3-D approach.
Mammograms are X-ray exams that hunt denser spots in normal breast tissue, shadows that might signal a tumor. Regular mammograms starting at age 40 help reduce deaths from breast cancer by finding tumors when they're smaller and more treatable.
They're far from perfect, however, and dense breasts may be the X-rays' biggest hurdle.
Some doctors already give women with dense breasts an ultrasound exam — the same sound-wave test used to view a developing fetus — in addition to a mammogram. A handful of studies conclude ultrasound improves cancer detection but it remains controversial. Other women seek MRIs, which detect blood-flow changes that could signal cancer. But they're not recommended solely for dense breasts, partly because of their $1,000-plus price. Both options trigger a lot of false alarms by spotting suspicious areas that turn out to be fine.
Enter the new technologies:
_Mammograms are two-dimensional, flat pictures of a surface that's simply not flat. When technicians literally smush women's breasts into the mammography unit, they're trying to spread the tissue out so less is hidden from the X-ray. "Stereo mammograms" allow radiologists to see those X-ray images in 3-D, so that a small spot on the bottom might not be hidden by normal tissue laying over it.
We have depth perception because each eye gets a slightly different view, allowing your brain to construct a 3-D view when it overlays the two, explains Dr. Newell at Emory. That's the concept behind stereoscopes, gadgets that help people see pictures in 3-D like the old cartoons of a View-Master.
Stereo mammograms, being developed by Cambridge, Mass.-based BBN Technologies, work essentially the same way. Separate X-rays are taken at slightly different angles. Then radiologists wear glasses that make each eye see a separate image on special monitors. The brain "reads" that as a single, 3-D view.
In a soon-to-be-published study, Emory radiologists gave nearly 1,500 women at increased risk of breast cancer both a mammogram and a stereo mammogram. Different radiologists analyzed each test. When researchers put together the results, the stereo mammograms increased detection of cancer by 23 percent, Newell says. Another plus, it decreased false-alarms by 46 percent.
_The Mayo Clinic's so-called molecular breast imaging, or MBI, takes a different approach — detecting how tumorous tissue acts instead of how it looks.
Doctors inject women with a drug known as a radioactive tracer, one cardiologists have used in heart stress tests for years. It tends to briefly collect in breast tumors, lighting up for viewing when Mayo switches on a small gamma camera.
The exam can be done in the same visit, even the same room, as a mammogram, while MRIs require injecting a different drug and spending an hour inside a doughnut-shaped magnetized machine, notes Mayo radiology fellow Carrie Beth Hruska.
Mayo researchers compared the records of 48 high-risk women who got both an experimental MBI and, within a month, a regular MRI. The faster MBI detected almost as many cancers — 51 tumors in 30 patients — as did the proven MRIs, which found 53 cancers in 31 patients, Hruska told a Defense Department breast cancer conference last week.
Stay tuned: Mayo just finished a study of 2,000 women comparing the gamma-camera technique to standard mammograms, and Hruska says additional government-funded studies at other hospitals will begin later this year.
Scientists unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer on Monday, a $100 million machine that for the first time has performed 1,000 trillion calculations per second in a sustained exercise.
The technology breakthrough was accomplished by engineers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and IBM Corp. on a computer to be used primarily on nuclear weapons work, including simulating nuclear explosions.
The computer, named Roadrunner, is twice as fast as IBM's Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which itself is three times faster than any of the world's other supercomputers, according to IBM.
"The computer is a speed demon. It will allow us to solve tremendous problems," said Thomas D'Agostino, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees nuclear weapons research and maintains the warhead stockpile.
But officials said the computer also could have a wide range of other applications in civilian engineering, medicine and science, from developing biofuels and designing more fuel-efficient cars to finding drug therapies and providing services to the financial industry.
To put the computer's speed in perspective, it has roughly the computing power of 100,000 of today's most powerful laptops stacked 1.5 miles high, according to IBM. Or, if each of the world's 6 billion people worked on hand-held computers for 24 hours a day, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner computer can do in a single day.
The IBM and
Some elements of the Roadrunner can be traced back to popular video games, said David Turek, vice president of IBM's supercomputing programs. In some ways, he said, it's "a very souped-up Sony PlayStation 3."
"We took the basic chip design (of a PlayStation) and advanced its capability," said Turek.
But the Roadrunner supercomputer, named after the
The interconnecting system occupies 6,000 square feet with 57 miles of fiber optics and weighs 500,000 pounds. Although made from commercial parts, the computer consists of 6,948 dual-core computer chips and 12,960 cell engines, and it has 80 terabytes of memory housed in 288 connected refrigerator-sized racks.
The cost: $100 million.
Turek said the computer in a two-hour test on May 25 achieved a "petaflop" speed of sustained performance, something no other computer had ever done. It did so again in several real applications involving classified nuclear weapons work this past weekend.
"This is a huge and remarkable achievement," said Turek in a conference call with reporters.
A "flop" is an acronym meaning floating-point-operations per second. One petaflop is 1,000 trillion operations per second. Only two years ago, there were no actual applications where a computer achieved 100 teraflops — a tenth of Roadrunner's speed — said Turek, noting that the tenfold advancement came over a relatively short time.
The Roadrunner computer, now housed at the IBM research laboratory in
Along with other supercomputers, it will be key "to assure the safety and security of our (weapons) stockpile," said D'Agostino. With its extraordinary speed it will be able to simulate the performances of a warhead and help weapons scientists track warhead aging, he said.
But the computer — and more so the technology that it represents — marks a future for a wide range of other research and uses. "The technology will be pronounced in its employment across industry in the years to come," predicted Turek, the IBM executive.
Michael Anastasio, director of the
Anastasio said the computer, in its unclassified applications, is expected to be used not only by
Turek said the computer represents still another breakthrough, particularly important in these days of expensive energy: It is an energy miser compared with other supercomputers, performing 376 million calculations for every watt of electricity used.
An ubertech "birdy bird," as Fox News is calling it, is flying over the skies of
The story came out a week ago, but Fox News now has video inside the copter. The $10 million vehicle was designed by Bell Helicopter and has infrared night-vision and GPS navigation that allows police to zoom in on a location by typing in an address. Live footage captured by the helicopter's cameras can be transmitted to a police command center or to handheld devices on the ground.
Police used it in a recent gun situation to determine that a man holed up inside his car had killed himself, making it safe for authorities on the ground to approach the vehicle.
Police insist they're only using the helicopter for legitimate law enforcement purposes in public places and would never peer inside someone's home, but privacy activists have concerns.
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