Science, Technology & Health: July 2013 Archives
I just received a notice in the mail from AT&T about two new advertising programs. Naturally the two new programs promise to "help [AT&T] and other businesses serve you better" by showing ads "more suited to my interests". The thing is, all I have with AT&T is a DSL account, so what ads is AT&T showing me anyway? Are they injecting ads into my data stream?
You can opt out of these two new programs, but check out the opt-out clause:
I have to opt out on each wireless device and every browser that I use? Screw you, AT&T! Why can't I opt out my entire account? What happens when I clear my cookies, do I have to opt out again?
I'm a paying customer, not a product for you to sell to advertisers! Argh.
Promising research using killer T-cells to target cancer cells.
Immunocore has found a way of designing small protein molecules, which it calls ImmTACs, that effectively act as double-ended glue. At one end they stick to cancer cells, strongly and very specifically, leaving healthy cells untouched. At the other end they stick to T-cells.The technology is based on the "T-cell receptor", the protein that sticks out of the surface of the T-cell and binds to its enemy target. Immunocore's ImmTACs are effectively independent T-cell receptors that are "bispecific", meaning they bind strongly to cancer cells at one end, and T-cells at the other - so introducing cancer cells to their nemesis.
"What we can do is to use that scaffold of the T-cell receptor to make something that is very good at recognising cancer even if it doesn't exist naturally," said Dr Jakobsen. "Although T-cells are not very keen at recognising cancer, we can force them to do so. The potential you have if you can engineer T-cell receptors is quite enormous. You can find any type of cell and any kind of target. This means the approach can in theory be used against any cancer, whether it is tumours of the prostate, breast, liver or the pancreas.
One complication is that every type of cancer cell needs to be analyzed and targeted, and each individual person's cancer can be unique. Cancers may vary enough person-to-person that it could be impossible to create a receptor that is broad enough to catch all the cancer cells but narrow enough to avoid the healthy cells. Only time will tell, but it's a very exciting possibility.
The key to the success of the technique is being able to distinguish between a cancer cell and a normal, healthy cell. Immunocore's drug does this by recognising small proteins or peptides that stick out from the surface membrane of cancer cells. All cells extrude peptides on their membranes and these peptides act like a shop window, telling scientists what is going on within the cell, and whether it is cancerous or not."All these little peptides tell you the story of the cell. The forest of them on the cell surface is a sort of display saying 'I am this kind of cell. This is my identity and this is everything going on inside me'," Dr Jakobsen explained.
Immunocore is building up a database of peptide targets on cancer cells in order to design T-cell receptors that can target them, leaving healthy cells alone and so minimising possible side effects - or that is the hope.
Venkat makes a good observation: just because a job is boring doesn't mean that a robot can do it better. We humans may be left with jobs that are hard to scale for robotics, but still boring. The archetypal task that fits this description is captcha interpretation: computers can't read the squiggly letters as well as humans, but would you want to do that 2,000 hours per year?
We make the mistake of thinking that just because computers do bounded-variety, repetitive information work very well, that they can do anything that seems repetitive (boring) to humans very well.But when we're talking complex systems-level schlepping, like the refining of crude data from disparate information systems, there are rarely any elegant algorithms. Just dozens or hundreds of arbitrary details, small fixes, one-time operations, error corrections and so forth. Humans think of it as repetitive work, but it isn't. It is hundreds of similar, but not identical, special cases that are easy (if tedious) for humans to handle, but resist general attacks via elegant algorithms.
In fact I suspect the amount of messy and non-repetitive but critical detail determines the amount of human work a domain can sustain.
The human share of the work pie isn't the gap between machine creativity and human creativity. The real human share of the work pie is the gap between machine repeatability and human boredom.
And this is brutal for the self-described artisans:
Aspiring artisans seek sexy work at small-and-local scales. They reject mass celebrity and status in a global culture, but still crave local celebrity and status (they call it "being respected in the community"). They still look to engage in conspicuous production. They are as prone to deluding themselves that sexy is creative as wannabe actors.How do they do this?
They do this by confusing economically essential variety (such as handling all the potential variety and ongoing evolution in an online payment system) with economically optional variety (such as uniqueness in hand-crafted coffee mugs). This is the artisan delusion.
If the uniqueness in the product mainly makes the producer feel more special and unique, without leading to profitable differentiation, it's the optional kind, like latte art.
The only food supplement I take is fish oil. I don't even take multivitamins. There have been a host of reports about the benefits of fish oil: reduces heart disease, improves brain power, etc. Great, right? Oh yeah, fish oil nearly doubles your risk for serious prostate cancer. (And there's zero evidence that it protects your heart or brain.)
Experts found that omega-3 fatty acids may raise the risk of the most lethal form of the disease by more than 70 per cent.Researchers warned against omega-3 pills, and recommended eating just one or two meals of oily fish per week. ...
However, scientists found that those with the highest levels of omega-3 in their blood were 71 per cent more likely to develop fast-growing, hard-to-treat prostate tumours.
They were also more likely to contract the slower, less deadly form of the disease, with the overall prostate cancer risk raised by 43 per cent.
The team from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle warned: 'There is really no evidence that taking dietary supplements is beneficial to health, and there is increasing evidence that taking high doses is harmful.'
Should you even be taking supplements? I won't be. All the evidence seems to show that at best they're a way to get very expensive urine, and at worst they are harmful.
The finding came amid a wider research project of more than 2,000 men, examining whether supplements of vitamin E and the mineral selenium can help prevent prostate cancer - the most common cancer in British men, killing more than 10,000. Selenium provided no benefit, and vitamin E increased the odds of contracting the disease.Dr Kristal said: 'As we do more and more of these studies - and I have been involved in them most of my career - we find high doses of supplements have no effect or increase the risk of the disease you are trying to prevent.
'There is not really a single example of where taking a supplement lowers chronic disease risk.'
It seems like the whole supplement industry is a modern-day version of the witch-doctor. People feel good about doing something to improve their health and enjoy the appearance of control.
Apparently spinal cord repair is advancing to the state that human head transpants may soon be possible. A description of the surgical process is engrossing. A head transplant wouldn't be purely for entertainment value, it could be a powerful treatment for numerous diseases:
- Any non-brain cancer
- Various forms of muscular degeneration
- Traumatic non-head injuries
- Organ failure
In the near future it will be simpler to transplant a head than to transplant a heart and lungs.
