For a few patients suffering from a bacterial infection, antibiotics simply won’t cut it. Some bacteria have developed multidrug tolerance, a clever defense against the best weapons doctors have to fight them. But a new study published in the journal Nature has shown that by simply adding sugar to a drug regimen, even the most persistant bacteria can be killed off.

The crux of an assault on bacteria is that they, like organisms, must eat to survive. When antibiotics are introduced, the bacteria consume the drugs and eventually die off. But some more wily bacterial invaders have learned to shut down their metabolic processes when their breathern start to die off. During this time, they don’t eat or reproduce. It could be compared to bears hibernating through the winter. These so-called persisters can remain dormant for months until finally waking up to reproduce once again.

To counter the persisters, researchers sought to trick the dormant bacteria into eating even while the antibiotic was still present in the patients.

Researchers looking to treat cancer patients without subjecting them to the ravages of chemotherapy have published some promising results in the journal of Science Translational Medicine on “adoptive T-cell therapy.” Using this technique, researchers removed immune system cells from nine melanoma patients. These cells, called T-cells, are the responsible for fighting off disease in the human body. They then “trained” the cells, by exposing them to genetically engineered cells that carried tumor antigens, which signaled the T-cells to attack.

The new, smarter, more experienced cancer-fighting cells were then multiplied and re-introduced to the patient’s body. After two weeks, the cancer in four of the nine patients had stabilized, neither growing nor shrinking. In one patient, the cancer had disappeared entirely and was still cancer-free after two years. Five of the nine patients also responded much better to cancer drug treatments later on.

Though this is only an early study, and will require many more experiments before it can be considered for widespread use, it does bode well for researchers. Especially since previous T-cell training experiments failed when the cells died off when put back in the body. With any luck, future research will be just as promising as this study.

(via Discover, image via Wikipedia)

xkcd gets its share of backlash from within the geek community for its occasional nerd-pandering (‘hey, you like math and video games? me too!’), but it’s stuff like this and the radiation chart that proves that xkcd cartoonist Randall Munroe is still the best in the business. Anyone can profess to enjoy Star Wars and Portal, but laborious, useful data-crunching is the mark of true geekery.

Here, Munroe combines first-page Google search results for a number of queries about the future to paint a picture of the coming century. Oh, and when the nerd-pandering punchline finally arrives, it is just delicious.

Full comic after the jump.

Mark Zuckerberg has been called many things — a punk, a genius, a traitor, a billionaire — but he’s also been called some unkinder things, and not just by people trying to promote some movie, but by random people searching Google. Publisher Exclusive Books makes a point of this fact in this ad for self-help books: All of the above are actual popular Google searches that follow “Mark Zuckerberg is.”

To those who think that he’s a thieving colorblind loser Antichrist, Zuckerberg is still “doing things that no one in this room, including and especially [you], are intellectually or creatively capable of doing.”

(via Copyranter)

I can’t possibly improve upon Tampa Bay news station WTSP’s headline on this story, so I’m not even going to try: A University of Florida student and Publix employee named Zachary Garcia idly Googled himself only to discover that his photo had been circulated by the Polk County Sheriff’s Office in connection with a murder. But the suspect in the felony murder case in question was Zachery Garcia – that’s Zachery with an “e.”

Zachary Garcia, the one who’s not a murder suspect:

“I was just very shocked to find my picture and the article saying that I was convicted of a felony murder charge,” he said, “and I was just very shocked and angry that someone put my name up there and said I did something I didn’t do.”

“Everybody makes mistakes,” Garcia added. “I work at Publix and I might get somebody’s sub (order) wrong. But for somebody to get (the photo of a suspect) wrong…it’s not a sandwich, it’s somebody’s life you’re playing with.”

And now as this story spreads, non-murder suspect Zachary Garcia is going to see his name pop up in all of these murder-related stories about how Googling his name used to erroneously cause his photo to turn up in connection with a murder case. D’oh!

(WTSP via Fark)

This is the first result you get when you Google “Watch Conan.” Huh?

From a search engine optimization perspective, this is probably because the URL in question is http://www.nbc.com/the-tonight-show rather than, say, nbc.com/jay-leno-tonight-show, so it would presumably gotten a lot of Conan-centric backlinks when O’Brien was helming the show. Since Conan’s show just started on TBS, it probably won’t be long until teamcoco.com or the SEO’d up TBS page, http://www.tbs.com/video/conan/ (title tag: “Watch Conan O’Brien Full Episodes, Conan Videos, Conan Comedy Clips @ TeamCoco.com”) get the glory, but it’s still ironic and a little evil that Jay Leno presently snags the top spot.

Apparently, more than 40,000 people search “watch Conan” every month; sorry guys.

(EW via BuzzFeed; pic via the latter)

Google is currently holding a press conference to announce Google Instant, their new search feature that displays search results as you type. From the FAQ:

Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.

The most obvious change is that you get to the right content much faster than before because you don’t have to finish typing your full search term, or even press “search.” Another shift is that seeing results as you type helps you formulate a better search term by providing instant feedback. You can now adapt your search on the fly until the results match exactly what you want. In time, we may wonder how search ever worked in any other way.

Marissa Mayer: “It’s not search ‘as you type,’ but ‘search before you type.’” “We can predict what you are likely to type and give you those results in real time.” (via RWW.)

Google claims that Instant will save many users 2-5 seconds per search, and, if used globally, will save humanity a collective 3.5 billion seconds per day. Personally, I find it a little  distracting, though you can turn it off by visiting your Google Preferences page.

One purpose for which it does seem useful, however, is mobile search: Google says they will have this out later this fall.

Google will be rolling Instant out over the course of the next few days; if it’s not already enabled for you on Google.com, you can hit this link to try it out. Thoughts?

(Google Instant FAQ.)

If you use Google to navigate the Internet, this just might be the coolest thing you read today: There’s a simple operator that lets you search for a word and all of its synonyms. If you place a tilde (~) before the word or phrase you’re searching with no spaces between the tilde and its associated word, you’ll conduct a search for the word, its synonyms, and terms with alternate endings.

ABC News is reporting that the Obama White House, in response to the SEC‘s suing Goldman Sachs for fraud, bought an ad for the Google search terms “Goldman Sachs SEC“ as part of an online ad campaign for financial reform. A simple search for those terms led to a page titled Organizing America that serves as a call to action for people frustrated with Wall Street.

According to Phil Noble, founder of Politics Online:

A keyword search for advertising is nothing new, but they have incorporated keyword searches into their daily war room activities. These guys are reacting to what’s in the news and creating a minute-by-minute strategy.

Goldman Sachs’ people weren’t slouches about it either:

The New York Times‘ Bits Blog has a neat post in which they run through Google suggested search and see what the first suggested results are for each letter of the alphabet. So: A is Amazon, B is Best Buy, C is Craigslist, D is Dictionary.com, et cetera. Bits expresses surprise that Hotmail nabbed the H, but: nothing too surprising.

We thought: why not run the same experiment on an obscurer, lower-volume search engine and see what happens. For whatever reason, we picked metasearch engine Dogpile. The results were pretty random. A was still Amazon, but: the top result for B was “bath body works coupons.” C was “county jail inmate search.” It got even stranger from there. Full results after the jump: