geekosystem

We've seen treatments with lasers, and treatments with tiny gold nanoparticles, but this is a new one on us: Secondary tumors that form in the lungs of cancer patients can now safely be killed using tiny ice crystals. Unlike other treatments, the process known as cryoablation has seen phenomenal success in a small-scale study, allowing patients to return home as soon as the day after their treatment. It is by no means a cure, but it looks like it has the potential to be a safe and reliable way to treat these types of lung tumors, and its future looks bright for more applications as well.

The man might have had some misguided notions about what is and is not art -- as evidenced by his personal crusade against video games -- but there's no denying the profound influence Roger Ebert (third from left) had on the world of movies as well as that of film criticism. So it is with heavy hearts that we relay this news: Roger Ebert is dead after a long and public feud with cancer.

Google Glass is going to do a lot of interesting things. Wearers will be able to get turn-by-turn directions, instantly share videos and pictures with the world, carry on video calls, and get information about the world while still looking at the world... as long as you have your cell phone or there's a Wi-Fi connection. It would be great if Glass was a completely standalone device, but it would need its own cellular connection for that. There is not, and won't be a cellular connection in Google Glass, but there's good reasons for that -- like FCC regulations, and people's irrational fear of cancer.

A research team from Saudi Arabia's King Abdulaziz University is clamoring for more government support for their work -- which isn't exactly surprising, as most research teams are pretty much perpetually clamoring for support for their work. When that work revolves around the careful study and examination of camel urine, though... well, it's exactly as hard a sell as it sounds. Yes, even if that camel urine may show promise as a cancer treatment, because euuuugh.

A team of researchers at Cambridge University have spotted the first instances of DNA with four helices present inside human cells. The Cambridge team hopes their findings could have implications for treating cancer, but the discovery more broadly suggests that we still may have a lot to learn about the basic structure of DNA and the shapes it can potentially take.

Smartphone apps are great at a lot of things. They can make our pictures look terrible "artistic", they can keep us connected to friends, they can even set us up on random blind dates with strangers we know nothing about, but it turns out they're not great at identifying skin cancer -- at least not most of them. A new study shows that smartphone apps designed to identify cancerous lesions misdiagnose them more than half the time. Good news, dermatologists! You haven't been replace by robots yet!

Marvel fans on top of their weekly comic book reading know that the publisher has been working hand-in-hand with Susan G. Komen for the Cure to promote breast cancer awareness in both men and women through variant covers -- featuring various heroes and heroines showing their support by donning pink -- and Captain and Iron Man discussing the importance of awareness and the foundation's mission in a full page ad. Continuing this partnership, Marvel allegedly has plans to craft an in-continuity storyline centered around a Marvel heroine contracting cancer. There is no official word at this time as to which one it will be, but Bleeding Cool says currently has four lined up to keep fans guessing.

Gilda's Club is a network of cancer charities that help patients cope with the disease. It is named after Gilda Radner, an original Saturday Night Live cast member, who died in 1989 of ovarian cancer. She said the disease gave her "membership in an elite club I'd rather not belong to." The Madison, Wisconsin branch of the organization announced they're changing their name to the Cancer Support Community in January 2013, leaving Gilda's legacy behind, and other branches are following suit. This isn't okay.

I think we can agree that the common cold sucks. I also think we can agree that it doesn't suck nearly as badly as cancer. Researchers at the Salk Institute, though, may be on the trail of a way to turn the lesser of these two evils into a weapon in the fight against the other. This week, a study in the journal Cell reports that the Salk team has taken steps toward hijacking the common cold's ability to disable immune responses within cells. That could lead to engineered cold viruses that hunt down and destroy cancer cells, while leaving healthy cells in peace.

You can be forgiven for not remembering what happened when you were an embryo, because things went really, really quickly. DNA-wise, you're still largely the same person. The genes that are responsible for embryonic development in the first few days of life just get switched off after they've done their job. Researchers don't know where that switch is, or how it functions, but they have found another reason to keep looking for it. When the switch malfunctions, reactivating embryonic development genes later in life, tumors can be the result.

Today in Bad News: Stem cell research could have hit a sizable stumbling block today as researchers at the University of California - Davis released a study demonstrating similarities between laboratory processes that turn adult cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and natural processes that turn cells cancerous. The troubling research adds to a growing body of evidence that iPSCs, while promising, are not ready for primetime. The silver lining though, is that understanding what's wrong with iPSCs today is the first step towards fixing it tomorrow.

Cells do an amazing number of things, from forming your skin to digesting your food, to telling you if you are sunburnt or hungry. Most of everything cells do, they do using proteins -- proteins that say where they are, proteins that let cells reproduce, and even proteins that issue orders to other cells. Tracking proteins from a cell is tricky work, though only tiny amounts are produced, and they can get lost or muddled in the cultures researchers use to grow and study cells. A team at North Carolina State University may have developed a more accurate way of watching for proteins, though, by identifying the specific highways that proteins take on their way through a cell.

Proving the principle that putting the words "Causes Cancer" in a headline behind literally any other string of words will guarantee you some news coverage, a French study showing a link between cancer in rats and genetically modified corn has been getting a lot of play over the last couple of days, with a truly heartening proportion of the coverage calling shenanigans on the study. Today, author Gilles-Eric Seralini is defending the study, even as he refuses to turn over his data to ESFA, the European Union's food safety watchdog for a counter study.

Researchers in Switzerland have applied the principles behind cellular communication to mammalian cells. By reprogramming the cells with a specialized series of genes and proteins that allow for two-way communication, researchers have crafted cells that can talk to one another, sending messages via chemical signals rather than electronic transmission. The hope is that this two-way communication system can be harnessed to fight cancer, overriding orders sent by tumors with preprogrammed messages sent from other cells.

Today in Solutions to Problems That Probably Don't Really Count As Solutions, scientists are proposing a new remedy to the bizarre, contagious facial tumors that are slowly but surely wiping out the world's Tasmanian devil population. That solution? Make the creatures less aggressive. The disease that causes the tumors is spread by biting, which, aside from spinning rapidly in circles and being manipulated by Bugs Bunny, is pretty much all Tasmanian devils are really good at. Their whole raison d'etre is more or less based around biting. If you take that away, there's an argument that you're not really dealing with a Tasmanian devil at all anymore, but that may also be one of the only ways to save the species.