cancer

After being available for several years in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and throughout Europe, Swedish firm Sectra's digital mammography system has now been approved by the FDA for use in the U.S. (It was also approved for use in Canada in March and in Russia in April.)

The system, called MicroDose, uses technology called photon counting that results in two key changes over traditional mammograms: higher-resolution images at half the radiation exposure.

"Until now, digital mammography systems in the U.S. have managed to reduce the radiation dose slightly below those of film-based systems," Dr. Jesper … Read more

While microscopes might be affixed to cell phones, they don't usually look like them. But it seems the researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF in Germany got the designer bug when they developed this one.

In this case, though, form is actually following function. The microscope is flat because it has been entirely rethought, with several tiny lenses to simultaneously scan one image instead of one that scans and then groups together many images.

"Our ultrathin microscope consists of not just one but a multitude of tiny imaging channels, with lots of tiny lenses arrayed alongside one another" Dr. Frank Wipperman, who managed the team, said in a news release. "Each channel records a tiny segment of the object at the same size for a 1:1 image."… Read more

DNA molecules are not merely carriers of information. They are also highly stable and programmable, which is why researchers have been working so feverishly on a design strategy called DNA origami.

And now a team at MIT is developing a program that makes the game playable by more than just a select few.

DNA origami--constructing specific 2D and 3D shapes out of DNA strands--could prove to be a highly effective means of developing nanoscale tools, such as synthetic photocells that perform artificial photosynthesis and highly targeted drugs (think of sending a cancer drug to hunt down a specific tumor).

But it's still young. Paul Rothemund of CalTech first introduced DNA origami in 2006 (thereby making the cover of Nature and delivering a TED Talk showing tiny DNA smiley faces), and William Shih's lab at Harvard Medical School was able to up the game from 2D to 3D a few years later.

The result is that today a small number of brilliant and highly specialized minds are bent over a nanoscale game of origami, playing with various sequences to try to build specific shapes for specific tasks. Imagine a room of highly sophisticated gamers playing with building blocks in a world without Tetris; if they had the game, they'd be able to work faster.… Read more

Two professors at Binghamton University in New York are using a novel imaging technique to observe the behavior of an enzyme--called tubulin tyrosine ligase, or TTL--as its behavior can suggest whether certain cancer cells might grow more aggressively than others.

Though they are not developing actual therapies, Susan Bane and Susannah Gal say their research could help further personalize targeted cancer therapies.

"Potentially, we could put [a tumor sample] in our labeling system and say, 'Yes, that has a problem with the TTL system, and therefore you should be more aggressive with it,'" says Gal, whose work is funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. "Or we could say, 'That's probably OK, so you can treat it with normal chemotherapy.'"

The enzyme TTL involves microtubules, which both help chromosomes line up correctly during cell division and provide part of the scaffolding of a cell's structure. Those microtubules are made of proteins called tubulin; the enzyme carboxypeptidase clips an amino acid called tyrosine off the ends of some of these proteins, and later the enzyme TTL puts that tyrosine back on.

Bane says it's unclear why tyrosine is clipped off only to be reattached, but it's clearly an important part of the cell's cycle: "We do know that if you don't have that enzyme, you'll die."

In some cancer cells, that cycle of removing and reattaching tyrosine is disrupted, with too many tubulins lacking tyrosine altogether. Tumors made of those cells, Bane says, "tend to grow more aggressively."… Read more

Researchers from Harvard and MIT have designed a microfluidic device that uses porous "forests" of carbon nanotubes to detect individual cancer cells or viruses such as HIV in a blood sample.

Harvard's Mehmet Toner, MIT's Brian Wardle and colleagues improved upon a device developed four years ago that had forests of silicon posts to detect target cells.

By making the posts out of porous carbon nanotubes, which are cylinders of carbon atoms, and attaching various antibodies to them, sample fluid can flow through and around the "trees," increasing the chances of detection.

The antibodies will bond to targets chemically, but the device also works mechanically by trapping particles depending on the distance between the trees. The forest has 10 billion to 100 billion carbon nanotubes per square centimeter, and is 99 percent air. … Read more

Facebook and boobs. The parties just can't seem to get along. Be it what kinds of pictures to allow (photos of breastfeeding and mastectomies, for instance) or what kinds of campaigns to host (even breast cancer campaigns such as I like it on have been frowned upon by other breast cancer awareness campaigns), the social network can't seem to steer clear of breastly woes.

Now the removal of U.K. Facebook user Melissa Tullett's recent double mastectomy image is raising more than a few eyebrows.

The question at hand is the exact nature of Facebook's nudity … Read more

Originally developed in the early 1990s to promote plant growth on board space shuttles, the light technology behind NASA's Astroculture 3 is now being repurposed to help soothe the painful side effects that can result from chemotherapy and radiation treatment in patients with bone marrow and stem cell transplants.

The treatment device, called WARP 75, uses High Emissivity Aluminiferous Luminescent Substrate, or HEALS, which lets LED chips function at their maximum irradiance--the equivalent light energy of 12 suns from each of the device's 288 grain-of-salt-sized LEDs--without emitting heat.

Researchers studied the effects of the technology to treat oral mucositis… Read more

Doug from Pennsylvania inadvertently started another 404 Podcast meme in yesterday's video voice mail with his sign-off salute, "Tagger easy!" We dedicate today's show title to him and WhiteWhine, a Tumblr for First World problems.

More than 200 protesters in Libya have been killed with Qaddafi's machine guns and large-caliber weapons, but some nerds in America are more concerned with the future of .ly domains like Bitly. How will we shorten our links to a Tweet-appropriate size if Libya shuts down the Internet again?!

Don't freak out yet, because Internet restrictions by the Libyan government will not affect those domains, since most of the servers that give access to .ly links are located outside of Libya, and most administrators like Bitly CEO John Borthwick are already using precautionary measures to ensure their stability.… Read more

Five melanoma patients at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York are about to become subjects in the first human clinical trial approved by the Food and Drug Administration that uses inorganic material in the same way as a drug.

Dubbed Cornell dots (or "C dots" for short), the brightly glowing nanoparticles are silica spheres less than 8 nanometers (one-billionth of a meter) in diameter that hold dye molecules. Those spheres are basically glass, chemically inert and small enough to pass through the body and out in a urine stream, and for clinical use are coated with polyethylene glycol … Read more