Cancer killing virus...Are you kidding me?!

I couldn't believe my eyes when I stumbled across this nugget online. Why on Earth hasn't this been plastered over the front page of every newspaper, the top of every science feed list or on billboards along the highway!
Before I get ahead of myself and incite an outrage, let me briefly tell you what I understood of the article.
At Uppsala University Hospital in Sweden, Prof Magnus Essand and his team have created a virus that eats cancerous cells. When a healthy cell is infected by a virus, it dies to prevent the spread of the virus to other cells. Cancerous cells change this behaviour and prevent their sacrifice (this is what make cancerous cells evil). But if a virus can be created to take advantage of this very feature of a cancerous cell, it would enter the cell, multiply uncontrollably and cause the cell to 'lyse' or explode, thereby spreading the cancer-munching virus (babies?) to other cancerous cells. This isn't a new idea apparently!
Oddly enough, in the 1890s, an Italian clinician found that prostitutes with cervical cancer showed alleviated symptoms when vaccinated against rabies. He then proceeded to roam the countryside injecting women with dog saliva. (Sigh!). In the 1900s, a 14 old year old boy with lymphatic cancer, found his swollen liver and spleen return to normal size after catch chicken pox. (and you never thought that you would find a bright side to chicken pox!).
The virus that Prof. Essand and his team have is said to attack neuroendocrine tumours (the same kind that assailed Steve Jobs). The virus, however, is in cold storage, refrigerated until it can go into human trials.
To be reasonable, the virus' success in rats doesn't necessarily translate into human viability, but that's what human trials are meant for! Money, is a blocker (surprise surprise). They need 1 million pounds to go through phase 1 and 2 of the trials and 2 million pounds to develop a better variety (I'm not really sure what this is even supposed to mean. Doesn't the virus either do its job or not? what does it get better at with an additional million pounds worth of research?) In any case, the virus remains unnamed and the team has agreed to name it after the person who donates a million pounds. I quote verbatim from the article
,

To donate money to Professor Magnus Essand's research on viral treatments for neuroendocrine cancer, send contributions to Uppsala University, The Oncolytic Virus Fund, Box 256, SE-751 05 Uppsala, Sweden, or visit www.uu.se/en/support/oncolytic. Contributions will be acknowledged in scientific publications and in association with the clinical trial. A donation of £1 million will ensure the virus is named in your honour

I also found another rather interesting tidbit. The details of the virus have already been published. This no longer allows them to file a patent (who would have thunk!). Without a patent, a pharma company that would have ordinarily take over the expense of the 3rd phase of human trials in order to profit from subsequent manufacturing and distribution when the drug goes commercial, won't think of investing the money. Devoid of an avenue to accrue profits, pharma companies would shrink away into the darkness. Unless....unless the team makes a modification to the virus, and redoes the entire process, this time taking care to file a patent before a publication. Politics in science...is a nasty business.
Here's hoping that the virus does succeed in human trials, that the team does get the money it seeks to continue their research and that patients with NETs (Neuroendocrine tumours) have a lantern bobbing brightly on the horizon.
If this were to succeed, I would be very excited to see how the results could be modified to deal with other kinds of cancers....could we truly be on the cusp of a breakthrough?
Cheering on the Uppsala team, here's wishing them all the very best of luck!


Links: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/9508895/A-virus-that-kills-cancer-the-cure-thats-waiting-in-the-coldc.html

Artificial Trees!

Now, this is an interesting idea! Given hat man is entirely hopeless at protecting the environment and compelled by some inner voice to make ash out of any remaining beauty in his path, this concept might actually take off, if only for the selfish need that we have for oxygen.

The idea is this - create artificial trees that would absorb CO2 out of humidity by a technique called humidity swing (more on this later).  They would also be equipped with solar panels to create energy to drive this process. Further, a see-saw below the tree would encourage people to play on it thereby creating more energy to be diverted to the absorption process. Excess energy would be used to light up the tree at night which would then serve as a pretty street light!
Hmmm....thats the first thought that came to my mind.
And the next one, what is this humidity swing process anyway?
and the third, what would the tree do with the CO2 it extracts from the humidity?
Oh, and another thing, the tree would be made out of recycled plastic from old bottles and what not.


To the second thought....A paper by Klaus Lackner and Allen Wright from Columbia University proposes a method of CO2 capture using a humidity swing sorbent.
Two things here,
1. Humidity swing is the process of raising the relative humidity (called RH ;) )  to a large value for a while and then returning it to normal value.
2. A sorbent is basically an absorbent, a material that absorbs another.
So this is how it works...
1. A dry resin absorbs CO2.
This dry resin consists of +ve ions fixed to a polymer matrix and free -ve ions (OH-)
OH- + CO2 -> HCO3-

2. The resin is wet with water.

3. When the CO2 saturated resin reacts with water it releases CO2 at a higher pressure. The resin is then ready to be used again as in step 1.
2HCO3- -> H2O + CO2 + CO3-
This the resin regeneration phase.

4. Drying of the resin
When the water and CO2 are released, the RH of the resin drops to the original value and it is ready for reuse.

Now coming to the question of the CO2 that would be stored and then released....where would it be stored? What happens to the CO2 when it becomes time to regenerate the resin? Will the saturated resin be unsaturated in an enclosure that traps the CO2 when it is released from the resin? If so, wha would they do with it once captured? Release it into space? solidify it and bury it?
And a new question that has popped into my head just now....where's the O2 in this process generated from? I wonder if the news articles were misleading.... Rather an unsatisfactory understanding at this stage...but when I do get more detailed information, I'll be sure to update :)

Links :
The news article in the bangalore mirror - http://www.bangaloremirror.com/index.aspx?Page=article&sectname=Tech%20-%20Sci%20Tech&sectid=44&contentid=2011031720110317202342266dbf165cd
http://www.worldarchitecturenews.com/index.php?fuseaction=wanappln.projectview&upload_id=16104
The paper - http://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBoQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.zero.no%2Fzero-konferansen%2F2010%2Finnleggene%2FKlaus_Lackner.pdf&rct=j&q=humidity%20swing%20klaus&ei=mySMTa2WNcjxrQfw27TQDQ&usg=AFQjCNFlkJLQOAb387Hnp6XM_vGIbdSMnw&cad=rja

The Two-Way Mirror

I went to a friend’s house on new year’s day and she took me on a little tour of her house. Her balcony, curiously enough, had a stepper (exercise machine) and was enclosed with a two-way mirror. For the rest of the evening, I couldn’t sit still! I had to figure out how the bloody thing worked!
So, as soon as I got home, I logged on and checked it out online and walaa! The mystery of the working of the two way mirror was discovered! :D
There are two sides to a pane of glass. The front and the front-of-the-back.
In conventional mirrors, it is the front-of-the-back which is silvered. Therefore, when light falls on it, it is almost completely reflected, leaving anyone on the other side of the mirror with nothing to look at but the painted back end.
However, in a two-way mirror, it is the front that is covered in a very sparse ( not dense ) coating of acrylic or a reflective material. Further, the lighting of the two rooms that this two-way mirror forms an interface between is very important.
Let ‘A’ and ‘B’ be two people...’A’ the prisoner and ‘B’ the cop.
A||||B represents the two people and the mirror in between them.
The room in which ‘A’ is present is very brightly lit while ‘B’’s room is dimly lit. Now, the coating on the mirror, is very thin and would cover say half the molecules on the front surface of the mirror, allowing quite a bit of light to pass through.
Since A’s room has so much light in it, say half the light passes through the two-way mirror into B’s room, allowing B to view A through what seems now like a tinted glass, which is what it exactly is! But B’s room is dimly lit, therefore, the light passing through to A is insufficient for A to see B. A ends up seeing on the light that is reflected off the coating, which is an image of itself. Hence, to A, the two-way mirror seems like a mirror!
If the lighting of the two rooms were to be interchanged, i.e. A’s room be made dim and B’s room be made bright, the situation would be reversed. That is why in cop stories on TV, the prisoner in his room, would try to cup his hand over his eyes and peer through the glass, thus obstructing the bright light of his room so that he may see through! And in the case of my friend’s balcony, she wouldn’t want other people in the surrounding flats to be able to see her on the stepper during  the morning hours when it is much brighter outside ( courtesy the sun :) ) while at night, there wouldn’t be much light in the sky anyway to let anyone look in.

A good way to figure out if you’re stuck at the wrong end of a two-way mirror is to put your finger up against the mirror. If the reflection of your finger is right up against your real finger without any gap, then your up against a two-way mirror. In a conventional mirror, you would notice a gap between your finger and its reflection, because the reflective coating is on the front-of-the-back of the mirror and not on the front ( unlike a two-way mirror ).

http://www.wisegeek.com/how-does-a-two-way-mirror-work.htm