Natural antibodies could combat Tasmanian devil cancer

Deakin University scientists may have found a way to stop the cancer that has been killing Tasmanian devils for the past 20 years.

And the devils (Sarcophilus harrisii) could actually already hold the solution – natural antibodies found in the marsupial's immune system.

Dr Beata Ujvari, from Deakin's Centre for Integrative Ecology within the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, investigated differences in molecules found in the devils' immune systems, comparing those that had the cancer, known as the Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumour Disease, and those that didn't.

We know from human and animal studies that certain natural antibodies are able to recognise and kill cancerous cells, so we wanted to see whether the presence of these molecules would also determine tumour development in Tasmanian devils," Dr Ujvari said.

"We found that devils that have a higher ratio of these natural antibodies were less likely to have cancer.

"We can deduce then that devils with higher natural antibody ratio are therefore less susceptible to the contagious cancer."

Dr Ujvari said the results could potentially halt the spread of disease that has devastated the Tasmanian devil population since its first sighting in 1996, hopefully enabling new vaccine and treatment options.

The research, "Immunoglubolin dynamics and cancer prevalence in Tasmanian devils (Sarcophilus harrisii)" is published in the latest edition of Nature Scientific Reports.

"Anti-tumour vaccines that enhance the production of these natural antibodies, or direct treatment of the cancer with natural antibodies, could become a solution to help halt this disease," Dr Ujvari said.

"This process known as 'active immunotherapy', is becoming more and more accepted in treating human cancers, and we think it could be the magic bullet in saving the Tasmanian devils from extinction."

The facial cancer is spread from devil to devil via biting during social interactions, and has caused massive population declines of Tasmanian devils since its first sighting in 1996, in Tasmania.

Dr Ujvari said that because the cancer was transmitted from devil to devil, their immune system should recognise the cells as foreign objects, like a pathogen, and work to eliminate them from the victim's system.

"However, this disease's cells are able to avoid recognition by the devils' immune systems and develop into large ulcerating tumours that ultimately kills the animals," she said

In 2009, the Australian Government listed the Tasmanian devil as Endangered under national environmental law. It is also listed as Endangered under the Tasmania's Threatened Species Protection Act 1995.

The Tasmanian devil has also been listed as Endangered on the Red List of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.

Tech world eyes digital life beyond the smartphone

The smartphone revolutionized how people live and work, but the technology world is now struggling to see what comes next.

As smartphone sales have peaked in most major markets, Apple, Samsung and others are being forced to rethink their business models to keep growing and connecting with consumers.

The trend in smartphones appears to follow similar peaks in tablet sales and personal computers, said Bob O'Donnell, chief analyst at Technalysis Research.

"We are clearly entering a new era where growth of traditional devices has ended and you have to think differently," O'Donnell said.

It's not clear what will be the "next big thing" in technology or even if there is one, and that is troubling for an industry that has been living off growth from smartphones and their ecosystems of Android and Apple iOS applications.

John Curran, managing director of Accenture's communications, media, and technology group, said that in a maturing smartphone market, consumers are not hesitating about new purchases.

"Consumers are basically satisfied with their current devices," said Curran.

Curran said the Internet of Things appears to be a promising market but that no single device has proved compelling so far.

The market for devices such as smartwatches, fitness bands and smart home technology is growing, but in a more disjointed fashion

"We're seeing a broad range of devices, smartwatches, home automation, drones and the like," Curran said.

"But these are not taking off (because) people don't see the personal value in their lives yet."

An Accenture survey released in January, based on polls in 28 countries, found declines in purchase intent for new smartphones and other big-ticket electronics devices.

Only a relative small number of consumers expressed interest in new Internet of Things devices such as smartwatches or drones—expressing concerns over cost, security and complexity of use.

Curran said the smartphone became wildly popular because it addressed a key problem of communications for people on the go, but that the next big thing is not clear.

"Consumers are looking for things that solve practical, tangible problems," he said.

"They want to see things that make their lives easier, that delight and amaze them."

Global smartphone sales in the first quarter showed their slowest growth on record of 0.2%

Looking for integration

Ramon Llamas, analyst at the research firm IDC, said consumers want to see how all their new gadgets and services can be interconnected.

"The smartphone will still have a privileged place in our lives, but it needs to connect to all our other devices," he said.

"You want your smartphone to talk to your home security system and your wearable device."

Global smartphone sales in the first quarter showed their slowest growth on record of 0.2 percent, according to IDC. A separate report by Juniper Research was even more gloomy, saying global sales fell nearly six percent.

The market for devices such as smartwatches, fitness bands and smart home technology is growing, but in a more disjointed fashion, with a number of competing operating systems that can often confuse consumers.

"In all of those environments, you will need some level of computing or connectivity, so the companies that can deliver those kinds of things will be better positioned," O'Donnell said.

Samsung, the world's biggest smartphone maker, said it too is looking at a different future of connected things

With no single important device dominating, O'Donnell said the future tech landscape will see players emerge that can combine hardware, software, virtual reality and artificial intelligence. That could open the door to important roles for Facebook, Amazon, Intel and other players.

Devices 'fade away'

Some look to a landscape where technology and artificial intelligence permeate all aspects of life, where the "device" may become almost irrelevant.

"Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of the 'device' to fade away," says Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Alphabet unit Google, in a recent blog post.

"Over time, the computer itself—whatever its form factor—will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day. We will move from mobile first to an AI (artificial intelligence) first world."

Samsung, the world's biggest smartphone maker, said it too is looking at a different future of connected things.

"We are already imagining the next step beyond the smartphone," Samsung Electronics mobile communications business president Dongjin Koh told the company's developer conference in California.

Samsung wants to integrate software and services using its Tizen platform in the belief that "everywhere you go, there will be opportunities to bring devices and people together," Koh said.

Intel, the company known for PC chips and failing to recognize the shift to mobile devices, last month unveiled a major restructuring, with a view to the "Internet of Things." Some reports said Intel's new structure abandons the smartphone in favor of emerging devices and services.

"The biggest opportunity in the Internet of Things is that it encompasses just about everything in our lives today," said Intel CEO Brian Krzanich in a blog post.

"From our shoes and clothes to our homes and cars—the Internet of Things is transforming everything and every experience."

NASA to Announce Latest Kepler Discoveries During Media Teleconference

› Full image and caption

NASA will host a news teleconference at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT) Tuesday, May 10 to announce the latest discoveries made by its planet-hunting mission, the Kepler Space Telescope.

The briefing participants are:

• Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington
• Timothy Morton, associate research scholar at Princeton University in New Jersey
• Natalie Batalha, Kepler mission scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California
• Charlie Sobeck, Kepler/K2 mission manager at Ames

The teleconference audio and visuals will be streamed live at:

http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio

When Kepler was launched in March 2009, scientists did not know how common planets were outside our solar system. Thanks to Kepler's treasure trove of discoveries, astronomers now believe there may be at least one planet orbiting every star in the sky.

Kepler completed its prime mission in 2012, and collected data for an additional year in an extended mission. In 2014, the spacecraft began a new extended mission called K2. K2 continues the search for exoplanets while introducing new research opportunities to study young stars, supernovae and other cosmic phenomenon.

Ames manages the Kepler and K2 missions for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation operates the flight system with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Struggles of our Life

Once upon a time a daughter complained to her father that her life was miserable and that she didn’t know how she was going to make it. She was tired of fighting and struggling all the time. It seemed just as one problem was solved, another one soon followed. Her father, a chef, took her

298 COMMENTS

The Travelers and The Plane Tree

Two men were walking along one summer day. Soon it became too hot to go any further and, seeing a large plane tree nearby, they threw themselves on the ground to rest in its shade. Gazing up into the branches one man said to the other, “What a useless tree this is. It does not

63 COMMENTS

Boy’s Job Appraisal

A little boy went into a drug store, reached for a soda carton and pulled it over to the telephone. He climbed onto the carton so that he could reach the buttons on the phone and proceeded to punch in seven digits (phone numbers).  The store-owner observed and listened to the conversation. Boy: ‘Lady, Can

123 COMMENTS

Keep Your Dream

I have a friend named Monty Roberts who owns a horse ranch in San Isidro. He has let me use his house to put on fund-raising events to raise money for youth at risk programs. The last time I was there he introduced me by saying, “I want to tell you why I let Jack

Homeless Man Steve

by STEPHEN on SEPTEMBER 20, 2015 · 26 COMMENTS

in INSPIRATIONAL STORIES, RELIGIOUS

This evening as I was leaving Best Buy, I noticed this man going through the garbage can outside of the store. As I walked to my car I watched him as he reached in the garbage can and pulled out fast food trash bags and inspected all that was in the thrown away bags. He did this for several minutes. He would find a few fries in one bag and a bite or two of a hamburger in another bag. You can see the hamburger wrapper by his knee where he was placing the food items he’d found.

He never bothered anyone or tried to stop and beg for money as people entered and left the store. After he went through the entire trash can he neatly cleaned up the area and wrapped up the food he found in the dirty hamburger wrapper. My heart literally hurt for him. I am not someone who just hands out money or even helps homeless people because so many are not truly homeless. I don’t guess I’ve ever seen someone actually go through a garbage can to try to find food to eat.

Steve

I knew I had to help him. I got out of my car and asked him if I could buy him something to eat. He told me he would appreciate anything I could get him. He was on a bike and I told him if he’d follow me I’d buy him a meal at the fast food place around the block. He followed me and I bought him the biggest meal they had on the menu. The only request he gave me for his order was if I could get him a big glass of sweet tea to go with his meal!

When I brought him his food, he was so thankful. He told me his name was Steve and he’d been homeless ever since his sister died last September. He was trying to get off the streets, but it was so hard. I told him God loved him and I would pray for him. He told me again how much he appreciated the meal.

When I got back in my car, I drove off with such a heaviness in my heart for this man. I drove down the road and felt compelled to go back to help this man. When I came back he had finished his meal and was riding away. I pulled up beside him and asked him if there was any way I could help him. He told me not really. He never asked me for money. I asked him if I could buy him a few meals and put it on a gift card for him. He told me that would be so kind. I drove to McDonalds and bought him some meals and gave him a gift card.

He broke down crying. He told me that he prayed for me today! I wasn’t sure what he meant (I was assuming he was praying for me for what I did for him) so I thanked him. He said, “No, you don’t understand. I prayed that God would send someone to buy me a hot meal today… and he sent you!” I didn’t know what to say… I was speechless! Praying for a hot meal wasn’t a prayer I had prayed today! Come to think of it, that’s not a prayer I’ve ever prayed! I always pray over my food, but I’ve never prayed for a meal… its expected! I’ve never doubted that I wouldn’t be able to eat… Tears began to fill my eyes! Oh my… how blessed am I… Maybe God used me to answer this man’s prayer… to let him know that He cares for Him and knows what goes going through! But, maybe God used this man to show me just how blessed I am and what I take for granted…

He said, “You see, I have cancer!” He pulled up his shirt and pointed to a huge mass that was poking out from his stomach. He said said he knew it wouldn’t be much longer. I asked him if knew Jesus. He told me that he did. I asked if I could pray for him and he said that I could. We prayed right there on the sidewalk of McDonalds. Tears just poured from his eyes. He told me he knew that he was going to die and that he was ready to die. He was tired of being in pain and he would be better off dead because this was no life – living this way. I stayed and encouraged him for a few minutes trying to fight back my tears. My prayer is that I showed him the love of Jesus today… that something I said gave him a hope.

You see, everybody has a story! I know Steve’s story now… all because I felt compelled to help him… he ended up touching me today!

When I left him, I knew I had done what God wanted me to do! God put him in my path today… I know he did! I’ve never felt such a feeling to help someone as I did today. I was reminded again of how blessed I am! I have a vehicle that gets me from place to place, I have a roof over my head, clean clothes, money to buy a hot meal, running water, electricity, my health, a job, family, and friends! Sometimes God sends situations our way to remind us of how blessed we are! If you’ve read this far, please remember Steve in your prayers!

Yes, I have been blessed, God’s so good to me! Precious are His thoughts of you and me! There’s no way I could count them, there’s not enough time, so I’ll just thank Him for being so kind. God has been good, so good! I have been blessed!

Measuring a black hole 660 million times as massive as our sun

It's about 660 million times as massive as our sun, and a cloud of gas circles it at about 1.1 million mph.

This supermassive black hole sits at the center of a galaxy dubbed NGC 1332, which is 73 million light years from Earth. And an international team of scientists that includes Rutgers associate professor Andrew J. Baker has measured its mass with unprecedented accuracy.

Their groundbreaking observations, made with the revolutionary Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, were published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. ALMA, the world's largest astronomical project, is a telescope with 66 radio antennas about 16,400 feet above sea level.

Black holes - the most massive typically found at the centers of galaxies - are so dense that their gravity pulls in anything that's close enough, including light, said Baker, an associate professor in the Astrophysics Group in Rutgers' Department of Physics and Astronomy. The department is in the School of Arts and Sciences.

A black hole can form after matter, often from an exploding star, condenses via gravity. Supermassive black holes at the centers of massive galaxies grow by swallowing gas, stars and other black holes. But, said Baker, "just because there's a black hole in your neighborhood, it does not act like a cosmic vacuum cleaner."

Combined image of NGC 1332 shows the central disk of gas surrounding the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. New ALMA observations traced the motion of the disk, providing remarkably precise measurements of the black hole's …more

Stars can come close to a black hole, but as long as they're in stable orbits and moving fast enough, they won't enter the black hole, said Baker, who has been at Rutgers since 2006.

"The black hole at the center of the Milky Way, which is the biggest one in our own galaxy, is many thousands of light years away from us," he said. "We're not going to get sucked in."

Scientists think every massive galaxy, like the Milky Way, has a massive black hole at its center, Baker said. "The ubiquity of black holes is one indicator of the profound influence that they have on the formation of the galaxies in which they live," he said.

Understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies is one of the major challenges for modern astrophysics. The scientists' findings have important implications for how galaxies and their central supermassive black holes form. The ratio of a black hole's mass to a galaxy's mass is important in understanding their makeup, Baker said.

Research suggests that the growth of galaxies and the growth of their black holes are coordinated. And if we want to understand how galaxies form and evolve, we need to understand supermassive black holes, Baker said.

Part of understanding supermassive black holes is measuring their exact masses. That lets scientists determine if a black hole is growing faster or slower than its galaxy. If black hole mass measurements are inaccurate, scientists can't draw any definitive conclusions, Baker said.

To measure NGC 1332's central black hole, scientists tapped ALMA's high-resolution observations of carbon monoxide emissions from a giant disc of cold gas orbiting the hole. They also measured the speed of the gas.

"This has been a very active area of research for the last 20 years, trying to characterize the masses of black holes at the centers of galaxies," said Baker, who began studying black holes as a graduate student. "This is a case where new instrumentation has allowed us to make an important new advance in terms of what we can say scientifically."

He and his coauthors recently submitted a proposal to use ALMA to observe other massive black holes. Use of ALMA is granted after an annual international competition of proposals, according to Baker.

IU data scientists launch free tools to analyze online trends, memes

The power to explore online social media movements—from the pop cultural to the political—with the same algorithmic sophistication as top experts in the field is now available to journalists, researchers and members of the public from a free, user-friendly online software suite released today by scientists at Indiana University.

The Web-based tools, called the Observatory on Social Media, or "OSoMe" (pronounced "awesome"), provide anyone with an Internet connection the power to analyze online trends, memes and other online bursts of viral activity.

An academic pre-print paper on the tools is available in the open-access journalPeerJ.

"This software and data mark a major goal in our work on Internet memes and trends over the past six years," said Filippo Menczer, director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research and a professor in the IU School of Informatics and Computing. The project is supported by nearly $1 million from the National Science Foundation.

"We are beginning to learn how information spreads in social networks, what causes a meme to go viral and what factors affect the long-term survival of misinformation online," Menczer added. "The observatory provides an easy way to access these insights from a large, multi-year dataset."

In this graph mapping connections between Twitter users tagging tweets #thedress in spring 2015, a larger "node" indicates more people also tagging #whiteandgold in connection to the topic than #blueandblack. Credit: Indiana University

The new tools are:

• Trends, which shows how memes rise and fall in popularity.
• Networks, which creates interactive graphs showing who is tweeting a meme and how they're connected.
• Movies, which generates animations on YouTube showing how memes spread and evolve over time.
• Maps, which creates a map pinpointing where in the world people are discussing a meme.

By plugging #thedress into the system, for example, OSoMe will generate an interactive graph showing connections between both the hashtag and the Twitter users who participated in the debate over a dress whose color—white and gold or blue and black—was strangely ambiguous. The results show more people tagged #whiteandgold compared to #blueandblack.

For the Ice Bucket Challenge, another widespread viral phenomenon—in which people doused themselves in cold water to raise awareness about ALS—the software generates an interactive graph showing how many people tweeted #icebucketchallenge at specific Twitter users, including celebrities.

One example illustrates a co-occurrence network, in which a single hashtag comprises a "node" with lines showing connections to other related hashtags. The larger the node, the more popular the hashtag. The other example illustrates a diffusion network, in which Twitter users show up as points on a graph, and retweets or mentions show up as connecting lines. The larger a cluster of people tweeting a meme—or the more lines showing retweets and mentions—the more viral the topic.

OSoMe's social media tools are supported by a growing collection of 70 billion public tweets. The long-term infrastructure to store and maintain the data is provided by the IU Network Science Institute and High Performance Computing group at IU. The system does not provide direct access to the content of these tweets.

The group that manages the infrastructure to store this data is led by Geoffrey Fox, Distinguished Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing. The group whose software analyzes the data is led by Judy Qiu, an associate professor in the school.

"The collective production, consumption and diffusion of information on social media reveals a significant portion of human social life—and is increasingly regarded as a way to 'sense' social trends," Qiu said. "For the first time, the ability to explore 'big social data' is open not just to individuals with programming skills but everyone as easy-to-use visual tools."

In addition to pop culture trends, Menczer said, OSoMe provides insight to many other subjects, including social movements or politics, as the online spread of information plays an increasingly important role in modern communication.

The IU researchers who created OSoMe also launched another tool, BotOrNot, in 2014. BotOrNot predicts the likelihood that a Twitter account is operated by a human or a "social bot." Bots are online bits of code used to create the impression that a real person is tweeting about a given topic, such as a product or a person.

The OSoMe project also provides an application program interface, or API, to help other researchers expand upon the tools, or create "mash-ups" that combine its powers with other software or data sources.