dewitte

Implant-Based Cancer Vaccine Is First to Eliminate Tumors in Mice

2009-11-25T22:52:24Z

Mice are so lucky! Doctors are always working hard on cures for them.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 25, 2009) — A cancer vaccine carried into the body on a carefully engineered, fingernail-sized implant is the first to successfully eliminate tumors in mammals, scientists recently reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The new approach, pioneered by bioengineers and immunologists at Harvard University, uses plastic disks impregnated with tumor-specific antigens and implanted under the skin to reprogram the mammalian immune system to attack tumors. The new paper describes the use of such implants to eradicate melanoma tumors in mice.

The slender implants developed by Mooney's group are 8.5 millimeters in diameter and made of an FDA-approved biodegradable polymer. Ninety percent air, the disks are highly permeable to immune cells and release cytokines, powerful recruiters of immune-system messengers called dendritic cells.

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Daily Show - Things not to be Thankful for

2009-11-24T14:32:21Z

You can fast-forward to about 4:05 if you are in a hurry.

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Paula Deen Hit In Face With Ham

2009-11-23T20:39:22Z

clipped from www.cbsatlanta.com

ATLANTA -- One celebrity chef is showing what it means lend a hand this holiday season.
Savannah's own Paula Deen is helping to deliver more than 25,000 lbs. of protein to Hosea Feed the Hungry.
Although the focus was on giving back, things took a quick turn when Deen got a serving of ham in a rather unique way.
While tossing hams and turkeys, a misguided thrown ham hit Deen in the face, but that didn’t sideline her from the topic at hand.

Related To Story
Paula Deen Ham Incident

Video: Raw Video: Paula Deen Hit In Face By Ham

Video: Deen's Reaction To Ham In Face

While Deen managed to escape visible injury, she did say the area around her nose hurt.
"I just got hit with a hog so what do I expect said Deen through laughter. "Ran head on to a hog."

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They've gone plaid

2009-11-22T00:01:35Z

Spaceballs

Barf: [Spaceball 1 roars by them, in a plaid colouration of speed] Aah!
Barf: What the hell was that?
Lonestar: Spaceball 1.
Barf: They've gone to plaid!

Or rather, "It's" gone plaid. That would be my electric meter. Since we moved in something has been bugging me. It's my hot water heater. I was outside raking leaves once or doing something and I was near the electric meter and it was spinning faster that some kids' toy top. I went through my breakers one by one until it stopped and the culprit turned out to the be hot water heater. Of course - you'd suppose this, but what killed me was I don't use all that much hot water, so for it to suddenly come on in the middle of the day when it really wasn't even that cold out - and not just on, but on with a vengeance. It's a quick recovery heater so it really kicks in to get to and maintain the temperature. Well - that hurt me and my pocketbook (if I carried a pocketbook - Jamie has a purse, but I don't think that's a pocketbook. You'd think a pocketbook would just be a book - maybe a paperback).

I probably forgot about it for a while, but my electric bills really are outrageous. I don't think they are until I'm talking to someone and they say "HOLY COW! THAT'S HIGH!" and then I go away shaking my head and I think "Hmm... Water Heater...!". Finally after a few years, I opened up the access covers and lowered the temperature from "ABSOLUTE MAX - 125 - DANGER!" which is what the previous owners had set it at down to about 115 - maybe 110. I mean, really - I always hated burning my hands anyway every time I turned on the hot water. This would be better. Believe it or not - it was, and it was practically unnoticeable in the shower as not many people need to blast off grime with a full 125 degrees.

My bill went down - noticeably. So here it is a few years later and I was paying the @%#$^ bill which included my August air-conditioner usage and I started thinking about that hot water heater again. I don't know why I thought of it, but I recalled that people used to put timers on them. I mean, why keep it crazy hot 24 hours a day when we only take a shower in the morning? 24 hours of hot water for 20 minutes of showers - ugh!

I looked them up on Amazon, and sure enough there is a nice one for about $35. I didn't order it because I was going to look nearby first. Lowes didn't have it and neither did Home Depot. I think Home Depot did have it on their web site, just not locally. I kept meaning to call my local hardware store, but just didn't get around to it. I kicked myself for that since if I had ordered it the day I found it, it would have already been here. Today we were running errands and I had to go to the hardware store (we have a kick-ass hardware store, btw - they've been around forever and they have just about everything I've ever gone in there to get), so while there I asked about water heater timers. "Oh, yep - they are right over here."

Crazy, really. There it was for only $29, and I didn't even have to pay shipping. I came home and put it right on (because I'm handy like that). What's ironically funny is the homeowners before me hooked up their water heater with just wire nuts and the wires were just hanging out like that all these years - so I solved two problems by adding the switch. Now there are no more wires hanging out - no more wire nuts sticking out - no covers missing. The covers are in place, the timer is in place and everything looks great. I set it to come on at 5:45am and go off at 8:30am - the other 21 hours and 15 minutes, it's on it's own.

Take that, power company.

Powerline

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Lab creates fake DNA evidence

2009-11-20T16:25:32Z

I heard about this on an episode of Law and Order this week. It's the first I'd heard about it.

clipped from www.scientificamerican.com

Unlike finicky fingerprints and frowned-upon fiber analysis, DNA evidence has been the most bulletproof evidence for forensic sciences in recent years. But staffers at a research firm in Israel have recently upended the presumed infallibility of this forensics golden child—by making it themselves.

Nucleix, a Tel-Aviv-based life sciences company, was able to create credible DNA evidence that could be used to finger the wrong person, proof that even genetic evidence can be manipulated (beyond planting a hair or used cigarette) just like other physical traces.

"You can just engineer a crime scene," Nucleix founder Dan Frumkin told The New York Times. "The current forensic procedure fails to distinguish between such samples of blood, saliva, and touched surfaces with artificial DNA, and corresponding samples with in vivo generated (natural) DNA," Frumkin and co-authors wrote in a recent Forensic Science International: Genetics study that announced the technological achievement.

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QotD: Gifted Ideas

2009-11-17T21:20:18Z

What’s the perfect gift to give to the person who has everything?
Sponsored by Best Buy. Find holiday gifts for everyone on your list.

Storage Boxes...

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Computers I've Used - #2 & #3 - PDP and VAX

2009-11-11T15:06:57Z

Oh, well - I've forgotten the model numbers. This is what happens when you take the time at a party to learn someone's name - you learn their name and make the whole evening special but you sacrifice some other random piece of information. In this case, model numbers.

As far as I can tell, I used a PDP-10:

Vs-dec-pdp-10

(Taken by Ed Thelen of material owned by Computer History Museum under the non-commercial rule.)

Followed shortly by a VAX 11/780:

Vax11-780

Talk about good times. I had access to these only because I was friends with the system administrator at school. He set me up (I think I basically whined a lot until he did) with a user name and password. My first user name and therefore email address ever was "tomato". I don't know why I chose that. He said "What do you want for a user name?" and I spouted out "Tomato". So I was known as "tomato" for a few years. Whenever I logged in I'd hear "Hey, there is a Tomato on the system!". I had email and was able to send/receive with a few friends that were online also - mostly right there at the school.

A few years ago a customer was walking through my company and he was talking about how he had made all of his money in the "internet" and how he had his first email address in 1988. That's how he started his conversation. It was like "How did you get rich in the internet?" and his first statement was "I had my first email address in 1988". Obviously there was something else involved because I had my first email address in 1983 and I didn't make it big in the internet. Of course, the internet wasn't really there yet so much back then. I think there was ARPANET, etc - but I'm not going to go into all of that.

I didn't do anything really constructive on either of these systems at the time besides read newsgroups. Later, maybe around 1987 I had to have a "real" account because I had a class on the VAX so the "tomato" account went away and I moved to something like just "wilso_d" or something else mundane. At that point I was taking an operating system class and we had to write our own OS in something like C or Pascal. It's all vague at this point, but none-the-less, this was my moment to both PDP and VAX systems. Both were pretty good considering the time frame. All text-based as I recall with dumb-terminals. I think the world really was faster before the advent of fancy graphical user interfaces (aka Windows).

You can read more about the VAX here.

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Computers I've Used - #1 - Commodore CBM-8032

2009-11-10T20:56:57Z

Is it "Write A Blog Every Day For A Month" again? Because I'm already 10 behind. So here is a post from about two years ago where I said "Oh, I'm going to post about every computer I've ever used!" and then I stopped, right after this one. Lord Kalvan has been posting about a bunch of old computers and it reminded me of my original intent.

So here goes - I'm going to take a few posts to talk about the different computers I've used. I'll start with the very first one. This is the Commodore CBM-8032. This came out around 1980 and had a massive 32k of RAM. It had an 80 column by 25 line green monochrome screen. The CPU was a 6502 2Mhz.

CBM_8032

This was owned by the science department at my high school. 1980 (10th grade for me) was well before the school had computer labs, etc. This was the ONLY computer in the school and we found it in the back of a store room where it wasn't being used.

It was beautiful. I used this from 1980 through 1982.

The base model used tapes, but the school actually had a dual floppy drive for it. I sent a letter to Commodore to see if they could send me any information on it, and they sent me a copy of their Commodore magazine. It was cool because it was filled with source code you could key in and also had instructions on how to do things with the system - like print. Yeah, this was before all of the magic we rely on today. Internet? Ha! I don't think so.

My first program was in BASIC and said something like:

10 PRINT "DEWITTE"
20 GOTO 10

and I'd run it... and run it.. and run it... There were three of us who started hanging around the back of the science room every chance we had - before school, after school, during lunch. We'd write programs and key in games and play them. One I recall the most is StarTrek (where you were a big E (for enterprise) and it moves around looking out for K (Klingons). Ah, good times, good times.

I would send a note to Commodore and when I received a reply, it would come from a different address. I thought something was up - they kept moving. Eventually I think they went away, but that wasn't until after the Vic-20, Commodore 64, and the Amiga. The only one of these I seriously used was the Amiga, but that's for another post.

I used to sit in the back of the classroom and just write mindless programs and listen to Supertramp on a cassette boom-box that I built (yes, built - and sad really because I don't have a single picture of it).

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Craigslist Find - Chicken Tractor Coop - $400 - Really?

2009-10-27T13:27:45Z

Somehow, this doesn't seem very spacey...

Chicken tractor coop

Chicken tractor coop - $400 (Norfolk)

Date: 2009-10-20, 3:16PM EDT

This is a brand new, never used chicken-tractor coop from Egganic Industries. It holds 2-3 chickens. Designed for laying hens. Get fresh eggs every day.

It retails at $499. You won't be able to build as safe or convenient a coop for less. I've already assembled it and it can be transported on a pick-up truck bed.

You don't need anything except chickens and chicken feed. Perfect for city folks who have a backyard.

I'm selling this one because I'm getting their new Tuf-Climate Coop. Email me if you are interested or have questions.

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Vox Neighborhood Cleanup - In Progress

2009-10-23T00:24:41Z

PERKY

Well, it's that time again. Time to clean up the old Vox neighborhood.

Why? Well, as it turns out some neighbor I had just started posting a bunch of ... risque pictures and that just won't do. Then I had to wonder why that person was in my neighborhood in the first place, since I never read their stuff and they never read mine - which totally defeats the whole "neighborhood" concept.

While I was at it, I just randomly removed a lot of other people - mostly people no longer posting on Vox or people who post only their daily Twitter notes. I added those people to my Twitter account and dropped them here. Still others just plain never comment EVER. I always feel obliged to say something if I'm at your page and it would be nice to get the same in return, even if it is a "This Is Good" (which is unfortunate if I posted about my dog getting ran over or something similar).

Admittedly, I'm a lousy neighbor because I don't really get around as much as I used to, but I still get around occasionally and likewise some of you seem to always read my stuff and comment - thank you!

So if you are reading this and actually do keep up with me, here is the quick way to tell if you are in my neighborhood.

If you see this:

Then you are still in. If you don't see.. THAT (^ up there) then you are NOT in my neighborhood. If you were and you think "Dang! I want to be in DeWitte's neighborhood!" then just comment and say so and I'll get you back in...

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