Private drone used to drop off drugs in to Australian Prison

Australian police are holding a 28-year-old man in custody for allegedly using a remote control drone carrying illicit drugs into Melbourne Assessment Prison, a maximum-security prison on the outskirts of Melbourne.

Police were called to the prison on Sunday afternoon after the small remote, unmanned craft (UAV) was seen hovering over the facility.

The male suspect and an unidentified female were later found on a nearby road with a drone and “a small quantity of drugs.”

Authorities are reportedly charging the suspect with “attempting to commit an indictable offense and possessing a drug of dependence.”

Assistant Commissioner Robert Hill said the incident was worrying, but he pledged that police would fight any hi-tech contraband smuggling ­attempts head-on.

“Certainly, it’s a concern that elements within society would use different technologies to further their criminal pursuits.

At the same time, Victoria Police will be engaging in advancing our capabilities through different technologies to ensure that we’re one step ahead of these criminal ­elements,” he said.

The hi-tech smuggling ­attempt is a modern version of throwing tennis balls filled with drugs over prison walls.

Maximum-security prisons use hi-tech machinery to ­detect contraband but they are still not impenetrable.

Sources say drugs, particularly methamphetamine or ice, are now widespread throughout the jail system.

Other contraband items in high demand are SIM cards, mobile phones and porn.

A Victoria Correction Dept. spokesman said a combination of surveillance and intelligence was used to help identify the potential for contraband to be smuggled in.

“In this case, staff identified the remote-controlled vehicle and assisted Victoria Police in identifying two individuals,’’ he said.

Sunday’s incident in Australia mirrored a similar event on the other side of the Pacific, where a remote controlled helicopter was used to drop 250 grams of cocaine into the courtyard of CDP (Provisional Detention Centre), a corrections facility near Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Diabetes, Weight Loss Surgery Works Better Than Medicine

Two studies have found that weight-loss operations worked much better than the standard therapies for Type 2 diabetes in obese and overweight people whose blood sugar was out of control. 

Those who had surgery, which stapled the stomach and rerouted the small intestine, were much more likely to have a complete remission of diabetes, or to need less medicine, than people who were given the typical regimen of drugs, diet and exercise.

The surgery also helped many to lower their blood pressure and cholesterol.

The new studies, published on Monday by The New England Journal of Medicine, are the first to rigorously compare medical treatment with these particular stomach and intestinal operations as ways to control diabetes. 

Doctors had been noticing for years that weight-loss operations, also called bariatric surgery, could sometimes get rid of Type 2 diabetes. But they had no hard data.

Experts say better treatments are desperately needed for the disease.

“Type 2 diabetes is one of the fastest growing epidemics in human history,” according to an editorial published with the two studies.

The question is whether major surgery, with its risks and complications, should be more widely used. 

Some surgeons and obesity experts are pushing to establish a role for the surgeries in treating diabetes, not just obesity, while other experts say more research is needed.

The president for medicine and science for the American Diabetes Association, Dr. Vivian Fonseca, said the two studies were “not game changers” because they were relatively small.

The disease, which causes high blood sugar, is linked to obesity and often becomes harder to manage as it progresses. It can bring devastating complications like heart disease, strokes, blindness, amputations and kidney failure.

In the United States, the number of diabetes cases has tripled in the past 30 years to more than 20 million, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most of the cases are Type 2. Type 1, far less common, is not linked to obesity.

Researchers said the operations used in the studies help control diabetes not just because they make people lose weight — a known treatment for the disease — but because the changes in anatomy alter the levels of gut hormones that affect the metabolism of sugars and fats.

Malaria treatment: Impact on disease risk for babies

The UK NHS Information Video is very good at explaining Malaria infections and preventative actions you can take, but it does not go into details of how it affects young women, pregnant women and young breast-feeding mothers.

Recent research has indicated that Mothers who receive treatment for malaria infection could pass on lower levels of natural immunity to their babies.

Edinburgh University experts found mice treated with malaria infection drugs before they became pregnant passed on fewer antibodies to their young.

Full-blown malaria gives the immune system the chance to produce protective antibodies to pass on.

However, it is thought the drug treatment shortens the process.

The mothers benefit while children's immunity is decreased, putting them at greater risk.

The researchers said their results highlighted the need to look at how treatment might be tailored most effectively for women and their babies.

Malaria affects millions of people worldwide, mainly in developing countries. One child dies from the disease in Africa every minute.

Dr Vincent Staszewski, of Edinburgh University's school of biological sciences, said: "How an infection plays out in an individual can impact on the immunity of the next generation.

"Some treatments against disease before or during pregnancy might be beneficial for maternal health but impair infant survival."

The study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, was funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society.

Major Breathrough in TB Research: Questions answered!

After three decades of searching, the random screening of a group of compounds against the bacterium that causes pulmonary tuberculosis has led scientists to a eureka discovery that breaks through the fortress that protects the bacterium and allows it to survive and persist against treatments.

The two findings, which occurred at Colorado State University, are published today in Nature Chemical Biology.

The article describes the discovery of an important cell function in the mycobacterium that causes tuberculosis which allows the mycobacterium to survive. The researchers also discovered a compound that prevents this cell function.

The bacterium that causes tuberculosis is extremely difficult to kill and current tuberculosis drugs on the market don’t do well to treat it. Six months of multiple antibiotics are generally required to treat tuberculosis in most people, and many current drugs no longer work because of resistant strains of the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. Scientists hope that finding new drugs to kill the bacteria in ways different than current drugs will help tackle those strains.

Cell envelopes form a virtually impenetrable bubble around the bacterium cell and protect it. Mycolic acids are key portions of this bacterium’s cell envelope. They are made inside the cell, but have to cross the cell membrane, with the help of a transporter, to reach their final location in the cell envelope.

“Without mycolic acids in the cell envelope, the bacteria die,” said Mary Jackson, one of the leading researchers on the project. Jackson is a professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology.

“While randomly testing a group of compounds against the bacterium in the lab, we found one class of compounds that powerfully stops the growth of the bacterium, a significant finding on its own.

When we looked closer, we found that the compounds stopped a transporter from moving mycolic acids from inside to outside the cell, which also means this discovery identified a new method of killing the bacterium.

Scientists have been trying to find the transporter of mycolic acids for decades, knowing that understanding how to stop mycolic acids from reaching the surface of the cell could lead to new tuberculosis treatments.

“If mycolic acids cannot be transported, the tuberculosis bacterium cannot grow,” said Mike McNeil, co-researcher on the project with Jackson and also a professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology at CSU.

“It is like a factory making bricks and no way to get them to the construction site. It is a long, hard road to develop new, badly-needed tuberculosis drugs. Still, we are optimistic that this research will strongly contribute to the worldwide crusade to diminish suffering and death caused by tuberculosis.”

Jackson, McNeil and partner researchers from CSU and St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis also note that there are other potential transporters in the bacterium that resemble the one just found.

“We hope that our work also will pave the way to understanding what those transporters do in the cell and finding how to target them to kill the mycobacteria,” Jackson said.

Tuberculosis causes the death of more than 1.5 million people around the globe each year.

New potent and broadly effective antibodies against HIV found

A team of researchers at and associated with the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), The Scripps Research Institute, the biotechnology company Theraclone Sciences and Monogram Biosciences Inc., a LabCorp company, report in the current issue of Nature the isolation of 17 novel antibodies capable of neutralizing a broad spectrum of variants of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

The new antibodies, large protein molecules that bind to pathogens and flag them for destruction, were isolated from blood serum samples collected in a continuing global search for broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) launched by IAVI.

They should provide researchers with a new set of targets for the design of vaccine candidates that can elicit similar antibodies to protect people from contracting HIV. Some of the bNAbs blocked HIV infection of cells as much as 10 to 100 times as potently as previously discovered bNAbs.

“Most antiviral vaccines depend on stimulating the antibody response to work effectively,” said Dennis Burton, a professor of immunology and microbial science and director of the IAVI Neutralizing Antibody Center at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. Professor Burton, one of the senior authors of the study, is also a member of the Ragon Institute, in Cambridge, Mass.

“Because of HIV’s remarkable variability, an effective HIV vaccine will probably have to elicit broadly neutralizing antibodies. This is why we expect that these new antibodies will prove to be valuable assets to the field of AIDS vaccine research.”

Only a minority of people who are HIV-positive begin to produce bNAbs after several years of infection. Animal studies suggest that such antibodies could block HIV infection if they were elicited by a preventive vaccine.

Researchers prize bNAbs because their structural and biochemical analysis can reveal how to achieve a preventive vaccine. Specifically, scientists expect that they can use information about how bNAbs bind to HIV to construct immunogens—the active ingredients of vaccines—that elicit similar antibodies.

The potency of bNAbs matter because a highly potent antibody could confer such protection at relatively low levels.

“Solving the neutralizing antibody problem is perhaps the greatest challenge facing the field today,” said IAVI’s chief scientific officer, Wayne Koff. “IAVI concluded many years ago that unlocking the information stored in bNAbs was going to be essential to the fulfillment of our mission—ensuring the design and development of broadly effective AIDS vaccines.

This is why we support several laboratories around the world that are designing novel vaccine candidates on the basis of what we’re learning from such antibodies. We have no doubt that these new bNAbs will contribute a great deal to our own immunogen design efforts and, we hope, those of other researchers working on AIDS vaccines.”

In that regard, the new bNAbs are encouraging. Many of them bind hitherto unknown molecular structures, or epitopes, on the surface of HIV. This means that they could significantly broaden the target options researchers have in designing vaccines to elicit similar antibodies.

Read the remainder of the article here

Sacked scientist promises impartial drugs advice

The scientist sacked by the British government for allegedly criticising government drugs policy today made good on his promise to set up his own committee to investigate and publicise the science of recreational drugs.

"We will provide the truth about drugs unfettered by any political interference," said David Nutt of Imperial College London, and the former head of the government's Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) until he was asked to leave last October by Home Office minister, Alan Johnson.

Now, true to his promise, Nutt is chairman of his newly created Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, and today proudly announced that its first meeting took place yesterday.

So far it has 14 members, including four of the five who resigned from the ACMD last October in protest at the sacking of Nutt. "This is the strongest grouping of scientists we've ever had in this country [who are experts on recreational drugs]," said Nutt. "The best science will come from us."

Already, the new committee has decided on its first three programmes.

Full article here ......

NASA: Cocaine found in Shuttle Discovery Hanger

NASA has launched an extensive investigation to determine how a small amount of cocaine ended up in a space shuttle hangar at the agency's Florida spaceport.

A bag containing a small amount of white powder residue that was later confirmed to be cocaine was discovered in the space shuttle Discovery's hangar at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

The hangar, known in NASA parlance as an Orbiter Processing Facility, is a restricted zone for shuttle workers only.

The cocaine was discovered Tuesday when a shuttle worker spotted it outside a bathroom and reported it to NASA security, NASA spokesperson Allard Beutel told SPACE.com today.

An on-site test of the bag stated it was cocaine, and subsequent follow-up tests confirmed it was the drug, he said.

"This is a rare and isolated incident, and I'm disappointed that it happened, but it should not detract from the outstanding work that is being done by a dedicated team on a daily basis," said Bob Cabana, a former astronaut and director of the Kennedy Space Center, in a statement. "We are conducting an investigation and working with center security and law enforcement officials to get to the bottom of it."

Health - Canadian research alters view of breast tumours

CBC News - Health - B.C. research alters view of breast tumours

Not all cells in a breast cancer tumour contain the same mutations, researchers in British Columbia have found.

The finding that changes occur in tumours over time could change how scientists think about developing new breast cancer drugs and deciding which patients would benefit most from treatments.

In Wednesday's issue of the journal Nature, Samuel Aparicio and his colleagues at the BC Cancer Agency charted the genetic mutations that occurred in the 3 billion letters of the DNA sequence from an estrogen-receptor-alpha-positive breast tumour.

"The impact is going to be in the way that cancer researchers look at developing therapies and applying therapies in the short term," said Aparicio, chair of breast cancer research at the BC Cancer Agency and Canada research chair in molecular oncology.

"Over the long term, we hope that being able to decode the sequence of tumours on a routine basis will eventually lead us to being able to better predict which combinations of medicines to use when treating a cancer. We're not quite at that point yet."

The team found 32 mutations after it had spread, nine years after the original biopsy of the lobular breast cancer, which accounts for eight to 15 per cent of all breast cancers, Aparicio said.


Shared via AddThis

Cancer: A Shot in the Arm or a shot in the Dark?

In 1999, two researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) received a long-awaited green light to launch separate studies on cancer care.

Six months apart, Dr. Douglas Schwartzentruber and Dr. Larry Kwak (what an unfortunate name for a doctor! Change it now, to Dr Cure-all) began enrolling patients/subjects to test an entirely novel weapon in the war on cancer, one which they hoped would bypass the toxic effects of chemotherapy and give patients a new edge in halting the spread of tumours.

Both had the blessings of Dr. Richard Klausner, then NCI director. But even Klausner, a well-respected researcher, had to be persuaded at first. "I came to the NCI being quite skeptical about it," he says of the new strategy.

Unfortunately, he wasn't the only one. What Schwartzentruber and Kwak were hoping to do was prove they could vaccinate a patient against cancer — educate a body to, in essence, recognise and round up tumour cells the same way it polices viruses and bacteria.

It certainly made good biological sense: the immune system is the body's built-in defense mechanism, after all, so why not turn it against one of the most persistent diseases?

One of the problems, is that a tumour is not exactly a pathogen. What it is, at its core, is a collection of aggressively growing cells that can't stop dividing. It is not entirely foreign, in the same way that a virus is; it does not infect healthy cells, as bacteria and viruses do.

Turning the immune system against cancer cells would involve turning the body's defense mechanisms against a part of itself. Designing a vaccine to do this entails creating the biological version of a stealth weapon encased in a smart bomb equipped with a guided missile.

All this was proving to be a bit too challenging. Hundreds of researchers in hundreds of trials had attempted to solve this and nothing had worked. While the vaccine idea made logical sense, the immune system, it seemed, just wasn't designed to battle cancer this way.

Eventually, in June this year, after nearly a decade of carefully inoculating patients suffering from either advanced melanoma or a type of lymphoma, both Schwartzentruber and Kwak announced positive outcomes of their trials, at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Orlando, Fla.

Their results, along with those of a trial vaccine against prostate cancer and an early candidate against a type of brain cancer, suggest that we might finally be on the way to unleashing the immune system against the disease.