The Four-eyed Journal » Cancer

3-D Mammograms coming soon

jhay — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 01:15:52 +0000

Great news for all women out there especially those concerned about breast cancer. New technology is being developed to increase the detection rate of spots that could eventually develop into tumors and then the dreaded breast cancer, by breast imaging experts at the Emory University at Atlanta.

Discovery Channel News reports:

Mammograms are two-dimensional, flat pictures of a surface that’s simply not flat. When technicians literally smush women’s breasts into the mammography unit, they’re trying to spread the tissue out so less is hidden from the X-ray. “Stereo mammograms” allow radiologists to see those X-ray images in 3-D, so that a small spot on the bottom might not be hidden by normal tissue laying over it.

We have depth perception because each eye gets a slightly different view, allowing your brain to construct a 3-D view when it overlays the two, explains Dr. Newell at Emory. That’s the concept behind stereoscopes, gadgets that help people see pictures in 3-D like the old cartoons of a View-Master.

Stereo mammograms, being developed by Cambridge, Mass.-based BBN Technologies, work essentially the same way. Separate X-rays are taken at slightly different angles. Then radiologists wear glasses that make each eye see a separate image on special monitors. The brain “reads” that as a single, 3-D view.

When this new 3-D mammograms or stereo mammograms become widespread or even standard in hospitals across the globe, women could say goodbye to painful and and sometimes less accurate old method of getting a mammogram. With a reported 23 percent increase in detection rate and a 46 percent decrease in false-alarms, this new technology is truly promising and will boost the fight against cancer.

Common compound in household products may cause cancer

jhay — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 14:43:50 +0000

Worrisome isn’t it? But a study by researchers at the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute, in collaboration with the Stanford Genome Technology Center have shown that a common organic compound in many household products may pose a health risk to breast cells.

Bisphenol A, a chemical that leaches (leaks) into food and beverages from many consumer products, causes normal, non-cancerous human breast cells to express genes characteristic of aggressive breast cancer cells.

What is Bishphenol A?

It is an organic compound that has many uses, the most common is being a component of plastic that is used is many common household products like plastic water bottles, plastic baby bottles, the lining in food cans, as well as in sealants used by dentists to protect teeth, as enumerated by the linked story from Science Daily.

William Goodson, M.D., Senior Clinical Research Scientist at the Institute and lead researcher on the study, was quoted as saying:

“This is a very common compound that most of us are exposed to on a regular basis, often without even being aware of it. If it’s true that exposure to BPA can cause normal, non-cancerous human breast cells to behave in ways that are more characteristic of aggressive breast cancer cells, this is very worrying.”

What is the deal with BPA?

In the studies conducted by Dr. Goodson’s team, the normal human breast cells exposed to bishpehnol A (BPA) have shown to:

increase the sets of genes that promote cell division
increase cell metabolism
increase resistance to drugs that usually kill cancer cells
prevent cells from developing to their normal mature forms

Aside from these new findings, BPA has had a controversial history of causing possible harmful health effects like hormonal disruptions because it mimics estrogen.

We’ve been so used to BPA

Since BPA is a common compound found in many household products, we’ve been exposed to it ever since. Especially now that plastic bottles, packaging and wrappings are almost the de facto packaging item for almost anything we drink or eat, it will be quite difficult to stay free from being exposed to BPA. Just count how many times you drink your favorite soda pop or juice drink that comes in plastic bottles in a single day, because even though it’s present in very small amounts, they all pile up through the years.

Though it’s not proven that BPA causes cancer or malignancy because of its gene altering effects, researchers say that more studies should be undertaken.

In the mean while and after reading this, I’m sure most would now have something to think about the next time we pick up a bottle of water or soda pop.

Help Pyro meet Batista

jhay — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 02:54:55 +0000

Downtimes, server maintenance, heavy load of academics plus a tree-planting trip to the mountains yesterda; all that are now over and once more I pronounce that I’m back to blogging. Woot! Thank you for those who have missed updates to the Pinoy Explorer.

For my first act, I’d like to call on to anyone, with the biggest of all hearts, the kindests of souls and with an extensive connection to help out Joseph Pyro to meet his idol, our very own (half of him) WWE Smackdown superstar, Dave Batista, in person, when the WWE caravan visits Manila again this coming October.

You’ve probably heard of this blog-powered and email driven plea of help for Pyro to meet his idol for some time now. For the unfamiliar, Joseph Pyro is a three-year-old kid who suffers from cancer and has gone through so much pain and suffering in his three years of life so far, than compared to what we have in our lives today. In a nutshell, the following would answer the question: “Who is Joseph Pyro?”

Name : Joseph PYRO
Age: 3 years, 2 months
Hospital : PCMC
Has Suffered: At least 8 chemo treatments, 2 major chest surgeries and 30 days of radiation treatments<
Loves: sucking on stuffed toys, mocha cake, massages, Sponge Bob, wrestling, Spiderman and his Ninong
Loved by: The whole family and our friends

Her loving aunt, has set up “In times of pain” a blog to chronicle his battle against the scourge that is cancer and to help the precious child to have one of his wishes be granted; to meet Dave Batista, his WWE idol.

So if you think you’re the one Pyro is looking for, or someone who knows someone who could make Pyro’s dream possible, please get in touch with his family by sending an email to this address: delisyus[at]gmail.com

Do you have a blog? Blog about Pyro’s wish and join in the hundreds if not thousands who are supporting the plight of this wonderful and beautiful child.

Help Pyro meet Batista!

Also; PayPal for the Philippines!

How your computer will save lives

jhay — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 03:09:41 +0000

A few weeks back I talked about how to use that underutilized kick-ass resources of your pc to save lives. I think I became ‘too emotional‘ in that post that I may have forgotten to fully explain how you could save lives with your computer.

In essence all we’re going to talk about this time is about volunteer computing.

What is volunteer computing?

Volunteer computing is an arrangement in which people (volunteers) provide computing resources to projects, which use the resources to do distributed computing and/or storage.

Several aspects of the project/volunteer relationship are worth noting:

The first volunteer computing project was GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search), which started in 1995. Other early projects include distributed.net, SETI@home, and Folding@home. Today there are at least 50 active projects.

Why is volunteer computing important?

It’s important for several reasons:

This advantage will increase over time, because the laws of economics dictate that consumer electronics (PCs and game consoles) will advance faster than more specialized products, and that there will simply be more of them.
* Volunteer computing power can’t be bought; it must be earned. A research project that has limited funding but large public appeal (such as SETI@home) can get huge computing power. In contrast, traditional supercomputers are extremely expensive, and are available only for applications that can afford them (for example, nuclear weapon design and espionage).
* Volunteer computing encourages public interest in science, and provides the public with voice in determining the directions of scientific research.

That’s the principle, here’s how it actually works

So now you understand what volunteer computing is, and you’re all set to join in and volunteer your pc’s idle time and resources to a great cause. How do you do it?

You go to the internet, particularly to the BOINC website, there you would find a list of projects in which you could volunteer to join and help in its completion. These projects range from predicting global climate change, searching for extra-terrestial life, predicting the outcomes of medical experiments that would be used for combating human diseases and other projects that could use your extra computing power.

I myself, in particular have joined two projects; the Rosetta@home and the Folding@home(which JD too is a participant) both are concerned with protein-folding which would greatly help us in curing diseases like cancer, parkinson’s, alzheimer’s etc.

You could join other projects as well depending upon your preferences. Once you’ve chosen your project, you download a piece of free and open-source software that will take care of the ‘hard work’ and turn your computer into a member of a world-wide network of desktop PCs helping to perform the computations to complete the project. You would also have to register for free, as a member in order for you to specify how much of your PC’s time and resources (e.g. disk space, bandwidth, processor time etc) would be devoted to the project. The picture below will better explain what I mean.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the client-software, it will contact the main server and requests/downloads the amount and portion of the project according to the preferences you set in your account. It’s really easy, so you wouldn’t have to worry about your machine getting wrecked or broken down because of the project. I set mine to use only 30% of my pc’s resources since I could spare and share that much.

After you’ve set everything up, the software or project manager would only kick in and start working once your PC is idle or not in use. It could also be synchronized with your screensaver. Once the your computer is done with is share of the computing load, the project manager will again connect to the main project server and upload the results and this gets published in the project’s website announcing to the world that the project has completed another positive step all thanks to your generosity and kick-ass pc. There are even features that will allow you to view the status of the project or the results of your own computation in glorious colored, sometimes animated, graphics.

The cycle starts over again until the over-all project completes itself again thanks to the thousands of kind-hearted individuals like yourself who have volunteered their spare computing time and resources for a great cause.

So what are you waiting for? Go on and join in and become a computer volunteer!

Saving lives with your computer

jhay — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 02:27:45 +0000

You’re one of the happiest persons in the world. You’ve just spent a good deal of your hard-earned money on a new computer. It has the latest, fastest, powerful and cutting-edge processor. It has Gigabytes of memory, a hard drive with three digits that precedes the letters “GB” on its label. You’ve also slapped in a cut-throat video card, a glorious sound card short of having your own home theater system. You can see it perform on a top-of-the-line flat screen LCD monitor, you have a wireless mice and keyboard that feels uber good to use. The entire machine is styled to your preferences and the beast has been fine-tuned and optimised to extract every amount of computing juice to the max. The thing is just so beautiful and powerful, it brings tears to your eyes. Lastly, like a cherry to top off the cake, you connect the rig to the www via a break-neck unlimited internet connection. Things couldn’t get any better.

But the thing is, all you do with this beast of a computer is to casually surf the net. Check your e-mail, chat for a few hours,watch the newest batch of retards and numskulls on youtube, download a few mp3 tracks (illegaly at most), and get your daily dose of the blog-o-sphere and give it back your own. Collect “friends” you’ve never even met in person and when combined all of you could form a small country.

Offline, you just use a wordprocessor to create your paperwork, school work, a few poems and a couple of stories you’ve been struggling to finish. You listen to music while doing all this and from time to time clock in a few hours in the gaming world. This average and sometimes repetitive cycle is all that you do with your uber computer.

Haven’t you realised that when all what you needed was a pen, a piece of paper, a desk to write on, and music player you ended up spending huge money on a printing and publishing house, music and film editing studio, a military simulation facility, a conference room with full live video features and a complete PR and propaganda machine to infect the world with your self-image and ideas?

Come to think of it, isn’t true that you’re barely using the full capacity of your computer’s horsepower? You conduct a performance test only to find out that the fraction of your computer’s full capacity and capabilities that you use on your average e-life could be delivered by an another computer costing less than what’s on the price tag of your machine?

Simply put, you’re not using your computer to its full capacity, hence its full monetary value. That’s your hard earned-money idling away inside a metal box with a lease to be on the “latest model” shelf for barely three years.

Worry not too much. For there is hope in turning this investment into something worth every centavo you’ve sweated and toiled over for it.

Join in the volunteer computing become part of a worldwide computer network and use the idle time and resources on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research. It’s your easy ticket to becoming a scientist without ever getting the needed degree, reading those heavy books, putting on the white coat, gloves, goggles and spending hours of your life in the lab.

It’s simple, safe and easy to do. Just click on the links above and they’ll point you to a free software that will take care of everything: from downoading bits of projects you’ll sign up to, to managing your completed ‘research’ and sending it back to the main computer completing another phase of the project all thanks to your generosity and kick-ass pc. Without you knowing, you have just given your fair share of making this planet a better and safer place to live in.

If this is all new to you and you’re still in the dark after visiting the sites above, come back here and I’ll try to explain how it works in a follow-up post later on. Until then, I suggest browsing the sites linked above, give it a shot and spread the word about it.