Public invited to astronomy event in Alexander County

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Posted: Tuesday, September 9, 2014 7:00 am

Public invited to astronomy event in Alexander County

HIDDENITE, N.C. The public is invited to a night of star gazing with the Piedmont Amateur Astronomers Club at Rocky Face Mountain Recreational Area (Rocky Face Park) on Saturday, Sept. 20, from 8 to 11 p.m.

Club members will bring their high-powered telescopes and allow the public to view cosmic objects including galaxies, star clusters, and nebulas. Or you can bring your own telescope and join in the fun.

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Public invited to astronomy event in Alexander County

Radiation Therapy with Concurrent Chemotherapy After Surgery Is an Effective Treatment for Patients with High-Risk …

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Newswise Fairfax, Va., September 9, 2014Radiation therapy with concurrent paclitaxel chemotherapy following surgery is an effective treatment for patients with high-risk endometrial cancer, according to a study published in the September 1, 2014 edition of the International Journal of Radiation Oncology Biology Physics (Red Journal), the official scientific journal of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO).

Endometrial cancer is the most common gynecologic malignancy. Patients with early-stage disease are typically treated with surgery alone; however, patients with advanced endometrial cancer have higher instances of local or distant recurrence. Concurrent radiation therapy and chemotherapy after surgery is used to reduce the rate of recurrence in patients with advanced disease. This study, A Phase 2 Trial of Radiation Therapy With Concurrent Paclitaxel Chemotherapy After Surgery in Patients With High-Risk Endometrial Cancer: A Korean Gynecologic Oncology Group Study, evaluates the efficacy and toxicity of concurrent chemoradiation with weekly paclitaxel in patients with stage III and IV endometrial cancer.

From January 2006 to March 2008, 57 patients from 20 institutions in Korea were included in the study. Patients eligible to participate in the study were between 20 and 80 years old, with a histologic diagnosis of International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) stage III or IV endometrioid adenocarcinoma with no history of prior surgery, chemotherapy or radiation therapy for the treatment of other cancers. Patients with diagnoses of other cancers or severe infection requiring parenteral antibiotics, with a history of cardiac arrhythmia, congestive heart failure or myocardial infarction within the previous six months, or with uncontrolled infection, diabetes, hypertension or compromised cardiac, renal, liver or bone marrow functions were not included in the study. Of the 57 patients in this study, 12 patients (21.1 percent) had FIGO stage IIIA disease, 40 (70.1 percent) had FIGO stage IIIC disease and five (8.8 percent) had FIGO stage IV disease. Fourteen patients (24.6 percent) had grade 1 tumors, 27 (47.3 percent) had grade 2 tumors, and 16 (28.1 percent) had grade 3 tumors. The average age of the study patients was 52.2 years old.

All eligible patients had a staging laparotomy, including total abdominal hysterectomy, bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy (removal of both ovaries and both fallopian tubes), pelvic and para-aortic lymphadenectomy and peritoneal washing cytology. Patients in the study received a total dose of 45.0 to 50.4 Gy of external pelvic radiation therapy (1.8 to 2.0 Gy daily, five times a week), and 60 mg/m2 of paclitaxel diluted in 500 mL of 5 percent dextrose in water administered intravenously for three hours, once a week, for six weeks. Radiation therapy and chemotherapy were initiated within six weeks of surgery, and radiation therapy began either two days before or two days after the first chemotherapy treatment.

Chemotherapy was suspended due to adverse toxic effects in two patients. Of those two patients, one experienced septic shock, and one had persistent grade 4 neutropenia (an abnormally low count of neutrophils, a type of white blood cell) for more than two weeks. One patient refused treatment after enrollment, and two patients withdrew from treatment prior to completing all six cycles of chemotherapy. Fifty-two patients were included in the studys final analysis.

Patients received follow-up for five years after surgery. Chest X-ray and abdominal-pelvic CT or MRI were conducted every six months for the first two years post-surgery and then annually for the next three years. Patients were also evaluated by pelvic examinations, monitoring CA125 blood serum levels and Papanicolaou tests every three months for the first two years post-surgery and then every six months for the next three years.

Severe toxicities observed during treatment were primarily hematologic toxicities. Of the 312 treatment cycles (52 patients each received six cycles), 52 episodes (16.7 percent) of grade 3 or 4 leukopenia (decrease in number of white blood cells) were observed, and 35 episodes (11.2 percent) of grade 3 or 4 neutropenia were observed. Hematologic toxicity caused 98 cycles to be delayed one week, and a paclitaxel dose reduction was required for eight patients (15.3 percent) who experienced persistent neutropenia for more than one week.

Disease recurrence occurred in 19 (36.5 percent) of the 52 patients in the final analysis. Eighteen patients (34.6 percent) experienced extrapelvic recurrence (lung, liver, bone, para-aortic, lymph node or other sites). One patient (1.9 percent) had intrapelvic recurrence in the vaginal vault. The median time to the detection of recurrence was 12 months (range 3 to 24 months).

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Radiation Therapy with Concurrent Chemotherapy After Surgery Is an Effective Treatment for Patients with High-Risk ...

RT and concurrent chemotherapy after surgery is effective treatment for high-risk endometrial cancer

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Contact: Michelle Kirkwood press@astro.org 703-286-1600 American Society for Radiation Oncology http://www.twitter.com/ASTRO_org

Fairfax, Va., September 9, 2014Radiation therapy with concurrent paclitaxel chemotherapy following surgery is an effective treatment for patients with high-risk endometrial cancer, according to a study published in the September 1, 2014 edition of the International Journal of Radiation Oncology Biology Physics (Red Journal), the official scientific journal of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO).

Endometrial cancer is the most common gynecologic malignancy. Patients with early-stage disease are typically treated with surgery alone; however, patients with advanced endometrial cancer have higher instances of local or distant recurrence. Concurrent radiation therapy and chemotherapy after surgery is used to reduce the rate of recurrence in patients with advanced disease. This study, "A Phase 2 Trial of Radiation Therapy With Concurrent Paclitaxel Chemotherapy After Surgery in Patients With High-Risk Endometrial Cancer: A Korean Gynecologic Oncology Group Study," evaluates the efficacy and toxicity of concurrent chemoradiation with weekly paclitaxel in patients with stage III and IV endometrial cancer.

From January 2006 to March 2008, 57 patients from 20 institutions in Korea were included in the study. Patients eligible to participate in the study were between 20 and 80 years old, with a histologic diagnosis of International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) stage III or IV endometrioid adenocarcinoma with no history of prior surgery, chemotherapy or radiation therapy for the treatment of other cancers. Patients with diagnoses of other cancers or severe infection requiring parenteral antibiotics, with a history of cardiac arrhythmia, congestive heart failure or myocardial infarction within the previous six months, or with uncontrolled infection, diabetes, hypertension or compromised cardiac, renal, liver or bone marrow functions were not included in the study. Of the 57 patients in this study, 12 patients (21.1 percent) had FIGO stage IIIA disease, 40 (70.1 percent) had FIGO stage IIIC disease and five (8.8 percent) had FIGO stage IV disease. Fourteen patients (24.6 percent) had grade 1 tumors, 27 (47.3 percent) had grade 2 tumors, and 16 (28.1 percent) had grade 3 tumors. The average age of the study patients was 52.2 years old.

All eligible patients had a staging laparotomy, including total abdominal hysterectomy, bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy (removal of both ovaries and both fallopian tubes), pelvic and para-aortic lymphadenectomy and peritoneal washing cytology. Patients in the study received a total dose of 45.0 to 50.4 Gy of external pelvic radiation therapy (1.8 to 2.0 Gy daily, five times a week), and 60 mg/m2 of paclitaxel diluted in 500 mL of 5 percent dextrose in water administered intravenously for three hours, once a week, for six weeks. Radiation therapy and chemotherapy were initiated within six weeks of surgery, and radiation therapy began either two days before or two days after the first chemotherapy treatment.

Chemotherapy was suspended due to adverse toxic effects in two patients. Of those two patients, one experienced septic shock, and one had persistent grade 4 neutropenia (an abnormally low count of neutrophils, a type of white blood cell) for more than two weeks. One patient refused treatment after enrollment, and two patients withdrew from treatment prior to completing all six cycles of chemotherapy. Fifty-two patients were included in the study's final analysis.

Patients received follow-up for five years after surgery. Chest X-ray and abdominal-pelvic CT or MRI were conducted every six months for the first two years post-surgery and then annually for the next three years. Patients were also evaluated by pelvic examinations, monitoring CA125 blood serum levels and Papanicolaou tests every three months for the first two years post-surgery and then every six months for the next three years.

Severe toxicities observed during treatment were primarily hematologic toxicities. Of the 312 treatment cycles (52 patients each received six cycles), 52 episodes (16.7 percent) of grade 3 or 4 leukopenia (decrease in number of white blood cells) were observed, and 35 episodes (11.2 percent) of grade 3 or 4 neutropenia were observed. Hematologic toxicity caused 98 cycles to be delayed one week, and a paclitaxel dose reduction was required for eight patients (15.3 percent) who experienced persistent neutropenia for more than one week.

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RT and concurrent chemotherapy after surgery is effective treatment for high-risk endometrial cancer

Researchers advance artificial intelligence for player goal prediction in gaming

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Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed artificial intelligence (AI) software that is significantly better than any previous technology at predicting what goal a player is trying to achieve in a video game. The advance holds promise for helping game developers design new ways of improving the gameplay experience for players.

"We developed this software for use in educational gaming, but it has applications for all video game developers," says Dr. James Lester, a professor of computer science at NC State and senior author of a paper on the work. "This is a key step in developing player-adaptive games that can respond to player actions to improve the gaming experience, either for entertainment or -- in our case -- for education."

The researchers used "deep learning" to develop the AI software. Deep learning describes a family of machine learning techniques that can extrapolate patterns from large collections of data and make predictions. Deep learning has been actively investigated in various research domains such as computer vision and natural language processing in both academia and industry.

In this case, the large collection of data is the sum total of actions that players have made in a game. The predictive AI software can then draw on all of that data to determine what an individual player is trying to accomplish, based on his or her actions at any given point in the game. And the software is capable of improving its accuracy over time, because the more data the AI program has, the more accurate it becomes.

"At some point that improvement will level off, but we haven't reached that point yet," Lester says.

To test the AI program, the researchers turned to an educational game called "Crystal Island," which they developed years earlier. While testing Crystal Island, the researchers amassed logs of player behavior (tracking every action a player took in the game) for 137 different players. The researchers were able to test the predictive AI software against the Crystal Island player logs to determine its accuracy in goal recognition. In other words, they could tell the AI everything a player had done in Crystal Island up to a certain point and see what goal the AI thought the player was trying to accomplish. By checking the AI's response against the player log, the researchers could tell whether the AI was correct.

"For games, the current state-of-the-art AI program for goal recognition has an accuracy rate of 48.4 percent," says Wookhee Min, a Ph.D. student at NC State and lead author of the paper. "The accuracy rate for our new program is 62.3 percent. That's a big jump."

The paper, "Deep Learning-Based Goal Recognition in Open-Ended Digital Games," will be presented at the Tenth Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, being held Oct. 5-7 in Raleigh, North Carolina. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation under grants IIS-1138497 and IIS-1344803.

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So you want to be a music producer? Just switch on your laptop

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Researchers at Birmingham City University are able to turn the complexity of a mixing board with its hundreds of dials and settings into a simple piece of software that takes minutes to install and understand. Photograph: Birmingham City University

Budding and confirmed musicians alike will soon be able to produce professional-sounding recordings of their work using a piece of free software presented yesterday at the British Science Festival in Birmingham.

In music, the path to perfection is a long and winding road, with years of practice before arriving at a memorable piece. After that, you have to pay a seasoned music producer a lot of money to mix it and take it to the next level. Or do you?

Not any more, according to Dr Ryan Stables, a lecturer in audio engineering and acoustics at Birmingham City University. He has developed a free software package that will allow you to make your music sound crunchy, saturated or fit to any other acoustic style that takes your fancy.

Of course there are many digital audio workstations already available online, such as the popular Garageband for Apple computers. However, they come with predefined filters that are meant to apply across all musical genres.

In contrast, Dr Stables code is a machine-learning instrument, which trains computers to understand the language used by musicians. Its knowledge is based on the cumulative expertise of thousands of music producers

who are providing their own settings, sound arrangements and musical landscape descriptors.

Machine learning is a form of artificial intelligence based on pattern recognition in large datasets. For example, Google Translate does not really speak scores of languages. Instead, it sifts through millions of human-translated documents to identify sentences close to your translation request.

Similarly, Dr Stabless software relies on an ever-expanding library of music and human perceptions of music. It will identify the musical genre of your guitar solo and then answer your request to make it sound metallic by drawing on and learning from its huge knowledge library.

Music production should not necessarily cost a lot of money nor take years to learn, says Dr Stables, who is a musician and a producer in his spare time. Our project aims to give music production novices the ability to be creative with their music.

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Interview With Robert Peters on the Developments With Aerospace Specifications – Video

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Interview With Robert Peters on the Developments With Aerospace Specifications
Tom Morrison from MTI interviews Robert Peters, MTI #39;s representative on the Aerospace Metals Engineering Committee, on the latest developments with the vario...

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S'pore Technologies Engineering unit sets up MRO facility in Florida

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Fiona Chan

The Straits Times

Publication Date : 10-09-2014

VT Mobile Aerospace Engineering, an aerospace unit of Singapore Technologies Engineering (ST Engineering), has agreed to set up an aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) facility in Pensacola, Florida.

The company signed an agreement with the City of Pensacola to set up the MRO facility at the Pensacola International Airport, ST Engineering said in a statement on Wednesday. This follows a memorandum of understanding the two parties inked in December last year.

The City of Pensacola will construct an aircraft hangar complex on 18.66 acres of greenfield land and lease it to VT Mobile Aerospace Engineering for 30 years.

The hangar, which is expected to be operational in mid-2016, will be able to accommodate two wide-body aircraft.

"We have played a pioneering role in the development and growth of the aviation industry in the Gulf Coast region in the last two decades, and have been looking for a suitable location to expand our presence and service offerings in this region," said General John Coburn, chairman and chief executive of VT Systems, the US headquarters of ST Engineering.

He added that "Pensacola presented an opportunity for us to add to our capacity with the development of an aircraft MRO facility within the Pensacola International Airport".

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S'pore Technologies Engineering unit sets up MRO facility in Florida

New knowledge of cannabis paves way for drug development

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About 40% of all medicines used today work through the so-called "G protein-coupled receptors." These receptors react to changes in the cell environment, for example, to increased amounts of chemicals like cannabis, adrenaline or the medications we take and are therefore of paramount importance to the pharmaceutical industry.

"There is a lot of attention on research into "G protein-coupled receptors," because they have a key roll in recognizing and binding different substances. Our new method is of interest to the industry because it can contribute to faster and cheaper drug development," explains Professor Dimitrios Stamou, who heads the Nanomedicine research group at the Nano-Science Center, where the method has been developed. The new method is described in a publication at the esteemed scientific journal Nature Methods.

Cheaper to test and develop medicine

The new method will reduce dramatically the use of precious membrane protein samples. Traditionally, you test a medicinal substance by using small drops of a sample containing the protein that the medicine binds to. If you look closely enough however, each drop is composed of thousands of billions of small nano-containers containing the isolated proteins. Until now, it has been assumed that all of these nano-containers are identical. But it turns out this is not the case and that is why researchers can use a billion times smaller samples for testing drug candidates than hitherto.

"We have discovered that each one of the countless nano-containers is unique. Our method allows us to collect information about each individual nano-container. We can use this information to construct high-throughput screens, where you can, for example, test how medicinal drugs bind G protein-coupled receptors," explains Signe Mathiasen, who is first author of the paper describing the screening method in Nature Methods. Signe Mathiasen has worked on developing a screening method over the last four years at the University of Copenhagen, where she wrote her PhD thesis research project under the supervision of Professor Stamou.

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New knowledge of cannabis paves way for drug development

‘The Giver’ reflects reality: Column

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Arina O. Grossu 6:34 p.m. EDT September 9, 2014

Jeff Bridges plays The Giver and Brenton Thwaites is the chosen Receiver of Memories in a movie based on a 1993 novel.(Photo: David Bloomer, The Weinstein Co.)

Atheist writer Richard Dawkins' Twitter message to the world regarding an unborn child with Down syndrome was, "Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice."

Even more horrific than Dawkins' assertion is the fact that we actually follow his advice. Up to 90% of unborn children with Down syndrome are aborted. Further, euthanasia of elderly people and children is a present-day reality in Belgium.

Are we that far off from the atrocities in the movie The Giver? Not really. The Giver, now in theaters, is a dystopian story based on Lois Lowry's 1993 best-selling book. The story takes place in a futuristic world where hatred, pain and war have all but been eliminated. No one has more or less. The constructed world with its apparent equality seems like a socialist's paradise. The environment, weather and even emotions are controlled. Each day, each member of the community must take drugs that numb real emotions.

An elderly man known as The Giver retains the memory of the "old world" and must pass it to a chosen Receiver, a boy named Jonas. Coming out of his allegorical cave with newfound knowledge of reality, Jonas describes his constructed world as "living a life of shadows" because he recognizes that evil still exists.

The movie is rife with bioethical implications applicable to our society, from genetic engineering and infanticide to surrogacy and euthanasia. In this seemingly perfect universe, the most imperfect members are eliminated. When elderly people no longer have utility, they are "released" (read, euthanized), as are sickly babies.

Isn't this exactly what the contracting parents in the recent Australian surrogacy case of baby Gammy wanted? They asked the Thai surrogate mother carrying their twins to abort one of them because he had Down syndrome. When she refused, they took only his healthy twin sister and demanded a refund.

Gammy represents Gabriel in the movie, a baby at risk because he was considered undesirable. Thankfully, Gammy was protected by his surrogate mother, just as Gabriel is protected by Jonas.

In the most disturbing scene in the movie, Jonas' father, whose job is "releasing" babies, takes a needle and inserts it into the head of a sickly baby to kill him. The Washington Post reported the line from the book that was "too dark" to add to the scene was the father cheerfully saying, "Bye-bye little guy," while placing the dead baby in a box. As Jonas puts it, "They hadn't eliminated murder. ... They just called it by a different name."

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Georgia Seeks NATO Membership: Ex-Soviet State reiterates aspiration to join NATO – Video

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NATO is using the crisis in Ukraine as a pretext to move its forces closer to Russias borders – Video

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Could nearby NATO member states benefit from the Ukraine crisis? – Video

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Could nearby NATO member states benefit from the Ukraine crisis?
While much of Ukraine #39;s future seems to be in the hands of Russia #39;s Putin, other NATO member states concerned about Russian aggression may end up benefiting from the conflict. Kimberly Marten,...

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NATO, Oil and Why All Yes Voters Hate Their Children (apparently) #IndyRef Mid-Weekly Review #2 – Video

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NATO, Oil and Why All Yes Voters Hate Their Children (apparently) #IndyRef Mid-Weekly Review #2
This week, Miriam takes a look at developments in the world of oil and NATO, as well as a glance at Better Together #39;s most recent campaign. Miriam also talks about the vision that Generation...

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