Erde aus ca. 5000km Entfernung ORION 1 – Earth From NASA Orion1 Spacecraft – Video

Posted on by


Erde aus ca. 5000km Entfernung ORION 1 - Earth From NASA Orion1 Spacecraft
Die Orion Testkapsel hat eine Hhe von etwa 5800 Km erreicht.-(zum Vergleich: ISS kreist in etwa 400 Kilometer- 15.43 Uhr: Kritischer Meilenstein: Orion 1 hat den kritischen Punkt von...

By: Stefan Meyer

Read this article:

Erde aus ca. 5000km Entfernung ORION 1 - Earth From NASA Orion1 Spacecraft - Video

NASA's New Horizons awakens for meeting with Pluto

Posted on by

After nine years in stasis en route to the outer limits of the solar system, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has woken up in preparation for its Pluto survey.

Artist's concept of New Horizons nearing Pluto. NASA

Almost 9 years and 3 billion miles ago, NASA launched New Horizons -- a space probe with a big mission -- to boldly go where no space probe had gone before. Its destination was the solar system's most famous dwarf planet, Pluto, and its home, the asteroid-rich region called the Kuiper Belt.

In order to travel the distance, New Horizons -- launched from Earth on January 19, 2006 -- was put into hibernation for about two-thirds of its journey, or 1,873 days. As its long journey comes to an end, so too has that hibernation: at 9:53 p.m. EST, the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory confirmed that it had received the signal that indicated the pre-programmed "on" switch had toggled (a signal, NASA noted, that took 4 hours and 26 minutes in transit between New Horizons and the NASA Deep Space Network in Canberra, Australia). The space probe is awake.

"This is a watershed event that signals the end of New Horizons crossing of a vast ocean of space to the very frontier of our solar system, and the beginning of the mission's primary objective: the exploration of Pluto and its many moons in 2015," said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern.

New Horizons' stasis wasn't constant: the probe went into 18 separate sleeps on its journey, ranging between 36 and 202 days. This sleep cycle allowed the NASA team to monitor the probe while it was awake, and preserve it from wear and tear on its components, and reduce the risk of system failure, while it was asleep.

Pluto and its moons Charon, Nix and Hydra, as captured by the Hubble telescope. New Horizons will provide a lot more information. NASA, ESA, H. Weaver (JHU/APL), A. Stern (SwRI), and the HST Pluto Companion Search Team

Its awakening was programmed by the team back in August.

"Technically, this was routine, since the wake-up was a procedure that we'd done many times before, said New Horizons project manager Glen Fountain. "Symbolically, however, this is a big deal. It means the start of our pre-encounter operations."

Before the probe begins surveying Pluto and its system on January 15, the team on Earth will spend the next several weeks checking New Horizons, making sure it is fully operational, testing commands and sequences. They'll also test the probe's array of sensors: infrared and ultraviolet imaging spectrometers, a compact multicolour camera, a high-resolution telescopic camera, two powerful particle spectrometers and a space dust detector.

Read more here:

NASA's New Horizons awakens for meeting with Pluto

If Slow Is Good For Food, Why Not Medicine?

Posted on by

Maybe you've heard about the slow food movement. Maybe you're a devotee.

The idea is that cooking, nutrition and eating should be intentional, mindful and substantive. Avoid fast food and highly processed grub. For the slow food set, the process is as important as the product.

Now I'm seeing a medical version of slow food. The concept is bubbling up in response to industrialized, hypertechnological and often unnecessary medical care that drives up costs and leaves both doctors and patients frazzled.

As a teacher of medical students and residents, I find myself pulled between two contradictory poles. I want new doctors to be efficient so that they can survive in the real world of medical practice, which breaks our time into eight-minute increments. But I also want them to take the time to think through their actions and consider potential consequences.

Slow medicine adherents will be quick to tell you that the vast majority of CT scans ordered in emergency departments are of little value, most of the time adding only unnecessary cost and radiation risks for patients. Antibiotics for colds are another example of harmful waste. They don't work for viruses, and patients who take antibiotics are more likely to develop resistant bacteria, diarrhea and other symptoms that lead to avoidable office visits and hospitalizations.

As I've learned more about slow medicine, I've found it comes in many flavors.

One variety geared to geriatrics is exemplified by family doctor and author Dennis McCullough. He argues that in caring for the elderly, we doctors need to slow down and think twice about treatments we might reflexively offer younger folks, like medication for blood pressure, which can cause older patients to faint. Doctors also have to take extra care to avoid sending the frail into a medical-industrial complex that frequently causes unintended harm think bedsores, falls and hospital-acquired infections.

Another vision of slow medicine is advocated by Victoria Sweet, whose two decades spent working at a hospital outside San Francisco taught her the value of low-tech, high-touch medical care for society's poorest patients. For Sweet, slow medicine incorporates the medieval view of the human body as a garden to be tended rather than a machine to be fixed.

At her hospital, a throwback to almshouses of old, severely ill patients sometimes stayed for years, and were slowly nursed back to health. Admittedly, this is an ideal that can't be easily copied because it's so expensive. But I find it is both possible and therapeutic to spend more quiet time with patients, away from the distractions of computers.

In searching for ways to teach the essence of slow medicine to new doctors, I was fortunate to come across what is perhaps its newest flavor: a running correspondence from two physicians driven to find hard evidence for the best approaches to medical practice. Their emails have sparked a nationwide conversation among doctors about costs, the limits of scientific proof and yes the art of medicine.

Read more from the original source:

If Slow Is Good For Food, Why Not Medicine?

ARMSTRONG WILLIAMS: Food is medicine

Posted on by

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

In todays society, everyone seems to know that a healthy diet is key to maintaining good health, whether we choose to do it or not. But a connection that seems more difficult for people to make is that food is actually medicine. That is, your food is your medicine if it enhances your health; but it can actually be a poison if we consume things that destroy the healthy functioning of the mind and body.

The thinking around food and medicine seems to be caught up in the notion that medicine can cure you in a short time. We are accustomed as a society to alleviating uncomfortable symptoms with a pill, so the medical profession has become a pill-pushing mill, bought and paid for by the pharmaceutical industry. It has produced a system in which the connection between diet and health are paid mere lip service, while the industrys economics center on hawking an ever-expanding menu of new drugs promising to cure whatever ails us.

SEE ALSO: Obama: racism deeply rooted in U.S.

This system of drug-based medicine is also deeply ingrained in the insurance system, which pays for drugs to supposedly cure problems, but very rarely finances the much cheaper alternative promoting fresh healthy foods that would probably prevent most of the prevalent chronic diseases that plague the population.

Lets not even start with the FDA a labyrinthine bureaucracy that tries to regulate the distribution of foods and pharmaceuticals to the consumer. One cannot overstate the corrupting influence of corporate food producers and big pharmaceutical companies over how the FDA inspects, regulates and analyzes the food we consume. One look at the shelves in any major supermarket is all the proof you need to know that when it comes to your health, the FDA is often part of the problem.

We have to get back to square one. The father of Western medicine, Hippocrates, was credited with the saying, let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food. But a point of clarification is needed here. What passes as food these days processed and packaged products filled with preservatives and artificial ingredients is not what Hippocrates envisioned when he was talking about food. A growing number of studies in recent years should put to rest the notion that artificial sweeteners and fats have any place in a healthy diet. And yet the standard American diet is filled with so many of them aspartame, trans-fats, modified sodium, concentrated sugars that the American palate can scarce recognize, much less appreciate what real food tastes like any more.

SEE ALSO: Should Rolling Stone blame rape victim or itself?

If you have any doubt whatsoever that food can be a drug, take a trip down to your local strip mall and look some of the stuff that passes as food: cheese-stuffed Doritos, a sandwich made of fried chicken and bacon, a supersized cherry soda, a pepperoni pizza with a crust made of chicken parts. If it werent for the genius marketing around these products, if people know these products by their ingredients, the very thought of eating them would make most people nauseous.

A recent study by Israels the Weizmann Institute of Science showed that low-calorie sugar substitutes produced alarming changes in body chemistry, including glucose resistance, weight gain, and diminished organ function, even when consumed over a relatively short period of time. These substances are prevalent in many supposedly health-oriented diet products, including soft drinks, cereals and desserts. The Weizmann Institute study also found that natural sugars found in fresh fruits and vegetables produced no such effects, even in large quantities.

View original post here:

ARMSTRONG WILLIAMS: Food is medicine

Penn Medicine Researchers Announce Latest Results of Investigational Cellular Therapy CTL019

Posted on by

Contact Information

Available for logged-in reporters only

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL: Abstract #380: 10 a.m. PST, Saturday, Dec. 6 Abstract #1982 and #1983: 5:30 p.m. PST, Saturday, Dec. 6 Abstracts #3087 and #2296: 6:00 p.m. PST, Sunday, Dec. 7

Newswise SAN FRANCISCO The latest results of clinical trials of more than 125 patients testing an investigational personalized cellular therapy known as CTL019 will be presented by a University of Pennsylvania research team at the 56th American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting and Exposition. Highlights of the new trial results will include a response rate of more than 90 percent among pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia patients, and results from the first lymphoma trials testing the approach, including a 100 percent response rate among follicular lymphoma patients and 45 percent response rate among those with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma.

We have now treated more than 125 patients in our trials of the chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy CTL019, and with each patient, we learn more and more about the potential of this therapy, said the research teams leader, Carl June, MD, the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in Penns Perelman School of Medicine, and director of Translational Research in the Abramson Cancer Center. We are continuing to refine our approach to ensure the best outcomes for patients who may be eligible for this experimental therapy, and we hope our findings will contribute to the emerging field of cellular therapy as a whole.

This personalized cellular therapy approach begins with patients own immune cells, collected through a procedure similar to dialysis. The cells are then engineered in a laboratory and infused back into patients bodies after being trained to hunt and kill their cancer cells. All patients who enroll in the trials have cancers that have progressed despite multiple conventional therapies.

Updated results of a CTL019 trial for children and young adults with relapsed, treatment-resistant acute lymphocytic leukemia who were treated at the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia (Abstract #380) includes data on 39 patients. The findings, which will be presented by Stephan Grupp, MD, PhD, the Yetta Deitch Novotny Professor of Pediatrics and director of Translational Research in the Center for Childhood Cancer Research at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, build on the teams report on 25 pediatric and five adult patients which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in October.

Thirty six of 39 children (92 percent) achieved a complete response (CR) after receiving an infusion of the modified cells. After a median follow-up of six months, more than two-thirds (70 percent) of children who responded remained in remission and 75 percent were alive, including the first patient to receive the therapy, in the spring of 2012. These results were achieved with only 3 of the patients going on to receive stem cell transplant while in remission.

All pediatric patients who responded to the therapy experienced a cytokine release syndrome (CRS) within a few days after receiving their infusions a key indicator that the engineered cells have begun proliferating and killing tumor cells in the body, but also a known potentially lethal type of toxicity. Patients who experience a CRS typically have varying degrees of flu-like symptoms, with high fevers, nausea, muscle pain, and sometimes, low blood pressure and breathing difficulties. Some patients require treatment with anti-cytokine agents and steroids to manage these symptoms.

The research team will also report the first results of a CTL019 study of patients with relapsed or refractory non-Hodgkin lymphomas (NHL) (Abstract #3087). In patients with follicular lymphoma (FL) or diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL) who received infusions of CTL019, assessments at three months after treatment revealed that all five FL patients (100 percent) and five out of 11 DLBCL patients (45 percent) responded to the therapy, including complete responses in four patients (80 percent) with FL and four patients (36 percent) with DLBCL. All patients who received infusions developed varying degrees of CRS. The longest complete response durations are ongoing, at 8.8 months for DLBCL and 7.4 months for FL; all other responses continue, as well. The findings will be presented by Jakub Svoboda, MD, an assistant professor of Medicine in the Abramson Cancer Center, on behalf of the Lymphoma Program under the leadership of the studys principal investigator, Stephen J. Schuster, MD, the Robert and Margarita Louis-Dreyfus Associate Professor of Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia and Lymphoma.

Read more:

Penn Medicine Researchers Announce Latest Results of Investigational Cellular Therapy CTL019

Top Pakistani medical college selling dead bodies for black magic – Video

Posted on by


Top Pakistani medical college selling dead bodies for black magic
Pakistan #39;s top most medical college selling dead bodies for black magic. Either you can order a whole body or you can opt for specific body parts as per your requirement. King Edward Medical...

By: Being Swadesi

More here:

Top Pakistani medical college selling dead bodies for black magic - Video