Cancer-initiating stem cells that launch glioblastoma multiforme, the most lethal type of brain tumor, also suppress an immune system attack on the disease, say scientists from The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.

In a paper featured in the Jan. 15 issue of Clinical Cancer Research, the researchers demonstrate that this subset of tumor cells stifles the immune response in a variety of ways, but that the effect can be greatly diminished by encouraging the stem cells to differentiate into other types of brain cell.

'Invisibility' has long been a staple of science fiction.  The ability to go unseen has benefits, mostly involving mischief, but there are some ways where being invisible need not involve the optical realm - it could involve the physical.   In a poor country like Haiti, where it would be impossible to retrofit all of the buildings to withstand an earthquake, it may soon be possible to make earthquakes simply pass them by.  

Filtering Information In The Information Age

The Fortean Times appears never to have been mentioned on scientific blogging.com, much less cited as a reference source.  Now, when you have quite finished falling about laughing, I would like, in all seriousness, to draw your attention to a recent Fortean Times article:

The New Information Order
How the Internet is freeing conspiracy theories from the control imposed by traditional media.
By Robin Ramsay, Fortean Times, December 2009.

Mailspam, Webspam, and Freedom of Speech.

"given that the e-mail system has gone largely unchanged since 1965,
perhaps we should be grateful that it works at all. " -  David A. Karp
PCmag.com

Spam is the biggest single threat to the continued operation of the entire internet.  I'll explain shortly why I think it's such a big threat, but first, I'll explain what I mean by the term 'spam'.

What Is Spam?

To my way of thinking, spam is just another variant of malware.  Even though most spam emails don't fire up software, they fit the simplest definition of malware.

Writing in Psychological Sciences, researchers from New York University and Cornell University say they've demonstrated that our desires influence how we see our environments. According to the new research, we view things we want as being physically closer to us than they actually are. The authors say this bias exists to encourage us to pursue things that we want by making them appear close. When we see a goal as being close to us (literally within our reach), it motivates us to keep on going to successfully attain it.

 People's tendency to match their risk perceptions about policy issues with their cultural values may explain the intense disagreement over proposals to vaccinate young girls against human-papillomavirus (HPV), according to a new study in Law and Human Behavior. The study also indicates people's values shape their perceptions of expert opinion on the vaccine.

Children have a reputation for driving their parents crazy, so chances are that most people don't become parents for the health benefits. But maybe they should. According to a study conducted by researchers at Brigham Young University, raising children is associated with lower blood pressure, particularly so among women.

 Air flows in one direction as it loops through the lungs of alligators, just as it does in birds, and this breathing method may have helped the dinosaurs' ancestors dominate Earth after the planet's worst mass extinction 251 million years ago, according to scientists from the University of Utah.

In a just-published series of studies involving hundreds of volunteers, University of Georgia and Duke University psychologists say that watching or even thinking about someone with good self-control makes others more likely exert self-control. The research found that the opposite holds, too; people with bad self-control influence others negatively. The effect is so powerful, in fact, that seeing the name of someone with good or bad self-control flashing on a screen for just 10 milliseconds changed the behavior of volunteers.

Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have identified neurons in the songbird brain that convey the auditory feedback needed to learn a song. Their research, published in Neuron, lays the foundation for improving human speech, for example, in people whose auditory nerves are damaged and who must learn to speak without the benefit of hearing their own voices.

"This work is the first study to identify an auditory feedback pathway in the brain that is harnessed for learned vocal control," said Richard Mooney, Ph.D., Duke professor of neurobiology and senior author of the study. The researchers also devised an elegant way to carefully alter the activity of these neurons to prove that they interact with the motor networks that control singing.