Projo Subterranean Homepage News

Breakthrough: Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers. At New Scientist:

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks. ....

The catch:

The next step is to run clinical trials of DCA in people with cancer. These may have to be funded by charities, universities and governments: pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to pay because they can’t make money on unpatented medicines. The pay-off is that if DCA does work, it will be easy to manufacture and dirt cheap.

The Toronto Globe and Mail reports (Long-used drug shows new promise for cancer) that more information can be found "in a paper published in today's edition of the medical journal Cancer Cell."

Hunted: Inside Iraq is a blog by the Iraqi journalists of the McClatchy (formerly Knight Ridder) Baghdad bureau. They use only first names for security reasons. It's harrowing. Here's a sample:

...I came to the office, and found this message in my phone saying “we are Kata’eb al Jehad, we know you, and we are watching you” isn’t that exciting!!! To get threat from unknown side whether al Jehad battalion or others!

Since a while a got this feeling that am counting down, yet I have to move on because as a single mother, full with ambitions and enthusiasm to achieve better future for me and for two daughters, pushes me to go on, beside, it is the work I love, to let the world understand the reality of what is going on here.

Living in Iraq, working as journalist, not in Iraqi media, but American one, going back and forth to work puts me in great danger because I live in an area fully controlled by the Mahdi army that you have to take different roads each time trying not to draw attention, pretend you don’t speak English, with spreading several rumors that you are working two jobs to justify you coming late to your neighborhood.

Such things are hard to get adopt on but I think I felt that it’s a duty on us to report what is going here since Iraq and specifically Baghdad as it is now one of the hottest spots in the world.

so I red the message, I stood for a while thinking that it might be the hidden camera, that all my colleagues are hiding all of a sudden would jump and say Yaaaa, surprise, but no one was there, I came back and re red the message, apparently this is not a jock, OH my God, they are addressing me personally, they know me, they have been following me … I think got a real threat.

I stood for a second feeling nothing at all, seconds after, I went like small tornado in the office telling everybody, I GOT A THREAT ... HELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLP, DOOOO SOMETHING.

Have you reached sometimes to a moment when you have a struggle within yourself but you can not express it, and you pretend to be ok and normal advising yourself to be calm down, despite being scared is so obvious on you. I hate it when I look like that. ...

Juicy by ~wulfster at Deviant Art

Here's how it was done: The orange slices were arranged on a black background (my granite counter top is black). I suspended a sheet of lexan over the oranges and sprayed water on top. To get the right effect, you have to focus on the images in the drops rather than on the drops themselves. This is the tricky part that takes lots of trial and error. For the best effect, your lights should be below the glass and pointed directly at the subject.

The photo above is a detail. Here's the enlargement.

Ask the world: "What should we do to free our planet from terrorism?" is a question posted at Yahoo Answers -- by the President of India. Background here.

What they've learned: Esquire has a long-running feature headlined "What I've Learned" -- just the quotes excerpted from interviews with dozens of well-known folks. They're short, and go down easy.

A Metafilter member posting as "Not Myself Right Now" has compiled the links. Readers pluck favorite sentences, add their own and make it more.

Here are a few tidbits:

Julia Child:

The problem with the world right now is that we don't have any politicians like Roosevelt or Churchill to give us meaning and depth. We don't have anyone who's speaking for the great and the true and the noble. What we need now is a heroic type, someone who could rally the people to higher deeds. I don't know what's to become of us.

Keith Richards:

I've done a lot of dadding. Whoo, I tell you what—it grows you up pretty quick when that little bugger starts waking up. Suddenly there's this little cute ball of stuff yelling its head off—boom! Snap to! Oh, man, I better take care of this.

Lucinda Williams:

The perfect man? A poet on a motorcycle. You know, the kind who lives on the edge, the free spirit. But he's also gotta have the soul of a poet and a brilliant mind. So, you know, good luck.

Curt Gowdy:

Casey Stengel was one of the funniest guys I ever met. Funny without trying to be funny. My first year broadcasting the Yankees was his first year as manager. I'll never forget, we went to a bar after a night game in Cleveland. He ordered a draft beer and knocked it down in one gulp. I said, "Jeezus, Casey, why do you drink your beer so fast?" And Stengel said, "I drink it like that ever since the accident." I said, "You were in an accident?" He said, "Yeah, somebody knocked over my beer."

Edward Teller:

I have regret connected to Hiroshima. We should have dropped the bombs not on Hiroshima but in Tokyo Bay. Ten million Japanese would have seen the blast and nobody would have been hurt. With the Japanese seeing that, we could have ended the war without killing. Or we could have dropped the atomic bomb over Tokyo at an altitude of twenty to thirty thousand feet, at eight o'clock in the evening, so they would have seen it and felt the shock. Hirohito would have seen the bomb and used it to surrender.

Pamela Anderson:

My breasts have a career. I'm just tagging along.