SpaceX Dragon Capsule Splashes Down In Pacific, Ending Historic Test Flight (Video)
SpaceX Dragon Capsule Splashes Down In Pacific, Ending Historic Test Flight – Space
The world’s first commercial space cargo ship dove through Earth’s atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean early Thursday (May 31), ending an historic test flight to the International Space Station.
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The SpaceX Dragon capsule made a water landing off the coast of Baja California, Mexico at 11:42 a.m. EDT (1542 GMT). Recovery ships have spotted the capsule and are en route to collect the vehicle to tow to Los Angeles.
Mission Control in Houston informed the space station crew that the capsule’s red-and-white striped parachutes were visible.
“That’s good news,” NASA astronaut Don Pettit radioed back.
Dragon departed the space station earlier today, when it was released from the outpost’s robotic arm after being plucked from a docking port on station’s Earth-facing Harmony module. The unmanned capsule began its return to Earth in earnest at 10:51 a.m. EDT (1451 GMT) with a nine minute, 50 second de-orbit engine burn.
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Dragon became the first private vehicle to visit the space station when it docked there May 25, three days after launching atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The capsule spent a total of five days, 16 hours and 5 minutes attached to the $100 billion orbiting laboratory. [Dragon Capsule's Space Station Arrival in Pictures]
“It was a major success for us,” Dragon mission director John Couluris of SpaceX said during a news conference yesterday (May 30). “The trust and hard work that NASA helped SpaceX with were really important. The ability to get to the space station on our first time, to not only rendezvous but to berth – we would call that mission alone a success.”
SpaceX’s test drive for NASA
The nine-day Dragon flight was a test run for the 12 cargo-delivery flights SpaceX (short for Space Exploration Technologies Corp.) is contracted to fly for NASA for a total of $1.6 billion. The Hawthorne, Calif.-based company was founded in 2002 by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who also co-founded PayPal.
Though this flight is only Dragon’s second-ever trip to orbit, the mission went smoothly from end to end, with all the major milestones achieved without mishap.
That Dragon’s re-entry and splashdown went well marks another significant achievement, as the spacecraft is alone among the automated cargo freighters that service the space station in its ability to carry supplies not just up, but down.
While the cargo-delivery spacecraft built by Russia, Japan and Europe are designed to burn up during re-entry, Dragon is equipped with a heat shield and parachutes to survive the fiery plunge.
Dragon is packed with 1,367 pounds (620 kg) of crew items, used hardware and completed science experiments for its return trip. On the way up, the spacecraft delivered student-designed experiments and food, clothing and other supplies for the station’s astronauts.
Will astronauts be next?
SpaceX is one of two private firms receiving NASA funding to develop robotic cargo spacecraft (the other is Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va.). SpaceX is also competing for a NASA contract to carry crew, as well as cargo, aboard Dragon.
Officials say if work proceeds on schedule, the first humans could fly on Dragon as soon as 2015. The capsule, which measures 14.4 feet tall (4.4 meters) and 12 feet wide (3.7 m), is designed to fit up to seven astronauts aboard.
Paralyzed Woman Moves Robotic Arm With Her Thoughts
Paralyzed Woman Moves Robotic Arm With Her Thoughts – Washington Post
A paralyzed Massachusetts woman picked up a bottle of coffee and sipped from it by moving a robotic arm with her thoughts, researchers reported Wednesday – the latest advance in the race to restore movement to people who have lost control of their muscles.
The moment marked the first time in 15 years the 58-year-old, who had suffered a stroke, was able to pick up anything of her own volition.
Researchers called the advance the first demonstration of reaching and grasping by a brain-controlled prosthetic arm. In recent years, other paralyzed patients have high-fived with a different robotic arm and moved a cursor around a computer screen simply by thinking about it.
While the scientists involved cautioned that it will be years before such devices will be widely available, they hailed the advance as a milestone.
“Things in this field are exploding right now,” said Andrew Schwartz, who is developing another thought-controlled robotic arm at the University of Pittsburgh and who was not involved in the work reported Wednesday. “You’re going to be seeing much more in the near future – much more natural movements, faster movements, approaching what normal [people] can do.”
In the new study, researchers implanted a tiny electrode chip – the size of a baby aspirin – into the brains of two patients. Both had suffered strokes in their brain stems that left them in a “locked-in” state. While their brains worked normally, connections to the muscles below had been severed, leaving them quadriplegic and unable to speak.
Placed on the motor cortex – a sliver of brain that controls movement – the chip listened to signals generated by the patients’ brain cells as they thought about moving their own arms. A computer read that signal, interpreted it and sent movement messages to the robotic arm.
“I just imagined moving my own arm, and the [robotic] arm moved where I wanted it to go,” the second patient, a 66-year-old man, told the researchers in response to questions submitted earlier by journalists. He can slowly communicate by moving his eyes as an assistant points to letters on a board.
A cable attached to the skull transmitted the signal.
“They’re basically plugged in,” said John Donoghue, a Brown University neuroscientist involved in the new work, which was reported in the journal Nature.
Ongoing work seeks to remove the cable, making the system wireless and more practical, Donoghue said in a teleconference with reporters.
The trials reported Wednesday took place last year. In them, the patients touched and grabbed foam balls on a table with two different robotic arms. The woman succeeded about half the time with an arm made by the company Deka as a prosthetic for amputees. With a second arm, made by the German Aerospace Center, she succeeded about 70 percent of the time. The male patient did even better.
“At the very beginning, I had to concentrate and focus on the muscles I would use,” the female patient, Cathy Hutchinson, told the researchers via assisted communication. But they said she quickly got accustomed to the process.
A team of brain scientists, engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists at Brown University, Harvard Medical School and elsewhere worked on the brain-computer interface – called BrainGate – for more than a decade. The National Institutes of Health and the Department of Veterans Affairs funded much of the work.
The key breakthrough: programming computers to interpret the brain signals as arm and hand motion.
The researchers did so by training the computers – and the patients. With the brain interface plugged in, the researchers moved the robotic arm and told the patients to imagine moving their own arm in the same way. The computer recorded the brain signals generated. Later, when the patients were asked to move the arm, the computer responded by tapping into the data bank of brain signals it had stored.
Despite her being paralyzed for 15 years, the woman’s brain still generated signals corresponding to hand and arm movement.
“This means the motor cortex continues to operate in what appears to be a normal way,” Donoghue said. “That allows us to tap into them even years after some event like a stroke or spinal cord injury.”
The Food and Drug Administration gave the researchers permission to study the BrainGate device as experimental, and they are collecting long-term safety data.
Researchers are encouraged that the brain chip in Hutchinson continued to work five years after it was implanted, although the signal it transmitted had weakened, probably because of scar tissue building up around the chip.
As the researchers tested her ability to pick up foam balls, they gave her the chance to grab a bottle of coffee and take a sip through a straw. She succeeded.
Said Brown University’s Leigh Hochberg, one of the scientists involved: “The smile on her face when she did this was something that I and… our whole research team will never forget.”
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Chinese Hackers Stole Plans For America’s New Joint Strike Fighter Planes, Says Investigations Subcommittee Chair (Video)
Intruders from China hacked into computers and stole the blueprints for America’s new joint strike fighter planes, the F-35 and F-22, according to the chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations and Management.
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Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) made the statement during a Tuesday hearing on cyber security.
“I’ve been dealing with this issue for a long time,” McCaul said. “But I think it’s important that the American people, who most of them don’t understand this issue, have a better idea of what – what is at risk. You know when I look at the theft of intellectual property to the tune of $1 trillion, that’s a serious economic issue for the United States.
“When I look at countries like China, who have stolen our Joint Strike Fighters, F-35 and F-22′s, stolen those blueprints so they can manufacture those planes and then guard against those planes,” he said.
China has created citizen hacker groups engaged in cyber espionage, established cyber war military units and laced the U.S. infrastructure with logic bombs, he said.
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It is not the only government to do so, he added.
“(M)ake no mistake, America’ is under attack by digital bombs,” McCaul said. “There are several things the American public should understand about these attacks. They are real, stealth and persistent and can devastate our nation.
“They occur at the speed of light. They are global and could come from anywhere on the earth. They penetrate traditional defenses,” he continued.
“So who is conducting these attacks and why? An October of 2011 report to Congress on foreign economic collection and industrial espionage states it is part of China and Russia’s national policy to identify and steal sensitive technology, which they need for their development,” McCaul said.
McCaul said Russia has been almost as active as China in trying to steal U.S. defense secrets.
“When you look at China and Russia who have hacked into every federal agency in the federal government including the Pentagon,” McCaul said. “You know we talk about the analogy agents of a foreign power call it paper files walking out with classified or non-classified information, it would be all over the papers. But yet in the virtual world, that’s happening. And no one seems to know or really pay attention to it. And then the final piece, you know there’s the espionage, the stealing of military secrets, satellite technology, rocket technology out of NASA, it’s prevalent. It’s everywhere.”
The Texas Republican, a former federal prosecutor, re-iterated his comments Wednesday on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” program.
Larry Wortzel, a member of the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee at a March 28, hearing that a report released by the commission last month had concluded that the People’s Liberation Army of China has made cyber attacks a “cornerstone” of its operations.
“At the same time, the report concludes, during peacetime, computer network exploitation has likely become a cornerstone of PLA and civilian intelligence collection operations supporting national military and civilian strategic goals,” Wortzel said.
“The Commission report tells us that China’s computer network exploitation activities to support espionage opened rich veins of information that was previously inaccessible or could only be mined in small amounts with controlled human intelligence operations,” Wortzel said.
The commission’s 2009 Annual Report to Congress, citing a Wall Street Journal article, discussed “intruders, probably operating from China, that exfiltrated ‘several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems’ of the F-35 Lightning II,” one of the most advanced fighter planes under development.
In addition, the report noted, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Northrop Grumman Corporation, and British Aerospace and Engineering reportedly all have experienced penetrations from hackers based in China in the past three years.
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Daily Benefactor News – TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless By Blog: How Anyone Can Get Anything Past The Scanners (Video)
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This video is here to demonstrate that the TSA’s insistence that the nude body scanner program is effective and necessary is nothing but a fraud, just like their claims that the program is safe (radiation what?) and non-invasive (nude pictures who?). The scanners are now effectively worthless, as anyone can beat them with virtually no effort. The TSA has been provided this video in advance of it being made public to give them an opportunity to turn off the scanners and revert to the metal detectors. I personally believe they now have no choice but to turn them off.
Please share this video with your family, friends, and most importantly, elected officials in federal government. Make sure they understand that your vote is contingent on them fixing the abuse that 200,000 passengers face from the TSA on a daily basis.
My legal battle against the TSA’s nude body scanner and pat-down molestation program continues in court, soon with a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court. If you’d like to donate to this effort, send PayPal to: jon [at] fourtentech.com
I’d like to thank:
Travel Underground – http://www.travelunderground.org
Freedom to Travel USA – http://fttusa.org
Legislators who have stood up to the TSA – especially Dr. Ron Paul & Sen. Rand Paul
…and all those who have both publicly and privately stood up to the TSA.
Add me on Twitter: @tsaoutourpants (no “of”)
Transcript:
I’m publishing this video because I want the world to know how much danger the American Transportation Security Administration is putting all us all in with their haste to deploy the expensive, invasive nude body scanner program. When the machines came out, we were told that the invasion on our privacy, doses of radiation, and trashing of our Constitution were necessary because the old metal detectors weren’t good enough. That “non-metallic explosives” were a threat, even though no one has boarded a plane in the US with any type of explosive in nearly 40 years. But while America was testing these devices, Rafi Sela, who ran security for Ben Gurion airport in Israel, which is known for being one of the most secure airports in the world, was quoted saying he could “overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to take down a Boeing 747,” and Ben Gurion therefore refused to buy scanners. The US ignored this warning, and Mr. Sela never publicly explained his statement. But it stuck with me.
As a scientist, engineer, and frequent traveler, as well as the first person to sue the TSA when they rolled out the scanners as primary in Nov. 2010, I studied and learned about both kinds of scanners currently in use by the TSA. Here are several images produced by TSA nude body scanners. You’ll see that the search victim is drawn with light colors and placed on a black background in both images. In these samples, the individuals are concealing metallic objects that you can see as a black shape on their light figure. Again that’s light figure, black background, and BLACK threat items. Yes that’s right, if you have a metallic object on your side, it will be the same color as the background and therefore completely invisible to both visual and automated inspection.
It can’t possibly be that easy to beat the TSA’s billion dollar fleet of nude body scanners, right? The TSA can’t be that stupid, can they?
Unfortunately, they can, and they are. To put it to the test, I bought a sewing kit from the dollar store, broke out my 8th grade home ec skills, and sewed a pocket directly on the side of a shirt. Then I took a random metallic object, in this case a heavy metal carrying case that would easily alarm any of the “old” metal detectors, and walked through a backscatter x-ray at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. On video, of course. While I’m not about to win any videography awards for my hidden camera footage, you can watch as I walk through the security line with the metal object in my new side pocket. My camera gets placed on the conveyer belt and goes through its own x-ray, and when it comes out, I’m through, and the object never left my pocket.
Maybe a fluke? Ok, let’s try again at Cleveland-Hopkins International Airport through one of the TSA’s newest machines: a millimeter wave scanner with automated threat detection built-in. With the metallic object in my side pocket, I enter the security line, my device goes through its own x-ray, I pass through, and exit with the object without any complaints from the TSA.
While I carried the metal case empty, by one with mal-intent, it could easily have been filled with razor blades, explosives, or one of Charlie Sheen’s infamous 7 gram rocks of cocaine. With a bigger pocket, perhaps sewn on the inside of the shirt, even a firearm could get through. It’s important to note that any metal object of any size can use this technique. …and I don’t urge you to try to bring contraband through security, as the nude body scanners often have false positives: so while the metal on your side might get through, a button on your shirt or a sweaty armpit might “look suspicious” and earn you a pat down anyway.
Now, I’m sure the TSA will accuse me of aiding the terrorists by releasing this video, but it’s beyond belief that the terrorists haven’t already figured this out and are already plotting to use this against us. It’s also beyond belief that the TSA did not already know everything I just told you, and arrogantly decided to disregard our safety: anything to force Americans to give up our liberty to the federal government and our tax dollars to companies that are in bed with that government. The nude body scanner program is nothing but a giant fraud, which should come as no surprise after the Fast & Furious scandal that sent thousands of guns to Mexican drug cartels and cost a Customs and Border Patrol agent his life. THIS is a disgrace. So let’s fix this problem – now – before the terrorists take this opportunity to hurt us: the TSA must immediately end the nude body scanner program, and return to the tried-and-true metal detectors that actually work, and work without invading our privacy, as well as implement better solutions for non-metallic explosives, such as bomb-sniffing dogs and trace detection machines.
The TSA is worse than ineffective: they are an epic fail placing us all in danger. Beyond the scanners, Demand of your legislators and presidential candidates that they get rid of this $8B a year waste known as the TSA and privatize airport security. Ask for their commitment to our rights in exchange for your vote. And no matter which party is in the White House or holds on to Capital Hill, the issue of ending TSA abuse is of interest to all Americans; it’s NOT a partisan issue. We must all stand together and demand an end to the organization that molests our families while placing us in danger by directly ignoring blatant security flaws.
Thank you.
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Daily Benefactor News – Foreign Hackers Gain Remote Access To Illinois Water Plant Control System, Destroy Pump
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Foreign Hackers Gain Remote Access To Illinois Water Plant Control System, Destroy Pump – Wired
Hackers gained remote access into the control system of the city water utility in Springfield, Illinois, and destroyed a pump last week, according to a report released by a state fusion center and obtained by a security expert.
The hackers were discovered on Nov. 8 when a water district employee noticed problems in the city’s Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System (SCADA). The system kept turning on and off, resulting in the burnout of a water pump.
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Forensic evidence indicates that the hackers may have been in the system as early as September, according to the “Public Water District Cyber Intrusion” report, released by the Illinois Statewide Terrorism and Intelligence Center on Nov. 10.
The intruders launched their attack from IP addresses based in Russia and gained access by first hacking into the network of a software vendor that makes the SCADA system used by the utility. The hackers stole usernames and passwords that the vendor maintained for its customers, and then used those credentials to gain remote access to the utility s network.
The theft of credentials raises the possibility that other customers using the vendor’s SCADA system may be targeted as well.
“It is unknown, at this time, the number of SCADA usernames and passwords acquired from the software company’s database and if any additional SCADA systems have been attacked as a result of this theft,” the report states, according to Joe Weiss, managing partner of Applied Control Solutions, who obtained a copy of the document and read it to Threat Level.
Control system software vendors often have remote access to customer systems in order to provide maintenance and upgrades to the systems. But this provides a backdoor for intruders to exploit. This is how a Romanian hacker obtained access into restaurant credit card processing systems in the U.S. a few years ago. The point-of-sale systems in several states were installed by a single company, which maintained default usernames and passwords for remote access into the systems that the hacker was able to use to breach them.
In the case of the utility company hack, the fusion report indicates that for two to three months prior to the discovery, operators at the utility noticed “glitches” in the remote access for the SCADA system. The report doesn’t indicate the nature of the glitches, but could refer to problems that legitimate users experienced trying to gain remote access into the system during the time the intruders were using log-in credentials.
“They just figured it’s part of the normal instability of the system,” Weiss told Wired.com. “But it wasn’t until the SCADA system actually turned on and off that they realized something was wrong.”
The fusion report indicates that the SCADA software vendor that was initially hacked prior to the utility company’s compromise is located in the U.S., but Weiss declined to name the city until it’s known which vendor was hacked.
“One thing that is important to find out is whose SCADA system this is,” Weiss said. “If this is a [big software vendor], this could be so ugly, because a biggie would have not only systems in water utilities but a biggie could even be [used] in nukes.”
Weiss initially published details from the report on his blog. He expressed frustration that the information apparently hadn’t been released to other water utilities so they could be on the lookout for similar attacks, complaining that he could find no evidence of the information in reports distributed by the Department of Homeland Security’s Industrial Control System-Cyber Emergency Response Team or other government and industry security lists. “Consequently, none of the water utilities I have spoken to were aware of it,” he wrote.
“There very easily could be other utilities as we speak who have their networks compromised,” he said. “This is unconscionable.”
The report didn’t name the utility company that was attacked or the software vendor that was initially hacked, but the DHS, after queries from reporters, identified the location of the utility company as Springfield, Illinois. City Water, Light and Power supplies utility services to that municipality. A spokeswoman for City Water, Light and Power said the incident did not occur at their utility and suggested it occurred at systems belonging to the Curran-Gardner Township Public Water District.
A woman who answered the phone at Curran-Gardner Friday morning, who would not give her name, said, “I cannot discuss it, and the manager is on vacation,” before hanging up.
A spokesman for Curran-Gardner later reportedly acknowledged that the burnout occurred with a well pump at its plant that services about 2,200 customers outside of Springfield.
“Whether the burnout of that pump was related to this what might or might not have been a hacking, we don’t know,” Don Craven, a water district trustee, told the local State Journal-Register newspaper. “From what we can tell at this point, this is one pump. The water district is up and running and things are fine.”
The DHS statement downplayed the severity of the incident.
“DHS and the FBI are gathering facts surrounding the report of a water pump failure in Springfield, Illinois,” according to a statement released by DHS spokesman Peter Boogaard. “At this time there is no credible corroborated data that indicates a risk to critical infrastructure entities or a threat to public safety.”
The fusion report indicated that the hack into the utility system shared a similarity to a recent hack into an MIT server last June that was used to launch attacks on other systems. In both cases, the intrusions involved PHPMyAdmin, a front-end tool used to manage databases. The MIT server was used to search for systems that were using vulnerable versions of PHPMyAdmin that could then be attacked. In the case of the water utility in Illinois, the fusion report said that the company’s log files contained references to PHPMyAdmin, but didn’t elaborate.
The hack of the SCADA system is the first breach of an industrial control system reported since the Stuxnet worm was found on systems in Iran and elsewhere last year. Stuxnet was the first known digital attack designed to target an industrial control system in order to cause physical damage. In the case of Stuxnet, the worm was designed to commandeer an industrial control system used at a uranium enrichment plant in Iran in order to periodically increase and decrease the speed of centrifuges used to enrich uranium and destroy the devices.
Weiss and other industrial control system experts warned last year that similar attacks would soon begin to target other industrial control systems in the U.S. and elsewhere. But no attacks had materialized – or at least been made public – until now.
“Everybody keeps asking how come you don’t see attacks on SCADA systems? Well, here it is guys,” Weiss said.
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Daily Benefactor News – Flu Breakthrough Promises A Vaccine To Kill All Strains
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Flu Breakthrough Promises A Vaccine To Kill All Strains – The Guardian
Scientists at Oxford University have successfully tested a universal flu vaccine that could work against all known strains of the illness, taking a significant step in the fight against a disease that affects billions of people each year.
The treatment – using a new technique and tested for the first time on humans infected with flu – targets a different part of the flu virus to traditional vaccines, meaning it does not need expensive reformulation every year to match the most prevalent virus that is circulating the world.
Developed by a team led by Dr Sarah Gilbert at Oxford’s Jenner Institute, the vaccine targets proteins inside the flu virus that are common across all strains, instead of those that sit on the virus’s external coat, which are liable to mutate.
If used widely a universal flu vaccine could prevent pandemics, such as the swine flu outbreaks of recent years, and end the need for a seasonal flu jab.
“The problem with flu is that you’ve got lots of different strains and they keep changing,” said Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute. “Occasionally one comes out of wildfowl or pigs and we’re not immune to it. We need new vaccines and we can’t make them fast enough.”
A universal vaccine would save the time and money now needed to create vaccines to fight whatever particular virus has emerged in any year. The government spent an estimated £1.2bn in preparing for the swine flu outbreak of last winter.
The process of developing a seasonal vaccine takes at least four months and if the flu strain is highly pathogenic – as in 1918 when millions of people died – the delay means more people get sick and die before the vaccine is ready.
This winter the government was criticised for its handling of the annual winter flu outbreak. Shortages of the seasonal flu vaccine became so acute in some areas that GPs were told to use old stocks of swine flu vaccine instead.
“If we were using the same vaccine year in, year out, it would be more like vaccinating against other diseases like tetanus,” said Gilbert. “It would become a routine vaccination that would be manufactured and used all the time at a steady level. We wouldn’t have these sudden demands or shortages – all that would stop.”
While traditional vaccines prompt the body to create antibodies, Gilbert’s vaccine boosts the number of the body’s T-cells, another key part of the immune system. These can identify and destroy body cells that have been infected by a virus.
In her trial, Gilbert vaccinated 11 healthy volunteers and then infected them, along with 11 non-vaccinated volunteers, with the Wisconsin strain of the H3N2 influenza A virus, which was first isolated in 2005. She monitored the volunteers’ symptoms twice a day, including runny noses, coughs and sore throats, and she calculated how much mucus everyone produced by weighing tissues they used. Though a small study, it was significant in that it was the first vaccine of its type to be tested on people.
Gilbert said: “This is the first time anyone’s tested if you can boost somebody’s T-cell response to flu and, having done that, if it helps protect against getting flu. It’s the first time anybody’s done that in people.”
Her results showed that the vaccine worked as planned. “Fewer of the people who were vaccinated got flu than the people who weren’t vaccinated,” said Gilbert. “We did get an indication that the vaccine was protecting people, not only from the numbers of people who got flu but also from looking at their T-cells before we gave them flu. The people we vaccinated had T-cells that were more activated. The people we hadn’t vaccinated had T-cells as well but they were in a resting state so they would probably have taken longer to do anything. The volunteers we vaccinated had T-cells that were activated, primed and ready to kill. There were more T-cells in people we vaccinated and they were more activated.” Gilbert has now sent her results to a scientific journal.
Hill said the trial proved two important things about the vaccine. “It showed that it was safe; and giving people flu virus in the presence of lots of T-cells induced by the vaccine was absolutely fine.” “What we’ll probably do is take the existing flu vaccine and mix in the new virus-vector vaccine, so you get both good antibodies and good T-cells. As well as giving you the antibodies for this season’s strain of flu, we’ll give you some T-cells that will cover this season, next year, next year and thereafter. It may not be 100% effective against all strains, but at least if there were a pandemic coming around, it would cover you for any strain.”
It is believed that the vaccine could provide better protection against flu for older people. The Jenner Institute scientists are already testing it on people over 50, a group that does not respond so well to traditional vaccines.
“The [traditional flu] vaccine efficacy is 70-80% of young people, but only 30-40% in old people,” said Hill. “What we’ll do is an efficacy trial in the elderly and try to improve that 30-40% to hopefully double that.”
Gilbert says that the older people get, the less efficient their immune systems are at making new antibodies. “Immune memory lasts longer than that, so if people have already got responses to something, it’s not so difficult to re-activate them. What we’re trying to do with our T-cell vaccine is re-activate the T-cell responses they’ve already got as a result of their previous exposure to flu.”
The next step for the T-cell vaccine is to stage a field trial in comparing several thousand people are given and not given the vaccine. It will take several more years, therefore, before Gilbert’s vaccine can be licensed for use alongside traditional, antibody-inducing vaccines.
Mark Fielder, a medical microbiologist at Kingston University, said: “This study represents some potentially very exciting findings with positive implications not only for influenza but possibly for infectious disease in a wider context. The findings are extremely encouraging in terms of the apparent efficacy of the virus and the that it appears to be a safe formulation. However, I think that a larger trial will be able to confirm these findings and let this technology be taken forward.”
He added: “T-cell vaccines are an exciting technology and we should encourage research and development into the area of vaccinology to help combat infectious diseases in all parts of the world.”
A traditional flu vaccine uses the external proteins on a flu virus (the H and N on strains such as H1N1 and H3N2) to prompt the body’s immune system to create antibodies. These proteins, however, are different across different strains and they are liable to mutate, making immune responses from vaccines limited.
Instead, Sarah Gilbert’s team at the Jenner Institute created a vaccine that targets two proteins inside the flu virus that are much more similar across strains and less liable to change over time. Nucleoprotein and matrix protein 1 are more than 90% identical in all strains of influenza A. “The nucleoprotein is wrapped around the viral RNA, there’s quite a lot of it in flu virus and infected cells,” she said.
“It’s essential for the virus because, if it doesn’t have the nucleoprotein, its genome isn’t stable. It can’t do without it and it can’t change it very much because it has a particular function and, if it mutates, it won’t work. Matrix protein 1 is a structural protein which is part of the inside of the shell around the virus.” Though Gilbert used the H3N2/Wisconsin strain in her trial, she can therefore be confident that her results will also hold for other strains.
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Daily Benefactor News – Indonesian Volcano Unleashes Biggest Blast Yet – More Articles
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Indonesian Volcano Unleashes Biggest Blast Yet – Fox News
Clouds of gray ash rumbled down the slopes of Indonesia’s most volatile volcano Saturday in its most powerful eruption of a deadly week, prompting soldiers to force reluctant villagers to evacuate amid fears of a larger blast.
On the other side of the archipelago, storms again prevented aid deliveries to increasingly desperate survivors of a tsunami – including a teenage girl with an open chest wound – that killed 413 people in the Mentawai islands. Relief workers found some comfort, however, when the number of missing dropped by half to 163 as searchers discovered more survivors and villagers who had fled to the hills returned home.
The simultaneous catastrophes have severely tested the emergency response network. Indonesia lies in the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” a cluster of fault lines prone to earthquakes and volcanic activity.
Mount Merapi, which sprang back to life early this week, unleashed a terrifying 21-minute eruption early Saturday, followed by more than 350 volcanic tremors and 33 ash bursts, said Surono, chief of the Center for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation.
The latest spewing of the notoriously unpredictable volcano forced the temporary closure of an airport and claimed another life, bringing the death toll this week to 36.
At least 47,000 people have fled the mountain’s wrath, according to the National Disaster Management Agency. Government camps well away from the base were overflowing with refugees, including most of the 11,000 people who live on the mountain’s fertile slopes. They were told Saturday, with signs the danger level was climbing, that they should expect to stay for three more weeks.
Despite such warnings, many people have returned to their land to check on precious crops and livestock. The new eruption triggered a chaotic pre-dawn exit, killing a 44-year-old woman who was fleeing by motorcycle, said Rusdiyanto, head of disaster management office in the main city of Yogyakarta.
For the first time Saturday, more than 2,000 troops were called in to help keep villagers clear of the mountain. Camouflaged soldiers stood guard in front of ash-covered homes and local television showed one woman who refused evacuation orders being carried away as she screamed in protest.
Still, the villagers may be later allowed to go back for a few hours a day if the volcano appears to be calm, said Djarot Nugroho, head of the Central Java disaster management agency, adding that they must return to the camps immediately if a new alarm is raised.
“Once the sirens go off, no excuse, everyone has to get back to the camps,” he said.
The eruption temporarily forced the closure of the airport in Yogyakarta, 12 miles south of the volcano, because of poor visibility and heavy ash on the south of the runway, said Naelendra, an airport official.
Despite earlier hopes that Merapi’s activity might be waning, scientists warned Saturday the worst may be yet to come.
High-pressure gas appeared to be building up behind a newly formed thick magna dome in the crater, “setting the stage, potentially, for a more explosive eruption,” said Subandrio, who heads the nearby volcanology center. “It’s a bad sign,” he said.
In the tsunami zone, where more than 23,000 people have been displaced, government agencies were forced to pull back boats and helicopters that had been ferrying noodles, sardines and sleeping mats to the most distant corners of the Mentawai islands because of stormy weather and rough seas.
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Judge Rules That 4-Year-Old Girl Can Be Sued Over Bike Accident – Terra
A Manhattan judge has decided that a 4-year-old girl is old enough to know better and can thereby be sued for negligence when she seriously injured an elderly woman in a bicycle accident.
According to reports the little girl was racing her a bicycle with training wheels, on the sidewalk of a building in Manhattan when she accidentally struck an 87-year-old woman.
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Terror Bombs Were Primed To Down Cargo Planes In Mid-Air -The Guardian
Sophisticated bombs contained in packages sent from Yemen were designed to explode in the air and bring down the cargo planes carrying them, the government confirmed.
Intelligence experts believe the use of the devices, contained in printer cartridges on board two Chicago-bound cargo planes, represents a shift in terrorist tactics to commercial targets.
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Wake Forest Scientists Successfully Grow ‘Miniature Livers’ – Local Tech Wire
Scientists at Wake Forest University have engineered a “miniature” liver in a lab that functions like the human organ.
It’s the latest tissue breakthrough at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which in 2006 reported the growth and transplant of bladders into humans. Anthony Atala, MD, the director of the institute, is a leading pioneer in the field of regenerative science.
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Grayson Accused Of Tea Party Plant – News Max
Alan Grayson, a Democratic congressman in Florida, is alleged to be assisting Peg Dunmire, a third candidate, in order to protect his seat from a challenge by Daniel Webster, a Republican.
Grayson, Dunmire, Webster, FloridaOne of the founders of the Florida “Tea Party”, which Ms. Dunmire represents, has business connections with Mr. Grayson, and his son has worked as an intern for the congressman.
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Astronauts, Space Scientists Call For Global Action To Prevent Asteroid Impact – Washington Examiner
Countries around the world must team up to prevent an asteroid from slamming into Earth, scientists and former astronauts said Friday.
NASA has tracked nearly 7,000 near-Earth objects that are bigger than several feet across. Of those, 1,157 are considered “potentially hazardous asteroids.” “We can’t escape the conclusion that one could happen tomorrow,” former NASA astronaut Thomas D. Jones said.
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During an interview on the program “CNN Late Edition” in 1992 Jerry Brown (D-CA) admitted that nearly everything he said in his first campaign for governor of California was a lie.
Jerry Brown: You run for office and the assumption is “Oh, I know what to do”. You don’t. I didn’t have a plan for California. Clinton doesn’t have a plan. Bush doesn’t have a plan.
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North Korea Opens Fire At South Korea – CTV
Tensions escalated along the North Korea-South Korea border on Friday after the North fired two rounds at its southern neighbour. South Korean troops immediately fired back.
The shots from North Korea were fired towards a South Korean guard post in the Demilitarized Zone between the two countries. No one was injured and it wasn’t clear whether the shots represented a military action.
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Man Shoots Himself While Sleepwalking – Stuff
A man likely shot himself while sleepwalking, Boulder, Colorado police say. The Daily Camera reported that 63-year-old Sanford Rothman told investigators he had no clear recollection of the incident early Tuesday morning.
He told police he woke up to a “bang” and realised he had suffered a gunshot wound to his knee. No one else was in Rothman’s home at the time.
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Deputy Wins Back Job After Torturing Frog With White-Out And A Stun Gun – Weekly Vice
Raul Alvarado, a 34-year-old Arizona man is fighting to get his Sheriff’s Office job back after he allegedly painted a frog with White-Out and then zapped it with a stun gun because “he was bored.”
According to the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office, Alvarado was terminated from his position after an internal investigation revealed that he tortured a frog back in August of 2009.
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German Anatomist Now Selling Bodies Online – Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Still wondering what to get that special someone for the holidays? Why not “earrings with giraffe tail slices” from German anatomist Guenter von Hagens’ new online shop for euro41.53 ($57.55)?
Mr. Von Hagens, famous for his “Body Worlds” traveling exhibition of preserved human bodies and body parts, said Friday his new Internet shop is going online on Nov. 3, 2010.
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Man’s Mouth Declared World’s Biggest By Guinness – Orange News
An Angolan man has been recognised as having the world’s widest mouth by the Guinness Book of World Records. Francisco Domingo Joaquim, 20 – aka the Angolan Jaw of Awe – can fit a 330ml can of pop into his mouth – sideways.
He can stretch his mouth more than six-and-a-half inches wide, and recently put his skills to the test at the the Big Mouth competition in Rome.
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Dave C
