For a long time researchers have been unable to discover what exactly causes asthma. Researchers at Harvard have found that “killer cells” are responsible for asthma, which is contrary to the popular theory that “helper cells” exasperate the development of asthma.
Finding the primary cell that causes asthma can lead to much more effective treatments.
A safer and relatively inexpensive drug has been used to reduce breast cancer in women, a drug that was originally meant to treat osteoporosis. The drug is raloxifene and according to the study reduced breast cancer in women by 50 percent!
“That’s a success rate as good as the rate for the cancer drug tamoxifen.
But patients taking raloxifene had fewer of the serious illnesses linked to tamoxifen, including cancer of the uterus and blood clots.”
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Go check it out and make the world a better place! Or just do something funny, but only if other do it too.
The Washington Post is reporting on a group of 12 volunteers has just started on the first human trial of an HIV vaccine. The trial is being conducted at four American universities.
The vaccine is administered in stages over the course of about 2 months. The recipient is exposed to fragments of HIV DNA, followed by a modified poxvirus which is meant to boost the immune system.
In this first stage trial, researchers will be checking to see if the vaccine is safe to be administered at low doses. If the trial is successful, it will move onto a larger trial, and eventually the researchers will test to see if the vaccine actually prevents AIDS from developing.
In animal trials involving rhesus macaques, the vaccine protected 22 of 23 animals.
A cheaper way to use solar power energy has been created that concentrates the sun intense rays on a very small focal point. The key is using the sun as heat, opposed to turning the light directly into electricity.
“It uses an old principle—that concentrated light is a great heat source—to achieve a level of efficiency on par with conventional power sources and far higher than traditional solar cells. Instead of converting sunlight directly into electricity, as those familiar rooftop solar panels do, it uses a concave array of mirrors to focus light on a central point, where the resulting heat causes compressed hydrogen to expand, driving a four-cylinder engine that turns a 25-kilowatt generator. “