Smart lasers could make cancer biopsies painless, help speed new drugs to market

Public Release: 31-Jan-2011

Biopsies in the future may be painless and noninvasive, thanks to smart laser technology being developed at Michigan State University. To test for skin cancer, patients today must endure doctors cutting away a sliver of skin, sending the biopsy to a lab and anxiously awaiting the results. Using laser microscopes that deploy rapid, ultra-short pulses to identify molecules, doctors may soon have the tools to painlessly scan a patient's troublesome mole and review the results on the spot, said Marcos Dantus.
National Science Foundation

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‘Countdown to Zero’—or Apocalypse, Whichever Comes First

Film Review
By Richard Schickel
Truthdig
July 29, 2010

“Countdown to Zero” is an intelligent, graphically sophisticated documentary film about what is almost certainly the most important issue confronting the world today—nuclear proliferation. Its director, Lucy Walker, interviewed 84 individuals, ranging from Valerie Plame Wilson to Tony Blair, over the course of a year’s intermittent shooting, of whom 31 made it into her final cut. In addition, she grabbed an indeterminate number of on-the-street interviews with ordinary people, designed to determine what, if anything, they know about this problem...

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Agency That Oversees Offshore Drilling to Be Split by Obama Administration

By Erika Bolstad
McClatchy Newspapers
May 11, 2010

The troubled federal agency that oversees all aspects of offshore leasing will split in two in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil rig explosion, an Interior official confirmed Tuesday...

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The Big Bang Machine And The Mind Of God

By Marcelo Gleiser
National Public Radio
April 20, 2010

...Over the next few years, physicists will have a new tool to probe deep into the heart of matter. The hype is well-deserved: The LHC is the largest machine ever built in the history of civilization, the collective effort of thousands of scientists from across the world. But what will it do, really? Will it be able to solve all the questions that it's meant to? Or is the PR surrounding it masking the reality that, if it fails, it may well represent the end of high-energy physics as we know it?

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Pat Mooney on the Dangers of Geoengineering and Manipulating the Planet to Combat Climate Change

DemocracyNow!
April 20, 2010

Supporters of geoengineering have proposed radical ways to alter the planet to decrease the level of greenhouse gas emissions. Proposals include creating artificial volcanoes to pollute the atmosphere with sulphur particles, fertilizing the oceans and placing sun-deflecting aluminum foil in the sky. But opposition is growing to geoengineering. Here at the World Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change in Bolivia, the ETC Group is launching an international campaign against geoengineering experiments. We speak with the group’s founder, Pat Mooney, a Right Livelihood Award winner...

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