New Cancer Discovery, Hormone to Blame

ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) - A breakthrough discovery reveals one exacting hormone is responsible for helping a cancer enzyme cause a type of deadly red blood cell cancer.

Thomas Bumm, M.D., lead researcher and member of the Oregon Health & Science University Cancer Institute was working with the JAK2 cancer enzyme that is known to cause a blood thickening red blood cell cancer called polycythemia vera when he found that a specific hormone was actually fueling the JAK2 enzyme and causing the cancer to flourish.“Sometimes cancer cells need other things to help them produce. And this is what I’ve found and it’s a hormone called TNF-alpha,” Dr. Bumm told Ivanhoe. “The first description of this hormone was that it kills cancer cells, and we’ve found now that it actually is completely different it actually helps cancer cells to grow.”

Drugs to help suppress TNF-alpha are already in existence and are used to treat patients with autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis. Dr. Bumm thinks these drugs may be efficient for treating patients with polycythemia vera.

Although this discovery is promising, Dr. Bumm says it’s very preliminary. “The next step is looking at this more closely, and determining whether TNF-alpha plays a role in other cancers,” said Dr. Bumm.

Geena Davis-Women's Rights Group

Geena Davis Appointed to Women's Rights GroupLOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Oscar-winning actress Geena Davis has a new role -- on a Californian commission promoting the rights of women.

Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the appointment of Davis, a Democrat, to the Commission on the Status of Women on Tuesday in a statement that also outlined her previous work with various women's groups.

The commission, a nonpartisan state agency, works with Schwarzenegger to promote equality and justice for women and girls. Davis' appointment , which pays $100 a day, requires confirmation by the California state senate.

Davis, who has starred in films such as "Tootsie," "The Accidental Tourist" and "Thelma and Louise," is the founder of the Geena Davis Institute confirmation by the California state senate.
Davis, who has starred in films such as "Tootsie," "The Accidental Tourist" and "Thelma and Louise," is the founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in the Media.

She set the group up after watching G-rated films and shows with her young daughter with the aim of reducing gender stereotyping in film and television and increasing the percentages of female characters.

Davis is also a member of Mensa International, the well-known society for people with high IQs that are in the statistical top two percent.

The Cabinet

The ritual of the Cabinet dates back to the beginnings of the Presidency itself. recognized in Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, the Cabinet's position is to advise the President on any subject he may need relating to the duties of each member's individual office.




The Cabinet includes the Vice President and the heads of 15 executive departments — the Secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, as well as the Attorney General.

Super computer

A supercomputer is a computer that leads the world in terms of processing capacity and speed of calculation. New York World newspaper in 1929 refers to a large custom-built tabulators IBM made for Columbia University first used the term “Super Computing”. Super Computers introduced in the year 1960s and were designed by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), and led the market into the 1970s. The term supercomputer itself is rather fluid, and today's supercomputer tends to become tomorrow's also-ran.

Technologies developed for Supercomputers include:
Vector processing
Liquid cooling Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA)
Striped disks
Parallel file systems

Supercomputers traditionally gained their speed over conventional computers through the use of innovative designs that allow them to perform many tasks in parallel, as well as complex detail engineering. They tend to be specialized for certain types of computation, usually numerical calculations, and perform poorly at more general computing tasks. Their memory hierarchy is very carefully designed to ensure the processor; much of the performance difference between slower computers and supercomputers is due to the memory hierarchy. Their I/O systems tend to be designed to support high bandwidth, with latency less of an issue, because supercomputers are not used for transaction processing.

Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as weather forecasting, climate research (including research into global warming), molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and research into nuclear fusion), cryptanalysis, and the like. Major universities, military agencies and scientific research laboratories are heavy users.

Tiger

The tiger is a mammal of the Felidae family, one of four large cats in the Panther a genus. Native to the mainland of southeastern Asia, the tiger is an apex predator and the largest feline species in the world, similar in size to the biggest fossil felids. The Bengal Tiger is the most general subspecies of tiger, constituting approximately 80% of the entire tiger population, and is found in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, and Nepal. An endangered species, the popular of the world's tigers now live in captivity.

The tiger is introverted and territorial, preferring cover in deep forest, but also ranging in open areas. The cat hunts by stalk-and-ambush and may take a variety of mid- and large-sized prey, particularly ungulates. Males are much larger than females and have bigger home ranges. Amongst the nine extant tiger subspecies, there is major size variation.

Evolution

Life, as we understand it, is currently only known to exist on the planet Earth. The origin of life is still a poorly understood process, but it is thought to have occurred about 3.9 to 3.5 billion years ago during the hadean or archean eons on a primordial earth that had a substantially different environment than is found at present. These life forms possessed the basic traits of self-replication and inheritable traits. Once life had appeared, the process of evolution by natural selection resulted in the formation of ever-more diverse life forms.

Species that were unable to adapt to the changing environment and competition from other life forms became extinct. However, the fossil record retains evidence of many of these older species. Current fossil and DNA evidence shows that all existing species can trace a continual ancestry back to the first primitive life forms.

The advent of photosynthesis in very basic forms of plant life worldwide allowed the sun's energy to be harvested to create conditions allowing for more complex life. The resultant oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere and gave rise to the ozone layer. The incorporation of smaller cells within larger ones resulted in the development of yet more complex cells called eukaryotes. Cells within colonies became increasingly specialized, resulting in true multicellular organisms. With the ozone layer absorbing harmful ultraviolet radiation, life colonized the surface of Earth.

Gear

A gear is a wheel with teeth around its circumference, the purpose of the teeth being to mesh with similar teeth on another mechanical device possibly another gear wheel so that force can be transmitted between the two strategies in a direction tangential to their surfaces. A non-toothed wheel can transmit some tangential force but will slip if the force is large; teeth put off slippage and permit the transmission of large forces.

A gear can mesh with any device having teeth friendly with the gear's teeth. Such devices include racks and other non-rotating policy; however, the most common condition is for a gear to be in mesh with another gear. In this case revolution of one of the gears necessarily causes the other gear to rotate. In this way, rotational motion can be transferred from one position to another. While gears are sometimes used simply for this reason to transmit rotation to another shaft perhaps their most significant feature is that, if the gears are of asymmetrical sizes, a mechanical advantage is also achieved, so that the rotational speed, and torque, of the second gear are dissimilar from that of the first. In this way, gears provide a means of increasing or decreasing a turning speed, or a torque.