GEN-ERIC News

Safer, more predictable warfarin therapy could come from pretreatment genotyping to individualize dosing, investigators reported. Combining data on polymorphisms for two genes with clinical variables resulted in an algorithm that accounted for 79% of the variability in therapeutic dose in orthopedics patients, Brian F. Gage, M.D., of Washington University here, and colleagues reported online and in the Sept. 1 issue of Blood. “Ultimately, with further validation and refinement, this pharmacogenetic model should yield a streamlined approach to refining the dose and improving the safety and efficiency of warfarin initiation,” the authors concluded. Marked variation in individual dosing requirements and a narrow therapeutic index have long complicated the use of warfarin. Doses that are too high or too low increase the risk of potentially serious adverse events, including fatal bleeding.

Government agents may soon find valuable information through an online-recommendation system like the one on Amazon.com: Spies who read this report, it might say, also found these reports useful. That is one of several features the Office of the Director of National Intelligence might borrow from mainstream technology as it designs its new Web-based information-sharing system. The DNI is working on a new system intended to “tunnel through” the 16 different intelligence-gathering agencies in hopes of streamlining data sharing, said Michael Wertheimer, DNI’s assistant deputy director for analytic transformation and technology. The system, called A-Space, will only be open to those cleared to use it and is scheduled to go live in December. The DNI said it was taking its cues from social networking sites, Web-based mail, online maps and other commonly used online tools. Next month, it will take its concepts to a conference in Chicago, where universities, tech companies and other government agencies will be invited to scrutinize the project. “This is a revolutionary concept for us,” Wertheimer said. “This is unlike any other technology we’ve created.” This is not the government’s first attempt to imitate consumer technology. Last year, inspired by the popular user-generated encyclopedia Wikipedia, the government launched Intellipedia, an internal site aimed at information exchange in the intelligence community.

AT&T is paying millions to be the exclusive United States provider of Apple’s much-hyped and glowingly reviewed gadget, the iPhone. It took 17-year-old George Hotz two months of work to undermine AT&T’s investment. Mr. Hotz, a resident of Glen Rock, N.J., published detailed instructions online this week that he says will let iPhone owners abandon AT&T’s service and use their phones on some competing cellular networks. Mr. Hotz’s method, which requires a soldering gun, a steady hand and a set of obscure software tools, is one of several techniques that have emerged over the last week to break the technological locks confining the iPhone to AT&T’s network. “This was about opening up the device for everyone,” Mr. Hotz said in an interview over his iPhone, which he was using on the network of T-Mobile, a rival to AT&T. Last fall, the Librarian of Congress issued an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, ruling that people can legally unlock their cellphones. But the ruling does not specifically apply to people like Mr. Hotz and the iPhoneSimFree group who distribute the unlocking tools.

Former US astronaut Lisa Nowak on Friday came face-to-face in court with the romantic rival she is accused of attacking after allegedly driving half-way across the United States wearing diapers. And in testimony that raised eyebrows in the courtroom, a police officer said Nowak had told him she had used the soiled baby diapers he found in the back of her car to avoid making too many stops on her long drive from Texas to Orlando, Florida. Nowak, whose bizarre saga has earned her nicknames such as “astronutty,’ asked the court to remove the monitoring bracelet she has to wear pending her September 24 trial. But the woman she allegedly attacked and plotted to kidnap testified that she is still scared of her.

Where would a good prostitute be without her (or his) signature platform shoes? In trouble, that’s where. The Aphrodite projects has taken steps to protect street-walkers with Platforms. The shoes have a built in audible alarm to scare off attackers, and when the alarm is triggered, the prostitute’s position is transmitted to either the police (in places where prostitution is legal) or to sex worker’s rights groups. The GPS unit uses APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System) a system which uses amateur radio frequencies to send data, which, ironically, was first developed at the United States Naval Academy (all the nice girls love a sailor).

So much for the meatball defense. A veteran counterterrorism detective’s claims that he flunked a drug test because his wife served him marijuana-spiked meatballs “simply weren’t credible,” and he has been fired by the New York Police Department, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said Thursday. With the dismissal, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly rejected an earlier recommendation by an administrative judge that the detective, Anthony Chiofalo, be reinstated. Kelly has final say on firings. An attorney for Chiofalo did not immediately respond to a telephone message seeking comment. Chiofalo, a 22-year-veteran assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, was suspended without pay in 2005 after a random drug test found marijuana in his system. The officer denied ever using drugs and demanded a hearing.

Rice University chemists have found a way to package some of nature’s most powerful radioactive particles inside DNA-sized tubes of pure carbon – a method they hope to use to target tiny tumors and even lone leukemia cells. “There are no FDA-approved cancer therapies that employ alpha-particle radiation,” said lead researcher Lon Wilson, professor of chemistry. “Approved therapies that use beta particles are not well-suited for treating cancer at the single-cell level because it takes thousands of beta particles to kill a lone cell. By contrast, cancer cells can be destroyed with just one direct hit from an alpha particle on a cell nucleus.” In the study, Wilson, Rice graduate student Keith Hartman, University of Washington (UW) radiation oncologist Scott Wilbur and UW research scientist Donald Hamlin, developed and tested a process to load astatine atoms inside short sections of carbon nanotubes. Because astatine is the rarest naturally occurring element on Earth – with less than a teaspoon estimated to exist in the Earth’s crust at any given time – the research was conducted using astatine created in a UW cyclotron.

A consortium of energy companies, working with the University of Texas at Austin, plans to research the use of nanotechnology to help produce oil and natural gas. The proposal came to light Thursday when the Justice Department announced it would not oppose the project on antitrust grounds. Nanotechnology involves the manufacture of materials at the nanometer scale — one one-billionth of a meter. A human hair is about 80,000 nano- meters wide. The joint venture partners, calling themselves the Advanced Energy Consortium, want to develop subsurface nanosensors that could be injected into oil and gas well bores. They believe the tiny nanosensors would migrate from the well hole into the pores of surrounding geological structures, collecting information producers could use to evaluate the potential of a reservoir. The partners are BP America, ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil Corp., Shell International E&P, Occidental Oil & Gas Corp., Halliburton Energy Services and Schlumberger Technology Corp., according to the Justice Department. UT’s Bureau of Economic Geology will manage the project. Each member will contribute $1 million a year for the first three years of the project to fund the research, according to information provided to the Justice Department by the consortium and quoted in the department’s response to the consortium’s lawyer. UT will conduct the research and will own any inventions resulting from the work, while the companies will have the right to make and sell any patented technology.

“Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”

“You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.”

“Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.”

“We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.”

“Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so.”

Astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. That’s got them scratching their heads about what’s just not there. The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That’s an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday. Astronomers have known for many years that there are patches in the universe where nobody’s home. In fact, one such place is practically a neighbor, a mere 2 million light years away. But what the Minnesota team discovered, using two different types of astronomical observations, is a void that’s far bigger than scientists ever imagined. “This is 1,000 times the volume of what we sort of expected to see in terms of a typical void,” said Minnesota astronomy professor Lawrence Rudnick, author of the paper that will be published in Astrophysical Journal. “It’s not clear that we have the right word yet … This is too much of a surprise.”

The Bush administration acknowledged for the first time that telecommunications companies assisted the government’s warrantless surveillance program and were being sued as a result, an admission some legal experts say could complicate the government’s bid to halt numerous lawsuits challenging the program’s legality. “Under the president’s program, the terrorist surveillance program, the private sector had assisted us,” Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said in an interview with the El Paso Times published Wednesday. His statement could help plaintiffs in dozens of lawsuits against the telecom companies, which allege that the companies participated in a wiretapping program that violated Americans’ privacy rights, former Justice Department officials said. Warrantless surveillance began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and was placed under supervision of a special court in January. An appeals court in San Francisco is weighing the government’s argument that these cases should be thrown out on the grounds that the subject matter is a “state secret” and that its disclosure would jeopardize national security. The government has repeatedly asserted that any relationship between the telecommunications firms and the National Security Agency’s spy program is classified. The firms’ alleged cooperation and other details of the program, government lawyers have argued, are so sensitive that they cannot be disclosed.