A pill could soon radio signals from inside your gut to help doctors diagnose diseases from ulcers to cancer to inflammation, according to a new study.

Scientists have developed a small, swallowable capsule that mixes synthetic biology and electronics to detect bleeding in the digestive tract.

The system can be adapted for a wide range of medical, environmental and other uses, the researchers say.

The biological part of the pill uses bacteria engineered to glow when exposed to heme, the iron-containing molecule in blood.

The electronic side includes a tiny light detector, computer, chip, battery, and a transmitter that sends data to a cell phone or computer.

“A major challenge for sensing in the GI tract is, the space available for a device is very limited,” said Massachusetts Institute of Technology electrical engineer Phillip Nadeau.

Using very low-power electronics they designed, Nadeau and colleagues fit all the components into a capsule about 3 centimeters long by 1 centimeter wide.

It’s still a bit big to swallow. But Nadeau says with engineering work it can likely be made about a third that size.

The engineered bacteria are contained in chambers covered by a membrane that lets small molecules in but does not let the organisms out. The researchers say the bacteria can be engineered to die if they accidentally leak from the capsule. Or future models may just use the key enzymes, rather than whole bacteria.

In laboratory tests, the pill successfully distinguished pigs fed small amounts of blood from those not given blood. The capsule has not yet been tested on humans. The team aims to do so in the next year or two.

Since the components are all fairly cheap to manufacture, the researchers speculate that the cost would be in the range of tens to hundreds of dollars.

And they say the same platform could be used to detect markers of a range of illnesses. Or, it could be used to sense chemicals in the environment.

“It’s really exciting, and I think it’s got a lot of legs,” said Rice University bioengineer Jeff Tabor, who was not part of the research team.

But Tabor notes that the sensors may need to be much more sensitive than what was used in the pig tests. He says there may be much less blood in the guts of actual patients than what the pigs were given. Other conditions may have the same limitations.

“For many actual diseases, you might have far less of the molecule that you need to sense available to you,” he added.

The research is published in the journal Science.
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From: MeNeedIt

Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein is expected to enter a plea in a New York court on Tuesday to charges of rape and sexual assault, the first cases involving the disgraced producer to be tested in criminal court since scores of accusers emerged last year, New York court documents showed.

Weinstein, 66, has said through his lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, that he has never had nonconsensual sex and plans to plead not guilty.

His appearance in Manhattan Supreme Court on Tuesday morning comes after a grand jury indicted him last week in two cases.

Weinstein turned himself in at a New York police station on May 25, and was taken to court in handcuffs for his initial arraignment. A judge ordered him released on a $1 million cash bail on condition that he surrender his U.S. passport and agree to wear a location-tracking device. He was ordered to remain in New York state or Connecticut.

More than 70 women have accused Weinstein, the co-founder of the Miramax film studio and The Weinstein Co, of sexual misconduct, including rape, with some allegations dating back decades, all of which he has denied.

The accusations, first reported by the New York Times and the New Yorker last year, gave rise to the #MeToo movement, in which hundreds of women have publicly accused powerful men in business, government and entertainment of misconduct.

Prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office did not name the two women accusing Weinstein of sexual assault in the criminal complaint filed against him following a months-long investigation with the New York Police Department.

The details of one of the cases closely align with the account of Lucia Evans, a former aspiring actress who told the New Yorker that Weinstein forced her to give him oral sex in 2004.

If convicted on the most serious charges, Weinstein could face between five and 25 years in prison.

Once a fixture of elite Manhattan and Los Angeles society, Weinstein has been ostracized since the accusations became public. He went to Arizona for sex addiction therapy.

The Weinstein Co.’s board fired him, the company filed for bankruptcy in March, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences expelled him. In years past, the Academy had showered him with Oscars for a string of films that helped define independent cinema in the 1990s, including “Shakespeare in Love” and “Pulp Fiction.”

London’s Metropolitan Police and Los Angeles prosecutors have said they are reviewing accusations of sexual assault against him.
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From: MeNeedIt

The U.S. Defense Department’s inspector general has opened an investigation into misconduct allegations against White House physician Ronny Jackson, the inspector general’s office said in a statement on Monday.

President Donald Trump nominated Jackson to be veterans affairs secretary in March, but Jackson withdrew from consideration a month later amid allegations he had overseen a hostile work environment as White House physician, drank on the job and allowed the overprescribing of drugs.

Jackson, a U.S. Navy rear admiral, has denied the allegations.

“The DoD Office of Inspector General has initiated an investigation into allegations related to Rear Admiral (Lower Half) Ronny L. Jackson,” Bruce Anderson, spokesman for the inspector general’s office, said in a statement.

Democrats on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee have said more than 20 current and former colleagues had come forward to accuse Jackson of prescribing himself medications, getting drunk at a Secret Service party and wrecking a government vehicle.

Jackson has worked as a presidential physician since 2006. After withdrawing his nomination for the VA post, Jackson stopped serving as Trump’s lead physician.
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From: MeNeedIt

Demi Lovato’s best-known songs include “Sorry Not Sorry.” But when it comes to sharing details of a sexual joke on her bodyguard, she is sorry — mostly.

The pop singer triggered a flurry of negative reactions over the weekend when, in a largely innocuous exchange with fans on Twitter, she was asked to name the funniest prank she has ever pulled off.

Lovato said that she hired a sex worker to enter the hotel room of her bodyguard when they were staying in Las Vegas, where prostitution is legal.

“She walked into his room without permission and grabbed him in his ‘area’ and he freaked,” Lovato said, sharing her amusement.

A number of Twitter users took Lovato to task, saying she was admitting to a serious episode of sexual harassment, an issue that has drawn growing attention amid the rise of the #MeToo movement.

Lovato deleted the post and quipped: “I swear I could tweet something about craving jelly beans and it would offend someone.”

But she also urged upset people to revisit her song “Warrior” in which she speaks of being a survivor of sexual abuse.

“Maybe you’ll have more compassion for a simple mistake,” she wrote, while adding: “So sorry if anyone was offended.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Microsoft on Monday said it will buy software development platform GitHub, in a deal worth $7.5 billion which will blend two opposite corporate cultures.

The tech giant, based in Washington state, is a heavyweight in terms of software whose source codes are not openly available or modifiable, exactly the counter of GitHub’s philosophy.

Created in 2008, GitHub allows developers to cooperatively manage software and has more than 28 million users around the world.

“Microsoft is a developer-first company, and by joining forces with GitHub we strengthen our commitment to developer freedom, openness and innovation,” Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said in a statement.

“We recognize the community responsibility we take on with this agreement and will do our best work to empower every developer to build, innovate and solve the world’s most pressing challenges.”

The veteran tech firm said it “will acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock.”

Subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory review, the deal is expected to be finalized by the end of the year, Microsoft said in a statement on its website.

“GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for all developers in all industries,” Microsoft said.

“Developers will continue to be able to use the programing languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects — and will still be able to deploy their code to any operating system, any cloud and any device.”

Microsoft has begun moving towards an open source software culture, proposing for example Linux on its Windows Azure cloud service. It also started a training program with Linux and others.

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Nat Friedman, founder of Xamarin and an open source veteran, will become GitHub CEO.

GitHub’s current chief executive, Chris Wanstrath, will move to Microsoft as a technical fellow to work on strategic software initiatives.

Writing on The GitHub Blog, Wanstrath said that he “could have never imagined” news of such a merger, when open source and business were considered as different “as oil and water” a decade ago.

But he said Microsoft and GitHub have already collaborated on projects, and “their vision for the future closely matches our own.”

He said “both believe that software development needs to become easier, more accessible, more intelligent, and more open, so more people can become developers and existing developers can spend more time focusing on the unique problems they’re trying to solve.”

In April, Microsoft reported that its earnings rose 35 percent to $7.4 billion in the fiscal third quarter, with revenue up 16 percent to $26.8 billion.

Earnings were lifted by gains in its core cloud computing operations for business.

Microsoft said the GitHub acquisition is expected to have a negative impact on 2019 earnings but positive beginning in 2020.
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From: MeNeedIt

A woman with an aggressive form of breast cancer which defied chemotherapy and spread to other organs, was cured with an experimental treatment that triggered her immune system, researchers said Monday.

The woman has been cancer-free for two years, reported the U.S.-based team, presenting their results as “a new immunotherapy approach” for the treatment of patients with a late-stage form of the disease.

Other experts not involved in the work hailed it as “exciting”.

So-called “immunotherapy” has already been shown to work in some people with cancer of the lung, cervix, blood cells (leukaemia), skin (melanoma) and bladder.

But an immune breakthrough for bowel, breast and ovary cancer has remained elusive.

In the latest study, a team extracted immune cells called lymphocytes from the patient, tweaked them in the lab, then reinjected them.

The woman was 49 when she signed up for the clinical trial after several attempts at a cure through conventional treatments had failed, said the study published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine.

The cancer had spread to various parts of her body, including the liver.

A person’s immune system is designed to kill invaders, including rogue, cancerous cells. But it can fail, often because it cannot recognize cancer cells containing the patient’s own DNA.

Immunotherapy trains a patient’s own immune cells to recognize and fight cancer.

For the new study, researchers took lymphocytes from a tumor in the woman’s body and scanned them for specific types which reacted to mutant, cancerous cells.

Complete regression

These were reactivated or “switched on” in the lab and injected back, along with a so-called “immune checkpoint inhibitor” — another type of immunotherapy that has shown success in other types of cancer.

This resulted in a “highly personalized” anti-cancer therapy that yielded “complete tumor regression,” the researchers wrote.

In a comment also published by Nature Medicine, expert Laszlo Radvanyi from Canada’s Ontario Institute for Cancer Research said the woman’s response to the treatment was “unprecedented” for such advanced breast cancer.

This work showed “we are now at the cusp of a major revolution in finally realizing the elusive goal of being able to target the plethora of mutations in cancer through immunotherapy,” he wrote.

In a reaction via the Science Media Centre in London, immunotherapy professor Alan Melcher of The Institute of Cancer Research said the trial was “fascinating and exciting.”

The work “provides a major ‘proof-of-principle’ step forward, in showing how the power of the immune system can be harnessed to attack even the most difficult-to-treat cancers,” he said.

Peter Johnson, an oncology professor at the Cancer Research UK Centre, said the study confirmed the immune system can recognize some cancers, and “if this can be stimulated in the right way, even cancers that have spread to different parts of the body may be treatable.”

The technique is “highly specialized and complex”, he cautioned, and may not be suitable for many patients.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

Serena Williams announced her shock withdrawal from the French Open with injury on Monday just minutes before her scheduled fourth-round clash against long-time bitter rival and fellow Grand Slam icon Maria Sharapova.

The 36-year-old said she had suffered a pectoral muscle injury in her third-round win over Julia Goerges and “can’t serve at all.”

The 23-time Grand Slam champion added that she would stay in Paris for scans on the injury to find out how long she will be out of action.

“I unfortunately have been having some issues with my pec, my pec muscle, and [it] has unfortunately been getting worse to the point where right now I can’t actually serve. It’s kind of hard to play when I can’t physically serve,” she explained.

She was unable to say whether or not she would be fit for Wimbledon which gets underway in four weeks’ time.

“I’m beyond disappointed,” added three-time Roland Garros champion Williams who was playing in her first Grand Slam since winning the 2017 Australian Open while two months pregnant.

She was also in just her third tournament of the year after giving birth to daughter Olympia in September.

“I gave up so much time with my daughter and time with my family all for this moment. So it’s really difficult to be in this situation.”

The shock withdrawal came just minutes before she was due on Court Philippe Chatrier to face fierce rival Sharapova.

Williams has not lost to the Russian since 2004, winning the last 18 matches.

It had been the most eagerly-awaited match of the tournament, coming just two days after Williams had blasted Sharapova’s autobiography for being “100 percent hearsay” when it came to references about her.

‘Sacrificed so much’

Sharapova, the champion in Paris in 2012 and 2014, goes on to play a first quarter-final at the Slams since losing to Williams at the same stage at the 2016 Australian Open.

It was in Melbourne that Sharapova tested positive for meldonium after which she served a 15-month doping ban.

The Russian will face either 2016 champion Garbine Muguruza or Lesia Tsurenko of Ukraine for a semi-final place.

“I was looking forward to my match against Serena and am disappointed that she had to withdraw,” said Sharapova in a statement.

“I wish her a speedy recovery and hope she returns to the tour soon.”

Monday’s bombshell announcement was the first time in her 20-year career that Williams had pulled out during a Grand Slam event.

Despite her well-documented fall-outs with Sharapova, Williams insisted she had been looking forward to the match.

“I love playing Maria — it’s just a match I always get up for. Her game matches so well against mine.”

Despite playing just four matches in 2018 before Roland Garros, Williams played doubles in Paris with sister Venus.

They had been knocked out on Sunday by Andreja Klepac and Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez with the American sisters getting a 6-0 bagel in the final set.

Serena had gone into that match wearing her striking all-black catsuit but she admitted she had had to tape her serving arm to try and protect the injury.

“Every match has been getting better for me. Physically I’m doing great.

“I sacrificed so much to be at this event. I can only take solace in the fact I’m going to continue to get better.

“And I had such a wonderful performance in my first Grand Slam back. I just feel like it’s only going to do better.”

However, her status for Wimbledon where she has been champion seven times, will only become clear once she has had an MRI.

“I made a promise that if I’m not at least 60 percent or 50 percent, then I probably shouldn’t play,” she added.

“The fact that I physically can’t serve at all is a good indication that maybe I should just go back to the drawing board and stay positive and try to get better and not get it to a point where it could be a lot worse.”

 
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From: MeNeedIt

German chemicals and pharmaceuticals giant Bayer will discard the name Monsanto when it takes over the controversial US seeds and pesticides producer this week, it said Monday.

But Bayer executives insisted Monsanto practices rejected by many environmentalists, including genetic modification of seeds and deployment of “crop protection” technologies like pesticides, were vital to help feed a growing world population.

“The company name is and will remain Bayer. Monsanto will no longer be a company name,” chief executive Werner Baumann told journalists during a telephone conference.

Bayer’s $63 billion (54 billion euro) buyout of Monsanto — one of the largest in German corporate history — is set to close Thursday, birthing a global giant with 115,000 employees and revenues of some 45 billion euros.

Bosses plan to name the merged agrichemical division Bayer Crop Science once the merger is complete, German business newspaper Handelsblatt reported, citing “industry sources”.

The Monsanto brand “was an issue for some time for Monsanto management,” noted Liam Condon, president of Bayer’s crop science division, adding that the US firm’s employees were “not fixated on the Monsanto brand” but “proud of what they’ve achieved.”

Weedkiller arms race

Producing high-tech genetically modified seeds, many designed to grow crops resistant to its proprietary pesticides, Monsanto has been a target for environmentalist protests and lawsuits over harm to health and the environment for decades.

“It’s understandable that Bayer wants to avoid having bought Monsanto’s negative image with the billions it has spent on the firm,” said Greenpeace campaigner Dirk Zimmermann.

“More important than giving up the Monsanto name would be a fundamental transformation in the new mega-company’s policies,” he added, accusing Bayer of having “no interest in developing future-proof, sustainable solutions for agriculture.”

Activists fear the firm’s addition to Bayer will further reduce competition in the hotly-contested agrichemical sector, limiting farmers’ and consumers’ choices if they want to avoid GM and chemically treated crops.

What’s more, in recent years weeds have begun to emerge that are resistant to products like Monsanto staple glyphosate, marketed as Roundup alongside “Roundup-ready” seeds beginning in the 1990s.

As agrichemical firms scramble to respond with new pesticides and resistant seeds, there are fears of an arms race with ever-more-potent weedkillers.

Some scientists already suspect glyphosate could cause cancer, with a 2015 World Health Organization study determining it was “probably carcinogenic” — although Bayer and other defenders of the chemical have contested the research.

In 2017, attempts to block the European Union’s five-year renewal of its approval for the weedkiller were unsuccessful.

But activists are lobbying governments and France has vowed to outlaw the substance within three years.

When launching the Monsanto takeover bid, Bayer also promised it would not introduce genetically modified crops in Europe.

“We will listen to our critics and work together where we find common ground,” Baumann said, but added that “agriculture is too important to allow ideological differences to bring progress to a standstill”.

With the world population set to reach almost 10 billion people by 2050, Bayer argues its products and methods are needed to meet demand for food.

‘Number one in seeds’

Bayer has put massive resources behind the deal, raising $57 billion in financing including a new share issue worth six billion euros announced Sunday.

It will also sell large parts of its existing agrichemical and crop seeds business to BASF in concessions to competition authorities on both sides of the Atlantic.

Once the buyout and the sales to BASF are completed, Leverkusen-based Bayer’s crop science business plus Monsanto will account for around half its turnover, with the remainder coming from pharmaceuticals and over-the-counter health products.

At around 19.7 billion euros in 2017, Monsanto and Bayer’s combined agriculture sales outweighed those of competitors ChemChina, DowDuPont and BASF, according to figures provided by Bayer.

“We estimate that Bayer will become number one in seeds and number two in crop protection globally” following the merger, analysts at Standard and Poor’s wrote Monday.

Nevertheless, the ratings agency downgraded its score for Bayer’s debt from “A-” to “BBB,” while upgrading the outlook to “stable”.

“Bayer’s stronger business position in agriculture products… does not fully offset the increased debt in its capital structure,” the analysts wrote.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

Institutional investors with $26 trillion in assets under management called on Group of Seven leaders on Monday to phase out the use of coal in power generation to help limit climate change, despite strong opposition from Washington.

Government plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions were too weak to limit warming as agreed by world leaders at a Paris summit in 2015, they wrote. U.S. President Donald Trump announced a year ago that he was pulling out of the pact.

“The global shift to clean energy is under way, but much more needs to be done by governments,” the group of 288 investors wrote in a statement before the G7 summit in Canada on June 8-9.

Signatories included Allianz Global Investors, Aviva Investors, DWS, HSBC Global Asset Management, Nomura Asset Management, Australian Super, HESTA and some major U.S. pension funds including CalPERS, it said.

As part of action to slow climate change, the investors called on governments to “phase out thermal coal power worldwide by set deadlines,” to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and to “put a meaningful price on carbon.”

The investors also urged governments to strengthen national plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and to ensure that companies improve climate-related financial reporting.

Stephanie Pfeifer, CEO of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGC), said it was the first time that such a broad group of investors had called for a phase-out of thermal coal, used in power generation.

“There is a lot more momentum in the investor community” to put pressure on governments, she told Reuters. The IIGC was among backers of the statement, delivered to G7 governments and to the United Nations.

G7 nations Canada, Britain, France and Italy are members of a “Powering Past Coal” alliance of almost 30 nations set up last year and which seeks to halt use of coal power by 2030. Japan, Germany and the United States are not members.

The investors wrote that countries and companies that implement the Paris climate agreement “will see significant economic benefits and attract increased investment.” U.S. gross domestic product was $18.6 trillion in 2016, World Bank data show.

Trump doubts scientific findings that heatwaves, downpours and rising sea levels are linked to man-made greenhouse gas emissions and wants to bolster the U.S. fossil fuel industry.

Worldwide, coal is now used to generate almost 40 percent of electricity.
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From: MeNeedIt

Most women diagnosed with early stages of common forms of breast cancer may be able to avoid having to undergo chemotherapy, according to a new study. 

The study, led by Dr. Joseph Sparano and published Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that women who had small tumors that had not spread to the lymph nodes did almost as well with medications as those who received chemotherapy. 

“The impact is tremendous,” said Sparano, of Montefiore Medical Center in New York. The study, the largest ever done on breast cancer treatment, could spare about 70,000 American women from having to undergo the toxic treatment every year. 

The study found that a genetic test of the tumors could determine which women would benefit from taking only a drug that blocks the hormone estrogen or stops the body from making it.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide. More than half the women diagnosed worldwide have cancer that is hormone-positive, where the growth of cancer cells is stimulated by estrogen or progesterone. 

After following 10,273 women for an average of nine years. researches determined that for 83.3 percent of those on hormone therapy alone the original cancer did not return and they did not develop cancer elsewhere in their bodies. For the group that had both hormone and chemotherapy, the rate was minutely better at 84.3 percent.

The overall survival rate for both groups was 93.9 percent and 93.8 percent, respectively.
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From: MeNeedIt

Three astronauts from the International Space Station have safely returned to Earth after completing a five-month mission. 

American Scott Tingle, Russian Anton Shkaplerov and Japan’s Norishige Kanai touched down at 12:39 UTC Sunday in Kazakhstan.

Shkaplerov, who was the first to be helped out of the Russian Soyuz space capsule, said, “We are a bit tired but happy with what we have accomplished and happy to be back on Earth. We are glad the weather is sunny.”

The trio will undergo medical tests in the Kazakh city of Karaganda before flying on to Moscow or Houston. 

Shkaplerov will return to Moscow with a football he brought back from the space station. He and another cosmonaut were filmed practicing with the ball aboard the ISS. The Russian news agency Tass reported that the ball will be used in the opening game of the World Cup later this month. 

Three astronauts, Americans Drew Feustel and Ricky Arnold and Russian Oleg Artemyev, remain on the ISS. They will be joined by three others who will take off Wednesday from the Baikonur complex in Kazakhstan.
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From: MeNeedIt

Governments around the world plan to strike back harder at snakebite, a scourge that kills tens of thousands of people a year.

A World Health Organization (WHO) resolution raises the priority of improving snakebite prevention as well as access to effective and affordable anti-venom. The measure was approved by 192 countries in late May.

The WHO estimates that venomous snakes bite 1.8 million to 2.7 million people a year, killing between 81,000 and 138,000 of them.

“For every person who dies following a snakebite, another four or five are left with disabilities such as blindness, restricted mobility or amputation, and post-traumatic stress disorder,” the WHO reports.

Snakebite envenoming is most prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia, the WHO reports. People in rural, impoverished areas there and elsewhere are most at risk, challenged by poor or remote health systems, and limited diagnoses, ambulances and other emergency care – including reliable anti-venom.

In sub-Saharan Africa, just 2 percent of people bitten by venomous snakes have access to appropriate anti-venom, says Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), the aid group also known as Doctors Without Borders.

“We need to know better the data [on] where most cases take place,” said Julien Potet, MSF’s policy adviser on neglected tropical diseases, speaking by phone last week from Geneva. “We need to better regulate the quality of the anti-venoms, to distribute them accordingly in the areas of highest need” and to make them affordable, “because otherwise they [patients] will not be able to access the product.”

Potet pointed out that French pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur has stopped manufacturing Fav-Afrique, the only serum known to effectively treat bites from some sub-Saharan African snakes. The last batches of the company’s serum expired in June 2016.

Production of the anti-venom takes roughly two years, the in-Pharma Technologist website reported.  It said the pharmaceutical company cited manufacturing costs, and competition from cheaper but less effective treatments, in its decision to stop producing Fav-Afrique.

MSF has estimated that the anti-venom costs a patient $250 to $500 for treatment.

Sanofi Pasteur announced in January that it had agreed to divest its anti-venom immunoglobulin range, which includes Fav-Afrique, to the U.K.-based firm MicroPharm.

“We hope this resolution will trigger some actions to better regulate the market … and to prioritize and subsidize” anti-venom production and distribution, Potet said.

“Now we need to make sure this resolution is translated into a concrete, fully funded action plan,” he added.

A WHO working group is expected to offer recommendations on how governments can bolster data collection, training for health workers, access to care and support for effective anti-venoms, according to Devex, a website aimed at the global development community. It said the group’s report is expected by Nov. 30.         

Devex also reported that David Williams, the group’s chair, estimated “about $6 million was needed in 2018-2019 to prepare the recommendations, improve surveillance, deliver antivenoms, and address other technical and medical challenges.”

This story originated in VOA’s English to Africa Service.
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From: MeNeedIt