THE WORLD HUMANITARIAN PEACE AND ECOLOGY MOVEMENT.

Sunday, July 23, 2017

Catching speeding stars

This animation reveals the evolution of stars in our Galaxy over the past million+ years.

It starts from the positions of stars in the sky 1 035 000 years ago, which were calculated using data from the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution, or TGAS, one of the products of the first Gaia data release. The video follows the evolution of stellar positions until the present day, ending with a view of the sky as measured by Gaia between 2014 and 2015.

Highlighted in yellow are the trajectories of six special stars: these are hypervelocity stars, moving through the Galaxy at several hundred of km/s. While it might not be apparent from the video, which shows the motions of stars as projected on the sky, they are moving through space much faster than the galactic average.

Scientists spotted these speeding stars from the TGAS data set of two million stars with the help of an artificial neural network – software that mimics a human brain – and they are looking forward to finding many more in future Gaia data releases.

These stars owe their high speeds to past interactions with the supermassive black hole that sits at the centre of the Milky Way and, with a mass of four million Suns, governs the orbits of stars in its vicinity. Having travelled great distances through the Galaxy, they provide crucial information about the gravitational field of the Milky Way from the centre to its outskirts.

One of the six stars (labelled 1 at the end of the video) seems to be speeding so fast, at over 500 km/s, that it is no longer bound by the gravity of the Galaxy and will eventually leave. The other five stars are somewhat slower (over 400 km/s for the stars labelled 2, 3, 4 and 6, and 360 km/s for the star labelled 5) and are still bound to the Galaxy.

These slightly slower stars are perhaps even more fascinating, as scientists are eager to learn what slowed them down – the invisible dark matter that is thought to pervade the Milky Way might also have played a role.

The stars are plotted in Galactic coordinates and using a rectangular projection: in this, the plane of the Milky Way stands out as the horizontal band with greater density of stars. The stripes visible in the final frames reflect the way Gaia scans the sky and the preliminary nature of the first data release; these artefacts are gradually washed out in the video as stars move across the sky.

Source and further reading:

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Gaia/Artificial_brain_helps_Gaia_catch_speeding_stars

Credit:

ESA/Gaia/DPAC

#universe #Gaia #ESA #exploration #science #stars

﻿

Shared publicly•View activity

Sam Collett+9

What catches my eye in this is the cluster of stars travelling in a group in the bottom left of the animation. Like they are going on a celestial family vacation, or chased by something

20h

A possible Cancer cure is climbing up the ladder.

PAGE

BACK TO HOMEPAGE SUBSCRIBE TO RSS FEED

Living Drug for Common Form of Children’s Leukemia Passes 1st FDA Hurdle

July 19

10:552017

Print This Article Share it With Friends

by HLA Staff

Millions of Americans get some form of cancer. The cost of treating and fighting cancer reaches into the billions of dollars. One source lists the cost of cancer care in 2010 at $157 billion. Imagine how much could be saved if researchers could find a successful way to fight cancer that didn’t require traditional chemotherapy or radiation therapy? Millions of lives could be saved and total healthcare costs in the United States could be lowered enough to almost make a national healthcare system affordable – ALMOST.

Researchers working for Novartis, a large drug company may have made what some are calling the most major breakthrough in cancer treatment in decades. Dr. David Lebwohl heads up the CAR-T Franchise Global Program that developed the breakthrough technology.

The process has been named CAR-T cell immunotherapy and the idea is brilliant. Important immune T cells are removed from a patient. The scientists then genetically modified them so that they would target and attack just cancer cells. Once the T cells have been genetically modified, they are injected back into the patient where they travel through the blood stream to the cancer and attack it. Using the patient’s own T cells to fight cancer eliminates many of the harsh and debilitating side-effects of most chemotherapies and/or radiation therapies.

Many cancer patients will tell you that many of the treatments they undergo are almost worse than the cancer itself. The nausea, weakness, headaches, aches and pains that go with most treatments, often leave cancer patients unable to function. They end up spending hours, days and even weeks feeling sicker than a dog before they feel better.

Dr. Lebwohl commented about the new CAR-T cell immunotherapy, saying:

“It’s truly a paradigm shift. It represents a new hope for patients.”

The FDA Advisory Panel has endorsed the use of the new immunotherapy, which was initially developed to treat children and young adults with B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, that either doesn’t respond to standard treatment of they have relapsed. This form of cancer is the most common cancer that affects children in the United States.

With standard treatment, many children become cancer free, but at some time down the road may suffer a relapse. Others don’t respond to the standard treatment or cannot tolerate it. When this form of leukemia relapses, quite often the standard treatment is not nearly as successful.

The initial study for the new treatment was conducted at 25 different locations on 88 patients in 11 different countries. The patients ran in age from 3 to 23 and all had experienced a relapse that did not respond to standard treatment or they failed to respond to standard treatment to begin with. The drug developed to help genetically modify the patient’s T cells is known as tisagenlecleucel or CTL019, or the ‘living drug’. In the studies, 83% of the patients that received CTL019 saw their leukemia go into total remission.

Dr. Stephen Hunger, a doctor at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia assisted in the study on the new immunotherapy. He commented about the need for such a treatment, saying:

“There is a major unmet medical need for treatment options.”

Other drug companies and researchers have tried to use similar forms of immunotherapy, but ran into a serious side-effect known as cytokine release syndrome. This is when the genetically modified T cells begin attacking some of the patient’s organs. In some cases, they attacked the brains, causing severe brain swelling and death.

So far in the study using CTL019, only a few patients developed the side effects, but none of those cases were fatal and all of the patients recovered. Dr. Timothy Cripe, an oncologist at the Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio commented about the drug, saying:

“This is the most exciting thing I’ve seen in my lifetime.”

Dr. Malcolm Smith, associate branch chief for the pediatric oncology at the Nation Cancer Institute, also commented about the study, saying:

“This is a major advance and is ushering in a new era in treating children.”

Since the researchers use a virus to help genetically modify the T cells, no one is sure if there are any long-term effects.

Getting the endorsement of the Advisory Panel, which voted 10-0 to endorse the new drug and treatment, is one of the first steps towards approval of the drug and treatment process. The FDA does not have to always take the endorsement of the Advisory Panel, but doctors and families of patients involved in the study are lobbying for approval.

While the new living drug, if approved, could save billions of dollars in cancer treatment, it’s probably not going to be cheap for patients to get. Novartis has not said how much the drug treatment will cost, but some analysts in the industry are estimating it could cost as much as $500,000 per infusion of the genetically modified T cells. Hopefully, it won’t cost nearly this much and is made readily available to the thousands of kids suffering from this form of leukemia.

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

IS THERE LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE? YES!

Where there is energy there is life!

Some people believe the universe is Black with a few stars mixed in. I beg to differ! The universe is filled with Galaxies containing Stars and Planets and dare I say it, life!
In this picture there is a White spot for every Galaxie.

Monday, July 17, 2017

Eat for the planet and for better health.!

“Eat in a way that nourishes you without starving the planet.“~ Nil Zacharias, Co-founder, One Green Planet

Our planet is in serious trouble. In the past 40 years alone, we’ve lost over half of the world’s wildlife; there are more than 400 massive dead zones in the oceans, completely devoid of life due to our pollution; and there is currently more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than there has ever been in human history.

So what’s driving this damage? Well, mostly – it’s our food choices. Primarily, our obsession with meat, dairy, and eggs.

*The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that livestock production is responsible for 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, while other organizations like the Worldwatch Institute have estimated it could be as much as 51 percent.

As you can see, we’re using more land and water resources than the world can sustain to simply produce food. In addition, industrial animal agriculture is driving large-scale deforestation, habitat loss and pushing countless species to the brink of extinction.

And despite the widespread destruction and drain on natural resources to produce food, nearly one billion people still go to bed hungry every night! As our population grows from 7.5 billion today to 9.6 billion by 2050, things are going to get rather bleak on planet earth.

But the good news is you have the power to be a part of the solution starting today.

By eating for the planet, you will not only save thousands of trees every year, but also conserve hundreds of thousands of gallons of water, cut your carbon footprint in half, and help redirect grain from the livestock system to feed people.

You have the potential to make an enormous impact!

You can #EatForThePlanet starting today. Just follow this simple framework below.

Moderate: Limit consumption of your favorite meats like beef, lamb, pork, etc.
Replace: Try to swap animal-based products in your daily diet with vegan alternatives (milk, butter, mayo, cheese, grilled chicken, beef crumbles, sausages, cold cuts, etc.)
Embrace: Add plant-based whole foods (local and organic when possible) to your diet like greens, fresh fruits, and vegetables, whole grains, plant proteins like lentils, nuts/seeds, beans, tofu, etc.

Show the world how you #EatForThePlanet!