Month: December 2019

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A number of years back, there was a great deal of excitement about using viruses to target cancer. A number of viruses explode the cells that they've infected in order to spread to new ones. Engineering those viruses so that they could only grow in cancer cells would seem to provide a way of selectively killing these cells. And some preliminary tests were promising, showing massive tumors nearly disappearing.

But the results were inconsistent, and there were complications. The immune system would respond to the virus, limiting our ability to use it more than once. And some of the tumor killing seemed to be the result of the immune system, rather than the virus.

Now, some researchers have focused on the immune response, inducing it at the site of the tumor. And they do so by remarkably simple method: injecting the tumor with the flu vaccine. As a bonus, the mice it was tested on were successfully immunized, too.

Enlarge / A Comcast van in Sunnyvale, California, in November 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Andrei Stanescu)

A whole slew of cable companies are notching up a victory in a lawsuit against the state of Maine that seeks to block a recent law that would require à la carte cable offerings.

Comcast spearheaded the coalition of companies, which filed the suit in September. The Maine law, the first of its kind in the nation, was invalid for two reasons, the suit argued: first, because it pre-empts federal communications law, and second, because it violates companies' First Amendment rights. Comcast was joined by more than a dozen other plaintiffs, including its own NBCUniversal subsidiary, CBS, Viacom (which had not yet completed its merger with CBS), Disney, Fox, A&A, Discovery, and Hearst.

As is common in such suits, the plaintiffs first sought an injunction that would block the state from enforcing the law while the rest of the legal process gets sorted out. District Judge Nancy Torresen granted the injunction in a ruling (PDF) issued just before Christmas.

It has been more than 50 years since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy shocked the nation, but the case still generates considerable public interest—particularly fragments from the bullets that killed the president, which have been preserved in a temperature and humidity-controlled vault at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC, for decades. Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently teamed up with forensic experts at the National Archives to digitize the bullets, the better to preserve their features for the conspiracy theorists of tomorrow. All the data should be available in the National Archives' online catalog sometime in early 2020.

There are two fragments of the bullets that killed JFK—one that hit him in the neck and another that hit him in the back of the head—as well as the so-called "stretcher bullet." That's the bullet that struck the president and also Texas Governor John Connally, found lying near the latter's stretcher at the hospital. Also in the archives: two bullets used in a test firing of the assassin's rifle for forensic matching purposes.

The curators from the National Archives were on site while all the analysis was being done, locking up the precious artifacts in a safe every night to ensure their safety. The biggest challenge, according to NIST's Thomas Brian Renegar, was figuring out how to make measurements in sufficient detail to create the kind of 3D models they needed. For instance, "How do we hold the artifacts safely and securely?" he told Ars. "We don't want them moving while we're doing the scans, but we need to hold them carefully so as not to damage the artifacts." The fragments in particular are also badly warped and twisted, making surface scanning difficult.

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I was cooking this weekend when my eight-year-old son looked up from the couch, where he was listening to the Stardew Valley game soundtrack on Apple Music.

"Dad," he announced, "I'm going to read you the name of every song on this album."

"Cool," I said as I minced the garlic.

Enlarge / Chinese geneticist He Jiankui speaks during the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing at the University of Hong Kong days after he claimed to have altered the genes of the embryo of a pair of twin girls before birth, prompting outcry from scientists of the field. (credit: S.C. Leung/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

On Monday, China's Xinhua News Agency reported that the researchers who produced the first gene-edited children have been fined, sanctioned, and sentenced to prison. According to the Associated Press, three researchers were targeted by the court in Shenzhen, the most prominent of them being He Jiankui. Jiankui, a relatively obscure researcher, shocked the world by announcing that he had edited the genomes of two children who had already been born by the time of his public disclosure.

He Jiankui studied for a number of years in the United States before returning to China and starting some biotech companies. His interest in gene editing was only disclosed to a small number of advisers, and his work involved a very small team. Some of them were apparently at his companies, while others were at the hospital that provided him with the ability to work with human subjects. After his work was disclosed, questions were raised about whether the hospital fully understood what Jiankui was doing with those patients. The court determined that Jiankui deliberately violated Chinese research regulations and fabricated ethical review documents, which may indicate that the hospital was not fully aware.

He's decision to perform the gene editing created an ethical firestorm. There had been a general consensus that the CRISPR technology he used for the editing was too error-prone for use on humans. And, as expected, the editing produced a number of different mutations, leaving us with little idea of the biological consequences. His target was also questionable: Jiankui eliminated the CCR5 gene, which is used by HIV to enter cells but has additional, not fully understood immune functions. The editing was done in a way that these mutations and their unknown consequences would be passed on to future generations.