Injecting the flu vaccine into a tumor gets the immune system to attack it

Activating the immune system at the site of a tumor can re-engage the immune system.

Injecting the flu vaccine into a tumor gets the immune system to attack it

Enlarge (credit: picture alliance/Getty Images)

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.

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Court backs Comcast, puts Maine’s à la carte cable law on hold

Two of the three arguments probably won’t fly, judge ruled, but third just might

The back of a Comcast van driving along a street in Sunnyvale, California.

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.

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NIST digitized the bullets that killed JFK

“The virtual artifacts are as close as possible to the real things.”

Courtesy of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

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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AMD-Leak: Github zeigt Specs von PS5 und Xbox Series X

Ein Github-Repository legt offen, welche Hardware in den Chips der Playstation 5 und der Xbox Series X stecken dürfte: Beide haben Modi zur Abwärtskompatibilität, wobei die Sony-Konsole sehr hoch taktet und das Microsoft-Pendant extrem viele Shader-Ein…

Ein Github-Repository legt offen, welche Hardware in den Chips der Playstation 5 und der Xbox Series X stecken dürfte: Beide haben Modi zur Abwärtskompatibilität, wobei die Sony-Konsole sehr hoch taktet und das Microsoft-Pendant extrem viele Shader-Einheiten aufweist. (Spielekonsole, Microsoft)

Umfrage: Warum Angestellte nicht ins Homeoffice wollen

Viele Festangestellte vermissen im Homeoffice den Kontakt mit den Kollegen. Einsam Zuhause am Computer im Bademantel oder Gartenarbeit in der Mittagspause sind nicht immer gefragt. (Politik/Recht, Bitkom)

Viele Festangestellte vermissen im Homeoffice den Kontakt mit den Kollegen. Einsam Zuhause am Computer im Bademantel oder Gartenarbeit in der Mittagspause sind nicht immer gefragt. (Politik/Recht, Bitkom)

Bundesdatenschutzbeauftragter Kelber: Mit den Hackern gegen das Überwachungsgift

Der Bundesdatenschutzbeauftragte Ulrich Kelber wirbt beim CCC um die Zusammenarbeit “auf der hellen Seite der Macht”. Nicht Daten, sondern Vertrauen sei der Rohstoff des 21. Jahrhunderts. Ein Bericht von Friedhelm Greis (36C3, Urheberrecht)

Der Bundesdatenschutzbeauftragte Ulrich Kelber wirbt beim CCC um die Zusammenarbeit "auf der hellen Seite der Macht". Nicht Daten, sondern Vertrauen sei der Rohstoff des 21. Jahrhunderts. Ein Bericht von Friedhelm Greis (36C3, Urheberrecht)

Domain Seizures Give ACE Anti-Piracy Portal a Massive Traffic Boost

Just over two years ago, relatively few people had heard of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment. Today, it is widely recognized as the most formidable anti-piracy association on the planet. After dozens of domain seizures, it now boasts close to 2.3 million visits to its website every month, a figure that most pirate sites would struggle to match.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

In 2017, the newly formed anti-piracy group Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) announced its presence to the world. Headed up by the traditional studios of the MPA plus Netflix and Amazon, the coalition also featured dozens of global movie and TV show giants.

The clear aim of ACE is to tackle video piracy on a global scale by pooling resources, finances, and knowledge. At least publicly, the coalition had a relatively slow start but as projects came to fruition, sites and platforms associated with piracy began to fall.

Some legal battles were conducted publicly through US courts (Omniverse, SetTV) but many others were settled quietly behind the scenes, without any official announcements. But perhaps the most dramatic, such as the takedowns of major IPTV player Vaders and file-hosting platforms Openload and Streamango, began silently, never went to trial, and were only confirmed when big cash settlements were revealed.

But of course, cash wasn’t the only thing ACE demanded from these players. In numerous cases so far (1,2,3,4,5), ‘pirate’ platforms were also compelled to hand over their domain names to the MPA. However, instead of lying dormant, ACE now uses them to deliver a short message to former users, declaring that platforms have been shut down due to copyright infringement.

A few seconds later visitors are then diverted to ACE’s anti-piracy portal, a place where movies and TV shows can’t be found. Instead, pro-copyright messages are presented with every click alongside details of previous ACE successes, shutdowns, and some (but certainly not all) ACE domain seizures.

Despite plenty of smaller domain seizures, traffic to Alliance4Creativity.com was minimal right up until September 2019 but then things took off in a big way. SimilarWeb stats reveal that at the start of the month the site had around 10,000 monthly visits.

At the start of October, however, visits had skyrocketed to around 620,000 per month, an increase of more than 6000%.

While this increase is impressive in its own right, by the start of November ACE’s website was receiving 2.3 million monthly visits, around 23,000% up on September’s traffic. Leading pirate sites aside, many illicit platforms never reach this number of eyeballs.

Given that the Openload/Streamango shutdown took place on October 31, it seems likely that the majority of the traffic to ACE’s site comes from former users of the defunct file-hosting platforms.

Whether the figures will continue to rise when SimilarWeb’s stats update remains a question, however. It’s possible that all traffic is yet to be accounted for but as a negative, former Openload and Streamango users are unlikely to keep revisiting the domains now that they know that ACE is in control.

TorrentFreak approached ACE for comment on its increasingly ‘popular’ website, which is now delivering its anti-piracy message while being largely fueled by traffic from seized ‘pirate’ domains. Unfortunately, an ACE spokesperson declined on the group’s behalf.

In the background, however, more seizures are taking place. TF has discovered that in recent weeks ACE quietly took over the domains of another pair of allegedly-infringing sites, Jailbrokenfirestick.com and Jailbrokefiretv.com. In common with other smaller seizures, no official announcements were made but nevertheless, will still add to the Alliance’s growing website traffic.

Finally, there’s a strong chance that ACE will be analyzing the traffic hitting these former ‘pirate’ domains that they now own. While that data isn’t likely to be particularly useful from a direct litigation perspective, it will certainly prove of interest to the global anti-piracy alliance.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

China sentences researcher behind gene-edited babies to 3 years in prison

China cracks down on researchers who edited genes in fertilized human eggs.

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.

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.

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Geld ausgegangen: Bundesarbeitsminister muss Stechuhr-App einstellen

Erst zahlte das Bundesarbeitsministerium 74.000 Euro an Pixelpark, um eine App zur Arbeitszeiterfassung zu schaffen. Nun wurde das Projekt auf Druck des Bundesrechnungshofs und aufgrund der EU-Datenschutz-Grundverordnung eingestellt. (App, Internet)

Erst zahlte das Bundesarbeitsministerium 74.000 Euro an Pixelpark, um eine App zur Arbeitszeiterfassung zu schaffen. Nun wurde das Projekt auf Druck des Bundesrechnungshofs und aufgrund der EU-Datenschutz-Grundverordnung eingestellt. (App, Internet)