From the really tiny to the really vast
Nano This
It is truly amazing the progress some researchers are making in cancer treatment. A while back I wrote about scientists from North Carolina using blood platelets as a delivery mechanism to disguise cancer drugs and make them more effective (“A very clever approach to cancer treatment, Thinking Critically, Yorkton This Week, October 7, 2015).
Now, the same group has announced another advancement in the delivery of cancer drugs. The new technique uses nanoparticles of liquid metal to deliver drugs, specifically Doxorubicin (Dox). One of the big problems with cancer drugs is they frequently affect healthy cells as well as cancer cells. Because of differences in acidity between cancer cells and healthy cells, the metal coated Dox targets cancer cells. The cancer cells dissolve the coating allowing the medicine to take effect. This promises to make the drug more effective and reduce dosages.
Furthermore, once the metal membrane has broken down the nanoparticles glom back together, which may help doctors find tumours as the recombined metal becomes readily visible on scans.
Mislaid blame
Any time something tragic happens, there is a natural tendency for people to want to lay blame. And often when something seems inexpicable, people turn to magical thinking.
Such was the case in the suicide, or apparent suicide, of UK teen Jenny Fry, who was found hanging from a tree in June. Even though the girl had a history of suicidal tendencies for which her parents did not seek professional help, they claim it was a sensitivity to WiFi (a fictional condition referred to as Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity Syndrome or EHS) that drove her to kill herself.
Of course, in a situation like this, one wants to be sensitive to parents’ grief. At the same time, one cannot be expected not to speak out against the proliferation of utter nonsense. There are some things in this world that appear to be malarky, but cannot be ruled out for lack of evidence. EHS is not one of those things. It has been so thoroughly and definitely debunked that believing in it can only be described as superstition.
Out of this world
In 1929, just 86 years ago, Pluto, or Planet X as the theoretical ninth object from the sun was then dubbed by Percival Lowell, was nothing more than a mathematical probability predicted by perturbations of Uranus’s orbit.
That year, Clyde Tombaugh, a 23-year-old astronomer from Streator, Illinois, arrived at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona tasked with the job of finding Planet X, which was then estimated to be a planet approximate seven times the mass of Earth. By systematically photographing the area of the solar system Lowell had predicted for Pluto, Tombaugh observed the planet in February 1930. It was confirmed on March 13.
As it would turn out, Pluto was not, in fact, Lowell’s predicted Planet X. The apparent effect on Uranus’s orbit was a miscalculation of Neptune’s mass, which was adjusted using data from Voyageur 2’s flyby in 1992.
During the first 75 years following the discovery, Pluto would remain a non-descript ball of ice in the far reaches of the solar system approximately 4.7 billion kilometres from Earth. Its size was continually downgraded and following the discovery of many other Pluto-ish objects between 1992 and 2005, including the more massive Eris, Pluto was stripped of its planet designation in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union.
Despite all of this, Pluto remains a very fascinating world. In July, Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft started sending data back from Pluto indicating it is has an exceptionally varied surface. “Pluto displays a surprisingly wide variety of geological landforms, including those resulting from glaciological and surface–atmosphere interactions as well as impact, tectonic, possible cryovolcanic, and mass-wasting processes.”
Last week, NASA released high resolution photos of the surface showing craters, mountains and icefields. No aliens yet, however.
