Louis J Sheehan
Louis J Sheehan, Esquire
http://louis2j2sheehan.bloggerteam.com/ http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog&pop=1&indicate=1http://pub25.bravenet.com/journal/post.php?entryid=22156
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=a1206a74-5f7f-443f-97f5-9b389a4d4f9e&m=0
Louis
J Sheehan Esquire
I am in Toronto, I already have two
cycles of CMF chemo. Now waiting for radiation, herceptin and hormone treatment
after another surgery at the end of the chemo cycles.
Where do I stand? What do I suggest to
my medical team? They seem to be knowing what they are doing. I wonder whether
they are aware of your researches and findings.
What is your opinion about
supplementary or complementary treatment of Homeopathy?
Where would I see any answers you
might be posting?
A friend of mine send me this link
from Wall Street Journal.
Thank you,
Confused
Comment by Confused from Toronto,
Canada - January 4, 2008 at 11:57 am
I wonder what the reason is for these
diagnostic inaccuracies? Is it (a) the equipment that detects the analyte in
the blood/tissue sample? (b) is the problem with the analyte (marker)? (c) is
it a sample storage/handling issue? (d) maybe its the folks reading the test
results???
Comment by The Laughing Cavalier -
January 4, 2008 at 12:53 pm
You might want to double check about
your understanding…it is triple negative is the rarest not triple positive. I
think your treatment seems fine for a triple positive br cancer.
Comment by Reality - January 4, 2008
at 1:37 pm
Gene profiling tests, important in
order to identify new therapeutic targets and thereby to develop useful drugs,
are still years away from working successfully in predicting treatment response
for individual patients. Perhaps this is because they are performed on dead,
preserved cells that were never actually exposed to the drugs whose activity
they are trying to assess. However, it will never be as effective as the cell
culture method, which exists today and is not hampered by the problems
associated with gene expression tests. That is because they measure the net
effect of all processes within the cancer, acting with and against each other
in real time, and it tests living cells actually exposed to drugs and drug
combinations of interest.
Comment by gpawelski - January 4, 2008
at 1:42 pm
Louis J Sheehan
Louis J Sheehan, Esquire
http://louis2j2sheehan.bloggerteam.com/ http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog&pop=1&indicate=1http://pub25.bravenet.com/journal/post.php?entryid=22156
Louis
J Sheehan Esquire
statistically valid testing has proven
that the women with certain hormone and gene profiles respond differently to
different regimens of treatment. Women with certain profiles should NOT receive
treatment as it is ineffectively. Gene test cost is around $3000 - but he cost
of treatment can be $15000 or more - so the question is - is the balance - of
testing vs excessive treatment, right?
Comment by OncoAdmin - January 4, 2008
at 6:41 pm
88888999999
A new and hitherto unknown atmospheric
gas, a combination of oxygen and nitrogen, exists 10 to 25 miles above the
Earth's surface, Drs. Arthur Adel and C.O. Lampland of the Lowell Observatory,
Flagstaff, Ariz., announced to the American Association for the Advancement of
Science at the Indianapolis meeting.
It is nitrogen pentoxide, its molecule
consisting of two atoms of nitrogen and five of oxygen. It is probably the
rarest of gases of the air, present only in the outer regions where the
ultraviolet rays of the sunlight bring oxygen and nitrogen into combination.
Existence of the new gas in the ozone
layer of the atmosphere was demonstrated by delicate spectroscopy of the far
infrared region of the spectrum. If the new gas existed nearer to Earth in the
air around us, it would not be detectable by the most refined chemical and
physical methods. Because the nitrogen pentoxide takes out certain portions of
the sunlight as it comes through the atmosphere to Earth, its existence could
be detected.
The situation of Lowell Observatory
high on a mountain in a dry atmosphere contributed to the discovery.
What use was there for a
ball-and-socket jointed bone at the back of a dinosaur's skull?
Charles W. Gilmore, curator of
vertebrate paleontology at the U.S. National Museum, would like to know.
At the back of the skull of a
hadrosaur, a rooster-crested monster that once lived in Montana, he has found a
bone arrangement that has never been found in any other kind of skull. A
relatively small, triangular bone bears on its front edge a socket or cup,
which fits neatly over a ball-shaped projection on the bone in front of it.
Whatever was the use of this unique
skull-joint, it could hardly have been to make room for the hadrosaur's massive
brain. For the hadrosaur's brain was anything but massive. It couldn't have
weighed more than 2 or 3 ounces. It was enough to see, hear, and probably smell
with, but that was about all. But then, very likely a dinosaur never bothered
to think—except possibly once in a while about another dinosaur.
1)
The bigger the telescope the better, right? So what if your scope is the size
of the Earth?
A
technique called interferometry combines the light from telescopes that are
widely separated, and with it you can make a virtual telescope that’s the same
size as the distance between the physical telescopes. If those ’scopes are on
opposite sides of the Earth, you get a telescope thousands of miles across. Using this technique,
astronomers have made phenomenal measurements, including actually seeing the
rotation of the galaxy M33 as well as its physical motion across the sky;
something that had never been done before. They have been able to see the
effects of the Sun’s motion around the Milky Way’s center, even though a full
orbit takes 240 million years!
2)
One long-standing mystery in astronomy is an apparent fountain of antimatter
streaming out from the center of the Galaxy. What’s causing it? Most
astronomers assumed it was coming from the giant supermassive black hole there,
but now observations
indicate it’s actually being accelerated by binary stars, where one
of the two orbiting stars is a neutron star or black hole.
The
cloud of antimatter is detected because it gives off gamma rays, which are a
very high energy form of light. The gamma rays from the Galactic center are not
centered on the center (hmmm, remember to edit that line), but extend a little
bit more on the western side. This matches the distribution of the black hole
or neutron star binaries. These binaries can generate antimatter when regular
matter from the normal (sunlike) star swirls around the denser object.
3)
The most luminous objects in the Universe are, ironically and paradoxically,
the faintest.
Huh?
Black holes can generate fantastic amounts of light as matter falling in to the
hole first forms a disk around it. The disk is hot, and magnetic forces (along
with friction and gravity) can make it extremely bright, as bright as billions
of stars like the Sun. Supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies are
big, and have proportionately big disks which can outshine the rest of the
galaxy in which it sits. We call these active galaxies, and there are different
kinds (quasars, blazars, Seyferts) depending on the various characteristics of
the galaxy.
It
turns out, though, that in many cases our view of these black holes is blocked
by tick gas and dust in the galaxy. The folks at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
have figured out a way to detect a fingerprint of these obscured galaxies, and
found 887 hidden quasars that were previously unknown, by far the largest such
sample ever made. What this means is that we have to be careful in the future
about what objects we can and cannot see — astronomers may say "We expect
to see XXX of these kind of galaxies and see none, which means our cosmology is
wrong," we can take it with a judicious grain of salt.
Space is a dangerous place. Stars explode, black holes gobble up
matter… but some violent events are so huge they affect entire galaxies, mayhem
on a scale so vast it numbs the mind.
Galaxies are island universes, cities of billions or even
hundreds of billions of stars. Some galaxies, like our Milky Way, live pretty
much on their own, but others live in vast complexes called clusters. These
galaxy clusters may have hundreds or thousands of denizens, all orbiting each
other due to their mutual gravity, looking something like bees buzzing around
hive.
But there is more there than just the matter we see. Dark matter
is there as well; invisible stuff that adds to the gravity of the cluster due
to its mass, but gives off no light. However, it betrays its presence in two
ways: its gravity changes the motion of the galaxies in the cluster, and it distorts
the light from more distant galaxies due to gravitational lensing.
A team of
astronomers has used the Hubble Space Telescope to examine the
galaxy cluster Abell 901/902 (they call their project STAGES: Space Telescope
A901/902 Galaxy Evolution Survey). They wanted to very carefully map out many
aspects of the cluster: how many galaxies it contains, what kinds of galaxies
they are (spirals, ellipticals, etc.), and, using lensing, determine where the
dark matter is. By making a map of all of these characteristics, they hoped to
be able to understand the history of the cluster, since the present
configuration of the cluster can provide clues to its past.
For the first time, these cosmic archaeologists were able to map
out the dark matter of this cluster, and found four very large concentrations
of it scattered throughout Abell 901/902. These clumps of invisible stuff are
enormous: they total a stunning 100
trillion times the Sun’s mass, or 500 times the mass of our entire galaxy.
Needless to say, that much mass exerts a powerful gravitational
pull. Galaxies round the clumps are falling in toward them, inexorably drawn in
by the clumps’ gravity. And as they fall in from the suburbs to the downtown
regions, they change. They slam into the thin gas between galaxies, which can
blow out the gas inside the galaxies (like leaving you car window open on a
highway can air out the inside of the car), for one. But as the galaxies fall
in, the inevitably interact with one another, colliding and merging as the make
the downhill slide. This distorts the galaxies’ shapes, and that in turn allows
the astronomers to determine the past history of the objects.
What’s interesting is that they found that galaxies tend to be
more distorted on their way in to the
centers of the clusters than they are when they are actually at the center. It appears that as they
fall, they have time to interact and merge, changing their shape, but once they
aproach the center they are falling so quickly they simply don’t have time to
distort much as they pass each. Also, it takes time to settle in at the center,
so the galaxies at the center appear to be very old, and have finished their
transformation from being unsettled and twisted into more sedate, round,
elliptical galaxies. The astronomers also determined that the galaxies at the
edge of the cluster still produce stars, but by the time they reach the center
that has mostly turned off. Their gas — needed to make stars — gets blown out
of the galaxies on the way in, and the mergers trigger vast bursts of star
formation, which also uses up the gas.
These discoveries were possible only through the use of Hubble,
Spitzer, and other telescopes, each of which unpeeled another layer of the
puzzle. I’ll note that for Hubble’s part, this represents the largest area of
sky ever observed by the grand dame of space ’scopes; it took 80 separate
pointings of Hubble to complete the survey of the cluster, and they mapped the
locations and shape of 60,000
galaxies in all, a truly staggering amount.
One last thought: the Milky Way is more or less alone in space,
being part of a loose collection of other galaxies. But we are headed toward
the Andromeda galaxy, and in a couple of billion years we’ll collide and merge
with it. I hope that in this far flung future, some distant astronomers can use
our own violent fate to learn a little more about the Universe, too. It only
seems fair.
One of the more amazing aspects of looking into deep, deep space
is that the path there is tortured and twisted. Space itself
can be distorted by mass; it gets bent, like a road curves as it
goes around a hill. And like a truck that must follow that road and steer
around the hill, a photon must follow the curve of space.
Imagine a distant galaxy, billions of light years away. It emits
light in all directions. One particular photon happens to be emitted almost —
but not quite — in our direction. Left on its own, we’d never see it because it
would miss the Earth by thousands or millions of light years.
But on its travels, it passes by another massive galaxy. This
galaxy warps space, and the photon does what it must do: it follows that curve
in pace, and changes direction… and it just so happens that the curve is just
right to send it our way.
The intervening galaxy is essentially acting like a lens,
bending the light. If the more distant galaxy is exactly behind the lensing
galaxy, we see the light from that more distant galaxy distorted into a perfect
ring, a circle of light surrounding the lens. We call this an Einstein Ring. If
the farther galaxy is off to the side a bit, we see an arc instead of a
complete ring. Gravitationally lensed arcs and rings are seen all over the sky,
and they can be used to determine the mass of the intervening galaxy! The more
mass, the more distorted the light from the farther galaxy. So the Universe has
given us a nice method to let us weigh it.
In a surprising twist, astronomers have found a new type of
lensed galaxy: a double ring! In a rare alignment, there are two distant
galaxies aligned behind an intervening lensing galaxy. They’re like beads on a
wire, lined up just right such that both more distant galaxies are lensed by
the nearer one. In this case, the lens is about 3 billion light years away, and
the other two are 6 and 11 billion light years away, an incredible distance.
This image is amazing, but it is also a powerful scientific
tool. It allows us to measure not just the mass of the lensing galaxy, but also
the amount of mysterious dark matter nearby. We cannot see the dark matter, but
it too bends light, and contributes to the lensings. By observing lenses like
this, we can take a sample of dark matter in the Universe, and that’s a crucial
first step in understanding it. Even better, these double rings allows us to
measure the amount of total mass not just in the nearest galaxy, as is usual,
but also in the middle galaxy as well, since it distorts the light from the
galaxy behind it (turns out it’s a rather lightweight one billion solar masses;
our own Galaxy has more than 100 times that mass, so the middle galaxy is
considered a dwarf).
This is a beautiful happenstance; it gives us a measure of the
Universe at two points, with one being for free. In fact, Tommaso Treu, the
astronomer at U.C. Santa Barbara who investigated this lens, points out that if
we can find as few as 50 of these double rings, we can get a much better idea
of the distribution of not just dark matter, but also the even more mysterious
dark energy in the Universe. That’s one of the biggest goals of modern astronomy…
and we may get a handle on it due to a coincidental ring toss.
0000000000
0000000000
A fast-food quarter-pounder costs $3,
and 1,300 gallons of water. That's how much it takes, per burger, to hydrate
the cow, grow its food and process its carcass, according to the Web sites of
the National Park Service, the U.S. Geological Survey and a bottled-water trade
group. By contrast, a loaf of bread uses up 150 gallons, and milk requires just
65.
The message dovetails with the goals
of environmental meal-managing: Eat meat, and you're using up a precious
natural resource.
That message is broadly correct, but
the number itself is disputed. It stems from decades-old research conducted by
California scientists for a presentation to a local high school's future
farmers class. One of the scientists now says the number is too high. A more
thorough investigation by an independent group halved the figure. And a
researcher funded by the cattle industry reduced it still further.
Asked to speak at Colusa High School
in the 1970s, Thomas M. Aldrich, a Colusa-based scientist with the University
of California Cooperative Extension, decided the budding agriculturalists would
enjoy a presentation on the water usage of various foods. To help him, he
tapped his colleague, Herbert Schulbach. The two compiled data from California
studies and farmers' reports on how much water was needed for various
agricultural products and for animal feed.
The result, Mr. Aldrich recalls, was
that a burger and fries "took almost a swimming pool to produce. It was
kind of awesome that you need that much water for that much food."
The cattle industry didn't find the
result so awesome. "We came out, made our presentation, and all hell broke
lose," Mr. Aldrich says. Nonetheless, it wasn't until 1993 that the
industry-funded study appeared. Mr. Aldrich now says that his study was in the
"95th percentile" for accuracy in its time but shouldn't be cited
now. "I would say that that figure would not be right," he says.
"I think it would be too high."
The Sacramento-based Water Education
Foundation had been using the Colusa scientists' numbers on a slide rule it
distributed to educate students about water consumption. "It had been
produced on the back of an envelope," says Marcia Kreith, now a program
analyst at the Agricultural Issues Center at the University of California,
Davis. "It was a good, reasonable estimate, but they couldn't document how
they got their numbers." The Colusa scientists published their results in
a newsletter and didn't explain all of their assumptions. (Three decades later,
both are retired and don't recall some details.)
The foundation hired Ms. Kreith to
look into the issue. The resulting study, in 1991, tried to systematize the
water-consumption problem. She laid out 20 assumptions common to all the dozens
of foods studied, looked at local data from throughout the state on water usage
and crops, and consulted with agricultural experts to arrive at estimates for
such things as the amount of water pregnant cows drink daily (8.7 gallons, when
not lactating; 16.9 gallons when they are). Her estimate for a burger's total
water use: 616 gallons.
"To all those who so eloquently
tried to make the case that the use of numbers can be a mystical process
leading to nowhere," Ms. Kreith wrote, "the author responds that the
methodology used in this study is as objective as she is able to make it."
One of Ms. Kreith's assumptions was
that rainwater counts. The thinking, she says, is that with any fresh water,
there's an opportunity cost -- the range land could have been used by other
animals. But critics say range land is inappropriate for raising other crops,
and the California Beef Council helped to fund a peer-reviewed study that
excluded rainwater. That study found that a quarter pound of beef takes just
over 100 gallons of water.
Howard Perlman, the hydrologist who
set up the Geological Survey's Web page on foods' water use, says that now that
he knows there's a range of estimates he will update the page.
None of these numbers, though,
includes the water it takes to get the burger from meat-processing plant to
plate. "There's canning, freezing, and you have to cook it and wash the
pots," Mr. Schulbach says. "An awful lot of water is used in between
the field and your mouth."
Former Senate Majority Leader Joseph
Loeper, a suburban Philadelphia Republican, pleaded guilty in federal court in
2000 of falsifying tax-related documents to conceal more than $330,000 in
income he received from a private consulting firm while serving in the Senate.
Loeper, who could not be reached for
comment, spent six months in federal prison. Today, he is a lobbyist with 23
clients -- from the Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers to Drexel University.
When I flew down to Atlanta to
interview Carol Worthman, the director of the Laboratory for Comparative Human
Biology at Emory University, she greeted me in her office, among the stacks of
research monographs and the photos of her with beaming tribal groups from
several continents. I asked why she had first thought to study sleep, and she
smiled. “It was a true ‘aha’ experience. I was sitting in my office when a
friend of mine who was studying mood disorders called me up and asked me what
anthropologists knew about sleep.”
She laughed and paused for a moment of
dramatic emphasis. “Nothing!” She widened her eyes behind the thick lenses. “We
know nothing about sleep! I think of all the places I’ve slept around the
world, all the groups I’ve studied. . . . I mean, here I was, part of this
discipline dedicated to the study of human behavior and human diversity, and
yet we knew next to nothing about a behavior that claimed one-third of our
lives. I was stunned.”
So Worthman began to comb the
literature, interviewing ethnographers, sifting through fifty-odd years of
published work. What she found, she said, shouldn’t have surprised her: “The
ecology of sleep is like the ecology of everyday life.” Sleep, it seems, comes
in many cultural flavors.
No comments:
Post a Comment