Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Google is developing cancer and heart attack detector wristband - article, video, pics

Google is developing cancer and heart attack detector

By Leo Kelion & James GallagherTechnology and health desk editors

Google hopes to develop a wristband that would carry out non-invasive blood tests

Google is aiming to diagnose cancers, impending heart attacks or strokes and other diseases, at a much earlier stage than is currently possible.

The company is working on technology that combines disease-detecting nanoparticles, which would enter a patient's bloodstream via a swallowed pill, with a wrist-worn sensor.

The idea is to identify slight changes in the person's biochemistry that could act as an early warning system.

The work is still at an early stage.

Early diagnosis is the key to treating disease. Many cancers, such as pancreatic, are detected only after they have become untreatable and fatal.

There are marked differences between cancerous and healthy tissues.

Google's ambition is to constantly monitor the blood for the unique traces of cancer, allowing diagnosis long before any physical symptoms appear.

The project is being conducted by the search company's research unit, Google X, which is dedicated to investigating potentially revolutionary innovations.

Andrew Conrad and Google Life Sciences team

Mr Conrad, seen on the left, joined Google X as head of Life Sciences in 2013

It marks the firm's latest shift into the medical sector following its work on glucose-measuring contact lenses for patients with diabetes and the acquisition of a start-up that developed a spoon to counteract the tremors caused by Parkinson's disease.

Google has also bought stakes in Calico, an anti-ageing research company, and 23andMe, which offers personal genetic-testing kits.

Nanoparticles

The diagnostic project is being led by Dr Andrew Conrad, a molecular biologist who previously developed a cheap HIV test that has become widely used.

"What we are trying to do is change medicine from reactive and transactional to proactive and preventative," he told the BBC.

“Start Quote

Doctor-patient relationships are pretty privileged and would not involve Google in any way”

Dr Andrew ConradGoogle X

"Nanoparticles... give you the ability to explore the body at a molecular and cellular level."

Google is designing a suite of nanoparticles which are intended to match markers for different conditions.

They could be tailored to stick to a cancerous cell or a fragment of cancerous DNA.

Or they could find evidence of fatty plaques about to break free from the lining of blood vessels. These can cause a heart attack or stroke if they stop the flow of blood.

Another set would constantly monitor chemicals in the blood.

High levels of potassium are linked to kidney disease. Google believes it will be possible to construct porous nanoparticles that alter colour as potassium passes through.

"Then [you can] recall those nanoparticles to a single location - because they are magnetic - and that location is the superficial vasculature of the wrist, [where] you can ask them what they saw," said Dr Conrad.

Unattached nanoparticles would move differently in a magnetic field from those clumped around a cancer cell.

In theory, software could then provide a diagnosis by studying their movements.

As part of the project, the researchers have also explored ways of using magnetism to concentrate the nanoparticles temporarily in a single area.

The tech company's ambition is ultimately to create a wristband that would take readings of the nanoparticles via light and radio waves one or more times a day.

Prof Paul Workman, chief executive of the Institute of Cancer Research in London, told the BBC News website: "In principle this is great. Any newcomers with new ideas are welcome in the field.

"There is an urgent need for this. If we can detect cancer or other diseases earlier, then we can intervene with either lifestyle changes or treatment.

"How much of this proposal is dream versus reality is impossible to tell because it is a fascinating concept that now needs to be converted to practice."

His team at the institute is investigating cancer cells and cancer DNA in the blood as new methods of diagnosis and planning treatment.

He did warn Google that a diagnosis could increase anxiety and lead to unnecessary treatment, so there needed to be "very careful and rigorous analysis" before this type of blood monitoring could be used widely.

The scheme is being made public because Google is now seeking to establish partnerships.

But Dr Conrad sought to play down the idea that his firm wanted to run a search tool for the human body, alongside the one it already offers for the internet.

"We are the inventors of the technology but we have no intentions of commercialising it or monetising it in that way," he said.

"We will license it out and the partners will take it forward to doctors and patients.

"These are not consumer devices. They are prescriptive medical devices, and you know that doctor-patient relationships are pretty privileged and would not involve Google in any way."

Analysis: James Gallagher, health editor

From searching the internet to searching your blood, Google certainly has high ambitions. But is it feasible?

The basic principles are sound and mirror the work already taking place around the world.

Many research groups are looking at bits of cancer floating in the blood as a better way of diagnosing the disease and also to assess which tumours are more aggressive.

But Google will have to address concerns around "false positives", when healthy people are told they are ill.

These have plagued the PSA test for prostate cancer, as PSA levels can soar even when cancer is absent.

There is also the issue of "over-diagnosis". Who needs treating even if a condition is discovered?

There is continuing controversy around breast cancer screening: for every life saved, three women have invasive treatment for a cancer that would never have proved fatal.

Screening the body for disease is littered with dangers, and if it is not done carefully, it could make hypochondriacs out of all of us.

Big risk?

The nanoparticle project is the latest so-called "moonshot" to originate from Google X.

Other schemes include the firm's driverless car effort and Project Loon, an attempt to provide internet access to remote areas via a network of high-altitude weather balloons.

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WATCH: Google X "captain of moonshots" Astro Teller explains why he does not fear failure

While such ideas have the potential to make money, there is also a high risk of failure, and Google X acknowledges that several of its ideas have been ditched before being made public.

One analyst commented that its parent was in a rare position to make such investments.

"Under normal circumstances this is the kind of thing that would worry investors because such projects are too long-term and the miss rate is too high," said Cyrus Mewawalla, from CM Research.

"But because Google's core search business is currently so strong, shareholders are not worried at the moment and are allowing the firm to take a gamble."

Analysis: Leo Kelion, technology desk editor

Google's diagnostic project may never come to fruition, but its significance lies in the fact it represents part of a wider push by the firm into health tech.

Bearing in mind this is already a crowded sector, it begs the question: why?

The search firm denies that it wants to run its own diagnosis service, with all the privacy headaches that would entail, but the patents it creates along the way could prove lucrative.

No doubt the fact that co-founder and Google X chief Sergey Brin has been told that a gene mutation has increased his likelihood of contracting Parkinson's has also focused efforts.

And the company clearly believes its expertise in "big data" analysis and its freedom to focus on giant leaps forward, rather than incremental steps, plays to its advantages.

It's worth remembering that another much hyped health idea, Google Flu Trends - which aimed to predict the spread of the virus based on internet searches - has been dubbed a failure by some after researchers said it had overestimated the number of cases in 100 out of 108 weeks.

And US health watchdogs banned Google-backed 23andme from selling its genetic screening kits last year.

On the other hand, Google's "smart lens" for diabetics shows promise, with Swiss firm Novartis stepping up to license the technology in July.

And the forthcoming Android Fit platform, designed to harness data from other apps and wearables, has a good chance of success given the huge number of people using the operating system

Monday, October 27, 2014

Security nails Rolling Stones stage invader - pics, video

Security nails Rolling Stones stage invader

2:20 PM Tuesday Oct 28, 2014

An intruder who jumped up on stage at the Rolling Stones concert in Adelaide was not a fan from the audience but actually appeared from backstage.

Video footage of the incident shows a man, wearing shorts, a black hoodie and an orange high visibility vest, charge at lead singer Mick Jagger during their final song -Satisfaction.

The rock and roll veteran has been around long enough to not allow such an unexpected antic faze him.

Like a true professional, Jagger simply glanced at the man - while security wrestled him to the ground - and then turned away before continuing on with the show like nothing had happened.

A minder dragged the man by the hood on the back of his black jumper when another security guard appeared and helped very quickly get him off the stage.

The male and female back-up singers looked quite alarmed as the hooded man ran past them but Jagger casually joked: "All part of the act, some Aussies Rules tackling!", The Adelaide Advertiser reported.

"The intruder was dealt with by the band's security and was subsequently handed over to SAPOL," Adelaide Oval Stadium Management Authority general manager Darren Chandler told Daily Mail Australia.

"We believe the man came from back-stage and was not a concert goer."

A SA Police spokesman told the Advertiser that officers cautioned the stage invader before evicting him from the Adelaide Oval Stadium.

Interstellar Trailer 2014 - Chris Nolan, Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway - article, pics, video

OCTOBER 27, 2014 | 08:00AM PT

Christopher Nolan hopscotches across space and time in a visionary sci-fi trip that stirs the head and the heart in equal measure.

Scott Foundas

Chief Film Critic@foundasonfilm

To infinity and beyond goes “Interstellar,” an exhilarating slalom through the wormholes ofChristopher Nolan’s vast imagination that is at once a science-geek fever dream and a formidable consideration of what makes us human. As visually and conceptually audacious as anything Nolan has yet done, the director’s ninth feature also proves more emotionally accessible than his coolly cerebral thrillers and Batman movies, touching on such eternal themes as the sacrifices parents make for their children (and vice versa) and the world we will leave for the next generation to inherit. An enormous undertaking that, like all the director’s best work, manages to feel handcrafted and intensely personal, “Interstellar” reaffirms Nolan as the premier big-canvas storyteller of his generation, more than earning its place alongside “The Wizard of Oz,” “2001,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Gravity” in the canon of Hollywood’s visionary sci-fi head trips. Global box office returns should prove suitably rocket-powered.

We begin somewhere in the American farm belt, which Nolan evokes for its full mythic grandeur — blazing sunlight, towering corn stalks, whirring combines. But it soon becomes clear that this would-be field of dreams is something closer to a nightmare. The date is an unspecified point in the near future, close enough to look and feel like tomorrow, yet far enough for a number of radical changes to have taken hold in society. A decade on from a period of widespread famine, the world’s armies have been disbanded and the cutting-edge technocracies of the early 21st century have regressed into more utilitarian, farm-based economies.

“We’re a caretaker generation,” notes one such homesteader (John Lithgow) to his widower son-in-law, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA test pilot who hasn’t stopped dreaming of flight, for himself and for his children: 15-year-old son Tom (Timothee Chalamet) and 10-year-old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy), the latter a precocious tot first seen getting suspended from school for daring to suggest that the Apollo space missions actually happened. “We used to look up in the sky and wonder about our place in the stars,” Cooper muses. “Now we just look down and wonder about our place in the dirt.”

And oh, what dirt! As “Interstellar” opens, the world — or at least Cooper’s Steinbeckian corner of it — sits on the cusp of a second Dust Bowl, ravaged by an epidemic of crop blight, a silt-like haze hanging permanently in the air. (Some of this scene-setting is accomplished via pseudo-documentary interviews with the elderly residents of some more distant future reflecting on their hardscrabble childhoods, which Nolan films like the “witness” segments from Warren Beatty’s “Reds.”) And as the crops die, so the Earth’s atmosphere becomes richer in nitrogen and poorer in oxygen, until the time when global starvation will give way to global asphyxiation.

But all hope is not lost. NASA (whose massive real-life budget cuts lend the movie added immediacy) still exists in this agrarian dystopia, but it’s gone off the grid, far from the microscope of public opinion. There, the brilliant physicist Professor Brand (Michael Caine, forever the face of avuncular wisdom in Nolan’s films) and his dedicated team have devised two scenarios for saving mankind. Both plans involve abandoning Earth and starting over on a new, life-sustaining planet, but only one includes taking Earth’s current 6-billion-plus population along for the ride. Doing the latter, it seems, depends on Brand’s ability to solve an epic math problem that would explain how such a large-capacity vessel could surmount Earth’s gravitational forces. (Never discussed in this egalitarian society: a scenario in which only the privileged few could escape, a la the decadent bourgeoisie of Neill Blomkamp’s “Elysium.”)

Many years earlier, Brand informs, a mysterious space-time rift (or wormhole) appeared in the vicinity of Saturn, seemingly placed there, like the monoliths of “2001,” by some higher intelligence. On the other side: another galaxy containing a dozen planets that might be fit for human habitation. In the wake of the food wars, a team of intrepid NASA scientists traveled there in search of solutions. Now, a decade later (in Earth years, that is), Brand has organized another mission to check up on the three planets that seem the most promising for human settlement. And to pilot the ship, he needs Cooper, an instinctive flight jockey in the Chuck Yeager mode, much as McConaughey’s laconic, effortlessly self-assured performance recalls Sam Shepard’s as Yeager in “The Right Stuff” (another obvious “Interstellar” touchstone).

Already by this point — and we have not yet left the Earth’s surface — “Interstellar” (which Nolan co-wrote with his brother and frequent collaborator, Jonathan) has hurled a fair amount of theoretical physics at the audience, including discussions of black holes, gravitational singularities and the possibility of extra-dimensional space. And, as with the twisty chronologies and unreliable narrators of his earlier films, Nolan trusts in the audience’s ability to get the gist and follow along, even if it doesn’t glean every last nuance on a first viewing. It’s hard to think of a mainstream Hollywood film that has so successfully translated complex mathematical and scientific ideas to a lay audience (though Shane Carruth’s ingenious 2004 Sundance winner “Primer” — another movie concerned with overcoming the problem of gravity — tried something similar on a micro-budget indie scale), or done so in more vivid, immediate human terms. (Some credit for this is doubtless owed to the veteran CalTech physicist Kip Thorne, who consulted with the Nolans on the script and receives an executive producer credit.)

The mission itself is a relatively intimate affair, comprised of Cooper, Brand’s own scientist daughter (Anne Hathaway), two other researchers (Wes Bentley and the excellent David Gyasi) and a chatty, sarcastic, ex-military security robot called TARS (brilliantly voiced by Bill Irwin in a sly nod to Douglas Rain’s iconic HAL 9000), which looks like a walking easel but proves surprisingly agile when the going gets tough. And from there, “Interstellar” has so many wonderful surprises in store — from casting choices to narrative twists and reversals — that the less said about it the better. (Indeed, if you really don’t want to know anything more, read no further.)

It gives nothing away, however, to say that Nolan maps his infinite celestial landscape as majestically as he did the continent-hopping earthbound ones of “The Prestige” and “Batman Begins,” or the multi-tiered memory maze of “Inception.” The imagery, modeled by Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema on Imax documentaries like “Space Station” and “Hubble 3D,” suggests a boundless inky blackness punctuated by ravishing bursts of light, the tiny spaceship Endurance gleaming like a diamond against Saturn’s great, gaseous rings, then ricocheting like a pinball through the wormhole’s shimmering plasmic vortex.

With each stop the Endurance makes, Nolan envisions yet another new world: one planet a watery expanse with waves that make Waimea Bay look like a giant bathtub; another an ice climber’s playground of frozen tundra and sheer-faced descents. Moreover, outer space allows Nolan to bend and twist his favorite subject — time — into remarkable new permutations. Where most prior Nolan protagonists were forever grasping at an irretrievable past, the crew of the Endurance races against a ticking clock that happens to tick differently depending on your particular vantage. New worlds mean new gravitational forces, so that for every hour spent on a given planet’s surface, years or even entire decades may be passing back on Earth. (Time as a flat circle, indeed.)

This leads to an extraordinary mid-film emotional climax in which Cooper and Brand return from one such expedition to discover that 23 earth years have passed in the blink of an eye, represented by two decades’ worth of stockpiled video messages from loved ones, including the now-adult Tom (a bearded, brooding Casey Affleck) and Murphy (Jessica Chastain in dogged, persistent “Zero Dark Thirty” mode). It’s a scene Nolan stages mostly in closeup on McConaughey, and the actor plays it beautifully, his face a quicksilver mask of joy, regret and unbearable grief.

That moment signals a shift in “Interstellar” itself from the relatively euphoric, adventurous tone of the first half toward darker, more ambiguous terrain — the human shadow areas, if you will, that are as difficult to fully glimpse as the inside of a black hole. Nolan, who has always excelled at the slow reveal, catches even the attentive viewer off guard more than once here, but never in a way that feels cheap or compromises the complex motivations of the characters.

On the one hand, the movie marvels at the brave men and women throughout history who have dedicated themselves, often at great peril, to the greater good of mankind. On the other, because Nolan is a psychological realist, he’s acutely aware of the toil such lives may take on those who choose to lead them, and that even “the best of us” (as one character is repeatedly described) might not be immune from cowardice and moral compromise. Some people lie to themselves and to their closest confidants in “Interstellar,” and Nolan understands that everyone has his reasons. Others compensate by making the most selfless of sacrifices. Perhaps the only thing trickier than quantum physics, the movie argues, is the nature of human emotion.

Nolan stages one thrilling setpiece after another, including several hairsbreadth escapes and a dazzling space-docking sequence in which the entire theater seems to become one large centrifuge; the nearly three-hour running time passes unnoticed. Even more thrilling is the movie’s ultimate vision of a universe in which the face of extraterrestrial life bears a surprisingly familiar countenance. “Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” harks the good Professor Brand at the start of the Endurance’s journey, quoting the melancholic Welshman Dylan Thomas. And yet “Interstellar” is finally a film suffused with light and boundless possibilities — those of the universe itself, of the wonder in a child’s twinkling eyes, and of movies to translate all that into spectacular picture shows like this one.

It’s hardly surprising that “Interstellar” reps the very best big-budget Hollywood craftsmanship at every level, from veteran Nolan collaborators like production designer Nathan Crowley (who built the film’s lyrical vision of the big-sky American heartland on location in Alberta) and sound designer/editor Richard King, who makes wonderfully dissonant contrasts between the movie’s interior spaces and the airless silence of space itself. Vfx supervisor Paul Franklin (an Oscar winner for his work on “Inception”) again brings a vivid tactility to all of the film’s effects, especially the robotic TARS, who seamlessly inhabits the same physical spaces as the human actors. Hans Zimmer contributes one of his most richly imagined and inventive scores, which ranges from a gentle electronic keyboard melody to brassy, Strauss-ian crescendos. Shot and post-produced by Nolan entirely on celluloid (in a mix of 35mm and 70mm stocks), “Interstellar” begs to be seen on the large-format Imax screen, where its dense, inimitably filmic textures and multiple aspect ratios can be experienced to their fullest effect.

Film Review: 'Interstellar'

Reviewed at TCL Chinese Theatre, Hollywood, Oct. 23, 2014. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 165 MIN.

Production

A Paramount (in North America)/Warner Bros. (international) release and presentation in association with Legendary Pictures of a Syncopy/Lynda Obst Prods. production. Produced by Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan, Obst. Executive producers, Jordan Goldberg, Jake Myers, Kip Thorne, Thomas Tull.

Crew

Directed by Christopher Nolan. Screenplay, Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan. Camera (Fotokem color and prints, partial widescreen, 35mm/70mm Imax), Hoyte Van Hoytema; editor, Lee Smith; music Hans Zimmer; production designer, Nathan Crowley; supervising art director, Dean Wolcott; art directors, Joshua Lusby, Eric David Sundahl; set decorator, Gary Fettis; set designers, Noelle King, Sally Thornton, Andrew Birdzell, Mark Hitchler, Martha Johnston, Paul Sonski, Robert Woodruff; costume designer, Mary Zophres; sound (Datasat/Dolby Digital), Mark Weingarten; sound designer/supervising sound editor, Richard King; re-recording mixers, Gary A. Rizzo, Gregg Landaker; visual effects supervisor, Paul Franklin; visual effects producer, Kevin Elam; visual effects, Double Negative, New Deal Studios; special effects supervisor, Scott Fisher; stunt coordinator, George Cottle; assistant director, Nilo Otero; casting, John Papsidera.

With

Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck, Wes Bentley, Bill Irwin, Mackenzie Foy, Topher Grace, David Gyasi, Timothee Chalamet, David Oyelowo, William Devane, Matt Damon.

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Saturday, October 25, 2014

The surprising way to get rich online - world changing ideas - article, video, pics

How ‘crowd patronage’ could shape music and art

David Robson

From World-Changing Ideas

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Want to write a novel or release an album, but don’t have the money? Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of reddit, thinks that “crowd patronage” is the answer. In our video interview with Ohanian, he explains the power of the internet to nurture creativity, while David Robson explores an eccentric and intriguing example of this new “renaissance”.

What links Michelangelo to a musician named Smooth McGroove? Alexis Ohanian, an internet entrepreneur and co-founder of reddit, has a surprising answer – and it suggests a way for you to quit your job and make a load of money while doing something you love. Maybe.

For those who haven’t yet experienced his music, McGroove has carved out a surprisingly lucrative niche singing multi-layered a capella versions of classic video game tunes. (Check out his YouTube pages for songs fromMario 64, Minecraft, and Sonic the Hedgehog.) McGroove has found a loyal following among millennials hunting for a shot of nostalgia, And they are prepared to pay a lot of money to see the fruits of his labours. Through a website called Patreon, around 800 or so fans donate money to pay for the next video – which he charges at $2,655.40 per clip. He is now producing about one video a week – easily giving him enough cash to quit his former job as a music tutor.

Smooth McGroove sings Super Mario

Ohanian thinks this represents something deeper than first appears. Sure, Smooth McGroove is not to everybody tastes – Ohanian is mildly tongue-in-cheek in his praise – but the point is that the artist has got the funding to be creative. He calls it “crowd patronage”, and argues that it could help bring about an explosion in culture and art in the same way that money from the Medici family allowed Michelangelo to nurture his muse back in the 16th Century.

“[Crowd patronage] creates a tremendous opportunity: a renaissance,” he told BBC Future’s World-Changing Ideas Summit in New York earlier this week. Talking about the original Renaissance, he said: “It was an amazing time, we learnt a lot, so much was created during that period of time and yet it only affected a small part of the world; not a lot of people got the chance to do a lot of awesome stuff during that period, but we are experiencing it again on a much bigger scale. And that is exciting, because things like [Smooth McGroove] can exist.”

It means artists have the time and money to concentrate on the creative process – rather than, say, working in restaurants. “We have seen this model work before. There was a woman who was stuck working as an airline receptionist and her friend was like – you’ve got to stop, you need to be a writer. But she never got the chance to write. So he said, you know what, take a year off, here’s a year’s salary, go write the book you always wanted to write. She got her chance, and we got To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee maybe never would have written one of the greatest works of American literature if it weren’t for a rich friend. But think of all the Harper Lees who never got to produce the content they could have. The internet is connecting these people, and now they’re finding patrons.”

BBC Future caught up with Ohanian after the event to discuss his views in more detail; see the video above for his take on the way that the internet is helping to nurture new ideas and innovation more generally. “It’s exciting because we’ve always been capable of this as humans, we’ve just never been able to have the platform to access knowledge… or share it back.”

It remains to be seen if crowd patronage does create another masterpiece, or simply more lolcats. But as Ohanian puts it, “If for each 1,000, or 10,000 or even 100,000 silly cat photos, there is one great work – it’s worth it in my opinion.”

Discover more ideas from the World-Changing Ideas Summit

Tuesday, October 28, 2014