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Sunday, December 4, 2011

Farmers worry new labor rules will end teen jobs

In this photo taken on Nov. 30, 2011, Stetson Meyer, 14, vaccinates piglets on a hog farm run by his father Shane Meyer, near Beatrice in southeast Nebraska. The U.S. Labor Department is proposing new rules for child farm workers that would keep many from driving tractors, using big equipment and working with livestock. Labor officials say the rules are needed because farming is one of the nation's most dangerous occupations, but farmers say the proposed rules could keep kids from helping out on their parents' and grandparents' farms. And, they say, if young people can't get jobs on farms, fewer will develop an interest in agriculture careers. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

In this photo taken on Nov. 30, 2011, Stetson Meyer, 14, feeds sows on a hog farm run by his father Shane Meyer, near Beatrice in southeast Nebraska. The U.S. Labor Department is proposing new rules for child farm workers that would keep many from driving tractors, using big equipment and working with livestock. Labor officials say the rules are needed because farming is one of the nation's most dangerous occupations, but farmers say the proposed rules could keep kids from helping out on their parents' and grandparents' farms. And, they say, if young people can't get jobs on farms, fewer will develop an interest in agriculture careers. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

In this photo taken on Nov. 30, 2011, Shane Meyer Jr., 16, feeds sows on a hog farm run by his father, near Beatrice in southeast Nebraska. The U.S. Labor Department is proposing new rules for child farm workers that would keep many from driving tractors, using big equipment and working with livestock. Labor officials say the rules are needed because farming is one of the nation's most dangerous occupations, but farmers say the proposed rules could keep kids from helping out on their parents' and grandparents' farms. And, they say, if young people can't get jobs on farms, fewer will develop an interest in agriculture careers. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

In this photo taken on Nov. 30, 2011, Stetson Meyer, 14, feeds sows on a hog farm, with his brother Shane Meyer Jr., 16, working in the rear, near Beatrice in southeast Nebraska. The U.S. Labor Department is proposing new rules for child farm workers that would keep many from driving tractors, using big equipment and working with livestock. Labor officials say the rules are needed because farming is one of the nation's most dangerous occupations, but farmers say the proposed rules could keep kids from helping out on their parents' and grandparents' farms. And, they say, if young people can't get jobs on farms, fewer will develop an interest in agriculture careers. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) ? From tending cattle to driving tractors or ATVs, 15-year-old Taylor Muller and her three younger brothers have always done what they could to help the family's farming business.

"Most kids my age don't even have jobs," said Taylor, who assists her father at one southwest Oklahoma farm and her grandparents at another. "We already know what hard work is."

Many other young kids won't be allowed to do those kinds of chores if the U.S. Labor Department approves new rules on children working in agriculture. While the Mullers would likely be exempt because it's a family business, the proposed rules would prohibit most children under age 16 from driving tractors, using power equipment, working with livestock in certain circumstances and doing work at heights over 6 feet.

Federal officials say the rules are needed because farming is one of the nation's most dangerous occupations, but many farmers say children learn important life lessons and might develop an interest in agriculture by working on farms or ranches.

Muller's dad, Matt, says he worries about what the new rules might mean for the future of farming.

"It's very disheartening to me," he said. "Farming is not just a business. It's a way of life."

Michael Hancock, the assistant administrator for policy at the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division, said the rules covering child farm workers haven't been updated in more than 40 years and that changes are needed to address the dangers of working with tractors and other large farm machines. Farming, he said, is "the single-most hazardous occupation, as measured by fatalities, for children."

Nearly 29 out of every 100,000 farm workers in the U.S. die on the job, according to the National Safety Council. Among workers ages 15 to 24, the rate is about 21 deaths per 100,000 workers. Statistics for workers younger than 15 aren't available because there isn't enough data on them.

Hancock compared the proposed rules, which mostly apply to farm employees between the ages of 12 and 16, to those prohibiting a teenager from operating a meat slicer in a restaurant or a cardboard compactor in a grocery store.

"There's any number of things kids can do on a farm that will be totally unaffected by these regulations," Hancock said. For instance, he said, they can still detassle corn, haul hay and feed cattle.

Hancock also said he supports the proposed exemptions in the rules for children working on their parents' farms or on farms where a parent is a main operator.

"If the parents are responsible for what goes on on that farm, they're uniquely able to judge those risks," Hancock said.

Nebraska farmer Shane Meyer worries those exemptions won't cover someone like him because the farm with about 2,500 hogs that he runs near Beatrice, Neb., is owned by someone else.

The rules may not be much of a problem for Meyer's boys, who do yard work and help care for the hogs, because one is already 16 and the other will turn 16 next year, but they would make it hard for him to hire any of his employees' or neighbors' kids.

"It's not the farms that are going to suffer. It's the kids," he said.

Agricultural groups say the parental exemption raises a lot of questions because many farms or ranches today are technically owned by limited liability corporations or other entities even if they are run by families. They say the proposed rules simply aren't clear about how they would apply to various ownership structures.

Matt Muller, who grows wheat and cotton on about 2,000 acres near Altus, Okla., said young cousins and nephews have helped out on his farm, but that might not be possible under the new rules. Plus, he wouldn't be able to hire neighbor kids.

He also wonders how his children would be affected if he and his wife switched the ownership to a limited liability corporation.

A fourth-generation farmer with four children under age 16, Muller said he hopes they will follow him into the business but worries they won't if they don't get interested in farming early. He grew up driving tractors and sweeping out grain bins and said it's a lifestyle he doesn't think labor officials understand.

"They may have legitimate safety concerns, but I don't think they've spent much time on a farm," he said.

For instance, the proposed rules would prohibit the use of any sort of electronic or communication device while operating a tractor, but it's common practice to use two-way radios or cellphones to communicate between tractors, trucks and combines in the field. And many modern tractors come equipped with GPS systems and other electronics that teens might not be able to use.

The National Pork Producers Council, Farm Bureau chapters in several states and other major agriculture groups have organized to oppose the proposed rules. Officials in agricultural states also have questioned the wisdom of the changes.

Iowa Cattlemen chief executive Matt Deppe said he believes the new rules would make it harder for young people to get the hands-on experience they need to become interested in agriculture.

"I see them as creating a barrier for young people interested in the business," said Deppe, who grew up on a farm and learned to drive a tractor at age 10.

And Oklahoma Farm Bureau President Mike Spradling, who raises pecans near Sand Springs, said he didn't think the rules were needed because farmers and ranchers weren't likely to assign teenagers to the most dangerous jobs.

"Having young people around to help with the daily chores is a big help, and it frees up employees to do some of the more dangerous work," he said,

The Labor Department can only regulate employer-employee relationships, so Hancock said the proposed rules shouldn't affect 4-H, Future Farmers of America or other educational programs. And, they may not keep children from helping on their grandparents' or uncle's farms if they aren't paid.

"I think there is a clear path forward for kids who want to pursue agriculture as a career," Hancock said.

___

Online:

Proposed rules for agricultural jobs: http://www.dol.gov/whd/CL/AG_NPRM.htm

___

Follow Josh Funk's reporting at http://www.twitter.com/funkwrite

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2011-12-02-Food%20and%20Farm-Child%20Labor/id-982f6c80957c4f5389e987b740bb99b0

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Saturday, December 3, 2011

Video: Wisconsin governor fights recall efforts

>>> the effort to recall governor scott walker collided with the annual lighting of wisconsin's christmas tree at the state capital . take a look at this. this is an incredible sight. protesters turned their backs as governor walker lit the tree. many carrying recall walker signs. recall organizers have more than half the signatures they need to trigger a recall. governor walker says he's taking this effort, this recall effort seriously.

>> do i take the recall seriously? absolutely. if the unions who spent in total there was about 40 plus million dollars spent on six senate recall elections in my state , i spent $13 million running for governor. so if that many outside influences of my state are going to come in, i'm going to take that seriously no matter what.

>> joining me via skype milwaukee daniel, thank you for your time. protesters turning their backs on governor walker there. this image reminds people how tense and i guess how the anger exists there. this is not the headline as it was several months ago. the anger and the divide still exists in that state .

>> the hostility is clearly still here. you know, early on in the recall process, i was telling people i thought the first 300,000 signatures would be easy to get. it would be the second 300,000 would be difficult. it's been much easier than anyone expected. even the democrats have been surprised how quickly they have been able to gather signatures this time. the electorate is here is undecided. there aren't many people undecided about who scott walker is.

>> he's done ads to counter the recall. what else is he doing to shore up the support in that state . he's incredibly unpopular.

>> he's shoring up in the state by going out of the state . he's going to a number of locations. in fact, sometimes we don't even know where he is until we see in the media that he's in another location. the other thing, as you said is tv. look at the numbers today. it appears in just the last four weeks he spent $1.7 million, which would be the equivalent of what you would expect in the final month of a gubernatorial campaign here.

>> that's interesting that you would take his message out of state . as you know, that was part of the influence, the brothers influencing this governor's agenda against union workers in that state .

>> actually the allegations have gone both ways. you just heard him talk about out of state unions and how much money they spent here.

>> you're right.

>> both sides are trying to play that up. he's got a lot of support, a lot of national publicity. so he's gone to a number of locations where people like what he has to say and raise money . in this race, he can raise as much money typically in a governor's race someone can contribute $10,000 to his race. in a recall lec, wisconsin has this unusual thing that allows him to raise unlimited contributions. so that's part of the reason. he can raise as much as he wants anywhere across the united states .

>> all right, daniel. we'll see what happens. both sides still digging their heels in there. thank you very much. a

Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/newsnation/45527537/

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In a star's final days, astronomers hunt 'signal of impending doom'

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

An otherwise nondescript binary star system in the Whirlpool Galaxy has brought astronomers tantalizingly close to their goal of observing a star just before it goes supernova.

The study, submitted in a paper to the Astrophysical Journal, provides the latest result from an Ohio State University galaxy survey underway with the Large Binocular Telescope, located in Arizona.

In the first survey of its kind, the researchers have been scanning 25 nearby galaxies for stars that brighten and dim in unusual ways, in order to catch a few that are about to meet their end. In the three years since the study began, this particular unnamed binary system in the Whirlpool Galaxy was the first among the stars they've cataloged to produce a supernova.

The astronomers were trying to find out if there are patterns of brightening or dimming that herald the end of a star's life. Instead, they saw one star in this binary system dim noticeably before the other one exploded in a supernova during the summer of 2011.

Though they're still sorting through the data, it's likely that they didn't get any direct observations of the star that exploded ? only its much brighter partner.

Yet, principal investigator Christopher Kochanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio State and the Ohio Eminent Scholar in Observational Cosmology, does not regard this first result as a disappointment. Rather, it's a proof of concept.

"Our underlying goal is to look for any kind of signature behavior that will enable us to identify stars before they explode," he said. "It's a speculative goal at this point, but at least now we know that it's possible."

"Maybe stars give off a clear signal of impending doom, maybe they don't," said study co-author Krzystof Stanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio State, "But we'll learn something new about dying stars no matter the outcome."

Postdoctoral researcher Dorota Szczygiel, who led the study of this supernova, explained why the galaxy survey is important.

"The odds are extremely low that we would just happen to be observing a star for several years before it went supernova. We would have to be extremely lucky," she said.

"With this galaxy survey, we're making our own luck. We're studying all the variable stars in 25 galaxies, so that when one of them happens go supernova, we've already compiled data on it." The supernova, labeled 2011dh, was first detected on May 31 and is still visible in telescopes. It originated from a binary star system in the Whirlpool Galaxy ? also known as M51, one of the galaxies that the Ohio State astronomers have been observing for three years.

The system is believed to have contained one very bright blue star and one even brighter red star. From what the astronomers can tell, it's likely that the red star is the one that dimmed over the three years, before the blue star initiated the supernova.

When the Ohio State researchers reviewed the Large Binocular Telescope data as well as Hubble Space Telescope images of M51, they saw that the red star had dimmed by about 10 percent over three years, at a pace of three percent per year.

Szczygiel believes that the red star likely survived its partner's supernova.

"After the light from the explosion fades away, we should be able to see the companion that did not explode," she said.

As astronomers gather data from more supernovae ? Kochanek speculates that as many as one per year could emerge from their data set ? they could assemble a kind of litmus test to predict whether a particular star is near death. Whether it's going to spawn a supernova or shrink into a black hole, there may be particular signals visible on the surface, and this study has shown that those signals are detectable.

The team won't be watching our sun for any changes, however. At less than 10 percent of the mass of the star in supernova 2011dh, our star will most likely meet a very boring end.

"There'll be no supernova for our sun ? it'll just fizzle out," Kochanek said. "But that's okay ? you don't want to live around an exciting star."

###

Ohio State University: http://researchnews.osu.edu

Thanks to Ohio State University for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/115608/In_a_star_s_final_days__astronomers_hunt__signal_of_impending_doom_

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Napolitano says lone wolf terror threat growing (AP)

PARIS ? U.S. Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano said Friday that the risk of "lone wolf" attackers, with no ties to known extremist networks or grand conspiracies, is on the rise as the global terrorist threat has shifted.

Such risks, Napolitano said in an interview in Paris, heighten the need to keep dangerous travelers from reaching the United States, and she urged European partners to finalize a deal on sharing passenger data that has met resistance over privacy concerns.

Napolitano acknowledged shifts in the terror threat this year, but said the changes had little to do with the uprisings that have overturned the old order in countries around the Arab world and opened up new opportunities for extremist groups.

Asked about the greatest current threats to the United States, she said one from al-Qaida has morphed. "From a U.S. perspective, over the last several years we have had more attacks emanating from AQAP (al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula) than from core al-Qaida," she told The Associated Press.

"There's been a lot of evolution over the past three years," she said. "The thing that's most noticeable to me is the growth of the lone wolf," the single attacker who lives in the United States or elsewhere who is not part of a larger global conspiracy or network, she said.

She named no examples, but it's a phenomenon that is increasingly the focus of international anti-terror operations.

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist is the sole suspect in deadly shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009. In March, a Kosovo Albanian acting alone fatally shot two American airmen in Frankfurt, Germany. In April, a remote-control bomb exploded in a Marrakech cafe popular with tourists, killing 17 people, mostly foreigners ? an attack devised by a Moroccan who was inspired by al-Qaida and tried unsuccessfully for years to join the international terror network before returning to Morocco to devise an attack of his own.

One threat that has remained constant, Napolitano stressed, is that of terrorists reaching U.S. territory. She said the agreement with the EU on sharing data on air passengers for flights from Europe to America is needed to "make sure these global networks and global systems that we all rely on remain safe."

She stressed that such data aided high-profile U.S. terrorist investigations in recent years, including that into Najibullah Zazi, who admitted plotting to bomb New York subways, and David Headley, who was involved in the 2008 Mumbai, India, terrorist attack.

The United States and European Union initialed a new agreement on Nov. 17 after a previous accord from 2007 had to be renegotiated because of changes in EU legislation, and amid criticism that it allowed U.S. authorities too much insight into the private data of EU citizens.

The new deal sets clear limits to what data can be used by U.S. authorities and for how long, and allows passengers to obtain access to their records to correct and delete them.

The accord must still be endorsed by the EU Council ? the heads of state, expected to sign off easily later this month ? and the European Parliament, where a small group of legislators remains opposed.

The U.S. effort won support Friday from France's interior minister, who acknowledged that Europe gets spillover benefits from the tough U.S. line on terrorism. Claude Gueant said the U.S. made concessions to European concerns about privacy and agreed to share some data with Europe.

"I think this is accord is really a win-win," he told reporters after meeting with Napolitano and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

Napolitano and Holder were in Paris for a meeting with counterparts from the so-called G-6 countries: Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain.

___

Associated Press writer Jamey Keaten contributed to this report.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/europe/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111202/ap_on_re_eu/eu_france_us_terrorism

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Friday, December 2, 2011

Insight: Did Conficker help sabotage Iran's nuke program? (Reuters)

(Reuters) ? A cyber warfare expert claims he has linked the Stuxnet computer virus that attacked Iran's nuclear program in 2010 to Conficker, a mysterious "worm" that surfaced in late 2008 and infected millions of PCs.

Conficker was used to open back doors into computers in Iran, then infect them with Stuxnet, according to research from John Bumgarner, a retired U.S. Army special-operations veteran and former intelligence officer.

"Conficker was a door kicker," said Bumgarner, chief technology officer for the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a non-profit group that studies the impact of cyber threats. "It built out an elaborate smoke screen around the whole world to mask the real operation, which was to deliver Stuxnet."

While it is widely believed that the United States and Israel were behind Stuxnet, Bumgarner wouldn't comment on whether he believes the Americans and Israelis also unleashed Conficker, one of the most virulent pieces of so-called malware ever detected. He wouldn't name the attackers he believes were behind the two programs, saying the matter was too sensitive to discuss.

The White House and the FBI declined to comment.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office, which oversees Israel's intelligence agencies, also declined comment.

If Bumgarner's findings, which couldn't immediately be independently confirmed, are correct then it shows that the United States and Israel may have a far more sophisticated cyber-warfare program than previously thought. It could also be a warning to countries other than Iran that they might be vulnerable to attacks.

His account leaves unresolved several mysteries. These include the severity of the damage that the program inflicted on Iran's uranium enrichment facility, whether other facilities in Iran were targeted and the possibility that there were other as yet unidentified pieces of malware used in the same program.

The analysis may be met with skepticism in some quarters because dozens of researchers teamed up in 2009 and spent months studying Conficker, yet nobody concluded that the worm was used to attack Iran. Still, the bulk of that work was concluded long before Stuxnet was even discovered.

Bumgarner - who wrote a highly praised analysis of Russia's 2008 cyber assault on Republic of Georgia - says he identified Conficker's link to Stuxnet only after spending more than a year researching the attack on Iran and dissecting hundreds of samples of malicious code.

He is well regarded by some in the security community. "He is a smart man," said Tom Kellermann, an advisor to the Obama Administration on cyber security policy and the chief technology officer of a company called AirPatrol.

His analysis challenges a common belief that Conficker was built by an Eastern European criminal gang to engage in financial fraud.

The worm's latent state had been a mystery for some time. It appears never to have been activated in the computers it infected, and security experts have speculated that the program was abandoned by those who created it because they feared getting caught after Conficker was subjected to intense media scrutiny.

If confirmed, Bumgarner's work could deepen understanding of how Stuxnet's commanders ran the cyber operation that last year sabotaged an underground facility at Natanz, where Iranian scientists are enriching uranium using thousands of gas centrifuges.

He provided Reuters with his timeline of the attack, which indicates it began earlier than previously thought. He said that it was planned using data stolen with early versions of Duqu, a data stealing tool that experts recently discovered and are still trying to understand. The operation ended earlier-than-planned after the attackers got caught because they were moving too quickly and sloppiness led to errors.

WHO DID IT?

The view that Stuxnet was built by the United States and Israel was laid out in a January 2011 New York Times report that said it came from a joint program begun around 2004 to undermine Iran's efforts to build a bomb. That article said the program was originally authorized by U.S. President George W. Bush, and then accelerated by his successor, Barack Obama.

The first reports that the United States and Israel were behind Stuxnet were greeted skeptically. There are still a handful of prominent cyber security experts, including Jeffrey Carr, the author of the book "Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld," who dispute the U.S.-Israel idea. He says that circumstantial evidence paints a convincing case that China was behind Stuxnet.

According to Bumgarner's account, Stuxnet's operators started doing reconnaissance in 2007, using Duqu, which spied on makers of components used in Iran's nuclear and critical infrastructure facilities.

In November 2008, Conficker was let loose and it quickly spread, attacking millions of PCs around the world. Its initial task was to infect a machine and "phone home" with its location. If it was at a strategic facility in Iran, the attackers tagged that PC as a target. The release left millions of untagged machines infected with Conficker around the world, but no damage was done to them.

In March 2009, Bumgarner says, the attackers released a new, more powerful version of Conficker that started the next phase of the attack on April 1 by downloading Stuxnet onto the targeted PCs. After it completed that task, Conficker's mission on those machines was complete.

CRACKING THE CASE

It took Bumgarner months to conclude that Conficker was created by the authors of Stuxnet.

First, he noticed that the two pieces of malware were both written with unprecedented sophistication, which caused him to suspect they were related. He also found that infection rates for both were far higher in Iran than the United States and that both spread by exploiting the same vulnerability in Windows.

He did more digging, comparing date and time stamps on different versions of Conficker and Stuxnet, and found a correlation -- key dates related to their development and deployment overlapped. That helped him identify April Fool's Day, April 1, 2009, as the launch date for the attack.

Bumgarner believes the attackers picked that date to send a message to Iran's leaders. It marked the 30th anniversary of the declaration of an Islamic republic by Ayatollah Khomeini after a national referendum.

He also identified two other signals hidden in the Stuxnet code, based on the dates when key modules were compiled, or translated from programming text into a piece of software that could run on a computer.

One coincided with a day when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his nation would pursue its nuclear program despite international objections, and another with the day that he made a highly controversial appearance at Columbia University in New York.

FUTBOL FANS

The operators communicated with Stuxnet-infected computers over the Internet through servers using fake soccer websites that they built as a front for their operation: www.mypremierfutbol.com and www.todaysfutbol.com.

If Iranian authorities noticed that traffic, they would be deceived into assuming it was from soccer fans, rather than suspect that something was awry, Bumgarner said.

Once Conficker had pulled Stuxnet into computers in Iran there was still one big hurdle, he said. Those infected computers weren't yet in the target - the underground uranium enrichment facility at Natanz.

Getting the virus in there was one of the trickiest parts of the operation.

Computers controlling the rapidly rotating gas centrifuges were cut off from the Internet. The best way to attack was to put the malware on a device like a USB thumb drive, and then get somebody to connect that drive to the system controlling the centrifuges.

Stuxnet was programmed to automatically jump from an infected PC to a USB drive as soon as it was put into a computer. That was the easy part. Getting somebody to be a human "mule" by bringing that USB drive to Natanz and plugging it into the right machine was a logistical nightmare.

It was impossible to predict when somebody with an infected USB drive would visit the plant. It could take a week or it might be six months.

"It's a painstakingly slow game of chess," said Bumgarner. "They had to keep making moves and countermoves until they reached the centrifuges. Then it was checkmate."

That was probably delivered by somebody who regularly visited the facility and had reason to share information electronically - an academic affiliated with an engineering program at one of Iran's universities or a worker at a company that provided technology to the facility, according to Bumgarner. He or she was almost certainly unaware of what was happening, he said.

Bumgarner is not sure when Stuxnet first hit Natanz, but suspects that early versions only did limited damage. He believes the attackers grew impatient with the pace at which it was damaging the facility and as a result they performed the cyber equivalent of injecting steroids into Stuxnet, adding modules to make it spread faster and inflict more damage. They deployed an enhanced version in January 2010, and two months later an even more powerful one.

Bumgarner believes the juiced-up malware was effective in damaging the centrifuges. But just as steroids have side effects on humans, so the additional modules had a negative impact on the malware: They started causing infected machines to act abnormally.

A then-obscure security firm known as VirusBlokAda in Belarus reported that it discovered Stuxnet after a piece of the souped-up virus made a computer in Iran behave erratically. International investigations followed, which eventually uncovered the attacks on Natanz.

"It blew their operation wide open," says Bumgarner.

Yet its creators may still have other irons in the fire, thanks to Conficker, which lies dormant in millions of PCs around the globe in strategic locations such as Iran, China, Russia, India and Pakistan.

"Conficker represents the largest cyber army in the world," Bumgarner said. "These soldiers are just waiting for their next mission."

(Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa and Caren Bohan in Washington and Crispian Balmer. Editing by Martin Howell)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/iran/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111202/ts_nm/us_cybersecurity_iran

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A data bank to battle cancer | Harvard Gazette

Personalized cancer treatment has become a holy grail of researchers, physicians, and patients. By reading the genes of individual tumors, drugs can sometimes be used against specific cells, replacing the shotgun blasts of traditional chemotherapy and radiation with treatments that are more targeted with fewer side effects.

In the past several years, researchers have taken steps toward that goal, identifying specific mutations in breast, skin, blood, and other cancers and developing treatments targeting those specific cell types. Those treatments remain limited, however, leaving the majority of cancer patients still facing lengthy, draining chemotherapy and radiation regimens.

Researchers at Brigham and Women?s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute are seeking to improve that. The Harvard-affiliated hospitals are collaborating on a massive, long-term effort to collect and analyze tumor tissue from 10,000 cancer patients each year. Using automated gene-analysis technology, they?ll scan each tumor for nearly 500 known mutations on 41 genes.

Barrett Rollins, Dana-Farber?s chief scientific officer and Linde Family Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS), said the project straddles the research and clinical worlds. It will enable researchers to understand better how different tumors behave, and it will provide an opportunity to test new therapies, even as it provides information to physicians.

Though the program is just getting off the ground, Janina Longtine, associate professor of pathology at HMS, director of molecular diagnostics at the Brigham, and head of the lab conducting the analysis, said that researchers already have issued about 100 reports on tumor types that might be useful to physicians in designing cancer patients? care.

Though the study, called Profile, will initially examine tumor genes for known mutations, it also will allow more rapid testing of new treatments by providing a database of patients, their cancers? genetic profiles, and records of what treatments have worked or not over time. If a drug company comes up with a new treatment for breast cancer, for example, rather than spending a year recruiting patients, the database could include a group of patients whose disease has failed first-line treatment, and who might be good candidates for the drug trial. Just by speeding up the process of performing clinical trials, the system aims to cut the time to market for promising treatments, Rollins said.

As genetic-sequencing technology advances and becomes cheaper, researchers hope to switch from examining tumors for known mutations to scanning tumors? entire genetic codes, which would allow researchers to look for new mutations and currently unknown weaknesses that could be targeted by future treatments.

The Profile study, one of the largest of its kind in the nation, is part of a shifting cancer landscape. Not long ago, cancers were known mainly by the type of tissue in which they originated. As medical understanding of cancer biology and genetics advanced, scientists understood that cancer cells were driven not just by the tissues from which they arose, but by the mutations that, for example, caused skin cells to transform into melanoma.

What had long been thought to be one type of cancer may turn out to have five, 10, or 20 subtypes, Rollins said. In addition, cancers arising in different organs have been shown to have mutations in the same genes, and may respond to similar treatments. A mutation in the B-Raf gene, which creates a protein involved in cell growth, has been found in 10 or 12 cancers.

While this newfound understanding greatly complicates the view of cancer, it also provides multiple avenues through which to attack the disease.

Rollins said this project is by far the most complicated he has worked on and involves 40 people. In addition to the scientific aspects, there were administrative tasks related to coordinating two major institutions (which will be joined by a third, Harvard-affiliated Children?s Hospital, in the coming months). The goal is to enroll as many cancer patients at the participating hospitals as possible, something that required study intake procedures to be incorporated into normal hospital intake procedures, while still protecting confidentiality.

?There?s data in all those patients,? Rollins said. ?What we wanted to do ? is turn a population of 16,000 patients into a cohort we could study.?

Source: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/12/a-data-bank-to-battle-cancer/

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Carrier IQ Video Shows Alarming Capabilities Of Mobile Tracking Software

You may be aware of the growing controversy surrounding Carrier IQ, a piece of software found pre-installed on Sprint phones that, according to developers who have investigated, is capable of detecting, recording, and transmitting various user actions and inputs. Among the data CIQ potentially has access to are location, SMS, apps, and key presses. News of the software has been percolating for months on development forums, but when Trevor Eckhart recently summarized his findings, he found himself facing a cease and desist while Sprint vigorously denied the charges, saying "We do not and cannot look at the contents of messages, photos, videos, etc., using this tool." The C&D was quickly retracted, but Eckhart has now released a video that seems to give the lie to both Sprint and Carrier IQ's assurances.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/GQWX523E1Kw/

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