A screen for cancer killers

Method identifies drugs that target the cells behind cancer growth.

A new approach for identifying drugs that specifically attack cancer stem cells, the cellular culprits that are thought to start and maintain tumour growth, could change the way that drug companies and scientists search for therapies in the war against cancer.

“We now have a systematic method that had not been previously known that allows us to find agents that target cancer stem cells,” says Piyush Gupta of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and first author of the study, published online today in Cell .

Applying the technique, Gupta and his colleagues discovered one of the first compounds that can selectively destroy cancer stem cells. The drug, an antibiotic commonly fed to pigs and chickens, reduces the proportion of breast cancer stem cells by more than 100-fold compared with a drug widely used in chemotherapy for breast cancer.
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US probe captures Saturn equinox

Raw images of the moment Saturn reached its equinox have been beamed to Earth by the US Cassini spacecraft.

Scientists are studying the unprocessed pictures to uncover new discoveries in the gas giant’s ring system.

Equinox is the moment when the Sun crosses a planet’s equator, making day and night the same length.

During this time, the Sun’s angle over Saturn is lowered, showing new objects and irregular structures as shadows on the otherwise flat plane of the rings.
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Google and Microsoft: The Battle Over College E-Mail

College students used to complain about dining-hall mystery meat. Their new gripe? Puny e-mail inboxes.

Students have been howling that school e-mail accounts are too small to handle their daily deluge of mail and attachments. To address that problem, a growing number of colleges and universities are outsourcing their e-mail. The companies swooping in to manage student accounts for free? Google and Microsoft. Like search, software and operating systems, campuses are a burgeoning battleground for the tech titans.

Google now manages e-mail for more than 2,000 colleges and universities, enabling students to transform accounts capped at 100 mb into Google-managed inboxes that allow for 70 times as much mail. Microsoft also provides free Web-based mail for thousands of schools, including colleges in 86 countries. Once colleges switch systems, students keep their .edu e-mail address while upgrading from stodgy campus access pages to speedier, sleeker Google (or Microsoft) log-ins.
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Apple’s Snow Leopard: A flurry of changes

According to rumors, the release of Mac OS X 10.6, Apple’s operating system also known as Snow Leopard, might arrive a bit early. Though Apple announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June that Snow Leopard would hit stores in September, tech blogs became overly excited when it was whispered that it might be ready to debut on or about August 28.

How much does it matter that it could arrive five whole days before September officially begins? It doesn’t. Regardless of when the operating system ships, here’s what to expect from Snow Leopard, and why it might matter to you.
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As important as Darwin

In praise of astronomy, the most revolutionary of sciences

FOUR hundred years ago our understanding of the universe changed for ever. On August 25th 1609 an Italian mathematician called Galileo Galilei demonstrated his newly constructed telescope to the merchants of Venice. Shortly afterwards he turned it on the skies. He saw mountains casting shadows on the moon and realised this body was a world, like the Earth, endowed with complicated terrain. He saw the moons of Jupiter—objects that circled another heavenly body in direct disobedience of the church’s teaching. He saw the moonlike phases of Venus, indicating that this planet circled the sun, not the Earth, in even greater disobedience of the priests. He saw sunspots, demonstrating that the sun itself was not the perfect orb demanded by the Greek cosmology that had been adopted by the church. But he also saw something else, a thing that is often now forgotten. He saw that the Milky Way, that cloudy streak across the sky, is made of stars.
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The next blue planet

The race is on to discover a second Earth

IN 1995, when Michel Mayor of the University of Geneva detected the first exoplanet (a planet that orbits a star other than the sun) he started a race that has gained pace ever since. Some 360 such planets have now been detected, but none is exactly equivalent to the Earth.

The closest so far is Gliese 581c, which was discovered in 2007 by Dr Mayor’s colleague, Stéphane Udry. It is both rocky and orbits its parent star at a distance where liquid water could reasonably be expected to exist. However, since its parent star is a red dwarf—a far smaller and fainter object than the sun—that orbit is, in fact, much smaller that the Earth’s around the sun. That, in turn, suggests Gliese 581c is likely to be tidally locked to its orbital period, so that one side of the planet always faces the star and the other never does. Having half a planet in permanent daylight and the other half in permanent darkness does not sound like a good recipe for life.
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Unwired

As more people ditch landline phones for mobiles, America’s regulators need to respond.

IF YOU want to save money, cut the cord. In these difficult times ever more Americans are heeding this advice and dropping their telephone landlines in favour of mobile phones. Despite some of the flakiest mobile-network coverage in the developed world, one in four households has now gone mobile-only. At current rates the last landline in America will be disconnected sometime in 2025.

Good. Mobile phones offer individuals more freedom. Yet confronted by the inexorable march of progress, America’s telecoms regulators have failed to respond. In many ways the landline network is still an essential utility. Maintaining landline networks provides thousands of jobs (the landline operators support more pensioners than even the car industry does). Landlines are the platform for many public services, such as emergency response. And taxes on landlines are the basis of the complex system of subsidies to ensure universal service, meaning an affordable phone line for all.
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‘Many hurricanes’ in modern times

Hurricanes in the Atlantic are more frequent than at any time in the last 1,000 years, according to research just published in the journal Nature.

Scientists examined sediments left by hurricanes that crossed the coast in North America and the Caribbean.

The record suggests modern hurricane activity is unusual – though it might have been even higher 1,000 years ago.

The possible influence of climate change on hurricanes has been a controversial topic for several years.
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