Researchers at Washington University have developed a laser beam that can cook brain tumours.

The feat could help save the lives of people with, until now, inoperable brain tumours, and could soon be extended to destroy other tumours in other parts of the body without resorting to surgery.

“This tool gives us a treatment for patients with tumours that were previously deemed inoperable. It offers hope to certain patients who had few or no options before,” Discovery News quoted Eric Leuthardt, a doctor at Washington University, as saying.

The patient the Missouri doctors operated on had a recurrent and life threatening brain tumour. Because of the prior surgeries, and the location of the tumour deep inside the brain, normal surgery was not an option. Since the surgeons couldn’t cut the tumour out, they decided to cook it to death.

Last month the Washington University surgeons drilled a small burr hole, about the diameter of a pencil, into the patient’s skull. Using the MRI machine to guide them, the surgeons carefully directed the narrow and flexible laser probe through the brain and into the tumour. The laser emerges from the probe at a 90 degree angle, so once it is in the correct position all that the doctor had to do was heat the golf ball-sized tumour, essentially cooking it to death at 140 degrees F. While the tumour cooked, the doctors used the MRI machine to make sure the temperature of the surrounding cells was low enough so the healthy cells survived.

“The patient did pretty well. He went home three days later, instead of spending one to two weeks in the ICU,” said Leuthardt.

Barnes-Jewish Hospital, where the operation took place, is the third hospital in the country to zap brain tumours with lasers. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved lasers for neurosurgery in May 2009.

“This is just the latest use for laser technology,” said Richard Ellenbogen, the chief of neurosurgery at the University of Washington. Ellenbogen has used lasers to treat tumours in children. “The beauty of this technology is that you can bend the light and use it to access areas that you otherwise couldn’t,” said Ellenbogen.

Could mobile phones be giving us brain cancer?

Academic and toxicologist Devra Davis, who was in the group that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, says yes. According to Davis, an eminent American scientist and one of the country’s leading epidemiologists, the mobile phone industry spent years trying to bury scientific evidence — that it harms — to protect its $3 trillion, 4.6 billion customer global business.

With mobile phone use soaring, especially among the young, Davis says a “global public health catastrophe” will be seen in as little as three years if the problem is ignored, the Daily Mail reported.

The most troubling research, she says, threatens male fertility.

Research in seven countries, including the US, China and Australia, suggests that keeping a switched-on mobile phone in a trouser pocket can have a drastic effect on sperm count.

“All the research shows the same thing – if you take young men who are trying to become fathers, those who use mobile phones at least four hours a day have about half the sperm count of others,” Davis says.

“Sperm exposed to mobile phone radiation in the lab is sicker, thinner and less capable of swimming,” she adds.

Mobile phones are low-powered radio frequency transmitters which produce microwave radiation. In a new book provocatively titled “Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation, What The Industry Has Done To Hide It And How To Protect Your Family,” Davis says the threat from mobile phone radiation has been underplayed for too long.

“Is it possible that the pervasive use of mobile phones is causing a host of subtle, chronic health problems, damaging our ability to have healthy children and creating long-term risks to our brains and bodies,” she asks. Her
work includes supporting research from studies in the US, Sweden, Greece, France and Russia.

For example, a team at the University Of Washington found that just two hours of mobile phone-level radiation splintered the DNA of brain cells in rats, making them similar to cells found in malignant tumours.

Davis, who is a grandmother, is worried about the effect on children, arguing that their thin, pliant skulls make them more vulnerable.

The U.S. government has said it is back in the business of funding embryonic stem cell research at least for now after an appeals court temporarily lifted a judge’s ban.

The National Institutes of Health said it is resuming its own research and will again evaluate applications from scientists who are seeking taxpayer money to do the work, a process that has been frozen since late last month.

An appeals court on Thursday temporarily stayed a judge’s preliminary order barring that funding until it could hear full arguments in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, the NIH said it is lifting its suspension of all grants and contracts involving use of the cells.

“We are pleased with the court’s interim ruling, which will allow promising stem cell research to continue” while the court battle is waged, said the NIH’s statement.

Scientists who already had received NIH grants had been told to continue working until their dollars ran out, but that 22 projects due to get yearly checks in September would have to find other money.

Now the question is whether the NIH will finish the reviews required for those projects during what could be only a temporary reprieve. No matter what, the case is certain to be bouncing around the court system for many months before there’s a final resolution.

“We believe it’s a shame that they would rush to push funding of embryonic stem cell research, and a waste of taxpayer money,” said Steven H Aden, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, which is involved with the lawsuit that challenged the government funding.

Embryonic stem cells are master cells that can turn into any tissue of the body, and researchers hope one day to harness that power in ways that cure spinal cord injuries, Parkinson’s disease and other ailments.

Culling them from embryos left over after fertility treatment kills a days-old embryo. A 1996 law prohibits the use of taxpayer dollars in work that harms an embryo, so batches have been culled using private money.

But those batches can reproduce in lab dishes indefinitely, and government policies say using taxpayer dollars to work with the already created batches is permissible.

A mind reading machine has edged closer to reality after scientists found a way of converting thoughts into words.

Researchers were able to render brain signals into speech for the first time, relying on sensors attached to the brain surface.

The breakthrough, which is up to 90 percent accurate, will be a boon for paralyzed patients who cannot speak and could help read anyone’s thoughts ultimately, reports the Telegraph.

“We were beside ourselves with excitement when it started working,” said Prof Bradley Greger, bio-engineer at the Utah University who led the project. “It was just one of the moments when everything came together.”

“We have been able to decode spoken words using only signals from the brain with a device that has promise for long-term use in paralyzed patients who cannot speak. I would call it brain reading and we hope that in two or three years it will be available for use for paralyzed patients.”

The breakthrough came when the team attached two button-sized grids of 16 tiny electrodes to an epileptic brain’s speech centers, says the journal of Neural Engineering.

The patient had part of his skull removed for another operation to treat his condition.

Using electrodes, the scientists recorded brain signals in a computer as the patient repeatedly read each of 10 words that might be useful to a paralyzed person: yes, no, hot, cold, hungry, thirsty, hello, goodbye, more and less.

Then they got him to repeat the words to the computer and it was able to match the brain signals for each word 76 percent to 90 percent of the time.

The computer picked up the patient’s brain waves as he talked and did not use any voice recognition software.

Because just thinking a word is enough to produce the same brain signals, Prof. Greger and his team believe that soon they will be able to have translation device and voice box that repeats the word you are thinking.

Besides, the brains of paralyzed people are just as healthy and produce the same signals as those in physically-fit people – it is just they are blocked by injury from reaching the muscle.

Researchers said the method needs improvement, but could lead in a few years to clinical trials on paralyzed people who cannot speak due to so-called ‘locked-in’ syndrome.
“This is proof of concept,” Prof. Greger said adding: “We’ve proven these signals can tell you what the person is saying well above chance.”

As the scope of information technology widens further, some professions are particularly perilous. The dangers differ from psychological stress to physical threat suck as risking the very life.

Elsa Wenzel from PC World lists some of the most dangerous jobs in the field of technology.

1. Internet Content Moderation

The work of Internet content moderators are to filter out that kind of material which might disturb the web users mind such as hate crimes, torture or child abuse from the social network or photo-sharing site. Demand for the work is growing, especially as more Web-based services enable users to post pictures instantly from their mobile devices.

2. Electronics Assembly

Psychological pressure has been a major issue noticed in electronic factories. The number of suicides has been on increase due to the strict safety rules in such factories. Many manufacturers are accused for creating an unbearable, pressure-cooker environment for workers, mostly young migrants from rural areas. Apart from this, labor and human-rights organizations also charge that workers testing microchips and assembling LCDs for Samsung were exposed to radiation that caused cancer. Foxconn, which makes iPhones, iPads, and other electronics from Apple, Dell, and HP, has been accused of fostering “sweatshop” conditions.

3. Fixing Undersea Internet Cables

About 70 vessels around the world are tasked with fiber-optics installation and repairs. Some are on call around the clock. Each has a crew of about 50 people, including cable-installation engineers and controllers of remote-operated vehicles, who spend weeks or months at sea. Robots rather than human divers lay and bury cables in the seabed as deep as 16,000 feet below the water’s surface, but it takes the human hands on deck to haul in, repair, and drop heavy cables. Though they wear rubber gloves, in a worst-case scenario a cable operating with 10,000 volts could become energized. And looking straight into the lasers of a sliced cable can burn out your retinas in a matter of seconds. Members of the crew are also prone to slips, trips, and falls on wet decks.

4. Communications-Tower Climbing

Close to 11,000 people install and fix the communications towers that keep our mobile calls connected. In 2006, 18 of them died on the job. Accident can happen when workers don’t use the right safety gear, when they disconnect just for a moment, or even when the employee takes precautions; a tower can weaken at its base and fall.

5. Unregulated E-Waste Recycling

People involved in the recycling of e-waste come into dangerous contact with lead, cadmium, beryllium, mercury, and brominated flame retardants. Some are exposed to more chemical harm by soaking circuit boards in acid, or burning PVC cabling to retrieve copper.

6. Mining ‘Conflict Minerals’

There are tens of thousands, or by some estimates, hundreds of thousands of people work in appalling conditions to extract those. No tech company has been able to audit and certify that all of its products are “conflict-free,” but some–including Intel and Motorola–are taking steps in that direction.

7. Infrastructure Work in War Zones

Whether building communications infrastructure for civilians or military operations, military personnel and private contractors in the conflict zones of Iraq and Afghanistan risk their lives on a regular basis. It’s unclear exactly how many people doing IT-related work have lost their lives among the 4734 Coalition military deaths in Iraq since 2003, and the 2061 dead in Operation Enduring Freedom since 2001 so far, as counted on the independent iCasualties website.

Much of the world’s electronic waste is being shipped to China for recycling and the cottage industry that has sprung up there to recover usable materials from computers, cell phones, televisions and other goods may be creating significant health and environmental hazards.

Scientists from China and the United States have identified numerous toxic elements in the emissions from an e-waste recycling workshop in southern China, which uses low-tech methods to separate reusable electronic components from the circuit boards. It is not an isolated case, the scientists point out; such methods are used all over China.

Results of their study have been published in the journal Atmospheric Environment.

“The most immediate problem is the health of the workers and the people who live in the city,” said Bernd R. T. Simoneit, a professor emeritus at Oregon State University and one of the authors of the study. “But this may also be contributing to global contamination. For example, previous studies have found carcinogens in wind-carried dust from Asia.”

Simoneit is a widely published scientist who has been involved in numerous studies identifying chemical “signatures” for emissions, including coal smoke, biomass burning, petroleum-based fuels and even the burning of municipal refuse.

By using mass spectrometers and other sophisticated instrumentation, the researchers can pinpoint the contributions of specific emissions to the atmosphere. Their work in China was conducted in Shantou City, a town of 150,000 people located in southern China’s Guangdong Province.

They collected samples during four working days, when workers were removing the electronic components by heating the circuit boards over grills on stoves burning coal briquettes. The workshop had 24 stoves along three walls, and an estimated five tons of circuit boards stacked along the fourth wall for processing. Workers would use the grills to melt the solder, and then remove reusable portions of the circuitry.

The research team included five Chinese scientists and Simoneit, who has dual appointments in OSU’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences and the Department of Chemistry. The researchers found that through this “roasting process,” numerous organic chemicals, heavy metals, flame retardants and persistent organic pollutants (or POPs) were emitted into the air via the smoke. The chemical signature created by this process of roasting or toasting circuit boards “is unmistakable.”

“The next step is to see to what extent this is harming the environment and creating a health hazard for both the workers, and people living in the path of the emissions — either through inhalation, or exposure to the skin,” Simoneit said. “Some of these chemical compounds may be carcinogens; others may be just as harmful because they can act as ‘environmental disruptors’ and may affect body processes from reproduction to endocrine function.”

The Chinese authors of the study are affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and include lead author Xinhui Bi, with ZhenZhen Wang, Xinming Wang, Guoying Sheng and Jiamo Fu.

Simoneit also is working with scientists in India to identify chemical signatures from the burning of wire and other materials, which is done to recycle copper and other minerals. And he is working in Saudi Arabia on a different problem — helping develop “green chemistry” methods for recycling that country’s massive urban waste to create methane.