Golden Nano-Bullet Cancer Treatment

This is just damn cool. Gold “nano-bullets” could seek and destroy inoperable human cancers, suggest new studies by US scientists. The tiny silica particles are plated with gold and heat up when near infrared light (NIR) is shone on them. This kills the cancer cells. Tests on human breast cancers, both in the test tube and in tumours in mice, were highly successful, the researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The nanoshells are designed to absorb near infrared light and convert that light to heat,” explains Jennifer West, who led the study at Rice University, …

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What is Art? What is an Artist? Does It Matter?

I posted about this over on New Sophists’ Almanac, but I cannot resist also posting about it here. There’s a woman named Judith Scott who produces all kinds of “fiber art”, which isn’t really remarkable in itself (unless you happen to find that the artworks speak to you in a wway that they simply don’t speak to me…). Nothing remarkable at all, actually, can be said about her, except… she’s got Down’s Syndrome, severe mental handicaps, some physical handicaps too. And she very likely has no concept of art that would be recognizable to us. And yet she works at …

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eclexys updates…

I’ve been busily updating this page for a while now. You may notice the random banners on the tops of all the different pages… I’m having fun adding a few every few days, and I would like to have a lot of them up. I’ve also added feeds from other blogs where I post, including New Sophists’ Almanac, my Korean blog, and my band’s infoblog. This is a very cool. It is actually possible to add feeds for blogs that one likes, as well as one’s own blogs, since it all just works off RSS. But I won’t go there… …

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