With Halloween falling on a Thursday this year, we know a lot of you will be out this weekend in costume getting your party on. Odds are you'll be carrying a phone in your pocket too. Heck, some of you will probably even be dressed up as a phone or tablet.
We had a great time with our Halloween Contest the last several years, and we can't wait to see how you guys top it this year! While you're out getting spooky, be sure to snap a photo with your Android phone (you can include other mobile gadgets to, but you know... we love Android best). Then tweet or Instagram it using the hashtag #LloydOWeen, or email us your photos. We'll put together all the photos received into a sweet video for the blogs. And beyond that, you can win some awesome prizes for taking part.
HONG KONG (AP) — Police are investigating a second reported extortion attempt at the Hong Kong film set of the latest "Transformers" movie, authorities say. .
A government statement received overnight said a production company crew member was setting up on the roof of a building in Kowloon on Tuesday when four men "intimidated her and asked for money."
She called police, who arrested a 35-year-old man. He's being held pending further inquiries. The three others are still wanted. The case has been classified as blackmail and a police anti-triad unit is investigating.
Triads are Chinese organized crime gangs.
Police arrested two brothers last week after director Michael Bay was assaulted at another filming location. They allegedly demanded 100,000 Hong Kong dollars ($13,000).
"Transformers 4: Age of Extinction" is set for release in June 2014. It's partly set in Hong Kong, where filming involving stars including Mark Wahlberg has attracted attention.
Non-violent attempts at extortion involving location filming have been an occasional problem for Hollywood over the years. They usually involve residents disrupting filming by making noise or other means in an effort to prompt a payoff. In recent years, studios have been more diligent with compensation to residents in neighborhoods where films are shot.
The Obama administration is scrambling on multiple fronts to salvage the Obamacare web site and change the negative narrative for the president’s signature health care law.
On Wednesday the CEOs of several health insurance companies will head to the White House to meet with adviser Valerie Jarrett and chief of staff Denis McDonough,two industry sources said. And a top Health and Human Services official will update House Democrats on the glitchy health care enrollment site.
You know Shark Week on the Discovery Channel? This is Troll Week on the Internet.
Actually, trolls have more in common with piranha -- small, vicious, single-minded creatures that kill you one small bite at a time -- but the concept is similar. This week, these anonymous haters are being outed in droves, and it couldn't happen to a more deserving group of people.
First up: Jofi Joseph. Who's that? Until today, he was a member of the National Security Council's nuclear nonproliferation team, working on negotiations with Iran. But he was also the pseudonymous Twitter account @NatSecWonk (since retired), which routinely savaged his own employers as well as members of the opposing team. Like this tweet:
Vitriol against @arifleischer entirely justified. He married a woman a decade younger than him - and she's as ugly as he is! #jackass
Yesterday, Joseph got canned, after a months-long investigation in which White House staffers pieced together clues from his voluminous tweets to figure out who he was. According to Politico, Joseph also operated another pseudo Twitter account called @DChobbyist where he doled out advice about dating professional escorts. (In Washington, D.C., it seems that everyone is a professional escort of one sort or another.)
Joseph is hardly the only person to be fired for trashing his bosses on social media. To his credit, at least he didn't spray out photos of his manhood to strange women on the InterWebs. He has that going for him.
Their wicked wiki ways But NatSecWonk's outing is just one of a series of exposures of creatures who've been hiding under rocks for too long. Earlier this week, the folks behind Wikipedia ousted some 250 "editors" of the online encyclopedia, who were in fact employees of a public relations firm called Wiki-PR with the sole job of posting nice articles about their clients.
In this case, the editors were sock puppets -- a close cousin of trolls, but equally pernicious in their own way -- who pretended to be real users in order to post glowing comments about Wiki-PR's clients. Per the Daily Dot's Simon Owens, who first identified the source of the animatronic outfits:
Of the four Wiki-PR clients I interviewed, all found out about the company through its aggressive email marketing....
The former clients said they paid between $500 and $1,000 to have the page created, then an additional $50 a month afterward for "monitoring" -- basically Wiki-PR promised to track changes to their pages and resurrect them if any got deleted. If a client didn't meet Wikipedia's "notability" standard, Wiki-PR offered to generate articles about you.
Remember the old saw about believing half of what you see and none of what you hear? That goes double for Wikipedia.
Earlier this year at the PlayStation 4'scoming out event, Mark Cerny, the system's lead architect, announced that gamers would be able to use real names onPlayStation Network. Today, Sony re-confirmed that news to Kotaku, stating that it will be available as an option at launch, although gamers can still opt to elect an alias. The move clearly highlights a different, more social direction for PSN, which up until now has just been a digital storefront. Apart from live video streaming capabilities, we don't have many more details about Sony's planned evolution for PSN, but we do know that, unlike Microsoft and its Xbox One, gamers won't have to wait to unmask themselves online. For its part, Microsoft does intend to let gamers use real names within its Friends app, but that option isn't set to go live until sometime after next month's Xbox One release.
Photographer Laurie Brown documents the edges of cities, where streets uncoil into the drought in the distance and pieces of suburban infrastructure reveal themselves like unnamed monuments on the periphery.
Contact: Michael Bernstein m_bernstein@acs.org 202-872-6042 American Chemical Society
Some of the most dangerous cancers are those that can outmaneuver the very drugs designed to defeat them, but researchers are now reporting a new Trojan-horse approach. In a preliminary study in the journal ACS Nano focusing on a type of breast cancer that is highly resistant to current therapies, they describe a way to sneak small particles into tumor cells, lower their defenses and attack them with drugs, potentially making the therapy much more effective.
Paula T. Hammond and colleagues at the Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research at MIT note that triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive disease that is difficult to treat with standard-of-care therapy, and patients' prognoses are poor. These cancer cells evade treatment by ramping up the production of certain proteins that protect tumors from chemotherapy drugs. Interfering with this process could give anticancer drugs a better chance at killing resistant tumors. Recent research into molecules called small interfering RNAs, or siRNAs, is opening doors into possible new treatments using this approach. These molecules can halt the production of particular proteins, so they are ideal candidates for dialing down the levels of protective proteins in tumors. But there are challenges to using siRNAs as part of a cancer therapy, so Hammond's team set out to address them with novel molecular engineering approaches.
They designed a two-stage, "stealth" drug delivery system to attack TNBC cells in mice, often used as stand-ins for humans in research. They created "layer-by-layer" nanoparticles through assembly of components in a certain order around a nano-sized core. An anticancer drug is loaded into the core of the particle, which is then wrapped in a layer of negatively charged siRNA, alternating with positively charged polypeptides, then coated on the outside with a stealthy tumor-targeting shell layer. That layer helps keep the particles in the body long enough for therapy to work. It also allows the particles to specifically bind to TNBC tumor cells. When tested in mice, the nanoparticles targeted the tumors and reduced the levels of protective proteins by nearly 80 percent. With the cancer cells rendered vulnerable, the nanoparticles' anticancer drug payload showed significantly enhanced therapeutic effects and shrunk tumors by 8-fold. The scientists state, "In summary, the results here provide a potential strategy to treat an aggressive and recurrent form of TNBC, as well as a means of adapting this platform to a broad range of controlled multi-drug therapies customizable to the cancer type in a singular nanoparticle delivery system." They also say that the "layer-by-layer" nanoparticle components are biocompatible and biodegradable, which will allow rapid translation into potential clinical benefits.
###
The authors recognize funding from Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the National Cancer Institute, the National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia) the National Science Foundation and the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada).
The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With more than 163,000 members, ACS is the world's largest scientific society and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.
To automatically receive news releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org.
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Contact: Michael Bernstein m_bernstein@acs.org 202-872-6042 American Chemical Society
Some of the most dangerous cancers are those that can outmaneuver the very drugs designed to defeat them, but researchers are now reporting a new Trojan-horse approach. In a preliminary study in the journal ACS Nano focusing on a type of breast cancer that is highly resistant to current therapies, they describe a way to sneak small particles into tumor cells, lower their defenses and attack them with drugs, potentially making the therapy much more effective.
Paula T. Hammond and colleagues at the Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research at MIT note that triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive disease that is difficult to treat with standard-of-care therapy, and patients' prognoses are poor. These cancer cells evade treatment by ramping up the production of certain proteins that protect tumors from chemotherapy drugs. Interfering with this process could give anticancer drugs a better chance at killing resistant tumors. Recent research into molecules called small interfering RNAs, or siRNAs, is opening doors into possible new treatments using this approach. These molecules can halt the production of particular proteins, so they are ideal candidates for dialing down the levels of protective proteins in tumors. But there are challenges to using siRNAs as part of a cancer therapy, so Hammond's team set out to address them with novel molecular engineering approaches.
They designed a two-stage, "stealth" drug delivery system to attack TNBC cells in mice, often used as stand-ins for humans in research. They created "layer-by-layer" nanoparticles through assembly of components in a certain order around a nano-sized core. An anticancer drug is loaded into the core of the particle, which is then wrapped in a layer of negatively charged siRNA, alternating with positively charged polypeptides, then coated on the outside with a stealthy tumor-targeting shell layer. That layer helps keep the particles in the body long enough for therapy to work. It also allows the particles to specifically bind to TNBC tumor cells. When tested in mice, the nanoparticles targeted the tumors and reduced the levels of protective proteins by nearly 80 percent. With the cancer cells rendered vulnerable, the nanoparticles' anticancer drug payload showed significantly enhanced therapeutic effects and shrunk tumors by 8-fold. The scientists state, "In summary, the results here provide a potential strategy to treat an aggressive and recurrent form of TNBC, as well as a means of adapting this platform to a broad range of controlled multi-drug therapies customizable to the cancer type in a singular nanoparticle delivery system." They also say that the "layer-by-layer" nanoparticle components are biocompatible and biodegradable, which will allow rapid translation into potential clinical benefits.
###
The authors recognize funding from Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the National Cancer Institute, the National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia) the National Science Foundation and the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada).
The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With more than 163,000 members, ACS is the world's largest scientific society and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.
To automatically receive news releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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