One hell of a landing!

So said Jeff Kolodjay, a passenger aboard a US Airways flight that ditched in the Hudson River.

Well, any landing you can walk away from is a good one, and I am so pleased everyone did escape with their lives.

A good result.

(Well, it would have been better if it had been an uneventful flight... but it could have been so much worse)

The BBC has this.

Barry George guilty! but not of murder...

Well, the worst you say say about Barry George is that he is a bit odd, which combined wit the fact that he lived near Jill Dando about sums up the prosecution case against him.

I am very pleased he has been acquitted because last time I looked being a bit odd was not a criminal offence.

I wonder of the police will investigate the murder properly. Somehow I doubt it.

The BBC has this.

Money grabbing Vultures circle over Methylene Blue wonder drug

According to a comment by greygeek77 (who alas does not allow viewing of his profile and so I can't find his blog to link to it) on a previous article on the subject:

A little Googleing will show that Methylene Blue, a coal tar dye, was first synthesized in 1875, and was used by the famous French scientist, Ehrlich, in 1861, to treat pain and neuropathy because he noticed it had an affinity for neural fibers. A typical dose is 100 mg per 100Kg of body weight as a pill, or 1 to 2 mg per 100Kg as an injection.

Bulk price for MB is $42/Kg but pharm grade is now going for $285 for 250mg!! The greed has begun.

A patent was filed in 2004 for a "new" way of making the compound because MB is too old to patent itself, and hence wouldn't be profitable enough. It appears that the prescription price will be about $5/day.

This is one "drug" that the US government should nationalize in order to HELP the elderly, most of whom are on limited incomes, and to prevent their exploitation by the pharmaceuticals for unearned profit.

So the bottom line is this:

Methylene Blue has been known for 127 years to be good for neurological problems, and is cheap.

Drug companies seem to have realised this and are rushing to shore up profits by applying for new patents on an old remedy.

The price has spiked, probably due to a sudden interest. I bet that as soon as things settle down generic drug producers will be producing this stuff like it is going out of fashion.

Methylene blue: The new wonder drug?

After having published this article on Methylene blue and its affects on Alzheimer's I have been doing a bit of reading about this blue dye.

It seems that according to this article on a research paper it also repairs defective memory.

The great thing is that it is already administered as a medicine and crucially is cheap.

The interesting thing about the memory repair is that it works in a different way to the way it cures Alzheimer's in that it deals with some problems in mitochondria. You do have to wonder what its affect would be on errant proteins in cancer mitochondria as well. I suspect no one has tried this though as there will not be any money in it.

This does lead to some serious questions about how medical research and drug research is funded and what results it produces. There is no money in finding out that the cure for some ailment is something that is cheap as chips already. More on that later.

Blue dye known to cure Alzheimer's cures Alzheimer's Shocker!

There is a blue dye, methylthioninium chloride, otherwise known as the common biological staining agent and chemical indicator Methylene blue which seems to kill Alzheimer's stone dead. Well perhaps that is over egging it a bit, but it tackles the root observation of Alzheimer's which is a tangle of the tau proteins in neurons.

Apparently a researcher looking at tau proteins tried to dye them with methylene blue and found they disappeared 20 years ago.

It has taken this long, that is 100 years from finding the root pathology, and 20 years from finding a clearing agent for some research to be done.

Whilst I hail this storming success, which not only promises to halt Alzheimer's but in part reverse it, you have to ask why this research has taken so long and why it has taken a drug company to fund it? Alzheimer's is already a very expensive disease economically.

Curiously though, if the "drug" is expensive and unavailable on the NHS there may well be some jobbing chemists quite prepared to make the stuff up.

It will be cheap as chips after all.

The BBC has this, whilst the Telegraph has this.

Incidentally the Telegraph nor the BBC broadcast reports mention that it is a common chemical that has been available for years, whilst the Telegraph suggest that it may cost as much as £2.50 a day, half the price of the current non prescription curative, a pack of cigarettes. I do not know what other stiff is in "Rember" but suspect we will not find out easily. If it is just Methylene Blue, then it can be make up as a solution for little and I suspect available to even the poorest in society.

Cure for Cancer?

Some good news on a black day.

There is news of a new treatment for cancer. It seems that the body always has had a cure for cancer in its immune system but the problem is that the immune system does not see cancer as quite the threat that it is.

The treatment revolves around the idea of taking a blood sample, isolating the immune cells that attack the cancer that someone has then picking the most aggressive and cloning them until you have something like 5 billion of them. Then you inject them.

This therapy has been used on advanced skin cancer but there is no reason why it could not work on all cancers.

At the moment it looks expensive because of the large amount of work and expertise involved in each case but then things that needed that combination 20 years ago are so cheap now it is ridiculous.

There is hope!

The Telegraph has this.

The Phoenix has landed!

I would just like to say well done to NASA for landing its Phoenix probe on Mars' North pole. It will be looking for water and other signs of life.

I wish the mission well.

The BBC has this.

Gene Therapy working! 18 year old has his sight fixed.

One of the interesting things about modern times is genetic testing.

In its early days this led to fears that if you had a genetic test which said you were very likely to get say cancer, you then would not be able to get life insurance.

However now we have the upside of the testing which is gene therapy. It is now being tried on a rare genetic condition that causes eyesight to generate over time until it is lost.

Well, the Independent has a headline "The blind man who was given the gift of sight by gene therapy" which may be over egging it a little as he still had some residual sight so was not blind though he would have become so in time.

What is now going to happen is the techniques and understanding of how to replace defective genes in situ will grow in leaps and bounds, which may well lead to curers for many diseases which are at there heart genetic, and where they don't lead to a full cure they may at least stop the progress of the diseases.

The BBC has this.

Israel accepts Arab peace plan as starting point!

Well, at least Ehud Olmert has not dismissed it out of hand.

The Saudi's proposed a peace plan back in 2002, which has now been put back on the table (The BBC has this). In outline the proposal is that Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, (Well actually land it controlled, Israel's borders have not actually been set by Israel as far as I am aware), that East Jerusalem be the capital of a Palestinian state and that there be a fair an just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem along the lines of UN Resolution 194.

According to reports in Haaretz and the BBC it looks like this could lead to a regional peace conference. It seems that it may be the case that US and Egyptian pressure has brought Israel to the table, though it also has to be said that the public mood there may have also played a part.

Sean Thomas, journalist and novelist has been traveling and has in fact been on both sides of the Israeli/Lebanese border has just come back from Israel. In this report he quotes a Tel Aviv civil servant and hardcore Zionist as saying:

'For the first time', he told me, 'I wonder if we will survive. Now I think the only hope is peace. Just give us someone, anyone, to talk to. We are desperate for a solution.'

When people are fed up with fighting I suppose they talk, and when you want to talk, you need to talk to your enemies.

The shame of it all is this if what Count Folke Bernadotte was trying to achieve between 1947 and 1948 when he was assassinated, all those years ago, and yes although not publicly offered the 2002 peace plan was in essence on the table then.

I forgot to mention that whilst Saudi Arabia may well be able to bring the whole Arab world with them no one has a clue as to what Iran is going to do. Iran is after all not an Arab country.

Conservatives build massive poll lead

The Guardian ICM poll for the month is out, giving the following poll breakdown:

Conservatives 41
Labour 31
Liberal Democrats 18,

In terms of seats, these numbers give the Conservatives 329, Labour 251, and the Liberal democrats 39 with others at 31 an overall majority of 8, according to the election predictor from the UK Polling report website and the seats work out like this Conservatives 362, Labour 239, and the Liberal democrats 18 with others at 31 an overall majority of 74, according to Martin Baxter's election predictor here.

However when asked who you would vote for with David Cameron leading the Conservatives, Brown Labour and Ming Campbell the Liberal Democrats, it comes out as:

Conservatives 43
Labour 28
Liberal Democrats 18

In terms of seats, these numbers give the Conservatives 374, Labour 213, and the Liberal democrats 35 with others at 28 an overall majority of 98 according to the election predictor from the UK Polling report website and the seats work out like this Conservatives 415, Labour 183, and the Liberal democrats 21 with others at 31 an overall majority of 180 according to Martin Baxter's election predictor here.


That is a fantastic lead. It has taken David Cameron a while, but now we are consistently either around or above 40% whilst Labour seem to drift between the low 30's to high 20's.
Hat tips all round to those on Politicalbetting.com, especially Ted and Andrea!

Update 21:04

The Guardian report on the Poll is here.

Something right on the Railways

I went to the Brighton Model World exhibition at the Brighton Center in, well, Brighton.

In previous years I have gone by car. This involves either struggling with the various one way systems designed to annoy motorists and cause havoc, or alternatively to provide clear bus and taxi routes (depending on who you chose to believe), or going via Hove and then sitting in a queue of between a half a mile to a mile for half an hour before getting an extortionately priced car parking space.

Well, this year I took my children by train, as I did to Alexandra Palace last month.

£3 parking at Haywards Heath, £7 for the train (for all of us) and that was it. So much easier than driving into Brighton, but then where I was going was not a long walk from the train station and the weather was good.

I certainly would not want to have to go that way to get to the hospital in Brighton if I could help it, as you would have to get a bus or taxi afterwards if there is one running.

That said there was one thing that made me titter at the Railways. The train I caught was a First Capital Connect train. The train arrived on time but left late. The driver apologised and blamed this on a signal box at Three Bridges favouring Southern Trains!

Cure for Cancer!

I remember a time around 10 years ago or more when every 6 to 12 months you would hear about some promising break through that promised to beat X, Y or Z cancer.

Well, these days they come a lot more often, and in fact I have seen one yesterday and one today. However, the new ways of combating cancer are for all cancers, not just the fashionable ones.

Most ways of dealing with cancer relied on battering everything on the basis that healthy tissue would recover whilst cancer cells would not. Radio therapy certainly works this way. So no cure has been pleasant.

Drugs like Herceptin have been developed but are specific to one type of cancer, or rather one subset.

The problem with cancers is that they are of course quite a lot like normal human cells, so it has been hard to target them specifically.

Well, not so know, and more bizarrely the two things that can beat cancer are both naturally occurring. Odds are you have had at least one of them, and if you like hot food, both, so are fairly safe as well.

The BBC has this on Jalapeno peppers as a cure, or rather the chemical that makes them hot, capsaicin which does interesting things to a cancer cells mitochondria. Mitochondria are a cells boiler house, and almost all cells have them. Apparently they are different in cancer cells, and have different proteins in them. Capsaicin binds to the proteins and effectively shuts the mitochondria down leading to cell death. It does not affect normal cells because they don't have the protein. You can also read this on when the jalapeno pepper cure came to light for prostate cancer.

The Guardian has this on the Common cold. Another thing that is different about cancers is that in order to survive they shut down the immune system locally. If they didn't the immune system would wipe the cancer out and that would be that. What scientists have found is they can use this against the cancer by giving it the common cold.

The common cold is a virus, and like all viruses it gets into a cell, replicates until it fills the cell, which then bursts and then all the "children" go on to do the same to other cells. Whilst this is going on, and cells are dying the immune system gets it's act together and finds a way to kill off the virus. Except not in tumours, because the cancer cells have shut down the immune system so they are easy pray. What is more, out side this sphere of protection the immune system is waiting for any common cold viruses.

For me the exciting thing about both techniques is that the do not damage healthy tissue, or at least not significantly and so should have a lot less in the way of side effects.

Well, as a smoker I have to say I am pleased. Now all I have to worry about is whether the milk I have in my copious amounts of tea are negating all the good effects of having the tea in the first place!

A Mobile revolution in Africa!

I was frankly a bit sad to hear a few years ago that one f the fuels to the fire that is the civil strife in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was a mineral mines to make capacitors small enough for mobile phones. My luxury killing in Africa, plus la change.

However there is hope. There is something I did not think would ever happen, but it is. Africans are getting mobile phones, and not just the rich or the white, but lots of people.

I listened to a Radio 4 and now having just watched BBC two's Newsnight I am stunned to learn that in Kenya a third of the adult population have mobile phones. It is revolutionising peoples lives. They can where ever they are (Yes, pretty much where ever they are) pick up the phone and make a call. They can get text services and even surf the Internet.

The Newsnight reporter, Paul Mason, even tried to get off network by going to the bottom of the Rift Valley, and the the touristy bit with the Safari parks, but the bit with the Masai. These poor nomadic tribesmen wouldn't have a phone and probably no coverage.

Well, not so. The reporter could even surf the net their if he wanted to, and they had mobiles as well!

To give you some idea of the revolution, a farmer used to sell his goods to a middle man. he could pay what he liked as the farmer had no way of knowing what price was available elsewhere. Not so any more. He can get the price of tomatoes any where and any time, so he knows where to send his crops to market. This is already making a huge difference to people. No longer are they trapped with out contact with the outside world or the world in the next town.

Apparently most people in Africa's largest shanti town don't own mobile phones, but then 15 years ago you could have said the same about Kensington and Chelsea. The fact is some people in the slums DO have them! Some seem to use it for mutual political activism. Fantastic!

In fact Africa is the fastest growing mobile market in the world.

So how come Africa has mobile phones but otherwise crumbling infrastructure?

Straight answer is that all the mobile operator needs is a licence. The cleptocracy don't get their hands on the money so it grows. What is more, it is all private money. It is not yet revolutionising the poorest in Africa but it will as it is helping at all other levels.

You can read more here.