cancer

What: Fluorescence-Assisted Resection and Exploration, a new technique that makes cancerous tissue glow during surgery, one cell at a time
Where: Boston
Why: Of the 1.5 million cases of cancer diagnosed annually, nearly all of them require surgery.
Wow: Pinpoints the spread of cancer in seconds

My theory about the itty-bitty iPod shuffle is that Apple made it so small so that people will constantly be losing them, and buying replacements.

But besides the over-the-top portability, the new shuffle has another advantage: it can be swallowed.

Also in today's links: cute ancient creatures, a link between anorexia and autism, and more.

In a few years, doctors won’t need to fill the bodies of gastrointestinal-cancer patients with chemotherapy drugs that also kill off normal tissue. Instead, patients will swallow an electronic pill that finds its way to a tumor, dispenses drugs onto it—and only it—and then passes harmlessly from the body. That’s the promise of the iPill, an ingestible capsule being developed by the electronics giant Philips.

Sad news: John Kanzius, the Florida-based inventor whose cancer-curing machine we awarded a PopSci Invention Award last year, passed away last Wednesday. Kanzius was a true PopSci guy: A former radio engineer who, upon being diagnosed with leukemia, figured there had to be a better way to deal with it than his crippling chemo treatments. So he pulled out his wife’s pie pans and started tinkering, ultimately creating a machine that would have great success in animal trials using radio waves and carbon nanotubes to burn away cancer cells. He was even profiled on “60 Minutes.”

Spitting, kicking and saving lives: all in a day's work for the lovable llama. Scientists have found that the uniquely small size of the llama's antibodies, used by the immune system to identify and counteract bacteria and viruses, could provide new and improved therapies for diseases including cancer, Alzheimer's, and diabetes.

The hairy palms don’t sound so bad, and the blindness seems manageable. But cancer! It’s bad news for both Don Juans and subscribers to Swank Magazine, as a new paper in the British Journal of Urology International (BJU) reports a statistically significant correlation between the frequency of sex and masturbation to the early onset of prostate cancer.

When your mother says eat your greens, you just might want to listen. It's been known since the 1970's that cruciferous vegetables, or cabbage family vegetables, such as broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and kale, have anti-cancer benefits. But researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who have studied the benefits of anti-cancer vegetables for 15 years, are the first to explain how an anti-cancer compound, indole-3-carbinol (I3C), found in broccoli and cabbage, works to slow down the activity of an enzyme linked to rapidly developing breast cancer.

“Cancer treatments have hit a wall,” says chemist Michael J. Sailor of the University of California at San Diego. Today’s chemotherapy drugs leave the body too quickly, and both chemo and radiation kill healthy cells indiscriminately, he explains. So he has developed “nanoworms,” strings of iron-oxide particles that could swim through your blood to kill nascent cancerous tumors—and nothing else.

“Cancer treatments have hit a wall,” says chemist Michael J. Sailor of the University of California at San Diego. Today’s chemotherapy drugs leave the body too quickly, and both chemo and radiation kill healthy cells indiscriminately, he explains. So he has developed “nanoworms,” strings of iron-oxide particles that could swim through your blood to kill nascent cancerous tumors—and nothing else.

Along with flying cars and underwater bubble cities, pills curing every ill are a staple of science fiction. But while aero-autobahns and submerged metropolises have not moved any closer to reality, medical science has advanced to the point where pills once considering miraculous may soon be a reality. Popular Science has a rundown of the top future pills that may one day change your life. Launch it here.

Catching cancer before it metastasizes, or spreads throughout the body, is one way to increase your chances of survival. Now scientists may have found a way to help even when cancer is already on the move, by using magnets to lasso cancer cells and drag them out of the body. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have shown that magnetic nanoparticles—tiny shards of magnetic metal, less than a hundred thousandths of an inch in diameter—can be attached to cancer cells, which can then be manipulated and moved with another magnet.

If technology were a religion, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center would be one of the holiest shrines on any pilgrimage. So much of our modern computer world was invented at this freewheeling innovation lab (and largely given away). Prefer your mouse and point-and-click graphical interface to a UNIX-style command line? Thanks PARC. Think laser prints look better than dot-matrix scrawl? Thanks again.

Some say the glory days have passed. PARC today is a more-focused operation that has to turn quick profits (no more open funding from its owner Xerox). But its still a well-staffed corporate research lab in an era with ever-fewer of those creatures. On Monday, its staff opened the doors to the press to show off the latest gizmos.

Germophobes and OCDers may want to stop reading now, or at least seriously consider only continuing with a bottle of Purell on hand—for today, were talking about bacteria, those squirmy no-see-‘ems that densely cover just about every surface imaginable here on Earth, including your own skin. However much hypochondriacal hatred the mention of them can bring about, as with other quasi-oxymorons like good cholesterol, wed be in a lot of trouble if it werent for bacteria.

Eggs used to be in the news all the time. One month they were good for you, the next month, bad. Morning talk shows and television commercials would trot out expert after expert to volley the conflicting health claims back and forth. But while there is a legitimate debate over the cholesterol content of egg yolks and whether that cholesterol is ultimately bad for you or not, the analogous debate getting airtime these days is not much of debate at all: whether cellphones cause brain cancer.

Sure, there have been a few studies backing this idea before, but its one of those conclusions that you can never really hear enough: cell phones do not increase your risk of brain cancer.