SNSG - Pinter Ngaji (dance version)
Ngakak... hahahaha...
Courtesy of Youtube
Jumat, 19 Juli 2013
Ngaku Penggemar K-Pop? Kenal Lagu Ini Donk...
SNSG - Pinter Ngaji (dance version)
Ngakak... hahahaha...
Courtesy of Youtube
Rabu, 17 Juli 2013
AIDS Virus Modified, Used To Deliver Gene Therapy To Rare Disease Patients
Scientists have used a modified AIDS virus to successfully treat six children suffering from rare inherited genetic diseases.
By disabling HIV’s ability to replicate and run rampant in a patient’s body, scientists can then safely use the virus as a courier for gene therapy. Blood stem cells are taken from a patient with a genetic disorder and infected with a virus carrying the non-mutated version of the gene, which inserts it into the cells’ DNA. Then, the patient gets their own modified blood cells back.
In a pair of papers published in the journal Science on Thursday, an international team of researchers led by the San Rafaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy (TIGET) in Italy reported on their success with the technique in three children with metachromatic leukodystrophy, and three with the rare disease Wiskott-Aldrich Syndrome. The trials began in the spring of 2010, and three years later, all six children are doing well.
“The results obtained from the first six patients are very encouraging: The therapy is not only safe, but also effective and able to change the clinical history of these severe diseases,” senior author Luigi Naldini, the director of TIGET, said in a statement. “After 15 years of effort and our successes in the laboratory, but frustration as well, it's really exciting to be able to give a concrete solution to the first patients.”
The new technique also seems to be safer than a similar treatment that uses a different class of virus to deliver gene therapy.
“We’re taking advantage of what we’ve learned over the past 30-some-odd years about this family of viruses,” Baylor College of Medicine pediatrician and immunologist Jordan Orange, a co-author on one of the papers published Thursday, said in a phone interview. “Clearly the clinical side of this is incredibly exciting.”
Metachromatic leukodystrophy impairs the development of the myelin sheath, a fatty covering that insulates nerve fibers. At birth, the children appear healthy, but their nervous systems start to degrade quickly. Most children with MLD die by 5 years old, and there are currently no other treatments available.
Children with Wiskott-Aldrich Syndrome have a mutation that affects tiny protein filaments that provide internal structure to a person’s cells as part of a scaffold called the cytoskeleton. The cell is constantly tearing down and rebuilding its internal structure as it grows, moves and duplicates, so being able to effectively rebuild the cytoskeleton is essential to a person’s daily function. The filaments affected by the disease, which alters a key protein called WASP, are analogous to the metal girders that support buildings.
Basically, “what’s wrong in this disease is you can’t make new ‘girders’ real well,” Orange says. “The cell is unable to organize its insides.”
Because of this impaired cellular functioning, Wiskott-Aldrich patients have a compromised immune system that leaves them much more vulnerable to diseases, cancers and infections. Patients also tend to bleed easily, thanks to a defect in the platelets of their blood.
One of the three patients in the Science study is one of Orange’s charges. He saw the boy soon after his birth, and blood tests confirmed the patient had the more severe form of the disease. Sometimes this severe form can be treated with a bone marrow transplant – which has about a 75 percent cure rate – but in this boy’s particular case, there was no matching donor. Left untreated, the severe form of Wiskott-Aldrich is usually fatal by age 12.
Doctors have explored the possibility of using viruses to deliver the normal gene that encodes the WASP protein before. But previous methods using another kind of virus – sort of a “cousin” of HIV – sometimes resulted in patients developing blood cancers.
The problem with the other viral vector was that it would “only insert [itself] into places in DNA that are open and actively being used,” Orange says. “Those places are often the parts that maintain normal [cellular] growth. If you go in and plug something ahead of that, you can get uncontrolled growth.”
The modified HIV, which belongs to a genus of viruses called lentivirus, is much more varied in selecting where to insert itself, and as a result is much less likely to insert itself in a position that could end up causing cancer. When the scientists examined the patients after treatment, the difference caused by the takeup of the normal gene was striking.
“What I could see with my own eyes was that when the correct protein was in the patient’s cells, the ‘girders’ were perfect,” Orange says. “It was proof to me that the delivery of this healthy gene truly restored” the cell’s ability to function.
Time will tell just how safe the therapy is in the long run. But in the meantime, the six patients are getting a much longer lease on life than they started out with. Orange saw his patient just last week, at a national conference.
Seeing the boy running around, indistinguishable from children that were not born with a life-threatening mutation, “was definitely one of my finest days in clinical medicine,” he says.
SOURCES: Biffi et al., “Lentiviral Hematopoietic Stem Cell Gene Therapy Benefits Metachromatic Leukodystrophy”; Aiuti et al., “Lentiviral Hematopoietic Stem Cell Gene Therapy in Patients with Wiskott-Aldrich Syndrome,” Science published online July 11, 2013.
Neptune's strange new moon is first found in a decade
Neptune has a new moon, and its existence is an enigma. The object, known for now as S/2004 N1, is the first Neptunian moon to be found in a decade. Its diminutive size raises questions as to how it survived the chaos thought to have created the giant planet's other moons.
The faint moon was discovered in archived images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, was poring over pictures of Neptune taken in 2009 to study segments of its rings.
The rings around our outermost planet are too faint to see without taking very long-exposure pictures. However, the rings orbit so fast that taking one long shot would smear them across the frame. Showalter and colleagues gathered multiple shorter-exposure images and developed a technique to digitally rewind the orbits to the same point in time. Then they could stack several images on top of each other to reveal details of the rings.
"I got nice pictures of the arcs, which was my main purpose, but I also got this little extra dot that I was not expecting to see," says Showalter.
Stacking eight to 10 images together allowed the moon to show up plain as day, he says. When he went back and repeated the process using Hubble pictures taken in 2004, the moon was still there and moving as expected.
Daughters of Triton
The tiny addition to Neptune's family is an added shock because it seems too small to have survived the formation of the other moons, according to accepted theories.
Neptune's biggest moon, Triton, is 2705 kilometres wide and orbits backwards – travelling in the opposite direction to the planet's spin. Its large size and wonky orbit led astronomers to believe that Triton was captured by Neptune's gravity about 4 billion years ago and that it destroyed whatever moons the gas giant originally had as it was settling into its new home.
"The Neptune moons we see today were probably broken up and regenerated after the arrival of Triton," says Showalter.
S/2004 N1 is about 20 kilometres across, and it has a nearly circular orbit that takes it around Neptune in 23 hours. Its orbit is squarely between Proteus, the outermost moon aside from Triton, and Larissa. These moons are 400 and 200 kilometres across, respectively. But in the post-Triton chaos, such a small rock should have been swept up to become part of Proteus, or broken up by interloping asteroids sometime after the system settled down.
"How you can have a 20-kilometre object around Neptune is a little bit of a puzzle," says Showalter. "It's far enough away that its orbit is stable. Once you put it there it will stay there. The question is, how did it get there?"
Name game
A more immediate question may be what to call this new and unusual moon. Neptune's other natural satellites are named after minor water deities in Greek and Roman mythology, an official naming convention set up by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Showalter and colleagues alsorecently discovered two new moons around Pluto and put their names to a public vote – although the IAU had the final say.
"Compared to work we recently did naming the moons of Pluto, there's not quite as colourful a cast of characters to work with, but there is still an interesting list of sea creatures one can choose from," he says.
For now, Showalter and the discovery team do not have a favourite in mind: "We don't really have a name for it. It's just 'that little moon', because S/2004 N1 does not roll off the tongue."
Pemerintah Berencana untuk Naikkan Harga SIM Card hingga 5000 Persen
Tak hanya bahan bakar minyak dan sembako yang mengalami kenaikan harga di Indonesia. Kartu SIM untuk handphone pun dikabarkan bakal mengalami kenaikan. Tak tanggung-tanggung, pemerintah bakal menaikkan harga SIM card hingga 5000 persen. Dengan begitu, harga SIM card yang kini bisa diperoleh dengan banderol 2 ribu rupiah akan meningkat menjadi 100 ribu rupiah.
Rencana tersebut dilakukan terkait tingginya churn rate di Indonesia. Churn rate sendiri merupakan angka yang menunjukkan pelanggan non aktif atau nomor hangus. Saat ini tercatat terdapat 20 persen churn rate di tanah air. Jumlah tersebut pun cukup tinggi dibandingkan dengan negara di Asia lainnya.
Selain itu, dengan menaikkan harga SIM card, BRTI ingin menekan trafik sambungan langsung internasional (SLI) ilegal yang dilakukan melalui VoIP. Dalam catatannya, BRTI mengatakan bahwa akibat SLI ilegal tersebut pendapatan telekomunikasi hilang sebesar 770.8 miliar dengan potensi pemasukan negara sebesar 206.19 miliar.
Namun kebijakan tersebut masih berupa wacana. Pihak Kominfo pun mengatakan bahwa saat ini harga sebuah SIM card memang terlalu murah. Oleh karena itu pemerintah melalui draft revisi Rancangan Peraturan Menteri (RPM)Registrasi Pelanggan Jasa Telekomunikasi No. 23 tahun 2005 ingin mengkaji ulang tentang hal tersebut.
via Tech in Asia
Smartwatch Microsoft
Microsoft dilaporkan tengah mengembangkan sebuah smartwatch yang menggunakan OS Windows 8. Bahkan proyek smartwatch tersebut kini dikabarkan telah menghasilkan beberapa prototype.
Selanjutnya, jam tangan pintar tersebut dikatakan akan hadir dengan beberapa pilihan warna, yakni biru, merah, kuning, hitam, putih serta abu-abu. Tak hanya itu, jam tangan Windows 8 itu akan didesan dengan alumunium tipe baru yang disebut Oxynitride Alumunium. Alumunium ini pun dikatakan memiliki tranparansi 80 persen dan 4 kali lebih keras dibandingkan kaca.
Fitur lainnya yang bakal dipunyai jam tangan tersebut adalah dukungan SkyDrive. Jam tangan tersebut pun dilaporkan bakal memiliki konektivitas 4G LTE dan akan kompatibel dengan Windows Phone.
Sumber: Berita Teknologi via Softpedia
PairASight lets other people in on what you're seeing
Imagine if you were having a real-time conversation with someone at another location, and wanted them to see what you were seeing, from the perspective you were seeing it. Well, you soon may be able to do just that, once the PairASight project is up and running.
PairASight utilizes a tiny 1080p HD video camera and a two-way audio communications system, integrated into headgear such as glasses. Video and audio content is wirelessly streamed from that system to the user’s smartphone, from which it can then be transmitted anyplace in the world via the internet.
Users could confer with other people on what they were looking at, without having to hold their laptop, tablet or phone up to it like a camcorder. This would keep their hands free, and avoid any confusion arising from seeing the same subject from different points of view.
The technology is still in the prototype stage, although the designers hope that it could ultimately have applications in fields such as automotive repair, healthcare and retail. It will be interesting to see how the system stacks up against its obvious competitor, Google Glass.
31 Peserta Tes Calon Mahasiswa UMM Gunakan Jasa Joki
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, MALANG -- Sedikitnya 31 peserta tes calon mahasiswa baru Universitas Muhammadiyah Malang, Jawa Timur, Senin, tertangkap menggunakan jasa joki.
"Jumlah peserta yang ketahuan menggunakan jasa joki ini bisa terus bertambah karena saat ini kami masih melakukan penggeledahan terhadap seluruh peserta tes," kata Rektor Universitas Muhammadiyah Malang (UMM) Dr Muhadjir Effendi disela-sela meninjau pelaksanaan tes di kampus setempat.
Ia mengatakan, cara yang digunakan para joki untuk mendistribusikan jawaban pada kliennya (peserta tes) cukup canggih, yakni dengan menggunakan berbagai modifikasi alat komunikasi dan kamera berteknologi tinggi dan rapi.
Muhadjir menjelaskan, cara yang digunakan joki bersangkutan dan juga menjadi peserta tes ini cukup rapi. Namun, dari 31 peserta yang tertangkap ini hanya dua yang benar-benar joki karena bertugas mengirim foto atau rekaman soal-soal kepada pihak lain atau jaringannya yang berada di luar area kampus (tempat tes) melalui peralatan canggih.
Muhadjir memperkirakan praktik perjokian tersebut merupakan sindikat yang sangat rapi, bahkan tidak menutup kemungkinan juga akan digunakan pada tes atau seleksi bersama masuk perguruan tinggi negeri (SBMPTN).
"Alhamdulillah, panitia seleksi yang dibantu oleh berbagai pihak akhirnya mampu mengungkap sindikat dan praktik perjokian yang sangat rapi ini. Ini bukan saja menjadi perhatian serius bagi UMM, tapi juga kepentingan yang lebih besar lagi, yakni nasional," tegasnya.
Menyinggung jika ditemukan adanya pihak kampus yang terlibat dalam praktik perjokian tersebut, Muhadjir secara tegas mengatakan, akan langsung dipecat dan peserta yang terbukti menggunakan jasa joki juga langsung didiskualifikasi.
"Kami tidak akan main-main dengan masalah ini, kami akan dalami lebih jauh lagi, bahkan kami sudah meminta bantuan pada Kapolresta Kabupaten Malang," ujarnya.
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