Thursday 5 April 2018

Playing Games with Cancer

There's a fascinating paper been published in Nature Communications suggesting that a game theoretical approach to treating prostate cancer by aiming to keep it at bay rather than eradicating it can lead to significantly enhanced survival times. The key is to keep medication doses below the threshold where the cancer is likely to become stronger and more resistant. Although the paper doesn't mention it, I wonder if there's mileage in combining this approach with multi-drug testing of cloned cancer cells - a kind of personalised therapy.

By-the-by there's also news in the Journal of Infectious Diseases that Australia is well on the way to the near eradication of cervical cancer through its programme of school-based vaccination against the human papillomavirus. Exciting stuff!

Unnecessary Packaging

I ordered four new printer cartridges the other day. Half the order arrived today - in separate plastic bags. Inside each was one cardboard package. Inside each package was one plastic wrapped cartridge. How daft is that? I guess part two of the order will be similar.




Wednesday 4 April 2018

Dictionary of National Biography 1st and 2nd Editions

The DNB is a great source tome for genealogists. Wanting to look up details of a distant cousin the other day I did a standard internet search and came upon this wonderful site. I'm not sure why I didn't take my usual route of going directly to Internet Archive's search function but I didn't and I'm now glad that was the case because having a direct link to each volume is just SOOO useful.