"Big Bang" experiment advancing fast

After a year's delay, scientists at the world's biggest accelerator have restarted an experiment to recreate "Big Bang" conditions that had sparked suggestions the earth would be sucked in by millions of black holes.

Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have established circulating particle beams in both directions in the underground Large Hadron Collider, a step that is already beyond where the experiment stalled during a first attempt in September 2008, CERN spokesman James Gillies said.

The high-profile experiment, through which tiny particles are smashed in a bid to learn more about the birth of the universe, failed just nine days after it was launched due to a technical problem that took longer than expected to fix.

"We are further advanced now than where we were after five days of experiment last year," said CERN's Director for Accelerators Steve Myers, saying the extra year had allowed researchers to upgrade instrumentations and computer software.

Myers added that researchers had increased the sensitivity of the protections at the 10 billion Swiss franc ($9.82 billion) collider under the French-Swiss border.

Stealthy Nanoparticles Attack Cancer Cells

Drugs embedded in special polymers can more effectively shrink tumors.

This article is quoted from Technology Review

In a small manufacturing space on a Cambridge, MA, street dotted with biotech companies, Greg Troiano tinkers with a series of gleaming metal vats interweaved with plastic tubes. The vats are designed to violently shake a mix of chemicals into precise nanostructures, and Troiano's task, as head of process development at start-up BIND Biosciences, is to make kilograms of the stuff--a novel drug-infused nanoparticle. The company hopes the new drug-delivery system will diminish the side effects of chemotherapy while increasing its effectiveness in killing cancer.

Scientists at BIND have shown that their nanoparticles--which are not only infused with drugs but also enrobed in cancer-targeting proteins--can better stop the growth of prostate, breast and lung tumors in rodents. BIND has made particles that can remain in the bloodstream for more than a day, increasing the likelihood that the drug will reach its target tissue. It is also refining a method for making large volumes of its nanoparticle-based delivery system in preparation for clinical trials of its technology in cancer patients next year.

The company's approach is based on self-assembling polymers developed in the lab of Robert Langer, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT and a pioneer in biomaterials research. Langer founded BIND in 2006 with Omid Farokhzad, a scientist and physician at Harvard Medical School and a former postdoctoral researcher in Langer's lab.

"The idea of using nanoparticles is to lower the dose while maintaining efficacy and reducing side effects," says Piotr Grodzinski, director of the Nanotechnology for Cancer Programs at the National Cancer Institute, in Bethesda, MD. Grodzinski said in some cases the nanoparticles could be used to increase the dose while reducing toxicity. This is especially important for chemotherapeutics, which often must be administered in high doses that result in severe side effects--so severe that some patients choose to forgo the treatment.