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On World Head and Neck Cancer Day (27th July), doctors from across the country urge people to stop tobacco use and adopt a healthy lifestyle as they suggest that this can prevent almost 80 percent of head and neck cancer cases in India.

According to a consolidated report of Bengaluru's National Centre for Disease Informatics and Research, head and neck cancer cases account for 30 and 10 percent of total cancers in males and females respectively between 2007 and 2011.

"Almost 80 percent of head and neck cancers are preventable since the majority of them are tobacco induced - smoke or the smokeless forms," says Tapaswini Pradhan, senior consultant for surgical oncology at the BLK Super Speciality Hospital.

(When Will They Find a Cancer Cure, Doc? | Ranjana Srivastava)

"Due to increase in alcohol consumption and tobacco, there is an alarming increase in the incidence of head and neck cancer cases over the past decade in developing countries like India," Pradhan added.

Fifty percent of head and neck cancers are oral cancers or mouth cancers, said A.K. Dewan, consultant and chief of head and neck surgical oncology at the Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute. Other major forms of head and neck cancer include lyrangial cancer (voice-box cancer), throat cancer (phyrangial cancer), paranasal sinus cancer (sinus cancer), thyroid and salivary gland cancers, Dewan explained.

To draw the world's attention to effective care and control of head and neck cancer, the International Federation of Head and NeckOncologic Societies (IFHNOS) proposed at its fifth World Congress in New York last year that July 27 be declared World Head Neck Cancer Day. The Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) also supported the move and July 27 will be observed as such from this year.

Explaining the need for a different advocacy programme for this eminently preventable disease, Dewan said that the problems in head and neck cancers are very different in the sense that they affect day-to-day life in far greater way than any other type of cancer."Head and neck cancers affect all essential functions including speech, breathing and swallowing," says Dewan.

(Alternative Therapies Risk Effectiveness of Cancer Treatment, Researchers Find)

"More importantly, in most of the cancers we do not know the reason why they are occurring but in case of head and neck cancers 80 percent of deaths are due to tobacco chewing or smoking," he said. "We also know that by cessation of tobacco chewing we can virtually prevent head and neck cancers," he emphasised.

Rakesh Dhurkhare, consultant for general and laparoscopy surgery at Gurgaon's Paras Hospitals, agreed. He said that the cancer-causing effect of tobacco goes up when it is combined with betel nut and lime.

(Patients Rarely Recognise Telltale Signs of Cancer - Study)

"Better oral hygiene, avoiding repetitive injury inside the mouth by sharp teeth and non-consumption of spicy food and alcohol can also help prevent these deadly cancers," adds Dhurkhare. He said that India's poorer states bear the maximum burnt of head and neck cancers.

The maximum cases of head and neck cancers are reported from Assam, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh Dhurkhare pointed out. "Particularly in Assam, about 50 percent cases of all the cancers are of the head and neck region," he said.

Pradhan said that the maximum number of tongue cancers is reported from Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh, followed by Goa.Besides tobacco chewing and smoking, ill-fitting dentures, which cause wounds, and some viral infections, including one caused by human papillomavirus (HPV), can result in infections and cancers of the head and neck region, Tushar Patil, medical oncologist at Pune's Columbia Asia Hospital. He said that good dental and oral hygiene, along with regular check-ups can help save many lives.Those with a family history of the infections should especially remain vigilant, Patil cautioned.

According to Pradhan, intake of more than 50 gm of alcohol per day increases the risk five- to six-fold in men and consumption of as low as 10-20 gm per day significantly increases the risk in females. "For people who consume both alcohol and tobacco, the risk increases in a multiplicative manner rather than in an additive manner," she pointed out.

According to Pradhan, a little attention to diet can also goes a long way in preventing the debilitating conditions."Deficiency of Vitamin A, C, E, beta-carotene, iron, selenium and zinc can also cause head and neck cancer," Pradhan said.

(Foods That Prevent Cancer)

High-temperature cooking which leads to loss of vitamins, especially vitamin C, should be avoided. "Fresh fruits and vegetables have a known protective effect against these cancers. Preserved meat with high content of nitrates should be avoided," Pradhan advised.
source:food.ndtv.com

On 3 June this year, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN began delivering particle collisions at an energy 63% higher than previously achieved. This week in Vienna, first physics results were presented. Here are some highlights

The European Physical Society High Energy Physics conference is taking place now in Vienna. This is the first big chance for the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to show off what they have managed to extract from the new data they have recorded since 3 June, when the LHC restarted particle collisions after a two-year break.

The new collisions are at a higher energy - 13 TeV¹ compared to the previous record of 8 TeV. Since we are bumping up against the speed-of-light barrier, this means the speed of the protons increases from 299 792 449 metres per second to 299 792 454 m/s (the speed of light is 299 792 458 m/s). An increase of only 5 m/s, which doesn’t sound terribly important. But speed is the wrong way to judge the significance of the increase. The main point of high energies in particle colliders is that they allow us to see into the heart of atoms and study the structure of matter at tiny distance scales; in a way the LHC is like a giant microscope. Turning up the energy is like turning up the power of the microscope, and we are eager to see what that might reveal.

The ‘reveal’ doesn’t all happen at once of course. As well as the energy, the amount of data is also important, and so far we only have a tiny fraction of what the LHC will deliver.
Minimum Bias

One of the first things to do is simply count the particles produced when protons collide at these new energies. These so-called “minimum bias” measurements set the stage on which all other measurements are made. They tell us what a typical collision looks like, before we start trying to select rarer and more interesting varieties.

Both ATLAS and CMS have produced results on the number of particles produced in 13 TeV collisions. The ATLAS result follows the template of our earlier results at lower energies, and shows how well (or how badly) various theoretical models predict the energy dependence of the particle multiplicity. The CMS result is a bit different. It takes advantage of a data-taking period during which their solenoidal magnet (the “S” in CMS) was off.

Having no magnet is a bad thing in general, because charged particles bend in the magnetic field, and from that bending, their momentum can be measured. No magnetic field, no momentum measurement. However, with the magnet on, very low momentum particles get bent so much that their paths curl up inside the LHC beam-pipe, and they never make it to the detector, and so never get detected at all.

With the magnet off, those tracks can be detected. We don’t know their momentum, but CMS have measured how many of them there are and what direction they are going in. All useful information for constraining the theoretical models, and understanding the environment in which the rest of LHC physics will be done.
The Ridge

Another ‘counting particles’ type of measurement is the so-called ‘ridge’, first measured by CMS very early in 7 TeV data-taking, back in 2010. This involves saving a lot of events which are not ‘average’, but in which an unusually large number of particles have been produced. Then you look at the correlations between pairs of those particles.

The CMS measurement first showed a surprising ‘ridge’, indicating an increased probability of emitting particles at a similar azimuthal angle (perpendicular to the beams) even when the angle along the beam (the rapidity) was very different. This kind of correlation has been seen as evidence that a sort of plasma, or liquid, of quarks and gluons has been formed, and are undergoing some kind of “collective flow”... essentially following each other around. Such an effect is expected (and seen) in heavy ion collisions, but very unexpected in proton-proton collisions. ATLAS confirms the CMS result (and now at higher energy), and in the meantime a wide variety of alternate theoretical explanations have arisen.

The question now is whether new measurements can help us reject some of the those explanations, and perhaps zoom in on the correct one. If quarks and gluons really show collective flow in these collisions, that is a big surprise. Like the recent pentaquark results from LHCb, it’s an example of the puzzling and rich phenomenology of the strong interaction. The ATLAS summary of this result is here, with the detailed write up here.
Jets

Jets of hadrons are produced when quarks and gluons smash into each other at short distances. The shorter the distance, the higher the energy of the jet. In fact measurements of jets give us our first glimpse of this really short distance physics, the reason we went for higher energies in the first place.

The first ATLAS jet measurement at 13 TeV was released for this conference; so far it only covers the range of jet energies that we’ve covered before, but it shows that, as expected, these jets are produced much more frequently in 13 TeV collisions than at 7 or 8 TeV, and illustrates the potential of these measurements as we get more data.



There are more results coming, and things are happening so quickly that I have probably missed some good ones here already. ATLAS is in a frenzy of reviewing and approving preliminary results at the moment and I would assume that CMS, LHCb and ALICE are in a similar state. Apologies to colleagues, especially on those other experiments, if I have missed your favourite highlight - it wasn’t deliberate and it may well feature on these pages soon anyway.

In short, there’s a lot going on at the moment. And the best is definitely still to come, with updates on the top quark, W, Z and Higgs boson production and (my current favourite) the question as to whether this bump will be seen again in the new data or not?
Tera electron Volts - the energy an electron would acquire accelerated through 13 trillion volts of electrical potential.
Jon Butterworth’s book Smashing Physics is available as “Most Wanted Particle” in Canada & the US. He is also on Twitter.
source:http://www.theguardian.com

Users left unamused as social media company replaces content subject to takedown notices with ‘tweet withheld’ messages, allowing 10 days to appeal

Twitter has begun to honour takedown requests from users complaining their jokes have been lifted wholesale and shared by others, passing them off as their own.

Certain tweets have begun to be replaced with copyright notices and a message saying “tweet withheld”. The blocked tweets offer users the chance to “learn more” via a link to Twitter’s policy on DMCA takedown notices.

A statement on Twitter’s policy page asserts:

    Twitter will respond to reports of alleged copyright infringement, such as allegations concerning the unauthorized use of a copyrighted image as a profile photo, header photo, or background, allegations concerning the unauthorized use of a copyrighted video or image uploaded through our media hosting services, or Tweets containing links to allegedly infringing materials.

Users who are subject to DMCA takedown notices have 10 days in which to appeal, according to Twitter. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a US legislation targeting the avoidance of digital rights management that protects copyrighted work.

In the US, the law is assessed on a central four tenets which comprise fair use: the purpose and character of use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and the effect of the use on the potential market.

Twitter says that it will make a “good faith effort” to contact those whose content is removed under copyright claims, and the claims will be passed on to ChillingEffects.com, a database of online removal requests.

It appears Twitter’s policy of removing tweets that have been reported for copyright infringement is a new development in the past few days. The social network has always had rules around copyright, but these appear to be the first instances of users being referred to as “original authors” and “copyright holders”, as well as the removal of tweets for this reason.

The Verge website reported that one freelance writer, Olga Lexell, had tweeted about the DMCA takedown request she filed after the content of her tweet was taken without credit.

    I simply explained to Twitter that as a freelance writer I make my living writing jokes (and I use some of my tweets to test out jokes in my other writing). I then explained that as such, the jokes are my intellectual property, and that the users in question did not have my permission to repost them without giving me credit.

Plenty of Twitter accounts, with thousands of followers, many similar to each other, comprise solely of lifted jokes and media. Some accounts have even joined together to form businesses, and the owners are making a lot of money.

Tweet theft and content appropriated without credit has been happening since the dawn of the social network. In 2013, a minister from South Carolina, Sammy Rhodes, who became famous for his witty tweets, was found to be lifting them from famous comedians. Even comedians themselves, including British star Keith Chegwin, have been found to have copied.
source:http://www.theguardian.com

More than 1,000 experts and leading robotics researchers sign open letter warning of military artificial intelligence arms race

Over 1,000 high-profile artificial intelligence experts and leading researchers have signed an open letter warning of a “military artificial intelligence arms race” and calling for a ban on “offensive autonomous weapons”.

The letter, presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was signed by Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis and professor Stephen Hawking along with 1,000 AI and robotics researchers.

The letter states: “AI technology has reached a point where the deployment of [autonomous weapons] is – practically if not legally – feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.”

The authors argue that AI can be used to make the battlefield a safer place for military personnel, but that offensive weapons that operate on their own would lower the threshold of going to battle and result in greater loss of human life.

Should one military power start developing systems capable of selecting targets and operating autonomously without direct human control, it would start an arms race similar to the one for the atom bomb, the authors argue.Unlike nuclear weapons, however, AI requires no specific hard-to-create materials and will be difficult to monitor.

“The endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting,” said the authors.

Toby Walsh, professor of AI at the University of New South Wales said: “We need to make a decision today that will shape our future and determine whether we follow a path of good. We support the call by a number of different humanitarian organisations for a UN ban on offensive autonomous weapons, similar to the recent ban on blinding lasers.”

Musk and Hawking have warned that AI is “our biggest existential threat” and that the development of full AI could “spell the end of the human race”. But others, including Wozniak have recently changed their minds on AI, with the Apple co-founder saying that robots would be good for humans, making them like the “family pet and taken care of all the time”.

At a UN conference in Geneva in April discussing the future of weaponry, including so-called “killer robots”, the UK opposed a ban on the development of autonomous weapons, despite calls from various pressure groups, including the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.
source:http://www.theguardian.com

From using password managers to checking urls, best practices revealed in new study

Cybersecurity experts aren’t like you or I, and now we have the evidence to prove it. Researchers at Google interviewed more than 200 experts to find out what security practices they actually carry out online, and then spoke to almost 300 non-experts to find out how they differ.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the security experts practice what they preach – or, at least, they tell Google they do. They’re more likely to use two-factor authentication, to install software updates, and avoid visiting shady websites. Even for practices that are subject to healthy debate within the security community, actions speak louder than words: the experts are more likely to run anti-virus software and to use password managers than non-experts.

So what do the experts do? And, perhaps more importantly, what are the modern-day superstitions we can all stop doing to save time?

1) Yes, you do want to install updates

“Update all the software and firmware to fix any possible vulnerability.” “Patch, patch, patch.” The experts are clear: never turn down a security update. The researchers found that not only was installing updates the most commonly cited practice that experts do to keep safe online, it was also the largest difference between experts and non-experts: 35% of the former mentioned it, while only 2% of the latter. And a further 2% of experts also mentioned turning on automatic updates as one of the top three things they do, something no non-expert mentioned.

Non-experts, however, were worried that the updates could themselves lead to an infection: “Automatic software updates are not safe in my opinion, since it can be abused to update malicious content,” said one. And they were also worried that the updates would lead to new problems, with one saying that “there are often bugs in these updates initially”.

Software updates are usually the only way to combat actual security vulnerabilities – those bugs in software that let malicious attackers do things they shouldn’t. For instance, the recent Adobe flash vulnerabilities opened a user’s computer up to hacking if they continued using the software: until patches were issued, there was little option but to simply stop using Flash to stay safe online.

2) Use antivirus software – but don’t bank on it

Antivirus packages have a bad rap. For years, the software had a reputation for slowing down computers with added cruft, foisting pricy support packages on desperate users, and not really doing much to actually protect the computers in the first place. But despite all that, a majority of experts said they use the software.

However, antivirus software was vastly more favoured by non-experts than experts, and barely 60% of the experts actually used it. Users in the know said that “AV is simple to use, but less effective than installing updates,” and that the software “is good at detecting everyday/common malware. But nothing that’s slightly sophisticated”. In contrast, 70% of non-experts thought the advice to use AV software was likely to be “very effective”, and more than 80% of them had it installed.

So, while you shouldn’t uninstall your AV software, don’t get lulled into a false sense of security about it. Oh, and like everything else, always install the updates.

3) Keep your passwords unique

Password security online is frequently summed up as “strong, unique passwords” – but it turns out one part of that might be more important than the other. Non-experts tend to focus on the strong part, with 30% of them picking that as one of their top three tips against 18% of the experts; conversely, 25% of the experts pick “unique”, against 15% of the normal users.

It’s easy to see why. Using a strong password (that is, one that uses a good mixture of case, letters, numbers and symbols, as well as steering clear of dictionary words) requires a one-off feat of memory, and can feel very much like the sort of security procedure one should carry out, while avoiding password reuse is an ongoing hassle, requiring a new password for every site.

But in practice, most people are unlikely to face a brute-force attempt to break into their account by simply guessing their password, and even if they do, it doesn’t take much to render such an attack unsuccessful. But most people are likely to be the user of at least one service which gets hacked, as Adobe, Playstation and Ashley Madison users have all learned to their disadvantage. Having a unique password can prevent that misfortune compounding.

4) Use a password manager

How do you remember all those unique passwords? Password managers, such as 1Password, Lastpass and Keepass solve that problem. They are used by more than three times as many experts than non-experts, and experts are four times more likely to name them as one of the most important things they do online. The researchers cite one expert as saying that “’password managers change the whole calculus, because they make it possible to have both strong and unique passwords”.

Yet only 18% of non-experts thought the advice to use a password manager was “very effective”, and some even explicitly said they don’t trust them. Their reasoning is that password managers can be hacked, and that if other software has bugs and flaws, who can guarantee the same problems won’t apply to managers? In those worries, the users are backed-up by a team from Microsoft, who reported in 2014 that users should rely on easily-memorised passwords rather than managers.

But the security experts are clear: despite their concerns, using password managers is better than not. In fact, some of them even recommend writing the most valuable passwords down on paper. As one says, “malware can’t read a piece of paper”. But the number of experts actually writing down passwords was still lower than the number of non-experts.

As a rule of thumb, if you can remember all your passwords, you’re doing it wrong. Over half the non-experts claimed to remember every password, while just 17% of the experts said the same.

5) Use two-factor authentication

Perhaps because of companies such as Google or Twitter being increasingly pushy about trying to encourage users to switch to two-factor authentication (2FA) – where a password is backed up by a code linked to a specific mobile phone – almost two-thirds of non-experts say they use the security system on their accounts. Those rates still lag behind the experts, but the high numbers suggest that the message is getting through.

At the same time, the non-experts over-state the benefit of 2FA, especially when compared to the less flashy practice of using a password manager. More than four in five non-experts said they thought it was effective, compared to just 32% for password managers.

6) Visit secure websites, even if you don’t recognise them

Non-experts tend to claim that they keep safe by only visiting websites they already know about: “Visiting websites you’ve heard of doesn’t mean they are completely safe, but there is a higher chance of this,” explains one. But they might be exaggerating slightly: while 21% of non-experts said that not visiting unknown websites was an important safety practice, only 7% of them claimed to never visit unknown websites.

Even though 32% of experts said they “rarely” visit unknown websites, the more important piece of advice – and the one where the experts differed from the non-experts – was to check for HTTPS, the secure connection protocol, when visiting an untrusted website. In fact, it was the third most mentioned security practice amongst experts.

7) Do as I say, not as I do

But not everything security experts do is something to be followed. Despite recommending that users not click links on emails from unknown sources – a way to avoid phishing emails as well as targeted malware – the researchers themselves admit to doing so. “I do all the time,” one said, laughing, “but I tell my mother not to.” Another admitted that the advice is given more for simplicity’s sake than because it’s the best thing to do: “I never really found a way of giving more precise advice for people who are not technical on what is really safe and what is not.”

The hot air balloon that is Donald Trump’s campaign for the Republican nomination continues to head for the stratosphere, with one weekend poll showing that he is not only the leading contender but has nearly doubled his support among Republican voters in the past two weeks. It is tempting to say that Mr Trump’s policies are as lacking in substance as his hairdo. That is true in the sense that he seems to have absolutely no idea how he would execute them were he to achieve office. But, aside from that defect, the proposals he has been putting forward either do not greatly differ from those of his more mainstream rivals, or tend to be somewhat more liberal than they are. He does not differ in essence from most of the rest of the field on immigration, global warming, or equal marriage. He does differ from most in that he opposes cuts in social security, Medicare and Medicaid, and although he wants Obamacare repealed, he believes in some form of universal healthcare. He continues to forthrightly describe the Iraq war as a disaster, while most of the other contenders have tried to avoid or obfuscate that issue.

If this were all, Mr Trump could be described as average in the field and better than some. But it is his coruscating style that has propelled him into the spotlight. He insults his party rivals with abandon. He slaps meanly at a Republican elder such as Senator John McCain. He describes Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. He makes up tall stories about facing physical danger on the border with Mexico. He repeatedly fails to explain his views in any coherent way or fluffs his lines at press conferences. And yet bluster carries him through, and the great ego trip rolls on, seemingly delighting a significant number of core Republican voters, although it alienates others and his appeal outside the party is limited.

He celebrates his own wealth, his alleged appeal to beautiful women, and his years throwing up mediocre buildings in American cities as if these were unalloyed credentials for running a great nation facing great problems. In so doing he has tapped into a section of the electorate that is fearful of demographic and cultural change, sees the America it thinks it knows slipping away, and has lost faith in conventional politics. It looks for scapegoats, wants its prejudices confirmed and yearns for a Mr Fixit who can make everything right again. Whether it thinks Mr Trump could ever actually be the president is uncertain. But in the meantime he satisfies certain emotional needs.

Unfortunately for the Republican party, and to the advantage of the Democrats, there are other effects. In the highly unlikely event of him winning the nomination, he would be almost bound to lose the election, because the “silent majority” that he claims to represent has dwindled in size in the days since Richard Nixon coined the term to refer to the then much larger number of white working-class and lower-middle-class voters. But, if spurned, Mr Trump might run as a third-party candidate, splitting the Republican vote as Ross Perot did in 1992 and 1996.

At a more fundamental level, he threatens to show up the central weakness of the modern Republican party, which is that it needs to draw on two contradictory constituencies – that older one, anxious about immigration, sexual matters, abortion, and “ordinary” jobs; and a new, younger, and more ethnically diverse population, familiar with the altered economic landscape of recent years. The difficulty is clearest when the party tries to appeal both to voters who want immigration cut and to recent immigrants themselves.

That is why Republican politicians usually speak with forked tongue as they deal with these issues. But Mr Trump does not speak with a forked tongue. For every voter he pleases with his uncomplicated rhetoric, he is likely to lose one who might otherwise have rallied to the Republican cause. These problems have not much impeded Republicans in local or state fights, because they can tailor their campaigning to particular circumstances. But they are disabling when they have to craft a national message in a presidential contest. That contributes to the American political gridlock, pitting an activist president against obstinate Republican lawmakers. The only way out of this impasse would be for the Republican party to make its peace with the new America. A contender like Donald Trump can only hinder such a development, leaving the party stranded in the contradictions from which it must escape if American politics is ever to work properly again.
source:http://www.theguardian.com