Microsoft says Windows head Sinofsky leaving

REDMOND, Wash. (AP) ? Microsoft Corp. said Monday that Steven Sinofsky, the president of its Windows and Windows Live operations, is leaving the company.

Sinofsky's departure comes just weeks after the Redmond, Wash., software company launched Windows 8, which represented a major overhaul of its ubiquitous computer operating system.

Company veteran Julie Larson-Green has been promoted to lead all Windows software and hardware engineering, Microsoft said. Tami Reller will take over responsibility for the Windows business while retaining her posts as chief financial officer and chief marketing officer.

The company did not say why Sinofsky is leaving.

In a statement, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer expressed gratitude for Sinofsky's contribution to the company. He indicated the need for the company to further integrate its array of offerings, which in addition to Windows includes services such as Bing, Skype and Xbox and a new tablet computer, as it begins what he called "a new era at Microsoft."

Ballmer said "it is imperative that we continue to drive alignment across all Microsoft teams, and have more integrated and rapid development cycles for our offerings."

The launch of Windows 8 last month heralded the biggest change to the industry's dominant operating system in at least 17 years. It attempts to bridge the gap between personal computers and fast-growing tablets with its touch-enabled interface.

Sinofsky joined Microsoft as a software design engineer in 1989. Before heading the Windows division, his work included overseeing the development of Microsoft Office products.

Larson-Green has been with Microsoft since 1993. She was responsible for program management, user interface design and research, as well as development of all international releases for Windows 7 and Windows 8, Microsoft said.

In her new role, she will be responsible for all future Windows product development in addition to future hardware projects.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/495d344a0d10421e9baa8ee77029cfbd/Article_2012-11-12-Microsoft-Windows%20Shakeup/id-c27af31706484065bf006b5261317aa1

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Chernobyl cleanup workers had significantly increased risk of leukemia

Thursday, November 8, 2012

A 20-year study following 110,645 workers who helped clean up after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident in the former Soviet territory of Ukraine shows that the workers share a significant increased risk of developing leukemia. The results may help scientists better define cancer risk associated with low doses of radiation from medical diagnostic radiation procedures such as computed tomography scans and other sources.

In the journal Environmental Health Perspectives this week, an international team led by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the Chernobyl Research Unit at the Radiation Epidemiology Branch of the National Cancer Institute describes the increased risks of leukemia among these workers between 1986 and 2006. The risk included a greater-than-expected number of cases of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, which many experts did not consider to be associated with radiation exposure in the past.

The new work is the largest and longest study to date involving Chernobyl cleanup workers who worked at or near the nuclear complex in the aftermath of the accident.

Overall, there were 137 cases of leukemia among the workers over the 20-year span of the study, and 16 percent of those cancers were attributable to the Chernobyl radiation exposure, the team found.

The findings shed light on the thorny issue of estimating cancer risk from low doses of radiation ? an issue of importance to miners, nuclear workers and anyone who is chronically exposed to low levels of radiation at work or patients who receive sizeable radiation doses when undergoing medical diagnostic tests.

"Low doses of radiation are important," said the lead researcher Lydia Zablotska, MD, PhD, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UCSF. "We want to raise awareness of that."

Worst Nuclear Accident of All Time

The nearly 111,000 Ukrainian workers in the study were among the more than 500,000 former Soviets who worked directly on the front lines in the aftermath of Chernobyl disaster, which was the worst nuclear accident of the 20th century followed by the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

It began in the early morning hours of April 26, 1986 when a planned test of a backup system for operating cooling pumps went awry. A combination of human error and unsafe reactor design led to the runaway production of heat in Chernobyl's Reactor No. 4, which quickly caused two massive explosions, ruptured the reactor, crumbled the building, exposed the nuclear core, rained radioactive debris around the compound and spread fallout through the atmosphere over the Soviet Union and Europe.

Many of the Ukrainian workers were exposed to high levels of radiation because they were part of the teams that helped sweep up contaminated debris from the immediate area ? much of which was highly radioactive. Some of them, in fact, reached lifetime limits of radiation exposure within a matter of a few hours.

Although an elevated radiation-related risk of leukemia was not surprising, given the level of exposure among many of these workers, what did surprise Zablotska and her colleagues was the elevated risk of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), which was similar in size to the risk estimated for non-CLL leukemia.

Leukemia and Low-Dose Radiation

For many years, doctors have known that ionizing radiation from an X-ray source or produced by the decay of radioactive elements can cause leukemia, because it can penetrate the body, expose bone marrow to the radiation and damage DNA. But while scientists have understood this basic mechanism for decades, the question of how much leukemia risk is associated with moderate or low doses of radiation has been hard to answer.

For many years, the best estimates came from long-term studies involving survivors of the 1945 atomic bomb detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan during World War II. People in the immediate vicinity of the blasts were exposed to various levels of radiation, and in the decades afterward, their health was monitored and the increase in cancer tracked.

From those assessments of cancer risk, scientists estimated risks from lower doses by extrapolating the data down. But there have always been problems with this approach, said Zablotska. Atomic bomb survivors were bathed in gamma or neutron rays, while someone who undergoes a CT scan in the U.S. is exposed to X-rays, a different type of radiation. Moreover, extrapolating risks for Japanese population to Western population is further confounded by differences in genetics, lifestyle and diet between the two.

The new work helps to bridge this gap because the doses received by the Ukrainian cleanup workers falls somewhere in between the high level received by the Japanese atomic bomb victims and the lower levels received by people who undergo extensive medical scans.

It also challenges the idea that chronic lymphocytic leukemia is not linked to radiation exposure ? something that earlier studies of atomic bomb survivors had seemed to support.

The genetic makeup of the Japanese population may have hidden any increased risk, Zablotska said, because they are much less likely to develop this type of cancer anyway. Chronic lymphocytic leukemia accounts for only 3 percent of all cases of leukemia in Japan ? as opposed to about one-third of all leukemia cases in the U.S. and 40 percent of all cases of leukemia in Ukraine.

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University of California - San Francisco: http://www.ucsf.edu

Thanks to University of California - San Francisco for this article.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/125163/Chernobyl_cleanup_workers_had_significantly_increased_risk_of_leukemia

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Achilles Had Only 2 Heels

Recently, I came across the headline ?Scientists Find Achilles? Heel of Cancer Cells?, describing the discovery of a histone deactylase (HDAC11) as a novel target for cancer therapies. I was irritated by the metaphor of Achilles? heel, because it implied that this was the lone vulnerability of cancer. I was also embarrassed by the fact that I used the same metaphor for the press release describing our work earlier this year showing that mitochondrial network structure can be targeted in cancer.

I decided to google the expressions ?Achilles? heel? and ?cancer?. It turns out that every year, numerous press releases and news articles claim that researchers have finally identified the ?Achilles? heel? of cancer. In Greek mythology, Achilles only had two feet and thus two heels; only one of the two heels was vulnerable. So how can it be that hundreds of researchers have found the Achilles? heel of cancer? Apparently, I am not the only one who has used this metaphor inappropriately and it begs the question, whether we should even be using it at all.

When I was a child, Gustav Schwab?s??Sagen des klassischen Altertums? was one of my favorite books. His gripping narrative of the ancient Greek myths has also been translated from German into English and is available as ?Gods and Heroes of Ancient Greece?. It was in this book that I first encountered the legend of Achilles and the story of the Trojan War, originally relayed by the Greek poet Homer in his great epic ?The Illiad?. Achilles was the son of the sea-goddess (nymph) Thetis and King Peleus and was known for his great strength and skills in battle, but I could find nothing heroic in this demigod Achilles.

Even though I loved Schwab?s narration, I despised Achilles. He vacillated between fits of rage and episodes of prolonged sulking. He was rude, arrogant and violent ? Anakin Skywalker on steroids. I was especially horrified by how Achilles tied the body of his enemy Hector to his chariot and dragged it around, in order to humiliate the deceased and inflicting great psychological pain on Hector?s family. Basically, Achilles was a jerk; but according to the diagnostic classification of the American Psychiatric Association, Achilles may just have had IED (intermittent explosive disorder).

When Achilles was a baby, his mother Thetis stuck him in a special flame to make him invulnerable. She was interrupted by Achilles? father, who was shocked by what he perceived as poor parenting skills shown by Thetis. The interruption prevented Thetis from making her son completely invulnerable, which is why one of Achilles? heels remained vulnerable. Later on in the legend, this vulnerable heel is where the Greek god Apollo directs his arrow and this injury ultimately results in Achilles? demise.

I remember the relief I experienced when I first read about Achilles? death. It was karma ? he deserved to die, considering all the pain and suffering that he had caused. I also remember that I was confused by the whole invulnerability aspect of the story. In a different part of the legend, his mother Thetis helps him obtain a special armor to protect his body. If nearly all of his body was already invulnerable, why would he need such a special armor? Wouldn?t he just need a special kind of Band-Aid to cover his one vulnerable heel? But then again, these were Greek gods and goddesses and they may have had different ways of approaching problems. Perhaps the special armor was extra insurance, just like people whose personal auto insurance covers rental cars but they still get suckered into buying additional rental car insurance at the airport.

Later on, I found out the Schwab had combined multiple Achilles legends. The story of Achilles being invulnerable everywhere except for his heel and Achilles? death are not part of Homer?s Illiad. It was long after Homer that the heel story became an integral part of the Achilles legend. In one version, Thetis did not place Achilles in a flame but instead dipped him in the magical River Styx. She held him by the heel of his foot, which is why he remained vulnerable in that one area. I am not sure that I would have held my son by the heel of all places, while dipping him into a magical river. Then again, I am not a Greek god. It also begs the question why Thetis did not dip him in a second time to make sure that the previously dry heal now also became invulnerable. In one narration, it was not Apollo who shot the arrow, but the Trojan prince Paris and Apollo merely directed the arrow into Achilles? heel, possibly because Paris was not a very good shot.

Even though the heel story and Achilles? death or not part of the Illiad, it is difficult to envision the Achilles legend without it. The idea that even strong, arrogant entities remain vulnerable is very comforting. This may explain why this aspect of the legend is so popular and why it has given rise to the commonly used metaphor of the ?Achilles? heel? to describe lone vulnerable spots.

Especially when describing cancer, the metaphor seems very apt. One can easily envision a growing tumor as an Achilles ? aggressive and apparently invincible. When one identifies a gene or protein that can prevent tumor growth and or even kills the tumor, it is easy to succumb to using the ?Achilles? heel? metaphor. The problem with using this metaphor is that Achilles only had one single vulnerable heel. If a researcher claims to have found an Achilles? heel, it not only implies that it is ?one? area of vulnerability of the cancer, but that it is the ?only? area of vulnerability.

Most researchers who work with cancer cells know that there are many different mechanisms by which cancer growth can be slowed down. There is no single vulnerable pathway that can stop all cancer progression. Therefore, when researchers use this expression, they probably just like to convey the image of the powerful Achilles being brought to his knees by a single arrow. They do not want to claim that they have found the ultimate weapon to fight cancer. However, this metaphor inadvertently does imply that the described method is the only way to arrest the tumor. This is not only a gross over-simplification, but plain wrong. Someone who is not familiar with the complexities of cancer biology and reads a press release containing this metaphor may take this to mean that the sole vulnerability of cancer has been identified.

Mythology and literature can be very inspiring for scientists and it is tempting to use powerful literary or mythological metaphors when communicating science, but one also needs to think about what these metaphors truly represent. Especially metaphors that oversimplify scientific findings or convey a false sense of certainty should be used avoided. When I think about research, two other Greek legends come to mind: The legend of Sisyphus and the Odyssey. Every day, Sisyphus rolled a rock up a mountain and then had to watch how it would roll back down again. This was his punishment decreed by the Greek gods. It reminds me of a lot of experiments that we scientists perform. When we feel that we are getting close solving a scientific problem we sometimes realize that we have to start all over again. Similarly, Odysseus? long and exhausting journey is also a metaphor that appropriately characterizes a lot of real-life scientific research. Odysseus did not know if and when he would ever reach his destination, and this is how many of us conduct our research.

I googled ?Odyssey? and ?cancer? to see if I could find news articles that allude to the scientific Odyssey of cancer research. To my surprise, I did find a number of articles, but these were not descriptions of scientific ?Odysseys?. They were reports of cancer patients who described how they had undergone numerous different cancer treatments, often with little improvement. I realize that it is easier to market scientific ideas with a simplistic Achilles metaphor than to point out that science is long-winded and at times disorienting journey, similar to the Odyssey. But if we do want to use metaphors, we should probably use ones that appropriately convey the complexity and beauty of science.

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Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=ac121fddafa0fd8be417457693045f41

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