D.I.Y. Treatment of Cancer

The cancer cells are different from normal human body cells. The scientists advocating the Somatic Mutation Theory speculated that cancer is caused when mutations have caused the Human Genome of the human body-cells to be changed into the Cancer Genomes of the cancer cells. There is, however, no good reason to assume that mutations of the Human Genome would cause the cancer cells to grow and replicate out of control. There is, in fact, no good evidence indicating that there has ever been such mutations, or that cancer cells had been human body cells before they are changed by mutations into cancer cells. Perhaps cancer cells have always been cancer cells, but some cancer cells have not been inherited by the offsprings from their ancestors.Some of us believe that the difference between Human and cancer cells have resulted from the difference of their inherently different genomes, and have not resulted from changes, or mutations. The evolution of the eukaryote genomes and the evolution of the Cancer Genomes during the course of Earth’s history have followed parallel paths of evolution that indicate adaptations of the metabolic modes in response to the ever-increasing oxygenation of the Earth’s atmosphere during the past few billion years. Compared to that of the Human Genome of the human body cells, the cancer cells have genomes that indicate a retarded development in the evolution of the metabolisms. When the Human genome encodes a progressive mode of OXPHOS, the cancer genomes may still encode the anammox mode of metabolism.We cannot deny an assumption that cancer cells have inherited evolving cancer genomes that encode different metabolic modes, while their hallmark is the uncontrolled cell-growth and replications. |We have good evidence that cancer genomes have also evolved to encode progressively different metabolic modes. Chinese medical scientists have found, for example, a wealth of evidence that some forms of cancer may have been caused by the nitrite pollution of the public water supply. China’s Deep Standardized Well Water (DSWW) Program of substituting nitrite-free deep groundwaters as the source of public water supply was partially successful. Local cancer-mortality rates were reduced by half at places where there had been such substitutions. Nitrite, as a reducing agent, could be the indispensable chemical in our food or drink intakes that could render the interior of cancer cells anaerobic. Nitrite, as an oxidation agent, could then be the substrate of the metabolic reaction anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anammox). The source of oxygen would then be mineral-oxygen from the nitrite. PET scan studies have indicated an advanced stage of metabolism, when cancer cells have evolved to encode aerobic glycolysis under hypoxic conditions. We can postulate a hypothesis that predicts the starvation of cancer cells if there is no supply of nitrite in the food-take to the cancer cells as a substrate of anammox metabolism, or if there is no sufficient supply of glucose for glycolysis. We recommend thus to the UK’s National Health Services to look into this matter that nitrite in public water is a health hazard. Such an investigation serves as a clinical trial on the efficacy of diet-treatments to cure cancer

Real-Time Implementation of JPEG Encoder/Decoder

With the immense size of images, compression has become a common way of minimizing the amount of storage necessary for images. This is also beneficial for transmission purposes. The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) standard is frequently used for still images. This standard is very flexible and many of the same algorithms can be used for video applications. Video applications require large amounts of data to be processed every second. Therefore, the following describes the hardware design of a chip allowing for high-speed compression. The design uses the JPEG algorithms and is targeted towards ASIC design. Further plans include use of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The hardware design is based on grayscale images and only works with the raw image data

Project RISE: Recognizing Industrial Smoke Emissions

Industrial smoke emissions pose a significant concern to human health. Prior works have shown that using Computer Vision (CV) techniques to identify smoke as visual evidence can influence the attitude of regulators and empower citizens to pursue environmental justice. However, existing datasets are not of sufficient quality nor quantity to train the robust CV models needed to support air quality advocacy. We introduce RISE, the first large-scale video dataset for Recognizing Industrial Smoke Emissions. We adopted a citizen science approach to collaborate with local community members to annotate whether a video clip has smoke emissions. Our dataset contains 12,567 clips from 19 distinct views from cameras that monitored three industrial facilities. These daytime clips span 30 days over two years, including all four seasons. We ran experiments using deep neural networks to establish a strong performance baseline and reveal smoke recognition challenges. Our survey study discussed community feedback, and our data analysis displayed opportunities for integrating citizen scientists and crowd workers into the application of Artificial Intelligence for social good.Comment: Technical repor

Examining multiracial youth in context: ethnic identity development and mental health outcomes

Although multiracial individuals are the fastest growing population in the United States, research on the identity development of multiracial adolescents remains scant. This study explores the relationship between ethnic identity, its components (affirmation, exploration), and mental health outcomes (anxiety, depression) within the contexts of schools for multiracial adolescents. Participants were multiracial and monoracial minority and majority high school students (n=4,766). Using Analysis of Variance and Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes (MIMIC) models, results indicated that multiracial youth experience more exploration and less affirmation than African Americans, but more than Caucasians. In addition, multiracial youth were found to have higher levels of mental health issues than their monoracial minority and majority peers. Specifically, multiracial youth had higher levels of depression than their African American and Caucasian counterparts. Multiracial and Caucasian youth had similar levels of anxiety but these levels were significantly higher than African Americans. Results also show that school diversity can mitigate mental health outcomes finding that multiracial youth in more diverse schools are at lower risk for mental health issues

Using Growing Self-Organising Maps to Improve the Binning Process in Environmental Whole-Genome Shotgun Sequencing

Metagenomic projects using whole-genome shotgun (WGS) sequencing produces many unassembled DNA sequences and small contigs. The step of clustering these sequences, based on biological and molecular features, is called binning. A reported strategy for binning that combines oligonucleotide frequency and self-organising maps (SOM) shows high potential. We improve this strategy by identifying suitable training features, implementing a better clustering algorithm, and defining quantitative measures for assessing results. We investigated the suitability of each of di-, tri-, tetra-, and pentanucleotide frequencies. The results show that dinucleotide frequency is not a sufficiently strong signature for binning 10 kb long DNA sequences, compared to the other three. Furthermore, we observed that increased order of oligonucleotide frequency may deteriorate the assignment result in some cases, which indicates the possible existence of optimal species-specific oligonucleotide frequency. We replaced SOM with growing self-organising map (GSOM) where comparable results are obtained while gaining 7%–15% speed improvement