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Past Shows
October 31, 2009
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Cancer as a Chronic Disease
We think of cancer as a frightening killer, but in fact, the face of the disease is changing. We're better at curing many cancers than ever before, but researchers have also made remarkable progress in allowing people to live with cancer for longer. In this way, some cancers are becoming more like diabetes or heart disease - diseases that people, with appropriate treatment, can live with for longer and longer periods of time. As a result, for many people diagnosed with incurable cancer, the answer to the question, "how long have I got", is changing quickly.
The story of Anita Cochrane of Vancouver, BC, is an example of this. She was diagnosed with a incurable recurrence of her breast cancer four years ago. Thanks to the proliferation of new treatment options, her cancer has been beaten back by repeated treatments, which has allowed her to live a fulfilling life with cancer.
According to Dr. Susan O'Reilly, a Medical Oncologist and Vice President of Cancer Care at the BC Cancer Agency in Vancouver, new treatment options for several cancers, including breast cancer and multiple myeloma, have had a dramatic impact on how long some people can live with cancer. The best case for how well cancer can be controlled is Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML), which can be kept at bay with a single drug called Gleevec. Dr. Ben Neel, Director of Research at the Ontario Cancer Institute, thinks the future will see more cases like CML, with designer drugs stopping cancers, but thinks that this will just be a way station as we find our way to true cancer cures. The idea of turning chronic cancer into a disease that can be treated over a long period is attractive, but Dr. Mary Gospodarowicz, the Medical Director of the Cancer program at the Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, is concerned that it might draw attention and funding away from other parts of the battle against cancer. She points out that prevention strategies can still save many lives, and that most current cures don't involve expensive drug therapies, but are a result of early detection, surgery and radiation therapy.
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Unicorn Fly
Unicorn Fly in Amber, courtesy G.Poinar/OSU
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Dr. George Poinar, a professor of zoology at Oregon State University, has found a tiny unicorn, perfectly preserved in a piece of prehistoric Burmese amber. Of course, it doesn’t exactly look like the unicorns you’ve seen in books and movies. That’s because it’s a hundred-million-year-old unicorn fly. It is a species from the Cretaceous Period that has never been observed before. The horn on its head may have acted like a kind of periscope, with eyes on each of its three tips. The fly went extinct at some point, perhaps due to the change in flowering plants at that time.
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Two-Alarm Squirrels
It was thought that Red Squirrels made sounds to warn other squirrels that predators were near. The sounds were also thought to be predator specific; a tonal sound for aerial predators, and another sound for ground danger. But Dr. Shannon Digweed, from the Departments of Psychology and Biology at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, believes that red squirrels use those same two sounds in all conditions; in the presence of natural predators, non-predators and even encounters with other squirrels. The purpose is to let the intruders know that their presence has been detected. It serves to repel predators who know they cannot catch an alert red squirrel.
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Blast from the Past
Reconstruction of a Gamma Ray Burst, courtesy NASA/Swift/Cruz deWilde
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On April 23rd of this year, NASA's Swift Satellite telescope identified the oldest known gamma ray burst in the universe. In fact, it established a new record for the most distant astronomical object to be observed. The telescope detected light from a star that exploded 13.1 billion light years away. This event occurred in a very young universe - only 630 million years after the Big Bang. The detection of this gamma ray burst opens a window to the cosmic 'Dark Ages' of the universe, an era not previously observed. Dr. Robert Rutledge, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at McGill University in Montreal, is part of the research team that observed this record breaking event.
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Theme music bed copyright Raphaël Gluckstein.
Creative Commons License by-nc-nd-2.0
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