Category Archives: Transhuman News

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The murder trial for David Camm continued Tuesday with continuing testimony from Indiana State PoliceDNA analyst Lynn Scamahorn.

In February 2005,Scamahorn tested the gray sweatshirt left at the crime scene and Charles Boney's DNA came up as a match. Also in 2005, another area of the sweatshirt tested and matched Boney's girlfriend's DNA.

The DNA analyst testified outside the presence of the jury that during the first trial in 2001, prosecutor Stan Faith threatened her because she wasn't willing to testify the way he wanted her to. He wanted her to say that she found Camm's DNA on the sweatshirt and she couldn't do that.

According to Scamahorn, Faith threatened her job and threatened to charge her with obstruction. The defense petitioned the court to allow the jury to hear about Faith's misconduct but the court upheld a previous ruling. The jury will not hear about Faith's misconduct in this trial.

The defense also petitioned the court to exclude testimony from Danny Camm, David's brother, who sold and was the beneficiary on Kim Camm's life insurance policy. The court allowed testimony about insurance and beneficiaries but no testimony about possible wrongdoing by Danny Camm.

The prosecutor maintains that money was motive for the murders of David Camm's wife and children.

The jury then heard from Shelly Romero, a former ISPK-9 trooper and friend of David Camm. She responded to the crime scene onthe night of the murders and Camm's first words to Romerowere, "Someone killed my[expletive] family."

Romerosaid Camm was adamant that the investigationbe done right. He asked Romero if she thought his kids were in heaven.

Camm became emotional in court when Romero recounted a conversation she had with him about the funeral preparations. Romero felt the investigation was going too quickly and like there was a "pack mentality" within the post against Camm.

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DNA analyst testifies at David Camm trial

Sep. 1, 2013 Nanoscale "cages" made from strands of DNA can encapsulate small-molecule drugs and release them in response to a specific stimulus, McGill University researchers report in a new study.

The research, published online Sept. 1 in Nature Chemistry, marks a step toward the use of biological nanostructures to deliver drugs to diseased cells in patients. The findings could also open up new possibilities for designing DNA-based nanomaterials.

"This research is important for drug delivery, but also for fundamental structural biology and nanotechnology," says McGill Chemistry professor Hanadi Sleiman, who led the research team.

DNA carries the genetic information of all living organisms from one generation to the next. But strands of the material can also be used to build nanometre-scale structures. (A nanometre is one billionth of a metre -- roughly one-100,000th the diameter of a human hair.)

In their experiments, the McGill researchers first created DNA cubes using short DNA strands, and modified them with lipid-like molecules. The lipids can act like sticky patches that come together and engage in a "handshake" inside the DNA cube, creating a core that can hold cargo such as drug molecules.

The McGill researchers also found that when the sticky patches were placed on one of the outside faces of the DNA cubes, two cubes could attach together. This new mode of assembly has similarities to the way that proteins fold into their functional structures, Sleiman notes. "It opens up a range of new possibilities for designing DNA-based nanomaterials."

Sleiman's lab has previously demonstrated that gold nanoparticles can be loaded and released from DNA nanotubes, providing a preliminary proof of concept that drug delivery might be possible. But the new study marks the first time that small molecules -- which are considerably smaller than the gold nanoparticles -- have been manipulated in such a way using a DNA nanostructure, the researchers report.

DNA nanostructures have several potential advantages over the synthetic materials often used to deliver drugs within the body, says Thomas Edwardson, a McGill doctoral student and co-author of the new paper. "DNA structures can be built with great precision, they are biodegradable and their size, shape and properties can be easily tuned."

The DNA cages can be made to release drugs in the presence of a specific nucleic acid sequence. "Many diseased cells, such as cancer cells, overexpress certain genes," Edwardson adds. "In a future application, one can imagine a DNA cube that carries drug cargo to the diseased cell environment, which will trigger the release of the drug." The Sleiman group is now conducting cell and animal studies to assess the viability of this method on chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and prostate cancer, in collaboration with researchers at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research at Montreal's Jewish General Hospital.

Funding for the Sleiman team's research was provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), a CIHR Drug Development Training Program scholarship to Mr. Edwardson, the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), the Centre for Self- Assembled Chemical Structures (CSACS) and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR).

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DNA 'cages' may aid drug delivery

By early next year, parents of newborns at two Boston hospitals will have the chance to participate in the first randomized study of the medical and ethical repercussions of sequencing the DNA of babies. The research is part of a major federal effort to finally settle a debate that has raged for years about the possible benefits and harms of finding out such information.

The five-year study, a joint effort of Boston Childrens Hospital and Brigham and Womens Hospital, was one of four proposals selected for funding, federal health officials announced Wednesday in a press conference. The National Institutes of Health will spend $25 million over five years to support the program, $6 million of which will support the Boston-based study.

The federal officials listed a litany of questions they hoped the studies, each testing a slightly different application of DNA sequencing to newborn care, would address. They included figuring out which babies might benefit most from the testing, and which genetic conditions should be search for in healthy newborns.

New parents in the Boston area who choose to participate in the research will be randomly assigned to either a group that has their infants DNA sequenced and learns the results, or a group whose babies do not undergo sequencing. The study will test whether that information helps guide the care of babies, and will monitor how pediatricians and parents react to knowing it.

Sequencing the DNA of newborns has been controversial, since the technology can reveal a vast amount of information about a baby, including risk for diseases that lie far in the future. Parents are making decisions to receive information that children might, when they are older, decide they do not want to know. Medical ethicists talk of keeping an open future for children, and knowing genetic information might influence parents relationships with their children. While the information may inform medical care, it might also create undue worry.

One of the goals, the purpose of the whole project, is for us to try and figure out in the real world whats appropriate and whats not, said Alan Beggs, director of the Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research at Childrens, who co-leads the study with Dr. Robert Green, a medical geneticist at the Brigham.

Having their genome is a resource that can be consulted at any age. If an illness occurs, or a new drug is going to be started, or if surgery is going to be considered, Beggs said, their DNA may provide clues about best treatments or important warning signs about risk factors.

Researchers plan to recruit 480 newborn babies and families: half will be healthy babies from the nursery at Brigham and Women's, and half will be from the neonatal intensive care unit at Childrens, where the DNA analysis may be helpful in determining whether there is a genetic cause of the babies health problems.

Among both pools of participants, only half of the babies will have their DNA sequenced; the other half will be followed as a comparison group.

The researchers have yet to decide what genetic risk factors they will look for in both the healthy and sick babies DNA, but Beggs said they would use guidelines released by the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics earlier this year as a starting point.

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Boston-area team to study DNA sequencing in newborn infants

IRVINE, Calif., Sept. 4, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- StorageDNA, Inc., a leader in intelligent storage and archiving workflow solutions for media professionals, today announced version 3.1 of its revolutionary LTO LTFS archive-retrieval workflow solution, DNA Evolution(TM). The company will highlight DNA Evolution 3.1 at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC2013) taking place in Amsterdam, The Netherlands on September 12 -- 17, 2013. Version 3.1 improves the built-in mini-media asset manager (miniMAM) with enhanced search and browse features to help users quickly find and restore digital assets, and supports LTFS-based network delivery formats, such as Discovery Channel and the BBC, providing easier data exchange.

"Our post production facility serves clients such as the BBC, Discovery Channel, and Disney Nature. Because we work on high-profile projects with enormous amounts of media that must be kept online for an extended period of time, we need a cost-effective solution with a fast and reliable archive-retrieval process. With DNA Evolution, we can quickly archive the high-resolution media and conform directly from the LTO tape--easily restoring content selectively against an edited timeline," said Stuart Dyer, Operations Manager, Films at 59. "The latest enhancements, including support for network delivery formats and improvements to the miniMAM, will allow us to be even more productive for our clients."

DNA Evolution is a platform that combines nearline and archive storage on LTO tape and was designed from the ground up to help media professionals manage digital content and lower storage costs as they transition to file-based workflows. Built on Linear Tape-Open (LTO) with Linear Tape File System (LTFS) technologies, it enables new levels of archive-restore performance, allows new media workflows like conform from LTO, and delivers powerful search and browse features to help streamline and speed up media pipelines in production and post production environments.

Key features of version 3.1 include:

Version 3.1 builds on the innovations of DNA Evolution 3.0 including Smart Conform, Smart Browse and upgraded miniMAM, global search, advanced tape tools, improved archiving-restore workflows, expanded support for CatDV and Avid(R) Interplay(R), and more. DNA Evolution is the only solution capable of conforming high-resolution media directly from LTO tape, with format support for numerous conform workflows.

Optional features will be added throughout 2013 including XSIO Archive Engine Accelerator, the fastest LTO LTFS media archive technology on the market, and Smart Access LTO, which enables LTO tape archives to act like a nearline, direct access storage medium, so that popular media applications can directly access files on LTO tape, allowing users to perform partial restores, transcodes, and remote transfers.

"DNA Evolution continues to lead the market as the only archive and retrieval software designed to tap into the benefits of LTFS," said tC Chakravarty, CEO and president of StorageDNA. "By building in a powerful miniMAM, we truly enable customers to manage their media and create significant efficiencies in their workflows. We are committed to developing the solution with key features that not only solve pressing challenges for our customers, but also make file-based workflows easier and more cost-effective than ever."

StorageDNA will be showcasing DNA Evolution 3.1 at IBC2013 September 13-17, 2013 in Hall 7, at Stand 7.J47.

About StorageDNA, Inc.

StorageDNA helps film, video, and broadcast professionals store and manage their media so they can work more efficiently and save costs. DNA Evolution, the innovative LTO with LTFS workflow solution, allows users to easily archive, find, retrieve, and directly access digital assets at incredible speeds. StorageDNA's solutions power some of the most complex and critical workflows for a wide range of customers from broadcasters, major film studios and television production companies to sports organizations, government agencies, and Fortune 500 corporations. Learn more at http://www.storagedna.com.

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StorageDNA's DNA Evolution 3.1 Delivers Powerful Search and Browse, and Broadcast Data Exchange Support