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A vaccine that can train cancer patients' own bodies to seek out and destroy tumour cells has been developed by scientists. The therapy, which targets a molecule found in 90 per cent of all cancers, could provide a universal injection that allows patients' immune systems to fight off common cancers including breast and prostate cancer. Preliminary results from early clinical trials have shown the vaccine can trigger an immune response in patients and reduce levels of disease. The scientists behind the vaccine now hope to conduct larger trials in patients to prove it can be effective against a range of...

SANTIAGO, Chile -- It might be argued that a country ceases to be underdeveloped when its citizens shift their anger from other people's wealth to the quality of the services their own wealth is paying for. Chile is perhaps the world's best example. For the past two years, President Michelle Bachelet has faced a national malaise that has manifested itself in violent student protests, strikes affecting copper mining and the forestry industry, and the gradual unraveling of the coalition that has governed since 1990. I recently asked Bachelet and former President Ricardo Lagos what was happening. Their answers were instructive....

A development that could advance of the hottest areas of physics research - "spintronics" - has been announced by US scientists. Ultimately, physicists hope that research in spintronics could lead to smaller, faster and less power hungry computers. These machines would operate using logic devices based on manipulating and measuring the spin of electrons, rather than turning current on and off. Now researchers have for the first time shown that they can inject spin-polarized electrons into silicon, manipulate them, and measure them coming out the other side.

Emissions levels have proved a sticking point Leading US politicians are meeting with legislators from the EU, China, Japan and India to seek a breakthrough in the international climate deadlock. The meeting, organised by British-run parliamentarians' group Globe, is strongly supported by the UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. On Thursday, it will publish recommendations for a new world deal on climate change at the G8 summit. G8 leaders will be meeting in Germany this summer. The gathering in the US senate has attracted two presidential candidates - John McCain and the Senate Foreign Relations committee chair Joe Biden. In...

An anti-globalization group called “Anti-Marketing” defines globalization as “the process of exploiting economically weak countries by connecting the economies of the world, forcing dependence on (and ultimately servitude to) the western capitalist machine.” While this formulation may sound extreme, the same basic, perverted understanding of globalization has poisoned the minds of many. In a world of scarcity, the most advanced societies have the most internationally connected economies. This has always been true. In ancient northern African nations, the Greco-Roman world, and later in the Netherlands, Britain, Spain, and the United States, nations that traded widely were nations that prospered. Trading...

As Israel considers allowing Egypt to control the critical Philadelphi corridor along Israel’s border, startling revelations about Egyptian chemical weapons proliferation are coming to light. Egypt secretly helped former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in his chemical weapons program, according to a CIA report. The report, authored by the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group, says that Egypt sent specialists to Iraq in the 1980s to help him manufacture poison gas. Iraq later used the gas against Iranian citizens as well as Iraqi Kurds. The report says that the Iraqi government paid Egypt $12 million, "in return for assistance with production and storage...

Until the 18th century, there was basically only one kind of Judaism, that which is now called Orthodox. It meant living by the religion's 613 laws, and doing so suffused Jews' lives with their faith. Then, starting with the thinker Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) and moving briskly during the Haskala, or "enlightenment," from the late 18th century, Jews developed a wide variety of alternate interpretations of their religion, most of which diminished the role of faith in their lives and led to a concomitant reduction in Jewish affiliation.These alternatives and other developments, in particular the Holocaust, caused the ranks of the...

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