Friday, December 27, 2013
Thursday, December 26, 2013
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Monday, December 9, 2013
Despite plastic gun ban, 3-D printed firearms still have a future
YouTube
Cody Wilson, founder of Defense Distributed, fires a 3D-printed handgun known as the Liberator.
The provocative demonstration prompted fears from politicians that criminals would be able to arm themselves in the future by simply printing guns in their basements.
On Monday, the U.S. Senate addressed those concerns by voting to extend the Undetectable Firearms Act for another 10 years, mirroring similar action last week by the House. The legislation, expected to be signed by President Obama, continues the ban on the sale or possession of firearms that aren't detectable by X-ray machines or metal detectors, a category that could include 3-D printed guns.
“In 1988, when we passed the Undetectable Firearms Act, the notion of a 3-D printed plastic firearm slipped through metal detectors, onto our planes in secure environments was a matter of science fiction,” Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., said on the House floor. “The problem is that today it is a reality.”
The law, as extended, requires 3-D guns to have a metal strip that would make them visible to metal detectors. Some Democratic senators wanted stricter controls, including a requirement that 3-D printed guns have permanent metal components. They argued that a non-permanent metal strip could be taken off the gun, allowing it to pass through metal detectors and scanners before being reinserted. But in the end the Senate simply approve the House-passed bill, meaning that regulations for 3-D printed firearms will look pretty much the same tomorrow as they did yesterday.
For 3-D gun proponents like Wilson, the vote was a mixed bag. On one hand, he told NBC News, it means that completely banning the technology was likely "off the table."
"As the technology is adopted and gets more popular, it looks like 3-D printed guns have a future now," he said. But, he also said, he was "not optimistic" about what it meant for 3-D printed guns overall, claiming that it could lay the groundwork for further regulations. "I'm still expecting more restrictions as a result of this law being passed."
MORE: Senate extends ban on undetectable guns but nixes tighter restrictions
It's not clear just how advanced 3-D printed guns can get. In November, the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) attempted to build and fire one of Defense Distributed's Liberators, only to watch it explode.
"Will fully plastic handguns will ever be as reliable as regular handguns?" said Wilson, a self-described "crytpo-anarchist" who opposes gun control. "The answer is no, not directly. Down the road, there will be hybrid materials that people might use, but right now, it's more impractical, more experimental."
Local governments have also made moves to regulate 3-D printed guns. In Philadelphia, the city council passed an ordinance that would hit anyone caught with a 3-D printed firearm with a fine of up to $2,000.
While the Philadelphia Police Department has never caught anyone using or making weapons with a 3-D printer, it supports the new law, Lt. Francis Healy, special adviser to the police commissioner, told NBC News.
"It’s a good idea," he said. "It's not like we saw a rash of 3-D printed guns in Philadelphia, but the city council is just trying to be proactive."
State and local legislators in California, New York and Washington, D.C., have proposed similar measures.
This isn't new technology. Large manufacturers have been using 3-D printers to build plastic parts for decades. Over the last few years, however, their cost has come down, making them relatively affordable for people who want to print anything from plastic hangers to 3-D portraits of themselves.
In May, however, Wilson raised the profile of 3-D printing by posting a video of himself firing the Liberator on YouTube, an event that created intense media hype. He didn't break the law, because he put a 6-ounce metal strip in the gun.
Most of the legislation in Washington and local governments has centered around punishing people found with 3-D printed guns, not preventing people from printing the guns in the first place.
"There is no way of purging the Internet of these files. It's just like the file-sharing conversation that played out over the last decade," Wilson told NBC News."That's why no legislation is being written to stop it — everyone already understands how difficult it is."
Printing a gun isn't prohibitively expensive. The printer and the plastic combined can be bought for as little as $1,400, Cody said, while an ideal set-up would involve a higher-end 3-D printer that normally sells for around $6,000.
Of course, much more reliable, traditionally manufactured handguns sell for under $400 — cheaper on the black market — and don't require the technical know-how to read CAD files and hook up a 3-D printer.
"The gun laws are so weak in this country, it's hard to imagine that there is any reason for someone to go out and buy a 3-D printer, download these blueprints, and test-print a gun, when even people who are clearly dangerous can get guns, if not through licensed sales, then through private ones," Ladd Everitt, director of communications for The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, told NBC News.
Everitt warned that despite their relative scarcity, guns that can evade metal detectors are a legitimate concern. As for Wilson and Defense Distributed, Everitt said that he was more concerned about the ideology the organization was spreading as a result of widespread media attention than the guns themselves.
"He has been very honest in saying that the point of promoting 3-D printed guns is to essentially foment insurrectionism," he said, "to send a message to our government and other governments around the world that you cannot regulate firearms because we can print our own if necessary, and if you go too far, we can use them."
Keith Wagstaff writes about technology for NBC News. He previously covered technology for TIME's Techland and wrote about politics as a staff writer at TheWeek.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @kwagstaff and reach him by email at: Keith.Wagstaff@nbcuni.com
Sunday, December 8, 2013
Gene therapy scores big wins against blood cancers
By MARILYNN MARCHIONE
In one of the biggest advances against leukemia and other blood cancers in many years, doctors are reporting unprecedented success by using gene therapy to transform patients' blood cells into soldiers that seek and destroy cancer.
A few patients with one type of leukemia were given this one-time, experimental therapy several years ago and some remain cancer-free today. Now, at least six research groups have treated more than 120 patients with many types of blood and bone marrow cancers, with stunning results.
"It's really exciting," said Dr. Janis Abkowitz, blood diseases chief at the University of Washington in Seattle and president of the American Society of Hematology. "You can take a cell that belongs to a patient and engineer it to be an attack cell."
In one study, all five adults and 19 of 22 children with acute lymphocytic leukemia, or ALL, had a complete remission, meaning no cancer could be found after treatment, although a few have relapsed since then.
These were gravely ill patients out of options. Some had tried multiple bone marrow transplants and up to 10 types of chemotherapy or other treatments.
Cancer was so advanced in 8-year-old Emily Whitehead of Philipsburg, Pa., that doctors said her major organs would fail within days. She was the first child given the gene therapy and shows no sign of cancer today, nearly two years later.
Results on other patients with myeloma, lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL, will be reported at the hematology group's conference that starts Saturday in New Orleans.
Doctors say this has the potential to become the first gene therapy approved in the United States and the first for cancer worldwide. Only one gene therapy is approved in Europe, for a rare metabolic disease.
The treatment involves filtering patients' blood to remove millions of white blood cells called T-cells, altering them in the lab to contain a gene that targets cancer, and returning them to the patient in infusions over three days.
"What we are giving essentially is a living drug" — permanently altered cells that multiply in the body into an army to fight the cancer, said Dr. David Porter, a University of Pennsylvania scientist who led one study.
Several drug and biotech companies are developing these therapies. Penn has patented its method and licensed it to Switzerland-based Novartis AG. The company is building a research center on the Penn campus in Philadelphia and plans a clinical trial next year that could lead to federal approval of the treatment as soon as 2016.
Talking with the researchers, "there is a sense of making history ... a sense of doing something very unique," said Hervé Hoppenot, president of Novartis Oncology, the division leading the work.
Lee Greenberger, chief scientific officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, agreed.
"From our vantage point, this looks like a major advance," he said. "We are seeing powerful responses ... and time will tell how enduring these remissions turn out to be."
The group has given $15 million to various researchers testing this approach. Nearly 49,000 new cases of leukemia, 70,000 cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and 22,000 cases of myeloma are expected to be diagnosed in the United States in 2013.
Many patients are successfully treated with chemotherapy or bone marrow or stem cell transplants, but transplants are risky and donors can't always be found. So far, gene therapy has been tried on people who were in danger of dying because other treatments failed.
The gene therapy must be made individually for each patient, and lab costs now are about $25,000, without a profit margin. That's still less than many drugs to treat these diseases and far less than a transplant.
The treatment can cause severe flu-like symptoms and other side effects, but these have been reversible and temporary, doctors say.
Penn doctors have treated the most cases so far — 59. Of the first 14 patients with CLL, four had complete remissions, four had partial ones and the rest did not respond. However, some partial responders continue to see their cancer shrink a year after treatment.
"That's very unique to this kind of therapy" and gives hope the treatment may still purge the cancer, said Porter. Another 18 CLL patients were treated and half have responded so far.
Penn doctors also treated 27 ALL patients. All five adults and 19 of the 22 children had complete remissions, an "extraordinarily high" success rate, said Dr. Stephan Grupp at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
Six have since relapsed, though, and doctors are pondering a second gene therapy attempt.
At the National Cancer Institute, Dr. James Kochenderfer and others have treated 11 patients with lymphoma and four with CLL, starting roughly two years ago. Six had complete remissions, six had partial ones, one has stable disease and it's too soon to tell for the rest.
Ten other patients were given gene therapy to try to kill leukemia or lymphoma remaining after bone marrow transplants. These patients got infusions of gene-treated blood cells from their transplant donors instead of using their own blood cells. One had a complete remission and three others had significant reduction of their disease.
"They've had every treatment known to man. To get any responses is really encouraging," Kochenderfer said. The cancer institute is working with a Los Angeles biotech firm, Kite Pharma Inc., on its gene therapy approach.
Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center will report on 13 patients with ALL; the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center will report about two-dozen patients with ALL or lymphoma, and Baylor College of Medicine will give results on 10 patients with lymphoma or myeloma.
Patients are encouraged that relatively few have relapsed.
"We're still nervous every day because they can't tell us what's going to happen tomorrow," said Tom Whitehead, 8-year-old Emily's father.
Doug Olson, 67, a scientist for a medical device maker, shows no sign of cancer since gene therapy in September 2010 for CLL he had had since 1996.
"Within one month he was in complete remission. That was just completely unexpected," said Porter, his doctor at Penn.
Olson ran his first half-marathon in January and no longer worries about how long his remission will last.
"I decided I'm cured. I'm not going to let that hang over my head anymore," he said.
Online:
Emily Whitehead's story: http://bit.ly/VxB0dL
Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP
A few patients with one type of leukemia were given this one-time, experimental therapy several years ago and some remain cancer-free today. Now, at least six research groups have treated more than 120 patients with many types of blood and bone marrow cancers, with stunning results.
"It's really exciting," said Dr. Janis Abkowitz, blood diseases chief at the University of Washington in Seattle and president of the American Society of Hematology. "You can take a cell that belongs to a patient and engineer it to be an attack cell."
In one study, all five adults and 19 of 22 children with acute lymphocytic leukemia, or ALL, had a complete remission, meaning no cancer could be found after treatment, although a few have relapsed since then.
These were gravely ill patients out of options. Some had tried multiple bone marrow transplants and up to 10 types of chemotherapy or other treatments.
Cancer was so advanced in 8-year-old Emily Whitehead of Philipsburg, Pa., that doctors said her major organs would fail within days. She was the first child given the gene therapy and shows no sign of cancer today, nearly two years later.
Results on other patients with myeloma, lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL, will be reported at the hematology group's conference that starts Saturday in New Orleans.
Doctors say this has the potential to become the first gene therapy approved in the United States and the first for cancer worldwide. Only one gene therapy is approved in Europe, for a rare metabolic disease.
The treatment involves filtering patients' blood to remove millions of white blood cells called T-cells, altering them in the lab to contain a gene that targets cancer, and returning them to the patient in infusions over three days.
"What we are giving essentially is a living drug" — permanently altered cells that multiply in the body into an army to fight the cancer, said Dr. David Porter, a University of Pennsylvania scientist who led one study.
Several drug and biotech companies are developing these therapies. Penn has patented its method and licensed it to Switzerland-based Novartis AG. The company is building a research center on the Penn campus in Philadelphia and plans a clinical trial next year that could lead to federal approval of the treatment as soon as 2016.
Talking with the researchers, "there is a sense of making history ... a sense of doing something very unique," said Hervé Hoppenot, president of Novartis Oncology, the division leading the work.
Lee Greenberger, chief scientific officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, agreed.
"From our vantage point, this looks like a major advance," he said. "We are seeing powerful responses ... and time will tell how enduring these remissions turn out to be."
The group has given $15 million to various researchers testing this approach. Nearly 49,000 new cases of leukemia, 70,000 cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and 22,000 cases of myeloma are expected to be diagnosed in the United States in 2013.
Many patients are successfully treated with chemotherapy or bone marrow or stem cell transplants, but transplants are risky and donors can't always be found. So far, gene therapy has been tried on people who were in danger of dying because other treatments failed.
The gene therapy must be made individually for each patient, and lab costs now are about $25,000, without a profit margin. That's still less than many drugs to treat these diseases and far less than a transplant.
The treatment can cause severe flu-like symptoms and other side effects, but these have been reversible and temporary, doctors say.
Penn doctors have treated the most cases so far — 59. Of the first 14 patients with CLL, four had complete remissions, four had partial ones and the rest did not respond. However, some partial responders continue to see their cancer shrink a year after treatment.
"That's very unique to this kind of therapy" and gives hope the treatment may still purge the cancer, said Porter. Another 18 CLL patients were treated and half have responded so far.
Penn doctors also treated 27 ALL patients. All five adults and 19 of the 22 children had complete remissions, an "extraordinarily high" success rate, said Dr. Stephan Grupp at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
Six have since relapsed, though, and doctors are pondering a second gene therapy attempt.
At the National Cancer Institute, Dr. James Kochenderfer and others have treated 11 patients with lymphoma and four with CLL, starting roughly two years ago. Six had complete remissions, six had partial ones, one has stable disease and it's too soon to tell for the rest.
Ten other patients were given gene therapy to try to kill leukemia or lymphoma remaining after bone marrow transplants. These patients got infusions of gene-treated blood cells from their transplant donors instead of using their own blood cells. One had a complete remission and three others had significant reduction of their disease.
"They've had every treatment known to man. To get any responses is really encouraging," Kochenderfer said. The cancer institute is working with a Los Angeles biotech firm, Kite Pharma Inc., on its gene therapy approach.
Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center will report on 13 patients with ALL; the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center will report about two-dozen patients with ALL or lymphoma, and Baylor College of Medicine will give results on 10 patients with lymphoma or myeloma.
Patients are encouraged that relatively few have relapsed.
"We're still nervous every day because they can't tell us what's going to happen tomorrow," said Tom Whitehead, 8-year-old Emily's father.
Doug Olson, 67, a scientist for a medical device maker, shows no sign of cancer since gene therapy in September 2010 for CLL he had had since 1996.
"Within one month he was in complete remission. That was just completely unexpected," said Porter, his doctor at Penn.
Olson ran his first half-marathon in January and no longer worries about how long his remission will last.
"I decided I'm cured. I'm not going to let that hang over my head anymore," he said.
Online:
Emily Whitehead's story: http://bit.ly/VxB0dL
Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP
Related Stories
- HIV cure hopes dashed for two US cancer patients AFP
- Bone Marrow Transplants Are Increasing World-Wide The Wall Street Journal
- Novartis bone marrow cancer drug meets goal in late-stage study Reuters
- Gov't to keep ban on paying bone marrow donors Associated Press
- Cancer Centers, Longtime Rivals, Launch Company to Develop New Drug The Wall Street Journal
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Report: NSA tracks billions of cellphones daily
The NSA inadvertently gathers the location records of "tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad" annually, along with the billions of other records it collects by tapping into worldwide mobile network cables, the newspaper said in a report on its website.
Such data means the NSA can track the movements of almost any cellphone around the world, and map the relationships of the cellphone user. The Post said a powerful analytic computer program called CO-TRAVELER crunches the data of billions of unsuspecting people, building patterns of relationships between them by where their phones go. That can reveal a previously unknown terrorist suspect, in guilt by cellphone-location association, for instance.
As the NSA doesn't know which part of the data it might need, the agency keeps up to 27 terabytes, or more than double the text content of the Library of Congress' print collection, the Post said. A 2012 internal NSA document said the volumes of data from the location program were "outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store" it, the newspaper said.
The program is detailed in documents given to the newspaper by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden. The Post also quotes unidentified NSA officials, saying they spoke with the permission of their agency.
Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, declined to comment on the report.
The DNI's general counsel, Robert Litt, has said that NSA does not intentionally gather bulk location data on U.S. cellphones inside the U.S. — but NSA Director Keith Alexander testified before Congress his agency ran tests in 2010 and 2011 on "samples" of U.S. cell-site data to see if it was technically possible to plug such data into NSA analysis systems. Alexander said that the information was never used for intelligence purposes and that the testing was reported to congressional intelligence committees. He said it was determined to be of little "operational value," so the NSA did not ask for permission to gather such data.
Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said at the time that Alexander could have explained more. "The intelligence leadership has decided to leave most of the real story secret," Wyden said, though he would not elaborate on the extent of the program.
Wyden and two other Democratic lawmakers have introduced an amendment to the 2014 defense spending bill that would require intelligence agencies to say whether the NSA "or any other element of the intelligence community has ever collected the cell-site location information of a large number of United States persons with no known connection to suspicious activity, or made plans to collect such information."
Alexander and other NSA officials have explained that when U.S. data is gathered "incidentally" overseas, it is "minimized," meaning that when an NSA analysts realize they are dealing with a U.S. phone number, they limit what can be done with it and how long that data can be kept.
Rights activists say those measures fall short of protecting U.S. privacy.
"The scale of foreign surveillance has become so vast, the amount of information about Americans 'incidentally' captured may itself be approaching mass surveillance levels,'" said Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program.
"The government should be targeting its surveillance at those suspected of wrongdoing, not assembling massive associational databases that by their very nature record the movements of a huge number of innocent people," said Catherine Crump, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Operation Dead-Mouse Drop
The U.S. government is planning to drop toxic mice from helicopters to battle the snakes, an invasive species that has decimated Guam's native bird population and could cause billions of dollars of damage if allowed to spread to Hawaii. (Eric Talmadge/AP)
A group of 2,000 dead mice equipped with cardboard parachutes have been airdropped over a United States Air Force base in Guam in order to poison brown tree snakes.
It may sound like the plot to an animated movie starring the vocal talents of Gilbert Godfried, but we assure you this is actually happening.
NBC News reports that the dead mice were pumped full of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. The hope is that the snakes, which are invasive to the area and cause harm to exotic native birds and the island's power grid, will be drawn to the toxic rodents, eat them, and then croak. Other animals face minimal risk, reports the Air Force Times.
Dan Vice, the Agriculture Department's assistant supervisory wildlife biologist for Guam, told KUAM that the mice are dropped in a time sequence from low-flying helicopters. Each rodent is strung up to a tiny parachute made of cardboard and tissue paper.
Via NBC News:
So how will workers know if the plan is working? After all, it's not like the mice can radio back to base. Or can they? The workers behind the plan told NBC News that some of the mice will have data-transmitting via radios.
It may sound like the plot to an animated movie starring the vocal talents of Gilbert Godfried, but we assure you this is actually happening.
NBC News reports that the dead mice were pumped full of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. The hope is that the snakes, which are invasive to the area and cause harm to exotic native birds and the island's power grid, will be drawn to the toxic rodents, eat them, and then croak. Other animals face minimal risk, reports the Air Force Times.
Dan Vice, the Agriculture Department's assistant supervisory wildlife biologist for Guam, told KUAM that the mice are dropped in a time sequence from low-flying helicopters. Each rodent is strung up to a tiny parachute made of cardboard and tissue paper.
Via NBC News:
"The cardboard is heavier than the tissue paper and opens up in an inverted horseshoe," Vice said. "It then floats down and ultimately hangs up in the forest canopy. Once it's hung in the forest canopy, snakes have an opportunity to consume the bait."
The mission is part of an $8 million program from the Interior and Defense departments, Phys.org reports. If the mission is successful, experts may expand it to other parts of Guam. In other words, maybe a sequel is forthcoming.
Obama on Affordable Care Act: 'We're not repealing it as long as I'm president'
Carolyn Kaster / AP
President Barack Obama at a health care event, Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2013, in Washington.
"Do not let the initial problems with the website discourage you, because it's working better now, and it's just going to keep on working better over time," Obama said at an event at the White House intended to promote the health law and its benefits.
"If I've got to fight another three years to make sure this law works, then that's what I'll do," he defiantly added later.
"We're not repealing it as long as I'm president," Obama said at another point during his remarks, a thinly-veiled reference to repeated Republican attempts to undo or eliminate the law.
December is also a crucial time for Obama and the law. Proponents of the Affordable Care Act have always circled this month on the calendar as a crucial month in which they expected enrollment to spike as the end of the year approaches.
President Obama says that the Affordable Healthcare Act is helping people, and if he needs to spend the remainder of his second term making sure the law works, he will.
The administration is now highlighting the website's improved capacity -- 1 million users visited HealthCare.gov on Monday without major issues, and over 380,000 users had visited the site by midday on Tuesday -- in hopes of encouraging Americans to enroll in insurance plans.But Obama and Democrats suffered in the polls as scrutiny over the troubled rollout grew. Tuesday's event was meant to turn the public's focus back toward some of the law's benefits, and criticize Republicans for threatening those very benefits should they finally make good on their threat to repeal the law.
"My main message today is we're not going back," Obama said. "That seems to be the only alternative that Obamacare's opponents have."
Just hours earlier on Capitol Hill, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, demurred on the question of whether the GOP would produce and vote on its own health care plan next year. Obama challenged Republicans to produce their own health care plan if they found his law so distasteful.
To that end, Obama also culled stories of Americans who either benefited or stand to benefit from some of the provisions in the law -- like the ban on lifetime caps for benefits, or allowing younger Americans to stay on their parents' plans through age 26.
Perhaps predictably, Republicans in Congress were dissatisfied by Obama's remarks.
"Another campaign-style event won't solve the myriad problems facing consumers under Obamacare," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said of the president's 12-minute remarks delivered from the White House complex. "The only 'fix' is full repeal followed by step-by-step, patient-centered reforms that drive down costs and that Americans actually want."
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