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John Lemke

Artificial spleen cleans up blood : Nature News & Comment - 0 views

www.nature.com/...spleen-cleans-up-blood-1.15917

blood 2014 indienationnews biotech spleen filter artificialOrgans

shared by John Lemke on 15 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • A device inspired by the spleen can quickly clean blood of everything from Escherichia coli to Ebola, researchers report on 14 September in Nature Medicine1.
  • Blood infections can be very difficult to treat, and can lead to sepsis, an often-fatal immune response. More than 50% of the time, physicians cannot diagnose the cause of an infection that has prompted sepsis, and so they resort to antibiotics that attack a broad range of bacteria2. This approach is not always effective, and can lead to antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
  • To test the device, Ingber and his team infected rats with either E. coli or Staphylococcus aureus and filtered blood from some of the animals through the biospleen. Five hours after infection, 89% of the rats whose blood had been filtered were still alive, compared with only 14% of those that were infected but not treated.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • the device had removed more than 90% of the bacteria from the rats' blood.
  • The researchers then tested whether the biospleen could handle the volume of blood in an average adult human — about 5 litres. They ran human blood containing a mixture of bacteria and fungi through the biospleen at a rate of 1 litre per hour, and found that the device removed most of the pathogens within five hours.
  • That degree of efficacy is probably enough to control an infection, Ingber says. Once the biospleen has removed most pathogens from the blood, antibiotics and the immune system can fight off remaining traces of infection — such as pathogens lodged in the organs, he says.
    • John Lemke
      John Lemke on 15 Sep 14
       
      In short, it remove enough pathogens to be an effective human treatment.
John Lemke

Active malware operation let attackers sabotage US energy industry | Ars Technica - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...rs-sabotage-us-energy-industry

2014 indienationnews malware energy industry cuberattack hacking security

shared by John Lemke on 30 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Researchers have uncovered a malware campaign that gave attackers the ability to sabotage the operations of energy grid owners, electricity generation firms, petroleum pipelines, and industrial equipment providers.
  • the hacking group managed to install one of two remote access trojans (RATs) on computers belonging to energy companies located in the US and at least six European countries, according to a
  • Called Dragonfly
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "This campaign follows in the footsteps of Stuxnet, which was the first known major malware campaign to target ICS systems," the Symantec report stated. "While Stuxnet was narrowly targeted at the Iranian nuclear program and had sabotage as its primary goal, Dragonfly appears to have a much broader focus with espionage and persistent access as its current objective with sabotage as an optional capability if required."
  • been in operation since at least 2011
  • "The Dragonfly group is technically adept and able to think strategically," the Symantec report stated. "Given the size of some of its targets, the group found a 'soft underbelly' by compromising their suppliers, which are invariably smaller, less protected companies."
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