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A. Stealth Attack Drains Cell Phone Batteries
Narrator: This is Science Today. Many of us now have cell phones that feature a system called multimedia message service, or MMS. It's the next generation of text messaging and it allows users to receive images, audio, video and rich text. But there's a weakness in the MMS system that could be the target of a stealth attack. Computer scientist Hao Chen of the University of California , Davis demonstrated that this vulnerability can be exploited to drain people's cell phone batteries.
Chen: What we do is, just before your phone is about to enter the standby mode, we deliver a packet that is a piece of data to your cell phone. This would prevent your cell phone from ever entering the standby mode.
Narrator: Chen says bad guys can easily obtain a large hit list of vulnerable cell phone numbers and use a computer to launch the attack, silently sending these packets of information to drain batteries.
Chen: That would prove to be very bad in certain situations, such as emergency response and rescue.
Narrator: By demonstrating this weakness, companies and researchers can now come up with ways to foil such attacks. For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
B. Adolescent and Young Adult Cancer Patients
Narrator: This is Science Today. The majority of cancer patients seen at pediatric centers are under 15 years of age and more than 90 percent of all patients seen by oncologists at adult hospitals are over 40 years of age. Each year however, 70,000 Americans between ages 15 and 40 are diagnosed with cancer. Dr. Leonard Sender, director of clinical oncology services at the University of California, Irvine 's Comprehensive Cancer Center , says because of these statistics, these patients have not had optimal therapy.
Sender: So one of my passions and interests and now the university's interests, is how we can treat these people. Usually we've done a tremendous job of how we treated our young patients zero to fourteen – that classic pediatric cancer patient, who had a very unique type of cancer versus the adult patient who gets the more well-known types of cancers like prostate, colon cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer.
Narrator: Caught in the middle are adolescents and young adults.
Sender: Because this group of people do not get adequate care.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C.
Detecting Chemical Elements in Fingerprint Residue
Narrator: This is Science Today. Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed a way to detect elements that are only found in fingerprint residue.
Worley: So, it's not in the background, but it's in the fingerprint itself. So, people sweat, they exude sodium chloride, potassium chloride, so that's what we're looking at is – those kinds of elements.
Narrator: Christopher Worley, an analytical chemist at the Lab, adds that this is preliminary work using x-ray based instruments in their laboratory, but the technology is promising.
Worley: In certain circumstances, for instance, children's prints tend to degrade over time, we can actually, through looking at the chemical composition, detect elements and in other words, see the fingerprint, where it would not be seen with traditional methods over time. If somebody has left a fingerprint, not only can we detect the fingerprint pattern, but if we see certain elements in the fingerprint that are unusual, it tells us that maybe they've been handling material containing that element, so it gives us additional clues as to where the person may have been.
Worley: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
D. Virtual Colonoscopy Reveals Disease Outside of the Colon
Narrator: This is Science Today. Virtual colonoscopy, a new radiology technique that uses a CAT scan to less invasively study the colon, also reveals diseases outside of the colon. Dr. Judy Yee, chief of radiology at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, led the study.
Yee: Some of the things that we identified were lung nodules, because we do scan at the base of the lungs. We did find some lung cancers, some kidney cancers, liver masses and splenic lesions as well.
Narrator: Because patients tested in this study were not symptomatic for these other problems, Yee says they were able to identify disease outside of the colon at an earlier stage, when it is more curable.
Yee: I think that we need to perform additional cost-effectiveness analyses, probably in a larger number of patients. Our patient cohort included only males because we were dealing with the veteran population. So, looking at it in women would be important as well, so it would include in women, for example, the uterus and the ovaries.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E. New Insights into Why the Elderly Suffer More Fractures
Narrator: This is Science Today. Using sophisticated imaging and testing techniques, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have gained better insight into why older people suffer more from bone fractures – a finding that may lead to new therapeutic measures. Robert Ritchie, a senior scientist at the Lab who led the study, says as people grow older, they lose bone quality.
Ritchie: We took bone from 30-year olds, 50 to 60-year olds and we have some 90 to 100-year old bone. And what we found was there was dramatic reduction in the toughness of bone with age – dramatic. In fact, the resistance to a crack that's growing in bone is almost nothing in 100-year old bone. So, there's a huge reduction in toughness of the bone.
Narrator: As we age, our bones lose density, and that was considered to be the main reason why the elderly were more prone to fracture: due to less bone quantity.
Ritchie: In fact, bone density or bone quantity was perhaps only five, ten percent of the problem. There was something else going on as well. The bone itself is diminishing in quality, making it more prone to fracture.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
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