“SPECFLIC 2.6″ and “Particles of Interest”
Installations by Adriene Jenik and *particle group*
August 6 to October 3, 2008

http://gallery.calit2.net/

New-media art installations that caution visitors about a future when books are relics of the past, and nanoparticles represent a pervasive threat to human health, will be on display starting August 4 at the gallery@calit2 on the campus of the University of California, San Diego.

By using tumor-targeting nanoparticles filled with chemotherapy drugs, scientists kept kidney and pancreas cancers from spreading through the bodies of mice.In an experiment described today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers led by University of California, San Diego pathologist David Cheresh designed nanoparticles that selectively attached to a protein found on the surface of blood vessels that supply tumors with nutrients and oxygen.

The particles were loaded with doxorubicin, an effective but highly toxic anti-cancer drug with side effects ranging from white cell destruction to fatal heart disease. By targeting blood vessel cells, the researchers needed just one-fifteenth the amount used in a traditional, system-flooding dose.

“To use an analogy from warfare, we didn’t have as much collateral damage,” said Cheresh.

Such findings aren’t unique in the fast-growing field of cancer nanotech, but the researchers found something new: Although their nanoparticles didn’t affect the original tumor, they did stop the cancers from spreading through the mice. That process is known as metastasis — a word synonymous, for anyone who has experience with cancer, with doom.

“Patients often don’t die from primary tumors, which you can recognize and detect and develop a therapy for,” said Cheresh. “They die from metastatic disease — when, for example, a breast cancer spreads to the liver, the lymph nodes, the brain. Those patients could theoretically be treated with this type of therapy, with the hope that it would prolong the progression of the disease, that the metastatic lesions would slow.”

Cheresh said that newly forming tumors, still too small to be detected, depend on a fresh supply of blood. With doxorubicin rendering them unable to form blood vessels, the tumors didn’t grow.

Cheresh added that doxorubicin, which has already been approved for human use, is merely one example of what could be achieved through the nanotherapeutic use of other, highly toxic drugs.

In addition to treatment, nanoparticles can also be used for the early detection of cancer.

“Those trials have begun or are in the process of being finalized,” he said. “The day isn’t too far off.”

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/07/drug-infused-na.html

Nanoparticle-mediated drug delivery to tumor vasculature suppresses metastasis [PNAS]

Image: Areas of nanoparticle binding show up green, courtesy of PNAS.

Carbon nanotubes, the poster child of the burgeoning nanotechnology industry, could trigger diseases similar to those caused by asbestos, a study suggests. Specific lengths of the tiny fibres were found to cause “asbestos-like” inflammation and lesions in mice. Use of asbestos triggered a pandemic of lung disease in the 20th Century.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7408705.stm

This Nano-Virtual-Sit-In is being performed on the 5th anniversary of the war on Iraq. We have chosen biotech and nanotech corporations and organizations as our targets, because their science is driven by the war and drives the war.
The Electronic Disturbance Theater and the borderlands Hacklab call for a virtual strike against these war profiteers on March 19th, 2008,in solidarity with the Bay Area Direct Action to Stop the War and actions in the street around the world.
To join the action, and to learn more, go to

http://bang.calit2.net/5yearsofwar

The *particle group*, funded by Calit2 and UCSD Arts & Humanities, is among the artists represented in the new San Diego Museum of Art exhibition, March 8-June 22

San Diego, CA, February 29, 2008 — A new exhibition organized by the San Diego Museum of Art showcases regional artists producing thought-provoking and interactive social art — and the artists include two UC San Diego professors supported by the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA).

Running from March 8 through June 22, 2008, Inside the Wave features six artists and artist collectives from the San Diego/Tijuana region working within spheres of alternative cultures to produce works that combine material culture and everyday life. Participating artists include Adriene Jenik (whose SPECFLIC speculative cinema work debuted at the dedication of Calit2’s Atkinson Hall); Tijuana-based bulbo (a collective that includes an undergraduate student of Jenik’s); Brian Dick and Allison Wiese, both MFA graduates from UCSD; Zlatan Vukosavljevic; and the *particle group*, a collective of media and performance artists, including UCSD visual arts professor Ricardo Dominguez.

The *particle group* is funded by Calit2 and the UCSD Division of Arts and Humanities. The *particle group* is comprised of artists, researchers, and computer engineers led by Ricardo Dominguez and Diane Ludin who are the Principal Investigators. Other members of the group are Nina Waisman (Interactive Sound Installation Design); Amy Sara Carroll (Critical Particle Engineer); Marius Schebella, Program Developer; and Pierre Galaud, Cesaire José Carroll-Dominguez, Robert Twomey, and Caleb Waldorf, Assistant Researchers.
(Waisman, Twomey and Waldorf are all graduate student artists at UCSD.) The group combines digital technology, investigative research, and multimedia formats into works that forge a subversive relationship with the newest frontiers of technological science in an effort to undermine corporate assumptions of authority and power. particle group exhibited together for the first time in the Nomadic New York series, House of World Cultures, Berlin, 2007. “The group combines theater, activism and humor into many works that forge a subversive relationship with the newest frontiers of technological science in an effort to undermine some of their assumptions of authority and power,” said Ricardo Dominguez.

March 8th to June 1, 2008

San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA

MORE

http://calit2.net/newsroom/release.php?id=1240

Swarms of robots that use electromagnetic forces to cling together and assume different shapes are being developed by US researchers. The grand goal is to create swarms of microscopic robots capable of morphing into virtually any form by clinging together. Seth Goldstein, who leads the research project at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, in the US, admits this is still a distant prospect. However, his team is using simulations to develop control strategies for futuristic shape-shifting, or “claytronic”, robots, which they are testing on small groups of more primitive, pocket-sized machines.

MORE
http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13244

Washington, December 4: A presentation made by Cornell University researchers at the ongoing 47th Annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology suggests that the biological pathway that powers sperm to swim long distances may be harnessed to nanotech devices, releasing drugs or performing mechanical functions inside the body.

It is believed that the presentation by researchers at the university’s Baker Institute of Animal Health was the first to show how multistep biological pathways could be assembled, and could function on a human-made device.

Mammalian sperm have long, thin, whip-like tails that power their swimming. They meet the challenge of energy delivery, in part, by onsite power generation, modifying the enzymes of glycolysis so that they can attach themselves to a solid structure running the major length of the sperm tail.

MORE
http://www.topnews.in/energy-supply-drives-sperm-may-power-nanotech-devices-home-28182