Nothin' on earth like a genuine bona-fide electrified cancer monorail

Cancer "monorails" can be used to kill tumours by luring them into toxic pits or areas of the body that are safer to operate on, according to a team at the Georgia Institute of Technology who designed nanofibres thinner than a human hair which cancers "choose" to travel down. Animal studies showed brain tumours could be shrunk by tricking cancer cells into migrating down the fibres. The team were working with difficult-to-treat brain cancers known as glioblastomas, which have a tendency to spread inside the brain. The cancerous cells travel down nerves and blood vessels as they invade the brain. The nanofibre technology, reported in Nature Materials, mimics the channels cancerous cells use to move. One of the researchers, Prof Ravi Bellamkonda, said: "The cancer cells normally latch on to these natural structures and ride them like a monorail to other parts of the brain. By providing an attractive alternative fibre, we can efficiently move the tumours along a different path to a destination that we choose." It works by bringing the tumour to the drug (or at the very least to an area that can be operated on more easily), not the drug to the tumour. You can move the tumour along a path you specify and then kill it. It's not creating extra tumour - in fact, the primary tumour actually shrinks. This fascinating, cutting-edge approach could in time lead to new ways of stopping tumours growing without damaging healthy tissue, which is particularly important for those with brain tumours. But it's still in its infancy and so far has only been tested in rats, so there is a long way to go before we know if it will be safe and effective as a cancer treatment. And speaking of cancer, when 14 members of the anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church showed up at the University of Missouri on Saturday to protest the presence of openly gay football player Michael Sam at an NCAA basketball game against Tennessee, they were in for a bit of a surprise. Sam, who acknowledged he is gay on February 9, has received a great deal of support from around the globe, but his fellow students were about to go one step further. Missouri students Kelaney Lakers and Alix Carruth organized an event called "One Wall, One Mizzou," which drew hundreds of people to the campus on Saturday afternoon for the purpose of supporting Sam. According to the group event's Facebook page, the students planned to form a human wall to block off the Westboro protesters. "The focus of this wall is unification behind Sam to represent this school as One," the Facebook page stated. A total of 4,952 people responded to the page. The Westboro protesters had announced that they planned to show up at 1:30 (Central Standard Time), so the Mizzou students assembled at 1 and formed a long human chain that surrounded the campus. Many wore the school colors of black and gold and carried handmade signs that used the hashtag #StandwithSam. By the time Westboro protestors did arrive, all they could do was wave their signs, because they couldn't get close to the school. Maybe now they'll hate fags somewhere else.