Archives for April 2016

While I have always been the stunningly good looking humanoid you all like to worship, I have also tooled around the arts and entertainment industry most of my life. You can CLICK HERE if you need a casual bio (it’s not what I use for submissions). While most of the stuff I was involved in could easily be called fun there is one aspect of my career that makes me want to punch nuns. It’s called reviewing artist submissions. Not because of the art, music, writing, whatever. I can handle bad creative efforts. You just say “No thank you” and move on. No, I’m talking about the submission process itself. Above and beyond the item being submitted there are four elements that go into any kit in any genre; Cover Letter, Bio, Credits, and an Image that accurately portrays what you are trying to convey. And people manage to fuck these up in spectacular fashion. Now that I’m working with a couple of comic book companies I was appalled to discover the Fuck Up Fairy is still handling careers.

The first thing that will make me Hulk out is bad grammar. I actually had one artist tell me he wasn’t a writer as an excuse for mixing up there, their, and they’re, among other sins. When I asked who wrote the mess I had failed to translate into usable English he replied he had. To which I said, “You wrote words on paper, that makes you a fucking writer. Learn how to do it or pay someone to not be you.”

He was very insulted and said I was mean.

Fuck him.

Wait until he hits a major company. They’ll use his shit for paper planes and burn the rest.

Okay, rant number one over, let’s move on.

Cover Letter

The cover letter should state, in the first sentence if possible, why you’re submitting. Something like this is fine, “I thought your series “Anal Clown Girls from Venus” was a work of art and feel my submission will appeal to your audience.”

Now they have a baseline comparison to work from. Remember the cover letter is not a bio. Hit some highlights, mention the one thing you’re most proud of in your career – WARNING: If you say anything about your kids or spouse or your ability to make a peach cobbler, your shit gets tossed. Nobody, and I do mean NO FUCKING BODY, cares. You’re asking people to put their careers and reputations on the line for you. Respect that simple truth and prove you’re worth their time.

Make sure your contact info is clearly available and DO NOT use cute graphics, colored paper, or difficult to read fonts. If you’re older than ten you should avoid Comic Sans as well. Also, unless you’re Steven King, the cover should be kept to one page, with 1 1/5 line spacing, indented paragraphs, and no double spaces after periods. In fact, even if you are Steven King keep it to a page. They should already know who the fuck you are in that case.

I’m assuming your smart enough to address to a person and not “To whom it may concern.” The latter is an instant garbage can filler.

BIO

Bio is short for Biography. A professional biography is a written dissertation of facts which are exclusively relevant to your career. It should include awards you’ve won, accolades (keep them brief), previous works you’ve released and anything similar which makes you look like the hot shit you are. It can be conversational or more résumé-like. Use what feels best given the amount of information you have to include. As a general rule new artists should remain conversational.

It SHOULD NOT include anything about your childhood, your family (they’re not getting this deal, you are), or anything which occurred in high school, or previously, unless you are actually in high school.

CREDITS

If you’re new you may not have any beyond what you list in your bio. That’s fine, just skip this page if that’s true. DO NOT make shit up. I check, companies check, everyone will check. You lie, you die. Keep in mind that each industry is a small group. Piss off one member of their tribe and you’ll succeed in pissing them all off. You’d be stunned to see how fast that can happen and how hard, nearly impossible, it is to overcome.

But, if you do have credits, put them in a nice bullet point list.

• This got released – when / where
• This got released – when / where
• This got released – when / where
• This got released – when / where

If anything received an award or accolade, even if you mentioned it in your cover letter, note it here. Also, if the accolade has a more complete version, here’s where it should go.

IMAGE

People want to know who they’re going to be working with. A simple head shot with no background is best. Unless you’re positioning yourself as a professional image manipulator, then a manipulated image of you would be fine.

The “NO” list:

• Kittens
• Porn – yes, someone did this
• Some image you stole off the web – someone once sent me something I’d created
• Amateur graphics
• Squirrels
• Your family – see above
• Food – no exceptions

SOME PRO TIPS

Know your weaknesses. If you are not good with the language you’re using for your submission, have someone else do the writing. You can even note it in your cover letter. Something like “I am fluent in Nigerian and am having Amanda Wiley write this for me.” That lets them know to have someone who speaks your language available should they need to speak with you. If you choose this option make sure the person you’re using is actually fluent in the submission language and not just someone who uses Bing.

If you are fluent in the submission language but terrified of grammar, hire an editor. Yes, take your money, give it to them, and say thank you. Please don’t use a family member or close friend. They will color the results to their opinion of you and, quite honestly, no one gives a fuck what they think. Get fresh eyes.

Actually, hire an editor anyway. What makes sense to you could get completely lost on others. They don’t live in your head. And, just like Eminem in 8 Mile, you only get one shot. Before you ask, yes, I use an editor on my submissions

Make sure your contact information is in the header or footer of every page. I prefer a footer, but that’s entirely your call.

If you have a web site, and you should if you’re trying to be professional, make sure it’s a site dedicated to you. Addresses like www.OurHostingService.com/YourWebSite make you appear to be a pre-teen.

Overall keep this in mind, you are asking for a huge favor from complete strangers. You want them to give you a career in your chosen field. You aren’t owed that, you have to earn it.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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Ever had a bad day? I mean one where nothing makes sense at all? The kind of day Kafka seemed to have every Tuesday? Well, today’s story is about someone who has that kind of day every day and has since around 2002. There is a nice, 82 year old, lady named Joyce Taylor who lives on her family farm in Kansas. Normally that’s not the kind of thing that sparks a Steven King story, or a Kafka reference, but here we are. You see, Mrs. Taylor, and her family, live near the center of the United States. There is corn, wheat, cows, and a dumping ground for unknown IP addresses. It is that last little bit of trivia that has led to threats, vandalism, FBI raids, and random acts of hatred. What did the gentle Mrs. Taylor do to deserve this?

Well, nothing really.

I’ll let Kashmir Hill, from Fusion, tell you all about it.

For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They’ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They’ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They’ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.

All in all, the residents of the Taylor property have been treated like criminals for a decade. And until I called them this week, they had no idea why.

To understand what happened to the Taylor farm, you have to know a little bit about how digital cartography works in the modern era—in particular, a form of location service known as “IP mapping.”

IP refers to an Internet Protocol address, which is a unique identifier assigned to a computer or a computer network. IP addresses play an essential role in computers talking to each other, and every internet-connected device needs one. The device you’re using to read this article has an IP address, and when you visited this site, our servers wrote it down. So we now have a record that someone using that particular IP address read this story in our server logs. Sometimes, through some sophisticated sleuthing, you can find out more information about a specific IP address—for example, whether it’s been associated with a malicious device, or where in the world it’s located.

The trouble for the Taylor farm started in 2002, when a Massachusetts-based digital mapping company called MaxMind decided it wanted to provide “IP intelligence” to companies who wanted to know the geographic location of a computer to, for example, show the person using it relevant ads or to send the person a warning letter if they were pirating music or movies.

There are lots of different ways a company like MaxMind can try to figure out where an IP address is located. It can “war-drive,” sending cars around the U.S. looking for open wifi networks, getting those networks’ IP addresses, and recording their physical locations. It can gather information via apps on smartphones that note the GPS coordinates of the phone when it takes on a new IP address. It can look at which company owns an IP address, and then make an assumption that the IP address is linked to that company’s office.

But IP mapping isn’t an exact science. At its most precise, an IP address can be mapped to a house. (You can try to map your own IP address here.) At its least precise, it can be mapped only to a country. In order to deal with that imprecision, MaxMind decided to set default locations at the city, state and country level for when it knows only roughly where the IP address lives. If it knows only that an IP address is somewhere in the U.S., and can’t figure out anything more about where it is, it will point to the center of the country.

As any geography nerd knows, the precise center of the United States is in northern Kansas, near the Nebraska border. Technically, the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the center spot are 39°50′N 98°35′W. In digital maps, that number is an ugly one: 39.8333333,-98.585522. So back in 2002, when MaxMind was first choosing the default point on its digital map for the center of the U.S., it decided to clean up the measurements and go with a simpler, nearby latitude and longitude: 38°N 97°W or 38.0000,-97.0000.

As a result, for the last 14 years, every time MaxMind’s database has been queried about the location of an IP address in the United States it can’t identify, it has spit out the default location of a spot two hours away from the geographic center of the country. This happens a lot: 5,000 companies rely on MaxMind’s IP mapping information, and in all, there are now over 600 million IP addresses associated with that default coordinate. If any of those IP addresses are used by a scammer, or a computer thief, or a suicidal person contacting a help line, MaxMind’s database places them at the same spot: 38.0000,-97.0000.

Which happens to be in the front yard of Joyce Taylor’s house.

IP addresses were never designed to be used for locating a physical location, but more and more companies, and amateur detectives, use them for just that. Sometimes the results are hilarious, but often they’re not.

Kashim has many examples in her article that will give you pause. People are assumed guilty until proven innocent when things like this happen.

To their credit, MaxMind is changing the default address, hopefully to somewhere near the north pole (actually to the middle of an ocean), and is working with others who are experiencing problems, but this is going to take a while.

You’re talking about millions of potential mistakes.

Well, I’m talking about them. You’re reading about them. But you get the idea.

Kashim rounds this all out for us.

There are lots more of these phantom IP houses. When Dave Maynor (her research assistant) sent me that list of thousands of locations in the MaxMind database that have aberrantly high number of IP addresses associated with them, my colleague Kristen Brown and I called dozens of them. Many remain blissfully unaware that they’re living in an IP flood zone; they’d never had strangers show up on their doorstep. Apparently, the IP addresses attached to their homes haven’t yet been used for anything nefarious. Yet.

One important lesson of my sleuthing is that IP addresses, which get used as digital evidence in criminal trials and to secure search warrants, are not always reliable. Like Social Security numbers, they were a numerical system built for one purpose that are now used for something completely different. Social Security numbers were designed to keep track of a person’s earnings over their lifetime, but are now the security token used to lock down their entire identity. IP addresses were meant to allow computers to talk to each other, but have been repurposed to reveal details about the person behind that computer. The words “security” and “address” in their titles promise more than they can deliver.

I’m not sure how much I need to emphasize this, but just as John Oliver showed how credit reports can be wildly fictional (I was dead, while still in prison, on one for a couple of years – for the record, I’m alive and have never been to prison), IP Addresses are only meant to do one thing; let your computer talk to another computer. If you’re looking for more information than that, get a phone book.

How to Uninstall McAfee Antivirus from FFAKE Animation on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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I know that all my readers are the best looking and most intelligent humans ever evolved. But we all know that one person who may, just may, need a little guidance when dealing with this internet thing. Every now and then I post stuff about safe internetting, and it seems to help. A little, anyway. I have gotten emails from nice people who were able to print this stuff out and share it at nursing homes, homes for the developmentally disabled, and for those around them who just never seem to catch on. There are eleven common scams that seem to have reared their ugly heads again and are making inroads into people’s pockets as well as their computers. So, in an attempt to tamp them out once and for all, yes – I know that’s a Sisyphean task, I gathered them here, top ten lists are for amateurs, for you to be aware of.

Well, not you, of course, but that friend of yours.

#1. Tech Support Scams

Reported countries: India and Pakistan. In many cases, scammers used U.S. VOIP phone numbers.
Damages reported: $100-$1000 and the cost of real technical support after to fix the damaged computer. As scammers usually ask for payment via credit card, many victims have also reported having their identities stolen afterward.

It’s rare that any technician from a PC manufacturer or tech support company would cold call non-client computer users and tell them that there’s an immediate threat to their computers and that the company needs remote access to fix the problem. Yet, many people fall for this scam.

Operating usually out of India, scammers call victims and allege that they’re with a big name tech company. Victims are told that their computers are either already infected or about to become infected with malware that can cause significant damage, such as operating system corruption or identity theft. The “technicians” then urge users to allow them to have remote access to troubleshoot and fix related issues. Scammers use these opportunities to infect systems with malware or perform other damage; or send users to third-party websites that cause damage. All of these actions are focused on the singular goal of giving scammers access to computers so they can cause errors and then charge for unnecessary repair services.

#2. Fake/Counterfeit Merchandise Scams

Reported countries: China
Damages reported: $100-$1000. As scammers usually ask for payment via credit card, victims have also reported identity theft at a later time.

With so many online stores available, it’s sometimes very difficult to know the difference between a legitimate e-commerce site and a fake one set up to steal money or a person’s identity.

Operating predominantly out of China, scammers set up generic online stores that sell name brand items or mimic the websites of big name brand companies. On these sites, scammers sell fake or counterfeit products at significantly reduced prices designed to attract buyers looking for big deals on name brand merchandise. The over-reaching goal of these scammers is to gain access to the credit card numbers of their victims and then use the numbers to fraudulently make purchases, or make a buck with the information on the black market. In some cases, the criminals even go so far as to send fake or counterfeit products to victims. As the merchandise ships from international locations, victims often remain unaware of any wrong-doing against them until weeks have passed. Although many brand companies discover these sites and shut them down, it’s usually too late.

#3. Pets-for-Sale Scams

Reported countries: Unknown
Damages reported: $200-$2000

The promise of cuddly and cute puppies, kittens and other pets is another scam and has harmed a lot of people in 2014.

Pets-for-sale scammers create fake websites that claim to be associated with pet adoption or animal nurseries. On these sites, they offer a wide selection of pets for adoption or sale at prices significantly below the norm. Some sites even offer puppies for free to attract victims. With this scam, victims are told that they must pay for at least the insurance, shipping and other services associated with processing and delivering the pets. Victims are then required to make their purchases and/or pay their fees with non-returnable, cash-like forms of payment, including but not limited to: Moneygram, Western Union, Vanilla prepaid cards or wire transfer to a foreign bank account.

#4. Grant Scams

Reported countries: India and Pakistan
Damages reported: $100-$2000+

Representatives of the United States government don’t call American citizens with offers to sell them grant money. Operating usually out of India and Pakistan, scammers who deal in selling grants purchase consumer information from legitimate companies that run payday loan affiliate websites. The companies usually have no idea that they’re dealing with scammers. Instead, they believe that the scammers can offer some of their payday loan applicants financial assistance. Scammers also acquire consumer personal details from unsuspecting advertising agencies who run lead generation campaigns targeting consumers in need of loans. The scammers then contact the people from these lists and claim they represent the United States government. They advise victims that they can provide access to grant money for a “processing fee”. As with the Pets-for-Sale scenarios, scammers require victims to pay via non-returnable payment methods that act like cash.

The processing fee is merely the beginning of the crime. Grant scam artists then use the banking information of their victims to gain access to additional funds or sell the information to the highest bidder on the black market.

#5. Collection Agency Scams

Reported countries: India and Pakistan
Damages reported: $100-$2000+

Some scammers are well aware that collection agencies have the right to contact consumers who owe money to them or companies they represent. Criminals involved with collection agency scams use this knowledge to their advantage to steal money.

Representing a fake collection agency, or even the United States Attorney General’s office, scammers make cold calls to victims and threaten lawsuits or embarrassing on-the-job confrontations unless the victims start making payments. Sometimes, the scammers support their claims with real details about outstanding loans. This type of scam can go on for months. After repeated harassment, victims cave to demands and pay a fee. Some time later, the scammers repeat the tactic with the same victims or sell/share the information to other scamming organizations who repeat the vicious cycle. Fee payment is also expected via non-returnable methods, such as Moneygram, Western Union, Vanilla and wire transfer.

#6. House/Vacation Property Rental Scams

Reported countries: Unknown
Damages reported: $500-$3000+

After the housing market scandals of the last few years, many consumers have opted to rent home and vacation properties, and scammers have targeted this trend.

Scammers advertise properties that they don’t actually own on classified ads websites, such as Craigslist and Backpage, with attractive pictures and detailed descriptions. Typically, they associate the ads with desirable, rich or low crime rate neighborhoods and offer prices that fall well below local rental averages. Instead of in-country phone-based contact, scammers use VOIP numbers from foreign countries and text messaging to communicate with buyers and renters. All payments are requested via non-returnable methods like Moneygram, Western Union, Vanilla and wire transfer.

#7. Payday Loan Scams

Reported countries: India, Pakistan
Damages reported: $500 – $3000+

As previously mentioned, scammers love to pick their victims from those most in need — people who are willing to take out high-interest payday loans.

Like grant scams, payday loan scams rely heavily on legitimate leads gathered by payday loan affiliate website companies or advertising agencies. Advertising agencies use cleverly designed small websites to entice consumers who have bad debt to apply for payday loans. Once the information is gathered, they sell it to other companies and re-sell it over and over until a scamming company posing as a legitimate company gains access to it. From there, scammers advise payday loan applicants that they qualify for low interest loans that they can also can get immediately with payment of a processing- or security-related fee. For example, some scammers tell victims that the fee helps confirm that the victims have the means to repay their loans when it’s time. As with similar scams, payday loan scammers request upfront money through cash-like payment methods or wire transfer and then never follow through with any sort of loans. Sometimes these criminals also ask for the bank account details of their details. They claim that they need the information to direct deposit the approved payday loan amount, but in reality they take the information to steal from the accounts later or to sell it to those who will use it to steal.

#8. Timeshare Resale Scams

Reported countries: USA, India
Damages reported: $200-$3000+

“Don’t have the time or money to invest in your timeshare any longer? Need someone to take it off your hands? We have the perfect buyer for you!”

These lines are what scammers want you to believe.

For decades, criminals have taken advantage of the idea of sharing a single property between multiple owners to reduce costs.

Operating usually from within the United States, timeshare resale scammers tell their victims that they have buyers, or in some cases renters, ready to take over any timeshare at a moment’s notice. The scam? They require an upfront fee to move forward with the process. Timeshare resale scammers give their victims a wide range of reasons for the fee, including but not limited to: appraisal, marketing analysis and fees related to transfer or closing. Some even claim that any fees pay for marketing and go so far as to mock up a contract that has wording to that effect to reassure their victims.

#9. Dating and Relationship Scams

NEVER FUCKING CLICK ON A RANDOM EMAIL LINK FOR DATING SITES. JUST DON’T DO IT!

#10. Work from Home – Inspecting and Shipping Merchandise

Reported countries: Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe

Damages reported: Loss of funds for variable amounts. If not reported to authorities immediately, victims can suffer legal consequences if believed to be part of any criminal activities related to product sales or shipping.

Many people around the world dream of working from home. After all, who wouldn’t want to give up the stresses from commuting to work or dealing with co-workers? For some, job ads and websites claiming to offer at-home work opportunities seem like the perfect answer.

In reality, these offers are usually the bait for various types of scams.

One big scam in 2014 involves at-home merchandise inspection and shipping. Scammers set up professional-looking websites and claim that the sites are owned by shipping and logistics intermediaries. Some also set up sites to state that they can offer these work-at-home opportunities because they represent large merchant companies in the United States that don’t have international shipping services.

Scammers use job search website ads to attract victims or target victims using job board profiles. They go through the interview process with each victim, usually via an Internet communications application like Yahoo Messenger, and then offer a job to every single person they interviewed. Once they’ve “hired” their virtual workers, scammers use stolen credit cards to purchase merchandise and then ship it to their new work-at-home “employees” with instructions on how to open the packages, inspect the merchandise and ship it elsewhere.

Not long after, usually a week, the scammers cut all ties with their recent batch of employees or go a step further and attempt to scam their victims with fraudulent paychecks made out for amounts that are much greater than the compensation for time worked. Victims are then advised to deposit their checks and use the overpayment amount to perform a bank transfer of the funds to one or more people who supposedly weren’t paid for some type of service, such as document verification or office supplies. The check then bounces and victims to their horror that not only worked for free, but they also lost extra money.

#11. Fraudulent/Fake Check Scams

Reported countries: Nigeria, India and USA
Damages reported: $200-$3000+

One of the most popular scams involves scammers convincing unwitting victims to accept fraudulent/fake checks.

Victims with banks accounts in the United States receive checks for whatever reason at much higher amounts than expected. Scammers then use a variety of creative, clever stories to explain any compensation discrepancies and convince victim to send back overpayment via cash-like payment methods or wire transfer. When these checks bounce, the victim discover that they have been fleeced. Over the years, this scam has been used with a variety of consumer actions, including purchase of vehicles and renting property.

It really all comes down to this; do you know the person or company that allegedly sent the email? If so, contact them directly, don’t respond to the email. Second, if it sounds too good to be true, it is. It’s really that simple.

Also, no, there are no restaurants giving out $50 coupons for clicking a link. They’d go fucking broke if they did.

Pompeya – Liar from Alexander Khudokon on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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We live in interesting times, to quote an ancient Chinese curse. We have access to most of the world’s contemporary knowledge yet we spend our time sharing pictures of cats and food. When I say “we” I’m talking about you and me, not the people I’m writing about today. You see, though it may sometimes seem as though everything’s going to hell in a hand basket, that’s not really true. While we get battered with constant news of idiots and bigotry, there are many who are thinking way outside the box to make our world a better place. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. The two articles we’re going to share today feature people who never even heard of the damn box in the first place. So, today, instead of focusing on those who wish to drag us back to those wacky Middle Ages, I thought it might be fun to talk about those who can heal the unhealable.

Let’s start with a given. Ever since Dr. Edward Jenner discovered a cure for smallpox by ogling milk maids scientists have known that human bodies could be taught to prevent disease. The simple explanation is that they inject a small amount into a person, that person fights it off, and then, should they become exposed to a more damaging dose of the disease, they don’t catch it. That’s how vaccines work.

John Palferman, over at Nova Next, says a couple of scientists took this concept to a whole new level and may have found the cure for Alzheimer’s.

In 2004, the British chemist Chris Dobson speculated that there might be a universal elixir out there that could combat not just alpha-synuclein for Parkinson’s but the amyloids caused by many protein-misfolding diseases at once. Remarkably, in that same year an Israeli scientist named Beka Solomon discovered an unlikely candidate for this elixir, a naturally occurring microorganism called a phage.

Solomon, a professor at Tel Aviv University, made a serendipitous discovery one day when she was testing a new class of agents against Alzheimer’s disease. If it pans out, it might mark the beginning of the end of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and many other neurodegenerative diseases. It’s a remarkable story, and the main character isn’t Solomon or any other scientist but a humble virus that scientists refer to as M13.

Among the many varieties of viruses, there is a kind that only infects bacteria. Known as bacteriophages, or just phages, these microbes are ancient (over three billion years old) and ubiquitous: they’re found everywhere from the ocean floor to human stomachs. The phage M13’s goal is to infect just one type of bacteria, Escherichia coli, or E. coli, which can be found in copious amounts in the intestines of mammals. Like other microorganisms, phages such as M13 have only one purpose: to pass on their genes. In order to do this, they have developed weapons to enable them to invade, take over, and even kill their bacterial hosts. Before the advent of antibiotics, in fact, doctors occasionally used phages to fight otherwise incurable bacterial infections.

To understand Solomon’s interest in M13 requires a little background about her research. Solomon is a leading Alzheimer’s researcher, renowned for pioneering so-called immunotherapy treatments for the disease. Immunotherapy employs specially made antibodies, rather than small molecule drugs, to target the disease’s plaques and tangles. As high school students learn in biology class, antibodies are Y-shaped proteins that are part of the body’s natural defense against infection. These proteins are designed to latch onto invaders and hold them so that they can be destroyed by the immune system. But since the 1970s, molecular biologists have been able to genetically engineer human-made antibodies, fashioned to attack undesirable interlopers like cancer cells. In the 1990s, Solomon set out to prove that such engineered antibodies could be effective in attacking amyloid-beta plaques in Alzheimer’s as well.

In 2004, she was running an experiment on a group of mice that had been genetically engineered to develop Alzheimer’s disease plaques in their brains. She wanted to see if human-made antibodies delivered through the animals’ nasal passages would penetrate the blood-brain barrier and dissolve the amyloid-beta plaques in their brains. Seeking a way to get more antibodies into the brain, she decided to attach them to M13 phages in the hope that the two acting in concert would better penetrate the blood-brain barrier, dissolve more of the plaques, and improve the symptoms in the mice—as measured by their ability to run mazes and perform similar tasks.

At the time, Solomon had no clear idea how a simple phage could dissolve Alzheimer’s plaques.

Solomon divided the rodents into three groups. She gave the antibody to one group. The second group got the phage-antibody combination, which she hoped would have an enhanced effect in dissolving the plaques. And as a scientific control, the third group received the plain phage M13.

Because M13 cannot infect any organism except E. coli, she expected that the control group of mice would get absolutely no benefit from the phage. But, surprisingly, the phage by itself proved highly effective at dissolving amyloid-beta plaques and in laboratory tests improved the cognition and sense of smell of the mice. She repeated the experiment again and again, and the same thing happened. “The mice showed very nice recovery of their cognitive function,” Solomon says. And when Solomon and her team examined the brains of the mice, the plaques had been largely dissolved. She ran the experiment for a year and found that the phage-treated mice had 80% fewer plaques than untreated ones. Solomon had no clear idea how a simple phage could dissolve Alzheimer’s plaques, but given even a remote chance that she had stumbled across something important, she decided to patent M13’s therapeutic properties for the University of Tel Aviv. According to her son Jonathan, she even “joked about launching a new company around the phage called NeuroPhage. But she wasn’t really serious about it.”

Joking or not, fast forward to now and they have such a company, have received millions in seed money, and are ramping up for human trials. Scientists have known for a while that it’s the plaque in the brain that causes the the true damage and not the disease itself. In other words, rid the body of the symptoms and let it get on with life, just like treating Malaria with Quinine. It doesn’t cure Malaria, it just makes you healthy. Researchers in Australia have been developing a technique using ultra-sound waves to break up the plaque in the brain and restore functions. As it stands now, a combination of these therapies could provide a cure.

Another thing scientists have long known is that discovering a disease early greatly enhances a person’s chances of surviving it. A lot of progress has been made in that regard, but David Nield, over at Science Alert, says that one group of scientists have taken this to a whole, new, level.

Spotting the spread of diseases such as cancer in their early stages can make a huge difference to the likelihood of being able to beat them into submission, and scientists in Singapore have developed a new biosensor that could provide on-the-spot diagnoses to do just that.

The new sensor picks up on biomarkers known as microRNAs (a class of RNAs or ribonucleic acids) that help translate genetic DNA information into protein. MicroRNAs can act as signposts to various diseases, and because they’re well-preserved in fluids such as urine and blood, they’re an ideal way of quickly testing for signs of trouble in the body.

What the researchers from Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) have done is develop a silicon photonic biosensor that uses beams of light to detect tiny changes in the composition of a urine sample.

It essentially looks at the level of binding between a DNA probe and target microRNA to figure out the level of microRNA in the sample. This can then provide clues to the presence of some types of cancer, cardiac disease, and other serious health issues.

The research team says its lightweight sensor is highly sensitive, works without any other equipment, and can provide results in as little as 15 minutes. It’s not ready for widespread use yet, but if it proves effective enough to be released to the public, that kind of quick assessment can make all the difference.

“Existing methods to detect microRNAs are time consuming and require cumbersome machines, which limit their usefulness in clinical settings,” said one of the team, Mi Kyoung Park. “This inspired us to develop a simple and efficient point-of-care device for detecting microRNAs.”

Park and her colleagues have used the newly developed system to detect two types of microRNAs in urine samples from three patients with late-stage bladder cancer.

When compared with samples from two healthy subjects, the microRNA levels differed significantly. Although only small-scale testing has been carried out so far, the team thinks the device has plenty of potential as a future diagnostic tool. They’ll now need to test it on a much larger sample of people to confirm its accuracy.

“The system can be expanded to detect a number of microRNAs of different species and should be useful for a variety of point-of-care clinical applications,” says Park.

Just imagine this, you go to the doctor, give up a urine sample, read a magazine, and know exactly what is or is not wrong with you. No more days of sitting and fretting. More importantly, the cures available to you, at this early stage, are usually noninvasive and don’t cause you to alter your lifestyle.

Well, you’ll have to quit smoking and so on, but you should do that anyway. Or so I’m told.

Both of these teams will, obviously, get very rich. But, here’s the fun part, the cost to consumer of each product is low. There is no need to jack up the prices so, pretty much, everyone will have access to them.

I just thought you’d like some good news for a change.

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