Search Results for: cancer

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.

This has been a strange week for me. Every time something seemed to be headed in the right direction it would blow up. In one instance, literally. Fortunately no one was injured but it does sum things up nicely. In the case of the last event a gentleman was trying to prove that gasoline couldn’t burn if struck with a lit match. This is, in fact, true. However, like all facts gleaned exclusively from the internet, some context is due. While liquid gasoline requires a much higher temperature to burn, otherwise your car would be a rolling bomb, gas fumes do not. Especially if they are mixed with enough oxygen. Then you get an instant flame thrower. As I said no one was hurt so here’s hoping lesson learned. Just FYI, don’t try this at home. In the right, rare, circumstances, you can light the gas on fire. At least the top layer and fumes which will start a nasty burn off.

Now, what good is this lesson? Well, oddly enough, it could help keep generations of others from making the same mistakes. As long as they’re your descendants. Darold Treffert, at Scientific American, explains how your memories become their’s.

Steven Pinker’s 2003 book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, refutes the “blank slate” theories of human development. Brian Butterworth, in his 1999 book, What Counts: How Every Brain is Hardwired for Math, points out that babies have many specialized innate abilities, including numerical ones that he attributes to a “number module” encoded in the human genome from ancestors 30,000 years ago.

Whether called genetic, ancestral or racial memory, or intuitions or congenital gifts, the concept of a genetic transmission of sophisticated knowledge well beyond instincts, is necessary to explain how prodigious savants can know things they never learned.

We tend to think of ourselves as being born with a magnificent and intricate piece of organic machinery (“hardware”) we call the brain, along with a massive but blank hard drive (memory). What we become, it is commonly believed, is an accumulation and culmination of our continuous learning and life experiences, which are added one by one to memory. But the prodigious savant apparently comes already programmed with a vast amount of innate skill -and knowledge in his or her area of expertise–factory-installed “software” one might say–which accounts for the extraordinary abilities over which the savant innately shows mastery in the face of often massive cognitive and other learning handicaps. It is an area of memory function worthy of much more exploration and study.

Experiments have been done on mice wherein they were exposed to pleasure when faced with one object and pain with another. Other mice were faced with the same objects with no ramifications. The spawn of the mice that had faced ramifications would gravitate towards the pleasure inducing item, while avoiding the other, even though they had no reason to do so. Spawn of the mice not affected simply went out and lived their little mousey lives.

These experiments are lending scientific credence to people who claim to experience past lives. Nothing supernatural at all, just a genetic memory that tagged along with your life.

So what else is trapped in those genes you’re carrying? Josh L. Davis, at IFL Science, says you have the ability to regrow limbs.

Of all living four-legged animals, known as tetrapods, only salamanders have the ability to truly regenerate their limbs. Scientists have long questioned this impressive feat, because all other tetrapods develop their limbs in a strikingly similar way, making salamanders seem like the black sheep. But new research hints at the possibility that rather than being an evolutionary oddity, salamanders are actually the only ones to have retained this ability, which was once common to all tetrapods.

The study, published in Nature, looked back at fossil tetrapods from the early lineages of both amphibians (frogs, salamanders, and caecilians) and amniotes (mammals, birds, and reptiles), from around 300 million years ago. This is roughly 30 million years after the two groups are thought to have split, and so the logic goes that if fossils from both lineages at around this time share characteristics, it’s highly likely that the last common ancestor before the split had these characteristics, too.

When animals re-grow limbs, they sometimes leave tell-tale signs such as fused digits, extra digits, or digits missing altogether. It was these signs that the researchers were looking for in the record from both groups, and this is exactly what the researchers found in the fossils from both lineages, indicating that they could both indeed regenerate body parts. This leaves the intriguing proposition, though, that while salamanders were able to hold onto limb regeneration, most other four-legged animals lost it.

“At first sight it is astonishing that a character that is so obviously beneficial like the capacity of limb regeneration has been lost in most extant tetrapods (i.e., in all amniotes),” Brown’s Florian Witzmann told IFLScience in an email. “We have no definite explanation for this, although a number of hypotheses exist related to the cost-benefit ratio of regeneration. Regeneration of limbs and other parts of the body is certainly energy expensive, and in some cases, the costs might be greater than any advantages.”

There are those who think that the regeneration genes might be able to be turned on in injured humans. It would have to be done under controlled circumstances and would require the patient to constantly have access to food, a/k/a fuel, but all the parts are there. We just don’t know how to make them work.

Yet.

Oh, and one last one you might be curious about; can processed meats cause cancer?

Short answer? Yes. But it’s not that simple. I’ll let Aaron E. Carroll from the NY Times explain.

The I.A.R.C. published that for each 50 grams of processed meat eaten daily, the risk of colon cancer goes up by 18 percent. That sounds scary. But that’s a relative risk increase. What we really need to know is the absolute risk increase. I went to the National Cancer Institute’s colorectal cancer risk assessment calculator, and plugged in all of my information. I had to say I’m 50, because it doesn’t have risks for people younger than that. It determined that 50-year-old me has a lifetime risk of 2.7 percent of getting colon cancer.

That’s not nearly as scary as what many headlines would have you believe. Even with all that processed meat (which I am not going to eat), a 0.5 percent increase in the lifetime risk of something is still pretty small. Eating it occasionally, which is more likely, is not going to affect my lifetime risk measurably at all.

Let’s be clear. Rational people are willing to accept small risks of harm to obtain something they value. The example I always like to use is cars. The No. 1 killer of children in the United States is, by far, accidents. Every time we put a child in a car, we are exposing them to the thing most likely to kill them.

We don’t see headlines like “Cars Found to Kill Kids in Record Numbers!” or “Putting a Child in a Car Increases Their Risk of Death by 20 percent!” That’s because we have all recognized that while cars do increase the risk of a bad outcome, the gains from driving outweigh the potential and very small absolute risks of death.

The same is true of many things. I like Scotch. I like skiing. I like the occasional steak. All of these things may increase my absolute risk of death someday by some very tiny amount, but the daily happiness and satisfaction I gain from them outweigh those future, and most likely very small, risks.

What I said about red meat still holds, as do my recommendations for healthy eating. If you’re consuming multiple portions of processed meat a day, then you may see some small benefit in the lifetime risk of cancer by cutting back. But if you’re like most people I know, enjoying bacon or prosciutto a couple of times a week, this news most likely doesn’t affect you at all.

Your body is sturdier than you might think and a lot of that comes from thousands of generations figuring out how to survive and passing that info down to you. In other words, hoist a beer to your great-great ancestor, enjoy a nice BLT, and try to pass useful memories to your descendants.

It’s been an interesting week. With the Cubs in the playoffs, and a World Series win predicted by Back to the Future II (i.e., what passes for science education in Texas), a large portion of the media spent an incredible amount of time trying to figure out what the movie got right or wrong. Side note, in Norway the word texas (all small letters) is slang for crazy and/or stupid. In line with that comment I should let you know that one right wing blog claimed that the movie proved there is a liberal oligarchy in Hollywood since there was no mention of Benghazi. No I am not making this up but nor am I linking to them. This site doesn’t promote stupid. For the most part though it was harmless fun. If you want a complete list of every prediction in the movie and how each panned out just click here and feel your work day slip away. Before you fire off the angry email about the article saying there are no flying cars, there really aren’t. There are several in various stages of production but none commercially available. The one upshot of all this is that it got people thinking about real science too.

So let’s take a look at some of that.

Leukemia is the disease that killed my mom so I tend to carefully read any articles on it. And, no, grapefruit doesn’t cure it. Quit reading your emails. Anyway, Robin Andrews says there is an unlikely new candidate to kill leukemia cells, leukemia cells themselves.

No, she’d not drunk.

Leukemia, a group of cancers affecting the bone marrow and blood, is notoriously difficult to treat, often relapsing and becoming resistant to treatment. But a new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could offer hope, revealing that it’s possible to make leukemia cells kill each other.

More accurately, the researchers from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have construed a technique that convinces the leukemia cells to transform into leukemia-killing immune cells, rewriting their biological programming. The key, so to speak, is an extremely rare human antibody. But where did the researchers find it, and how does it work?

Antibodies are proteins produced naturally by the human body’s immune system. They act as the “handcuffs” to the white blood cells’ “police,” sticking to foreign invaders like microbes and either directly neutralizing them or tagging them for destruction.

Recently, the scientists were attempting to find antibody therapies to treat people with immune cell deficiencies in which the bone marrow doesn’t produce enough white blood cells. They hoped that they could find antibodies that would activate receptors on immature bone marrow cells that would cause them to change into mature cells. Over the last few years, they have succeeded in doing this. What they didn’t expect to see, however, was that a handful of these growth-induced antibodies turn immature bone marrow cells into completely different types, such as cells normally found in the nervous system.

Speaking of mysterious stuff in your body, have you ever had the feeling you lived in a previous time? Maybe that you were reincarnated? The World News Desk over at Soul Surfing says there might be a very logical reason for that. It appears that memories can be transmitted genetically.

New research from Emory University School of Medicine, in Atlanta, has shown that it is possible for some information to be inherited biologically through chemical changes that occur in DNA. During the tests they learned that that mice can pass on learned information about traumatic or stressful experiences – in this case a fear of the smell of cherry blossom – to subsequent generations.

According to the Telegraph, Dr Brian Dias, from the department of psychiatry at Emory University, said: ”From a translational perspective, our results allow us to appreciate how the experiences of a parent, before even conceiving offspring, markedly influence both structure and function in the nervous system of subsequent generations.

“Such a phenomenon may contribute to the etiology and potential intergenerational transmission of risk for neuropsychiatric disorders such as phobias, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.”

This suggests that experiences are somehow transferred from the brain into the genome, allowing them to be passed on to later generations.

Obviously there needs to be a ton more research conducted but many scientists are calling this early evidence compelling and are willing to look into it further. Some even think that we may, one day, be able to access our ancestors’ memories. I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. What if you could only access the sexy time your grandparents had?

Ewwww!

Another thing that sounds kind of crazy but could be a real boon for mankind, not a cancer curing boon but still cool, is a material that can’t get wet. Caroline Reid has the story.

Objects that are kept underwater eventually succumb to the inevitable decay associated with being submerged – metal rusts, wood rots and human hands go all wrinkly. These effects could be delayed in the future by a new type of rough coating that “deflects” water.

The material uses the same strategy as water-walking insects such as water striders. Both bug and material take advantage of protrusions on their rough surfaces to resist water and stay dry. As long as the gaps between the grooves on the material (or hairs on the insect) are less than a micrometer apart, then it has the ability to stay dry when in contact with water.

The team exploited the fact that water can be prompted to evaporate using the right combination of surface roughness and chemistry. The little pockets of water vapor that form are trapped in the framework of the material. They act as a first line of defense against liquid water drops, deflecting them to keep the surface dry.

In fact, the rough surface kept material samples dry for up to four months when constantly submerged in water. It could be longer, but the test will have to run for a longer period of time to know for sure what the time limit is. The research can be found in Scientific Reports.

The commercial possibilities are staggering. Bridges could last hundreds of years as long as they were structurally sound. The same for water pumps, sewage plants and anything else that needs to work under water.

Oh, and of course, you’d never need to worry about your Versace getting ruined by that nasty old weather stuff.

In another cool development, not foreseen in BTTF II, you may soon get your internet service from a lightbulb. Pavlos Manousiadis, Graham Turnbull and Ifor Samuel tell us all about it and, no, none of them were drunk either.

Visible light spectrum has huge, unused and unregulated capacity for communications. The light from LEDs can be modulated very quickly: data rates as high as 3.5Gb/s using a single blue LED or 1.7Gb/s with white light have been demonstrated by researchers in our EPSRC-funded Ultra-Parallel Visible Light Communications programme.

Unlike Wi-Fi transmitters, optical communications are well-confined inside the walls of a room. This confinement might seem to be a limitation for Li-Fi, but it offers the key advantage that it is very secure: if the curtains are drawn then nobody outside the room can eavesdrop. An array of light sources in the ceiling could send different signals to different users. The transmitter power can be localised, more efficiently used, and won’t interfere with adjacent Li-Fi sources. Indeed the lack of radio frequency interference is another advantage over Wi-Fi. Visible light communications is intrinsically safe, and could end the need for travellers to switch devices to flight mode.

A further advantage of Li-Fi is that it can use existing power lines as LED lighting so no new infrastructure is needed.

This technology could hit the market sooner than you think. If it does the only change in your home system, or business, would be to have a line run from your router to each room so it would have a dedicated signal. It would also eliminate the need for a password since no one outside of a room could access the signal.

I should also note that it will be cheaper than the current methods.

Speaking of light, Michigan State University has developed transparent solar panels. You replace your windows with them and you have free power forever.

Here’s what it looks like.

It’s not commercially available yet but could be in a year or so.

Here’s an interesting bit for you to chew on; Paul Devaney posits that humans may not be the most intelligent creatures on the planet. Before you laugh think about how we define intelligence and how it could be defined.

Cetologists observe, document, and decipher evidence that points to a profound intelligence dwelling in the oceans. It is an intelligence that predates our own evolution as intelligent primates by millions of years. – Paul Watson

I had a profound experience while kayaking in Hawaii this past winter with friends. We were visited by a whale and there is no doubt that this majestic being was coherent, aware of us, and enjoying our company as much as we were enjoying his. We put our snorkeling masks on and jumped in and could easily see the whale gently make eye contact with each of us. With one thrust of his tail he could have left in an instant but he stayed with us for over an hour. A mammal with a brain bigger than ours and complex migration songs that change every year, I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of thoughts could be going through his mind. The recent piece by Dawn Agnos on UPLIFT about a conversation with a horse shows that emotional intelligence and empathy are a language that many animals understand. It was only recently that terms like emotional intelligence emerged and it is interesting to consider that there are many different kinds of intelligence. Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd makes a good argument in a recent Facebook post that perhaps humans concept of intelligence is anthropocentric and lacking in breadth.

Watson starts early in his essay with the bold assertion that, “Biological science is provoking us to shatter our image of human superiority.” Though indigenous wisdom has always considered humans a part of the circle of life rather than above it, that sentiment has almost been completely destroyed by generations of colonial indoctrination. The very roots of colonial indoctrination not only conclude that humans are superior to all other life forms, it also considers some humans as superior to others. Social Darwinism, a myth, was an effort to use science to validate the behavior of employing superior weaponry to oppress other humans. Though we owe much respect to western science we must also understand the cultural and religious backdrop from which this discipline emerged. We must also be willing to explore the assumptions within science if we are to evolve it.

If technology is not the true measure of intelligence then our search for life in the cosmos just got more interesting.

And it is with that thought that I bring you this one.

Have we already discovered an alien civilization?

The short answer is “maybe” with a high probability of “no.”

LA Blake over at ABC television has the story.

Take it away LA!

A recent conundrum about a star 1,500 light years away discovered by the Kepler Space Telescope has extraterrestrial enthusiasts crying “alien” as an explanataion, but scientists studying the star are saying “not so fast.”

The strange nature of the star, KIC 8462852, was brought to public attention by the citizen scientists of the Planet Hunters program, ABC News reports. The program enlists the public’s help in studying dips in light from the 150,000 stars discovered by Kepler, usually caused by planets passing in front of them. With KIC 8462852, though, the light pattern has irregular, large dips — not like those of a planet– and scientists aren’t sure why.

The explanation that some jumped to? Large alien spacecrafts. The dips in light are caused by the alien megastructure periodically crossing between Kepler and the star, the theory goes.

The alien theory fire was further fueled when Jason Wright, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, mentioned that aliens might provide a possible explanation in a paper, saying that “Kepler would be able to detect large alien megastructures via anomalies like these.”

After the theory went viral, Wright wrote a blog post to clarify that “we didn’t have anything ready to show our professional colleagues so that they can give reporters informed takes on it” and recommending, “You should reserve the alien hypothesis as a last resort.”

Instead, Wright says he’s pondering the theory of Tabetha Boyajian, who published a paper about the star in the Monthly Notes of the Royals Astronomical Society. Though the Yale University astronomer said the star had her scratching her head, she said the most likely scenario was that the strange light pattens could have been caused by a group of comets from a nearby star.

“I would put low odds on that being the right answer, but it’s the best one I’ve seen so far,” Wright wrote, “(and much more likely than aliens, I’d say).”

Yes, logically, the answer should be that the results are caused by an array of comets caught in a gravity well or the remains of a planet that was destroyed.

But hundreds of stationary solar panels fueling a planet as it passes by also works. That’s why they’re looking into it more deeply.

And how do we do that?

We hang out in China.

Tom Hale tells us why.

China is in the final stages of building the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope. The state-owned China Central Television has released drone footage showing their progress, as well as the vertigo-inducing size of it.

The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) is being built deep in the misty mountains of Pingtang County, located in the Guizhou Province of southwest China. Construction has been going on since 2011. When completed in 2016, the FAST will become the largest radio telescope on the planet – at 500 meters (1,640 feet) in diameter, its dish will trump Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory, which is 300 meters (984 feet) wide.

Wu Xiangping, the director-general of the Chinese Astronomical Society, said to Xinhua News, “Having a more sensitive telescope, we can receive weaker and more distant radio messages. It will help us to search for intelligent life outside of the galaxy and explore the origins of the universe.”

Here’s a look at this sucker.

The fact is that searching for alien life in space is hard. A civilization too advanced for us may be undetectable. Likewise, anyone that’s evolved but not past its industrial age may as well be invisible. Keeping in mind that any such detectable transmissions will have to travel for hundreds or millions of years to get to us and you see the problem. They might be our equals now but a million years ago they would have been excited by pointy sticks.