I have a few more videos to post, mostly Lewis ones but I haven’t had time as I’m prepping to leave the country. I’ll get to it. And if I’m lucky I’ll film a music video or two before saying goodbye to Live Charge forever. I hope someone out there has enjoyed my terrible videos, but at least I’ve kept myself entertained over the past two years.

Also, be sure to read Dan the Man’s first post “Overclocking your Attractiveness Server” when you get a chance. It’s hilarious. Below is a preview of Lewis’ next video, his Top 10 Pickup Lines part 1. Be sure to check it out soon… it’s rendering.

No one knows romance like the French. Stay tuned…

Nanotechnology has taken off in recent years, and it’s coming to fruition in the fight against cancer. In fact there have been two major breakthroughs recently that have fueled my optimism over the whole issue.

The first was a study out of Washington University in St. Louis (WAUSL) using gold nanocages and lasers. Intrigued yet? The nanocages are roughly the size of a virus, constructed around silver particles that are then washed out of the cage in what I guess you could call a chemical nanobath. The cages, covered in a solution mostly used in laxatives, manage to slip by the proteins that would otherwise attach themselves to the particles and drag them out of the blood stream via the liver and/or kidneys.

The immune system thwarted, our nanocages manage to lodge themselves in gaps left in the tumor’s cell wall structure, creating a cast around the tumor. Once the cast is in place lasers at a particular, near infra-red, frequency are used to heat the cages. This disrupts the proteins keeping it alive and kill it off. Kind of like an intense, target-able fever that kills tissue.

The brilliant part is that the light doesn’t adversely affect surrounding tissue, so only the tumor ends up dying off (read the article for more on how that works, super cool). So far it’s only been tested in mice, and while the efficiency of the injections isn’t where they want it (only 6% of the injected nanocages actually attach themselves to the tumors and they want it at 40%) it certainly is promising.

What’s even more promising is the recent use of small-interfering RNA (siRNA) being delivered by nanobots to cancerous tumors in recent studies done at Cal Tech. The best part: they’ve been tested on humans and found 100% EFFECTIVE WITH NO SIDE EFFECTS.

Hold on a second… no side effects?!

Apparently so. They inject these suckers, the nanoparticles, and away they go. Attaching themselves to the tumors they release some interfering RNA which targets the inner workings of said tumors and *blegh* dead. The concept is nothing new, it’s been around (according to Technology Review) since 1998 but hasn’t been put into practice until recently. There’s a lot of tempering going on regarding the research, however, since it’s only been performed on three people. That and there hasn’t been FULL disclosure yet. But I don’t really care, it’s a hop and a skip away from a cure.

Which is why I’d bet you $5, right here and now; and though it’s possible, perhaps probable, that I would lose – we’re close. There’s another article out recently which leads me to believe that soon only sideburns and the creation of adamantium will stand between me and becoming Wolverine, but I’ll save that for later.

I also need to make an iSaber 4 post, but who cares? It’s almost April and I’m so far behind on video ideas/production that it’s almost comical in and of itself. Almost. There’s nothing funny about it, or notable, but almost. I’m hoping to work with @JoelBarbour in the next week or two on a few ideas, and my buddy Ted with one in particular in the near future.

–Want sources?–

Nanobots delivering siRNA to cancer cells: http://gizmodo.com/5501103/this-is-the-future-of-the-fight-against-cancer

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/24841/?a=f

Golden nanocages heated with lasers to kill tumors: http://www.gizmag.com/gold-nanocages-cancer-photothermal-treatment/14512/

If you got here because of the facebook blitz, sorry to spam you but we’re so bad at promoting our videos half of our friends don’t even know they exist. You can become a fan of us on Facebook though if you feel so inclined, just click on the facebook link in the “find me on” section on the sidebar (to the right).

Leave a comment here (no account necessary) or on YouTube after you SUBSCRIBE! Plenty more details to come.

But I’m back, and got some work done on iSaber 4 while at my grandparents. Just because you don’t have the internet doesn’t mean you can’t do something useful with your computer; I had forgotten this. It was weird not having the webz at my beck and call, however. Especially when rendering previews; I ended up staring at my computer wondering what on earth I was supposed to be doing.

We got some sweet Spite and Malice time in though, and it was a great relaxing time with my family.

Hope to have the new video up soon, but in the mean time go check out our latest 140 Second Chances on YouTube. I’ll post it in blog format here when it comes up chronologically… I think. I’m not really sure how to go about all this. Bah, I’ll just post it now. But you should still go to our YouTube page and subscribe.

Seriously, we didn’t even make it in the dang contest. Go subscribe.

I just thought I’d let you in on the disappointing truth of the matter. To make things worse Nikon didn’t even tell me straight up that I didn’t make it in. They simply sent me an Email saying “go see if you made it in!” THEN the site has been down most of the last 24 hours so I had to wait until I was heading out to work at 5:30am today to see if I made it in or not. I can’t even double check right now because it’s down again (due to too much traffic, which seems to be a grave oversight on their part).

I’m assuming,  since my search turned up bupkis and the embedded version of it in a previous post is dead, that it’s been rejected and removed. They didn’t even keep it around… the pain. I need to upload it to our Live Charge YouTube account now if I want anyone to see it.

As for getting up at 5am to go to work, I started a new temporary job extracting venom from bees. Of course I got moved to packaging so I never got to extract any venom, but by the sound of it I dodged a bullet on that one.

The theme, rules, whatever was: “A day through your lens in 140 seconds or less.” Most of the entries are pretty artsy (or just ridiculously non sequitur) which makes me wonder what kind of a chance I have. Of course I went for more of a narrative/comedy, which for all I know puts us out of the running too.

But I wanted to be true to who we are if the goal is to get our name out there. That’s really what entering contests is about for me right now, but I’m still waiting for it to be approved so we’ll see if we even manage that. Of course winning would be AWESOME, but I won’t hold my breath. And if I do I’ll cheat by silently breathing through my nose.

I figure my chances at winning this competition are much like my chances at winning in Fantasy Football this week. I had a slow start to the season but cranked it up and took four weeks or so by storm. After propelling myself to an impressive 3rd place from last (impressive because Miller stacked his team in the draft and hasn’t looked back since) I’ve been struggling to maintain 4th and get into the playoffs. This is largely due to a few major injuries sustained on my team (Owen Daniels anyone) but also due to a lack of luck and/or general skill.

This week I’m going up against one of the league’s worst teams, “Holy Crip it’s a Crapple!” One would think losing to him impossible, but unfortunately for me I’m the worst team in the league now and have been operating mostly off luck for a while now.

As you can see, things don’t look too good for the ol’ Jayster. If I win this I’m in the playoffs, if the guy in 5th place (Urine Trouble) loses I’m in the playoffs. However if he wins and I lose this week it’s all over for me.

Unfortunately (things just keep getting worse don’t they?) he’s been on a killer streak for a few weeks and is projected to win while I’ve been struggling along and am projected to lose. Granted projections don’t mean jack when it comes down to Sunday, but it doesn’t look good.

Similarly my chances at winning the Nikon Festival could be construed as decent, if you’re a blind squirrel, but I have this horrible tendency to get strong armed out of competition. Note the Oreo Competition and Nesquik Competition videos. Neither ever made it in to competition due to some ‘technical error’ on their end.

This, my friends, is frustrating. And we all know the true reason they weren’t accepted: they… well actually I have no conspiracy for this. However I’m sure it was a conspiracy aimed at destroying my hopes and dreams! Or a technical error somewhere along the line. I’d rather think it wasn’t my fault either way.

I’m rambling. The point is I’ve entered us in the Nikon Festival and when it’s up I’ll post a link on here. So please, for the love of squirrels everywhere, go comment on it if and when it goes up, and vote for it if it makes it that far. I’ll love you forever, or at least 30 seconds. Whichever comes first.

Anyways, through all of his experiences he managed to stumble upon the Temp Diaries, a blog written by a mostly anonymous blogger under the name of TempX. It turns out that he has an annual film festival, or at least that’s what it’s turning into, and I managed to find this out on the last day he was accepting entries.

Of course I didn’t have anything to submit, but I’ve made it a goal to start entering these things if for no other reason than to get our videos out there, so I threw Satan’s Seat at him in hopes it would do just that. It’s the most film-studenty thing we’ve made, though it’s not even really that close.

Anyways, we didn’t win. In fact we placed so badly that we were only second to last in the alphabetically ordered ‘participants’ category. Oh well, perhaps we’ll make it someday. I think the grand prize was a DVD of Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show, talk about missing out. But up against competition like this…

You can check out the rest of the entries for the 2009 Il Festival di d’Arte Cinematografica di Assurdita’ here.