Official: Google's China changes in line with law, AS

BEIJING (AP) China renewed Google's Internet license after it pledged to obey censorship laws and stop automatically switching mainland users to its unfiltered Hong Kong site, an official said Tuesday. It was Beijing's first public comment on its decision to allow Google to continue operating a China website following a public clash over censorship.

The company closed its China search engine in March but still offers music and other services in China. Google promised to "obey Chinese law" and avoid linking to material deemed a threat to national security or social stability, said Zhang Feng, director of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's Telecoms Development Department, at a news conference.

Zhang also cited Google's planned "rectification and reform," apparently a reference to the U.S. search giant's commitment in its June 29 renewal application to stop switching users automatically to its Hong Kong search site. "The rectification and reform in the annual application basically conforms to regulation," Zhang said.

The dispute threatened to shut Google out of China's fast-growing Internet market while also depriving the communist government of an important source of technology in an industry that Beijing is pushing hard to develop. Google's announcement in January that it might shut down in its China search engine because it no longer wanted to censor results prompted an outcry by Internet users who pleaded with the company to stay.

The communist government promotes Internet use for business and education but tries to block access to material considered subversive or pornographic. Google closed its China search engine March 22 and started switching users automatically to Hong Kong, which is Chinese territory but has Western-style civil liberties.

Google said that was a proposed compromise to uphold the principle of free access to information while obeying Chinese law. The company said regulators objected to the automatic switching and threatened to revoke its Chinese license if it continued.

Google's China site now includes a tab for users to click to be switched to Hong Kong. "As for the question of Hong Kong, this a matter of the company's internal business conduct," Zhang said.

China is not yet a big moneymaker for Google, accounting for an estimated $250 million to $600 million of Google's projected $28 billion in revenue this year. But industry analysts said the loss of its China platform would have hampered its ability to profit from the expected future growth of the market.

Moon builds massive snowballs in Saturn's ring

Washington, July 21 (ANI): Scientists from the Yale University have discovered a new genetic marker that can help in predicting the risk of developing the fatal and hard to detect ovarian cancer.

The research team showed that a variant of the KRAS oncogene was present in 25 percent of all ovarian cancer patients.

This variant was also found in 61 percent of ovarian cancer patients with a family history of breast and ovarian cancer, suggesting that it could be a new marker of ovarian cancer risk for these families, according to the researchers.

"For many women out there with a strong family history of ovarian cancer who previously have had no identified genetic cause for their family's disease; this might be it for them," said Joanne B. Weidhaas, associate professor of therapeutic radiology, and co-senior author of the study.

"Our findings support that the KRAS-variant is an new genetic marker of ovarian cancer risk," she added.

To confirm that the KRAS-variant was a genetic marker of ovarian cancer risk, Weidhaas and co-senior author Frank Slack studied women with ovarian cancer who also had evidence of a hereditary breast and ovarian cancer syndrome.

All these women had strong family history of cancer, but only half in their study had known genetic markers of ovarian cancer risk, BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations.

Unlike women with BRCA mutations who develop ovarian cancer at a younger age, women with the KRAS-variant tend to develop cancer after menopause.

Because ovarian cancer is difficult to diagnose and thus usually found at advanced stages, finding new markers of increased ovarian cancer risk is critical, note the researchers.

The research was published in the July 20, 20010 edition of the journal Cancer Research. (ANI)

Image-processing algorithm reduces CT radiation by 95 pct

Washington, July 21 (ANI): A new image-processing algorithm uses around 20-times less radiation to give radiologists all the information they need.

Perfusion CT scanning, an emerging imaging technology, was slammed in 2009 when a machine set to incorrect radiation levels overdosed hundreds of people in Los Angeles.

After the incident, researchers at the Mayo Clinic have developed a way to reduce the amount of radiation involved in the procedure which, when done properly, already involves very little risk.At the correct dose, there should be no injury," said Cynthia McCollough.

"We believe in the clinical value of perfusion CT, so we're trying to lower the dose and reduce the stigma," she added.

McCollough and her colleagues created a new image-processing algorithm that can give radiologists all of the information they need using as up to 20 times less radiation, depending on the diagnostic application.

A typical CT perfusion procedure lasts about half a minute and scans the same tissue many times, each scan at a low dose.

"When we use very low doses, the noise gets so high that it's hard to tell what you are seeing," said Juan Carlos Ramirez Giraldo.

"With this algorithm, we're trying to maintain both the image quality, so that a doctor can recognize the anatomic structures, and the functional information, which is conveyed by analyzing the flow of the contrast agent over the many low dose scans," he added.

"We're up to 15 or 20 cases that we've shown to the docs, and they're all giving us the thumbs up," said McCollough.

The research will be presented at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) in Philadelphia. (ANI)