Friday, September 21, 2007

Beer is Good

More proof that beer is possibly very good. Especially for women.

"The female inflorescences of the hop plant (Humulus lupulus L.) are essential during brewing to add taste and flavor to beer and to stabilize beer foam. Xanthohumol, the main prenylated chalcone in hops, was investigated for its antiinvasive activity on human breast cancer cell lines (MCF-7 and T47-D) in vitro. Xanthohumol was able to inhibit the invasion of MCF-7/6 cells at 5 M in the chick heart invasion assay and of T47-D cells in the collagen invasion assay. Xanthohumol inhibited growth of MCF-7/6 and T47-D cells, but not of chick heart cells. Moreover, it induced apoptosis of these tumor cells as demonstrated by the cleavage of nuclear PARP after 48 hr treatment. To probe the mechanism of the antiinvasive effect of xanthohumol, involvement of the E-cadherin/catenin invasion-suppressor complex was investigated. An aggregation assay demonstrated stimulation of aggregation of MCF-7/6 cells in the presence of 5 M xanthohumol and this could be completely inhibited by an antibody against E-cadherin. Xanthohumol upregulates the function of the E-cadherin/catenin complex and inhibits invasion in vitro, indicating a possible role as an antiinvasive agent in vivo as well. © 2005 Wiley-Liss, Inc."
-- quoted from Wiley

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Tricking the censors?

Well we know that the company O, roped in some of the Japanese anime studios as a show of support and justified their apparent inaccurate subtitles to the need to adhere to censorship requirements for certain mature themes in some of the anime. The interesting part comes when the censorship board writes to the newspaper slamming that remark as totally falsified.

"The BFC has never asked for subtitles to be tweaked. We require that subtitles accurately reflect the content of a film or video so that we can classify the content accurately. Inaccurate subtitles also do no service to the community or to the young who may be misled into thinking that an anime is suitable for them when it could be meant for a higher age group." -- Letter to Voices, Today 4 Sep 2007

Now the question is, whether O deliberately misled the censorship board into rating anime with themes of homosexuality as suitable for children in order to reap in more profits from a wider market.