Researchers have found a way to block the development of cancer by putting tumor cells into a permanent coma, according to BBC News website.
The Marie Curie Research Institute believes the breakthrough holds the promise of a completely new way to treat the disease.
Current treatments are based on cutting out or killing cancer cells.
The new method works by reactivating a natural self-defense mechanism which blocks cells carrying potentially dangerous mutations from dividing.
In normal circumstances, this mechanism prevents damaged cells from reproducing themselves by putting them into a state known as senescence.
But in cancer it is somehow switched off, allowing cell division to run riot, and leading to the formation of tumors.
Scientists previously thought that in cancers the mechanism was damaged beyond repair.

Viacell and Genzyme, biotechnology companies based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are joining forces to develop a novel therapy that they say has a chance of eventually curing juvenile diabetes, Herald Tribune online reported.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Genzyme said it would pay for development of the experimental treatment until it was ready for human clinical trials, estimated to take two years.
The Viacell chief executive, Marc Beer, said, “This is the only thing I see that has a potential to cure Type 1 diabetes.“
Type 1, or juvenile, diabetes is a condition in which the body’s immune system destroys the islet cells in the pancreas, which produce insulin. That enzyme is crucial to maintaining a proper blood sugar level. Both Type 1 and Type 2, or adult onset diabetes, produce a wide range of painful and potentially fatal complications.
People with Type 1 diabetes inject themselves with insulin several times a day to regulate their blood sugar. Researchers say they believe that juvenile diabetes shortens a patient’s lifespan by an average of 15 years.
Viacell’s approach is to take pancreatic tissue from cadavers and isolate the stem cells that mature into islet cells.
Using unique methods, Viacell grows those cells into enormous quantities of islet stem cells. Doctors then inject the cells into the main vein entering the liver. The cells are believed to take up residence in the liver--and perhaps other organs--and begin generating insulin.
Viacell, which went public in January, is working to develop cell-based therapies that sidestep the controversy over stem cells, which are tiny, undifferentiated cells with the ability to develop into any type of body tissue. Many scientists use stem cells harvested from days-old embryos, like those left over from fertility treatments.
Many abortion opponents object to that technique because they say scientists should not destroy a potentially viable fetus for medical purposes. Viacell seeks to develop treatments from newborns’ umbilical cord blood, which is rich in stem cells, and others derived from uncontroversial sources.

Women receiving radiation for breast cancer may no longer face an increased risk of potentially deadly heart damage from the treatment. More than 40 percent of women with breast cancer undergo radiation following surgery, ABC News online said.
Studies in the 1970s indicated that radiation therapy for breast cancer also exposed the heart to radiation and increased the woman’s long-term risk of dying from cardiac disease. Radiation was kept in use because the benefit of reduced cancer recurrence was greater than the heart risk.
Over the years radiation therapy has been improved to deliver doses much more accurately, and a new study, published in Wednesday’s Journal of the National Cancer Institute, indicates the heart risk has been sharply reduced, perhaps eliminated.
“I would like this to be reassuring to women with breast cancer who are going to receive radiation, that radiation is safe,“ lead researcher Dr. Sharon Giordano of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center said in a telephone interview.
Giordano and colleagues studied the records of women treated for breast cancer between 1973-1979, 1980-1984 and 1985-1989. Long-term follow-up is needed because the effects of radiation on the heart may not show up for more than a decade.
The researchers compared 13,998 women with cancer in the left breast near the heart, meaning treatment could potentially expose the heart to more radiation to 13,285 women with cancer in the right breast.
They found that among the women treated in the 1970s the 15-year death rate for heart disease in women with left-breast cancer was 13.1 percent, compared with 10.2 percent for those with right-breast cancer.
For the group treated in the early 1980s the heart death rates fell to 9.4 percent for left-breast cancer and 8.1 percent for right-breast cancer.
And by the late 1980s, 5.8 percent of women with left-breast cancer died of heart disease within 15 years compared with 5.2 percent with right-breast cancer, nearly eliminating the difference between the groups.
While the study does not compare rates with women who did not have radiation, heart disease remains the No. 1 cause of death in women overall.
In 1989 the death rate for heart disease in women age 20 and over was 397 per 100,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Projecting that over 15 years would result in an overall death rate of 5.79 percent.

Swirling dust devils on Mars have given NASA scientists both a scientific treat and a very welcome power boost.
On 10 March, the rover Spirit captured images of two dust devils in one day. It is the first time any have been seen on Mars since first being identified in a single image from the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997. One of the two appears on two different images from the rover’s Navigation Camera, making it possible to track its direction and speed.
Furthermore, a separate dust devil has apparently swept the rover clean. The power output of the rover’s solar panels had been reduced by almost half because of a year’s worth of accumulated dust. But on 9 March, the output shot up to 93% of its initial level, giving it more power for future exploration.
Images looking down at the rover’s deck show an almost pristine surface, with just a few small tails of dust, compared to the dingy surface seen just a day earlier.
The team is still figuring out exactly when the power boost occurred, and whether it was a single event or not. Science team member Geoffrey Landis told New Scientist that the cleaning of the solar panels may have taken place at night. But dust devils occur only in the midday sunlight, he notes, so it may have simply been a strong breeze that cleaned the rover.

The world’s first hydrogen-powered motorbike has been launched in Britain, according to ananova.com.
It can reach 50mph in 12 seconds, produces no emissions and is as quiet as a laptop computer--but that could be a problem.
Anti-noise campaigners welcomed the prospect of a motorbike without the usual earth-shattering roar.
But engineers are considering adding an artificial “vroom“ as they were worried its silence might be dangerous.
Harry Bradbury, chief executive of manufacturer Intelligent Energy, said, “There has never been a silent bike produced, so no one is used to it.
“As it goes forward towards production, we’re going to give thought to some light noise modulation.“
He is planning to introduce an artificial engine noise which could be used in an urban setting to alert other road users but switched off in the countryside to allow for a peaceful ride.
The bike is powered by a briefcase-sized cell filled with high-pressure hydrogen, which needs to be topped up every 100 miles.

Large doses of vitamin E widely touted as an elixir of youth do not protect against heart attacks and cancer and might actually raise the risk of heart failure in people with diabetes or clogged arteries, a study found.
According to AP, the study, published in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association, is just the latest to cast doubt on the safety and effectiveness of vitamin E supplements and other antioxidants.
The study was designed to examine whether vitamin E pills protect against heart attacks and cancer. Echoing other recent findings, it found no benefit against those conditions.
But the heart failure finding was unexpected and should prompt more research to confirm the results, said Dr. Eva Lonn, a McMaster University cardiology professor who led the study.
Lonn said it is unclear how vitamin E pills might be linked with heart failure, but she theorized that high doses might disturb the balance of beneficial, naturally occurring antioxidants.
Vitamin E has been touted in recent decades as a powerful weapon against aging, capable of protecting against everything from wrinkles to cancer and dementia. Preliminary research over the past 15 years has suggested that antioxidants fight the harmful effects of oxygen, warding off blood-vessel damage and cell abnormalities that can lead to cancer.
The study “effectively closes the door“ on the theory that high doses have a major protective effect against cancer and narrowing of the arteries, University of Washington health specialists Dr. B. Greg Brown and John Crowley said in an editorial.
The study found no differences in the incidence of or deaths from breast, colon, prostate, oral and gastrointestinal cancer. The researchers said a slightly lower incidence of lung cancer in vitamin E users was probably only a chance finding.

A galaxy that clings to our Milky Way has a strong and ordered magnetic field, even though the field ought to be in disarray since the galaxy itself is being torn apart, SPACE.com said.
Astronomers think star explosions are blowing the magnetic field into shape, something like inflating a ball. And the process, which has never been supported by clear evidence before, may be at work in all galaxies.
The Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC, is about 160,000 light-years away. It is considered a satellite to the Milky Way, a much larger collection of stars that is gravitationally ripping the LMC to shreds.
The Milky Way has a smooth magnetic field that scientists have assumed was created over billions of years by the relatively undisturbed rotation of the galaxy and a fairly smooth distribution of stellar birth and death.
By that logic, the LMC -- which is squeezed and squashed periodically and which undergoes disruptive fits of star birth -- ought to have a totally disorganized magnetic field. The LMC never sat still for the billions of years needed to build a stable magnetic field the old-fashioned way.
Yet the LMC’s magnetic field is not at all disorganized, based on the most comprehensive map ever made of another galaxy’s magnetism.
“Some powerful forces must be at work to keep the magnetic field from being messed up,“ said Bryan Gaensler of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the work.
Gaensler said the best explanation is that the exploding stars fill the LMC with high-energy cosmic rays, which en masse behave like hot gas.
Picture the galaxy’s magnetic field lines as rubber bands around a ball, Gaensler suggests. Inflating the ball stretches the field and makes it stronger. The LMC’s rotating motion then smoothes the field out, the thinking goes. All this, Gaensler said, could occur in just hundreds of millions of years.
The scenario, if proven accurate, would suggest that the theory of how the Milky Way’s magnetic field was built might need to be rethought.