May 7, 2013 ? The protein tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) is a powerful weapon in the arsenal to control cancer. Unfortunately, as is the case with many potent cancer therapies, the use of TNF-alpha as an anti-cancer therapy has been severely limited. "It was so toxic that it caused death," and researchers gave up on it, explains Scott McNeil, director of the Nanotechnology Characterization Lab at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research.
That was back in the 1990s. Today, TNF-alpha is a prime example of how to safely and effectively deliver toxic substances to cancer cells through the use of nanotechnology.
McNeil's lab, part of the federally funded research and development center operated by SAIC-Frederick for the National Cancer Institute, worked with a drug company to reformulate TNF-alpha by coupling it with gold nanoparticles. Using the nanotechnology-enhanced protein, it appears possible to safely inject up to three times the amount that had been lethal with previous versions. The modified drug has been through a Phase 1 clinical trial and is entering Phase 2.
In McNeil's lab, and for other scientists using nanotechnology for drug delivery, stories like this one are increasingly common. Researchers are looking to accelerate the development of potential nanotechnology drugs for cancer by exploring ways to reduce side effects and make treatments hit their targets more effectively. This can mean using nanotechnology to reformulate drugs that may have failed in previous clinical trials. In some cases, by attaching a nanoparticle to an existing drug, researchers may not only be able to lower its toxicity, but they may also see significant life expectancy gains for patients.
Many cancer drugs are approved based on how long they delay the progression of disease. Some drugs on the market "only improve life expectancy by maybe five weeks," says McNeil. He sees nanomedicine as a potential game-changer for cancer drugs in the future.
McNeil, both a chemist and biologist, has spent the majority of his career working in nanotechnology, but when he was asked to apply his expertise to find better drugs for cancer, he was skeptical. "My professional career was mostly military," says the former Army officer. "I was using nanotech for military applications at SAIC, using quantum dots to see if you scatter things, where they land. I got a call out of the blue in December of 2003 and the message was, 'We want to use nanotech for cancer applications.' I thought, 'What are they thinking? You are going to put a cadmium quantum dot in a human? There is no way!' I discounted it at first and I actually ignored the emails, hoping it would go away."
But it did not go away. In fact, much has changed in the last 10 years. Now, nanopharmaceuticals are beginning to demonstrate their capacity to place the drugs directly in the tumor, where they will do the most good, rather than let them roam freely in the body. A drug is attached to a nanoparticle, which is often a tiny little sphere. To put it in perspective, a nanometer is one billionth of a meter; the width of a single strand of hair is about 10,000 nanometers. The nanoparticle is small enough to flow through blood vessels and into a tumor, where the particle dissociates, and the drug is released. In the end, the goal of nanomedicine is that the only part of the body affected by the drug is the tumor, the area of need.
McNeil's Nanotechnology Characterization Lab was founded in 2004 in collaboration with the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. There is one thing the lab does not do: develop nanotechnology drugs. Instead, researchers there -- ranging in expertise from cancer biology and toxicology to chemistry, immunology, and physics -- help investigators from around the world create the best drugs possible. "We help investigators get from proof of concept, where they are generating a few tens of milligrams of material and get into clinical trials, where they are going to need kilograms of materials," say McNeil. "That translational research, as we call it, is absolutely germane to getting into clinical trials."
The majority of scientists who apply for assistance from the NCL are seeking FDA approval for their nanotech drugs but they don't have the resources to optimize their formula. The NCL can help. "We help them understand what is involved with their particle because they don't have the tools that we have to be able to characterize," says McNeil. "They may have a nice picture or cartoon of it but until they see our electron micrographs, they don't know what it looks like."
The Nanotechnology Characterization Lab serves two purposes. After a molecule has been through the NCL's assay cascade which consists of a set of tests that evaluate the preclinical toxicology, pharmacology, and efficacy of nanoparticles, the NCL is able to offer an evaluation. "The investigator is going to need $40 million dollars to get into Phase 2 trials. Investigators need to justify the investment. We help them generate data they need to further their work and then we serve as a third-party evaluation." That is crucial, McNeil says, for an investigator seeking funding. "A venture capital company can come to us and say, 'Well, what do you really think of this? Let's see your data, and explain it and defend it.' We, obviously, cannot endorse it but we can discuss the data in the context of what they are trying to do. That really holds a lot of weight."
Consider the example of Abraxane (paclitaxel), which was approved for use by the FDA in 2005. Abraxane, a variably toxic but widely prescribed cancer drug, has been enhanced by attaching it to a nanoparticle, thereby creating a new, targeted treatment. "Because of the size and the binding to a different receptor, that drug now has decreased toxicity compared to the former drug. For the nanoparticle-Abraxane conjugate toxicity is very marginal, at least for immunotoxicity and hypersensitivity," says McNeil.
Since 2005, the Nanotechnology Characterization Lab has characterized nearly 300 different particles. Six of them are in clinical trials. "Depending upon what community you are from, either that is a terrific ratio or that is a poor ratio," explains McNeil. "We view it as a super terrific ratio. A pharmaceutical company can make hundreds of thousands of different drugs and only about one out of 100,000 gets into clinical trials."
May 7, 2013 ? The search for cleaner, low temperature nuclear fuels has produced a shock result for a team of experts at The University of Nottingham.
First they created a stable version of a 'trophy molecule' that has eluded scientists for decades. Now they have discovered that the bonding within this molecule is far different than expected. Remarkably their findings have shown that it behaves in much the same way as its counterparts in the well-known transitional metals such as chromium, molybdenum and tungsten.
The research, done by PhD student David King, which could help in the extraction and separation of the two to three per cent of highly radioactive material in nuclear waste, was led by Professor Stephen Liddle in the School of Chemistry, and has been published in the academic journal Nature Chemistry.
Professor Liddle said: "The major motivation for doing the first piece of research was to understand the nature of the chemical bonding of uranium. Now we have extended the series to enable meaningful comparisons the 'shock' is that whereas the bonding would be expected to be very different to commonly known and well understood transition metal analogues the bonding is in fact very similar. This is a real surprise and could have an effect on nuclear clean up because differences in chemical bonding are exploited in the separation processes.
Building on previous advances
Working with experts in the Photon Science Institute at The University of Manchester, their latest discovery builds on their previous advances in this area of chemistry, published in the academic journal Science last year.
With funding from the Royal Society, European Research Council, and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council the team first established the method to make the 'title molecule'. For the first time they prepared a terminal uranium nitride compound which was stable at room temperature and could be stored in jars in crystallized or powder form.
Previous attempts to do this required temperatures as low as -268 ?C -- roughly the equivalent temperature of interstellar space -- therefore these compounds have, until now, been difficult to work with and manipulate, requiring specialist equipment and techniques.
Exploiting the bonding process
Professor Liddle said: "What the nuclear industry wants to do is minimise the volume of waste by extracting the radioactive elements from spent fuel. This relies on exploiting differences in the bonding, but in some circumstances it may be surprisingly similar and this is going to be important in the amelioration of nuclear waste clean-up and devising new atom-efficient catalytic cycles."
The way atoms behave in uranium bonding is still unclear and there is much debate and great interest in respect to the nature of uranium nitride materials because they have the potential to offer a viable alternative to the mixed oxide nuclear fuels currently used in reactors. Nitrides exhibit superior high densities, melting points and thermal conductivities and the process this team of researchers has developed could offer a cleaner, low temperature route reducing the amount of impurities which are difficult to remove from the waste produced by current fuels.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
More than a good eye: Carnegie Mellon robot uses arms, location and more to discover objectsPublic release date: 6-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Byron Spice bspice@cs.cmu.edu 412-268-9068 Carnegie Mellon University
HERB, the robot butler, continually improves its understanding of objects
PITTSBURGHA robot can struggle to discover objects in its surroundings when it relies on computer vision alone. But by taking advantage of all of the information available to it an object's location, size, shape and even whether it can be lifted a robot can continually discover and refine its understanding of objects, say researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute.
The Lifelong Robotic Object Discovery (LROD) process developed by the research team enabled a two-armed, mobile robot to use color video, a Kinect depth camera and non-visual information to discover more than 100 objects in a home-like laboratory, including items such as computer monitors, plants and food items.
Normally, the CMU researchers build digital models and images of objects and load them into the memory of HERB the Home-Exploring Robot Butler so the robot can recognize objects that it needs to manipulate.
Virtually all roboticists do something similar to help their robots recognize objects. With the team's implementation of LROD, called HerbDisc, the robot now can discover these objects on its own.
With more time and experience, HerbDisc gradually refines its models of the objects and begins to focus its attention on those that are most relevant to its goal helping people accomplish tasks of daily living.
Findings from the research study will be presented May 8 at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Karlsruhe, Germany.
The robot's ability to discover objects on its own sometimes takes even the researchers by surprise, said Siddhartha Srinivasa, associate professor of robotics and head of the Personal Robotics Lab, where HERB is being developed. In one case, some students left the remains of lunch a pineapple and a bag of bagels in the lab when they went home for the evening. The next morning, they returned to find that HERB had built digital models of both the pineapple and the bag and had figured out how it could pick up each one.
"We didn't even know that these objects existed, but HERB did," said Srinivasa, who jointly supervised the research with Martial Hebert, professor of robotics. "That was pretty fascinating."
Discovering and understanding objects in places filled with hundreds or thousands of things will be a crucial capability once robots begin working in the home and expanding their role in the workplace. Manually loading digital models of every object of possible relevance simply isn't feasible, Srinivasa said. "You can't expect Grandma to do all this," he added.
Object recognition has long been a challenging area of inquiry for computer vision researchers. Recognizing objects based on vision alone quickly becomes an intractable computational problem in a cluttered environment, Srinivasa said. But humans don't rely on sight alone to understand objects; babies will squeeze a rubber ducky, beat it against the tub, dunk it even stick it in their mouth. Robots, too, have a lot of "domain knowledge" about their environment that they can use to discover objects.
Taking advantage of all of HERB's senses required a research team with complementary expertise Srinivasa's insights on robotic manipulation and Hebert's in-depth knowledge of computer vision. Alvaro Collet, a robotics Ph.D. student they co-advised, led the development of HerbDisc. Collet is now a scientist at Microsoft.
Depth measurements from HERB's Kinect sensors proved to be particularly important, Hebert said, providing three-dimensional shape data that is highly discriminative for household items.
Other domain knowledge available to HERB includes location whether something is on a table, on the floor or in a cupboard. The robot can see whether a potential object moves on its own, or is moveable at all. It can note whether something is in a particular place at a particular time. And it can use its arms to see if it can lift the object the ultimate test of its "objectness."
"The first time HERB looks at the video, everything 'lights up' as a possible object," Srinivasa said. But as the robot uses its domain knowledge, it becomes clearer what is and isn't an object. The team found that adding domain knowledge to the video input almost tripled the number of objects HERB could discover and reduced computer processing time by a factor of 190. A HERB's-eye view of objects is available on YouTube.
HERB's definition of an object something it can lift is oriented toward its function as an assistive device for people, doing things such as fetching items or microwaving meals. "It's a very natural, robot-driven process," Srinivasa said. "As capabilities and situations change, different things become important." For instance, HERB can't yet pick up a sheet of paper, so it ignores paper. But once HERB has hands capable of manipulating paper, it will learn to recognize sheets of paper as objects.
Though not yet implemented, HERB and other robots could use the Internet to create an even richer understanding of objects. Earlier work by Srinivasa showed that robots can use crowdsourcing via Amazon Mechanical Turk to help understand objects. Likewise, a robot might access image sites, such as RoboEarth, ImageNet or 3D Warehouse, to find the name of an object, or to get images of parts of the object it can't see.
###
Bo Xiong, a student at Connecticut College, and Corina Gurau, a student at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany, also contributed to this study.
HERB is a project of the Quality of Life Technology Center, a National Science Foundation engineering research center operated by Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh. The center is focused on the development of intelligent systems that improve quality of life for everyone while enabling older adults and people with disabilities.
The Robotics Institute is part of Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. Follow the school on Twitter @SCSatCMU.
About Carnegie Mellon University: Carnegie Mellon is a private, internationally ranked research university with programs in areas ranging from science, technology and business, to public policy, the humanities and the arts. More than 12,000 students in the university's seven schools and colleges benefit from a small student-to-faculty ratio and an education characterized by its focus on creating and implementing solutions for real problems, interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation. A global university, Carnegie Mellon has campuses in Pittsburgh, Pa., California's Silicon Valley and Qatar, and programs in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and Mexico. The university has exceeded its $1 billion campaign, titled "Inspire Innovation: The Campaign for Carnegie Mellon University," which aims to build its endowment, support faculty, students and innovative research, and enhance the physical campus with equipment and facility improvements. The campaign closes June 30, 2013.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
More than a good eye: Carnegie Mellon robot uses arms, location and more to discover objectsPublic release date: 6-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Byron Spice bspice@cs.cmu.edu 412-268-9068 Carnegie Mellon University
HERB, the robot butler, continually improves its understanding of objects
PITTSBURGHA robot can struggle to discover objects in its surroundings when it relies on computer vision alone. But by taking advantage of all of the information available to it an object's location, size, shape and even whether it can be lifted a robot can continually discover and refine its understanding of objects, say researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute.
The Lifelong Robotic Object Discovery (LROD) process developed by the research team enabled a two-armed, mobile robot to use color video, a Kinect depth camera and non-visual information to discover more than 100 objects in a home-like laboratory, including items such as computer monitors, plants and food items.
Normally, the CMU researchers build digital models and images of objects and load them into the memory of HERB the Home-Exploring Robot Butler so the robot can recognize objects that it needs to manipulate.
Virtually all roboticists do something similar to help their robots recognize objects. With the team's implementation of LROD, called HerbDisc, the robot now can discover these objects on its own.
With more time and experience, HerbDisc gradually refines its models of the objects and begins to focus its attention on those that are most relevant to its goal helping people accomplish tasks of daily living.
Findings from the research study will be presented May 8 at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Karlsruhe, Germany.
The robot's ability to discover objects on its own sometimes takes even the researchers by surprise, said Siddhartha Srinivasa, associate professor of robotics and head of the Personal Robotics Lab, where HERB is being developed. In one case, some students left the remains of lunch a pineapple and a bag of bagels in the lab when they went home for the evening. The next morning, they returned to find that HERB had built digital models of both the pineapple and the bag and had figured out how it could pick up each one.
"We didn't even know that these objects existed, but HERB did," said Srinivasa, who jointly supervised the research with Martial Hebert, professor of robotics. "That was pretty fascinating."
Discovering and understanding objects in places filled with hundreds or thousands of things will be a crucial capability once robots begin working in the home and expanding their role in the workplace. Manually loading digital models of every object of possible relevance simply isn't feasible, Srinivasa said. "You can't expect Grandma to do all this," he added.
Object recognition has long been a challenging area of inquiry for computer vision researchers. Recognizing objects based on vision alone quickly becomes an intractable computational problem in a cluttered environment, Srinivasa said. But humans don't rely on sight alone to understand objects; babies will squeeze a rubber ducky, beat it against the tub, dunk it even stick it in their mouth. Robots, too, have a lot of "domain knowledge" about their environment that they can use to discover objects.
Taking advantage of all of HERB's senses required a research team with complementary expertise Srinivasa's insights on robotic manipulation and Hebert's in-depth knowledge of computer vision. Alvaro Collet, a robotics Ph.D. student they co-advised, led the development of HerbDisc. Collet is now a scientist at Microsoft.
Depth measurements from HERB's Kinect sensors proved to be particularly important, Hebert said, providing three-dimensional shape data that is highly discriminative for household items.
Other domain knowledge available to HERB includes location whether something is on a table, on the floor or in a cupboard. The robot can see whether a potential object moves on its own, or is moveable at all. It can note whether something is in a particular place at a particular time. And it can use its arms to see if it can lift the object the ultimate test of its "objectness."
"The first time HERB looks at the video, everything 'lights up' as a possible object," Srinivasa said. But as the robot uses its domain knowledge, it becomes clearer what is and isn't an object. The team found that adding domain knowledge to the video input almost tripled the number of objects HERB could discover and reduced computer processing time by a factor of 190. A HERB's-eye view of objects is available on YouTube.
HERB's definition of an object something it can lift is oriented toward its function as an assistive device for people, doing things such as fetching items or microwaving meals. "It's a very natural, robot-driven process," Srinivasa said. "As capabilities and situations change, different things become important." For instance, HERB can't yet pick up a sheet of paper, so it ignores paper. But once HERB has hands capable of manipulating paper, it will learn to recognize sheets of paper as objects.
Though not yet implemented, HERB and other robots could use the Internet to create an even richer understanding of objects. Earlier work by Srinivasa showed that robots can use crowdsourcing via Amazon Mechanical Turk to help understand objects. Likewise, a robot might access image sites, such as RoboEarth, ImageNet or 3D Warehouse, to find the name of an object, or to get images of parts of the object it can't see.
###
Bo Xiong, a student at Connecticut College, and Corina Gurau, a student at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany, also contributed to this study.
HERB is a project of the Quality of Life Technology Center, a National Science Foundation engineering research center operated by Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh. The center is focused on the development of intelligent systems that improve quality of life for everyone while enabling older adults and people with disabilities.
The Robotics Institute is part of Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. Follow the school on Twitter @SCSatCMU.
About Carnegie Mellon University: Carnegie Mellon is a private, internationally ranked research university with programs in areas ranging from science, technology and business, to public policy, the humanities and the arts. More than 12,000 students in the university's seven schools and colleges benefit from a small student-to-faculty ratio and an education characterized by its focus on creating and implementing solutions for real problems, interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation. A global university, Carnegie Mellon has campuses in Pittsburgh, Pa., California's Silicon Valley and Qatar, and programs in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and Mexico. The university has exceeded its $1 billion campaign, titled "Inspire Innovation: The Campaign for Carnegie Mellon University," which aims to build its endowment, support faculty, students and innovative research, and enhance the physical campus with equipment and facility improvements. The campaign closes June 30, 2013.
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?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
For years now, internet banner advertising has captured the World Wide Web for it has become a large help in saving an amount of money while reaching beyond territories. Banner advertising played a major part in market trafficking all over the internet and many individuals and companies have bought themselves these cheap internet banner advertising. Some made use of it financially; others have no idea on what to do with it.
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By Ken Y-N ( May 6, 2013 at 01:31)
? Filed under Polls, Rankings
goo Ranking recently published the results of what painful fashion failures people trying too hard to dress young make.
Demographics
Over the 6th and 7th of March 2013 1,083 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 56.7% of the sample were female, 11.6% in their teens, 15.0% in their twenties, 24.9% in their thirties, 24.7% in their forties, 12.7% in their fifties, and 11.1% aged sixty or older. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample.
Wifey occasionally strays into number 2 territory, and of course what Japanese woman doesn?t do 20?
Pictured here is Saki chan and Sayuri; Saki chan often falls into a number of the traps when she does her Evangelion cos-play as here despite being just 29 years old, but Sayuri regularly does just about everything below, but I think she manages to avoid looking too muttonesque? However, her husband has an ill-suited number 17 haircut.
Ranking results
Q: What are the painful characteristics of a person trying too hard to dress young? (Sample size=1,083)
Rank
?
Score
1
Showing off lots of leg with an extremely mini-skirt
100
2
Wearing clothes with frills or ribbons
95.5
3
Dyeing hair a colour that obviously doesn?t suit one
90.1
4
Wearing clothers that a schoolchild might wear
86.6
5
Excessive fake eyelashes or eyelash extensions
82.7
6
Wearing loud make-up
81.4
7
Sparkly eyes from wearing too much lam?
72.8
8
Wearing loud clothers inappropriate for one?s age
69.8
9
Wearing loud lipstick
61.9
10=
Carrying a young person-oriented brand bag
58.2
10=
Having over-curled, over-bunched-up hair
58.2
12
Wearing clothes that show off one?s body line
53.0
13=
Wearing a short shirt that shows off one?s midriff
52.5
13=
Sending email with excessive smilies, decomail (animated icons)
52.5
15
Having over-decorated nails
52.0
16
Having lots of accessories, straps hanging off one?s mobile phone
49.0
17
Getting a Johnny?s-like (male idol) hairstyle
42.6
18
Wearing fashion matching one?s children
40.8
19
Wearing trainers that secondary school kids would wear
New York Knicks forward Carmelo Anthony (7) fouls Indiana Pacers guard George Hill (3) in the second quarter of Game 1 of their second-round NBA basketball series at Madison Square Garden in New York, Sunday, May 5, 2013. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)
New York Knicks forward Carmelo Anthony (7) fouls Indiana Pacers guard George Hill (3) in the second quarter of Game 1 of their second-round NBA basketball series at Madison Square Garden in New York, Sunday, May 5, 2013. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)
Indiana Pacers forward David West (21) drives past New York Knicks forward Kenyon Martin (3) in the second quarter of Game 1 of their second-round NBA basketball series at Madison Square Garden in New York, Sunday, May 5, 2013. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)
New York Knicks' Raymond Felton (2) is guarded by Indiana Pacers' George Hill as he drives to the basket in the first quarter of Game 1 of their NBA basketball playoff series in the Eastern Conference semifinals at Madison Square Garden in New York, Sunday, May 5, 2013. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)
Indiana Pacers David West is guarded by New York Knicks Carmelo Anthony in the first quarter of Game 1 of their second-round NBA basketball series at Madison Square Garden in New York, Sunday, May 5, 2013. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)
NEW YORK (AP) ? David West scored 20 points, Paul George added 19 and the Indiana Pacers beat the New York Knicks 102-95 on Sunday in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semifinals.
D.J. Augustin had 16 points for the Pacers, who built a 16-point lead while Carmelo Anthony was on the bench in foul trouble in the third quarter, and easily held on to spoil the Knicks' first second-round game since 2000.
Anthony finished with 27 points and 11 rebounds, but was frustrated by the Pacers' rugged defense and by the referees. He shot 10 of 28 from the field.
Game 2 is here Tuesday night, and then the series takes a lengthy break before Game 3 on Saturday in Indiana.
The Pacers, who allowed the second-fewest points per game and the lowest field goal percentage in the league during the regular season, mixed in solid offense as well. They outscored New York 59-38 across the middle two quarters and were comfortably ahead throughout the fourth.
Roy Hibbert scored 14 points in thoroughly outplaying counterpart Tyson Chandler, and George Hill also had 14 for the Pacers.
J.R. Smith scored 17 points but was 4 of 15 for the Knicks. Raymond Felton had 18 and Kenyon Martin added 12 for the Knicks, who hope to have reserves Amare Stoudemire (right knee surgery) and Steve Novak (back spasms) back for Game 3 and certainly looked as if they could use the help.
Both teams wrapped up their first-round series Friday night, the Knicks' victory in Game 6 in Boston giving them their first series victory in 13 years and sending them on to face a familiar postseason foe in Indiana, which ousted Atlanta.
The teams met three straight years from 1993-95, then again from 1998-00, splitting their six series, and this was the type of slugfest so many of those matchups were.
Indiana led 60-54 when Anthony committed his fourth foul and came out of the game with 7:48 remaining in the third quarter. The Pacers then outscored the Knicks 21-11 the remainder of the period, opening an 81-65 bulge on Augustin's 3-pointer with 31.5 seconds left in the quarter.
Anthony came back on to start the fourth and scored the first six points to get the Knicks back within 10. He picked up a fifth on a questionable offensive foul call with 10 minutes left and appeared to wave off a substitution when Chandler checked in, so Martin ended up coming off instead.
But there was no final flurry, and Chandler eventually fouled out with four points and three rebounds.
Anthony wore a sleeve under his jersey to cover his sore left shoulder that was first hurt against the Pacers in April, then aggravated when Kevin Garnett pulled on his arm while setting a screen during the first-round series.
That may have contributed to his poor shooting but certainly the Pacers had plenty to do with it, as did having to bang inside with the bigger West.
The Knicks closed the first quarter with a 9-0 spurt, taking a 27-22 lead after 3-pointers by Smith and Felton to end the period. But the Pacers tightened up the defense in the second, holding the Knicks to two baskets in the final 5 minutes.
Indiana outscored New York 13-4 during that stretch, taking a 52-46 lead to halftime after George hit a 3-pointer with 2.7 seconds left.
Notes: Anthony averaged 29.1 points in the first round, equaling the second-highest ever by a Knicks player. Patrick Ewing had 31.6 per game in a 1990 series. ... Anthony received the one first-place vote that kept LeBron James from being the NBA's first unanimous selection as MVP. ... Indiana won both matchups in the conference semifinals, a 4-3 victory in 1995 and a 4-1 win in 1998. ... Indiana's Jeff Pendergraph was fined $5,000 by the NBA, the first player punished for violating the league's anti-flopping rules in the playoffs. ... Novak said he hurt his back while warming up at halftime of Game 5 against Boston but has been feeling better each day since.
In this image taken from video obtained from the Ugarit News, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, smoke and fire fill the the skyline over Damascus, Syria, early Sunday, May 5, 2013 after an Israeli airstrike. Israeli warplanes struck areas in and around the Syrian capital Sunday, setting off a series of explosions as they targeted a shipment of highly accurate, Iranian-made guided missiles believed to be on their way to Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group, officials and activists said. The attack, the second in three days, signaled a sharp escalation of Israel's involvement in Syria's bloody civil war. Syria's state media reported that Israeli missiles struck a military and scientific research center near the Syrian capital and caused casualties. (AP Photo/Ugarit News via AP video)
In this image taken from video obtained from the Ugarit News, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, smoke and fire fill the the skyline over Damascus, Syria, early Sunday, May 5, 2013 after an Israeli airstrike. Israeli warplanes struck areas in and around the Syrian capital Sunday, setting off a series of explosions as they targeted a shipment of highly accurate, Iranian-made guided missiles believed to be on their way to Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group, officials and activists said. The attack, the second in three days, signaled a sharp escalation of Israel's involvement in Syria's bloody civil war. Syria's state media reported that Israeli missiles struck a military and scientific research center near the Syrian capital and caused casualties. (AP Photo/Ugarit News via AP video)
In this image taken from video obtained from the Ugarit News, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, a Israeli airstrikes hit Damascus, Syria, early Sunday, May 5, 2013. Israeli warplanes struck areas in and around the Syrian capital Sunday, setting off a series of explosions as they targeted a shipment of highly accurate, Iranian-made guided missiles believed to be on their way to Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group, officials and activists said. The attack, the second in three days, signaled a sharp escalation of Israel's involvement in Syria's bloody civil war. Syria's state media reported that Israeli missiles struck a military and scientific research center near the Syrian capital and caused casualties. (AP Photo/Ugarit News via AP video)
In this image taken from video obtained from Shaam News Network, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, smoke and fire fill the skyline over Damascus, Syria, early Sunday, May 5, 2013 after an Israeli airstrike. Israeli warplanes struck areas in and around the Syrian capital Sunday, setting off a series of explosions as they targeted a shipment of highly accurate, Iranian-made guided missiles believed to be on their way to Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group, officials and activists said. The attack, the second in three days, signaled a sharp escalation of Israel's involvement in Syria's bloody civil war. Syria's state media reported that Israeli missiles struck a military and scientific research center near the Syrian capital and caused casualties. (AP Photo/Shaam News Network via AP video)
BEIRUT (AP) ? Israeli warplanes struck areas in and around the Syrian capital Sunday, setting off a series of explosions as they targeted a shipment of highly accurate, Iranian-made guided missiles believed to be on their way to Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group, officials and activists said.
The attack, the second in three days, signaled a sharp escalation of Israel's involvement in Syria's bloody civil war. Syrian state media reported that Israeli missiles struck a military and scientific research center near Damascus and caused casualties.
An intelligence official in the Middle East, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to disclose information about a secret military operation to the media, confirmed that Israel launched an airstrike in the Syrian capital early Sunday but did not give more precise details about the location. The target was Fateh-110 missiles, which have precision guidance systems with better aim than anything Hezbollah is known to have in its arsenal, the official told The Associated Press.
The airstrikes come as Washington considers how to respond to indications that the Syrian regime may have used chemical weapons in its civil war. President Barack Obama has described the use of such weapons as a "red line," and the administration is weighing its options ? including possible military action.
Iran, a close ally of the Assad regime, condemned the airstrikes but gave no other hints of a possible stronger response from Tehran.
Israel has said it wants to stay out of the Syrian war, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly stated the Jewish state would be prepared to take military action to prevent sophisticated weapons from flowing from Syria to Hezbollah or other extremist groups.
Israel and Hezbollah fought a monthlong war in mid-2006 that ended in a stalemate.
Syria's state news agency SANA reported that explosions went off at the Jamraya military and scientific research center near Damascus and said "initial reports point to these explosions being a result of Israeli missiles." SANA said there were casualties but did not give a number.
Damascus-based activist Maath al-Shami said the strikes occurred around 3 a.m. "Damascus shook. The explosion was very, very strong," said al-Shami adding that one of the attacks occurred near the capital's Qasioun mountain that overlooks Damascus.
He said the raid near Qasioun targeted a military position for the elite Republican Guards that is in charge of protecting Damascus, President Bashar Assad's seat of power.
Mohammed Saeed, another activist who lives in the Damascus suburb of Douma, said "the explosions were so strong that earth shook under us." He said the smell of the fire caused by the air raid near Qasioun could be felt miles away.
There has been no official statement from the Syrian military.
The strikes put the Assad regime in a tricky position. If it fails to respond, it looks weak and leaves itself open to such airstrikes becoming a common occurrence. But if it retaliates militarily against Israel, it risks dragging the Jewish state and its powerful military into a broader conflict.
After the airstrikes overnight, Israel's military on Saturday deployed two batteries of its Iron Dome rocket defense system to the country's north. It described the move as part of "ongoing situational assessments."
The Iron Dome protects against short-range rockets. Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets at Israel during the 2006 war, while Israeli warplanes destroyed large areas of south Lebanon.
Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israel's military intelligence, said the strike is a signal to Syria's ally, Tehran, that Israel is serious about the red lines it has set.
"Syria is a very important part in the front that Iran has built. Iran is testing Israel and the U.S. determination in the facing of red lines and what it sees is in clarifies to it that at least some of the players, when they define red lines and they are crossed, take it seriously," he told Army Radio.
In Tehran, Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast condemned an Israeli airstrike against Syria and urged countries in the region to remain united against Israel, according to the semiofficial Fars news agency. The brief statement gave no details.
The Fateh-110, or Conqueror, is a short-range ballistic missile developed by Iran and first put into service in 2002. The Islamic Republic unveiled an upgraded version in 2012 that improved the weapon's accuracy and increased its range to 300 kilometers (185 miles).
Iranian Defense Minister Gen. Ahmad Vahidi said at the time that the solid-fueled missile could strike with pin-point precision, making it the most accurate weapon of its kind in Iran's arsenal.
An airstrike in January also targeted weapons apparently bound for Hezbollah, Israeli and U.S. officials have said. The White House had no immediate comment on Sunday's reported missile strikes.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist group, also reported large explosions in the area of Jamraya, a military and scientific research facility northwest of Damascus, about 15 kilometers (10 miles) from the Lebanese border.
Hezbollah's al-Manar TV said the research center in Jamraya was not hit. It added that an army supply center was targeted by the strike. It quoted unnamed Syrian security officials as saying that three sites including military barracks, arms depots and air defense center were targeted by the strike.
The station aired footage of what it said was a facility in Jamraya that was hit in the airstrike. It showed a heavily damaged building as well as what appeared to be a chicken farm with some chickens pecking around in debris scattered with dead birds.
The raid appeared to have taken place next to a major road that was filled with debris, and shell casings were strewn on the ground. A blue street sign on the side of the road referred to the direction of the Lebanon border and the Syrian town of Zabadani near the frontier.
Lebanon's Al-Mayadeen TV, that has several reporters around Syria, said one of the strikes targeted a military position in the village of Saboura, west of Damascus and about 10 kilometers (six miles) from the Lebanon border.
An amateur video said to be shot early Sunday in the Damascus area showed fire lighting up the night sky. The video appeared genuine and corresponded to other AP reporting.
Uzi Rubin, a missile expert and former Defense Ministry official, told the AP that if the target were Fateh-110 missiles as reported then it is a game changer as they put almost all Israel in range and can accurately hit targets.
Rubin emphasized that he was speaking as a rocket expert and had no details on reported strikes.
"If fired from southern Lebanon they can reach Tel Aviv and even (the southern city of) Beersheba." He said the rockets are much five times more accurate than the scud missiles that Hezbollah has fired in the past. "It is a game changer because they are a threat to Israel's infrastructure and military installations," he said.
Israel's first airstrike in Syria, in January, also struck Jamraya.
At the time, a U.S. official said Israel targeted trucks next to the research center that carried SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles. The strikes hit both the trucks and the research facility, the official said. The Syrian military didn't confirm a hit on a weapons shipment at the time, saying only that Israeli warplanes bombed the research center.
Israeli lawmaker Shaul Mofaz, a former defense minister and a former chief of staff, declined to confirm the airstrike but said Israel is concerned about weapons falling into the hands of the Islamic militant group amid the chaos of Syria's civil war.
"We must remember that the Syrian system is falling apart and Iran and Hezbollah are involved up to their necks in Syria helping Bashar Assad," he told Israel Radio. "There are dangers of weapons trickling to the Hezbollah and chemical weapons trickling to irresponsible groups like al-Qaida."
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Deitch was reporting from Jerusalem. Associated Press writer Brian Murphy contributed to this report from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
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Public release date: 6-May-2013
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