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And in the news, turning cancer cells into harmless fat cells, why one of our favourite drinks is under threat

and is there really a dark side of the moon? I'm Georgia Mills.

I'm Chris Smith and this is the Naked Scientists.

The Naked Scientists podcast is powered by UKfast.co. UK. First up this week a new approach to halting cancer has been announced by scientists in Switzerland.

Gerhard Christophory at the University of Basel has found a way to make cancer cells into harmless fat cells.

The technique relies on the fact that the more aggressive tumor cells, which

are the ones actually capable of doing the most damage and spreading to other parts of the body,

are also the most chemically impressionable, so it's possible to use two existing licensed drugs to persuade them to

transform from relatively unspecialized cancer cells into inert fat cells that

just can't grow anymore. So these cells, the aggressive cancer cells, differ from the original tumor cells and being able to survive the bloodstream, to survive in distant organs and also to become resistant to

chemotherapy for example but that also makes them also very plastic these

cells have a lot of potential to convert into other cell types and this is essentially what we tried to use.

So you're talking about persuading these cells because they're highly impressionable and that's why they're so successful on the one hand

but persuade them to become something a lot less nasty.

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