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Huffington Post.com, the political blog community, is considering raising more money and has seen traffic triple since last year, but the big question now is how popular the site will be when the 2008 presidential campaign is over.

Founded in 2005 by author Arianna Huffington, the site was intended to provide a left-of-center audience with political commentary and analysis in the form of constantly updated blogs, penned by various talking heads and celebrities, and other members of Huffington's extensive social network.

In recent months the site has reaped the benefits of its strong partisan political tone and content, as a nail-biter of an election season nudged traffic from half a million visitors per month last August to a high of over 3 million in March (back down to 2 million by April), according to Compete.com, an internet analytics website.

In a common new-media discrepancy, the site's internal numbers, obtained via Google analytics, are even more impressive. "We're averaging 11 million to 12 million uniques a month and 100 million pageviews," says Betsy Morgan, HuffPo's C.E.O.

But a rising tide lifts all boats, and Huffington Post isn't the only website with a political bent to enjoy increased traffic in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. Sites such as Slate.com, Politico.com, and, to a lesser extent, TalkingPointsMemo.com and DailyKos.com, have all enjoyed steady increases in traffic between last April and this, the most recent period for which Compete.com has data.

While Huffington Post's growth has certainly been dramatic, detractors wonder if the site's political focus might become a liability next fall when the election is over and the nation settles back into business as usual.

Morgan doesn’t think so.

"We believe that there's no longer a historical political cycle. People are interested in politics 365 days of the year," she says.

Nevertheless, Huffington Post is making a conspicuous effort to expand its reach beyond the confines of Washington D.C. Last summer it rolled out several new vertical sites, including non-political topics such as media, business, and entertainment. Just last week the site introduced another new channel, green, which will focus on eco-news and trends. And Morgan says there are more on the way.

Also new? The site's tagline, "the internet newspaper," introduced in 2008. The line de-emphasizes politics in favor of a more neutral, newsy tone. According to Morgan, over half of the site's traffic is now for non-political stories.

Barry Parr, a media analyst at JupiterResearch, says Huffington Post is better positioned than most political websites to weather the transition to a post-election U.S., although he adds that a slight drop-off in the site's traffic after election fever subsides wouldn't be surprising.

A bigger concern, especially as the site navigates the wider waters of general news coverage—placing itself in the same category as newspapers and news sites that already exist—is the vulnerability of its advertising-driven business model.

"The challenge for anybody in the news business is that a general news audience is not a very desirable one to advertisers," says Parr. That's because news audiences, unlike those for beauty or sports sites, don't come packaged into convenient demographic bundles—18-to-34-year-old males, for example. And for Huffington Post, which isn't attracting the volume of visitors that sites like Yahoo or AOL do, the appeal for advertisers may be limited.

The answer to sustainability might lie in the site’s staking out more niche areas of credible coverage, as it has so successfully done with politics.

Parr thinks an obvious place to start is media, where HuffingtonPost has published relatively strong, although less prominent, content. "That's an area their audience is going to be interested in," he says. And with a dearth of mainstream publications focusing explicitly on the media business, and Huffington Post's roster of plugged-in contributors, the site stands a good shot of owning this area.

For now, however, the Huffington Post homepage is dominated by half-inch-tall red block letters, "…152 Days And Counting…" until November 4, 2008. That's the day of the U.S. presidential election, and quite possibly, the day the game changes for HuffingtonPost.

1833: Ada Byron meets Charles Babbage. He designed an early computer, and she would write the first computer program.

Ada's father was the poet Lord Byron, but her parents separated when she was a month old. Her famous -- and poetically wild -- father went to Greece, and she never knew him.

Ada was 15 when she met the Cambridge mathematics professor Babbage 175 years ago today. Babbage had already received funding from Parliament to build a "difference engine" that could do mathematical calculations. While that project was still unfinished, he conceived in 1834 a new and broader idea: an "analytical engine" that "could not only foresee but could act on that foresight."

In 1835, Ada married William King, who inherited the title Earl of Lovelace in 1838, making her Countess of Lovelace. They had three children, but Ada's family and social responsibilities did not keep her from continuing her study of advanced mathematics.

Babbage, meanwhile, gave a seminar on the analytic engine in Turin, Italy, in 1841. Countess Ada translated an article about the presentation and showed it to Babbage. He was apparently better at conceiving things than explaining them (unheard of in a mathematician, eh?) and suggested that Ada expand the article with her own notes.

When published in 1843, those notes ran three times as long as the original article. Ada predicted that a computing machine could compose music, draw graphics and find application, so to speak, in business and science.

She also wrote a plan for the analytical engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers. It's now considered the first computer program. The countess originated the idea of a loop in a program, which she likened to a "snake biting its tail."

Ada was also a friend to novelist Charles Dickens, scientist Michael Faraday, inventor Charles Wheatstone and David Brewster, creator of the kaleidoscope. She was an opium addict who had numerous affairs and gambled away a lot of her family fortune. She died of cancer in 1852, two weeks shy of her 37th birthday.

The Countess of Lovelace has attained recent fame through Betty Toole's 1992 edition of her correspondence, Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers and Lynn Hershman-Leeson's 1997 film Conceiving Ada, starring Tilda Swinton.

The U.S. Department of Defense named a computer language "Ada" in her honor.

Source: Betty Toole

LOS ANGELES -- UCLA scientists have developed a process for targeting cancer cells that could eliminate some of the worst side effects of chemotherapy. The new technique deploys nanoscale, light-activated containers filled with cancer-fighting drugs throughout the body. These containers release the drugs only when targeted by a special laser, allowing scientists to confine treatment only to desired areas of the body.

Normally in chemotherapy, the drugs are delivered to the whole body and attack healthy cells as well as the cancerous ones, which can be devastating to cancer patients. In a couple of years, these new nanomachines, called nanoimpellers, could help eliminate cancer in specific areas of a patient while the unused drugs pass through the body without affecting healthy tissue.

Click through the gallery to see the labs behind this process and time-lapse images of the nanoimpellers at work in real cancer cells.

Left: A sample of cancer cells infused with the nanoimpellers fills the bottom of a test tube in Dr. Fuyuhiko Tamanoi's lab in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics at UCLA.

Left: The nanoimpellers are created through a series of chemical reactions, using this lab equipment. No mechanical nanofabrication is required.

The nanoimpellers are contained in nanosize, sand-like particles which are covered with tiny holes. These holes are coated with a substance called azobenzene. When a very specific wavelength of light hits the azobenzene, it flexes and flaps tiny molecular arms. This motion pushes the cancer drugs out of the nanoimpeller and into the surrounding cell. The cancer cell, which unknowingly took the nanoonimpellers in, is then tricked into killing itself. Think of them as light-activated Trojan horses.

Here, the activating laser sits on an optic bench. If you look closely, you can see a blue light bouncing off a mirror in the center left of the photo. This is a laser with a wavelength of 413 nanometers, the exact wavelength needed to activate the nanoimpellers. Under the laser, the nanoimpellers flex and release the cancer-fighting medication directly inside the target area.

The UCLA researchers claim that the laser would be able to reach most skin cancer without surgery, but deeper tumors would require surgery in order to expose the cancerous tissue. Most cancer cells infused with the nanoimpellers die within a few minutes of exposure to the laser.

The nanoimpellers are too small to observe directly without an electron microscope (see slides 9 and 10) so this optical microscope is used observe the effects the nanoimpellers have on the cancer cells (see next slide).

Figure A shows how cancer cells quickly die after absorbing the nanoimpellers and being exposed to the precisely calibrated laser (413 nm). Figure B shows how cells that are exposed to the light without the nanoimpellers, or with nanoimpellers but with no anti-cancer drug, end up living a happy cancerous life. Figure C shows untreated cells and cells infused with unactivated nanoimpellers in the dark.

Dr. Jefferey Zink stands in the chemistry laboratory where the nanoimpellers are created.

A member of the California Nanosystems Institute, Zink is one of the authors of a recent paper on nanoimpellers. Zink has worked in the chemistry department of UCLA for almost 40 years and he is a widely recognized authority on nanomachines.

This ventilated workbench is used to prepare living tissue samples for testing with the nanoimpellers. The samples containing the cancer cells and the nanoimpellers are then taken back to Zink's lab for blue-laser zapping.

Vials filled with solutions containing billions of nanoimpellers cover a lab bench in the UCLA Zink Group laboratory.

A scanning electron microscope is used to image the nanoscale features of the nanoimpellers (see next slide).

Using a transmission electron microscope, we can see the sponge-like pores on the outside of the silica that contain the nanoimpellers (figure B and enlarged view on right). In figure A, a scanning electron microscope shows a zoomed-out view of three silica particles. Note that the actual nanoimpellers are too small to be imaged with either of these instruments.

This X-ray diffraction scanner is used to image nanoscale crystalline structures like the ones that make up the nanoimpellers. The machine sends X-rays through a rotating sample and depending on the way they bend and scatter, the sample's structure can be determined. While the scanner does not produce an image, the physical configuration of the crystal can be reconstructed in software.