The first full weekend of March and the wishful thoughts of Spring fill the air.
Local–WE still have had little to no winter this year….even at night we have 90-100% humidity….very sticky.
We leap forward at 2 am….just worthless waste of time.
Personal–March is a month I dread….while others are looking forward to the arrival of Spring all I have is dread for the month…..24th four years ago my son-in-law died and last year on the 12th my beloved wife passed away….so March holds no joy for my family.
This year the US celebrates it’s 250th year of existence and our founding documents are going on a national tour….
Some of the United States’ most important historical documents are beginning a first-of-its kind journey Monday as part of the country’s 250th anniversary commemoration. Typically housed in highly controlled vaults under the watch of preservation experts at the National Archives, documents such as the 1783 Treaty of Paris that formally ended the Revolutionary War and the 1774 Articles of Association that urged colonists to boycott British goods are rarely moved. But those documents, signed by George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and other American revolutionary leaders, will be making their way across the country and put on display for free at local museums, reports the AP.
Among the planned activities are a fleet of mobile museums driving across the country, a story collection initiative, and a Great American State Fair on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The “Freedom Plane” departed DC on Monday and headed to its first stop in Kansas City, Missouri, where the documents will be transferred to the National WWI Museum and Memorial. The records include a rare original engraving of the Declaration of Independence printed in 1823 from a copperplate of the original; the Oaths of Allegiance signed in 1778 by George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and other officers of the Continental Army; and a rare draft copy of the Constitution that includes handwritten notes by the delegates.
Since I am battling cancer I try to find the different attempts to try and control the disease….
We’ll bet you didn’t have this on your 2026 bingo card. Scientists have been experimenting with using bacteria to eat cancerous tumors from the inside out, and – thanks to some clever genetic tweaks – it’s proving surprisingly effective. So much so, the authors of a new study say they hope to progress to preclinical studies in the not-too-distant future.
The bacteria that have been enlisted for this cancer-fighting quest are called Clostridium sporogenes. They usually live in soil, because they need an environment with no oxygen at all. As it turns out, the inside of a solid tumor – full of dead cells and starved of oxygen – is pretty much the perfect habitat for these microbes.
“Bacteria spores enter the tumour, finding an environment where there are lots of nutrients and no oxygen, which this organism prefers, and so it starts eating those nutrients and growing in size,” explained chemical engineering professor Dr Marc Aucoin, from the University of Waterloo in Canada, in a statement.
Ever heard of lab grown brains?
Back in 1907, American biologist Henry Van Peters Wilson discovered that sponges will re-form into living creatures after their cells are broken apart through a fine mesh screen — demonstrating that the cells of living organisms contained something telling them how to build complex, multi-cellular structures.
Researchers dined out this for decades, and their subsequent discoveries led to the isolation of pluripotent stem cells — “master cells” that can divide endlessly and become any type of cell in the body — first from mouse embryos in 1981, then from human embryos in 1998.
Lab-grown brains finally came onto the scene in 2013, when a team of scientists led by Madeline Lancaster created the first brain “organoid”: a tiny, three-dimensional cell culture mimicking the human brain. These mini-brains, made out of stem cells, contain real neurons, thus allowing researchers to study brain development, model neurological diseases, and test drugs before human trials. (As you might guess, the practice is not without controversy.)
Now, scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz are taking lab-grown mini-brains into their toddler era, after demonstrating that brain organoids can process information in real time.
https://futurism.com/health-medicine/lab-grown-brain-organoid
Every heard of ‘Aquamation?
Memento mori tells us it’s good to remember that one day we will die. It gives you a kind of agency to live life on your terms, agency that can extend to choosing how you go out when the time comes.
Human funerary practices have come a long way, but until recently your main options were either burial or cremation using gas and/or fire. Now, green alternatives like water cremation are becoming more popular, and Scotland just became the first country in the United Kingdom to allow this sustainable funerary alternative. So, what is it?
Water cremation – also known as aquamation, biocremation, resomation, or flameless cremation – uses alkaline hydrolysis to dispose of human or animal remains. Touted as an eco-friendly alternative to cremation, it uses a heated alkaline solution to break down the body, leaving behind only the skeleton.
During aquamation, the body is placed inside a pressurized vessel filled with a mixture of water and potassium hydroxide (lye) and heated to around 90-150°C (200-300°F). As the container is pressurized, the solution doesn’t boil and instead gently gets to work breaking down the organic matter over several hours.
Fascinating.
Some entity known as ‘Vast’ has a plan for space….
Vast wants to extend humanity’s footprint into the final frontier, and it now has a lot more money to funnel toward that goal.
The California startup, which is developing a line of private space stations called “Haven,” announced today (March 5) that it has raised $500 million in new funding.
The financing consists of $300 million in “Series A” equity and $200 million in debt, according to Vast. (Series A funding is the round that follows initial “seed capital.”)
“The funds will be used to expand facilities, grow the team, and advance the company’s proposed successor to the ISS, Haven-2, designed to ensure continuous human presence in low Earth orbit for the United States and its allies,” Vast wrote in the statement.
I would love to see the people and companies being taken in by this con.
Would you pay for recycled toilet water?
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Similarly, the water in your toilet bowl could be another person’s drink — after it’s rigorously filtered and becomes so pure that treatment facilities actually need to manually add minerals back into the water so it doesn’t, dare we say, flush important nutrients out of your own system.
Icky as it may sound on paper, recycled sewage or waste water may be the next game changer for water conservation, with many cities across the US already depending on these systems.
And encouragingly, a new study highlighted by Grist shows the public is open to the idea of drinking water recycled from their own sewage. In a survey of small communities of fewer than 10,000 people published in the journal Water Resources Research, residents said they’d be willing to pay an average of $49 per month to have access to reused water. And hey, astronauts do it — so why shouldn’t the rest of us get access as well?
https://futurism.com/science-energy/average-american-drink-toilet-water
Time for me to move on….I hope everyone has a great Saturday and as always…..Be Well and Be Safe…..
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”