Milestone–Yesterday I posted my 20,000th post….and every one has been a joy….hopefully I can keep going for another 20,000. Thanx everyone for your support and most of all your visits and comments.
We begin a new month, a Summer month, when all thoughts are to a coming vacay….today’s Dump is a bit lengthy for it must make-up for my absence last Saturday….sorry….
Local–All this weekend there will be 2 blueberry festivals and a pickle festival….and somewhere in there there will be a celebration of Elvis who visited the Coast in the Summer of 1956…plus the Scraping The Coast….cars tricked out come to play….
Personal–Lung doctor is still fighting to find out what that new mass is in my lung…..not responding to chemo so probably not a cancer…..but what then? That means more scans and more doctors getting involved.,….oh goody.
I have been harvesting my blueberries….I have two big bushes left out of 12….storms have taken its toll. I will get about 2-3 quarts of berries this year….plus my plums have come in and not the harvest I wanted only about a 2 gallons of plums….
Enough chit chat let’s get to the grits and gravy……
Since cancer is an important part of my life as well as many others I like reporting on new approaches…..
National Institutes of Health (NIH)-supported investigators have developed a blood test to find pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, one of the deadliest forms of cancer. The new test could improve survival rates from pancreatic cancer, which tends to be diagnosed at late stages when therapy is less likely to be effective. The findings were published in Clinical Cancer Research.
Overall, only about 1 in 10 pancreatic cancer patients survive more than five years from diagnosis. However, experts expect that when the cancer is found and treated at an earlier stage, survival would improve. While finding the cancer early is key, there are no current screening methods to do so.
In the study, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, Philadelphia, and Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, used a phased approach to testing biomarkers in the blood collected from patients with pancreatic cancer and similar patients without the malignancy. They included two blood biomarkers previously explored for use in this way, carbohydrate antigen 19-9 (CA19-9), which is used to monitor treatment response in patients with pancreatic cancer, and thrombospondin 2 (THBS2), another previously used marker. Neither worked well as a screening tool. CA19-9 can be elevated in people with benign conditions such as pancreatitis and bile duct obstruction while other patients don’t produce it at all due to genetic factors.
In analyzing banked blood samples, the team found two novel biomarker proteins that were elevated in the blood of early-stage pancreatic cancer patients compared with healthy volunteers, aminopeptidase N (ANPEP) and polymeric immunoglobin receptor (PIGR).
When they combined ANPEP and PIGR with CA19-9 and THBS2 the four-marker panel successfully distinguished pancreatic cancer cases from non-cases 91.9% of the time for all stages combined at a false positive rate of 5% in non-cases. Similarly, for early-stage (stage I/II) cancer, the four-marker test identified 87.5% of cases.
Today organ transplants are no big deal…..that is unless you do 3 major organs at one time.
Organ transplants are among the greatest achievements in medicine, but there’s a major limitation: we just don’t have enough organs. One way that scientists hope to get around this is by using animal organs in place of human ones, and this field just took a step forward thanks to the first-ever combined liver and kidney transplant in a human using pig organs.
The use of animal organs in human transplants is called xenotransplantation, and it’s something that’s been the subject of imagination, scientific theory, questionable attempts, and – most recently – increasing experimental success.
The inescapable reality of organ transplantation is that a lot of people will not receive a human organ in time. There are over 100,000 people on the waiting list in the US alone, and 13 people die each day waiting for a transplant.
Strategies to tackle this problem include better ways of preserving, transporting, and selecting donor organs. Artificial options are also being explored, such as the titanium heart that recently saw a man in Australia become the first person to survive for a milestone 100 days with such a replacement organ.
Parkinson’s is a debilitating disease and there may be some progress on the disease….
Parkinson’s disease is one of the most common brain disorders in the world. It affects movement, balance, and coordination, and it gradually becomes worse over time.
More than one million people in the United States live with Parkinson’s disease, and thousands of new cases are diagnosed every year. Although doctors have treatments that can help reduce symptoms, there is still no approved therapy that can slow or stop the disease itself.
Now, researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have discovered an important clue that could change that situation.
Their study, published in the journal Neuron, identified a brain immune protein that appears to help Parkinson’s disease spread through the brain. The researchers believe that blocking this protein may one day help slow the disease in its earliest stages.
New Parkinson’s Discovery May Stop the Disease Before It Gets Worse
My daughter gets so angry at politics that it drives her to tears….why is that?
A new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that political emotions, including anger, anxiety, disgust, depression and hope, are physically experienced in ways that differ from everyday emotions.
Researchers asked nearly 1,000 participants to map where they felt both ordinary and political emotions in their bodies using a body-mapping method known as the emBODY tool, which tracks bodily sensations tied to emotional experiences.
The study found that political emotions “take on distinct bodily patterns.”
“Politics itself may be a substantial source of emotional dysregulation,” the researchers wrote.
They also found ideological differences in how political emotions are experienced. Participants who leaned Democratic reported stronger bodily sensations tied to negative political emotions than those who leaned Republican.
https://www.newsnationnow.com/health/political-anger-comparison-study/
Tattoos, a fad that I never understood, has moved from the silly to the intellectual….
In line with the the rise of AI slop, visualised thinking – charts, Venn diagrams, complex chord diagrams and various other illustrations pulled from statistics – has become something of a signifier in recent years. They’re usually posted in Substack articles, pinned to Pinterest boards, or tucked into Instagram carousel posts with an indie-electro backing track. But beyond online spaces, these diagrammatic visuals have also begun cropping up in the tattoo world.
More and more posts of freshly tattooed skin with diagrams, axes and arrows are appearing on feeds. Some show fine line designs of systems-based models, others use labelled axes, or interconnected structures that map the many forms of the human condition. It’s an influx that East London-based tattoo artist Deven, whose recent work includes a circular map of the genetic code and a triangular mapping of the spirit, body and soul, can attest to. “Although abstract patterns and diagrammatic tattoos have always existed, there’s been a noticeable increase in people wanting these kinds of designs,” she tells us. “I’ve had people asking to add structural elements into my existing flash designs, while others have sent me diagrammatic images to incorporate into their tattoos.”
This report is eeeewww!….
More than 100,000 live cockroaches that are illegal to keep in Australia were confiscated from a single breeder, officials said Friday. Not surprisingly, it accounts for the country’s largest-ever seizure of exotic invertebrates, per the AP. The haul of Madagascar hissing cockroaches and dubia cockroaches, worth 200,000 Australian dollars ($142,000), was seized in May from a commercial breeder in the city of Bathurst in New South Wales state.
The Madagascar hissing species is one of the world’s biggest cockroaches, measuring 2 to 3 inches in length. Photos released by the department showed a shiny, brown invertebrate larger than a person’s finger. It’s much bigger than the country’s common Australian cockroach, which measures between 0.9 and 1.4 inches long. Cockroaches flourish in Australia because of its sub-tropical climates, with the country home to hundreds of species.
Bathurst snake catcher Stefanie Lesser told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that the larger exotic species were likely being sold as a cost-effective reptile food because their large size meant fewer insects were needed. Officials urged pet owners to seek out crickets or wood roaches to feed their lizards instead. Both Madagascar hissing and dubia cockroaches are illegal to import into Australia. They can’t be legally kept, bred, or sold, no matter how they were obtained. Australia has strict biosecurity controls at its borders to protect its agriculture and horticulture sectors and native wildlife from pest infestations.
You fools want roaches? Then come South we have them in spades.
How about masturbating birds?
A new study has found that masturbation among birds (that’s the birds doing the masturbating, not what would happen if a human were to practice self-loving in a park) is natural and healthy. The result flies in the face of the prevailing assumption that such behavior is a harmful response to captivity and stress that should be punished.
Self-love, also known as autosexual behavior, is pretty common in the animal kingdom, especially among mammals. It has been observed in species such as primates, marine mammals (dolphins and walruses), elephants, horses, squirrels, and dogs, among others. Tortoises and marine iguanas are also known to enjoy some “personal” attention when the mood takes them.
However, despite being a widespread behavior, masturbation represents a bit of a Darwinian puzzle. Viewed purely through the lens of adaptive functions, it has never been clear why individuals should waste resources such as time, energy, or sperm on something that doesn’t seem to aid them.
Finally….the collection of urine….
A select number of toilets in Europe are doing double duty: collecting human waste and then turning the urine component into fertilizer. Writing for the Guardian, Chloé Farand profiles VunaNexus, the Swiss company behind “Aurin,” a nitrogen- and phosphorus-rich liquid fertilizer made entirely from treated urine that’s now approved for use in Switzerland and France. Special toilets divert urine to a set of tanks that scrub the urine of antibiotics and other micropollutants, pasteurize it to eliminate viruses, strip out the water, and concentrate it into Aurin.
VunaNexus’ system is in place in a number of commercial and residential buildings, including one that houses one of Geneva’s biggest private banks; it currently recycles about 800,000 gallons of urine a year. If it managed to magically gain access to all the urine in Europe, CEO David de Chambrier estimates it could meet roughly 30% of the nitrogen need. As Farand writes, “That’s not enough to transform the fertilizer market but it provides an alternative,” especially as the war in Iran “[exposes] the vulnerability of the fertilizer market.” The big hurdle is cost—currently as much as 50x that of conventional products—so scaling up and getting paid for the wastewater treatment it provides are key.
If interested …. Read the full story
Enough stuff….I hope everyone has a lovely Saturday and as always….Be Well and Be Safe….
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”