Another departure from thew mundane…..Trump yelled something….Biden walked slowly….McConnell forget something…..and Florida took a big hit.

But I will not be reporting on any of that rather I will give you the news that time will forget.

I start with the Yuk Factor…..

The call went out to Dr. Sanjaya Senanayake, an infectious diseases physician at Canberra Hospital in Australia, from a neurosurgeon who’d just performed brain surgery. “Oh, my god, you wouldn’t believe what I just found in this lady’s brain,” Dr. Hari Priya Bandi said, according to Senanayake. “It’s alive and wriggling.” Pulling a live 3-inch-long roundworm from the brain of a human patient was not in Bandi’s plans that day, as the Guardian reports. If it had been, she might not have come into work. As Bandi tells CNN, “I’ve only come across worms using my not-so-good gardening skills” and “I find them terrifying.” And probably more so now. Per CNN, the case, described in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, marks the “first discovery of a live worm inside a human brain.”

The female patient, 64, from New South Wales, had been admitted to the hospital in January 2021 with symptoms including abdominal pain, diarrhea, fever, dry cough, and night sweats. By the following year, she was also experiencing forgetfulness and depression, which led doctors to perform an MRI scan of her brain, per the Guardian. The scan revealed an abnormality in the right frontal lobe, but it was unclear what that abnormality was. A live roundworm “was definitely not what we were expecting,” Bandi tells the BBC. There was a definite “yuck factor,” adds Senanayake. Sent to a government agency lab following the June 2022 surgery, the roundworm was quickly identified as Ophidascaris robertsi, a species typically found in pythons.

It turns out the patient liked to harvest native grasses from a lake area inhabited by carpet pythons. Doctors believe there may have been python poop containing roundworm eggs on the grasses collected and later ingested. The roundworm not only invaded her brain, but likely her lungs and liver, too, CNN reports. The woman received additional treatment along with medication to counteract inflammation, which can be harmful to organs. “That poor patient,” says Senanayake, per the Guardian. “You don’t want to be the first patient in the world with a roundworm found in pythons,” but “she was so courageous and wonderful.” The patient, who is immunodeficient due to a pre-existing medical condition, is recovering well and continues to be monitored.

One word….Eeeeeeeewwww!

Climate change has effected the Panama Canal…..

If drought in the Panama Canal region sounds like something that has no impact on you, think again. CBS News reports the lakes that feed the canal system are close to their minimum levels after an atypically dry season, and that’s throwing a wrench into how much traffic the canal can handle. Some 40% of US container traffic passes through it, with roughly two of every three ships in it either bound for the US or coming from it. A lack of rainfall spurred officials to reduce the number of ships passing through daily to 32 in late July; the AP reports the typical max is between 36 and 38. Weight limits have also been shaved down, and in late August, those restrictions were extended for the next 10 months.

Panama is halfway through its rainy season, and what is typically one of the wettest countries on Earth is seeing some of the lowest rainfall numbers it has recorded, per CNN. The drought itself is not entirely unprecedented, with the canal—which relies on freshwater—having weathered a drought over 2019 and 2020. But as USA Today puts it, “the current drought recurrence and severity has no historical precedence,” according to officials.

CBS News reports it takes at least 55 million gallons of water to move a single ship through the canal’s lock system, with the water typically ending up in the ocean. The Panama Canal Authority is looking into options ranging from retaining some of that water to building more reservoirs or diverting nearby rivers. Shipping company Maersk is the canal’s top user, and its managing director warns that should the drought persist, we could feel it come Christmastime, with potential delays and increased shipping costs that could get passed on to the consumer.

This should effected prices if it continues.

For people that have lost teeth there may be something better than dentures…..

An international, multidisciplinary team of researchers has taken a fascinating step toward a possible future in which we could regenerate human teeth with the use of stem cells.

As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Developmental Cell, the researchers created organoids, which are three-dimensional scaffolds of stem cells that mimic the functions of organs, to secrete proteins that eventually turn into dental enamel, the hard material that protects teeth from decay or damage.

“This is a critical first step to our long-term goal to develop stem cell-based treatments to repair damaged teeth and regenerate those that are lost,” said co-author Hai Zhang, professor of restorative dentistry at the University of Washington, in a statement.

https://futurism.com/neoscope/scientists-progress-regenerating-human-teeth

Keeping with scientific break through…..people with traumatic brain injuries may have a new hope….

For all our leaps in brain interface technology, the devices that help severely paralyzed patients communicate are still extremely sluggish.

That may be starting to change. Two teams of researchers in California, as detailed in dual new studies published in the journal Nature, say they’ve engineered a device set to revolutionize the field.

In essence, the device intercepts a patient’s brainwaves, interprets them into speech and facial expressions, and externalizes these in a digital avatar of themselves.

“Our goal is to restore a full, embodied way of communicating, which is the most natural way for us to talk with others,” said Edward Chang, chair of neurological surgery at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and co-author of the university’s study, in a statement.

“These advancements bring us much closer to making this a real solution for patients.”

The results already sound impressive. Chang’s team has shown that their brain implant can empower patients to “talk” up to 80 words per minute, and on average, between 60 and 70 — simply by thinking.

https://futurism.com/neoscope/brain-implant-talk-mentally

I close with a bit of humor….bull riding….

You might think this is what traffic stops are like in Nebraska, but even the police in this one were bamboozled. “We didn’t have a full understanding of it until we saw it,” says Chad Reiman, police captain in the city of Norfolk. “It” was a 2,200-pound Watusi bull named Howdy Doody who was riding in the passenger seat of a specialized car pulled over in a not-so-routine traffic stop, reports News Channel Nebraska. The outlet’s video of the stop has gone viral for understandable reasons. As it turns out, there’s a somewhat reasonable explanation behind it all.

The driver was 63-year-old Lee Meyer, who has been participating in parades with Howdy Doody for several years now, per the AP. He had taken the bull out for a “test run” and was on his way home to his ranch in nearby Neligh when police in Norfolk received a call and pulled him over, reports the New York Times. “It’s so shocking to people, I guess, sometimes that they don’t know what to do,” Meyer tells the newspaper. “And the bigger the town you go to, the more stiff-necked they are, for lack of a better word. I’ve been to plenty of towns that are a lot smaller and nobody has had any problems with it.” (The metropolis of Norfolk has a population of 26,000.)

Police let Meyer off with a warning and a plea to get his bull and his weird car off the road. Half of the Crown Victoria’s hood and windshield have been removed to make room for the animal, per the AP, and Meyer says the bovine seems to enjoy the car rides, though he typically transports him to parades in a standard trailer. “I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve never seen anything like it on the road before,” says the police captain.

That’s my offering for this Saturday and I hope you found something entertaining or informative….

Enjoy your Labor Day weekend….be well and be safe….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”