Half way through May and things are not any better.
This is for all the old acid heads….Wavy Gravy turns 90…..
Ninety years does not seem like enough time to contain the life of Wavy Gravy. The hippie icon is probably best known as the emcee of Woodstock, but his impact on American culture goes far beyond those three days of peace and music.
He was Albert Einstein’s neighbor, Bob Dylan’s roommate, and the official clown of the Grateful Dead. His friends are a who’s who of 1960s counterculture: Lenny Bruce, Ram Dass, Ken Kesey. He’s been a beatnik poet, a hog farmer and a jester. An actor, an activist, an artist. A Merry Prankster, a Yippie and an ice cream flavor. He introduced granola to the hippies at Woodstock and ran a pig for president against Richard Nixon.
Wavy Gravy, most famous counterculture icon alive in Berkeley, turns 90
Local–we finally got some rain after months of little to none….4+ inches in a couple of days…..even with that we are still in drought condition.
Forecaster say we are in for a brutal Summer….oh goody more 110+ temps….can’t wait for that.
Personal–A week of no scans,pokes, prods or meetings….and it was hard to keep from just sleeping all day…..but I have two pups that refuse to let me do nothing.
Let’s begin with more cancer treatment advances (hopefully)….
Researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago have designed a new cancer treatment by borrowing a strategy from bacteria that live inside tumors. Instead of attacking cancer cells directly, the approach targets how those cells generate energy.
In prostate cancer models, the therapy delivered its strongest results when combined with radiation, a standard treatment. Tumor growth slowed dramatically. The key component is a lab-made peptide called aurB, derived from a bacterial protein. Once inside cancer cells, aurB disrupts the mitochondria, the structures responsible for producing energy.
Without that energy supply, tumor cells struggle to survive and multiply. The findings were published in Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy.
https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-turn-cancers-own-bacteria-against-it-in-breakthrough-therapy/
One of my cancers is prostrate and the biopsy is truly humbling but there may be a better way….
A new urine test may soon change how doctors monitor men with low-risk prostate cancer, offering a much less invasive way to check whether the disease is becoming dangerous.
Researchers found that the test performed better than common methods such as PSA blood tests and MRI scans when deciding which patients truly needed repeat biopsies.
The study, published in The Journal of Urology, suggests that the test could help many men avoid unnecessary procedures while still catching cancers that become more aggressive and require treatment.
New urine test could spare thousands of men from painful prostate cancer biopsies
All this research needs to be fast forward for cancer patients have only a small window most of the time.
Speaking of research….death…..the great mystery
Humans have been pondering the nature of death since prehistoric times, with evidence of funeral practices dating back to early hominids more than 400,000 years ago. In the millennia since, our curiosity about death has grown more and more complex, with most of the world’s most prominent religions and folklore traditions seeking to answer the mysteries of life’s end. However, it wasn’t until the mid-1900s that researching death became a true science. Known as thanatology, the study of death has yielded fascinating evidence for what it physically feels like to die, and how the mind reacts to those final moments. It may sound like a grim field of study, but thanatology has actually unearthed some surprisingly soothing answers to the mysteries of death.
Thanatology is a uniquely challenging field because, as they say, dead men tell no tales. How can you study an experience without any firsthand accounts? There’s no easy way around this problem, but researchers have a few resources to work with. Believe it or not, near-death experiences, known in the medical field as NDEs, are coming to be seen as valuable evidence. Instances in which people’s hearts stopped but were later resuscitated have revealed unexpected findings about both the physical and emotional experience of dying. On top of that, there have been a handful of cases in which people actually died while undergoing neurological imaging, providing the most intimate look at mortality that doctors have ever observed. It turns out, many of our preconceptions about death have been all backwards.
https://www.sciencing.com/2165883/what-scientists-know-about-death-that-you-didnt-until-now/
There use to be a time when America stood for freedom of the press…..I said use to be….
Reporters Without Borders warned Thursday that the United States is facing a “press freedom crisis” as President Donald Trump and his subordinates wage an aggressive assault on the media that has included threats of treason charges and imprisonment against journalists.
The Trump administration’s active disdain for press freedom has pushed the US to its lowest-ever rank on Reporters Without Borders’ (RSF) World Press Freedom Index, which ranks countries based on numerous indicators including legal protections for journalists, reporter safety, and overall political hostility toward the press. The US landed at 64th out of 180 countries on the latest version of the index, falling seven spots compared to last year.
“The US has experienced a steady decline in the RSF Index over the past decade, but President Trump is pouring gasoline on the fire,” said Clayton Weimers, executive director of RSF’s North America section. “Trump and his administration have carried out a coordinated war on press freedom since the day he took office, and we will live with the consequences for years to come.”
“The index shows that this decline is measurable and ongoing, but preventable,” Weimers added. “Our message is clear: Protect legal rights, ensure accountability for attacks on media professionals, and support independent media to restore American press freedom.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/us-press-freedom-index
How sad is this?
Recently my friend Pete, bettleypete.com, posted on some unanswered questions and I have found one that I never had thought about….
What’s in a fart? This question, far from rhetorical, was one put to Dr Karl Kruszelnicki in the early 2000s. A nurse had asked if quietly farting during an ongoing operation could be considered a contamination of the sterile field.
“I realised that I didn’t know,” Kruszelnicki told Brisbane’s Triple J radio. “But I was determined to find out.”
Farts, known to science as flatulence, are a fact of life. We have seen evidence of the passing of wind in fish, sloths, and certainly humans. Hardly surprising when you consider the internal marble run that is our digestive system.
When we eat, digestion begins in the mouth as we chew up food. Enzymes in our saliva help to break it down further, and our gut mixes it all together with acid until it forms a substance called chyme.
…
That gas escapes through our rectum and is released into the air. It’s normal and healthy in most cases, but there’s no getting away from the fact that a fart must pass through a valley of bacteria on its way out into the world. So, does any of it hitch a ride?
As long as I am on the fart thing….
We are up to our butts in ‘smart’ things, phones, homes, etc and now we have one for farts….
People have a poor grasp of how often they fart, but smart underwear can provide a more accurate measure of flatulence, helping to spot gut-related conditions that might go undiagnosed like lactose intolerance.
Brantley Hall at the University of Maryland and his colleagues have designed a small hydrogen-detecting device that you can attach to your underwear to measure the frequency of farts, or flatus. “It’s like a medium-sized coin, like a nickel or a two-pence piece, and a couple of coins thick. And it clips on adjacent to the perineum,” says Hall.
He and his colleagues got 37 people to use the device to record what happened after consuming lactose, the sugar in dairy products. Producing excess intestinal gas is a hallmark of lactose intolerance, because if people don’t have the enzyme lactase to break down lactose, microbes ferment it instead. This produces hydrogen, leading to bloating and releases of gas. The trouble is, about one-third of people with lactose intolerance don’t report symptoms – sometimes because they don’t know they are farting.
The researchers put the participants on a low-fibre diet for two days to minimise microbiome activity and establish a baseline of farting. Then, on the morning of the third day, each person received either 20 grams of lactose or of sucrose. On the fourth morning, they consumed the other sugar. The participants and research teams didn’t know who was getting what.
Of the 37 participants, 24 were sensitive to lactose and farted over 1.5 times more than their baseline during the day after consuming it, according to the smart underwear. The day with higher gas production corresponded to the lactose consumption in 22 of these people.
Smart Underwear….what’s next?
Do you have weird dreams?
Those weird dreams you sometimes have aren’t just neurons firing aimlessly inside your brain at night. Although they may warp reality into something half-familiar and wholly bizarre, mounting evidence suggests that dreams are actually mirroring your personality traits and lived experiences. As you fall into the deepest phase of sleep, the way your experiences transform into strange movie reels in your subconscious is anything but random. In fact, your most vivid and memorable dreams are the ones with the deepest connection to your daily life and personality traits.
New research from a team of neuroscientists led by Valentina Else of the IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy, documented many unexpected connections between dream contents and waking life. The study analyzed recorded dream reports and compared the visions in dreams to data about individuals’ personality traits, psychological profiles, cognitive skills, and sleep habits. Else used AI models known as natural language processing tools to get to the bottom of dream structures and descriptions. And it turns out your brain isn’t just replaying the past. Dreaming is more of a dynamic process that merges lived experience with who you are.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a71251558/your-weirdest-dreams/
That is enough useless information for this Saturday. If the weather is nice go out and have some fun and just relax….and as always….Be Well and Be Safe….
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”