One more week in the bag and Summer is hitting us hard the 100+ days are back and stifling….humidity is back and just gross.

The World Cup is in full swing and the countries that are here in the US to play have fallen in love with Ranch Dressing…..and the greasy spoon known as the Waffle House.

Local–Scrapin’ The Coast for tricked out cars will be on for this weekend….the weather is normal 100+ temps and off and on rain….it is 0400 and the temp is 85 with 90% humidity…welcome to Summer in the South.

Personal–Weds I was scanned and Thursday I met with two doctors….after days of meeting with the Docs they come to the conclusion that the second mass in my lung is shrinking and nothing to worry about but continue watching…..but none of that changes my chemo so next week I can look forward to that right before the 4th.

Enough about me and my problems….let’s get to the good stuff….

The older we get and our joints start sounding like a bowl of Rice Krispies and we look for relief….

A supplement that many older Americans swallow for their knees may not be so benign for their brains. University of Florida researchers report that glucosamine use was linked to a greater shift from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer’s disease in a large review of patient records, reports the Conversation. Using AI to sift through UF Health data from 2012 to 2024, the team found about 8% of patients with either Alzheimer’s or mild cognitive impairment reported taking glucosamine, per a release. After adjusting for age, sex, and demographics, it was found that using glucosamine was tied to a 25% greater risk of mild cognitive impairment advancing to dementia.

Among those already diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or related dementias, glucosamine use was also tied to a 25% higher risk of death over time. The study, published in Nature Metabolism, doesn’t prove that glucosamine, which many take for joint pain and arthritis, causes the decline, but it’s backed by mouse experiments and brain-tissue analyses suggesting the supplement feeds into an overactive “sugar-tagging” process on proteins seen in Alzheimer’s. That metabolic pathway, the authors say, could be a new treatment target—but they stress that the findings need confirmation in clinical trials before changing medical guidance.

Please do some research before using some of these drugs.

If you are old and dealing with pain and have turn to weed for relief….some news….

Could smoking weed protect your aging brain? A study recently highlighted by The Washington Post suggests it might.

Led by the Salk Institute, the work focused on a cannabinoid called cannabinol, which is a byproduct of THC, the active ingredient in pot responsible for its psychoactive effects.

In experiments using human brain cell cultures and animal cells, the researchers found that cannabinol appeared to protect neurons against oxidative stress, a pernicious form of biological wear and tear that leads to cell death. Oxidative stress is considered a critical factor in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.

The possible upshot? Smoking more weed could lower your chances of developing dementia and similar cognitive conditions — though, to be fair, the work is far from conclusive. Still, it’s not the only study to suggest that cannabis could stem the inflammation associated with Alzheimer’s, and it continues to be a promising avenue of research.

https://futurism.com/health-medicine/research-smoke-weed-older

Your coffee grounds could be the next fuel source….

How long does it take to convert soggy coffee grounds into a highly efficient fuel source? About as long as it takes to brew a fresh pot of java, researchers say.

According to a press release from South Korea’s National Research Council of Science and Technology, a team of researchers at the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (KIGAM) have developed a method to convert spent coffee waste into high-quality charcoal, known as biochar.

While that’s a feat in and of itself, the kicker is the method’s blistering speed: it takes just 90 seconds from start to finish, with no drawn-out drying process or oil separation required. According to the release, the new technique solves a major issue in extracting the latent energy potential of spent coffee beans.

Though we generate anywhere from 8 to 10 million tons of high-energy coffee waste a year, the vast majority of that ends up occupying space in landfills. While other coffee recycling techniques do exist, the high moisture content of spent beans has made energy extraction a massive chore, preventing the kind of efforts that could give bean juice a second life at scale

https://futurism.com/science-energy/scientists-new-method-coffee-grounds-renewable-energy

Just a little space news…..oxygen on Mars….

Sometime around midday on April 20, 2021, a microwave-sized device on Mars finished its first hour of work and reported back to its operators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It had produced 5.4 grams of breathable oxygen, enough for an astronaut to breathe for about ten minutes. The machine, called MOXIE, was the first device ever to manufacture air on the surface of another planet. By the time it shut down for the final time on August 7, 2023, it had run sixteen times and produced a cumulative 122 grams of oxygen — roughly what a small dog breathes in ten hours.

This is a very small amount of oxygen. It is also, depending on how you look at it, one of the most consequential 122 grams in the history of space exploration. The reason is that MOXIE was never meant to keep anyone alive. It was a proof of concept for a much larger machine that does not yet exist, and the question its operators were trying to answer was not whether a human could breathe its output, but whether the principle worked at all under Martian conditions. The principle worked. What follows from that is genuinely large, and considerably more uncertain than the popular framing of the story tends to suggest.

https://spacedaily.com/d-breathable-oxygen-has-now-been-produced-on-the-surface-of-mars-generated-between-2021-and-2023-by-a-nasa-experiment-about-the-size-of-a-toaster-riding-inside-the-perseverance-rover/

The first step in terra forming?

A test gig for robots to replace humans in the work space….

Sometimes we like convenience stores for their charm as much as their actual convenience.

Now, a new one popping up in Hong Kong is hoping to endear customers and crank up the novelty factor by having the whole thing be run by a single humanoid robot. The South China Morning Post reports that it’ll be the first of its kind to open in the bustling city.

Plopped on the Hung Hom waterfront, the 24-hour pop-up — packaged in a portable “capsule” — will be managed by “Xiao Gai,” a humanoid built by the Beijing-based AI and robotics firm Galbot. At five feet and six inches tall, it will use its gangly six feet of arm span to stock shelves, pick out out items, and handle customer checkouts, according to Inside Retail.

The Hong Kong Investment Corporation, which is backing the project, is hailing it as a sign of how AI “is entering people’s everyday lives in more tangible ways.”

https://futurism.com/robots-and-machines/hong-store-no-employees-robot

It is only a matter of time.

Now we go to the funky….ever drop your phone in a toilet?

A visitor to a popular California campground accidentally dropped his sunglasses into a camp toilet and tried to retrieve them. It ended exactly the way you think it ended: Emergency crews had to fish him out, reports CBS Fresno. The Fresno County Sheriff’s Office says the visitor to Camp Edison in the Sierra Nevada foothills tumbled into the vault toilet and required a “confined space rescue.”

“Via a Spanish translator, they advised that the subject had fallen into the chemical storage tank,” says the sheriff’s office, per the Guardian. Luckily, first responders got him out in about 15 minutes, and he was none the worse for wear, though Cal Fire did hose him down. And did he get the sunglasses? Unclear.

Would you go through that for a pair of sunglasses?

Finally a really sick story.

Police in Hungary have arrested a 30-year-old man who investigators say collected human body parts that he’d gathered from abandoned cemeteries and from his workplace at a hospital. Hungary’s National Bureau of Investigation arrested the man in Budapest on June 17 after receiving information that he’d been storing the body parts at work and at home. The man is employed as an orderly at a hospital, police said in a statement on Tuesday, per the AP.

During a search of the man’s apartment, investigators seized skulls, a complete lower leg and a hand, as well as a reconstruction of a human face prepared from facial skin. Other bones were found stored in a suitcase. A heart in a jar was also found, which police were trying to determine whether it was of human or animal origin. The man, who admitted collecting the body parts during questioning, said that he was particularly attracted to human body parts, and that he had prepared food from such parts and eaten them. He is being held on suspicion of illegal use of human bodies.

In their statement, police said the man is “passionate about anatomy and pathology, and likes to dissect animals.” They suspect he obtained the body parts through his work at a hospital and by digging up bodies “in abandoned cemeteries in Slovakia and Hungary.” Police seized the man’s computer, laptops, tablets, mobile phones, SIM and data cards. All of the recovered body parts will be examined by forensic experts, police said, adding that the range of alleged crimes could expand after the origin of all the body parts is determined.

Shades of Jeffrey Dahmer.

Music from my day…..the days of acid rock….

“We were about loud, psychedelic rock,” says bassist Richard Price, remembering the mind-bending fuzztone glory days of his ‘60s band The 2nd Coming. But their history is tightly intertwined with the origins of the Allman Brothers Band and the birth of the rootsy rumble the world came to know as Southern rock. Their only album, Evaluations, went unreleased, and their story’s been somewhere between secret and myth for the last six decades…until now.