Ferroptosis is your friend…

Your new buddy is a type of  cell death  associated with iron dependence.   Its recent discovery has generated a lot of excitement because of its potential in treating cancer.   Washington State University researchers have demonstrated that the fatty acid known as dihomogamma-linolenic acid (DGLA) kills human cancer cells upon exposure.   That is a first-class reason for interest,  since if you could deliver DGLA to a cancer cell,  you might kill it.   The science is rather complicated,  but it certainly offers hope for a number of patients who currently have only limited options.

 

 

Tunguska…

…has been the subject of intense discussion since the nearly 800 square miles of flattened Siberian forest was examined in 1927,  nearly 20 years after the event.   Now there is a   new theory  that an asteroid caused the destruction without impacting Earth.    I’m no astrophysicist,   but I grasp that an asteroid could explode above the ground and still cause extraordinary damage.   The latest theory proposes that  “…the event was caused by an iron asteroid body,  which passed through the Earth’s atmosphere and continued to the near-solar orbit.”  OK,  I’ll bite,  but can they prove it?

 

Decorah Eagles…

The Decorah eagle cam  is back  for a tenth year and there are three adorably fluffy and fierce eaglets.   I predict you and any children about will be hooked in short order.

Counting by smell…

Elephants can use their  sense of smell  to determine which container holds the larger amount of food.   Researchers apparently think this is unique,  but one of my rescue dogs could do it.   It was easier and faster for BG to use her vision,  but she could do it by odor alone.   I suspect it was the larger concentration of odors because that seems logical to me.  After all,  even we humans with our weak olfactory competence can usually identify the stronger concentration of a particular smell.punny senses.   I think proper testing methods of other species would show that many animals can identify a larger food source by smell alone.

 

 

Life from nothing…

I can’t quite decide whether to applaud or run for cover  over this.   It is potentially a huge step towards human cloning,  and if you believe scientists and researchers will restrain themselves,  you don’t understand human nature very well.

 

 

Galactic archaeology…

Professor Bill Chaplin,  from the University of Birmingham,  says we can use the sounds coming from inside of stars to learn about them,  much the same way archaeologists excavate the earth to uncover the past.   This makes sense if you consider that they just recorded  ‘resonant acoustic oscillations’  inside stars in ‘M4’,  one of the oldest known clusters of stars in the Galaxy,  some 13 billion years old.

These  ‘sounds’  lead to tiny changes or pulses in brightness,  and though they have been compared to the odd groans malfunctioning computers make,  I prefer to think of them as the  stars singing.

Cell phones and kids…

There is still great debate about the health hazards of cell phones,  and I am not totally convinced that anything but constant heavy use might cause brain cancer,  but I think children may well be more susceptible than adults.   Therefore,  read this  with a grain of salt attitude,  and do some more research,  but do pay attention.

The snail economy…

If you are not a contributor to the  Mercatus Center  at George Mason University,  you should be.   It is a non-profit,  free-market-oriented education,  research and outreach organization which bridges the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.   Mercatus can tell you how fiscally responsible your state is,  just for starters.   The researchers deal in facts and figures  — reality,  not high theory,  demonstrated in plain English instead of academic babble-speak.

With His Oneness assuring us that tepid economic growth must be regarded as the new “normal”,  Mercatus decided to examine the problem and discover  —  ts causes.   What it found was that if government regulations had been capped in 1980,  our GDP  would be  25% larger.   Put another way,  if the economic growth lost to regulation in the U.S. were its own country,  it would be the world’s fourth largest economy.

Read the IBD article I linked to above — the charts included make it quite easy to grasp —  then show it to everyone you know who believes in big government.   It should open their eyes to the dangers of big government and the over-regulation which unfailingly accompanies it.

Hell’s address?

What else could you call  planet 55 Cancri-e,  with its sea of molten lava with a surface temperature of 4,352 degrees Fahrenheit,  and the other side still solid at only half that?   Scientists have found some other oddities as well.

Striped rabbits?

Who knew there were  really striped  rabbits?   Who knew the mysterious and rarest rabbit in the world would be so easy to find?