|
|
Post by WingsofCrystal on May 10, 2018 16:46:35 GMT
Science Alert
We Could Be Getting a Hangover 'Pill' Soon, After Hugely Positive Results in Mice
YES!
YUNFENG LU, THE CONVERSATION
10 MAY 2018
"Civilization begins with distillation," said William Faulkner, a writer and drinker. Although our thirst for alcohol dates back to the Stone Age, nobody has figured out a good way to deal with the ensuing hangover after getting drunk.
As a chemical engineering professor and wine enthusiast, I felt I needed to find a solution. As frivolous as this project may sound, it has serious implications. Between 8 and 10 percent of emergency room visits in America are due to acute alcohol poisoning.
Alcohol is the leading risk factor for premature deaths and disability among people aged 15-49 and its abuse leads to serious health problems, including cardiovascular and liver cancer.
Despite these sobering facts, current treatments for alcohol overdose largely rely on the body's own enzymes to break down this drug.
I decided to design an antidote that could help people enjoy wine or cocktails or beer without a hangover, and at the same time create a lifesaving therapy to treat intoxication and overdose victims in the ER.
I chose to create capsules filled with natural enzymes usually found in liver cells to help the body process the alcohol faster.
Together with professor Cheng Ji, an expert in liver diseases from Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, and my graduate student Duo Xu, we developed an antidote and tested it in mice.
Inspired by the body's approach for breaking down alcohol, we chose three natural enzymes that convert alcohol into harmless molecules that are then excreted.
That might sound simple, because these enzymes were not new, but the tricky part was to figure out a safe, effective way to deliver them to the liver.
To protect the enzymes, we wrapped each of them in a shell, using a material the US Food and Drug Administration had already approved for pills.
We then injected these nanocapsules into the veins of drunk mice where they hurtled through the circulatory system, eventually arriving in the liver where they entered the cells and served as mini–reactors to digest alcohol.
We showed that in inebriated mice (which fall asleep much faster than drunk humans), the treatment decreased the blood alcohol level by 45 percent in just four hours compared to mice that didn't receive any.
Meanwhile, the blood concentration of acetaldehyde – a highly toxic compound that is carcinogenic, causes headaches and vomiting, makes people blush after drinking, and is produced during the normal alcohol metabolism – remained extremely low.
The animals given the drug woke from their alcohol-induced slumber faster than their untreated counterparts – something all college students would appreciate.
The ability to efficiently break down alcohol quickly should help patients wake up earlier and prevent alcohol poisoning. It should also protect their liver from alcohol–associated stress and damage.
We are currently completing tests to ensure that our nanocapsules are safe and don't trigger unexpected or dangerous side effects. If our treatments prove effective in animals, we could begin human clinical trials in as early as one year.
This sort of antidote won't stop people from going too far when consuming alcohol, but it could help them recover quicker. In the meantime, we plan on drinking responsibly, and hope that you do too.
Yunfeng Lu, Professor Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles.
This article was originally published by The Conversation theconversation.com/a-hangover-pill-tests-on-drunk-mice-show-promise-96188
www.sciencealert.com/there-might-soon-be-a-hangover-pill-test-mice
Crystal
|
|
|
|
Post by GhostofEd on May 10, 2018 22:39:52 GMT
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on May 11, 2018 0:25:35 GMT
Isn't that the fish that terrifies small fishing boats and goes straight for a certain unmentionable part of the anatomy?  |
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on May 11, 2018 2:35:45 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by WingsofCrystal on May 11, 2018 13:01:02 GMT
Good morning all,
Atlas Obscura
The Oldest Cookbooks from Libraries Around the World
Vintage recipes include flaming peacocks and kangaroo brains.
by Anne Ewbank
May 10, 2018
For as long as libraries have been repositories of wisdom and knowledge, there has been a place on the shelf for cookbooks. In fact, many early cookbooks were more than just recipe collections—instructions for concocting medicine often jostled with dinner ideas for page space. Atlas Obscura has previously displayed ancient recipe collections, such as the Yale Peabody Museum’s Babylonian tablets, which contain the oldest known recorded recipes, and the New York Academy of Medicine’s 9th-century De re culinaria, the oldest surviving cookbook in the West.
Cookbooks were once intended mainly for upper-class households. Only relatively recently did printing and educational advances make them more democratic. Today’s versions tend to hold well-lit photographs and elegant prose. But humanity has long turned to cookbooks for inspiration and entertainment, and whether sauce-stained or Gothic-lettered, cookbooks offer glimpses of humanity’s food history. Here is a collection of some of the oldest cookbooks from libraries around the world.
The Library of Congress
Libro de arte coquinaria
This 15th-century Italian manuscript was authored by one Maestro Martino of Como, chef to a famous cardinal. Martino was known for cooking lavish banquets for his employer. Along the way, he achieved fame as “the prince of cooks.” Martino likely deserves the title, according to Brett Zongker from the Library of Congress, since his Libro “is the first known book to specify ingredients, cooking times, techniques, utensils, and amounts.” As a late medieval chef cooking on the cusp of the Renaissance, Martino includes a recipe for everything from almond-rice pudding to “How to Dress a Peacock With All Its Feathers, So That When Cooked, It Appears to Be Alive and Spews Fire From Its Beak.” He also recommends that chefs boil eggs for the amount of time needed to recite the Lord’s Prayer: around two minutes. Martino’s work is momentous for another reason too: In the 15th century, his recipes made up a major part of the world’s first printed cookbook, Platina’s De honesta voluptate et valetudine. A scribe practiced calligraphy on one of the last pages of this particular volume.
more after the jump:
www.atlasobscura.com/articles/oldest-cookbooks
Crystal
|
|
|
|
Post by swamprat on May 11, 2018 17:41:04 GMT
Can you hear me now?How Did This Soldier 'Grow' an Ear on Her Forearm?
By Brandon Specktor, Senior Writer | May 10, 2018
Courtesy the U.S. Army Credit: When a soldier lost her left ear in a car crash, Army surgeons helped her grow a new one — on her forearm.
Army Pvt. Shamika Burrage's left ear is unlike other ears, though you might not realize it at first. Like her right ear, it is made from Burrage's own cells, and connected to her head by her own blood vessels. She can hear perfectly well out of it, and feel perfectly well when you touch it. And yet, until a few days ago, Burrage's left ear was not on her head — it was on her arm.
Burrage lost her left ear during a single-car crash in Odessa, Texas, in 2016. Now, she is the latest recipient of a cosmetic reconstruction procedure called prelaminated forearm free flap surgery — a sci-fi-sounding operation that involves "growing" new tissue by implanting a patient's cartilage under their forearm skin. While many civilians around the world have successfully undergone the procedure, Burrage is the first American soldier to receive the novel reconstruction process, according to a statement from the U.S. Army.
"The whole goal is, by the time she's done with all this, it looks good, it's sensate and in five years if somebody doesn't know her they won't notice," Lt. Col. Owen Johnson III, chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at William Beaumont Army Medical Center in El Paso, Texas, said in the statement. "As a young active-duty soldier, they deserve the best reconstruction they can get."
To lend an ear
So how does prelaminated forearm free flap surgery work? First, surgeons create a mold of the new prosthetic ear by harvesting some of the patient's cartilage — usually from the patient's ribs. The cartilage is shaped, sometimes with the help of a 3D-printed mold, and then inserted under a flap of skin cut open on the patient's forearm. (In another variant of the surgery, patients have had cartilage implanted under their forehead skin to grow new noses.)
Because the molded cartilage comes from the same cells as the patient's arm tissues, the skin will begin to grow around the mold. New blood vessels begin to form inside the transplanted tissue and, after several months of healing, the newly formed ear can be safely transplanted to the head. In Burrage's case, extra skin from her forearm was also used to cover scar tissue around her jawline.
"[The ear] will have fresh arteries, fresh veins and even a fresh nerve so she'll be able to feel it," Johnson said. In addition, Burrage will even be able to hear out of it, because surgeons were able to reopen her ear canal following the trauma of her accident.
"I didn't lose any hearing and [Johnson] opened the canal back up," Burrage said in the statement. "It's been a long process for everything, but I'm back."
A growing field
While this sort of transplant may be a first for the Army, similar operations have been performed successfully on civilians around the world. In 2017, a team of Chinese plastic surgeons led by Dr. Guo Shuzhong completed a similar surgery on a man who lost his ear during a traffic accident. (The forearm-ear transplant took about 7 hours to complete.) Guo told the Daily Mail that he and his team perform similar procedures on about 500 children each year.
Famously, not all recipients of the surgery have been human. In 1995, perhaps the first patient to "grow" a human ear using transplanted cartilage was a laboratory mouse at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. The mouse — nicknamed the "earmouse" or the "Vacanti mouse," after lead researcher Charles Vacanti — carried the ear on its back and spurred a wave of controversy about genetic engineering.
In fact, the Vacanti mouse was not genetically engineered at all: He was a regular (albeit hairless) mouse who had simply received what is fast becoming a standard — and life-changing — plastic surgery procedure.
www.livescience.com/62532-how-to-grow-ear-on-forearm.html
|
|
|
|
Post by WingsofCrystal on May 12, 2018 11:13:49 GMT
"How Did This Soldier 'Grow' an Ear on Her Forearm? "
Never thought I would read that sentence! Thanks Swamprat.
Good morning lovely UFOCasebookers!
~
Crystal
|
|
|
|
Post by bluefin on May 12, 2018 12:48:02 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by bluefin on May 12, 2018 12:52:17 GMT
The fish is a Tautog and it only good for chowder and I make them, at my shop out of clay, this is not spam, Grainger Pottery, you can see my fish in the price list, mine is a clay casting from a 10 pounder. graingerpottery.com/fotos/tautog1.jpg |
|
|
|
Post by GhostofEd on May 12, 2018 14:00:49 GMT
The fish is a Tautog and it only good for chowder and I make them, at my shop out of clay, this is not spam, Grainger Pottery, you can see my fish in the price list, mine is a clay casting from a 10 pounder. graingerpottery.com/fotos/tautog1.jpgThanks for that info. Proves you can learn something new even on a UFO forum.  That's a nice interesting product line you have. Fun hobby too. |
|
|
|
Post by GhostofEd on May 12, 2018 14:10:08 GMT
"How Did This Soldier 'Grow' an Ear on Her Forearm? "
Never thought I would read that sentence! Thanks Swamprat.
Good morning lovely UFOCasebookers!
~
Crystal
I eat up these westerns, especially the TV series. There's a channel on my cable (meTV) that runs Rawhide, The Rifleman, The Big Valley, Bonanza, Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, etc. I like to binge watch ocassionally while enjoying a bucket of fresh apples. |
|
|
|
Post by swamprat on May 12, 2018 15:36:59 GMT
It's about time!  97 Million Calls Trigger $120 Million Fine
FCC sends ‘message’ to Miami Robocaller
Mike Snider, USA TODAY
May 12, 2018
The Federal Communications Commission has approved its largest fine ever — $120 million — against a Miami man who was found to have placed 96.8 million fraudulent robocalls for vacation deals.
The FCC initially levied the fine against Adrian Abramovich, doing business as Marketing Strategy Leaders, in June 2017 alleging HIS BUSINESS USED “NEIGHBORHOOD SPOOFING” TECHNOLOGY TO INCLUDE LOCAL AREA CODES AND THE FIRST THREE NUMBERS OF THE RECIPIENT’S OWN PHONE NUMBER TO ENCOURAGE PEOPLE TO ANSWER ROBOCALLS.
The calls professed to offer vacation deals from major travel companies such as Expedia, Hilton, Marriott and TripAdvisor. But instead, those who answered were transferred to foreign call centers and sold travel packages at unrelated destinations, including timeshares in Mexico. TripAdvisor, which doesn’t do telemarketing, helped the FCC in the investigation as it had many complaints about the robocalls.
During a Senate Commerce hearing last month, Abramovich denied being “the kingpin of robocalling that is alleged.”
Abramovich did not deny making the calls but has said he did not intend to mislead or defraud consumers.
“But if so, WHY DID HE INCLUDE FRAUDULENT CALLER ID INFORMATION WITH EACH AND EVERY ONE OF HIS 96 MILLION ROBOCALLS?” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said Thursday. “And why did the recorded messages indicate that the calls came from well known travel or hospitality companies ... even though they were attempting to sell vacation packages at destinations unrelated to those named companies?”
Pai said Abramovich’s robocall operation not only defrauded customers by selling misrepresented travel packages, but also caused harm to Spo_k, a Virginia- based medical paging service whose system was disrupted by the robocalls.
“Our decision sends a loud and clear message, this FCC is an active cop on the beat and will throw the book at anyone who violates our spoofing and robocall rules and harms consumers,” he said.
AROUND 90% OF ABRAMOVICH’S ROBOCALLS WERE MADE TO WIRELESS PHONES, 10% TO LANDLINES.
It remains to be seen if the fine will help stem the increasing tide of robocalls; 3.4 BILLION WERE MADE NATIONWIDE IN APRIL, UP 30% OVER LAST YEAR.
The agency needs to update rules and adopt better technology to combat the robocall scourge, FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said.
“We are drowning in them,” she said.
|
|
|
|
Post by WingsofCrystal on May 13, 2018 12:04:28 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by WingsofCrystal on May 13, 2018 14:33:27 GMT
Good morning all,
Ars Technica
How a “location API” allows cops to figure out where we all are in real-time
"Securus takes no steps to verify that uploaded documents in fact provide authorization…"
Cyrus Farivar - 5/12/2018, 5:30 AM
The digital privacy world was rocked late Thursday evening when The New York Times reported on Securus, a prison telecom company that has a service enabling law enforcement officers to locate most American cell phones within seconds. The company does this via a basic Web interface leveraging a location API—creating a way to effectively access a massive real-time database of cell-site records.
Securus’ location ability relies on other data brokers and location aggregators that obtain that information directly from mobile providers, usually for the purposes of providing some commercial service like an opt-in product discount triggered by being near a certain location. ("You’re near a Carl’s Jr.! Stop in now for a free order of fries with purchase!")
The Texas-based Securus reportedly gets its data from 3CInteractive, which in turn buys data from LocationSmart. Ars reached 3CInteractive's general counsel, Scott Elk, who referred us to a spokesperson. The spokesperson did not immediately respond to our query. But currently, anyone can get a sense of the power of a location API by trying out a demo from LocationSmart itself.
Currently, the Supreme Court is set to rule on the case of Carpenter v. United States, which asks whether police can obtain over 120 days worth of cell-site location information of a criminal suspect without a warrant. In that case, as is common in many investigations, law enforcement presented a cell provider with a court order to obtain such historical data. But the ability to obtain real-time location data that Securus reportedly offers skips that entire process, and it's potentially far more invasive.
Securus’ location service as used by law enforcement is also currently being scrutinized. The service is at the heart of an ongoing federal prosecution of a former Missouri sheriff’s deputy who allegedly used it at least 11 times against a judge and other law enforcement officers.
On Friday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) publicly released his formal letters to AT&T and also to the Federal Communications Commission demanding detailed answers regarding these Securus revelations.
"To access this private data, correctional officers simply visit Securus’ Web portal, enter any US wireless phone number, and then upload a document purporting to be an official document giving permission to obtain real-time location data," Wyden wrote.
Blake Reid, a law professor at the University of Colorado, told Ars that he was unfamiliar with services like this that allow police to obtain, in real-time, location information for nearly any number with little scrutiny.
"That’s certainly pretty unprecedented," he said. "This isn't how it's supposed to work for law enforcement to get location data—they’re supposed to get it from the phone companies."
Securus did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment, but a spokesman told the Times in a statement that "responsibility of ensuring the legal adequacy…lies with our law enforcement customers and their counsel." For its part, Securus' "ensuring" seems to consist of nothing more than a check box on a website.
"Top officials at Securus confirmed to my office that Securus takes no steps to verify that uploaded documents in fact provide authorization for real-time surveillance, or conduct any review of surveillance requests," Wyden continued. "Securus claimed, incorrectly, that correctional facilities, not Securus, must ensure that correctional officers don’t misuse the Web portal."
arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/05/senator-furious-at-polices-easy-ability-to-get-real-time-mobile-location-data/
Crystal
|
|
|
|
Post by WingsofCrystal on May 14, 2018 12:54:24 GMT
Good morning lovely UFOCasebookers
Scientific American
Exoplanet Everests May Be Detectable When Giant Telescopes Come Online
Astronomers have proposed a way of finding mountains, oceans and volcanoes on distant planets that are much too small to observe directly
By Bob Henderson | Scientific American May 2018 Issue
The Himalayas distort Earth's contour only about as much as a human hair would that of a billiard ball. Discerning such a minuscule bump on a planet orbiting a distant star might seem laughably impossible, but two astronomers have proposed a way to detect mountains and other surface features on exoplanets.
Finding mountains could help address another key question: Can these planets hold life? So says astronomy graduate student Moiya McTier of Columbia University, one of the co-authors of the proposal, which was published in April in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Life on Earth is apparently dependent on the inner life of the planet itself. Plate tectonics recycles carbon and regulates temperatures, and Earth's magnetic field provides a shield from dangerous solar winds. Mountains and volcanoes are signs that a planet has, or at least at one point had, such an inner life.
Astronomers have now identified some 3,700 planets, but little is known about most of them besides their size and mass. Most were detected by the so-called transit method, in which astronomers measure a slight dimming of the light from a distant star when a planet orbits in front of it. The strategy proposed by McTier and her Columbia colleague David Kipping builds on that method but will likely require huge telescopes that may not be completed for decades.
The Himalayas distort Earth's contour only about as much as a human hair would that of a billiard ball. Discerning such a minuscule bump on a planet orbiting a distant star might seem laughably impossible, but two astronomers have proposed a way to detect mountains and other surface features on exoplanets.
Finding mountains could help address another key question: Can these planets hold life? So says astronomy graduate student Moiya McTier of Columbia University, one of the co-authors of the proposal, which was published in April in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Life on Earth is apparently dependent on the inner life of the planet itself. Plate tectonics recycles carbon and regulates temperatures, and Earth's magnetic field provides a shield from dangerous solar winds. Mountains and volcanoes are signs that a planet has, or at least at one point had, such an inner life.
Astronomers have now identified some 3,700 planets, but little is known about most of them besides their size and mass. Most were detected by the so-called transit method, in which astronomers measure a slight dimming of the light from a distant star when a planet orbits in front of it. The strategy proposed by McTier and her Columbia colleague David Kipping builds on that method but will likely require huge telescopes that may not be completed for decades.
The astronomers' insight is that a rotating, mountainous planet presents a changing silhouette during transit, causing measurements of the dip in light to fluctuate. Based on conservative estimates, the scientists believe the “bumpiness” of planets as mountainous as Mars could be measured accurately by a 74-meter telescope observing transits for about 20 hours, spread out over roughly six months. That is still a tall order for today's telescopes, but larger ones are on the horizon.
One of Kipping's biggest concerns with this approach is mountain-cloaking clouds. Nicolas Cowan, an astronomer at McGill University who was not involved in the research, agrees. But even without clouds, he worries that atmospheric absorption, scattering and refraction of light could spoil the view. “I suspect that for that method to work for a planet, it'll probably need to be airless,” Cowan says. The Columbia researchers, though, think they can mitigate these effects by observing different wavelengths of light.
Even if astronomers manage to confirm a planet's bumpiness, they will need additional information—such as the presence of liquid water, tolerable temperatures and an atmosphere—to interpret the implications for habitability. “No single piece of information is going to solve it,” Kipping notes.
This article was originally published with the title "Exoplanet Everests"
www.scientificamerican.com/article/exoplanet-everests-may-be-detectable-when-giant-telescopes-come-online1/
Crystal
|
|
