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Three hurt in plant explosion
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TMhe notion of using viruses to attack cancer has been around nearly as long as we’ve known about viruses themselves. But several roadblocks– viruses attacking patients’ immune systems, or, not effectively targeting tumors–have led to slow growth in this area of research. Until now.
Earlier this month, a team led by Dr. Stephen Russell at Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic announced that a patient with previously unresponsive, blood-borne cancer (multiple myeloma) had gone into complete remission after being treated with a massive dose of a modified measles virus. A second patient given a similar dose (10 million times the amount in the common measles vaccine) didn’t respond as dramatically to the treatment, but the patient’s tumors did shrink, indicating the virus was at least attacking the targeted areas.
In a separate study that hasn’t yet made it to human trials, a team led by Dr. Khalid Shah at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital has made progress in attacking brain tumor cells in mice using the herpes virus.
Shah’s team packed the virus inside a type of human stem cell which, unlike some previous vehicles, is amenable to carrying modified viruses and doesn’t trigger a significant immune response. The team’s second trick: They wrapped the herpes-loaded stem cells inside a biocompatible gel to help keep the virus in place and attacking tumor cells for a longer period of time. According to the team, mice treated in this way had significantly improved survival.
The victories come more than half a century after work on cancer-fighting viruses (known in the field as oncolytic virotherapy) began in earnest in the 1950s, when scientists began attempting to engineer the evolution of viruses to make them more effective at fighting specific types of cancer. But that initial surge of research mostly fizzled, resulting in little success, and other promising areas of cancer treatment lured researchers elsewhere.
So what’s behind the recent promising research in cancer-fighting contagions? For Russell at the Mayo Clinic, the difference has been incremental, parallel advancements.
Matt Safford writing in The Next Wave of Cancer Cures Could Come From Nasty Viruses for Smithsonian.
I first heard about the Mayo Clinic results from a colleague at the end of May. I think that efforts such as these are the best of what science does: makes connections between disparate concepts, ideas or bits of Nature and brings them together in unique ways to better existence.
COMMANDMENTS
- Work on one thing at a time until finished.
- Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
- Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
- Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
- When you can’t create you can work.
- Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
- Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
- Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
- Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
- Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
- Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.
From Henry Miller as found at Lists Of Note…
Yesterday I wrote about the front page story in my hometown newspaper that explored recent concerns about the dangers of too much salt in our diets. As I noted, the story was very well written, but the online poll associated with the story stepped over the line in sensationalizing the question by implying that the federal government was about to force Americans put down their salt shakers.
The comment section on the story illustrates precisely what the question writer hoped would result: wrong wing/libertarian rage.
Squidkid–Jun-24-14 8:46 AM: Sodium, salt, is an added ingredient so why are we charged more for a no salt or low salt product?
dolittle–Jun-24-14 10:12 AM: Government–Get out of my house and what I eat. Best take care of the national business. and all that stuff you claim to know nothing about. Like IRS, Vets Hospitals, Fast and Furious, Benguizie, Take care of your business and I will take care of mine.
NasCarNut–Jun-24-14 11:04 AM: The article in the Times today said nothing about being “forced” they used the word “voluntary” 2 different words with 2 very different meanings…
LovesBuckeyes–Jun-24-14 12:57 PM: I want to buy a drink in the size I want, I want high fructose corn syrup in my canned fruit and pie fillings, and if there is high sodium in my packaged food, then I hope I’ll be allowed to READ the label and decide for MYSELF if I want to buy it or not. I am a proponent of free agency and self control!!!
jacsm1217–Jun-24-14 2:53 PM: I hate it when the government has to be involved but companies refuse to make changes and this is what happens. We have too much sugar and salt in our diets already.
The 22 June 2010 Jon Stewart/Josh Gad video (above) nails the point.
Mano Singham (yes, that Mano Singham) explored the topic recently in: The obesity conundrum.
Clearly there’s more money in selling snake oil than there is in actually performing cardiothoracic surgery. Here’s something I didn’t know: Dr. Oz, was born Mehmet Cengiz Öz in Cleveland.
A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the US government’s no-fly list banning people accused of links to terrorism from commercial flights violates their constitutional rights because it gives them no meaningful way to contest that decision.
US District Judge Anna Brown, ruling in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Oregon by 13 Muslim Americans who were branded with the no-fly status, ordered the government to come up with new procedures that allow people on the no-fly list to challenge that designation.
The 13 plaintiffs – four of them veterans of the US military – deny they have links to terrorism and say they only learned of their no-fly status when they arrived at an airport and were blocked from boarding a flight.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought a suit against the policy in 2010, argues that secrecy surrounding the list and lack of any reasonable opportunity for plaintiffs to fight their placement on it violates their clients’ constitutional rights to due process.
From a Reuters story–Federal judge rules no-fly list process is unconstitutional–as reported in The Guardian.
Down. Bromley Kent
Thursday
My dear Sir
I must write to thank you for your last letter; I to tell you how much all your views and facts interest me. I must be allowed to put my own interpretation on what you say of “not being a good arranger of extended views” which is, that you do not indulge in the loose speculations so easily started by every smatterer & wandering collector. I look at a strong tendency to generalize as an entire evil.
What limit shall you take on the Patagonian side – has d’Orbigny published, I believe he made a large collection at the R. Negro, where Patagonia retains its usual forlorn appearance; at Bahia Blanca & northward the features of Patagonia insensibly blend into the savannahs of La Plata. The Botany of S. Patagonia (& I collected every plant in flower at the season when there) would be worth comparison with the N. Patagonian collection by d’Orbigny. I do not know anything about King’s plants, but his birds were so inaccurately habitated, that I have seen specimen from Brazil, Tierra del & the Cape de Verde Isd all said to come from the St. Magellan. What you say of Mr Brown is humiliating; I had suspected it, but cd not allow myself to believe in such heresy. FitzRoy gave him a rap in his Preface, & made me very indignant, but it seems a much harder one wd not have been wasted. My crptogamic collection was sent to Berkeley; it was not large; I do not believe he has yet published an account, but he wrote to me some year ago that he had described & mislaid all his descriptions. Wd it not be well for you to put yourself in communication with him; as otherwise some things will perhaps be twice laboured over. My best (though poor) collection of the Crptogam. was from the Chonos Islands.
Would you kindly observe one little fact for me, whether any species of plant, peculiar to any isld, as Galapagos, St. Helena or New Zealand, where there are no large quadrupeds, have hooked seeds, such hooks as if observed here would be thought with justness to be adapted to catch into wool of animals.
Would you further oblige me some time by informing me (though I forget this will certainly appear in your Antarctic Flora) whether in isld like St. Helena, Galapagos, & New Zealand, the number of families & genera are large compared with the number of species, as happens in coral-isld, & as I believe? in the extreme Arctic land. Certainly this is case with Marine shells in extreme Arctic seas. Do you suppose the fewness of species in proportion to number of large groups in Coral-islets., is owing to the chance of seeds from all orders, getting drifted to such new spots? as I have supposed.
Did you collect sea-shells in Kerguelen land, I shd like to know their character.?
Your interesting letters tempt me to be very unreasonable in asking you questions; but you must not give yourself any trouble about them, for I know how fully & worthily you are employed.
Besides a general interest about the Southern lands, I have been now ever since my return engaged in a very presumptuous work & which I know no one individual who wd not say a very foolish one. I was so struck with distribution of Galapagos organisms &c &c & with the character of the American fossil mammifers, &c &c that I determined to collect blindly every sort of fact, which cd bear any way on what are species. I have read heaps of agricultural & horticultural books, & have never ceased collecting facts – At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a “tendency to progression” “adaptations from the slow willing of animals” &c, – but the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his – though the means of change are wholly so – I think I have found out (here’s presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends. You will now groan, & think to yourself ‘on what a man have I been wasting my time in writing to.’ – I shd, five years ago, have thought so. I fear you will also groan at the length of this letter—excuse me, I did not begin with malice prepense.
Believe me my dear Sir
Very truly your’s
C. Darwin
Charles Darwin writing to Joseph Hooker found in It is like confessing a murder at Letters Of Note.
[This post was originally posted at 1747 on Monday, 23 June.]
A recent survey suggests that Christianity is still the dominant religion in America. More than three-quarters of Americans identify as Christians, but the number of atheists is on the rise. In 2007, 1.6 percent of Americans identified as atheists, but today that number is 2.4 percent. We’ll talk about Americans’ changing beliefs and attitudes towards religion with:
- Mano Singham, Theoretical Physicist at CWRU and atheist
- Joe Puckett, Jr., Minister at Hartville Church
- Peter Haas, Chair of Religious Studies at Case Western Resrve University
- Craig Bauman, President of the University of Akron’s Secular Student Alliance
- Tracey Lind, Reverend at Trinity Episcopal Church
and you.
To interact with the show you may:
There is a live video stream of the show beginning at 0900, but the stream is not archived. You may listen to the discussion live or from the archive.
The story above, which dominates the front page of today’s Marietta Times is straight forward, well written and informative and helpful; two marks to Sam Shawver.
The poll question related to the story—Should the food industry be forced to lower sodium levels?–however, is ill-conceived, misleading and worthless as a measure of response because of the use of the use of the word forced. (I also note that the subhead on Shawver’s story is: Voluntary guidelines of sodium levels considered.)
What is wrong with forced? For those who fear the government is coming to run their lives, you might as well have blown your dog whistle. Consider these alternatives:
These suggestions invite an adult conversation. Forced incites a school-yard donnybrook.
As a magazine editor who conducted a number of annual, national polls, I always spent considerable time agonizing with my staff over the precise wording of each question so that the results would be of maximum use to my readers. I know that for the Marietta Times, the polls are something of an unscientific bit of fun, but still, they should spend a little time considering their word choices.
At 3am on 28 May, Alecia Phonesavanh was asleep in the room she was temporarily occupying together with her husband and four children in the small town of Cornelia, Georgia. Her baby, 18-month-old Bou Bou, was sleeping peacefully in his cot.
Suddenly there was a loud bang and several strangers dressed in black burst into the room. A blinding flash burst out with a deafening roar from the direction of the cot. Amid the confusion, Phonesavanh could see her husband pinned down and handcuffed under one of the men in black, and while her son was being held by another. Everyone was yelling, screaming, crying. “I kept asking the officers to let me have my baby, but they said shut up and sit down,” she said.
As the pandemonium died down, it became clear that the strangers in black were a Swat team of police officers from the local Habersham County force – they had raided the house on the incorrect assumption that occupants were involved in drugs. It also became clear to Phonesavanh that something had happened to Bou Bou and that the officers had taken him away.
“They told me that they had taken my baby to the hospital. They said he was fine he had only lost a tooth, but they wanted him in for observation,” Phonesavanh said.
When she got to the hospital she was horrified by what she saw. Bou Bou was in a medically-induced coma in the intensive care unit of Brady Memorial hospital. “His face was blown open. He had a hole in his chest that left his rib-cage visible.”
The Swat team that burst into the Phonesavanh’s room looking for a drug dealer had deployed a tactic commonly used by the US military in warzones, and increasingly by domestic police forces across the US. They threw an explosive device called a flashbang that is designed to distract and temporarily blind suspects to allow officers to overpower and detain them. The device had landed in Bou Bou’s cot and detonated in the baby’s face.
“My son is clinging to life. He’s hurting and there’s nothing I can do to help him,” Phonesavanh said. “It breaks you, it breaks your spirit.”
Bou Bou is not alone. A growing number of innocent people, many of them children and a high proportion African American, are becoming caught up in violent law enforcement raids that are part of an ongoing trend in America towards paramilitary policing.
The American Civil Liberties Union has released the results of its new survey into the use of Swat teams by police forces across the country. It concludes that policing has become dangerously and unnecessarily militarized, literally so with equipment and strategies being imported directly from the US army.
Ed Pilkington writing in US police departments are increasingly militarised, finds report for The Guardian.
I experienced martial law up close and personal in Ferdinand Marcos’ Philippines during the ’70s. No. We’re not that bad. Yet. This year my home town of Marietta, Ohio, purchased, with help from the federal government, not one, but two armored personnel carriers. When Washington County, Ohio has the money to waste on these war toys, the situation is indeed out of hand.
Local News
Hold the salt
2nd teen accused of home burglary pleads guilty
Charge to use stadium discussed
Wolf Creek shares fairly positive roof results
Fort Frye addresses behavior and bullyingTop Headlines Poll: Should the food industry be forced to lower sodium levels?
Useless Tips For Anglers:
- Be sure the carburettor and spark-plugs are cleaned before reassembly.
- Make sure that the shelf is at right-angles to the fixing-joint (use Rawlplug ‘cavity fixing screws’)
- Always check the bill for service charge.
- Rods should be about 3 feet long and 6 inches thick, and covered with industrial plasti-laminate (Brit. Standard BS 635429) 1/3-1/2 inch thick including sound-proofing.
- Pike can pass on whooping-cough if you let them breathe over you.
- Carp, bream and guppies usually know a lot of useful phone-numbers, so make sure you extract the maximum information from them before you bang their heads on the stone.
- Never believe trout.
- For landing salmon, a little lipstick and a new hairdo will increase the average angler’s chances no end.
- Angling does not make you blind.
- Taking your boots off when you fish does not encourage the growth of testicles.*
Words of wisdom from Eric Idle as found at Lists Of Note…
*Follow the link you silly goose…
Sting has revealed his children will not inherit his £180m fortune, fearing that his riches are “albatrosses round their necks”.
The former frontman of The Police grew up in a working-class family in Wallsend, North Tyneside, and has gone on to become one of Britain’s wealthiest musicians.
But in an interview with the Mail on Sunday, he said he has told his six children not to expect to inherit much money because he doesn’t believe in trust funds.
He said: “I told them there won’t be much money left because we are spending it. We have a lot of commitments. What comes in we spend, and there isn’t much left. I certainly don’t want to leave them trust funds that are albatrosses round their necks. They have to work. All my kids know that and they rarely ask me for anything, which I really respect and appreciate.”
He also attacked assumptions that his children are bank-rolled by his fortune: “People make assumptions, that they were born with a silver spoon in their mouth, but they have not been given a lot.”
From Sting says his six children will not inherit £180m fortune in The Guardian.
This was still posted at 0837 (so, sometime between 1300 and 1550, the post was pulled after being there for something like 22 hours. Wow.) today, but I expect that after people have their first cup of coffee the hacked message will disappear. Poor Flumpy, I wonder who he pissed off.
And just so you don’t think that this is buried so deep in the website that no one might quickly see the damage:
This morning the phrase All Access has taken on a whole different meaning.
Also, I have no idea what this phrase means or what it might be in reference to (the googles are of no help). Suggestions anyone?
The Learner, who wishes to try the question fairly, whether this little book does, or does not, supply the materials for a most interesting mental recreation, is earnestly advised to adopt the following Rules:
- Begin at the beginning, and do not allow yourself to gratify a mere idle curiosity by dipping into the book, here and there. This would very likely lead to your throwing it aside, with the remark “This is much too hard for me!, and thus losing the chance of adding a very large item to your stock of mental delights. This Rule (of not dipping) is very desirable with other kinds of books—-such as novels, for instance, where you may easily spoil much of the enjoyment you would otherwise get from the story, by dipping into it further on, so that what the author meant to be a pleasant surprise comes to you as a matter of course. Some people, I know, make a practice of looking into Vol. III first, just to see how the story ends: and perhaps it is as well just to know that all ends happily—that the much-persecuted lovers do marry after all, that he is proved to be quite innocent of the murder, that the wicked cousin is completely foiled in his plot and gets the punishment he deserves, and that the rich uncle in India (Qu. Why in India? Ans. Because, somehow, uncles never can get rich anywhere else) dies at exactly the right moment—-before taking the trouble to read Vol. I.
This, I say, is just permissible with a novel, where Vol. III has a meaning, even for those who have not read the earlier part of the story; but, with a scientific book, it is sheer insanity: you will find the latter part hopelessly unintelligible, if you read it before reaching it in regular course.
- Don’t begin any fresh Chapter, or Section, until you are certain that you thoroughly understand the whole book up to that point, and that you have worked, correctly, most if not all of the examples which have been set. So long as you are conscious that all the land you have passed through is absolutely conquered, and that you are leaving no unsolved difficulties behind you, which will be sure to turn up again later on, your triumphal progress will be easy and delightful. Otherwise, you will find your state of puzzlement get worse and worse as you proceed, till you give up the whole thing in utter disgust.
- When you come to any passage you don’t understand, read it again: if you still don’t understand it, read it again: if you fail, even after three readings, very likely your brain is getting a little tired. In that case, put the book away, and take to other occupations, and next day, when you come to it fresh, you will very likely find that it is quite easy.
- If possible, find some genial friend, who will read the book along with you, and will talk over the difficulties with you. Talking is a wonderful smoother-over of difficulties. When I come upon anything—in Logic or in any other hard subject—that entirely puzzles me, I find it a capital plan to talk it over, aloud, even when I am all alone. One can explain things so clearly to one’s self! And then, you know, one is so patient with one’s self: one never gets irritated at one’s own stupidity!
If, dear Reader, you will faithfully observe these Rules, and so give my little book a really fair trail, I promise you, most confidently, that you will find Symbolic Logic to be one of the most, if not the most, fascinating of mental recreations!
[snip]
Mental recreation is a thing that we all of us need for our mental health; and you may get much healthy enjoyment, no doubt, from Games… But, after all, when you have made yourself a first-rate player at any one of these Games, you have nothing real to show for it, as a result! You enjoyed the Game, and the victory, no doubt, at the time: but you have no result that you can treasure up and get real good out of. And, all the while, you have been leaving unexplored a perfect mine of wealth. Once master the machinery of Symbolic Logic, and you have a mental occupation always at hand, of absorbing interest, and one that will be of real use to you in any subject you may take up. It will give you clearness of thought—the ability to see your way through a puzzle—the habit of arranging your ideas in an orderly and get-at-able form—and, more valuable than all, the power to detect fallacies, and to tear to pieces the flimsy illogical arguments, which you will so continually encounter in books, in newspapers, in speeches, and even in sermons, and which so easily delude those who have never taken the trouble to master this fascinating Art. Try it. That is all I ask of you!
Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodson writing in his essay How To Learn found at Brain Pickings.
Local News
Rider course
River Sweep turnout low
Parkersburg man dies of stab wound
Hundreds enjoy garden tour
Former councilman bent on volunteeringTop Headlines Poll: Will you go to watch the fireworks at this year’s Washington County Fair?
What would you do right now if you learned that you were going to die in ten minutes? Would you race upstairs and light that Marlboro you’ve been hiding in your sock drawer since the Ford administration? Would you waltz into your boss’s office and present him with a detailed description of his personal defects? Would you drive out to that steakhouse near the new mall and order a T-bone, medium rare, with an extra side of the really bad cholesterol?
The things we do when we expect our lives to continue are naturally and properly different than the things we might do if we expected them to end abruptly. We go easy on the lard and tobacco, smile dutifully at yet another of our supervisor’s witless jokes, read books like this one when we could be wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub, and we do each of these things in the charitable service of the people we will soon become. We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. Rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves, squirreling away portions of our paychecks each month so they can enjoy their retirements on a putting green, jogging and flossing with some regularity so they can avoid coronaries and gum grafts, enduring dirty diapers and mind-numbing repetitions of The Cat in the Hat so that someday they will have fat-cheeked grandchildren to bounce on their laps. Even plunking down a dollar at the convenience store is an act of charity intended to ensure that the person we are about to become will enjoy the Twinkie we are paying for now. In fact, just about any time we want something – a promotion, a marriage, an automobile, a cheeseburger – we are expecting that if we get it, then the person who has our fingerprints a second, minute, day, or decade from now will enjoy the world they inherit from us, honoring our sacrifices as they reap the harvest of our shrewd investment decisions and dietary forbearance.
[But] our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they’d like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn’t work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan. Even that person who takes a bite of the Twinkie we purchased a few minutes earlier may make a sour face and accuse us of having bought the wrong snack.
Dan Gilbert writing in Stumbling On Happiness found in Brain Pickings.
As at Wardha,
C. P.,
23-7-’39Dear friend,
Friends have been urging me to write to you for the sake of humanity. But I have resisted their request, because of the feeling that any letter from me would be an impertinence. Something tells me that I must not calculate and that I must make my appeal for whatever it may be worth.
It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to a savage state. Must you pay that price for an object however worthy it may appear to you to be? Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success? Any way I anticipate your forgiveness, if I have erred in writing to you.
I remain,
Your sincere friend
M. K. Gandhi
HERR HITLER
BERLIN
GERMANY.Published in Letters Of Note as For the sake of humanity.
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