Friday, July 16
Fireflies Sync Their Flashes
“Above that threshold, it is almost perfect synchronization,” with rhythmic, coordinated waves of light, said Sarfati, a postdoctoral associate at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
The spontaneous synchronization of certain species of fireflies, such as Photinus carolinus in the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina and Tennessee, has long baffled humans who observed the peculiar mating ritual, in which blinking males strive to attract the attention of ground-level females.
Early-20th-century scientists dismissed the phenomenon as accidental or blamed it on puffs of wind or the twitching eyelids of the people who made these reports, according to one 1935 review in Science.
In the past 50 years, scientists collected anecdotal observations of these unified flashes but not enough empirical data to truly study firefly synchronization’s mechanisms.
Now, Sarfati and Orit Peleg, a physicist and assistant professor also at the University of Colorado, have filmed the mating hordes of P. carolinus and mapped their flashing patterns in three-dimensional space.
In the past 50 years, scientists collected anecdotal observations of these unified flashes but not enough empirical data to truly study firefly synchronization’s mechanisms.
Now, Sarfati and Orit Peleg, a physicist and assistant professor also at the University of Colorado, have filmed the mating hordes of P. carolinus and mapped their flashing patterns in three-dimensional space.
Their research, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, adds to evidence that the insects sync their flashes, and suggests what may drive that coordination. TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE...
Thursday, July 15
OPDIVO Day
This includes
and esophageal or gastroesophageal junction (GEJ) cancer.
It is used by slow injection into a vein.
The most common side effects include fatigue, rash, musculoskeletal pain, pruritus, diarrhea, nausea, asthenia, cough, dyspnea, constipation, decreased appetite, back pain, arthralgia, upper respiratory tract infection, pyrexia, headache, abdominal pain, and vomiting.
The most common side effects include fatigue, rash, musculoskeletal pain, pruritus, diarrhea, nausea, asthenia, cough, dyspnea, constipation, decreased appetite, back pain, arthralgia, upper respiratory tract infection, pyrexia, headache, abdominal pain, and vomiting.
Nivolumab is a human IgG4 monoclonal antibody that blocks PD-1. It is a type of immunotherapy and works as a checkpoint inhibitor, blocking a signal that prevents activation of T cells from attacking the cancer.
The most common side effects when used in combination with chemotherapy include peripheral neuropathy (damage to the nerves outside of the brain and spinal cord), nausea, fatigue, diarrhea, vomiting, decreased appetite, abdominal pain, constipation and musculoskeletal pain.
Nivolumab was approved for medical use in the United States in 2014. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.
Nivolumab was approved for medical use in the United States in 2014. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.
It is made using Chinese hamster ovary cells.
NOTE: I have had over 40 infusions of Opdivo which includes 12 infusions in conjunction with YERVOY prior to 6 treatments of radiation to combat metastatic melanoma that migrated from my foot to my groin to my neck.
Ongoing treatments are being conducted to keep it suppressed.
Medieval Islamic Tombs
The team used satellite imagery to identify the locations of more than 10,000 monuments in the Kassala region of eastern Sudan. The monuments include tumuli, which are made of stone and are "relatively simple raised structures, widespread throughout African prehistory and history," and "qubbas," which is a term that referred to Islamic tombs and shrines in the pan-Arab world, a team of researchers wrote in a paper published July 7 in the journal PLOS One.
After the team mapped the funerary monuments, they had trouble interpreting the data, given that few of the monuments had been excavated.
"We faced the challenge of interpreting the creation of the funerary landscape with almost no traditional archaeological data, but [we had] a large enough data set to be able to hypothesize the presence of complex processes both at regional and local scale[s]," Stefano
Costanzo, a doctoral student in archaeology at the University of Naples L'Orientale in Italy and lead author of the journal article, told Live Science.
"To the naked eye, it was clear that the clustered tombs were conditioned by the environment, but deeper meaning may have been implied in their spatial arrangement," Costanzo said. He and other members of the team searched for statistical modeling techniques that could help them detect patterns. Ultimately, they decided on a method called the Neyman-Scott cluster process, which was originally developed to study the spatial patterns of stars and galaxies. As far as the team knows, archaeologists have never used the technique.
"The biggest feature of this model lies in the fact that it can deal with archaeological data sets that [lack excavation data and historical records] but are composed of a very large number of elements, which is the basis to meaningful statistical analyses," Costanzo said. TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE...
Quantum Entanglement
Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently of the others, even when the particles are separated by a large distance—instead, a quantum state must be described for the system as a whole.
Measurements of physical properties such as position, momentum, spin, and polarization, performed on entangled particles are found to be appropriately correlated. For example, if a pair of particles are generated in such a way that their total spin is known to be zero, and one particle is found to have clockwise spin on a certain axis, the spin of the other particle, measured on the same axis, will be found to be counterclockwise, as to be expected due to their entanglement. However, this behavior gives rise to paradoxical effects: any measurement of a property of a particle can be seen as acting on that particle (e.g., by collapsing a number of superposed states) and will change the original quantum property by some unknown amount; and in the case of entangled particles, such a measurement will be on the entangled system as a whole. It thus appears that one particle of an entangled pair “knows” what measurement has been performed on the other, and with what outcome, even though there is no known means for such information to be communicated between the particles, which at the time of measurement may be separated by arbitrarily large distances.
up up→|↑〉|↑〉
down down→|↓〉|↓〉
up down→|↑〉|↓〉
down up→|↓〉 |↑〉
Such phenomena were the subject of a 1935 paper by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, and several papers by Erwin Schrödinger shortly thereafter, describing what came to be known as the EPR paradox.
Einstein and others considered such behavior to be impossible, as it violated the local realist view of causality (Einstein referring to it as “spooky action at a distance”) and argued that the accepted formulation of quantum mechanics must therefore be incomplete. Later, however, the counterintuitive predictions of quantum mechanics were verified experimentally.
Experiments have been performed involving measuring the polarization or spin of entangled particles in different directions, which—by producing violations of Bell’s inequality—demonstrate statistically that the local realist view cannot be correct. This has been shown to occur even when the measurements are performed more quickly than light could travel between the sites of measurement: there is no lightspeed or slower influence that can pass between the entangled particles. Recent experiments have measured entangled particles within less than one hundredth of a percent of the travel time of light between them. According to the formalism of quantum theory, the effect of measurement happens instantly.It is not possible, however, to use this effect to transmit classical information at faster-than-light speeds.
Quantum entanglement is an area of extremely active research by the physics community, and its effects have been demonstrated experimentally with photons, neutrinos, electrons, molecules the size of buckyballs, and even small diamonds. Research is also focused on the utilization of entanglement effects in communication and computation.
Wednesday, July 14
IVIG Day
Intravenous immune globulin ("IVIG") is a product made up of antibodies that can be given intravenously (through a vein).
Antibodies are proteins that your body makes to help you fight infections. Each antibody made by your body is slightly different, because it fits like a lock and key to every foreign substance (such as a piece of a virus or bacterium) that gets into your body. Over the course of your life your body makes thousands of different antibodies as you are exposed to different infectious organisms that your body considers to be "foreign."
IVIG is prepared from the blood donated by thousands of people, to make a super-concentrated and very diverse collection of antibodies against many possible infectious organisms your body might encounter.
WHY DO I NEED IVIG?
IVIG is used primarily in two situations.
One reason you might need IVIG is if your body does not make enough antibodies. This is called "humoral immunodeficiency." The IVIG simply provides extra antibodies that your body cannot make on its own. The antibodies usually last for several weeks to months and help your body fight off a large variety of infections. If you are getting IVIG for this reason, you will need to get it on a regular schedule.
A second reason you might need IVIG is if your immune system has started attacking your own body by producing antibodies directed against your own cells. Conditions in which this happens include:
●Destruction of your own blood platelets (known as immune thrombocytopenia [ITP])
●Destruction of your own red blood cells (known as autoimmune hemolytic anemia [AIHA])
●Attack on your nervous system, such as nerves that control your breathing (in Guillain-Barré syndrome) or nerves that control sensation (for example, in chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy [CIDP]) SOURCE: UpToDate Patient Education
I receive monthly infusions of IVIG because my Oncologist fears that my low immunity and anemia from over a decade of cancer treatments that have included: surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and immunotherapy, puts me in a HIGH RISK CATEGORY of contracting other life threatening illnesses.
Today, is the day that I get my monthly infusion. I will arrive at UT Medical Center around 7:00 am and finish around 10:30 am and like always will be receiving premeds to keep from my getting sick. The nurses will access my port on the right side of my upper body.
Of the two and a half hour treatment, I will probably sleep for about 90 minutes due to the premeds... it's weird at first as I feel lightheaded and weak and my legs feel restless... then, my eyes get heavy and the next thing I know I am waking up and there's about 30 minutes left.
A Lurking Cosmic Cloud
Not a galaxy, although it's of a comparable size: A vast cloud of hot, faintly glowing gas, bigger than the Milky Way, in the space between galaxies congregating in a huge cluster.
Scientists believe this cloud may have been unceremoniously stripped from a galaxy in the cluster, the first gas cloud of this kind we've ever seen. Even more surprisingly, it hasn't dissipated, but has remained clumped together for hundreds of millions of years.
This not only tells us something new about the environments inside galaxy clusters, it suggests a new way to explore and understand these colossal structures.
"This is an exciting and also a surprising discovery. It demonstrates that new surprises are always out there in astronomy, as the oldest of the natural sciences," said physicist Ming Sun of the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Galaxy clusters are, as the name suggests, groups of galaxies that are bound together gravitationally. The galaxy cluster where our 'orphan' gas cloud was found is called Abell 1367, or the Leo Cluster, around 300 million light-years away. It contains at least 72 major galaxies, and makes up part of a larger, supercluster complex.
Such environments often have a lot going on, and astronomers like to peer into them to try and figure out how our Universe is connected. In 2017, astronomers using Japan's Subaru Telescope spotted what appeared to be a small, warm cloud in Abell 1367; since its origin was unclear, they went back with more instruments to take a closer look. TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)