Saturday, August 7
Dopamine
From the thrill of hearing an ice cream truck approaching to the spikes of pleasure while sipping a fine wine, the neurological messenger known as dopamine has been popularly described as the brain’s “feel good” chemical related to reward and pleasure.
A ubiquitous neurotransmitter that carries signals between brain cells, dopamine, among its many functions, is involved in multiple aspects of cognitive processing.
The chemical messenger has been extensively studied from the perspective of external cues, or “deterministic” signals. Instead, University of California San Diego researchers recently set out to investigate less understood aspects related to spontaneous impulses of dopamine.
Their results, published on July 23, 2021, in the journal Current Biology, have shown that mice can willfully manipulate these random dopamine pulses. READ MORE
Friday, August 6
Life in the Valley
Weather in the Tennessee Valley has been mild this entire week and while the weather has been mild the tiny black bugs have decided to come out and play in droves which forces most of the outside people inside. Earlier this week, it rained and while the sun took a holiday the grass still decided to grow to the point that it needed mowing and after two weeks of not weed eating, I was backed into a corner and had to do that as well...
Crime in the Valley is damn near non-existent although I am sure that there is some kind of crime being committed, I just don't know about it. The police are around but I hardly ever see them and when I do see them, they are trying to hide behind something so that they can catch speeders. But, people in the Valley don't really speed, they just drive a little faster than they should. Besides, isn't it a violation of my rights for the government to tell me how fast I should drive??? Of course, I don't expect you to agree with me.
When I was associated with ITT Technical Institute, the Chair of the Criminal Justice Program there told me that MS-13 was enrolled in CJ Classes in the hopes that they could find better ways to break the law. He could not stop them from enrolling. He also said that all kinds of drugs were being sold in the elementary schools all around Knoxville. I never saw it because I had no reason to be at those schools.
SO... I am sure that crime is going on around me, I just don't see it, and as a result think life is wonderful and great here in the Valley. For me, I have fiber connecting my WIFI so there is plenty of bandwidth and speed to do most anything I want online. I am paying for HULU LIVE so I have most any show I want to watch or record. I have a ROKU device so there are a lot of movies and shows I watch for FREE... My bill is cheaper than what I was paying for CABLE through SPECTRUM...
Life is good in the Valley with good WIFI, movies to watch, and no crime that I can see.
I also have central air and a heat pump so if it were to get either hot or cold, I would stay comfortable inside my home where the mortgage was paid off 15 years ago.
I have plenty of coffee in the mornings and plenty of unsweetened tea in the afternoons and plent of cyrstal light packages to pour into water should I desire a change. People hate change and I hate change as well except for a few things... like what I want to drink or what I want to eat or what I want to wear... However, I don't like my thoughts to change although my ideas are always subject to change... if you can convince me they should be changed. So, my mind is open to change.
Getting old is a BITCH but the irony of life is that EVERYONE OF US is going to eventually get old, and once we get old and our bodies have changed, everyone one of us is going to die as well. Now that's a happy thought, isn't it? But, it's the truth.
Our present day media like CNN, CBS, ABC, and NBC don't like the truth... or, at least they want to censor the truth, so they only tell you part of it, hoping that you will not want to know the rest. But, while the truth will piss you off, it will also set you free.
Death sets you free as well...
AND friends, death and old age is what we all have in common regardless of the color of our skin or the absurdity of our politics.
BLM Accomplished NOTHING
The morning news is always the same ole shit from the day before just reheated a little like leftovers. The immigrants coming into our souther border is out-of-control... There is an increase in violence in many of our major cities... the Democrats want to spend money faster than a daily bowel movement... and, we still cannot decide whether to wear facemasks or not or if students should return to school...
ALL I CAN SAY TO ALL OF THIS IS WTF???
I look back on this last year and the focus that has been given on BLACK LIVES MATTER, tearing down confederate statues, renaming buildings, taking money away from law enforcement, and making the claim that America is a RACIST country and we should be ashamed to live here because of our heritage and past history.
Has the Black Lives Matter movement really changed anything?
I don't believe anything in the black communities has changed at all...
I know nothing has changed in whte communities...
But, isn't it interesting that I say describe life in the USA like that as if it is as normal as can be... white and black communities... how in the world are we supposed to change our racist beliefs if we still continue to live in those two completely different types of communities???
Because of all the media coverage as to how bad the white man is, I am not only offended by the implications of that statement but now I am going to bend over backwards to never have anything to do with BLACK PEOPLE... If I am so bad, let them stay away from me... and, I will stay away from them!!!
Black Lives Matter will always be associated with marches, violence, protests, burning, and looting... IT WILL NEVER BE ASSOCIATED WITH CHANGE...
Remote Working Employees
The COVID-19 pandemic forced these companies to operate with mostly remote workforces for months straight.
And since many of them are based in areas with relatively high vaccination rates, the calls to return to the physical office began to sound over the summer.
But thousands of high-paid workers at these companies aren't having it. Many of them don't want to go back to the office full time, even if they're willing to do so a few days a week.
But thousands of high-paid workers at these companies aren't having it. Many of them don't want to go back to the office full time, even if they're willing to do so a few days a week.
Workers are even pointing to how effective they were when fully remote and using that to question why they have to keep living in the expensive cities where these offices are located. READ MORE
Disk Around Exoplanet
ANDY TOMASWICK, UNIVERSE TODAY 26 JULY 2021
Planetary formation is a complicated, multilayered process. Even with the influx of data on exoplanets, there are still only two known planets that are not yet fully formed.
Known as PDS 70b and PDS 70c, the two planets, which were originally found by the Very Large Telescope, are some of the best objects we have to flesh out our planetary formation models.
And now, one of them has been confirmed to have a moon-forming disk around it. READ MORE
Optical Illusions
We've seen plenty of mind-blogging optical illusions over the years, and it's fair to say we'll always have room for one more. But almost every illusion we see is impressive (the human brain is quite a thing), it's not every day we see one that's also carrying an important message.
Titled They Can Disappear, this illusion by Russian artist Ilja Klemencov was created for the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF), and features the organisation's iconic panda logo (arguably one of the best logos around) – you'll just have to squint to see it.
Spot the panda (Image credit: Ilja Klemencov)
Stare at those zigzag lines for long enough, and you might eventually be able to make out the shape of the Panda. Klemencov's design is an example of an illusion known as the McCollough effect. Discovered in 1965 by Celeste McCollough, the illusion is a "phenomenon of human visual perception in which colourless gratings appear colored contingent on the orientation of the gratings," (thanks, Wikipedia).
Brain Cancer and Mitochondria
One in Five Brain Cancers Fueled by Overactive Mitochondria
Mitochondria are responsible for creating the energy that fuels all cells. Though they are usually less efficient at producing energy in cancer, tumor cells in this newly identified type of glioblastoma rely on the extra energy provided by overactive mitochondria to survive.
The study, by cancer scientists at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, was published in Nature Cancer.
The study also found that drugs that inhibit mitochondria—including a currently available drug and an experimental compound that are being tested in clinical trials—had a powerful anti-tumor effect on human brain cancer cells with overactive mitochondria. (Follow-up, unpublished work found that the same drugs are also active against mitochondrial tumors in glioblastomas growing in mice).
Such drugs are being tested in patients who have a rare gene fusion—previously discovered by the same researchers—that also sends mitochondria into overdrive.
“We can now expand these clinical trials to a much larger group of patients, because we can identify patients with mitochondria-driven tumors, regardless of the underlying genetics,” says Antonio Iavarone, MD, professor of neurology, who led the study with Anna Lasorella, MD, professor of pediatrics. Both are members of Columbia’s Institute for Cancer Genetics.
Study finds four types of brain cancer
The study found that all brain cancers fall into one of four groups, including the mitochondrial subtype.
By classifying brain cancers based on their core biological features, and not just genetic alterations or cell biomarkers, the researchers have gained new insights into what drives each subtype and the prognosis for patients.
“Existing classifications for brain cancer are not informative. They don’t predict outcomes; they don’t tell us which treatments will work best,” Lasorella says.
The importance of an accurate classification system is best illustrated by the example of breast cancer. Breast cancers have very well-defined subtypes that led to the development of therapies that target the key hallmarks, such as estrogen receptors or HER2, that sustain specific subtypes.
“We feel that one of the reasons therapeutic progress in brain cancer has been so slow is because we don't have a good way to classify these tumors,” Iavarone says.
Glioblastoma is the most common—and most lethal—primary brain tumor in adults. Median survival for individuals with glioblastoma is only 15 months.
The new study showed that glioblastoma can be classified in four biological groups. Two of them recapitulate functions active in the normal brain, either stem cells or neurons, respectively. The two other groups include mitochondrial tumors and a group of tumors with multiple metabolic activities (“plurimetabolic”) that are highly resistant to current therapies.
Patients with the mitochondrial tumors had a slightly better prognosis—and lived for a few more months—than patients with the other three types.
“We are excited about the mitochondrial group, because we have drugs for that group in clinical trials already,” Lasorella says, “but the classification now gives us ideas about how to target these other three and we are starting to investigate these more intensely.”
“We’re going beyond one mutation, one drug concept,” she says. “Sometimes it’s possible to get a response that way. But it’s time to target tumors based on the commonalities of their core biology, which can be caused by multiple different genetic combinations.”
Single-cell analyses opens new view of brain cancer
The new findings were only possible by utilizing recent advances in single-cell analyses, which allowed the scientists to understand—cell by cell—the biological activity of thousands of cells from a single tumor.
Overall, the scientists characterized the biological properties of 17,367 individual cells from 36 different tumors.
In addition to analyzing each cell’s genetic mutations and levels of gene activity, the researchers looked at other modifications made to the cells’ genomes and the proteins and noncoding RNAs made by each cell.
Using the data, the researchers devised a computational approach to identify core biological processes, or pathways, in the cells rather than the more common approach of identifying gene signatures. “In this way, we can classify each individual tumor cell based on the real biology that sustains them,” Iavarone says.
Most tumors, the researchers found, were dominated by cells from one of the four subtypes, with a smattering of cells from the other three.
Applying same techniques to other cancers
Lasorella and Iavarone are now applying the same techniques to multiple different aggressive cancers.
This “pan-cancer” approach, they say, should identify commonalities among different types of cancer regardless of the tumor’s origin. If such common pathways exist, drugs that treat mitochondrial brain cancer may also be able to treat mitochondrial types of lung cancer, for example.
“When we classify based on the cell’s core biological activities, which all cells rely on to survive and thrive, we may find that cancers share more in common than was previously apparent by just looking at their genes,” Lasorella says.
Thursday, August 5
Has Black Lives Matter Made A Difference?
Crime and Violence in many of the larger cities throughout the USA has increased becasue there are less law enforcement personnel to monitor and/or patrol local neighborhoods. Law Enforcement Personnel are apprehensive about getting into an altercation while a crime is being committed for fear of being sued later by the victim(s) or by the perp(s)... consequently, law enforcement has lost much of its influence.
Law Enforcement is also apprehensive about arresting people who commit crimes for fear that they will not be prosecuted by the Attorney General's office so there is no need to go through all the trouble and all the paperwork that is associated with arrests.
For example, if a criminal steals less than $950 in NYC, they will not be prosecuted by the criminal justice system. So, instead of arresting, law enforcement just stands by and watches in case someone is inadvertantly hurt.
If Black Lives Matter set all of this into motion, they hurt themselves and their communities worse than they hurt the white race which they hate. Defunding the police is not going to lessen their hatred of the white race, it is just going to temporarily pacify a small group of people.
Once store owners realize that law enforcement is no longer going to protect them or their personal property, they will relocate their store to another city or perhaps even leave the State. This loss of revenue for the city will result in offering fewer services or an increase in taxes or both... In the long run that will hurt the city's growth prospects.
The Black Lives Matter Movement got a few statues taken down that all of a sudden reminded them of slavery. Most of the white people didn't give a rat's ass whether those statues were there or not there. So, the impact on the minds of the whites was minimal other than increasing the separation between the races that already existed and was pretty strong on both sides.
History will record these last 12 months as pretty silly and full of nonsense as it evaluates the pros and cons of American economic growth and culture. History will record that not only was this period rather worthless but on the whole, crime increased, drugs increased, and prosecutions decreased... but there was no substantial changes in the racial structure of America...
WHO WON ANYTHING???
Our Government Does Not Care
HOWEVER...
I am totally opposed to the GOVERNMENT CONTROLLING my life in the form of:
- higher taxes
- Vaccination passports
- Allowing abortions
- Defunding police
- Teaching CRT to children
- Perpetuating racism
- Changing history
- Censorsoring speech
- Double standards
- Increasing national debt
- Not retaliating against China
- Reducing military budget
- Increasing social welfare
Our Federal Government SHOULD NOT control our lives like is currently being attempted...
Our Federal Government no longer wants the USA to lead the world in anything...
Our Federal Government does not care that our education system is ranked 14th in the world...
Our Federal Government does not care that CHINA has a larger military: army, navy, and air force than the USA...
Our Federal Government does not care about all the illegal immigrants that are coming across the border with COVID and drugs...
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