MY WRITING JOURNAL

Sunday, March 26

Generating New Brain Neurons

Recently biologists discovered how to generate new neurons in the adult brain. This is an incredible breakthrough that has enormous potential to revolutionize neurodegenerative disease research. By generating genetically-mutated mice with a unique gene that activates dormant neural stem cells, scientists were able to generate new neurons in the brain.

For years, scientists have been searching for ways to promote the growth of new neurons in the brain, especially in individuals with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. This new discovery could lead to new treatments and therapies that could help to restore brain function and improve the quality of life for millions of people around the world.

Leslie Samuel, founder of Interactive Biology, gives some context for the importance of genetic trading between organisms for scientific research, and notes how the loss of nerve cells in the brain is one of the hallmarks of neurodegenerative diseases. The ability to generate new neurons in the adult brain could be a game-changer in the field of neurology.

Leslie’s Thoughts
“Anytime you have a situation where extracts from one organism can have beneficial effects on another organism, especially if that other organism is a human, I think it’s an exciting thing. In my last video I spoke about how certain cordyceps fungi can have anti-cancer effects. But it doesn’t stop there. READ MORE...

Egypt

Morning Reflections

LIFE IS SHORT... or, so it seems. As we get older, each days seems to get shorter, when in reality it just moves by faster, basically because we are busy... and, do not take the time to reflect upon its passing.

At 25 years of age, we look back and wonder what took us so long to get here.
At 40 years of age, we feel that we will probably live another 40 years.
At 50 years of age, we can no longer double our age and begin to wonder if we can accomplish all that we set out to do.
At 60 years of age, our physical body and sometimes our minds begin to betray us, as we experience health issues.
At 70 years of age (67 for some) we see the need to retire unless we are not experiencing any work related issues, then we work as long as we can.
At 80 years of age, we see each additinal year as living on borrowed time, even though some of us will live well into our 90s.

The common theme here is that time passes by quickly but we don't think about it until it is half over... which is probably good because it keeps us from needless worrying.

Wars can end a life early as can illegal drugs, car accidents, and unexpected illnesses. Most of us don't think about that unless it happens to us, a family member, or a close friend. We are oblivious to the fragility of life.

Battle

A Bermuda Triangle of Financial Risks

The economy is headed into a "Bermuda Triangle" of danger, and markets should brace for a crisis that could rival the 2008, according to economist Nouriel Roubini.

In a recent interview on the McKinsey Global Institute's "Forward Thinking" podcast, the top economist warned that the economy was risking another financial crisis as central bankers continue to tighten monetary policy.

Federal Reserve officials raised interest rates another 25 basis-points this week, and have hiked rates 475 basis-points over the last year to control inflation. That marks one of the most aggressive Fed tightening cycles in history, and could place the economy under three different kinds of stress, Roubini warned.

First, high interest rates could easily overtighten the economy into a recession, experts say, which reduces income for households and corporations.

Second, high interest rates means firms are battling higher costs of borrowing and waning liquidity, which weighs on asset prices. Last year, US stocks plunged 20% amid the Fed's rate hikes, with warnings from other market commentators of an even steeper crash in equities this year.

Finally, high interest rates are pressuring the mountain of debt, both private and public, that was amassed during the years of low rates, Roubini said. He pointed to bankrupt "zombies", which include households, corporations, and governments.

"It's got like, a Bermuda Triangle. You have a hit to your income, to your asset values, and then to the burden of financing your liabilities. And then you end up in a situation of distress if you're a highly leveraged household or business firm. And when many of them are having these problems, then you have a systemic household debt crisis like [2008]," he warned.

Roubini, one of the experts who called the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, has repeatedly sounded the alarm for another crisis to strike the US economy. The scenario he envisions combines the worst aspects of 70s-style stagflation with something like the 2008 crisis, with a severe recession, stubborn inflation, and mounting debt levels bludgeoning economic growth. READ MORE...

Strictly Political

Paul Simon

Saturday, March 25

Guess Who

On Being Informed

I watch the news each morning on FOX News... it is always depressing... I used to watch the news on CNN and CBS, but discovered they were not sharing all of the news, just what suited their liberal agendas...

For me, that is called CENSORSHIP

I want to know the news good, bad, or indifferent. I want to know the news whether it supports my political views or not... it is up to me, not network news agency to decide what I should or should not know...

The Liberals say that Black Lives Matter... and, I agree but what about all the other lives? Do they not matter? Only Blacks?

Is this how we want to stay informed?

The Liberals say that ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION is ok, despite what our laws say...

Does this mean that we should just ignore all the laws with which we disagree?

And what of all the UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCS of all this ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION, should we just ignore that as well?

Do we even know what those consequences might entail? Do we really care?

The Liberal say that CHINA is just a friendly competitor and that we should treat this with kindness...

BUT...

our own military says that China might be stronger than us and that they want to TAKE OVER THE WORLD...

Who do we believe?

Who cares if China takes over the world?

China just might be a better GLOBAL LEADER than the USA?

You never thought of that, did you?

Is is because you are not INFORMED?

Our US Constitution and The Bill of Rights, provides us with the FIRST AMENDMENT... which is bascially FREEDOM OF SPEECH.... that freedom entails knowing both sides of what is going on in the world today... which means, we should know the LIBERAL SIDE as well as the CONSERVATIVE... if one side is censored, then we are NOT INFORMED...

How ignorant do you want to be for the rest of your life?

A Second Big Bang

Dark matter, represented as blue light in this Hubble Telescope image of galaxy cluster Cl0024+1654, may have exploded into the universe one month after the Big Bang, new research suggests. (Image credit: European Space Agency, NASA and Jean-Paul Kneib (Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées, France/Caltech, USA))

The Big Bang may have been accompanied by a shadow, "Dark" Big Bang that flooded our cosmos with mysterious dark matter, cosmologists have proposed in a new study. And we may be able to see the evidence for that event by studying ripples in the fabric of space-time.

After the Big Bang, most cosmologists think, the universe underwent a period of rapid, remarkable expansion in its earliest moments, known as inflation. Nobody knows what triggered inflation, but it’s necessary to explain a variety of observations, like the extreme geometrical flatness of the universe at large scales.

Inflation was presumably driven by some exotic quantum field, which is a fundamental entity that soaks all of spacetime. At the end of inflation, that field decayed into a shower of particles and radiation, triggering the "Hot Big Bang" that physicists commonly associate with the beginning of the universe. Those particles would go on to coalesce into the first atoms when the cosmos was around 12 minutes old and — hundreds of millions of years later — begin clumping into stars and galaxies. READ MORE...

Honesty

Negative Mind

Budget Thinking

Yesterday, I mowed my lawn for the first time in 2023... last year, the first mowing was in April... as soon as you mow for the first time, it is once a week until October... or about 6/7 months... sometimes, the grass stops growing by the end of September and sometimes, it grows for another month.

My gas can is 5 gallons and it lasts about 3 tanks so I will fill it up about 8-10 times. At $3/gallon, I will spend $150 mowing the lawn this spring-summer-fall.

While that may not seem like much money, for some people it is a lot of money. It takes about an hour to mow and another hour to weed eat. So, 26 weeks times 2 hours is a total of 52 hours spent on lawn maintenance. If I paid myself $10/hour, I would spend another $500 and if I paid myself $20/hour, it would be $1,000+/-...

By thinking this through, I am able to prepare a budget that will incorporate lawn maintenance and gasoline... Do I use the cost of labor or just the supplies?

I ask this because the two hours that I spend working on lawn maintenance are two hours that physically impact my body negatively. The riding lawn mower that I use, goes over rippled ground, so I am constantly bouncing up and down which is bad for the disks in my back. When I weed eat, the eater is not long enough for my body and I must bend over just slightly and that puts a strain on my body as well.

My cancer treatments require that I stay out of the sun, so I must wear UV protective clothing, otherwise my skin turns pink and red and I am not sure what other impact it may have on my cancer cells that are trying to grow inside me.

So, several things must be taken into consideration when planning out a budget, just for lawn maintenance. Of course, there is wear and tear on the riding lawn mower and each year of usage, the wear and tear increases just like with the human body. Lawn mower maintenance cost is about $150 each year as well.

Then one must also consider grass seed, straw, fertilizer, and water. Then there again is the labor when using these things as well as the labor watering the grass seed.

I don't rake leaves, I mow them up so I am saving myself some physical exertion there. Many of my neighbors rake up their leaves... not sure why they do that.

When you think about budgets, figure out your total annual cost for something, then prorate it over 12 months... for example, car insurance comes out twice a year, but if you spread it out over 12 months, you will already have that money set aside.

Illusion of Time

Yin Yang

Time Reflections

The explanation of spatial reflections—whether by light or by sound—are pretty intuitive. Electromagnetic radiation in the form of light or sound waves hit a mirror or wall, respectively, and change course.

This allows our eyes to see a reflection or echo of the original input. However, for more than 50 years, scientists have theorized that there’s another kind of reflection in quantum mechanics known as time reflection.

This term might conjure up images of a nuclear-powered DeLorean or a particular police box (that’s bigger on the inside), but that’s not quite what scientists mean by the term.

Instead, time reflections occur when the entire medium in which an electromagnetic wave travels suddenly changes course. This causes a portion of that wave to reverse and its frequency transforms into another one.

Because these time reflections require a uniform variation across an entire electromagnetic field, scientists assumed it would require too much energy to actually observe time reflections in action.

But scientists from the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) in New York City successfully observed time reflections by sending broadband signals into a strip of metal filled with electronic switches that were connected to reservoir capacitors. READ MORE...

American Education

In the 1960s and for the next 20-25 years, American Education was the best in the world. When I say American Education, I am speaking K-12 as well as undergraduate and graduate school. It was rigorous, robust, and came with lots of homework. Sometime between 1985 and 1995, grades K-12 started to suffer as recent college graduates wanted to bring into the classroom, new learning techniques. There was new math and new ways of learning English. Teachers started to rely on teaching aid rather than honing their own teaching skills. Consequently, students got bored.

There was an increased emphasis on going to college and making high grades so you would be accepted. Students started memorizing for the tests without retaining knowedge or remembering what they memorized. Those graduates ended up in college and found that they were not properly prepared. Pressure was placed on the faculty to retain student and not loose revenue so the professors lowered their standards.

In the business world in the 1970s realized their employees did not know basic high school math even though they had graudated. These companies had to spend millions to educate the workforce and consequently passed those costs onto the consumer with high prices.

Businesses also started realizing that college graduates were coming out of college uneducated and instead of putting pressure on the educational institutions, they just started hiring international students who were better prepared academically. Many of these well educated student were Asians and/or from India.

Throughout my 45 year career and while I was mainly in administration, I logged a substantial amount of hours in the classroom teaching both degree seeking and non-degree seeking students. I have noticed over the years a decline in the retention of knowledge, problem solving skills, reading, communications, and presentation skills. I also have noticed that students do not want to drill down on a subject to learn more or learn more than they have to learn for the grade.

THESE LACK OF SKILL IS WHAT THEY ARE BRINGING TO THE MARKETPLACE AS THEY SEARCH FOR EMPLOYMENT...