Classic Sunday Comics

 

Shooting Star

From his perch on the International Space Station, a French astronaut watched a long-running Russian space module break into pieces in a shower of fireworks. What's more, he caught the event on video.

The European Space Agency's Facebook page shows a sped-up timelapse of the module, called Pirs, meeting its fiery demise Monday (July 26) under the watch of Thomas Pesquet.

"Atmospheric reentry without a heat shield results in a nice fireball," Pesquet wrote in the post, which also included a French description. "You clearly see smaller pieces of melting metal floating away and adding to the fireworks."  READ MORE

Video: Watch a spacecraft burn up in Earth's atmosphere from space station
Related: Astronaut watches Russian space station module fall from space in fiery demise (photos)

Sharing Vids

 

Backside of Black Hole

Scientists have finally seen the backside of a black hole and in doing so, they've proved that a 1915 theory posited by Albert Einstein was correct.

Einstein's 1915 Theory of General Relativity predicted that the gravitational pull of black holes is so large that black holes warp the fabric of space, according to The Telegraph. 

His theory posited that this extremely massive gravitational pull was so massive that it twists magnetic fields and bends lightwaves near black holes.

As reported by The Telegraph, a new Nature report proves Einstein's theory correct.

"Fifty years ago, when astrophysicists started speculating about how the magnetic field might behave close to a black hole, they had no idea that one day we might have the techniques to observe this directly and see Einstein's general theory of relativity in action," Standford University professor and research report co-author, Roger Blandford, said.

Einstein's theory stated that because of how black holes warp the space fabric around them, it should be possible to see light waves ejected out of a black hole's backside as the twisted magnetic fields act as a mirror for the black hole. 

This theory was accepted by experts, according to The Telegraph, but it was never technically proven as it was always deemed an unobservable phenomenon.  READ MORE

Plant in Bottle

Living With Cancers & Heart Disease

For the last 13 (almost 14 years) I have been dealing with heart disease from the standpoint of having a heart attack from 3 blocked heart arteries and 5 stents inserted.  Results are that my heart is working normally but I have to be really careful with what I am eating and really careful with my physical exertion so as not to overdo it.  I have handicapped liscense plates because I can no longer walk very far without being out-of-breath.

For the last 13 (almost 14 years) I have been dealing with preventing two types of cancers from simultaneously growing in my body and for the first 10 years was not that successful but for the last 3 years have been relatively successful...

During the last 13 years, I have experienced surgery, chemotheraphy, immunotherapy, and radiation.  My treatments have caused me to experience nausea, fatigue, anemia, and a destroyed immune system along with damaging my thyroid.

The treatments that I took to suppress my Lymphoma caused me to contract Melanoma which from the getgo was very aggressive and moved from my foot to my groin to my neck...  however, once it got to my neck and was surgically removed, the cancer cells were all dead.

I get a PET scan or a CT scan every 3 months to see if my cancers are displaying any metabolic activity.  My next scan is this coming Monday or in two days.

Other than having cancers hanging over your head and having to watch what you eat, and how you must dress when out in the sun, I am living a relatively normal life. 

I don't eat red meat except for maybe once or twice a year.  I don't eat fried foods except for maybe once or twice a year.  I stay away from sugar but that is not as easy as it sounds.

I eat veges, chicken, veal, a variety of beans, and fish mainly.  The fish I prefer is Salmon, Cod, and Flounder.

Goodbye Govenor

Young Athlete

 

Political Cartoons

 

Giant Vampire Bat

Desmodus draculae is an extinct species of leaf-nosed bat that inhabited Central and South Americas from the Pleistocene epoch until the early Holocene epoch.

First described in 1988, its fossils are known from Argentina, Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela, Belize, and Bolivia.

Desmodus draculae had a wingspan of up to 50 cm (20 inches) and a body mass of 60 g, making it the largest known vampire bat of all time.

It belongs to the subfamily Desmodontinae (vampire bats), which also includes three extinct and three living species.

“The size of Desmodus draculae was larger than that of a computer keyboard and significantly larger than that of its living relatives,” said Dr. Santiago Brizuela, a paleontologist at the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata and CONICET.

The food source of Desmodus draculae and other vampire bats is blood, a dietary trait called hematophagy.  READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

A Few GIF's

 

Around The World

RegentSeven Seas Cruises' 132-night 2024 world cruise sold out in less than three hours.

Its the third straight year the cruise has broken the company's "opening day booking record."

Bookings for the luxury cruise opened on July 14 at 8:30 a.m. ET.

By about 11 a.m., the cruise had been completely booked.

This is the third year in a row the World Cruise has broken Regent Seven Seas' "world cruise opening day booking record," according to a press release.

Females

 

Dopamine

Neuroscientists show that mice can learn to manipulate random dopamine impulses for reward.

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

Movie Clips

 

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

We are in the process of ending another week...  and, I am looking at the last weekend before the next week begins and I find myself with 4 medical appointments...  a CT scan, fasting blood work, an IVIG infusion, and an Opdivo Infusion...  then, there is another complete week before we leave, two weeks from today, for Myrtle Beach...

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...

Words To The Wize

 

Remote Working Employees

All across the United States, the leaders at large tech companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook are engaged in a delicate dance with thousands of employees who have recently become convinced that physically commuting to an office every day is an empty and unacceptable demand from their employers.

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. 

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

Animals

 

Disk Around Exoplanet

For The First Time, Astronomers Witness a Moon-Forming Disk Around an 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

Think About It...

 

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).

Modeling

 

Brain Cancer and Mitochondria

 
One in Five Brain Cancers Fueled by Overactive Mitochondria

A new study has found that up to 20% of glioblastomas—an aggressive brain cancer—are fueled by overactive mitochondria and may be treatable with drugs currently in clinical trials.

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.