PLIF Surgery

 

Posterior Lumbar Interwoven Fusion or PLIF...  is the surgery that I will be having in July to fuse together L2, L3, L4, L5, & S1...  it is a total of 4 fusions...

• L2 with L3
• L3 with L4
• L4 with L5
• L5 with S1

I would say that the photo on the right is a close approximation of what will be happening to my lower back...

There will be 2 screws on either side that will be connected to two rods to keep the vertebrae separated even though they will be fused together.

PLIF surgery is being performed because my age has caused my vertebrae to expand and the opening for the nerve to pass through is being pinched causing me not to be able to walk but more importantly is putting me in pain as well as preventing me from having the strength to walk up a flight of steps to either go down to our basement or down to our outside deck. 

Standing in one place for more than a minute or two is also a problem.  I have to sit down several times when cooking meals at the stove.

The surgery will take 4-6 hours, with recovery being 4-6 weeks (6 months for 100% recovery), and the first couple of days, I will be given meds for the pain that I am expected to have.  I will remain in the hospital for 1-2 nights depending on my immediate recovery process.

If I don't have this surgery now I could possibly end up in a wheelchair in a few years...  so, it is a no-brainer choice for me.

The Eyes

Secret Hidden Images

Windows and mirrors embedded with liquid crystals can hide images that appear only when the right kind of light is shined on them. The technique, inspired by a 4000-year-old trick for building “magic mirrors”, may be a step towards developing better displays for 3D images.

A magic mirror or window looks transparent until a light is shined onto it to reveal a secret image. Craftspeople in ancient China and Japan made magic mirrors out of bronze that similarly hid images, but physicists only began to understand how they work around 15 years ago.


Felix Hufnagel at the University of Ottawa in Canada and his colleagues used those insights to build a new type of magic mirror and window. Their versions contain a state of matter known as a liquid crystal. While liquids flow freely and crystal atoms are organised in stiff grids, liquid crystals split the difference: their molecules are both fluid and arranged in patterns.  READ MORE...

Classic Sunday Morning Newspaper Cartoons

 

Being Sleep Deprived

Scientists continue to discover ways in which a lack of sleep affects our mental and physical health – now a new study reveals that a serious lack of shut-eye can even influence the way we see other people.

When we've gone without sleep, we spend less time fixing our gaze on other people's faces, the study shows. As that's a crucial part of reading social cues from those around us, our relationships could potentially suffer.

What's more, after sleep loss, angry faces appear to us to be less trustworthy and less healthy, while neutral or fearful faces come across as less attractive, compared to when we've had a full night's sleep.

"Since facial expressions are crucial to understanding the emotional state of others, spending less time fixating on faces after acute sleep loss may increase the risk that you interpret the emotional state of others inaccurately or too late," says sleep researcher Lieve van Egmond from Uppsala University in Sweden.

The study authors recruited 45 participants who went through a night without sleep, and another with 8 hours of slumber, separated by at least a week. In each case, eye-tracking sensors were used the morning after to monitor the gaze of the subjects as they looked at images of faces.

A mix of expressions were shown on the faces: happy, angry, fearful, and neutral. Participants were also asked to rate the attractiveness, trustworthiness and healthiness of the faces they saw.  READ MORE...

Heading Home

 

Drones Planting Trees

Combating climate change and biodiversity loss is a complicated matter, causing prolonged and perhaps tedious conversations. But what if there was a cooler way to achieve all that?

Enter Australian start-up AirSeed Technology and their swarms of seed-firing drones that are planting 40,000 trees a day to fight deforestation. The company and its incredible technology were featured Wednesday on Euro Green News.

What does this unique innovation look like?
The novel technology combines artificial intelligence with specially designed proprietary seed pods that can be fired into the ground from high in the sky. The firm claims that it performs 25 times faster and 80 percent cheaper compared to traditional seed-planting methodologies.

How do these seed pods work?

According to the firm's website, the "patented seed pods are a low cost, low-impact solution to reforesting native species and provide several supplementary nutrients, minerals, and other additions, all of which are necessary for developing seedlings but may not be available in abundance in the soil at a planting location."  READ MORE...

Flipbook

 

Russia's BIG BLUNDER

 

Vladamir Putin has got to be seen by the rest of the world as not just a BULLY but an incompetent warrior in the truest sense of the word...  

and, it is not just Putin that is seen as a clown bully, but his army has not been able to accomplish most of its militaristic goals...  

and, the Russian people have been lied to as they have been told that the Russian army is fighting NAZIs...  

how stupid can a population become?  

If the government controls the media, then the government conveys to its people only that which they want the people to know and believe.

What amazes me more than Russia's inability to conquer Ukraine, is China's continued desire to partner with Russia in their conquest to RULE THE WORLD...  That does not say much for China's decision-making ability...  now, does it?

It is time for the USA to start kicking some butt.

Babies

 

Altered Face

Humans Apex Predators

Paleolithic cuisine was anything but lean and green, according to a 2021 study on the diets of our Pleistocene ancestors. For a good 2 million years, Homo sapiens and their ancestors ditched the salad and dined heavily on meat, putting them at the top of the food chain.

It's not quite the balanced diet of berries, grains, and steak we might picture when we think of 'paleo' food. But according to anthropologists from Israel's Tel Aviv University and the University of Minho in Portugal, modern hunter-gatherers have given us the wrong impression of what we once ate.

"This comparison is futile, however, because 2 million years ago hunter-gatherer societies could hunt and consume elephants and other large animals – while today's hunter gatherers do not have access to such bounty," said Miki Ben‐Dor from Israel's Tel Aviv University in April last year.

A look through hundreds of previous studies on everything from modern human anatomy and physiology to measures of the isotopes inside ancient human bones and teeth suggests we were primarily apex predators until roughly 12,000 years ago.

Reconstructing the grocery list of hominids who lived as far back as 2.5 million years ago is made all that much more difficult by the fact plant remains don't preserve as easily as animal bones, teeth, and shells.

Other studies have used chemical analysis of bones and tooth enamel to find localized examples of diets heavy in plant material. But extrapolating this to humanity as a whole isn't so straight-forward.  READ MORE...

Rainbow

 

Cancer Drug Toxicity

3D rendition of T cells attacking cancer cells. Credit: La Jolla Institute for Immunology

Researchers uncover a new strategy to avoid cancer immunotherapy side effects.  It’s not often that a failed clinical trial leads to a scientific breakthrough.


When patients in the UK started experiencing negative side effects during a cancer immunotherapy trial, researchers at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) Center for Cancer Immunotherapy and University of Liverpool went back, examined the data, and worked with patient samples to determine what went wrong.


Their findings, published today (May 4, 2022) in the journal Nature, provide critical clues to why many immunotherapies trigger dangerous side effects—and point to a more effective strategy for treating patients with solid tumors.

“This work shows the importance of learning from early stage clinical trials,” says La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) Professor Pandurangan Vijayanand, M.D., Ph.D., who co-led the new research with Christian H. Ottensmeier, M.D., Ph.D., FRCP, a professor with the University of Liverpool, The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre NHS Foundation Trust, and adjunct professor at LJI.  READ MORE...

Flying By

 

Sugar Beneath the Ocean

Many coastal areas around the world are home to lush green meadows — all thanks to seagrasses.

As the only flowering plants growing in marine environments, these meadows are magic: One square kilometer of seagrass stores nearly twice as much carbon as land-based forests, and it does so 35 times faster. This makes seagrasses one of the most efficient global sinks of carbon dioxide on Earth.

And this isn't the only remarkable thing about them, a new study has revealed. Submerged beneath the waves, seagrass ecosystems hold colossal reserves of sugar we never knew existed before, with roughly 32 billion cans of Coca-Cola's worth of sweet stuff hiding in the seabed.

Naturally, this holds major implications for mitigating climate change and carbon storage.

Sweet, sweet seagrass
Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, reported in a study published in the journal Nature Eco­logy & Evol­u­tion that seagrasses release colossal amounts of sugar into their soils, which is also known as the rhizosphere. Under the seagrass, sugar concentrations were unexpectedly at least 80 times higher than previously measured in marine environments.  READ MORE...

Waterfall

Birds

Grave For Men Holds Woman

Scientists tested the ancient DNA of 14 people interred at the monumental cemetery at

Li: Pascal Radigue; CC BY 4.0)

ve

The mysterious 6,500-year-old burial of a woman and several arrowheads in northern France may reveal details of how women were regarded in that society during the Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, a new study finds.


The researchers investigated giant graves known as "long barrows" — large earthen mounds, often hundreds of feet long and sometimes retained by wooden palisades that have since rotted away. Of the 19 human burials in the Neolithic cemetery at Fleury-sur-Orne in Normandy, the team analyzed the DNA of 14 individuals; but only one was female.


The woman was buried with "symbolically male" arrows in her grave, and the researchers argue that she may have had to be regarded as "symbolically male" to be buried there.

"We believe that these male-gendered artefacts place her beyond her biological sexual identity," said study lead author Maïté Rivollat, an archaeologist and geneticist at the University of Bordeaux. "This implies that the embodiment of the male sex in death was necessary for her to gain access to burial in these giga Dntic structures."

Archaeologists attribute the barrows at Fleury-sur-Orne to the Neolithic Cerny culture. Several other Cerny cemeteries have been found hundreds of miles away in the Paris Basin region to the southeast, but Fleury-sur-Orne is the largest yet found in Normandy.  READ MORE...

Dog at Ocean

 

Giant Claw Marks on Mars

While it still has plenty of mysteries for us to solve, Mars is becoming clearer to us every day, thanks to the dozen functioning robots we currently have either on the red planet's surface or in its orbit.

In this latest release from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express orbiter, a unique feature of Mars's geology is shown with breathtaking detail.

Looking like giant scratches across the planet's surface, these grooves are part of a giant fault system on Mars known as Tantalus Fossae.

Aside from the detail in the image, what's really gobsmacking is the scale we're looking at – these troughs are up to 350 meters (1,148 feet) deep and 10 kilometers wide (6.2 miles) and can stretch for up to 1,000 kilometers.

The image is true color, which means it represents what humans would see if they were looking at the region with their own eyes.

It's not technically a 'photo'; the image was generated from a digital terrain model of Mars and using the color channels of the High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA's Mars Express – but it presents an incredibly clear view of the vast area.  READ MORE...

Dog Musician

 

Restore Hearing

According to a new study, scientists have uncovered a single master gene that programs ear hair 

cells into either outer or inner ones, overcoming a major hurdle that had prevented the 

development of these cells to restore hearing.

‘We have overcome a major hurdle’ to restore hearing, investigators say.

• Gene discovery allows the production of inner or outer ear hair cells 
• Death of outer hair cells due to aging or noise cause most hearing loss 
• Master gene switch turns on ear hair cell development

Hearing loss caused by aging, noise, and some cancer therapy medications and antibiotics has been irreversible because scientists have not been able to reprogram existing cells to develop into the outer and inner ear sensory cells — essential for hearing — once they die.

But Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered a single master gene that programs ear hair cells into either outer or inner ones, overcoming a major hurdle that had previously prevented the development of these cells to restore hearing, according to new research published today (May 4, 2022) in the journal Nature.

“Our finding gives us the first clear cell switch to make one type versus the other,” said lead study author Jaime García-Añoveros, PhD, professor of Anesthesiology and Neuroscience and in the Ken and Ruth Davee Department of Neurology. “It will provide a previously unavailable tool to make an inner or outer hair cell. We have overcome a major hurdle.”

About 8.5% of adults aged 55 to 64 in the U.S. have disabling hearing loss. That increases to nearly 25% of those aged 65 to 74 and 50% of those who are 75 and older, reports the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).  READ MORE...

Twirling Sheet

Basic Economics - Opportunity Costs (Trade Offs)

What are opportunity costs?

Opportunity costs are those costs that are associated with a gain or a loss of revenue or income as a result of the choices you make.

For example:  going to college or not going to college

Let's look at not going to college first    

You are 18 years old and will be earning $24,000 annually and after 10 years your wages increase by $500/year.  After 20 they increase by $1,000.  After 30 they increase by $1,500.  After 40 they increase by $2,000

18-28 =  $240,000 first 10 years
28-38 =  $245,000 second 10 years
38-48 =  $345,000 third 10 years
48-58 =  $360,000 fourth 10 years
58-68 = $600,000 fifth 10 years (at 68 you retire)
             $1,790,000  Total lifetime earnings (+/-)

Let's Look at going to college

You are 24 years old and your first job earns you $50,000/year because you have a Masters's Degree.  After 10 years you receive a $1,000/year increase.  After 20 years you receive a $1,500/year increase.  After 30 years you receive a $2,000/year increase.

18-24 =  ($200,000) college loan plus 6 years of lost wages ($144,000) or ($344,000)

24-34 =  $500,000 first 10 years

34-44 =  $600,000 second 10 years

44-54 =  $750,000 third 10 years

54-64 =  $990,000 fourth 10 years (you retire at 64)

              $2, 840,000  Sub-Total lifetime earnings (+/-)

                   ($300,000) Tuition Loan plus interest

                   ($144,000)  Lost wages while in college

                   ($444,000)  Opportunity cost

              $2, 396,000

A college graduate with a Masters's Degree will earn (on average) $600,000 more than someone who decided not to go to college.  However, this amount is cut in half if a college graduate stops after receiving just their Bachelor's degree.  This means there is another opportunity cost of not going to college for 2 more years.

The difference between going to college and not going to college can be offset again by finding different ways to invest one's excess monies whether it be in the Stock Market or in Real Estate.  Many people who do not go to college end up receiving trade skills either by investing their own money or by finding employers who will give them the money or train them on the job.  Many of these people end up investing in real estate because they can provide the labor themselves.

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