Science Ain't So Bad

STELLATE CELL ACTIVATION (Hey! I needed a picture.)

Oncology: Pancreatic Cancer. Head/Neck Cancer

What’s your favorite cancer?

I bet it isn’t pancreatic cancer.

The request queue for cancer’s pretty short. But the least popular members of this rather unpopular group of diseases may be things like the oral cancers (head and neck), pancreatic, and lung cancer. Course I haven’t taken a survey, and I bet there’re plenty of others that aren’t big favorites either. But if you DO have the bad luck to have a tumor, you want it to be at an early stage and easy to get at.

The pancreas, when it goes bad, doesn’t send off early warnings and it isn’t easy to get at. Aesthetics aside, things would probably work out much better with the pancreas if it were located on your ear. Signs of disease would be easier to spot early and snipping off the bad thing would be an outpatient procedure.

CANCER BOMBLETS

Well Mark Howard (University of Kent, School of Bioscience) hasn’t figured out a way to rotate your pancreas to your ear but he seems to be onto something equally (some would say more) exciting than a pancreas hanging off of your right ear:  cancer bullets.

Dr. Howard’s “thing” is the shape of certain amino acids (peptides). He was able to figure out how to optimize their ability to lock onto (bind with) cancer cells. Hook the amino acids to the right drugs, and you have a delivery system,  a “cancer bullet”.

DOES IT WORK?

You WOULD ask!

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad’s beat is science and Mark Howard is, in every sense, a scientist. But this is early in the process. It’s a remarkable accomplishment and he gets himself a ScienceAintSoBadRating of 10 which, while not a Nobel Prize, isn’t pigeon crap, either.  But that doesn’t mean this’ll permanently eradicate cancers. And, if it does, it remains to be seen if it will work for everyone. Those studies haven’t been done yet.

ScienceAintSoBadFingers are crossed.

REFRESHED

CANONIZING AN ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEM

Several cities are toying with changing their names to Google to see if that’ll land ‘em ultrafast Internet.

Bejing, the Capital of China isn’t one of them.

But its good name IS being sullied by big piles of smelly garbage. Bejingers toss  out roughly 18,000 tons of garbage each day.

It’s out of space for garbage.

The 17 million neo-capitalists there are putting out 7,000 tons a day more than the dumps.. uh, ‘scuse moi!, .. the landfills can accommodate. It will be about 30,000 years before their garabage covers the whole land area of the earth, so we’re most worried about those of you who live nearby. Specially if you breathe.

One of the dump.. uh.. landfills is so bad that the social minded people of that area have, supposedly, taken to walking around holding each OTHERS noses.

Anyway, the government’s gonna do something about it.

CANNONS

According to Discover, they’re deploying a hundred specialized cannons to the site and the specialized cannons will be shooting out specialized deodorant which will, according to theory, mask, disguise, confound, and hide the odors from the landfill.

MISTER ScienceAin’tSoBad believes that this is science at its best. Creative, bold, AND public spirited. Sadly, the experts, say the leaders are a bunch of schmucks and that this little trick won’t work.

Oh well..

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 1

Shh!

SEARCH FOR INTELLIGENCE: An Agreement

THEM

Hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy. Hundreds of billions of galaxies.  Lots of stars and lots of planets.

Lots .

How many restless alien souls are looking this way, wondering what’s over here?

US

Meanwhile, we’re looking for planets; we’re listening to signals; and we’re trying to figure out how to tell  if a planet has life on it from a long, long distance away.

If we keep at it long enough, won’t we come up with something?

IMAGINE

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad knows it’s been a while since we started “the search” (in the 1980′s).  One of our first readers, BlaseBoy14 says: “If it were out there, we’d a heard by now.  If it was gonna happen, it woulda happened.”

Well, yeah, MISTER ScienceAintSoBad‘ll fall of his chair about the same time you do if we do hear from the pickle brains in the Andromeda Cluster. But stay with me here.  You knew the Red Sox would never win the World Series, didn’t you? You knew an African American would never become President of the United States, right? And you knew those electronic book things would never catch on and replace real books. So let’s SAY you’re wrong this time. Let’s just SAY we get “pinged”. What do we do?

“We’re HERE! We’re HERE! We’re HERE! Whoopee! Oh BOY!

Right?

No reason not. They’re gonna be too far away to hurt us. Plus they’ll be wise and kindly.  Maybe they’ll tell us how to end wars.

Nuh uh.  We have an agreement. I’m sure you never heard about this, but there’s to be NO talkin’. At least not till we’ve checked around with all concerned parties (which would be, more-or-less, the occupants of this particular rock).

A paper by Michael Michaud, written back in 1991, talks about what’s to be done before answering a signal received from ANY non-Earthians but, basically, it consists of some careful checking around to make sure us Earthians are on the same page about accepting the tiny risk that off-Earthers we’re chatting with, turn out to be the North Koreans of Andromeda.

THE COST OF LOOKING

ROAD SIGN (NEVADA)

Then there this:

We’re wasting money looking for intelligent life “out there” when we should be spending it on our own people right here on earth. At 10 billion dollars a month, this stupid diversion of funds is more expensive than a major war. And what good is it? How’s it going to help us to hear the a-m-a-z-i-n-g opinions of some slithery space creatures? I say close down the programs and concentrate on poverty in this country.  - Proud2BeLiberal14

Aw Proud. You should be ashamed.  Here’s the cost of war . And, anyway, your numbers are all wrong. Searching for intelligent signals is cheap, cheap, cheap and the funding is private.

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science ain’t so bad’s t-shirts and mug’s and such

EVIL METER

GOOGLE’S NEW INDICATOR

Have you been watching the ins and outs, ups and downs, backs and forths of Google/China?

If you have, you know that Google’s modest experiment in self-censorship’s resulted in a sour magnesium taste for the “Do no harm” guys who don’t like all the ropes ‘n chains ‘n blindfolds that seem to be the cost of doing business in China. So they said – I think the word was..  tryin’ to think here.. I think it was “NO“.

Unless China took the gag off.

And China, always, nimble in these kinds of negotations said “Uh.. Jeez. But we ALWAYS censor.” And stuck to its idiotic guns.

Without an acceptable response from China, Google’s decided to move its operations to Hong Kong where it’ll get itself out of the censoring business and back to the search business. And the map business. And the phone business. And.. well.. like that.

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad has no standing here since this is politics. But just in case you want my opinion? I think the huge, powerful, fast growing nation of China will lose and the funny li’l guys with the search engine’ll win.

But it’ll take awhile.

Anyway, now that Google, itself, isn’t censoring (with some temporary exceptions till contracts expire), Google felt it would be useful for its readers to have a visual indicator of how much censoring is being done by the Chinese authorities. So they developed a nice “status page”, called by some, its “Evil Meter”

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 10 (for Google)

ScienceAintSoBadRating = -1 for China

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No More Colorblind Monkeys

Ophthalmology: Colorblindness

MONOCHROME WORLD

You always wondered, didn’t you? What’s it like to be colorblind? That word – blind. Very dark and murky. But, if you’re colorblind, it’s colors you can’t see. It’s not like yer gonna wump into a wall or anything.

So is it such a bad thing?

The answer’s kinda yes and kinda no.

Some people are only a LITTLE color blind. They see a lot of colors. But not all of them. And some people (with monochromasy) are flat out colorless – like a “black and white” movie. Just black, white, and a bunch of grays.

Minochromasy isn’t common. But if you’ve got it, I wouldn’t plan a career around painting or photography or even police work (“Watch  for a guy wearing a blue cardigan”). And try not to take stuff like “Those SOCKS! What’re you, colorblind?” to heart.

Whether it’s a disability or just a disadvantage, it is one a those imperfections that makes life richer (one might even say, more colorful) if, sometimes, a little tougher.

A CURE

So. Guess what Jay Neitz (University of Washingon) just cured?

You’re GOOD!

That’s right. Fixed it right up. In monkeys. (Which, at least in your case, isn’t SO far removed.) And he seems optimistic that homo sapiens isn’t too far down this path as well as other vision disorders.

Good one, Dr Neitz.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 9