A Cure For Type 1 Diabetes?
Vanquished!
Diabetes: cure.
INSULIN PRODUCING BETA CELLS PROTECTED IN FOUR YEAR STUDY
Let’s see what’s new.
Ah. Here’s a study from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation about a cure for diabetes.
Now I KNOW I’m dreaming!
A new drug, otelixizumab, is in phase III trials. (Phase III trials are the randomized, controlled, multicenter trials where you figure out if the drug really works).
Forty eight months into the study, the insulin making cells of the eighty “type 1″ patients in the study are still OK.
How’re you doin’? Hair standing up on the back of yer neck? Hands shakin’? If not you don’t get it. This is an atomic bomb! This is a breakthrough of a breakthrough! This is.. well… ScienceAintSoBadRating = 10.
MISTERScienceAintSoBad SHOULD know better than to give away 10′s like this. Something this important’s gotta be tested on more than 80 patients. Maybe the head’ll fall off of the 81st one (considered a setback). But DAMN this is neat!
Maybe there IS something to all this science stuff!
FOR BACK PAIN: AN INJECTION OF YOUTH
BACK ZAP
REJUVINATE YOUR BACK
Brian Saunders and Tony Freemont (University of Manchester) would inject a new kind of substance into aging spines to restore them to almost their “original” condition. Which we will discuss shortly. But first..
BACKS (According to MISTERScienceAintSoBad)
Your spine’s an upright column of bones (vertebrae) and disks. The disks are there to make things flexible and to absorb the shock from impact. The outer shell of the disk is fibrous. The inside’s pulpy.
It’s not a specially good design as it rarely outlasts the nose.
Long before your first midlife crisis, the disks are already drying up and cracking. Under considerable pressure, the pulp can squeeze out of the disks. Also, the disks, themselves, can become distorted or can start to fall apart (herniate). This can cause pressure against a nerve “root” where the nerve enters/leaves the spinal column.
That’s when you find yerself reading your emails on your side in bed.
If you lay around long enough and take anti-inflammatories, good chance you’ll be back to not getting enough exercise soon. Worst case, you’ll cycle through MRI’s, pills, injections, physical therapy, surgery, and prayer. Not necessarily that order.
A few months, and you get to repeat everything. This time, as an expert on the subject of back pain.
The crappy “intervertebral disk” is a constant annoyance to those who would argue that we got here from “Intelligent Design”. If this is intelligent design, what’s Dopey Design?
AN ASIDE
Kinda obvious that pressure against a nerve would cause pain.
Except for one thing.
Nerves CONDUCT sensations around the body. They don’t have pain sensors of their own. So why pain from pressure on a nerve?
Hey. Maybe it’s not really there! HUGE MISTERScienceAintSoBad breakthrough in orthopedics!! My first Nobel.
Back me out of the textbooks please. What’s going on: If you put constant pressure on a nerve, its blood supply (microvasculature) may get pinched, its outer cover (myelin sheath) may get scarred, causing a short circuit, or the nerve fibers may get stretched (constricted). All this stuff makes the nerve kinda hinkey, causing it to send bogus signals when it shouldn’t. The pain you feel isn’t from the site of the pressure, itself. It’s from the areas that are served by the malfunctioning nerve.
NASA Mission Control would call this a “bad sensor”. A patient would call this a “bad day”.
THE INJECTION
Now, back to the guys from the University of Manchester.
MISTERScienceAintSoBad isn’t going to beat up on them. Their claims are reasonable. They say that their research is unfinished and they aren’t talking about a miracle cure.
Fair enough.
They are currently refining a fluid that they hope can be injected into a bad intervertebral disk. After being injected, the fluid will transform itself into a suitable substitute for the dehydrated nuceleus poposa, giving the spine a whole new life contract. If it works.
OTHER INJECTIONS
Something along these lines was tried a few years ago, using a natural product (an extract from the papaya fruit called Chymopapain), but, luckily for fruit lovers, it was abandoned when it turned out to have unacceptable side effects; Saunders/Freemont get to study what went wrong there.
EverVigilant9 writes: What’re you NUTS? I had a back injection three weeks ago. No bigee! My doc says she’s been doing this a long time! So where’s the cheese, Big Boy?
OK. Good catch, EverVigilant.
Wrong ball though.
You’re getting steroidal injections (image guided), an accepted treatment for acute back pain. MISTERScienceAintSoBad knows this from personal experience. The difference is that those injections are intended to ease the inflammation of irritated tissue. Not as ambitious as the project we’re describing here. On the other hand, it’s real and in the clinic now. The Saunders/Freeman stuff is still a work-in-progress.
ScienceAintSoBadRating = 4. One of those exciting ideas that’re full of potential and full of pitfalls.
Credit for top image (sans syringe): http://www.fotopedia.com/items/flickr-4011886723
UNBREAKING STUFF
Don't Let This Happen To YOUR Earth!
JUNKIFIED
The year is 2015. Discarded cell phones cover everything. The “layer” varies in thickness from a few inches to as much as three feet. Mostly, it consists of iPhones, IPads, ITouches, and IPods.
Newer layers have Android stuff.
Apple cultists fight against calling it the ICrap layer. Too disrespectful. Look what Apple’s DONE for the human race. Why not call it gCrap? What’s GOOGLE ever done?
Looking Out
People crunch around looking for edible plants which seem to thrive on the crumbled carcasses of HTC products while a defeated looking MISTERScienceAintSoBad, stands, looking out at the ocean, and listening to the waves clank together.
A WAY OUT?
Is this our destiny? Can we duck it?
A new web site, calling itself, Ifixit, says it’s bad to “landfill” our devices when they become unreliable. Devices are getting more and more capable. Toss our smartphones when they fail and what do you suppose THEY will do to US when THEY’RE in charge?
IFixit offers, humbly, to “fix the planet”. It wants to be THE place for free repair manuals as well as parts and info that can keep your devices out of the junk yard for longer.
BESIDES
Besides. The world’s gone nuts.
You gotta have two Phd’s to set yer alarm clock. Complexity INSIDE’S sposed to result in simplicity outside. Maybe that’ll happen eventually. But, for now, if you DO wanna set your alarm clock, you do need some good resources to turn to.
MISTERScienceAintSoBad wishes Ifixit all the luck in the world with its overarching ambitions. We hope it succeeds.
ScienceAintSoBadRating = 7 for Ifixit’s early efforts. Watch our rating needle climb as Ifixit proves itself. 
attribution for the top photo:
Teen Angst: Cure For Acne? Cure For Backpacks?
OMG!
YOUNG RESEARCHER WITH ACNE CURE
We were once beautiful. Even Fink. Once, we were healthy. supple and unblemished.
Except for the nasty zits which would lie dormant until a few days before something important like a first date, a prom, or a bar mitzvah when they would BURST into glorious Technicolor blotches, humiliating and depressing us.
And obliterating our dreams of becoming ex-virgins.
Ever.
Well thank YOU, Dissaya “Nu” Pornpattananangkul, for coming up with a zit-killer DECADES too late. I don’t believe ther’re any virgins left in high school to benefit from this work but Pornpattananangkul (am I pronouncing that right?) has developed a drug delivery system based on gold nanoparticles which deliver lauric acid directly to the (very) offending lesions.
ENGINEERING IS NOT (no offense) SCIENCE
Pornpa.. Pornpatt.. WHATEVER! .. is gonna be a terrific engineer. But there’s some science yet to be done. Will it REALLY work? Side effects? Cost?
A great first step and the article says human testing may follow soon.
ScienceAintSoBadEngineeringRating = 10
ScienceAintSoBadScienceRating? Let’s hope we hear more.
A CURE FOR BACKPACKS?
I can ONLY ride the Nostalgia Dunebuggy so far. MISERABLE and PATHETIC as our young lives were, we didn’t walk to school leaning forward.
School books have gotten so heavy in the last five years, that obesity’s become the only REMEDY for the struggling future generations that we call kids or (sometimes) just annoying. In fact, their parents are EGGING THEM ON to gain a few pounds. ”Hey. EAT that! You wanna get pulled over backwards by your books and lie there like a DOPE with yer arms and legs wavin’ around?”
Sad.
Eric v.d. Luft, PhD (Syracuse) did a little research on WHY the books are so engorged.
Oomph!
Fat margins, fat paper, and lots of jazzy color illustrations.
You know fer SURE some kid’s gonna be too loaded up to dodge a runaway foreign car.
Too much backpack mass. This is all just a GIFT to pediatric orthopedic surgeons.
‘course the ultimate solution is a digital child. Did I say “child?”. I MEANT, of course, BOOK. An eBook.
Not a specially original thought. Electronic book readers are catching on among adults. There’re a LOT of choices. Kindle, Sony’s E-reader, The Nook (Barnes and Noble), ALL kinda smart phones, netbooks, the Ipad (and it’s soon-to-be competitors), and so on. There’re way more “initiatives” then MisterScienceAintSoBad is in the mood to discuss. (Example).
The technology’s there. It’s even affordable. Text book publishing, parents, and teaching institutions are trying to catch up with it.
ROBOTS COUNT FOR SOMETHING
According to the IEEE Spectrum, the world’s robot population’s about 8.6 million souls.
Well. Not souls, exactly.
You know what I mean.
IS YOUR KID HAVING TROUBLE BREATHING?
WITHOUT HIS GLASSES
“BREATHERS”
Remember Hal Finkelstein?
The glasses? The awful red sneakers?
Remember how he breathed through his mouth all the time? The way his nostrils seemed welded together? “Ngh! Gimme BANNNK my BOOK!”
Hey Finkelstein. You still out there? Maybe you should pop by the dentist. I been readin’ about mouth breathers – a study in General Dentistry by Yosh Jefferson, DMD.
Not good.
The faces of “breathers” change. In a bad way.
They get longer and narrower (like you, Finkelstien, now that I think about it). Their teeth get crooked, their gums go bad, and they’re at at risk for ADD, high blood pressure, heart problems, and lots of other stuff.
If Finkelstein’s any example, it doesn’t do much for yer personality neither. (Sorry Fink.)
I wouldn’t be so mean if there wasn’t stuff a mouth breather can do. But there is. Dr. Jefferson, being a dentist, suggests that a good place to start would be a.. a dentist. (I’m in shock!). A GP could probably help too.
Could be tonsils, adenoids, allergies, narrow passages (that can be expanded). Other stuff.
I also wouldn’t be so mean if Finkelstien didn’t happen to be a figment of my overheated imagination.
But you can be sure I’ll be hearing from SOME Hal Finkelstien anyway. He’ll turn out to be a mouth breather. And he’s gonna read this and HATE MISTER ScienceAintSoBad.
And I’ll hate myself!
ScienceAintSoBadRating = 0 to myself and my cruel indifference to the Hal Finkelstein’s of the world.
But ScienceAintSoBadRating = 8 for a useful study, bringing to light an unexpected and troubling condition which can be remedied if caught.
My Blog’s 100th Anniversary & A Plug-in Domestic
Party
CENTURY MARK
A hundred posts ago, in the first article on this blog, I said: Science has gotten beaten up in the past few years. It’s not just that it’s been starved for funds; there’s the feeling that it’s a crappy pursuit – opaque, dangerous, and inconsistent with the things that real people care about. I hope, with this blog, I can strike a small blow for the idea that science, though it most certainly CAN be complicated, is really a warm and lovely wind blowing us toward our destiny.
(My GOD I love my own writing!)
That was January, 2009. The Dow was crashing and The Nasdaq was evaporating. We were gonna have The Great(er) Depression.
George W Bush had just handed over the garage door opener and he was he glad to be rid of it. Couldn’t BELIEVE they found someone to take the job.
Since then, I’ve written articles about diseases and cures, earthquakes, animal behavior, pirates, inventions, astronomy, cosmology, robots, the search for intelligent non-earthians, alternative energy, headaches, backaches, runaway Toyotas and plenty more. Drew pictures too!
100 articles.
Not the bloody Wikipedia. But nobody gets paid here.
So 100 articles – that’s a lot.
Maybe you remember the scary robots from Boston Dynamics. I was trying to say that robotics is quietly getting good. In the meantime, Jeremy Maitin – Shepherd (University of California, Berkeley) and team’s getting its towels folded.
FOLDING THE LAUNDRY
PROGRESS AGAINST PANCREATIC AND ORAL CANCER
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.
Image attribution: Artwork by Robert Jaster under a Creative Commons license.Shoot! What A Smelly Landfill!
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
EXTRATERRESTRIAL CONTACT: PUT A SOCK IN IT
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.
———————————-
science ain’t so bad’s t-shirts and mug’s and such
Google’s Evil Meter
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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