Posts

Showing posts from 2017

FDA approves Revolutionary Cancer Drug - Geek.com

Image
The Food and Drug Administration — the American agency in charge of ensuring the safety of most of the things we ingest — has approved a radical new therapy for fighting cancer called Yescarta. It is a type of CAR T-cell therapy, a technique that genetically modifies the subject’s immune cells so that they can attack cancer (specifically, in this case, non-Hodgkin lymphoma) directly. This is only the second time it’s approved such a treatment. The first, back in August, was for leukemia that was non-responsive to more traditional drugs. “Today marks another milestone in the development of a whole new scientific paradigm for the treatment of serious diseases,” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in a statement. “In just several decades, gene therapy has gone from being a promising concept to a practical solution to deadly and largely untreatable forms of cancer.” Indeed, these new treatments could be boons for cancers that are traditionally stubborn or nearly impossible to treat.

Atlas of the Underworld | van der Meer, D.G., van Hinsbergen, D.J.J., and Spakman, W., 2017, Atlas of the Underworld: slab remnants in the mantle, their sinking history, and a new outlook on lower mantle viscosity, Tectonophysics

Image
Welcome to the website of The Atlas of the underworld – the first complete mapping of subducted plates in the Earth’s mantle and their geological interpretation. The Earth’s rigid outer shell – the lithosphere – is broken into plates that move relative to one another along discrete plate boundaries – ridges, transforms, and subduction zones. At subduction zone plate boundaries, one plate disappears below another and sinks into the mantle. These sinking plates, called ‘slabs’, are colder than their surroundings, and remain colder for a very long period of time – about 250 million years. As a result, the speed at which seismic waves travel through these bodies of sinking lithosphere is a little higher than from the surrounding hot mantle. Since the 1980’s, the technique of seismic tomography has been developed that provides a 3D image of the seismic velocity structure of the Earth’s crust and mantle, from the surface to the boundary between the mantle and the Earth’s liquid outer core

Read This If You Ever Find Yourself Doubting Your Worth | Shine

Image
Read This If You Ever Find Yourself Doubting Your Worth | Shine

Why is everyone so busy?

Image
THE predictions sounded like promises: in the future, working hours would be short and vacations long. “Our grandchildren”, reckoned John Maynard Keynes in 1930, would work around “three hours a day”—and probably only by choice. Economic progress and technological advances had already shrunk working hours considerably by his day, and there was no reason to believe this trend would not continue. Whizzy cars and ever more time-saving tools and appliances guaranteed more speed and less drudgery in all parts of life. Social psychologists began to fret: whatever would people do with all their free time? This has not turned out to be one of the world’s more pressing problems.  Read More ...

Personal Finance Has Everything and Nothing to Do With Money

Image
On the surface, personal finance seems to be primarily about money: getting rich and optimizing your investments and so on. It’s definitely about all of that stuff, but in a larger, more important way, it has nothing to do with money at all. It’s more about using it to optimize your values and priorities. Learn to Manage Your Money So It Doesn’t Manage You My dad used to say, “Money isn’t the problem; the lack of it is.” And it’s true: money doesn’t buy you happiness, but not having enough of it can be a pain. And the level of pain varies, depending on your situation. Read More ...

How a Gilded-Age Heiress Became the 'Mother of Forensic Science'

Image
Frances Glessner Lee grew up in the Gilded Age as the heiress to a fortune made in industrial farm equipment. Her childhood was “sheltered and indulged.” She would marry at age 20, have three children, and then, in a turn against convention, divorce her husband. It was in her 40s—free of a husband and then free of a brother and father who both died, leaving her a vast fortune—that Lee embarked on the project that would consume the rest of her life. She had become enthralled by the grisly crime stories of George Burgess Magrath, her brother’s friend and a medical examiner in Boston. And so Lee began pouring her family fortune into a project that combined the very unladylike world of crime with the domestic arts: the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Read More ...

Hear What Literally Every Genre of Music Sounds Like With This Tool

Image
There is a lot of different types of music out there. Like, a lot. Don’t believe me? Check out this time-sucking tool called Every Noise at Once . When you load up the page in your browser , you’ll be greeted with a massive wall of colored text links. Each one represents a specific genre of music. There’s everything from “Taiwanese pop” to “dark psytrance” to “Danish jazz” to “vapor twitch” to “Brazilian gospel” to “funk rock” to “discofox” to good ol’ fashioned “hip hop.” With more than 1,500 different music genres mapped, it’s all there. Read More ...

When Ruminating Becomes a Problem

Image
Everyone ruminates. We especially ruminate when we’re stressed out. Maybe you’re ruminating about an upcoming test—you have to score an A to keep your scholarship. Maybe you’re ruminating about an upcoming presentation because you want to impress your boss. Maybe you’re ruminating about an upcoming date and the many ways it could go. Maybe you’re ruminating about a bad performance review. Maybe you’re ruminating about an injury that’s really been bothering you. READ MORE