Scuttlebutt Pipeline

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A big step in the ever ongoing battle against breast cancer was recently announced. How is it that the cancerous cells can spread to attack the lungs? This was something that was never understood, and thus, fighting it proved exceptionally difficult. That’s no longer the case. The cancer sends out a signal or “relay” to the tissue that it plans to target, the lungs. This relay molecularly weakens the targeted tissue thus allowing the breast cancer cells to pass through the capillary walls and penetrate the lung.

Key to this study is a signaling molecule called TGF-beta. Early in cancer progression, TGF-beta acts as a tumor suppressor, inhibiting cancer growth. Later, it actually stimulates cancer progression and metastasis. Massague was interested in how tumors trigger this molecular dichotomy.

His team began by identifying a molecular signature, a pattern of gene expression of 153 genes that identifies tumors that are both expressing and responding to TGF-beta. They then applied that signature to hundreds of primary breast tumors. (source).

This might seem like such a small step forward to some, but this progress has been long sought after and I for one am glad to see that we are gaining ground in this fight at long last. After all, understanding the enemy and finding its weak points are the first steps in defeating it.

I have always been a big fan of Japanese cellphones. They’re light years ahead of any model you can get here in the US in terms of function, capabilities, and durability. This just proves it:

The handheld phone, equipped with various devices that can measure your pulse or the amount of steps you’ve taken in a day, dispenses heath advice after you’ve punched in statistics such as gender, age and weight.

And you can also exhale into the phone and it will tell you whether its time to reach for the breath mints.

You can read the rest of the article here. Now while I’m all for being concerned with one’s health I have to raise an eyebrow at the breath tester function bit of it. That just might be going a bit too far.

Of course, if you’re a vampire it might be nice to test people’s breath and see if they’ve eaten garlic recently.

Do you ever get the feeling that your doctor and physicians don’t care about you or see you as merely another source of income and nothing more? Have you ever felt forgotten or mistreated by them? Well rest assured, your fears are probably legitimate.

What, you thought I was going to be reassuring you that they do care? Pft! Check this out:

A cancer patient says she was left alone in a CT scanner for hours after a technician apparently forget about her, and she finally crawled out of the device, only to find herself locked in the closed clinic.

A technician placed her inside the large machine at about 4 p.m. on Sept. 19, dimmed the lights so she could relax and told her not to move during the 25-minute procedure.

“At some point, my mom lost track of time and felt like too much time had passed, but she couldn’t look at a clock or anything because it was dark,” her son Ariel Tellez said.

After calling out, then screaming for help, she said, she spent several hours trying to free herself from the machine. Finally, she wiggled out from under a heavy blanket and out of the machine. By the time deputies found her, it had been five hours since she was placed inside.

read full article

You’ve got to love the fact that the office that this happened at is now going to institute a lockup procedure, whereby all employees will have a checklist of things to check on and secure before leaving to insure a full sweep of the premises is conducted in order to prevent another occurrence.

Hey that sounds like an excellent idea!

But wait, if gas stations, business offices, and what not already check to make sure everyone is gone and things tidying up before closing for the evening then why wasn’t a medical practice doing the same?

HOUSTON - An infestation of bats at Texas Southern University has health officials concerned.

The bats took over a dormitory, forcing more than 200 students into hotels. Now, there are worries the students may have been exposed to rabies.

Videos posted on the Internet show students swinging a broom and a tennis racket as several bats fly about in a dorm hallway. One student said he killed dozens of bats but didn’t know if anyone was bitten.

Health officials asked students who had been in the dorm to meet with them this week to determine whether any would need rabies vaccinations.

Texas Southern officials, meanwhile, say they’re trying to rid the dorm of the bats. It’s not clear how many bats were in the building.

(source)

I’m actually kind of surprised that bats would even think of making a dorm their home. Bats generally need somewhere dark and removed from intrusion for their resting grounds. Caves, trees, burrows, this is where you would expect to find bats. Not a University dorm.

I don’t think that says very much about the dormitory conditions at that school.

A fireball fell from the sky and slammed into southern Peru over the weekend, creating a huge crater that emitted a sickeningly smelly gas, local authorities said. More than 600 villagers fell ill, the Peruvian radio network RPP reported Tuesday.

Video reports from the scene, near the remote Andean village of Carancas along Peru’s border with Bolivia, showed what appeared to be a 100-foot-wide (30-meter-wide), 20-foot-deep (6-meter-deep) impact crater with a bubbling pool of water at the bottom.

Authorities said that the crater was made Saturday by a falling meteorite. Agence France Presse quoted a local official, Marco Limache, as saying that “boiling water started coming out of the crater, and particles of rock and cinders were found nearby.”

Limache told RPP that the gases emanating from the crater caused nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, headaches and stomach pain — so much so that authorities were considering calling a state of emergency. The newspaper La Republica reported that seven policemen became ill and were taken to a hospital.

(full article

To be frank I don’t understand why authorities are considering declaring this an emergency, it clearly already is one. Honestly, the moment authorities first responded and began falling ill the officials should have stepped up and taken measures to protect their people. Something unknown falls from the sky and upon visiting the site people fall dangerously ill. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that, hey, that could because of what fell out of the sky, and hey, having people living near it right now without any knowledge of what is causing the problem is a very bad thing.

Common sense truly isn’t so common anymore.