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Overnight News Digest - Saturday Science, 01/14/2023 - Brain cancer vaccine [1]
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Date: 2023-01-14
Sunset in the Lehigh Valley, PA
Welcome to the Overnight News Digest, Saturday Science with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, Rise above the swamp and jeremybloom. Alumni editors include (but not limited to): Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
Items in tonight’s digest include:
Wine in a can to reduce global warming
New brain cancer vaccine kills and prevents brain cancer
Kevin McCarthy is already inviting the next pandemic mess
Unintended consequences of the EV revolution
Recycling plastic into bricks stronger than concrete in Kenya
JWST distant galaxy findings may be fooling us
Global warming is destroying parasites — not a good thing
Global warming is causing starving children in Kenya — also not a good thing!
Understanding the size of the universe using grapefruit and other fruits
The Guardian
by Francesca Carington
A six-pack of sauvignon: could canned wine help save the planet?
First came the shame. As fellow customers of my smart local Brooklyn wine shop perused the shelves with studious looks, I slithered over to the register. “I’m embarrassed to ask, but you don’t have any wine in cans, do you?” The clerk gestured to a small fridge right beneath my nose. Yes, they had loads of cans. Yes, they were proving super popular. No, he hadn’t tried the one with the fun vintage circus illustration on the label. The art on the 187ml can spoke to me, so I took it home, along with four others. Together, they cost around the same amount as the last bottle I’d bought. They tasted even better. For the past few years, a quiet revolution has been taking place in the wine industry. Cans are cool and bag-in-box is chic, and not just according to Vogue. The stigma of alternative wine containers, from kegs to cartons, has drained away. Perfectly portable, often beautifully designed cylindrical vessels are demystifying the rarefied world of wine. Cans are shaping up to be one of the most promising sustainable interventions in the industry.
The Brighter Side News
by Serena Bronda
Breakthrough cancer vaccine simultaneously kills and prevents brain cancer
Scientists are harnessing a new way to turn cancer cells into potent, anti-cancer agents. In the latest work from the lab of Khalid Shah, MS, PhD, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, investigators have developed a new cell therapy approach to eliminate established tumors and induce long-term immunity, training the immune system so that it can prevent cancer from recurring. The team tested their dual-action, cancer-killing vaccine in an advanced mouse model of the deadly brain cancer glioblastoma, with promising results. Findings are published in Science Translational Medicine.
The Daily Beast
by Peter J Hotez
Kevin McCarthy is already inviting the next pandemic mess
When a week of chaos on the floor of the House ended with a near-fistfight and Kevin McCarthy finally claiming the gavel this weekend, it was easy to forget we were living through a pandemic. But the novel coronavirus is still killing hundreds of Americans every day, with the XBB.1.5 variant poised to spark another major—if less than overwhelming—surge. And McCarthy and his fellow Republicans have a disturbing set of plans for so-called oversight of the coronavirus that could divert precious resources from what must be our main goal in the coming years: preventing the next pandemic. It’s still early, and the shape of GOP intentions—and their ability to enact them—are still very much coming into focus. But it’s clear that after years of far-right, anti-science resistance to vaccines or basic pandemic safety, the Republicans plan to satiate their base’s lingering anti-government rage. This could mean fresh epidemiological disaster—and not in 20 or 30 years, but within this decade.
Vox
by Rebecca Heilweil
5 unintended consequences of the EV revolution
The world around us was built to cater to gas-powered cars. Tank trucks carrying thousands of gallons of fuel are a near-ubiquitous presence on the highway. Auto repair shops are stocked with drain pans and wrenches for oil changes. Gas prices are a central focus in politics. Even pedestrians and cyclists depend on the hum of the internal combustion engine — it’s a powerful audio signal that a car might cross their path. That’s all about to change. In the next few years, electric vehicles will replace many cars with internal combustion engines, and the White House has called for half of new vehicles to be electric by the end of the decade. This transition is a critical part of adapting to climate change, since EVs don’t produce tailpipe emissions and will reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. But electric cars will also be an awkward fit for today’s transportation infrastructure, and not just because gas stations might one day go the way of horse stables. “Modern American cities bear a powerful physical imprint of automobiles and other motorized vehicles,” urban historian Martin V. Melosi wrote for the University of Michigan project Automobile in American Life and Society. “It is estimated that as much as one half of a modern American city’s land area is dedicated to streets and roads, parking lots, service stations, driveways, signals and traffic signs, automobile-oriented businesses, car dealerships, and more.”
Upworthy
by Chandni G
A Kenyan woman's startup recycles plastic into bricks that are five times stronger than concrete
Editor's note: This article was originally published on February 12, 2021. It has since been updated. Nzambi Matee is the founder of Gjenge Makers, a startup based in Nairobi, Kenya's capital. Her business transforms plastic waste into bricks that are five to seven times stronger than concrete. In addition to establishing the company, Matee designed the machines that manufacture the bricks. She sources plastic low and high-density polyethylene and polypropylene from local packaging plants for free to produce durable building materials. The materials she sources are waste others cannot process anymore or recycle. Therefore, Matee prevents tonnes of plastic waste from ending up in landfills across the country. She hopes to expand her business to add a bigger manufacturing line, Good News Networking reports. Matee said in an interview that she was "tired of being on the sidelines" while civil servants struggled with the mounting piles of plastic waste in Kenya. Hence, Gjenge Makers was born. Her company produces a variety of different paving stones after the plastic polymer is heated and mixed with sand. The polymer, which comes from a range of items such as milk and shampoo bottles, bags for cereals or sandwiches, and flip-top lids and buckets, is waste that can no longer be processed. She stated, "There is waste they cannot process anymore; they cannot recycle. That is what we get." Once Gjenge Makers completes their transformation process, they are able to output building materials pressed via hydraulic machine into different thicknesses. The materials, which come in a variety of colors, sell for an average of $7.70 per square meter.
Big Think
by Ethan Siegel
JWST’s “most distant galaxies” might be fooling us all
Somewhere out there, in the distant recesses of the expanding Universe, is the farthest galaxy we’re capable of seeing. The farther away an object is, the more time it takes light to travel through the Universe to reach us. As we look to greater and greater distances, we’re seeing objects as they were farther and farther back in time: closer back toward the start of the hot Big Bang. The Universe, because it was born hot, dense, and relatively uniform, requires lots of time — hundreds of millions of years, at least — for those first galaxies to form; beyond that, there’s nothing to see. We’ve known there needed to be galaxies out there beyond the limits of what Hubble was capable of seeing, and the JWST was designed with precisely the specifications needed to find what Hubble cannot. Even in the very first science image released by JWST scientists, showcasing the gravitationally lensed galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, a large number of objects that had all the properties an ultra-distant one would have were identified, despite taking up just a tiny region of the sky. If all of these ultra-distant galaxy candidates were real, we’d have too many of them too early, forcing us to rethink how galaxies begin forming within the Universe. But we might be fooling ourselves completely, and we won’t know for sure with only our current data. Here’s why.
Science Alert
by Carly Cassella
The World's Biggest Study on Parasites Has Found Something Terrible. They're Dying
Parasites are not all bad, and in a rapidly changing world, they need our protection, but they don't seem to be getting it. In fact, in the second-largest estuary in the United States, scientists have cataloged a mass die-off among marine organisms that rely on free-living hosts to survive. Over the past 140 years, from 1880 to 2019, parasite numbers in Puget Sound dropped by 38 percent for every degree Celsius of warming in sea surface temperature, researchers at the University of Washington (UW) have found. The study is the largest and longest dataset on parasite abundance collected anywhere in the world, and the results are even worse than some conservationists had feared.
Undark
by Georgina Gustin
In Kenya, an Epidemic of Children Hospitalized for Starvation
Aid workers blame a climate change-induced drought that’s turned the Horn of Africa into a parched, barren wasteland. THE WORDS “STABILIZATION WARD” are painted in uneven black letters above the entrance, but everyone in this massive refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya, calls it ya maziwa: The place of milk. Rescue workers and doctors, mothers and fathers, have carried hundreds of starving children through the doors of this one-room hospital wing, which is sometimes so crowded that babies and toddlers have to share beds. A pediatric unit is only a few steps away, but malnourished children don’t go there. They need special care, and even that doesn’t always save them.
Big Think
by Ethan Siegel
Ask Ethan: How can we comprehend the size of the Universe?
Human beings are tiny creatures compared to the 92 billion light-year wide observable Universe. How can we comprehend such large scales? Share Ask Ethan: How can we comprehend the size of the Universe? on LinkedIn Here on Earth, human beings exist on the scale of meters, with the average human being a little less than two meters in height. Our typical experiences might take us three or four orders of magnitude away from that scale: down to millimeter scales or a little bit smaller, and up to scales of several kilometers. Beyond that, however, we have to stop thinking of the world in scales that we experience and get very abstract; it’s simply beyond what we’re familiar with on a day-to-day basis, and beyond what our senses are capable of perceiving and making sense of. But what about the entire Universe? Is there any way, given our limitations as humans, to make sense of such impressive scales? That’s what Scott Brenner wants to know, writing in to ask: “Trying to truly comprehend how large the universe really is seems like an ant trying to understand how far, say, New York is from California. Perhaps you could suggest some ways to wrap our heads around that.”
This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the science news of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
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