The report named, Global Thyroid Hormone Disorder Drug Makret has been added to the archive of market research studies by QY Research. The industry experts and researchers have offered reliable and precise analysis of the global Thyroid Hormone Disorder Drug market in view of numerous aspects such as growth factors, challenges, limitations, developments, trends, and growth opportunities. This report will surely act as a handy instrument for the market participants to develop effective strategies with an aim to reinforce their market positions. This report offers pin-point analysis of the changing dynamics and emerging trends in the global Thyroid Hormone Disorder Drug market.

Additionally, it provides a futuristic perspective on various factors that are likely to boost the global Thyroid Hormone Disorder Drug market growth in the years to come. Besides, authors of the report have shed light on the factors that may hamper the growth of the global Thyroid Hormone Disorder Drug market.

Get the Sample of this [emailprotected]https://www.qyresearch.com/sample-form/form/1030305/global-thyroid-hormone-disorder-drug-market

The report also helps in understanding the global Thyroid Hormone Disorder Drug market through key segments including application, product type, and end user. This analysis is based on various parameters such as CGAR, share, size, production, and consumption.

The leading industry experts have also scrutinized the global Thyroid Hormone Disorder Drug market from a geographical point of view, keeping in view the potential countries and their regions. Market participants can rely on the regional analysis provided by them to sustain revenues.

The report has also focused on the competitive landscape and the key strategies deployed by the market participants to strengthen their presence in the global Thyroid Hormone Disorder Drug market. This helps the competitors in taking well-versed business decisions by having overall insights of the market scenario. Leading players operating in the global Thyroid Hormone Disorder Drug market are also profiled in the report.

Market Segments:

Key Players:Novo NordiskSanofiMerckEli LillyAstraZenecaAbbVie

Product Type Segments:InjectionOralOthers

Application Segments:HospitalClinicMedical CenterOthers

Regional GrowthThe report offers in-depth analysis of key regional and country-level Thyroid Hormone Disorder Drug markets, taking into account their market size, CAGR, market potential, future developments, and other significant parameters. The Middle East and Africa (GCC Countries and Egypt) North America (the United States, Mexico, and Canada) South America (Brazil etc.) Europe (Turkey, Germany, Russia UK, Italy, France, etc.) Asia-Pacific (Vietnam, China, Malaysia, Japan, Philippines, Korea, Thailand, India, Indonesia, and Australia)

What the Report has to Offer?

Market Size Estimates: The report offers accurate and reliable estimation of the market size in terms of value and volume. Aspects such as production, distribution and supply chain, and revenue for the global Thyroid Hormone Disorder Drug market are also highlighted in the report

Analysis on Market Trends: In this part, upcoming market trends and development have been scrutinized

Growth Opportunities: The report here provides clients with the detailed information on the lucrative opportunities in the global Thyroid Hormone Disorder Drug market

Regional Analysis: In this section, the clients will find comprehensive analysis of the potential regions and countries in the global Thyroid Hormone Disorder Drug market

Analysis on the Key Market Segments: The report focuses on the segments: end user, application, and product type and the key factors fuelling their growth

Vendor Landscape: Competitive landscape provided in the report will help the companies to become better equipped to be able to make effective business decisions

Get Customized Report in your Inbox within 24 hours @https://www.qyresearch.com/customize-request/form/1030305/global-thyroid-hormone-disorder-drug-market

Table of Contents:

Report Overview: It includes six chapters, viz. research scope, major manufacturers covered, market segments by type, Thyroid Hormone Disorder Drug market segments by application, study objectives, and years considered.

Global Growth Trends: There are three chapters included in this section, i.e. industry trends, the growth rate of key producers, and production analysis.

Thyroid Hormone Disorder Drug Market Share by Manufacturer: Here, production, revenue, and price analysis by the manufacturer are included along with other chapters such as expansion plans and merger and acquisition, products offered by key manufacturers, and areas served and headquarters distribution.

Market Size by Type: It includes analysis of price, production value market share, and production market share by type.

Market Size by Application: This section includes Thyroid Hormone Disorder Drug market consumption analysis by application.

Profiles of Manufacturers: Here, leading players of the global market are studied based on sales area, key products, gross margin, revenue, price, and production.

Thyroid Hormone Disorder Drug Market Value Chain and Sales Channel Analysis: It includes customer, distributor, Thyroid Hormone Disorder Drug market value chain, and sales channel analysis.

Market Forecast Production Side: In this part of the report, the authors have focused on production and production value forecast, key producers forecast, and production and production value forecast by type.

About Us:QYResearch always pursuits high product quality with the belief that quality is the soul of business. Through years of effort and supports from huge number of customer supports, QYResearch consulting group has accumulated creative design methods on many high-quality markets investigation and research team with rich experience. Today, QYResearch has become the brand of quality assurance in consulting industry.

Read the original:
Thyroid Hormone Disorder Drug Market 2020 Report with Competitive Research by 2025 - Instanews247

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

Those who sleep in cold environments, meanwhile, tend to fare better. A study of people with a sleep disorder found that they slept longer in temperatures of 61 degrees Fahrenheit versus 75 degrees. The cold-sleepers were also more alert the next morning. The basic physiology is that your body undergoes several changes at night to ease you into sleep: Your core and brain temperatures decrease, and both blood sugar and heart rate drop. Keeping a bedroom hot essentially fights against this process. Insomnia has even been linked to a basic malfunctioning of the bodys heat-regulation cyclesmeaning some cases could be a disorder of body temperature.

In light of this physiology, sleep experts unanimously suggest keeping your bedroom cooler than the standard daytime temperature of your home. There is no universally accepted temperature that is the correct one, but various medical entities have suggested ideal temperature ranges. The most common recommendation, cited by places like the Cleveland Clinic and the National Sleep Foundation, is 60 to 67 degrees Fahrenheit. Within that range, experts vary. A neurologist in Virginia told Health.com that the magic number is 65. Others have advised an upper limit of 64.

Read: How to sleep

The U.S. Department of Energy recommends keeping your home at 68 degrees during the day and lower while youre asleep. That guideline is based on money, not health: It was originally suggested by President Richard Nixon as a way of conserving oil during an embargo. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter went further, suggesting 65 degrees in daytime and 55 at night. He ordered that the White House thermostat be lowered accordingly, and subsequently extended the rule to all public buildings. The change was estimated to have saved around 300,000 gallons of oil daily.

Even though no one was fined under the thermostat rule, Ronald Reagan promptly undid it in 1981, citing unnecessary regulatory burden. No such executive thermoregulatory fiats have since been attempted. If you want to work and sleep in a sauna-like sweat box, that is your God-given right as a red-blooded American. But it should be done with the knowledge that thermostat decisions affect far more than ones own personal sleep. The burning of fossil fuels contributes to the air pollution that kills millions of people every year, and the health effects of climate change are far-reaching.

As for individual health guidelines, human variation makes giving any specific number almost impossibleand borderline irresponsible. Different temperatures will suit different people differently. At the same time, a range like 60 to 67 degrees can feel nebulously broad. Its less satisfying than a single number, and it doesnt solve the bed-partner argument. So I will say this: 60 degrees is the correct temperature for winter sleep. Anything warmer is incorrect.

More:
Your Bedroom Is Too Hot - The Atlantic

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

For a complete list of our obituaries, seehere.

SYDNEY BRENNER SCIENTIFIC SYMPOSIUM

Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner died in April at the age of 92.

Brenner was best known for his discovery of sequences that stop protein translation, mRNA, and his investigation of the nematode C. elegans, which he realized would be an ideal model organism to study cell differentiation and organ development. That work won him the 2002 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

[H]is great strength was in experiments, and in particular the choice and execution of ones that were both important and ingenious, Francis Crick, the codiscoverer of DNA who shared an office with Brenner at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in the UK, wrote in atribute to Brenner in The Scientist in 2002.

US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY, OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY

American geneticist Liane Russell, famous for her work on the deleterious effects of prenatal radiation exposure and the chromosomal basis for sex determination in mammals, died in July at age 95.

She and her husband William Russell established the Oak Ridge National Laboratorys (ORNL) Mouse House, an extensive colony of mutant mice bred to model the effects of exposure to radiation.

Russells work led to a healthcare policy to ask women if they are pregnant before X-raying them and also to avoid X-rays shortly after menstruation in women of childbearing age.

Inventor of the polymerase chain reaction technique and winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993, Kary Mullis, died in August at age 74.

Mullis was known as a weird figure in science and a flamboyant philanderer who evangelized the use of LSD, denied the evidence for both global warming and HIV as a cause of AIDS, consulted for O.J. Simpsons legal defense, and formed a company that sold jewelry embedded with celebrities DNA, according to a 1998 profile in The Washington Post.

Mullis wrote in The Scientist in 2003 that his first attempt at PCR in 1983 was a long-shot experiment. . . . so [at midnight] I poured myself a cold Becks into a prechilled 500 ml beaker from the isotope freezer for luck, and went home. I ran a gel the next afternoon [and] stained it with ethidium. It took several months to arrive at conditions [that] would produce a convincing result.

Even still, Science and Natureboth rejected the resulting manuscript, which was ultimately published in Methods in Enzymology in 1987 and helped earn Mullis his Nobel.

Chemical engineer George Rosenkranz, the director of the pharmaceutical company that first synthesized a synthetic form of the hormone progesterone, died in June at the age of 102.

He and colleagues developed norethindrone, a synthetic version of progesterone, which was then used in the combined oral contraceptive pill and approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1959. The work, along with efforts in biotech, earned him many awards from scientific organizations and from the Mexican government.

Despite that, he was a very humble man, Roberto Rosenkranz, one of his sons, told the Los Angeles Times. He never was out to take credit.

Ophthalmologist and inventor Patricia Bath, whose research on lasers advanced cataract surgery, died in May at the age of 76.

During her medical internship in New York, she conducted an epidemiological study on blindness and found the rate of the condition among the black population was twice that of the white population. The finding led her to start the field of community ophthalmology, caring for underserved populations. She promoted the field by traveling to perform surgeries, training clinicians, and donating equipment.

Bath then moved to the University of California, Los Angeles, medical center in 1974 and in the 1980s began studying lasers for their potential to treat eye disorders. In 1988, she patented a device called Laserphaco Probe, which removes cataracts.

I had a few obstacles but I had to shake it off, Bath told ABC News in 2018. Hater-ation, segregation, racism, thats the noise you have to ignore that and keep your eyes focused on the prize, its just like Dr. Martin Luther King said, so thats what I did.

Nobel laureate Paul Greengard, who discovered that the brain communicates with chemical signals, died in April. He was 93.

Paul was an iconic scientist whose extraordinary seven-decade career transformed our understanding of neuroscience, Richard Lifton, president of Rockefeller University, where Greengard had been a faculty member, said in a statement. His discoveries laid out a new paradigm requiring the understanding of the biochemistry of nerve cells rather than simply their electrical activities. This work has had great impact.

Greengards work revealed how the brain uses dopamine and other chemicals to send signals from one nerve cell to another, discoveries that won him a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000. Greengard used the prize money to establish an award for women doing outstanding biomedical research and named the prize after his birth mother. Drawing attention to the achievements of women working in science, he and Baylor College of Medicine professor Huda Zoghbi wrote in The Scientist in 2014, sets a powerful example for those women still dreaming of their own success.

Public health whistleblower, physician, and researcher, Shuping Wang, died in September at the age of 59.

Wangs career started in China in the 1980s, where she was a doctor and hepatitis researcher. In 1992, she was testing blood serum samples from a plasma collection station where she worked and realized that unsanitary blood collection methods had led to a hepatitis C epidemic among people who donated and received plasma at the clinic. She reported the findings to officials and was fired, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

She took a job at the Zhoukou Health Bureau and, analyzing the blood samples there, she found 13 percent of donors had HIV and the cross-contamination there was also leading to the spread of the virus. Officials challenged her results and asked her to change the data for a report that would be sent to the provincial Department of Health. Again, she refused.

Her findings lead to the shutdown of her clinic and the establishment of HIV testing for donors. Still, roughly 1 million farmers were infected with HIV from selling their blood plasma at Chinese collection sites during the epidemic, according to The Washington Post.

In September, a few days before Wangs death, a play about her life, The King of Hells Palace, opened at Hampstead Theatre in London.

COURTESY OF RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

The developer of a widely used DNA analysis technique called shotgun sequencing, Joachim Messing, died in September. He was 73.

Jos approach to the development of his DNA sequencing tools was to spread them freely and widelythat is, he did not patent them, Robert Goodman, the executive dean of agriculture and natural resources at Rutgers University, where Messing was a faculty member, told The New York Times. He was an incredibly generous man.

His development of the DNA analysis technique and his use of it made Messing the most-cited scientist of the 1980s, according to the Institute for Scientific Information. He went on to study crop modifications, such as boosting amino acids in corn to make it more nutritious and increasing crops drought resistance.

TUFTS UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

Tufts University researcher Stuart Levy died in September at the age of 80.

Levy studied antibiotic resistance and in the 1970s showed that bacteria resistant to the drugs could move from the intestine of farm animals to farm workers, a discovery that had implications for bacterial spread in facilities such as hospitals. After Levy published his findings, other researchers started to study antibiotic resistance in hospitals.

It is hard to overstate his importance in limiting the spread of antibiotic resistance, particularly in hospital settings, Ralph Isberg, a professor of molecular biology & microbiology at Tufts, and his colleague John Leong wrote in a statement sent to The Scientist.

Neuroscientist Rahul Desikan, who developed an MRI-based map of the human cortex and identified genetic risk factors for neurogenerative diseases, died in July from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. He was 41.

The MRI-based map, which quickly became one of the most widely-used tools in the neuroscience community, has been cited more than 4500 times, Christopher Hess, a colleague of Desikan at University of California, San Francisco, wrote in a memorial. Color figures of the atlas in its various forms still fill the pages of our leading scientific journals.

Desikan and his colleagues had just started, in 2016, what was then the largest study on the genetics of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) when he began to experience his first symptoms the disease. He was diagnosed with ALS a few months later.

I went into medicine to take care of patients with brain diseases. Now, I have one of the diseases that I study, Desikan said in a press release earlier this year. Even with the disease, he said, he continued to find neurology fascinating and beautiful.

Ashley Yeager is an associate editor atThe Scientist. Email her at ayeager@the-scientist.com. Follow her on Twitter @AshleyJYeager.

See the article here:
Those We Lost in 2019 - The Scientist

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

(Real Clear Investigations)Abortion rights advocates hoping to make it easier to end later-term pregnancies have outsourced a potentially dangerous drug trial to an impoverished African country.

The clinical trial in Burkina Faso is testing the efficacy of second-trimester abortions using a two-drug combination that includes RU-486, which is currently used in a growing number of first-trimester abortions. Excessive bleeding is a common side effect of the drug, leading some to question the ethics of conducting the trial in a country with limited medical facilities and blood supplies.

In an interview in Ouagadougou, Burkina Fasos capital, the studys director, Dr. Blandine Thieba, confirmed that blood supplies are an ongoing concern.

Right now there are big problems of need in blood bags, she told RealClearInvestigations, but fortunately, thanks to God we did not have a case that required a transfusion.

[Click here to subscribe to Pregnancy Help News!]

The outsourcing of the study, which began 2 years ago, appears to reflect the reluctance of American women to participate in such trials. In a recent illustration, researchers writing in a 2013 bulletin from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists acknowledged that they had failed to recruit enough women for a North Carolina study of mid-term, drug-induced abortions. Reason: Potential participants strongly preferred surgical abortion, which is normally performed with anesthesia, while drug-induced abortions typically are not, even though they can be physically and emotionally distressing. The researchers recommended outsourcing such trials to Europe or Asia.

Tweet This: "The outsourcing of the study, which began 2 years ago, appears to reflect the reluctance of American women to participate in such trials"

The Burkina Faso trial is sponsored by Gynuity Health Projects, a New York-based group aligned with Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States.

Gynuitys literature boasts that it is a a small team willing to take risks on the frontiers of reproductive and maternal health. One of those efforts seeks to increase availability and market sustainability of mifepristone another name for RU-486 with a United States-approved protocol that might not even require a visit to a doctor or clinic.

In separate, federally approved research being conducted in 10 American states from Hawaii to New York, Gynuity is testing whether it is safe for doctors to prescribe abortion drugs through telephone or Internet consultations. The Food and Drug Administration now requires abortion drugs to be administered under the supervision of a doctor who can perform surgery or has access to a physician who can in case of emergency.

Tweet This: The FDA requires abortion drugs to be administered under the supervision of a doctor who can perform surgery/with access to one who can ..

It is not clear whether abortion rights advocates envision second-trimester abortions using such telemedicine. But the research in Burkina Faso and the U.S. is happening as the advocates redouble efforts against what they see as threats to abortion access posed by a conservative-leaning Supreme Court and restrictive new state abortion laws.

More lenient abortion procedures might gain wider acceptance if they are certified as safe and offer greater privacy, and assuming liberal states set a trend by adopting them. While several states have imposed new abortion restrictions, others such as New York, Illinois, Vermont, and Rhode Island have adopted new abortion protections.

The Supreme Court is looming large over these state debates, Elizabeth Nash, a policy analyst at the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights advocacy group, told the Pew Charitable Trusts Stateline website recently. The last time that people thought Roe was in this kind of jeopardy was the early 1990s. Thats the only other time we saw Democratic-led states adopt protections for abortion. She was referring to the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which protects a pregnant woman's right to have an abortion without excessive government restriction.

Current FDA guidelines approve mifepristone abortions only through the first 70 days of pregnancy, or roughly the first trimester of a nine-month pregnancy. But state laws vary, and American doctors are known to perform later abortions off-label. Drug-induced second-trimester abortions are performed in European countries, although usually with restrictions.

These drugs should not be confused with the contraceptive morning-after pill. The Mayo Clinics website explains that morning-after pills the over-the-counter drug levonorgestrel or the prescription drug ulipristal acetate do not end a pregnancy that has implanted. They work primarily by delaying or preventing ovulation.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, more than 850,000 abortions are performed in the United States each year with about 90 percent occurring the first trimester. Surgical abortions comprise 61% of the total. Drug-induced abortions, which normally occur during the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, accounted for 39% of the total in 2017 up from just 5% in 2001 and 29% in 2014.

Gynuity did not respond to RealClearInvestigations inquiries about the Burkina Faso trial, although Dr. Thieba was interviewed in the country in late November by a freelance journalist hired by RCI. Abortion rights advocates such as Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the Guttmacher Institute all declined to talk with RealClearInvestigations about abortion research and related ethical considerations. Officials at the State Department and federal health agencies also declined.

Tweet This: "Planned Parenthood, NARAL and the Guttmacher Institute all declined to talk [] about abortion research and related ethical considerations"

Public documents shed some light on the study, however. A description based on information provided by Gynuity was posted in August 2017 on the federally maintained research database ClinicalTrials.gov. It said an estimated 100 women with an ongoing pregnancy of 13-22 weeks gestation that is, in their second trimester were to be recruited to participate in the study.

The trial, to begin in May 2017 and end Dec. 31, 2019, would be conducted in four cities in Burkina Faso: Ouagadougou, Bobo-Dioulasso, Boromo, and Ouahigouya. Patients in the study had to be willing to undergo surgical completion if necessary surgical abortion in the event of complications, and to provide consent.

It is not clear how the women were recruited for the study, and details of Gynuitys role in supporting this research could not be ascertained, including how much funding it provided, and whether doctors affiliated with Gynuity traveled to Burkina Faso to supervise or work on the study.

The U.S. government website states that the goal of the Burkina Faso trial is to examine the effectiveness and feasibility of a mifepristone-misoprostol medical abortion regimen in the second trimester.

Mifestrone blocks progesterone, a hormone vital to fetal development, delivered from the mother through the placenta and umbilical cord, and kills the fetus. Another drug, misoprostol, administered later, causes the uterus, where the fetus was conceived, to shrink, expelling the detached embryo through the vagina.

At 19 weeks or mid-second trimester -- a typical fetus is about 6 inches long and weighs about 8 ounces. Medical News Today reports that the fetus may be developing hair on its head. The kidneys of the fetus will now be making urine. A female fetus now has six million eggs in her ovaries.

Abortions in these circumstances are more likely to lead to potentially life-threatening complications for the mother, including cervical laceration, infection, and uterine rupture.

A 2009 study on women in Finland published in Obstetrics & Gynecology found that one out of every five given abortion drugs in the first trimester experienced some kind of complication. The most common adverse effect was potentially life-threatening hemorrhaging, which represented 16% of the total complications.

Doctors with experience in the region doubt that such research is ever advisable in places such as Burkina Faso. The landlocked, recurrently unstable former French West African colony has one physician for roughly every 16,000 people, and one hospital bed for every 2,500 people, in a nation of over 19 million, according to the CIA World Factbook. There are currently about 100 gynecologists in the Society of Gynecologists and Obstetricians of Burkina Faso, RCIs reporting established. The CIA also reports that the country has one of the highest infant-mortality rates (72 deaths per 1,000 live births) and lowest life expectancy rates (56 years) in the world.

The numbers may help explain why the Guttmacher Institute found that about two-thirds of the 23,000 women treated for abortion-related complications there in 2008 suffered serious complications but did not receive the care they needed.

A major problem is chronic shortages of transfusion blood. Dr. Christina M. Francis, an OB-GYN whos done extensive work in Kenya, Burma, Afghanistan, and other developing countries, said: In general, throughout Africa, regardless of whether you're in this big city or a small village, blood products tend to be difficult to come by. There are national shortages very frequently.

Dr. Francis, who is affiliated with the Charlotte Lozier Institute, a scientific research organization that does work from a pro-life/anti-abortion perspective, continued: And so, even if you've got a woman in, say, the biggest hospital in the capital of Burkina Faso, that doesn't mean that she's going to have access to blood products just because she's in that hospital.

The study director in Burkina Faso, Dr. Thieba, confirmed that the availability of blood is most often a real problem. But, she said, as soon as the woman realizes that she is bleeding a lot, she comes and we end the abortion with the aspiration [vacuum suction]; we do not continue, because if we let the medicine act it will take time; the bleeding will be prolonged.

Dr. Thieba said there is a tracking protocol for the women in the study that ensures regular follow-ups until the abortion is completed, but the lack of hospital beds and medical facilities means that women cannot be monitored after the mifepristone and misoprostol are administered. When we prescribe, we explain the signs of danger to women and, as soon as these signs appear, they come, she said. "Most often, they have provider contact."

The Guttmacher Institute estimates that between 2% and 4% of pregnancies in Burkina Faso end in abortion. Dr. Thieba said drug-induced abortions may be useful because a lack of anesthesia and anesthesiologists are impediments to safe surgical abortions.

An abortion-related drug trial in a developing country raises other concerns because of the Wests past influence over population-control efforts that have adversely affected women.

In 1972, the International Planned Parenthood Federation sponsored an experiment to terminate the pregnancies of hundreds of Bangladeshi women who had been raped by Pakistani soldiers. A number of the pregnancies were ended using an unproven device known as a super coil, developed by a psychologist with no formal medical training. The device was later described in a court case as "basically plastic razors that were formed into a ball and would spring open inside a womans uterus. It resulted in a high rate of complications.

While there are few specifics on what happened to the women in Bangladesh, the super coil was used on one occasion in America later that year; 13 out of 15 women had to be hospitalized with serious complications, and one of them had to have a hysterectomy.

No charges were brought at the time against the Philadelphia doctor who used the device, Dr. Kermit Gosnell. He would become infamous decades later when he was convicted of first-degree murder and a host of other crimes in 2013 related to his operation of an abortion clinic in Philadelphia.

In India in 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared overpopulation a national emergency and created a large-scale, mandatory sterilization program. The Ford Foundation backed the effort, providing the infrastructure that made the sterilization programs possible.

The drug being tested in Burkina Faso is connected to abortion research's international past. Mifepristone was developed in France, and in 1994 a nonprofit American group called the Population Council was given the rights to sell RU-486 by French drug maker Roussel Uclaf SA, which was put off by the controversy surrounding the drug in the United States, the Washington Post reported in 2000, the year the drug was approved for use in the United States.

The Population Council was founded by John D. Rockefeller III in the 1950s with a mission rooted in population control and eugenics. In Donald T. Critchlows book Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern America, the organizations mission and motives are made clear:

An initial draft charter of the council submitted by Rockefeller called for the promotion of research so that "within every social and economic grouping, parents who are above the average in intelligence, quality of personality and affection, will tend to have larger than average families."

This paragraph would be dropped when Thomas Parran, a Catholic and former surgeon general, told Rockefeller, "Frankly, the implications of this, while I know are intended to have a eugenic implication, could readily be misunderstood as a Nazi master race philosophy."

Gynuity also illustrates ties between population control advocates and abortion rights advocates. Before she became president of Gynuity in 2003, Dr. Beverly Winikoff had spent 25 years working at the Population Council.

The clinical trial in Burkina Faso also resonates with the history of abortion drugs in the United States. Aside from the involvement of the Population Council in producing RU-486, the Buffet Foundation provided millions of dollars to perform clinical trials on mifepristone for U.S. approval.

Approving the drug in 2000 was a major priority for the soon-departing Clinton administration, which took extraordinary steps to fast-track the process. Mifepristone approval was expedited through an FDA regulation known as Subpart H, which was meant only for Accelerated Approval of New Drugs for Serious or Life-Threatening Illnesses where existing treatments are either insufficient or nonexistent.

The FDA approval process for mifepristone was unusual in other ways. FDA Commissioner Jane E. Henney said the agency broke with precedent by not publishing the names of the experts who reviewed RU-486 for the agency, the Washington Post reported. In another first, it did not publish the name or location of the company that will manufacture the drug.

Eventually, it was reported that the drug was manufactured by a pharmaceutical company formed in the Cayman Islands in 1995 named Danco, which continues make the drug. After the formation of Danco, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation of Hewlett-Packard fame lent it $10 million to help with marketing and FDA approval.

To this day, little is known about Danco Laboratories, beyond the names of a few of its top officers and that it is based in New York City. Abortion advocates insist that such secrecy is necessary for the safety of those who work at the company.

The Trump administration hasnt publicly expressed concern, though it has touted its "Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance" policy, aimed at ending U.S. government funding of international abortion efforts.

Despite RCIs multiple requests for comment from the State Department, National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Global Affairs, no government official would speak on the record about chemical abortion research and the issues involved in international clinical trials. The only response was a statement from an HHS spokesperson: The U.S. government has oversight of international clinical trials if they are federally funded, or if the trial is privately funded and is being conducted to support an application to FDA for a new drug or device.

Tweet This: No (US) government official would speak on the record about chemical abortion research and issues involved in international clinical trials

If Gynuitys studies regarding chemical abortion and telemedicine are successful, they might make it widely possible for women seeking abortions to perform them themselves, leaving legal restrictions on abortion exceedingly difficult to enforce. Pro-life groups raise alarms about the safety of such a situation.

The end game, the ultimate goal for the pro-abortion side, is to have a powerful abortion drug available over the counter, said Dr. Donna Harrison, an OB-GYN and executive director of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Tweet This: The end game, the ultimate goal for the pro-abortion side, is to have a powerful abortion drug available over the counter

If they can generate some studies that say, 'Oh, this is safe' -- whatever 'safe' means in the second trimester -- then they can argue, 'Oh, it doesn't matter if women don't know how far along they are.' It's quote 'safe,'

Editor's Note: This report was first published by Real Clear Investigations. Heartbeat International, which manages Pregnancy Help News, also manages the Abortion Pill Rescue Network.

Read more here:
An American later-term abortion trial on women in impoverished Africa - Pregnancy Help News

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

It felt like the plot to a Christmas film: I was turning out of my therapists office in Fitzrovia one late November morning - sunny and crisp, perfect romcom conditions - when a little cat, as scrawny as a chicken leg, rushed out from under a car.

She was ravishingly pretty; cloudy grey and apricot, with huge green eyes and clearly lost. Not once in 14 years of working in this busy central London area had I seen a cat; not even a 3am feral when waiting for the night bus. My south London neighbourhood has self-important street toms, but this little kitten was not at all like them. She looked young and underfed. Mrrrp, she trilled, winding her body around me as though air-kissing a friend...

Follow this link:
After a devastating year of failed IVF, finding a cat on the street has changed my life for good - Telegraph.co.uk

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

McLean (United States) (AFP)

When a person's immune system is impaired by a genetic disease, a bone-marrow transplant can be a powerful therapeutic tool, but with a major downside: during the first few months the recipient's defenses against viruses are severely weakened. The slightest infection can lead to a hospital trip.

A still-experimental type of treatment known as T-cell therapy aims to assist during this vulnerable period -- the months during which the body is rebuilding its natural defenses. After two decades of clinical trials, the technology has been refined, and is being used to treat more and more patients, many of them children.

A boy named Johan is one of them.

Today he is a mischievous, smiling toddler with a thick shock of light-brown hair, who never tires, playfully tormenting the family's puppy, Henry.

There is no sign of the three-year-long medical and emotional roller-coaster ride he and his family, who live in an affluent Washington suburb, have been on.

The first traumatic surprise came with the results of a pregnancy test: Johan was not planned.

"That was a huge shock. I cried," said his mother, 39-year-old Maren Chamorro.

- Risky procedure -

She had known since childhood that she carried a gene that can be fatal in a child's first 10 years, chronic granulomatous disease (CGD).

Her brother died of it at the age of seven. The inexorable laws of genetics meant that Maren had a one in four chance of transmitting it to her child.

For their first children, she and her husband Ricardo had chosen in-vitro fertilization, allowing the embryos to be genetically tested before implantation.

Their twins Thomas and Joanna were born -- both disease-free -- seven and a half years ago.

But in Johan's case, a post-birth genetic test quickly confirmed the worst: he had CGD.

After conferring with experts at Children's National Hospital in Washington, the couple took one of the most important decisions of their lives: Johan would receive a bone-marrow transplant, a risky procedure but one that would give him a chance of a cure.

"Obviously, the fact that Maren had lost a sibling at a young age from the disease played a big role," Ricardo confided.

Bone marrow, the spongy tissue inside bones, serves as the body's "factory" for the production of blood cells -- both red and white.

- His brother's immune system -

Johan's white blood cells were incapable of fighting off bacteria and fungal infections. A simple bacterial infection, of negligible concern in a healthy child, could spread out of control in his young body.

Luckily, Johan's brother Thomas, six years old at the time, was a perfect match. In April 2018, doctors first "cleansed" Johan's marrow using chemotherapy. They then took a small amount of marrow from Thomas's hip bones using a long, thin needle.

From that sample they extracted "supercells," as Thomas calls them -- stem cells, which they reinjected into Johan's veins. Those cells would eventually settle in his bone marrow -- and begin producing normal white blood cells.

The second step was preventive cell therapy, under an experimental program led by immunologist Michael Keller at Children's National Hospital.

The part of the immune system that protects against bacteria can be rebuilt in only a matter of weeks; but for viruses, the natural process takes at least three months.

- Hurdles remain -

From Thomas's blood, doctors extracted specialized white blood cells -- T-cells -- that had already encountered six viruses.

Keller grew them for 10 days in an incubator, creating an army of hundreds of millions of those specialized T-cells. The result: a fluffy white substance contained in a small glass vial.

Those T-cells were then injected into Johan's veins, immediately conferring protection against the six viruses.

"He has his brother's immune system," said Keller, an assistant professor at Children's National.

Johan's mother confirmed as much: today, when Thomas and Johan catch a cold, they have the same symptoms, and for nearly the same amount of time.

"I think it's pretty cool to have immunity from your big brother," Maren Chamorro said.

This therapeutic approach -- boosting the body's immune system using cells from a donor or one's own genetically modified cells -- is known as immunotherapy.

Its main use so far has been against cancer, but Keller hopes it will soon become available against viruses for patients, like Johan, who suffer from depressed immune systems.

The chief obstacles to that happening are the complexity of the process and the costs, which can run to many thousands of dollars. These factors currently restrict the procedure to some 30 medical centers in the United States.

For Johan, a year and a half after his bone marrow transplant, everything points to a complete success.

"It's neat to see him processing things, and especially play outside in the mud," his mother said.

"You know, what a gift!"

Her only concern now is the same as any mother would have -- that when her son does fall ill, others in the family might catch the same bug.

2020 AFP

Read the original post:
The 'supercells' that cured an infant's grave genetic illness - FRANCE 24

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

"One reason that cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers. Gwendolyn Brooks

I had a question from a follower last week about a small biotech firm based near one of my residences in New York City. This $4 developmental firm is focused on diseases of the central nervous system. I had not looked at this name in quite some time, and there is very little research posted on this company, so we will revisit it in the paragraphs below.

Brainstorm Cell Therapeutics (BCLI) is a small biotech concern out of New York. The company is developing adult stem cell therapeutic products. It focuses on utilizing the patients own bone marrow stem cells to generate neuron-like cells that may provide an effective treatment initially for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinsons disease, multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injury. It develops these therapies with its proprietary NurOwn platform. The shares currently trade at the $4 level and have an approximate market cap of $90 million.

Source: June Company Presentation

Pipeline:

Source: June Company Presentation

As can be seen above, the company has several mostly early stage assets it is developing in its pipeline.

By far the most advance therapy in the company's pipeline is its product aimed at ALS which is also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. This rare condition affects some 450,000 individual worldwide, including some 30,000 in the United States.

Source: June Company Presentation

The company posted a second safety analysis around this Phase 3 trial in late October. Much more important top-line results from this key study should be out sometime in the fourth quarter of next year. 200 people have been enrolled in this critical study. Here are the company's conclusions about its Phase II trial.

Source: June Company Presentation

Top-line data from a Phase 2 NurOwn trial to treat Progressive Multiple Sclerosis should be out mid-year in 2020 as the only other trial milestone on the horizon.

It is hard to find many small biotech firms that get less coverage than Brainstorm. I can find only one analyst firm that has 'chimed in' on BCLI in 2019. That was Maxim Group five weeks ago which maintained its Buy rating and $9 price target.

Notably, no insiders have sold shares in this firm since late in 2015. Earlier this month, the CEO, CFO and CMO purchased just over $65,000 in shares in aggregate. Although this is hardly a big insider buy, this was the first insider activity in the stock since January of this year.

The company ended the third quarter with just over $2 million in cash and marketable securities on the balance. It also has remaining non-dilutive CIRM and IIA grants that amount to approximately $5.9 million. Given Brainstorm burned through just over $5 million, some sort of capital raise is very likely on the horizon.

According to a recent interview posted on Seeking Alpha with the company's CEO, there are several other potential competitors in the ALS also conducting late stage trials. Brainstorm's leaders believe NurOwn's effort stands out in 'by being autologous and because it can produce high levels of neurotrophic factors. Moreover, unlike most stem cell competitors, it's delivered directly into the spinal fluid through bimonthly lumbar punctures, unlike others that need an invasive surgical procedure "that carries considerable morbidity".'

The company's platform is intriguing. However, there simply doesn't seem to be enough information to make an informed decision around this name especially in light of a coming capital raise. I offer up this analysis in response to an inquiry and because there is little posted here on Seeking Alpha on this name.

"There is, incidentally, no way of talking about cats that enables one to come off as a sane person. Dan Greenberg

Bret Jensen is the Founder of and authors articles for the Biotech Forum, Busted IPO Forum, and Insiders Forum

I present and update my best small-cap biotech stock ideas only to subscribers of my exclusive marketplace, The Biotech Forum. Try a free 2-week trial today by clicking on our logo below!

Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

Read the original:
Reading Up On Brainstorm Cell Therapeutics - Seeking Alpha

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

Soft tissue injuries in muscles, tendons and ligaments, andosteoarthritis, can make moving around painful and limit your physical activity. ButDr. James Presley,a Mayo Clinic physical medicine specialist, says two specialized treatments are growing more common and can help you heal faster.

Platelet-rich plasmais a specialized treatment that Dr. Presley says can bring relief for many patients dealing with soft tissue injuries.

Platelet-rich plasma is a way of trying to harness the bodys immune system or the bodys own ability to heal tissues, Dr. Presley says. [We] concentrate it and then spot-shoot it into the area of injury.

Dr. Presley says the process involves taking blood from your arm, processing it to concentrate the platelets, then injecting it directly into the affected area.

These treatments seem to be helpful in helping the healing process move along when it comes to tendon and ligament injuries, and potentially to help decrease pain and improve function in a joint that has some arthritis, Dr. Presley says.

The second treatment is calledbone marrow aspirate concentrateand involves extracting cells, including stem cells, from bone marrow in the pelvis; processing them into a solution; and injecting them into a painful joint.

The studies that have been done with this have shown patients have decreased pain and thereby improved function of a joint with mild to moderate osteoarthritis, Dr. Presley says.

But he says the best thing you can do is protect your muscles, tendons, and ligaments from injury by finding a happy medium between staying active and avoiding overuse.

Original post:
Advances In Treatment Of Soft Tissue Injuries (Video) - South Florida Reporter

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

HUNTINGTON Serucell Corporation, a cosmeceutical company based in Huntington, has developed the worlds only dual-cell technology to create and produce anti-aging skincare products, and they did it in Huntington.

Serucell KFS Cellular Protein Complex Serum is made start to finish at Serucells laboratory on the south side of Huntington.

This has been one of the best kept secrets in West Virginia, said Cortland Bohacek, executive chairman and a co-founder of Serucell Corporation.

The company soft launch was in September 2018 at The Greenbrier Spas. The Official online launch was April 2019 and is getting exposure with some well known sellers like Neiman Marcus, local dermatologist and plastic surgeons offices and several other retail locations from New York to California. It is also sold online at serucell.com.

One person that has tried the product is Jennifer Wheeler, who is also a Huntington City Council member.

As a consumer I have an appreciation of the quality of the product and the results Ive seen using it, she said. It has been transformative for my skin and seems like its success will be transformative for our city as well.

She said Serucell and the people behind it are impressive on every level.

In my role on council, Im especially grateful for the companys conscious effort to stay and grow in our city, Wheeler said.

A one-ounce bottle of the serum costs $225. The recommended usage is twice per day and it will last on average of about six weeks.

Serucells active ingredient is called KFS (Keratinocyte Fibroblast Serum), which is made up of more than 1,500 naturally derived super proteins, collagens, peptides and signaling factors that support optimal communication within the cellular makeup of your skin.

This is the first and only dual-cell technology that optimizes hydration and harnesses the power of both keratinocytes and fibroblasts, two essential contributors to maintaining healthy skin by supporting natural rejuvenation of aging skin from the inside out, said Jennifer Hessel, president and CEO of the company.

When applied to the skin, KFS helps boost the skins natural ability to support new collagen and elastin, strengthen the connection and layer of support between the upper and lower layers of your skin. The result, over time is firmer, plumper and smoother skin, according to Hessel.

Why it works so naturally with your skin is because it is natural, Hessel said. These proteins play an important role in strengthening the bond between the layers of your skin, and thats where the re-boot happens.

KFS is the creation of Dr. Walter Neto, Serucells chief science officer and co-founder of the company. Neto is both a physician and a research scientist, specializing in the field of regenerative medicine with an emphasis on skin healing and repair.

Neto said Serucells technology unlocks the key to how our cells communicate and harnesses the signaling power actions to produce the thousands of bioactive proteins necessary to support the skins natural rejuvenation.

Originally from Brazil, Neto studied at Saint Matthews University and completed his clinical training in England. His clinical research on stem-cell cancer therapies, bone and tissue engineering and wound and burn healing led to his discovery in cell-to-cell communication, and ultimately the creation of Serucells KFS Cellular Protein Complex Serum.

Neto received multiple patents for the production method of Serucell KFS Serum. He lives in Huntington with his wife and four golden retrievers and works alongside his longtime friend, Dr. Brett Jarrell.

I have known Brett since I was 18 years old, Neto said.

Jarrell practices emergency medicine in Ashland, Kentucky, and oversees all aspects of quality control for Serucell. He received his bachelors degree in biology from Wittenberg University, his masters degree in biology from Marshall University and his medical degree from the Marshall University School of Medicine. Jarrell completed his residency at West Virginia University and is board certified by the American Board of Emergency Medicine.

Jarrell has served as a clinical instructor of emergency medicine at the Marshall School of Medicine, president of the West Virginia chapter of the American College of Emergency Medicine and he has published a number of peer-reviewed journal articles on stroke research.

Jarrell also lives in Huntington.

Another co-founder of the company is Dr. Tom McClellan.

McClellan is Serucells chief medical officer and director of research and is a well-respected plastic and reconstructive surgeon with a private practice, McClellan Plastic Surgery, in Morgantown.

McClellan completed his plastic and reconstructive surgery training at the world-renowned Lahey Clinic Foundation, a Harvard Medical School and Tufts Medical School affiliate in Boston, Massachusetts. While in Boston, he worked at Lahey Medical Center, Brigham and Womens Hospital, as well as at the Boston Childrens Hospital. McClellan is board certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery.

In addition to his practice and role at Serucell, McClellan utilizes his surgical skills through pro bono work with InterplastWV, a non-profit group that provides comprehensive reconstructive surgery to the developing world. He has participated in surgical missions to Haiti, Peru and the Bahamas.

McClellan lives in Morgantown with his family.

All three doctors here have strong connections to West Virginia, and we didnt want to leave, Neto said. We all want to give back to West Virginia, so that is the main reason we have our business here in Huntington.

We are building a company we believe can make a difference in the community, Hessel added. Our goal is to grow Serucell and build our brand right here in Huntington. There is a pool of untapped talent here in Huntington. When we expand our business here, we can provide another reason for young people to be able to stay and grow their careers, whether it is in science, operations or manufacturing. The team is a pretty excited to make an impact in the community where it all started.

Hessel decline to give sales numbers, but said the business has been growing each year since the product was introduced. She also declined to give the number of employees at the facility, but did say it has sales representatives across the country.

For more information, visit serucell.com.

Read the original here:
Firm adds a new wrinkle to anti-aging products - The Logan Banner

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

HERE are four beaming children none of whom would be alive today if a stranger had not given blood.

Each of their lives was saved by a transfusion, yet many of us never find the time to sign up to become a donor.

NHS Blood and Transplant is encouraging readers to make giving blood one of their New Year resolutions.

It is particularly calling on men to donate because their blood can be more suitable for treating patients. The families of these four survivors tell Lynsey Hope their stories.

'We worry every day he might suffer a serious bleed'

GEORGE CLAXTON lives with mum Faye, 36, a salon owner, dad Luke, 34, an electrical engineer, and sister Ella, six, in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire. Faye says:

"When George was 14 months old he was diagnosed with a rare platelet disorder.

"The condition doesnt have a name but it means his blood cant clot properly.

"Tiny blood cells called platelets in his blood are the wrong shape and size and he has to take medication daily.

"We found out he had it after he suffered a virus and came out with a rash.

"Its called petechiae but can look similar to meningitis.

"We took George to A&E at Hinchingbrooke Hospital near Huntington. Blood tests came back negative and we were sent home.

"But two weeks later, we were back again.

"We were referred to specialists at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge, who discovered George was bleeding under the skin.

"Its been hard to accept its a lifelong condition and not something that can be cured.

"There have been two occasions when George has needed a transfusion.

"The first was in June 2016.

"Doctors had to perform a transfusion before he had a tooth extracted to make sure he didnt bleed too much during the procedure.

"In May last year, he fell over in the school playground and hurt his elbow, causing a bleed in his joint.

"George has been brave from the start.

"He loves football but we worry every day he may have an accident that causes a serious bleed.

"He can also have spontaneous bleeds.

"His little sister was also diagnosed with the condition.

"She hasnt needed a transfusion yet but she may do and that is devastating for us as parents.

"Were so grateful to people who donate blood.

"It can enable people to live."

'Just an hour of your time could be the gift of a lifetime'

JESSICA FAY lives in Burnley with her mum Laura Bell, 32, dad Adam Fay, 39, who is a carer, and her brothers Kyle, 14, Denver, 13, Jayden, eight and Taylor, six. Laura, a full-time mum, says:

"Jessica was diagnosed with meningitis and septicaemia when she was 15 weeks old.

"I took her to the GP when she started feeling unwell.

"She wasnt feeding and had a high temperature.

"The doctor was concerned and said I must take her straight to hospital.

"Within hours of arriving at A&E, Jessica stopped breathing and was put on life-support.

"The disease had taken over her body and, one by one, her organs were shutting down.

"There was only one option. A blood transfusion might dilute the infection in her blood and give her a chance.

"There was a risk her body would reject the blood and we knew if that happened wed lose her.

"Incredibly though, that blood transfusion saved her life.

"She remained in intensive care for a week and, after three weeks, she came home.

"Jessica was being given so many treatments in those terrible few weeks that I didnt think too much about where the blood had come from.

"But when she recovered, I realised that without it she would not have made it. Unfortunately, Jessica suffered some brain damage because of what happened.

"She has social communication disorder and finds it hard to make friends.

"She is an incredible child and Im so grateful to whoever it was that took the time to donate blood for her.

"If someone hadnt donated that blood, Jessica would be dead.

"She has done all she can to give something back.

"Shes raised thousands of pounds for charity by organising events in the community.

"I would urge anyone who can to give blood it is just an hour of your time but it could be the gift of a lifetime to a child like Jessica.'

'Our baby can be in a lot of pain due to the disease'

EZRAH PINK was born with sickle cell disease. He lives with his mum Serena, 30, who looks after an office building, and her partner Courtney, 32, an estate agent, in Beckenham, Kent. Serena says:

"We knew before Ezrah was born that he might have sickle cell disease.

"When I was pregnant, doctors found out I carried a gene.

"About a week after he was born, they confirmed Ezrah had the disease.

"People with sickle cell produce unusual C-shaped red blood cells, meaning they sometimes get stuck or block blood vessels. At first, he didnt show any symptoms.

"He started having problems when he was around 11 months.

"Since then its been a whirlwind. We have been in and out of hospital.

"Id never known anyone with sickle cell so its been a tough learning curve and the condition will affect him for life.

"Ezrah has already had four blood transfusions.

"When one of his odd-shaped blood cells gets stuck, it causes what is called a sickle cell crisis and this can cause a great deal of pain.

"Ezrah is also prone to serious infections.

"He takes penicillin every day as well as folic acid to boost his immunity.

"Id never given blood before having Ezrah.

"It wasnt until the first time doctors told me that they were going to have to transfuse him that I realised how important it was.

"Im pregnant now so I cant do it myself just yet, but as soon as I can sign up, I will.

"You never know whats round the corner.

"Its not until it happens to someone close to you that you realise how important it is."

'While recovering he's had more than 50 transfusions'

JACOB JESSEL lives with mum Emma Riley, 47, an NHS project manager, dad Nick Jessel, 44, a sales manager, and brother Sam, eight, near Grimsby, Lincs. Emma says:

"Jacob was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder when he was seven.

"We went on a camping trip and he was bitten by a mosquito. A huge bruise came out, which covered most of his forearm.

"Our GP took blood and told us his blood count was dangerously low and that we had to take him straight to hospital.

"It was a huge shock and it was obvious to us that doctors feared he had leukaemia.

"Jacob was given an emergency bone marrow biopsy at Sheffield Childrens Hospital and we were told he probably had cancer.

"Waiting for the results of the biopsy was horrible.

"We were relieved when the tests came back negative, but more tests revealed he had an incurable bone marrow disorder.

"Doctors said hed need a transplant, which he had in 2017.

"There was only one match on the register at the time so we went ahead with it. But sadly that didnt work.

"About a month later, he had a transplant using his dads stem cells, which has been effective.

"While recovering, he had more than 50 blood transfusions.

"He now attends a follow-up clinic every four to six months to make sure his blood keeps working properly.

"Before Jacob was ill, I was one of these people who never got round to giving blood.

"I thought it was a good thing to do but I kept putting it off.

SCRUBS UP Mum uses Mrs Hinch's favourites to clean filthy washing machine & they cost 4

MIDNIGHT MONARCH The Queen stays up until midnight on New Years to celebrate with Philip

STEP UP Bloke creates a man cave in the cupboard under his stairs complete with a giant TV

WRAPPED UP The mums who have their Christmas shopping for next year sewn up by January

TOYING WITH US Mums slam 25 Scruff-a-Luvs toy pets which look nothing like the ad

ICE WORK! Woman shows how youre actually meant to use ice cube bags

"But every time a unit of blood was delivered to the ward for Jacob, I felt incredibly relieved that someone, somewhere, had taken the time to give blood.

"Now I give blood regularly. Its a good feeling to know you are helping someone else.

"I know how grateful the recipient will 7 be. Its the best gift anyone can give."

See more here:
None of these four beaming children would be alive today if a stranger had not given blood - The Sun

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

Playing pool, watching comedy, and performing karaoke. These are some of the activities many Europeans do while drinking alcohol.

Athletic exertion is not one of them.

However, in recent years, more and more races have popped up across Europe that involve both running and drinking - at the same time.

Marathons in traditional wine heartlands like Bordeaux and Beaujolais have been running for decades but in recent years, many more races have popped up across the continent such as the Genusslauf in Germany, the Forges of the Anlier Forest in Belgium and now the new kid on the block - the Marathon of Flavours in Switzerland.

Most races of this sort require a medical certificate, so I popped down to my local doctor, had my blood pressure taken, jumped up and down a bit, and was duly awarded one.

At 9 a.m. I'm queuing for my bib in the picturesque Swiss town of Sion. It's the inaugural edition of the Marathon des Saveurs.

It's pouring hard, overcast and I'm severely underdressed in my running top and shorts. Looking around, many people are sensibly robed, as if they're here for a hike. And perhaps they are. This is the point where I begin to think it's not really a race.

Once out of the centre of Sion we climb a few hundred metres into the hills and run on narrow paths alongside tiny irrigation canals called 'bisses', some of which date back to the 13th century.

These man-made streams have been vital to the survival of farmland and viticulture in the area since the dark ages. The rain has not stopped and so I put my foot down and overtake a few people to warm up.

By 10:30 I'm drenched and the sight of a small marquee in the distance heralds the first 'tasting stop' - and it's a mixed blessing. Shelter from the rain is very welcome, as are the friendly faces telling us what is on offer. And though it's a little early for wine, I figure I should throw myself into the fray to get the full experience.

I'm given a white wine called Fendant, which is actually Chasselas - Switzerland's most widely grown indigenous grape. They have special names for grapes in the Valais - more of which later. It has a slight fizz on the tongue, which is a surprise. It's not a tasting glass either, it's a full wine glass. Same with the red that follows, which is called Dole. It dawns on me we're going to drink around three bottles' worth. There's food, too, of course. The organisers won't let you drink on an empty stomach. A platter of meat and cheese is the fare here. I have a chat with a couple of other competitors and everyone is in good spirits. I wonder if everyone will be drunk in an hour or so?

Rze and Cornalin are very old varietals (which is a terribly sophisticated word for grape types). Records of these two wines date back to the middle ages and the irrigation canals. We're served these, along with some delicious pumpkin soup, in the garden of some kind of traditional farm house.

The party is in full swing with some hilarious accordion music and the first glimpse of sunshine. I'm nearly 10k in, and I'm starting to really enjoy myself.

It's between stops two and three that I really begin to notice that I'm overtaking a lot of people. I heard a few competitors say they were feeling a little light-headed while we were enjoying the Cornalin, and it made me wonder when my body would start feeling the effects.

It's common knowledge that Alcohol is a diuretic (something that will dehydrate you).

"Staying well hydrated is absolutely key in races such as the 23k," Dr Chris Gaffney, Lecturer in Sports Science at Lancaster University tells me. "When we exercise our core body temperature increases and you sweat to dissipate this heat. If you consume alcohol during exercise then the body is getting rid of fluid necessary to try and maintain our body temperature. Thus, we are stopping the body from regulating temperature normally."

Dehydration is something I was aware of as someone who runs regularly, and I was carrying a three litre water bladder in my backpack for the run. What I didn't know was other, quite startling, considerations that Dr Chris made me aware of. Cardiovascular and metabolic considerations for example.

"Drinking alcohol effects the electrical activity of our heart. This can lead to an increase in heart rate, an increase in blood pressure, and an increased frequency of abnormal heart rhythms. These can be dangerous during exercise where the heart is already under increased demand."

He goes on: "Over 90% of alcohol is broken down in the liver. The processing of alcohol may impair the livers ability to detoxify other metabolites during exercise, and the accumulation of some metabolites can be bad for our health."

It's not hitting me yet and I'm still happily running through vineyards.

The promise of hot cheese leads me to run quite quickly to this, the third tasting station. A glass of Muscat is a sweet kick upon arrival as is the stereo system which is pumping out AC/DC's Highway to Hell, a fitting tribute to those struggling with the alcohol. Then comes the Humagne Rouge, which pairs stupendously with the bubbling raclette. I'm sure I'm not drunk. But then again, I am singing.

It's at this point I start to sniff victory. I am told there's only one group of runners that have already passed this way, eaten, drank and left. I decided it was game on so I declined the second plate of raclette and headed off.

After about two kilometres I could see runners in the distance. That gave me something to aim for. Soon, I'm gaining on them and feel really good.

Could it be that my fairly regular drinking habits have given me an advantage?

Gaffney seems to think so. He highlights the two elements that support the theory - genetics and what he terms the 'training' effect.

"You may be biologically advantaged through being male and having genetics that predispose to efficient breakdown of alcohol. You will further be advantaged through possessing greater quantities of enzymes in the liver to break down this alcohol that youve gained from frequent drinking.

I had been running solo for about 20 minutes by the time I reached the penultimate tasting station. Nobody was there aside from the guys running the food and drink stall. Did I just miss the frontrunners? Yes, they tell me. By about 5 minutes.

I can't just swig two glasses of wine, wolf down the game terrine and scuttle off. I have to do this properly.

I am given a glass of Johannisberg. Which takes us back to Stop One. The names for grapes that aren't actually the names for grapes.

Much like Fendant is the special Valais name for the ubiquitous Chasselas, similarly Johannisberg is really Sylvaner. These fantasy names are romantic and truly make one feel like you've entered into an entirely new world of wine. And you kind of have.

The Valais is the same size as Bordeaux's St Emilion region. That's about 5,000 hectares. Wine-wise, that's not particularly huge.

A day before the race I went to visit one of Switzerland's flagship wine estates, Domaine du Mont d'Or. Laurent Guidoux, who runs the operation, gave me a tour of the vineyards and we discussed the singular problem that is how to export Swiss wine.

"99% of Swiss wine never leaves the country," he says. "And the cost of production is too high to have prices that are interesting to supermarkets."

A wine without a profile isn't going to intrigue buyers, especially at a high price. And Guidoux has overheads that push the price point beyond an easy sell. But the quality does make the wine from the Valais competitive.

Their Petite Arvine is remarkable. There's an unmistakable saline finish that sets it apart from any other white I've ever tasted. A total shoe-in for a blind tasting. Nevertheless, he's facing a serious problem. The sort of problem that closes vineyards. Guidoux has the means to ride it out, but not every producer does.

Back to the race, and it's getting hot. I start running with a guy called Gerald and his mate. Gerald thinks we might win but I tell him I was told we're not the leaders. I then speed off, which proves foolish as while I'm running and filming a local man waving to me, I miss a signpost and take myself about half a kilometre the wrong way. It's only when I come to a crossroads with no signpost that I realise my mistake.

By the time I reroute myself, Gerald is a spot in the distance and I've got some running to do.

Eventually, after about two kilometres, I catch up. I still have a little water left in my bladder pack but I'm swigging quite heavily now. Gerald says he feels "very good" and it makes me laugh. Soon we come to "Raspille Gorge", the fifth and final tasting stop. It's dessert. Strudel with grape seeds served with Plum sorbet.

The dessert wine that goes with it, an overmaturated Hermitage, is exceptionally decent. The grapes that make this are not harvested until December, giving them more time to sweeten.

It's at this time an official gives me the news that there are two runners ahead and they left a few minutes ago. I'm not going to win this. At that moment, another couple get to Stop 5, and carry on through without stopping to drink. No, you don't, I think to myself. I down the wine, finish off the strudel and thank the volunteers. Gerald and chum are not quite ready so I wave and hit the final stage.

As I run up a hill and overtake the non-drinking couple, I ask myself if I'm drunk. I really don't think so. I don't feel unsteady and haven't the whole time.

"Alcohol affects the density of fluid within the inner ear, which sets off a cascade of signals to the brain which can result in feeling unsteady on our feet and even falling," Dr Gaffney notes in his advice to me. "This is compounded by the effect on the oculomotor (eye movement) system. This happens because alcohol affects the central nervous system and changes our eye movement patterns so they are less effective. This could pose dangers when running, particularly on uneven ground. In brief, if we consume (enough) alcohol we become unsteady on our feet and this is usually bad for exercise."

Legendary Clash frontman Joe Strummer reportedly ran a marathon in 3 hours 20 mins. According to various sources it was the Paris marathon of 1982. His advice on preparation? Drink 10 pints of beer the night before the race."

No cheering crowds, in fact no-one at all is there to witness me finish. Initially I worry I've got the wrong place, but once into a courtyard I see two officials having a glass of wine and a chat, so I head towards them. I sign to say I have completed the race and they tell me that I have come third.

A man comes over from the bar area to say that, since there's no actual podium, would I like a congratulatory drink. I gladly accept. Well, I'm not made of stone.

Read more from the original source:
Boozy marathons: can running and drinking alcohol really be healthy? - Euronews

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

Its easy to forget about Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes with so many great quarterbacks like Lamar Jackson and Russell Wilson this year.

Mahomes just threw over 4,000 passing yards and 26 touchdowns to only 5 interceptions during a season where he dealt with multiple injuries, including two games missed with a dislocated knee cap.

Plus, his Chiefs are the No. 2 seeded team in the AFC Playoffs. They get a home playoff game after a bye thanks to their dominate quarterback.

Still, it is hard to forget how great Mahomes is. It is even harder finding a proper comparison.

So who are some players similar to the Chiefs 24-year-old signal caller?

Last year, Mahomes joined Drew Brees, Peyton Manning, Ben Roethlisberger, Matt Stafford, Dan Marino, Tom Brady and Drew Brees as the only passers to surpass 5,000 yards. Brees is the only one in that group to do it multiple times (five). Marino was the first youngest player to do it (23).

Patrick Mahomes wasnt too far off doing it in his second season. Stafford was close too, hitting the mark in 2011 at 23 during his third season. The Lions QB came close to joining the club again the next season. However, Mahomes threw five less interceptions than Marino or Stafford in their 5k passing seasons. Marino also never broke 100 yards rushing in a season like Mahomes has twice. Stafford has done that three times in 10 seasons.

Otherwise, most of the other guys did it deeper in their career. Tony Romo, Kirk Cousins and Eli Manning have also come close to this club but have not made it. Mahomes is also elite in that group because he threw 50 touchdowns along with all those yards. Manning is the only other guy to do that.

What really separates Mahomes from the rest of the 5,000 passing yards club, like Manning and Brady, is his ability to run. Well many of those guys can scramble, or create in the pocket, they do not have the same size and speed to pose a threat as a runner.

In two seasons as a starter, Mahomes has 490 rushing yards along with four touchdowns. Those rushing numbers are easily passed by Cam Newton in basically any of his seasons. However, Newton has only passed 4,000 passing yards or 30 touchdowns one time each. Mahomes also completed 66 percent of his passes in each of his two seasons as a starter.

The same could be said for Steve McNair, Steve Young, Donovan McNabb, Daunte Culpepper, Michael Vick, Randall Cunningham or any other quarterback you think of for running. Sure, those guys own Mahomes in rushing yards and touchdowns, but Pat beat them majorly in passing last season. Maybe it is a different league but Mahomes is a different bread.

Mahomes isnt really a true running quarterback. He is more of a mobile QB with a big arm. He relies on the threat of his arm to open opportunities to run and not his running ability to open up passing.

That makes him closer to Warren Moon. Moon, like Mahomes, could run but he was better with his arm. Moon passed 4,000 passing yards four times in his career despite his career having an asterisk on it since he had so much time in the CFL.

However, Moon never came close to the 50 touchdowns like PatrickMahomes. Moon also only completed more than 64 percent of his passes once. Patrick completed 66 percent of his throws twice in his three seasons.

Patrick Mahomes also separates himself from the pack with his early success. The Chiefs QB is 23-7 as a starter. Moon finished his career with about a .500 winning percentage in over 200 games. It is an apple to oranges comparison, but it took Moon three seasons before he had a winning season.

Yet Mahomes won MVP in only his second season. He had the Chiefs looking unstoppable last season. His starts are down this year, as he threw 1,000 less yards and half the touchdowns, but his team is still in the playoffs. Mahomes also threw way less interceptions in his second year as the starter. All this coming after he sat out three games nursing an injury.

You would have to go back to Marino to find a player with the kind of success Mahomes is having this early. You could make a case for a young Ben Roethlisberger in terms of winning, but it took Big Ben four seasons to throw more than 30 touchdown passes.

Russell Wilson had success early in his career too. However, Mahomes is bigger and takes a lot less sacks than Wilson. Wilson has also played predominately in a run offense so his passing numbers do not really compare well to Mahomes either.

Of course, there is Lamar Jackson who has his team at the top of the AFC, and is most likely headed to an MVP in only his second season. However, Jackson is in his own unique group, as he set the record for rushing yards for a QB. Jackson is completing over 66 percent of his passes with over 30 touchdowns and single-digit interceptions.

Jackson is also like Mahomes in that they both slid down their draft boards. They both had to get the torch passed to them by an incumbent as well. Alex Smith started Mahomes first season in the league while Jackson watched Joe Flacco for half the year.

Speaking of draft slides, Aaron Rodgers is another one who knows about waiting in the green room as well as inheriting a team. He slid to the 20s in his draft and he had to inherit the team from Brett Favre. Nonetheless, the Chiefs traded up and gave up picks to draft Mahomes at No. 10 overall which put him on an instant winner.

When it comes to the eye test, you could probably compare him to either of those guys. Rodgers is infamous for his deep ball with the flick of a wrist. He can also takeover a game. Rodgers has only thrown double-digit interceptions twice in his 14 seasons. Rodgers also bests Mahomes in rushing yards. Yet, Rodgers has not had 5,000 passing yards or 50 touchdowns like Mahomes last year. He has come close. Rodgers was also older than Mahomes when he took over.

Favre on the other hand was a master at improvising. Throwing on the run and creating. Still, Mahomes has never thrown more than 12 interceptions. Over nearly a twenty year career, Favre did that once. Not to mention, PatrickMahomes is also unique for really practicing no-look, jumping throws, side arms and other highlights.

Matt Ryan is also a modern gunslinging QB who comes to mind. Ryan has thrown over 4,000 yards and completed over 60 percent of his passes the last nine seasons. Yet, Ryan has never thrown over 40 touchdowns. His numbers also took a sizable jump in his fourth season when the Falcons drafted Julio Jones. Pat Mahomes No. 1 receiver Tyreek Hill is great but he is no Julio Jones and Mahomes could still put up those big numbers.

Besides 5,000 passing yards and 50 passing touchdowns in one season, Mahomes also shares something with Peyton Manning. That is a pops who is a professional athlete. Some have even compared him to Steph Curry for having a pro athlete dad, transcending the game putting up godly numbers.

Mahomes father was a professional baseball player with 11 seasons. Its not the same as the Mannings, but it means he had guidance and genetics. In fact, it probably makes Mahomes a better athlete than either of the Mannings. Mahomes is also in the 80th percentile for three-cone drills at the NFL Combine and the 90th percentile for 20-yard shuttle which again proves his athleticism.

There is actually an entire feature about the legend of Mahomes playing basketball, football and baseball at a high-level his entire life.

In High School, Mahomes was a baseball phenom. He got drafted and offered to play in the MLB but he loved football more. That puts him somewhat in a group with Kyler Murray and Russell Wislon as guys who got drafted by the MLB. Murray and Mahomes both came up under current Cardinals head coach Kliff Kingsbury as well.

Murray is actually faster and a better runner. Mahomes athletic profile is actually closer to Teddy Bridgewater or Drew Lock. Yet neither of those guys have the same arm as Mahomes. Not to mention, Murray only threw two less interceptions this year than Mahomes last season, but Murray hasnt thrown half the touchdowns.

Moreover, Mahomes is already on his way to being as visible as the Mannings or Tom Brady. He was just on the cover of Madden and has been in commercials. It wasnt until recently we really saw Brady get the visibility Mahomes is receiving.

No there is no quarterback like Kansas City Chiefs star Patrick Mahomes. That is the short answer.

The long answer is that there is no player with the flash, arm-strength, accuracy, dual-threat ability, team success and story that Mahomes brings in only his second year as a starter in the NFL.

It does not matter what class you put him, there is no QB in history like Patrick Mahomes. His athletic pedigree, arm-strength, highlights, team success, mobility and story make him one of a kind. We cant forget the froggish-voice or athlete girlfriend either as part of his story.

The point is, Mahomes is in a category by himself. At 24, and only his second year starting, Mahomes still gets to play his best football too. Guys like Murray or Jackson might be the future of the league, but even they are no Mahomes yet.

Look at stats, look at tape or look at impact and you will not find a quarterback like Patrick Mahomes.

Read the original:
Is there any quarterback in NFL history similar to Patrick Mahomes? - ClutchPoints

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

Weve already looked at political and economic lessons from Magneto and historical revisionism from Apocalypse in todays X-Men #4 fromJonathan Hickman (#9 on the power list) and Leinil Francis Yu.And it addresses one very central point brought up in House Of X and skirted around since. How could Professor Charles Xavier give up on his dream of mutants and humans co-existing in peace. A dream that has informed every X-Men comic book since the beginning and for what, over the decades, he has sacrificed lives for, including his own. But in House Of X, that had all been done away with. Back from the dead in a rejuvenated body, walking or floating around with a massive Cerebro helmet, there were doubts about his identity and his sanity but now the Professor explains it all.

Yes, Professor, we kinda had. Given that you have taken all mutants into an isolationist racist paradise where no human may enter, given genetic parameters on entry that border on eugenics, imposing a governmental council without a democratic mandate and turned the whole place into a shag palace.

This is one of those tough love things, right? Loving someone so much that you have to dominate, subjugate and control them? Am I the only one hearing King George singing Youll be back? Still, at least it got him to take the helmet off.

I mean, okay, he does have a point. But then again the bad guys often do and it isnt long before the helmet goes back on. Red Hood: Outlaw #41, also out today, Written by former X-Men writer Scott Lobdell had something to say about that too. Once you could work out what the hell was going on in that comic.

Yes. That.

X-MEN #4 DX(W) Jonathan Hickman (A/CA) Leinil Francis YuThe Krakoan leaders attend and economic forum to show the humans what real power looks likeRated T+In Shops: Jan 01, 2020 SRP: $3.99

X-Men #4 is published today by Marvel Comics in all good comic shops. I bought mine from Piranha Comics in Kingston-Upon-Thames.Piranha Comics is a small south London comic storechain with a small south-east store in Kingston-Upon Thamess market centre, which runsMagic The Gathering nights on Fridays, and a larger south-west store in Bromley, whichalso runs Magic nightsand hasan extensive back issue collection and online store. If you are in the neighbourhood, check them out.

Here is the original post:
Professor Xavier on Giving Up His Dreams Of Mutants and Humans Coexisting Peacefully (X-Men #4 SPOILERS) - Bleeding Cool News

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

Share

Share

Share

Email

A few months ago, readers sent a second round of Santa Cruz-related science questions for students from UCSCs Science Communication Program to investigatehere are their answers

Where will sea-level rise from climate change hit the hardest in Santa Cruz County, and how soon will we see the impacts?

It may be decades or centuries before tourists will be able to snorkel the Boardwalk. But long before then, well see the effects of rising sea levels, when low-lying coastal areas temporarily flood during major storms.

Locally, Capitola is ground zero for climate impacts, says coastal geologist Patrick Barnard of the U.S. Geological Survey. The city has endured significant storm flooding three times since 1978, but rising tides will make it even more vulnerable. Other at-risk areas include downtown Santa Cruz and Twin Lakes. Some of these stretches may face permanent inundation if climate change worsens.

The cliffs and bluffs that line much of our coastline are slowly wearing away, too. The higher the sea level is, the more waves will hit those cliffs, and the more rapidly theyll erode, says geologist Gary Griggs of UCSC. Riprap armoring on the bases of coastal cliffs cannot stave off the Pacifics relentless pounding. Already, Santa Cruz officials are considering a plan to relocate portions of West Cliff Drive and its pedestrian path further inland.

When will the ocean invade? No ones going to be threatened tomorrow, says Griggs. But it could be 10, 20, 30 years before the water is in your living room, or the cliff edge is 5 feet away. By 2050 or so, 7-13 inches of sea level risethe current likeliest forecastmay double the frequency of flooding along Californias coast.

Such forecasts are imperfect, and perhaps well reduce or even reverse carbon emissions. But theres little chance the dangers of sea-level rise are being overstated, says Bernard. In fact, he says, I think were going to find itll be quite a bit worse.

Jesse Kathan

Are there species of birds in Santa Cruz County specially adapted to live only in redwood forests?

Our redwoods host a variety of birds, from little Oregon juncos to great horned owls. But one species in particularthe marbled murreletseeks out the upper canopy of old-growth forests to raise its young.

Marbled murrelets, robin-sized seabirds, live along the Pacific Coast from here to Alaska. They spend most days feeding on small fish close to shore. But in the summer, when their plumage changes from black and white to a speckled, marbled brown, they venture inland to mate and lay a single jade-green egg.

No one knew where these murrelets nested until 1974, when a tree trimmer in Big Basin Redwoods State Park found a single chick atop a wide branch 150 feet above the ground. The parents take turns watching the nest and flying back to sea for food. Their elusive habits pose a challenge to ecologists. Its a bird thats really hard to know much about, says Portia Halbert, senior environmental scientist for California State Parks.

By some estimates, only about 600 secretive individuals now live in the U.S.earning the bird endangered status in 1992. Logging has destroyed much of the old forests they need for their nests, and their fishy meals could be harder to find at sea.

But park visitors create one of the greatest threats to marbled murrelets. Sloppy tourists leave food waste that attracts aggressive crows and Stellers jays. Too often, these hungry scavengers turn their hunting eyes to murrelet eggs and chicks. In response, state park officials started a Crumb Clean campaign to educate visitors about storing food in lockers and disposing waste in secure bins.

To see our local marbled murrelets, says Halbert, go to Big Basins Redwood Meadow for spring and summer sunrises, especially in July. You might spot them circling high above for their morning social hour, or hear their piercing, keer-like call.

Ariana Remmel

With bees in decline, how much impact would there be if 100 Santa Cruz households installed new hive boxes with honeybee colonies in them?

If homeowners managed all of their hives properly, this could be a good move. But planting flowers in your yard is a simpler, more surefire way to support local bees.

Honeybees and other pollinators help produce one-third of our food. Busy bees cant perform this feat on an empty stomach. They feed on pollen and nectar from flowers, trees and crops to get the protein and carbohydrates they need.

Urbanization in Santa Cruz Countyand nationwidehas replaced flowery meadows with acres of pavement, while single-crop farms laced with pesticides can stress bees. Hungry, stressed bees are susceptible to parasites, such as the blood-sucking Varroa mite. As a result, U.S. beekeepers lost two out of every five hives last year, according to a startling survey by the Bee Informed Partnership.

Given this decline, starting your own honeybee hive may seem a noble hobby. Another sweet perk: A single hive can produce up to 100 pounds of honey a year.

But bee conservation researcher Hamutahl Cohen thinks the buzz around honeybees misses the larger point. We actually have dozens of species of bees in Santa Cruz, says Cohen, who earned her doctorate in environmental studies at UCSC and is now a postdoctoral scholar at UC Riverside. Beekeepers can always make more honeybees by inseminating the queen, Cohen says, but wild bees are key pollinators that cant be replaced. Common wild bee species on the Central Coast include the yellow-faced bee, green sweat bee and valley carpenter bee.

Cohens research shows that, without proper cleaning, beehives can spread infections to wild species. Instead of starting a hive, she recommends planting clumps of flowersincluding sunflowers, cosmos and daisiesto ensure that bees are well fed year-round. UC Berkeleys Urban Bee Lab (helpabee.org) has online resources if youre eager to get started.

Jonathan Wosen

Why does Santa Cruz have such good air quality? Is it luck and geography, or does it result from smart environmental policy and our culture of environmental awareness?

Lets clear the air: Santa Cruz does boast some of the best air quality in the state. Were lucky that way, says William Chevalier, supervising air monitoring specialist at the Monterey Bay Air Resources District. Ocean winds and a lack of heavy industry provide a breath of fresh air along our shores.

So why does the American Lung Association frequently give Santa Cruz County a failing grade for air quality? Chevalier calls it a patchy situation. While the coast enjoys the sea breeze effect, the San Lorenzo Valley is, as the districts air pollution control officer Richard Stedman puts it, cursed by geography. Surrounding hills trap tiny particles from vehicle emissions and wood-burning stoves at ground level.

The district offers an incentive program to encourage the valleys residents to change out their old stoves for cleaner options. Locals also support other clean initiatives, like forest conservation and recycling, but they tend to resist proposals that could reduce pollution from cars and trucks, says Adam Millard-Ball, an urban planning expert at UCSC.

Where our environmental awareness falls apart is housing and transportation, he says.

Replacing some parking spaces with protected bicycle lanes and bus lanes would cut down on emissions. Increasing affordable housing options downtown would also help, notes Millard-Ball. Opposition to new housing construction forces people to live farther out and spend more time driving.

Most of the time, though, poor air-quality days in Santa Cruz result from winds that carry smoke and smog from hundreds of miles away. For instance, the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise in November 2018 shrouded all of northern California in smoke, including the Monterey Bay area.

In general, Santa Cruz residents can breathe easier knowing that our beautiful geography also protects our air quality.

Erin Malsbury

How does the county handle scheduled burns, and is there a better way to reduce wildfire risk?

Our landscape craves regular fires. Without them, pent-up combustible materials threaten to burst into catastrophic wildfires with a single spark. Prescribed burning is an attempt to negotiate with nature. They consume fuels, but only when its safe.

The majority of California is probably pretty outside of its natural fire regime, says Andy Hubbs, a forester for Cal Fires San Mateo-Santa Cruz unit. To counter this, fire crews try to reduce fuels with chainsaws, wood chippers and heavy machinery to grind up undergrowth. But these labor-intensive methods only mimic what a prescribed burn often does better.

In Santa Cruz County, either Cal Fire or California State Parks manage a handful of burns each year. The agencies require specific conditions: some humidity, low winds and fuels that are damp but still combustible. Controlled burns also require a perimeter: a road, trail or strip of land devoid of fuels to separate it from grasses or trees. Burn crews monitor changes in wind that could cause flare ups, and are ready to mobilize if fire threatens to escape.

These closely watched burns are highly unlikely to turn into wildfires, Hubbs says. But even the safest ones produce smoke, another hazard of burning that ignites debate.

David Frisbey, the monitoring manager at Monterey Bay Air Resources District, says smoke gets residents pretty unglued. The countys cities and towns are close to areas that agencies might wish to burn. That means smaller prescribed fires.

The largest burn well see in Santa Cruz County is about 300 acres up in Big Basin [Redwoods State Park], Frisbey says. For comparison, a recent burn in a remote part of San Benito County spanned 6,000 acres.

The biggest challenge to prescribed burning, says Hubbs, is getting people used to smoke being part of life again in our flammable state.

Jerimiah Oetting

Are there any negative environmental consequences from flying drones in Santa Cruzs natural spaces?

Drones are rapidly rising in popularity. But birds and other animals may be less than wild about their artificial associates.

Most people arent necessarily aware of what wildlife is doing when they fly a drone, says Lisa Sheridan, president of the Santa Cruz Bird Club. Several years ago, club members were monitoring a nest at Anna Jean Cummings Park in Soquel with three baby white-tailed kites when a drone whirred onto the scene. The parents darted away to attack it, abandoning their young. We were afraid a collision with a bladed helicopter would kill one of them, she says. We did our best to inform people, since they werent aware of the birth being there.

Sheridan has also seen terns, willets, plovers, and other migratory birds scatter when drones appear. The birds waste energy fleeing instead of resting and feeding, she says.

Rules written to prevent such clashes mean you cant fly a drone wherever you wish. Within the California State Parks system, each district sets its own guidelines for drone operation. In Santa Cruz County, for example, only one state park permits visitors to fly drones near its parking lot. County parks forbid them. You also cant pilot your drone over specific coastlines that are part of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Violators can be fined.

Drones arent necessarily all bad, though. This past summer, UCSC researchers flew droneswith permissionto capture aerial photographs of Ao Nuevo Island. Citizen scientists counted animals in these photos to tally elephant seals, sea lions and birds, providing a valuable census for ecologists.

Some of these drones, in the right hands, can be very helpful for research, Sheridan says. As long as their operators respect the environment, drones and wildlife may be able to coexist after all.

Jack J. Lee

Why do rip tides happen, and are they dangerous in the Monterey Bay?

Daily tidal ebbs and flows at the narrow mouth of a bay like San Franciscos can create strong surges called rip tides, which funnel out to sea. But in less restricted waters, like those of the Monterey Bay, the hazards actually come from rip currentsnarrow channels of water in the surf zone that can sweep beach-goers far offshore.

As waves break against an uneven shoreline, seawater flows back out at different speeds. Energetic waves can scour away enough sand to focus outgoing water into rapid rip currents often hidden from plain sight.

There are always rip currents at local beaches, says Eddie Rhee-Pizano, lifeguard supervisor for state parks in Santa Cruz County. Surfers even ride the rips like conveyor belts to get beyond wave breaks.

Many such currents are small and pose no threat to a perfectly planned beach day. But when the currents intensify, these flows can tow swimmers into perilously deep waters.

The main danger stems from panic. Instinctively, most people try to swim straight back to the beach when suddenly dragged out. But thats the last thing you want to do, says Rhee-Pizano. Its basically swimming up-river.

Instead, its best to stay calm and ride the rip until it weakens. Moving parallel to shore also allows swimmers to escape the strongest pull and swim back farther down the beach. This is especially important for those without a wetsuit, as the frigid Pacific quickly saps a bodys strength.

Every year, county lifeguards stop hundreds of swimmers teetering close to rip currents. Though the numbers vary, California Sea Grant estimates rip currents lead to about 80% of all beach rescues in the state. To stay safe, pick a beach with lifeguards, ask them about the conditions, and swim alongside a buddy.

Lara Streiff

Local levels of recycling organic material (i.e. composting) are terrible. How big of a difference would it make if we improved?

If everyone in Santa Cruz County composted their food and organic waste, our landfills would have roughly 40% more space overall. Wed also reduce the countys greenhouse gas emissionsand get fantastic fertilizer in return. All of this is easy to do.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that more food gets dumped or burned every day than any other kind of trash. Each person who composts diverts more than three pounds of waste from the dump each week.

That impact really adds up, says J. Elliott Campbell, an expert in food sustainability at UCSC. By composting, you can help to extend the life of the landfills, so we dont have to build another one, Campbell says. Indeed, at our current rate of dumping, Santa Cruz County has about 10 years to find a new landfill site.

Composting at home also cuts down the harmful greenhouse gases we release. When food ends up in a landfill, trash is piled on topjust like putting food inside a plastic bag and letting it rot. With no oxygen, the decay produces methane, a gas that traps heat in our atmosphere 25 times more powerfully than carbon dioxide. In a composting bin, oxygen infiltrates the breakdown process and eliminates methane, along with that awful rotten trash smell. Statewide, California residents could release 20% less methane gas if everyone composted.

You can do all of this as a comfortable family project at home. As a bonus, youll create soil so rich in nutrients that composters call it black goldgood for you and your garden, and great for the planet. To get started, visit dpw.co.santa-cruz.ca.us.

Ashleigh Papp

What will global warming do to our summer fog bank? And if theres less fog, would that change our coastal ecosystems?

About one-third of the fog along Californias coast has disappeared over the past century as the planet has heated up, scientists estimate. Losing this cool, moist blanket may put some plant species at risk, but solutions to this clearing of the air are not so clear.

Fog spreads moisture through coastal ecosystems, especially redwood forests, while helping to rinse pollution from the air. Without the higher humidity, water and nutrients carried in fog droplets, like nitrogen and phosphorus, plants may suffer from more heat stress. When its cool, plants create sugars they need from photosynthesis more easily than in a blazing-hot sun.

In the Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay area, the fog provides moisture for a lot of species that are dependent on that moisture when there isnt any rain, says Daniel Fernandez, an environmental scientist at California State University, Monterey Bay.

Fog forms when water vapor changes to water droplets at high levels of humidity. When the air is cooled, the water vapor contained in it can condenses into particles, creating the calming mist of fog.

But if climate change erodes more of our fog banks, it can have an adverse effect on ecosystems during the otherwise-dry summer season, Fernandez says. Most research he has seen predicts that fog levels will continue to decrease as seawater in the Monterey Bay warms up, creating less of a contrast with the air temperature above the water. That contrast is what makes fog droplets condense, Fernandez says.

Researchers have struggled to make models and projections for coastal fog because its presence depends on so many factors, both local and global. There will be variability, and not all locations will respond in the same fashion within the same time period, says Fernandez.

S. Hussain Ather

Why are male elephant seals so much larger than females?

Among elephant seals, massive males top the breeding hierarchy. The more they mate, the more their genes get passed on to ensure the next generation of giants.

When one sex is larger or flashier than the other, scientists call it sexual dimorphism. We see it in many animals, including gorillas, peacocks andoddly enoughstick insects. Often, the dimorphism reflects mating style.

The drive to mate creates spectacular displays at Ao Nuevo, the nearest breeding ground for northern elephant seals. In early January, females arrive en masse to give birth to their pups. After nursing them for only 28 days, the females mate again before returning to sea.

This tight window creates intense competition among males. Larger seals can weigh more than 4,000 pounds, so fighting is risky. A bellow from their inflated nose sackthink gravel in a garbage disposalsends smaller males scuttling, but evenly matched pairs come to blows. Colliding violently, they rake each others chest, neck and head. The winner gains control of a harem of females, which top out at a slimmer 1,500 pounds. Losers may miss out on mating altogether.

During breeding season, adult seals stop eating and drinking. Their thick layers of fat sustain the males. Still, its an amazing physiological feat for such a large mammal, says Patrick Robinson, director of the Ao Nuevo Reserve. They stick it out to the bitter end, Robinson says. If theres one female that its possible to mate with, they will be there.

Hunted down to about 100 seals in 1900, the species has rebounded. However, Robinson says, the animals now suffer from a genetic bottleneck, a lack of diversity that occurs when a population expands from just a few sets of parents. This leaves them at risk in a changing ocean. But dont worry: these seals are fighters.

Amanda Heidt

Excerpt from:
The Birds and the Bees of Santa Cruz, answered by UCSC students - Good Times Weekly

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

Tap to listen to this article instead: Listen to Post

Malaysia has had its fair share of interesting crime cases and today, were going crack open the most mysterious case in Malaysia, which involves a pair of twins. Many of us may have overlooked this case but it remains bizarre because people still cant wrap their heads around how these brothers dodged a death penalty just by having similar DNA.

So, without further ado, heres a breakdown on the unsolved mystery of R. Sathis and R. Sabarishs case, which left everyone baffled, including the authorities.

The Bizarre Case of the Twin Siblings, R. Satish & R. Sabarish

You may be wondering, how did the authorities decide to close a serious case ten years ago, which often results in the mandatory death penalty, without convicting a criminal?

Before the court proceedings took place, the brothers were first arrested (along with their other brother, R. Deva Raj) and charged with two counts of trafficking in 166,336gm of cannabis and 1,762gm of raw opium. The confusion over the two brothers began when the arresting officer, Chief Inspector N. Sekaran couldnt tell the twins apart and he couldnt recognise the first twin.

Natheless, Kpl Mohamad Sidek Paiman an officer from the arresting team identified the one wearing spectacles as the first twin but the doubt still remained. This is mainly because during the time of arrest, the brothers werent wearing spectacles and Sidek only said that he could only tell them apart by the shirts they wore on that day.

Fast forward, five years after the infamous arrest, the twins were acquitted of all charges due to the lack of evidence. As a result of that, the twins escaped a death penalty. Even DNA results couldnt solve the case because the brothers share very similar DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). Thus, the police couldnt figure out which brother was the actual culprit behind the crime. To top it all off, the twins didnt tell on each other!

Judge Zaharah, who was on duty that particular day said,

My job, as required by the law, is to determine whether the prosecution has succeeded in establishing a prima facie against the two accused. In this case, both are identical twins. Arresting officer Chief Insp N. Sekaran, when identifying the first twin, was sceptical but when asked by counsel, said that he needed some time and yet was still not so sure when identifying the first twin.

Unwilling to send the wrong person to jail, Judge Zaharah finally acquitted the brothers of their crime on 7th February 2009, five years later. After they were freed of all charges, the twins cried and hugged each other in relief, but till today the case remains unsolved.

Similar cases all over around world

The inability to identify between two identical siblings isnt uncommon because there are many similar cases all around the world. Here are some similar cases:

In Michigan, 1999, two brothers were arrested for allegedly hitting an 18-year-old female on the head and raping her. Both brothers, Tyrone & Jerome Cooper have criminal records but they denied raping the girl. The police thought that the criminal would eventually come around and surrender himself to ensure his innocent brother will not be blamed for the crime, but it was merely wishful thinking.

They even put the brothers in one cell to see if they would accidentally slip the truth out, but it was to no avail because they only engaged in small talk. Until today, the girl hasnt been given justice because the authorities couldnt figure out which one of the brothers is the rapist.

Orlando Nembhard was charged with the murder of 19-year-old Sir Xavier Brooks. He was shot and killed right outside a nightclub in Arizona on 12th February 2011. The case was finally closed after the defendants lawyer argued that the identity of the killer could have been mistaken.

The lawyers argument opened a possibility that Brandon (Orlandos twin brother) could have been the killer, and just like that, the lawyer created a rift in the case. Even though Brandon doesnt have a criminal record unlike Orlando who has a long-standing criminal record -, the case remained unsolved because they couldnt genetically separate the brothers.

In 2012, France woke up to the shocking news of six women being raped in Marseille and evidence led to two people a set of twins named Elwin & Yohan. When one of the victims was asked to identify the perpetrator, but she couldnt single out between the twins.

Therefore, the twins were taken into custody, but whats interesting is that both of them denied the felony and didnt rat out each other. However, theres a twist to this case because the authorities could actually figure out the criminal thanks to the rapid growth of technology, but the process would cost a fortune.

Do twins actually have similar DNAs?

Yes, they do have similar DNAs but recent research has proven that theyre not genetically identical. They have the same DNA because they are formed with the same sperm and egg.

A study American Journal of Human Genetics proved that theres a slight difference in the genetic patterns of twins. The researchers tested 19 pairs of twins, and they found out that there are DNA segments which might exist in one twin and not the other. Therefore, this research proves that twins do have similar DNA but not identical.

Well, isnt that interesting?

That said, Satish and Sabarishs case is probably Malaysias most interesting case because of its nail-biting plot twist. Not only that but many people have called these brothers intelligent criminals for using their similar DNA to their advantage and dodging a death penalty. I think we all can agree on that.

On that note, what other Malaysian criminal cases would you like us to cover? Drop your opinions in the comments section below.

Also read: 40 Years Ago Today: The Tragic Murder of A Msian Ex-Beauty Queen That Was Never Solved

Read the original post:
Unsolved Cases: M'sian Twin Brothers Escape Death Penalty Because Their DNA Were Too Similar - WORLD OF BUZZ

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

CreditAlexandra Citrin/The New York Times

An equal number of infertility cases are caused by male factors as by female ones, according to the United States Department of Health and Human Services. But thats not the perception: Many couples who have trouble conceiving assume the woman is at the root of any problem, and thats how they go about seeking help. I have a long list of anecdotal stories of people who went forward with fertility treatments only to recognize later that the guy had a significant issue that explained his sperm count and their difficulty getting pregnant, said Dr. Joseph Alukal, M.D., a urologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Several start-ups are trying to address the sperm side of things and to rebalance responsibilities around family planning.

[Male infertility: what to know and how to cope]

Legacy, a start-up out of Harvard Innovation Lab, began in 2018 to make inconvenient meetings with physicians a thing of the past. Customers mail their semen to the company in temperature-controlled kits. Then Legacy, in partnership with clinical labs, analyzes the deposit for factors like sperm motility and quality, provides recommendations if necessary and sets up a plan to cryogenically store the best sperm. We are working toward creating a new social norm for men, a world where all men are freezing their sperm at a young age, when they have their healthiest genetic material, said Khaled Kteily, the companys chief executive officer. A similar company named Dadi began this year. Both have raised several million dollars in funding. (Theres also Yo, an at-home testing kit, that employs a glass slide and an app to analyze sperm number without shipping them anywhere.)

Convenience and cost. Dadi charges $99 for the testing kit and $99 for annual storage. Legacys pricing starts at $199 for clinical fertility analysis; optional cryogenic storage is $149 a year. Traditional sperm banks can cost around $1,000 for semen analysis and a year of storage.

Experts say these mail-in kits cannot replace in-office visits. Neither Dadi nor Legacy is able to offer what would be legally considered medical advice, and in cases of results that indicate a problem, they refer customers to fertility specialists who will most likely redo the test and ask more comprehensive questions, said Dr. Alukal. Some of the start-ups tests could also be falsely reassuring or falsely alarming without the necessary context, added Dr. Zev Williams, M.D., Ph.D., chief of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at Columbia. When it comes to sperm-freezing, doctors we spoke with agreed that anything that makes a man consider his fertility is a boon: There is no demographic that sees a doctor less than men between the ages of 18 and 45. But they werent convinced that banking was necessary beyond specific populations like men with cancer or other diseases that could affect fertility, those in the military or trans patients. I still think its overkill to recommend that everyone bank their sperm in their 20s, said Dr. Bobby Najari, M.D., a urologist and the director of the Male Infertility Program at N.Y.U. Langone Health.

Lauren is a project manager for NYT Magazine Labs and freelance journalist in New York.

See original here:
What's the Deal with Mail-In Sperm Start-Ups? - NYT Parenting

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

Two weeks ago, Andre Hollins sat behind the bench with his former Gophers basketball teammates and friends watching the programs biggest victory in nearly a decade unfold in the blowout over then-No. 3 Ohio State at the Barn.

Hollins, who starred for Minnesota from 2011-15, has the best single-game performance for the Gophers in the last four decades, but he was also in attendance for sophomore Marcus Carrs memorable 35-point effort against the Buckeyes.

It was most points by a U player since Hollins exploded for 41 points in a win against his hometown program, Memphis, in the Battle for Atlantis in the Bahamas his sophomore year in 2012.

Hes the catalyst of the team, Hollins said of Carr. Everything goes through him. He runs it. Theyre not very deep with experience. Theyre really young, but they can, like Marcus says, compete with anyone in the country. They showed it.

A big reason Hollins was in town goes backseven years ago the same season hebecame the first Gopher to score 40 points in a game since the 1970s.

In 2012, Hollins signed up to be a blood donor for Be the Match, the global leader in bone marrow transplants. It was during an event called Hope Day for Gophers athletes on campus.

The organization didnt find a genetic match for Hollins until this summer. The 27-year-old Memphis native returned to Minneapolis this month for them to retrieve his stem cell donation a couple days after the Gophers defeated Ohio State on Dec. 15.

Hollins lookedforward to the patient being strong enoughphysically to receive the marrow, which can help to battle blood cancers such as leukemia and sickle cell.

Its always good to be a blessing to someone and give back, Hollins said. And it was easy. [Be the Match] makes sure you have all the information. They take care of the flights and travel and get you to where youre going. They make it really easy for the donor. Now, hopefully the patient is ready.

Hollins most recently played a full basketball season in the Hungarian League in 2017-18 before taking a break to fully recover from a strained Achilles. Hes healthy now and waiting for another opportunity to continue his pro career overseas.

It all worked out for Hollins to watch a big win for his alma mater, spend the holidays with ex-teammates like KendalShell and Trevor Mbakwe and friend and ex-Gopher womens star Rachel Banham (She has two of thebest U hoops performance of the decade overall with her 60 points vs. Northwestern and 52 points vs. Michigan State in 2016). But most importantly, he got to help someone in need back in Minnesota.

I always love to come back, Hollins said. That was an awesome game to come to. [A lot] of magic there.

This year isn't officially the end of the decade, not untilafter 2020.But Hollins and Carr, who both played for Richard Pitino,hadtwo of the biggest individual performances from 2010 until the present.

Here'smy ranking of the top 10 Gophers mens hoops performances since 2010. Let me know if I missed any of them.

TOP GOPHERS PERFORMANCES SINCE 2010

NEXT FIVE: Gabe Kalscheur 34 points on 7 for 9 threes in Dec. 21 win vs. Oklahoma State, Jordan Murphy 35 points and 15 rebounds vs. USC Upstate in 2017-18 opener, Daniel Oturu 21 points and 20 rebounds in Dec. 28 win vs. Florida International (first Gopher 20-20 game since 1966), Austin Hollins 32 points with six threes and three steals in the NIT quarterfinal win vs. Southern Miss in his final home game in 2014 (Austin Hollins eventually named NIT Most Outstanding Player after leading the Gophers to NIT title), Amir Coffey 32 points on 8 for 16 field goals and 14 of 17 free throws with six rebounds and six assists in win Dec. 5 vs. No. 24 Nebraska (Win was dedicated to Dupree McBrayer's mother, Tayra McFarlane, who died earlier in the week).

The rest is here:
Best Gophers hoops performances of the decade? Andre Hollins was there for both - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

When Henry Ross discovered the marble-sized lump on his chest, he was alarmed. But his eventual diagnosis still came as a shock.

I just never did think that I, a male, would get breast cancer, said Ross, 65.

His 2017 diagnosis of invasive ductile carcinoma was triggered by a mutation of his BRCA2 gene, which can raise the risk of developing breast, prostate and ovarian cancers. Women with this genetic mutation have a 40 to 60 percent lifelong risk of getting breast cancer.

For men, its 6 percent. Ross was unlucky enough to be counted among that group.

On ExpressNews.com: I belong here: Advocate works to raise profile of black women with breast cancer

Breast cancer is understandably treated as a womens disease men make up only 1 percent of all diagnoses. Last year, about 2,500 men in the U.S. learned that they have the disease, and the number of cases seems to be growing slightly over time, said Dr. Maryam Elmi, a breast surgical oncologist with the Mays Cancer Center at UT Health San Antonio.

Men have breast and glandular tissue as well. Although its rare, they are at risk for breast cancer, she said.

With such small numbers, the men who do get diagnosed can feel isolated, out of place. Everything in the field is oriented around women, from clinical trials to guidelines for preventive screenings.

Most of the support groups are led by women. The majority of the survivors, 99 percent, are women, Elmi said. Its hard for men to relate.

That was true for Ross, whose experience with breast cancer was in some ways the same and in others completely different from that of women.

The treatment itself was standard: chemotherapy and a mastectomy, followed by radiation. Ross, who was at the time commuting from his home in San Antonio to his job in Austin with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, felt the same overwhelmed emotions that come with any cancer diagnosis, the same physical toll from chemo and surgery.

The social aspects were another story. When he went in for his appointments, the waiting room was filled with women. He had few peers to lean on, as opposed to the numerous groups for women with breast cancer and survivors. Telling other people about his diagnosis felt embarrassing, Ross said, because we still look at this as a womens issue.

On ExpressNews.com: MRI scans are better than mammograms for certain types of breast cancer screenings, researchers find

After initially refusing treatment a diabetic, Ross was also dealing with dialysis and the prospect of a kidney transplant at the time he came to grips with the situation. Ross, whose mother and aunt both had breast cancer, told his extended family members, which led to three cousins learning that they also had BRCA2 mutations. He did his research, learning that he was about 30 percent more likely to also develop prostate cancer.

Sure enough, in September he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He plans to undergo treatment for it this month and into next year.

Ross surgical oncologist, Dr. Morton Kahlenberg, said men like Ross who have family members with a history of breast and ovarian cancers should be aware of the risks, even if theyre small. He encouraged men to conduct self-examinations and consider undergoing genetic testing, which can provide more information about a persons risk of getting breast cancer.

Kahlenberg, who serves as medical director of San Antonios Baptist Cancer Center and Baptist Breast Network, added that some negative stigma around mens ability to develop breast cancer, including the incorrect perception that it makes them more feminine, leaves men more reluctant to pursue medical care.

As a result, they are often diagnosed at a later stage, limiting treatment options. For example, Kahlenberg said, most men end up getting mastectomies, where the entire breast is removed, as opposed to lumpectomies, where just the abnormal tissue is excised.

Top hits: Get San Antonio Express-News stories sent directly to your inbox

Some doctors may even have their own blind spots when it comes to treating male breast cancer patients, Elmi said. While reconstruction is a normal part of treatment for women, she said its important that physicians broach that conversation early on with men, too.

Ross said he is more comfortable now talking about his experience with breast cancer so that other men can be aware of the risks without feeling ashamed.

Its not just a disease that your mother or your aunt gets, he said.

Lauren Caruba covers health care and medicine in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | lcaruba@express-news.net | Twitter: @LaurenCaruba

See the original post here:
He was embarrassed by his breast cancer diagnosis. Now, he wants others to know that men are at risk, too. - San Antonio Express-News

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

There I was, watching my old VHS copy ofThe Boys from Brazil, idly reading the lab reports on the swabs I took from my gentile neighbors kids when he wasnt looking, and revising the bassoon part of a concerto Ive been working on, when I saw something alarming trending on Twitter. Not eugenics, but Bret Stephens.

Whats he done now? I asked in six languages, two of them not from the Indo-European language family.

In todaysNew York Times, Bret Stephens discusses Norman Lebrechts excellent new history of the Jews in modern times. Lebrecht describes the unparalleled contributions of notorious underachievers like Marx, Freud, Heine, Disraeli, Herzl, Trotsky, Kafka, Wittgenstein and Einstein but, inexplicably, he fails to mention the contributions of members of the Green family a lacuna that I, with my inherited Ashkenazi acumen, can already see him correcting in the paperback edition.

Lebrecht specifically does not attribute Jewish success to Jewish DNA. He attributes it to environmental factors: the Jewish tradition of Talmudic study, which produced near-universal adult literacy among Jewish males when most Europeans couldnt even write well-poisoner in blood; to the cultural imprint of intellectual labor even among secular Jews; to the Jewish emphasis on hard work, family and education; and to the perennial threat of violence, as nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of your neighbors burning you and your children alive in your home.

There is solid evidence for all these environmental factors, and plenty of evidence that similar factors apply to many other minorities. There is less solid evidence for genetic factors in Jewish achievement, and especially epigenetic factors (changes in gene expression in living organisms, presumably due to environmental factors). Bret Stephens summarizes all this by saying, Jews are, or tend to be smart.

This is not terribly smart. Perhaps it reflects the errors of compression that go into editing. The evidence that we have and it would be interesting to have more is that Jews arent much smarter than any other group. The difference is that they produce high-achieving intellectual outliers at a slightly higher rate. As in athletics, so in the life of the mind: the higher you get, the more marginal the advantages become.

Stephens also refers to a genetic study from 2005. This is an interesting study you see, we read all the time. In particular, it challenges the bottleneck theory (Ashkenazi genes were bottlenecked in the early Middle Ages) and instead focuses on how intelligence in heterozygotes are increased by the well-known clusters of Ashkenazi genetic diseases, the sphingolipid cluster and the DNA repair cluster. I want you to know that I understood that first time round, while making a pastrami sandwich.

The mention of athletics shows how fast the topic of heredity slides into the unsayable. Is there a genetic component to the excelling of Kenyans and Ethiopians at long-distance running? Why are Afro-Caribbeans, who were subjected to a horrific bottlenecking under slavery, better at sprinting than whites from the same geographical zone? Why, returning to safer ground, have Sephardi and Mizrachi Jews not produced the army of Nobel prize winners that the Ashkenazim have?

These are difficult questions, in part because they suggest that what applies to cattle might apply in marginal degree to humans. Nietzsche may have been right when, plagiarizingKelly Clarkson, he said that What doesnt kill me makes me stronger. But to pretend that difficult questions cannot be asked because some people will draw dumb or malicious conclusions is to surrender truth and the advancement of knowledge to the arbitrary moods of the mob and its digital commissars.

These dimwits were out on Twitter within hours on Saturday. In theGuardian, theNew York Timess twin these days in thick virtue-signaling, Edward Helmore wrote that that Stephens had sparked furiouscontroversy online for a column praising Ashkenazi Jews for their scientific accomplishments, which critics say amounts to embracing eugenics. In other words, praising a group for actual accomplishments is racist.

There is nothing obnoxious at all in what Stephens has said. There are obviously obnoxious things in the history of eugenics, and also it appears that one of the authors of that 2005 paper has said some obnoxious things. All of which may be true and regrettable, and none of which discredits social facts and scientific findings.

If you wish to avail yourself of the secrets of Jewish genius, there are two simple courses of action. One is to enlist your children at an early age in the study of the Talmud, and teach them the values of ethics, work and family, which are also the near-universal immigrant virtues. This will be demanding for both them and you: helping them with math homework will be a cinch by comparison.

The other option is to hire Jewish people who show marginal aptitude in their fields of specialization. This is the much less demanding course to take, and it is much more likely to lead to success in the long run. But it does mean refraining from chasing them out of the universities, the professions and the Democratic party. So, be smart like us.

Dominic Green is Life & Arts editor ofSpectator USA.

See the article here:
Want to know the secret of 'Jewish genius'? - The Spectator USA

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

This undated screen grab shows the cell-division of two fertilized human embryos during the first 24 hours of embryonic development following IVF treatment at a private clinic in London. ( Jim Dyson/Getty Images )

LOS ANGELES - Some of the scientific advancements of the 2010s have been truly mind-blowing, and perhaps none more so than the leaps and bounds weve made in the realm of reproduction.

This was not only the decade in which the first three-parent baby was born, it was the era when a rogue scientist chose to make edits to a set of twin girls DNA, making real the long-imagined scenario of genetically altering human beings while simultaneously thrusting the deeply complicated ethical discussions surrounding this practice into the limelight.

These are the five most life-altering breakthroughs in reproduction from the past decade.

In 2018, Chinese biophysics researcher He Jiankui announced that he had used the gene-editing tool CRISPR to modify the genes of two twin girls before birth. He and his team said that their goal was to make the girls immune to infection by HIV through the elimination of a gene called CCR5.

When the news broke, many mainstream scientists criticized the attempt, calling it too unsafe to try. Where some people saw the potential for a new kind of medical treatment capable of eradicating genetic disease, others saw a window into a dystopian future filled with designer babies and framed by a new kind of eugenics.

At the time, Dr. Kiran Musunuru, a University of Pennsylvania gene-editing expert, said Hes work was unconscionable... an experiment on human beings that is not morally or ethically defensible.

Other experts believe Hes work could propel the field of gene editing forward.

The twins, known as Lulu and Nana, have continued to make headlines since their birth. The gene modification that He claims to have carried out may have caused some unintended mutations in other parts of the genome, which could have unpredictable consequences for their health long term something many scientists who argue against Hes work cite as a reason to hold off on using gene-editing technology on humans.

Only time will tell what will happen to Lulu and Nana and if the edits to their DNA ultimately help or hurt them, but their story pushed the topic of human gene-editing and the ethics surrounding it to the forefront of the global scientific community.

In 2016, a technique called mitochondrial transfer was used successfully for the first time to create a three-parent baby grown from a fathers sperm, a mothers cell nucleus and a third donors egg that had the nucleus removed.

This technique was developed to prevent the transmission of certain genetic disorders through the mothers mitochondria. The majority of a three-parent babys DNA would come from his parents in the form of nuclear DNA, and only a small portion would come from the donor in the form of mitochondrial DNA.

A team led by physician John Zhang at the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City facilitated the birth of the first three-parent baby in April 2016.

Using human pluripotent stem cells, researchers were able to make the precursors of human sperm or eggs. In other words, they reprogrammed skin and blood stem cells to become an early-state version of what would eventually become either sperm or an egg.

"The creation of primordial germ cells is one of the earliest events during early mammalian development," Dr. Naoko Irie, first author of the paper from the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge told Science Daily. "It's a stage we've managed to recreate using stem cells from mice and rats, but until now few researches have done this systematically using human stem cells. It has highlighted important differences between embryo development in humans and rodents that may mean findings in mice and rats may not be directly extrapolated to humans."

A 2018 study showed that gene editing can allow two same-sex mice to conceive pups, and two female mice were able to successfully create healthy pups that then went on to reproduce themselves.

A team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, led by developmental biologist Qi Zhou, were able to use gene editing to produce 29 living mice from two females, seven of which went on to have their own pups. They were able to produce 12 pups from two male parents, but those offspring were not able to live more than two days.Whether or not the method can one day be used in same-sex human reproduction is still up for debate.

For the first time ever, Chinese scientists were able to clone two primates using the technique that produced Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell via nuclear transfer.

The two cloned female macaques were named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, and their successful birth opened up the possibility of using the same cloning method to one day clone humans.

View original post here:
What a time to be alive: Reproductive breakthroughs of the 2010s that changed life as we know it - FOX 10 News Phoenix

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

Incorporating a facial massage tool into your daily beauty routine might just be the fast-track way to get flawless skin and now, you dont need to be a professional to own one. The following beauty tools for hair, skin, and foot are the perfect winter season must-haves for that product lover who wants flawless, uplifted and natural glow in their skin.

Roller

This elegant tool provides gentle yet effective massages for the eye, face, neck and body areas. It is naturally cool to touch, immediately soothing your skin and depuffing areas prone to water retention like the under-eye area. With regular and continued use, your skin will glow and look younger every time. The gentle rolling motion eases tension knots in your facial muscles and anxieties away.

Derma Roller for hair growth

Just like the skin on our face, the scalp also loses collagen as we age, resulting in slow hair growth and dormant hair follicles. Derma Roller brings blood flow and nutrients to the scalp and induces new stem cells that support hair growth. Derma Roller is a safe and promising tool in hair stimulation and also is useful to treat hair loss.

Paraffin Socks for crack heels

A special, intensive and easy-to-use foot treatment mask that features a sock type design that envelopes the whole foot. The innovative rejuvenating formula guarantees deep and intensive regeneration and hydration of dry patches on hands, feet, and heels. It intensively smoothens out and firms the skin, lubricates and gently warms up, as well as improve the condition of the skin.

Face massager

A Face Massager through micro-vibration gives your facial muscles the right amount of stimulation in order to get a firming effect to improve the skin. It can also reduce wrinkles around eyes, lips, forehead, and neck, and instantly reshape the face contour to reveal your youthful look and energy! It can beautify your skin, only using it for 2 3 minutes per day.

Continue reading here:
Face tools to get perfect winter glow - The Statesman

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

Doctor close-up of a doctor showing a picture of a kidney on a tablet in a hospital

With a float in this years Rose Bowl parade celebrating organ donation, there are a lot of questions many have about the process and why they should donate their organs.

Legacy of Hope, the Alabama organ donation alliance, said over 1,400 Alabama residents are waiting for a life-saving transplant, with 471 lives saved in 2018.

2.9 million residents across the state are on the registry.

Can I become an organ donor?

The federal government organ donation website, Organdonor.gov, says anyone 18 and older can join the national and state organ donor registries and donate as long as they and their organs are in healthy condition.

The Tennessee donor registry also allows anyone between 13 and 17 to join as long as they have a state ID, drivers license, or leaners permit. However, their parents will have the final say on organ and tissue donation if that decision needs to be made.

Even if you have health issues, you could still donate even one organ, which could save or improve a life.

What can be donated?

How do I register to donate?

There are two registries: The National Donor Registry and the state registry.

In Alabama and Tennessee, if you checked yes to organ donation when applying for or renewing your license, youre already on the state list.

If you didnt check yes, you can make your decision when applying for or renewing your drivers license or state ID at your local DMV or visit your states registry online.

In Alabama, Legacy of Hope manages the state registry, and you can sign up here.

In Tennessee, Donate Life Tennessee manages the state registry donation registry, and you can sign up here.

Youll need to check yes every time you renew to stay on the list.

You can join the national registry hereor in the iPhone Health app.

Who will get my organs if I decide to donate?

Its possible anybody could get your organs if you donate. People of different races match frequently, according to organdonor.gov.

The matching process includes many factors such as location, how long a recipient has been on the list, medical need, and determining blood and tissue type.

The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network handles the matching process and it varies based on the organ being transplanted.

Does my decision to donate affect the care I get in the hospital?

No. The medical teams saving your life will do everything in their power before donation becomes a possibility. A separate team handles organ retrieval should it be necessary.

The donation process only begins once brain death is confirmed. In those cases, a potential donor must have no brain activity and be unable to breathe without a machine.

Legacy of Hope says in Alabama, two doctors have to mutually agree that a patient is brain dead before the process starts.

Where can I find more information?

If youre trying to decide or just want more information, there are multiple resources.

View original post here:
Curious about organ donation? Heres what you need to know - WHNT News 19

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

The 2010s are coming to an end, and looking back there have been some pretty amazing advances and innovations in health and science.

Advances in prosthetic limbs

Prosthetic limbs have been around since ancient times. In Egypt, a prosthetic wooden toe was found on a mummy dating back 3,000 years. By the Dark Ages, inventors could incorporate hinges on prosthetic arms used by knights. In modern times, the field of prosthetics has turned to incorporating more technology into physical stand-ins for limbs. In the last several years, theres been a boom in advances that have led to the best and most useful prosthetics weve ever seen.

Reports from the early 2010s talked about the potential for new technology to allow people to control prosthetics with their minds and to receive sensory information from their devices. It may have been a reach in the early part of the decade, but now it is literally within grasp. There are new prosthetic hands being tested that give the user the ability to grab objects with their thoughts and even to sense the texture of what they are touching. New bionic hands allow the user to feel again by sending signals back to the brain about the things they are touching, like whether its hard or soft. Other research groups have been working on bionic arms that can move based on the users thoughts through a brain-computer interface. While these have demonstrated its possible to accomplish these goals in the lab, theres still more to be done before people can use these devices outside in the real world.

Many of these advanced prosthetics are still prototypes and may not reach the general population for a while. Luckily, cheaper 3D printers have made simple prosthetics more accessible. These are important because a prosthetic device can improve the quality of life for people. For example, this person has been printing prosthetic hands and arms for people in Africa after watching an online tutorial. New materials that go into 3D printers are cheaper than they used to be and are being used in prosthetics to provide a more affordable option for patients.

Although prosthetics have been around for ages in some form or another, they arent always used. One variable to consider is the social acceptance of having a prosthetic. Theres still a lot of stigma around disabilities and many people may reject prosthetics even if they are available. In 2012, an athlete with both feet amputated competed in the mens 400 meter race at the Olympics in London. There was some controversy over whether the runner with a prosthetic foot should be allowed to run in races with people who dont have prosthetics or if they should only be allowed in competitions specifically for people who have them. Prosthetics also need to be comfortable and usable in order to be successfully adopted. In one study, about 4.5 percent of people rejected prosthetics and 13.4 percent stopped using their prosthetics. As the new prosthetics that are more natural and intuitive to use come to market, hopefully more people will benefit, and the social barriers to acceptance will disappear.

CRISPR

The genome modification technique called Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, aka CRISPR, was a culmination of a few decades of work by scientists, and major studies explaining the method were published in 2013. The version of it called CRISPR-associated protein 9 or CRIPSR-Cas9 is what most researchers are specifically using in most cases. It involves a regular gene editing mechanism that happens in bacteria. The bacteria can take sections of DNA from attacking viruses and essentially use that to remember the viruses if they return. When the virus is back, the bacteria can target the matching sections of DNA in the virus, cut it and disable the virus.

Though 2013 was only six years ago, as far as science goes, CRISPR has been moving at lightning speed towards practical applications. Using CRISPR to edit a gene sequence, researchers can now add, delete or modify DNA segments more quickly and accurately than ever before. Since the technique was developed, researchers have used CRISPR to target diseases caused by a single gene like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell disease.

Probably the most infamous use of CRISPR are the CRISPR babies. In late 2018, a Chinese researcher, He Jiankui, claimed to have used CRISPR to modify the genomes of two babies to include a mutated version of a gene that protects against HIV. This case was and is highly controversial for the ethical concerns with genetically modifying a human genome at the embryo level, or germline, meaning it can be passed down to future generations and has not been done before in humans. Recently, MIT Technology Review obtained excerpts from Hes research, and experts say that the report and data may be untrustworthy. This means it is still unclear if He and collaborators actually successfully modified the babies genomes. The scientific community overall condemns this way of using CRISPR to edit a human germline genome and has called for an international moratorium on it until a framework can be agreed on.The researcher has been sentenced to three years in prison in Shenzhen, China.

As fraught with controversy as the CRISPR babies may be, CRISPR technology still holds a lot of promise and can be used responsibly, supporters say. For example, researchers are using it to target cancer cells by taking a patients immune cells, modifying them using CRISPR and then infusing the patient with the modified cells. For blood diseases, a patient with sickle cell disease is reported to be responding well to a CRISPR treatment that has allowed her body to produce a crucial protein.

Another area that has boomed this decade partly because of CRISPR technology is stem cell therapy, which well get into in the next section.

Stem cell therapy

Technically, the only Federal Drug Administration (FDA)-approved stem cell therapies are blood-forming stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood. Blood-forming stem cells are used to treat patients with cancer after chemotherapy has depleted blood cells, as well as patients with blood disorders like leukemia whose bone marrow tissues are damaged. These types of treatments have been around for about 30 years, but in the 2010s weve seen potential for more uses of stem cells in health care.

The main idea behind stem cell therapy is that because the cells are pluripotent meaning they can become many other types of cells they can be introduced into parts of the body that are damaged and need new cells. On top of that, researchers can now extract some types of stem cells from a persons body, so no need for umbilical cords. This opens up the possibilities for highly personalized treatment where one person can be treated with stem cells from their own body.

Researchers are exploring how stem cells can be used to treat liver disease, cerebral palsy, stroke, brain injury and others. There are many ongoing research-backed clinical trials for stem cell therapy. A quick search for stem cell therapy on the governments clinical trial database turns up 5,638 results. And because of the work necessary to even get to the clinical trial stage, theres likely an order of magnitude more stem cell therapy studies in the pre-clinical trial stages.

Stem cell therapy is also being offered in for-profit clinics around the U.S. In these cases, the clinics are typically taking fat tissue from a patient, isolating the stem cells and then administering the stem cells back to the patient. In some cases, the treatments may lead to health complications, like blindness in a few extreme cases, and the FDA warns that such treatments are unapproved and potentially harmful. The FDA is ramping up regulation of stem cell clinics and earlier this year took a specific clinic in Florida to court.

Although there are many stem cell clinics offering unproven stem cell therapies, its not all hype. Granted that its difficult to pass the clinical trial stage to get FDA approval, stem cell research may lead to new treatments for several health conditions that could completely change the health care landscape.

You can follow Chia-Yi Hou on Twitter.

More here:
The 3 most important health innovations of the past decade - The Hill

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

Stem Cell Therapy Market 2019 report is a proficient and in-depth research report on the worlds major regional market conditions, focusing on the main regions (North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific). It covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the Key Vendors operating in this Global market.

The data and the information that was gathered was checked and approved by the subject matter experts. The users will discover this report for a better understanding of the Stem Cell Therapy market inside and out. The prime goal of this report is to help the user to comprehend the Stem Cell Therapy market as far as its definition, division, market potential, compelling patterns, and the difficulties that the market is facing.

Major companies in Stem Cell Therapy market analysis:Osiris Therapeutics, Inc., Medipost Co., Ltd., Anterogen Co., Ltd., Pharmicell Co., Ltd., Holostem Terapie Avanzate Srl, JCR Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd., Nuvasive, Inc., RTI Surgical, Inc., Allosource

By Therapeutic ApplicationMusculoskeletal disorders, Wounds and Injuries, Cardiovascular Diseases, Surgeries, Gastrointestinal Diseases, Other Therapeutic Applications

By Cell SourceAdipose Tissue-derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells, Bone Marrow-derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells, Cord Blood/Embryonic Stem Cells, Other Cell Sources

Points Covered in The Report:

Get a sample copy of the report at @https://www.360researchreports.com/enquiry/request-sample/12900039

The information and the data with respect to the market are taken from solid sources, for example, sites, yearly reports of the companies, journals, and others. The facts and information are mentioned in the report utilizing outlines, diagrams, pie graphs, and other pictorial portrayals. This upgrades the visual portrayal and furthermore helps in understanding the facts much better. The properties that are clarified in the report are the technological progressions that are made in the Stem Cell Therapy market, the business made in the worldwide market, the annual production, the profit made by the business, the ventures made by the manufacturers and the measures that are taken by the government to boost the development of the market.

The Stem Cell Therapy market revenue generation is also included in the report. The different sections from which significant offers of the market is acquired is incorporated inside the report with the regional division. The regional division encourages the market players to comprehend where to make investments and where there will be support from both the consumers and government.

Major regions in Stem Cell Therapy market analysis:

Detailed TOC of 2019 Global Stem Cell Therapy market Depth Research Report:

Chapter 1 Industry Overview

Chapter 2 Production Market Analysis

Chapter 3 Sales Market Analysis

Chapter 4 Consumption Market Analysis

Chapter 5 Production, Sales and Consumption Market Comparison Analysis

Chapter 6 Major Manufacturers Production and Sales Market Comparison Analysis

Chapter 7 Major Type Analysis

Chapter 8 Major Application Analysis

Chapter 9 Industry Chain Analysis

9.2 Manufacturing Analysis

9.3 Industry Chain Structure Analysis

Chapter 10 Global and Regional Market Forecast

10.2 Sales Market Forecast

10.3 Consumption Market Forecast

Chapter 11 Major Manufacturers Analysis

11.1 Company 3

11.2 Company 2

11.3 Company 3

Chapter 12 New Project Investment Feasibility Analysis

Continued.

Look into Table of Content of Stem Cell Therapy Market Report @ https://www.360researchreports.com/TOC/12900039#TOC

Key Reasons to Purchase:

Look into Table of Content of Stem Cell Therapy Market Report @https://www.360researchreports.com/TOC/12900039#TOC

Key questions answered:

Purchase this report (Price 3500 USD for a single-user license) @ https://www.360researchreports.com/purchase/12900039

This report revolves around Global and regional market, giving data on significant players like producers, providers, wholesalers, brokers, clients, investors, significant types, significant applications and so forth. Information type capacity, production, market share, price, revenue, cost, gross, gross margin, growth rate, consumption, import, export, etc. Industry chain, producing process, cost structure, promoting direct are also analysed in this report.

About Us:

360 Research Reports is the credible source for gaining the market reports that will provide you with the lead your business needs. At 360 Research Reports, our objective is providing a platform for many top-notch market research firms worldwide to publish their research reports, as well as helping the decision makers in finding most suitable market research solutions under one roof. Our aim is to provide the best solution that matches the exact customer requirements. This drives us to provide you with custom or syndicated research reports.

Contact Us:

Name: Mr. Ajay More

Email:[emailprotected]

Organization: 360 Research Reports

Phone: +44 20 3239 8187/ +14242530807

Check Out Our Other Related Reports-

Dental Lasers Market Research 2020 | Industry Analysis by Trends, Scope, Stake, Business Overview, Growth and Forecast by 2023

Polyurethane Sealants Market trends and forecast to 2023 | Report based on reviewed data and important sources by Size, Share, regional and geographical predictions till 2023

Global Proppant Market Analysis 2019 Industry Analysis, Size, production, scenarios, intake and cost structure Study and forecast to 2023

Solar Photovoltaic Material market growth and detailed insights 2020 by types, applications, trends, and forecast to 2023

Drilling Tools Market 2018 Industry Price Trend, Size Estimation, Industry Outlook, Business Growth, Report Latest Research, Business Analysis and Forecast 2023 Analysis Research

Cannula Market Report 2019 | Competitive analysis, trends, stake, challenges and forecast to 2023

Continue reading here:
Stem Cell Therapy Market Report to 2020 | Analysis and forecast of market till 2023 by key players(companies), applications and classification of the...

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

Hereare four K-dramaactors andK-pop idols who are going to be gracing our shores next year:

Whereyoulast saw him: He played scaredy-cat hotel manager Chan Sung in the hit 2019 dramaHotel Del Luna.

When and where you can see him IRL: Jin Goo'sMemory Linefan meeting will be held at the New Frontier Theater on February 1, 2020.

Continue reading below

Whereyoulast saw him: He recentlystarred in the TV series Melting Me Softly,where he played the role of avariety show director named Ma Dong Chan who"volunteers to participate in a cryonics experiment"and wakes up 20 yearsinstead of 24 hourslater!

When and where you can see him IRL:TheJi Chang Wook Asia Fan Meeting Tour will start in January 2020, and the actor will be visitingseven countries including Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, and the Philippines!

Continue reading below

Whereyoulast saw him:CNBLUE member Yong Hwa was on hiatus and he got discharged from military service in November 2019.

When and where you can see him IRL: His showStill 622 will take place on March 6, 2020, at the SM Mall of Asia Arena.

Whereyoulast saw her: The last timeGirls' Generationwas in Manila was in 2015 for theirBest Of Best In The Philippinesconcert.

Continue reading below

When and where you can see her IRL: Open Hearts EvePart Two in Manilais happening on January 25, 2020, at the New Frontier Theater.

Follow Lily onInstagram.

More here:
All The K-Drama Actors And Idols Who Are Coming To Manila In 2020 - Cosmopolitan Philippines

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith