"This might come in handy someday"

The perfect comic to send to a friend or relative with hoarding tendencies.

More Pearls Before Swine.

Looks like phocomelia ("T. rex arms")...

... but it's just an optical illusion.  The mother has normal arms.  Look closely.

Phocomelia.

Via.

Car with dashcam left at the dealership..

YouTube link.

There are lots of stories about cars being taken on joy rides by service technicians, but this customer left his dashcam on and was able to document not just the frivolous "test drive" but the failure to provide service.

"Paid Over $700 for transmission service and it wasn’t even done! Car was on the Hoist for 11 minutes! And charges for Over 90 minutes labour!! "

'Qui ouvre une école, ferme une prison.'

The title is a quote from Victor Hugo: "Each time you open a new school, you shut down a prison."

Photo cropped for size and emphasis and brightened from the original here.

Snake

Jingtai County, Baiyin City, Gansu Province, China.  This is a section of mountain road leading to the Yellow Stone Forest.

Looks ever-so-much like the garter snakes we used to have in our yard when I was growing up in Minnesota.  They seem to be less common these days.

The photo is from a remarkable gallery posted at The Atlantic of winning entries in the Sony World Photography competition.

Credit © Li Wang, China, Commended, Open, Travel (Open competition), 2018 Sony World Photography Awards.

Cars in the movies

YouTube link.

Adult cured of sickle-cell disease by stem cell transplant

The recipient was fortunate to have an HLA-perfect-match donor:

An Edmonton woman who received donor stem cells from her sister during a procedure in Calgary last year has been declared cured of her sickle-cell disease and health officials believe Revée Agyepong is the first adult in Canada to be cured of the disease through this method...

“When Revée approached us, we had coincidentally been thinking about adult stem cell transplant for sickle-cell disease based on the remarkably good outcomes that Alberta Children’s Hospital has been seeing with transplants in the pediatric population,” explained Dr. Daly in a released statement. “She met all the necessary criteria in terms of being able to tolerate a transplant but, most important, she had a sibling who was a 100 per cent match.”

The procedure proved successful but there are concerns as her immune system will remain compromised as a result of the anti-rejection drugs. The side-effects are expected to persist for another year.

On Tuesday, blood tests confirmed the 26-year-old was sickle-cell disease free.

"Over the past few months, what we've seen is that Revée's sister's bone marrow has taken over the production of Revée's red blood cells," said Dr. Daly. "The amount of sickle-cell hemoglobin in her bloodstream has decreased almost to zero."

Anyone who has ever seen a sickler in crisis, with excruciating pain in every bone in their body from no fault of their own, will appreciate what an absolutely awesome event this is.  I have a family member who received stem cells to treat scleroderma, and spoke this week to a woman whose son received intraarticular stem cells to try to reverse degenerative arthritis.  Macular degeneration, ALS, and other "incurable" diseases are being studied.  Amazing.

Bluebonnets

I lived in Texas for ten years, but never got to the Hill Country region while the bluebonnets were in bloom.  This photo is too highly saturated for my taste, but there can be no doubt about the beauty and impressiveness of the spectacle.   Years ago I was fortunate enough to visit Kew when the bluebells were blooming in profusion, and always loved the woodlands of central Kentucky carpeted with Blue-Eyed-Marys in the spring.

Icarus

The furthest-from-earth non-supernova star was discovered incidentally because its light emissions were lensed around a cluster of galaxies.

MACS J1149+2223 Lensed Star-1, also known as Icarus, is a blue supergiant observed through a gravitational lens and the most distant individual star detected, at 9 billion light-years from Earth... Light from the star was emitted 4.4 billion years after the Big Bang.  According to co-discoverer Patrick Kelly, the star is at least a hundred times more distant than the next-farthest non-supernova star observed, and is the first magnified individual star seen.

More at the link.  I find it curiously difficult to think about this star using verbs in the present tense, since everything we know about it (position, size, wavelengths) describe it nine billion years ago.

Related (with some discussion of gravitational lensing): The first "multiple-image gravitationally-lensed supernova."

Also related: List of star extremes (nearest, oldest, brightest, hottest, least massive, fastest moving...)

Fishing nets

I didn't know what they were either, until I read a caption.  Still don't know how they work...

Credit Yen Sin Wong/ Travel (Open competition) /2018 Sony World Photography Awards, via.

The first American tea

Excerpts from an article at the always-amazing Atlas Obscura:

Cassina, or black drink, the caffeinated beverage of choice for indigenous North Americans, was brewed from a species of holly native to coastal areas from the Tidewater region of Virginia to the Gulf Coast of Texas. It was a valuable pre-Columbian commodity and widely traded. Recent analyses of residue left in shell cups from Cahokia, the monumental pre-Columbian city just outside modern-day St. Louis and far outside of cassina’s native range, indicate that it was being drunk there. The Spanish, French, and English all documented American Indians drinking cassina throughout the American South, and some early colonists drank it on a daily basis. They even exported it to Europe...

Upon export to Europe, cassina was marketed in England under the names “Carolina tea” and “South Sea tea,” and in France as “appalachina,” likely a reference to the Appalachee people.This confusing array of names emphasizes the practicality of the Linnaean classification system, which was still in its infancy when Europeans learned of cassina. William Aiton, an eminent British botanist and horticulturist, director of Kew Gardens, and “Gardener to His Majesty,” is credited with giving cassina the scientific name it bears to this day: Ilex vomitoria. Ilex is the genus commonly known as holly. Vomitoria roughly translates to “makes you vomit.”...

In the earliest days of the Southern colonies—when plantations were being carved out of woodland and luxury imports were rare—cassina drinking was widespread from slaves to plantation owners. But as plantations became larger and more profitable, the nouveau riche demonstrated their wealth by drinking expensive imported tea.

For further discussion of the NON-emetic properties of the tea, see Atlas Obscura.

Biomimicry

One of these is a Peregrine falcon.  The other is a B-2 bomber.

The peregrine falcon reaches faster speeds than any other animal on the planet when performing the stoop, which involves soaring to a great height and then diving steeply at speeds of over 320 km/h (200 mph), hitting one wing of its prey so as not to harm itself on impact. The air pressure from such a dive could possibly damage a bird's lungs, but small bony tubercles on a falcon's nostrils are theorized to guide the powerful airflow away from the nostrils, enabling the bird to breathe more easily while diving by reducing the change in air pressure. To protect their eyes, the falcons use their nictitating membranes (third eyelids) to spread tears and clear debris from their eyes while maintaining vision. A study testing the flight physics of an "ideal falcon" found a theoretical speed limit at 400 km/h (250 mph) for low-altitude flight and 625 km/h (388 mph) for high-altitude flight. In 2005, Ken Franklin recorded a falcon stooping at a top speed of 389 km/h (242 mph).

Discussion of biomimetics/biomimicry here.  Via.

White House intern diversity

Where's Waldo?

Photo credit Shealah Craighead/White House.

Available

Best comment from the discussion thread:

"Alternating between upper and lower case and style...like a good ransom note."

The efficacy of sugar in wound healing

This is not new information, but the BBC has a nice brief review:

As a child growing up in poverty in the rural Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe, Moses Murandu was used to having salt literally rubbed in his wounds when he fell and cut himself. On lucky days, though, his father had enough money to buy something which stung the boy much less than salt: sugar...

To treat a wound with sugar, all you do, Murandu says, is pour the sugar on the wound and apply a bandage on top. The granules soak up any moisture that allows bacteria to thrive. Without the bacteria, the wound heals more quickly...

The sugar Murandu uses is the plain, granulated type you might use to sweeten your tea... he found that it worked for diabetics without sending their glucose levels soaring. “Sugar is sucrose – you need the enzyme sucrase to convert that into glucose,” he says. As sucrase is found within the body, it is only when the sugar is absorbed that it is converted. Applying it to the outside of the wound isn’t going to affect it in the same way...

McMichael, who works at the University of Illinois Veterinary Teaching Hospital, first started using both sugar and honey on pets back in 2002. She said it was a combination of the simplicity of the method and the low cost that attracted her – especially for pet owners who couldn’t afford the usual methods of bringing the animal to the hospital and using sedation.

McMichael says that they keep both sugar and honey in their surgery and often used it on dogs and cats (and occasionally on farm animals). Honey has similar healing properties to sugar (one study found it to be even more effective at inhibiting bacterial growth), though it is more expensive...

As well as being cheaper, sugar has another upside: as more and more antibiotics are used, we are becoming resistant to them.

Anyone who doubts that wounds can be difficult to treat has never seen a sacral decubitus ulcer that has burrowed down to the level of the vertebral bodies.  I do hope that more attention is paid to non-antibiotic interventions.