- Magician relies on AirTag and a second plane ticket after United makes his bag disappear 9to5Mac
- Magician’s bag lost at Newark so he bought new ticket, found it with Apple AirTag Business Insider
- Apple Sorcery Saves The Day — Magician Finds Bag Stranded On Airport Tarmac Thanks To AirTag – Apple (NAS Benzinga
- Apple’s AirTag helps a magician find his lost bag at Newark airport AppleInsider
- When an airline made his bag disappear, a magician bought another plane ticket just to get back in the airport and track it down with an Apple AirTag — and found it sitting right on the tarmac. Yahoo News
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: disappear
Glaciers in Yosemite and Africa will disappear by 2050, U.N. warns
Other glaciers can be saved only if greenhouse gas emissions “are drastically cut” and global warming is capped at 1.5 degrees Celsius, the Paris-based UNESCO warned in its report.
“This report is a call to action,” UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said in a statement and linked the report to United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP27, which is set to begin in Egypt next week. “COP27 will have a crucial role to help find solutions to this issue.”
About 50 of the organization’s more than 1,150 World Heritage sites have glaciers, which together constitute almost a tenth of the world’s glaciered area.
The almost 19,000 glaciers located at heritage sites are losing more than 60 billion tons of ice a year, which amounts to the annual water consumption of Spain and France combined, and accounts for about 5 percent of global sea-level rise, UNESCO said.
“Glaciers are retreating at an accelerated rate worldwide,” said Tales Carvalho Resende, a hydrology expert with UNESCO.
The organization described a “cycle of warming” in which the melting of glaciers causes the emergence of darker surfaces, which then absorb even more heat and speed up the retreat of ice.
Besides drastic cuts in emissions, the UNESCO report calls for better monitoring of glaciers and the use of early warning mechanisms to respond to natural disasters, including floods caused by bursting glacial lakes. Such floods have already cost thousands of lives and may have partly fueled Pakistan’s catastrophic inundations this year.
While there have been some local attempts to reduce melt rates — for example, by covering the ice with blankets — Carvalho Resende cautioned that scaling up those experiments “might be extremely challenging, because of costs but also because most glaciers are really difficult to access.”
Throughout history, glaciers have grown during very cold periods and shrunk when those stretches ended. The world’s last very cold period ended over 10,000 years ago, and some further natural melting was expected in Europe after the last “Little Ice Age” ended in the 19th century.
But as carbon dioxide emissions surged over the past century, human factors began to quicken what had been expected to be a gradual natural retreat. In Switzerland, glaciers lost a record 6 percent of their volume just this year.
While the additional melting has to some extent balanced out other impacts of climate change — for instance, preventing rivers from drying out despite heat waves — it is rapidly reaching a critical threshold, according to UNESCO.
In its report, the organization writes that the peak in meltwater may already have been passed on many smaller glaciers, where the water is now starting to dwindle.
If the trend continues, the organization warned, “little to no base flow will be available during the dryer periods.”
The changes are expected to have major ramifications for agriculture, biodiversity, and urban life. “Glaciers are crucial sources of life on Earth,” UNESCO wrote.
“They provide water resources to at least half of humanity,” said Carvalho Resende, who cautioned that the cultural losses would also be immense.
Around the world, global warming is exposing ancient artifacts faster than they can be saved by archaeologists.
“Some of these glaciers are sacred places, which are really important for Indigenous peoples and local communities,” he said.
UNESCO cited the example of the centuries-old Snow Star Festival in the Peruvian Andes, which has already been impacted by ice loss. Spiritual leaders once shared blocks of glacier ice with pilgrims, but the practice was stopped when locals noticed the rapid retreat in recent years.
Small glaciers at low or medium altitudes will be the first to disappear. UNESCO said ice-loss rates in small glaciered areas “more than doubled from the early 2000s to the late 2010s.”
This matches observations from researchers who have studied the retreat of glaciers. Matthias Huss, a European glaciologist, said scientists had seen “very strong melting in the last two decades” in Switzerland.
At the same time, there are fewer and fewer places cold enough for glaciers to actually grow. “Nowadays, the limit where glaciers can still form new ice is at about 3,000 meters [about 9,840 feet],” he said, explaining that in recent decades that altitude has risen several hundred meters.
Glaciers at Yellowstone and Yosemite National Park on track to disappear in the next 30 years, report says
CNN
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The climate crisis is touching nearly every region of the world. But perhaps one of the most visible indicators of its impact is its effect on Earth’s iconic glaciers, a major source of freshwater supply. Glaciers have been melting at a breakneck pace in recent decades, leading to around 20% of global sea level rise since 2000.
Now researchers at the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization have found that glaciers in one-third of the planet’s most beautiful parks and protected areas are set to disappear by 2050 – whether or not global warming is slowed.
Among the glaciers on the brink of vanishing at World Heritage sites are those in two of the most visited and most beloved parks in the United States – Yellowstone National Park, which saw unprecedented flooding earlier this year, and Yosemite National Park.
The list also includes some of the largest and most iconic glaciers in Central Asia and Europe as well as the last remaining glaciers in Africa, namely Mount Kenya and Mount Kilimanjaro.
Glaciers at World Heritage sites shed around 58 billion tons of ice each year, UNESCO reports, which is equivalent to the total volume of water used annually in France and Spain combined. And these glaciers have already contributed nearly 5% of global sea level rise in the last 20 years.
The study provides the first global assessment of both the current and future scenario of glaciers in World Heritage sites, according to Tales Carvalho Resende, project officer at UNESCO’s natural heritage unit and author of the report.
“This report brings a very powerful message in the sense that World Heritage Sites are iconic places – places that are extremely important for humanity, but especially for local communities and Indigenous peoples,” Resende told CNN. “Ice loss and glacial retreat is accelerating, so this sends an alarming message.”
Only by limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels can we save glaciers at the other two-thirds of these parks, scientists report – a climate target that recent reports say the world is far from achieving. The global average temperature has already risen around 1.2 degrees since the industrial revolution.
Glaciers cover around 10% of land, providing fresh water supply for households, agriculture and industry downstream. Under normal conditions, they take as long as a millennium to fully form; each year, they gain mass through snow or rain, and lose mass by melting in the summer.
Melting glaciers may seem like a faraway problem, but Resende said it’s a serious global issue that can hit downstream communities hard. He highlighted Pakistan’s deadly floods this year, which left nearly one-third of the country underwater. Reports say the multiweek floods were likely triggered by a combination of heavier than usual monsoon rains and several glacial lake outbursts due to melting that followed the recent extreme heat that enveloped the region.
“As water melts, this water will accumulate in what we call glacial lakes; and as water comes, these glacial lakes might burst,” he said. “And this outburst can create catastrophic floods, which is something we can see very recently in Pakistan.”
Thomas Slater, a glaciologist at the University of Leeds in London, noted that these glaciers are contributing a small fraction of sea level rise compared to the amount of ice loss the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets could generate. Researchers like Slater have already found those ice sheets to be the major contributors to global sea-level rise this century.
“While it’s sad to hear some of these glaciers could be lost, we should take hope in the fact that reducing emissions can save the majority of them and avoid disruption to the water supply of millions of people worldwide who live downstream,” Slater, who is not involved with the UN report, told CNN.
With the rate at which the climate crisis is accelerating, more water will be released from glaciers. In drought-stricken areas like the Western US, an increase in meltwater may be a good thing, but Resende said it is only temporary.
Once a glacier’s peak water – the maximum meltwater it contributes to the system – has been reached, annual runoff decreases as the glacier shrinks to the point where it’s no longer able to produce water supply.
According to the report, many small glaciers in the Andes, Central Europe and Western Canada either have already reached peak water or are expected to in the coming years. Meanwhile, in the Himalayas, annual glacier runoff is forecast to jump around 2050, before it plunges steadily afterward.
If countries fail to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees, or even 2 degrees, glaciers will only continue to recede, the report shows. In that future, places would see significant glacier runoff during the wet periods, with little to no flow to quench drier and hotter conditions.
“This is a hot topic currently in the research community – to see what will be the landscape after glacier melting,” Resende said. “Unfortunately, glaciers will keep melting because there’s always a delay. Even if we stop or drastically cut our emissions today, they will keep retreating because there’s this inertia – and it is extremely important that we manage to set up adaptation measures.”
The report comes as world leaders gather in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, next week for the UN-brokered international climate negotiations, where the focus will be on getting countries to commit to stronger fossil fuel cuts that would limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. They will also discuss plans to adapt to worsening extreme weather events including heat waves, floods and storms.
“We need to really unite ourselves, to make as much as possible this 1.5 objective feasible,” Resende said. “The impacts might be irreversible, so this is really a pledge to take urgent action.”
Tumours disappear in all participants of small cancer drug trial | Doctor’s Note
Colorectal cancer, or bowel cancer, is the third most common cancer worldwide; the third most common in men and the second most common in women.
Now a small rectal cancer drug trial, carried out in the United States, has shown extremely promising results: tumours were found to have disappeared in 100 percent of participants.
What is colorectal cancer?
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a disease in which cells in the colon or rectum grow out of control. Sometimes it is called colon cancer, for short. The colon is the large intestine or large bowel. The rectum is the passageway that connects the colon to the anus.
The symptoms of CRC include:
- A persistent change in bowel habit
- Bleeding from the back passage, or blood in stools
- Unexplained weight loss or tiredness
- Unexplained abdominal pain
- Any new lumps, swelling or masses in the abdomen
Anyone experiencing any of these symptoms should speak with a healthcare professional. It may not be anything serious, but if it is cancer, finding it early dramatically improves the chances of getting better.
There were more than 1.9 million new cases of CRC in 2020. The global burden of CRC is expected to increase by 60 percent to more than 2.2 million new cases and 1.1 million deaths by 2030.
The treatment for those diagnosed with colorectal cancer usually involves:
- Surgery: the cancerous segment of the bowel is cut out; this is the most effective way of curing bowel cancer
- Chemotherapy: medicines to kill cancer cells
- Radiotherapy: using radiation to kill cancer cells
Due to the sheer numbers being diagnosed with this disease globally, and the burden it puts on patients and healthcare systems, we urgently need new effective and safe treatments to be made available.
What does the new research show?
Scientists and healthcare professionals are excited by the new research published in the New England Journal of Medicine in June. The study, carried out at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, followed 12 patients who had a specific form of rectal cancer and were given the new drug, dostarlimab, developed by pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline.
The drug was given to the patients every three to six months at a cost of $11,000 for each dose. Some of the participants also had standard chemo/radiotherapy and surgery, but for those who responded well to the drug, this step could be skipped.
At the end of their treatment, all 12 participants were found to be in remission and no trace of cancer was found on physical examination or scans.
The type of cancer being treated was a specific mismatch repair deficient (MMRd) locally advanced rectal cancer. Mismatch repair genes are involved in correcting mistakes made when DNA is copied in a cell. When they are deficient, as is the case with these tumours, DNA mutations can take place and lead to cancer.
Dostarlimab is from a group of drugs called anti-programmed death-1 (anti-PD1) monoclonal antibodies. These specific rectal tumour cells being treated have special immunosuppressive properties known as programmed death-1 (PD-1), which down-regulate immune cells known as T-cells which are needed to destroy them. Dostarlimab, an anti-PD1, interferes with this process so the cancer cells can no longer protect themselves against the T-cells and the immune system is then able to attack and kill them.
The new study takes us a step closer to the ultimate goal of cancer treatment, to provide individual personalised care to each patient specific to their tumour. Every person’s cancer will have subtle differences in the type of mutations the cancer cells have, by giving drugs that are targeted to that individual’s specific cancer type and, more importantly, the very specific mutations that patients have will improve positive outcome rates.
Side effects of the drug were reported as minimal, but it is not yet known how long the participants will remain cancer-free, so scientists are unable to call this treatment a cure yet.
One of the hopes for this kind of immunotherapy is that it will reduce the need for surgery and chemo/radiotherapy for cancer sufferers in the future, especially for younger people. Both chemotherapy and radiotherapy can affect fertility in particular, for both men and women, meaning eggs and sperm have to be frozen where possible and then artificially fertilised and implanted at a later date. Bowel surgery for cancer itself carries risks, with many patients left with stoma bags and/or difficulty going to the toilet to open their bowels afterwards. If dostarlimab reduces the need for all of these other treatments, we may well see an improvement in the quality of life of those being treated for bowel cancer.
How can we reduce our risk of colorectal cancer?
Being diagnosed with any type of cancer is never the fault of the individual, and people should never be made to feel this way. Often, unavoidable things like genetics play a big part and if you have a strong family history of colorectal cancer you should be under regular surveillance from a healthcare team. People may be at higher risk of CRC if they have other bowel problems such as inflammatory bowel disease and should be especially vigilant to any new and unexplained symptoms.
There are, however, things we can all do to reduce our risk of CRC. There is evidence that eating red and processed meat – including beef, lamb, pork and goat – can increase the risk of bowel cancer, so we should try to limit our intake to one-two portions per week. Eating more fibre – such as whole grains, oats, chickpeas, lentils and beans – has been shown to reduce our risk of bowel cancer, and we should be eating approximately 30gm per day.
Obesity has been linked with bowel cancer, so maintaining a healthy weight will reduce our risk of developing the disease. People who are physically active have a lower risk of developing bowel cancer. Alcohol is linked to seven types of cancer, including bowel cancer, so ensure you are drinking alcohol to safe levels only and make sure you have at least two alcohol-free days per week. Smoking has also been linked to bowel cancer, so stopping smoking will not only reduce the risk of this cancer but of several other health conditions also.
Many countries now have screening programmes in place to help detect bowel cancer in its early stages before symptoms develop. If you are offered a test as part of a screening programme, which may include giving in a stool sample, please do it. The earlier these things are detected, the better your chances of survival.
And lastly, never be embarrassed to talk about your bowel habits with a healthcare professional; we are used to it and need to know if you have had any changes in yours. Remember, it might not be anything serious, but it is better to know early than to wait until it is too late.
Small rectal cancer drug trial sees tumors disappear in 100 percent of patients
“I don’t think anyone has seen this before, where every single patient has had the tumor disappear,” said Andrea Cercek, an oncologist with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and lead author of the study.
The patients all shared the same genetic instability in their rectal cancer and had not yet undergone treatment. Each was given nine doses of intravenous dostarlimab, a relatively new drug designed to block a specific cancer cell protein that, when expressed, can cause the immune system to withhold its cancer-fighting response.
After six months, scans that once showed knotty, discolored tumors instead revealed smooth, pink tissue. No traces of cancer were detected in scans, biopsies or physical exams.
“All 14 patients? The odds are exceedingly low and really unheard of in oncology,” Cercek said.
The results were so successful that none of the 14 patients who completed the trial needed the planned follow-up treatment of chemo-radiation or surgery, nor did any have significant complications from the drug. Four other patients in the trial are still undergoing treatment but thus far are showing the same promising results.
Sascha Roth, the first patient to enter the experimental study in late 2019, knows firsthand how big a deal the results are, but said that since the news was released Sunday, she and her family are beginning to understand the broader impact.
“My cousin from Brussels said it’s in the paper there,” Roth said Tuesday. “It’s touching everybody.”
The results point to a promising option for rectal cancer treatment, which can often leave patients with life-altering effects.
Though rectal cancer is highly survivable when treated in its early stages, the most effective traditional treatments of radiation, chemotherapy and surgery can also leave patients with permanent bowel and bladder dysfunction, sexual dysfunction and infertility. For younger women, the treatment can cause scarring of the uterus, making them unable to carry a pregnancy; other patients with low-situated rectal tumors need to permanently use a colostomy bag after surgery.
The study does have caveats: The sample size of patients, while diverse in age, race and ethnicity, was small. And even the earliest patients in the trial still have several more years of observation to ensure that the tumors haven’t reemerged or metastasized elsewhere in the body. The results also only pertain to those who carry a specific abnormality to their rectal cancer known as mismatch repair-deficiency, which impedes the body’s function to normalize or “repair” abnormalities when cells divide and instead results in mutations. The deficiency occurs in roughly 5 to 10 percent of all rectal cancer patients and tends to resist chemotherapy.
“We’re definitely seeing an influx of people calling saying, ‘Is this drug for me?’ ” Cercek said. “It’s a very emotional reaction of, ‘Oh my gosh, they had cancer and now look at them.’ ”
David Ryan, the director of clinical oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital, said the results are a game changer for cancer patients with mismatch-repair deficiency. The study was sponsored by biotech company Tesaro — which was acquired by GlaxoSmithKline when the earliest patient began treatment in 2019.
“This is a very big deal,” said Ryan, who did not participate in the study. “It’ll be really hard not to think about this for the next patient who walks through the door: ‘Should I do chemo and radiation, or should I do this immunotherapy?’ ”
Ryan said that the trial participants have and will continue to be closely monitored by a team of specialists who will be able to watch for any possible tumor recurrences or spread and quickly intervene with treatment if necessary. He said that necessity could be a challenge for patients who don’t live near where they can easily and regularly access care from specialists.
“We do worry that if recurrences happen, that they have to be picked up as soon as possible to give people the best chance,” he said.
But Ryan and Cercek separately said the trial results raise the specter that anyone with a mismatch repair deficiency in other tumor types, like those of the pancreas, stomach or bladder, could be effectively treated with the same drug from Cercek’s study.
For Ryan, the study also reinforces the importance of cancer patients knowing their mismatch repair status.
“We always knew about it, but we didn’t know these were the tumor types that respond like gangbusters to immunotherapy and the tumors melt like butter with treatment,” he said.
Cercek presented the paper Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago. She had not even finished her 10-minute presentation when the room broke into applause. Gasps and tears rippled through the audience as bold, white, underlined letters appeared on a blue screen with her study’s top-line finding: “100% clinical COMPLETE response in the first 14 consecutive patients.”
In layman’s terms, it was like spiking a football after a touchdown.
Roth, now 41, feels equally triumphant. She described her journey into the trial as “bizarre.”
“All the stars aligned in a perfect way that allowed me to do this trial,” she said. “If I had done one infusion of chemo, that would have disqualified me.”
Roth, who lives in Bethesda, Md., and runs a furniture store, was diagnosed in September 2019 when she was 38 years old. She had experienced some rectal bleeding and chalked it up to the anti-inflammatories she took as a result of her active lifestyle that included the occasional bike crash and soccer collision.
“I thought they were going to tell me I had a gluten allergy,” Roth said. “I definitely was not anticipating a cancer diagnosis.”
She spoke to a friend who had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer a-year-and-a-half earlier who advised her: Memorial Sloane Kettering or bust. Three days before she was scheduled to begin chemotherapy in the Washington area, she met with a doctor at MSK who, she recalled, “threw down the gauntlet” in the exam room.
“He said, ‘One, you’re not a candidate for surgery because of where the cancer is located,’ ” and also advised her that chemotherapy — typically the standard care — would not be an effective option given that she had a cancer abnormality that tends to resist that treatment.
The doctor was near-certain she was a “Lynch” patient, or someone with an inherited cancer syndrome that’s associated with abnormalities. Roth’s doctor introduced her to Cercek, and she soon became the trial’s first patient.
Roth would have to wait another two months for FDA approval before she could begin the experimental treatment.
“In my mind, every day that’s passing, I’m wide-eyed and crazy,” she said of the fear her cancer could worsen from Stage 3 to Stage 4 during the wait. “But I was reassured that cancer doesn’t grow in a day.”
Roth was closely monitored to ensure that it was safe to wait on treatment and keep her in the trial. She began the experimental therapy in December 2019. After her first infusion, she went to Florida on vacation and said she felt no adverse side effects. She even continued running.
Halfway through the trial, Roth’s tumor was visibly shrinking. By the six-month mark, when Roth would transition to chemotherapy, she received a late-Friday-night call from Cercek telling her to cancel her move to New York. The researchers were going to adjust the trial; chemo — along with radiation or surgery — would no longer be necessary, at least for now.
Roth’s family jokes that she’s a “unicorn,” a living example of a medical miracle. What Roth feels is gratitude — for the doctors and nurses, and those who encouraged her to advocate for herself and seek a second opinion.
She also is grateful for the scientific advancements, given the prevalence of cancer in her family. Roth’s father died of brain cancer in 1999, and her mother is currently in “the final days of her life” fighting cancer. Thanks to innovations in the field, she feels optimistic about her own future.
“I feel a universal feeling of gratitude — but also hope for others,” she said. “Hope for all cancers.”
Every patient in this experimental cancer drug trial saw their cancer disappear, researchers say
A small clinical trial conducted by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center found that every single rectal cancer patient who received an experimental immunotherapy treatment had their cancer go into remission.
One participant, Sascha Roth, was preparing to travel to Manhattan for weeks of radiation therapy when the results came in, Memorial Sloan Kettering said. That’s when doctors gave her the good news: She was now cancer-free.
“I told my family,” Roth told The New York Times. “They didn’t believe me.”
These same remarkable results would be seen in 14 patients to date. The study was published Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine. All of the patients had rectal cancer in a locally advanced stage, with a rare mutation called mismatch repair deficiency (MMRd).
They were given six months of treatment with an immunotherapy drug called dostarlimab, from the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, which helped fund the research. The cancer vanished in every single one of them — undetectable by physical exam, endoscopy, PET scans or MRI scans, the researchers said.
Memorial Sloan Kettering
The drug costs about $11,000 per dose, The Times reports. It was administered to each patient every three weeks for six months, and it works by exposing cancer cells so the immune system can identify and destroy them.
“This new treatment is a type of immunotherapy, a treatment that blocks the ‘don’t eat me’ signal on cancer cells enabling the immune system to eliminate them,” CBS News medical contributor Dr. David Agus explains.
“The treatment targets a subtype of rectal cancer that has the DNA repair system not working. When this system isn’t working there are more errors in proteins and the immune system recognizes these and kills the cancer cells.”
After six months or more of follow-up, the patients continued to show no signs of cancer — without the need for the standard treatments of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy — and the cancer has not returned in any of the patients, who have now been cancer-free for a range of six to 25 months after the trial ended.
“Amazing to have every patient in a clinical trial respond to a drug, almost unheard of,” Agus said, adding that it “speaks to the role of personalized medicine — that is identifying a subtype of cancer for a particular treatment, rather than treating all cancers the same.”
Another surprise from the study was that none of the patients suffered serious side effects.
“Surgery and radiation have permanent effects on fertility, sexual health, bowel and bladder function,” Dr. Andrea Cercek, a medical oncologist and principal investigator in the study, said in an MSK news release. “The implications for quality of life are substantial, especially in those where standard treatment would impact childbearing potential. As the incidence of rectal cancer is rising in young adults, this approach can have a major impact.”
“It’s incredibly rewarding,” Cercek said, “to get these happy tears and happy emails from the patients in this study who finish treatment and realize, ‘Oh my God, I get to keep all my normal body functions that I feared I might lose to radiation or surgery.'”
Researchers agree the trial needs to now be replicated in a much bigger study, and noted that the small study focused only on patients who had a rare genetic signature in their tumors. But they say that seeing complete remission in 100% of patients tested is a very promising early signal.
Dr. Hanna K. Sanoff of the University of North Carolina’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, who was not involved in the study, said it is not yet clear if the patients are cured.
“Very little is known about the duration of time needed to find out whether a clinical complete response to dostarlimab equates to cure,” Dr. Sanoff wrote in an editorial accompanying the paper.
But she noted, “These results are cause for great optimism.”
The trial is expected to include about 30 patients, which will give a fuller picture of how safe and effective dostarlimab is in this group.
“While longer follow-up is needed to assess response duration, this is practice-changing for patients with MMRd locally advanced rectal cancer,” said study co-leader Dr. Luis Diaz Jr., head of the division of solid tumor oncology at MSK.
Joe Rogan’s Embattled Podcast and Other Shows Disappear From Spotify
After a brief disappearance from Spotify, The Joe Rogan Experience is back on Spotify, but other shows produced by The Ringer, Gimlet, and Parcast still appear to be missing from the streaming service.
A rep for Spotify explained the situation, saying, “It’s a technical issue affecting a number of our shows and should be resolved soon.” Indeed, the issue appeared to only impact shows Spotify is behind: The streamer has an exclusive deal with The Joe Rogan Experience, while it also owns The Ringer, Gimlet and Parcast.
While the disappearances aren’t exclusively affecting Rogan’s podcast, they do come as Spotify contends with an ongoing controversy surrounding their wildly popular podcasting torchbearer. In recent months, Rogan has garnered significant controversy for spreading Covid-19 misinformation on his show, as well as for his past use of racist slurs and other offensive language.
This story is developing…
1,000 “Digital-Only” Titles Estimated To Disappear When Nintendo Closes 3DS & Wii U eShop
Nintendo yesterday announced the beginnings of a phased shutdown for the 3DS and Wii U eShop stores.
It’s set to wipe out a huge amount of digital content on these systems, but just how many games can we expect to disappear? While we already know Fire Emblem Fates: Revelation and its DLC will be lost, our friends over at VGC have now done some rough estimates – highlighting the number of games that will no longer be accessible to the masses.
Here in the west, there are currently around 2,000 games available across the 3DS and Wii U eShop, and it seems around 1,000 “digital-only” titles will permanently disappear on these platforms. That’s not to forget the Virtual Console offerings that will go missing – with around 350 of them currently not available on Nintendo’s Switch Online service.
– Around 450 digital-only Wii U games
– Around 600 digital-only 3DS games
– Around 100 Wii U games that are also available physically
– Around 300 3DS games that are also available physically
– Nearly 530 Virtual Console games, around 350 of which are not currently available on Nintendo Switch Online
Nintendo’s phased closure of 3DS and Wii U eShop stores will see credit cards usage removed from the service by 23rd May 2022. Nintendo eShop card funds can no longer be added to eShop accounts as of 29th August 2022, but download codes can still be redeemed until late March 2023.
How are you feeling about Nintendo shutting down the 3DS and Wii U eShop? Leave a comment below.
COVID may have helped man’s cancer disappear: study
For someone with cancer, a bout of COVID-19 could derail treatment — or worse.
But for one 61-year-old man with terminal stage III lymphoma, his coronavirus infection may have been a stroke of good luck.
A recent case study published in the British Journal of Haematology reported that the man had been diagnosed with the disease, presenting with tumors all over his body, not long before he contracted COVID-19, which put him in the hospital for 11 days.
When the respiratory illness cleared, he went home. About four months later, his tumors did, too.
Lymphoma has occasionally been known to clear on its own, according to Dr. Jonathan Friedberg, of the University of Rochester Medical Center. However, certain immune system responses behind how the COVID-19 pathogen mutates in the body suggests that it could also help wipe out other unwelcome cells, report authors said.
“We can’t be 100% sure,” Dr. Friedberg told Forbes. “For many types of lymphoma, there have been well-described spontaneous regressions and remissions.”
He said that for one type of lymphoma, the cancer can go away on its own about 25% of the time.
“But in this case, the lymphoma was more aggressive and spontaneous regressions and remissions are more rare,” he said. “It is pretty surprising in this case and certainly intriguing.”
While rare, some cases of incurable cancers have seemingly disappeared following some viral illness.
The report described a process by which the body’s own unique immune response to COVID-19 could have farther-reaching effects throughout the body. The so-called “storm” of cytokines — proteins responsible for directing your army of T-cells and antibodies — are perhaps just the boost it needed to take cancer to task.
“This massive cytokine response [to COVID-19] can turn on other non-specific immunity, leading to fever and many of the unpleasant symptoms associated with being sick. This stress causes very high levels of cytokines, which may have a direct effect on cancers.” said Friedberg.
Lymphoma is a cancer of the immune system, Friedberg noted, and is usually treated with immunotherapy.
The COVID-19 finding could open doors for research into cancer treatment, Friedberg suggested.
“We are at the beginning of understanding how the immune response to the viruses can have anticancer properties,” he said.
Still, the vast majority of cancer patients have reason to fear COVID-19, which has taken an outsized toll on the patients — and not only because they’re immunocompromised. At various heights of the pandemic, overrun hospitals have had to turn away cancer patients in need of treatment.
China Has Built an ‘Artificial Moon’ on Earth That Can Make Gravity ‘Disappear’
China has created an artificial low-gravity research facility. The gravity of this place can be controlled using powerful magnets by scientists to such low levels that it could successfully simulate the moon’s gravity, as per South China Morning Post. The research facility can control the gravity inside a vacuum chamber that is 60 centimetres in diameter and make the gravitational pull of the earth “disappear.” The moon has one-sixth of the Earth’s gravity, and developing the ability to control it, despite Earth’s omnipresent gravitational pull, is a significant achievement that can help scientists with future missions to the moon. However, because of the small size of the chamber, it cannot be used to train astronauts. Currently, NASA trains astronauts for microgravity situations in high-altitude parabolic flights.
The newly built research facility in China can maintain low-gravity conditions for “as long as you want,” Li Ruilin, a geotechnical engineer working at the China University of Mining and Technology, told South China Morning Post. According to Ruilin, the chamber will be filled with rocks and dust to totally simulate the lunar surface, an experiment that Ruilin believed is the “first of its kind in the world.”
According to scientists, the facility, which is built to augment China’s ongoing lunar exploration program, will be used to extensively test technologies that the scientists plan to send to the moon. This will help scientists work out technical vulnerabilities in the expensive equipment and test the durability of instruments in a simulated lunar environment before the deployment of the actual missions.
Scientists behind the research say that they were inspired by a 1997 experiment that used magnets to completely levitate a frog. According to the original research, most of the ordinary material including human beings exhibit weak diamagnetism. A diamagnetic object, according to scientists, is repelled by magnetic fields. So, if a diamagnetic object is placed under a strong enough magnetic field, its repulsion can even balance gravity, levitating the object in the air and staying that way as a result.
The 1997 experiment, conducted by a Dutch-British Physicist Andre Geim, was awarded the satirical Ig Nobel Prize 2000. Ig Nobel Prize is awarded for unusual scientific achievements.
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