News Round Up [July 27, 2017]

You got me there!

Woman killed aboard cruise ship off Southeast Alaska

By KTVA Web Staff

Anchorage FBI spokeswoman Staci Feger-Pellessier said the death, aboard the Emerald Princess near Juneau, was reported to the FBI Wednesday morning.

“It was in water outside of any state’s territory,” Feger-Pellessier said. “That’s why it’s our jurisdiction.”

Charles Rowlen tells KTVA he and his wife were in a room, two floors above, where the incident took place Tuesday night.

“It was evening for us, I had turned in and my wife was taking a shower and I heard terrible screaming, I mean you knew it wasn’t normal,” Charles said. “And it sounded like two or three ladies or girls, definitely women screaming.”

Rowlen said his wife looked over the balcony and saw a man, bruised, cut and covered in blood.

“My wife’s a registered nurse, she thought he was going to jump over the rail, and at one point he put his hand on the rail and set his rear on it, but she started yelling get back in and the ship announced, get a security team to that area,” he said.

Rowlen said the yelling got worse.

...

“One of the little girls from that room came running out, calling for help, that her parents were in a fight,” Ceman said. “She sounded pretty desperate.”

Like most of the other passengers, he didn’t learn of the death until the morning. Both Rowlen and Ceman say they didn’t hear gunshots. [Read the rest]

Green sponge discovered in Southeast could treat some cancers

Alaska Public Media by Leila Kheiry, KRBD

A green sponge discovered in 2005 in Southeast Alaska waters has unique properties that could be used to treat certain types of cancer.

...

“The second I saw it, I thought I should collect it,” Stone said. “I didn’t know what it was, (and) I like to collect anything I’m not familiar with.”

It was a green sponge — unusual for the region, where sponges are more of a brownish color.

Stone said it looked like some sponges he had been collecting in the Aleutians for Mark Hamann, a cancer researcher for the Medical University of South Carolina.

Another cancer researcher, Fred Valeriote of the Detroit-based Henry Ford Cancer Institute said he investigates natural products for potential treatments, and has collaborated with Hamann in the past.

Valeriote said Hamann’s lab studied the chemical diversity of that green sponge and then sent an extract to the Detroit lab for them to take a look.

“We did that, and we found that this extract and eventually the pure compound that Mark discovered from the extract, had selective activity in our tissue-culture system for both pancreatic cancer and ovarian cancer,” Valeriote said.

The extract appears to target and kill tumor cells for those types of cancer, without also hurting normal cells. Those slow-growing cancers don’t typically respond to conventional treatments, such as chemotherapy. [Great Article here]

Late state budget delays fall-winter-spring ferry schedule

Alaska Public Media by Ed Schoenfeld

Alaskans have until the end of the month to tell the Marine Highway System what they think of its fall, winter and spring sailing plans.

The schedule, which is similar to last year’s, came out later than usual and the comment period is shorter.

Last year, the fall-winter-spring ferry schedule was released in May. Residents had about a month to go through it and provide feedback.

Written comments on the schedule are due by July 30 and a teleconference will be held the following day.

Marine Transportation Advisory Board Chairman Robert Venables doesn’t see that as a problem.

“It is a shorter public review and comment period,” Venables said. “But I think most folks are very familiar with the schedule and the system and their needs. So, it’s best to get that schedule published and open for reservations.” [Source]

We’re All Guinea Pigs in a Failed Decades-Long Diet Experiment

"The change in dietary advice to promote low-fat foods is perhaps the biggest mistake in modern medical history."

Let's say you want to lose some weight. Which of these foods would you choose: A skim-milk latte, or the same drink with whole milk? A low-cal breakfast bar or steak and eggs? A salad tossed in light dressing or the same salad doused with buttermilk ranch?

If you're like most Americans, you either aren't sure how to answer, or you're very sure—but very wrong. And it's not your fault. It's the fault, experts say, of decades of flawed or misleading nutrition advice—advice that was never based on solid science.

The US Department of Agriculture, along with the agency that is now called Health and Human Services, first released a set of national dietary guidelines back in 1980. That 20-page booklet trained its focus primarily on three health villains: fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol.

Recently, research has come out strongly in support of dietary fat and cholesterol as benign, rather than harmful, additions to person's diet. Saturated fat seems poised for a similar pardon.

"The science that these guidelines were based on was wrong," Robert Lustig, a neuro-endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, told Tonic. In particular, the idea that cutting fat from a person's diet would offer some health benefit was never backed by hard evidence, Lustig said.

Just this week, some of Lustig's colleagues at UCSF released an incendiary report revealing that in the 1960s, sugar industry lobbyists funded research that linked heart disease to fat and cholesterol while downplaying evidence that sugar was the real killer.
[Full article]

Note, by the way, that it's not just Americans who have been affected by this disastrous dietary science. Keep that in mind when you consider the "global climate change consensus".

In a recent editorial appearing in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, researcher Zoe Harcombe from the University of the West of Scotland explains that obesity rates among British men and women rose from 2.7 percent in 1972 to 23 percent and 26 percent, respectively, by 1999.

Amazingly well preserved 3,500-year-old lunch box discovered in Swiss Alps

An incredibly rare wooden container from the Bronze Age has been discovered on the Lötschberg mountain in Switzerland, still with detectable traces of the grains that the box contained.

The box was found at the summit of the Lötschenpass, a transit through a glacier, at an elevation of about 2,650 metres above sea level. It's thought to have remained frozen since it was lost or abandoned by its owner in 1500 BCE.

Such discoveries are rare. Only one other similar artefact has been discovered, found in another alpine pass, the Schnidejoch, about 25km to the west of the Lötschenpass. Perhaps the most famous discovery from the ice-packed Alps is Ötzi the iceman, a human discovered dating from about 3300 BCE.

Analysis of the box showed traces of spelt, emmer and barley, according to a study in the journal Scientific Reports. The research is the first time that such detailed information on food contents has been retrieved from a Bronze Age artefact.

"The box has this kind of strange amorphous residue on it. Cereal grains quite rarely survive thousands of years. [Source]

Identity Politics in the US

Imagine you lived your whole life in a quiet suburb that was just far enough away from the metro area where no one bothered you. It’s full of upper middle class homes, very low crime rate and you’re generally afforded a peaceful life. You don’t notice at first, but soon your way of life is getting chipped away at. The people from neighboring towns, whom you have no quarrel with and have rarely interacted with start trash talking your town. Sure, you can ignore it. Maybe it’s just petty jealousy and there is no advantage for you to get involved at all; let them say what they want.

As time goes on, the anger from the towns around you grows, the rhetoric gets dialed up and soon you’re being painted as evil just for living in your town. People from the other towns start coming through your town, holding demonstrations and demanding that you apologize for being a resident of that town and demanding that you give in to other demands from the towns around you. They demand payouts from businesses who face boycotts if they don’t relent. You find that you’re just not as comfortable being out in public anymore because your quiet life has been disturbed. Even so, you tell yourself that if you keep your head down, this will all blow over because there’s nothing to it and you’re not one of the bad guys. You’re not even sure who the bad guys are really supposed to be.

You’ve never had a reason to look down on the people from the towns around you. You’ve been more than content to let them leads the lives they see as most beneficial to them and you pay them no mind at all. You have no hatred or resentment, nor feelings or superiority either. But now you’re being pushed. Your’e being encroached on. Your way of life is threatened by people that have no business telling you how to live your life, but they’re doing it anyway. They’ve painted you as a hater, a terrorist, and any other negative label they can pin on you. They get control of the media. They shame people relentlessly for not conforming to their way of doing things. At what point do you get fed up and start fighting back?

Welcome to identity politics in America. [Source]

Pickett's Charge—what modern mathematics teaches us about Civil War battle

[Read the article here analyzing the different ways the Battle of Gettysburg Could Have Gone]

Just a Reminder that This Man is Now Leading the Senate Run in Michigan

For the older generations that don't understand how Kid Rock is leading the race (and will win), this can be summed up in three words: Generation X Politics.

If you think that's bad.

Just Wait Till Generation Zyklon Hits Voting Age:

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