BioOrbit hopes drug-crystallisation technology will lead to self-injected cancer treatment that could save millions

Onboard a SpaceX flight last week was a remarkable piece of cargo – a hi-tech box destined for the International Space Station to grow ultra-pure protein crystals, with the aim of producing self-injected cancer drugs.

A British startup, BioOrbit, has developed the drug-crystallisation technology at its labs in London and launched Box-E, a compact unit the size of a microwave, on the 15 May rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

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Millions are being dragged into starvation, while people everywhere pay a Trump war tax. But there are plenty of powers who could bring him to heel

With the deadlocked war in Iran about to enter its fourth month, loose comparisons with previous US quagmires in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam are bandied about. When the conflict began, warnings of another “forever war” seemed exaggerated. No longer. As matters stand, the negative international humanitarian, economic and geopolitical fallout from this fiasco looks set to prove more permanently globally damaging than any of those past US-made disasters.

That being the case, an urgent question arises, not least today as reports suggest the US president and his secretary of war are planning to rain more bombs on Iran: who will stop Donald Trump?

Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

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The end of The Late Show, an American institution since 1993, leaves those still surviving within the format wondering what the future looks like

• Share your favorite memories from The Late Show With Stephen Colbert

In a way, it’s a shock every time the biggest talkshow hosts assemble into their “Strike Force Five”, the podcast-born group consisting of Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and John Oliver. No, the shock isn’t the lack of Greg Gutfeld, the highly viewed Fox News talkshow host who has nonetheless only ever been funny as a punchline unto himself, and was playfully name-checked on the final episode of Colbert’s The Late Show, after the deposed king of late-night was informed the highest-rated host was getting the boot. (“They’re canceling Gutfeld?!” he cried in fake panic.) The real repeated surprise is the realization that there are (or were) five major late-night hosts still standing.

OK, even before Colbert got the axe, it was actually four: Oliver hails from a weekly perch on HBO, which, given similar jobs held by Dennis Miller for nine years and Bill Maher for 24, seems likely to last for at least 200 seasons. But still: four big-name network talkshows? In this economy?! Strike that down to three, now that Colbert’s tenure is officially over, and his David Letterman-founded late-night franchise with it. Though Colbert is the exact wrong one to cull – the group’s best interviewer, strongest comedy bona fides, and highest-rated show to boot! – it’s hard to argue that network TV is in need of the late-night chatshows that used to be such a major status symbol and, presumably, cash cow. Though the shows are notoriously expensive (such that CBS was able to claim that their king of late-night also lost money), they must have once generated substantial revenue, given the amount of jockeying the 11pm-and-beyond slot inspired throughout the 1980s and especially 90s.

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US-backed board has put sole blame for stalled ceasefire on militant group despite Israel not fulfilling its obligations, analysts say

The top diplomat from the Board of Peace has blamed Hamas for the stalled ceasefire, but critics have said the US-backed board’s lack of even-handedness in implementing the truce risks a return to war.

The “high representative for Gaza”, Nickolay Mladenov, told the UN security council on Thursday that Hamas was the “principal obstacle” to the ceasefire’s continued implementation because “it refused to accept verified decommissioning, relinquish coercive control and allow a genuine civilian transition”.

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@mbootsman
In ons Franse dorpje zijn er tijden gepubliceerd wanneer je herrie mag maken met je (tuin) gereedschap.
Weekdagen en zaterdag van 8 tot 12 en van 2 tot 8, zondag. Van 2 tot 6.
Dat geldt ook voor betaald werk.
En dat wordt prima nageleefd.

Robstours has added a photo to the pool:

Goami Pond. It is a picturesque, central feature of the open-air museum in Takayama, Gifu Prefecture, Japan

wing of kaz has added a photo to the pool:

鹿児島県霧島市、和気神社

Kanker voelt voor veel mensen als een ongrijpbare ziekte waar je nauwelijks invloed op hebt. Toch laat nieuw onderzoek van de Wereldgezondheidsorganisatie (WHO) zien dat een groot deel van alle kankergevallen wereldwijd wél te voorkomen is. Volgens de analyse had in 2022 bijna 38 procent van alle nieuwe kankerdiagnoses voorkomen kunnen worden door bekende risicofactoren aan te pakken.

De onderzoekers bekeken wereldwijd bijna 19 miljoen nieuwe gevallen van kanker. Daarbij richtten zij zich op dertig beïnvloedbare risico’s, variërend van roken en alcoholgebruik tot luchtvervuiling, infecties en gebrek aan lichaamsbeweging. Vooral long-, maag- en baarmoederhalskanker blijken sterk samen te hangen met factoren die in principe vermijdbaar zijn.

De grootste boosdoener is nog altijd tabaksgebruik. Roken was in 2022 verantwoordelijk voor ongeveer 15 procent van alle nieuwe kankergevallen wereldwijd. Bij mannen lag dat percentage zelfs op 23 procent. Daarmee blijft tabak met afstand de belangrijkste vermijdbare oorzaak van kanker.

Maar ook luchtvervuiling speelt een belangrijke rol. In Oost-Azië werd ongeveer 15 procent van de longkankergevallen bij vrouwen gekoppeld aan vervuilde lucht. In delen van Noord-Afrika en West-Azië gold dat voor ongeveer een vijfde van de longkankergevallen bij mannen. De impact van milieuvervuiling verschilt dus sterk per regio.

Roken en alcohol

Na roken volgt alcoholgebruik als tweede grote leefstijlfactor. Volgens de onderzoekers hing 3,2 procent van alle nieuwe kankerdiagnoses samen met alcoholconsumptie – goed voor ongeveer 700.000 gevallen. Samen zijn roken en alcohol verantwoordelijk voor bijna de helft van alle vermijdbare vormen van kanker.

Daarnaast blijken infecties verantwoordelijk voor ongeveer 10 procent van de nieuwe gevallen. Bij vrouwen speelt vooral het humaan papillomavirus (HPV) een grote rol. Dit virus kan leiden tot baarmoederhalskanker. Hoewel er inmiddels effectieve vaccins bestaan tegen HPV, blijft de vaccinatiegraad in veel landen achter.

Ook maagkanker komt vaker voor in regio’s waar slechte sanitaire voorzieningen, overbevolking en beperkte toegang tot schoon drinkwater leiden tot meer infecties. Dat onderstreept volgens de WHO dat kankerpreventie niet alleen draait om individuele keuzes, maar ook om maatschappelijke omstandigheden.

De onderzoekers spreken van een belangrijke doorbraak in het wereldwijde kankeronderzoek. Voor het eerst werd op wereldschaal in kaart gebracht hoeveel kanker ontstaat door factoren die beïnvloedbaar zijn. Volgens de WHO biedt dat overheden en burgers concrete handvatten om miljoenen gevallen van kanker in de toekomst te voorkomen.

De boodschap van het onderzoek is helder: kanker is niet altijd te voorkomen, maar gezonde keuzes, vaccinaties en een schonere leefomgeving kunnen wereldwijd een enorm verschil maken.

Bron: Science Alert

Adventures of the Toy Maker is a self-indulgent collection of animated artworks by Amrit Pal Singh depicting the life and times of the Toy Maker. It's mostly about the small things he does every day and the people he meets along the way. Currently Exhibited at Artehouse, New York City. Notable Collaborations: Adobe, Google, Apple, Wacom, Elegoo, BenQ, and Absolut.

The Virtual OS Museum is an epic collection of historically significant operating systems, representing more than 600 OSes across upwards of 250 platforms. It’s all local, so you’ll need a good few gigs of space. The Virtual OS Museum is a giant mixtape for enthusiasts of the history of OS evolution. As an indication of its breadth of coverage, it reaches all the way back to the Manchester Baby – from 1948. Multics, the Xerox Alto, NeXTstep, PowerPC Mac OS X, early versions of Windows NT and Android, and more. It is one hefty layer-cake of code. The project offers two versions to download. The Full edition is a whopping 121 GB download, which unpacks to 174 GB, but includes everything ready for offline use. If that’s a little indigestible, there’s also a “Lite” edition which includes the various emulators, but not the all the disk and tape images of actual vintage OSes: those are downloaded and run on first use. This is a mere 14 GB download, which expands to 21 GB of space. The download contains an x86 Linux VM, and inside that are the various emulators, which are listed on the Credits page. The VM should run on most things: the README has instructions for launching it on Linux, and on both macOS and Windows on both x86-64 and Arm64. On Linux and Windows it runs inside VirtualBox, and on macOS inside QEMU. Either way, the package will install and configure the hypervisor for you if needed – including adding itself to an existing copy, if you already have it installed. There’s a lot in here: the homepage has a section with 45 screenshots and there’s a second page with over 100 more. This means that its licensing is a little complicated. The launcher and its configuration is distributed under the MAME license, which keeps source code available but prohibits commercial use. The metadata of the various OSes is distributed under the CC-BY-NC-SA license. As for the many OSes themselves, the license page merely says: Everything else retains its original license. Any commercial software in this collection is included for purposes of historical research and preservation only This is followed by a note that nothing in the compilation is still available for retail sale anywhere, and a request for copyright holders to contact the author if they want anything removed. That author is Canadian developer Andrew Warkentin, who also has a blog called Andrew’s OS Lab, plus a Gitlab instance, holding the project’s scripts, config and website, and for his unfinished RTOS UX/RT. It’s an impressive assembly. Although this vulture suspects that he’s already tried quite a few of the contents, this is a vastly larger collection than we’ve ever assembled. Part of the value here is that it contains snapshots of various important steps in the evolution of modern computers – including things outside of the main sequence. So many such emulators exist because somebody somewhere got curious and went looking for some relics of code gone by and built tools to run it – but to do that, you need to know that it existed. If you don’t already know, then this browsable catalog of OSes running via emulation is your illustrated and interactive guide. It’s way more interesting to play with these old systems than just watch videos, and at least for us, it’s more interesting to run it on your own computer than inside an web page. We’ve also personally failed fairly hard at getting some ancient mainframe OSes running, because the meager available documentation assumes that if you’re interested enough to want to try something, that means that you already know about it. When it comes to very early mainframes, for example, the Reg FOSS desk definitely doesn’t – even though our knowledge reaches back to the early 1980s. On that note, we also like Warkentin's mention that if you break the emulated system, then there is a button to restore to a working snapshot. In his introductory video, he says that it’s a work-in-progress and he has enough additional candidates yet to add to push the collection to over 2,000 different entries. An updater is included, so you won’t have to re-download the whole thing. He also, slightly disarmingly, does admit that not every single one has been tested yet, and that he’s publishing it partly in the hopes of finding employment. We wish him luck. ®