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Oh man I absolutely love this.
Not the Bee
Scientists Find Evidence in Mice That Inherited Alzheimer’s Could Be Transmittable
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A new study this week points to a potential transmission risk of Alzheimerās disease. Researchers found evidence in mice that an inherited form of the neurological disorder can be passed on via bone marrow donation. While such a danger has yet to be confirmed in humans and likely to be infrequent if it can happen, the authors say more research has to be done to investigate the possibility.
Rebecca Hall on Filming Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
The research was led by scientists from the University of British Columbia. They were interested in studying cells that produce something known as the amyloid precursor protein (APP)āproteins that seem to have several important functions but can also be turned into amyloid beta, a protein thought to play a driving role in causing Alzheimerās disease. In those with Alzheimerās, a misfolded and damaging version of amyloid beta accumulates in the brain, eventually forming into clumped-together deposits called plaques (a similar process occurs with the tau protein).
Most cases of Alzheimerās are caused by multiple factors working together, such as age-related changes in the brain. But there are known inherited mutations that can make someone much more likely to develop it, usually at an earlier age than normal. Some of these mutations involve the gene that regulates APP production in cells. APP-producing cells arenāt just found in the brain, though, but throughout the body, including within our bone marrow. So the authors, led by immunologist Wilfred Jefferies, were curious about the potential of these outside cells to cause Alzheimerās as well.
āWe wondered, therefore, whether a familial form of Alzheimerās disease could be initiated in a mouse after injection of the bone marrow from an afflicted mouse into the bloodstream of a normal mouse,ā Jefferies told Gizmodo in an email.
The team first bred mice carrying a defective version of the APP gene found in humans, one that would ensure their development of Alzheimerās. Then they transplanted bone marrow from these mice to two other groups of mice: mice with a normal APP gene and mice bred to have no APP gene at all. Following the transplantation, both groups of mice developed symptoms of cognitive impairment and clear signs of Alzhemerās, such as plaque build-up in the brain. Those without the APP gene became sick quicker than expected, however, showing symptoms at six months old on average (both the original and normal APP-carrying mice began to show symptoms around nine months).
The findings, published Thursday in Stem Cell Reports, appear to demonstrate that āthe mutated gene in the donor cells can transfer and causeā Alzheimerās, Jefferies said. And while the mice without APP became sicker faster, the results suggest that even healthy individuals could be at risk from this route of infection.
Other scientists have found evidence that Alzheimerās can be transmitted between people, though only under very rare and specific conditions, such as the donation of contaminated human growth hormone extracted from cadaver brains (a practice long since ended). And if there is a real transmission risk of familial Alzheimerās via bone marrow transplantation, itās likely to be low.
But based on their findings, the authors do āurge further investigation of this phenomenon,ā Jeffries said. āWe also advocate that human donors of blood, tissue, organ, and stem cells should be screened to prevent the inadvertent transfer of disease during blood product transfusions and cellular therapies.ā
The authors plan to keep looking into the matter themselves. They would like to better understand exactly how these donated APP-producing stem cells, which can only turn into blood cells or platelets, not neurons, go on to trigger Alzheimerās. They also hope to study whether other types of transplantation can transmit the disease or whether itās possible to treat Alzheimerās by transplanting normal cells to those afflicted with the condition; early animal trials involving stem cells have found some promising results for this approach.
Gizmodo
A feel-good moment more than 80 years in the making
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Ā
Courtesy of James Higham at Nourishing Obscurity, I came across this touching video.Ā It seems there’s only one surviving airworthy Hawker Hurricane fighter from the Battle of Britain in 1940.Ā The mechanic who worked on that aircraft during the Battle is still alive, at 102 years of age, and was recently reunited with the plane.
A WWII RAF veteran had the chance to fly alongside the aircraft he helped maintain during the heroic Battle of Britain in 1940.
Jeff Brereton, who celebrated his 102nd birthday earlier this year, took to the air in BE505, the worldās only two seat Hurricane, with R4118, the only remaining airworthy Mk 1 Hurricane to have taken part in the Battle of Britain, and the aircraft Jeff worked on, flying alongside.
Jeff, who lives in Evesham, Worcestershire, said: āI have great memories of the plane. Of all the aircraft I dealt with, that was the one that stuck in my mind. It was unbelievable to be able to see that aircraft again, that it had survived.ā
There’s more at the link.
Here’s a video report, including mid-air images.
I found the story particularly moving because my father was also an aircraft mechanic during the Battle of Britain.Ā I wrote about his World War II service some years ago.
It’s nice to come across a good news story like this in our turbulent, not-so-good world.
Peter
Bayou Renaissance Man
Scaling our Laravel app, after a flash sale took down our MySQL database
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Laravel News Links
Best Practices for Database Security
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Anyone working with databases knows that data is the driving force behind every online activity, and data security is always a top concern. Seeing as how they store and manage vast amounts of sensitive and valuable data, ranging from financial records to personal information and intellectual property, a lapse in database security measures can trigger [ā¦]Percona Database Performance Blog
Build a Web Shop From A-Z: Create the Cart Page
In this episode, we’ll add a ‘cart’ page where users can review the contents of their respective…Laracasts
Build a Web Shop From A-Z: Create the Cart Page
In this episode, we’ll add a ‘cart’ page where users can review the contents of their respective…Laracasts
PhotoCube PD+ aims to make physical backups of your phone photos a breeze
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| Image: Photofast |
Backing up your smartphone images usually involves sending them to the cloud or manually syncing them to a computer. Seamless? Maybe, until you have to start paying monthly storage fees. And while you can plug a hard drive into many modern smartphones, it isn’t quite user-friendly or universal across all smartphones.
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PhotoCube PD+, launched via Kickstarter and Indiegogo by Hong Kong electronics company Photofast, aims to make cloud-free physical backups of phone photos more straightforward.
Built for USB-C devices, the PhotoCube PD+ attaches directly to your smartphone or tablet and is compatible with both iOS and Android. It accepts microSD cards with up to 2TB of storage space, and you can interchange your cards if needed.
Supporting SD cards up to 2TB in size, the PhotoCube PD+ can be configured to automatically back up photos when plugged in, as well as additional data like contacts, without the need for additional cables.
An obvious downside is that the device wonāt work with iPhones older than the iPhone 15 or any other device that doesn’t have a USB-C port. Android users shouldnāt have an issue using the portable device, even with slightly older handsets.
While there’s no monthly fee, PhotoCube PD+ obviously costs money upfront. Also, PhotoCube PD+ doesnāt come with built-in storage or a card included, so prepare to bring your own.
The device is currently available for preorder, with two devices at an early bird price of $115 (USD) through Indiegogo with an estimated ship date of August 2024. As with all crowdfunded campaigns (and preorders in general), caveats apply. Crowdfunded products are no stranger to delays or quality control issues. The company’s previous model eventually came to Amazon. Presumably, this one will too. Whether it’s worth the gamble to get an early bird discount is up to you.
Note/disclaimer: Remember to do your research with any crowdfunding project before backing it. Pledges to crowdfunding campaigns are not pre-orders. DPReview does not have a relationship with this, or any such campaign, and we publicize only projects that appear legitimate, and which we consider will be of genuine interest to our readers. You can read more about the safeguards Kickstarter has in place on its ‘Trust & Safety‘ page.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Formula 1 chief appalled to find team using Excel to manage 20,000 car parts
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Enlarge / A pit stop during the Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix in early March evokes how the team’s manager was feeling when looking at the Excel sheet that managed the car’s build components.
ALI HAIDER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
There’s a new boss at a storied 47-year-old Formula 1 team, and he’s eager to shake things up. He’s been saying that the team is far behind its competition in technology and coordination. And Excel is a big part of it.
Starting in early 2023, Williams team principal James Vowles and chief technical officer Pat Fry started reworking the F1 team’s systems for designing and building its car. It would be painful, but the pain would keep the team from falling even further behind. As they started figuring out new processes and systems, they encountered what they considered a core issue: Microsoft Excel.
The Williams car build workbook, with roughly 20,000 individual parts, was "a joke," Vowles recently told The Race. "Impossible to navigate and impossible to update." This colossal Excel file lacked for information on how much each of those parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether parts were already on order. Prioritizing one car section over another, from manufacture through inspection, was impossible, Vowles suggested.
"When you start tracking now hundreds of 1000s of components through your organisation moving around, an Excel spreadsheet is useless," Vowles told The Race (which uses British spellings). Because of the multiple states each part could be ināordered, backordered, inspected, returnedāhumans are often left to work out the details. "And once you start putting that level of complexity in, which is where modern Formula 1 is, the Excel spreadsheet falls over, and humans fall over. And that’s exactly where we are."
The consequences of this row/column chaos, and the resulting hiccups, were many. Williams missed early pre-season testing in 2019. Workers sometimes had to physically search the team’s factory for parts. The wrong parts got priority, other parts came late, and some piled up. And yet transitioning to a modern tracking system was "viciously expensive," Fry told The Race, and making up for the painful process required "humans pushing themselves to the absolute limits and breaking."
Williams’ driver Alexander Albon drives during the qualifying session of the Saudi Arabian Formula One Grand Prix at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit in Jeddah on March 8, 2024.
Joseph Eid/AFP via Getty Images
The devil you know strikes again
The idea that a modern Formula 1 team, building some of the most fantastically advanced and efficient machines on Earth, would be using Excel to build those machines might strike you as odd. F1 cars cost an estimated $12-$16 million each, inside a resource cap of about $145 million. But none of this really matters, and it actually makes sense, if you’ve ever worked IT at nearly any decent-sized organization.
Then again, it’s not even uncommon in Formula 1. When Sebastian Anthony embedded with the Renault team, he reported back for Ars in 2017 that Renault Sport Formula One’s Excel design and build spreadsheet was 77,000 lines longāmore than three times as large as the Williams setup that spurred an internal revolution in 2023.
Every F1 team has its own software setup, Anthony wrote, but they have to integrate with a lot of other systems: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and wind tunnel results, rapid prototyping and manufacturing, and inventory. This leaves F1 teams "susceptible to the plague of legacy software," Anthony wrote, though he noted that Renault had moved on to a more dynamic cloud-based system that year. (Renault was also "a big Microsoft shop" in other areas, like email and file sharing, at the time.)
One year prior to Anthony’s excavation, Adam Banks wrote for Ars about the benefits of adopting cloud-based tools for enterprise resource planning (ERP). You adopt a cloud-based business management software to go "Beyond Excel." "If PowerPoint is the universal language businesses use to talk to one another, their internal monologue is Excel," Banks wrote. The issue is that all the systems and processes a business touches are complex and generate all kinds of data, but Excel is totally cool with taking in all of it. Or at least 1,048,576 rows of it.
Banks cited Tim Worstall’s 2013 contention that Excel could be "the most dangerous software on the planet." Back then, international investment bankers were found manually copying and pasting Excel between Excel sheets to do their work, and it raised alarm.
But spreadsheets continue to show up where they ought not. Spreadsheet errors in recent years have led to police doxxing, false trainee test failures, an accidental $10 million crypto transfer, and bank shares sold at sorely undervalued prices. Spreadsheets are sometimes called the "dark matter" of large organizations, being ever-present and far too relied upon despite 90 percent of larger sheets being likely to have a major error.
So Excel sheets catch a lot of blame, even if they’re just a symptom of a larger issue. Still, it’s good to see one no longer connected to the safety of a human heading into a turn at more than 200 miles per hour.
Ars Technica – All content
Formula 1 Chief Appalled To Find Team Using Excel To Manage 20,000 Car Parts
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Starting in early 2023, Williams team principal James Vowles and chief technical officer Pat Fry started reworking the F1 team’s systems for designing and building its car. It would be painful, but the pain would keep the team from falling even further behind. As they started figuring out new processes and systems, they encountered what they considered a core issue: Microsoft Excel. The Williams car build workbook, with roughly 20,000 individual parts, was "a joke," Vowles recently told The Race. "Impossible to navigate and impossible to update." This colossal Excel file lacked information on how much each of those parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether the parts were already on order. Prioritizing one car section over another, from manufacture through inspection, was impossible, Vowles suggested.
"When you start tracking now hundreds of thousands of components through your organization moving around, an Excel spreadsheet is useless," Vowles told The Race. Because of the multiple states each part could be in — ordered, backordered, inspected, returned — humans are often left to work out the details. "And once you start putting that level of complexity in, which is where modern Formula 1 is, the Excel spreadsheet falls over, and humans fall over. And that’s exactly where we are." The consequences of this row/column chaos, and the resulting hiccups, were many. Williams missed early pre-season testing in 2019. Workers sometimes had to physically search the team’s factory for parts. The wrong parts got priority, other parts came late, and some piled up. And yet transitioning to a modern tracking system was "viciously expensive," Fry told The Race, and making up for the painful process required "humans pushing themselves to the absolute limits and breaking."
The idea that a modern Formula 1 team, building some of the most fantastically advanced and efficient machines on Earth, would be using Excel to build those machines might strike you as odd. F1 cars cost an estimated $12-$16 million each, with resource cap of about $145 million. But none of this really matters, and it actually makes sense, if you’ve ever worked IT at nearly any decent-sized organization. Then again, it’s not even uncommon in Formula 1. When Sebastian Anthony embedded with the Renault team, he reported back for Ars in 2017 that Renault Sport Formula One’s Excel design and build spreadsheet was 77,000 lines long — more than three times as large as the Williams setup that spurred an internal revolution in 2023.
Every F1 team has its own software setup, Anthony wrote, but they have to integrate with a lot of other systems: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and wind tunnel results, rapid prototyping and manufacturing, and inventory. This leaves F1 teams "susceptible to the plague of legacy software," Anthony wrote, though he noted that Renault had moved on to a more dynamic cloud-based system that year. (Renault was also "a big Microsoft shop" in other areas, like email and file sharing, at the time.) One year prior to Anthony’s excavation, Adam Banks wrote for Ars about the benefits of adopting cloud-based tools for enterprise resource planning (ERP). You adopt a cloud-based business management software to go "Beyond Excel." "If PowerPoint is the universal language businesses use to talk to one another, their internal monologue is Excel," Banks wrote. The issue is that all the systems and processes a business touches are complex and generate all kinds of data, but Excel is totally cool with taking in all of it. Or at least 1,048,576 rows of it. Banks cited Tim Worstall’s 2013 contention that Excel could be "the most dangerous software on the planet." Back then, international investment bankers were found manually copying and pasting Excel between Excel sheets to do their work, and it raised alarm.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Slashdot