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SIG SAUER P320 (courtesy Nick Leghorn for TTAG)

Happy new year. Now that the hangover has fully cleared and the calendars have been replaced around the house, it’s probably a good opportunity to do some of those tasks that you’ve been putting off or forgetting about. The little things that might seem slightly annoying, but might just save your life.

Clean Your Carry and Home Defense Guns

Matt Sandy for TTAG

Some of us manage to regularly get in some range time with our home defense guns. But it seems that’s increasingly rarely for me — my range time has been severely limited recently, in case you couldn’t tell from my posting history.

For those who similarly don’t get out to the range as often as they’d like, the new year is a perfect time to pull the guns out and make sure that they are clean and in good working order.

Some things to put on your checklist:

• Check the barrel for obstructions (spiders? ants? whatever may have crawled in)
• Cycle the action and make sure it’s smooth
• Rotate the ammunition in your magazines for some fresh ammo, and consider rotating the magazines in your guns as well
• Check all of the batteries for your lights, lasers, optics, coffee makers, chainsaw bayonets … everything.

Oh, and of course, give everything a good scrub down and lube when you’re done. Next . . .

Change The Batteries In Your Gun Safe

This one was inspired by true events.

I have a GunVault MiniVault in my bedroom where I store my SIG SAUER Mk25 P226 as my “bump in the night” gun. The other day I wanted to give the handgun a once-over so I entered the combination, heard the click of the lock, and…nothing. The door didn’t budge.

A couple of further futile attempts later and I had to grab the spare emergency key to finally get it open.

What had happened was, unbeknownst to me, the battery had run down to the point where the electronics would still work, but there wasn’t enough juice left to actually pop the door open. So while it sounded like it was working, the reality was that it wouldn’t open without the key.

That’s annoying for “normal” use, but potentially deadly if I needed to rely on that handgun in an emergency.

For those of us who rely on electronic access control mechanisms, the turn of the calendar is a good time to go ahead and rotate those batteries, whether they need changing or not. It’ll set you back a few dollars, but the peace of mind is more than worth the price.

Pick One Training Course and Book It

Image by J. Schwarm courtesy GSL Defense Training / Guns Save Life

The tool is only as good as the person wielding it. Most gun owners hit the range every so often and call it good for their recurring “training,” but having your skills tested and sharpened by a professional is a great reality check and can give you some concrete things to work on in the coming year.

Point in case: I used to be a pretty competent competition shooter. Well, best on staff here at TTAG anyway (an admittedly low bar).

I went to a local match not too long ago after about a year’s hiatus and marveled at how much I was absolutely sucking at every stage. I could feel myself being more far sluggish than I ever remembered, missing shots that once were child’s play.

I was off my game, and I knew it was because I hadn’t been practicing as hard as I once was.

The same goes for self defense shooting. Going to the range and popping a paper target just isn’t enough; you need to be training as often as you can. And no, the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare doesn’t count.

The best way to knock off the rust is to sign up for a class — any class, really — and get some proper training. Make it your gun-related new year’s resolution to pick a course, book it, and attend sometime, preferably in the early part of the year.

You’ll be thanking yourself if you’re ever in a position where those skills become a matter of life and death.

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CCI Mini-Mag 40gr .22LR

A number of years back, there was a great deal of excitement about using viruses to target cancer. A number of viruses explode the cells that they’ve infected in order to spread to new ones. Engineering those viruses so that they could only grow in cancer cells would seem to provide a way of selectively killing these cells. And some preliminary tests were promising, showing massive tumors nearly disappearing.

But the results were inconsistent, and there were complications. The immune system would respond to the virus, limiting our ability to use it more than once. And some of the tumor killing seemed to be the result of the immune system, rather than the virus.

Now, some researchers have focused on the immune response, inducing it at the site of the tumor. And they do so by a remarkably simple method: injecting the tumor with the flu vaccine. As a bonus, the mice it was tested on were successfully immunized, too.

Revving up the immune system

This is one of those ideas that seems nuts but had so many earlier results pointing toward it working that it was really just a matter of time before someone tried it. To understand it, you have to overcome the idea that the immune system is always diffuse, composed of cells that wander the blood stream. Instead, immune cells organize at the sites of infections (or tumors), where they communicate with each other to both organize an attack and limit that attack so that healthy tissue isn’t also targeted.

From this perspective, the immune system’s inability to eliminate tumor cells isn’t only the product of their similarities to healthy cells. It’s also the product of the signaling networks that help restrain the immune system to prevent it from attacking normal cells. A number of recently developed drugs help release this self-imposed limit, winning their developers Nobel Prizes in the process. These drugs convert a “cold” immune response, dominated by signaling that shuts things down, into a “hot” one that is able to attack a tumor.

But not everyone has a response to these drugs, raising the question of whether there are other ways to activate the immune system at the site of a tumor. One potential option is simply the things that normally rev up the immune system: infectious agents. The immune response to cancer-targeting viruses mentioned above would provide an indication that this does occur. Others have targeted a variety of pathogens to the sites of tumors and found that this increases the immune response to the tumor as well.

To check whether something similar might be happening in humans, the researchers identified over 30,000 people being treated for lung cancer and found those who also received an influenza diagnosis. You might expect that the combination of the flu and cancer would be very difficult for those patients, but instead, they had lower mortality than the patients who didn’t get the flu.

Moving to mice

For more detailed tests, the researchers moved to mice, using melanoma cells that can form tumors when transplanted into the lungs of the mice. These model systems often respond to treatments that don’t end up working in humans, so the results have to be treated with appropriate caution. Still, they can be a valuable way of understanding the biology of the immune response here.

The use of melanoma cells is informative, as these cells cannot be infected by the influenza virus. So this system also provides a test of whether the tumor cells themselves have to be infected in order to increase the immune response to them. Apparently they do not. Having an active influenza virus infection reduced the ability of the melanoma cells to establish themselves in the lung. The effect isn’t limited to the location of the infection, though, as tumors in the lung that wasn’t infected were also inhibited. The effects were similar when breast cancer cells were placed into the lung, as well.

All of this is consistent with the immune stimulation provided by a pathogen. The stimulation causes a general activation of the immune system that releases it from limits on its activity that prevent it from attacking tumor cells. But does it require an actual infection? To find out, the researchers used a flu virus that had been inactivated by heat treatment. Normally, heat treating a virus is used to create a control for an effect that needs an active virus. But here, it turned out to be another experiment, as the heat-treated virus was also able to work just as effectively as the live virus.

This isn’t entirely surprising, given that inactive viruses are often used as vaccines and thus clearly can stimulate the immune system. But that, in turn, suggested another experiment: would vaccines actually work? To find out, the researchers obtained this year’s flu vaccine and injected it into the sites of tumors. Not only was tumor growth slowed, but the mice ended up immune to the flu virus.

Oddly, this wasn’t true for every flu vaccine. Some vaccines contain chemicals that enhance the immune system’s memory, promoting the formation of a long-term response to pathogens (called adjuvants). When a vaccine containing one of these chemicals was used, the immune system wasn’t stimulated to limit the tumors’ growth.

This suggests that it’s less a matter of stimulating the immune system and more an issue of triggering it to attack immediately. But this is one of the things that will need to be sorted out with further study. The location of the stimulation will also need to be sorted out, too. Here, stimulation in one lung increases activity in both. But injection into muscles didn’t work at all, and earlier work by some of the same team had indicated a heavy infection outside the lungs enhanced tumor growth by diverting immune cells elsewhere.

But the story does fit in well with the general consensus that the immune system can be a powerful tool against cancer, provided it can be mobilized properly. And, in at least some cases, a flu vaccine just might do the trick.

PNAS, 2019. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1904022116 (About DOIs).

I was cooking this weekend when my eight-year-old son looked up from the couch, where he was listening to the Stardew Valley game soundtrack on Apple Music.

“Dad,” he announced, “I’m going to read you the name of every song on this album.”

“Cool,” I said as I minced the garlic.

“Stardew Valley Overture,” he began. “Cloud Country. Grandpa’s Theme. Settling In. Spring (It’s a Big World Outside). Spring (The Valley Comes Alive). Spring (Wild Horseradish Jam). Ha ha!”

He liked the phrase “Wild Horseradish Jam” so much that he read it again before going on.

“Pelican Town…”

As a parent, I have acquired the finely honed ability to tune out my beloved offspring, and I put it to use now. This was a good decision, because the Stardew Valley soundtrack has a whopping 70 different tracks. Minutes passed before he finally made it to track 70: “Load Game.”

He then lay still, listening to the “Dance of the Moonlight Jellies,” and I listened to it, too. The music in Stardew Valley can feel buoyant, melancholy, or numinous—sometimes all three at once. Underlying its many moods are feelings of stillness and calm; even “Mines (Danger!)” lacks the frenetic element found in so much video game music.

Like its music, Stardew Valley does not agitate or arouse, but neither is it boring, sappy, or simple. It is, nominally, a farming simulator, in which you inherit a patch of land from grandpa and head out to the country to clear trees and grow pole beans. But then you find the nearby town, and the mines, and the locals, and a strange tower, and a branch of the evil JoJoMart corporation, and you pick up a fishing pole and some geodes and a strange key… Indeed, the game turns out to be surprisingly complex, and my kids have become experts at using the Stardew Valley Wiki to figure out how the game works and what you can do within its world.

Because our kids get enough screen time during the week—the two oldest kids use Chromebooks constantly at school and for homework—we limit their time on the PlayStation 4 to weekends. Which has meant that every Saturday morning of 2019 in Casa Anderson has been permeated by the sounds of the Stardew Valley soundtrack as the kids build, explore, unlock, and interact within the game.