It's a Weird World, After All!

[SIM-ple Jack 17,444]

Post pics and stories of strange creatures, people, events and places you've tripped over, in your internet travels.

 

The Mola Mola, a saltwater sunfish

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Thar's gold in them thar skies!

 

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The Sahara was once a lush paradise, only hundreds of years ago...

 

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Rewind this in your mind, the next time you go to a modern art gallery...

 

[Brad 343]

a spider taught him how to do that.

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Italian cheese-maker fatally crushed by thousands of wheels of cheese.

An Italian man died when he was crushed by thousands of wheels of cheese at his warehouse on Sunday, authorities said.

Cheesemaker Giacomo Chiapparini, 74, was buried by thousands wheels of Grana Padano, a Parmesan-style hard cheese popular in Italy, according to reports. The incident happened when a shelf broke in his factory’s warehouse, which holds a total of 25,000 wheels of cheese. Each cheese wheel weighed about 20kg, or nearly 90 pounds.

It took emergency responders about 12 hours to find Chiapparini’s body, BBC News reports.

“When we got there, the whole warehouse was full of cheese wheels on top of one another,” said Daniele Retto, a spokesperson for the local fire brigade department, according to NBC News. “We had to call the unit that specializes in the search and rescue of people under the rubble, especially after an earthquake. They spent hours moving the wheels by hand, one by one, and found his body only in the morning.”

We bid Giacomo Chiapparini a fondue farewell.

[SIM-ple Jack 17,444]

Just a hand-carved wooden piano...

[SIM-ple Jack 17,444]

60 fps 18k in Vegas. Smellin' me a BAT, boss!

 

[SIM-ple Jack 17,444]

Long in the tooth-

Japanese Scientists Develop Groundbreaking Drug That Grows New Teeth

This groundbreaking drug enters clinical trials in 2024 and is scheduled to be available to consumers by 2030.

By Emma Suttie

 

A team of Japanese scientists has developed a groundbreaking drug that stimulates the growth of new teeth—the first of its kind in the world.

Dr. Katsu Takahashi, lead researcher, co-founder of Toregem Biopharma, and head of dentistry and oral surgery at the Medical Research Institute Kitano Hospital in Osaka, Japan, has been working on how to induce the growth of new teeth his entire career.

“The idea of growing new teeth is every dentist’s dream. I’ve been working on this since I was a graduate student. I was confident I’d be able to make it happen,” he said in an article in The Mainichi.

The antibody-based drug targets a protein that inhibits the growth of new teeth from “tooth buds,” and in previous animal experiments, the drug induced the growth of a “third generation” of teeth, in addition to baby teeth and permanent adult teeth.

Sharks and many reptiles have teeth that are continually replaced, and crocodiles replace their teeth more than 40 times throughout their lifetimes, but mammals do not have the same unlimited tooth-replacing abilities. Until recently, it was assumed that humans had only two sets of teeth. However, there is now evidence that humans also possess these tooth buds, which have the potential to become a third set of teeth.

The drug has been used successfully to grow new teeth in mice and ferrets, with clinical trials expected to begin in humans in July 2024 to test the drug’s safety in healthy adults.

In 2018, Dr. Takahashi and his team gave the drug to ferrets, which, like humans, have tooth buds, baby teeth, and permanent adult teeth—and new teeth grew.

In similar experiments in 2018, the team gave the drug to mice, which also grew new teeth, and the findings were published in Science Advances in 2021.

The new drug could solve the problem of tooth agenesis, which is the failure of all or part of an organ to grow during fetal development. Tooth agenesis is the absence of one or more permanent teeth. Oligodontia is the absence of six or more teeth (not including third molars), and anodontia is the complete absence of teeth.

Anodontia is a congenital disorder that affects about 1 percent of the population.

Children born with tooth agenesis have trouble with basic activities such as eating and speaking, which can undermine their development. Until now, treatments have focused on replacing the missing teeth with dentures, bridges, and implants.

If the first clinical trial in healthy adults succeeds, Dr. Takahashi said he and his team are planning a second clinical trial in 2025 for children between 2 and 6 with anodontia. The children will be injected with the drug to stimulate the growth of new teeth.

How the Drug Works

In the early 1990s, scientists began isolating genes that, when removed, caused mice to grow fewer teeth, and researchers found that the number of teeth that grew varied by manipulating just one gene.

In 2005, Dr. Takahashi returned to Japan from studying in the United States. He and his team at Kyoto University began research based on the discovery of the genes that specifically affect tooth growth. They found that mice missing a particular gene had more teeth and that a protein, called USAG-1, which was synthesized by the gene, decreased the number of teeth that grew. They theorized that blocking the USAG-1 protein would stimulate the growth of more teeth. They were right.

Dr. Takahashi and his team developed an antibody medication that could block the protein’s function, testing it in 2018 on mice who congenitally had fewer teeth. The mice were given the drug, and new teeth appeared—it was the first medicine ever to regenerate teeth. The findings were published in 2021.

Final Thoughts

The implications of such a drug could be significant given that dental problems—and tooth loss in particular—affect billions of people worldwide, including the approximately 41 million Americans who have dentures, according to 2020 U.S. Census data and Simmons National Consumer Survey. That's about 12 percent of the population.

According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics, 26 percent of adults over 65 have eight teeth or fewer, and 17 percent adults 65 or older have lost all of their teeth—although the numbers have been decreasing in recent years. The statistics also show that older adults who face economic challenges, have less than a high school education, or smoke are more than three times as likely to have lost all their teeth than other groups.

Should the drug prove safe and effective, millions of people worldwide who suffer from a wide range of dental conditions—especially children with congenital disorders—may soon be able to have their teeth grow and develop naturally.

Dr. Takahashi said that he and his team hope to bring the drug to market by 2030.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/japanese-scientists-develop-groundbreaking-drug-that-grows-new-teeth-5507318?welcomeuser

 

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Two Africas...

 

 

[SIM-ple Jack 17,444]

Wooden glass...

January 3, 2024

See-Through Wood Is Stronger Than Plastic and Tougher Than Glass

Transparent wood material is being exploited for smartphone screens, insulated windows, and more

By Jude Coleman & Knowable Magazine

The piece of glass in the above photo was made from wood. Research work at the Forest Products Lab on using wood to create transparent windows is making great strides.

Credit:

USDA Forest Service

 

Thirty years ago, a botanist in Germany had a simple wish: to see the inner workings of woody plants without dissecting them. By bleaching away the pigments in plant cells, Siegfried Fink managed to create transparent wood, and he published his technique in a niche wood technology journal. The 1992 paper remained the last word on see-through wood for more than a decade, until a researcher named Lars Berglund stumbled across it.

Berglund was inspired by Fink’s discovery, but not for botanical reasons. The materials scientist, who works at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, specializes in polymer composites and was interested in creating a more robust alternative to transparent plastic. And he wasn’t the only one interested in wood’s virtues. Across the ocean, researchers at the University of Maryland were busy on a related goal: harnessing the strength of wood for nontraditional purposes.

Now, after years of experiments, the research of these groups is starting to bear fruit. Transparent wood could soon find uses in super-strong screens for smartphones; in soft, glowing light fixtures; and even as structural features, such as color-changing windows.

“I truly believe this material has a promising future,” says Qiliang Fu, a wood nanotechnologist at Nanjing Forestry University in China who worked in Berglund’s lab as a graduate student.

Wood is made up of countless little vertical channels, like a tight bundle of straws bound together with glue. These tube-shaped cells transport water and nutrients throughout a tree, and when the tree is harvested and the moisture evaporates, pockets of air are left behind. To create see-through wood, scientists first need to modify or get rid of the glue, called lignin, that holds the cell bundles together and provides trunks and branches with most of their earthy brown hues. After bleaching lignin’s color away or otherwise removing it, a milky-white skeleton of hollow cells remains.

This skeleton is still opaque, because the cell walls bend light to a different degree than the air in the cell pockets does — a value called a refractive index. Filling the air pockets with a substance like epoxy resin that bends light to a similar degree to the cell walls renders the wood transparent.

The material the scientists worked with is thin — typically less than a millimeter to around a centimeter thick. But the cells create a sturdy honeycomb structure, and the tiny wood fibers are stronger than the best carbon fibers, says materials scientist Liangbing Hu, who leads the research group working on transparent wood at the University of Maryland in College Park. And with the resin added, transparent wood outperforms plastic and glass: In tests measuring how easily materials fracture or break under pressure, transparent wood came out around three times stronger than transparent plastics like Plexiglass and about 10 times tougher than glass.

“The results are amazing, that a piece of wood can be as strong as glass,” says Hu, who highlighted the features of transparent wood in the 2023 Annual Review of Materials Research.

The process also works with thicker wood but the view through that substance is hazier because it scatters more light. In their original studies from 2016, Hu and Berglund both found that millimeter-thin sheets of the resin-filled wood skeletons let through 80 to 90 percent of light. As the thickness gets closer to a centimeter, light transmittance drops: Berglund’s group reported that 3.7-millimeter-thick wood — roughly two pennies thick — transmitted only 40 percent of light.

The slim profile and strength of the material means it could be a great alternative to products made from thin, easily shattered cuts of plastic or glass, such as display screens. The French company Woodoo, for example, uses a similar lignin-removing process in its wood screens, but leaves a bit of lignin to create a different color aesthetic. The company is tailoring its recyclable, touch-sensitive digital displays for products including car dashboards and advertising billboards.

But most research has centered on transparent wood as an architectural feature, with windows a particularly promising use, says Prodyut Dhar, a biochemical engineer at the Indian Institute of Technology Varanasi. Transparent wood is a far better insulator than glass, so it could help buildings retain heat or keep it out. Hu and colleagues have also used polyvinyl alcohol, or PVA — a polymer used in glue and food packaging — to infiltrate the wood skeletons, making transparent wood that conducts heat at a rate five times lower than that of glass, the team reported in 2019 in Advanced Functional Materials.

And researchers are coming up with other tweaks to increase wood’s ability to hold or release heat, which would be useful for energy-efficient buildings. Céline Montanari, a materials scientist at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, and colleagues experimented with phase-change materials, which flip from storing to releasing heat when they change from solid to liquid, or vice-versa. By incorporating polyethylene glycol, for example, the scientists found that their wood could store heat when it was warm and release heat as it cooled, work they published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces In 2019.

Transparent wood windows would therefore be stronger and aid in temperature control better than traditional glass, but the view through them would be hazy, more similar to frosted glass than a regular window. However, the haziness could be an advantage if users want diffuse light: Since thicker wood is strong, it could be a partially load-bearing light source, Berglund says, potentially acting as a ceiling that provides soft, ambient light to a room.

Hu and Berglund have continued to toy with ways to bestow new properties on transparent wood. Around five years ago, Berglund and colleagues at KTH and Georgia Institute of Technology found they could mimic smart windows, which can switch from transparent to tinted to block visibility or the Sun’s rays. The researchers sandwiched an electrochromic polymer — a substance that can change color with electricity — between layers of transparent wood coated with an electrode polymer to conduct electricity. This created a pane of wood that changes from clear to magenta when users run a small electrical current through it.

More recently, the two groups have shifted their attention to improving the sustainability of transparent wood production. For example, the resin used to fill the wood scaffolding is typically a petroleum-derived plastic product, so it’s better to avoid using it, Montanari says. As a replacement, she and colleagues invented a fully bio-based polymer, derived from citrus peels. The team first combined acrylic acid and limonene, a chemical extracted from lemon and orange rinds that’s found in essential oils. Then they impregnated delignified wood with it. Even with a fruity filling, the bio-based transparent wood maintained its mechanical and optical properties, withstanding around 30 megapascals of pressure more than regular wood and transmitting around 90 percent of light, the researchers reported in 2021 in Advanced Science.

Hu’s lab, meanwhile, recently reported in Science Advances a greener lignin-bleaching method that leans on hydrogen peroxide and UV radiation, further reducing the energy demands of production. The team brushed wood slices ranging from about 0.5 to 3.5 millimeters in thickness with hydrogen peroxide, then left them in front of UV lamps to mimic the Sun’s rays. The UV bleached away the pigment-containing parts of lignin but left the structural parts intact, thus helping to retain more strength in the wood.

These more environmentally friendly approaches help limit the amount of toxic chemicals and fossil-based polymers used in production, but for now, glass still has lower end-of-life environmental impacts than transparent wood, according to an analysis by Dhar and colleagues in Science of the Total Environment. Embracing greener production schemes and scaling up manufacturing are two steps necessary to add transparent wood to mainstream markets, researchers say, but it will take time. However, they are confident it can be done and believe in its potential as a sustainable material.

“When you’re trying to achieve sustainability, you don’t only want to match the properties of fossil-based materials,” Montanari says. “As a scientist, I want to surpass this.”

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Not your grandpa's Gatling gun...

 

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The easiest city to replicate in SimCity...