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'Summoned' UFOs: New video may be coming soon, Ross Coulthart says

Understanding the composition and transport of mineral dust is essential for assessing its environmental and health impacts.

Using physical and geochemical analyses, we identified significant differences between urban and natural dust that are not attributable to the intervening landscapes. These differences arise from the mixing of natural dust with local anthropogenic materials, including sediments from the Great Salt Lake playa conditioned by over a century of urban activity. This urban-influenced dust is transported downwind, where it may contribute to elevated levels of cadmium, copper, and zinc in streams of downwind mountain watersheds.

These findings underscore the far-reaching impact of urban dust on critical ecosystems and highlight the need for integrated management strategies to mitigate dust-related environmental consequences.

A mission will deliver rock and soil from Mars to laboratories on Earth in the 2030s. Mars Sample Return (MSR) is led by Nasa with participation from the European Space Agency (Esa). The mission will allow scientists to use the best laboratory instruments on Earth to determine whether Mars hosted microbial life billions of years ago.

So what will happen to the samples once they arrive on Earth?

The study concludes that if scientists were to examine 40 to 80 exoplanets and find a "perfect" no-detection outcome, they could confidently conclude that fewer than 10 to 20% of similar planets harbor life. In the Milky Way, this 10% would correspond to about 10 billion potentially inhabited planets.

This type of finding would enable researchers to put a meaningful upper limit on the prevalence of life in the universe, an estimate that has, so far, remained out of reach.

Even in the case of uncomplicated infections, the body prepares itself early on for the possibility of a more severe course. A research team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and Helmholtz Munich has now uncovered this mechanism. The scientists showed that, right at the onset of mild illness, the body also produces special T cells previously known only from chronic, severe infections and tumors.

The damage produced by silica has some special characteristics that prompt us to call it a polyhedric disease.

The fact that it is a slowly progressing disease that is rare in terms of the overall population makes randomized trials difficult, and the reduced “market” limits the interest of the pharmaceutical industry. In contrast to other fibrotic lung diseases and common lung diseases such as asthma, very little use has been made of modern research techniques to understand this ancient disease or identify new therapeutic options.

However, our knowledge of the pathogenic mechanisms of damage caused by silica inhalation is steadily growing.

Firstly, silica-induced lung injury presumably results from the combined action of several interacting pathogenic mechanisms, including the direct cytotoxic effect of silica on macrophages, activation of macrophage surface receptors, lysosomal rupture, generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS), activation of inflammasome, cytokine and chemokine production, cell apoptosis/pyroptosis, and pulmonary fibrosis.

Then there is the accompanying immune dysfunction.

Silica inhalation causes the activation and apoptosis of macrophages, while the excess antigen generated is ingested by other activated macrophages. These can migrate to lymph nodes, eventually leading to the activation of T and B lymphocytes.

The likelihood of developing connective tissue disease is enhanced in subjects with exposure to silica and silicosis.

Furthermore, there is strong evidence for a very high risk of tuberculosis in the presence of radiological silicosis

The term scleritis describes a chronic inflammation that involves the outermost coat and skeleton of the eye. Disease can be isolated to the eye, but in up to half of affected individuals it occurs in the context of an immune-mediated systemic inflammatory condition, such as rheumatoid arthritis or Wegener's granulomatosis.

Although uncommon, scleritis is often extremely painful, can lead to vision-threatening complications (and involvement of other ocular tissues), and is considered to confer an increased risk of mortality in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

Most drugs typically have three names: a chemical name, a generic name, and a brand name. Each serves a different purpose.

Generic drug names often incorporate stems or suffixes that denote the drug’s mechanism of action, chemical structure or target receptor, and a prefix that differentiates it from drugs in the same family.

This is why lots of drug names share the same ending. Examples include cholesterol medicines ending in -statin, Ace inhibitors for reducing blood pressure ending in -pril, monoclonal antibody drugs ending in -mab, and tyrosine kinase inhibitors (mainly used in cancer treatment) ending in -tinib.

Once voted the UK’s favourite river, the River Wye flows from the Welsh mountains to the Severn estuary – 150 miles through an officially recognised “national landscape”. But this idyllic picture is changing, as the river is gradually choked by waste from industrial chicken farming.

In the land that feeds into these rivers, millions of chickens are being reared in intensive units to supply supermarkets with cheap meat and eggs. But all those chickens produce vast amounts of manure which can end up in the rivers.

This floods the river with excess nutrients causing algal blooms to flourish. The algae blocks out sunlight and consumes oxygen, which kills other creatures in the water. For instance the number of Atlantic salmon passing through the River Wye each year has plummeted from 50,000 in the 1960s to less than 3,000.

The problems caused by chicken farming have led to legal action against US food company Cargill and its subsidiary Avara Foods (both firms deny the allegations). Meanwhile food outlets including Nando’s have denied sourcing their products from polluting farms.

Almost 4,000 years ago, a Mesopotamian man named Nanni was so disappointed with the copper he bought from a trader named Ea-nāṣir, that he decided to write a formal complaint. Today, this Bronze Age clay tablet is the oldest customer complaint we know of – and it's a doozy.

Wasting no inch of his clay, Nanni's complaints cover both front and back of a small tablet measuring 11.6 by 5 centimeters (that's 4.6 by 2 inches). It was translated from its original Akkadian language by assyriologist Adolf Leo Oppenheim, and published in his 1967 book Letters from Mesopotamia.

EXCLUSIVE: Meet The Scientist Behind The MASSIVE Giza Plateau Discoveries!

On 6th April 1320 the barons and freeholders of the Kingdom of Scotland wrote a letter to Pope John XXII. The letter asked the pope to recognise Scotland's independence and acknowledge Robert the Bruce as the country's lawful king. Written in Latin, it was sealed by eight earls and about 40 barons. It was authenticated by seals, as documents at that time were not signed.