#Knowable Magazine

[hennethgalad]

icthyosporans

probably. amoeba that lives in the sea

but is it really single cells?

[younes-ben-amara]

مستحيلٌ أن يكون لديك مليون دولار في حسابك البنكي وأنت تجهل هذا المصطلح: إدارة علاقات العملاء CRM

ما هذه المجموعة من المختارات تسألني؟ إنّها عددٌ من أعداد نشرة “صيد الشابكة” اِعرف أكثر عن النشرة هنا: ما هي نشرة “صيد الشابكة” ما مصادرها، وما غرضها؛ وما معنى الشابكة أصلًا؟! 🎣🌐 صباحكم سعيد؛ 🎲 صالح النجراني يبدع في كتابة عدد جديد من نشرته البريدية “عشوائيات فكر”🏭 النقطة الأولى: أن التعابير الاصطلاحية المستقاة من اللغات مَفسدةٌ للسان العرب🧬 النقطة الثانية: تدريس العلوم بالعامية + الإنجليزية ليس…

[official-linguistics-post]

A new look at our linguistic roots

Linguists and archaeologists have argued for decades about where, and when, the first Indo-European languages were spoken, and what kind of lives those first speakers led. A controversial new analytic technique offers a fresh answer.

An article from early 2024 on the use of computational phylogenetics for historical linguistics work on Proto-Indo-European. Read at Knowable Magazine (no paywall).

[artifacts-and-arthropods]

Grote's Bertholdia Moth: when this moth detects a predatory bat nearby, it emits a barrage of ultrasonic signals that "jam" the bat's echolocation system, allowing the moth to remain hidden

Several different moths are known to produce their own ultrasonic "clicks" or "chirps" as a defense mechanism against bats, but Grote's Bertholdia moth (Bertholdia trigona) can emit these signals at a staggering speed of up to 4,500 "clicks" per second, which is much faster than any other species.

When the moth detects the acoustic signals that bats use to navigate and hunt, it responds by blanketing the surrounding environment with a barrage of ultrasonic "clicks," effectively cloaking itself from sonar detection.

As this article explains, adaptations involving ultrasonic signals have played a major role in the evolutionary arms race between moths and bats:

Like other nocturnal insects, moths need to contend with bats. Unlike grasshoppers or beetles, they have soft bodies without spines or hard cuticles to protect them. Yet bats’ reliance on echolocation has given moths a way to avoid ending up as food: by tapping into their predators’ acoustic signals. Many have evolved ears that can hear the calls of bats. Some moths make ultrasonic squeaks, chirps, or clicks to warn their predators (honestly or not) that they are poisonous. Others generate near-constant, ultrasonic buzzes capable of jamming bat sonar. 

Sources & More Info:

Smithsonian: How One Moth Species Can Jam Bats' Sonar Systems

Knowable Magazine: Prey Tell: How Moths Elude Bats

Journal of Experimental Biology: How Do Tiger Moths Jam Bat Sonar?

The Scientist: Many Moths Speak Up to Ward Off Bats

Science: Moths Block Bats' Sonar

The Telegraph: Tiger Moth Wards Off Hungry Bats with Ultrasound

PubMed: High Duty Cycle Moth Sounds Jam Bat Echolocation

Journal of Theoretical Biology: Neural Representation of Bat Predation Risk and Evasive Flight in Moths

[mehilaiselokuva]

How much time 🪂 did it took you to learn Finnish?

To quote the Knowable Magazine:

"Children go from babbling, starting by about 6 months, to speaking their first words around the age of 1, to forming full sentences by their third year. This process, known as language acquisition, happens with hardly any structured adult guidance."

Hope this helps! <3

[csuitebitches]

hi! i love the newsletter, and i wanted to ask, is there any free online publication of economics and business news? i'm currently subscribed to knowable magazine for my science news and would love a source like that for business if you know any

So I generally just subscribe to different media houses’ newsletters. Like Financial Times, Bloomberg - and I listen to their podcasts in the morning / catch their live news on YouTube.

[cavenewstimestoday]

Worm-Inspired Treatments Inch Toward the Clinic

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine. The experiment was a striking attempt to investigate weight control. For six weeks, a group of mice gorged on lard-enriched mouse chow, then scientists infected the mice with worms. The worms wriggled beneath the animals’ skin, migrated to blood vessels that surround the intestines, and started laying eggs. Bruno Guigas, a molecular biologist…

[xtruss]

Credit: Ana Yael

How Stress Shapes Cancer’s Course! Studies Show Psychological Strain Can Accelerate Tumors — Could Beta Blockers Slow Them Down?

— By Diana Kwon | April 7, 2025

About two millennia ago, the Greek physicians Hippocrates and Galen suggested that melancholia — depression brought on by an excess of “black bile” in the body — contributed to cancer. Since then, scores of researchers have investigated the association between cancer and the mind, with some going as far as to suggest that some people have a cancer-prone or “Type C” personality.

Most researchers now reject the idea of a cancer-prone personality. But they still haven’t settled what influence stress and other psychological factors can have on the onset and progression of cancer. More than a hundred epidemiological studies — some involving tens of thousands of people — have linked depression, low socioeconomic status and other sources of psychological stress to an increase in cancer risk, and to a worse prognosis for people who already have the disease. However, this literature is full of contradictions, especially in the first case.

In recent decades, scientists have approached the problem from another angle: experiments in cells and animals. These have revealed important mechanisms by which stress can alter tumors, says Julienne Bower, a health psychologist at UCLA who coauthored a 2023 article on the connection between the brain and the immune system in diseases, including cancer, in the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology. Such studies are showing that “psychological factors can influence aspects of actual tumor biology,” she says. On the flip side, studies in people and animals suggest that blocking the chemical signals of stress may improve cancer outcomes.

Today, a growing number of researchers think that psychological factors can influence cancer’s progression once someone has the disease. “I don’t think anyone appreciated the magnitude by which even mild stress, if it’s chronic, can have such a negative influence on cancer growth,” says Elizabeth Repasky, a cancer immunologist at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, N.Y.

Psychological Effect On Stress

Source: Adapted From A. Eckerling Et Al/Nature Reviews Cancer 2021. Knowable Magazine. People with cancer may experience a wide range of stressors, both related and unrelated to the disease. A growing body of evidence suggests that these may influence how a tumor grows and spreads.

A Viral Beginning

New interest in the relationship between stress and cancer growth emerged in part from research into how stress affects the body’s response to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). In the 1990s and early 2000s, genomics researcher Steve Cole and his team at UCLA investigated why people infected with HIV who were under high stress tended to have worse outcomes, including larger viral loads and poorer responses to antiretroviral drugs.

Cole’s team discovered several routes through which stress could worsen HIV infections. In monkeys, they found, the lymph nodes of stressed animals had many more connections to sympathetic nerve cell fibers — which execute the body’s fight-or-flight response — than the nodes of unstressed monkeys. Lymph nodes contain immune cells, and the nerve fibers reduced the antiviral function of these cells, which, in turn, led to an increase in the replication of a version of HIV that infects monkeys and apes.

Lymph nodes, in addition to housing immune cells, also act as the body’s drainage system, flushing away toxins through a network of tissues, organs and nodes called the lymphatic system. Importantly, cancer cells can hijack this system, using it to travel through the body. Erica Sloan, a postdoctoral trainee of Cole who was involved in the HIV work, wondered whether stress, via the sympathetic nervous system, might also affect lymph nodes in those with cancer.

Sloan, now a cancer researcher at Monash University in Australia, went on to discover in mice that chronic stress increases the number of connections between the lymphatic system and breast tumors, making the cancer cells more likely to spread. Strikingly, treatment with a drug — a beta blocker that blunts the activity of key molecules of the sympathetic nervous system such as norepinephrine — prevented these effects.

Research by other groups has shown that stress can lead to molecular changes, particularly within the immune system, that influence how cancer progresses. Some of this work suggests that, when stress leads to inflammation — a broad immune reaction typically brought on by injuries and infections — it can boost the growth of tumors.

Stress can also impair the activity of immune cells that play an active role in fighting cancer. In the early 2000s, research by University of Iowa behavioral scientist Susan Lutgendorf and her colleagues found that in patients with ovarian cancer, depression and anxiety were associated with impaired tumor-fighting immune cells. In another study of people with ovarian cancer, the researchers found that poor social support was linked to higher levels of a growth factor that stimulates blood vessel growth around tumors. This growth, called angiogenesis, enables new blood vessels to supply nutrients to tumors and — like the lymphatic system — provide pathways through which cancer cells can spread to other parts of the body.

How Stress Affects Tumors

Stress Exposures Promote Hallmarks of Cancer and Alter The Immune System

Source: Adapted From A. Eckerling Et Al/Nature Reviews Cancer 2021. Knowable Magazine. The sympathetic nervous system carries signals from the brain to sites around the body, including tumors. These signals can influence tumor cells in a variety of ways that promote cancer, studies show. Blocking the activity of key molecules in this system with beta blockers may help counteract some of these effects.

Lutgendorf and her colleagues have since found that stressful situations have a similar effect on mice with ovarian cancer, enhancing tumor angiogenesis and cancer spread. Equally important, they’ve found that these effects can be reversed with beta blockers. Other groups have found similar effects of blocking stress signals on other types of cancer in rodents, including blood and prostate cancer. In addition, researchers have found that increasing levels of stress hormones such as norepinephrine and cortisol in mice can make previously dormant cancer cells more likely to divide and form new tumors.

Studies like these are revealing that stress can trigger a cascade of biochemical changes and alter a cancer cell’s environment in a way that may promote its spread. “Stress signaling and stress biology really have an impact on most — if not all — of these processes,” says Jennifer Knight, a cancer psychiatrist at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Blocking Stress Signals

If stress can make cancer worse, how can the process be stopped? Little by little, new treatments are emerging.

For about half a century, clinicians have used beta blockers to treat hypertension. By scouring data from patient registries, researchers found that people with cancer who already had been taking certain kinds of beta blockers at the time of diagnosis often had better outcomes, including longer survival times, than those who were not on the medicines.

Over the last few years, several clinical trials — most of which are small and early-stage — have directly tested whether beta blockers could benefit people with cancer. In one pair of studies, a research team led by neuroscientist Shamgar Ben-Eliyahu at Tel Aviv University, administered the beta blocker propranolol along with an anti-inflammatory drug to people with colorectal or breast cancer five days before surgery. The team chose this timing because earlier research had shown that while surgery is an opportunity to remove the tumor, it can also paradoxically provide the chance for the cancer to spread. So blocking any potential effects of stress on cancer spread, they reasoned, could be crucial to a patient’s long-term prognosis.

These trials, which involved dozens of patients, revealed that the tumor cells of those who received the drugs showed fewer molecular signs of being able to spread — a process known as metastasis — less inflammation, and an increase in some tumor-fighting immune cells. For colorectal cancer patients, there were also hints that the intervention could reduce cancer recurrence: Three years after the procedure, cancer returned in two of the 16 patients who received the drugs, compared to six of 18 patients who didn’t receive those meds.

Other studies have assessed the effect of using beta blockers alone, without anti-inflammatory drugs. In 2020, Sloan and her colleagues published a study including 60 breast cancer patients, half of whom were randomly assigned to receive propranolol a week before surgery, while the other half received a placebo. They, too, found that tumor cells from patients who received beta blockers had fewer biomarkers of metastasis.

Stress-reducing beta blockers may also benefit other cancer treatments. In a 2020 study, Knight and her team looked at the effect of beta blockers in 25 patients with multiple myeloma who were receiving blood stem cell transplants. Patients who took beta blockers had fewer infections and faster blood cell recovery — although the study was too small to properly evaluate clinical outcomes. And in a small study of nine people with metastatic skin cancer, Repasky and her colleagues found hints that beta blockers might boost the effectiveness of cancer immunotherapy treatments.

Breast Cancer Cells Grown in a Dish. In small clinical trials, researchers have found that tumors in breast cancer patients treated with beta-blockers have fewer biomarkers of metastasis, less inflammation and an increase in tumor-fighting immune cells. Credit: Tom Misteli, Karen Meaburn/NCI Center For Cancer Research

While studies on beta blockers are promising, it’s not clear that these drugs will improve outcomes in all kinds of cancers, such as lung cancer and certain subtypes of breast cancer. Some patients can react badly to taking the medications — particularly those with asthma or heart conditions such as bradycardia, in which the heart beats unusually slowly.

And, crucially, the drugs only block the endpoint of stress, not its cause, Repasky says. They will therefore likely need to be combined with mindfulness, counseling and other stress-reducing strategies that get closer to the root of the problem.

Such interventions are also in the works. Bower and her team have conducted clinical trials of mind-body interventions such as yoga and mindfulness meditation with breast cancer survivors, to improve health and promote lasting remission. They’ve found that these therapies can decrease inflammatory activity in circulating immune cells, and they speculate that this may help to reduce tumor recurrence.

Ultimately, bigger clinical trials are needed to firmly establish the benefits of beta blockers and other stress-reducing interventions on cancer survival outcomes — and determine how long such effects might last. The timing of treatment and the type of cancer being treated may play a role in how well such therapies work, researchers say. But lack of funding has been a barrier to conducting the larger follow-up studies needed to answer such questions. The work isn’t yet backed by pharmaceutical companies or other organizations that support large studies in oncology, Knight says.

And for now, whether stress can increase a person’s risk of developing cancer in the first place, as the ancient Greeks once postulated, remains a mystery. Population studies linking stress to cancer risk are often complicated by other factors, such as smoking, poor nutrition and limited access to health care.

“We have no definitive way of saying, ‘If you’re stressed out, you’re going to develop cancer,’” says Patricia Moreno, a clinical psychologist at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and coauthor of an article in the 2023 Annual Review of Psychology about stress management interventions in cancer.

But for people who already have a cancer diagnosis, many researchers argue that the evidence is strong enough to include stress management in clinical practice. On average, cancer patients do not receive psychological therapies that can reduce stress at the level for which they are needed, says Barbara Andersen, a clinical psychologist at Ohio State University. Although they won’t be necessary for every patient, many can benefit from mind-body interventions, she says. “I’m not saying they should be a first priority, but they shouldn’t be the last.”

— Diana Kwon is a Freelance Science Journalist Who Covers Health and The Life Sciences.

[obtener2]

"As the ability to treat initial, or primary, tumors has improved, people survive early rounds with cancer only to come back years or decades later when the #cancer has somehow resettled in a new tissue, such as brain, lung or bone. This is metastatic cancer, and it’s the big killer." Amber Dance, Knowable Magazine & Smithsonian Magazine

[anumberofhobbies]

What’s wrong with ‘"'til"? Why tiny words control conversations. How many cookies? Episode 1067

Mar 25, 2025  Grammar Girl Podcast, Full Episodes 1067. Think "'til" is a valid alternative to "until"? Think again! Today, we learn about the difference between "till" and "until" and why many style guides frown on "'til." Then, we uncover the hidden power of interjections—words like "um," "huh," and "mm-hmm"—and how they help us negotiate meaning, keep conversations flowing and even challenge artificial intelligence.

The "interjections" segment was written by Bob Holmes, a science writer living in Edmonton, Canada and who until recently, had no idea how often he uses interjections.

The piece originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a digital publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. And they've produced a special standalone episode of their podcast about interjections, so if you want to learn more, check that out too.

[fahrni]

Saturday Morning Coffee

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

This week has been a bit of a struggle. I’m still sick and feel exhausted and our country is being dismantled.

My thoughts are not so good. I’m so pissed off.

I hope you all had positive weeks and enjoy the links. ❤️

Iván Carrillo • Knowable Magazine

North America’s largest bird disappeared from the wild in the late 1980s. Reintroduction work in the United States and Mexico has brought this huge vulture back to the skies. This is the story of its comeback.

I remember these beautiful monsters as a kid and remember being really bummed out when they became extinct.

This gives me a bit of hope.

John Timmer

While the work was done with trapped ions, almost every type of qubit in development can be controlled with photons, so the general approach is hardware agnostic. And, given the sophistication of our optical hardware, it should be possible to link multiple chips at a variety of distances, all using hardware that doesn’t require the best vacuum or the lowest temperatures we can generate.

I find quantum computing to be way more fascinating than LLMs. When — if? — these machines become reality the world changes dramatically, again.

I’ll probably be dead before it reaches a state of usefulness, but I hope it does, and I hope the “AIs” of the world or climate change don’t kill us off as a species before then.

Sara Hashemi • Smithsonian Magazine

In Summerville, South Carolina, a mysterious light has been seen hovering over old railroad tracks. Legend has it, it’s the glow of a lantern lighting the path of a ghost searching for her decapitated husband.

I love a good ghost story and a mystery. I also learned something new! I had no idea earthquakes could produce Earthquake lights!

Now, it’s not nearly as exciting as a good ghost story but it’s still fun nonetheless. 😀

Jon Hicks

A long dive into the features that make my ideal music app, and why nothing currently fulfils the brief.

If you have the time to read a longer post and understand how some folks prefer their music apps to work, this article is for you.

As a developer I want my music player to work a certain way and be beautiful to boot but designers can go to an entirely different level when it comes to the beauty of a thing.

Both perspectives are very necessary to make beloved software.

Ben Lovejoy • 9to5Mac

It’s being reported that the British government secretly ordered Apple to create a security backdoor into all content uploaded by iCloud users anywhere in the world.

This is really shameful of the British government if they’ve really asked for a back door.

Remember, once you make an exception for the “good guys” the bad guys will exploit it for their own needs.

What we need now is for Apple to implement end-to-end encryption for messages and other systems. Tighten it up, don’t dumb it down.

Larry Fried • /Film

Every awards season, movie fans and aspiring pundits across the country become obsessed with the ever-coveted Academy Awards. The longstanding awards show has long been considered the holy grail of the film industry and can often feel like an all-encompassing part of the discourse, particularly around the four acting categories. In the lead-up to Oscar Sunday, many of us debate who will win, and once the ceremony comes and goes, there are still debates over who should have won.

Some of these actors shocked me, like Samuel L. Jackson. He’s extremely good in everything he does. Two roles that come to mind are Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction and Major Marquis Warren in The Hateful Eight. Oh, I also loved him in The Red Violin. I’m 100% certain I’m missing a critically acclaimed film in this mix. The man has done so much over his lifetime.

Numeric Citizen

Generation X is the last cohort to have one foot firmly planted in the pre-digital world while seamlessly adapting to the rapid technological changes that followed. We were raised on mixtapes, handwritten letters, and Saturday morning cartoons, yet we were also the first to embrace personal computers, email, and the internet. This unique position grants us a rare perspective—one that values both the patience and craftsmanship of an analog world and the speed and efficiency of the digital revolution. We understand progress because we lived through it, adapting with each new wave of innovation while maintaining the ability to unplug and appreciate the world beyond the screen.

I know not everyone enjoyed their childhood but I did. We were kids of two worlds. One side middle class the other poor. But, rarely did we ever want for the basics and we always had a tremendous amount of love surrounding us thanks to an amazing mother and grandparents.

As a kid my brothers and I lived outside. During the summer we’d get up, get on our bike, and disappear for long periods of time. If not that we’d be at the trailer park swimming pool or out in the street playing football or baseball. There was always the brick yard to occupy us — the brick yard was a deep and wide hole in the ground we’d play in, swimming in the pond or jumping our bikes into it. We had lots of fun tied together with the occasional mischief.

Jerry, the middle brother, got a Commodore 64 when he was around 10 and it was great for games and the die rolling program he wrote, we played a lot of D & D as teens. I never really used his computer, he is the brains of the family, but I was fascinated by it. I also knew I wanted to be a computer programmer at some point in my life. In high school I had the chance to write some BASIC programs and I sucked at it. I was always a horrible student but at some point I figured it out.

All that to say I agree with the article. Generation X is the perfect mix of analog and digital life. We touched grass a lot and as a generation helped build some of the greatest technology on the planet.

Mark Savage • BBC

Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath are reuniting for one last time, to play a fund-raising concert in Birmingham on 5 July.

This show is going to be amazing. Not just because of Ozzy and Sabbath. This is one for the ages and whoever gets to attend will probably have some great stories to tell. 🎙️

Jamie Zawinski

I didn’t think that my former (extremely former) friend and coworker could be more of an unmitigated piece of shit, but “We hired this completely inexperienced guy solely because he murdered a black man” really takes it up a level.

Mark Andressen has turned out to be a real piece of crap human being. Why anyone would work with him is beyond me. Especially now. Garbage.

Politics

Here’s the section many of you may want to avoid. Cursing may ensue, hostile opinions for sure, and general disgust lie ahead.

You’ve been warned.

We are in the early days of the destruction of our democracy. No, that’s not hyperbole. If we manage to go back to being a democracy after the next four years it will be a miracle. There’s a better than average chance the Marmalade Messiah and his boss, Space Karen, don’t leave the White House and install themselves as dictator of this new nation.

In the last three weeks Space Karen has been dismantling our Federal Government through our computer systems. He is in control, illegally.

USAID and other agencies are being ripped out, root and all, by Space Karen and his merry band of pimple faced teenagers.

When is someone with any authority going to walk into whatever building they’re occupying and arrest the entire team, Musk included?

Better yet. When will the violence begin? Musk and Trump have proven they do not respect the law and will continue to go about dismantling things until they are stopped.

Of the two Musk is certainly the bigger threat. I don’t believe he’s the genius everyone thought he was but he is smart and a narcissistic sociopath. He’s not gonna stop. The law can’t or won’t stop him. It going to take a citizen or group of citizens to end what he’s doing.

Assholes. They’re all assholes and violence may be the only way to stop them.

Parker Molloy

In the past two weeks, Elon Musk — a man no one elected to any office — has gained unprecedented access to Social Security payment systems, fired thousands of federal workers, shuttered entire agencies, and installed his loyalists throughout the government. If this were happening in any other country, we’d call it what it is: a coup.

Jeet Heer • The Nation

In truth, Musk is emerging as a government within the government, using the time-honored revolutionary tactic of developing dual power in order to seize control.

Vittoria Elliott and Leah Feiger • WIRED

A US Treasury Threat Intelligence Analysis Designates DOGE Staff as ‘Insider Threat’

Steven Beschloss

Let’s start here: In a sane world, Elon Musk and his merry band of marauding miscreants would have already been arrested. For crying out loud: They have taken control of government computer systems at the United States Treasury and invaded the databases containing the private records of nearly every American, including personal medical records and financial information from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, all under the pretext of rooting out waste and fraud.

Katherine Stewart • The New York Times

To be clear, “they” are not just Donald Trump and his billionaire co-pilot. Over the past half-century, an anti-democratic movement has coalesced in the United States. It draws on super-wealthy funders, ideologues of the new right, purveyors of disinformation and Christian nationalist activists. Though it pretends to revere the founders and the Constitution, it fundamentally rejects the idea of America as a modern pluralistic democracy.

The violence is coming. At some point people will break. It’s just a matter of time.

[entomoblog]

Tracking butterfly’s transcontinental migrations with pollen and citizen scientists | Knowable Magazine

See on Scoop.it - EntomoScience

Trillions of insects move around the globe each year. Scientists are working on new ways to map those long-distance journeys.

  By Saugat Bolakhe 11.18.2024

  ------

via Le secret de la migration des papillons est écrit dans le pollen - Geo.fr - Publié le 27/11/2024 à 20h31 - Mis à jour le 28/11/2024 https://www.geo.fr/environnement/le-secret-de-la-migration-des-papillons-est-ecrite-dans-le-pollen-223384

[stephanurban]

Ikea-style wooden skyscrapers are popping up worldwide thanks to "mass timber" | TechSpot

[wolfnowl]

Amazing evolutionary adaptations of hummingbirds | Knowable Magazine

Such fierce little creatures!!

[cavenewstimestoday]

These Tiny Beautiful Fossils Tell the Future

This article originally appeared in  Knowable Magazine. Climate change and declining biodiversity are the two biggest environmental crises facing humankind today, but predicting how they’ll play out together is tricky. Ideally, scientists would study how life on Earth responded to previous periods of drastic climate change, but the fossil record for most species is spotty. The fossils of…