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mRNA COVID vaccine during cancer therapy linked to 2x survival rate
Oct. 24th, 2025 01:47 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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Getting a COVID shot might do more than protect against the virus – it could also help cancer patients live longer. A new study found that mRNA vaccines were linked to a doubling in three-year survival for those on immunotherapy.
Category: Illnesses and conditions, Body and Mind
Tags: Cancer, mRNA vaccines, Coronavirus (COVID-19), Immunotherapy, University of Texas, University of Florida
icanhascheezburger_feedHave you ever walked into a room and found something you didn't expect? This human found a motherly feline and four of her baby kittens hanging out in a storage bin! Talk about lucky.
There's always something new with the cat distribution system. Sometimes, they'll show up on your front doorstep, or hang out in your garage to keep warm, or you might even find a completely different species of animal! The distribution system doesn't discriminate. Thank goodness for that! When the cat distribution system decides that we humans are deserving of fluffy balls of feline love, we must accept their nomination. A feline knows best, and when they know they've found their furever purrson, then that's that. Humans don't make the rules. We just follow them, because cats are our rulers and we're merely their subjects who feed them and provide them with everything else they might desire. That's why the human in the story below accepts their fate as a parent of five new felines, four of whom are babies with full bellies of their cat mama's milk! Scroll below to watch the adorable video.
Pixel Scroll 10/23/25 It’s True. This Fan Has No Pixel
Oct. 24th, 2025 12:48 amfile770_feedFederal database says ICE bought 'guided missile warheads.' That's probably an error
Oct. 24th, 2025 01:30 amsnopes_feedDHS Posts Video Featuring Song Popular With Nazi Creators
Oct. 24th, 2025 12:26 amio9_feed
The agency denied making "Nazi propaganda" in a statement that could be characterized as "very online."
Stopping long-term prescription opioids doesn’t increase suicide risk
Oct. 23rd, 2025 11:50 pmgizmag_newatlas_feed
New research challenges fears about stopping long-term prescription opioid use, uncovering no associated rise in suicide risk and a sharp drop in overdose death. The findings offer reassurance for clinicians and patients managing chronic pain.
Category: Mental Health, Brain Health, Body and Mind
Tags: Opioids, Chronic pain, Suicide, mental health, National Drug and Alcohol Research Center (NDARC), University of New South Wales
The Dark Side of Putting Mirrors in Space
Oct. 24th, 2025 12:00 amnautilus_feedShould sunlight be delivered on demand, no matter the time of day?
One company is toying with this godlike act. Reflect Orbital recently applied for a federal license to trial this concept in April 2026. During this test, an orbiting satellite will unfurl a 60-by-60-foot mirror and aim sunlight to specific sites on Earth. The goal is to launch a constellation of some 4,000 of these massive mirrors by 2030, expanding the world’s access to solar energy and increasing availability during peak-use hours in the morning and night.
The company says the constellation could also boost crop yield and illuminate rescue efforts, defense operations, and entire cities. Reflect Orbital even claims customers could eventually “order sunlight to your exact coordinates at any time.”
But these beams could interfere with telescopes’ views—and astronomers are already dealing with surging light pollution around the world and up in space. Most astronomers say the constellation would affect their work, according to an August survey from the American Astronomical Society.
This would “be like having the full moon up every night, and that will be devastating to astronomy,” Siegfried Eggl, co-lead of the International Astronomical Union’s Center for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky, told Gizmodo. In response to such criticisms, Reflect Orbital told Bloomberg that it aims to steer clear of observatories and will share its satellite positions with scientists. Those who study the night skies have already had issues with visual pollution from the increasingly crowded low-orbit melee of Starlink and other prolific satellite initiatives.
These harms wouldn’t stop in space, of course. Light pollution messes with the day-night cycle that has regulated Earthly creatures for billions of years. And from our planet, these thousands of extra-reflective satellites could resemble rapidly traveling stars—so migratory birds and other animals, who look to the stars for navigation, might get lost.
It’s also possible that the many mirrors involved may not be enough. The planned constellation of a few thousand satellites might only offer a few minutes of light in a given spot. The company would need thousands more to stretch that to an hour, astronomers Michael J. I. Brown and Matthew Kenworthy noted for The Conversation.
“The cost that this incurs not only on astronomy, but on the entire civilization—plus the ecological impacts—are, in my personal view, not worth the effort,” Eggl said to Gizmodo. Perhaps this proposal is just the latest reflection of humanity’s long quest to bend the rules of the cosmos. 
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Lead image: Jacob W. Frank / Wikimedia Commons
Unraveling claims about $376M White House renovation under Obama
Oct. 23rd, 2025 11:56 pmsnopes_feedBooker prize launches £50,000 children’s award
Oct. 23rd, 2025 11:01 pmguardianbooks_feedChildren will help judge the new prize along with children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce
• ‘The Children’s Booker prize will tell kids that they matter’: Frank Cottrell-Boyce
The Booker prize foundation has launched a major new literary award, the Children’s Booker prize, offering £50,000 for the best fiction written for readers aged eight to 12.
The new award will launch in 2026, with the first winner announced in early 2027. It will be decided by a mixed panel of adult and child judges, a first for a Booker award. The inaugural chair of judges will be Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the children’s author and current children’s laureate. He will be joined by two other adult judges, who will help select a shortlist of eight books before three child judges are recruited to help decide the winner.
Continue reading...The Children’s Booker prize will tell kids that they matter
Oct. 23rd, 2025 11:01 pmguardianbooks_feedAs the number of children reading for pleasure hits a record low, the new award highlights its importance for wellbeing, and will give away thousands of books
At the end of the movie Ratatouille, the food reviewer Anton Ego, voiced by Peter O’Toole, makes this beautiful defence of the art of the critic: “There are times when a critic truly risks something. That is in the discovery and defence of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.” The Booker prize has been a friend to the new – new voices, new names, new ways of telling a story – for 56 years. It has made household names of writers whose work might otherwise only have been enjoyed by a few. More importantly – especially since the launch of the International Booker in 2005 – it has helped broaden the horizons of readers.
Now there’s going to be a Booker prize for children’s books aimed at readers aged eight to 12, and I am going to be the first chair of judges. Despite my vast vocabulary, I can’t begin to tell you how hopeful this makes me. Because if the Children’s Booker brings the same energy and boldness to the world of children’s books, it’s going to make a real difference to the lives of thousands of children. It comes at a crucial moment. Everyone knows that children who read for pleasure do better educationally and emotionally. Yet – as we approach the government’s Year of Reading – we find ourselves in a situation where the number of children who read daily has dropped to a 20-year low. We risk losing a whole generation.
Continue reading...Thursday 23 October 1662
Oct. 23rd, 2025 11:00 pmpepysdiary_feedUp and among my workmen, and so to the office, and there sitting all the morning we stept all out to visit Sir W. Batten, who it seems has not been well all yesterday, but being let blood is now pretty well, and Sir W. Pen after office I went to see, but he continues in great pain of the gout and in bed, cannot stir hand nor foot but with great pain. So to my office all the evening putting things public and private in order, and so at night home and to supper and to bed, finding great content since I am come to follow my business again, which God preserve in me.
‘Assassin’s Creed Syndicate’ Helped the Rise of Dual Protagonists
Oct. 23rd, 2025 11:00 pmio9_feed
It's not the first game to say two heroes are better than one, but 'Assassin's Creed Syndicate' helped pave the way for an ongoing gaming trend.
Here's how we know Steven Tyler did not launch $1M cat sanctuary
Oct. 23rd, 2025 11:27 pmsnopes_feed