Month: September 2024

The clown doctor will see you now – and you’ll get better, quicker

September 9, 2024 Ellen Phiddian

(Back in the 80s I heard a story of Norman Cousins putting his apple juice in a specimen cup, then later taking a sip while listening to a visitor. I think of Norman Cousins when I see headlines like this one. I don’t believe he was a clown, but others’s mileage may vary, as to humor in the hospital, also Norman Cousins, not to mention clowns.)

Child looks suspiciously at medical clown in hospital
Credit: FatCamera / Getty Images

Medical clowns are known to have a positive therapeutic impact on kids in hospitals for a range of health issues, and now it’s been shown they can reduce the length of stay and antibiotic use for children with pneumonia.

A study, done on 51 children, found that those visited by medical clowns on average left hospital more than a day earlier than those who weren’t.

“Medical clowns undergo specific training to work in hospitals,” says Dr Karin Yaacoby-Bianu, a researcher at the Carmel Medical Centre and Israel Institute of Technology, Israel.

“They have been shown to reduce pain and alleviate stress and anxiety in children and their families during medical treatment, and have been gradually integrated into many aspects of hospital care.

“But their impact on children being treated for pneumonia has not been investigated.”

Yaacoby-Bianu presented her team’s research at the 2024 European Respiratory Society Congress.

“Community acquired pneumonia is one of the leading causes of hospitalisation in children, globally,” she says.

The team split 51 children, aged between 2 and 18, who had been hospitalised with pneumonia, into 2 groups.

They all received standard care, but one group also had four 15-minute visits from a medical clown from the Dream Doctors Project during their stays.

Photo of medical clown
Medical clown ‘tres jolie’. Credit: Dream Doctors/European Respiratory Society

The clowns did a variety of activities including music, singing, and guided imagination.

The group visited by clowns stayed in hospital for 43.5 hours on average, while the control group stayed in hospital for 70 hours on average.

Children visited by clowns needed an average of 2 days of IV antibiotic treatment, while the control group required 3. Other medical markers, like heart rate and inflammation, were lower in the clown group.

“While the practice of medical clowning is not a standardised interaction, we believe that it helps to alleviate stress and anxiety, improves psychological adjustment to the hospital environment and allows patients to better participate in treatment plans like adherence to oral antibiotics and fluids,” explains Yaacoby-Bianu.

“Laughter and humour may also have direct physiological benefits by lowering respiratory and heart rates, reducing air trapping, modulating hormones, and enhancing the immune function.”

Dr Stefan Unger, a paediatrician at the Royal Hospital for Children and Young People Edinburgh, UK, who wasn’t involved in the research, says the study shows the positive effect humour can have in healthcare. (snip-MORE)

https://cosmosmagazine.com/health/body-and-mind/medical-clowns-pneumonia/

How fast can a fruit fly walk – scientists built mini treadmills and found out

September 8, 2024 Evrim Yazgin

(I want to guess that it’s the same everywhere, and ask: did they put these treadmills on bananas?)

Fruit flies on treadmills are giving scientists insights into how insects walk in ways that previous, more invasive techniques could not.

Cartoon illustration of an imaginary fruit fly wearing sports apparel and running on a treadmill
Fruit fly on a treadmill. Illustration by Alice C. Gray.

Researchers want to understand how insects’ nervous systems respond to rapid changes underfoot. All animals must navigate potential hazards and changes in terrain, otherwise injury from falls would be likely (send this to your clumsy friend or relative).

Animals as diverse as flies, cockroaches, rats and humans all show similar ways of readjusting after a trip, for example.

Studying how insects adjust their walking will help scientists understand proprioception: how the body continually senses its articulation and movement.

These techniques have been helpful in evaluation and treatment of people, such as stroke patients, who have locomotive issues.

Fly on a treadmill
Graphical abstract. Credit: B G Pratt et al. Current Biology.

University of Washington researchers published in Current Biology their findings when fruit flies – Drosophila melanogaster – were put on specially-designed miniature treadmills.

Fruit flies are a good model for mapping neural locomotion control because they have a compact, fully mapped nervous system. Previous studies have also given scientists a suite of genetic tools to perform precise and specific manipulations of the fly’s nervous system.

Traditionally, researchers have studied insect locomotion either free walking or tethered.

Tethered insects have a small camera mounted on a stick attached to their backs. Unsurprisingly, this method is not the most comfortable for the insect, but an advantage of this approach is that it allows the fly’s movements on 3D surfaces to be studied.

“One disadvantage of studying locomotion in tethered flies is that their posture is constrained and normal ground reaction forces may be disrupted, which could affect walking kinematics,” the authors of the new study write.

Enter the Drosophila’s very own treadmill.

The researchers were able to track fly walking over long periods of time. Split-belt treadmills were used to investigate how the flies reacted to belts with different speeds on either side of the body.

Without the burden of a tethered camera, the flies were able to strut their stuff freely.

“At the extremes, flies on the treadmill were able to sustain walking at a max belt speed of 40 mm/s and surpassed an instantaneous walking velocity of 50 mm/s [about 0.18km/h], which is the fastest walking speed ever reported for Drosophila melanogaster,” the researchers say. (snip-MORE)

https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/biology/fruit-flies-insect-walking-treadmill/

Peace & Justice History for 9/9:

September 9, 1862
Minnesota Governor Alexander Ramsey declared that “The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state.”
The previous month the Dakota, or Santee, Sioux, long burdened by treaty violations and late or unfair payments from Indian agents, killed four settlers and decided to attack settlers throughout the Minnesota River valley. The number killed was estimated between 300 and 800, until 9/11 the largest civilian death toll in the U.S. The number of Indian deaths was not recorded.
September 9, 1944
Religious conscientious objector Corbett Bishop was arrested after walking out of a Civilian Public Service Camp. During subsequent trials and imprisonments, he refused any type of cooperation with the government until he was released 193 days later.
 
“I’m not going to cooperate in any way, shape or form.
I was carried in here.If you hold me, you’ll have to carry me out.War is wrong. I don’t want any part of it.” – Corbett Bishop, 1906-1961
September 9, 1963
Students at Chu Van An boys’ high school in Saigon tore down the government flag and raised a Buddhist flag to protest the corrupt Diem regime in South Vietnam; 1,000 were arrested.
September 9, 1971
The Attica (New York) State Penitentiary revolt began. The interracial revolt was led by blacks but featured cooperation between prisoners of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

It was finally brutally suppressed by the state five days later, upon orders from Governor Nelson Rockefeller who refused to become directly involved. 29 prisoners and 10 guards were shot and killed by attacking state troopers in the bloodiest prison confrontation in U.S. history.

The prisoners had been demanding improvements in their living and working conditions at the increasingly overcrowded facility.
September 9, 1980
Eight activists from the Atlantic Life Community were arrested after hammering the nose cones of two missiles at the General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. 
Read about Plowshares 8
 
The Plowshares 8 (in alphabetical order):
Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Dean Hammer, Carl Kabat, Elmer Maas, Anne Montgomery, Molly Rush, and John Schuchardt.

This action would become the first of an international movement of dozens of “Plowshares” anti-nuclear direct actions.
 A chronology of Plowshares actions 
September 9, 1997
Sinn Fein (pronounced shin fayn), the Irish Republican Army’s allied political party, formally renounced violence by accepting the principles put forward by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell (D-Maine) who was mediating the talks between the Irish Republicans and the British Unionists on Northern Ireland’s future.
Senator George Mitchell
The Mitchell Principles:
• To democratic and exclusively peaceful means of resolving political issues;
• To the total disarmament of all paramilitary organisations;
• To agree that such disarmament must be verifiable to the satisfaction of an independent commission;
• To renounce for themselves, and to oppose any effort by others, to use force, or threaten to use force, to influence the course or the outcome of all-party negotiations;
• To agree to abide by the terms of any agreement reached in all-party negotiations and to resort to democratic and exclusively peaceful methods in trying to alter any aspect of that outcome with which they may disagree; and,
• To urge that “punishment” killings and beatings stop and to take effective steps to prevent such actions.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryseptember.htm#september9

THE GUARDIAN: ‘I am the police, I am the army’: blacklisted settler’s rule in West Bank

‘I am the police, I am the army’: blacklisted settler’s rule in West Bank
Palestinians tell of self-styled warlord’s brutal reign across whole of Jabal Salman valley – and he is one of many

Read in The Guardian: https://apple.news/AmCE1igzkT7eQ2qhcB0A8Lg

Shared from Apple News

Best Wishes and Hugs,Scottie

NBC NEWS: A Gazan girl’s pink rollerblades become an image of tragedy and desperation

A Gazan girl’s pink rollerblades become an image of tragedy and desperation
Tala Hussam Abu Ajiwa had pleaded with her parents to let her go out and play, her grieving father told an NBC News crew on the ground in Gaza.

Read in NBC News: https://apple.news/AdJsH07Q_QSejGorB07G3eQ

Shared from Apple News

Best Wishes and Hugs,Scottie

The Cases of January 6th

AP News

(I debated about putting this here; the page is a bit complicated for copy-pasting, but the material is important, as sometimes the passage of time blurs memories. There is work for justice being done on these cases and the whole of it, and here’s a nice gathering of information to date. Maybe a thing to read when you’ve got a few minutes. It is longer, but not TL;DR. You’ll want to know this stuff. )

by Michael Kunzelman, Alanna Durkin Richer, and Cal Woodward

Snips:

The Associated Press has spent more than three years tracking the nearly 1,500 Capitol riot cases brought by the Justice Department. AP reporters have reviewed hours of video footage and thousands of pages of court documents. They have sat through dozens of court hearings and trials for the rioters who descended on the Capitol and temporarily halted the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory. These videos represent a mere fraction of the evidence that prosecutors have presented to juries and judges deciding these cases.

Inside Washington’s federal courthouse, there’s no denying the reality of Jan. 6, 2021. Day after day, judges and jurors silently absorb the chilling sights and sounds from television screens of rioters beating police, shattering windows and hunting for lawmakers as democracy lay under siege.

But as he seeks to reclaim the White House, Donald Trump continues to portray the defendants as patriots worthy of admiration, an assertion that has been undercut by the adjudicated truth in hundreds of criminal cases where judges and juries have reached the opposite conclusion about what history will remember as one of America’s darkest days.

The cases have systematically put on record — through testimony, documents and video — the crimes committed, weapons wielded, and lives altered by physical and emotional damage. Trump is espousing a starkly different story, portraying the rioters as hostages and political prisoners whom he says he might pardon if he wins in November.

There are no broadcast television cameras inside the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse on Constitution Avenue. But the real story of Jan. 6 is found in the mounds of evidence and testimony judges and juries have seen and heard behind the doors of the courthouse where hundreds of Trump’s supporters have been convicted in the attack. (snip-go read when you have a little time)

https://apnews.com/projects/january-6-cases/

2nd Sunday news video 9 8 2024

More news on the Sunday shows. This time I talk about the Cheney endorsement for Kamala, Johnathan’s attempt to make drama, And how the cult of tRump is not law and order. I also talked about Gov Sanders from Arkansas tried to claim … wrongly that Harris did not talk to media or answer questions. I also talked about her claim tRump is willing to talk to media. Hugs. Scottie

 

Sunday news into video 9 8 2024

My preamble into my next video on the Sunday news.

Enjoy a couple from Randy Rainbow

(One is definitely from a while back, but is somehow still pertinent…)

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

(These fill me with wonder almost every day. There are far worse ways to start the day!)

2024 September 8
M31: The Andromeda Galaxy
Image Credit: Subaru (NAOJ), Hubble (NASA/ESA), Mayall (NSF);
Processing & Copyright: R. Gendler & R. Croman

Explanation: The most distant object easily visible to the unaided eye is M31, the great Andromeda Galaxy. Even at some two and a half million light-years distant, this immense spiral galaxy — spanning over 200,000 light years — is visible, although as a faint, nebulous cloud in the constellation Andromeda. A bright yellow nucleus, dark winding dust lanes, and expansive spiral arms dotted with blue star clusters and red nebulae, are recorded in this stunning telescopic image which combines data from orbiting Hubble with ground-based images from Subaru and Mayall. In only about 5 billion years, the Andromeda galaxy may be even easier to see — as it will likely span the entire night sky — just before it merges with, or passes right by, our Milky Way Galaxy.

Teachers & Students: Ideas for using APOD in the classroom
Tomorrow’s picture: dark moon, red planet