George and Lennie have traveled to a ranch in the countryside. George is a small, intelligent man, while Lennie is massive, but has the brains of a child. Lennie got them in trouble by trying to touch a girl. Just liked the dress, he says. When she panicked, he wouldn't let go because he didn't know what to do, and he hid with George in a ditch until they could get away. They have decided to work on the ranch and make enough money to buy their own place, with rabbits for Lennie. When they get there, they meet the owner, who is nice enough, but his son is the problem. His son is a fighter with a flighty wife, always afraid the men on the ranch are after her. He is especially wary of Lennie because of his size.
Your body has trillions of blood cells circulating inside you. All of these originate in your bones. Bones may seem hard, but they're actually porous inside, allowing blood vessels to enter. Most of the bone is filled with soft bone marrow. The most important part of this is blood stem cells. These multiply many times, turning into red and white blood cells, and platelets. They go out into the blood stream through capillaries. This is why many blood cancers occur in bone marrow. If the stem cells have a mutation, they could produce malignant blood cells, which are bad for the body. For patients with diseases like leukemia and lymphoma, their best bet at survival is a bone marrow transplant. To do this, stem cells are taken from a donor in one of two days. The first is by extracting blood and then separating stem cells, the second by direct extraction from bone. Chemotherapy or radiation are used to kill existing bone marrow, then the donor's is transplanted in the patient. This can also cause graft-vs-tumor activity. This is when the transplanted immune cells from the donor wipe out cancer cells that the patient's immune system couldn't. However, there could also be adverse effects. Graft-vs-host disease occurs when the donor's immune cells begin attacking the patient's organs, causing life-threatening conditions. This occurs in about 30-50% of people whose donor isn't an identical twin. To prevent this, patients can take immunosuppressants, or immune cells can be removed from the donor's cells. But if they overcome this obstacle, they face the possibility of their own immune system denying entry for the new stem cells. In order to find the best donor, genetic samples are taken and key strands that control the immune system are matched. For this reason, siblings and close relatives are often the best donors, as these genes are passed down. If you want to donate, go to join.bethematch.org to enter yourself in the registry. The donating process is just giving some blood.
Antibiotics are some of the most important drugs in modern medicine. We commonly use them to fights infectious diseases. But they make many other things possible, from surgery to chemotherapy and organ transplants. But they are becoming less effective. Many bacteria have developed resistance to antibiotics, some having full resistance to every drug available. We've also stopped creating new drugs. The first antibiotic was penicillin, discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming. He warned that overuse of these would ruin their miracle. Between the 1940s and 80s, resistant bacteria appeared, which pharmaceutical companies countered with new drugs. This was very successful, as well as profitable. However, many of these were only effective on a few types of bacteria, and antibiotics were being prescribed more and more carefully. As a result, the industry became less profitable. So, antibiotic discovery stopped, while bacteria continued to gain resistance. To combat this, we need to regulate existing antibiotics, create new ones, fight resistance, and find new ways to beat bacteria. The agricultural community uses the most antibiotics, often to treat animals. This gives diseases like salmonella more chances to become resistant. In nature, many new antibiotics can be found. For example, many fungi have bacterial resistance because they need it to survive in their environment. Furthermore, existing antibiotics can be given defense against degrading mechanisms that bacteria use to fight them. This allows antibiotics to stay alive long enough to fight the disease. The biggest factor in this is funding. Since antibiotics are no longer profitable and countries don't support companies that make them, discovery of new ones in inhibited. There are ways to solve this, however. For instance, the UK is testing a strategy where healthcare providers buy antibiotic subscriptions. But whatever we do, we need to make sure antibiotics can continue to be used.
We live in a three dimensional world, meaning we have length, width, and height. But what if we were squished flat onto a two dimensional plane? Edwin Abbott wrote a novella called Flatland in 1884 on these premises. It details the experiences of a square that has been exposed to the 3D world. But before we talk about that, what is a dimension? It is a direction, basically a line, that is perpendicular to others. A one-dimensional world is a line, 2D is two perpendicular lines, and we live in a 3D world with a third perpendicular. But what about higher dimensions? Flatland can help us explore these possibilities. In Flatland, the flat objects see a line. Closer objects are brighter than those far away, helping them see depth. This makes them unable to see the third dimension. However, a sphere visits one day, and the way a square sees it amazes him. Then, the square is lifted into the third dimension by the sphere, allowing him to see what no one else has ever seen before. The square wants to see the fourth and higher dimensions, but the sphere can't accept this, which is understandable. It would be very hard for us to imagine a fourth dimension. We can look at it the way the square saw the sphere. 2D cross-sections of a 3D object, replaced by the third and fourth dimensions. Or, we can take a point and extend it in all directions and eventually get a 4D hypercube (see video at 3:42 for better explanation). There could be entire 4D worlds that we can't see because of the way we see things.
