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A new paper shows how an amino acid may hold the secrets of oral cancers. Upper aerodigestive squamous cell carcinoma is a common and aggressive malignancy—it attacks more than half a million people each year, leaving them battling fatal tumors in the airways of the head and neck. Even with so many individuals impacted, there are few effective therapeutic options. Assistant Professor Dechen Lin may just have a solution. New research shows that a pathway of a particular amino acid may be critical in shutting down the growth and proliferation of oral cancers, and a specific diet could be a...

Regular aspirin may help lower risk of colorectal cancer in people with greater lifestyle-related risk factors for the disease, according to a study. For the study, researchers analyzed the health data from 107,655 participants from the Nurses' Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. They compared the colorectal cancer rates in those who took aspirin regularly with those who did not take aspirin regularly. Regular aspirin use was defined as either two or more standard dose (325 mg) tablets per week or daily low-dose (81 mg) aspirin. Study participants were followed starting from an average age of 49.4 years. Those...

On this date in 1673, Indians named Kaelkompte and Keketamape were sentenced to hanging and gibbeting for the murder of an English soldier near Albany, New York. (The date this sentence was executed, if it was not immediate, has been lost to history.) This place had been known as Beverwijck up until a few years prior, when the English gave it its new and still-current christening* after taking it away New Netherland during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The transition of its legal organs was a more gradual process — with a long survival of Dutch practices upon which the English...

It has been reported that a couple in North Carolina has been arrested for making horrific child abuse material as part of a sting operation. Carmen Delia Foley, 31, and Darryl Edwin Foley, 34, are facing multiple charges related to child sex crimes. These heinous crimes involve underage victims as young as 12 months to 12 years old. WRAL News reports, Darryl was arrested in January and is charged with 10 counts of second-degree exploitation of a minor. The arrest warrant said victims included children ranging from the ages of one to 12 years old. Darryl has already been indicted...

On this date in 1951, the first of two batches comprising the “Martinsville Seven” — black, all — went to the Virginia electric chair for gang-raping a white woman. (The remainder were executed on Feb. 5) Somewhat forgotten today, the Martinsville Seven were in their day the locus of radical activism against Jim Crow in the South — very much like Willie McGee, who was put to death in Louisiana later that same year. In fact, this case generated a bit of a legal milestone: a month before the executions began, the U.S. Supreme Court declined an appeal seeking relief...

As an electrical engineer, the most glaring problem with EVs is that we simply do not have the grid capacity to power a national EV fleet. A few months ago some colleagues and I did the analysis for California – Australia is similar. In order to create the same “power to wheels” as currently provided by gasoline and diesel, California would need to double its generation capacity.

On this date in 1946, fascist William Joyce, famous by the nickname “Lord Haw-Haw” for his English-language Nazi propaganda broadcasts, was hanged at Wandsworth Prison for treason. As a pugilistic young anti-Semite with the unusual credential of being a Unionist Irish Catholic, Joyce had been a moving spirit in the interwar British fascist party. (Since audio broadcasts would define Joyce’s life, it seems appropriate to refer the reader for a fuller biography to this recent Oxford biography podcast.) But because time loves a good laugh, it had the guy haranguing his countrymen for insufficient patriotism marked out for the last...