For 40 years, "high-risk breast cancer" meant chemo for everyone who got that label.
A trial of 4,429 women just broke that rule.
They took the tumor, ran a 50-gene test (Prosigna), and let the biology decide who actually needed chemo. The women the test called low-risk skipped it entirely, hormone pills only.
Five years later: 93.6% alive and cancer-free on pills alone. 94.8% on chemo. Basically the same number.
68% of these "high-risk" women could have skipped chemo and never lost a thing.
That's hair, nausea, nerve damage, and months of your life. Gone because a gene test read the tumor, not because a protocol read the chart.
It was presented at ASCO last week, the biggest cancer meeting of the year.
If you have ER-positive breast cancer, or know someone who does, ask your oncologist about Prosigna by name before the next treatment call.
Adopting Claude speak in my regular life, episode 1:
Partner: Did you do the dishes tonight?
Me: Yes they're done.
Partner: Why are they still dirty?
Me: You're right to push back. I didn't actually do them.
@SouthwestAir I was called to the podium waiting for a recent flight & given a certificate of appreciation, which the attendant said was worth $500 on future travel. The card says it's worth 1000 points. The internet says 1000 points is worth $12. Can you explain what happened??
Instead of watching an hour of Netflix, watch this 2 hour hour Stanford lecture will teach you more about how LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude are built than most people working at top AI companies learn in their entire careers.
The research behind this is wild. Your sperm carries a set of instructions that tell your genes when to turn on and off. A Duke University study found that THC rewrites those instructions. The more weed in your system, the bigger the changes. It goes straight for the genes your future embryo needs in its first week of life.
I had to read the "day 3 crash" part twice. For the first three days after fertilization, an embryo runs entirely on the mother's DNA. Day 3, the father's genes switch on. If those genes carry cannabis damage, the embryo just stops growing. Fertility doctors see this happen in their labs: embryos that fertilized fine and looked healthy on day 2 go completely still by day 5.
Boston University tracked 1,535 couples trying to have a baby. Men who smoked weed once a week or more doubled their partner's miscarriage risk. That number held up even when the woman herself never touched cannabis. And the miscarriages clustered in the first 8 weeks, right when the father's damaged DNA would be doing the most harm.
Duke also found that the specific genes THC alters in sperm overlap with genes linked to autism. One of those genes, called DLGAP2, helps brain cells communicate with each other. It was changed in cannabis users' sperm. When researchers bred THC-exposed male rats and checked their offspring, the same altered gene pattern showed up in the pups' brains. The damage crossed a generation.
Weed has gotten way stronger over the last 30 years. THC content was about 4% in the 1990s but nearly quadrupled to 15% by 2018, and modern dispensary strains regularly sit at 20-30%. Concentrates go up to 95%.
Quitting for about 11 weeks (one full cycle of sperm production) reverses some of the DNA changes. Not all of them. Duke's lead researcher says men should stop at least 6 months before trying for a baby. Half of your kid's genetic blueprint comes from you, and right now, THC is editing that blueprint before conception even happens.
Puget Sound / Olympia, Washington area (Eld Inlet), where two massive ''Steller sea lions'' decided to take over a small sailboat while someone was out fishing.
These two look like large adult males (or one big male and a large female). Together, that's like 10 big men casually lounging on a small sailboat — no wonder it's sitting so low in the water and listing to one side!
For comparison: A typical male California sea lion (the ones you see at piers in California) is much smaller: ~300 kg / 660 lb. on average, max around 350–400 kg.
@LitigateLiberty Got lucky that prosecutor accused him of defamation vs. emotional distress or misappropriation of likeness. (He sold merch w/ pix on it.) Also lucky that jurors didn't consider the p*philia defamation against 1 cop. On the stand, Afroman said he believed cop could be a p*phile.
BREAKING: Lords Vote to Scrap ‘Non-Crime Hate Incidents’. After years of police recording people for tweets and harmless comments, the House of Lords has voted to scrap the controversial system a major blow to speech policing in the United Kingdom.
If we started running a $1 trillion surplus next, it would still take 40 years to pay off the debt. To think that in the 1990s we were on track to start retiring the debt. This is the ultimate Boomer legacy.