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In 2023, heat waves in Italy got some ominous names.
In Italy, the founder of a popular weather website has been naming heat waves since 2012. In 2023, he picked names like Cerberus, a.k.a., the dog that guards the underworld in Greek mythology. According to the BBC, temperatures across Italy were well above 100 degrees.
love this one
happy happy friday!
Kind of tough to take them out on New Years when they are that young. Unless you, have no more than two, and the wife and you want to carry them most of the night.
WELCOME TO PAGE 343 - 2023 FIRST TIME EVENTS !!!
Leprosy made headlines in Florida in 2023 ...
Leprosy (a.k.a.Hansen’s disease) cases have been increasing in the central part of the state, and health experts fear the infectious disease could become endemic to Florida—meaning that it’s permanently established in that area. Previously, most leprosy cases in the U.S. originated through carriers traveling from other parts of the world.
… As did malaria.
Malaria is also on the rise in the Sunshine State, as well as Texas and Maryland. Seven cases were recorded across Florida, and like the recent leprosy outbreak, they were locally acquired rather than imported from overseas.
Nintendo closed some of its e-shops.
In March 2023, Nintendo permanently closed down their 3DS and Wii U e-shops. While this does mean that no new software can be downloaded onto these consoles, both the Wii U and the 3DS are still able to access the internet.
The most popular wedding songs were revealed.
A group gift platform called Givetastic crunched the numbers on 100,000 wedding-related Spotify playlists to determine the most popular wedding song. Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” took the blue ribbon, followed by “Marry You” by Bruno Mars. The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” also made the list.
American Girl’s debuted ‘90s-era historical dolls.
In 2023, American Girl debuted two new dolls in its historical collection: Isabel and Nicki Hoffman, fraternal twins growing up in Seattle during the 1990s, making elder Millennials feel very old indeed.
Guinness gave out a record for the world’s most expensive ice cream.
If you want to eat the world’s most expensive ice cream, which Guinness World Records crowned in 2023, you better have some seriously deep pockets. Japanese ice cream company Cellato charges a whopping $6696 for its decadent dessert. Its ingredients include decorative gold-leaf shavings, a rare white truffle, Parmigiano Reggiano, and sake lees.
There was an important update to the Henrietta Lacks story in 2023.
Lacks—a Black woman—visited Baltimore’ s Johns Hopkins Hospital in February 1951, where a piece of cancerous tissue was removed from her cervix. Those cancerous cells were cultured and labeled “HeLa”—and, in contrast to the other cells researchers had tried to culture, they didn’ t die. Instead, they divided and divided and divided. These immortal cells were distributed, mass produced, and commercialized, all without the knowledge or permission of Lacks, who had died in October and was buried in her unmarked grave, or her family, who didn’ t learn about the cells until 1973.
It’s impossible to overstate the impact of Lacks’s immortal cells—as Bettye Kearse wrote in a piece about Henrietta for MentalFloss.com, her cells were “central to the development of vaccines and many medical advances. By 2017, HeLa cells had been studied in 142 countries and had made possible research that led to two Nobel Prizes, 17,000 patents, and 110,000 scientific papers, thereby establishing Henrietta’s role as the mother of modern medicine.” And many people—though not the Lacks family—made money off of those cells.
Some of Henrietta’s heirs eventually sued Thermo Fisher Scientific, a biotech firm, accusing them of profiting from the HeLa cell line without compensating her family. That lawsuit was settled in 2023; the amount wasn’t disclosed. Afterward, Lacks’s grandson, Alfred Lacks Carter, Jr., said, “It was a long fight—over 70 years—and Henrietta Lacks gets her day.”
Lacks was also honored with a statue.
A statue of Lacks went up in her hometown of Roanoke, Virginia, in October 2023, replacing a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
The Food and Drug Administration approved the first new drug in 20 years to treat Alzheimer’s disease.
Leqembi, its brand name, slowed the progression of the disease by about five months in an 18-month clinical trial, but it comes with high risks for serious side effects, such as brain bleeding and death. It also can’t stop disease progression completely nor repair cognitive function. But it gives hope to Alzheimer’s patients and their families, who still have very few therapeutic options. Dr. Joanne Pike, president and CEO of the Alzheimer’s Association, hailed the decision, saying, “This treatment, while not a cure, can give people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s more time to maintain their independence and do the things they love.”
The oldest evidence for the parasite Giardia duodenalis was found.
Archaeologists working in Jerusalem in 2023 pulled 2500-year-old feces out of two ancient toilets and discovered evidence of Giardia duodenalis, a parasite that can cause something akin to dysentery—specifically, according to LiveScience, “a cyst wall protein that is produced and released by G. duodenalis.” It’s the oldest evidence of the protozoan discovered so far.
In 2023, we learned about one of the world’s earliest cases of brain surgery.
Archaeologists working in the ancient site of Tel Megiddo in northern Israel discovered the graves of two high-status brothers who lived during the Late Bronze Age, roughly 1550 to 1450 BCE. The skeletons showed signs of chronic disease—possibly leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease—which given that they lived to their early 20s, alongside other lines of evidence, suggested that the brothers were elite individuals who had access to quality food and medical care during their lives. The skull of the older brother, who was between 20 and 40 when he died, also displayed a hole cut with a human-made beveled instrument. This type of cranial surgery, called trephination, was used in the ancient world to relieve sinus pressure and other ailments, but evidence for it being performed in the Near East is rare.
A highly-detailed 3D scan of the wreck of the Titanic was released in 2023.
The wreck of the Titanic has been disintegrating on the bottom of the North Atlantic for more than a century, and its decay has accelerated in recent years. In May, the underwater mapping company Magellan Ltd. and Atlantic Productions released a stunning “digital twin” of the entire ship and its 15-square-mile debris field to preserve them for all time. The mapping team used robotic submersibles to scan the legendary ocean liner over the course of six weeks with super-high-definition equipment. Then, they knit the images together to create a 3D digital model. It is so detailed that you can even read part of the serial number on one of the ship's three propellers.
In August 2023, we learned that a man bitten by a stray cat contracted an unknown infection.
His arm and fingers became enlarged and swollen, but when doctors analyzed the tissue samples from his wounds, they found an organism they hadn’t seen before. Researchers came in to sequence the bacteria, and found that while it appeared to be a streptococcus-like organism giving the man such a violent reaction, it was actually a never-before-documented globicatella species.
We found out that vaccines are beneficial to bee health.
American foulbrood, a destructive disease that affects honeybees, can now be prevented in the pre-pupal stage with a vaccine created by biotech company Dalan Animal Health. It works by having worker bees ingest dead Paenibacillus larvae cells (the bacterium responsible for American foulbrood), which they then pass on to their queen. While the vaccine is under conditional approval, it’ll hopefully be leagues better for both bees and beekeepers than the previous alternative: burning the infected bees and hives.
There were important updates on the sea spider front.
Did you know that there aren’t just land spiders—there are also sea spiders? And that we recently got our first look at one type of them mating? In 2023, during an expedition by the Ocean Exploration Trust, scientists captured footage of a type of sea spider mating for the first time. The researchers announced in a study released in June 2023 that these particular sea spiders were from the genus Colossendeis, which had a leg span of over a foot; analysis of the footage showed a pair of spiders, one on top of the other. The female used specialized legs to manipulate her eggs. Why is this important? In the words of lead study author Georg Brenneis, University of Vienna zoologist, “This is the first time humans have ever witnessed this behavior ... At this stage, people believed [sea spiders of the Colossendeidae group] may have a completely different reproductive biology to their relatives. But this video unmistakably shows that at least their mating follows typical sea spider fashion.”
One Florida town was overrun by bunnies.
Dozens and dozens of friendly, domesticated bunnies are populating the yards, driveways, and roads of Jenada Isles. It’s a pretty adorable problem to have, but it’s still a problem: The rabbits could dig holes in yards and chew on wires, and the animals—which stem from a group illegally released by a breeder who moved out of the area—could feel the ill effects of Florida’s heat. One resident, Alicia Griggs, has started a GoFundMe to capture and relocate the rabbits.
Siberia’s Extensive Territory
Siberia encompasses a staggering area of over 13.1 million square kilometers, making it the largest region in Russia. Its vast expanse covers almost 77% of the country’s total land area.