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You’ve heard of lung cancer… Breast cancer… Brain cancer… Pancreatic cancer… and cancers of almost all parts of the body. But have you ever heard of muscle cancer? Probably not. Although it does exist, muscle cancer is exceedingly rare and accounts for less than 1% of new cancers in the United States. Why?

Scientists don’t know for sure, but many suspect that muscle cancer is uncommon for a simple reason: muscle cells can store glucose (sugar). Here’s why this matters:

1.      The first mutation that occurs in many cancers is a mutation that causes a cell to take up too much glucose.

2.      The more glucose a cell takes up, the more glucose a cell consumes.

3.      The more glucose a cell consumes, the more waste the cell produces. And unfortunately, a consequence of this waste is the production of reactive oxygen species, commonly abbreviated as ROS.

4.      ROS damage DNA and cause mutation. Eventually, ROS will induce mutations that create uncontrolled cellular proliferation, and cancer will have begun.

However, muscle cells differ from other cell types in a very fundamental aspect. When muscle cells take up extra glucose, they don’t consume it right away. Instead, they store the glucose as glycogen. Consequently, muscle cells have a much lower mutation rate if they are forced to take up extra glucose than other cells have if they consume extra glucose. It is this ability to store glucose as glycogen, instead of burning it and producing mutation inducing ROS, that protects muscle cells from cancer.

Sources:

http://www.canceranswers.com/Muscle.Cancer.html

“Fueling Cancer Cell Growth” Craig Thompson, Ph.D., M.D. Anderson Symposia on Cancer Research 2009

Picture of Global Warming

Everyone worries about global warming these days. As a direct result of humans pumping trillions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, global temperatures are predicted to steadily climb, leading to the melting of the polar ice caps by around 2100 (according to the most dire predictions) and a vast rise in sea level that would put modern coastlines under water. The only chance humanity has of halting the progress of global warming is to cap our emission of carbon dioxide, and even then a significant amount of warming will likely still occur (as a result of the CO2 already in the atmosphere). Or is there another option?

There is… geoengineering. Earth scientists have come up with a multitude of ways that people could cool the climate in order to mitigate or prevent the effects of greenhouse gas-induced global warming. In this blog, I’ll focus on the most likely and most cost effective method: sulfur dioxide emission

How It Works:

·         Using commercial planes, military fighter jets, or even giant balloons,  vast quantities of sulfur dioxide would be transported into the stratosphere daily

·         Once in the atmosphere, the SO2 would oxidize to form sulphate (SO4) aerosols

·         Sulphate aerosols are reflexive, so they will reflect some sunlight from the earth and thus cool the planet

·         This concept has already been demonstrated in principle with the Mt. Pinatubo volcanic eruption in 1991. This eruption unleashed a huge quantity of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, and global temperatures fell by half a degree Centigrade a year later.

Potential Drawbacks:

·         Although the sulfur dioxide approach would help with global warming, it would do nothing to combat the ocean acidification that carbon dioxide emission is causing

·         The world would need to come to an international consensus before this plan could be put into place

·         Since current climate models aren’t very accurate, there is a very real possibility that humans could overcompensate with the sulfur dioxide and cause too much cooling

·         The view of the stars with underground telescopes would be obscured because of all of the aerosols in the air… KHS Astronomy Club… Bye bye…

·         Solar power would be less efficient

·         Potential drought; the year after the Pinatubo eruption had the lowest rainfall over land ever recorded

Should we geoengineer? The potential problems are real and dangerous. Still, global warming is just as real and dangerous, and geoengineering may be the only way to stop drastic climate change. As time moves on, people will have to weigh the costs and benefits of geoengineering against the consequences of global warming. For instance, which is worse… The drought that would likely be created from sulfur dioxide geoengineering, or the worse hurricanes and rising sea levels that would result from global warming? More importantly, who decides? Thoughts?

Sources:

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/10/weighing-the-pros-and-cons-of-stratospheric-geoengineering.ars

http://www.climateark.org/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=140354

Superfreakenomics  by Stephen J Dubner and Steven Levitt