Sunday, January 19, 2020

Can Indian Fruit Fight Off Cancer? An Indian fruit known as bitter lemon

Here and elsewhere, Airbnb’s self-presentation is comically at odds with reality. According to its media kit, the magazine “celebrates humanity wherever it exists — across borders, time zones, languages and skin tones — to showcase travel that is accessible, immersive, local and people-focused.” Its focus is “connection,” the vapid word for our conscription in data-mining digital networks so beloved by Silicon Valley executives and public relations flacks. Airbnb, the company, describes itself as a horizontal platform “powered by local hosts” who open up their homes to make us all more “connected.” Just as Uber and Lyft have no drivers, Airbnb has no housekeepers or landlords; there are only “hospitality entrepreneurs,” welcoming us into their abodes.
Can Indian Fruit Fight Off Cancer? An Indian fruit known as bitter melon appears to block some cancer cells' ability to get energy from sugar or fat. Watch for further research


[Memoir] The Cancer Chair, by Christian Wiman | Harper's Magazine
I have right here on my cancer chair an essay that praises Job as a work of profound theology adorned with poetry, which is so spectacularly wrong I have not yet been able to finish it. As if the poetry were beside the point. The poetry is the point. When Job needs to scream his being to God, it’s poetry he turns to. When God finally answers, his voice is verse so overwhelming that Job is said to “see” it. The speech is a reprimand, yes, but God also allows that Job has spoken “the thing that is right.” It’s not obvious what God is referring to here. Job has said a lot of things. But the one thing that he’s truly hammered home is that cry of dereliction, destruction, and profane (yet not faithless) rage. Whether Job has torn a rift in the relation of man and God, or simply pointed out one that was always there, it now can never be altogether repaired or ignored. The destruction, though, is also a resurrection. God’s being, which extends from the center of the atom to the burning edge of the universe and beyond beyond, is what Job must accept. But Job’s being, and the rage that now ramifies through the centuries (“I will wreak that hate upon him”), is part of that creation and thus a part of what God must accept. Jack Miles points out that in the Hebrew Bible this speech of God’s is the last word God utters. God hasn’t silenced Job. Job has silenced God.

  

 A world without pain (New Yorker))





“We’re talking hundreds of degrees celsius, possibly over 1000,” said Professor Keith. “It takes a massive input of energy to get a living tree to burn to the core, right down to ashes… [and] these trees could have been uprooted [in the firestorm] or they could have been standing dead