My fabric from Eemerald Dreams still hasn't arrived!! Rang and rang and they will deliever it tomorrow. Thank goodness! I hate leaving things late!! grrr!
Anyways, seeing as I can't sew I was reading the paper only to find 3 articles (same paper, same day) about skin cancer and UV radiation!
The sydney morning herald obviously needed some science content! So the ozone hole is getting bigger but the good news (or bad depending how you look at it) is that there may be a melanoma gene which we could test for in the future and therefore those who have it could be checked more regularly for them.
The first article outlines that:
AUSTRALIAN scientists have helped discover five genetic faults that together increase the risk of melanoma by almost 60 per cent.
These are the first genetic mutations linked to the most lethal skin cancer that are not related to hair, skin or eye colour.
The discovery supports the need for a genetic test to diagnose people who have an increased risk of developing melanoma.
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Scientists are hopeful drug therapies that target the gene faults will be available in 10 years.
One study, led by researchers from the Queensland Institute of Medical Research, compared the genomes of more than 2000 Australians with melanoma with more than 4000 people without it.
They found people with a variation in two genetic regions on chromosome one had about a 30 per cent greater risk of developing melanoma compared with people without the variations.
A British study, published with the Australian research in the journal Nature Genetics, has uncovered a further three genetic regions that increase the risk of developing the skin cancer.
People who carried both copies of all three gene faults had a one-in-46 chance of developing melanoma, scientists from the University of Leeds found.
And once i read that i could have a faulty gene.... read find this picture..... a mammoth hole in the ozone layer that is going to have me absorbing UVC rays as well.... great...according to the article:
THE Antarctic ozone hole, yawning open longer than usual, is topping out this year as one of the larger holes ever recorded.
Instead of following the usual pattern of hitting a maximum, then declining, the hole has stayed near its peak for weeks, even rising again last week, according to measurements made by NASA.
The US space agency's OMI satellite captured a maximum of 26 million square kilometres on September 12, but showed it rising again in recent days as ozone-depleted air repeatedly brushed the far south of South America. Larger than in the previous two years, it was still short of the record 2006 hole measured by NASA at 27 million square kilometres - the size of North America.
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It was persisting under the influence of particularly strong prevailing winds in the upper atmosphere, the CSIRO's Paul Fraser said yesterday.
Dr Fraser confirmed trends still indicated recovery of Earth's ozone layer, while uneven, was continuing, with man-made ozone-depleting chemicals now about 15 per cent below their peak in the atmosphere.
''Year to year variability in the weather can effect the scale of the ozone hole significantly,'' Dr Fraser said.
The UN's Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion report concluded that the Antarctic hole drove changes in surface winds over southern hemisphere mid and high latitudes, and was linked to warming of the Southern Ocean.
It said as a result of the phase-out of ozone depleting substances, the ozone layer outside the polar regions should recover to pre-1980 levels some time before mid-century.
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