'What do you mean, you just take the stomach out'' Karyn Paringatai wondered, when doctors first said her stomach had to be surgically removed. Could she still eat' Yes, but differently. What would replace it' Nothing. She would have to live the rest of her life missing a major organ. Paringatai was not actually sick, not yet. Her stomach was fine. But her cousin, just a few years older, had recently died of an aggressive stomach cancer at age 33, leaving behind three children. In a video recorded after her diagnosis turned terminal, the cousin told her little kids to be good for their father. 'Please don't be too mean to the lady that he meets,' she added, anticipating how the void left by her death might be filled. But she must have known that this void could not be filled, not ever. The cousin's own mother had died young of stomach cancer. So had her grandmother. So had her sister. To the doctors who saw Paringatai's cousin in Tauranga, New Zealand, this pattern was hauntingly familiar. Her cancer was an unusual and distinct kind called diffuse gastric cancer, in which cancerous cells percolate undetected through the stomach, forming obvious masses only in advanced stages'usually too late to treat. The doctors had witnessed the same rare cancer run through a large Maori family near Tauranga. In that family, one woman lost six of her siblings to stomach cancer; a boy had died at 14. The family now reached out to Paringatai's. It's genetic, they said. You have to get tested....
The American suburb has long been the land of the homeowner. For the most part, suburban municipalities permit only one physical form of housing: the detached single-family home, floating on its parcel of lawn and driveway. It's an image that stands for homeownership, and nearly 85 percent of these structures are owner-occupied. Some communities contain so few accommodations for tenants that they have been defined as 'rental deserts.' But there is no technical reason that a renter cannot live in a house. The mortgage is not what makes the walls stand up. This picture started to change during the 2008 financial crisis, when an unexpected buyer emerged for foreclosed properties: the corporate landlord. Over the course of the 2010s, companies such as Blackstone and American Homes 4 Rent scooped up houses around Atlanta; Charlotte, North Carolina; Tampa, Florida; and Sun Belt cities. In the eyes of many aspiring homeowners, these 'Wall Street' landlords were villains who had the upper hand in every bidding war. For people looking to rent, however, the business opened up neighborhoods that had largely been accessible only with a down payment and a mortgage....
Greg Knutson is a military veteran who recently transitioned from 22 years of flying helicopters for the U.S. Navy to director of business development for Airbus U.S. Space and Defense. Now a second-year student in the MIT Sloan School Executive MBA program and a Pat Tillman Scholar, Knutson works to advance autonomous aircraft technology ' while managing frequent travel, coursework and projects at MIT, and time with his wife and children in Houston. He also volunteers as a water polo coach, U.S. Naval Academy recruiter, and holds leadership positions in MIT's Space Industry and Venture Capital clubs. Working on, alongside, or in aircraft is familiar territory for Knutson. "I am the son of a son of a sailor," he explains. Third-generation military, he grew up in Houston immersed in a pilot's world: His father flew jets for the U.S. Navy, and his grandfather worked on Navy planes. After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy in 2001 with a degree in oceanography, Knutson completed training and earned his Naval Aviator Wings, which recognizes naval aviation mastery, in 2003. Throughout his career, he crewed three different variants of the H-60 Seahawk (the Navy equivalent to the Army's Black Hawk), as well as the uncrewed MQ-8 Fire Scout....
In a 1981 magazine essay, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould let readers in one of his field's counter-intuitive truths. Aquatic animals, including lungfish and coelacanths, are more closely related to tetrapods ' four-limbed vertebrates ' than to salmon, sticklebacks and many other things people call 'fish' ' or, as Gould quipped, 'there is surely no such thing as a fish'. Sharks could be in a similar situation. A genomic study of dozens of shark species and their close relatives suggests that the ocean's top predators might also not be a natural biological group, contrary to what studies using more-limited genetic data have suggested. The analysis, posted last month to the bioRxiv preprint server, finds that, when researchers look at some 'ultra-conserved' parts of the genome, a peculiar family of sharks called Hexanchiformes might be part of an evolutionary lineage that is distinct from the group that includes all other sharks, as well as skates and rays1. The results, which haven't been peer reviewed, suggest that most animals that people call sharks are more closely related to rays and skates than to hexanchiform shark species ' just as Gould pointed was the case for some species called fishes. Biologists call such groups paraphyletic....
