Sidelined by football's governing body, the unofficial 1971 Women's World Cup tournament faded into obscurity. Now, a film executive produced by Venus and Serena Williams seeks to restore its rightful place in history as one of the most significant events ever held.

In 2024, womens football is one of the worlds fastest growing sports.

However, this hasn't always been the case as, after World War II, women were banned or marginalised for playing the beautiful game - which is one of the many reasons that not much is known about the Womens World Cup in Mexico in 1971.

"Copa 71, a new documentary, aims to close this gap in awareness.

Through a compelling blend of rich archival footage and interviews with key figures and players from the tournament, the film explores the remarkable history of the event.

Notably, the final match between Mexico and Denmark garnered the highest attendance in the history of female sports.

Trudy McCaffrey, a former England football player, vividly recalls the physical sensation of stepping onto the field in front of more than 100,000 spectators at Mexico City's Azteca Stadium.

It was just a wave of noise. And you could hear it from the dressing room. And it was the drums. I could feel the drums thudding in my body. That's how loud they were. And it just went on and on, and on and on, all the way through the matches, these drums. And when you walked out onto the pitch, the sound just hit you."

In the documentary, players for Argentina, Mexico, France, Denmark and Italy also look back to August 1971, when they were celebrated for their ball skills and treated like superstars. A far cry from their home countries, where most of them were forbidden from playing on football pitches and were reduced to practising in public parks instead.

Directed by Rachel Ramsey and James Erskine, and executive produced by tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams as well as USA's Women's World Cup-winning striker Alex Morgan,the film is set for release on 8 March in the UK.

Video editor Theo Farrant

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"COPA 71" documentary sheds light on forgotten Women's World Cup - Euronews

In a new study, people experiencing homelessness with a pet documented their lives in photos and participated in interviews, revealing their experiences and potentially informing support initiatives. Gemina Garland-Lewis of the University of Washington, Seattle, and colleagues present this project in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on March 13, 2024.

Having a pet while experiencing homelessness can boost physical and mental health and provide social benefits. However, it can pose unique challenges, such as making it difficult to access medical care, shelters, and other services at facilities that restrict pet entrance. Often, owners choose to forgo services in order to remain with and care for their pet, and many face harassment from people perceiving them as "unfit" for pet ownership.

Proposed efforts to address these barriers assert the importance of modifying public perceptions of this population. To explore how such change could be implemented, Garland-Lewis and colleagues conducted a Photovoice projecta research method that invites community members to take photos that can help deepen understanding of a certain issue and drive change. They recruited Seattle-area pet owners experiencing homelessness; a total of 19 participants of varied ages, genders, and living situations captured their daily lives in more than 900 images.

After reviewing the photos and interviewing participants, the researchers identified key themes: the mental and physical health benefits of the human-animal bond, the importance and strength of the bond itself, and the bond serving as motivation for daily activities and positive changes, such as staying sober or finding housing.

The project also reaffirmed known challenges faced by this population. Participants shared their own recommendations for improved services and policies, such as pet food banks and better public education about service animal laws.

The photos were exhibited to more than 500 people, including policymakers, service providers, and the public. Some housed viewers reported positive changes in their attitudes about homeless community members with pets.

The researchers say that this project increased empathy and boosted the potential for efforts to support people experiencing homelessness and their pets, especially efforts addressing health and housing.

The authors add: "Participants experiencing homelessness with a pet created over 900 photographs during this study. Collectively, their images, stories and themes deepen our understanding of homelessness with pets, leading to increased empathy and potential for policies that benefit the health of both people and their pets during times of housing insecurity."

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Photo Series Sheds Light on Homelessness with Pets - Mirage News

'I thank the firefighters:' Neighbor on cars and shed catching fire in Bedford County  WSET

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'I thank the firefighters:' Neighbor on cars and shed catching fire in Bedford County - WSET

New Study Sheds Light on Where India's People Came From  The Wire

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New Study Sheds Light on Where India's People Came From - The Wire

Who Was Behind Sam Altman's Ouster From OpenAI? New Reports Sheds A Light On Key Executives' Role - Micro  Benzinga

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Who Was Behind Sam Altman's Ouster From OpenAI? New Reports Sheds A Light On Key Executives' Role - Micro - Benzinga

March 11 (SeeNews) - Romanian stock indices ended in red on Monday, as freight forwarder Transport Trade Services [BSE:TTS] paced blue-chip decliners, data from the Bucharest Stock Exchange, BVB, indicated.

The total equity turnover of the BVB increased to 41.26 million lei ($9.1 million/8.3 million euro) on Monday, from 27.47 million lei on Friday, BVB data showed.

Shares of blue-chip lender Banca Transilvania [BSE:TLV] inched up by 0.15% to 27 lei in the session's largest trading turnover of 9.47 million lei.

Blue-chip oil and gas group OMV Petrom [BSE:SNP] saw its shares decrease by 1.09% to 0.635 lei in the day's second largest turnover of 7.38 million lei.

Transport Trade Services was the top blue-chip decliner on Monday, shedding 5.56% and closing at 25.5 lei in the day's third largest trading turnover, of 4.97 million lei. The company bought back 4,900 of its shares at an average price of 28.46 lei per share between March 4 and March 8, it said in a report filed with the BVB on Monday. In February, TTS shares ranked twelfth on the list of the most traded shares listed on the BVB, representing 2.29% of the total value of transactions registered by shares included in the bourse's Premium category.

Details follow:

BET is the first index developed by BVB and represents the reference index for the local capital market. BET reflects the performance of the most traded companies on BVBs regulated market, excluding financial investment companies (SIFs). It now includes 20 companies.

BET-TR is the first total return index launched by BVB. It is based on the structure of market reference index BET. BET-TR tracks the price changes of its component shares and is adjusted to also reflect the dividends paid by constituent companies.

BET-FI is the first sector index launched by BVB and reflects the price changes of SIFs and of other assimilated entities.

BET-BK was designed to be used as a benchmark by asset managers and other institutional investors.

BET-NG is a sector index which reflects the evolution of all the companies listed on BVBs regulated market included in the energy and related utilities sector. The maximum index weight a company can hold is 30%.

BET-XT tracks the price changes of the 25 most traded companies listed on BVBs Regulated Market, including SIFs.

BET-XT-TR is the total return version of BET-XT index, which includes the 25 most traded Romanian companies listed at BVB.

ROTX is an index developed by BVB together with Vienna Stock Exchange. It tracks, in real-time, the price changes of the blue-chip shares traded on the Bucharest Stock Exchange.

BET AeRO is the first index for the AeRO market developed by BVB which reflects the price performance of the representative companies listed on the AeRO market that meet the liquidity and free-float market capitalization criteria. It is a free-float market capitalisation-weighted index, with the maximum weight of 15% for an index constituent.

(1 euro=4.9671 lei)

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Romanian stock indices start week in red, TTS sheds most - SeeNews

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AMBCrypto's content is meant to be informational in nature and should not be interpreted as investment advice. Trading, buying or selling cryptocurrencies should be considered a high-risk investment and every reader is advised to do their own research before making any decisions.

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Are Edibles Safer Than Smoking? New Study Sheds Light on Cannabis and Heart Problems  Verywell Health

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Are Edibles Safer Than Smoking? New Study Sheds Light on Cannabis and Heart Problems - Verywell Health

A molecular "snapshot" of a protein can be critical to understanding its function. Scientists at Stanford and NYU have published and investigated a new structure of the protein LAG-3 which could enable the development of new cancer treatments.

By Erin Ross

Some cancerous tumors hijack proteins that act as "brakes" on our immune system and use them to form a sort of shield against immune recognition. Immunotherapy treatments have been created that turn off these "brakes" and allow our body to attack foreign-looking cancer cells. To further advance such treatments, researchers at Stanford University and New York University have published a new structure of one of these brake proteins, LAG-3. Their work contains key details of the molecule's structure, as well as information about how the LAG-3 protein functions.

Although over a dozen immunotherapies targeting LAG-3 are in development, and one is already FDA approved, knowledge of LAG-3's structure and function has been incomplete.

"Given the amount of time and resources being put into developing therapeutics that target LAG-3, it is astounding that we don't yet have a full understanding of how this protein functions," said Jennifer Cochran, the Addie and Al Macovski Professor in the School of Engineering and professor of bioengineering, and co-senior author on the study detailing LAG-3, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Getting a clear image of a protein might not seem like a big deal, but when it comes to proteins, form often begets function. If you know what a protein looks like at the atomic scale, you can begin to understand how it interacts with other molecules and design experiments to further deduce how it works. Studies like these are crucial to developing drugs that can optimally block their target's function.

Proteins like LAG-3, called immune checkpoints, exist to stop our immune system from attacking things they shouldn't. In theory, our immune system should naturally recognize tumor cells as foreign. But a checkpoint protein shield can give cancer cover.

Current immunotherapies aren't chemical drugs, they're lab-manufactured antibodies that attach to certain parts of these checkpoints, and essentially turn them off. Once the checkpoint is turned off, our immune system can recognize and target the cancer again.

There are already approved antibody treatments that target two checkpoint proteins: CTLA-4 and PD-1. Both turn off our immune systems but in different ways. Because CTLA-4 and PD-1 were the first two checkpoint proteins found, they are quite well studied, and different approaches to inhibiting them for cancer therapy earned scientists the 2018 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.

LAG-3 seems to work in an entirely different way. Scientists hope that those differences might make it a better or complementary target to treat certain types of cancer, said Jack Silberstein, the Stanford immunology PhD student who co-led the work.

Because of that, Silberstein said, "there was all this excitement in the field. Groups rushed to make antibodies against LAG-3, without knowing entirely how LAG-3 or those antibodies functioned."

Silberstein and colleagues, including those in Stanford's ChEM-H Macromolecular Structure Knowledge Center and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, began working on LAG-3's structure in 2019. A structure of LAG-3 was published by a different group in 2022 providing an initial glimpse of the protein, but it lacked crucial detail around sugar molecules that are key to LAG-3's function, and detailed information on how the LAG-3 structure related to its biological activity.

When Silberstein first started this project, "I quickly realized why there was no published structure. It's a tremendously difficult protein to work with."

And the technique Silberstein used to get the structure, called X-ray crystallography, is extremely finicky. First, Silberstein had to grow a crystal made entirely out of LAG-3 protein. Then, in collaboration with Irimpan Mathews at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, they fired X-ray beams at the crystal to create a 3D image of the molecule.

LAG-3 is a spindly, flexible protein, so it's difficult to get the molecules to stack in an orderly way. Silberstein estimates he made more than 10,000 crystals, of which 3,000 were fired with X-rays before the team finally solved the structure.

"It was a very intense, grind-it-out-for-three-years, bang-your-head-against-the-wall kind of thing," Silberstein said.

But it paid off. The team's structure confirmed that LAG-3 exists as a dimer, with two LAG-3 molecules coming together to form the functional checkpoint protein. The sugar residue that was elusive in previous structural efforts is a key element in the LAG-3 dimer interface and helps promote a different orientation of the LAG-3 protein.

With the structure described, colleagues at New York University, including MD, PhD student Jasper Du and pathology Assistant Professor Jun Wang co-led critical experiments further elucidating LAG-3's function. Other NYU colleagues, including Kun-Wei Chan and Xiang-Peng Kong, helped conduct electron microscopy studies to detail disruption of dimer formation by LAG-3 antibodies.

Additional work by the team uncovered, for the first time, that an antibody that has been used for close to 20 years to demonstrate therapeutic efficacy in animal tumor models blocks the activity of LAG-3 by binding to the interface between two LAG-3 molecules, disrupting LAG-3 from forming its functional dimer. Intriguingly, LAG-3 antibodies in clinical development bind to other areas of the protein, away from this dimer interface.

There will never be just one "cure," because cancers are all different and involve a number of diverse biochemical pathways. Silberstein and Cochran envision a future where a tapestry of surgical, chemical, and immunological treatment approaches are employed, driven by basic science discoveries and medical innovations. Additional treatments targeting LAG-3 may very well be a part of that picture.

Additional Stanford co-authors are Jessica Frank, BS '22 in bioengineering, MS '23 in computer science; Irimpan Mathews, lead scientist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; graduate students Yong Bin Kim, Phillip Liu, and Grayson Rodriguez; and Daniel Fernandez, director of crystallography at Sarafan ChEM-H. Additional co-authors are from New York University.

Cochran is also the senior associate vice provost for research and professor by courtesy, of chemical engineering. She is a member of Stanford Bio-X, the Cardiovascular Institute, the Maternal & Child Health Research Institute (MCHRI), the Stanford Cancer Institute, and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, and a faculty fellow of Sarafan ChEM-H.

This work was funded by Stanford Bio-X, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, an Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) Fellowship, National Science Foundation graduate fellowships, a Cancer Research Institute Irvington Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Stanford Molecular Biophysics Training Program, a Stanford Graduate Fellowship in Science & Engineering, the NIH Melanoma Research Alliance, the V Foundation, the Mark Foundation, the NYU Colton Center for Autoimmunity, and the Emerson Collective Cancer Research Fund.

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New Protein Structure Sheds Light on Anti-Cancer Immunotherapies - Mirage News

A female orca catches a herring as it swims in the Reisafjorden fjord region, near the Norwegian northern city of Tromso in the Arctic Circle, on January 13, 2019. Why do humans experience menopause? Its a question that some women going through the symptoms might have asked themselves more than once. AFP photo

PARIS (March 14): Why do humans experience menopause? Its a question that some women going through the symptoms might have asked themselves more than once.

Scientists are also baffled. From an evolutionary perspective, animals generally take every chance they can get to have as many offspring as possible to boost their odds of survival.

So why have some species evolved to have menopause, in which females live many years after they stop being able to reproduce?

That there are so few other examples in the animal kingdom only deepens the mystery.

Out of 5,000 mammals, just five species of whales with teeth including killer whales, beluga whales and narwhals are the only others known to have females that regularly live long after they stop reproducing.

However plenty of other toothed whales, such as dolphins, do not experience menopause.

By looking at the differences between these two groups, a UK-led team of researchers sought to discover why some whales evolved to get menopause and what this could tell us about ourselves.

Despite our many differences, humans share a convergent life history with these ocean giants that led to the independent evolution of menopause, the researchers concluded in a study published in Nature on Wednesday.

Their results tied together several existing hypotheses. The first piece of the puzzle involving lifespan.

The grandmother hypothesis

Females of the five species that have menopause live roughly 40 years longer than other similar-sized whales, the researchers found.

These female whales also easily outlive males of their own kind.

Female killer whales regularly live into their 60s and 70s, but the males are all dead by 40, lead study author Samuel Ellis of the UKs University of Exeter told an online press conference.

This supports what is known as the grandmother hypothesis that older females care for their grandchildren, therefore helping their species survive in a different way.

But why would it be an evolutionary advantage for these grandmothers to stop having offspring?

The second part of this story is about competition, study co-author Darren Croft said.

When killer whale mothers and daughters try and breed at the same time, the calves of the older females have a significantly lower survival rate as they compete for resources, he said.

So they have evolved a longer lifespan while keeping a short reproductive lifespan, Croft added.

This is just the same pattern of life history we see in humans.

Though we walk on land and they swim through the ocean, the similarities between human and whale social structures is absolutely striking, Croft said.

The importance of matriarchy

Older matriarchs play an important role within both societies, he said.

For example, the experience older females have gathered over their lives helps the whale families get through hard times such as environmental challenges or a lack of food.

But just having a matriarchal society is not enough. Older female elephants, for example, look after their offspring but keep reproducing until the end of their lives.

The key difference could be that older whale mothers keep looking after their sons, Croft said. Young male elephants, however, leave the family group.

Both sons and daughters sticking around could even be a unique trait to the five whales and humans that get menopause, he speculated.

Rebecca Sear, an evolutionary demographer and anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine not involved in the study, cautioned that this could not provide definitive answers to the question of why menopause evolved.

Whales are incredibly difficult to study, and a lot of the data used for the research was from unnaturalevents such as mass strandings, she commented in Nature.

Meanwhile, there has been increasing criticism that menopause in human women remains badly under-researched due to a long-standing male-skewed bias in medical research.

Human grandmothers, like whale grandmothers, are important in the lives of their adult children and grandchildren, but older women are too often ignored in policy circles and public health research, Sear said. AFP

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Whale menopause sheds light on human evolutionary mystery - The Borneo Post