Steve Kerr's childhood home within the Pacific Palisades burned down within the devastating Los Angeles County fires, this news organization confirmed Wednesday.

The Warriors head coach spent much of his childhood each at home and abroad along with his parents within the Middle East.

Kerr's mother, Ann, still lives in the home. She turned 90 in August.

The San Francisco Chronicle was the one report first the news.

More than 1,000 buildings were destroyed within the Palisades fire, essentially the most destructive in LA's modern history. As of Wednesday afternoon, the three fires had killed five people and burned a complete of as much as 1,500 buildings, with greater than 100,000 people being forcibly evacuated. In Palisades Village, the general public library, two large grocery stores, two banks and a number of other boutiques were destroyed.

The wildfires began on Tuesday morning. California Governor Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency.

“I want to express my thoughts and condolences to everyone in Los Angeles who is dealing with the fires,” Kerr said Tuesday after the Warriors' loss to the Heat. “My mother had to be evacuated. Everett Dayton is on our team (in player development), he grew up in Pacific Palisades and as far as I know his family home is lost.”

According to CNN, the fires may very well be the most costly in U.S. history.

The Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Altadena and parts of Brentwood are among the many areas under either an evacuation order or warning.

Draymond Green has a house in Brentwood, much of which is being evacuated. Green's family is protected, his mother, Mary Babers, told this news organization. Green reportedly purchased the property in 2020 for $9.6 million.

Kerr and Green are only two of dozens of public figures whose homes have been evacuated as a result of the three fires within the Los Angeles area.

The fires have destroyed a complete of about 42 square miles (108 square kilometers) – almost the scale of the complete city of San Francisco.

Originally published: January 8, 2025 at 6:26 pm PST

Looking for travel inspiration? Our world-traveling readers can show you how to—they've road tripped to Tuscany, climbed Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio, and explored the Azores. Now they share their adventures and practical travel suggestions with us.

This week we hear from 4 women – friends since elementary school days in Santa Clara! – who recently visited Amsterdam. Read on for details and find more travel inspiration at www.mercurynews.com/tag/wish-you-were-here/.

Wish you were here

NETHERLANDS: The fiftieth reunion of Santa Clara's Wilcox High School Class of 1973 last yr was the proper opportunity for 4 lifelong friends – Jane Droogsma of Santa Clara, Carmen Beggs of Atlanta, Gayle Jackson of Walnut Creek and Susan Valladao of Dublin – not only to satisfy again here, but to embark on a 12-day trip to Amsterdam.

“The four of us have been friends since elementary school,” says Gayle. “Our friend Jane is from Amsterdam and has arranged accommodation in a beautiful two-bedroom apartment overlooking the canals and next to Castle Square. We even saw the king and his wife!”

TRAVEL TIPS: There is a lot to see in Amsterdam. Gayle and her friends recommend a tour of “Anne Frank's house where she and her family were hidden from the Nazis, fabulous art in the museums and a tour of the palace.” We saw how wood shoes are made and the windmills and 1000’s of tulips!” Tulip season normally lasts from late March to early May. Amsterdam hosts a tulip festival in April.

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Brain tumors remain amongst essentially the most difficult tumors to treat. They often don’t respond to standard treatments, as is the case with many chemotherapy treatments cannot penetrate the protective barrier across the brain. Other treatments resembling radiation and surgery can result in lifelong consequences for patients debilitating unintended effects.

As a result, brain cancer is the commonest reason behind cancer-related death in children. Brain tumors in children often don’t reply to treatments designed for adults, likely on account of the indisputable fact that brain tumors in children do not so well studied as brain tumors in adults. There is an urgent have to develop recent treatments specifically for kids.

We have developed a brand new messenger RNA or mRNA cancer vaccine described in newly published research resultsthat may provide treatments to children with brain tumors more effectively and train their immune systems to defend themselves.

How do cancer vaccines work?

The immune system is a posh network of cells, tissues and organs whose primary role is to repeatedly monitor the body for threats from foreign invaders – pathogens that damage tissues and cause illness. This is achieved by detecting antigens or abnormal proteins or molecules on pathogens. T cells that recognize these antigens seek for and destroy the pathogens.

Your immune system also protects you from domestic threats like cancer. Over time, your cells suffer DNA damage from internal or external stressors, resulting in mutations. The proteins and molecules produced from mutated DNA look very different than those cells normally produce, allowing your immune system to acknowledge them as antigens. Cancer occurs when cells accumulate mutations that allow them to proceed to grow and divide while remaining undetected by the immune system.

In 1991, scientists identified the first tumor antigen, to offer the framework for contemporary immunotherapy. Since then, researchers have identified many recent tumor antigens, facilitating the event of cancer vaccines. Broadly speaking, cancer vaccines deliver tumor antigens into the body to show the immune system to acknowledge and attack cancer cells which have these antigens. Although all cancer vaccines work very similarly conceptually, they’re vary considerably in each case in the best way they’re developed and within the number and combination of antigens they carry.

One of the most important differences between cancer vaccines is how they’re made. Some vaccines use Protein fragments or peptides, of tumor antigens administered on to patients. Use other vaccines Viruses revised to specific cancer antigens. Vaccinations carried out by the patient themselves are much more complex Immune cells are collected and trained to detect cancer antigens in a laboratory before giving them back to the patient.

Currently, the event of mRNA-based cancer vaccines may be very eager and focused amongst researchers. While DNA is the blueprint for which proteins to make, mRNA is a replica of the blueprint that tells cells the right way to construct those proteins. This allows researchers to make use of mRNA to create blueprints of potential antigens.

mRNA cancer vaccines

The COVID-19 pandemic has drawn significant attention to the potential of using mRNA-based vaccines to stimulate the immune system and protect against the antigens they encode. But even before the pandemic, researchers were investigating using mRNA vaccines to treat various varieties of cancer.

Our team by scientists within the Brain Tumor Immunotherapy Program on the University of Florida has spent the last 10 years developing and optimizing mRNA vaccines to treat brain cancer.

Cancer vaccines are facing significant challenges. A key hurdle is that these vaccines may not at all times trigger a robust enough immune response to completely eradicate the cancer. Furthermore, tumors should not made up of 1 variety of cancer cell, but somewhat a posh mixture of cancer cells, each containing its own unique cocktail of mutations.

Our cancer vaccine targets this address these problems in other ways.

We first developed our vaccines through the use of the RNA from a patient's cancer cells as a template for the mRNA in our nanoparticles. We also packaged our cancer vaccine in nanoparticles fabricated from special lipids, or fat molecules. We maximized the quantity of mRNA packaged in each nanoparticle They are sandwiched between lipid layers just like the layers of an onion. In this manner, we increase the likelihood that the mRNA molecules in our nanoparticles will produce enough tumor antigens from the patient's cancer to trigger an immune response.

Instead of injecting nanoparticles into the skin, muscle, or directly into the tumor, as is common practice with many therapeutic cancer vaccines, our mRNA nanoparticles are injected into the bloodstream. From there, they travel to organs throughout the body which can be involved within the immune response to show the body to fight cancer. This is how we found that the immune system mounts an almost immediate and powerful response. Within six hours of receiving the vaccine, there may be a big increase in the quantity of blood markers related to immune activation.

Looking into the longer term

Our mRNA-based vaccines are currently in early clinical trials to treat real brain cancer patients.

We administered our mRNA-based vaccine to them 4 adult patients with glioblastoma who had relapsed after previous treatment. All patients survived several months longer than the expected average survival time for this advanced stage of disease. We expect to have the opportunity to treat children with a variety of brain tumor called pediatric high-grade glioma by the tip of the yr.

Importantly, mRNA vaccines might be developed to treat any variety of cancer, including brain tumors in children. Our Pediatric Cancer Immunotherapy Initiative focuses on developing recent immune-based therapies for kids with cancer. After developing an mRNA vaccine against gliomas in children, we’ll expand our work to treat other varieties of pediatric brain tumors, resembling medulloblastoma, and potentially also to treat other varieties of cancer, resembling skin cancer and bone cancer.

We hope that mRNA-based vaccines can result in more children being cured of their brain tumors.

Myopia, or the necessity for corrected vision to focus or see objects in the space, has turn out to be increasingly common in recent many years. Some even consider shortsightednessalso called myopia, an epidemic.

Optometry researchers appreciate this about half of the world's population will need corrective lenses to correct myopia by 2050 if current rates proceed – up from 23% in 2000 and in some countries lower than 10%.

The associated healthcare costs are enormous. In the United States alone, expenses for corrective lenses, vision tests and related costs are incurred might be as much as $7.2 billion per 12 months.

What explains the rapid growth of myopia?

I’m a vision scientist who has studied visual perception and perceptual disorders. To answer this query, let's first examine what causes nearsightedness – and what reduces it.

How myopia occurs

If you might have two nearsighted parents, you usually tend to be nearsighted. There is not any single myopia gene. This implies that the causes of myopia are behavioral moderately than genetic.

Optometrists have learned loads in regards to the progression of myopia Study of visual development in young chickens. They do that by putting little helmets on little chickens. Lenses on the front of the helmet cover the chicks' eyes and are adjusted to affect how much they see.

Just like humans, a chick's eyes will turn out to be too large if the visual input is distorted. which results in nearsightedness. And it's progressive. Blur results in eye growth, which results in more blur, which makes the attention even greater, and so forth.

Two recent studies involving extensive interviews with children and their parents strongly support the concept that a necessary driver of the upswing This is the case with myopia People spend more time Focusing on objects directly in front of our eyes, be it a screen, a book, or a sketchpad. The more time we spend concentrating on something that’s inside arm's length of our face, called our “workspace,” the greater the likelihood of affected by nearsightedness.

So as much as People might blame latest technologies like smartphones And an excessive amount of “screen time” damages our eyes, the reality is that even activities as invaluable as reading an excellent book can affect your vision.

The light from outside keeps myopia at bay

Other research has shown that this unnatural eye growth might be interrupted by sunlight.

For example, a 2022 study found that myopia rates are increasing were greater than 4 times larger for youngsters who didn’t spend much time outdoors – about a couple of times every week – in comparison with children who were outside day-after-day. At the identical time, children who spent greater than three hours a day reading or taking a look at a screen close-up outside of faculty were 4 times more prone to develop myopia than children who spent an hour or less doing so.

In one other article from 2012, researchers conducted a meta-analysis of seven studies The duration of time spent outdoors was compared with the occurrence of myopia. They also found that more time outdoors was related to lower incidence and progression of myopia. The likelihood of developing nearsightedness decreased by 2% for each hour spent outside per week.

Other researchers have reported and argued for similar effects far more time outdoors and changes in education at an early age to scale back the prevalence of myopia.

What is driving the epidemic?

That still doesn't explain why it's rising so quickly.

Worldwide a A big a part of that is on account of rapid development and industrialization of the countries of East Asia within the last 50 years. At this time, young people spent more time within the classroom reading and concentrating on other objects that were very near their eyes, and fewer time outdoors.

This can also be what researchers observed within the North American Arctic after World War II, when education was made mandatory for indigenous peoples. Rates of myopia amongst Inuit rose from single digits before the Nineteen Fifties to over 70% within the Seventies, when all children attended school for the primary time.

countries in Western Europe, North America and Australia have shown increased myopia rates in recent times, but nothing comes near what has been observed in recent times China, Japan, Singapore and another East Asian countries. The two foremost aspects that result in increased myopia are: increased reading and other activities that require concentration on an object near the eyes and a Reducing time spent outdoors.

The rise in myopia cases will probably have its worst impact in 40 or 50 years because it takes time that young people diagnosed with myopia suffer essentially the most serious vision problems today.

Treatment of myopia

Luckily, just a couple of minutes a day with glasses or contact lenses can correct blurring stops the progression of myopiaThat's why early vision tests and vision correction are necessary to limit the event of myopia. In some countries, eye exams are mandatory for youngsters. like Great Britain And now Chinain addition to most US states.

However, individuals with high myopia do increased risk of blindness and other serious eye problemsB. a retinal detachment, wherein the retina separates from the back of the attention. The possibilities of myopia-related Macular degeneration to extend by 40% for every diopter of myopia. A diopter is a unit of measurement for ophthalmological prescriptions.

But there appear to be two surefire ways to offset or delay these effects: Spend less time specializing in objects near your face, like books and smartphones, and spend more time outside in shiny, natural light. Since the previous is difficult advice in our modern times, the subsequent neatest thing is to take frequent breaks – or perhaps spend more time reading and scrolling outside within the sun.