English 4, Post 4: 'Themed Free Post [II]'

Today, I'm going to take the chance of this "themed free" entry to recommend a music band that I recently found. The name of the band is "Pigeons Playing Ping Pong" an extremely weird name, for sure, but I like it, it is catchy in some way. But what I like the most of them is the genre of music that they compose, a kind of a mix of funk, blues, and rock that every time I listen to it makes me want to move my body. If you don't believe me thus far, here you have some of their songs, go ahead and feel the rhythm yourself:

King Kong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMOx20vqpfU&ab_channel=PigeonsPlayingPingPong. 

Oceans Flow (Live):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpEut44gJjo&ab_channel=PigeonsPlayingPingPong-Topic

Melting Lights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Smpn6dQGQx8&ab_channel=PigeonsPlayingPingPong

Investigating a little bit about them I found that they are active since 2009 but released their first album, titled Funk E P in 2010. Nowadays, they have 5 studio albums and 1 live album (which I consider the best because the songs have long sections of improvisation that are really cool). 

Current members of the band are mentioned below:

• Vocals, Guitar: "Scrambled" Greg Ormont
• Vocals, Guitar: Jeremy Schon
• Vocals, Bass: Ben Carrey
• Drums: Alex "Gator" Petropulos

Well, that's all I had to say today, I wish that you liked my  "music recommendation" and who knows, maybe they'll become one of your favorite bands. 

English 4, Post 3: 'Themed Free Post - Carrer Related

Today I'm going to talk about a very interesting paper (scientific article) that I read not so long ago, as part of an evaluation activity of an elective class called "new nano and micrometric size vehicles for biological applications" and I will try my best to summarize the paper as much simple as I can. 

So the title of the paper is "Exosome-mimetic nanoplatforms (EMNs) for targeted cancer drug delivery" and all the investigation developed in it was aimed to solve a big problem of anticancer therapies: the non-selective reaching of the drugs to tumoral tissues. 

Some kinds of cells are capable of secreting extracellular vesicles and one type of these vesicles of a nanometric size is called exosomes. What is important about these exosomes is that someones had tumor-homing properties and can be loaded with anticancer drugs, these two properties made them a pretty valuable technology to develop anticancer drugs but unfortunately, they are not exempt of safety problems (adverse effects) and bad production yields. 

So the proposal of the scientists was to develop a platform that was pretty similar to exosomes but safer and easier to produce, using lipids and proteins that are present in exosomes. And to summarize, they managed to develop this technology and called it "Exosome-mimetic nanoplatforms". Of course this is not a reality in anticancer medicine yet, but it is an important advance in the nanomedicine field and who knows, maybe in a couple of years we'll see this technology applied. 

Link to the article: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12951-019-0517-8