Friday Four

1. Might offshore drilling, of all things, help alleviate a scarcity of fresh water for some areas in the not-so distant future?

"The volume of this water resource is a hundred times greater than the amount we've extracted from the Earth's sub-surface in the past century since 1900," says lead author Dr Vincent Post ... of the National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training (NCGRT) and the School of the Environment at Flinders University.

The vast, off-shore reserves originated hundreds of thousands of years ago, when sea levels were much lower, and now are protected from salt contamination by layers of clay and sediment between them and the overlying ocean.

2. Here's a rule my nearly twenty-year-old fantasy football league won't be adopting any time soon...

Fantasy football analyst Matthew Berry writes:

... It's a 10-team league with one very simple but very real rule: last place in the league has to get a tattoo. You heard me. Not some lame henna tattoo that fades in a few weeks, either. We're talking a full-on, legit, for the rest of your life ... tattoo.

Chosen by the winner.

... They've done it for three years now. It started with a unicorn tattoo, two years ago it was a Care Bear "Tebowing," and last season the words "Fantasy Loser" were inked above a picture of Justin Bieber's face. Yep. With the words "#YOLO SWAG" underneath.

I do have my limits on how far I am willing to go for the sake of a joke.

3. I love the way my two-year-old daughter says, "Gatorade": "Gatorator"

4. A new method of fighting cancer is showing great promise in trials with leukemia patients:

"This is absolutely one of the more exciting advances I've seen in cancer therapy in the last 20 years," said Dr. David Porter, a hematologist and oncologist at Penn. "We've entered into a whole new realm of medicine."

In the therapy, doctors first remove the patient's T-cells, which play a crucial role in the immune system. They then reprogram the cells by transferring in new genes. Once infused back into the body, each modified cell multiplies to 10,000 cells. These "hunter" cells then track down and kill the cancer in a patient's body.

Essentially, researchers are trying to train [the patient's] body to fight off cancer in much the same way our bodies fight off the common cold.

The new therapy also lacks many of the severe and lasting side-effects of chemotherapy. Researchers hope to apply the technique next to other types of blood cancer, and then try it on solid tumors.

-- CAV