Aron Roberts

@aronro.bsky.social

147 Followers 220 Following

Consulting with small businesses High Sierra Showerheads & Western Ecology. Worked for 31 years in IT at Cal. Active investor in crowdfunded startups: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/crowdfunding-small-investors-aron-roberts-f2shc/ Opinions solely my own.

From a January 19, 2026 Substack blog post by Greg Scatudo: "Through arguments that leave sediment rather than solutions, conversations that erode the same cliff face grain by grain, the slow accumulation of shared disappointments and private reconciliations, the other person soon becomes less of a story and more of a landscape. "You begin to learn the interior geography of another human being: the soft ground that gives underfoot, the ridgelines they defend without knowing why, the low places where loneliness collects after the weather passes. You learn which silences mean safety and which ones mean retreat. You learn that access to another person’s inner life is not a right but a privilege that can be revoked by carelessness. "And so at some point, without anyone saying so, it’s different. Love stops being something you feel and becomes something you do. ... "It looks like showing up without conviction and staying when it feels so much heavier than leaving. ... "This kind of love does not break the surface. It takes hold underground, like a cottonwood finding water, roots following what is hidden until the tree can stand."
Excerpt from Michael Le Page's October 19, 2025 article in New Scientist, "mRNA covid vaccines spark immune response that may aid cancer survival": "The background to this finding is our immune system kills off many cancers long before they become a problem. But some tumours develop the ability to shut down this response. They do this by taking advantage of “off switches” on the immune cells called T-cells, which kill cancerous cells. For instance, one common off switch is a protein called PD-1, which protrudes from the surface of these T-cells. "PD-1 is flipped to the off position when it binds to a protein called PD-L1, found on the surface of some cells. This is a safety mechanism by which cells can effectively say, “stop attacking me, I’m friendly”. "Many cancers hijack this by producing lots of PD-L1. Checkpoint inhibitors work by stopping PD-1 or other off switches being flipped. They have greatly improved survival rates for lung cancers and melanomas, among others, and won a Nobel prize for their creators in 2018. "But the effectiveness of checkpoint inhibitors varies greatly. If a person’s immune system hasn’t responded to a tumour by sending out T-cells to attack it, the drugs can’t help much."
Photo of Diana Marcum, the late Los Angeles Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner. Photo credit: Mark Crosse.