How fast can a fruit fly walk – scientists built mini treadmills and found out

September 8, 2024 Evrim Yazgin

(I want to guess that it’s the same everywhere, and ask: did they put these treadmills on bananas?)

Fruit flies on treadmills are giving scientists insights into how insects walk in ways that previous, more invasive techniques could not.

Cartoon illustration of an imaginary fruit fly wearing sports apparel and running on a treadmill — Fruit fly on a treadmill. Illustration by Alice C. Gray.

Researchers want to understand how insects’ nervous systems respond to rapid changes underfoot. All animals must navigate potential hazards and changes in terrain, otherwise injury from falls would be likely (send this to your clumsy friend or relative).

Animals as diverse as flies, cockroaches, rats and humans all show similar ways of readjusting after a trip, for example.

Studying how insects adjust their walking will help scientists understand proprioception: how the body continually senses its articulation and movement.

These techniques have been helpful in evaluation and treatment of people, such as stroke patients, who have locomotive issues.

Fly on a treadmill — Graphical abstract. Credit: B G Pratt et al. Current Biology.

University of Washington researchers published in Current Biology their findings when fruit flies – Drosophila melanogaster – were put on specially-designed miniature treadmills.

Fruit flies are a good model for mapping neural locomotion control because they have a compact, fully mapped nervous system. Previous studies have also given scientists a suite of genetic tools to perform precise and specific manipulations of the fly’s nervous system.

Traditionally, researchers have studied insect locomotion either free walking or tethered.

Tethered insects have a small camera mounted on a stick attached to their backs. Unsurprisingly, this method is not the most comfortable for the insect, but an advantage of this approach is that it allows the fly’s movements on 3D surfaces to be studied.

“One disadvantage of studying locomotion in tethered flies is that their posture is constrained and normal ground reaction forces may be disrupted, which could affect walking kinematics,” the authors of the new study write.

Enter the Drosophila’s very own treadmill.

The researchers were able to track fly walking over long periods of time. Split-belt treadmills were used to investigate how the flies reacted to belts with different speeds on either side of the body.

Without the burden of a tethered camera, the flies were able to strut their stuff freely.

“At the extremes, flies on the treadmill were able to sustain walking at a max belt speed of 40 mm/s and surpassed an instantaneous walking velocity of 50 mm/s [about 0.18km/h], which is the fastest walking speed ever reported for Drosophila melanogaster,” the researchers say. (snip-MORE)

https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/biology/fruit-flies-insect-walking-treadmill/

The Cases of January 6th

AP News

(I debated about putting this here; the page is a bit complicated for copy-pasting, but the material is important, as sometimes the passage of time blurs memories. There is work for justice being done on these cases and the whole of it, and here’s a nice gathering of information to date. Maybe a thing to read when you’ve got a few minutes. It is longer, but not TL;DR. You’ll want to know this stuff. )

by Michael Kunzelman, Alanna Durkin Richer, and Cal Woodward

Snips:

The Associated Press has spent more than three years tracking the nearly 1,500 Capitol riot cases brought by the Justice Department. AP reporters have reviewed hours of video footage and thousands of pages of court documents. They have sat through dozens of court hearings and trials for the rioters who descended on the Capitol and temporarily halted the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory. These videos represent a mere fraction of the evidence that prosecutors have presented to juries and judges deciding these cases.

Inside Washington’s federal courthouse, there’s no denying the reality of Jan. 6, 2021. Day after day, judges and jurors silently absorb the chilling sights and sounds from television screens of rioters beating police, shattering windows and hunting for lawmakers as democracy lay under siege.

But as he seeks to reclaim the White House, Donald Trump continues to portray the defendants as patriots worthy of admiration, an assertion that has been undercut by the adjudicated truth in hundreds of criminal cases where judges and juries have reached the opposite conclusion about what history will remember as one of America’s darkest days.

The cases have systematically put on record — through testimony, documents and video — the crimes committed, weapons wielded, and lives altered by physical and emotional damage. Trump is espousing a starkly different story, portraying the rioters as hostages and political prisoners whom he says he might pardon if he wins in November.

There are no broadcast television cameras inside the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse on Constitution Avenue. But the real story of Jan. 6 is found in the mounds of evidence and testimony judges and juries have seen and heard behind the doors of the courthouse where hundreds of Trump’s supporters have been convicted in the attack. (snip-go read when you have a little time)

https://apnews.com/projects/january-6-cases/

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

(These fill me with wonder almost every day. There are far worse ways to start the day!)

2024 September 8
M31: The Andromeda Galaxy
Image Credit: Subaru (NAOJ), Hubble (NASA/ESA), Mayall (NSF);
Processing & Copyright: R. Gendler & R. Croman

Explanation: The most distant object easily visible to the unaided eye is M31, the great Andromeda Galaxy. Even at some two and a half million light-years distant, this immense spiral galaxy — spanning over 200,000 light years — is visible, although as a faint, nebulous cloud in the constellation Andromeda. A bright yellow nucleus, dark winding dust lanes, and expansive spiral arms dotted with blue star clusters and red nebulae, are recorded in this stunning telescopic image which combines data from orbiting Hubble with ground-based images from Subaru and Mayall. In only about 5 billion years, the Andromeda galaxy may be even easier to see — as it will likely span the entire night sky — just before it merges with, or passes right by, our Milky Way Galaxy.

Teachers & Students: Ideas for using APOD in the classroom
Tomorrow’s picture: dark moon, red planet

Did I just duplicate a post?

100 Sheriffs, Cops, And Deputies Endorse Harris/Walz

GA Rep. Mike Collins: Now Is “Not The Time” To Talk About Gun Control, We Need More Jesus In Schools

Vance: School Shootings Are A “Fact Of Life” [VIDEO]

Paxton Sues To Block Federal Abortion Privacy Rule

New Poll Shows Florida Senate Race In Dead Heat

Loomer Claims FBI Allowed GA Shooting To Help Dems

As a reminder, Trump has publicly floated Loomer to be his next White House press secretary and he has reposted hundreds of her tweets on Truth Social.

Watters Blames “Deep State” For New Russia Scandal

Coors Beer Maker Is Latest To Cave To Anti-LGBTQ Push

Molson Coors joins Ford, Harley Davidson, Lowes, Tractor Supply, John Deere, and the maker of Jack Daniel’s in retreating from diversity and pro-LGBTQ programs.

Coors beer, once the subject of a nationwide boycott by gay bars over its founder’s anti-LGBTQ stance, has been prominent at Pride events in recent years. Last year, for example, Coors Light was the main sponsor of Denver Pride despite attacks by the cult.

In 2015, when the company was called MillerCoors, its chairman and then-US Senate candidate Pete Coors, dropped out of a speaking gig at the convention of Legatus, the ex-gay and pro-ex-gay torture Catholic group, after widespread criticism.

The company’s current brands include Coors, Coors Light, Blue Moon, Icehouse, Miller, Miller Light, Keystone, Molson, and dozens of others.

Sade’s First New Song in 6 Years Is a Tribute to Her Trans Son

(I love Sade; that voice!)

The song is part of Transa, a compilation album that also features several trans and nonbinary artists including Sam Smith, Hunter Schafer, Perfume Genius, and Clairo.

By Mathew Rodriguez September 5, 2024

Everyone’s favorite smooth operator is back.

Nigerian-British singer Sade is set to release her first song in about six years, and it’s dedicated to her trans child, Izaak Theo Adu.

The song is part of Transa, a new compilation album from activist music organization Red Hot. The album will feature a bevy of trans and nonbinary artists, including Sam Smith, Hunter Schafer, Perfume Genius, Clairo, and more. The album, according to the organization, represents a “spiritual journey in eight chapters” and features 46 songs, running at over three-and-a-half hours.

Sade’s song, “Young Lion,” is dedicated to Adu, who is a trans man. Though Sade is known for keeping her personal life private, her son has posted about her support of him in the past. “Thank you for staying by my side these past 6 months Mumma,” Adu wrote in an Instagram caption in 2019, alongside a photo with his mother. “Thank you for fighting with me to complete the man I am. Thank you for your encouragement when things are hard, for the love you give me. The purest heart.”

Dust Reid, who put together the album alongside trans artist and activist Massima Bell, said Red Hot wanted a project “talking about all the gifts that trans artists have been giving to the world.”

“We hoped to create a narrative that positions trans and non-binary people as leaders in our society insofar as the deep inner work they do to affirm who they are in our current climate,” Reid told Variety. “We felt this is something everybody should do. Whether you identify as trans or non-binary or otherwise, if you took the time to explore your gender, get in touch with the feeling side of yourself, maybe we would have a future oriented around values of community, collaboration, care, and healing.” (snip-MORE)

https://www.them.us/story/sade-new-music-trans-son-izaak-theo-adu-transa-red-hot

A Second Trump Term Scares Me…

This man understands, this person gets it! Those of us not center, those of us not maga, those of us paying attention to what is happening and see what red states are doing to the LGBTQ+ and how hard they are trying to keep anyone not fully supporting them from voting … Yes we are scared. We feel all the movement to the future acceptance of people who are different from the main stream, all the rights for black people, all the rights for minorities, all the rights for the disabled, all the rights for the poor, and all the rights that have been gained for the LGBTQ+ are being wiped away with the goal being removing us from public society so that we have no voice in the very country we live. Welcome to the 1950s white cis straight men in charge society. Hugs. Scottie

Strangely Blogged

This blog kills fascists. Eventually. It’s a process I’m working on. Be patient with me.

This Tenet Thing–

Since 2016, I’ve felt sort of hyperaware about the potentiality of Russian disinfo because obviously, WikiLeaks and the IRA. Per the Senate Intelligence Committee, in multiple volumes, this was anything but a hoax. The claim Trump didn’t welcome it and appreciate it is more than answered by his campaign’s silence about it and even attempted cover-up. Money was funneled through Facebook and Twitter ads and RW-pressure groups like NRA. I joke that we are still living in 2016 because we are still finding out how that election was, well, weird.

I deleted a post about how weird it was that Benny Johnson was a dupe to launder Russian talking points in the Tenet exploit because I realized that his basic dopiness and right-wing credulity is a whole fucking bigger mood than I was handling at the moment. We get that RW dopey incendiaries are out here–and they are pretty well-funded domestically as it is. Like, you pick a random concern-trolling “Liberty” “Freedom” “Heritage” or “Family”-labelled group from the last 100 years, and it was probably founded by some freaky Christian billionaire bigot family like the DeVos, Wilkes, Prince, Mellon, Coors, Koch, Busch, etc. The family-tree of theocratic and Bircher-light think tankitude has been incestuous and generously endowed since forever.

But where there is money and batshit, you have a real problem–people who love the hell out of money and don’t care what degree of batshit they spew. If you wanted useful idiots for foreign actors, this is one way you could open up a path for useful idiots to wrongfully mobilize people by playing on their fears and so on. Propaganda is cheap and effective. Even when we try to sanction the fuck out of the players to try and make it prohibitively costly to shit in the US litterbox–someone will try it.

Part of the reason why is we have a great big permission-structure to lie on the GOP side of things. We talk about it, but I don’t think we talk about it as much as we need to. The media is in part at fault, but also, money has generated a whole right-wing puke funnel, just feeding viewers like baby birds. And the results of the propaganda: fear and anger–short circuit logical critical thinking pathways. Well-fed ducklings become sitting ducks.

The internet influencer thing though, is even more perverse. There’s no reason to believe these people are anything but cons. I’ve thought of it as the “Triumph of the Swill”, because it’s propaganda without even artistry or competence. It relies on people being poorly educated or getting hopped-up on the idea that contrarianism is “independent thinking”–because you are a super genius of rare qualities, you can see through Big Atmosphere’s lies since Joseph Priestly and reject climate change, or see where that shill Jenner was headed with his vaccination/germ theory nonsense. You have clearly beat the mentality of Darwin and Le Compte de Buffon regarding that evolution jazz, too.

Conspiracy theories proliferate and why not? Anything might be true once anything can be called false.

Why not DARVO Russia and Ukraine? Why not introduce a little Holocaust denial? Why not suggest civil wars are actually good and healthy, or that secession could be beneficial to a large US State?

Harmful, wrongheaded views can be pimped out to attractive or engaging morons, who speak down to controversy-curious people without the tools to resist. They’ll even have you believing education itself is a problem and suggest you do away with it.

I think it’s good it’s being addressed, but the right wing is super-great at trying to say their free speech right are denied whenever they get told to stop being shills for utter bullshit. I get the feeling the pool of people who have been Russian-cash injected and super-bullshit charged will widen. And yes to people maybe being made examples of, because the shit has to stop.

But we clearly have a problem with toxic “elements” in our political environment. Some remediation feels like a good thing. Geting people to realize and care that one side has been enabling foreign propaganda to influence us and to recognize it as a national security threat is very important–that we haven’t been screaming about it enough since 2016 feels like a failure.

Also the Feds need to do Posobiec and Flynn. because I can’t believe those asses aren’t being handled from elsewhere.

at September 06, 2024

Labels: 2016 Presidential election, assholes, GOP, journalism, new media, old media, propaganda, social media, trump

Georgia shooting: father of teen suspect charged with second-degree murder

(Now that things have calmed down media-wise, and there is solid information, here’s a post. I’m glad to see the parent and gun owner held accountable; for this, and always. I am never in favor of charging a minor as an adult, though there should be consequences laced heavily with rehabilitation. But the parent and gun owner should be fully responsible because they’re actual adults, and the parents (some child shooters will not have parents, so this goes to the caregiver.) Gun owners should always know that their guns are secure, and tell law enforcement when they’re not secure. Others’s mileage with these things may vary, and you’re welcome to chime in!)

Colin Gray faces four involuntary manslaughter, two second-degree murder and eight cruelty to children counts

The father of the teen suspected in the Georgia school shooting has been arrested, the Georgia bureau of investigation has said.

Colin Gray, 54, was arrested by the bureau in connection to the shooting at Apalachee high school. Colin is the father of Colt Gray, the 14-year-old who is suspected of fatally shooting two students and two teachers with an assault-style rifle at the high school on Wednesday.

He is charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, the Georgia bureau said.

“His charges are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon,” Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia bureau of investigations, told reporters on Thursday evening.

“What are we facing? Heartbreak. A young person brought a gun into a school, committed an evil act and took lives, and injured people not just physically but mentally,” said the Barrow county sheriff, Jud Smith, during the news conference.

The teenager has been charged as an adult in the deaths of the school students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and educators Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53, Hosey said.

At least nine other people – seven students and two teachers – were taken to hospitals with injuries and all are expected to make a full recovery, Smith said.

Colin Gray is being held at the Barrow county detention center.

More than a year ago, the alleged shooter was interviewed by Georgia police after they received tips about online posts threatening a school shooting. Police did not have enough probable cause to arrest him then, according to the Georgia bureau of investigation.

In that 2023 inquiry, the father said he had hunting guns in the house but that his son did not have unsupervised access to them, and the son denied making the threats online, the FBI said.

Georgia state and Barrow county investigators say the younger Gray used an “AR platform style weapon”, or semiautomatic rifle, to carry out the attack in which two teachers and two 14-year-old students were killed.

It remained unclear how the shooter obtained the weapon.

Investigators have yet to comment on what may have motivated the first US campus mass shooting since the start of the school year.

Jackson county sheriff’s investigators closed the case after being unable to substantiate that either Gray was connected to the Discord account where the threats were made, and did not find grounds to seek the needed court order to confiscate the family’s guns, according to police reports released by the sheriff’s office on Thursday.

“This case was worked, and at the time the boy was 13, and it wasn’t enough to substantiate,” Janis Mangum, the Jackson county sheriff, said in an interview. “If we get a judge’s order or we charge somebody, we take firearms for safekeeping.”

The younger Gray was taken into custody shortly after the shooting and was being held without bond at the Gainesville regional youth detention center, Glenn Allen, the Georgia department of juvenile justice communications director, said on Thursday.

His arraignment is set for Friday morning before a Georgia superior court judge in Barrow county by video camera.

While parents are not usually held criminally liable if their child shoots someone, recent high-profile events are evidence that they could face charges in the future. In November 2023, Deja Taylor of Virginia was sentenced to 21 months on two federal charges after her then six-year-old son shot his teacher in January.

The elder Gray’s arrest also comes months after the unprecedented conviction of the parents of a Michigan high school student who shot and killed four students on 30 November. In February, Jennifer Crumbley was convicted on four counts of involuntary manslaughter. The next month, her husband, James Crumbley, was convicted on the same charges. The pair was sentenced to serve at least 10 years in prison.

“I didn’t really think about what precedent it was setting,” Karen McDonald, the prosecutor for Oakland county who brought the case against the Crumbleys, told CNN on Thursday. “If nothing else I would’ve hoped that the highly publicized details of this case would steer parents and make them think twice.”

“It’s enraging that this could still happen when it’s so easily preventable,” she continued.

This article was amended on 6 September 2024. An early version said Deja Taylor was sentenced to 21 years, not 21 months.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/05/georgia-school-shooting-father-arrested?CMP=share_btn_url

Randy Rainbow on T & P

Thoughts and Prayers- Again

Why are ‘fact checks’ vouching for Trump’s lies?

Losing the framing battle

L O L G O P

https://www.theframelab.org/why-are-fact-checks-vouching-trumps-lies/

Let’s hope 2024 will be the year that “both sides” fact-checking as a journalistic genre grows up.

The comically bad “fact-checking” that came out of the Democratic National Convention should be a wake-up call for anyone who cares about the truth.

Example: Kamala Harris received a “Mostly False” when she said that, through Project 2025, Donald Trump “plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions.” Politifact explained that “Project 2025 doesn’t mention a ‘national anti-abortion coordinator.’ The document calls for a ‘pro-life politically appointed Senior Coordinator of the Office of Women, Children, and Families.’”

That’s like saying it’s untrue to suggest a diner serves ketchup when it merely offers catsup.

Trump’s Firehose of Falsehoods

These attempts to parse “tomato” from “tomah-to” might make some sense in a reality that didn’t include Donald Trump, whose complete rejection of the truth thrives when the press falls into the trap of suggesting “both sides” as equally flawed. The perennial GOP nominee lies about everything from hurricane warnings to his historically bad jobs record.

His lies – including his flood of falsehoods about the 2020 election that led to the end of America’s tradition of a peaceful transfer of power – define him.

Even the idea that Trump can be fact-checked helps Trump. It falsely suggests there are times when he might be constrained by the truth when he, like all authoritarians, is “cognitively irresponsible,” says rhetoric scholar Jennifer Mercieca. He uses his words almost solely to reject the idea that he’s accountable to anyone or democracy itself.

The combination of Trump’s firehose of falsehoods and the media’s agenda to appear even-handed has always yielded toxic slop. But “fact checkers’” do accidentally reveal two truths:

As Dr. George Lakoff has explained for years, accepting someone else’s framing spreads that framing, even if you’re debunking it.

The whole fact-check genre could be called “Don’t Think of this Thing I Think is Wrong.” Whether it’s Richard Nixon saying, “I am not a crook,” or the AP telling us that JD Vance didn’t technically mate with furniture, the idea you’re trying to dispel is spread far more than it can ever be debunked. A fact check tends to be the opposite of a truth sandwich, which Dr. Lakoff proposed to minimize the spread of blatant lies.

The press still has no idea how to treat Trump, one of the worst liars in American history.

Many of the worst fact checks – like the suggestion Trump doesn’t want to repeal Obamacare – rely on Trump’s constant contradictions of himself, often in the same sentence. This loads in the presumption that Trump uses language the way typical politicians do instead of as a super salesman/demagogue.

Lakoff categorized Trump’s tweets to make it easier to analyze Trump’s linguistic vandalism:

Trump is also an expert in paralipsis, which Mercieca describes as his way of asserting something without taking responsibility for saying it himself. It’s his game of “I’m not saying/I’m just saying.” He does this by retweeting particular noxious notions or images he’s trying to spread or framing his assertions with “many people are saying.” It’s a repulsive hack that renders fact-checks useless.

Fact checks in the Trump era have begun to operate a bit like the “Community Notes” scam on Elon Musk’s version of Twitter. Sure, you occasionally get a gem that exposes an obvious scam – like a faked Trump rally photo or a Republican bragging about an infrastructure program he opposed. But think about where those notes don’t appear. They’re never on Elon’s tweets, which are saturated with right-wing propaganda, AI-generated disinformation, and neo-Nazi conspiracy theorizing. So, in essence, they’re vouching for every lie he spreads.

Can Fact Checks be fixed?

Donald Trump depends on journalism’s failed conventions to continue to normalize his unprecedented attack on American freedoms. That’s why editors must pursue multiple strategies to ensure they don’t mislead anyone into thinking Trump’s dishonesty is comparable to his opponent’s or any relevant American political figure.

We need information to debunk lies, yet there should be a greater sense of responsibility when dealing with blatant untruths. That starts with recognizing that lies change brains, even when debunked. They are like toxic spilloff or nuclear waste that must be tracked, contained and cleaned up as much as possible. The best way to do that is to lead with the truth whenever possible, the exact thing Trump is trying to bury with his lies.

Readers also need a sense of Trump’s lies’ unprecedented scope, recurrence and purpose. One strategy is to annotate a typical rally speech with facts and reality checks. Then, compare it to a typical Harris speech. Another is to track his most-repeated lies. And, as Dr. Lakoff has suggested for decades, journalists should also analyze the rhetoric’s frames to give voters a sense of the information war being waged for their brains.

The problem with all of these strategies is that the press would be required to do something that they seem to do their best to avoid: Call out Trump’s lies directly. The best we can hope for is a “falsely claims” in a headline or two, which is better than nothing.

Fact checkers should stop pretending they are the be-all and end-all of determining a fact’s value. Since their jobs do not seem to depend on their reputations or track records, they should bring in experts whose careers depend on accuracy to take on Trump’s most repeated lies.

Publications that care about the truth need to show they understand the seriousness of this moment. Democracy and journalism face an unprecedented attack from Trump and MAGA that threatens the future of these two pillars of a free society.

Cowering to Trump will, at best, buy you more opportunities to cower to Trump, who will never be satisfied – not until he can imprison anyone who displeases him by suggesting he alone isn’t in charge of deciding what is true.