Blanche last appeared here when he sanctioned the American Bar Association because its lawyers have failed to show suitable obedience to Glorious Leader.
Chilean flamingo. Credit: Victor Ortega Jiménez, UC Berkeley
Flamingos are known for posing serenely on one leg in extreme wetlands, placidly bobbing their heads into the shallow water to feed. But a new study has revealed there’s more going on beneath the surface than meets the eye.
It seems flamingos create controlled underwater chaos to actively trap their prey, according to the research in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
They use a repertoire of behaviours, including stomping feet, jerking heads, and chattering beaks, to create swirling “underwater tornadoes” that concentrate and funnel prey into their mouths.
“Flamingos are actually predators, they are actively looking for animals that are moving in the water,” says lead author of the paper Victor Ortega Jiménez, an assistant professor of integrative biology at the University of California Berkeley in the US.
“The problem they face is how to concentrate these animals, to pull them together and feed. Flamingos are using vortices to trap animals, like brine shrimp.
“It’s not just the head, but the neck, their legs, their feet and all the behaviours they use to effectively capture these tiny and agile organisms.”
Ortega Jiménez and his collaborators trained Chilean flamingos at the Nashville Zoo to feed from a shallow aquarium.
They used high speed cameras and laser light to view the gas bubbles created in the water to visualise the animals’ feeding behaviour. They then confirmed their observations using fluid dynamics computer simulations and experiments using 3D printed models of flamingo beaks and feet.
They found that flamingos stomp their floppy webbed feet to churn up the sediment beneath them, propelling it forward in whorls.
The birds then draw these vortexes towards the water’s surface by jerking their heads upward at speeds of about 40cm/s, creating mini tornadoes that concentrate particles of food.
These small vortices are strong enough to trap even agile invertebrates, such as brine shrimp and microscopic crustaceans called copepods.
The flamingos’ heads remain upside down within this watery vortex, with their unique beaks angled so that the flat front end stays parallel to the bottom. They then “chatter”, clapping the lower beak open and shut about 12 times every second, to create smaller vortices that direct sediment and food into their mouths.
Experiments with 3D replicas of flamingo beaks revealed that chattering increases the number of brine shrimp captured by the beak seven-fold.
They found that flamingos also use a technique called “skimming”, which involves pushing the head forward while chattering to create sheet-like vortices – called von Kármán vortices.
“We observed when we put a 3D printed model in a flume to mimic what we call skimming, [it produces] symmetrical vortices on the sides of the beak that recirculate the particles in the water, so they actually get into the beak,” Ortega Jiménez says.
“It’s this trick of fluid dynamics.”
The team believes that their findings could be used to design better systems for concentrating and sucking up particles, such as microplastics, from water.
Next, Ortega Jiménez aims to determine the role of the flamingo’s piston-like tongue and how the comb-like edges of the beak filter prey out of the water.
“This is a once-in-a-century brain gain opportunity.”–Australian Strategic Policy Institute, urging its government to woo U.S.-based scientists and researchers caught in the Trump II attack on research and development
In rivers and oceans across the globe, fish are behaving strangely. Some swim faster than they should. Others take risks they’d normally avoid. Many abandon the social structures that once protected them. These shifts are not random. They point to an invisible threat flowing just beneath the surface: pharmaceutical pollution.
Drugs designed for human anxiety, pain, and insomnia are entering the world’s water systems through sewage, manufacturing waste, and improper disposal. Once there, they don’t vanish. They linger, affect wildlife, and disrupt entire ecosystems.
Bold Fish, Bigger Risks
Juvenile salmon migrating from Sweden’s River Dal to the Baltic Sea have become an unexpected case study. Researchers implanted hundreds of these fish with tiny slow-release doses of clobazam, an anti-anxiety drug commonly prescribed to humans. Tracking tags revealed something remarkable: salmon exposed to the drug completed their journey faster and in greater numbers than their drug-free peers.
According to Jack Brand, a researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, these medicated salmon passed through hydropower dams two to three times faster than untreated fish, likely because they were less hesitant around the turbines, NPR reports.
This boldness might sound like a survival advantage. But in ecosystems, risk-taking has consequences. When predators lurk or conditions shift, impulsive behavior can turn deadly.
Anti-anxiety drugs are altering fish behavior in the wild.
A Global Cocktail of Contaminants
The scope of contamination is staggering. Almost 1,000 pharmaceutical compounds have been detected in waterways around the world—including Antarctica. A Cary Institute report found that up to 80% of streams in the U.S. alone are polluted with pharmaceuticals and personal care products.
These compounds are potent by design. Many target receptors in the human brain, and those same receptors are found in fish and other species. Drugs like benzodiazepines, used to treat anxiety in people, also alter the stress response in fish. As a result, animals become less risk-averse, change their migration timing, or fail to form protective schools—shifts that can affect survival.
Drugged salmon are taking dangerous risks during migration.
From Lab to Wild
Previous experiments hinted at these effects. In labs, fish exposed to psychoactive drugs became more isolated and less cautious. But the new field studies from Sweden show that these behavioral changes persist—and even intensify—in the wild.
A follow-up experiment revealed that drugged salmon formed looser groups, even when a predator was nearby. The tighter a school, the safer its members. Disrupted shoaling behavior means more fish swimming solo—making them easier prey.
Michael Bertram, an ecologist leading the study, described the salmon’s altered behavior as a form of “unnatural selection,” The New York Times reports. If bolder fish survive migration but die later in predator-rich waters, the long-term outcome could be population decline, not resilience.
Predator-prey dynamics are being disrupted by pharmaceutical waste.
The Long Tail of Human Medicine
Human waste isn’t the only path these drugs take to the water. Wastewater from hospitals, improper drug disposal, and runoff from pharmaceutical manufacturing sites all contribute. Deutsche Welle reports that some wastewater treatment plants near manufacturing facilities have drug levels 1,000 times higher than others.
Yet most treatment plants are not equipped to filter out pharmaceuticals. Some drugs pass through the system unchanged. Others break into byproducts that are just as toxic.
Unknowns Beneath the Surface
Despite years of research, the full ecological impact of pharmaceutical pollution is unknown. Scientists have documented effects on hundreds of species, including reproductive issues and behavioral disruptions. A Cary Institute investigation described how certain antidepressants alter fish breeding cycles, while hormones from birth control pills can cause male fish to develop female egg cells.
As compounds accumulate in fish, they climb up the food chain. Birds, mammals, and even humans may be exposed through drinking water or consumption of contaminated seafood.
Solutions and Setbacks
There are potential fixes. Advanced treatment technologies like ozonation and membrane filtration can help. But they’re expensive and rare. Designing drugs that biodegrade safely—an approach known as green chemistry—is promising, though slow to implement.
Policy change is another lever. Currently, pharmaceutical companies are responsible for testing their own products for environmental safety. Critics argue that these reviews are insufficient and underregulated.
Improved drug disposal practices, public education, and cross-agency coordination could all make a difference. But as things stand, no pharmaceuticals are currently regulated under the EPA’s primary drinking water standards, Cary Institute reports.
The Cost of Inaction
The salmon darting through Swedish dams may seem like a scientific curiosity. But they are just one visible indicator of a much larger, invisible crisis. Every flushed pill, every untreated discharge, adds to a global experiment with no control group and no reset button.
What happens in rivers doesn’t stay there. It shapes the ocean, the land, and the web of life that connects them all.
Click and help us keep our oceans clean!(Note from A: this is a simple free Greater Good organization click-to-donate; the easily ignored ads help pay for cleaning the ocean. I’ll never know whether you click or not, I just wanted to let you know what it is.)
While RFK Jr. wanders the Earth saying foolish things like “autistic people are broken,” a 10-year-old prophet named Teddy stood before his school board and said, “I have autism. I am not broken.”
Well said, Teddy! Bless you!
1. And a Child Shall Lead Them
RFK Jr., the walking cautionary tale of nepotism, recently claimed that people with autism “can’t work” or “have families.” He said this with the confidence of a man who’s never Googled the words “ableism” or “shut up.”
Teddy is a fourth grader in Princeton, New Jersey. He has autism. He also has courage,poise, and the holy fire of truth.
He stood before the Princeton School Board and said:
“Recently, the U.S. secretary of health, RFK Jr., made false comments about autism like people with autism are broken, that autism is caused by vaccines, and that people with autism will never have jobs or families. But that’s not true. I have autism and I’m not broken, and I hope that nobody in Princeton Public Schools believes RFK Jr.’s lies.”
“PPS already recognizes Autism Awareness Month. But not much. There are posters in the cafeteria that say to be kind and inclusive. Students wear blue on April 2nd. But we are never taught about the spectrum of autism.”
“Kids need to be taught more about the different kinds of autism, that autism is a natural variation in the genes that you are born with (NOT caused by vaccines), and about successful people with autism. The lessons should also be extended to other “disabilities” like ADHD, cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness, dyslexia, apraxia, and more.”
“I want everyone to know that people with autism and other disabilities are not tragedies, but just different, like all people. If everyone understood more about autistic people, and about people with other disabilities, they would know more about how to treat them, what their lives are like, and that they don’t need to be fixed or cured.”
“This will help kids with disabilities have a better life. When people are aware of disabilities and are accepting them, they will have friends and less bullying. Also, the teachers might be more aware because they learned about the disabilities also.”
“Kids and teachers should know more about disabilities so they do not believe RFK Jr. is right about autism, and they choose to treat them in a way that is good for the kid. By knowing more about it, kids and teachers will be nicer to kids with disabilities.”
“This is important to me and PPS because I have a ‘disability’ and I noticed that disabilities are not being taught, only a few people mentioning autism. When teaching about culture, we teach many different cultures to accept them better. Because that’s what disabilities are like, a culture, a culture of differences.”
“PPS must add this to the curriculum of all grades and students, so we don’t have people like RFK Jr. in the future.”
BOOM. The Earth shook. Angels clapped. And lo, that dummy RFK Jr. dropped his dumbbell on his foot mid-curl.
Black holes are one of our favorite cosmic objects
So we created Black Hole Week to celebrate them.
Throughout the week, science communicators from across the globe will be sharing news, videos, and social media posts about black holes. Our goal is that no matter where people turn that week, they’ll run into a black hole. (Figuratively, of course — we don’t want anyone falling in!) (snip)
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First Tip: Don’t Visit Black Holes!
But if you must, read our safety guide.
Learn more about black holes, how to find them, and how to stay safe on your travels!Read More snip) Enjoy!
By: Susan J. Kressly, MD, FAAP, president, American Academy of Pediatrics
“The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is deeply alarmed by the report released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today on medical care for transgender and gender-diverse individuals and the process that informed its development. For such an analysis to carry credibility, it must consider the totality of available data and the full spectrum of clinical outcomes rather than relying on select perspectives and a narrow set of data.
This report misrepresents the current medical consensus and fails to reflect the realities of pediatric care.
As we have seen with immunizations, bypassing medical expertise and scientific evidence has real consequences for the health of America’s children. AAP was not consulted in the development of this report, yet our policy and intentions behind our recommendations were cited throughout in inaccurate and misleading ways. The report prioritizes opinions over dispassionate reviews of evidence.
Patients, their families, and their physicians—not politicians or government officials —should be the ones to make decisions together about what care is best for them based on evidence-based, age-appropriate care.
We urge government officials and policymakers to approach these conversations with care, humility, and a commitment to considering the full breadth of peer-reviewed research. The AAP remains focused on supporting pediatricians in delivering the best possible care to every child, informed by science and the lived experiences of patients and families. We will continue to support the well-being of all children and access to high-quality care that meets their needs.”
It’s rare these days that I see a new product and think, this is really cool, but seriously, this is really cool:
“Meet the Slate Truck, a sub-$20,000 (after federal incentives) electric vehicle that enters production next year. It only seats two yet has a bed big enough to hold a sheet of plywood. It only does 150 miles on a charge, only comes in gray, and the only way to listen to music while driving is if you bring along your phone and a Bluetooth speaker. It is the bare minimum of what a modern car can be, and yet it’s taken three years of development to get to this point.”
So far, so bland, but it’s designed to be customized. So while it doesn’t itself come with a screen, or, you know, paint, you can add one yourself, wrap it in whatever color you want, and pick from a bunch of aftermarket devices to soup it up. It’s the IBM PC approach to electric vehicles instead of the highly-curated Apple approach. I’m into it, with one caveat: I want to hear more about how safe it is.
It sounds like that might be okay:
“Slate’s head of engineering, Eric Keipper, says they’re targeting a 5-Star Safety Rating from the federal government’s New Car Assessment Program. Slate is also aiming for a Top Safety Pick from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.”
I want more of this. EVs are often twice the price or more, keeping them out of reach of regular people. I’ve driven one for several years, and they’re genuinely better cars: more performant, easier to maintain, with a smaller environmental footprint. Bringing the price down while increasing the number of options feels like an exciting way to shake up the market, and exactly the kind of thing I’d want to buy into.
Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating – so let’s see what happens when it hits the road next year.
About the Tea Party, the direction the Republican Party took during the Obama administration, and then of Trump first riding down the escalator to announce his candidacy:
“If you saw in any of this a threat to liberal democracy writ large, much less one that could actually succeed, you were looked at with the kind of caution usually reserved for the guy screaming about aliens on the subway.”
And yet, of course, it got a lot worse.
The proposal here is simple:
“I propose we promote a simple rule for these uncertain times: Those who saw the danger coming should be listened to, those who dismissed us should be dismissed. Which is to say that those of us who were right should actively highlight that fact as part of our argument for our perspective. People just starting to pay attention now will not have the bandwidth to parse a dozen frameworks, or work backwards through a decade of bitter tit-for-tat arguments. What they might ask—what would be very sensible and reasonable of them to ask—is who saw this coming?”
Because you could see it coming, and it was even easy to see, if you shook yourself out of a complacent view that America’s institutions were impermeable, that its ideals were real and enduring, and that there was no way to overcome the norms, checks, and balances that had been in place for generations.
What this piece doesn’t quite mention but is also worth talking about: there are communities for whom those norms, checks, and balances have never worked, and they were sounding the alarm more clearly than anyone else. They could see it. Of course they could see it. So it’s not just about listening to leftists and activists and people who have been considered to be on the political fringe, but also people of color, queer communities, and the historically oppressed. They know this all rather well.
I enjoy this man’s commentary. He’s always seemed to know whereof he speaks. Every weekend I intend to post this newsletter, and every weekend gets by me without me getting it done. This is a copy-paste of my newsletter; I receive it in email from “The Nation” magazine. All links within are live.
A retirement for the ages Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, who has been in Congress or the Senate for nearly my entire life, has announced that he will not seek reelection in 2026. The 80-year-old’s retirement will touch off a firestorm of a Democratic primary in Illinois, and I’m already dreading the prospect of a heap of progressives jumping into the race, cannibalizing each other, and clearing the path for the wealthiest available moderate white man to buy the nomination. If progressives could just coalesce around one candidate and stick together, they’d win this thing. Then again, if I had wheels, I’d be a wagon. In any event, Durbin’s long overdue retirement is more important to what I cover than the primary, because Durbin is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which controls the judicial nomination process. He was the head of the committee during Joe Biden’s presidency—a job he got by literally pulling rank over the guy who was best suited for the post (according to me), Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. The last four Democratic leaders on Judiciary have been, pretty much, a disaster. Durbin was preceded by Diane Feinstein, who was preceded by Patrick Leahy, who was preceded by Joe Biden. All four of these people were establishment moderates who were more concerned with formalities and courtesies than fighting for control of the courts. It was during their watch that the Federalist Society was able to overrun the judiciary with Republican judges who have literally taken away constitutional rights and redefined the law as a tool of the Republican political agenda. The Judiciary Committee desperately needs new, energetic leadership, to say nothing of a fighting spirit. I can only hope that Durbin’s retirement marks the end of the era of Democrats’ getting punked on judicial nominations.
The Bad and The Ugly SCOTUSblog, a popular website that reports on the Supreme Court, has been acquired by the right-wing media outlet The Dispatch. The acquisition likely marks the end of one of the few nonpartisan sources of information about the Supreme Court and plunges yet another independent outlet into the dark morass of the white-wing media ecosystem. I have a ton of respect for the website’s senior editor, Amy Howe, and I know she will fight like hell to retain the site’s nonpartisan independence. But this ain’t no fairy tale. When you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.The number of young people who are incarcerated is going down, but the racial disparities among the children we put behind bars are “the highest in decades.” Black and Native American children are getting the worst of it, according to NPR. Pope Francis died. Francis was from Argentina. He was the first pope from Latin America, the first pope from the Southern Hemisphere, the first Jesuit pope, and the first pope born and raised outside of Europe since the 8th century. He was also one of the most progressive popes in the history of that office, though admittedly that’s a bit like saying he was the least fungal fungus. For my lapsed-Catholic part, I liked him. I hope the next pope is the second pope who can claim to be most of these things. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been caught up in yet more Signal-inspired controversy. I know I’m supposed to care, but I don’t. They put a Fox News host in charge of the American military; what the hell did people think was going to happen? Decency? Competence? A group of bigoted parents went before the Supreme Court this week and asked the justices to allow them to object to books in school that mention gay people. The Republican justices on the court fell all over themselves to agree with the parents. I am once again asking bigoted religious wing nuts to homeschool their children and leave the rest of us who want to live in a society alone.
Inspired Takes In The Nation, my colleague Joan Walsh took on the Trump administration’s ridiculous and sexist obsession with white birth rates. For my part, I am willing to help the administration accomplish its goals: If it really wants white birth rates to go up, all it has to do is make most white people poor again. The lesson from literally all today’s high-income societies is that birth rates go down as economic prosperity goes up, so the solution is actually pretty simple. Maybe that’s the real reason behind Trump’s tariffs? Contraband Camp has put out a “Trump Administration Discrimination Database.” So now, whenever your MAGA uncle says, “Point to one thing Trump has done that is racist,” you have a reference source. I used to feed my dog a “raw food” diet. It made sense to me, in an unthinking way (dog = wolf = murderous carnivore = “Aww… who’s the good girl who wants to feast on the raw viscera of your slain enemies?”). The fru-fru suburban veterinarian I go to didn’t immediately tell me it was a bad idea. But then, I happened to run into my old, hardscrabble city veterinarian and she basically said, “What the fuck? Don’t do that. I thought you were a smart person?” She then gave me some research. Now, we’re back to kibble. For people who don’t have the benefit of knowing a frank-talking vet, Emmet Frazier explains in The Nation why your fully domesticated dog doesn’t need to be eating rabbit liver.
Worst Argument of the Week This isn’t really an argument, but I read a story in Gothamist that almost made me cry. The Trump administration has largely cut off funding for legal aid programs that would provide lawyers to immigrant children sent here without their parents or legal guardians. That has forced thousands of children in New York City to go through the court process—which can lead to their deportation (among other things)—with no legal representation. We’re talking about children as young as 4 being hauled into a courtroom without a lawyer. I do not know what kind of sick fucks think this is OK. I cannot fathom the base, racist, cruelty and inhumanity you have to be comfortable with to think that Trump is right to cut this funding. I cannot conceive of the argument one might make to support this. All I know is that whatever argument one has for making this OK is wrong.
What I Wrote I was not prepared to engage with a Supreme Court decision at 1 o’clock on Saturday morning, but I’m very glad the court was still working. It issued a ruling that prevented Trump from deporting another group of immigrants, and in so doing, probably saved some of their lives. The Harvard lawsuit against the Trump administration over his illegal and unconstitutional freeze of the university’s research funding is very strong. Harvard should win, if winning in court still matters.
In News Unrelated to the Ongoing Chaos You should watch Andor. The first episode of its second season just came out and, trust me, you should just watch it. Forget that it’s part of the Star Wars franchise. Forget that it’s another Disney-owned media property looking to milk that franchise for all its worth. This show is about fighting fascism. It is the most relevant piece of dramatic fiction of this era.
Scottie's Playtime 