The presidential election has turned into a contest between a capable, smart woman who emphasizes what Americans can achieve when they work together for the common good, and a sundowning old racist creep who would be pathetic if he weren’t so dangerously close to returning to power.
In case you’re wondering what the difference looks like, compare the hate and division the old racist creep is spreading with some recent announcements from President Joe Biden’s administration, nearly all of them about programs funded by one or another of Biden’s big legislative packages. Just a little reminder of why elections matter, and of the legacy that Kamala Harris is committed to building on. For, y’know, the people.
Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison for opposing U.S. entry into World War I. Debs had been an elected official in Indiana, a labor organizer, writer and editor, had founded the first industrial union in the U.S., the American Railway Union, and had run for President four times on the Socialist Party ticket.
He ran again for president from prison in 1920 with the slogan “From Atlanta Prison to the White House,” and received nearly one million. Learn more about Eugene V. Debs
September 14, 1940 Congress passed the Selective Service Act, providing for the first peacetime draft (though Japan had already invaded China in 1937 and Germany had invaded Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1939) in U.S. history.
September 14, 1948 A groundbreaking ceremony took place in New York City at the site of the United Nations’ world headquarters. The site selected for the permanent headquarters of the United Nations as it was in 1946. The 39-story building on 18 acres of Manhattan’s Turtle Bay neighborhood (donated by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) on the East River. It is a major expression of the International Style with its simple geometric form and glass curtain wall, designed principally by Le Corbusier. The UN building today Background and more examples of the minimalist, utilitarian International style
September 14, 1963 The ABC television network invited singer, songwriter, banjo player and activist Pete Seeger to appear on its Saturday night folk and acoustic music show, Hootenanny, despite the fact that he had been blacklisted. But the invitation stood only if he’d sign an oath of loyalty to the U.S. He described his reaction: “This is ridiculous. I’d sign ’em, if you sign ’em, and everybody who’s born will sign ’em, then we’d all be clean.” In the 1940s Seeger traveled throughout the country with Woody Guthrie, performing at union meetings, strikes and demonstrations. After World War II, he and Lee Hays co-founded the Weavers, the legendary folk group that gained commercial success despite being blacklisted. A Pete Seeger BiographyMore about Hootenanny
September 14, 1964 The Free Speech Movement began at the University of California-Berkeley when its Dean Katherine Towle (pronounced toll) announced that existing University regulations prohibiting advocacy of political causes or candidates, signing of members, and collection of funds by student organizations at the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph, would henceforth be ”strictly enforced.” Read more
September 14, 1982 Wisconsin became the first to approve a statewide referendum calling for a freeze on all testing of nuclear weapons.
September 14, 1990 The Pentagon announced a $20 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (Saudi Arabia’s eastern neighbor) had invaded Kuwait six weeks earlier. Saud royal family
September 14, 1991 The South African government, the African National Congress, the Inkatha Freedom Party, a total of forty organizations, signed the National Peace Accord. It led to the country’s first multi-racial elections and the end of South Africa’s racially separatist apartheid (literally separateness in the Afrikaans language) political, economic and social system by 1994. “ Bearing in mind the values which we hold, be these religious or humanitarian, we pledge ourselves with integrity of purpose to make this land a prosperous one where we can all live, work and play together in peace and harmony.” Background of the conflict
taking the Covid vac with other shots; I did flu and Covid yesterday, got tired and achey around 6 hours later, and chilled and sweated through the night. I did sleep some, but not as usual, and I’m exhausted today. Corky’s not even nagging me about a walk, she can tell, with her doggy ESP, that I really don’t feel good. Anyway, I thought I’d pass that along. I admire people who take both or more of the vacs, then live through this each year, but I’m going back to getting one one week, the other the next week. I sailed through, comparatively, last year doing that. But now I know! And it is true I do not have to go back next week for another shot. 👨⚕️
(Back in the 80s I heard a story of Norman Cousins putting his apple juice in a specimen cup, then later taking a sip while listening to a visitor. I think of Norman Cousins when I see headlines like this one. I don’t believe he was a clown, but others’s mileage may vary, as to humor in the hospital, also Norman Cousins, not to mention clowns.)
Credit: FatCamera / Getty Images
Medical clowns are known to have a positive therapeutic impact on kids in hospitals for a range of health issues, and now it’s been shown they can reduce the length of stay and antibiotic use for children with pneumonia.
A study, done on 51 children, found that those visited by medical clowns on average left hospital more than a day earlier than those who weren’t.
“Medical clowns undergo specific training to work in hospitals,” says Dr Karin Yaacoby-Bianu, a researcher at the Carmel Medical Centre and Israel Institute of Technology, Israel.
“They have been shown to reduce pain and alleviate stress and anxiety in children and their families during medical treatment, and have been gradually integrated into many aspects of hospital care.
“But their impact on children being treated for pneumonia has not been investigated.”
“Community acquired pneumonia is one of the leading causes of hospitalisation in children, globally,” she says.
The team split 51 children, aged between 2 and 18, who had been hospitalised with pneumonia, into 2 groups.
They all received standard care, but one group also had four 15-minute visits from a medical clown from the Dream Doctors Project during their stays.
Medical clown ‘tres jolie’. Credit: Dream Doctors/European Respiratory Society
The clowns did a variety of activities including music, singing, and guided imagination.
The group visited by clowns stayed in hospital for 43.5 hours on average, while the control group stayed in hospital for 70 hours on average.
Children visited by clowns needed an average of 2 days of IV antibiotic treatment, while the control group required 3. Other medical markers, like heart rate and inflammation, were lower in the clown group.
“While the practice of medical clowning is not a standardised interaction, we believe that it helps to alleviate stress and anxiety, improves psychological adjustment to the hospital environment and allows patients to better participate in treatment plans like adherence to oral antibiotics and fluids,” explains Yaacoby-Bianu.
“Laughter and humour may also have direct physiological benefits by lowering respiratory and heart rates, reducing air trapping, modulating hormones, and enhancing the immune function.”
Dr Stefan Unger, a paediatrician at the Royal Hospital for Children and Young People Edinburgh, UK, who wasn’t involved in the research, says the study shows the positive effect humour can have in healthcare. (snip-MORE)
(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.
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.
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)
Telling tourists on the Great Barrier Reef about climate change doesn’t negatively affect their trip, according to a new study.
Instead, finds the research, it could be a good avenue to promote climate action for people who wouldn’t otherwise be engaged.
The study, done by a team of Queensland researchers, is published in People and Nature.
“Tourism operators are getting more engaged in learning how they can spread more awareness, given the state of the Reef and how urgent it’s getting,” says lead author Dr Yolanda Waters, an environmental social scientist at the University of Queensland.
“But they still have these concerns – what if it ruins people’s day? People pay a lot of money to go to the Reef.”
The team tested this concern by surveying 656 visitors on a variety of Reef tours that either did or didn’t mention climate change.
Waters tells Cosmos that her background working in Great Barrier Reef tourism provided the stimulus for the research.
“I used to work on the boats out of Cairns, and I went through these experiences of tourists asking questions and not really feeling equipped to answer them,” she says.
“There is this real feeling: how do we talk about this in a way that doesn’t negatively affect the industry?”
Dr Yolanda Waters (right) on the Great Barrier Reef. Credit: Yolanda Waters
The researchers joined forces with 5 Reef tour operators in north Queensland to set up the experiment.
“We tried to get a range of different operators out of Cairns and Townsville, because we were also testing if it depends on the type of experience, the type of boat, if it’s 300 people or a smaller trip,” says Waters.
The researchers and tour staff developed control and experimental climate trips for each tour.
“It really depended on the boat and the type of trip,” says Waters.
“The operators let us work with their staff and design one trip that had no information about climate change specifically – they still had their regular information about marine life and regular day-to-day operations.
“And on other trips, they let us work with the staff to make sure climate change was very clearly incorporated throughout the day.”
This might include marine biologists’ presentations addressing climate change, videos, and posters.
“On the trip back, I went around and surveyed as many tourists as I could,” says Waters.
Visitors were asked to complete a 5-minute paper survey asking about their experience of the trip, and their engagement with climate change.
The researchers found that trips mentioning climate didn’t have a significant effect on visitors’ experiences.
“There was no overall effect on satisfaction,” says Waters.
Credit: Yolanda Waters
People on both trips were interested in learning more about climate change.
“A lot of them wanted to have a chat about it, especially on days where there was no climate information on the boat – people noticed,” says Waters.
But people on trips with climate information weren’t any more likely to be spurred to action on climate change.
“We found that the climate information did increase people’s awareness about the threat, that information did get across to people, but we found that didn’t really translate to people’s willingness to do something when they went home,” says Waters.
This means that the information about climate change could be tweaked to be more solutions-focussed, according to the researchers.
“Our conclusion out of this, which aligns with some of the other research we’ve been doing, is that if tourism is to be this beacon of engaging people with climate change, it can’t just be talking about threats – people really want to know about solutions,” says Waters.
“Most people have no idea how they can help stop the ocean boiling. So that was the opportunity we identified.”
Credit: Yolanda Waters
The research comes shortly after the release of the 2024 Great Barrier Reef Outlook report by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, which is compiled every 5 years.
The report found that, while parts of the Reef had declined and parts had improved, the overall state of the Reef remained “poor” and climate change was rapidly closing the window to preserve its health.
The researchers say in their paper that the tourism industry has an opportunity to promote action on climate change, provided it uses the right strategies.
“Two million people visit the Reef every year,” points out Waters. She adds that tourists often place a high amount of trust in the information given to them by guides.
“This is the right place and time to do it, but if tourism wants to really embrace the role, they need to start tailoring those talks and those education materials around solutions and actions that people can take home with them.”
Waters says the tourism operators the team worked with were “very receptive” to the study.
“I think tourism really does want to be on board,” she says.
“Tourism has to change, no matter what happens. And I think they’re starting to really recognise that.”
Marmosets do something that only humans, dolphins and elephants have been known to do: give each other names.
Mother and daughter marmoset monkeys named Bhumi and Belle. Credit: David Omer’s Lab.
“Phee-calls” – a specific vocal call – used to identify and communicate between individual marmosets are described in new research published in the journal Science. Listen:
There are 22 species of marmoset native to South America and occasionally spotted in Central America. The generally live in small family groups of 2 to 8 individuals.
The common marmoset weighs just a few hundred grams and is about 19cm tall. They are easily recognised by their large, white ear tuffs.
Naming other individuals is a highly advanced cognitive skill in social animals. Interestingly, our closest evolutionary relatives, non-human primates, have until now appeared to lack this ability.
Researchers uncovered the phee-calls in marmosets by recording their conversations.
They found that, not only do the little monkeys use phee-calls to address specific individuals, they are also able to tell when a call was directed at them and responded more accurately when it was.
“This discovery highlights the complexity of social communication among marmosets,” explains study lead and senior author David Omer from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “These calls are not just used for self-localisation, as previously thought – marmosets use these specific calls to label and address specific individuals.”
The researchers also noticed marmosets within a family group used similar vocal labels to address different individuals. Adult marmosets were even able to learn the names of individuals they weren’t related to by blood.
Such vocalisations may help marmosets in dense rainforest habitats where visibility is limited.
Baby marmoset monkey named Bareket. Credit: David Omer’s Lab.
“Marmosets live in small monogamous family groups and take care of their young together, much like humans do,” says Omer. “These similarities suggest that they faced comparable evolutionary social challenges to our early pre-linguistic ancestors, which might have led them to develop similar communicating methods.”
Understanding how social communication developed in marmosets could help explain human language evolution.
In the Spring edition of Cosmos Magazine, Drew Rooke looks at the prospects of talking to whales, and Amalyah Hart looks at insect consciousness. Out September 26.
The site selected for the permanent
The UN building today
Saud royal family
Scottie's Playtime 