MARCIE JONES JUL 27, 2024
Good news!
Snippet:
TRIGGER WARNING: Contains disgusting descriptions of the nasty-ass Guinea Worm, though no photos. Do not Google the photos.
…
So this is very nice, former President Jimmy Carter — who is still alive and 99 years young, though in hospice — has succeeded in his decades-long goal to get Guinea Worm Disease cases down to zero before he dies. (Warning, the picture at that link is disgusting.) There have now been zero cases of Guinea Worm disease in the past three months, and there were only 14 last year. Extremely promising signs that maybe they are truly gone forever! If no more Guinea Worms burst through anybody’s flesh within the next nine months, then it’ll officially be the second disease eradicated by humanity after smallpox.
When the Carter Center started trying to take down big Guinea Worm back in 1988, more than 3.5 million people in Africa and India were suffering from it. And BOY WERE THEY SUFFERING, because while the worm won’t directly kill you, it is agonizing and SO RETCHINGLY GROSS. First, nasty-ass fucking worm larva gets into your guts through dirty drinking water. Then it grows in your stomach for a fucking year. And THEN, a fucking THREE-FOOT WORM POPS OUT OF YOUR SKIN which hurts like fucking hell, obviously. And there is no vaccine or cure, the only solution is to pull this FUCKING DISGUSTING WORM out of your fucking skin by winding it around a fucking STICK.
So it is not the glamorous kind of affliction that makes a good poster for a benefit concert or bake sale, or plays well on an ad with Sarah McLachlan playing in the background. But one fixed relatively simply, with clean drinking water. And so that is what sweet peanut-farming Jimmy worked at. His Carter Center partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and has been quietly toiling to eradicate many other un-glamorous diseases that no one in the year of our Lord 2024 should have to suffer from, including: poliomyelitis (a virus that paralyzes mostly children), mumps, rubella, lymphatic filariasis (aka elephantiasis, a roundworm transmitted by mosquitoes), cysticercosis (tapeworm infection), measles, river blindness, and yaws (a nasty spirochete bacteria that causes bursting lesions). (snip-More)
Genetics explains bizarre echidna and platypus stomachs
July 24, 2024
Imma Perfetto
Monotremes are weird animals. They’re famously the only mammals to lay eggs instead of live young.
But did you know that they also have bizarre stomachs more akin to some fish than other mammals?
Platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) and short-beaked echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus) gastric systems are abnormally small, and lack the glands for secreting enzymes and acidic juices.
Platypus even go without a pyloric sphincter – the ring of smooth muscle that acts like a valve to regulate the flow of partially digested food from the stomach to the small intestine. This makes it difficult to tell the different between the oesophagus and intestines!
Now, Australian researchers have pinpointed a single gene, the NK3 homeobox 2 (Nkx3.2), as the likely cause for all this weirdness. The gene probably became inactivated tens of millions of years ago in the most recent ancestor of modern monotremes.
“Work from our lab previously had shown that the platypus and echidna had lost the genetic instructions for proteins that break down food and secrete stomach acids, but to me this didn’t explain the drastic shift in their stomach anatomy relative to other animals,” says Jackson Dann, a PhD student at the University of Adelaide and lead author of a new study detailing the discovery in the journal Open Biology.
“Thanks to novel repositories of genetic data, and physical specimens we had at the lab, we were able to discover that Nkx3.2 wasn’t functional in monotremes and that this inactivating event contributed to the evolution of their unique body plans.”
Apart from monotremes, only some aquatic and semi-aquatic fishes have lost their stomachs over the course of their evolutionary past.
The Australian ghostshark (Callorhinchus milii), Japanese puffer (Takifugu rubripes), zebrafish (Danio rerio), and Japanese rice fish (Oryzias latipes) all lack the same hydrochloric acid and gastric enzyme genes as seen in monotremes.
“It’s likely there is some overarching ecological factor we’re missing as to why these species have lost their stomach,” says Dann.
“It’s otherwise surprising that we would see these drastic shifts in stomach anatomy in monotremes and then the next closely related species are loose groups of fish.”
Dann and co-authors suggest that if this was a trait associated with aquatic and semi-aquatic organisms, their evidence would support a semi-aquatic ancestor of the short-beaked echidna and platypus.
Subsequent adaptations to the echidna lineage would have then allowed them to become specialised for terrestrial environments.
According to Dann, the more we know about monotremes, the more we can appreciate their role in their ecosystems and celebrate their eccentricities.
He highlights ecology endeavours like EchidnaCSI, which is an Australia-wide citizen science project helping conserve wild echidnas.
“A better understanding of these unique and iconic species provides a significant contribution to Australian ecology and culture, they help us understand more about mammals, including ourselves,” says Dann.
Originally published by Cosmos as Genetics explains bizarre echidna and platypus stomachs
https://cosmosmagazine.com/nature/evolution/genetics-explains-bizarre-echidna-and-platypus-stomachs/
A few headlines of interest here, with snippets and links.
I got a great giggle when I saw this story last night. Imagine Republicans telling other Republicans they’re being too racist…
https://apnews.com/article/trump-harris-attacks-johnson-hudson-76f8e90d24004e49449087787ac031a5
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican leaders are warning party members against using overtly racist and sexist attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, as they and former President Donald Trump’s campaign scramble to adjust to the reality of a new Democratic rival less than four months before Election Day.
At a closed-door meeting of House Republicans on Tuesday, National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Richard Hudson, R-N.C., urged lawmakers to stick to criticizing Harris for her role in Biden-Harris administration policies. (snip-more)
=====
Monthly headlines are turning into daily headlines:
Monday was recorded as the hottest day ever globally, beating a record set the day before, as countries around the world from Japan to Bolivia to the United States continue to feel the heat, according to the European climate change service.
Provisional satellite data published by Copernicus on Wednesday showed that Monday broke the previous day’s record by 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.1 degree Fahrenheit).
Climate scientists say it’s plausible that this is the warmest it has been in 120,000 years because of human-caused climate change. While scientists cannot be certain that Monday was the very hottest day throughout that period, average temperatures have not been this high since long before humans developed agriculture. (snip-more)
=====
Cuteness overload!
The second baby of a tree-dwelling kangaroo made its public debut this week in New York, poking its pink head head out of its mom’s furry white pouch. (snip-click the Video hyperlink just above the title)
I am posting this video for those that think sex and gender is assigned at birth. That the birthing person simply has to look between the legs to see it a new baby is a boy or a girl. As I repeatedly say that has been replaced by more advanced medical understanding. If a baby has a dangle or an innie don’t mean it is one sex or the other, one gender or the others. Also for those who will shout those people are anomalies and rare. Not many of them. There are more of those people, intersex people than there are red heads in the world. And even though she is genetically a male she still feels, acts, and goes by female pronouns. Where are all those saying pronouns are offensive. Going to call this girl him / his and send her to the boy’s bathroom. Hugs. Scottie
Talk of self entitled importance. By my dogs that love gravy you have to watch the videos. This woman is so over the top that if she was doing this to any other group it would have been thought an SNL skit. If she had been acting like this to black people, Hindus, or Muslims, no one would have accepted it. Sh was screaming in peoples faces and demanding their names. She is a total stranger acting as if she has some type of authority over other paying guests. If she had done that to me she sure wouldn’t have liked my reaction. Scottie wouldn’t have been so nice as the drag queens. The drag queens were guests of the hotel filming there and they got treated horribly by this woman. Yet she claims to be the victim. She went after them, she got in their faces not once but several times filming them, insulting them, accusing them of wanting to chop her son’s penis off. The hotel staff did try to stop her but acted like they were afraid of her or to get too forceful with her and she just went around them or ignored them. Then she continued her lecture and screed to the police when they were escorting her off the hotel grounds. She continued her triad and even accused one of the police officers of being a trans woman, she called the woman a man. She was an attention seeker and did not care who she hurt to get her fix of attention. And her X posts are full of lies and myths about trans people, including something she claimed at the hotel. She said that after sexual reassignment and I think she meant transitioning also, that suicides go way up. In fact studies have proven they decrease greatly after transitioning or having gender affirming medical care. But again facts mean nothing to these haters. Hugs. Scottie
———————————————————————————————————–
The Sacramento Bee reports:
UC Davis published a statement Tuesday about “offensive comments” made by employee Beth Bourne while she was on a family vacation in Hawaii.
Bourne, the local chapter president for parents rights group Moms for Liberty, posted a video of herself confronting a group of drag queens who were filming a video at the hotel Bourne was staying in, the Alohilani Resort in Waikiki, on Sunday.
“We reject all manifestations of discrimination, including those based on gender and gender expression,” the university’s statement said. The video shows Bourne verbally accosting the people dressed in drag, including drag queen Marina Del Rey.
Newsweek reports:
In the video, Bourne took aim at the drag queens as she accused the hotel of failing to provide a safe environment for her son.
“I’m sorry, but this is—I paid to be a customer at a hotel where I thought you believed that women were real. That because you put on makeup, because you’re wearing high heels, because you have a Barbie outfit on, that you don’t think this is degrading? This is misogyny,” Bourne said addressing the drag queens.
She added, addressing a hotel representative: “If you give me back my money right now, I will leave the hotel, but I’m not going to have my children come down from the 30th floor and see what’s happening here.” According to Bourne’s X bio, she claims without evidence that “1/22 kids is trans” at UC Davis, adding that her views are “mine, not my employer.”
Yahoo News reports:
“This type of behavior is unacceptable,” Hawaii Democratic Governor Josh Green said in a statement Monday. “It is not aloha and we will not tolerate it from anyone.”
As the videos continued to garner views, social media users began tagging UC Davis, Bourne’s employer, demanding she be fired. Bourne works at the university’s Institute for Transportation Studies.
“I’m used to my colleagues thinking I’m a terrible person,” Bourne told The Bee in an April story about Bourne and her estranged trans child. The university said that Bourne’s comments “are protected by the First Amendment,” but that the school condemns them nonetheless.
Videos of the incident together have nearly ten million views at this writing. I encourage you to watch both of activist Tizzy Ent’s clips in full.
Scottie's Playtime 