Part of attempts to ban all research that involves human fetal tissue, because the superstitious feelings of anti-choice fanatics over useless, garbage corpse flesh is apparently more important than any number of entire human lives.
Faced with a gulf between the species in need and the available resources, some scientists are pushing an approach that combines the cold-blooded eye of an accountant with the ruthless decisiveness of a battlefield surgeon. To do the greatest good, they argue, governments need to consider shifting resources from endangered species and populations that are getting too much attention to those not getting enough. That could mean resolving not to spend money on some species for which the chance of success appears low, such as the vaquita, an adorable small porpoise now down to fewer than 30 animals in Mexico’s Gulf of California.
let me share a memory with y’all. it’s from i guess 1978 or thereabouts. it’s high summer. i don’t remember where my mom was driving me, in our avocado green chevette, i just know there was a traffic jam that turned 35w northbound into a parking lot from horizon to horizon.
picture it – wait, you don’t have to use your imagination, this happened all the damn time back then.
every one of those damn cars was burning leaded gasoline. there were no emissions regulations. there were no safety regulations. there were just thousands and thousands of detroit steel shoeboxes belching visible smoke as they idled, engines loud and hot, here and there a radiator giving up in the heat, a cloud of burning oil rising.
i, a smeet of five or six, was choking on toxic smog.
i reckon it was about a half hour into the traffic jam that i first threw up. i remember a blinding headache, i remember being confused, i remember dry heaving with my arms and head hanging out the window, the green metal of the car burning my hands and my chin. i don’t remember passing out, but i’m told i lost consciousness before mom was able to get to an off-ramp, because there were no emergency lanes on the highways back then.
i lived. and life went on. what were we going to do, complain? if i’d died, the cause of death probably would’ve been recorded as heatstroke, not carbon monoxide poisoning.
i know i’m probably preaching to the choir here on tumblr. but i really wish i could tell that story to the people who think deregulation is no big deal. i wish they’d put themselves in my mom’s shoes.
or even just look at some old pictures, then look out the window.
ever notice how cityscapes used to have that orange tint and hazy aura? yeah, that’s poison gas.
remember how the mississippi river used to be a stinking soup of baby-shit yellow sludge covered with disturbingly stiff rafts of light orange foam?
i can’t even find pictures of the sludge and foam, i guess they didn’t end up on the internet. the smell was indescribable. that oily shimmer. the reek of dead things. people didn’t boat on the river for pleasure; it smelled too bad, it was too ugly, and you could get super super sick if you touched the water.
and now look at it.
i still wouldn’t want to drink it, but if i fell in i wouldn’t bolt for the shower in a panic, you know?
if the thieving billionaires get their way, we can kiss those sailboats goodbye, and learn the smell of toxic foam once more. the ultra-rich won’t even feel the extra money, they’ve already got more than they could ever touch, they just stash it in offshore accounts to rot, but the rest of us will return to a time of neverending nausea and weird cancers. a time when every elementary school class had at least one kind who’d been born with no fingers or their heart outside their body, and this was just… the way things were.
i’m sorry. i didn’t mean to longpost. it’s just. god. y’all have no idea how CLEAN everything is now, compared to when i was a kid. and these rich old men are counting on that, on people not knowing or not remembering how bad it was before regulation, not realizing how much we need these protections until it’s too late.
“Soon it will be
too late to shift course away from our
failing trajectory, and time is running
out. We must recognize, in our day-to-day
lives and in our governing
institutions, that Earth with all its life
is our only home.”
I can honestly say I’m not surprised at all – given the captive mortality rate,and the immense stress the population is already under, adding the stress of capture and captivity on top of that? Would have probably killed them all faster.
I’m not saying anything new when I say that, in my opinion, vaquita are functionally extinct.
They are a zombie species. They are dead and gone, we’re just waiting for the population numbers to catch up to that fact. The population is too small to succesfully breed back to strength without suffering inbreeding collapse, and their environment is not going to improve fast enough for them to persist anyway.
Too little, too late, and all for naught. This is a great example, unfortunately, of an empty token gesture, of people trying to look like they’re doing something when what they should have done was listened years ago and stopped it from ever getting this bad. Maui’s dolphin is another prime example of this – down to approximately forty individuals – only 10 of which are females, and even fewer are females of reproductive age – are abhorrently under-protected, their habitat is exploited by mining and drilling, as well as commercial fishing. Despite biologists lobbying the New Zealand government for better protection measures, nothing is really being done.
We are not learning from our mistakes, it would seem.
The abundance of flying insects has plunged by three-quarters over the past 25 years, according to a new study that has shocked scientists.
Insects are an integral part of life on Earth as both pollinators and prey for other wildlife and it was known that some species such as butterflies were declining. But the newly revealed scale of the losses to all insects has prompted warnings that the world is “on course for ecological Armageddon”, with profound impacts on human society.
The new data was gathered in nature reserves across Germany but has implications for all landscapes dominated by agriculture, the researchers said.
The cause of the huge decline is as yet unclear, although the destruction of wild areas and widespread use of pesticides are the most likely factors and climate change may play a role. The scientists were able to rule out weather and changes to landscape in the reserves as causes, but data on pesticide levels has not been collected.
“The fact that the number of flying insects is decreasing at such a high rate in such a large area is an alarming discovery,” said Hans de Kroon, at Radboud University in the Netherlands and who led the new research.
“Insects make up about two-thirds of all life on Earth [but] there has been some kind of horrific decline,” said Prof Dave Goulson of Sussex University, UK, and part of the team behind the new study. “We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.”
The research, published in the journal Plos One, is based on the work of dozens of amateur entomologists across Germany who began using strictly standardised ways of collecting insects in 1989. Special tents called malaise traps were used to capture more than 1,500 samples of all flying insects at 63 different nature reserves.
The house of homeland security literally approved for billions of dollars to be used on a stupid wall that promotes xenophobia.
I can’t fucking believe this shit
The country is going through a fucking crisis right now and all cheeto man can do is sit up in his comfy golf resorts criticizing Puerto Ricans while spending $10 billion on a FUCKING wall!
@ science side of tumblr,, ALL JOKES ASIDE WE REALLY NEED YALL TO TELL US IF WE’RE GONNA BE OKAY OR NOT
By “diseases,” they mean microbes (MICROBES, not the same as PATHOGENS), that were living their merry lives in water when it began to freeze over.
Yes, we are going to be okay, at least as far as these little friends are concerned. The odds of a microbe that evolved in an aquatic environment THOUSANDS of years ago suddenly up and adapting to infect a human system as soon as it’s thawed are basically zilch. (The megaviridae [big ass viruses] that are the actual subject of the above clickbait infected ancient amoeba. It would take a TREMENDOUS amount of time and selection pressure for these viruses to learn to infect human systems, even by viral time scales.)
You SHOULD be worried about deforestation, especially in rain forests, which has the potential to release microbes that are more than adapted to mammalian systems and are generally happy to make a zoonotic (animal to human) jump, especially those that primarily infect simians. The major hemorrhagic fevers (Ebola, Marburg) were more than likely first exposed to humans after major deforestation.
Wow im so glad at least someone in this craphole of a website is smart and can educate my dumb ass.
BettSplendens Tumblr Evac 