Friday, July 26, 2024
Is the monarch butterfly ready for its moment?
URI researchers would like to see the monarch get its due
Despite weighing half a gram each, between August and October, monarch butterflies
will travel up to 3,000 miles from the U.S. and Canada to the mountains of Mexico,
sipping flower nectar as fuel for their journey. (URI Photos / Casey Johnson)
As summer
progresses and travelers embark on trips to destinations near and far, Steven
Alm and Casey
Johnson in the University of Rhode Island plant sciences and
entomology department would like to remind New Englanders of another late
summer and fall traveler — the monarch butterfly.
Between August and October, monarch butterflies travel up
to 3,000 miles from the U.S. and Canada to overwintering grounds in the
mountains of Mexico.
Monarchs are first seen in Rhode Island in June; their numbers increase through late summer and into fall when secondary generations begin their journey southward. The orange and black butterflies can be spotted in gardens and fields, especially those with lots of native milkweeds and flowers.
Their flight is fueled by flower nectar, so they need
plenty of food sources to alight on: butterfly weed, common and swamp milkweed,
red clover, blazing stars, bee balm, native thistles, purple coneflowers,
asters, goldenrods, New York ironweed, Joe-pye weed, and sweet pepperbush all
provide abundant nourishment for the long journey.
LEAVE BUTTERFLY BABIES ALONE! Researchers at URI say that homegrown
butterfly gardens help. Even a single potted plant outside the front
door has the potential to provide food for beneficial insects. (Casey Johnson)
The monarch is one of hundreds of species of butterflies and moths that call Rhode Island home for at least some of the year.
Some are
more common than others, but the monarch is one species with documented drastic
declines. Many of Rhode Island’s local insects, including moths and
butterflies, benefit from Rhode Islanders planting more native plants, removing invasive species,
reducing pesticide use, leaving the leaves for overwintering insects, and
advocating for their conservation.
Republicans wary of Republicans – how politics became a clue about infection risk during the pandemic
Can't be trusted
Ahra Ko, University of Pennsylvania and Steven Neuberg, Arizona State University
 |
| The behavioral immune system learned a new proxy for disease risk during the COVID pandemic. gilaxi/E+ via Getty Images |
Even Republicans who felt vulnerable became more wary of other Republicans. That’s one finding from research we recently published in the journal American Psychologist, and it has important implications for understanding a fundamental feature of human disease psychology.
Many Republican politicians and supporters, as compared to their Democratic counterparts, downplayed the threat of COVID-19 to public and personal health and resisted masking and social distancing. These attitudes and actions appear to have turned political affiliation into a new cue of possible infection risk.
This is an example of what scientists call the behavioral immune system at work.
Political rhetoric about third trimester abortion is misleading, experts say
Trump's Big Lie on abortion
By Kelcie Moseley-Morris, Rhode Island Current
It’s an oft-repeated talking point of anti-abortion rights groups and Republican politicians, before and after the June 2022 Dobbs decision — that those who are supportive of abortion rights also must be in favor of abortions that happen during the last weeks of pregnancy, or even “after birth.”
Planned Parenthood
Former President Donald Trump brought it up in the June debate against President Joe Biden, saying Biden’s position on restoring abortion access would lead to doctors being able to “take the life of the baby in the ninth month, and even after birth.”
Trump’s newly announced vice presidential running mate, Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, told Fox News this week that Biden “wants taxpayer-funded abortions up until the moment of birth.”
And candidates in states such as North Dakota and Montana have campaigned on that rhetoric in recent months, saying some states allow “post-birth abortions” or abortion “the day before” a due date.
In reality, abortion “after birth” does not happen, because it would be categorized as murder under all state laws. And while abortions do occur later in pregnancy, they are exceptionally rare and happen for many diverse reasons, such as a fatal fetal diagnosis and financial or travel barriers that extend timelines.
Thursday, July 25, 2024
ACLU Warns Trump Win Would Herald 'New Era of Mass Incarceration'
And then death camps?
The 14-page memo argues that
Trump's agenda would be to expand incarceration, abusive policing practices,
and the use of the death penalty, all of which the ACLU, a nonprofit human
rights organization, opposes.
"We know from this country's history that these
extreme and immoral policies harm communities and infringe upon our rights and
humanity," Yasmin Cader, director of the ACLU's Trone Center for Justice
and Equality, said in a statement that
accompanied the release of the memo. "The ACLU is prepared to meet the
Trump administration with the same fierce response as we did during his last
term in office should he be reelected."
Help save homeless critters
|
Could You Have Lyme Disease and Not Know It?
You really want to detect Lyme Disease early because early treatment offers the best results
By RUTGERS UNIVERSITY
Every year in the United States, an estimated
476,000 people are diagnosed
and treated for Lyme disease. The estimate comes from the
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Ask CCA leader Cliff Vanover. He bragged about getting
bitten 50-60 times a year and contracting Lyme Disease
multiple times in an interview with Rhode Island Monthly
Lyme disease can be treated with antibiotics.
The best health outcomes are most likely when diagnosis is made within the
first weeks of infection. If left untreated, the effects of Lyme disease can
linger for years and cause neurological problems, arthritis, and a host of other ailments.
But because diagnosing Lyme can be difficult, some cases of the disease go
undetected long after initial transmission.
To help clinicians improve Lyme disease
outcomes, physician-scientists at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and Stony
Brook University have published a guidance article in NEJM
Evidence, The New
England Journal of Medicine’s digital digest, on the
informed evaluation and treatment of Lyme in its early stages.
Lead author Steven E. Schutzer, a professor
of medicine at Rutgers Health, discussed how clinicians can approach patients
who have the possibility of an early Lyme disease infection.
New AFL-CIO Guide Shows How Trump Agenda Would Be 'Catastrophic' for Workers
No friend to working families
"We are deeply concerned about pro-corporate
policies that would drive up costs, put people out of work, endanger people's
lives, and make it harder for working people to get ahead," the
AFL-CIO—which endorsed Biden
last year—said in a statement. "For
unions, this agenda would make it tougher for members to win gains in our next
contracts and stack the deck in favor of CEOs."
Trump has recently tried to distance himself from Project
2025 and appeal to
working-class voters by announcing Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate
and inviting International Brotherhood of Teamsters general president Sean
O'Brien's to speak at this week's Republican National Convention—but
progressives and labor advocates are calling "bullshit."
The AFL-CIO guide highlights how Project 2025 would
"be catastrophic for working people," including by:
- Banning unions for public service workers (page 82);
- Firing civil service workers and replacing them with Trump anti-union loyalists (page 80);
- Letting bosses eliminate unions mid-contract (page 603);
- Letting companies stop paying overtime (page 592) and allowing states to opt out of federal overtime and minimum wage laws (page 605);
- Eliminating child labor protections (page 595); and
- Urging Congress to pass Sen. JD Vance's bill to let employers create their own sham company-run unions (page 599).
Wednesday, July 24, 2024
Unity at the RNC Looks a Lot Like Jonestown
Pass the Kool-Aid
WILL BUNCH for the The Philadelphia Inquirer
I came to the American Heartland to cover a
political convention, but all I found was a tent revival, Brother Trump’s
Traveling Salvation Show.
By Mike Luckovich
The Republican National Convention took
just minutes after Monday’s opening gavel to officially nominate its
Dear Leader for the third and probably not the last time. The roll call,
once the highlight of
past conventions, is now an empty ritual. A party platform that
was probably written on a Mar-a-Lago cocktail napkin was rammed though with no
dissent. RNC schedulers quickly liberated all four nights for the only real
purpose they had here in Wisconsin.
The deification of
Donald J. Trump.
The undulating white hats that staked a claim for Texas; the buttoned-down accountants under their ill-fitting, newly purchased red MAGA hats; and the tightly-wound blonde women in their adult cheerleading outfits—all of them populated the crowded floor of the Fiserv Forum wearing a badge that read “Delegate,” but they were only extras in the ultimate reality show.
They mildly whooped for the transphobic jokes and
Second Amendment bravado of faceless GOP congressional candidates but by 8 pm
Central most were sucked by a cosmic force toward the back corner of the floor,
iPhones aloft to capture a moment of political transubstantiation.
It reaches fever pitch as the Village
People’s gay disco anthem “Y.M.C.A.” floods the
massive basketball arena, with images of the Leader’s goofball dancing on a big
screen. A house band segues into The Romantics’ “What I Like About You” as he finally enters
the long tunnel and climbs to his seat, white bandage covering the stigmata of his right ear, which bled from Butler,
Pennsylvania, to Milwaukee for the salvation of America and this delirious
throng.
In the minutes that follow, vanquished
rivals like Nikki Haley or
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis plead
for mercy by pledging their undying fealty. The faithful thank their God for
intervening Saturday to save Trump and save America. Eventually, the speeches
all start sounding like a riff on The Manchurian Candidate: “Donald J. Trump is the kindest,
bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”
But the camera is drawn, like a moth to
flame, to Trump—head-cocked, absorbing the adulation, probably hoping the TV
talking heads are speculating wildly about this obviously changed man. Here in
Milwaukee, the political pundits finally saw the thing they’ve been pleading
for—unity—and what that really looks like. It looks a lot like Jonestown.
“It seems that our party is really getting
unified quite well,” Daniel Bobay, an ex-Californian who retired near Sulphur
Springs, Texas, and was attending his first RNC as an alternate delegate, told
me inside the Fiserv Forum. It was a variation of a quote I heard again and
again and again. Bobay said he hopes the Trump shooting will reduce overheated
rhetoric—but only from the media, and not especially from Republicans. “That’s always been the message,”
he said with a slight chuckle, referring to tough talk on immigration. “You
can’t only build half the wall, or deport only half the people.”
Like any cult, the real mysticism in
Milwaukee was the things that went unsaid. I never thought I’d see a four-day
national celebration of a presidential candidate who just 45 days earlier had
been convicted on 34 felony charges,
stemming from his efforts to win the 2016 election by paying off the porn star
who would later testify she had sex with him.
But I’m much, much more flabbergasted by
how quickly those convictions just vanished from your TV screen and the
national conversation—just like the massive financial fraud,
just like the E. Jean Carroll rape case, just
like the taking of our top secret documents,
just like the role he played in trying to tamper with his
2020 election defeat, and his summoning of a violent mob to
the U.S. Capitol.
Any need to “tone it down” or “lower the
national temperature” after Saturday’s shooting in Butler doesn’t undo the fact
that all of those disqualifying things have happened. But here’s the other
thing: Nobody at the RNC was really toning it down or lowering the temperature.
Instead, it was like a weeklong heat dome of baseless accusation settled over
eastern Wisconsin.
The harsh tone was set early on Monday,
when Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson welcomed the faithful to his home state by
declaring “the Democrat agenda, their policies, are a clear and present danger
to America, to our institutions, our values, and our people.” Johnson then
claimed that “the wrong speech” had
been stuck into the teleprompter.
Really? In that case, the teleprompter guy
must have brought all the wrong speeches. Because if there was some kind of
memo about a new GOP message of peace, love, and understanding, it was not
widely circulated. As I looked on from the upper deck Tuesday night, I heard a
string of “everyday Americans” present a nonstop saga of murder, rape, and
drug-related deaths. I wasn’t sure at times if I was watching the RNC or if
Comcast had reactivated FEARnet. While some of
the crimes were committed by undocumented migrants and others they sought to
blame on liberal prosecutors, these truly awful, heartbreaking incidents were
always tied back to President Joe Biden.
Massive IT outage spotlights major vulnerabilities in the global information ecosystem
On the edge of chaos
Richard Forno, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
 |
| Displays at LaGuardia Airport in New York show the infamous “blue screen of death.” AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura |
The outage is emblematic of the way organizational networks, cloud computing services and the internet are interdependent, and the vulnerabilities this creates.
In this case, a faulty automatic update to the widely used Falcon cybersecurity software from CrowdStrike caused PCs running Microsoft’s Windows operating system to crash. Unfortunately, many servers and PCs need to be fixed manually, and many of the affected organizations have thousands of them spread around the world.
For Microsoft, the problem was made worse because the company released an update to its Azure cloud computing platform at roughly the same time as the CrowdStrike update. Microsoft, CrowdStrike and other companies like Amazon have issued technical work-arounds for customers willing to take matters into their own hands. But for the vast majority of global users, especially companies, this isn’t going to be a quick fix.
Modern technology incidents, whether cyberattacks or technical problems, continue to paralyze the world in new and interesting ways. Massive incidents like the CrowdStrike update fault not only create chaos in the business world but disrupt global society itself. The economic losses resulting from such incidents – lost productivity, recovery, disruption to business and individual activities – are likely to be extremely high.
As a former cybersecurity professional and current security researcher, I believe that the world may finally be realizing that modern information-based society is based on a very fragile foundation.
Universal Flu Vaccine Shows Promise in Primate Trials
New Hope for Flu Prevention
By OREGON HEALTH & SCIENCE UNIVERSITY
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, tested an OHSU-developed vaccine
platform against the virus considered most likely to trigger the next pandemic.
Researchers reported the vaccine generated a
robust immune response in nonhuman primates that were exposed to the avian H5N1
influenza virus. But the vaccine wasn’t based on the contemporary H5N1 virus;
instead, the primates were inoculated against the influenza virus of 1918 that
killed millions of people worldwide.
Conn. Joins R.I. and Mass. in Northeast Energy Collaborative
Power in unity
EcoRI
Connecticut
joins a memorandum of understanding with
Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, New
Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland to increase the flow of electricity between
three different regions in the Northeast.
The
announcement of the formation of the Northeast States Collaborative on
Interregional Transmission was met with positive reactions from Connecticut
policymakers and officials, according to CTNewsJunkie.
State
Sens. Norm Needleman and Christine Cohen — co-chairs of the Energy and
Transportation committees, respectively — said the collaboration will mean
lower costs for consumers and will help benefit the grid in periods of high
usage.
“This
Collaborative will also provide a better and more accessible market for
offshore wind, with statewide interconnection helping to aid a transition away
from fossil fuels in a more emphatic way,” they wrote in a statement.
Tuesday, July 23, 2024
Trump Accepts GOP Nomination…Behaving Just Like Usual
Still crazy (and OLD!) after all these years
By TOM CANTLON
 |
| By David Horsey |
After he received the nomination in 2016, I wrote in a column that I was mourning the loss of an old frenemy, the former Republican party.
The party I often
disagreed with, but which operated in as rational a form as any. Now, it is
built mostly on falsehoods, but in a very smooth package. Being totally at ease
with all that falseness is a key part of what makes the new Republican party
feel so smooth.
For the first hour, Trump was very subdued. As he told
the story of almost getting killed by a sniper —we are glad he wasn’t, violence
would only make things worse — many, from barely old enough to vote, up to
retirement aged men in suits and ties were crying, fully sobbing at both the
sad story, and with pride and joy at what they felt was a great moment.
In the second hour, Trump got into more of his claims regarding what is currently wrong with the country, and how he would fix things. I won’t try to address the needed fact checking, there are numerous others doing excellent work at that.
Trump touched on many problems, and that
is part of his appeal. He is often right about things that need improving, for
instance, China for many years has stolen our intellectual property and trade
secrets. But then he turns it into an attack on a whole group of people, and he
uses clumsy, problematic tactics to appear as if he will do something about
said issues.
Of the many real problems though, the border got by far
the most attention, far beyond what would fit with reality. But it’s an easy
issue to cast in an us-vs-them framing and rile people with.
If you didn’t know any of the lies behind the speech, you would not find much to be put off by. It’s easy to lie your way to winning people over if it turns out so many millions don’t really want to know the truth — and then a whole infrastructure of false information flows through society to give Trump and others a different reality in which to live.
But how
can anyone not know the truth? All the words out of Trump’s own mouth about
feeling free to molest women, and about Black people being lazy — see the hyperlink
for yourself. Plus, the people who would run his administration documenting
their ugly plans in their Project 2025.
Urgent Need For Blood Donors
Save lives!
By Daily Dose
Trauma season is in full swing and the blood supply is
critically low; your donation can make a difference in emergencies, surgeries,
and for cancer patients. There is a critical need for Type O donors.
You can save up to three
lives in only one hour every time you give blood so boost your good karma and
donate today.
Summer is the most
difficult time for blood centers throughout the country—and here in Rhode
Island. School breaks, increased travel, and busy summer schedules have caused
a drop in donations during the critical summer months.
If you have questions
about your eligibility to donate, you can email the medical team at medicalstaff@ribc.org. They can also be
reached by phone at 401.453.8383.
Go here to make an appointment.
RI Blood Center, 405 Promenade
Street, (directions)
The Blood Center's South County office has limited hours. Make an appointment. Here's their info:
RI - South County Donor Center
14 Woodruff Ave
Narragansett, RI 02882
401-453-8383
Narragansett, RI 02882
401-453-8383
Biden administration unveils plan to wean US government off single-use plastics
Federal purchasing can shift the market for these products
Brian Bienkowski BY EHN
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The announcement also set a goal for the federal government to stop buying plastic for food service, events and packaging by 2027.
While the strategy isn’t enforceable by law and could change under future administrations, it is the first government-wide strategy aimed at reducing plastic pollution and recognizes that the plastic pollution “crisis” encompasses the entire lifecycle: from the fossil fuels used as building blocks in plastic manufacturing to the microplastic bits lining our shorelines.
Proposed winter electric rates down 8% compared to last year
But up compared to current rates
By Nancy Lavin, Rhode Island Current
The seasonal spike in winter electric rates is nearing, with Rhode Island Energy on Thursday submitting its proposed rates for the six-month period that starts Oct. 1.
The proposed 16.4 cents per kilowatt-hour winter electric rate marks a 22.8% increase over existing summer rates. For the average residential customer using 500 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month, this translates to a $31.30 monthly bill increase.
Business and industrial customers would also see their bills rise, with the increase dependent upon usage.
The actual monthly bill also includes extra charges to help fund the company’s renewable energy program and capital infrastructure projects, among other fees.
The seasonal increase in electricity prices is not unexpected, reflecting increasing demand and constrained supply of natural gas during the colder months. The proposed winter rates are 8% less than the rates set for the prior winter, estimated to save the average residential customer $8 a month not including changes to other fees, according to Rhode Island Energy.
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