In the Rhode
Island House of Representatives, Representative Samuel Azzinaro (Democrat,
District 37, Westerly) has introduced legislation essentially
banning LGBTQIA+ books in public and charter schools and State House libraries.
Representative Azzinaro wants the law to apply to all Rhode
Island libraries. In support of their elected Representative, members of
the Westerly Town Council crafted a resolution in urging passage of
the legislation. In effect, the resolution would be a message telling the House
of Representatives that Westerly residents are in favor of book banning.
At Monday night’s Council
meeting, where the proposed resolution was to be voted on, 21 people who live
or work in Westerly testified against the resolution. Many of those testifying
are people whose work puts them on the front lines protecting America’s fragile
First Amendment freedoms – Librarians.
Have you ever made a great catch—such as
snatching a falling phone before it plunges into the toilet, or preventing an
indoor cat from dashing outdoors?
Those skills—the ability to grab a moving
object—require exact synchronization between our visual and motor systems.
A study conducted by researchers at the Del
Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester suggests that our
capacity to predict visually perceived motion plays a significant role in our
capability to make a great catch—or grab a moving object.
“We were able to develop a method that
allowed us to analyze behaviors in a natural environment with high precision,
which is important because, as we showed, behavioral patterns differ in a
controlled setting,” said Kuan Hong Wang, Ph.D., a Dean’s Professor of
Neuroscience at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
Movie at 10 fps, with frames being acquired every 30 min. Images were recorded 24 h after transfecting hippocampal neurons with p15 and GFP. Each frame represents the maximum intensity projection, with GFP intensity adjusted to facilitate the visualization of newly appearing GFP-positive neurons. Credit: The Authors
Scientists at The University of Queensland
have discovered viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 can cause brain cells to fuse,
initiating malfunctions that lead to chronic neurological symptoms.
Professor Massimo Hilliard and Dr. Ramon
Martinez-Marmol from the Queensland Brain Institute have explored how viruses
alter the function of the nervous system.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that
causes COVID-19, has been detected in the brains of people with ‘long
COVID’ months after their initial infection.
“We discovered COVID-19 causes neurons to
undergo a cell fusion process, which has not been seen before,” Professor
Hilliard said.
“After neuronal infection with SARS-CoV-2,
the spike S protein becomes present in neurons, and once neurons fuse, they
don’t die. They either start firing synchronously, or they stop functioning
altogether.”
As an analogy, Professor Hilliard likened the
role of neurons to that of wires connecting switches to the lights in a kitchen
and a bathroom.
“Once fusion takes place, each switch either
turns on both the kitchen and bathroom lights at the same time, or neither of
them,” he said.
After
leading federal COVID-19 response, Dr. Ashish Jha to resume role as dean of
Brown’s School of Public Health
Brown University
An American hero. He saved thousands of lives by calmly urging people to do the right thing to protect themselves during the pandemic - W. Collette
After spending 14 months on temporary leave to lead the U.S.
government’s COVID-19 pandemic response and recovery efforts, Dr. Ashish K. Jha
will return to lead the Brown University School of Public Health.
Jha will
resume his post as dean of SPH on July 1, as Interim
Dean Ronald Aubert continues his leadership through the close
of Brown’s academic and fiscal years before taking on the permanent role of
senior associate dean of education at the school.
Jha will return to Brown having concluded
his term as White House COVID-19 response coordinator, a position to which U.S.
President Joseph R. Biden appointed
him in March 2022. The federal COVID-19 public health emergency
expired May 11. Biden commended Jha’s leadership in a Thursday, June 8, statement from the White House.
“As one of the leading public health
experts in America, he has effectively translated and communicated complex
scientific challenges into concrete actions that helped save and improve the
lives of millions of Americans,” Biden said. “I extend my deepest thanks to
Ashish and his family. We are a stronger and healthier nation because of his
contributions to public service.”
It was a civil lawsuit that grew out of a feud on Twitter about whether transgender people were victims of the Holocaust. Though there is no longer much debate about whether gay men and lesbians were persecuted, there’s been very little scholarship on trans people during this period.
The court took expert statements from historians, including myself, before finding that the historical evidence shows that trans people were, indeed, persecuted by the Nazi regime.
This is an important case. It was the first time a court recognized the persecution of trans people in Nazi Germany. It was followed a few months later by the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, formally releasing a statement recognizing trans and cisgender queer people as victims of fascism.
Up until the past few years, there had been little research on trans people under the Nazi regime. Historians like myself are now uncovering more cases, like that of Toni Simon.
Would generate a fund to control invasive species, algae blooms
Photo by Will Collette
The Senate passed legislation
introduced by Sen. V. Susan Sosnowski (D-Dist. 37, South Kingstown) that would
create the Rhode Island Lake Management Program.
The bill (2023-S
0502A) would create
a restricted receipt account to aid with lake and pond management issues
relating to the control of invasive aquatic plants.
“Local
wetlands are being threatened by invasive aquatic weeds,” said Senator
Sosnowski. “This bill would be a first step to start a program at the
Department of Environmental Management. The situation is becoming worse with
warming temperatures, and it’s creating biological imbalance in these
freshwater bodies. We have to be proactive to protect our lakes, which provide
us with recreation, flood mitigation and an important habitat to plants and
animals.”
Conditions
in many Rhode Island lakes, ponds and tributaries are threatened or degraded by
the growth of aquatic invasive plants, harmful algal blooms, nutrient
enrichment and other water pollution problems. Restoring conditions in the
state’s freshwater resources is essential to sustaining the valuable ecosystem
services they provide.
The
measure now moves to the House of Representatives for consideration.
Clinicians at Queen Mary University of London and Barts
Hospital have identified a gene variant that causes a common type of
hypertension (high blood pressure) and a way to cure it, new research published
in the journal Nature Genetics shows.
The cause is a tiny benign nodule, present in
one-in-twenty people with hypertension. The nodule produces a hormone,
aldosterone, that controls how much salt is in the body. The new discovery is a
gene variant in some of these nodules which leads to a vast, but intermittent,
over-production of the hormone.
The gene variant discovered today causes several problems
which makes it hard for doctors to diagnose some patients with hypertension.
Firstly, the variant affects a protein called CADM1 and stops cells in the body
from ‘talking’ to each other and saying that it is time to stop making aldosterone.
The fluctuating release of aldosterone throughout the day is also an issue for
doctors, which at its peak causes salt overload and hypertension.
This
fluctuation explains why patients with the gene variant can elude diagnosis
unless they happen to have blood tests at different times of day.
For the past few months, Americans have
faced multiple political distractions: Ukraine, inflation, AI, whether or not
we intentionally nuke our own economy.
With all of these hyper-dramas, we quietly
managed to harpoon some of the half-century-old cornerstones of environmental
law.
Kansas legislators Brenda Landwehr, left, and Chris Croft confer during a vote on an anti-transgender bathroom bill, which both support. AP Photo/John Hanna
It has been seven years since North Carolina made headlines for enacting a “bathroom bill” – legislation intended to prevent transgender people from using restrooms that align with their gender identity.
Many of these anti-trans laws are writtenandfinanced by a group of far-right interest groups, including the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, the Liberty Counsel and the American Principles Project.
These groups claim their proposed laws would protect cisgender women and girls – those whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth – from the sorts of violent trans people that are often depicted in moviesandothermedia.
But as criminologists, we know these claims are without merit. No reliable data supports the argument that transgender people commit violent crimes at higher rates than cisgender men and women. In fact, transgender people are more than four times as likely to be the victim of a crime as cisgender people.
