“Venezuela has lost its last remaining glacier after it shrank so much that scientists reclassified it as an ice field.
“It is thought Venezuela is the first country to have lost all its glaciers in modern times.’
Scientists reclassify Humboldt glacier, also known as La Corona, to an ice field, since it has melted faster than expected.
It’s not theoretical anymore. It’s real.
In the first year after Roe v Wade was overturned (June 2022-June 2023), over 200 women have faced criminal charges for conduct associated with their pregnancy, pregnancy loss, or birth. The majority of these charges are in just six states: Alabama, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas. All run by Republicans and operating under abortion bans.
Trump said in an interview that “there has to be some sort of punishment” for the woman. And it’s already happening.
Researchers have found that pregnancies and pregnancy loss are more highly scrutinized in these states. And it’s more about the ramifications of giving full legal personhood rights to a fetus than it is about actual abortions. Read below:
“Almost none of the prosecutions documented by researchers were brought under state abortion laws. Instead, researchers found that law enforcement most often charged pregnant women with crimes such as child neglect or endangerment, interpreting the definition of “child” to include a fetus. In doing so, authorities relied on a legal concept called fetal personhood — the idea that a fetus, embryo or fertilized egg has the same legal rights as a person who has been born.
“If we focus only on abortion laws, we miss a crucial part of the picture in the fact that pregnant individuals are being criminalized for allegedly endangering their own pregnancies, for pregnancy loss and, in some cases, for conduct related to abortion. What’s driving pregnancy criminalization is the expansion of fetal personhood.’
“Charges of child abuse or endangerment carry stiffer penalties — higher fines and lengthier prison sentences — than the low-level drug charges the women likely would have faced had they not been pregnant.
“‘Pregnancy-related prosecutions don’t generally charge crimes that, on the face of the criminal statute, have anything whatsoever to do with pregnancy,’ said Wendy Bach, a professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law and the report’s principal investigator. ‘Instead, using the idea of fetal personhood, or more specifically the idea that the fetus can be the victim of a crime perpetrated by the pregnant person, they use that theory to charge general crimes.'”
Libraries aren’t the only group that is recognizing the racist or derogatory roots of some of their terms.
“An international group of researchers has voted to modify the scientific names of more than 200 plant species whose names carry a derogatory word.”
“The community of plant, algae, and fungi researchers has acknowledged that some of the names are problematic, demeaning, or even racist and took a series of steps to start tackling these issues.”
“It might sound like science fiction, but researchers have discovered real ‘cocaine sharks’ off the coast of Brazil.
“Thirteen wild Brazilian sharpnose sharks (Rhizoprionodon lalandii) caught near Rio de Janeiro tested positive for the drug, according to a study published last week in the journal Science of the Total Environment. The team is still teasing out the implications of this finding, but they say it adds to the growing body of evidence that humans’ illegal drug consumption is affecting wildlife and the environment.
“Previous research has detected cocaine in wastewater and rivers. Last year, researchers in England identified a chemical produced by the liver after cocaine use in seawater. Studies have also found the drug in other marine creatures, including shrimp, mussels and eels.
“But researchers were curious to know whether cocaine might be affecting sharpnose sharks that spend their entire lives in coastal waters near Brazil, which is a major exporter of the drug to Europe. In addition, people in Brazil and elsewhere often eat sharks, which raises questions about possible contamination up the food chain.”
“The African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, typically lives in the streams and ponds of sub-Saharan Africa, scavenging for food that it rips apart with its feet. In January, researchers at the University of Vermont and Tufts University published a report that gave the amphibian a different lot in life. They harvested its embryonic skin and heart cells and reassembled the living matter into robotic devices — transforming Xenopus into xenobot.
“Xenobots are the first robots made completely of living materials. They’re designed on a supercomputer running software that emulates natural selection: Algorithms determine possible effective tissue configurations for a xenobot to perform a specified task, such as moving through fluids or carrying a payload. The most promising designs are sculpted with tiny forceps and cauterizing irons, then set free in petri dishes, where the specks of amphibian flesh live for about a week before decomposing. There are no electronics involved. Behaviors are programmed entirely through the structural arrangement of the pulsating heart cells held in a matrix of rigid skin cells.
“Although xenobots can’t yet do much more than crawl or swim, the researchers see great potential for them to aid in fields like medicine and environmental remediation. In the future, xenobots could be engineered to deliver drugs through the human body or to gather up microplastics in oceans, politely biodegrading when the job is done.”
“Scientists have confirmed a cave on the moon, not far from where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed 55 years ago, and suspect there are hundreds more that could house future astronauts.
“An Italian-led team reported Monday that there’s evidence for a sizable cave accessible from the deepest known pit on the moon. It’s located at the Sea of Tranquility, just 250 miles (400 kilometers) from Apollo 11’s landing site.”
“The findings suggest there could be hundreds of pits on the moon and thousands of lava tubes. Such places could serve as a natural shelter for astronauts, protecting them from cosmic rays and solar radiation as well as from micrometeorite strikes. Building habitats from scratch would be more time-consuming and challenging, even when factoring in the potential need of reinforcing the cave walls to prevent a collapse, the team said.
“Rocks and other material inside these caves — unaltered by the harsh surface conditions over the eons — also can help scientists better understand how the moon evolved, especially involving its volcanic activity.”
More details in these articles:
https://apnews.com/article/moon-caves-nasa-astronauts-2dc57751f41a6e24f377c2259e8668ba
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce784r9njz0o
