Do spiders count?

My new experimental animal?

A couple of Republicans have introduced a bill in congress to ban all research on animals. All animals, although I’m not sure they understand the breadth of that term. They do helpfully declare that The term ‘‘animal’’ does not include a human. So, according to the ‘Safeguard Pets, Animals, and Research Ethics Act’, we’re going to have to shut down all research involving any kind of animal, except humans. They don’t have the first clue what an “animal” is, or how devastating this would be to biomedical research.

Specifically, this legislation would ban animal testing in federal labs, establish a three-year phase-out, rehabilitate and re-home former lab animals, saving taxpayer dollars while enhancing research outcomes, and ensuring accountability and transparency. American taxpayers spend an estimated $20 billion funding experiments here in the US and overseas including in countries with subpar safety conditions in China, Russia, and Iran.

“I am proud to work alongside Congressman Aaron Bean to end the cruel and unnecessary spending on animal experiments that have wasted billions of tax dollars and inhumanely kept hundreds of thousands of innocent animals in captivity to be tortured and sentenced to painful death,” said Congresswoman Malliotakis. “From administering transgender hormone therapy to monkeys to infesting beagles with fleas and drilling into cats’ skulls for so-called ‘research purposes,’ the American taxpayer would be outraged to learn how their money has been spent. As Co-Chair of the Congressional Animal Protection Caucus and the Cosmetics Caucus, I am committed to advancing our legislation, promoting humane research alternatives, and ensuring taxpayer dollars are spent responsibly.”

“What Fauci did to beagles and other animals is disgusting. The federal government needs to get out of the business of torturing Snoopy. I am proud to join Congresswoman Malliotakis in introducing the SPARE Act.” said Congressman Bean.

Of course she brought up transgender hormones, Fauci, and saving money, the current Republican shibboleths. I can’t believe this would ever pass into real legislation, but I don’t know…congress and the president have been pushing some insane stuff lately. If it did become the law of the land, you can kiss most biological research goodbye.

Welp, I guess I better go release my spiders and all those fruit flies. Then I’ll go raid the local orphanages for small children I can still legally use in my experiments, before my colleagues get the same clever idea.

Minnesota in the crosshairs

The Trump administration has been on a rampage against institutions that support diversity, equity, and inclusion, and in particular has told the states that they aren’t allowed to tolerate transgender athletes. So they’re threatening to sue us, and California, and Maine, any state that similarly refuses to cave in to bigotry. Minnesota says “no.”

Minnesota quickly went on the radar of newly sworn in U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi after state leaders vowed to buck President Donald Trump’s executive order banning transgender athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports.

Bondi warned Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison that the Department of Justice is prepared to sue states that do not comply with Trump’s order. But Ellison indicated he will not back down, arguing that compliance would violate state’s human rights protections.

This isn’t just bigotry, it’s also political payback. Our treacherous Minnesota Republicans seen an opportunity to tear down Democrats.

Minnesota Republicans appear to see an opening with Bondi heading the Justice Department for a broader legal push against Democrats in the state.

“We write to inform you of years of rampant unchecked fraud occurring in our state due to failed leadership by Governor Tim Walz, his agencies, and legislative Democrats. We also ask for your assistance to investigate the growing fraud in our state,” state House Republicans wrote in a letter to Bondi earlier this month.

Our state office of higher education has sent us a memo. They aren’t accepting this, either.

Minnesota Higher Education Leaders:
You have likely heard about a Dear Colleague Letter (DCL), distributed by the U.S. Department of Education (ED)
on February 14, 2025, that communicated a change in the agency’s interpretation of federal laws prohibiting
discrimination based on race, color, or national origin. The Minnesota Office of Higher Education (OHE), along
with the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE), and the Office of Attorney General Keith Ellison, is
assessing the legal and practical implications of this directive.
Like many of you, we have concerns about the letter’s timing, clarity, and potential impact on Minnesota
colleges, academic research, and students. The DCL asserts that diversity, equity, and inclusion, and similar
efforts, are at odds with longstanding civil rights law. It also announces that ED will begin assessing programs
and activities no later than February 28, 2025, with an intent to withhold federal resources from those deemed
not in compliance to this new interpretation of civil rights law.
While the DCL is just that – a letter, which does not carry the full force and effect of law – it has created
untenable uncertainty. With that in mind, I’m sharing more information for consideration as you assess what the
ambiguity and confusion brought on by the DCL means for your campus:
• The DCL by itself is not a civil rights enforcement action, and in its own footnotes, acknowledges that it
“does not have the force and effect of law and does not bind the public or create new legal standards”
(DCL, page 1, footnote 3).
• Federal civil rights enforcement is governed by federal regulations that require ED to take specific steps
before freezing or stopping funding.
• Minnesota state law, including the Minnesota Human Rights Act, prohibits discrimination or preferential
treatment in public education on the basis of race, religion, disability, national origin, gender identity
and other identities.
OHE will continue to seek clarity and keep you informed, and as always, we will do so with a focus on upholding
your academic freedom, your ability to determine curriculum and course offerings, your right to advance
research initiatives, and our shared mission to support every student’s pursuit and completion of a higher
education credential.
Thank you for your partnership,
Dennis Olson
Commissioner, Minnesota Office of Higher Education

But the Republicans have an alternate plan. The US Department of Education has put up a snitch sheet, a page called “End DEI“, where you, yes, YOU, can report all the schools that fail to burn witches torment trans kids.

Schools should be focused on learning.
The U.S. Department of Education is committed to ensuring all students have access to meaningful learning free of divisive ideologies and indoctrination. This submission form is an outlet for students, parents, teachers, and the broader community to report illegal discriminatory practices at institutions of learning. The Department of Education will utilize community submissions to identify potential areas for investigation.
Your email:
School or school district:
School or school district ZIP Code:
Please describe in as much detail as possible the discriminatory practice taking place:

It’s very 1984. Not discriminating has become an illegal discriminatory practice.

But please do report the University of Minnesota Morris — I’m sure people already are. This place supports our LGBTQ students and faculty…also our people who are members of other minorities. I wouldn’t have it any other way. The anti-DEI bigots are attacking, but we will fight back.

That’s how you get spiders, you know

I was feeding the black widows in my lab (all neatly caged, of course) when I saw this little guy hanging out just above the benchtop. Pholcus phalangioides, obviously.

I imagine most people have a little internal debate — do I squish him, or do I gently scoot him out the door? I always take the third option. I had just come from the genetics lab, with a bottle full of redundant Drosophila, and I shook a bunch out over her web. She was showered with flies! She was so excited, scurrying about to wrap them all up.

This is how I generally treat these random spiders in the lab (I call them the Ferals, and I’ve got Ferals all over the place.) I guess I shouldn’t wonder how she got here.

Is anyone still unconvinced that he is absolutely mad?

Come on, wake up. Trump has posted an AI-generated rendering of his peace plan for Gaza. It’s insane.

I also think Trump might have been played. If you freeze the above clip at the 0:31 second mark, you’ll get a glimpse of scantily clad belly dancers wiggling on a beach. They’ve got beards.

If you watch the whole thing <shudder> you’ll see why it would appeal to a narcissist — it’s got a giant golden statue of a surprisingly slim Trump, and gift shops full of nothing but golden statuettes of Trump. It reminded me of that giant statue of Saddam Hussein.

That’s what egotistical tyrants do.

Please, can we topple him now, even before the statues go up?

A guilty pleasure

Sometimes, I’ll tune in to these atheist phone line shows on YouTube. It’s unfair, but it’s always the worst, dumbest, most ignorant Christians who call in to air their idiotic views publicly — maybe there are intelligent Christians out there, but they don’t call in to get skewered by atheists who know the Bible better than they do. Also, I enjoy hearing Matt shout, “SHUT THE FUCK UP” to some babbling ninny who can’t answer a simple question and chooses to instead try and overwhelm everyone with frenzied bullshit.

For example, this video titled “From Biblical Slavery to Alien DNA – Nebraska Steve Takes Us on Another Trip” is a good example of the genre. First the guy tries to say the Bible doesn’t endorse slavery, only to be trounced by the hosts reciting Bible verses at him. Then he segues to claiming there is evidence for God, although he can’t say what it was, in spite of repeated requests from the hosts to explain what that evidence was.

He did finally gasp out that “the WOW signal” is evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. In case you don’t know, here’s is the WOW signal.

In 1977, an astronomer named Jerry Ehrman was recording radio transmissions from space, and got a brief, strong signal that he didn’t understand, so he scribbled “Wow!” on the printout. I’ve seen this cited so often by so many people as a sign that aliens are out there.

It’s not. The observation has been repeated. It’s noise from a passing comet.

The explanation started to come into focus last year when a team at the CPS suggested that the signal might have come from a hydrogen cloud accompanying a comet—additionally, the movement of the comet would explain why the signal was not seen again. The team noted that two comets had been in the same part of the sky that the Big Ear was monitoring on the fateful day. Those comets, P/2008 Y2(Gibbs) and 266/P Christensen had not yet been discovered. The team then got a chance to test their idea as the two comets appeared once again in the night sky from November 2016 through February of 2017.

The team reports that radio signals from 266/P Christensen matched those from the Wow! signal 40 years ago. To verify their results, they tested readings from three other comets, as well, and found similar results. The researchers acknowledge that they cannot say with certainty that the Wow! signal was generated by 266/P Christensen, but they can say with relative assurance that it was generated by a comet.

Somehow, I don’t think Nebraska Steve would care.

What would you tell people who want to gut basic research?

In 1997, Arthur Kornberg wrote an article for the Nobel Foundation, Basic research, the lifeline of medicine. It’s a good read.

The pursuit of curiosity about the basic facts of nature has proven, with few exceptions throughout the history of medical science, to be the route by which the successful drugs and devices of modern medicine were discovered. Though it seemed unreasonable and impractical, counterintuitive even to scientists, to solve an urgent problem of disease by exploring apparently unrelated questions in biology, chemistry and physics, these basic studies proved time and again to be utterly practical and cost-effective.

Then he goes on to give the examples of x-rays, penicillin, polio vaccine and genetic engineering.

The lessons to be learned from these four histories and so many others should be crystal clear. No matter how counter-intuitive it may seem, basic research has proven over and over to be the lifeline of practical advances in medicine. Without advances, medicine regresses and reverts to witchcraft. As in biomedical science, pioneering industrial inventions have not been mothered by necessity. Rather, inventions for which there was no commercial use, only later became the commercial airplanes, xerography and lasers on which modern society depends. Curiosity led to the inventions that became the source of industrial strength. It is imperative for a nation, a culture, a university and a company to understand the nature of the creative process and to encourage its support.

It’s too bad that we have a government that rejects this idea.

Reminder: the Stand up for science rally is taking place next week. The St Paul rally is from 3-5pm on Friday at the state capitol — I’ll be there.

I’m going to have to make a sign this weekend. Any suggestions for what I can put on it? I’m not going to put a copy of Kornberg’s paper on it — I need something short, pithy, and catchy.

A spider with two hoo-has

Nice.

Almafuerte peripampasica, female. A, prosoma and opisthosoma (dorsal view). B, opisthosoma (ventral view, arrow pointing to the duplicated epigyne). Note the difference in size and the slightly asymmetry. C, normal epigyne (arrow pointing to larva). D, duplicated epigyne. Specimen locality: Argentina: Córdoba: Parque Nacional Quebrada del Condorito, “sitio 2”, -31.63481, -64.71087, alt. 1846m, M. Izquierdo, D. Abregú, C. Mattoni, col. Sep. 16, 2019, under stones. LABRE-Ar 498, voucher MAI-4754.

Developmental variations always catch my eye, and this one is interesting from the standpoint of looking for spatial specifications. The normal blueprint for the spider body plan puts the epigyne at the anterior end of the abdomen, but here’s one way back near the spinnerets. What triggered formation at that position? It’s also non-functional, they think — I’d want to know more about the internal organs, what’s connected to what.

In general, malformations in spiders involve chelicerae, pedipalps, walking legs, and eyes, but those affecting female reproductive structures are not so frequent. A teratological case of a spider with a duplicated reproductive structure is described. The female specimen has the typical epigyne and a second one near the spinnerets. The second epigyne is less developed and seems to be non-functional. Similar malformations have been reported for Amaurobiidae and Salticidae, and here is presented for Gnaphosidae. Although it is widely known that temperature and humidity may induce abnormalities under experimental conditions, the causes behind teratological genitalia in wild females are unknown. This case opens the question of the origin of such a malformation and the ontogeny of female reproductive organs in spiders.

Also, that’s an adult of respectable size, so the ectopic organ doesn’t seem to have affected its viability. I’m going to have to spend some time looking up spiders’ skirts this summer.

Remembering my grandmother

Dang, these people look so happy.

Those are our kids, Alaric, Skatje, and Connlann (l-r) and their Great-Grandma Westad. Of course they’re happy — the kids are thrilled to be on vacation and hanging out with their favorite great-grandma, and great-grandma was always so excited to see them. This was probably the early 1990s, when we were living in Salt Lake City, Utah, and we didn’t get up to Washington state often enough. I found this photo in a pile and it reminded me of how much she loved to see her great-grandkids. She’d usually take them out to Dairy Queen for a Blizzard, or to Arby’s. She practically lived on Arby’s roast beef sandwiches, buying them in bulk and freezing them, and thawing them out for her dinner. Poor, you know, although she owned that house in the background. I think her greatest joy was her grandkids and great-grandkids.

She also had a yard full of flowers. Way back when I was dating my wife to be, she’d cut flowers and tell me I had to bring them to her — she was always telling me I had to marry that girl. I was happy to obey.

Unfortunately, these notices were also in the pile.

I wish I’d visited her a few more times before it was too late.