You can’t blame the spider!

Well, this is a fascinating example of spider toxicity. A heroin addict, looking for a cheap high or a weird story to tell her friends, ground up a black widow spider in a little water and…injected it intravenuously. I’ve heard of people eating strange dangerous things on a dare, but mainlining it takes it to a whole new level. Don’t do that!

The consequences were unpleasant but fortunately not lethal.

Several hours after arriving at the hospital, the woman began to have trouble breathing. Her wheezing became so severe that she was moved to the intensive care unit (ICU).

The diagnosis: Doctors determined that the patient’s symptoms were triggered by the black widow’s toxic venom, they wrote in a report. Black widow venom is known to disrupt signals in the nervous system, thus causing muscle pain and spasms, rapid heartbeat and high blood pressure. In some cases, it leads to inflammation that can ultimately restrict breathing, according to Harvard Medical School. The patient had asthma, and the physicians suspected that her breathing difficulties may have been worsened by an allergic reaction to a protein found in the venom.

Notably, when a black widow bites, it injects a very low volume of venom. Because the woman ground up the whole spider, she may have exposed herself to a dose orders of magnitude higher than is typical. A black widow’s venom glands hold about 0.2 milligrams of venom, on average.

The treatment: Doctors gave the woman an IV solution of calcium gluconate, a medication that can help relieve muscle cramps, but her symptoms did not improve significantly. Next, she received morphine for pain relief. The ICU doctors attempted to reduce her wheezing with three treatments of albuterol, a drug that relaxes airway muscles and is a common remedy for asthma. When those treatments were ineffective, they switched to methylprednisolone, a steroid medication. But her labored breathing continued, and the next day, she required a nebulizer. Doctors then gave her morphine and lorazepam — a type of depressant — to ease her muscle spasms and cramping.

Antivenin, or antivenom, for black widow bites carries a risk of anaphylaxis, a severe and immediate allergic reaction. Since the patient was already having trouble breathing, and the doctors suspected that antivenin would worsen her respiratory distress, they did not include it in her treatment.

By the second day of treatment, the patient’s breathing had returned to normal, her lungs were unobstructed and her muscle pain was gone. The doctors transferred her to a general ward and discharged her a day later. They instructed her to follow her standard regimen for controlling her asthma and suggested that she take oral steroids to control any lingering inflammation.

Did they also suggest that she not shoot up any more spiders?

For some reason, a lot of people have been sending me this story. Do I look like the kind of person who would inject themselves with spider venom? Are they warning me not to do this? I assure you all, I like spiders too much to want to grind one up.

Although…I do have several spiders of various species that died of natural causes, and are now floating in vials of 95% alcohol. They could be an interesting addition to a cocktail of some sort, don’t you think?

Soup in spaaaaace!

The country may be swirling down the drain, but at least we’ve got some interesting news from outer space…even if Nature chose a really misleading title for their article, Asteroid fragments upend theory of how life on Earth bloomed. Scientists are analyzing the samples returned from a probe sent to the asteroid Bennu. They’ve found all 5 nucleic acid bases, and 14 of our familiar 20 amino acids, which is not surprising. We’ve found those in meteorites here on Earth.

Furthermore, the molecules are found in roughly equal numbers of right- vs. left-handed enantiomers, which is also not surprising. It’s biological synthesis that favors one handedness over the other; this is exactly what we’d expect of molecules built via inorganic synthesis in a lifeless rock. We might have to upend a few theories if these molecules were found to have been assembled by living organisms that had been living on an ancient space rock. But they weren’t, so nobody is rewriting any biology textbooks.

I did not expect this, though:

In an accompanying paper published in Nature today, other researchers report that the material from Bennu is also rich in salts created billions of years ago, probably when watery ponds on Bennu’s parent asteroid evaporated and left behind a crust of minerals. Although no signs of life were spotted on Bennu, those salty ponds would have been a good environment to foster the chemistry that could lead to it.

Salty ponds? On space rocks? I’d like to know more about that, although note that there’s no evidence that life evolved in puddles on asteroids. It’s still cool to imagine briny ponds on distant moons and planetoids.

My depressing prophecy

I’ve been getting reassuring emails from my university to let me know that they have assembled a team to respond to the federal government shut down of NIH and NSF funded research. In case you hadn’t heard, they canceled review panels at NSF and suspended research at NIH. They made the uncertainty that has always haunted research funding far more shaky. This is a warning shot — they’re going to make everyone conscious of the fact that the Trump team, a collection of idiots with no qualifications in science to throttle any and all science they don’t like.

We already know what they don’t like. They’ve been signaling all along.

They don’t like climate science. They don’t like vaccines. They don’t like evolution. They don’t like human sexuality. If they have to shut down all of science to kill those subjects they don’t like, they will. The Republicans don’t care, they’re going to be smug and happy about destroying the institutions that have been built up since WWII, that enabled the post-war economic boom, that is the heart of our country’s health and safety, because they’ve weaponized the general public’s fear of change and progress to get elected. The science establishment is fragile and easily broken; we rely on chains of people training and building on prior work, and knocking out four years of research does more than cause a hiatus, it breaks a generation of progress, and you can’t get it back. It means scientists will move to countries with more reliable support.

But that’s not what worries me the most. They don’t like immigrants. Their solution is to put them in shackles, load them on busses and planes, and send them off to some other country that doesn’t want them either and is incapable of absorbing the sudden influx, and will turn them away, giving Trump an excuse to declare a trade war. Meanwhile, we have to do something with these people, and the solution in the works is to pay private prisons to house them in “detention centers”.

That’s a euphemism. The traditional name for them is concentration camps. The Trump White House wants to put 10-15 million people in camps, ideally prior to expelling them from the country, which they can’t realistically do. I have a pessimistic prediction to make.

We pack a few million malnourished people into cramped concentration camps, which is where the next great epidemic starts. We’ll have crippled the CDC and the NIH, so we can’t treat them; in addition the administration is ideologically opposed to sane medical treatment. They are treated with horse dewormer, or whatever quackery flits through the brain of Trump or RFK jr. The great dying begins.

The reasonable response to all the corpses piling up is to build ovens in our concentration camps. The circle is complete. We will have become Nazis in everything but the name. Don’t worry about that name, though, we have an alternative all ready to go. Four letters, two syllables, our contribution to the terminology of evil: MAGA. Don’t call them Nazis, when we can accurately call them MAGA. It’s the same thing.

This is my prophecy. It is what shall be within a few years. At the same time, the USA will begin the quest for Lebensraum, I mean, “national security”. Greenland and Canada are in our sights. The wars will begin, just as they did in the 1930s.

The world can find solace in the fact that this Reich begins their expansion by gutting science and technology, crippling ourselves at the onset and telling ourselves that god is with us. As a bonus, we will have swapped out our industrial and economic strength for useless AI and cryptocurrencies.

Sorry, world.

It will always be the Gulf of Mexico to me

It got the name in the 16th century, it’s internationally accepted, but one clown thinks he has the authority to change it.

Map of the Gulf of Mexico from 1718

Unfortunately, Google is happy to cave on this issue.

Google said Monday it will change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America” in Google Maps after the Trump administration updates its “official government sources.”

The company also said it will start using the name “Mount McKinley” for the mountain in Alaska currently called Denali.

I think someone told Trump that McKinley oversaw the last surge of American territorial expansion, and he thinks he can make a name for himself by seizing real estate. Maybe someone should mention to him the end of McKinley’s story? I don’t think he read it to the end.

A bad way to defend America

the face of a moral monster

Michael Knowles, the far-right pundit on the Daily Wire, has posted a defense of Trump’s mass deportations that is basically a confession of American atrocities, and excusing them because they’re American.

I don’t know if you guys are history buffs or not. Have you ever heard of the Trail of Tears? I know a lot of people don’t defend the Trail of Tears. But that was a mass deportation. That was in, what, 1830? Have you ever heard of Operation Wetback when we actually deported a ton of Mexicans, like a 100,000 or more Mexicans? You might not defend Operation Wetback, in part because of the name because it’s an offensive word. 1954. That was a mass deportation. How about the Palmer raids of all the communists? 1919, 1920, deported, because a lot of the communists were foreigners who were in America deported lots and lots of commoners — communists, rather. How about the Japanese? We always talk about Japanese internment during World War II. You know, we also deported a lot of Japanese. Again, you might say, well, that was all really terrible. OK. But it’s American, though. We sure did. I’m noticing a trend here. How about the Haitians and the Cubans that we deported after the Mariel boatlift in 1980? That was a mass deportation. You say, well, that’s wrong. It’s anti-American — again, I know. Maybe you don’t like it. Maybe you can make an argument that some of these things were unjust. But the one thing you can’t say is that it’s un-American or anti-American.

Deportation is as American as apple pie, therefore it must be good. That’s what the right is reduced to, excusing oppression because we’ve always oppressed other people. This is the language of tyranny.

I did not realize that in this time we need to explain that the Trail of Tears was injust, that the internment of citizens of Japanese descent in WWII was evil. I missed an opportunity yesterday, then — I was lecturing on Mendel, discussing the importance of institutions that easily provide agricultural/gardening stocks that were a precondition for his experiments, and I gave personal credit to Taki and Haru Nagasawa who exposed me to nursery work when I was in high school and college. That kind of work is an important foundation for science and we don’t acknowledge it often enough. I failed to mention, though, that the Nagasawas were well-respected members of the community, who had lost everything in the internments and had to rebuild their business after the war, and that American policy had done them a deep injury.

I should have hammered on that, briefly, in the class. It would have been a natural lesson given the specific subject I was trying to get across. I didn’t think it needed to be said, but apparently I’m wrong. It’s unfortunate, because some universities are kicking out professors who mention “political” topics in the classroom, and that might be my only path to retirement. In our dismal future, informed people with historical knowledge will be prohibited from disseminating that knowledge in small classrooms to a few people at a time, while blithering idiots will be free to misinform and spread hate en masse via the internet and certain television and radio channels.

The nice thing about all-meat diets is they kill my appetite

Sometimes, I hear about other people’s diets, and I’m left somewhat nauseous. I think this one needs to be called the FAFO diet.

The Fuck Around
This guy, in his 40s, decided to try what he called a “carnivore” diet. He was eating between 6–9 pounds of cheese, sticks of butter, and burgers daily—adding extra fat to the burgers for good measure. He claimed to have dropped weight, gained energy, and experienced improved mental clarity.

The Find Out
Our dear Florida Man went to the doctor for painless yellow nodules that had developed on his elbows, palms, and the soles of his feet. He was diagnosed with a condition called xanthelasma, which basically means you have so much cholesterol in your body that excess lipids leak from your blood vessels and form deposits. While the rest of his body worked overtime to keep him alive, his total cholesterol level was over 1,000 mg/dL. For context, the “at-risk” threshold for cholesterol is 240 mg/dL.

He could just swipe his hand across a piece of toast to butter it, I guess.

My cholesterol levels are well under control, but then we don’t eat any red meat, except for an occasional Impossible Burger, and most of my protein comes from fish. Moderation in all things, you know.

I’ve long had queasy feelings about those all meat diets, anyway.

Sex combs!

I mentioned sex combs a while back, so I thought I’d clarify a bit — I hope none of you rushed out to buy one for yourself (I don’t think human sex combs exist, but if they do, I don’t need to know.) Sex combs are secondary sexual characteristics found in on the forelegs of only male Drosophilidae. They are small dark patches of bristles on the tarsus of the first leg, and they are not something you’d notice if you saw a fly buzzing in your kitchen — you have to knock them out and carefully scrutinize the limbs with a hand lens or microscope to see them, but they’re important for recognizing the sex of a fly definitively. I tell my genetics students that you can tell the sexes apart by the shape of the abdomen or the pigment patterns, but to be really sure you should check for the presence or absence of the sex combs.

Sex comb in Drosophila melanogaster male: a) front leg with sex comb marked with black arrow; b) sex comb bristles

They don’t look like much, but they also matter to female flies. Mutants or surgically modified male flies with the sex combs reduced suffer with lower reproductive success. The flies use them as gentle grasping tools to separate her wings, grasp her abdomen, and tease open the genitals, so of course they’re subject to selection. Different species of fruit flies exhibit different patterns of sex combs, and we observe natural variation within a species.

Sex comb (SC) diversity. A phylogeny of eight comb-bearing species, assuming that the montium subgroup is a sister-taxon to the
Oriental lineage, as in Kopp (2006). Branch lengths are not to scale. Note the variation in the length, size and orientation of the SCs.

Variation within and between species makes sex combs of great interest to evolutionary biologists. Here’s an illustration of the variation we can see.

Variation in sex comb tooth number and development. (A–C) Exam-
ples of Drosophilidae forelegs with long combs. (D and E) D. melanogaster
forelegs. (F–J) Schematics of foreleg development of the top Drosophila legs.
(K–O) Examples of D. melanogaster perturbations in sex comb tooth number.
(A–C and F–H) Drosophila species with long sex combs achieve vertical orien-
tation by different mechanisms: (i) Teeth initially form in a vertical orientation
(F) (e.g., D. ficusphila t1–t2); (ii) rotation of a long row (G) (e.g., D. guanche t1–t2
and D. rhopaloa t1); (iii) rotation of multiple small rows and posterior fusion
into a long sex comb (H) (e.g., D. rhopaloa t2). (D, E, I, and J) In D. melanogaster, the male sex comb rotates from a horizontal to a vertical position
(diagrammed in D), while TRs remain horizontal. The only exception is the
most distal transverse row (red dotted box in D and I), which bends proximally
close to the top part of the sex comb. In contrast, the female rows of bristles
homologous to the sex comb remain static during development (brackets in E
and J). In order to study the phenotypic and developmental effect of changing
the number of sex comb teeth, this trait was perturbed using artificial selection
(K and L), mutants (M–O), and UAS-Scr RNAi transgenic lines . Gray circles represent sex comb teeth in the initial position and
black circles represent sex comb teeth in the final position. Empty circles represent the TR bristles. Gray arrows indicate movement of individual tooth or
sex comb rows. Red brackets indicate sex combs or homologous female bristles. Red numbers represent the range of sex comb teeth in each line. babPR72, bric à bracPR72; scd, sex combs distal; Scr, sex combs reduced; t1 and t2, first and
second tarsal segment, respectively. Distal is down and posterior is to the right.
Scale bar: 20 μm.

Focus for now on the top panel on the right, which shows a male and a female foreleg. They both have hairy legs, and in the default pattern seen in the females is a series of bristles in transverse rows (TRs) in arrays marching down the leg. The flies specifically use these bristles to groom their eyes — if you look closely, flies are remarkably tidy and neat.

The TRs are illustrated diagrammatically as small open circles in rows, the base pattern. These bristles are also developmentally interesting, because the way you make a sex comb is you express a set of specific genes in the distal two rows, and the whole structure rotates 90° to form a longitudinal comb. This opens up a whole set of informative interactions — the rotation is essential for function, and is subject to constraints imposed by adjacent tissues. I’ve been reading papers for the past week focused on the developmental and evolutionary significance of this tiny, odd, little known structure in flies. You should read some of these papers, too! I’m a sucker for anything evo-devo, and that’s what this little patch of hairs illustrates.

The most complex and diverse secondary sexual character in Drosophila is the sex comb (SC), an arrangement of modified bristles on the forelegs of a subclade of male fruit flies. We examined SC formation in six representative nonmodel fruit fly species, in an effort to understand how the variation in comb patterning arises. We first compared SC development in two species with relatively small combs, Drosophila takahashii, where the SCs remain approximately transverse, and Drosophila biarmipes, where two rows of SC teeth rotate and move in an anterior direction relative to other bristle landmarks. We then analyzed comb ontogeny in species with prominent extended SCs parallel to the proximodistal axis, including Drosophila ficusphila and species of the montium subgroup. Our study allowed us to identify two general methods of generating longitudinal combs on the tarsus, and we showed that a montium subgroup species (Drosophila nikananu) with a comb convergently similar in size, orientation and position to the model organism Drosophila melanogaster, forms its SC through a different developmental mechanism. We also found that the protein product of the leg patterning gene, dachshund (dac), is strongly reduced in the SC in all species, but not in other bristles. Our results suggest that an apparent constraint on SC position in the adult may be attributable to at least two different lineage-specific developmental processes, although external forces could also play a role.

Atallah J, Liu NH, Dennis P, Hon A, and Larsen EW (2009) Developmental constraints and convergent evolution in Drosophila sex comb formation. Evolution & Development 11(2): 205-218.

Malagón JN, Ahujab A, Sivapatham G, Hung J, Leea J, Muñoz-Gómez SA, Atallah J, Singh RS, and Larsena E (2013) Evolution of Drosophila sex comb length illustrates the inextricable interplay between selection and variation www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1322342111

Anti-DEI is another word for racism and sexism

You’re sitting there trying to argue that reality isn’t what you see right there in front of your face: nah, that wasn’t a Hitler salute, nah, Trump is not a fascist, nah, opposing DEI isn’t racist, but then eventually something is going to pop up that shows you’re totally wrong and are living in denial. On that last item, there are many people arguing that getting rid of DEI will simply open the door for a meritocracy, it will get rid of all those idle wastrels who are coasting on their victimhood and are demanding special privileges.

And then…whoops. The mask slips.

The Air Force has removed training courses with videos of its storied Tuskegee Airmen and the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs — the female World War II pilots who were vital in ferrying warplanes for the military — to comply with the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

The videos were shown to Air Force troops as part of DEI courses they took during basic military training.

In a statement, the Air Force confirmed the courses with those videos had been removed and said it “will fully execute and implement all directives outlined in the Executive Orders issued by the President, ensuring that they are carried out with utmost professionalism, efficiency and in alignment with national security objectives.”

Look at these pilots from WWII.

Apparently, they weren’t brave or skilled or self-sacrificing, and their history can be discarded. You can tell because they’re black, obviously DEI hires.

Same with those women who were ferrying bombers across the Atlantic to serve in Europe.

The Air Force was wrong to resist their willingness to serve their country 80+ years ago, and they continue their shame today.

It’s genocide

We can stop arguing about the term (as we should have done long ago): Israel is committing genocide, with the enthusiastic aid of the United States.

Donald Trump has suggested large numbers of Palestinians should leave Gaza to “just clean out” the whole strip, after ordering the US military to restart shipments of 2,000lb bombs to Israel.

“Cleaning out” a whole people, driving them from their homes, and moving them into camps in another country is genocide. It’s that simple.

Couple that to the fact that he’s not sending a fleet of moving vans and a lot of prefab homes and trailers to their destination, but is instead sending 2000 pound bombs, is a huge hint that we’re not talking about a peaceful, voluntary relocation. It’s hard to get 2.3 million people to all give up their homes, much easier if we whittle the numbers down a bit. A lot.

Combine this with his hatred of DEI, his denial that trans people exist, and his inability to recognize women’s autonomy, I think it’s clear that we have a psychopath in the White House, one who has no sense of empathy and is unable to recognize the rights of other people to exist.