Is it just me or does that fish look horrified?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Has your representative accepted money from the NRA? It’s easy to find out at Who is my voice?. I discovered that my rep, Collin Peterson, did not, which is about the first good thing I’ve heard about him…although it may be because, as the representative of a small rural area, the NRA didn’t feel the need to bribe him. My senators, Franken and Klobuchar, also did not — and there, it’s safe to say, it’s because they wouldn’t support an organization that is basically Murder, Inc.
But look yours up, and if they’re free of the NRA taint, write and let them know you appreciate it. And if they are owned by the NRA, let them know of your displeasure, and most importantly, NEVER VOTE FOR THEM AGAIN.
Here’s another site that lists the recipients of NRA money. It also tells you their approval rating from the NRA, and whether they’re up for re-election.
Unfortunately, this site does say that Peterson has received NRA money. I guess I won’t be voting for him again!
A reporter got into Turkish creationist Adnan Oktar’s compound last year for an interview with him and his “kittens”. It is weirdly creepy. Oktar has surrounded himself with a bevy of young women, all obviously treated with extensive plastic surgery and heavy cosmetics, and while claiming that he’s a feminist and that all of these women are truly liberated, they mostly just sit silently and only speak when he allows them to, and what they do say is stilted and scripted. It’s actually rather scary.
The creepiest bit is that every once in a while Oktar announces that they will have music, and a speaker plays some kind of pop pablum, and all the women smile and bounce and dance in their chairs. Then the music stops and the interview resumes.
Truly gag-a-riffic. Those poor women (and also the smiling PR men around them) are thoroughly enslaved by this cult.
I’m working with a student this summer on a project to measure the dynamics of a migrating cell population, and in addition to making pretty pictures and collecting data, we’re going over papers in the scientific literature. One of those papers is about filopodia as sensors.
For those of you who don’t know your cellular anatomy, migrating cells have this kind amoeboid movement in which their cytoplasm oozes in a kind of bulk flow into expanding volumes of membrane, but they also may make long, spindly, delicate ‘antennae’ that reach out in multiple directions. These filamentous processes are called filopodia. Moving cells probe their environment by sending out these little scouts that can sense signals, either repulsive signals that tell the cell to not go that way, or attractive signals that can trigger the cell to flow in a particular direction.
The illustrations in this paper are kind of quirky, but nice. To show how cells respond to signals in the environment, they use an octopus as a stand-in for the cell, with its arms representing filopodia.
Repulsive and attractive interactions in axon pathfinding. A) Repulsive interaction. When the cell contacts the target, the forward momentum of the growth cone is halted. The movement of the veil/lamellipodium resumes at the right or left of the contact site. As a result, the growth cone turns aside. The formation and turnover of FCs within the filopodium are correlated with its behavior during this interaction. B) Attractive interaction. The cell contacts a stationary target and binds tightly to it.
Despite the blatant octopomorphization, something about this appeals to me. I’ve been describing these cells we’re watching as spidery, but clearly I’ve been using the wrong phylum as a metaphor.
I like the bandaged arm image. One of the things we’re sometimes seeing is that cells don’t just retract and limp away, sometimes they literally die and explode into little fragments. This needs an octopoid illustration.
Almost a year ago, I briefly wrote up the results of the cephalopod genome sequence— a sequence, which thanks to a few off-the-cuff, silly remarks by one of the authors, had turned into an assertion by irresponsible journalists that science had proven that octopuses were aliens. They haven’t. Researchers actually found many commonalities — cephalopods are a branch of the animal family tree, and share genes with all other organisms on the planet.
But hey, what do you know, deja vu all over again. Inanity re-emerges, with a recent article titled SCIENTISTS CONCLUDE OCTUPUS DNA IS NOT FROM THIS WORLD.
Thanks to the first-ever full genome sequence, researchers have found that octopuses (NOT Octopi) are in fact entirely different from any other animals on our planet. Their genome shows a never-before-seen level of complexity with a staggering 33,000 protein-coding genes identified, more than in a human being.
US researcher Dr. Clifton Ragsdale, from the University of Chicago, said: The octopus appears to be utterly different from all other animals, even other molluscs, with its eight prehensile arms, its large brain, and its clever problem-solving abilities.
“The late British zoologist Martin Wells said the octopus is an alien. In this sense, then, our paper describes the first sequenced genome from an alien.”
What Wells said is what is known on planet Earth as a “joke”. An exaggeration for humorous effect.
Apparently, scientists have just proven that journalists are aliens, lacking normal human feeling and appearing incapable of comprehending the behavior of bipedal mammals.
They are also prone to lying.
Octopuses have an alien genetic baggage. The scientific report mainly concluded that Octopuses share ‘Alien’ genes.This has been a ground shaking claim in the scientific community which caused an upheaval among marine biologists who seemed to be shocked and intrigued at the same time.
None of this is true at all.
Casey Coates Danson, you are an incompetent, dishonest hack. Resign from your job. Never ever even attempt any science reporting ever again.
One of the blogs here, New Frontier, is experimental: we bring in people who want to try their hand at this bloggery thing, and put them in that group blog, and give them an opportunity to see if it all works out for them. It’s a way to try out people who may not have much of a track record yet, but look promising.
Those of you who’ve been following the prolific Siobhan on that blog will be pleased to know they’ve been bumped up to their own independent blog: check out Against the Grain.
I saw X-Men: Apocalypse tonight. It sank in about 20 minutes into the movie that this wasn’t a story about people, but about gods fighting incomprehensible battles with each other. So we had one set of gods exerting their will and destroying human civilization all around the world (one lesson from all of these X-Movies: Magneto really hates bridges), and then some other gods opposing them with the force of their will, and then someone yells “UNLEASH YOUR POWER!” at one of the other gods, and a bad god gets magically zapped. That’s really it. There’s no interesting personalities interacting, and each escalation in the conflict is resolved by another mutant grunting really loudly and waving their hands.
Oh, and along the way, Cairo and all of its inhabitants are casually annihilated. No one seems to care.
That’s the other thing about gods. In addition to being mind-numbing and unimaginative, even the good ones aren’t very nice.
A conservative wackaloon who is very concerned about who uses the bathroom dares us: How to Stump a Liberal: Are Sex Chromosomes Real?. Wow. Do they really think that most of us would be baffled by that question?
The basis of their belief that we can’t answer it is, of all the ludicrous sources, Camille Paglia.
In a 2013 debate at American University, dissident feminist Camille Paglia told a remarkable story of an argument she had with fellow feminists in the early 1970s. When she remarked that males and females have hormonal differences, her colleagues told her that hormones are not real, they were only made up by a conspiracy of male scientists.
Is it possible that Paglia was among a group of left-wing loons? Yes, they exist. Is that view representative of most liberals or most feminists? No, it is not.
I hate it. Mainly because I get swamped with people asking me to explain crap, and even more, because there’s a whole lot of people who enthusiastically embrace the crap. The crap in question is this press release from the University of Leiden, Second layer of information in DNA confirmed.
The press release is bullshit, OK? But for some reason, people really want to hear that there is some other magical kind of external information that, I don’t know, frees them from the tyranny of genetics, or something. See also epigenetics, which also appeals to the lay public for all the wrong reasons. The paper isn’t talking about a “second layer of information” — it’s talking about mechanical effects of the nucleotide sequence. That’s it. Everyone can calm down now.
There’s been another mass shooting, at a night club in Florida, with about 20 dead so far. There is something rotten in the USA, and part of it has to be this culture that regards owning an assault rifle as a right, and the use of that weapon as an expression of masculine power.
It needs to stop.
The only problem is that trying to take their guns away sets the gun-fondlers to squealing as if they’re threatened with castration, and the glinty-eyed madmen at the NRA get more money thrown at them to buy up congress. Maybe what we also need is huge reforms in campaign finance so that our representatives would listen more to the people who are moaning in fear in the electorate, than to the smug parasites with bags of money.
Because you know already that no government, state or federal, is going to change a damn thing now.
More information is trickling out. The death toll is up to 50, and the shooter is named Omar Mateen. The story is that he was infuriated to have seen two men kissing.
Now the take-away from all that should be that a) assault rifles in the hands of a single madman can cause horrific casualties, and b) this was a hate crime against the gay community. Unfortunately, I predict that all that will reverberate through the media is that he had an Islamic name, therefore we’ve got to do something about the Muslims.
The narrative has been set. The headline on CNN right now is “GUNMAN WAS PRO-ISIS”.
Jake Tapper wants you to be sure to know that this was caused by radical Islam.
“There are a lot of members of that community and supporting friends and family who are very worried,” Tapper explained. “Obviously if this was radical Islam, which the special agent in charge of the FBI suggested it may have been, that is a community that has been under siege from radical Islam.”
Do they even know that this hatred of LGBTQ people is a property held in common by radical Islam and radical Christianity? Except of course that radical Islam is thankfully marginalized in the US, while radical Christianity is happily legislating against queers from a position of power.
Governor Rick Scott doesn’t want to say openly that this was an attack on the gay community, and thinks the proper response is to “pray”.
Fuck “thoughts and prayers”.
