The female reproductive system has two ovaries (singular: ovary). These have two functions:

Each ovary is connected to the uterus by an oviduct.. The oviduct is lined with cilia, which are tiny hairs on cells. As part of the menstrual cycle, an ovum develops, becomes mature and is released from an ovary. The cilia move the ovum along the oviduct and into the uterus.

The uterus is a muscular bag with a soft lining. The uterus is where a baby develops until birth. The cervix is a ring of muscle at the lower end of the uterus. It keeps the baby in place during pregnancy.

The vagina is a muscular tube that leads from the cervix to the outside of the body. A penis goes into the vagina during sexual reproduction. This is also where menstrual blood leaves the body and where a baby exits during birth.

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Human reproduction - Reproduction - KS3 Biology - BBC ...

Its always good to get in a bit of intellectual fodder amongst the mince pies over the festive season, although I wouldnt necessarily recommend mixing the two. Not least with this fascinating exhibition at Surgeons Hall which would almost definitely allow you to trace the journey of any fictional mince pie down the oesophagus and beyond and in somewhat lurid detail. A Model Education is a temporary exhibition in the Surgeons Hall Museum galleries charting the influence of art on the teaching of anatomy.

It has its roots in the Surgeons Hall collections, which date back to its inception some 500 years ago. Sixteenth century illustrated anatomical atlases are shown here alongside models made in later centuries from wax, plaster of Paris and even papier mache, which, despite what ones own attempts in the school room might once have suggested, allows for deeply detailed reproduction.

There is even a somewhat unusual wooden kidney. The exhibition was the brainchild of curator Louise Wilkie, who researched the art historical aspect of anatomical illustration, scouring archives of many institutions for the exhibition. There are works on loan here, in something of a first for the museum, from the Hunterian in Glasgow, The Anatomical Museum at the University of Edinburgh, the Gordon Museum of Pathology at Kings College London, the Whipple Museum of the History of Science at Cambridge University, and the University of Aberdeen.

Each collection has specialist materials that tell the story of a practical yet often surprisingly beautiful artform that developed, loosely, in 16th century Italy when the hegemony of Ancient Greek theoretical knowledge of the anatomy, still used some 1000 years later, was broken by the likes of Vasalius, an anatomist who dissected whilst artists drew from life, tempering the somewhat brutal effect by placing the figures artfully against a classical landscape.

They all look rather thoughtful, laughs Thomas Elliott, Head of Learning and Interpretation. It was about softening down the harshness of the dissection room, whereas in Britain by the late 18th to early 19th century there was a real move to get anatomical accuracy, even though the illustrations were more gruesome.

But the anatomical depictions of Vaselius were hugely influential in the move towards observation from life and away from the more theoretical knowledge that had been handed down from Antiquity, a result of and a feeding in to the thirst for exploration of every aspect of human life in Renaissance Italy, from the depiction of the human form and in this they did look back to the artistic refinement of the Classical era to the mysteries of the human body.

Elliott talks me through the star exhibits, which include the Royal College of Surgeons own proof copy of Grays Anatomy, annotated with suggestions for amendments by Gray himself before publication in 1858. There are late 18th century wax models by the anatomist Joseph Towne, whoe worked for Guys Hospital in London. Wax models usually came from Italy. We have a dissected head and torso you see the head bilaterally dissected and see the outer surface on one side and the inner on other. The torso is opened up to show the main organs.

It was about showing medical students what to expect. The issue with the historical study of anatomy, which these types of models evolved to overcome, was twofold. Cadavers were in short supply in the 18th century. There was a moral and legal question mark over the supply of bodies, and public perception was that this was something untoward. Then, there was no refrigeration, so even if you could run an anatomical class, there would be problems of putrefaction after the body was dissected. Models had more permanence, and they were remarkably accurate.

Elliotts favourites are the papier mache models made by the French anatomist Thomas Louis Auzoux in the late 18th century in a factory in Normandy where he started mass production of models that were sent to medical schools around the world. Theyre stunning, says Elliott. Surgeons Hall has an Auzoux mini-figure that breaks down in to 92 pieces, all labelled and designed to be passed around by students, so that they could disassemble and reassemble the figure, and get a hands on feel for anatomy.

About ten years ago I was in France and found a museum dedicated to his work. They were full size papier mache human anatomy figures, made up of hundreds of detachable pieces, and other things too a massive snail and a spider, botanical models, all highly detailed. The workmanship and level of skill was staggering.

The anatomical models were designed to be reused, so the fact that we have so many still in existence some 130 years later speaks to the craftsmanship involved.

A Model Education, Surgeons Hall Museums, Nicholson Street, Edinburgh, 0131 527 1711/1600, http://www.rcsed.ac.uk Until 26 Jun 2022 (Closes for Christmas at 3pm on 24 Dec; reopens 5 Jan 2022) Daily 10am - 5pm, Admission included in entry ticket price to Surgeons Hall 8/4.50

Critic's Choice:

THE HQ of the Scottish Ornithologists Club is housed in a lovely building just outside Aberlady, and whilst its excellent shop contains everything from bird-related Christmas decorations to binoculars and a fantastic selection of second hand bird books, its exhibition space, looking out over the reeds towards the sea, has an ever-changing roster of exhibitions, each of which interpret the bird world through different eyes. This month, and until January 9th, its the turn of East Lothian-based artist Darren Woodhead, who works in watercolour in the field painting birds as he encounters them in all weathers. It has always been Woodheads way, painting directly in watercolour, the resulting images both impressionistic and evocative, whilst having an accuracy in terms of bird behaviour and plumage that comes from a lifetimes enthusiasm and knowledge. Many of the paintings, all of which are for sale, were completed in this last year, as we cycled through lockdowns although Woodhead, quite literally, did so on his bike, painting supplies on his back. All local birds are here, from the brilliance of an unexpected kingfisher to the tumble of thrushes over a winter hedgerow. Although the world has changed, my need to observe, document and record through watercolour has not. Even more so now, it is my escape, my sense of serenity and belonging. Many of the paintings have stemmed from observing birds in the garden or from one man on his bike trips in the field. Here, I could immerse myself in the changing seasons and the parallel natural world, and feel the ultimate connection to my subject, close to home.

Close to Home, Scottish Ornithologists Club, Waterston House, Aberlady, East Lothian, 01875 871330 http://www.the-soc.org.uk, Until 9 Jan, Weds Sun, 10am 4pm, Closed 25 Dec 2 Jan

Don't Miss

AS around the country, An Tobar mounts its Annual Open Exhibition in time for the festive season, a celebration of artistic work from the area. The theme this year, open to interpretation and all-comers, selected, is Hidden. In tandem, a wonderful exhibition of painted bones and bone jewellery from the talented children of Dervaig Primary School, who have also created workshop films to illuminate the whole.

Hiddden/Bones, An Tobar, Argyll Terrace, Tobermory, Mull, 01688 302211, http://www.comar.co.uk Until Mar 11 2022, Tues - Sat, 10am - 4pm

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Galleries: New exhibition explores intimate relationship of art and anatomy - HeraldScotland

The shredded plastic shopping bag caught on a fence or shrub is just the tip of the iceberg in an ocean of icebergs. One obstacle to raising awareness of the environmental and health costs associated with plastics is their invisibility. The amount of plastic accumulating in the environment has significantly increased in the past 15 years, but we seem to have grown numb to the waste.

The petrochemical industry reports that the world produced 260 million tons of plastics in 2016 and could produce 460 million tons per year by 2030 continuing the steep increase in output. The industry is reluctantly admitting that their products pose serious environmental problems. Public outcry is growing, and leaders are now forced to consider the future of single-use product disposal.

One strategy is small niche recycling which does not require changing the chemical structure of the material, although all recycling releases toxic materials.

Over half of all plastics are designed for single use, meaning we can effect change through our purchasing decisions. But responsibility also lies with the petrochemical industry, which continues to create new applications for single use plastics that we could live without. Bottled water contains twice the density of microplastics as tap water, according to studies conducted at Penn State University and elsewhere.

Microplastics are found in food that is difficult to rinse out, such as chicken and seafood, as well as the fishmeal fed to other animals. Microplastics removed by water treatment plants are found in the biosludge that is often spread on corn fields, where their quantity appears to be increasing and long-lasting. Significant amounts of microplastics have been found in the air, including in remote mountain regions, in every study conducted thus far.

A study of smallmouth bass in the Susquehanna River and Pine Creek conducted by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, Susquehanna University, and the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission reported that the number of microplastics found in the fish sampled increased dramatically in three years.

In 2017, 87.5% of the fish had 2.3 microplastics per fish, in 2018, 95.5% had 6.2 microplastics per fish, and in 2019, 100% had 28.9 microplastics per fish. Multiple causes are possible, but in the end, the fish are eating plastics. Therefore, fish predators, including human beings, are also eating plastics.

Plastics production depends on extracting petroleum and gas from the ground, and chemically transforming the molecules into strongly linked chains whose properties change when other chemicals are added.

These products, so useful in our daily lives, are also very damaging to the environment, both the production method and the products themselves have long-lasting harmful impact on the environment. Chemists know that plastics are stressors for all forms of life, and pollute waters, degrade habitats, harm wildlife, and endanger peoples health. Visible plastics break down into microplastics, which affect the growth, reproduction, and species interactions for those ingesting the microplastics which include humans and aquatic life, due to the omnipresence of plastics in our waters, air and lands, and in the food web.

Carol Armstrongs experience with plastic pollution is as secretary of the Friends of Heinz Refuge, as a frequent stream monitor, as a PennState Ext. Master Watershed Steward, and as a member of her towns Environmental Advisory Committee. Lana Gulden, president of Susquehanna Valley Progress, is involved in numerous environmental and civic organizations in the area.

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Plastics and our fate | Opinion | dailyitem.com - Sunbury Daily Item

To summarize: The recently conceived embryo must signal its presence to the mother, and a successful pregnancy can only establish when the signal preserves production of a pro-pregnancy hormone, progesterone, from a gland on the ovary called the corpus luteum. Progesterone from the corpus luteum in turn prompts the uterus to secrete nourishing factors that support the developing pregnancy.

Sometimes, there's a "miscommunication" between the developing embryo and the mother, resulting in the corpus luteum dying, progesterone levels dropping and the loss of the pregnancy.

For female dairy cows, the likelihood of this miscommunication has increased, resulting in fewer pregnancies. It's speculated that slower developing embryos miss their window of opportunity and fail to establish the maternal recognition of pregnancy. Burns and Haughian believe that omega-3 fatty acids could "extend the window" of time for perfectly healthy, yet slow growing, embryos to be recognized, resulting in more successful pregnancies.

"It's been documented that we do see an increase in pregnancy outcomes with the supplementation of omega-3 containing fish byproducts to the diet, and we're really interested in fine-tuning the mechanisms to make it even more efficient," Burns said.

Because the embryo is developing slowly, the mother cow doesn't recognize she's pregnant, so she naturally signals from the uterus to kill the corpus luteum gland, which resets her cycle and inadvertently also kills the embryo. The uterine hormone that ultimately kills the gland and the underdeveloped embryo is prostaglandin. Supplementing omega-3 fatty acids appears to shield the gland from prostaglandin, allowing the embryo more time to develop and be recognized, resulting in more successful pregnancies.

"Because the embryo develops slowly, the mother thinks she's not pregnant and, thus, releases the prostaglandin signal to kill the gland, and once the gland's going, then the embryo's also going [to die]" said Burns. "What we're trying to do is widen this window of opportunity so that if by chance mom makes a mistake and releases the prostaglandin hormone, then we can better protect the gland from the first initial signal with the use of omega-3 fatty acids in order to give the developing embryo more time to signal to its mother that she's still pregnant."

If Burns and Haughian's research proves positive, then dairy farmers and cattle ranchers could see an increase in profits that would then trickle down to consumers as cost-savings when purchasing milk and beef products.

"By increasing pregnancy outcomes, by say, 10%, this translates to an increase of profitability for American ranchers and dairy farmers in the millions of dollars in meat and dairy products," Burns said.

Another benefit is applying this research to other fields of biology. "You often also learn something about the way humans operate, as well," Haughian said. "In some ways, we know more about how we, as humans, reproduce due to work done in cattle, sheep, pigs, etc. There's this ultimate benefit to better understand human reproductive processes."

Burns and Haughian have partnered with Colorado State University's Animal Reproduction and Biotechnology Laboratory to house, care and feed the animals the omega-3 rich fish byproducts for their research. They're also conducting research in their lab at UNC with the help of numerous UNC undergraduate and graduate students.

"This gives an opportunity for undergraduates to participate in authentic research experiences and an opportunity to work with large, domestic farm animals," said Burns. "It allows these students to get into the laboratory and develop hands-on laboratory skills."

The research's first trial is set to begin in March, dependent on public health guidelines due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

About the GrantProject Title: Influence Of Fish Oil On Corpus Luteum FunctionGrant Awards and Funding Agencies: $500,000 four-year grant from the USDA's National Institute of Food and AgricultureResearchers: Patrick Burns (principal investigator) and James Haughian (co-principal investigator)Student Researchers: Anika Shelrud, Grace Kochman, Winford Rule, Hayley Stauber, Travis Kinn, Kathy Mireles, Aubrey Chacon, Natalia Sheppard, Allison Updike and Cam HuberMore information about the grant

Contact: Katie Corder Public Relations Strategist [emailprotected]

SOURCE University of Northern Colorado

http://www.unco.edu

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US Department of Agriculture Awards UNC Grant to Improve Pregnancy Outcomes in Dairy and Beef Cows - PRNewswire

The next crop of calves is what keeps the cattle industry in business. Knowing this, a Texas A&M University study aims to reduce reproduction failure, which can cause a significant loss to the U.S. beef industry.

Rebecca Poole, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research associate in theCollege of Agriculture and Life SciencesDepartment of Animal Science, has received a two-year grant from theU.S. Department of AgricultureNational Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Pooles project, Hormonal and Immunological Influences on the Uterine Microbiome in Cattle, is aimed at developing a better understanding of the relationship between reproductive hormones and immune changes as well as the microbiome of the reproductive tract in beef cattle.

Like a fertility clinic for humans its the same idea, just bringing it to the beef cattle world, Poole said. They have found there are a lot of relationships between the microbiome of the reproductive tract and fertility in women, and so the research has continued from there to establish the understanding of microbiomes in other species, like our livestock.

She said now that the technology is available to better understand the microbiome, its a great time to work in this area of research. Microbiome research in the past was dependent on being able to culture certain bacteria in a petri dish, but that was a limiting factor, because only about 1% of the bacteria can be cultured.

Now, using a sequencing-type approach, we are able to determine all the bacteria in a certain environment, Poole said.

Poole said the presence and activity of symbiotic bacteria in the reproductive tract and its effects on fertility is relatively unknown in cattle, and so that is where she will concentrate her research.

She believes that variation in reproductive hormone secretion and/or immune function control the bacterial species diversity in the uterus, which subsequently affects pregnancy establishment and maintenance in beef cattle.

The producer doesnt necessarily need to understand the different types of bacteria, Poole said. My research will take the concepts the producers understand along the lines of the estrous cycle, estrous synchronization protocols, and reproductive hormones; and I will see how those relate to the microbiome so that we can find ways to potentially manipulate it, from a hormonal standpoint, to create a healthy microbiome to establish a pregnancy.

She said she will be using standard estrous synch protocols that producers are used to, such as using GnRH or prostaglandin injections to create a high estrogen or high progesterone environment and seeing how that manipulates the bacterial species.

We have found differences between cattle that are essentially able to establish a pregnancy versus those that do not, differences in their uterine microbiome before breeding, Poole said. So really we are just trying to figure out if there are other mechanisms that are controlling that microbiome, like reproductive hormones, and also the immune system is another component that is most likely involved with changes in the microbiome.

Pooles project further contributes to the Department of Animal Sciences Areas of Excellence pregnancy and developmental programming,which emphasizes an increased understanding of animal reproduction at molecular, cellular and whole animal levels.

The first objective of this project is to look at the relationship between differing levels of reproductive hormones and the reproductive microbiome prior to breeding. The second objective is to look at the relationship between the immune system and reproductive microbiome.

Poole said she will be collecting samples over the next month and will artificially inseminate the cows and then begin looking at pregnancy results. She expects by the end of summer to have results that will help begin establishing the relationship between the reproductive hormones and the reproductive microbiome.Poole holds a blood collection tube post-centrifugation. The tube is coated with sodium heparin for the extraction of plasma (yellow portion) which can be used for hormone detection assays.

This will help us gain a better understanding of what is influencing the reproductive tract microbiome in cattle and help us focus on improving fertility in beef cattle through enhance management practices, she said. The ultimate goal is to increase the sustainability of the animal production industry.

Poole said in addition to this research, she is a part of another project looking at nutritional effects on the microbiome, and that should be available around the same time.

So, our suggestions to producers could be based on nutrition or it could be a hormonal thing, which means we suggest they take a blood sample at a certain point in time to see where a cow stands is she a good contender for breeding based on her hormone concentrations? she said. It may mean, for example, suggesting the use of cattle heat detection patches, which is an indication of estrogen concentrations at breeding.

Poole said knowing this information will allow producers to feel more comfortable at the time of breeding based on information of the cows reproductive hormones, which will indicate what its reproductive microbiome looks like.

Not every producer will utilize this information not those, for example, who just turn the bull out in the pasture and hope for the best, she said. This would be geared toward someone who has an extensive management program of some kind, utilizing estrous synchronization and artificial insemination.

Based on my results, I can provide suggestions for producers and say, you need to take a blood sample at this time, and lets look at her reproductive hormone concentrations or her immune cell levels and see if her uterine microbiome environment is acceptable for breeding, Poole said. Again, it is like the human fertility clinic, and we can estimate likelihood of establishing a pregnancy.

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Calves on the Ground Put Money in the Pocket - Drovers Magazine

By Ayomi Wolff, Madison365

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MADISON, WI (365 Media Foundation, Inc) As the full-time caretaker for her grandson, Patricia Dillon began to notice early on the ways in which his life was affected by his fathers incarceration.

I was interested in community supports for children affected by incarceration, she tells Madison365. I knew there was a Just Dane mentoring program, but I was really curious to know if children affected by incarceration was something that the schools were acknowledging.

The answer was no.

Upon further research into the subject for an Isthmus article, Dillon found that children with parents who are incarcerated are dealing with a whole battery of issues, suffering from higher risk-aversechildhood experiences (ACEs), such as living with a parent who has a mental health disorder, a drug addiction, or who is abusive; living in foster care; or houselessness. Said children also tend to perform poorly in school than their peers who live without a parent in the prison system. And it is no secret that incarceration rates disproportionately affect BIPOC families and children.

According to Linda Ketcham, executive director of Just Dane, it is estimated that in 2018, approximately 2,000 children in Dane County have a parent who is incarcerated.

Im an artist and a writer, and Im kind of a community organizer, too, and I knew that I could create a program that connects these kids to their larger community, Dillon said. We are a cultural art program, but the bigger overarching mission is to create a sense of wellbeing for these children through a connection to their community.

What then came into fruition was Dillons current program, Cultural Connections, a program that uses art as a tool, a program to lessen the trauma for these kids and connect them to their communities so that they feel a sense of belonging and less stigma.

The program first began in 2018 with a project conducted out of Dane Arts Mural Arts (DAMA) and was soon after picked up by Lake View Elementary to be a club affiliated with the school. Last year, members of Cultural Connections worked with multiple groups of children including Lake View students and kids from the Goodman Community Center. Starting this upcoming school year, Cultural Connections will be working with five schools across the local Madison area, tentatively.

Most Cultural Connections sessions begin with the introduction of a topic relating to racism or incarceration to encourage discussion around prompting the kids, if they so please, to wrestle with these topics through art. Occasionally, the kids will take field trips to different art spaces.

The kids have already created tangible pieces of art, the most recent of which is a mural made in partnership with DAMA to be erected at the Madisons Youth Arts Center. The mural features multiple designs and patterns made by the students.

According to Miranda Starr, Cultural Connections not only works to give kids the tools to understand the ways in which the prison system has affected their own lives, but to help humanize those who are or have been incarcerated.

So like starting to talk about how is [incarceration] portrayed and do you think thats real and. you know. just trying to build some compassion and humanity about that life experience and those that are affected by it, Starr said. I find that just to be such a beautiful opportunity to try to break some of the stigmas.

However, despite the prevalence of incarceration in the lives of many of the participating children, the topic of incarceration and its inextricable link to racism still remains a topic of nondiscussion.

Its so funny too because we talk about diversity and we talk about skin tone, but somehow incarceration still is this really taboo subject. Ive experienced families who say your dads in college somewhere. We cant even tell our children the truth about what their families are experiencing, Starr said. Ive always questioned that like: why do mothers feel like they cant share about a family member? Why do we create stories for children?

But at Cultural Connections, there are no stories. They are free to choose whether to speak or not to speak about what they have in common which, according to Dillon, is a point of interest for most of the kids.

I like that we can talk about that we all have something in common, but also that if we dont want to talk, we can express ourselves through what were working on, Dillon said, paraphrasing a comment made by one of the students. Another kid said, I just need to get away from my family They all just talked about [how] we feel safe. Some of the kids said, we dont talk about this with our friends. A couple of the kids said they have very close friends they share that with but its just a stigma-free environment.

Its an idea of creating a safe space and theres a beautiful freedom that artists come in and then theres always an opportunity for kids not to do like a molded reproduction but self-expression, Starr added.

After a year of running her program by herself, Dillon came to understand that she alone could not be the sole facilitator of the safe space she had created; she as a white woman could not be the one to help navigate these children as they produce art and grapple with their connections to incarceration. As such, Dillon added to her program one of the key aspects of Cultural Connections: having various BIPOC artists as the teachers.

[White people] never stopped learning, like never, Dillon explained. We are so conditioned to be white supremacists that we just the more woke you think you are, the less woke you are but, eventually, you come out of that because you realize the more comfortable you become with your work, the more work you have to do.

Its really important to me that Im working with people of color because the children that we serve are primarily children of color, she continued. I have a very diverse board of really just wonderful people who either have been affected by incarceration or they have worked with the population. And so they help inform the work that we do. Its really important that we are inclusive and diverse and our mission is to create access.

One of the many BIPOC artists who worked with the program was Terrence Adeyanju, who himself was formerly incarcerated. What intrigued him about working with the students was seeing myself in those kids and having someone to not make them not feel alienated about their experiences and to create a safe place.

Terrence Adeyanju (photo supplied)

Someone that looked like me creating or doing anything like that when I was growing up I didnt see that, Adeyanju said. And so, it would have given me a lot of hope that Im not alone and that I can do these things because I didnt see a lot of that growing up a lot of Black creatives in what I like to do. Seeing someone do that, it gives me confirmation that I can step into this power, too. I think its super important that the kids see that, especially the ones that look like me. I know what its like to be them and what its like to be marginalized. I know what its like to live in a society that tricks you into not being yourself.

Theres so many things telling you cannot do these things and get in line and do this .. you need to do this and you need to be like this to be accepted and its BS, Adeyanju continued. You just get convinced out of your power. So there are many sick messages in the media and all types of things; there are things that are passed down that we dont even know and that were not questioning at all, that are just doing serious damage.

Another of the programs initiatives is the notion of connecting their kids to the broader Madison community which, as Starr noted, often ostracizes its BIPOC citizens.

There is an isolation of populations of color and there are disproportionate effects in the city in different ways. Theres this idea that this is such a rich city, but in working with families in this community really closely, Ive heard firsthand accounts of experiences theyve had in certain public spaces in the community, Starr said. Ive heard the fear of going to events, going to street festivals, all these things that make people love Madison for, right? And so, number one, this idea about connecting our kids to the city is I want them to be able to see themselves in these spaces. We want to provide access to these spaces. We talked about trying to get our families into the space, where in the past, theres been fear associated with going into those spaces where they may not have felt welcomed.

So the idea of connecting with the community and giving them a place to display their work and see their work in the community is really with the hope that they recognize that they play a big part. They are the future of the city, and this is their home, Starr continued.

This summer, the Cultural Connections team will be creating a curriculum based on the social justice standards from Teaching Tolerance. This curriculum will be used solely for the Cultural Connections to help inform their work in a culturally conscious manner.

I am not a teacher, I dont know how to write a curriculum, but I knew that there had to be an intentionally socially responsible kind of template, Dillon said. It was Mirandas idea that we develop like a menu item. We will also create an allyship [portion] to support those kids through the kids who have never been affected.

So that next year, we can go to our artists and say, this is what were trying to do. This is how we like the template to be. You do the creative stuff were not going to tell you how to do your creative work, but we want that work, if its comfortable, to fit into our mission, Dillon added.

In addition to the curriculum, starting next school year, Dr. Julie Poehlmann-Tynan, professor of human development and family studies in the UW School of Human Ecology, and a team of graduate students will be researching Cultural Connections and its effects on the kids participating.

Serendipitously, Dr. Poehlmann-Tynans work was what informed Dillon about the ill effects of incarcerated parents on their children.

So part of working with the UW is great because we really want to be able to see if these programs are having an impact on how our families and the students in these programs, how theyre feeling before and after, do they really feel like they have some greater sense of connection to the community? Dillon said.

However, Adeyanju noted that there is still a lot of work to be done in the way of creating access and mitigating harm for individuals impacted by incarceration.

Its still gonna be a lot of work because you got people that dont want to do the work, you know, because were talking about people that have to question their beliefs and be willing to question their own belief systems and their own prejudices and people are terrified to do that, he says. And I get it.

But at the very least, Adeyanju was just happy to work with the young people at Cultural Connections.

Just being around kids just brings you to the present moment like no other, he said. Theyre so high energy and theyre just really there, they dont have that block that I do when it comes to creativity. Theyre not overthinking as much. So its very playful and so for me, thats beautiful.

It felt like it was a healing space and I felt like they got to release something that they were holding on to and I got to release something and we let it go, and the rest is history, Adeyanju added. And, hopefully, we can impact each other and. hopefully. that means whatever it means for them.

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Cultural Connections connects children affected by incarceration with opportunities in arts, academia - KTVZ

On average, humans cut down 2,400 trees each minute for expanding farmland and neighborhoods. This increases our risk of being exposed to animal-borne diseases, according to a study published in the journal Nature. Researchers found that, compared to untouched land, heavily-modified natural landscapes are breeding grounds for animals that carry disease-causing viruses and bacteria.

As humans continue to transform forest land into farms and suburban housing, we cause many animals to disappear from their natural habitat. Some animals are negatively impacted if their main survival resources are removed. However, some species do better when wild habitats are disrupted. They often thrive in places where humans live. The researchers set out to understand whether these animals are more likely to carry pathogens that are harmful to humans.

Researchers in the study first used a database called PREDICTS, which stands for Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems. This was their first step toward understanding why this happens. The PREDICTS database contains detailed information of the locations where various research studies found different species. This database helps us to analyze how different animal species respond to changes brought by humans in their habitat.

To make the PREDICTS database, researchers used information from other studies that had information about the species present in a location. For each of those studies, they classified the locations according to what they are used for untouched forests, forests recovering after logging, plantation forest, cropland, pasture, and urban. They classified the land by how heavily it is used for that purpose minimal, light, or intense.

The researchers used the PREDICTS database to see which animal species were more likely to be found in areas with a lot of people. Indeed, they did find that some species were more common in those areas than other species. Then they used other databases to look up those animals, to see if they were also known to carry human diseases. Animals that carry human diseases were referred to as host species and those that dont are referred to as non-host species. They used a strict definition of a host which was when a species either got sick from a disease causing pathogen, or if the species was found to carry the pathogen, even if it doesnt get sick from it.

Their dataset contained associations between 3,883 animal species and 5,694 pathogens. An association between an animal and a pathogen means that the animal was found to be capable of hosting a pathogen that can infect humans. But, it doesnt necessarily mean that the pathogens will be transmitted to humans.

Some species were not associated with any pathogens at all. This may simply be because there havent been enough studies done on those species. To account for this possibility, the researchers used a statistical method called bootstrapping. For example, if a particular kind of mouse was not associated with any pathogens, but a related species of that mouse had been studied more thoroughly and found to be a host, that mouse would also be classified as a host.

The decision to reclassify an animal as a host was not arbitrary. Bootstrapping is a mathematical procedure. The researchers began by stating two reasons that an animal might be misclassified as a non-host that animal might not be a host very often among others of its kind, and it might not be found to harbor human pathogens very often when it is studied. The researchers considered the probabilities of these two reasons when recalculating their classifications.

After building this dataset, they analyzed it to see if disturbed and undisturbed land had species differences. Overall, their analysis showed that in areas where land has been converted from forests to agricultural and urban lands, the species that are able to survive these changes are more likely to carry human pathogens. There were 21-144% more wildlife species that are known to carry human pathogens in human-inhabited lands than in non-inhabited areas.

Many of these disease-carrying species, such as rodents, bats, and perching birds, are small, highly mobile, and reproduce very quickly. They experience huge population increases in human-altered landscapes. The researchers suggest that it is possible that these species shorter generation times and higher reproduction make it easier for them to adapt to changes from human activity compared to large mammals.

Finding places on Earth for humans to live can be challenging in densely populated areas. To build and expand cities, humans will inevitably continue to alter natural landscapes, increasing our risk of exposure to wild animals that carry human diseases. This research was conducted to understand how human activities affect the environment, and how these decisions impact us in return.

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Small animals that carry disease adapt well to our activities A study suggests that small mammals - Sciworthy

A year ago, the number of Americans working from home stood at just under five million. These days, its up around 70 million. Thats hard to process. We moved almost half the nations workforce home in a matter of months. And while some still treat it like a temporary measure water cooler chat now is just Zoom riffs on the question When do you think were going back? any shift that seismic comes with a measure of permanence.

Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom expects the WFH era to outlive the reign of COVID-19. One survey, which he conducted with the Atlanta Federal Reserve and the University of Chicago, found that even after the pandemic dust settles, most top firms plan to keep employees home one to three days a week. That will change the world. Corporations will reconsider the value of a downtown high-rise. Workers without fast home internet will be left behind. Transit services will need to reconfigure their long-term goals.

Thats big-picture stuff. But extending telecommuting will result in countless tiny consequences, too some of them alarming. Just look at the habits youve picked up during quarantine. Are you prepared to keep them for years? Like, snacking all day. Checking emails hours after you logged off. Or working with your computer balancing on your lap.

Im especially guilty of that last one. Sometimes, in order to get my act together and draft an email, I need a change of scenery. There are only so many options in the house, so I move from the desk to the couch. Other days I climb back into bed (or put off ever leaving it), in order to get work done. I would guess Im not the only one. But is that a good idea, really? Is it okay to have a hot machine sitting directly atop your nether regions for hours at a time?

In the past, this wasnt much of a problem because it wasnt much of an option. Unless you worked in one of those open-floor startups, chances are you werent putting your feet up on a poof during the workday. But in a world that seems determined to not go back to normal, its important to know how a consistent laptop-on-lap routine could affect the body. Below, we break down four side effects commonly associated with the practice, and your risk of each.

Michael Oxendine/Unsplash

Male infertility is the first issue that comes to mind here. Theres a reason for that. In 2005, Human Reproduction published a study titled: Increase in scrotal temperature in laptop computer users. The conclusion was laptops could raise the temperature of a lap by five degrees Fahrenheit. Remember what laptops looked like in 2005, though? They were as thick as textbooks. Their cooling systems were useless.

A 2011 study, meanwhile, found that heat from a laptop could raise the temperature of yourscrotumby up to 2.8 degrees Fahrenheit. To be sure, any heating of that area is not a great idea; your testicles dangle for good reason sperm production occurs at around 93.2F. Thats well below the normal body temperature of 98.6F. The more sperm you make, the better chance you have that a few of them will be properly-shaped, straight swimmers.

But for years now, urologists have agreed that sitting with a laptop over your pants will not be the reason you lose fertility. That information hasnt exactly filtered its way through the public yet. Perhaps people have been reticent to ask, fearful that the answer they might hear. If youre struggling with fertility, you probably shouldnt plant something hot on your privates why risk it? but that falls in the category of low-caliber behavioral changes, like opting to wear loose-fitting boxers to bed.

There are larger forces at play that will damage your sperm count. Like obesity, drug or alcohol abuse, chromosomal defects, prior surgeries, and infections. If working with a laptop is going to lower your sperm count, itll be from working at night and missing out on sleep. Graveyard shifts have been linked to insomnia, which adversely affects fertility.

A close cousin to the sperm count discourse. People like to cite RFR, or radio frequency radiation, as another reason to keep the laptop away from the body. This point is reminiscent of the stand too close to a microwave and youll catch cancer myth. But radiation youre exposed to from long periods with a laptop is about the same amount youd experience from flying across the country. In other words, its not something to get too worked up about.

This condition has three over-the-top names: academic branding, toasted skin syndrome and erythema ab igne. Buckle up, cause its a doozie. Back in the day, elderly people used to sit too close to open fires or electric space heaters. Without central heating, it was more common for those who desperately needed heat to crowd around a single source. Over time, that habit could result in a reticular pigmented dermatosis, which is a fancy way of saying a big red rash.

The modern comeback of erythema ab igne, while still uncommon, has been fueled by direct contact between computers and thighs. When skin is consistently exposed to the surface of a laptop say, for at least six months, according to one study its at an increased risk of looking like this. Hence the fun nicknames. The key, clearly, is to make sure theres at least a pair of jeans (if not a pillow or blanket) in between you and the device.

Male infertility, radiation and skin scalding are essentially fringe fears of getting too intimate with your laptop. They could happen, they probably wont; youd be better served just getting off the bed or couch and not taking the chance. That said, one non-negotiable, not-great outcome of sitting or lounging with a computer is the hell it wages on your posture. Weve been beating this drum for a while now.

Looking directly down at a screen puts extreme pressure (up to 50 pounds!) on your neck. It morphs your back into an unnatural C. When staring at your computer, the top third of the screen should be as close to eye-level as possible. That allows your body to stay in a neutral position,whereby the spine is naturally aligned absolutely straight from head to toe. Feet planted firmly on the floor is extra credit.

This is why its worth setting up your WFH space correctly. Get a chair that doesnt want to destroy your back. Pick up a laptop stand. And experiment with other floating stations throughout the house; if you really have to sit at the couch, put a raised platform on your coffee table. Books and boxes can help you out there. Or pick up an adjustable tripod desk, which will give all sorts of heights to play with.

It might seem strange to worry about posture in the middle of a pandemic. But the world the pandemic has created isnt going away and the habits we create now are likely to stay, too. Give your back a break, keep your testes cool, and duck that toasted skin nonsense, too. Take the laptop off the lap.

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Is It Safe to Work With Your Laptop on Your Lap? - InsideHook

The gene expression signature of the human kidney interstitium is incompletely understood. The cortical interstitium (excluding tubules, glomeruli, and vessels) in reference nephrectomies (N = 9) and diabetic kidney biopsy specimens (N = 6) was laser microdissected (LMD) and sequenced. Samples underwent RNA sequencing. Gene signatures were deconvolved using single nuclear RNA sequencing (snRNAseq) data derived from overlapping specimens. Interstitial LMD transcriptomics uncovered previously unidentified markers including KISS1, validated with in situ hybridization. LMD transcriptomics and snRNAseq revealed strong correlation of gene expression within corresponding kidney regions. Relevant enriched interstitial pathways included G-protein coupled receptor. binding and collagen biosynthesis. The diabetic interstitium was enriched for extracellular matrix organization and small-molecule catabolism. Cell type markers with unchanged expression (NOTCH3, EGFR, and HEG1) and those down-regulated in diabetic nephropathy (MYH11, LUM, and CCDC3) were identified. LMD transcriptomics complements snRNAseq; together, they facilitate mapping of interstitial marker genes to aid interpretation of pathophysiology in precision medicine studies.

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Molecular characterization of the human kidney interstitium in health and disease - Science Advances

Abortion. In vitro and other forms of assisted reproduction. Euthanasia. End-of-life decisions. They are among the most sensitive social issues of our age, and public policies in these areas generate heated moral argument and debate. So why cant our society agree about them?

According to O. Carter Snead, Notre Dame University law and politics professor and director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, the reason is that we have lost any shared understanding of the meaning of human life.

O. Carter Snead (Courtesy image)

We have indeed forgotten who we are and what we owe to one another. We desperately need to remember, he has written.

Sneads new book, What It Means to be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics (Harvard, $39.95), was recently named one of The Wall Street Journals Top 10 books of 2020.

In it, Snead takes a deep look at the way our society looks at the human person and human life what he terms expressive individualism. This philosophy, he argues, reduces human persons to the sum of their feelings and desires, forgetting that we are living bodies with deep personal histories, and that we belong to one another in families and communities.

In an interview with Angelus, Snead explains how this way of thinking leads to policies that diminish the most vulnerable and encourage divisions in society. He also calls for a new anthropology and better laws that would lead to greater compassion for the weak and greater respect for the sanctity and dignity of human life.

Why write this book and why now?

Ive been involved in public bioethics for almost 20 years, including time as general counsel for President George W. Bushs Council on Bioethics. Ive always been struck by how frequently the law fails to protect the weakest and most vulnerable among us in the context of public bioethics.

Public bioethics began in scandals. Think of the Tuskegee scandal in which American researchers systematically deceived and exploited poor African American sharecroppers who were suffering from syphilis in Macon County, Alabama. Or of the research involving the intentional injection of Hepatitis into intellectually disabled children, chronicled by Henry Beecher in the New England Journal of Medicine. Or of the scandals involving research on newly born, just aborted, and imminently dying children in Scandinavia by American researchers.

So I started asking why it was that the law failed in this way, and what I came to was the view that our laws are rooted in a false and impoverished vision of what it means to be human and to flourish as a human being.

Laws dealing with abortion, assisted reproduction, end-of-life decision-making, euthanasia, and assisted suicide have a flattened, false vision of the person that excludes those who are not capable of high-level cognition, who cannot articulate their inner selves, and who cannot chart their own lifes course.

Its an anthropological vision that Robert Bellah, Charles Taylor, and others have referred to as expressive individualism, in which a person is conceived of as a singular, atomized individual unit abstracted from any social context such as connections to family, community, or country.

Expressive individuals are thought to flourish by their self-discovery of interior truths. They must chart their path accordingly and everything else relationships, the body, and nature are instruments to be harnessed in pursuit of that goal.

Excluded from that vision are the elderly, the disabled, the poor, the marginalized, and children including unborn and newborn.

A doctor draws blood from one of the Tuskegee test subjects in 1932. In his book, Snead argues that laws are failing the modern society's most vulnerable the same way they failed African Americans deceived during the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. (Wikimedia Commons)

In U.S. abortion jurisprudence the moral status of the developing human person is entirely determined by each individual pregnant woman. What are the dangers of building laws about the human person based on such a subjective approach?

In Roe v. Wade, Justice Harry Blackmun framed the question of abortion on the anthropology of expressive individualism, even though he didnt acknowledge it. He described the context of abortion as a clash of strangers, in which the child in the womb was considered to be an invasive burden, a parasite, something subhuman and sub-personal.

Blackmun declined to take a position on the moral status of the unborn human being. But he did say the state may not recognize that child as a person, not just under the Constitution but under the domestic laws of the state. The state may not adopt, as he said, one vision of personhood or one definition of personhood.

So the unborn childs moral status is an entirely subjective matter, to be determined by the woman carrying the child. It is a declaration that that child is sub-personal, has no rights under the Constitution, and may not have rights under state or federal law insofar as that conflicts with the interests and desires of the woman.

But a mother and her unborn child are not strangers. They are related to each other, both biologically and in a deeper relational way. If you were to understand the crisis of abortion through that lens, the conclusion is very different.

If we were to reframe abortion law as a unique crisis involving a mother and her child, we the community and the government would be summoned to their aid. By atomizing the mother and the child, Blackmun sets up an adversarial relationship of strife that can only be resolved through violence. Thats precisely what he gave us: the right to abortion.

You also explore the lack of laws that regulate artificial reproductive technologies (ART) and argue that this area of bioethics is also neglectful of the body and relationships. What would a coherent legal approach to ART look like?

People can do almost whatever they want in the quest to create a biologically related child. I argue that laws should treat these practices in light of the parent-child relationship that they involve.

The relationship between parent and child has certain implications and creates unchosen obligations on the part of the parent to care for the child, a right which that child does not need to earn.

When we begin the process of conceiving a child and initiating a pregnancy and birth through ART, were not just talking about an individual that is undertaking a project. Were talking about a person that wants to be a parent and who is a parent once they begin to participate in this process.

The best interest of that child is to be welcomed and unconditionally loved and cared for throughout his/her life. That means the law has to offer inducements, protections, deterrents, and other behavior-shaping devices to make sure that people act as they should vis-a-vis the well-being and the best interests of a child.

The way we practice IVF right now involves sex selection, multiple gestations, and all kinds of techniques that can modify the childs body. It involves gestational surrogacy and the buying and selling of eggs or batches of living embryos. Thats not an endeavor thats about being a parent and rightly taking care of children.

We have legal frameworks and policies that are designed to protect the well-being of children in American family law. And we have mechanisms to help support and shape the behavior of parents to ensure their childrens well-being.

Thats precisely the kind of norm that we should draw upon when thinking not only about ART, but about abortion, too: We should think about abortion as the proposed use of lethal force on behalf of a mother on an innocent child.

(Shutterstock)

Many states are passing laws that allow people the freedom to choose the time, place, and manner of ones death. How can we make the case for protecting life from conception until natural death?

Expressive individualism doesnt take seriously what it means to be an embodied being that were fragile corruptible bodies in time, that were mutually dependent upon one another, and that were subject to natural limits, including disease, age, and death.

Because were embodied beings, we have to have certain kinds of support systems in our lives. We need what the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre calls networks of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving made up of people who are willing to make the good of others their own without seeking anything in return for it. The most obvious example of a network of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving is the family.

We all depend on these networks for survival, from our time as newborns, when we get sick, and as were nearing the end of our life. But we also depend on them to learn to care for others without expecting anything in return.

The law goes wrong when it fails to acknowledge this, especially when it comes to end-of-life decision-making. In places like California, which has legalized assisted suicide and promotes aggressive termination of life-sustaining measures for quality of life reasons, the law assumes that the highest good of the person whos sick is to assert his/her unencumbered will.

And so proponents say, Lets give them the freedom to kill themselves, to author the last chapter of their book in a way that coheres with their life story.

But anybody whos familiar with the clinical context in which these issues arise knows thats not reality. A person whos having suicidal ideation is almost always a person whos suffering from depression or from intractable suffering. And thats not a zone where autonomy is operating at its height thats a zone where a person needs help.

If you come to their aid and treat someones depression or pain the right way, studies show that a lot of suicidal ideation goes away.

Now, are there people, probably rich, maybe white or privileged, who can make the decision to end their lives in a full and free way? Maybe there are, but you dont make law and public policy for the richest or most privileged people. You make law and public policy to protect the weakest and most vulnerable.

In California, there are just too many of those people the elderly, the disabled, members of marginalized groups, minorities, and others who already dont have enough protection from inequalities and the health care system that we have.

These laws create a path of least resistance toward assisted suicide, especially for the marginalized. This is why the disability rights community largely opposes assisted suicide, and why Bishop Charles Blake and the Pentecostal African American community in California rose up against it.

When it comes to persuasion, its important for arguments to be sound, to be grounded in evidence and good reasoning. But even more than that, I always come back to Mother Teresa: you cant really persuade someone without loving them first, and not in a cynical or strategic way.

People who disagree with us wont hear us and we wont listen to them if we dont take that approach. Hopefully that will touch their hearts in a way that they will be open to listen.

But even if not, you still have to love them, not only because its the right thing to do, but because its the only way were going to actually have a conversation in which we hear one another and think about what is being said.

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Could the fate of society depend on how we think about bodies? - Angelus News

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Human-created noise negatively affects marine animals and their ecosystems, researchers report.

This noise disrupts their behavior, physiology, reproduction, and, in extreme cases, causes mortality.

The researchers call for human-induced noise to be considered a prevalent stressor at the global scale and for policy to be developed to mitigate its effects.

The researchers set out to understand how human-made noise affects wildlife, from invertebrates to whales. They report that the soundtrack of the healthy ocean, plagued with human-created noise, no longer reflects the acoustic environment of todays ocean.

The research, published in Science, is eye-opening to the global prevalence and intensity of the impacts of ocean noise. Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have made the planet, the oceans in particular, noisier through fishing, shipping, infrastructure development, and more, while also silencing the sounds from marine animals that dominated the pristine ocean.

The landscape of soundor soundscapeis such a powerful indicator of the health of an environment, says coauthor Ben Halpern, director of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Like we have done in our cities on land, we have replaced the sounds of nature throughout the ocean with those of humans.

The deterioration of habitats, such as coral reefs, seagrass meadows, and kelp beds with overfishing, coastal development, climate change, and other human pressures, have further silenced the characteristic sound that guides the larvae of fish and other animals drifting at sea into finding and settling on their habitats. The call home is no longer audible for many ecosystems and regions.

The Anthropocene marine environment is polluted by human-made sound and should be restored along sonic dimensions, and along those more traditional chemical and climatic. Yet, current frameworks to improve ocean health ignore the need to mitigate noise as a pre-requisite for a healthy ocean.

We all know that no one really wants to live right next to a freeway because of the constant noise. For animals in the ocean, its like having a mega-freeway in your backyard.

Sound travels far, and quickly, underwater. And marine animals are sensitive to sound, which they use as a prominent sensorial signal guiding all aspects of their behavior and ecology.

This makes the ocean soundscape one of the most important, and perhaps under-appreciated, aspects of the marine environment, the authors write. They hope that the evidence presented in the paper will prompt management actions to reduce noise levels in the ocean, thereby allowing marine animals to re-establish their use of ocean sound.

We all know that no one really wants to live right next to a freeway because of the constant noise, Halpern says. For animals in the ocean, its like having a mega-freeway in your backyard.

The team set out to document the impact of noise on marine animals and on marine ecosystems around the world. They assessed the evidence contained across more than 10,000 papers to consolidate compelling evidence that human-made noise impacts marine life from invertebrates to whales across multiple levels, from behavior to physiology.

This unprecedented effort, involving a major tour de force, has shown the overwhelming evidence for the prevalence of impacts from human-induced noise on marine animals, to the point that the urgency of taking action can no longer be ignored, says Michelle Havlik, a PhD student at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).

The deep, dark ocean is conceived as a distant, remote ecosystem, even by marine scientists, says lead author Carlos M. Duarte, professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

However, as I was listening, years ago, to a hydrophone recording acquired off the US West Coast, I was surprised to hear the clear sound of rain falling on the surface as the dominant sound in the deep-sea ocean environment. I then realized how acoustically connected the ocean surface, where most human noise is generated, is to the deep sea; just 1,000 meters [3281 feet], less than 1 second apart!

The takeaway of the review is that mitigating the impacts of noise from human activities on marine life is key to achieving a healthier ocean. The study identifies a number of actions that may come at a cost but are relatively easy to implement to improve the ocean soundscape and, in so doing, enable the recovery of marine life and the goal of sustainable use of the ocean.

For example, simple technological innovations are already reducing propeller noise from ships, and policy could accelerate their use in the shipping industry and spawn new innovations.

Deploying these mitigation actions is low-hanging fruit. Unlike other forms of human pollution such as emissions of chemical pollutants and greenhouse gases, the effects of noise pollution cease upon reducing the noise, so the benefits are immediate.

The study points to the quick response of marine animals to the human lockdown under COVID-19 as evidence for the potential rapid recovery from noise pollution.

Source: UC Santa Barbara

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Human noise wreaks havoc on all kinds of ocean animals - Futurity: Research News

A year later, the Jewish peace group Never Again Action highlighted a difficult history not taught in most schools, while linking Amazons practices directly to the tech industrys record of supporting human rights abuses. In a 2019 protest of the companys actions, the group organized a march from a Holocaust memorial in Boston to the Amazon offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[W]eve seen this before, said protester Ben Lorber, I had ancestors killed in the Holocaust.

As a relatively new tech company, Amazon is at a crossroads. Will the company travel down a familiar road taken by other tech behemoths who turned a blind eye to human rights and workers rights? Or will it opt for the unfamiliar path, refusing to sell its technology and services in support of human rights abuses while also taking a strong, affirmative stance for better workplace conditions and greater diversity within its ranks? In large measure, this decision will fall to the incoming Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Lorber and many others are pleading and protesting for the road less travelled.

In the spring of 2020, bowing to pressure from its rivals IBM and Microsoft, Amazon announced it would cease selling Rekognition to law enforcement agencies, but only for one year. The end of that year is coming up. In December, the New York State Common Retirement Fund, a large institutional shareholder, along with the Vermont State Treasurers Office, jointly filed a proposal calling on the worlds largest online retailer to curtail surveillance technologies like Rekognition.

But that investor proposal went further, asking Amazon to curb hate speech, increase diversity and improve workplace conditions. It was eerily prescient. Only several weeks later, the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol showed Amazon had provided a safe haven for white nationalists to spew hate, organize and even plan their attack. By the time the social media platform Parler, used by many white nationalist groups, was taken down from the Amazon Web Services cloud, the damage had already been done.

Meanwhile, workers at the company's warehouses continue to endure unjust labor practices. During a pandemic, when so many have turned to Amazon, these workers bear the brunt of increased demand without adequate protective equipment and working conditions to shield them from the virus. Many Amazon factory workers come from communities of color already ravaged by COVID-19.

Amazon has said it stands with the nationwide movement to identify and bring an end to systemic racism, yet it continues to face claims of racial discrimination, said a disappointed Thomas P. DiNapoli, New York state comptroller and trustee of the New York retirement fund.

Instead of welcoming this opportunity, Amazon appealed to the Securities and Exchange Commission to block these proposals from being voted on at its upcoming shareholder meeting. Its a strategic blunder and a tone-deaf response to attempts aimed at preventing the company from tragically following in the footsteps of another high-tech giant.

In the late 1920s, IBM, a newly minted company, and its audacious president, Thomas J. Watson Sr., threw its technological prowess behind the eugenics movement. Eugenics sought to further reproduction of blond, blue-eyed, fair-skinned individuals the so-called Nordic stock while eliminating the bloodlines of undesirables such as Blacks, Jews, Native Americans, Hispanics, the Irish, Italians, mixed-race individuals, LGBTQ+ people and the mentally and physically ill.

A major 1926 study by the Eugenics Record Organization on the island of Jamaica was at risk because eugenicists had no way of tabulating and reporting on so-called pure blood Europeans and their mixed-race offspring, whom together numbered in the millions.

But IBM did.

IBM engineers worked with the Eugenics Record Organization, headquartered in Cold Springs Harbor, New York, to design punch card formats for collecting, sorting, tabulating, printing and storing information on racial characteristics, allowing the organization to declare the Jamaica study a success in 1929 and announce plans for another, similar global project.

Four years later, Watson and IBM brought automated racial classification to Hitler and the Third Reich. Nearly every aspect of the Holocaust and the Nazi war machine was supported by punch card technology, courtesy of IBM. Each concentration camp had an IBM room, where punch cards held prisoners fates, down to the means of their extermination firing squad, gas chamber, oven or being worked to death.

With Germanys defeat, IBM turned next to South Africa, automating most aspects of apartheid. The company even designed specialized equipment to print the Book of Life passbook,carried by white and Colored South Africans,and the dreaded national identification card, which Black South Africans were forced to show on penalty of arrest. Then, after apartheid, IBMs use of technology to circumvent human rights returned to American soil. In 2005, the company used secret CCTV footage of unwitting New Yorkers collected by the New York City Police Department to improve facial recognition technology in order to discriminate based on skin color.

So when protesters in Boston said they had seen this before, they were deliberately connecting Amazons present to IBMs past, pleading that Amazon not repeat the mistakes of a previous generation. Some shareholders understood this and took up that call as well.

Workers rights within high-tech firms bear a similar dark history. In 1970, Black employees organized the National Black Workers Alliance of IBM (BWA) to demand the company hire more Black people, promote Blacks workers more equitably, provide Black employees equal pay and withdraw from apartheid issues similar to those being demanded by Amazon shareholders today.

BWA leaders were targeted with poor performance evaluations, denial of pay raises, accusations of violating company policy by disclosing pay and promotion data and, in one case, false allegations of sexual abuse. Many were fired, demoted or forced to resign.

BWA was fighting systemic racism that still exists at Amazon and other high-tech firms, where a majority of board and senior decision-making positions are held by white men. Less than 3% of high-level positions at high-tech firms are held by people of color. And this is not a pipeline problem. Qualified candidates can be found, if high-tech firms can find the will.

On Friday, the National Labor Relations Board ruled against Amazon, allowing workers at a Bessemer, Alabama warehouse to vote on unionizing. The SEC should follow suit and insist that shareholder proposals are also brought to a vote.

Jeff Bezos may be stepping down as Amazons CEO, but the problems identified by workers, protesters and shareholders remain. Martin Luther King Jr. said, the time is always right to do right. Yet companies like Amazon seem to operate as though that time never arrives; that profits are always more important than people, even in the wake of George Floyds death and calls for racial equity, synagogue attacks, four years of official lies supporting racial hatred and division and an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. King said it best. Now is the right time for Amazon to do right.

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Opinion | On human rights, Amazon is at a crossroads - Crosscut

Ian Askew, Director, Department of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Research including UNDP-UNFPA-UNICEF-WHO-World Bank Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction

Happy new year! I hope that the last few weeks have offered some moments of pause and rest. At HRP we are energized, determined, and very much looking forward to continuing with you the important work of ensuring that every person can achieve the highest possible level of sexual and reproductive health and rights.

The COVID-19 pandemic, and especially the disruption to national health systems it has caused, has expanded the scope of our work at HRP but also refocused global attention on the challenges of gender inequalities, protecting human rights and reducing inequities in access to services. These are challenges which have always characterized HRPs work.

For example, on the International Day to Eliminate Violence Against Women in December, HRP and WHO introduced the RESPECT implementation package with UN Women. This emphasises the continuing need for our work on prevention of violence against women and management of its health consequences at the same time as highlighting new resources on addressing gender-based violence in the context of the pandemic.

Recently we launched Right To A Better World, a documentary series produced by HRP and WHO in partnership with Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the Oxford Human Rights Hub (OxHRH). This powerful series explores how tactics developed by the human rights movement are crucial for achieving sexual and reproductive health rights. Health is a human right, and Right To A Better World has many powerful stories to tell of how human rights frameworks can strengthen the effectiveness of global efforts towards the fulfilment of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Many of us are experiencing that feeling of life on pause because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but this is especially true for children and adolescents. The pandemic is disrupting their education, interfering with their friendships and relationships, and especially for girls increasing their domestic work and care obligations. For some, it is increasing their vulnerability to abuse and violence. HRP and WHO have worked with UNFPA to develop a technical brief titled NOT ON PAUSE: Responding to the SRH needs of adolescents in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, with practical guidance on what can be done to provide adolescents and young people with comprehensive sexuality education, as well as other SRH interventions.

This is, of course, a long-standing challenge and I was very glad to speak at a recent webinar with other UN and government representatives, as well as several youth representatives, launching the first International Technical and Programmatic Guidance on Out-of-School Comprehensive Sexuality Education. HRP and WHO are especially pleased to have contributed evidence from our research for this important document.

Infertility is a social and public health problem that is all too often neglected and stigmatised. More affordable, accessible and acceptable services are needed urgently to address infertility worldwide, as this new research from HRP and WHO shows. I am very glad to say that the infertility Guideline Development Group met online late last year, taking major steps towards developing this long overdue global guidance which should help countries to develop and improve services and care for the millions of people living with infertility and its consequences.

On Universal Health Coverage Day in December, we celebrated the launch of the WHO UHC Compendium of Health Interventions and highlighted the importance of integrating sexual and reproductive health services into national UHC planning. Colleagues in Burkina Faso and Thailand shared how they are achieving this, and in some cases even raising the level of service provision during the pandemic very inspiring.

December was also an exciting month for our collaborative work in striving to mobilise a new era of maternal and perinatal health, in which womens values and preferences are at the centre of their own care.

At the December FIGO Africa Regional Kigali Congress we introduced the Antenatal Care Portal, a one-stop shop' for evidence and tools to support country adaptation and implementation of WHO ANC recommendations. This will be a be a key link between policy-makers, health workers and women and will be regularly updated, reflecting our living guideline approach to maternal health.

We also launched the new Labour Care Guide and accompanying Users Manual, tools for putting the WHO recommendations on intrapartum care into practice. The Labour Care Guide revises and replaces the traditional WHO partograph, an important step forward in evidence-based, individualized labour care.

Our community is saddened by the recent death of Dr Alexander Kessler, HRPs co-founder and first director in 1972. Alexs dynamic and determined leadership, and his truly global commitment to improving the lives of people around the world, live on through HRPs commitment to rigorous research, international cooperation and sexual and reproductive health and rights for all.

2021 begins with some much-needed positive news, as the United States commits to remaining a Member State of WHO. In particular, we celebrate the announcement of support for womens and girls sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights in the United States as well as globally, and the revocation of the Mexico City Policy.

Still, before turning the page on 2020, I encourage you to visit HRP on Twitter and join us in looking back at some of the highlights from this challenging year with the hashtag #SRHR stories. Thank you for your collegiality, your expertise and support. It is wonderful to see how, as a global community, we pulled together and did much to support sexual and reproductive health and rights for all.

Read more from the original source:
Message from Director SRH/HRP 28 January 2021 - World Health Organization

To show respect for a worker when you paint them, as Gustave Courbet, later a Communard, did in his 1851 painting The Stonebreakers was to become, as his critics said at the time, political.

For the hoped-for bourgeois customers of their works, the rural poor were the acceptable noble savage but the industrial worker was a reminder of the dangerous mob, the seething undercurrent of society they hardly wanted to feature on a living room wall.

When artists did choose to show human work as it is, they were seen as transforming work into a heroic activity. The way in which the material world is transformed by human effort and skill against the odds has become the target for more than a few sneers at the hands of critics and historians who have never heaved a hundredweight bag of cement, joined a gang unloading in a matter of minutes 10,000 burning hot bricks brought to a site direct from the ovens or pick-axed a trench through stony ground for a hundred yards, ironed three dozen shirts an hour or dragged heavy bins of wool as Ferdinand Gueldry painted in 1913 (you can see it on the exhibition website).

None of this is heroism in the sense of something out of the ordinary. It is just now not only socially invisible as in the days of the Impressionists. In far less than the time of a generation, Western Europe has been largely denuded of those places where women and men like those featured in the Caen exhibition were gathered, often in their thousands, to engage in digging, making, doing, controlling with their muscles and their minds the transformation of something material into something that could become merchandise.

There is a fragment of film from 1980 in the BBC archives available here. You can laugh at the absurd sexism of the men interviewed on the theme of Can a man iron a shirt? More important for this current theme, is a casual remark by two retired workers, Mary-Rose and Lizzy, who had been employed all their working lives from the age of 14 in the factories that made Derry the twentieth century champion of mens shirt-making. Then, it was the women who were in the factories and the men who were at home, unemployed and lazing.

We all worked together and there were about 500 in the one room, so we had a very nice time. It was very hard work and we worked two nights until 10 OClock. We had all of the housework to do, all of the cooking and the cleaning. I never seen any of them (the men) doing it yet.

It is a pity that the BBC archives were not in a position to add in some film of the workshop itself. Such filmed records are not that common and in the countries where the industrial revolution started the experience of that kind of collective work is getting rarer.

Where do people in France or Britain today work 500 in one room? In call centres? In the few remaining large engineering shops? In the meat-packing plants? Or perhaps at Amazons vast warehouses?

As a student at Oxford, when visiting the rather decrepit offices of the local Communist Party in Cowley Road, one had to be careful not to be in the way of the wall of men filling the road as they cycled hard, homewards, from the Morris car plant at the end of a shift. There was a relationship between those two things, that office and those men, however weak, however poorly interpreted it may have been, a link that has now largely gone. In 1962, Morris employed as many as 20,000 in Cowley, all but a handful in a trade union. Before the Covid lockdown, the successor BMW Mini plant employed just under 4,000.

Like many a workplace you can go and visit the Cowley plant. A taste of what you may see is attached to the press release BMW issued when VisitEngland gave it an award in 2018 for being one of those places that go the extra mile to provide a high quality day out. Scroll to the bottom of the release here and there are three short videos.

In the first, we see the vast body shop, all the work done by robots. You can spot just ten human beings. In the second and third, there are more at work, but you sense quickly that the actions they are performing can be done by robots and that they will be so done as soon as the company finds a way of doing it that saves money. The workers have become temporary substitutes for machines rather than the other way around.

Just before Covid-19 got to grips with us, a vast hall in the Communist municipality of Gennevilliers, a suburb to the west of Paris, hosted an exhibition of works of art held in the legion of town halls, galleries, archives and museums of the suburbs round the capital. Tresors de Banlieues, Treasures of the Suburbs, offered something of the same historical perspective as the show in Caen: the arrival of industry, smoke and chimneys in a rural scene but it also took us forward to more contemporary times of the struggles of those at work.[ii] Sadly, the only film of people at work was of women workers in a French munitions factory during World War One.

The celebrations like these of the French working class, have more and more a celebration of what was, rather than what is. That is not because this class is fading away it now contains a higher proportion of French people than ever before. But the form of work and its obviously collective presence in physical activity has changed.

Novelist and historian Bernard Chambaz, born into a Communist family in Boulogne-Billancourt where Renault employed thousands in one of Europes largest car plants, has just published a selection of photographs from the collections of the Gamma/Rapho agency to illustrate the theme of workers.[i] He has even managed to include one of a masked worker in an engineering factory north of Paris, one of those whose work has continued despite the Covid epidemic.

But he approaches the whole presentation with the meaning of the French word ouvrier at the forefront of his thoughts. That is someone who engages in manual work. In the English language the words work and labour are more ambiguous, slipping across from by hand to by brain with ease. They need to, for that is the work of the future.

Accelerated by the imperative of the failure to halt the epidemic, swathes of the French workforce have gone over to what in French is termed tltravail, distance working. Ministers have consistently promoted this as one of the ways of reducing transmission of the virus. Towards the end of 2020, a majority of the French trade union confederation concluded a national agreement with the employers organisations covering how this might be managed.

The main federation on the left, the CGT, refused to back the deal. Indeed the agreement reflects the new regime for employment practices in the country where national deals offer only a very loose framework within which companies can then negotiate, rather than the strict standards agreed for the country or the sector as a whole in the past. For the CGT, the deal now leaves the individual on tltravail very much on their own. Not a worker who is part of a collective, but a middle class professional.

The opening pages of his critical analysis of capitalist production, Das Kapital, are ones where Karl Marx explores the meaning of the basic element of a society based on the production of commodities, the commodity itself. Despite the way in which he constantly pushes us to look behind the apparently physical nature of a commodity, it is hard not to constantly fall into the trap of always seeing it as something manifestly material, an object hammered, cut, pulled, scraped, sewed all those operations of work portrayed in the Caen exhibition.

At one point, though, Marx discusses how Robinson Crusoe seeks to satisfy the few wants he has on his isolated island through a little useful work of various sorts, such as making tools and furniture, taming goats [iv]

The properties of a commodity mean that it satisfies human wants of some sort or another whether they spring from the stomach or from fancy whether directly as a means of subsistence or indirectly as a means of production. The goat that has the property of being tamed by someone just sitting close and stroking it, has as much the right to be seen as a commodity produced by human labour as has the lump of white-hot metal bashed into shape in one of Frances remaining steelworks, an item of clothing turned out in the vast factories of China, or the new wind turbine sketched on a computer somewhere in the world.

Who in the past would have seen the landlords goat-trainer cuddling a kid as a hero of the working class? Todays keyboard worker isolated in their home also hardly rises to that role. Worse, the epidemic reinforces the solitariness of their experience, divorcing them from the human world even as the internet integrates them into the world of production.

Yes, the internet gives a new power to the far right, to business networks to soak up our private lives and to state surveillance, but the greatest danger is that it substitutes the appearance of connectivity for the reality. It transforms the relationship between living, vibrant beings into a virtual shadow of human social existence, that physical and emotional togetherness and mutual dependence, without which a human capacity to survive, to imagine, to construct, to work creatively are all starved of their essential driving force, the pleasure of being together, of acting together, of making the future together.

Turning a corner in the Caen exhibition, one fell upon what was for me the real discovery of the whole show: Marie Petiets Les Repasseuses, The Ironing women. From 1882, it groups seven young women chatting, working and exchanging around an ironing table, probably all painted from the same model.

Marie Petiet was no more a social critic than Degas but her artistry pulls you in. Those doing the ironing, a basic, manual task, are presented as equals with each other, with her as the artist and with you as the spectator. Once this exhibition is broken up, if you want to see it you will need to go the small museum that hosts her work. Muse de peinture Petiet was established in her home town of Limoux when the family assigned ownership of their house and paintings to the commune in 1880.

Visit link:
From keystroke to brushstroke: where's the art in modern work? - Open Democracy

Daijiworld Media Network - New Delhi

New Delhi, Jan 14: Former Madhya Pradesh minister and Congress leader Sajjan Singh Vermacriticisedthe statement made by MP chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan where the latter asked forraising themarriageable ageof girls from 18 to 21. The senior Congress leader in a retortquestioned Chouhan and stated that since a girl is ready for reproduction by 15, there was no need to raise the marriageable to 21. "According to doctors, a girl is ready for reproduction by the age of 15. Is chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan a doctor or a scientist? So, on what basis does girls' marriage age should be increased from 18 to 21," Verma questioned while speaking at a press conference.

"What is the logic behind saying that girls' marriage age should be increased to 21 from 18," he further said.

Verma was responding to the reporters when questioned about the statement made by the chief minister at a 'Nari Samman' programme wherein Chouhan said that the minimum age of marriage for girls should be increased from 18 to 21.

Verma attacked theMP government and said that the BJP government has failed to protect minor girls. "Madhya Pradesh has topped when it comes to the number of rapes against minors. The chief minister is playing politics full of hypocrisy, instead of taking strict action in such cases," he added.

Earlier,CM Chouhan, while speaking at a felicitation ceremony to honour those working for the safety of girl childhad saidthat therewas a decline of crime against women by 15 per cent in the state since past nine months after he assumed power.

Go here to read the rest:
'Girls can reproduce by 15, why raise their marriageable age to 21' - Congress MLA - Daijiworld.com

What will life on other planets look like, whennot ifits found? Arik Kershenbaum, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, takes up this question in The Zoologists Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliensand Ourselves (Penguin Press). Its a popular belief that alien life is too alien to imagine, he writes. I dont agree.

Kershenbaum argues that the key to understanding cosmic zoology is natural selection. This, he maintains, is the inevitable mechanism by which life develops, and therefore its not just restricted to the planet Earth or even to carbon-based organisms. However alien biochemistry functions, natural selection will be behind it.

From this premise, Kershenbaum says, it follows that life on other planets will have evolved, if not along the same lines as life on this planet, then at least along lines that are generally recognizable. On Earth, for instance, where the atmosphere is mostly made of nitrogen and oxygen, feathers are a useful feature. On a planet where clouds are made of ammonia, feathers probably wouldnt emerge, but we should not be surprised to find the same functions (i.e. flight) that we observe here. Similarly, Kershenbaum writes, alien organisms are apt to evolve some form of land-based locomotionLife on alien planets is very likely to have legsas well as some form of reproduction analogous to sex and some way of exchanging information: Aliens in the dark will click like bats and dolphins, and aliens in the clear skies will flash their colours at each other.

Assuming that there is, in fact, alien life out there, most of it seems likely to be microscopic. We are not talking about little green men is how Stofan put it when she said we were soon going to find it. We are talking about little microbes. But Kershenbaum, who studies animal communication, jumps straight to complex organisms, which propels him pretty quickly into Loebian territory.

On Earth, many animals possess what we would broadly refer to as intelligence. Kershenbaum argues that, given the advantages that this quality confers, natural selection all across the galaxy will favor its emergence, in which case there should be loads of life-forms out there that are as smart as we are, and some that are a whole lot smarter. This, in his view, opens up quite a can of interstellar worms. Are we going to accord aliens human rights? Will they accord us whatever rights, if any, they grant their little green (or silver or blue) brethren? Such questions, Kershenbaum acknowledges, are difficult to answer in advance, without any evidence of what kind of legal system or system of ethics the aliens themselves might have.

As disconcerting as encountering intelligent aliens would be, the fact that we havent yet heard from any is, arguably, even more so. Why this is the case is a question thats become known as the Fermi paradox.

One day in 1950, while lunching at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the physicist Enrico Fermi turned to some colleagues and asked, Where are they? (At least, this is how one version of the story goes; according to another version, he asked, But where is everybody?) This was decades before Pan-STARRS1 and the Kepler mission. Still, Fermi reckoned that Earth was a fairly typical planet revolving around a fairly typical star. There ought, he reasoned, to be civilizations out there far older and more advanced than our own, some of which should have already mastered interstellar travel. Yet, strangely enough, no one had shown up.

Much human intelligence has since been devoted to grappling with Fermis question. In the nineteen-sixties, an astronomer named Frank Drake came up with the eponymous Drake equation, which offers a way to estimateor, if you prefer, guesstimatehow many alien cultures exist with which we might hope to communicate. Key terms in the equation include: how many potentially habitable planets are out there, what fraction of life-hosting planets will develop sophisticated technology, and how long technologically sophisticated civilizations endure. As the list of potentially habitable planets has grown, the Where are they? mystery has only deepened. At a workshop on the subject held in Paris in 2019, a French researcher named Jean-Pierre Rospars proposed that aliens havent reached out to us because theyre keeping Earth under a galactic quarantine. They realize, he said, that it would be culturally disruptive for us to learn about them.

Loeb proposes that Fermi may be the answer to his own paradox. Humanity has been capable of communicating with other planets, via radio wave, for only the past hundred years or so. Seventy-five years ago, Fermi and his colleagues on the Manhattan Project invented the atomic bomb, and a few years after that Edward Teller, one of Fermis companions at the lunch table at Los Alamos, came up with the design for a hydrogen bomb. Thus, not long after humanity became capable of signalling to other planets, it also became capable of wiping itself out. Since the invention of nuclear weapons, weve continued to come up with new ways to do ourselves in; these include unchecked climate change and manufactured microbes.

It is quite conceivable that if we are not careful, our civilizations next few centuries will be its last, Loeb warns. Alien civilizations with the technological prowess to explore the universe are, he infers, similarly vulnerable to annihilation by self-inflicted wounds. Perhaps the reason no one has shown up is that theres no one left to make the trip. This would mean that Oumuamua was the cosmic equivalent of a potsherdthe product of a culture now dead.

A message an earthling might take from this (admittedly highly speculative) train of thought is: be wary of new technologies. Loeb, for his part, draws the opposite conclusion. He thinks humanity ought to be working to produce precisely the kind of photon-powered vessel that he imagines Oumuamua to be. To this end, hes an adviser on a project called the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative, whose stated aim is to demonstrate proof of concept for ultra-fast light-driven nanocrafts. In the longer term, the group hopes to lay the foundations for a launch to Alpha Centauri, the star system closest to Earth, which is about twenty-five trillion miles away. (The initiative has funding from Yuri Milner, a Russian-Israeli billionaire, and counts among its board members Mark Zuckerberg.)

Loeb also looks forward to the day when well be able to produce synthetic life in our laboratories. From there, he imagines Gutenberg DNA printers that could be distributed to make copies of the human genome out of raw materials on the surface of other planets. By seeding the galaxy with our genetic material, we could, he suggests, hedge our bets against annihilation. We could also run a great evolutionary experiment, one that might lead to outcomes far more wondrous than seen so far. There is no reason to expect that terrestrial life, which emerged under random circumstances on Earth, was optimal, Loeb writes.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was Chariots of the Gods?, by Erich von Dniken. The premise of the book, which was spun off into the TV documentary In Search of Ancient Astronauts, narrated by Rod Serling, was that Fermis question had long ago been answered. They had already been here. Von Dniken, a Swiss hotel manager turned author who for some reason in the documentary was described as a German professor, argued that aliens had landed on Earth sometime in the misty past. Traces of their visits were recorded in legends and also in artifacts like the Nazca Lines, in southern Peru. Why had people created these oversized images if not to signal to beings in the air?

I figured that von Dniken would be interested in the first official interstellar object, and so I got in touch with him. Now eighty-five, he lives near Interlaken, not far from a theme park he designed, which was originally called Mystery Park and then later, after a series of financial mishaps, rebranded as Jungfrau Park. The park boasts seven pavilions, one shaped like a pyramid, another like an Aztec temple.

Von Dniken told me that he had, indeed, been following the controversy over Oumuamua. He tended to side with Loeb, who, he thought, was very brave.

He needs courage and obviously he had courage, he said. No scientist wants to be ridiculed, and whenever they deal with U.F.O.s or extraterrestrials, they are ridiculed by the media. But, he predicted, the situation will change.

Its often said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The phrase was popularized by the astronomer Carl Sagan, who probably did as much as any scientist has done to promote the search for extraterrestrial life. By whats sometimes referred to as the Sagan standard, Loebs claim clearly falls short; the best evidence he marshals for his theory that Oumuamua is an alien craft is that the alternative theories are unconvincing. Loeb, though, explicitly rejects the Sagan standardIt is not obvious to me why extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, he observesand flips its logic on its head: Extraordinary conservatism keeps us extraordinarily ignorant. So long as theres a chance that 1I/2017 U1 is an alien probe, wed be fools not to pursue the idea. If we acknowledge that Oumuamua is plausibly of extraterrestrial-technology origin, he writes, whole new vistas of exploration for evidence and discovery open before us.

In publishing his theory, Loeb has certainly risked (and suffered) ridicule. It seems a good deal more likely that Extraterrestrial will be ranked with von Dnikens work than with Galileos. Still, as Serling notes toward the end of In Search of Ancient Astronauts, its thrilling to imagine the possibilities: Look up into the sky some clear, starlit night and allow yourself the freedom to wonder.

Read the original post:
Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens? - The New Yorker

Couples in Ireland who conceived through IVF and surrogacy fear that they may never be legally recognised as their children's parents, due to a gap in legislation.

New laws on the issue were passed in 2020, however, the new law does not encompass all couples, according to campaigners.

Also in today's Special Feature:

This new law, the Children and Families Relationship Act (2015) provided a legal framework for registering the births of children who are born through IVF, where the birth mother is an intending parent.

The act also allows the intending and birth mother to name their spouse, civil partner or cohabitant as the second parent of the child.

However, this law doesn't have any provision for surrogacy, where the woman who gives birth is not the intending parent.

Many people also go abroad to get IVF as it is significantly cheaper, but this new law doesn't recognise their parentage.

The fight is not just a symbolic one.

The parents who are not on their child's birth certificate or who can't get guardianship technically do not have the right to vaccinate their children or take them on a foreign holiday.

A campaign called Equality for Children is trying to bring attention to the issue.

The issue affects straight and lesbian couples who use IVF abroad or use surrogacy abroad and at home.

Gay couples will always be affected, as they will have to use surrogacy in order to have children.

However, because it only affects a minority, it is not seen as a big-ticket election issue, according to campaigners.

Meanwhile, families are left floundering.

Ranae Von Meding and her wife, Audrey, with their two children, Ava, 4, and Arya who is almost 2.

Ranae von Meding, head of the Equality for Children campaign, says pre-marriage equality, there was no way gay parents could become the legal parents of children.

"It had to be a mother and father," she said.

However, once marriage equality was gained in 2015, legislation was brought forward to try and rectify the issue.

"They rushed through the Children and Families Relationship Act, which had a very narrow criteria for parental rights.

"They didn't look at surrogacy at all, or conception outside of an Irish fertility clinic."

This bill enabled couples who used an Irish fertility clinic and a traceable sperm donor to be named as parents. It also allowed female same sex couples who undertake reciprocal IVF to became joint legal parents.

"It was a step forward, that bill passed in 2015 but wasn't commenced until May of this year," says Ranae. This meant families were waiting five years for legislation.

Many families fall outside this law, leaving parents in a precarious legal situation.

"If you decide to go to an IVF clinic abroad because it's cheaper, or if your child is born abroad, or if you choose to conceive at home, there is no provision for both parents to become legal parents."

Only traceable sperm donations are accepted under the legislation. In the 90s and early noughties, only anonymous sperm donation was allowed in Ireland, however the converse is now true.

There is a stay in the law, whereby anyone who meets the other criteria but used anonymous sperm donation prior to the bill being commenced can still apply to be legal parents.

However, if people received IVF abroad and/or used an anonymous sperm donation after the bill was enacted, they will not be able to apply for parentage.

Ranae is in this precarious legal situation herself, but is hopeful it will be resolved soon.

Four-year-oldAva plays with little sister Arya.

She has two children with her wife, Audrey, a four-year-old girl called Ava and a two-year-old called Arya. The children were conceived through reciprocal IVF in a clinic in Spain.

"I'm considered their only legal parent, as I gave birth.

"My wife is actually their biological parent, we used her eggs and donor sperm, and I carried the babies.

They are her biological children but since they were born she's been a legal stranger to them.

Thankfully, Audrey should be able to become a legal parent of their children, under the Children and Families Relationship Act 2015, which passed last May.

They are waiting on a court date in order for Audrey to get a declaration of parentage.

Ranae says they had to fight for five years to get this far.

If I die today, my wife would not have automatic guardianship over the children.

Ranae adds that there are many other parents who don't fall under this new legislation.

There are a few measures these parents can put in place.

"You can apply for emergency guardianship, if your partner is incapacitated or in a coma. The legal parent can also put it in their will that their wish is for the children to stay with their partner, this is called testamentary guardianship."

However, a guardian does not have the same rights as a parent. Ranae says once the child turns 18, the legal relationship is severed, meaning children will not have a say in a parent's end of life care.

Inheritance can also be an issue, as can citizenship, which is as often granted based on the parent's place of birth.

It is also not possible for parents to use adoption as a solution. While gay parents can adopt a child under normal circumstances, they cannot apply to 'adopt' their own children conceived through IVF and a donor egg or sperm, as there is no provision for this under Irish law.

"The Adoption Authority has refused to process these types of adoptions. They don't have the framework.

"In other adoptions, there is a birth family who give up the child for adoption, and an adopted family.

"In our case, we aren't giving up our children for adoption, because we are the birth family. Legislation is needed."

She says children are being discriminated against simply because they have LGBTQ parents, as they have to use some form of IVF.

Ranae also adds that children of straight couples who use IVF abroad or surrogacy are also affected.

'It's about allowing children to have a legal relationship with both their parents'

Gearoid Kenny and his husband Seamus Moore are in a similarly precarious legal situation. They live in north Dublin with their twins, Mary and Sen, who were conceived through surrogacy at an IVF clinic in London.

Gearoid Kenny and Seamus Moore.

The couple had to go to England, as Irish fertility clinics were unwilling to use egg donations as they felt the legislation was not yet in place, and they could be legally exposed.

"Our children were created through an egg donation. A friend of mine from London carried our babies, but has no biological connection to them, and doesn't want to have any parental responsibility."

Seamus is the biological father of both Sen and Mary, and he is their legal guardian due to UK law. Had the twins been born in Ireland, Seamus would only have become their guardian if the surrogate allowed him to, by signing a legal document.

"But guardianship is not the same as parentage," Gearoid says.

Meanwhile, Gearoid has no legal relationship with his children and their surrogate will be held legally responsible for the children if anything happens to Seamus.

Gearoid adds that while there is a narrow group of LGBT people who can be named as parents, this does not include his family, and straight couples who avail of IVF abroad and surrogacy are in the same predicament.

The lack of parental rights does have ramifications, he says.

Technically, you don't have the right to bring the child to the hospital, or bring them to a medical appointment or consent to medical procedures.

When Gearoid's children needed to be vaccinated, only their biological dad could sign the forms and attend the vaccination.

"When the children were born, we were very honest with our doctor and said 'we didn't give birth to them'," Gearoid says.

"We told him very clearly who is the dad. He was very supportive, but there were times when the biological dad had to present for vaccinations.

"Another time, Mary was getting a scan as they were worried she had heart murmur. Thankfully it turned out to be nothing, but we were told the biological father had to be present in the event any procedures had to take place.

"If you travel abroad, it is only the biological parent who can bring the children out of the country legally. If the other parent wants to do that they have to get a signed letter from the biological parent saying they can do this."

Only the biological parent can register the child for school.

Now that the twins are two, Gearoid can apply to become their guardian. The couple are in the process of submitting this application, but he still won't be their legal parent.

"The next thing the Government plans to do is introduce a piece of legislation called the Assisted Human Reproductive Act," Gearoid says. He met with Simon Harris when he was minister for health in relation to advancing this bill.

"He said under the draft legislation, what they will do potentially is allow surrogacy arrangements to be formalised in the future, but not retrospectively."

This means he won't be covered under the new legislation.

Not an election issue

Gearoid doesn't think it will become an election issue, as it only affects a small minority of people, so there's not much political will to solve it.

He adds that there is not much trust placed on LGBTQ couples, even for the same sex female couples who can apply for parental rights.

"They must go to court, gather vast amounts of paperwork, documents, get proof from the IVF clinic that they used... there is a certain inherent distrust, maybe even homophobia, at the bureaucratic level."

Seamus, as the biological father of both children, can get a declaration of parentage, as currently he is only their guardian. However, to do this would be quite onerous.

"That costs 15,000, as you have to get a barrister to do it. Also, despite having letters from the IVF clinic saying he was the sperm donor, he would still have to go through another parental test to ensure what he is saying is true, and all of his brothers would be required to submit a sperm sample, to rule out the possibility that they might be the father."

However, despite these legal challenges, Gearoid says having children was one of the best things that ever happened to him. He is a stay at home dad and looks after the kids full-time.

He says other countries can put forward legislation to solve this problem, so Ireland should be able to do the same.

"Really it's about allowing children to have a legal relationship with both their parents. I don't ever see a situation where I am recognised as the legal father to both my children."

Legal lacuna: Law was never designed for surrogacy

Dr Andrea Mulligan, assistant professor at Trinity's law school, says there is no law in Ireland governing surrogacy.

"There was one case on surrogacy, and a written judgment from the supreme court in 2014. There was a really famous statement from Judge Adrian Hardiman.

He said that the of Irish law and surrogacy was as if the Road Traffic Act didn't reflect the invention of the motorcar.

Dr Mulligan says the only way solicitors can use the law to establish parental rights is when the surrogacy can be fitted into the pre-existing law.

"It's never a law designed for surrogacy."

Currently, genetic fathers whose children are conceived through surrogacy can apply for parentage and then guardianship.

However, Dr Mulligan says the same is not true for genetic mothers who don't carry the child.

Intended mothers, even if there's a genetic connection, have no way of becoming a legal parent.

She says the Children and Family Relationships Act 2015, which was enacted in 2020, covers parentage in donor assisted reproduction in Ireland, which has helped some couples including same sex female couples who undertake reciprocal IVF, but not those who use surrogacy.

Dr Andrea Mulligan says there is currently no law governing surrogacy in Ireland.

Dr Mulligan adds that there was a general scheme of a surrogacy bill published in 2017 (the Assisted Human Reproduction Bill),but it has not been progressed yet.

She says there needs to be more regulation of surrogacy in general. Currently in Ireland, IVF and surrogacy is commercialised and privatised.

Due to how expensive it is, many couples choose to go abroad. However, Dr Mulligan says it would be very difficult for the Irish State to regulate things that happen outside of the country, which is why laws that govern assisted reproduction in Ireland may not address IVF or surrogacy abroad.

"Donors have to be identifiable in Ireland, to vindicate the child's right to identity," she said.

Dr Mulligan says that in other countries, there can be ethical concerns. "There can be exploitation of surrogates, or a situation where the child can never contact the donor, or know anything about their background."

She believes IVF should be available to couples on the public health system, to stop them having to travel abroad in search of more affordable services.

Dr Mulligan also adds that legislation is vital, in order to ensure IVF and surrogacy is properly regulated in Ireland.

"The new law regulating surrogacy proposes the establishment of a new, independent regulatory authority to regulate the industry," she said.

She adds that because the industry in Ireland is largely private, there is a lack of information on how many couples are availing of their services, as well as how many people are going abroad.

Department's response

In response to this issue, the Department of Health, which governs this area, said in a statement: "The Children and Family Relationships Act 2015 was enacted to modernise family law."

Continued here:
Couples who conceived through IVF and surrogacy fight to be legally recognised as parents - Irish Examiner

There's an odd twist to human physiology not seen in any other primatethat makes giving birth more complicated for our species. Now, a study using biomechanical modelling on gait and posture has provided some insights into this long-standing mystery.

The narrow shape of the human birth canal is kinked at the inlet, so that contractions of the mother must rotate the baby's big brain and wide shoulders nearly 90 degrees to fit into the pelvis.

Imagine sliding a foot into a tight boot with a twisted entrance and you've got a rough idea of how challenging this can be. If the baby gets stuck, it can endanger both the life of the mother and child. In fact, this is thought to occur inas many as 6 percent of all births worldwide.

So what's the advantage? Surprisingly, for such a key element in the reproduction of our very species, we're still trying to figure that out.

(Stansfield et al., BMC Biology, 2021)

Above:The rotational birth of humans. A) shows the head turning about 90 to fit into the largest dimension of the pelvic plane; B) shows the layers of the birth canal.

Today, some of the most fundamental parts of human pregnancy are a complete mystery. We don't know, for instance, why our species undergoes such long and dangerous labors compared to other mammals.

Traditionally, it is thought the human pelvis is shaped the way it is to make walking easier.Evolutionarily speaking, the advantages of bipedal movement on a daily basis were clearly worth the extra risks that came with having narrow hips and big-brained babies.

In the new study, extensive biomechanical models of the pelvic floor suggest the shape of the birth canal doesn't help us walk so much as it helps us stand up.

"We argue that the transverse elongation of the pelvic inlet has evolved because of the limits on the front-to-back diameter in humans imposed by balancing upright posture, rather than by the efficiency of the bipedal locomotion", says Philipp Mitteroecker, who was also involved in this study."

If the inlet from the womb to the birth canal was a deeper oval, a baby could slide right through without very many fussy movements at all, as they do in other primates.

But in a human, this would require the pelvis to tilt at an even greater degree than it already does, which would add a deeper curve to the lower back.

Ultimately, the new models suggest that extra curve would compromise the stability and health of our spines, which is possibly why the inlet to the birth canal evolved a new shape instead.

In comparison, other primates, like chimpanzees, can afford to have a deeper inlet to the pelvis because they are mostly on all fours and aren't putting a lot of weight on their hips. To get through to the birth canal, chimpanzee young only have to twist their heads a little.

The human baby, by comparison, has to move their body nearly 90 degrees to face the mother's spine to fit through the tight ellipsoid.

Even after this tricky maneuver, it's not a straight slide into the world. The outlet of the human birth canal is also shaped slightly different to primates. It requires the baby to once again turn to get its shoulders out, which are widest on a different axis to the head.

The models run by researchers suggest the outlet of the birth canal is shaped this way to better support the pelvic floor.

If the lower birth canal had an outlet that was wider still, the results indicate it would help pelvic floor stability even more; however, it would ultimately make childbirth too risky. The final twist would be too hard for the head and shoulders to shimmy through.

"Our results provide a novel evolutionary explanation for the twisted shape of the human birth canal," the authors conclude.

It's an intriguing idea from a well-thought out model, but real-world research will be needed to determine if this is really why humans are born with a twist and a shout.

Evolutionary studies, for instance, have shown female Neanderthals had birth canals more similar to chimpanzees, which suggests twisting is a uniquely human and relatively recent evolutionary development.

Given that Neanderthals also stood and walked on two feet, it would be interesting to compare the biomechanics of ancient humans to figure out why the modern human pelvis stands out.

The study was published in BMC Biology.

Go here to read the rest:
Human Birth Canals Are Seriously Twisted. Researchers Think They've Figured Out Why - ScienceAlert

Someone sick from the omicron variant might infect three to five people at one time on average, according to a U.K. health expert.

Dr. Susan Hopkins, the chief medical adviser at the U.K. Health Security Agency, said Thursday that the omicrons R-value a number that determines how many people can be infected from another person is somewhere between three and five, The Guardian reports.

However, Hopkins said theres not enough data yet on the omicron variant to make a full determination of its spread. So far, case counts linked to the virus appear to be doubling every day.

Thats close to what weve seen in Canada. Per Global News, the province of Ontario has seen the omicron variants R-value climb to four times higher than the delta variant.

Scientists are still racing to find out more about omicron and how fast it spreads. One new lab study suggested the omicron variant of the novel coronavirus could spread 70 times faster than the delta variant.

Original post:
Omicron variant: What is the R-value? How many people can you infect? - Deseret News

8 February 2021

The rollout of COVID vaccination programmes has brought with it a renewed hope of a return to normality but has also raised questions about the impact of vaccinationon fertility treatment and pregnancy.

To help explain and clarify the advice to fertility patients and clinicians, and to fight misinformation spreading online, the Progress Educational Trust (PET) the charity that publishes BioNew held an online event.

'The COVID-19 Vaccine: A Shot in the Arm for Fertility Treatment?' was chaired by PET's director Sarah Norcross, and featured speakers outlining the approaches taken by UK, EU and US bodies.

Professor Jason Kasraie, chair of the Association of Reproductive and Clinical Scientists (ARCS), gave the first presentation an overview of the UK guidance issued by ARCS and the British Fertility Society (BFS). He emphasised that there is no known risk in giving non-live vaccines to pregnant women or those looking to conceive.

ARCS and BFS say there is no need to avoid pregnancy after vaccination, and women who would benefit from the vaccine should receive it without compromising their planned fertility treatment. However, as with any medical treatment, patients should be involved in the decisionmaking process. Pointing out the prevalence of fearmongering misinformation online, Professor Kasraie stressed the importance of being careful about how risk is communicated, when there is currently no cause for fear.

The next speaker, Dr Anna Veiga, coordinator of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE)'s COVID-19 Working Group, explained that ESHRE's relatively cautious position relates to an absence of concrete evidence.

ESHRE has decided not to offer a universal recommendation on whether or not men and women attempting assisted conception should get vaccinated before starting treatment, and instead emphasises the importance of weighing up the factors that are relevant to each individual patient. ESHRE recommends postponing the start of fertility treatment for at least a few days after the vaccine, to allow the immune response to settle.

Regarding vaccination and pregnancy, ESHRE suggests that pregnant women should not be vaccinated unless they are at particularly high risk. ESHRE also suggeststhat if a woman becomes pregnant after receiving the first vaccine dose then, then unless the woman is at particularly high risk the second dose should be delayed until the pregnancy is over. There is no advice to avoid pregnancy after vaccination.

Despite this cautious approach towards the vaccine, Dr Veiga noted that pregnant women have been shown to be at higher risk of developing severe COVID-19 compared to non-pregnant women. Women may therefore still decide to go ahead with vaccination, since the benefits of protection from COVID-19 might outweigh any theoretical risks from, vaccination.

Dr Sigal Klipstein, member of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM)'s COVID-19 Task Force, explained that the ASRM's more permissive advice is based on assessing the known and very real risks of COVID-19 alongside the largely theoretical risks of the vaccine. As such, the ASRM recommends vaccination to everyone who can access the vaccine whether before or during pregnancy on the grounds that the benefits outweigh the risks.

To emphasise this point, Dr Klipstein gave the example of Israel's decision to make pregnant women a priority group for vaccination, due to their increased risk of developing severe COVID-19. Dr Klipstein further emphasised the important role of fertility specialists in promoting vaccination to their patients, their communities and the public, so as to counter worrying trends of vaccine hesitancy.

During the event, attendees were polled on whether they thought a consensus was needed between all relevant professional bodies on the COVID vaccine and fertility treatment. A clear majority (77 percent) voted yes, prompting Norcross to ask the panel if there was any hope of a consensus being worked out. All three speakers agreed that a uniform message would help avoid confusion and vaccine hesitancy, but that it would be difficult to achieve a consensus, due to each national body's need to follow the formal position of their country's health authorities. The speakers did, however, note that there was significant agreement on key points.

While most of the discussion focused on vaccination of women and the impact on pregnancy, there was an audience question about the impact vaccination might have on sperm quality. The panel agreed that there is no suggestion of risk to the quality of sperm, but that it might be beneficial for men to leave some time between vaccination and fertility treatment, simply to avoid any temporary side effects of the vaccine (such as a fever) having an effect on sperm production. However, it remains prudent for men to get vaccinated before a planned conception, not least so that they avoid the risk of transmitting COVID-19 to the pregnant woman.

Several audience questions addressed the lack of evidence available on the impact of the vaccine. The panel agreed that while there is currently little evidence on the impact of the vaccines on IVF treatment, gamete donation or the health of newborns, there is new information coming in constantly and at unprecedented speeds. Studies of long-term effects will by their nature take time, but there is reassurance to be drawn from studies undertaken on other non-live vaccines.

Dr Klipstein warned against the temptation of an overabundance of caution in the absence of data, as this could end up forcing women into an impossible scenario of weighing up the risk posed by COVID-19 to their own health with any theoretical risks to their baby from the vaccine. Professor Kasraie observed that IVF patients are known to be especially anxious during the pregnancy, so placing them in a position where they have to shield throughout the nine months of pregnancy for fear of catching COVID-19 could exacerbate their isolation and anxiety.

Overall, the event showed that despite some differences in the advice given by UK, EU and US bodies, there is significant agreement on the important role of vaccination in protecting the health of fertility patients and professionals alike. Evidence of the harm that can be caused by COVID-19 during pregnancy is clear, known and real. Evidence of harm that can be caused by COVID vaccines is at best theoretical and unsupported by evidence. Certain precautions may be taken in the absence of data, but it is important to ensure that such precautions are not taken to be an indication that there is a known risk.

PET is grateful to the Edwards and Steptoe Research Trust Fund, the British Fertility Society, the Bristol Fertility Clinic and CooperSurgical for supporting this event.

Originally posted here:
The COVID Vaccine: A Shot in the Arm for Fertility Treatment? - BioNews