Month: August 2017

Justice Dept. to Take On Affirmative Action in College Admissions

sarcasticcynic:

In case you were wondering what Jeff “Don’t Call Me a Racist” Sessions has planned as an encore after having Trump’s Justice Department:

  1. Drop claims that a strict Texas voter ID law was discriminatory;*
  2. Stop going after police departments for civil rights violations;
  3. Review all prior settlements with police departments over civil rights violations, with an eye towards eliminating as many of them as feasible;
  4. Drop its challenge to North Carolina’s “bathroom bill”; and
  5. File an unsolicited legal brief arguing that federal law doesn’t prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

“The Supreme Court has ruled that the educational benefits that flow from
having a diverse student body can justify using race as one factor
among many … The Justice Department declined to provide more details about its plans or to make the acting head of the civil rights division, John Gore, available for an interview.”

*It didn’t work–the judge ruled the law discriminatory anyway.

Justice Dept. to Take On Affirmative Action in College Admissions

Well, that sucks. A longtime mutual had to delete on short notice for some personal reasons, and I’m not sure if a best wishes reply even went through before the blog disappeared. Tried to refresh to see if there were any updates I hadn’t seen, and it was gone. Really hoping things are as OK there as they can be, though.

illogicalrabbit:

wheremyscalesslither:

end0skeletal:

vinegardoppio:

hellohowdareyou:

end0skeletal:

briancrafterussell:

magicturtle:

angstriddentrashhuman:

captain-raptor:

oodblood:

ladyoftheteaandblood:

end0skeletal:

unidentifiablelifeform:

end0skeletal:

Polycephaly is the condition of having more than one head.

Two-headed animals (called bicephalic or dicephalic) and three-headed (tricephalic) animals are the only type of multi-headed creatures seen in the real world, and form by the same process as conjoined twins from monozygotic twin embryos.

While two headed snakes are rare, they do occur in both the wild and in captivity at a rate of about 1 in 10,000 births.

Most wild polycephalic snakes do not live long, but some captive individuals do. A two-headed black rat snake with separate throats and stomachs survived for 20 years.

(Sources: x x x x x x x x)

Why does this seem to happen to snakes so often compared to other animals? I mean, you don’t see this happen to dogs or cats very often but snake embryos seem almost eager to mix it up every once in a while and pull a two-for-one deal in the head department.

The consensus seems to be that polycephaly occurs more often in reptiles than other animals, but the why of it, as far as I could find out, is relatively unknown. Polycephalic animals appear so infrequently and they survive for such a short time that scientists just have not been able to study them sufficiently. If anyone can find more information about why it happens more often in reptiles, feel free to chime in. In the meantime, enjoy these two-headed lizards and turtles:

Can you imagine the arguments!

One thought real quick: two-headed dinosaurs

oh my god i will lose my fuckin mind the day that fossil is found

@magicturtle two headed dinosaurs seems like something you’d be down for.

Rawr YEAH!

I think I misunderstood the assignment.

Um not to put a dampener on the idea of two headed dinos but aren’t dinosaurs closer to birds and birds most likely don’t have two heads.

Birds are reptiles! That sounds insane, but let me explain.

Biologists use a system to classify animals called the phylogenetic system, which means animals are grouped together based on their ancestry. In this way, birds are reptiles because they’re more closely related to reptiles than anything else, crocodiles in particular. In fact, crocodiles are more closely related to birds than they are to lizards.

The first groups of reptiles evolved about 300 million years ago. About 40 million years later,  a group of reptiles called therapsids branched off, which eventually became modern mammals. Other groups of reptiles split off over the next 120 million years, one branch being the dinosaurs. These dinosaurs were only distantly related to modern snakes, lizards, and turtles, groups that had split off at different times. But 65 million years ago there was a massive extinction event, and all dinosaurs were killed except for a single group of feathered dinosaurs. These evolved over the next 65 million years into modern birds.

So birds are dinosaurs, and dinosaurs were reptiles, and thus birds are reptiles.

Additionally, there were two-headed dinosaurs! Well, at least one. That we know of.
I can’t add the picture bc mobile but here’s a link: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061226-two-heads_2.html

#somebody not on mobile add the picture please?

here you go

however, the above mentioned and pictured fossil was not a dinosaur – just an aquatic reptile from the Cretaceous period – which is still badass! also this is one of the coolest threads ever.

Excellent additions!

A point I forgot to mention in my birds-are-reptiles ramblings…two-headed birds are definitely a (rare) thing. This bird with two heads and three beaks was found in Massachusetts. (x)

This is the true reason I got involved in Tumblr. Bring back these posts!!

@uglybeastie

Source: end0skeletal

kalany:

ffsshh:

for some disabled ppl their disability is a gift that they feel they’re a better person for having & they wouldn’t change it for the world
for some disabled ppl their disability is the worst thing that ever happened to them & they’d give anything not to have it
for most disabled ppl their disability is neither or both. their feelings are somewhere inbetween or all over the map. completely neutral or shifting between the extremes
all of these are perfectly valid relationships to have w/ your disability. none of them are wrong or right or inherently healthy or unhealthy. they just are what they are. if you wanna improve your relationship w/ your disability that’s fine. if you don’t that’s fine too.
the only thing that’s not fine is telling someone that their relationship w/ their own disability is wrong

Also? If you are abled, or have a markedly different disability? Your feelings about someone else’s disability are not important and are not welcome.

(I mean, competing access needs exist, and that’s worth recognizing—if for example someone’s stimming is an overload trigger for you, by all means, vent to someone else, try to find a way out of the situation, whatever. Maybe even discuss it with them if you can do so respectfully. But I sincerely do not give two fucks what some abled person feels about my disability. I don’t care. I don’t want to know. I just want to exist in peace.)

currentsinbiology:

Wow, wow, wow, and holy crap too.

Could diabetes spread like mad cow disease?

Prions are insidious proteins that spread like infectious agents and trigger fatal conditions such as mad cow disease. A protein implicated in diabetes, a new study suggests, shares some similarities with these villains. Researchers transmitted diabetes from one mouse to another just by injecting the animals with this protein. The results don’t indicate that diabetes is contagious like a cold, but blood transfusions, or even food, may spread the disease.

The work is “very exciting” and “well-documented” for showing that the protein has some prionlike behavior, says prion biologist Witold Surewicz of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who wasn’t connected to the research. However, he cautions against jumping to the conclusion that diabetes spreads from person to person. The study raises that possibility, he says, but “it remains to be determined.”

In a new study, neurobiologist and biochemist Claudio Soto of McGovern Medical School at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston and colleagues tested whether IAPP alone could instigate diabetes in mice. The researchers began by culturing pancreatic cells from healthy humans and from young mice that had been genetically engineered to synthesize large amounts of human IAPP. When the scientists added material from the pancreases of old engineered mice that already had diabetes, clumps of IAPP sprouted in the cultured cells. The clumps also appeared when the cells were exposed to lab-synthesized IAPP tangles, the scientists report online today in The Journal of Experimental Medicine.

Tangles of prion proteins like these cause lethal brain diseases, and a new study implicates similar protein snarls in type 2 diabetes. Scott Camazine/Science Source

Source: currentsinbiology