Incredible Photo Reveals Grim Fate Of Bat Sea Star Victims

'YUP, THAT’S ME. YOU’RE PROBABLY WONDERING HOW I ENDED UP IN THIS SITUATION,' - UNFORTUNATE CRAB, 2020. IMAGE C
OURTESY OF GREG POTTER


By Rachael Funnell 29 OCT 2020, 17:00


Aquariums are a great source of education, scientific research, and conservation funding when done properly. These unique establishments enable people from all backgrounds to gain insight into the fascinating world that exists beneath the waves. They also enable us to see things we normally can't, in the most literal sense of the phrase, as the glass tanks that house the animals can offer us a sneak peek of what's happening underneath an animal’s body.

Greg Potter was visiting the Ucluelet Aquarium, a non-profit catch-and-release aquarium on the west coast of Vancouver Island, Canada, when he spotted something unusual happening in one of the tanks. A bat sea star had managed to snag a crab and, thanks to the tank-side view provided by the clear glass, could be seen digesting it.

“Apparently the crabs are stored in there waiting to be fed to a wolf eel but this sea star just saw an opportunity,” Potter, who is joining the Strawberry Isle Marine Research Society (SIMRS) as Science Communications Director next week, told IFLScience. “They don't aim to feed the sea stars live prey.”

Sea stars, also known as starfish, move using tiny tube feet, which can be seen on the underside of the bat sea star in the photo. These animals have a reputation for being a bit slow and lethargic (probably because of photos like this) but some are faster than you might expect. An adult sunflower sea star, as seen in the above video, can whiz across the ocean floor at a rate of 1 meter (3 feet) a minute thanks to the 15,000 tube feet that sit beneath its body. Sea stars also use these tube feet to grab onto and hold their prey, which would explain how the unfortunate crab found itself in this situation.

“If the star already had a leg up waving around (as they sometimes do) it wouldn't take much contact to get the crab as they're surprisingly strong,” said Potter. “In the wild, I saw one trying to eat a fried egg jellyfish it had caught but I don't know how that turned out.”

Once a sea star has a hold of its prey, it will expel its stomach out of its mouth and digests its food into a sort of chowder which is then slurped up into digestive glands. Evidently, the bat sea star in the photo had only just begun its meal but no doubt employees at the aquarium were treated to a live crab chowder demonstration for the rest of the day. Yummy...

Exposure To Man-Made Chemicals Influences Genes Controlling Aging, Immune System And Metabolism




By Alexander Suvorov 02 NOV 2020, 


Today humans are exposed to thousands of man-made chemicals. Yet the effects on people’s health are still not fully understood.

In 2020 the number of registered chemicals reached 167 million. Every day people are exposed to them through food, water, contaminated air, drugs, cosmetics and other man-made substances. Less than 1% of these chemicals were tested for toxicity, and those that were tested demonstrate ability to disrupt almost every biological process in our body. Can we infer how cumulative exposures shape our health?

I am an environmental toxicologist studying effects of man-made chemicals on our health. I decided to develop a computational approach to objectively compare sensitivity of all genes to all chemicals and identify the most vulnerable biological processes.

Unbiased approach

For our study, my research colleagues and I used data from the Comparative Toxicogenomic Database. The Comparative Toxicogenomic Database collects information from thousands of published studies on how chemicals change the activity of genes. Genes are sections of DNA that encode proteins which perform a broad range of functions in cells, from building tissues to metabolizing nutrients. When chemicals affect genes, that results in increased or decreased production of proteins.

Modern methods of molecular biology can detect changes in activity of all genes in the genome in response to a chemical insult. I developed an approach that overlays lists of altered genes from different studies to calculate how many times each gene was affected. The resulting numbers reflect sensitivities of genes to chemicals generally.

Using 2,169 studies on mice, rats, humans and their cells, my research group ranked the sensitivity of 17,338 genes to chemical exposures. These studies tested the impact of 1,239 diverse chemicals ranging from prescription drugs to environmental pollutants.

At the next step we ran tests to ensure that this sample of over 1,000 chemicals was large enough to reliably represent all classes of man-made chemicals people are exposed to. To do so, we measured sensitivity of genes for one half of this list and then for another to test if even a smaller number of chemicals can reliably identify sensitive genes. The results were encouraging – the values of gene sensitivities were almost identical in the two trials.

Cellular defense system responds to chemicals

Our cells are not completely helpless when exposed to chemical insults. In fact, they possess strategies for dealing with stress and damage induced by chemicals. Our data confirm that these safeguards become active in response to exposures.

This line of defense includes enzymes that eliminate toxic chemicals, alleviate oxidative stress (the accumulation of reactive radicals in cells), repair damaged DNA and proteins, and identify highly damaged cells to trigger their death and prevent them from turning cancerous.

Could exposure to man-made chemicals be boosting obesity rates around the world? Fuss Sergey/Shutterstock.com

Metabolism of lipids and carbohydrates is vulnerable

Surprisingly, we found that molecular networks involved in the regulation of cellular metabolism are most sensitive to chemical exposures. One of them is PPAR signaling. PPARs are a group of proteins that regulate energy balance and metabolism of lipids and glucose.

Rises or falls in PPARs activity contribute to obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes and fatty liver disease. The ability of some environmental chemicals to affect PPARs was shown before. However, we didn’t expect to see sensitivity of PPARs to a very broad range of compounds.

We also discovered that genes involved in the development of pancreatic beta cells, which secrete insulin and play a key role in glucose metabolism, are suppressed by a majority of chemicals in our list. Dysfunction of beta cells results in diabetes. Thus, cumulative chemical exposures may be a significant risk factor for diabetes.

Today an epidemic of metabolic disease is a major public health issue. The prevalence of obesity nearly tripled between 1975 and 2016. Approximately 40% of Americans will develop Type 2 diabetes during their lives, and 33%-88% have fatty liver. Connection between exposures and metabolic diseases was shown before for some chemicals with endocrine disruptive properties. However, the role of a broadest range of man-made chemicals in this epidemic was not recognized before but can be significant.

Growth, aging and the immune system

Two hormones involved in growth – growth hormone (GH) and insulin-like growth factor (IGF1) – are also affected by exposure to chemicals.

IGF1 is a hormone secreted mostly by the liver. It is recognized as a major regulator of body growth. Additionally, multiple mouse experiments show that decreased GH-IGF1 signaling results in longer lifespan. This pathway also determines if cells will use energy to build new molecules the body needs, or if they will break down existing molecules to release energy for the organism to use. The ability of chemicals to affect this central regulator of growth and aging is a novel finding. What health problems may be due to the sensitivity of GH-IGF1 is yet to be uncovered.

Our analysis indicates that genes that control the immune response are also highly sensitive to chemicals.

Two major outcomes of a dysfunctional immune system are allergy and autoimmunity. Prevalence for both conditions follows upward trends. Food allergies increased from 3.4% to 5.1% between 1997 and 2011 among children in the U.S. Skin allergies increased from 7.4% to 12.5% during the same period. Another study showed a 5% increase in blood marker of autoimmune disease in Americans during the period 1988-2012.

All molecular pathways are sensitive to chemicals
Overall we found that almost every known pathway may be affected by chemicals. That finding has significant implications for regulatory toxicology.

With ever-increasing numbers of man-made chemicals, society needs to develop rapid and cost-efficient methods of toxicity testing.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

One important question that remains unanswered is what pathways should be covered by testing to ensure that regulators do not approve chemicals that harm or disrupt critical molecular circuits. Our data suggests that we need to develop tests that cover every known molecular pathway without exception.

Our study outlines new priorities for toxicological research, including the role of chemical exposures for metabolic health, immune system, development and aging.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

US companies add fewer jobs than forecast, ADP report shows

Henry Ren
Bloomberg

U.S. companies added fewer jobs in October than forecast, a private report showed, indicating the absence of additional fiscal stimulus is prompting some firms to adjust payrolls as the pandemic continues to wear on the recovery.

Businesses’ payrolls increased by 365,000 last month after a revised 753,000 rise in September, according to ADP Research Institute data released Wednesday. The October gain was weaker than all but one estimate in a Bloomberg survey of economists and was less than the median projection for a 643,000 gain.

The slower pace of hiring illustrates a long road to recovery for the labor market as the coronavirus continues to reduce revenue at service providers including the travel, hotel and restaurant industries. The figures, along with the recent resurgence in infections, underscore the need for lawmakers to agree on another round of fiscal assistance to shore up the most-affected businesses and keep employees on payrolls.

“The big picture is that employment growth is continuing to slow and the new wave of virus cases is only likely to exacerbate that trend,” Andrew Hunter, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics, said in a note.

The data precede the government’s monthly jobs report on Friday, which is forecast to show private payrolls increased by about 700,000 after a 877,000 gain in September. At the same time, public sector employment is likely to decline due to the unwind in federal government hiring as the 2020 Census concludes, according to a note by Bloomberg economists.

The ADP report showed service-provider employment increased 348,000 in October, reflecting slowdowns in hiring within trade and transportation, business services and health care. Payrolls at goods producers rose just 17,000 last month, the smallest gain in three months, due to less hiring in manufacturing and construction.

Medium-size businesses led the October rise with a 135,000 increase in payrolls. Large businesses hired 116,000 while small companies added 114,000 workers.

ADP’s payroll data represent firms employing nearly 26 million workers in the U.S.

Thai women use pro-democracy protests to challenge sexism
by Nanchanok Wongsamuth | @nanchanokw | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Tuesday, 3 November 2020 01:00 GMT

At protest sites throughout the country, people are being asked to sign petitions calling for abortion and prostitution to be decriminalised

By Nanchanok Wongsamuth

BANGKOK, Nov 3 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Napawn Somsak took to the stage in her school uniform, her hair in pigtails, to denounce sexism in Thai society and question the treatment of a royal princess - an act unthinkable before the protests that have roiled the country in recent months.

Before a cheering crowd of more than 2,000 people in the northern province of Chiang Mai, the 18-year-old demanded to know why women are paid less than men and cannot be ordained into the influential Buddhist monkhood.

Somsak is among the large numbers of young Thai women calling publicly for change, emboldened by widespread demonstrations to demand the departure of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha and reforms to the powerful monarchy.

"If we believe that everyone is equal and there is a need to reform the value of patriarchy in Thai society, then no one, including the monarchy, should be exempted," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview.

The protests have swept away a longstanding taboo on discussing the royal family, allowing Somsak to refer in her address to a royal princess who was stripped of her titles after marrying a foreigner - although she stopped short of naming her.

Princess Ubolratana Rajakanya Sirivadhana Barnavadi was required to give up the title Her Royal Highness after marrying an American fellow student while studying in the United States.

The Royal Palace and the Department of Women's Affairs and Family Development declined to comment on the protests, which began as political but have expanded to cover everything from corruption in the military to women's rights.

The Palace has made no official comment on the protesters, but on Sunday, King Maha Vajiralongkorn said "we love them all the same" in his first direct public comments on months of demonstrations.

Protesters say they do not seek to abolish the monarchy, only reform it. But the Thai constitution says the monarchy is "enthroned in a position of revered worship" and conservatives are horrified by such attacks.

Chumaporn Taengkliang, co-founder of Women for Freedom and Democracy, speaks on stage at a protest site in Bangkok on September 19, 2020. Thomson Reuters Foundation/Karnt Thassanaphak

SUPPRESSION

Many of the young protesters are students who also complain of a school system that emphasises obedience and tradition, from lining up daily for the national anthem to strict rules on uniforms, haircuts and behaviour.

Titipol Phakdeewanich, dean of Ubon Ratchathani University's Faculty of Political Science, said women faced more suppression than men in schools.

"The political space is opening up for young girls, who have long been suppressed," he said.

At protest sites throughout the country, people are being asked to sign petitions calling for abortion and prostitution to be decriminalised.

Women for Freedom and Democracy, a pressure group that formed in August, distributes sanitary pads and has also developed an online system to report sexual harassment.

More than 40 cases have been reported and it is providing legal advice on some.

But it is the group's organised "pussy painting" - colouring in an image of a vagina - that has garnered the most attention.

"People are excited because normally we don't talk about the vagina in public," said Kornkanok Khumta, a member of the group.

"As time goes by, people are getting better at colouring and they feel empowered that their sexual organ is mentioned in a protest site."

Anti-government demonstrators colour drawings of vaginas at a protest site in Bangkok on September 19, 2020. Thomson Reuters Foundation/Women for Freedom and Democracy

DEMANDS FOR CHANGE

King Vajiralongkorn was officially crowned as constitutional monarch in May last year after first taking the throne following the 2016 death of his widely revered father, who reigned for 70 years.

He has been married four times and his relationships with women have been the subject of scrutiny.

Last year, he stripped his royal consort of her titles and military ranks for being "disloyal", only to reinstate them in September.

Thai student groups have laid out 10 demands for change, including reducing the king's constitutional powers, personal control of the royal fortune and of some units of the army.

Chumaporn Taengkliang, who co-founded Women for Freedom and Democracy, wants them to add one more demand - that impunity for domestic or sexual violence should end.

"The monarchy is an important role model for the country, and if they have impunity when it comes to domestic or sexual violence, it is not surprising that a husband or father has impunity when they use violence among family members," she said.

"In a society in which people of all levels are oppressed, women are oppressed even more. They can't stand it any more."

Related stories:

Thailand's sex workers petition to decriminalise prostitution

Thailand pledges to protect women who report sexual abuse

INTERVIEW - Thai model targets 'shocking' gender violence in new U.N. role

(Reporting by Nanchanok Wongsamuth @nanchanokw; Editing by Claire Cozens. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly. Visit http://news.trust.org)

ABOUT OUR WOMEN COVERAGEWe focus on stories that help to empower women and bring lasting change to gender inequality

Biden wins most votes of any presidential candidate in history
Joseph Choi 

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has won the most votes out of any candidate in history, with the former vice president notching over 70 million votes nationwide as of Wednesday afternoon.

© UPI Photo Biden wins most votes of any presidential candidate in history

Former President Obama previously held the record for most votes cast for a presidential candidate in 2008, garnering over 69.4 million votes at the time.

Biden currently has registered 70,170,626 votes nationwide and counting, according a tally from The Associated Press.

President Trump, by comparison, has garnered 67.3 million votes nationwide and counting, according to tallies from the newswire.

The 2020 election saw a record turnout of early and mail-in voting in what has shaped up to be a high-stakes presidential race. Over 100 million votes were cast this year before Election Day.

The news comes as both Biden and President Trump remain locked in a tight race for the White House. On election night, the president made early gains in Florida, Texas, Ohio and Iowa - states that he needed to win in order to contend for the presidency.

Biden and Trump are currently competing in close races to clinch the Electoral College victory in Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Biden has moved to the lead in Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin, though the races in those states are still too close to call.

As of Wednesday morning, The New York Times projected 227 total electoral votes for Biden and 213 for President Trump.

US

 2020 presidential election had highest turnout rate in 120 years

Michael McDonald

@ElectProject

·

Nov 4, 2020

I posted PRELIMINARY estimates of the 2020 state and national turnout and voting-eligible population turnout rates 160 million people voted Turnout rate: 66.9% Highest turnout rate since 1900: 73.7% http://electproject.org/2020g

1:00 AM · Nov 4, 2020

Michael McDonald

@ElectProject

That is not a typo. The 2020 presidential election had the highest turnout rate in 120 years. There is still a fair amount of guesswork involving outstanding ballots to be counted. I will continue to refine these estimates over the coming weeks

PROVING ONCE AGAIN THAT THE OLD ANARCHIST ADAGE WAS RIGHT

America is a failing state. And establishment politics can’t solve the crisis

Our country is breaking down, we have no effective leadership, and we’re lagging behind other rich countries. The left needs to provide an answer

Bhaskar Sunkar
Mon 2 Nov 2020

Quincy Cohen writes the name of a friend lost to Covid-19 on to a tombstone at a memorial for local lives lost in North Miami, Florida. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

In 2020, America has shown itself to be exceptional in the worst possible ways. No other rich country has such a poor public health infrastructure or such a tattered social safety net. America’s levels of both police violence and violent crime find their closest peers in countries like Venezuela and South Africa, not Canada and Germany. And even Cuba and Bosnia and Herzegovina beat the world’s only superpower in infant mortality and other key social indicators.

In the most powerful country on Earth, 29.3 million people say that they 'sometimes' or 'often' do not have enough to eat

In the most powerful country on Earth, 29.3 million people say that they “sometimes” or “often” do not have enough to eat. Forty million Americans are impoverished, according to the UN. Half a million are homeless.

And all this was true before the full brunt of the pandemic’s economic recession hit.

Given these stark figures, the relative stability of the United States is a wonder. The country has maintained popular suffrage and democratic institutions (for white males, at least) for two centuries and married that form of government with a dynamic capitalist economy capable of creating vast wealth. In fact, American business owners have managed to avoid even the rise of a major social-democratic or labor party; in the US, demands for economic justice are filtered through – and watered down by – a centrist Democratic party and a byzantine system of government deliberately designed to limit popular passions.

But perhaps that muzzling is reaching its limit. The past decade has seen bolder challenges to the establishment order – the Occupy movement, the surprising outsider challenge of Bernie Sanders, the equally unexpected rise of Donald Trump and the populist right, and street protests against police violence. Faced with all of this, as well as its inability to address the Covid pandemic, the American state looks embarrassingly ineffectual and increasingly lacking in popular legitimacy.

Part of the problem lies with the federal structure of the United States. With power split between the local, state, and federal levels and among different branches of government, there are countless “brake” points in the system that stall or stymie attempts at reform.

Of course, this structure has a certain utility for elites. The labor journalist Robert Fitch put it well: “The aim of the right is always to restrict the scope of class conflict – to bring it down to as low a level as possible. The smaller and more local the political unit, the easier it is to run it oligarchically.”

For those on the left who want to change things, the dilemma is not just how to reach power and government (hard enough as that is) but how to reconstitute the American republic in a way that allows us to actually achieve justice. The most important periods of progressive activity in US history – Abraham Lincoln and the struggle against the slaver class; the populist era; the New Deal – have embodied this spirit. For Franklin D Roosevelt, new collective bargaining rights and entitlement programs needed to be safeguarded by more effective government institutions. His administration pushed for new agencies to enforce labor law, reorganized the executive branch, and attempted a sweeping modernization of the US supreme court. Roosevelt even flouted the (at the time, unofficial) presidential two-term limit.

The left must find a way to not just popularize our goals, but secure the means – institutional reform – to achieve them

The success of FDR and his predecessors was ultimately limited. Yet despite our past failures, popular organizing has yielded enough gains, over time, to create a US that is not quite the worst of all possible worlds. We have maintained crucial democratic rights and extended those rights to black Americans, women and other oppressed groups. We have a limited welfare system for the very poor and the elderly and public guarantees to primary and secondary education for all. But we live in the shadow of the failure of our workers’ movement to take root in the US as firmly as it did in the 20th century in other developed countries. The result is a state woefully inadequate to address either slow-moving crises like hunger and poverty or more acute ones like coronavirus and climate change.


Winning mass support for a program of Medicare for All, green jobs, affordable housing, and more seems within reach. But the left must find a way to not just popularize our goals, but secure the means – institutional reform – to achieve them.

Liberal figures like Senator Elizabeth Warren and, yes, the journalist Jeffrey Toobin have trumpeted the need for some of these changes. But we can’t just stop at the abolition of the electoral college and the Senate filibuster, or even full Congressional representation for Washington DC residents. We must more fundamentally fight to transform the pre-modern political system that we’ve grafted on to our modern economy and society. For progressives, that’s a battle far more daunting than just getting Trump out of the White House – but it’s just as necessary.


Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin magazine and a Guardian US columnist. He is the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality.