Real

On November 7, 2024, Denmark used a racist, culturally biased "parenting competency" test to remove a 2 hour old baby, Zammi, from her loving indigenous Greenlandic Inuit mother, Keira, because her native language, which uses minute facial expressions to communicate, will not be able to "[prepare] the child for the social expectations and codes that are necessary to navigate in Danish society." This test had been recommended not to be used at the federal level before this happened but certain municipalities, including the one this happened in, chose to continue to use it regardless. Not only is this blatantly racist but also violates multiple declarations and conventions that Denmark has signed that protect the rights of indigenous people.

Please sign this petition to help Keira to get her baby back.

Change.org

Bring a little girl inuk greenlander ZAMMI BACK HOME

Can you spare a minute to help this campaign?

I think we need one of those popular read-along blogs to tackle The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the same way that's been done for Dracula and Moby-Dick. The number of folks around here who appear to be under the impression that reading a queer subtext into Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a subversion rather than being straightforwardly material to the plot is frankly embarrassing, and I'm assuming this is because nobody's actually read the damn thing.

After Neil said that they kept David Tenant in a box on set I couldn't get this image out of my head...

A fantasy world with an industrial revolution, where Gods are hunted like whales were.

which one of u was going to tell me that tea tastes different if u put it in hot water?

this is awesome but why did they use this pic

Synergistic innovations enabled the radiation of anglerfishes in the deep open ocean

Chase D. Brownstein, Katerina L. Zapfe, Spencer Lott, Richard C. Harrington, Ava Ghezelayagh, Alex Dornburg, Thomas J. Near

Summary

Major ecological transitions are thought to fuel diversification, but whether they are contingent on the evolution of certain traits called key innovations is unclear. Key innovations are routinely invoked to explain how lineages rapidly exploit new ecological opportunities. However, investigations of key innovations often focus on single traits rather than considering trait combinations that collectively produce effects of interest.  Here, we investigate the evolution of synergistic trait interactions in anglerfishes, which include one of the most species-rich vertebrate clades in the bathypelagic, or “midnight,” zone of the deep sea: Ceratioidea.  Ceratioids are the only vertebrates that possess sexual parasitism, wherein males temporarily attach or permanently fuse to females to mate. We show that the rapid transition of ancestrally benthic anglerfishes into pelagic habitats occurred during a period of major global warming 50–35 million years ago. This transition coincided with the origins of sexual parasitism, which is thought to increase the probability of successful reproduction once a mate is found in the midnight zone, Earth’s largest habitat. Our reconstruction of the evolutionary history of anglerfishes and the loss of immune genes support that permanently fusing clades have convergently degenerated their adaptive immunity. We find that degenerate adaptive immune genes and sexual body size dimorphism, both variably present in anglerfishes outside the ceratioid radiation, likely promoted their transition into the bathypelagic zone. These results show how traits from separate physiological, morphological, and reproductive systems can interact synergistically to drive major transitions and subsequent diversification in novel environments.

Read the paper here: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(24)00576-1

(behind a paywall, unfortunately)

You may be able to contact the authors for a copy if you wish. (here)