as above👆
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On an average Sunday afternoon in rural Northern California in the 1950s and 60s, long before pollution, gas shortages and gasoline expense were even thought of by most of us, it was common for families to pile mom, dad and the kids into the car for a “Sunday drive.” Sometimes the object was visiting friends and family: “dropping in” and expecting to join in whatever Sunday meal was planned by the unsuspecting host families who somehow always miraculously had enough for all.
On Sunday, July 20, 1969, my parents and I were in the small living room area of our single-wide mobile home, that was on blocks on an acre of land far from neighbors, watching the news coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Dad was nursing his first beer of the day, mom probably had some kind of Bloody Mary (because it was Sunday) smoking Virginia Slims. I was 15, a science nerd who had already read all the Jules Verne, Orson Welles, and early science fiction that I could find. I was a Star Trek fan from the beginning so watching real-life - and LIVE! - space travel was my dream come true. My parents had to keep yelling at me to back away from the front of the television but I would soon be back to my pose of crossed legs with elbows resting on my knees and my chin on my fists, all the better for absorbing every word and image as we waited breathlessly to see the Eagle land.
Into our quiet drive rambled a station wagon full of my aunt, uncle and 4 cousins, ages 15 to 4 years, who were out for a Sunday drive, all piling out of the car and into our tiny home, clambering to use the bathroom, get a drink of water, a beer.
Just like that, our quiet devoted attention to mankind’s first small step on the moon was overwhelmed by the noise and confusion of getting everyone drinks – mom getting out chips and snacks for the kids, dad getting beer for my Uncle, wine for my mom and aunt, kids in and out of the single tiny bathroom.
I stayed glued to the tv, determined to not let this unruly tribe keep me from missing the historic moment of man’s first landing on the moon. The bigger kids wanted to change the channel to watch something more kid-friendly but I wasn’t having it. I was astonished to find that they didn’t know or care about the moon landing! The older cousins were pestering me to explain what was going on. The two little cousins were jumping on the couch and giggling while I yelled for them to be quiet. I was so mad! I was sure my noisy and uninterested cousins were going to make me miss the momentous occasion. I was intent on watching the landing and man’s first step on the moon as I desperately tried to tune them all out. Ironically, despite my stubborn insistence on not missing that iconic moment, I have no actual memory of watching the first step — only a memory of sitting 2 feet in front of the tv while surrounded by noisy chaos.
Mama fox getting a drink, watching babies from the hill
100 to 0
IMMA FUCKING KILL YOU
oh wait this is actually pretty good thank you
he attac but then he snac
@why-animals-do-the-thing ???? Is this safe food for him? Is he safe?
I don’t know of any situation in which it’s ever recommended to feed Popsicle to any animal, unless they’re enrichment ice blocks made specifically for that purpose. This looks like a normal Popsicle - that’s a lot of sugar for any wild animal.
Overall, nothing about this situation looks good. You’ve got a wild animal from a rabies vector species, possibly a juvenile, in a pet carrier with water and what looks like yogurt. There’s a person reaching in bare-handed to offer human food. There’s a lot of things wrong with that setup: an animal capable of inflicting a lot of damage or carrying fatal diseases, no longer in the wild, being interacted with by people without protective equipment. While it’s possible that this could be an animal in a rehabilitation scenario, it just… doesn’t look professional enough to me for that to be likely. So no, I’d say this is not a great situation for the raccoon unless we can find out more context about what was going on and why.
^ this.
For Janette, PET scan visualization
Magical light on rain wet moss
Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have reversed depression symptoms in mice by feeding them Lactobacillus, a probiotic bacteria found in live-cultures yogurt. Further, they have discovered a specific mechanism for how the bacteria affect mood, providing a direct link between the health of the gut microbiome and mental health.
Based on their findings, the researchers are optimistic that their discovery will hold true in people and are planning to confirm their findings in patients with depression.
“The big hope for this kind of research is that we won’t need to
bother with complex drugs and side effects when we can just play with
the microbiome,” explained lead researcher Alban Gaultier, PhD. “It
would be magical just to change your diet, to change the bacteria you
take, and fix your health – and your mood.”
Treating Depression
Depression is one of the most common mental health conditions in the United States, with up to 7 percent of people experiencing a major depressive episode, Gaultier noted. “It’s a huge problem and the treatments are not very good, because they come with huge side effects,” he said.
The role of the gut microbiome – the bacteria that live inside us – has been of tremendous interest to researchers studying depression and other health conditions, both mental and physical. Gaultier, of the UVA Department of Neuroscience and its Center for Brain Immunology and Glia, set out to see if he could find a concrete link between depression and gut health. “When you’re stressed, you increase your chance of being depressed, and that’s been known for a long, long time,” he said. “So the question that we wanted to ask is, does the microbiome participate in depression?”
The answer appears to be yes. Looking at the composition of the gut microbiome before and after mice were subjected to stress, Gaultier’s team found that the major change was the loss of Lactobacillus. With the loss of Lactobacillus came the onset of depression symptoms. Feeding the mice Lactobacillus with their food returned them to almost normal. “A single strain of Lactobacillus,” Gaultier observed, “is able to influence mood.”
He and his team then went on to determine the mechanism by which Lactobacillus influences depression. They found that the amount of Lactobacillus in the gut affects the level of a metabolite in the blood called kynurenine, which has been shown to drive depression. When Lactobacillus was diminished in the gut, the levels of kynurenine went up – and depression symptoms set in.
“This is the most consistent change we’ve seen across different
experiments and different settings we call microbiome profiles,”
explained researcher Ioana Marin, a graduate student who is finishing up
her PhD. work. “This is a consistent change. We see Lactobacillus levels correlate directly with the behavior of these mice.”
Testing in Humans
Gaultier was careful to call the symptoms seen in mice as “depressive-like behavior” or “despair behavior,” as mice have no way to communicate that they are feeling depressed. But those symptoms are widely accepted as the best available model for looking at depression in creatures other than humans.
Based on the new findings, Gaultier plans to begin studying the effect in people as soon as possible. He intends to examine the effects of Lactobacillus on depression in patients with multiple sclerosis, a group in which the disorder is common. Promisingly, the same biological substances and mechanisms Lactobacillus uses to affect mood in mice are also seen in humans, suggesting the effect may be the same.
In addition to looking at the effects in people, the researchers are continuing to explore the important role of kynurenine. “There has been some work in humans and quite a bit in animal models talking about how this metabolite, kynurenine, can influence behavior,” Marin said. “It’s something produced with inflammation that we know is connected with depression. But the question still remains: How? How does this molecule affect the brain? What are the processes? This is the road we want to take.”
While there is no harm in people with depression eating yogurt — assuming they can eat dairy without problem — people receiving treatment for depression should not stop taking their medications without consulting their physicians. More studies, the researchers noted, are needed.
For more on this discovery, including answers to questions such as whether the strain of Lactobacillus affects the effect on depression, visit the School of Medicine’s research blog, the Making of Medicine.
True blue flowers are a rarity in nature—they occur only in select species like morning glories and delphiniums. Now, researchers have created a genuinely blue chrysanthemum by adding two genes to the normally pink or reddish flower. The advance could be applied to other species—and it may mean that florists wanting to hawk blooms of blue will no longer have to dye them.
“This [advance] is of great impact,” says Toru Nakayama, a plant biochemist at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, who was not involved with the work. There are several popular commercial species for which no true blue varieties exist, he notes.
We all think we’ve seen blue flowers before. And in some cases, it’s true. But according to the Royal Horticultural Society’s color scale—the gold standard for flowers—most “blues” are really violet or purple. Florists and gardeners are forever on the lookout for new colors and varieties of plants, however, but making popular ornamental and cut flowers, like roses, vibrant blue has proved quite difficult. “We’ve all been trying to do this for a long time and it’s never worked perfectly,” says Thomas Colquhoun, a plant biotechnologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville who was not involved with the work.
Truly blue chrysanthemums proved easier to make than researchers had thought. Naonobu Noda/NARO
staff
Potatoes are neat, right? You know what else is neat? Expanding video upload limits. So we went ahead and did that.
Here are the deets:
Now you can watch all nine minutes and thirty-five seconds of a potato cooking in a microwave. Because that’s how long it takes.
🥔 Potatoes were harmed during the making of this video. 🥔
