tingilinde

the ghost forest

Maya Lin's latest installation makes a powerful statement.

 

1879 and today

Heather Cox Richardson on the frightening similarities.

 

pro tennis is dripping with money

And most of the players see very little. A fascinating look at dysfunction.

 

 

counting things in poop

Finding 54,118 species of viruses in  stool samples from 11,810 people.  92% of the viruses are unique to science.

from Nature Microbiology ( no - I didn't read the full paper.. just the abstract and discussion)

 

Metagenomic compendium of 189,680 DNA viruses from the human gut microbiome

 

Stephen Nayfach, David Páez-Espino, Lee Call, Soo Jen Low, Hila Sberro, Natalia N. Ivanova, Amy D. Proal, Michael A. Fischbach, Ami S. Bhatt, Philip Hugenholtz & Nikos C. Kyrpides

Abstract
Bacteriophages have important roles in the ecology of the human gut microbiome but are under-represented in reference databases. To address this problem, we assembled the Metagenomic Gut Virus catalogue that comprises 189,680 viral genomes from 11,810 publicly available human stool metagenomes. Over 75% of genomes represent double-stranded DNA phages that infect members of the Bacteroidia and Clostridia classes. Based on sequence clustering we identified 54,118 candidate viral species, 92% of which were not found in existing databases. The Metagenomic Gut Virus catalogue improves detection of viruses in stool metagenomes and accounts for nearly 40% of CRISPR spacers found in human gut Bacteria and Archaea. We also produced a catalogue of 459,375 viral protein clusters to explore the functional potential of the gut virome. This revealed tens of thousands of diversity-generating retroelements, which use error-prone reverse transcription to mutate target genes and may be involved in the molecular arms race between phages and their bacterial hosts.

 

 

 

on journalism

Donald Trump was an emergency and journalism wasn't up to the task. 

A must-read by journalist and journalism professor Dan Gillmor

snip

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Neutrality, objectivity — pick your journalistic norm — should not apply to these topics, not logically or morally, if we want to achieve that more perfect union and sustainable planet. Yet they remain entrenched, in too many journalistic circles, even when they are failing us.

Why? Probably because — and I’m being charitable — too many journalists can’t bring themselves to believe that these dangers are here today, or imminent, or necessarily even real.
That’s most evident when it comes to the growing threat to our republic. The people who report our news can’t, or won’t, imagine how close we may be to a tipping point that leads to the collapse of the great, unfinished American experiment in liberty.

Caution: It’s vital to take the growing threats to democracy seriously —and beware that we don’t allow our battle against the real authoritarian threat become a backdoor to a different kind of authoritarianism, the way we turned the 9/11 attacks into an years-long curbing of civil liberties at home.

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new york harbor's oyster island

Journey to a sort of island.

snip

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Oyster Island is primarily a sunken island, but it returns occasionally when the moon is both full and especially close, as it was a few weeks ago, when an unusually low tide offered a two-hour window during which a small group landed there to explore.

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one of fascism's greatest gifts to america

It's Hans Bethe's birthday - the rise of the Nazi's caused him to leave Germany for America.

 

wolflets

Wolf pups at a wolf conservation center in NY State.

 

 

the right wing's war on history

Timothy Snyder is one of the most important scholars on totalitarianism - he has a piece in The New York Times on why the right wing's war on history is a troubling step. 

snip

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But the most common feature among the laws, and the one most familiar to a student of repressive memory laws elsewhere in the world, is their attention to feelings. Four of five of them, in almost identical language, proscribe any curricular activities that would give rise to “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.”

History is not therapy, and discomfort is part of growing up. As a teacher, I cannot exclude the possibility, for example, that my non-Jewish students will feel psychological distress in learning how little the United States did for Jewish refugees in the 1930s. I know from my experience teaching the Holocaust that it often causes psychological discomfort for students to learn that Hitler admired Jim Crow and the myth of the Wild West. Teachers in high schools cannot exclude the possibility that the history of slavery, lynchings and voter suppression will make some non-Black students uncomfortable. The new memory laws invite teachers to self-censor, on the basis of what students might feel — or say they feel. The memory laws place censorial power in the hands of students and their parents. It is not exactly unusual for white people in America to express the view that they are being treated unfairly; now such an opinion could bring history classes to a halt.

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the destruction of lytton, bc

For several days Lytton, British Columbia was the hottest town in Canada getting up to about 121°F two days ago.  Then it was destroyed by fire.  A CBC video has some dramatic images and a bit of background