Books Hep Cats and Academics: Caitlin Kiernan’s “Four Excerpts for An Eschatology Quadrille” A jade idol, bloody rituals, and the end of the world… By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on June 26, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Caitlin Kiernan’s “Four Excerpts for An Eschatology Quadrille,” first published 2016 in Ellen Datlow’s Children of Lovecraft. Spoilers ahead! Summary “In this light and at this hour, it’s almost beautiful, the way that so many poisonous things are beautiful.” Excerpt One, June 1969, West Hollywood: Maxie Honeycutt, aka Paranoid Jack, is bedeviled by conspiracy theories from how aliens killed the Kennedys to how NASA’s electromagnetism is screwing up his wristwatch. You wouldn’t expect such a nervous guy to engage in “questionable business ventures.” But here he is at a go-go dive with Charlie Six-Pack, an associate of “the Turk.” Charlie wants Maxie to babysit something until the Turk’s back in town. The fist-sized jade figuring sits between them in a greasy paper bag, but Maxie wants nothing to do with it. Charlie got the “idol” from a Brigham Young professor who claimed it belonged to a Donner Party survivor. Patrick Breen found the figurine in the mountains; when the party was stranded by a blizzard, the cannibalism was the figurine’s suggestion. The Turk’s got an Australian buyer lined up. Hold it a couple days, and Maxie’ll get a nice cut. Maxie’s more worried about “heavy Apache hoodoo horseshit.” That night he has a terrible nightmare. Sunrise finds him clutching a whiskey bottle, trying not to think about the figurine, “or blizzards or a raw January wind howling through high mountain passes.” Excerpt Two, January 2007, Atlanta: Mike, an Atlanta policeman, recalls Esme Symes, who made a living reading palms and “telling rubes what they’d want to hear about their futures.” But she also had a knack for spot-on tips for finding victims’ remains. Esme provides a tip about a derelict warehouse; Mike and partner Audrey respond. Inside, they find a fourteen-foot great white shark suspended from the ceiling above an enormous red-sand design. Instinctively, Mike avoids treading on the mandala. The shark’s been gutted and sewn back together with fishing line. Red-nailed fingers stick out between stitches, still moving. Mike hacks the shark open to reveal a naked woman, barely alive. Audrey discovers she’s been sewn into the shark, hands around a jade figurine Mike describes as “evil, true and absolute”. But backup officers have to pry it from his grip. Esme hangs herself in an apartment wallpapered with sketches of the figurine. She must have realized she was a suspect. Guilty or not, Mike thinks Esme “got off scot-fucking-free.” Excerpt Three, December 1956, west of Denver: Archaeologist Ysabeau writes to her “Dearest Ruth” aboard a California-bound train. She’s returning from a trip east where she met Dr. Adelie Marquardt, who shares her interest Semitic-Mesopotamian fertility gods. A mutual friend urged Ysabeau to tell Ruth what happened between her and Marquardt, with whom Ruth has had firsthand disturbing experience. Ysabeau finds Marquardt engaging; the woman flatters her publications and offers to show her an artifact recovered from Syria. Ysabeau accepts an invitation to Marquardt’s Benefit Street house. She finds a gathering of the sort of Bohemians she usually avoids. She meets Marquardt’s Romanian companion Ecaterina. A naked young man kneels before the fireplace, crowned with ivy and blindfolded. Two women flank him, holding silver chalices. Just a game, Marquardt assures her. With Ecaterina, they retire to an adjacent library, where the artifact awaits. Ysabeau gasps. The figurine’s of exquisite craftsmanship, yet it’s “in all ways hideous…a wicked thing,” from which Ysabeau can’t look away. Found in Ugarit ruins, it likely came from Amenemhat III’s Egypt. It doesn’t represent Dagon, nor Dagon’s wife Ishara, but perhaps the “Mother Hydra” its discoverer Schaeffer described. Schaeffer sold it to the Frenchman Moreau: a believer in sunken civilizations, including R’lyeh, where dwelt Dagon and Hydra and a much mightier god to be resurrected by an apocalyptic flood. Moreau would eventually murder eight people. There were allegations of cannibalism – A wounded-animal cry interrupts Marquardt. Ysabeau remembers the naked boy as Marquardt apologetically hustles her out through a side door. Shaken, Ysabeau leaves Providence the next day. Afterwards, she receives a clipping about a naked male corpse pulled from the Seekonk River, its eyes and tongue cut out. Ysabeau urges Ruth to “stay away from that woman.” Excerpt Four, April 2151, Isle of Brooklyn Proper: From her apartment house roof, Inamorata observes an oil spill off Prospect Beach. It’s prismatic, almost beautiful, like “so many poisonous things.” Geli, her lover, arrives. She’s a former beachcomber whom Inamorata has gotten registered as a legal picker of whatever the drowned world pukes up. This morning she’s recovered a jade figurine. The figurine reminds Inamorata of her mother’s stories of the troll who lived under the ruined Williamsburg Bridge. It’s exaggeratedly female, full breasts and hips and buttocks, even the vulva depicted. Its eyes bulge, fish-like, and its belly sprouts anemone-tendrils. Sirens wail from the hurricane warning towers, and yet the sky remains cloudless. Inamorata lifts her spyglass. The oil slick drifts nearer Prospect Beach, though currents should be pushing it away. Gulls dive headfirst into the slick and disappear. She remembers her mother imitating a troll’s voice. The sirens scream on. The Degenerate Dutch: Probably, Charlie says, the idol was carved by the Apaches or the Incans. Libronomicon: Some New Yorker wrote a book about the woman sewn into a dead Great White Shark. Sounds like a real page-turner. Weirdbuilding: Ysabeau’s section takes place entirely in Providence, up the hill in Lovecraft’s neighborhood, with a significant scene in what I’m pretty sure is the Shunned House. Here you’ll find experts on Dagon and Hydra, and deities less mentionable. Madness Takes Its Toll: Crazy “Paranoid Jack,” “loonier than a run-over dog,” has a surprisingly good sense of self-preservation when it counts. Anne’s Commentary In her introduction to Children of Lovecraft, Ellen Datlow faces the perennial question: “What makes Lovecraft still relevant today?” She credits the innate creepiness of “his vision [of] Elder Gods that control human destiny.” It’s this “terror of the cosmic unknown” that she encourages her contributors to mine. Surely a cosmos is playground enough to share. Start on the original swings and monkey bars, then erect your own “play” structures. Some may cling to the old park benches and grouse that only their splinters are sufficiently soul-piercing; others will gladly sample fresh devices of horror and wonder. Kiernan’s contribution was the first I read. I can never resist a title that challenges me to figure it out. “Eschatology” rang a faint bell, something about the end of the world? From Merriam-Webster, “a belief concerning death, the end of the world, or the ultimate destiny of humankind.” More specifically, it’s “Christian doctrines concerning the Second Coming, the resurrection of the dead, or the Last Judgment.” Jane Austen taught me that a quadrille’s a ballroom dance. More specifically, it’s a dance performed by four couples in a square formation; “Excerpts” does dance out four substories. “Excerpts” reminds me of Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu,” which also deals with eschatological issues, such as Great C’s resurrection and the end of humanity. Its three sections, like Kiernan’s four, provide increasingly worrying glimpses of mysterious cults. Both end in Second Comings, though Cthulhu’s is thwarted by the premature resinking of R’lyeh, while Mother Hydra shows only her oily surface “halo” before fade-out. “Call” centers on investigations into the Cthulhu cult first pursued by Professor Angell and continued by his great-nephew. “Excerpts” ranges in nonchronological order through the 20th and 21st centuries before ending in 2151. Each section features unique characters and a different narrative style. Figurines representing Hydra link the sections. Section One’s point-of-view is difficult to classify. I’d call it third person omniscient except that the narrator “speaks” in a noir-hipster lingo like Charlie Six-Pack’s. Maybe the omniscient narrator adopts the setting’s “overheard” vernacular. Maybe Maxie’s telling his story in the voice of ever-hectoring Charlie. Nothing overtly supernatural happens, although Charlie’s figurine gives Maxie nightmares even after he refuses to “babysit.” Section Two, January 2007, has a first-person narrator in Atlanta policeman Mike. It reads not like a written report, but like Mike telling his story informally, his profanity-laced vernacular uninhibited. Unlike Maxie, he witnesses the aftermath of cult activity. I doubt Maxie ever touched Charlie’s figurine. Mike holds the one he takes from the victim and knows it for “evil, true and absolute”—it stares back at him like Nietzsche’s abyss, and later responders must pry it from his fingers. Psychic Esme kills herself amid sketches of the idol. Mike suggests she might have been a cultist. I think she might have drawn the idol from what her clairvoyance revealed, as Lovecraft’s sculptor Wilcox depicts Cthulhu from dreams. Section Three, December 1956, is first person, epistolary style. Ysabeau resembles the typical Lovecraft protagonist, being an academic too rational to believe in her objects of esoteric study. The believers are Marquardt and Ecaterina, who from her red eyeshine may be a werewolf. Ysabeau may be gay, but she’s unaccepting of the “Bohemian” women and “effeminate” men at Marquardt’s party; nor are naked, rouged and blindfolded boys part of any “games” she’s used to playing. Marquardt’s figurine immediately captivates Ysabeau; she knows it’s “wicked” and “vile,” but can’t look away. Meanwhile Marquardt supplies the idol’s history, from ancient Egypt to Ugarit Syria to its discoverer Schaeffer and its buyer Moreau. Though an exact description awaits Section Four, Ysabeau implies its female characteristics rule out a representation of Dagon or even his wife Ishara. Marquardt believes it represents another “wife,” Hydra. Schaeffer’s workers fled when he unearthed it. Little wonder, if Moreau was right about Hydra and Dagon dwelling in sunken R’lyeh, waiting for the global flood. Ysabeau’s saved from touching the idol by a scream and Marquardt hustling her away. Later an anonymous clipping confirms the scream probably did come from the blindfolded boy. Ysabeau knows that Marquardt’s residence was built in 1763 by Stephen Harris, whose misfortunes earned the place a reputation as cursed. She evidently doesn’t know 135 Benefit is where Lovecraft set “The Shunned House.” No wonder the address suits Marquardt. Section Four, April 2151, is set after the apocalyptic flood that real-world climate change predicts. New York City’s inundated, leaving only isolated above-water bits where some can afford hilltop apartments while others scrounge through shoreline trash. Civilization’s not quite dead. There’s still salvageable oil when ancient storage tanks rupture undersea. There are still communications networks and hurricane sirens. Third-person narrator Inamorata’s a hilltop dweller, whose lover Geli’s a “sanderling girl” she salvaged from among the beachcombers. Inamorata describes Geli’s new-salvaged figurine as a voluptuous woman with bulging fish-eyes and sea-anemone tendrils whose maker “meant to convey something terrible.” She thinks of a bridge troll from her mother’s fairy tales. Unsettling, how that oil slick drifts beachward when the current should be carrying it away. How gulls sacrifice themselves to its black maw. How she associates it with Geli’s find. Then sirens start screaming as if to herald a Second Coming. It’s the perfect ending, leaving us at the moment when Inamorata’s unease escalates, for all the good panic will do reduced humanity. Not, I suppose, that any humanity could long stare into the living Hydra’s eyes. Ruthanna’s Commentary Seventies through eighties Marvel comics had an unfortunate tendency to try and sound hip by having characters use pseudo-current slang. “Pseudo” because the writers were neither actual youths nor actually particularly hip; this was pretty easy to spot even as a non-hip youth in the 90s when I read the back issues. I regret to say that my experience reading “Excerpts,” which is doing some very cool things with cross-era artifact tracking, was not improved by the Dazzler flashbacks. I kept expecting a mutant pop star to dart through on roller skates, an image only made more plausible by that one time Magneto took over R’lyeh. So this cat Maxie did not draw me in, nor cause me to worry over-much about the jade idol in a grease-stained bag. Okay, maybe I worried a bit about what happens when supernaturally repulsive idols are stored with babysitters reeking of doobie smoke. My eldritch abominations must come from smoke-free storage, thank you very much. Then we go from someone paranoid about “pigs” to a jaded obscenity-spouting cop circa 2007. This pseudo-dialect seems drawn from hyperviolent police dramas, with a side order of Buddy From New Orleans Who Has Seen Some Call of Cthulhu. At least no one tries a Cajun dialect, because expecting Gambit to show up wouldn’t help the Dazzler problem. In the third excerpt we jump back to 1956 and the language gets more academic—something I can personally report comes more naturally to many genre authors than 70s disco slang—and the characters more three-dimensional and also queer. Ysabeau specializes in Mesopotamian fertility gods, and is writing to (I suspect) lover Ruth who specializes in… something that involves spending too much time around cultists. Dr. Adelie Marquardt specializes in running cults and providing infodumps. Here we finally confirm that the jade statue depicts Hydra (not Cthulhu as I first assumed), and that it doesn’t just feel repulsive but cause people to do repulsive things. Here also we get to the titular eschatology, in the form of a great flood that will herald the resurrection of “a still mightier being than either Dagon or his wife.” Cthulhu seems to fit that bill. Finally, we find ourselves in the future—possibly at the time of that great flood. For sure there’s sea level rise, not so different from elder god rise. It’s reminiscent of Livia Llewellyn’s “Bright Crown of Glory”. Inamorata and Geli look for scavengeable resources; Geli’s maybe got a touch of Innsmouth in her veins. And Cthulhu in His Aspect as Oil Slick is unpleasantly imminent.  Four segments, jumping around in time. One artifact, tying everything together—and hints of what it does between times. Both in these segments and in between, it attracts and repulses those who find it, and encourages those who hold onto it to start cults and sacrifice victims—in service of bringing about that flood? So what are these four excerpts from? And what’s An Eschatology Quadrille that they’re for? “From,” I would guess, is the full history of the jade idol, and the full set of bloody rituals that it orchestrates toward its eschatological ends. Each is narrated by a different scribe, some directly involved in the action and some mocking from the sidelines. So the history is also an anthology, with witnesses for documentation as important as high priestesses and sacrificial victims. A quadrille is a dance for four couples, evolved from what was originally a military parade formation. It’s ancestral to square dancing; make of that what you will. So here we have four pairs of people involved in the “dance” of the end of the world. Maxie and Six-Pack, cop guy and Audrey (or Esme?), Ysabeau and Ruth (or Marquardt and Ecaterina), Inamorata and Geli. Okay, so it’s not the most symmetrical quadrille. And it’s danced to nasty stories rather than opera melodies. But the grand finale, that part is going to be absolutely spectacular. Too bad the participants will be too busy screaming to appreciate it. We’re off for July 4th. In two weeks, Louis probably doesn’t follow good advice in chapters 19-21 of Pet Sematary.[end-mark] The post Hep Cats and Academics: Caitlin Kiernan’s “Four Excerpts for <i>An Eschatology Quadrille</i>” appeared first on Reactor.

The Biden administration is not content with the idea that teens need to become legal adults before they can go under the knife to remove healthy body parts in the name of transgender identity. It also wants to hide this advocacy for mutilation of minors. Newly revealed documents expose just how radical the administration’s support for experimental transgender surgery truly is. According to these documents, first reported by The New York Times, a top transgender leader in the Department of Health and Human Services pressured the World Professional Association for Transgender Health—a transgender activist group masquerading as a health organization—to drop age limits for interventions that leave people stunted, scarred, and infertile. WPATH released a document called the “Standards of Care” for these interventions, which activists euphemistically refer to as “gender-affirming care.” The interventions include experimental drugs to “delay” puberty, drugs to make males resemble females and vice versa, and surgeries to alter or remove healthy body parts to make a male appear female or vice versa. Doctors have warned about the negative side effects of these interventions, and WPATH internal files revealed that even doctors at the leading pro-trans organization have expressed concerns about them. Activists often claim that only legal adults go under the knife for transgender surgeries, but a study last year found that more than 3,000 minors had such surgeries between 2016 and 2020. WPATH draft guidelines, released in late 2021, recommended lowering age minimums to 14 for cross-sex hormones, 15 for mastectomies, 16 for breast augmentation or facial surgeries, and 17 for genital surgeries or hysterectomies. These lower age recommendations were insufficient, however, for Rachel Levine, a man—born Richard Levine—who identifies as a woman and who serves as assistant secretary of health at HHS. A member of the WPATH guideline development group wrote an email describing a conversation with Sarah Boateng, then Levine’s chief of staff. (Boateng became principal deputy assistant secretary for health in October 2022.) “She is confident, based on the rhetoric she is hearing in D.C., and from what we have already seen, that these specific listings of ages, under 18, will result in devastating legislation for trans care,” the WPATH member wrote of Boateng, according to The New York Times. “She wonders if the specific ages can be taken out.” Another email said Levine “was very concerned that having ages (mainly for surgery) will affect access to care for trans youth and maybe adults, too. Apparently, the situation in the U.S.A. is terrible, and she [meaning Levine] and the Biden administration worried that having ages in the document will make matters worse. She asked us to remove them.” These documents came to light in a lawsuit. Parents who claim their children identify as transgender are suing to block Alabama’s law protecting kids from experimental transgender interventions, and psychologist James Cantor submitted the emails in a report backing the Alabama law. Plaintiffs are seeking to bar Cantor from testifying in the case. Levine framed the request in political terms, noting that an explicit endorsement of transgender surgeries for minors would trigger backlash. Not only did Levine not push back against the idea of allowing transgender surgeries for minors, but by advocating for removing the ages, he suggested that minors at even younger ages should be able to obtain them. The fact that Levine framed his request in political terms reveals the Biden administration’s desire to cloak its support for putting minors under the knife. Levine knew this position would be unpopular and scandalous, yet he sought to advance it nontheless. Gender ideology activists and their allies who have infiltrated health care organizations often insist that experimental transgender medical interventions—which often amount to chemical castration—are essential for gender-confused children, to prevent them from committing suicide. Yet, many people who took experimental drugs and went under the knife to “affirm” a transgender identity later realized their mistake, and are now publicly warning others against mutilating their own bodies. Doctors at WPATH have privately discussed the side effects of “gender-affirming care,” including cancer in teens, reduced sexual function, and the lack of informed consent for procedures with lifelong impacts. In fact, this craze reminds me of the horrific history of eugenics and lobotomies, which were celebrated as the height of “progressive” science and medicine in the early 20th century. The inventor of the lobotomy received a Nobel Prize, and many Nobel laureates supported eugenics.   America may look back on transgender surgeries the way horrified students of history look back on these “progressive” phenomena.  Levine himself has expressed gratitude that he did not begin his “gender transition” until later in life, because otherwise he would not have been able to have children. “I have no regrets, because if I had transitioned when I was younger, then I wouldn’t have my children,” Levine, a father of two, said in a 2019 speech. “I can’t imagine a life without my children.” Yet Levine seems unconcerned about pushing children along the path toward sterility long before they can truly understand what it even means. Instead, Levine has attempted to enlist doctors to become evangelists for “gender-affirming care” and urged health officials to pressure Big Tech to stifle opposition to transgender orthodoxy. This latest revelation further exposes how radical the HHS has become under Biden. Not only is this “health” agency unconcerned with the medical side-effects of “gender-affirming care,” but it seeks to hide its advocacy for minor mutilation from the American people. The post UNMASKED: New Docs Reveal Rachel Levine Backs Scrapping Transgender Surgery Age Limits appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. More controversy is developing in the UK, this time in Scotland, around the use by law enforcement of cameras equipped with live facial recognition technology. Reports say that the police in Scotland may intend to start using this tech to catch shoplifters and persons who break bail conditions. But civil rights group Big Brother Watch is warning against any kind of deployment of live facial recognition as incompatible with democracy – primarily because it indiscriminately jeopardizes the privacy of millions of people. To make sure this is not happening, the non-profit’s head of research Jake Hurfurt has told the press that the tech should be banned. That would be an improvement also from the point of view of legal clarity around how AI and big data are used by law enforcement; since currently, Hurfurt remarked, the government and the police “cobble together patchwork legal justifications to experiment on the public with intrusive and Orwellian technology.” Big Brother Watch offered another observation – the UK is a rare country outside of China and Russia (apparently, even the EU is “scaling back”) that is ramping up this type of surveillance. The previous heated debate over live face recognition had to do with the London police, and at the moment, the Met’s decision to deploy it – besides being “a multi-million pound mistake,” is also facing a legal challenge, the group said. They are hopeful this might serve as a teachable moment for the police in Scotland and dissuade them from repeating the same costly “experiment” of trying to usher in a “hi-tech police state.” Meanwhile, press reports in the UK are confirming that Scotland police are considering using the technology, which works by trying to match images of people recorded by surveillance cameras with existing police databases. The problem with using this as a method of policing in crowded streets is that it turns every citizen who happens to pass by one of the cameras into a justified – as far as the authorities are concerned – target, as a “potential suspect.” And, the target may be shoplifters today – but who knows who might be another, if, as Big Brother fears, “we’re sleepwalking into a high-tech police state.” The fear that Scotland may be on the way toward introducing live facial recognition as a police tool originates from a Scottish Police Authority conference on biometrics, where Assistant Chief Constable Andy Freeburn said: “I think we do need to get into the difficult and potentially divisive topic of live facial recognition technology; we need to look at the limits of AI – and I hope that today is the first step in a wider debate.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Scotland Plans Live Facial Recognition Technology appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Sign Up To Keep Reading This post is for Reclaim The Net supporters. Gain access to the entire archive of features and supporters-only content. Help protect free speech, freedom from surveillance, and digital civil liberties. Join Already a supporter? Login here If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Assange’s Plea: A Controversial End to a 14-Year Legal Struggle and the Impact on Free Speech appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Guess Who Voters Think Will Defend Democracy Better... Hint: It Isn't Joe Biden.

Matt Yglesias on 'Elite Misinformation'

Scientists have come together to identify the most important hotspots for biodiversity, whose survival is essential if the era of human domination is to avoid ranking with Earth’s worst periods. Combined, the locations involved are smaller than Iran, but time is running out.Five times in the planet’s history the Earth is known to have lost the majority of living species during a short period of time. It’s likely this occurred on earlier occasions as well, but the record is obscured. Fears that this is happening again, not from an asteroid or super-volcano but human activity, may be premature but will be fulfilled eventually without deliberate action. It might seem simple to choose the areas most in need of protection to avoid this. It’s well known that locations like tropical rainforests are bursting with life and contain an astonishing proportion of the Earth’s land-based species. However, saving the whole of these regions is ambitious given current trends, perhaps too ambitious. The most efficient path to species protection turns out to be somewhat different.“Most species on Earth are rare, meaning that species either have very narrow ranges or they occur at very low densities or both,” said Dr Eric Dinerstein in a statement. “And rarity is very concentrated. In our study, zooming in on this rarity, we found that we need only about 1.2 percent of the Earth’s surface to head off the sixth great extinction of life on Earth.”This 1.2 percent is made up of almost 17,000 sites, and represents a 46 percent reduction on previous estimates though improved targeting. Co-author Professor Carlos Peres of the University of East Anglia claims this preservation “is a financially viable proposition, but I'm afraid this viability will rapidly decline over time." For this reason, the study’s authors are calling for protection by 2030.Currently, areas chosen for protection often have more to do with politics and cost than the number of species that can be saved. It’s easy for a government to legislate a National Park in an area with few competing interests, or around a beloved tourist attraction. Much harder to do the same for the only home to many species with the misfortune of sitting above an oil field. The authors quantify this truism, noting that 1.2 million square kilometers of land (0.47 million miles) gained protection between 2018 and 2023, but that less than 10 percent of this would be prioritized for species protection.Whether it is within our capacity to protect some of these areas from the consequences of climate change and invasive species is uncertain, however, even if we assume illegal poaching and deforestation can be prevented.Still, the authors want us to focus on what can be achieved, not what can’t. They note that 38 percent of the areas they identify lie close to locations that are already protected, and could often be incorporated with ease.“These sites are home to over 4,700 threatened species in some of the world's most biodiverse yet threatened ecosystems,” said Andy Lee, who like Dinerstein is from the NGO Resolve. “These include not only mammals and birds that rely on large intact habitats, like the tamaraw in the Philippines and the Celebes crested macaque in Sulawesi Indonesia, but also range-restricted amphibians and rare plant species.”By looking at the costs incurred for similar areas that have already been protected, the authors make an estimate of the price. They acknowledge there are often differences between locations even in economically similar regions, but across enough sites, these should cancel out. All up, the team produces a figure of $169 billion a year for the next five years to acquire the land and preserve it. Limiting the project to the tropics, where the majority of species lie, reduces the cost to $34 billion a year. Intimidating as this may be to anyone other than a handful of the planet’s richest people, Lee noted: “This represents less than 0.2 percent of the United States' GDP, less than 9 percent of the annual subsidies benefiting the global fossil fuel industry, and a fraction of the revenue generated from the mining and agroforestry industries each year.”Cost may not be the only obstacle, however. Maps of the priority areas reveal clusters in war zones like Somalia and Yemen.The authors also note the areas are vital for stopping global heating, given their vast carbon storage will be lost if the biodiversity is destroyed.“What will we bequeath to future generations? A healthy, vibrant Earth is critical for us to pass on,” said Dinerstein. “So we’ve got to get going. We’ve got to head off the extinction crisis. Conservation Imperatives drive us to do that.”The study is open access in Frontiers in Science. 

Under the shadow of night, criminals have put an end to an important field test in Italy. Scientists had planted a new experimental variety of rice that could be the answer to one of the most destructive diseases this crop faces – but the field was recently broken into and destroyed.If you have ever had a good risotto, you most likely had it with arborio rice. This variety is ideal for that kind of dish based on the consistency of its grains when cooked. But the popular Italian variety is also susceptible to a deadly fungus, Pyricularia oryzae. Every year, the fungus destroys an amount of rice that could have fed 60 million people.There is little to be done to stop the fungus. Fungicide treatments have been effective for a while, but it has pushed the fungus to adapt to them and left us to ingest the fungicide. A potential solution came in 2017 with the development of RIS8imo, a variety of rice resistant to the dangerous fungus that has many nicknames such as rice blast, rotten neck, and rice seedling blight.The variety was created with the revolutionary genetic technique CRISPR-Cas9. The pioneers of it, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna were honored with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. In Italy, it is illegal to plant genetically modified organisms (GMOs) but this variety of rice is not a GMO.There are three genes in the arborio rice that make it more susceptible to the fungus. Using the technique, the team made sure that those genes were inactivated variants. There's nothing added to the rice – some species of rice naturally do that.The destroyed field. The name of the rice, RIS8imo, is a pun in Italian. It means Best Rice.Image Credit: Vittoria Brambilla/Università Statale di Milano The only difference is that this natural development was made in the lab when it comes to RIS8imo. For this reason, in Italy this falls under the TEA category: assisted evolution techniques in agriculture. A law was passed last year to put specific requirements into testing potential crops developed like this.The rice field in this case was 28 square meters (302 square feet), planted on May 13. It was fenced and surrounded by another fenced field of 400 square meters (4,306 square feet) field to make sure that no rice could be spread beyond either through the weather or animals. Just over a month later, on June 21, the field was destroyed.In a press release, the creators of the rice, Vittoria Brambilla and Fabio Fornara, Università Statale di Milano explain how the goal of their research is to create sustainable agriculture that is not dependent on chemical fungicides. The work on the site came after a broad agreement from the local community and other stakeholders.“As publicly-funded scientists we express shock and sadness at having suffered this unjustified violence, the result of obscurantism and anti-scientific impulses,” Brambilla and Fornara stated. The team is expected to continue the work, given it could provide food for so many people, expressing hope that the Italian government would step up by protecting such experiments.

In a cozy home filled with love and laughter, a heartwarming friendship has blossomed between a Golden Retriever named Buttercup and a baby girl. This charming bond has captured the attention of everyone around them, especially the baby’s mother, Carrie. Buttercup’s devotion to the baby is apparent, as she watches over her with unwavering attention.... The post Mom lays baby down by Golden Retriever and captures the cutest ‘conversation’ appeared first on Animal Channel.

In a cozy home filled with love and laughter, a heartwarming friendship has blossomed between a Golden Retriever named Buttercup and a baby girl. This charming bond has captured the attention of everyone around them, especially the baby’s mother, Carrie. Buttercup’s devotion to the baby is apparent, as she watches over her with unwavering attention.... The post Mom lays baby down by Golden Retriever and what happens next is melting hearts appeared first on Animal Channel.