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A 155-million-year-old brittle star fossil has been declared a remarkable and “incredibly rare find” by a team of scientists. The beautiful specimen is remarkably intact, and preserves a delicate moment in which the individual was completing the process of cloning itself.Where do baby brittle stars come from? It’s an unusual question with a curious answer, as like starfish, they can make new versions of themselves by splitting in half and regrowing missing body parts.We know a lot about the process – called clonal fragmentation – but when it began was something of a mystery. Now, a new study has described a remarkable world-first fossil that has preserved a 155-million-year-old brittle star in the process of regeneration.This is an incredibly rare find that provides readily visible smoking-gun evidence for clonal fragmentation.Dr Ben Thuy“The fossil shows that fissiparity, or clonal fragmentation, dates back at least to the Late Jurassic,” Curator Dr Ben Thuy of the Palaeontology Department of Musée national d’histoire naturelle told IFLScience. “Even more exciting is the conclusion that clonal fragmentation has been linked to a sixfold body symmetry and an epizoic lifestyle, i.e., life on a host organism, from the beginning, suggesting that these features evolved together.”The chance find has turned out to be a pivotal fossil in our understanding of clonal fragmentation.Image credit: Gunter SchweigertDating back to the Jurassic, it tells us that this mode of reproduction has deep roots in evolutionary time, occurring among brittle stars that were alive when giant sea monsters were terrorizing the oceans. What makes the fossil even more remarkable is that it captured such a specific snapshot in time for this individual.“What fascinates me most is the fact that the specimen was frozen in time at exactly the right moment, i.e., during the relatively short time interval between splitting and full regrowth of the missing body half,” said Thuy. “This is an incredibly rare find that provides readily visible smoking-gun evidence for clonal fragmentation.”Such a dazzling specimen deserves a memorable name, and it got one: Ophiactis hex. Terry Pratchett fans may recognize it as a hat-tip to Unseen University.“My co-author Lea Numberger-Thuy is a huge fan of Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University, and when she came up with the name suggestion, we were all thrilled,” added Thuy. “Not only is ‘hex’ hinting at the sixfold symmetry of the new fossil, but it also primarily celebrates Terry Pratchett’s revealing view of academia.”The study is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

The astronomical object Dracula’s Chivito has more than a cool name; it contains more material for forming planets than any other disk we’ve ever seen. In fact, it’s got about twice as many ingredients as the nearest counterpart we have found.Officially known as IRAS 23077+6707, this disk makes the one from which the Solar System formed look puny. It’s about 3,300 astronomical units (the distance of the Earth to the Sun) wide, stretching to beyond fifty times the orbit of Neptune. When planets eventually form out of it, anything Jupiter-sized may struggle to get noticed by anyone studying the system. What living among such giants will mean for Earth-like planets remains to be seen. Earth’s position relative to IRAS 23077+6707 means we see it almost entirely side-on, which presumably contributed to it not being noticed until recently, although astronomers are still trying to work out how they overlooked it. Instead of seeing a broad plane, it looks a little like a cross between a side-view of a reverse-colored Oreo cookie and a butterfly. Its most similar counterpart was named Gómez’s Hamburger after its founder. Noticing shadows that look like fangs at certain wavelengths, Dr Ciprian Berghea called it Dracula’s Chivito earlier this year, after a type of Uruguayan sandwich.It's just as well it has a name more memorable than IRAS 23077+6707, as this object is likely to feature heavily in the future of astronomy. Measuring the composition of a protoplanetary disk at this angle has unique challenges, but a team predominantly based at the Harvard Smithsonian Center For Astrophysics notes it also has advantages. The star at the center of the disk is obscured from our perspective, making it possible to see aspects that would otherwise be lost in the glare.By combining scattered-light imaging and interferometric observations at millimeter wavelengths, the team notes that Dracula’s Chivito covers the largest known angular size of any protoplanetary disk. That’s extraordinary, because at an estimated distance of 1,000 light years, it’s a lot further away than many of the objects they compared it to. “What is perhaps most remarkable is that this source has until now gone unreported in the scientific literature,” the authors note.The red and blue shift of its gas confirms we're looking at a rotating protoplanetary disk.Image credit: SAO/ASIAA/SMA/K. Monsch et al; Optical: Pan-STARRS"What we found was incredible – evidence that this was the largest planet-forming disk ever discovered. It is extremely rich in dust and gas, which we know are the building blocks of planets." First author Dr Kristina Monsch said in a statement. The star at the disk’s center is large, but not exceptionally so, the team estimating it at 2-4 times the mass of the Sun.A cleaned-up image makes the comparison to sandwiches clearer.Image Credit: Berghea et alUnusually, Dracula’s Chvito’s gas and dust emissions cover the same area of the sky, instead of the gas extending around twice as far, as is typical of young disks like this. Emissions are exceptionally bright at the wavelengths associated with carbon monoxide, suggesting high concentrations, a trait shared with Gómez’s Hamburger.Monsch noted the disk may have already spawned its first planets, but the instruments used so far are not suited to detecting them. Either Hubble or the JWST, on the other hand, might be able to spot something, even at this distance. “We just have to look for them,” she told The Associated Press. This research is published open access in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The team that named Dracula’s Chivito has a paper accepted to the same journal currently available on ArXiv.org with overlapping findings, although it proposes the central star is 1.5-2.0 solar masses.

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A massive effort spearheaded by a censorship-obsessed group financed by leftist billionaire George Soros is looking to incorporate global pressure to push Big Tech platforms to juice their censorship operations before the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Free Press, a Soros-funded media group that claimed responsibility for helping get former President Donald Trump banned from Twitter, is at the helm of a new push to restrict free speech online. “More Than 200 Groups Urge Leading Tech Platforms to Implement Election-Integrity Policies to Protect Democracy Worldwide,” Free Press blared in its Apr. 9 press release on a new co-signed letter by groups around the world.  In the letter, the anti-free speech groups raged at social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter (now X) and YouTube for reducing “interventions necessary to keep online platforms” allegedly “safe and healthy” and demanded “swift action” to protect so-called democracy. MRC research unveiled that at least 45 of the signatories have had their coffers packed with Soros cash to the tune of a whopping $80,757,329 between 2016 and 2022 alone.  The letter was distributed to top executives at Big Tech platforms at Discord, Google, Instagram, Meta, Pinterest, Reddit, Rumble, Snap, TikTok, Twitch, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter). The document attempted to justify that it was written with reducing “real-world harms” and “the rise of extremism and violent attempts to overthrow democratic governments” in mind. However, it appears that its true design is to pressure Big Tech companies to silence  speech the left despises as 60 countries across the globe gear up for their elections in 2024. But even more disturbing was the letter’s implication that its primary target is interfering in the 2024 U.S. election. This development is directly in line with Soros’ brand, who has dedicated millions of his ungodly fortune to groups looking to interfere in elections by stifling online speech.  The first of six so-called “interventions” called for by the coalition involve investment “in greater platform integrity by reinstating election-integrity policies, inclusive of moderating content around the Big Lie,” which the Soros-funded co-signatory William J. Brennan Center for Justice defined as the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The letter also condescended how in “2020, Black people and other people of color, women, and non-English speakers were — and continue to be — disproportionately targeted with online election lies.” The statement linked out to an Associated Press article pertaining specifically to so-called 2020 election “disinformation” in the U.S. election and how 2024 will be allegedly “worse.”  Nora Benavidez, the senior counsel and director of Digital Justice and Civil Rights at Free Speech, railed in a statement, “‘The tech industry’s refusal to safeguard their platforms is already having a dangerous impact on democracies around the world.’” Her disingenuous pontificating ended in hyperbole: “‘Today, hundreds of civil-society groups are putting these companies on notice: Failure to uphold and enforce sound election-integrity policies and expand non-English staffing to monitor disinformation, political deepfakes and other harmful content will be catastrophic to free and fair elections worldwide.’”  The explicit push for speech controls is especially disturbing in light of the stated vision of one of Free Press’s founders. Leftist Free Press co-founder Robert W. McChesney once made a Marxist call to action in 2000 to “overhaul” the American press: “Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism.” He published his comments in the Monthly Review, a self-described “independent socialist magazine.” It appears Free Press is living up to its founder’s principles.  The signatory that received the most Soros funding in MRC’s tally was none other than the climate change-obsessed Global Witness, which is already on record pressuring Facebook and TikTok to increase censorship operations before the 2022 midterm elections. The Soros empire funded the group with a massive $20,338,270 between 2016 and 2022. The group’s “digital threats” campaign, for example, is specifically focused on pressuring governments to regulate speech on social media. “The Big Tech companies are not too big to be made to change, and change does not rely on significant numbers of us having to stop using the digital products these companies provide,” Global Witness claimed.   Another one of the more dangerous groups listed in the letter is the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), which received $3,149,863 from Soros between 2017 and 2022. The leftist group was recently exposed in a House Judiciary Committee investigation for co-authoring a “hate groups” blacklist with the Soros-funded Global Disinformation Index (GDI) targeting “conservative” and faith-based organizations. This list was later disseminated by law enforcement to several financial institutions. The discovery was part of a broader congressional investigation that uncovered federal law enforcement circulating documents to private financial institutions to jawbone them into giving up sensitive customer data. The customers caught up in the federal dragnet didn’t even necessarily have to be suspected of committing any crimes. ISD disturbingly lists the U.S. Department of State and Department of Homeland Security as funders. The fact that Free Press is at the tip of this Soros-tied spear should concern every American. Free Press’s obsession with censorship and gaining control of the Internet cannot be overstated. This is the same group that boasted how it was “involved in direct talks that pressured Google and Amazon to boot the dangerous” pro-free speech platform Parler from their platforms because of so-called “election lies.”  Free Press’s 2015 annual report celebrated how it was also responsible for influencing the Obama-era FCC into adopting draconian “Net Neutrality” rules that arbitrarily sanctioned massive government regulation of the Internet. Free Press praised how the FCC reportedly cited the Soros-funded organization “close to 70 times” in its final order on the matter. The adopted FCC rules empowered government officials to review, approve or reject Internet service provider rates. What they actually did, according to the Cato Institute, was guarantee “ISPs government enforced market protection and profitability, in exchange for regulators ensuring that ISPs won’t be too profitable.” In other words, the FCC rules proposed by former President Barack Obama and Free Press in 2015 sought to regulate the Internet as a public utility. Then-FCC commissioner Ajit Pai stated that the move gave the agency “broad and unprecedented discretion to micromanage the Internet,” in a 2015 press release on the proposed rules. Americans beware. The Soros network is coming after your free speech just in time for the U.S. elections — again. Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using MRC Free Speech America’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.  

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