After the Biden administration attempted to apply federal statute to supersede an Idaho law protecting unborn life, the Supreme Court chose to dismiss Idaho’s challenge to the combined cases in question and allow emergency abortions to take place in the state. While proponents on both sides of the abortion debate have voiced their opinions on the matter, the decision of the court not to rule is concerning for reasons other than the ethical dilemma of abortion. The court had another serious question before it: Does the federal government have the ability to intervene in state law in this situation? Nearly two years ago, a lower court issued a preemptive ban on Idaho’s Defense of Life Act as it pertained to allowing emergency procedures under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which requires hospital emergency rooms to accept patients even if they don’t have insurance. The Supreme Court lifted the ban in January as it took up the cases, but with their most recent decision to dismiss, the ban is back in effect and emergency abortions in Idaho are allowed while lower courts continue proceedings. While federal law typically preempts state law, the question as to whether or not it does in this instance is an important one. Several of the justices appeared to agree that this question was worth considering, even when they disagreed with one another on the ultimate decision to dismiss. Justice Samuel Alito dissented in the dismissal of the case and in his opinion, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas and, in part, Justice Neil Gorsuch, pointed out the concern over states’ rights. He noted, “…it is not necessary to decide whether the Legislature’s theory is correct. At a minimum, however, it provides yet another reason to be wary about interpreting EMTALA to displace the core powers of a nonconsenting State without unmistakable clarity regarding the meaning of the federal law.” Alito wrote that Congress already addressed the problem of the federal government intervening in state affairs in the Medicare Act, as well as the very wording of the EMTALA. Indeed, the preemption clause of the EMTALA states, “The provisions of this section do not preempt any State or local law requirement, except to the extent that the requirement directly conflicts with a requirement of this section. [sic]” This shows, he argued, that EMTALA was meant to exist alongside state law. Justice Amy Coney Barrett came down on the opposite side, but still acknowledged the need for clarity about the federal government’s power. In her concurring opinion in favor of dismissing the cases, she was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh. She wrote that there is a disagreement between the parties as to whether hospitals are required to administer abortions “or any other treatment forbidden by state law” under the federal statute of EMTALA. Notably, she added that they “also disagree about whether EMTALA, as a statute enacted under Congress’s spending power and that operates on private parties, can preempt state law [sic],” adding that this issue has been brought up now for the first time in the Supreme Court. Barrett wrote this is not the time to “answer these important questions” and “would be imprudent” to do so for various reasons. She also noted that the Idaho parties are concerned about the role Congress is allowed to play in state governance. The question over whether “Congress, in reliance on the Spending Clause, can obligate recipients of federal funds to violate state criminal law” was not addressed by the lower courts. She wrote that the lower courts should consider and decide on this before the Supreme Court supersedes the typical judicial order. In stating the importance of this issue of federal power versus state autonomy, it appears that Barrett and the justices joining her opinion agree there is a new concern that has been raised in bringing the cases, but still they decide not to act. Citizens depend on their local elected leaders to pass laws that reflect their own personal beliefs, and they should be able to rely on the courts to keep the federal government in check if it seeks to broaden its power. As Alito pointed out, the “gap between the Idaho law and the Government’s interpretation of EMTALA matters.” Idaho has always allowed abortions to save the life of the mother, he wrote, “but it has not allowed abortions for other non-life-threatening medical conditions.” This differentiation is not meaningless. It is exemplary of how the citizens of Idaho feel about the topic of abortion, he argued – and forcing hospitals to go against this and administer emergency abortions “thwarts the will of the people of Idaho as expressed in law by their elected representatives.” If states are made to change their laws based on the whims of those currently leading at the federal level, the peoples’ rights will suffer. A nation is only as strong as its foundational structure, and it is the duty of the courts to uphold it.

Kids learn by example, so it’s no wonder that this baby started “babbling” with her hands after watching her Deaf grandparents use ASL! In the sweetest video you’ll see all day, proud mom Mara McCullough captured her daughter, Jane, attempting to sign with her hands. Even though she was too young to communicate anything comprehensible, it’s still adorable to watch her try. Grandma was so thrilled that the baby wanted to copy her! “Are you trying to sign?” the woman asked her granddaughter in sign language. Since the baby didn’t actually know what she was saying, her mother jokingly called her wild gestures “babbling” in ASL. For someone who couldn’t talk yet, this little girl sure seemed to have a lot to say. Jane wouldn’t stop waving her arms around! @mara_mccullough She wanted to be in on the conversation too #babbling #asl #deaftiktok #coda #goda #baby #signlanguage #babybabble #grandparentsoftiktok #coffee ♬ Happy – AlexRockBeat “She wanted to be in on the conversation too,” Mara wrote in her caption on social media. This heartwarming video of baby Jane “babbling” in ASL has gone viral online, gaining over a million views! Commenters loved seeing the little girl trying so hard to communicate with her grandparents by mirroring their behavior. “She obviously has a lot to tell her grandparents,” wrote one user. “Babies finger babbling will never not be the most amazing thing to me,” marveled another. “The fact that they understand that the signing is communication and try to mimic it is so wild!” Screengrab from TikTok A third added, “She’s got the spirit, but doesn’t quite have the dexterity and is still so cute.” If baby Jane babbling in ASL looks familiar to you, it’s probably because this isn’t the first video of her that’s gone viral. A clip of this little girl as a newborn spending some quality time with her Deaf grandpa has received five million views! Even back then, she seemed to be trying to communicate with her hands. We’re sure this baby will eventually get the hang of ASL, but, until then, her hand babbling is just too cute! You can find the source of this story’s featured image here. The post Precious Clip Shows Baby “Babbling” With Grandparents In ASL appeared first on InspireMore.

'That is a huge problem. They'd have to go to court to get that changed'

'did not prove by a preponderance of the evidence'

In Fort Worth, a derelict litter of puppies was rescued by police officers from roasting in the heat of a 100-degree day. Left by their previous owner closed in a carrier without water, they were fortunate enough to be found by a good Samaritan who called the authorities. Tarrant County police and animal control arrived […] The post Eight Puppies Abandoned in Sweltering Texas Heat Rescued by Deputies and Ready for New Homes appeared first on Good News Network.

A seven-month-old baby girl dies after being bitten on the head by her family's pet dog in Coventry, West Midlands, police confirms.

The first hurricane of this year’s Atlantic season is certainly making a name for itself, with Beryl now having strengthened to become the earliest Category 5 Atlantic hurricane on record.As of 5am AST, the National Hurricane Center reported that Beryl had maximum sustained winds of 270 kilometers (165 miles) per hour, with even higher gusts, taking it firmly into the highest category for hurricane strength.While forecasters are predicting that the hurricane may well weaken later today, they’ve also said that is “quite an uncertain forecast” and that Beryl is likely to remain a “powerful” hurricane as it progresses across the Caribbean Sea over this week.A hurricane the strength of Beryl is unusual for this time of year.Image credit: CIRA/NOAAMajor hurricanes – Category 3 or higher – such as Beryl are well known for the catastrophic damage they can cause, which has already been seen in the regions hit by the storm on Monday. Several countries in the Caribbean have thousands of residents living without power and forced into temporary accommodation after severe damage to houses. At least one person from St Vincent and the Grenadines is reported to have died.Beryl is now continuing its journey toward Jamaica, which has been placed under a hurricane warning and is expected to see potentially life-threatening winds, heavy rainfall, and flash flooding on Wednesday.  While the Atlantic hurricane season runs all the way from June 1 through to November 30, the first named hurricane usually forms in early to mid-August, and the first major hurricane between late August and early September.Hurricane Beryl has already gone against the grain in both cases. First, it formed in late June – Friday 28 specifically, from a tropical storm. Second, it rapidly reached major hurricane status; on Sunday, its powerful winds took it into Category 4, making it the earliest storm of that strength to form in the Atlantic on record, and now the same for Category 5.“Hurricanes don’t know what month it is, they only know what their ambient environment is,” hurricane expert Jim Kossin told CNN. “Beryl is breaking records for the month of June because Beryl thinks it’s September.”The strength of the hurricane – and the predicted “extraordinary” rest of the season – is largely thought to be down to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, with the powerful, water-warming El Niño phase now making way for hurricane-fueling La Niña conditions.Together with the impact of climate change, and having already seen a decade of increasingly ferocious storms, some scientists are now arguing that authorities should introduce a new class of hurricane: Category 6.

Charlotte, the celebrity stingray that was controversially declared to be pregnant despite only sharing her tank with sharks rather than males of her species, has died.The Aquarium and Shark Lab in Hendersonville, North Carolina, announced the sad news on their social media late Sunday night while thanking fans for their “love and support.”“We are sad to announce, after continuing treatment with her medical care team and specialist, our ray Charlotte passed away today,” the aquarium posted on Facebook.“We are continuing to work with her medical care team and research specialist," they added.The aquarium didn’t explicitly give a cause of death, but a previous post did state she was suffering from a rare reproductive disease.                               Back in February, the aquarium announced that the female stingray was pregnant despite not having shared a tank with a male stingray in at least eight years. "Our stingray, Charlotte, is expecting! We have held this close to our hearts for over 3 months," Team ECCO, which runs the aquarium, announced on Facebook in February, alongside ultrasound scans. "The really amazing thing is we have no male ray!"The news was widely covered by the media – including IFLScience, obviously – and social media was abuzz with speculation. Some suggested Charlotte may have been impregnated by another species in the tank, such as a shark, in a rare instance of hybridization. However, marine biologists stressed the world's first "shingray" was unlikely, given the two species are fairly distantly related, plus there are no documented cases of sharks breeding with stingrays.                                 Experts at the aquarium eventually settled on parthenogenesis, a term that stems from the Greek for “virgin birth,” in which an embryo can develop without fertilization, as the most likely scenario. It's a pretty rare phenomenon, but it has been documented in certain species of insects, amphibians, birds, reptiles, and – most importantly – fish.A major twist in the story occurred in May when the aquarium revealed Charlotte had "developed a rare reproductive disease that has negatively impacted her reproductive system." They continued to suggest the stingray had previously been pregnant, but the embryo had been terminated due to the illness. Some, however, doubt whether she was ever pregnant in the first place. Smelling something fishy about the story, marine experts criticized the aquarium, claiming they had spread misinformation and were possibly putting the stingray's life at risk. The aquarium denied this."I can only tell you what we know for certain. I've never been a liar. This was not a scam. This was not anything made up, but people do that. People have their own thoughts," Brenda Ramer, the owner of the aquarium, told local TV station WLOS.      Surrounded by uncertainty, it appears the stingray's life was ultimately cut short due to her reproductive disease. It's a sad ending to the saga, but few rays can say they were featured on Saturday Night Live.

Marianne Dehasque and Love Dalen: In science, we usually share our successes and ignore the less glamorous mishaps. We decided to follow a different approach. This is the story of how multiple generations of scientists collaborated to decipher the genome of the mammoth formerly known as Lonely Boy, often referred to as the last mammoth on the Earth. The woolly mammoth was one of the most charismatic species of the last Ice Age, between roughly 120,000 to 12,000 years ago. Yet, the cause of its extinction remains a mystery. Mammoths roamed large parts of the northern hemisphere during their heyday, but by the end of the Ice Age, they had disappeared from most of their former range. The last mammoth population lived on Wrangel Island, a small island off the Siberian coast, until its final demise about 4,000 years ago. In our new study, published in Cell, we investigated whether the Wrangel Island mammoth population was genetically destined for extinction. And despite many mistakes along the way, we ultimately discovered it wasn’t. Mammoths became isolated on Wrangel Island around 10,000 years ago due to rising sea levels and survived as a small population for thousands of years. Inbreeding is a common problem in small populations and its negative effects could accumulate over time, eventually leading to an unviable population and extinction. Inbreeding can cause lots of issues. Portraits of Charles II of Spain, last monarch of the Habsburg house, show his deformed chin due to generations of inbreeding. Scientists have long wondered whether genomic processes led to the extinction of the mammoths on Wrangel Island. To address this, we generated a dataset of 21 mammoth genomes spanning the last 50,000 years of the species’ existence. This dataset allowed us to travel back in time and study the genetic effects of their isolation over time. Lonely Boy was the most precious individual in our dataset, the sample key to understanding why mammoths went extinct. Sequencing Lonely Boy’s DNA, however, proved to be challenging. The adventures of Lonely Boy Generating a genome for Lonely Boy took multiple attempts over a time span of almost ten years. In our first attempt to extract DNA, our sample turned out to be plagued with human contamination. In our second attempt, we used bleach to remove as much contamination as possible. Although this is common practice in the field of ancient DNA, it also comes with the trade-off that some of the mammoth DNA will also inadvertently be destroyed. In our case, it meant that not enough mammoth material was left in the sample to generate a high-quality genome. In a final attempt, we merged the data from the different DNA extracts from Lonely Boy. However, the DNA from our different extracts, while similar, looked like it belonged to different individuals. We came up with the wildest theories as to explain these new results. One of our leading theories at the time was that Lonely Boy had a condition called the “vanishing twin syndrome”. Apparently, in some rare cases, a mammal foetus can absorb the genetic material of a diseased twin during gestation. This would explain why the DNA extracts looked similar, yet not entirely identical. In the end, the explanation was not nearly as exciting and could all be tracked back to the egregious amount of effort we had put into this sample. This resulted in strange lab artefacts (which is anything causing difficulty in interpreting a specimen) – normally not even noticeable – that introduced a false genetic variation in the sample. We therefore created a simple filter to remove these artefacts. But even after all these steps, Lonely Boy still looked like an outlier. At this point, we decided to re-date the sample. Lonely Boy had been dated a long time ago and methods have considerably improved since then. The result came as a big surprise. Lonely Boy was not 4,000 years old as initially thought, but closer to 5,500 years – making him a completely average mammoth in our dataset, rather than the last such individual on Earth. Causes of extinction To answer the original question of this project, no, the Wrangel Island population did likely not go extinct due to inbreeding. By comparing our genomic data with results from computer simulations, we now know that the population decline of the mammoths after isolation on Wrangel Island some 10,000 years ago must have been huge, with only eight breeding individuals remaining. Nevertheless, our results show that the population recovered quickly to a population size of 300 within 20 generations and remained stable until the mammoth’s final demise. We can see it remained stable since there is virtually no change in inbreeding levels through this period. However, our results on harmful mutations tell a different story. While the most harmful mutations were gradually purged from the population through natural selection, mildly harmful mutations accumulated over time. This indicates that the initial population decline – despite fast recovery – had long-lasting genetic effects. Predicting the exact effect of harmful mutations is challenging, especially in an extinct species. Comparison with known human diseases suggests that some of the most harmful purged mutations likely disrupted genes that may have been important for the development of different senses, like hearing and sight. Yet it seems unlikely that this caused the mammoth’s final demise. Based on our results, the extinction must have happened rapidly. Humans did not co-exist with mammoths on the island, but a sudden event, such as a disease outbreak or a weather event, could have caused the population’s sudden extinction. As with most things in science, more research will hopefully provide new insights. Potentially even with a new Lonely Boy or Girl. Although we eventually managed to analyse the inbreeding of mammoths, it was a long journey with many detours. Yet, as a lab group we learned a lot from this project. We came up with a new bioinformatic method to deal with human contamination and discovered a new type of lab artefact. This new information may well be crucial to pinpoint the exact reasons why the woolly mammoth became extinct. Marianne Dehasque, Postdoctoral Researcher, Uppsala University and Love Dalen, Professor, Stockholm University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The post Did inbreeding cause the woolly mammoth’s extinction? appeared first on Anomalien.com.