The footage predates the 2024 RNC by several months.

A first-of-its-kind report has discovered that altering the ingredients list or manufacturing methods of widely used medication can really cut back on carbon emissions. They found a reduction of 26 million tons, enough to cancel out the whole carbon footprint of the city of Geneva for a decade. Best of all, it’s already happening, and […] The post World’s Leading HIV Drug Reduces Carbon Emissions By 26 Million Tons in Comparison to Predecessor appeared first on Good News Network.

The post I’ll Scratch Your Back if You Scratch Mine: Itchy Cats by Dr. Lauren Demos DVM (Veterinarian) appeared first on Catster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren't considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Catster.com. Hi, I’m Dr. Lauren! Read my introduction to learn more about me and my two adventurous cats, Pancake and Tiller. As a vet, this is a common time of year that I get all sorts of complaints about itchy cats. The warm weather leads to plants and trees that blossom, increasing the number of pollens and other allergens, insect levels skyrocket, and cats become itchy. But a cat doesn’t have to lose hair or be actively scratching to mean they are itchy. Sometimes cats show itching in very unexpected ways… let’s take a look. Signs of an Itchy Cat Typical signs of itchiness include the obvious like the physical act of scratching and hair loss. A less well known sign is the “itch response” -something we were commonly taught about in vet school in relation to sheep, but that I also observe in many itchy cats in clinics. If a cat has general itchiness (the Latin term is pruritus) then scratching them or petting them on the top of their butt can elicit a chewing response. Odd one! Hair loss, and scabs, can also indicate that physical scratching is traumatizing the hair coat and skin. But you may not realize that an itchy cat might also only present as a cat that is frequently grooming. Now, certainly most cats will spend a fair amount of time grooming their haircoat. But itchy cats often lick or groom when they are itchy, rather than outright scratching, like a dog may do. Try to look at the times your cat is grooming, if you are trying to decide if it is normal or not. Normal grooming behavior happens after meals, or before a nap. Itchy cats often groom at random times- they will be walking through a room, and then stop to do a brief grooming session. Or you pet them, and they suddenly have a frenetic cleaning session. They will also groom in front of strangers or in unusual places- where they otherwise wouldn’t and shouldn’t feel entirely relaxed. Common Causes of Feline Itch Just like people, cats can also get allergies. Fleas are a common one that many cats experience. Food is another, especially to proteins like beef and fish. But ectoparasites, like fleas, and skin mites, can also cause itch even in non-allergic cats. Ways to Help an Itchy Cat It’s always best to start with a visit to your cat’s vet. Bring photos and videos of anything questionable, as sometimes they can be hard to see in the clinic, or your pet may not display the behavior. Ensure, too, that your cat is up to date on flea and worm treatments. (Some tapeworms can cause extremely itchy behinds for some patients! And fleas are a main cause of feline tapeworms!) Also remember that even a small amount of fleas can cause some cats to be very itchy, if they are allergic. And if that itchy cat has a tendency to groom, they may ingest all evidence of fleas before they can be detected. Therefore, an ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure! Your vet can also guide you on other treatments that may help your cat, which can include diet trials to detect food allergies, and itch suppressing medications. Generally, itch is very treatable in cats, so never be afraid to scratch that itch, so to speak, and dig deeper into the issue by seeking professional help. The post I’ll Scratch Your Back if You Scratch Mine: Itchy Cats by Dr. Lauren Demos DVM (Veterinarian) appeared first on Catster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren't considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Catster.com.

Party platforms are a way of signaling to voters the policies that politicians are likely to pursue if they’re elected to office. But platforms also send a message to a party’s candidates about what policy positions the party expects them to support. If elected officials go against their own party’s platform, they might expect to be challenged in a primary. That’s why the fact that the new Republican Party platform endorses universal school choice is such an important development. For the first time, the Republican Party is signaling to voters and its own politicians that they should pursue policies that enable all families to choose the educational options that align with their values and work best for their own children—whether public or private, religious or secular. “We believe schools should educate, not indoctrinate,” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday on the second night of the 2024 Republican National Convention. “We stand for parents’ rights, including universal school choice.” Ron DeSantis: "We believe schools should educate, not indoctrinate. We stand for parents' rights, including UNIVERSAL SCHOOL CHOICE." pic.twitter.com/JUrqUEQ8yP— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) July 17, 2024 That’s a dramatic departure from the platforms the Republicans adopted in 2016 and 2020, which only mentioned school choice in passing and did not fully embrace making choice available to all families. Before now, Republican politicians could say they were adhering to their party’s platform if they were only willing to support school choice policies that were limited to specific populations, like families with low-incomes, students with special needs, or those enrolled in failing public schools. Now, the bar has been raised. If Republican officeholders and candidates want to abide by their party’s platform, they will have to support universal school choice policies for which all families would be eligible. There has been a wave of adoption of those universal school choice programs over the past four years, with 11 states embracing that approach. All 11 of those states have Republicans in control of both legislative chambers and the governor (except North Carolina, where the Democratic governor allowed it to become law without his signature). In some states, such as Iowa, school choice advocacy groups funded primary challenges that replaced Republican legislators who had previously opposed choice bills with others who backed the policy. This enforcement of party discipline helped ensure that Republican legislative majorities translated into school choice victories. In other states with Republican majorities, legislators have split over whether they favor passing universal programs or more limited, targeted school choice policies. Unable to get agreement among Republicans on the right approach has delayed adoption of any school choice bills in some states, such as Texas and Idaho. The adoption of a national Republican Party platform that fully endorses universal school choice may end that delay by pushing more Republican legislators wishing to adhere to their party’s platform to switch to the universal camp. Those who don’t get on board may face primary challenges, even if they support limited choice programs. Backing universal school choice is becoming the new standard for Republican state policymakers. Of course, sometimes elected officials stray from their party’s platform without consequences. But when parties signal that an issue is a top priority, party discipline to the national platform tends to become the norm. We saw that with respect to the abortion issue. For a number of years, there were pro-life Democrats and pro-abortion Republicans. But the issue became salient enough that both parties enforced discipline and either drove those who dissented out of office or people switched their positions. The same process appears to be underway on the issue of school choice. Democrats who have been supportive of school choice, even with more limited policies such as charter schools or means-tested vouchers, are being forced to change their positions or face defeat in primaries. The opposite is occurring among Republicans, who are facing pressure to support universal programs or lose to opponents who do in the primaries. In the short term, this sharper divide between the parties will make adoption of limited school choice harder in states controlled by Democrats. But in states where Republicans control both legislative chambers and the governor, adoption of universal school choice policies may get easier. There are currently 23 states fully controlled by Republicans compared to 17 fully controlled by Democrats, with the other 10 states with split control. Given that only 10 of those 23 Republican-controlled states have universal school choice, we might expect to see more than a doubling in the number of universal school choice states over the next several years as party discipline on this issue begins to be enforced. If so, more than half of K–12 students nationwide would be eligible for school choice, up from about 36% eligible today. The universal school choice wave has just gotten started and shows no signs of slowing down. The post The New GOP Litmus Test on School Choice appeared first on The Daily Signal.

'Mine Eyes Have Been Opened': Madeline Brame's Ferocious Indictment of Alvin Bragg, Joe Biden

A new study that left data to interact in a digital "primordial soup" has found that self-replicating patterns emerge.In 1970, British mathematician John Horton Conway created a zero-player videogame, dubbed Conway's Game of Life. The game takes place on a grid of squares, and the only input a user can have is setting the initial state. The rules, decided by Conway, are as follows: For a space that is occupied, each cell with one occupied neighbor or no neighbors dies, as if by solitude. Each occupied space with four or more neighbors also dies, as if by overpopulation. If an occupied cell has two or three neighbors, it will survive to the next step (i.e. it will remain occupied as the whole grid moves forward one step). A space that is unoccupied, meanwhile, will only become populated only when it has three occupied spaces beside it.Though only a few simple rules are followed, complex and self-replicating patterns and behaviors soon emerge as each step progresses.               In the new study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, researchers from Google, the Paradigms of Intelligence Team and The University of Chicago were attempting to gain a little insight into how life arises from the interaction of non-living molecules. "While searching for a general definition of life, we observe a major change in dynamics coincident with the rise of self-replicators, which seems to apply regardless of substrate," the team write in their paper. "Hence, we may use the appearance of self-replicators as a reasonable transition to distinguish pre-life from life dynamics."To investigate, the team placed tens of thousands of snippets of computer code, randomly mixed in a sort of digital primordial soup of random noise, which were allowed to interact over up to 16,000 epochs."Each program consists of 64 1-byte characters which are randomly initialized from a uniform distribution. In these simulations, no new programs are generated or removed – change only occurs through self-modification or random background mutations," the team explains. "In each epoch, programs interact with one another by selecting random ordered pairs, concatenating them and executing the resulting code for a fixed number of steps or until the program ends."The programs were not given any goal or reward mechanism rewarding survival or replication, and yet from this soup the team found that self-replicating programs emerged around 40 percent of the time. The replicators did not always survive, sometimes being destroyed in further interactions. State transitions – where the replicators came to dominate the system – were rare with a random initial setup, taking place only three times out of 1,000. When a self-replicator – extracted from previous simulations – was placed in a random soup, however, state transitions took place 22 percent of the time within only 128 epochs.These experiments were all in something analogous to a zero-dimensional environment, as the programs all had a uniform chance of interacting with each other, as if they were compressed into a single point. But the team also experimented with one- and two-dimensional environments, where the programs could only interact with neighboring code."In the resulting simulation, self-replicators still emerge," the team explained. "The main difference compared to the usual setup is given by the speed of propagation of self-replicators: if all tapes are allowed to interact in a soup of size n, once a self-replicator emerges it typically takes over at least half of the soup in about log n steps; on the other hand, in a 2D soup it takes a number of epochs that is proportional to the grid side lengths, which is √n for a square grid.""Because of this difference, 2D grid experiments are very helpful to visualize how self-replicators evolve and their behaviour. It also provides a fertile ground for multiple variations of self-replicators to co-exist and compete with each other."The result, shown in an accompanying YouTube video, included self-replicators coming to dominate the system.                 Though the experiments are of course not completely analogous to the primordial soup from which life on Earth emerged, they nonetheless show how complexity and self-replicators can emerge in the random interactions between "inert" constituent pieces. The team hopes to continue their work, and answer such questions as whether even more complex functions could arise, and whether evolution in computational systems is the same or notably different from biological systems."We argue that this set of computational substrates shows a new way of discovering and arriving at life.  "The behavior of such systems is markedly different from auto-catalytic networks and biologically-inspired systems," the team concludes. "Moreover, our initial explorations and the ones observed in similar systems such as Tierra and AVIDA suggest that this may be just the beginning of the complexity of behaviors that can emerge and flourish in such systems."The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, is posted to preprint server arXiv.

Analysis of brain scan data from 4,757 children has revealed new insights into how sex and gender influence the human brain. The study team concluded that when it comes to how the brain is wired, sex and gender are two distinct things. In the past, there’s been too much of a focus on sex, they say, and gender has not been accounted for – something that future scientific studies should correct.“Sex and gender have traditionally been conflated in research when they should have been studied separately,” said lead author Dr Elvisha Dhamala, an assistant professor at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, in a statement.Countless studies over many years have sought to unpick the complex interplay between sex, gender, and how our brains work. Equally, discussions around gender identity and how someone’s gender may impact their health and behavior, whether or not it diverges from their biological sex, have become increasingly fraught.Seeking to better understand the neurobiology behind sex and gender in children, Dhamala and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, the National University of Singapore, and Rutgers University turned to data collected as part of the largest long-term study of brain development in the US – the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study.Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were collected when the children were aged between 9 and 10. The cohort was split roughly evenly between children assigned male and female sex at birth, and information about the kids’ gender identity was obtained from questionnaires completed by their parents.The data revealed unique and overlapping brain connectivity networks associated with sex and gender. Sex was found to be mostly associated with motor, visual, control, and limbic networks. Gender, on the other hand, was distributed more widely throughout the brain. According to these results, sex and gender are separate concepts, even when it comes down to the interplay between different brain regions.The data collection methods do present some limitations, which commentators on the study have highlighted.“The children looked at are all very similar age – with imaging collected when they are aged 9 or 10 and the gender and self report gender being recorded a year later,” said Professor of Digital Health and of Medical Imaging Science Derek Hill, who was not involved in the work, in a statement to Science Media Centre. “It isn’t at all clear whether the results presented here would translate to children of other ages.”Dr Anne-Lise Goddings, a Clinical Academic Consultant in Paediatrics and Adolescent Health, also called for caution in interpreting the results. “It’s crucial when interpreting this study to contextualise that this ‘gender’ measure focuses mainly on how much parents report their children engaged in stereotypical ‘gendered’ play,” Dr Goddings told Science Media Centre, referring to the gender expression questions parents were asked.Importantly, the study cannot answer the age-old conundrum of whether there’s something innately different about male and female brains. “Nothing in our work establishes any aspect of causality,” Dhamala told Science, noting that the differences they observed could arise from the often very different social and environmental cues that male and female kids are exposed to.Questions around how sex and gender present within the brain remain timely and important, not least because of clearly observable differences in susceptibility to different neurological and psychiatric disorders between the sexes. If, as this study suggests, the influence of gender is far-reaching within the brain, and distinct from the influence of sex, it is important that future research takes this into account.“This research sheds light on the complex and nuanced ways in which biological and environmental factors influence brain organization,” said Dhamala, “and shows the need to consider a person’s sex and gender to fully understand health and disease across the human lifespan.”The study is published in Science Advances.

The crew of NASA’s first Mars habitat simulation, CHAPEA 1, exited their Earth-based environment after 378 days on July 6 at 5 p.m. EDT. Greeted by friends, family, mission team members and project directors, the crew of four expressed gratitude and optimism about their time in isolation and the data collected, which will contribute to the future goal of putting boots on Mars. The egress event at the Johnson Space Center was initiated by Deputy Director Steve Koerner, who expressed sincere gratitude to the team and their families and highlighted the crucial data gathered over the course of the project. The four crew members included Mission Commander Kelly Haston, Flight Engineer Ross Brockwell, Medical Officer Nathan Jones, and Science Officer Anca Selariu. NASA astronaut and Deputy Director of Flight Operations Kjell Lindgren ceremonially opened the habitat door, officially bringing the team out of isolation. Koerner remarked on the mission’s significance: “Mars is our goal. As global interests and capabilities in space continue to expand, America is poised to lead.” The mission, primarily focused on nutrition-based science but included cross-disciplinary experiments that simulated various aspects of life on Mars. “They’ve been separated from their families, placed on a carefully prescribed meal plan, and undergone a lot of observation. By growing and harvesting their own vegetables, dealing with communication delays and conducting simulated Mars walks, this team has helped us obtain crucial information as we prepare to return to the moon and on to Mars,” Koerner added. Principal Investigator Grace Douglas reiterated her thanks on behalf of NASA to the team and their families for their incredible sacrifice. Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) is a series of analog missions that will simulate year-long stays on the surface of Mars. “This project has enabled the collection of thousands of data points, yielding a unique and valuable integrated dataset in a Mars-realistic simulation. These data will provide unprecedented insight into how engineers, scientists, and astronauts can work together to achieve mission objectives while maintaining health and performance for the success of future human missions to Mars.” Douglas also thanked the science, engineering, and mission control teams who worked tirelessly to support the crew and ensure data integrity for mission success. The development of this analogue mission was a unique challenge for the engineering teams. Director of Engineering Julie Kramer White noted, “From working with the teams to outfit the habitat, whether it was Mars walks, robotic operations, or habitat maintenance—planned and unplanned—the analogues are crucial in understanding what it’s going to take and if our architectures will work when plans meet reality.” One of the key reasons for conducting missions like CHAPEA 1 is their ability to gather critical data in a controlled, safe environment. By simulating Mars-like conditions on Earth, researchers can test the limits of human endurance, develop effective countermeasures for potential health risks, and fine-tune the technological systems necessary for long-term space missions. This controlled setting allows for rigorous experimentation and monitoring without the immediate dangers posed by actual space travel. The information obtained from these simulations is invaluable; it helps identify potential issues and solutions before committing resources to more dangerous and expensive missions beyond Earth’s atmosphere. This approach not only enhances the safety and well-being of future astronauts but also ensures that every step taken towards Mars is based on robust scientific evidence and meticulous planning. As Douglas pointed out, the data collected from CHAPEA 1 will provide unprecedented insights into maintaining health and performance, which are crucial for the success of future human missions to Mars. By testing scenarios and gathering data on Earth, NASA can mitigate risks, improve mission outcomes, and ultimately, make human exploration of Mars a safer and more achievable goal. Mission Commander Kelly Haston expressed pride and gratitude for the experience, noting the support from her crew, friends, family, and partner. Flight Engineer Ross Brockwell highlighted the importance of sustainable living principles learned during the mission. Medical Officer Nathan Jones shared his appreciation for the opportunity and the crew’s camaraderie and Science Officer Anca Selariu emphasized the mission’s role in uniting and inspiring humanity. NASA also conducts isolation research across multiple projects, such as the Human Exploration Research Analog, expeditions to Antarctica, and other simulation environments, in addition to human spaceflight missions aboard the International Space Station. These efforts aim to achieve specific and essential research objectives that will guide future human expeditions to the Moon and Mars. The CHAPEA simulated missions stand out because they examine the effects of prolonged isolation and confinement, incorporating Mars-like communication delays with Earth – up to 44 minutes roundtrip – and resource constraints pertinent to Mars, including a more restricted food system compared to what can be supported on the space station and in other simulation environments. The completion of CHAPEA 1 is a significant milestone as NASA prepares for future Mars missions. Stay tuned for CHAPEA Mission 2 next year and CHAPEA Mission 3 in 2027, as the journey to Mars continues. Source: www.universetoday.com The post Volunteers locked inside a Mars simulator for 378 days are now free appeared first on Anomalien.com.