TacoButtPlug

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/31498992

smh

This shit sucks. Be safe if you're protesting tomorrow. WEAR A MASK. They are using facial recognition. DO NOT GO ALONE. Take a friend/s.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31615310

CBP also said in a statement that its air and marine operations were “not engaged in the surveillance of first amendment activities”, but that they are “providing officer safety surveillance when requested by officers”.

The Department of Homeland Security on Monday posted a video on X that the agency said was DHS drone footage and bore a CBP air and marine operations watermark. It included zoomed in clips of protestors on the streets.

CBP’s confirmation of its drone usage comes after the LA Times also reported that an LAPD helicopter flying over protesters announced to them, “I have all of you on camera. I’m going to come to your house.” The Guardian US contacted the LAPD and has not heard back.

This is not the first time the DHS has flown drones over protests. In 2020, the DHS dispatched drones over at least 15 cities across the US where people gathered to protest about the murder of George Floyd and logged more than 270 hours of surveillance footage. The LAPD has also ramped up surveillance in response to first amendment activity. During the city’s George Floyd protests, LAPD sent requests to Amazon for Ring doorbell footage that specifically sought videos of the protests.

Discourse, Flarum, MyBB, phpBB, Simple Machines Fourm, and NodeBB are what I can find. Any yays or nays? More suggestions? Purpose of self hosting for friends, privately.

COVID-19 infection was linked to a higher risk of new-onset mild and moderate chronic kidney disease (CKD) in US children and adolescents from 2020 to 2023, according to recent findings from the National Institutes of Health's Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) initiative.

The University of Pennsylvania-led research team assessed data on kidney outcomes from 1.9 million patients aged 20 years and younger with (487,400) and without (1.4 million) COVID-19 at 19 healthcare centers from March 2020 to May 2023, with up to 2 years of follow-up. The average age was 8.2 years, 51.0% were male, and 45% were White.

The results were published late last week in JAMA Network Open.

Key takeaways

In cooperation with the Los Angeles County Fire Department, a multidisciplinary team at UCLA will isolate the contaminants on firefighter jackets and assess their effects on human cells.

Firefighters at one station will wear the jackets in rotation for two months, then send them back to researchers, unwashed and coated with debris from their firefights.

Once the chemists isolate the gases and PM from the jackets, Gomperts will test their effects on human cells.

Scientists have attempted to map the human cell since the first microscope was invented more than 400 years ago. But many components of the cell still remain uncharted.

“ We know each of the proteins that exist in our cells, but how they fit together to then carry out the function of a cell still remains largely unknown across cell types,” said Leah Schaffer, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research scholar at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

Now, Schaffer and her colleagues at UC San Diego — in collaboration with researchers at Stanford University, Harvard Medical School and the University of British Columbia — have created a comprehensive, interactive map of U2OS cells, which are associated with pediatric bone tumors. They combined high-resolution microscope imaging and biophysical interactions of proteins to map the subcellular architecture and protein assemblies in the cell. The map revealed previously unknown protein functions and will help the researchers understand how mutated proteins contribute to diseases such as childhood cancers. It will also serve as a reference for developing maps of other cell types. The study will be published on April 9, 2025 in Nature.

“Based on cell biology 101 and textbook pictures of cells, you might think that we understand everything about a cell. But what’s remarkable is that for no human cell type do we really have a proper parts catalog and assembly manual,” said co-senior author Trey Ideker, Ph.D., a professor of genetics in the Department of Medicine, an adjunct professor in the Departments of Bioengineering and Computer Science and Engineering, and a member of Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego.

The mapping projects referenced in this story are really fucking cool:

https://www.proteinatlas.org/

https://musicmaps.ai/u2os-cellmap/

Back in 2014, a woman with advanced cancer pushed Adrienne Boire’s scientific life in a whole new direction. The cancer, which had begun in the breast, had found its way into the patient’s spinal fluid, rendering the middle-aged mother of two unable to walk. “When did this happen?” she asked from her hospital bed. “Why are the cells growing there?”

Why, indeed. Why would cancer cells migrate to the spinal fluid, far from where they’d been birthed, and how did they manage to thrive in a liquid so strikingly poor in nutrients?

Boire, a physician-scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, decided that those questions deserved answers.

Abstract

A well-functioning society requires well-functioning institutions that ensure prosperity, fair distribution of wealth, social participation, security, and informative media. Such institutions are built on a foundation of trust. However, while trust is essential for economic success and good governance, interconnected mechanisms inherent in weakly governed market economies tend to undermine the very trust on which such success depends. These mechanisms include the intrinsic tendency for inequality to grow, media to boost perceived unfairness, and self-interest to gain rewards at the expense of others. These mechanisms, if left unchecked, allow wealth concentration to result in state capture where institutions facilitate further wealth concentration instead of the promoting the common good. As a result, people may become alienated and untrusting of fellow citizens and of institutions. Several democracies now experience such dynamics, the United States being a prime example. We discuss ways in which well-functioning democracies can design institutions to help avoid this social trap, and the much harder challenge of escaping the trap once in it. Successful cases such as the ability of Scandinavian democracies to maintain high-trust, and the US progressive era in the early 20th century provide instructive examples.

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So great how this is paywalled, right? >_<

Human eyelashes are good for more than just catching dust and looking pretty: As researchers report in Science Advances, they also actively fling water droplets away from the #eyes, helping to keep vision clear when we swim, sweat, and cry (or shower)

Abstract

Neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and macular degeneration represent major sources of human suffering, yet factors influencing disease severity remain poorly understood. Sex has been implicated as one modifying factor. Here, we show that female sex is a risk factor for worsened outcomes in a model of retinal degeneration and that this susceptibility is caused by the presence of female-specific sex hormones. The adverse effect of female sex hormones was specific to diseased retinal neurons, and depletion of these hormones ameliorated this phenotypic effect, while reintroduction worsened rates of disease in females. Transcriptional analysis of retinas showed significant differences between genes involved in pyroptosis, inflammatory responses, and endoplasmic reticulum stress–induced apoptosis between males and females with retinal degeneration. These findings provide crucial insights into the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases and how sex hormones can affect disease severity. These findings have far-reaching implications for clinical trial design and the use of hormonal therapy in females with certain neurodegenerative disorders.