Members of Congress who voted for the TikTok divest-or-die bill last week "may own between $29 million and $126 million worth of stock in competing tech companies" https://gizmodo.com/politicians-who-voted-to-ban-tiktok-may-own-as-much-as-1851356203

LAist/KPCC reporter Josie Huang receives a 700K settlement for being beaten and arrested by the LA Sheriff's Department while #reporting on a George Floyd protest in 2020. https://laist.com/news/criminal-justice/settlement-with-laist-correspondent-would-be-among-largest-for-media-rights-violations-during-george-floyd-protests

@Natasha_Jay 🏆

“This study provides us with strong evidence that we need to stop looking at Covid-19 as strictly an upper respiratory disease and start viewing it as a systemic disorder that impacts multiple organs,” Douglas C. Wallace, the study’s coauthor, said in a statement. “The continued dysfunction we observed in organs other than the lungs suggests that mitochondrial dysfunction could be causing long-term damage to the internal organs of these patients.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ariannajohnson/2023/08/09/long-covid-may-affect-organs-like-the-heart-and-kidneys-after-lungs-recover-new-research-says/

In our blood, and especially in our marrow, there are cells responsible for making new blood cells, including immune system cells: these are haemapoietic stem cells (HSC).
At birth, we have between 50,000 and 200,000 of these cells, which will be used throughout our lives to renew our blood, including immune system cells.
The problem is that they express ACE2, a target of #SARSCoV2.
If you read this publication, mainstream scientists assume that #COVID will only call on this pool of cells indirectly, via intermediate cells which, at some point, will not be sufficient to make new immune system cells.
But there's a problem: there's no way of measuring the number of HSCs we have left.
So scientists aren't publishing articles saying that this coronavirus is destroying our entire stock of HSCs. All we know is that it happens in a Petri dish.
I'm not a specialist, I've only worked especially with stem cells for 10 years as a technician and 10 more years with immune system modulation. But it scares me, how can we imagine that SARS-CoV-2 targets cells with ACE2, including HSCs, without destroying them?

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhl/article/PIIS2666-7568(22)00190-8/fulltext

Auto workers are demanding a 40% raise to match the 40% pay increase CEOs of the Detroit automakers got over the past 4 years.

CEOs are calling this absurd, but they couldn't be more wrong.

THIS IS A COMPROMISE. Why? Because worker's real wages have fallen 30% over the past 20 years. They're foregoing 16 years of wage theft for 4 of equity, and consistent equity going forward. That's basic justice.

Pay workers. Unionize workers. Tax billionaires. Save our economy.

I know we're all keyed into the indictment news, but... Also TODAY:

Brutal heat in Argentina (in WINTER)
Uprecedented heat in Japan
Most intense rain in 140 years in China
Iran shuts down for two days due to high temperatures
Record low sea ice in Antarctica for July
Highest ever recorded ocean temps in Florida
"Dangerous heat" in US Southwest

We're seeing the climate spin out of control.

#climateemergency
#climatecrisis
#climate

Stop burning carbon.

"Christopher Nolan's #Oppenheimer explores the work of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer & colleagues to create the atomic bomb.

Yet, the film fails to depict a key part of the story, using 2 female scientists as stand-ins for ALL of the women who contributed."

Hundreds of women were essential to the Manhattan Project, including Nobel Prize winning physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer. But they are largely absent in the #film.

https://www.businessinsider.com/women-manhattan-project-christopher-nolan-oppenheimer-completely-ignored-2023-7 #HistoryRemix #science #history

"Why can't we just agree to disagree on politics?"

My dude.

- Agree to disagree was called pro-choice. You ended it and shoved authoritarian control of women's bodies down our throats.
- Agree to disagree was called LGBTQ inclusion. You banned it from schools, libraries, bathrooms, sports and the military.
- Agree to disagree was called Black Lives Matter. You mocked it and spat on it and threatened us with violence if we "try that in a small town".
- Agree to disagree was called Democracy. You traitors tried to kill it and install a military coup of your orange god emperor instead.

So no. Apparently, "we" CAN'T agree to disagree. And that's entirely your fault.

When my partner first told me the Oppenheimer movie didn't talk about this AT ALL, I immediately lost whatever little interest I had. Gross to make so much money off of them, yet not even mention the victims. 35 infants died the month after the test bomb alone.

Idk, call me a buzzkill or whatever but I don't think there's enough special effects in the world to make me feel less gross about this. I really thought part of the movie would be him facing the reality of what he created tbh.

The IRS pulled in $3.18 for each dollar spent auditing the top 1%, and $6.29 for the top 0.1%.

There’s one reason and one reason only the GOP wants to defund the IRS: to protect their wealthy mega-donors.

All in all, the GOP’s IRS cuts will cost $40 billion in lost revenue.

Never believe minimizers who lie and say there’s nothing more we can do to mitigate the spread of #COVID. This would be a huge game-changer!

Scientists are developing a breathalyzer that can detect coronavirus in just one or two breaths and provide results in less than 1 minute. The test could be more accurate than rapid home tests and faster than PCR tests.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/new-breath-test-shows-promise-rapid-covid-19-detection

This is why I bang on about #Bluesky. We need to create ***the most favorable*** ground on which we'll fight fascism. Because that IS what we'll be doing, for years.

B/c, let's be real: due to insufficient pushback, we are way too far down the road. Farther than your favorite pundit or political expert will ever admit. (Unless maybe they're ALSO an expert in the history of the US far right, or in historical rise of a specific fascist regime).

Stacking the deck against ourselves is a bad plan.

When your home burns, floods, or is destroyed in an extreme climate weather event, when someone in your family dies from heat waves, or when crops fail and people starve—come for these three people: Wael Sawan (Shell CEO), Darren Woods (Exxon CEO), and Patrick Pouyanne (TotalEnergies CEO). They knew what was coming and did it to you anyway. Sue them, shame them, heckle them, despise them. These are choices. They are to blame, not society.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/16/big-oil-climate-pledges-extreme-heat-fossil-fuel

How Threads’ privacy policy compares to Twitter’s (and its rivals’)

Here’s what is collected by Threads, as well as by Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Spill, and Hive Social.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/07/how-threads-privacy-policy-compares-to-twitters-and-its-rivals/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Before you create a #Threads account you should know that you can’t delete it without nuking your entire Instagram account.

"#Omicron has comparable intrinsic severity to the ancestral Wuhan strain, although the effective severity is substantially lower in Omicron cases due to vaccination"

#VaccinesWork #Vaccination #COVID19 #Science #FactsNotFeelz
https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/infdis/jiad236/7208626?

To anyone thinking about joining BlueSky, especially artists: everything you post is sent to a third party for AI labeling.

BlueSky uses AI to label content for moderation, and to do that they use a company called https://thehive.ai. If you look through their privacy policy, you will see that they can use content sent to them to train models for all their services, which include generative AI for both text and images.

Update: https://meow.social/@FluffyDeveloper/110652053858910840

#ai #bluesky

If you are in Canada and you're looking for a good long-term home on the fediverse, consider #CoSocialCa. We are a co-op, meaning we're member-owned and -operated.

( hoping a late #introduction is better than none
at all! )

Hi everyone,

I'm Sarah, a #chemistry prof at Hanover College in Indiana. My PhD work was in #membrane #protein #massspectrometry and now I've got a special interest in anything #neuro related! I teach an entire course on the biochemistry of psychoactive drugs and I'm still trying to get into research in that field because its super interesting to me! In the mean time I'm doing some #lcms of #cannabinoids and focusing on teaching.