Solid

interesting articles, illustrations, pictures about science, humans, nature, rights, and things

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The Power of Casual Gratitude

On swallowing “sorry”s and replacing them with simple “thank you”s

Over-apologizing seems to particularly be common for women. One study suggests that women just have a lower threshold for what’s offensive and requires an apology. Or perhaps women are just spending sorry coins in a male-dominated world to avoid paying a steeper price, like being seen as a bitch. Whatever the reason, there have already been a storm of articles telling women to stop apologizing, as well as ones telling people to stop telling women to stop apologizing.

While I do think the sorry scale tips unjustly toward women, the phenomenon of favoring casual apology over casual gratitude seems prevalent throughout American society, and perhaps beyond. For some, it may be inspired by low self-esteem—thinking everything you do is wrong and needs to be apologized for.

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128 Words to Use Instead of “Very”

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The Best Way to Cook Different Cuts of Beef, in One Chart

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305 Million-Year-Old Fossil A Glimpse Into The Origins Of Spiders

Scientists have discovered a well-preserved 305 million-year-old arachnid that is "almost a spider" in France. In a new journal article, they say the fossil sheds some light on the origins of "true" spiders.

The main point of distinction: This newly discovered arachnid very likely could produce silk but lacked the spinnerets used by true spiders to, well, spin it, the scientists say. The researchers say it belongs to a "sister group" to the real-deal spiders.

The species, which they described in a new article in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is named Idmonarachne brasieri. That's after Idmon, the father of Arachne in Greco-Roman mythology. Appropriately, Arachne was a master weaver who was transformed into a spider.

The paper says Idmonarachne "does not fit comfortably into the established orders." National Geographic reports that it "acts as a bridge between early spider-like creatures brewing up blobs of silk and the skilled weavers that we see today."

"While delicately constructed webs seem synonymous with spiders, we know from the fossil record that the ability to secrete silk came before the ability to carefully control it. Spider relatives called uraraneids, which lived from 385 million years ago through the time of Idmonarachne, could produce silk but could not build webs."

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A Jury Has Awarded $72 Million in a Suit Against Johnson & Johnson For Causing Ovarian Cancer

On Tuesday, a Missouri jury sided with the family of the late Jackie Fox in a civil suit against the iconic baby powder producers, two years after her diagnosis and just a few months after her death.

The AP reports that Fox’s suit was part of a larger claim in the city of St. Louis Circuit Court that included 60 people, all testifying that the “hygienic” use of Johnson & Johnson talcum powder directly contributed to their illnesses. Johnson & Johnson has been under scrutiny for years about the dangerous ingredients in their baby and personal use products, such as 1,4-dioxane and formaldehyde, which they swore to remove by 2015 after much negative publicity.

There was some conflict in testimony about the dangers of talc itself:

Spokeswoman Carol Goodrich said Tuesday that the New Jersey-based company was considering its next legal move. In a written statement, she said the verdict “goes against decades of sound science proving the safety of talc as a cosmetic ingredient in multiple products,” citing supportive research by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and National Cancer Institute.

At trial, Fox’s attorneys introduced into evidence a September 1997 internal memo from a Johnson & Johnson medical consultant suggesting that “anybody who denies (the) risks” between “hygenic” talc use and ovarian cancer will be publicly perceived in the same light as those who denied a link between smoking cigarettes and cancer: “denying the obvious in the face of all evidence to the contrary.”

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Dear New York Times: The Real Reason Young Feminists Reject Hillary

On Sunday, the world got its latest in a tired stream of “feminist generation war” think pieces, courtesy of The New York Times. The subject: Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.

In it, authors Amy Chozick and Yamiche Alcindor explore what they term the “generational divide” on the subject of Clinton’s candidacy. They interview older women who “get” sexism (“I fought this whole war, and now we’re running out of time, and if not Hillary, then who would it be?”) and younger women who don’t. They select quotes from the younger women that portray them as ditzy (“I want to see someone who, like, has the fervor to fight”) and post-sexism (“If I am supporting her because she is a woman, that’s equally as bad as not supporting her because of her gender”). The (older) women “experts”— who the authors identify by their titles rather than their age — are unanimous in their condemnation of the younger generation’s supposed inexperience, apoliticism, and indolence: “They haven’t experienced the kind of barriers that their mothers and grandmothers did — the kind of exclusions from areas of accomplishment,” one claims. “The younger generation just thinks the pipeline will magically fill up with women who are qualified enough to run for president.” They just haven’t “engage[d]” enough, or “pa[id] [enough] attention.”

Young women’s ambivalence about Clinton, the authors sum up, is “maddening.”

What the piece elides is that, for many young women, their rejection of Clinton is informed and deeply political. Many of them have suffered violence, discrimination, and rampant unemployment. They have drawn upon their feminist commitments, alongside their lived experience, to evaluate and reject Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy, her expansion of drone warfare, gutting of welfare, (continuing) defense of a burgeoning surveillance state, and more — all of which have hurt women in the U.S. and abroad.

By framing young women as hopelessly uninformed and apolitical — in contrast to their (fore)mothers — the piece obscures real debate and disagreement within generations. It’s a tired trope, one that erases the voices of young women who have decided to demand more of their candidate than that she identify as a woman. And that’s perhaps the most rigorous engagement of all.

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Hillary Clinton Turns Stand-Up Comic: "I'm a Progressive Who Gets Things Done."

A quick review of Hillary Clinton's record shows that much of what she gets done is anti-progressive (not unlike President Clinton in the 1990s).

PROMOTING FRACKING WORLDWIDE IS NOT PROGRESSIVE: On behalf of Chevron and other US oil companies, Secretary Clinton and the State Department pushed fracking globally, as Mother Jones has documented: "How Hillary Clinton's State Department Sold Fracking to the World."

BOOSTING CORPORATIST TRADE DEALS IS NOT PROGRESSIVE: Secretary Clinton repeatedly praised the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) -- as it was being negotiated by the US Trade Representative and her State Department -- and she recruited countries into the deal. In October, with Bernie Sanders climbing in the polls, Clinton said she no longer supported the pact, and prevaricated about her earlier boosterism.

ENABLING MILITARY COUPS IS NOT PROGRESSIVE: When she headed the State Department, it enabled a military coup in Honduras that overthrew democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya, a progressive. Clinton was briefed on the dishonesty that allowed aid to illegally reach the coup government.

POCKETING MILLIONS FROM CORPORATE LECTURE FEES IS NOT PROGRESSIVE: When Wall Street, Big Pharma and other corporate interests paid a soon-to-be presidential candidate an average of $230,000 for a speech, did Hillary Clinton think it was for her brilliant stand-up comedy? Or was it more akin to political bribery? Clinton now says these firms just wanted to hear the views of a former Secretary of State on our "complicated world" -- or about the Bin Laden raid. But Politico reported in 2013 soon after one of her three speeches to Goldman Sachs: "Clinton offered a message that the collected plutocrats found reassuring, according to accounts offered by several attendees, declaring that the banker-bashing so popular within both political parties was unproductive and indeed foolish." (Releasing the speech transcripts would help settle the matter.)

ESCALATING THE AFGHAN WAR IS NOT PROGRESSIVE: As insider books on the Obama administration have revealed, Secretary Clinton was among the most hawkish of Obama's advisors in country after country -- for example, vociferously urging the failed and pointless 2009 troop surge in Afghanistan.

CHAOTIC MILITARY INTERVENTION IN THE MIDEAST IS NOT PROGRESSIVE: If not for Hillary Clinton's 2002 Senate vote in support of Bush's Iraq invasion, Obama would not have defeated her in 2008. As if having learned nothing from the post-invasion chaos in Iraq, Secretary Clinton was one of the strongest voices in 2011 urging Obama to militarily depose Qaddafi in Libya, a country now in total, deadly chaos.

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It's almost over for Hillary: This election is a mass insurrection against a rigged system

Sanders has ended the coronation and fired up the grass roots. Now Clinton's electability argument is crumbling too

It would be hard to overstate what Bernie Sanders has already achieved in his campaign for president, or the obstacles he’s had to surmount in order to achieve it. 

Many of those obstacles were put in place by Democratic national party chair and Clinton apparatchik Deborah Wasserman Schultz. Without pretense of due process, Schultz slashed the number of 2016 debates to six, down from 26 in 2008, and scheduled as many as she could on weekends when she figured no one would be watching. To deprive would-be challengers of free exposure, Schultz robbed voters of free and open debate and ceded the spotlight to the dark vaudeville of the Republicans. That Sanders got this far in spite of her is a miracle in itself.

Sanders got bagged again in Iowa, this time by a state party chair, one Andrea McGuire. Like Schultz, McGuire’s specialty is high-dollar fundraising, and like Schultz she was deeply involved in Clinton’s 2008 campaign. Under the esoteric rules of the Iowa Democratic caucuses, and after a string of lucky coin tosses, Clinton eked out a 700.52 to 696.86 margin, not in votes cast but in a mysterious commodity known as “delegate equivalents.”

We’re electing a president, not the senior warden of a Mason’s lodge. All evidence indicates Sanders won the popular vote. It isn’t a minor point. If the public knew he won the only vote anybody understands or cares about, Clinton wouldn’t be “breathing a sigh of relief,” she’d be hyperventilating. McGuire refuses to release vote totals. She says keeping them a secret is an Iowa tradition. So what if it is? As with debates, the stakes transcend the candidates’ interests.

Even jaded political junkies were startled when the Tyndall Report exposed the media blackout of Sanders. In 2015, ABC News devoted 261 minutes to the 2016 campaign. Donald Trump got 81 minutes. Bernie Sanders got 20 seconds. Nearly as harmful is the dismissive tone of the cable commentariat, and I don’t mean just Fox News.

Sanders wants to talk about the fallen state of our politics, the fallen state of our middle class, and how the first fall caused the second. Clinton can’t have that discussion.  Exposing her differences with Sanders on such topics would sink her. So she says she and he are alike in every way except she’s practical and electable—”a progressive who likes to get things done”–and he’s a hopeless dreamer. It’s the kind of argument political reporters were born to buy, and despite being full of holes, it works even among some non-journalists.

The electability argument is all about money and polls, ground games and firewalls, though you hear less about money lately. Clinton’s campaign muddied the message of its launch by leaking a plan to raise $300 million for an “independent” super PAC. This was to be the year of the super PAC but it’s proving instead that even in politics, money isn’t everything. Among Republicans, Jeb Bush raised the most money, Trump the least. Trump rides high. Bush is on a respirator. As you may have heard, Bernie doesn’t have a super PAC. Backed by a record breaking 1.3 million small donors, he slashed 40 points off Clinton’s lead and rewrote the rules of presidential politics.

The core of Clinton’s realpolitik brief pertains not to electability but to governance.  Her point is that Sanders is naïve. She says none of his proposals can get though a Republican Congress. She strongly implies that he’d roll back Obamacare, a charge that is false, cynical and so nonsensical she’ll have to stop making it soon.  She says she has a plan to get to universal health care—she doesn’t—and that she’ll do it by working “in partnership” with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Who’s being naïve here? A Republican Congress won’t pass any of her ideas either. The only way to get real change is to elect Democrats to Congress and have a grass-roots movement strong enough to keep the heat on them. Nor will insurers cough up a dime of profit without a fight.

One way to sum up the case he’s trying to make might be as follows. In the 1990s a near bipartisan consensus celebrated a new age of globalization and information technology in which technology and trade spur growth that in turn fosters a broad and inclusive prosperity. Government’s job is to deregulate finance and trade and work with business in ‘public private partnerships’ for progress.

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Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright Rebuke Young Women Backing Bernie Sanders

While introducing Mrs. Clinton at a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday, Ms. Albright, 78, the first female secretary of state, talked about the importance of electing a woman to the country’s highest office. In a dig at the “revolution” that Mr. Sanders, 74, often speaks of, she said the first female commander in chief would be a true revolution. And she scolded any woman who felt otherwise.

“We can tell our story of how we climbed the ladder, and a lot of you younger women think it’s done,” Ms. Albright said of the broader fight for women’s equality. “It’s not done. There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!”

Women were expected to help power Mrs. Clinton to the Democratic nomination, but as she struggles to overcome a tough challenge from Mr. Sanders and trails him in New Hampshire polls, her support among them has been surprisingly shaky. Young women, in particular, have been drawn to the septuagenarian socialist from Vermont, and the dynamic has disappointed feminists who dreamed of Mrs. Clinton’s election as a capstone to their long struggle for equality.

Ms. Steinem, 81, one of the most famous spokeswomen of the feminist movement, took the sentiment a step further on Friday in an interview with the talk show host Bill Maher. Explaining that women tend to become more active in politics as they become older, she suggested that younger women were backing Mr. Sanders just so they could meet young men.

“When you’re young, you’re thinking: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie,’ ” Ms. Steinem said.

Realizing that this was potentially offensive, Mr. Maher recoiled. “Oh. Now if I said that, ‘They’re for Bernie because that’s where the boys are,’ you’d swat me.”

In numerous remarks on social media over the weekend, female supporters of Mr. Sanders accused both women of undermining feminism.

“Shame on Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright for implying that we as women should be voting for a candidate based solely on gender,” Zoe Trimboli, a 23-year-old from Vermont who supports Mr. Sanders and describes herself as a feminist, wrote on Facebook. “I can tell you that shaming me and essentially calling me misinformed and stupid is NOT the way to win my vote.”

During her debate with Mr. Sanders last week, Mrs. Clinton pushed back against his suggestion that she was part of the “establishment” by reminding voters that her election would be the end of a long road for women.

But even young women who would like to see a female president elected someday do not necessarily want to base their vote on that single factor.

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Bernie Sanders: Our first non-religious president?

Much of the attention paid to Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign has to do with the s-word: Can a socialist be elected president? How much of a socialist is he? What exactly is socialism?

What many haven't picked up on is that a Sanders presidency would be a first in a couple other ways. First, Sanders would be our first Jewish president. And second, while Sanders is culturally Jewish, he has said that he's "not particularly religious" and has been described by some as agnostic.

Asked during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel's show this week whether he believed in God, Sanders demurred.

"I am who I am," Sanders said. "And what I believe in and what my spirituality is about, is that we're all in this together. That I think it is not a good thing to believe that as human beings we can turn our backs on the suffering of other people."

Sanders added: "This is not Judasim. This is what Pope Francis is talking about -- that we cannot worship just billionaires and the making of more and more money. Life is more than that."

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How Mold on Space Station Flowers is Helping Get Us to Mars

When Scott Kelly tweeted a picture of moldy leaves on the current crop of zinnia flowers aboard the International Space Station, it could have looked like the science was doomed. In fact, science was blooming stronger than ever. What may seem like a failure in systems is actually an exceptional opportunity for scientists back on Earth to better understand how plants grow in microgravity, and for astronauts to practice doing what they’ll be tasked with on a deep space mission: autonomous gardening.

“While the plants haven’t grown perfectly,” said Dr. Gioia Massa, NASA science team lead for Veggie, “I think we have gained a lot from this, and we are learning both more about plants and fluids and also how better to operate between ground and station. Regardless of final flowering outcome we will have gained a lot.”

The next crop on the docket was a batch of zinnia flowers, but they weren’t selected for their beauty. They were chosen because they can help scientists understand how plants flower and grow in microgravity.

“The zinnia plant is very different from lettuce”, said Trent Smith, Veggie project manager. “It is more sensitive to environmental parameters and light characteristics. It has a longer growth duration between 60 and 80 days. Thus, it is a more difficult plant to grow, and allowing it to flower, along with the longer growth duration, makes it a good precursor to a tomato plant.”

Just more than two weeks into their growth period, though, NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren noted that water was seeping out of some of the wicks – the white flaps that contain the seeds and stick out of the tops of the plant pillows. The water partially engulfed three of the plants. Within 10 days, scientists noted guttation on the leaves of some of the plants. Guttation is when internal pressure builds and forces excess water out of the tips of the leaves. It occurs when a plant is experiencing high humidity. Additionally, the zinnia leaves started to bend down and curl drastically. This condition, called epinasty, can indicate flooding in the roots. The anomalies all pointed to inhibited airflow in the plant growth facility that, when coupled with the excess water, could lead to big problems for the crop.

“After observing the guttation and more significant amounts of free water we decided to see about toggling the Veggie fan from low to high,” said Smith. “We had evidence indicating reduced airflow through the internal Veggie facility volume, and needed to toggle the fan to high to dry things out.”

“When you have high humidity and wet surfaces,” he said, “leaves start dying, and become prime real estate for mold to grow.”

The mold issue had Smith out of bed and the Veggie team on the phone by 4 a.m. Within four hours, new procedures were written and communicated to NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, who took over care of the zinnias after Lindgren returned to Earth on Dec. 18. Kelly donned a dust mask as a safety measure, and cut away the affected, moldy plant tissue, which was then stowed in the minus eighty degree laboratory freezer (MELFI) so it could be returned to Earth and studied. The plant surfaces and plant pillow surfaces were sanitized with cleaning wipes, and the fans continued at a high speed in hopes of keeping the Veggie chamber dried out and mold growth abated.

By Christmas Eve, though, Kelly called down to the ground support team to report new problems with the plants. It seemed the high fan speed was drying out the crop too much, and Kelly said he thought they needed more water. He was told, though, that the next scheduled watering was not until Dec. 27.

“I think that would be too late,” Kelly told the ground team. “You know, I think if we’re going to Mars, and we were growing stuff, we would be responsible for deciding when the stuff needed water. Kind of like in my backyard, I look at it and say ‘Oh, maybe I should water the grass today.’ I think this is how this should be handled.”

News of the mold didn’t dampen Smith’s Christmas spirit, though.

“We’d been planning on figuring out how to garden autonomously and his request was just perfect,” Smith said. “Christmas Eve 2015 was our gift!”

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Earth's Atmosphere Just Crossed an Epochal Threshold

Where were you on November 11, 2015?

It was only a couple weeks ago, but already you may not remember. It was a humming but unexceptional news day. In the United States, protestors at the University of Missouri had just successfully ousted their president. Marco Rubio had done fine at the fourth Republican presidential debate, held the night before. And much of Europe and the English-speaking world were honoring Armistice Day.  

In two or 10 years’ time, we might recognize that Wednesday as world-historic. On November 11, the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii—which produces some of the most accurate and longest-running measurements of atmospheric carbon in the world—recorded that, of every million molecules in the atmosphere, 399.68 were carbon dioxide. On the following day, November 12, it measured 401.64 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Since then, its measurement of the amount of carbon in the atmosphere has waxed and waned, but always stayed above 400 ppm. (On Monday, they read 400.15 ppm.)

Keeling is a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, and he directs the program which oversees the Mauna Loa readings.  

Keeling’s name was famous in climate circles before his career even began. In 1958, his father, Charles David Keeling, began overseeing daily measurements of atmospheric CO2 at both Mauna Loa and at an American science station in Antarctica. Keeling’s precise, continuous measurements were the first to certify that atmospheric CO2 was increasing over time. We now call the chart that shows this rise in CO2 the Keeling Curve.

Why are we hitting the permanent 400 ppm mark now? As the younger Keeling puts it, the Keeling Curve has a “saw-tooth pattern.” From September to May, Mauna Loa’s value increases, as carbon previously trapped in fossil fuel enters the atmosphere. But from May to September, its value briefly falls by about 2 ppm, as plants in the Northern Hemisphere grow with the summer and absorb carbon out of the air.

In October, Keeling predicted that 2015 would be the last year when daily measurements—and especially monthly mean measurements—fell below 400 ppm. ​“Barring anything unusual, we would therefore expect next year’s September value to be around 399.3 ppm, just barely below 400 ppm, and we’d expect the lowest daily minima to be around 398 ppm or so,” he said at the time.

But this year there is also a strong El Niño, the most intense since 1997. Among its many effects, El Niño shifts rain away from tropical landmasses and toward the oceans, which in turn sends equatorial forests into drought. Indonesia’s forests suffered fires so bad this year that, every day they raged, they made that country the second-largest producer of atmospheric CO2 in the world. (The last year fires were so bad there? 1997.)

In the coming two to three years, atmospheric carbon may fall slightly as El Niño ends. “The loss of carbon from tropical forests in El Niño years is temporary as the forests tend to regrow in normal years, building back their biomass and sucking CO2 out of the air in the process,” Keeling said in his October forecast. “But the eventual recovery from this El Niño won’t bring us back below 400 ppm, because its impact will be dwarfed by the global consumption of fossil fuels, pushing CO2 levels ever higher.” In other words, El Niño may end—but the underlying trends won’t.

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Scientists Just Made a Major Breakthrough in Understanding Autism

Last week brought some rare good news in the autism research world: For the first time, scientists have found a direct link between autistic behavior and a neurotransmitter, a kind of brain chemical that communicates information from one nerve cell to another. In a study published in the journal Current Biology, scientists at Harvard and MIT found that some symptoms of autism appear to stem from problems processing gamma-Aminobutyric acid, or GABA. An inhibitory neurotransmitter, GABA stops brain cells from acting in response to information they receive from the senses.

"Autism is often described as a disorder in which all the sensory input comes flooding in at once, so the idea that an inhibitory neurotransmitter was important fit with the clinical observations," said Caroline Robertson, the lead researcher, in a statement. While many of us can simply tune out everyday sights or sounds—say, the sight of a grate on the sidewalk or the noise of a car driving by—those with autism are inundated with a deluge of sensory information that can turn everyday environments into distressing experiences.

In the study, participants started with a visual test: Looking through binoculars, they would see two different images in both eyes—say, a house on the left side and a car on the right side. Most people can focus on one image while diminishing focus on the other, and then switch, oscillating back and forth between the car and the house. In essence, inhibitory neurotransmitters enable the brain to process digestible pieces of information rather than try to take in everything at once.

But people with autism have a difficult time with this visual task—the oscillation between images is slower, and the focus on one image is less directed. Within both groups, though, there's variation in how well people can perform the task. When the participants took part in a neuroimaging test that measured the amount of GABA, an unsurprising trend appeared for people without autism: The better people are at visual processing, the more GABA they have. For people with autism, though, there was no such trend: Those who were better at visual processing had no higher or lower levels of GABA than those who weren't, suggesting a problem with the way that GABA is used or processed.

"It's not that there's no GABA in the brain," said Robertson, "It's that there's some step along that pathway that's broken."

The finding is especially notable because GABA inhibits all kinds of sensory stimulation—not just visual. In theory, a drug that targets bettering the GABA pathway could reduce sensory symptoms of autism.

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Second contagious form of cancer found in Tasmanian devils

Transmissible cancers—cancers which can spread between individuals by the transfer of living cancer cells—are believed to arise extremely rarely in nature. One of the few known transmissible cancers causes facial tumours in Tasmanian devils, and is threatening this species with extinction. Today, scientists report the discovery of a second transmissible cancer in Tasmanian devils. The discovery, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, calls into question our current understanding of the processes that drive cancers to become transmissible.

In 1996, researchers observed Tasmanian devils in the north-east of the island with tumours affecting the face and mouth; soon it was discovered that these tumours were contagious between devils, spread by biting. The cancer spreads rapidly throughout the animal's body and the disease usually causes the death of affected animals within months of the appearance of symptoms. The cancer has since spread through most of Tasmania and has triggered widespread devil population declines. The species was listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2008.

To date, only two other forms of transmissible cancer have been observed in nature: in dogs and in soft-shell clams. Cancer normally occurs when cells in the body start to proliferate uncontrollably; occasionally, cancers can spread and invade the body in a process known as 'metastasis'; however, cancers do not normally survive beyond the body of the host from whose cells they originally derived. Transmissible cancers, however, arise when cancer cells gain the ability to spread beyond the body of the host that first spawned them, by transmission of cancer cells to new hosts.

"The second cancer causes tumours on the face that are outwardly indistinguishable from the previously-discovered cancer," said first author Dr Ruth Pye from the Menzies Institute for Medical Research at the University of Tasmania. "So far it has been detected in eight devils in the south-east of Tasmania."

"Until now, we've always thought that transmissible cancers arise extremely rarely in nature," says Dr Elizabeth Murchison from the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge, a senior author on the study, "but this new discovery makes us question this belief.

"Previously, we thought that Tasmanian devils were extremely unlucky to have fallen victim to a single runaway cancer that emerged from one individual devil and spread through the devil population by biting. However, now that we have discovered that this has happened a second time, it makes us wonder if Tasmanian devils might be particularly vulnerable to developing this type of disease, or that transmissible cancers may not be as rare in nature as we previously thought."

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Trump Set To Lose A Fortune As Muslim Business Partners Begin Boycott

Donald Trump clearly hasn’t learned any lessons from the backlash he suffered for his crude and offensive remarks against Latinos. After he doubled down on his declarations that Mexicans were “criminals and rapists,” a number of his business partners cut ties and sent shock-waves through his already-shaky “business empire.” Now that he’s decided he wants to ban all Muslims from entering the United States, his business partners in the Muslim world, who have made Trump millions, are furious and beginning to cut their own ties to rambunctious demagogue.

Arabian Business has reported that the regional retail powerhouse Landmark Group has stopped selling Trump’s products in over 160 stores from Libya to Pakistan.

The Dubai-based firm signed a deal in February this year to sell items from the Trump Home collection to customers in the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia through its Lifestyle outlets. However, the group said on Tuesday it would now remove all products from its shelves. “As one of the most popular home decor brands in the Middle East, Lifestyle values and respects the sentiments of all its customers. In light of the recent statements made by the presidential candidate in the US media, we have suspended sale of all products from the Trump Home décor range.”

Khalaf al-Habtoor, the owner of the United Arab Emirates-based conglomerate Al Habtoor Group, told the Associated Press that he has rescinded his previous support for Trump and is furious at the mogul for his disgusting statements:

“If he comes to my office, I will not let him in. I reject him. Maybe we can meet somewhere where I can debate with him in a very civilized way, not in the way he approaches people. When he was talking about Muslims, attacking them … I had to admit I made a mistake in my supporting Mr. Trump. He is creating a hatred between Muslims and the United States of America. Extremists like ISIS will thank Mr. Trump for his comments — this is very dangerous what he is doing to the United States when strength is partnered with ignorance and deceit, it produces a toxic mix threatening the United States and our world.”

He ended his interview by endorsing Hillary Clinton instead.

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For the First Time, Physicists Have Measured the "Strong Force" of Antimatter

The nuclear strong force binds the smallest bits of matter together to form atoms, thereby making our material world possible. Physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have made the first-ever measurement of a similar strong force for antimatter — the mirror image of regular matter that lies at the heart of one of our biggest cosmological mysteries.

The experiments were conducted by the STAR collaboration at Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC); the results appeared last week in Nature. RHIC recreates conditions similar to those of the universe just after the Big Bang by accelerating heavy atoms (like gold) to speeds approaching the speed of light, then slamming them into each other. The resulting fireball creates a gooey plasma of quarks and gluons — the most fundamental building blocks — as well as tons of matter and antimatter particles.

These particles don’t hang around for very long because matter and antimatter are polar opposites: antimatter has a negative charge to counter matter’s positive charge, and they annihilate into energy when they collide. There should have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter at the birth of the universe, too, but for some reason, matter gained the tiniest bit of an edge. And good thing, too, otherwise our beautiful material world wouldn’t be here. Today, matter dominates our universe, while antimatter is extremely rare.

This is a small contribution to ongoing efforts to resolve the matter-antimatter mystery by conducting not only more precise tests, but also to approach the problem from a new angle. “We did not expect to solve the whole thing,” Tang told Gizmodo. But they did learn something valuable about the antimatter strong force. And one day, all that accumulated knowledge will crack the case.

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The tiny pill fueling Syria’s war and turning fighters into superhuman soldiers

A tiny, highly addictive pill produced in Syria and widely available across the Middle East, its illegal sale funnels hundreds of millions of dollars back into the war-torn country's black-market economy each year, likely giving militias access to new arms, fighters and the ability to keep the conflict boiling, according to the Guardian.

“Syria is a tremendous problem in that it’s a collapsed security sector, because of its porous borders, because of the presence of so many criminal elements and organized networks,” the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) regional representative, Masood Karimipour, told Voice of America. “There’s a great deal of trafficking being done of all sorts of illicit goods — guns, drugs, money, people. But what is being manufactured there and who is doing the manufacturing, that’s not something we have visibility into from a distance.”

A powerful amphetamine tablet based on the original synthetic drug known as "fenethylline," Captagon quickly produces a euphoric intensity in users, allowing Syria's fighters to stay up for days, killing with a numb, reckless abandon.

"You can't sleep or even close your eyes, forget about it," said a Lebanese user, one of three who appeared on camera without their names for a BBC Arabic documentary that aired in September. "And whatever you take to stop it, nothing can stop it."

"I felt like I own the world high," another user said. "Like I have power nobody has. A really nice feeling."

"There was no fear anymore after I took Captagon," a third man added.

According to a Reuters report published in 2014, the war has turned Syria into a "major" amphetamines producer -- and consumer.

"Syrian government forces and rebel groups each say the other uses Captagon to endure protracted engagements without sleep, while clinicians say ordinary Syrians are increasingly experimenting with the pills, which sell for between $5 and $20," Reuters reported.

One secular ex-Syrian fighter who spoke to the BBC said the drug is tailor-made for the battlefield because of its ability to give soldiers superhuman energy and courage:

"So the brigade leader came and told us, 'this pill gives you energy, try it,'" he said. "So we took it the first time. We felt physically fit. And if there were 10 people in front of you, you could catch them and kill them. You're awake all the time. You don't have any problems, you don't even think about sleeping, you don't think to leave the checkpoint. It gives you great courage and power. If the leader told you to go break into a military barracks, I will break in with a brave heart and without any feeling of fear at all — you're not even tired."