Pina or Taro | Any pronouns | 24 | Anarchist | Inclusionist | Gender essentialists fuck off | Hater of industrial agriculture, lover of community-based subsistence food production | icon by buggachat
A 25-year-old student has just come up with a way to fight drug-resistant superbugs without antibiotics.
The new approach has so far only been tested in the lab and on mice, but it could offer a potential solution to antibiotic resistance, which is now getting so bad that the United Nations recently declared it a “fundamental threat” to global health.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria already kill around 700,000 people each year, but a recent study suggests that number could rise to around 10 million by 2050.
In addition to common hospital superbug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), scientists are now also concerned that gonorrhoea is about tobecome resistant to all remaining drugs.
But Shu Lam, a 25-year-old PhD student at the University of Melbourne in Australia, has developed a star-shaped polymer that can kill six different superbug strains without antibiotics, simply by ripping apart their cell walls.
“We’ve discovered that [the polymers] actually target the bacteria and kill it in multiple ways,” Lam told Nicola Smith from The Telegraph. “One method is by physically disrupting or breaking apart the cell wall of the bacteria. This creates a lot of stress on the bacteria and causes it to start killing itself.”
Before we get too carried away, it’s still very early days. So far, Lam has only tested her star-shaped polymers on six strains of drug-resistant bacteria in the lab, and on one superbug in live mice.
But in all experiments, they’ve been able to kill their targeted bacteria - and generation after generation don’t seem to develop resistance to the polymers.
I love this solution because it’s just… So simple. Everyone is getting deeper and deeper into pharmacology trying to find new stuff and new combos that’ll overcome bacterial resistance (while Big Pharma rakes in the profits) and this student was like “what if.. We just.. Physically rip it the fuck apart?? What’s it gonna do? Develop resistance to me cutting a bitch?”
Iconic
Medicine: How do we defeat anti-biotic resistant super bugs?
Reagan-era “stranger danger” panic has done so much harm to americans’ sense of community. It cemented the idea that only the nuclear family could be trusted with the care of the child, deterred people from cooperative living with an extended community, and continues to place abuse victims in danger by perpetuating the misconception that most child abuse is done by strangers rather than someone they know. It is in our best interest to become more interdependent than we were raised to be.
I want to be clear that these posts are not perpetuating the false idea that precolonial Africa was a Utopian paradise without issues of class or hierarchy. Precolonial African traditions of gender & sexual variance still had its issues. I also want to be clear that certain African peoples, both pre and post colonialism, do not have the same language for gender as Western or other societies do-for ex: the Yoruba people.
Here is a wonderful thread addressing these topics in addition to confirming the presence of people in precolonial Africa who were not what we consider cisheterosexual-filled with book recommendations, full PDFs and various text resources
I was curious so I had a little look at religious TikTok and within two minutes saw like five videos of Orthodox women defending themselves against accusations of “cultural appropriation of hijab” so I think I’m just gonna uninstall lol… I don’t have the mental energy for this 😂
People are incapable of acknowledging that things can be cross-cultural.
The headscarf appears in (arguably) the majority of religions, many of which are older than Islam.
Kink is about exploring ideas and acts that elicit a strong physical/psychological response through play.
These ideas can be deeply attached to anything from trauma to memories of being nurtured and cared for.
As such, we should understand detrans and misgendering kinks not as a threat to trans people and our communities, but the exploration of the emotions produced through the negation of a core identity. This is what cis men often get out of feminization kinks as well.
If through this play someone decided to actually detransition it should be understood as them innovating on their self-concept.
It is not a trojan horse or a problem to be solved.
This also means that people should not interpret detransitioners or detrans kink to be proof that all or most trans people secretly want to detransition.
It’s safe to say that even many people into detrans kink don’t actually want to detransition.
I’m going to be open with y'all, I think bimbofication is hot as fuck. My guess is because “being smart” has always been part of my identity, something that people often say to me.
That comes with pressure. With stress. With responsibilities.
What if someone just popped my mind and I never had to worry about it again?
It’s a fun fantasy, but do I actually want to lose my ability to think clearly? The joy I get from exercising my brain?
I get the popular outrage against a lot of the things I defend. I understand, I also get the knee-jerk shock. I hear about some things and they make me anxious, insecure, scared, or even angry.
But I always try to interrogate that response.
What about this makes me uncomfortable? What about this makes me angry? Why does that bother me? Is it really a threat? What is the appeal? Who is doing it and why? Is it really what it seems to be? What do the people engaging in it have to say about it?
I do this because that’s how you avoid ending up the perpetrator of a witchhunt.
“If your comfort requires that society be structured so that a decent percentage of your fellow citizens live in a constant state of terror about whether they’ll get health care in an emergency, or whether they can keep a roof over their family’s heads, or whether they will simply have enough to eat, perhaps the problem does not rest with those people, but with you and what you think of as necessary, proper, and acceptable.” - Abigail Disney, “I Was Taught At A Young Age To Protect My Dynastic Wealth,” The Atlantic
