#is this good formatting?!?

[myokk]

from my oneshot, note-taking 🫶🫶🫶

[reasonsforhope]

"Tim Friede’s YouTube channel is home to a collection of videos depicting the Wisconsin-native truck mechanic subjecting himself to purposeful snake bites, blood slowly dripping down his arms.

For the past 20 years, Friede has been one of the most notorious “unconventional” medical researchers, undergoing over 200 bites from the world’s deadliest snakes — and more than four times as many — 850 — venomous injections. 

He did it all in the name of science.

According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 100,000 people are killed by snake bites each year, with countless more being disabled by the venom of the deadly reptiles. 

While life-saving anti-venom is available, very few countries actually have the capacity to produce it properly, given that most bites occur in remote and rural areas, and anti-venom requires arduous sourcing and accuracy. 

But Friede’s blood is now full of antibodies, following decades of strategic exposure to the neurotoxins of mambas, cobras, and other lethal slithering critters.

His blood is now the source material researchers are using to develop an anti-venom capable of neutralizing a broad spectrum of snake bites...

Friede started this hobby — which he is indeed adamant no one else tries at home — out of sheer curiosity in childhood. After playing with harmless garter snakes in his youth, he began keeping more dangerous species of snakes as pets. At one point, he had 60 of them in his home basement.

In 1999, he began extracting venom from his snakes, drying it, diluting it, and injecting himself with tiny doses — keeping meticulous records as he went.

He had one major hospitalization in 2001, when he was paralyzed and in a coma for four days. But instead of giving up, he doubled down. 

“In hindsight, I’m glad it happened,” Friede told The Times. “I never made another mistake.”

Jacob Glanville, an immunologist and founder of biotech company Centivax, stumbled on Friede’s videos.

Now, Friede is the director of herpetology at Centivax and serves as something of a “human lab” to Glanville.

“For a period of nearly 18 years, [Tim] had undertaken hundreds of bites and self-immunizations with escalating doses from 16 species of very lethal snakes that would normally a kill a horse,” Glanville told The Guardian.

“It blew my mind. I contacted him because I thought if anyone in the world has these properly neutralizing antibodies, it’s him.”

To develop the new anti-venom, Glanville and his fellow researchers identified 19 of the world’s deadliest snakes — in the elapid family — which kill their prey by injecting neurotoxins into their bloodstream, paralyzing muscles (including the big, important ones, like the heart and lungs).

The trouble is, each species in the elapid family has a slightly different toxin, meaning they would each require their own anti-venom.

But Friede’s blood contains certain fragments of each of these toxins; protein molecules seen across the various species. Because of his decades of service to science, his blood also contains the antibodies required to neutralize these toxins, preventing them from sticking to human cells and causing harm.

Combining the antibodies LNX-D09, SNX-B03, and a small molecule called varespladib that inhibits venom toxins, Centivax has successfully created a treatment effective against the entire range of 19 species’ toxins.

Their work, which was recently published in the journal Cell, will soon be tested outside of the lab. 

Trials will start with using the serum to treat dogs admitted to Australian veterinary clinics for snake bites. Assuming that goes well, the next step will be to administer human tests.

Researchers also believe that because the serum stems from a human, this should also lower the risk of allergic reactions when being administered to other people. 

“The final product would be a single, pan-anti-venom cocktail,” Professor Peter Kwong of Columbia University, a senior author of the study, told The Times.

Or, he added, they could make two: “One that is for the elapids, and another that is for the viperids, because some areas of the world only have one or the other.”

As for Friede, he maintains his affinity for snakes, though his last bite was in November 2018, when he said “enough is enough,” according to The New York Times.

By then, he had certainly done enough. His pursuit of immunity could feasibly save countless lives.

“I’m really proud that I can do something in life for humanity,” Friede told The New York Times, “to make a difference for people that are 8,000 miles away, that I’m never going to meet, never going to talk to, never going to see, probably.”

-via GoodGoodGood, May 2, 2025

[secondhandconverse]

the real enemy of The Doctor are these dumbass 8 episode seasons

[xthe-moonletx]

“You mean, like a sudden rainstorm forces them together beneath a canopy

they look into each other’s eyes

and realize they were made for each other.”

_____________________________________________

Here’s a revamp of a piece I drew about a year ago, now fully rendered and refreshed! It’s a spin-off of Pierre Aguste Cott’s The Storm that I thought fit the ineffables perfectly :)

[kalofi]

im playing and having fuunnnn

[samglyph]

It’s really quite simple, Artie.

Commissions & Tip Jar

[arcanegifs]

ARCANE LEAGUE OF LEGENDS: 2x01 - “Heavy is the Crown” ↳ "Hey."

[michaun]

So, in the ER, we all need to work together as a single unified entity. And if two people on my team can’t work together, it kind of throws the rhythm of the place off.

[fixing-bad-posts]

fucking swallow ME and try to live

[meltedmush]

Art dump (1/2) for today!

[largemandrill]

I made another one

[perfectthewayyouare]

👏 we 👏 are 👏 getting 👏 james 👏 buchanan 👏 barnes 👏 back 👏 on 👏 our 👏 screens 👏 as 👏 a 👏 main 👏 character 👏 in 👏 a 👏 marvel 👏 movie 👏 in 👏 the 👏 year 👏 of 👏 our 👏 lord 👏 2025 👏 can 👏 i 👏 get 👏 a 👏 yeehaw!!! 👏

[starboystation]

made this zine earlier this month and prepared 20 copies for distribution yesterday! super exciting for me, this is the first zine i've made for distribution and i can't wait to share it around :)

as the back cover says, this zine is ok to photocopy/print and distribute yourself so long as you keep the credits to me! if you do decide to make your own copies, i'd love to see!

[sunflower-chai]

i feel like another thing that was so rough about this arc is how isolated luthen’s rebels are. cassian and bix are together until cassian gets called on a mission and has to leave her behind. vel and cinta have been apart for two years, finally see each other again for one last mission and cinta dies. wilmon is with saw gerrera’s group and just having an awful time. kleya spends the majority of her time alone listening to radio frequencies. mon is trying in vain to get senators to support repealing the PORD. and most of them seem to hate luthen at least a little bit. they all have different ideas about what the rebellion should be and it leads to a lot of tension. a far cry from the ghost crew/family of rebels.

[insleywinsley]

I Had a Dream and You Were There. 2024. ph. Insley Smullen.

[stars-obsession-pit]

Ghost King Danny with de-aged Dani/Ellie as his daughter (or possibly trapped in her core form healing after some traumatic experience)

Someone (maybe Jason Todd) encounters her while in the realms and misunderstands the situation to think Danny is keeping her captive or something to that effect (and probably also doesn’t quite realize who/what Danny is). Thus, they choose to “rescue” (kidnap) her—taking her with them when they leave.

So now Danny’s daughter is missing, and he’s on a warpath looking for her. But the multiverse is an impossibly big place, so he’s yet to find the specific universe they escaped to

During this, the Justice League happens to summon him to deal with an unrelated threat.

Upon arriving, Danny senses these summoners have connections to the kidnapper he’s searching for, so he demands that they “return what was taken from him” soon (probably within a week at most) or he’ll kill every last one of them himself.

The JL is terrified. They knew they were dealing with an incredibly powerful entity, but they expected indifference (not caring about their issue beyond what payment they offer him) rather than outright hostility towards them.

Thus, there’s a panicked scramble to try to figure out what the hell it is he was referring to so they can return it before they’re all killed.

Oh and also that other threat they summoned Danny to deal with is still out there, so they have to try to manage that too so it doesn’t destroy them in the meantime.

They’ll likely also assume they have to figure out how to fully stop that threat too (since the Ghost King might not help them out even if they do manage to return the thing), but that’s slightly less immediate of a threat at the moment.