#this is talen when most are teens already

[ceoofmetagala]

For some reason qhat I struggle the msot with draiwng is coreect proportiojs which is why you'll always see me complaint I amde someone too small or top big! I keep making krby a tiny gumball even if he isn't soupspied to be one! Like he lolms so small compared to bandee soemyomes 😭😭 i,making a hieght chart for my ship kids but ill make one for the cannon charters I draw the most amd post it alter LOL

[nyxelestia]

mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s a really good fanfic. But it’s also painfully obvious that the author is white or super, super white-washed, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a heavily middle-class suburban home in their past, or a long line of nuclear families. // and that's a problem because... ?? I fail to see how someone being white (or poc) has something to do with their writing talent tbh

Who said it’s a problem? Pointing something out doesn't have to mean it's a bad thing, especially when I made clear in my tags that the fic is actually pretty good.And I don't know where you got the idea that this has anything to do with talen, either.More often than not, you can tell a LOT about a writer based on little details in their fic.Granted, much of it is conjecture. But I've had a lot of situations where I would click on an author's Tumblr and learn about them, and basically feel remotely unsurprised, as their personal attributes were things I'd guessed while reading their fanfic.Not always. Some authors just research the shit out of everything possible, so it can be really hard to discern anything about this. This is something I aspire to do in my own writing.But sometimes, it's almost glaringly obvious.The most common one that most people are familiar with is when British authors are writing in an American fandom, or when American authors are writing in a British fandom, or otherwise any instance of someone writing in a fandom that is contemporary to them, but set in another country (or sometimes, even just "across the coutry"/a different environment - the sheer number of fics that write Teen Wolf characters taking public transportation outside of school buses is a big enough hint, on its own.)After that, I usually see this in fics with astounding detail in one area, but then very little detail in other areas, or the details are nonsensical or lack depth. This usually indicates that author didn't really research much of anything - they just happen to have prior knowledge of something that they used in their fics.i.e. I know an author who has astounding medical and "body-related" details in their fic, yet their worldbuilding and most of their other details fell pretty flat. I wasn't at all surprised to find out they were a medical professional.(While I aspire to research my fics so well that everything is well-detailed and no one can really tell anything about me, I'm sure some of my own interests and background are glaringly obvious to some readers. Feel free to guess about me, based on my fic! :P)Fanfiction in general is extraordinarily dominated by girls and women, which means that sometimes, I read a fic and feel pretty confident in guessing the person is a boy/man.Sometimes, a writer's age shows tremendously - and belive it or not, it's more likely to be obvious how old a writer is than how young they are (at least at the moment, when I'm in a fandom that centers around high school characters).In this particular instance, a writer's background showed when they had supernatural creatures started up a new, online/digital way of sharing information in the supernatural world - and this was treated as groundbreaking, in a world where various supernatural communities communicate with each other all the time, in both formal capacities, informal visits, and outright gossip.This is a very white mentality, especially WASP/suburban white culture centered on nuclear families.Every other ethnic community in America has long shared and disseminated information long before the majority of them were even literate - or even when they were, but (due to race) were barred from conventional information-sharing methods (such as publishing things, or educational institutions). Non-white people have come up with tons of ways to come together, to share information, and to disseminate knowledge amongst each other and within their own communities. Granted, a lot of this is incorrect or folkloric, but most of it was accurate or useful, and all of it represented tremendous communication. For generations, this has been how most of us survived in racist environments.This was all possible due in large part to extended families, tight-nit neighborhoods, and other social structures that have been barely- or non-existent in mainstream white culture for generations.The fic I was reading that inspired my post was one which implied that an online forum was somehow groundbreaking communication in the supernatural world, that all information shared prior to it was incorrect or folkloric, and that this was the first time there was this amount of communication in the supernatural world.I've seen hints of this in a lot of fanfics, but the reason why it was so glaring in this one is because this was happening after it was already established that separated communities within the supernatural world had tremendous communication with each other.Things like formal family get-togethers, a ton of informal visiting, and just regular old "keeping in touch" are exactly the mechanisms by which non-White communities share and disseminate tons of ideas and inforamation about themselves and their circumstances - but for white/WASP communities, these are predominantly mechanisms of sharing personal information, with ideas and knowledge about themselves coming predominantly from educational institutions, or professionally published materials.So yeah, if this author isn't white or from a heavily WASP-oriented background, I will eat my metaphorical shoe.

[trendingnewsb]

This Gene-Editing Tech Might Be Too Dangerous To Unleash

To get to work in the morning, Omar Akbari has to pass through a minimum of six sealed doors, including an air-locked vestibule. The UC Riverside entomologist studies the world’s deadliest creature: the Aedes aegypti mosquito, whose bite transmits diseases that kill millions each year. But that’s not the reason for all the extra security. Akbari isn’t just studying mosquitoes—he’s re-engineering them with self-destruct switches. And that’s not something you want accidentally escaping into the world.

The technology Akbari is designing is something called a gene drive. Think of it as a way to supercharge evolution, forcing a genetic modification to spread through an entire population in just a few generations. Scientists see it as a powerful tool that could finally vanquish diseases like malaria, dengue, and Zika. But US defense agencies see something else: a national security issue.

Last year, former director of national intelligence James Clapper added gene editing to a list of threats posed by “weapons of mass destruction and proliferation.” In July, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded $65 million in four-year contracts to seven teams of scientists, including Akbari, to study gene-editing technologies. The commitment officially made Darpa the world’s largest government funder of gene drive research. Most of that money is going toward designing safer systems and developing tools to counter rogue gene drives that might get into the environment either by accident, or with malicious intent.

That danger may be more real than scientists first thought. Four years ago, when Harvard biologist Kevin Esvelt first suggested the idea of building gene drives with the newly discovered Crispr gene editing system, he was thinking about extinction. Specifically, preventing endangered wildlife from disappearing by spreading a fertility-reducing gene through the invasive animals competing with them for resources. Conservation biologists took the idea and ran with it; they're now considering gene drives to save native birds in Hawaii, New Zealand, and the Farallones. But now, Esvelt is saying they should slow down.

That's based on the results of a new mathematical model he and his colleagues published on Thursday on the bioRxiv preprint server. Taking into account things like how often Crispr screws up and the likelihood of protective mutations arising, their work shows how gene drives could be ruthlessly aggressive. Just a few engineered organisms could irrevocably alter an ecosystem. While Esvelt doesn't view the technology as inherently threatening, he is now preaching that it deserves a bold new caution in how it's applied.

"The primary risk posed by gene drive technology is social," he says. "Unethical closed-door research, unwarranted fears, or unauthorized releases of gene drives will damage public trust in science and governance." He still thinks gene drives have potential to save threatened species and battle public health threats. But researchers will have to invent safer forms of the technology first. That's where the Darpa money comes in. Until very recently, gene drives have been largely theoretical—safe ones even more so. But with the new funds, scientists like Esvelt and Akbari are starting to put together the pieces to test them in real life. That starts with bugs that have a gene editor baked into their DNA from the moment of conception. In a paper published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Akbari did that for the first time in Aedes aegypti, creating mosquitoes encoded with the bacterial Cas9 enzyme.

These mosquitoes were born with white eyes instead of black ones, after Crispr/Cas9 cut out genes associated with eye pigment.

Michelle Bui/UC Riverside

Cas9 is the DNA-chopping half of the Crispr gene editing system. So Akbari’s team just had to inject the other half—a bit of guide RNA—into the embryos, for Cas9 to automatically execute its patented snipping action. When they deleted a cuticle pigment gene, the mosquitoes turned from black to yellow. How about a wing development gene? Welcome to the world, flightless blood sucker. Good luck crawling your way to a human meal.

These modifications were just for show. But the skeeters with built-in Cas9 will be an important tool as we learn how to best disrupt mosquito populations. Scientists estimate they’ve only probed about 5 percent of the Aedes aegpyti genome. Which means no one knows what the vast majority of mosquito genes actually do. Now they’ll be able to more easily screen knockouts gene by gene. Maybe they’ll find one that makes the mosquito mouth a hospitable home for malaria. Or one that turns off their taste for human blood. The goal is to disrupt the animal—and the ecosystems they’re a part of—as little as possible while still eradicating disease. If you’re going to play God, the idea goes, use a light hand.

In addition to advancing a new way to study mosquito physiology, these strains represent an important building block for efficient gene drives. Normally, the technology would require expressing both Cas9 and the guide RNA together in the same location. But that could make the drive system invasive and uncontrollable. One way to control them is to keep the components separated in the genome. And that’s what Akbari is working on: a less virulent version called a split-gene drive.

His team has already started the process by breeding these Cas9 strains with mosquitoes encoded with guide RNAs. “The only way to keep the drive spreading is to continuously release Cas9 into the population,” Akbari says. “That makes it confinable to a laboratory setting or self-limiting in the wild as the drive will depend on the presence of Cas9 which gets inherited in a Mendelain fashion.”

More on Gene Drives

Megan Molteni

Creating Zika-Proof Mosquitoes Means Rigging Natural Selection

Matt Simon

Genes Might Be Helping the Tasmanian Devil Fight Off Face Cancer

Megan Molteni

When Is a Mosquito Not an Insect? When It's a Pesticide

Another way to do that is a “daisy drive,” which is what Esvelt is developing in nematodes on the DoD’s dime. It works by equipping the worms with a self-exhausting supply of genetic fuel. By splitting into three or more parts and then daisy-chaining them together, the desired modification disperses quickly right when you introduce it, but fizzles out after a while. The result is temporary, controlled gene editing of a local species. That’s the idea anyway. Other Darpa-backed groups are working on having a backstop should systems like these go awry, or worse, be released as part of a biological attack.

Teams at the Broad Institute and Harvard Medical school are screening and compiling a suite of chemical off-switches to block gene editors like Crispr/Cas9 and Talens. At UC Berkeley, Jennifer Doudna’s group is hoping to find anti-Crispr proteins to inhibit unwanted gene-editing activity, which would help design resistance-proof gene drives. While the military’s involvement has some in the public concerned about weaponized, Crispr-ized superskeeters, Esvelt sees defense department support as the only way to advance gene drive technologies safely, at least for the time being.

The Darpa program explicitly prevents the release of gene-drive organisms and requires participants to work under stringent biosafety conditions—hence Akbari’s six-door entrance and exit routine. Perhaps one day he’ll have the molecular tools to come and go without concern. But for now, they’re still the safest thing between his gene-drives and the world outside.

Related Video

Science

Biologist Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty – CRISPR

CRISPR is a new biomedical technique that enables powerful gene editing. WIRED challenged biologist Neville Sanjana to explain CRISPR to 5 different people; a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and a CRISPR expert.

Read more: http://ift.tt/2mynAbI

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2mZsaQz via Viral News HQ

[flauntpage]

Your Tuesday Morning Roundup

Sound the alarm. The Eagles have the best record in the NFL through the first seven weeks of the season. Philly was slow out of the gate, but turned it on later in the game en route to a 34-24 win over the Redskins on Monday night. The Eagles are now 6-1 on the season and in the driver’s seat for not just the NFC East, but the NFC overall.

During pre-game, ESPN re-aired this feature on Carson Wentz and the Kusters.

Also in attendance was former Eagles long snapper Jon Dorenbos, who received a great welcome back:

The end of that first half was nothing short of magic, right @JonDorenbos? #FlyEaglesFly http://pic.twitter.com/Q2GEeClV4e

— Philadelphia Eagles (@Eagles) October 24, 2017

He also met another former Philly athlete:

.@ColeHamels and @JonDorenbos catching up during tonight's game. #FlyEaglesFly http://pic.twitter.com/MHV162yaY3

— Philadelphia Eagles (@Eagles) October 24, 2017

A lot of positives to take from this one, but a few major injuries as well with Jason Peters and Jordan Hicks exiting the game early. Early reports do not look promising. Stay locked to Crossing Broad all day long as we’ll have the best day-after Eagles coverage.

Now to other stuff that doesn’t matter quite as much.

The Roundup:

The Sixers played last night as well and earned their first win of the season, 97-86, over the Detroit Pistons. Ben Simmons recorded his first ever NBA triple-double and Joel Embiid dropped 30 points in the win.

Fultz had two points off the bench. What’s eating him?

This is just beautiful:

EMBBIIIDDDDD http://pic.twitter.com/7O5bMqxt3j

— Drew Corrigan (@Dcorrigan50) October 23, 2017

Stay locked to CB for more day-after Sixers coverage today. The team hosts the Houston Rockets on Wednesday night at 7 p.m.

—

A CFL game ended with a team earning one-point by fielding a missed field goal and kicking it out of bounds. What?

—

In ESPN’s latest Egg-on-their-face moment, it canceled Barstool Van talk after just one show and released this statement:

“Effective immediately I am cancelling Barstool Van Talk. While we had approval on the content of the show, I erred in assuming we could distance our efforts from the Barstool site and its content. Apart from the decision, we appreciate the efforts of Big Cat and PFT Commenter. They delivered the show they promised.”

—

If you have this bad of luck, you really did someone wrong:

Never, ever celebrate early. #SCNotTop10 http://pic.twitter.com/f6Ej9uGucn

— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) October 23, 2017

—

Dan Patrick is starting a broadcasting school:

This week, he plans to unveil the plans behind the Dan Patrick School of Sportscasting at Full Sail University. The revenue-sharing partnership will see the Winter Park, Fla.-based for-profit university develop a sportscasting degree with instruction from Patrick and many of his industry colleagues.

The program launches Jan. 29. Administrators are in the process of hiring a regular faculty to teach the courses.

It already has commitments from what it calls an associate faculty. For example, a couple of times a year Bill Simmons will provide writing instruction, Jeremy Schaap will give talks on reporting and interviewing, and Jay Harris will teach the ins and outs of appearing on camera. They also are talking with former ESPN President George Bodenheimer about taking part.

—

This is a pretty cool time lapse from Penn State’s White Out last Saturday.

—

Eagles fans are currently the most interested in buying Super Bowl tickets.

—

According to a study, watching sports is not good for our health:

“Our results indicate that viewing a hockey game can likewise be the source of an intense emotional stress, as manifested by marked increases in heart rate,” said senior investigator Professor Paul Khairy, MD, PhD, Montreal Heart Institute, University of Montreal. “The study raises the potential that the emotional stress-induced response of viewing a hockey game can trigger adverse cardiovascular events on a population level. Therefore, the results have important public health implications.”

—

James Harden was a school yard bully last night on the court:

James Harden wasn't having it. http://pic.twitter.com/qzKtxpIpKV

— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) October 24, 2017

—

Our Kevin Kinkead dives deeply into the mess that is the Philadelphia Union that they their season is over:

It was business as usual in Chester, where the season’s inevitable outcome was determined less than halfway through. Young players were benched, others regressed, and the team played the same damn formation before finally getting experimental when the season was lost. One step forward, one step back for a franchise that can’t seem to get out of its own way.

The positives are few.

Rookie Jack Elliott surprised everyone with his intuitive and veteran style of play. Sapong, who started the season on the bench, had a career year. Haris Medunjanin wound up being a great signing and Andre Blake again proved his case for a European transfer. Folks continued the treck to Talen Energy Stadium despite onset apathy and continuing mediocrity, showing me that this fan base remains recession-proof and dedicated.

—

On the ice, the Flyers host the Ducks at the Wells Fargo Center. The puck drops at 7 p.m.

—

In the non-sports news….

A couple got a lot of weed with their Amazon order.

Teens dropped rocks on a road, killed a passenger in the process.

Your Tuesday Morning Roundup published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[trendingnewsb]

This Gene-Editing Tech Might Be Too Dangerous To Unleash

To get to work in the morning, Omar Akbari has to pass through a minimum of six sealed doors, including an air-locked vestibule. The UC Riverside entomologist studies the world’s deadliest creature: the Aedes aegypti mosquito, whose bite transmits diseases that kill millions each year. But that’s not the reason for all the extra security. Akbari isn’t just studying mosquitoes—he’s re-engineering them with self-destruct switches. And that’s not something you want accidentally escaping into the world.

The technology Akbari is designing is something called a gene drive. Think of it as a way to supercharge evolution, forcing a genetic modification to spread through an entire population in just a few generations. Scientists see it as a powerful tool that could finally vanquish diseases like malaria, dengue, and Zika. But US defense agencies see something else: a national security issue.

Last year, former director of national intelligence James Clapper added gene editing to a list of threats posed by “weapons of mass destruction and proliferation.” In July, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded $65 million in four-year contracts to seven teams of scientists, including Akbari, to study gene-editing technologies. The commitment officially made Darpa the world’s largest government funder of gene drive research. Most of that money is going toward designing safer systems and developing tools to counter rogue gene drives that might get into the environment either by accident, or with malicious intent.

That danger may be more real than scientists first thought. Four years ago, when Harvard biologist Kevin Esvelt first suggested the idea of building gene drives with the newly discovered Crispr gene editing system, he was thinking about extinction. Specifically, preventing endangered wildlife from disappearing by spreading a fertility-reducing gene through the invasive animals competing with them for resources. Conservation biologists took the idea and ran with it; they're now considering gene drives to save native birds in Hawaii, New Zealand, and the Farallones. But now, Esvelt is saying they should slow down.

That's based on the results of a new mathematical model he and his colleagues published on Thursday on the bioRxiv preprint server. Taking into account things like how often Crispr screws up and the likelihood of protective mutations arising, their work shows how gene drives could be ruthlessly aggressive. Just a few engineered organisms could irrevocably alter an ecosystem. While Esvelt doesn't view the technology as inherently threatening, he is now preaching that it deserves a bold new caution in how it's applied.

"The primary risk posed by gene drive technology is social," he says. "Unethical closed-door research, unwarranted fears, or unauthorized releases of gene drives will damage public trust in science and governance." He still thinks gene drives have potential to save threatened species and battle public health threats. But researchers will have to invent safer forms of the technology first. That's where the Darpa money comes in. Until very recently, gene drives have been largely theoretical—safe ones even more so. But with the new funds, scientists like Esvelt and Akbari are starting to put together the pieces to test them in real life. That starts with bugs that have a gene editor baked into their DNA from the moment of conception. In a paper published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Akbari did that for the first time in Aedes aegypti, creating mosquitoes encoded with the bacterial Cas9 enzyme.

These mosquitoes were born with white eyes instead of black ones, after Crispr/Cas9 cut out genes associated with eye pigment.

Michelle Bui/UC Riverside

Cas9 is the DNA-chopping half of the Crispr gene editing system. So Akbari’s team just had to inject the other half—a bit of guide RNA—into the embryos, for Cas9 to automatically execute its patented snipping action. When they deleted a cuticle pigment gene, the mosquitoes turned from black to yellow. How about a wing development gene? Welcome to the world, flightless blood sucker. Good luck crawling your way to a human meal.

These modifications were just for show. But the skeeters with built-in Cas9 will be an important tool as we learn how to best disrupt mosquito populations. Scientists estimate they’ve only probed about 5 percent of the Aedes aegpyti genome. Which means no one knows what the vast majority of mosquito genes actually do. Now they’ll be able to more easily screen knockouts gene by gene. Maybe they’ll find one that makes the mosquito mouth a hospitable home for malaria. Or one that turns off their taste for human blood. The goal is to disrupt the animal—and the ecosystems they’re a part of—as little as possible while still eradicating disease. If you’re going to play God, the idea goes, use a light hand.

In addition to advancing a new way to study mosquito physiology, these strains represent an important building block for efficient gene drives. Normally, the technology would require expressing both Cas9 and the guide RNA together in the same location. But that could make the drive system invasive and uncontrollable. One way to control them is to keep the components separated in the genome. And that’s what Akbari is working on: a less virulent version called a split-gene drive.

His team has already started the process by breeding these Cas9 strains with mosquitoes encoded with guide RNAs. “The only way to keep the drive spreading is to continuously release Cas9 into the population,” Akbari says. “That makes it confinable to a laboratory setting or self-limiting in the wild as the drive will depend on the presence of Cas9 which gets inherited in a Mendelain fashion.”

More on Gene Drives

Megan Molteni

Creating Zika-Proof Mosquitoes Means Rigging Natural Selection

Matt Simon

Genes Might Be Helping the Tasmanian Devil Fight Off Face Cancer

Megan Molteni

When Is a Mosquito Not an Insect? When It's a Pesticide

Another way to do that is a “daisy drive,” which is what Esvelt is developing in nematodes on the DoD’s dime. It works by equipping the worms with a self-exhausting supply of genetic fuel. By splitting into three or more parts and then daisy-chaining them together, the desired modification disperses quickly right when you introduce it, but fizzles out after a while. The result is temporary, controlled gene editing of a local species. That’s the idea anyway. Other Darpa-backed groups are working on having a backstop should systems like these go awry, or worse, be released as part of a biological attack.

Teams at the Broad Institute and Harvard Medical school are screening and compiling a suite of chemical off-switches to block gene editors like Crispr/Cas9 and Talens. At UC Berkeley, Jennifer Doudna’s group is hoping to find anti-Crispr proteins to inhibit unwanted gene-editing activity, which would help design resistance-proof gene drives. While the military’s involvement has some in the public concerned about weaponized, Crispr-ized superskeeters, Esvelt sees defense department support as the only way to advance gene drive technologies safely, at least for the time being.

The Darpa program explicitly prevents the release of gene-drive organisms and requires participants to work under stringent biosafety conditions—hence Akbari’s six-door entrance and exit routine. Perhaps one day he’ll have the molecular tools to come and go without concern. But for now, they’re still the safest thing between his gene-drives and the world outside.

Related Video

Science

Biologist Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty – CRISPR

CRISPR is a new biomedical technique that enables powerful gene editing. WIRED challenged biologist Neville Sanjana to explain CRISPR to 5 different people; a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and a CRISPR expert.

Read more: http://ift.tt/2mynAbI

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2mZsaQz via Viral News HQ