The South African government has expressed concerns that Israel’s continued occupation of “significant portions of the West Bank” and the development of new settlements there “are glaring examples of violations of international law” as the longrunning Israel-Palestine conflict goes on.
Share. Reblog. Protest. Boycott.
A lot of people forget that boycott and sanctions helped rid South Africa of apartheid.
Do not fall into despair. Continue calling your local officials, attending protests, boycotting companies that fund open genocide. Because of this media blackout, we are now Palestine’s voice - please do your best for them.
I haven’t seen this linked on here so: this is an awesome resource for how you can help the people in Palestine. It has donation links, helps you figure out how to contact your representatives, and a regularly updated list of planned protests. It is USAmerican centric but the list of protests is international.
If you are American this site has a tool that sends an email for you. All you need to enter is your name, email address, and street address so they can auto-find your senators. It will take 30 seconds.
Roshdi Sarraj, the photographer who took this widely shared picture of Israel’s destruction of Gaza, was himself later killed by an Israeli airstrike.
[ID: an instagram post by @/roshdi.sarraj. it is an aerial photo of a part of a city that is in ruins. end ID]
I think nonstop photos of rubble create this unspoken attitude that Gaza (or Ramallah, or Baghdad, or Damascus, or…) is just a wasteland, that nothing of value exists there and nothing is really lost. That it was always rubble anyway. This is maybe the first photo I’ve seen of Gaza City showing that it’s a real city worth calling home, and the destruction hits so much harder like this.
thinking about the mid-2000s string of freakshow television programs i watched as a kid/teenager and just. how cruel that shit was? i’ve met so many delightful strange people who’d readily wind up on that slop and it’s reminding me that a lot of people just disregard, demean and mock others who lie outside of a specific bubble of quirks, appearances and interests
“wow this fucking weirdo loves a roller coaster” who cares? does it bother you that of 8 billion people on earth some people are odd to you?
reading a quote from marcus aurelius’s meditations to my middle school students at the start of every class has been one of the best decisions i ever made as a teacher, partly because it exposes them to ancient literature but mostly because now i have a bunch of twelve year olds who talk like this
With the fast fashion industry… how it is… finding sustainable ways to make fabric is super important. Fibers from synthetic fabrics make up 35% of the microplastics that make their way to the ocean. Natural fibers sourced from plants or animals are much more environmentally sound options, including silk.
Currently, the only way to get natural silk on a large scale is to harvest it from silkworms. You’ve probably heard about the strength and durability of spider silk (it is 6x stronger than Kevlar!) but as of yet there hasn’t been a good way of getting it. Raising spiders the way people do silkworms isn’t really an option. Spiders need a lot of room to build their webs compared to silkworms, and individual spiders don’t produce that much silk. Plus, when you put a whole bunch of spiders in captivity together, they tend to start eating each other.
Attempts to artificially recreate spider silk have also been less than successful. Spider silk has a surface layer of glycoproteins and lipids on it that works as a sort of anti-aging “skin”- allowing the silk to withstand conditions such as sunlight and humidity. But this layer has been very tricky to reproduce.
However, as scientists in China realized, silkworms produce that same kind of layer on their silk. So what if we just genetically modified silkworms to produce spider silk?
That is exactly what the researchers at Donghua University in Shanghai did. A team of researchers introduced spider silk protein genes to silkworms using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing and microinjections in silkworm eggs. In addition to this, they altered the spider silk proteins so that they would interact properly with the other proteins in silkworm glands. And it worked! This is the first study ever to produce full length spider silk proteins from silkworms.
The applications of this are incredibly exciting. In addition to producing comfortable textiles and new, innovative bulletproof vests, silkworm generated spider silk could be used in cutting edge smart materials or even just to create better performing sutures. In the future, this team intends to research how to modify this new spider silk to be even stronger, and they are confident that “large-scale commercialization is on the horizon.“
