Mammals--or at least mice--make
new ova throughout
their lives.
ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
Mammals--or at least mice--make
new ova throughout
their lives.
It had been believed for decades that female mammals were born with all the egg cells we'd ever have; that was based on 1950s data showing that the number of follicles declines throughout life. The researchers who report these results investigated after finding that up to a third of the ovarian cells in young adult mice die at once, but the mice don't run out of eggs.
If humans are like mice in this regard, there could be a variety of applications to fertility treatment: either freezing ovarian stem cells when women are young, and reimplanting them later, or drugs that could encourage the ovaries to make more eggs. It would also overturn the medical model of menopause:
It was thought that women's fertility declines with age because the number and quality of immature eggs they are born with deteriorate over time; by menopause, eggs have been hanging around for roughly 50 years.Tilly's results suggest instead that there is continual birth and death of eggs. It may be that, with age, fewer [eggs] or more defective eggs are produced because the stem cells are dying off or growing old.
Madrid, te quiero. 
Comprendemos tu dolor, porque somos hermanos, y porque somos humanos.
It's never the same, and it's always the same: the pain and the fear, and I'm thinking especially of subways, which have always said "home" and "safety" to me, as well as utility.
It just keeps getting worse: the BBC is now reporting 190 dead in the rush-hour bombings of commuter trains, while investigators try to sort out whether it was ETA (the obvious first suspect) or Al-Qaeda (whose name is on a claim of responsibility).
There appears to be no causal connection between that story and a
fatal
shooting in a Masonic ritual that went badly wrong last night.
Next up, a bit further downriver, is Nyack, whose mayor plans not only to perform same-sex
marriages, but to ask for a license so he can marry his long-time partner, a man.
Firing whistleblowers is bad, which is why we now have a National Whistleblower
Center. Deliberately endangering the lives of third parties
to retaliate against whistleblowers is a species of blackmail, and should be
punished as such.
[via Talking Points Memo]
The landmark wedding, the first of many expected to be held at City Hall today, is sure to set off a legal challenge. City officials, in fact, rushed to issue the first marriage licenses to same-sex couples as quickly as possible for fear that opponents would seek a court injunction to stop them. Officials alerted only a handful of people that they were ready to act, wanting to keep it secret until the papers were signed and the "I do's'' were spoken.
9. Just say "No!" If you speak Spanish, say "¡No!"...
13. Pause. Pause again.
It's bad civic hygiene to build an infrastructure that can be used to facilitate a police state.
Jabberwocky
meets a spelling checker.
9 March 2004
Having done my senior thesis in college on
anti-Masonry in the US circa 1830, my immediate reaction to the headline about a
suicide
attack on a Masonic lodge was shock tinged with temporal dislocation.
But that's not what I wanted to tell
you about. I was at the Newsday Website because I wanted this link, to a story
I read while I was exercising this morning (yes, I read a physical newspaper):
another
lesbian who was snubbed at her lover's funeral by the dead woman's family.
Only, not just another story: any death is hard to bear, but most of us don't have our
grief rehashed in the press on a regular basis. I'd never heard of Mary Ann Zielonko until today:
she wasn't part of the stories about Kitty Genovese's murder, because it was 1964, and officially
they were "just friends". And because the story told over the years was never about Genovese,
it was about alienation and a particular view of urban humanity. (One of the sidebars to this
article claims that two of the neighbors went down to try to help Genovese, but it was too late.)
8 March 2004
Greetings from
Asbury Park, New Jersey! [via Joe Decker]
3 March 2004
On Monday, Jason West,
the mayor of New Paltz, pointed out that the Republican and
Democratic leadership can't pressure him not to perform same-sex marriages, because
he's not a Republican or a Democrat (he's a Green). He now faces nineteen misdemeanor counts of
conducting
marriages without a marriage license.
Jason West insisted Wednesday that it was New York's Health Department that was breaking the law
by refusing to give marriage licenses to same-sex couples. "Our state constitution requires equal
protection for all New Yorkers," he said on NBC's "Today Show."
20 February 2004
The King of Cambodia is
in favor
of same-sex marriage. He says it's something that, as a liberal democracy,
Cambodia should allow, and that God loves a wide range of tastes. Sihanouk's
statement is handwritten
and in French.
18 February 2004
A U.S. prosecutor has
sued
John Ashcroft for interfering in a terrorism case and deliberately releasing
the name of a confidential informant to retaliate when the prosecutor talked
to a Senate committee about his concerns.
16 February 2004
Europa's oceans look
less habitable
according to recent data. The Galileo probe found evidence of hydrogen peroxide--probably
just a surface layer--and sulfuric acid.
13 February 2004
San Francisco isn't waiting for Massachusetts, or for the court system:
a long-time
lesbian couple were married yesterday in San Francisco City Hall.
The wedding came just two days after Mayor Gavin Newsom announced that he wanted San Francisco to take the
lead in bestowing the same marriage rights to gays and lesbians as are awarded to straight couples, saying he
is duty-bound to fight discrimination.
It will be interesting to see who goes to court, and on what grounds anyone claims
to be an "interested party" to the claim that two women who have never been married before
should not be legally married.
[via Pat Kight]
8 February 2004
Maureen Speller pointed me to Tony Kushner's fine
Vassar commencement
speech. There are a lot of excellent things in here, about politics and
living and the self. And there's this:
But hope isn't a choice, it's a moral obligation, it's a human obligation, it's an obligation to the cells in your body, hope is a function of those cells, it's a bodily function the same as breathing and eating and sleeping; hope is not naive, hope grapples endlessly with despair, real vivid powerful thunderclap hope, like the soul, is at home in darkness, is divided; but lose your hope and you lose your soul, and you don't want to do that, trust me, even if you haven't got a soul, and who knows, you shouldn't be careless about it.
30 January 2004
Between Supreme Court decisions and barely-discussed
legislation, the U.S. is
slouching
toward a police state, in the dubious name of security.
29 January 2004
The Martian Air Force would like to
assure all citizens that
the alleged "alien spacecraft" that crashed in Gusev Crater is merely a harmless
weather balloon. [via Sean Colbath]
28 January 2004
D.C. Simpson sums up the
electronic voting
machine issue in three panels.
Some butterflies have
"ultrablack" wings,
using refractive tricks as well as pigments to increase their color contrast.
21 January 2004
A handy list of
instructions for
everything, including useful hints on the proper handling of fissile materials.
Think, write, revise. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Well, almost everything: it doesn't explain how to make a proper cup of
tea, which may be why so few Americans understand this simple process.
[Thanks to Pat Kight for the link]
14 January 2004
Bruce Schneier explains why
fingerprinting
visitors to the US will not make us safe.
Security is a trade-off. When deciding whether to implement a security measure, we must balance the costs
against the benefits. Large-scale fingerprinting is something that doesn't add much to our security against
terrorism and costs an enormous amount of money that could be better spent elsewhere. Allocating the funds
on compiling, sharing and enforcing the terrorist watch list would be a far better security investment. As
a security consumer, I'm getting swindled....
Two researchers claim to have
created a "supersolid":
solid helium (weird to begin with) that flows like a superfluid. It counts as a
solid, despite being a Bose-Einstein condensate, because it forms a crystal lattice.
Copyright 2004 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page or my online journal.