so this is from 2013 when i got to play madame thenerdier in a production of les mis but my mom gave me the video recently and i’ve just been keeping it on my computer so i figured i’d upload it since i did that with my other play-related videos that’s all bye
They make electric cars seem so environmentally friendly but don’t tell you what it takes to make the batteries and what it’s going take to dispose of the batteries.
The COVID vaccine came out super quickly. Here’s why it’s safe.
There are different types of vaccines, but they all have the same purpose.
The first one ever created was for smallpox. A doctor realized that people who got a milder but similar virus called cowpox seemed to be immune to smallpox.
By fighting off cowpox, the body had learned to recognize smallpox and produce antibodies to ward it off. This is fundamentally how vaccines function today. Teaching the body to fight smallpox, however, required injecting cow scabs into humans, and risking real illness.
Although traditional vaccines have taken years to develop, scientists have harnessed a much faster method for the COVID vaccine.
The technique, used to create both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, uses mRNA — or messenger RNA — to make harmless versions of the spike proteins found on the COVID-19 virus. In earlier vaccines, scientists had to make those proteins in a lab and then transfer them into the vaccine.
With mRNA, our body produces the proteins — a vastly quicker and more efficient process. It does this so well because our body already knows how to make mRNA (and does all the time). mRNA is like a blank piece of paper that our cell nucleus encodes instructions into in order to make proteins that control bodily processes, like hormones. Our cell nucleus then “mails” the mRNA it’s encoded out into the rest of the body. This process happens inside us every moment of the day.
Ready for the next big disaster? Here’s what we do if an asteroid is headed to earth
Asteroids hitting the Earth have been a staple of Hollywood blockbusters for years. But what happens if there actually was an asteroid hurtling towards us?
Luckily, there are people like Kirsten Howley, a Lawrence Livermore National Lab researcher, who has a game plan for dealing with this potential danger. And strangely enough, it doesn’t seem to involve Bruce Willis.
The old expression is “if you aren’t counted, then you don’t count.” And the census, administered every 10 years, is the primary tool by which you are counted.
In 2020, for the first time ever, the U.S. census will ask directly whether adults are involved in same- or opposite-sex married or unmarried partnerships, in order to improve the accuracy of information about the true number of same-sex relationship households in the U.S. Sixteen years after gay marriage first became legal in Massachusetts, and five years after it became legal across the country, it’s a landmark achievement for those who have fought for decades to be recognized as equals.
But, according to Kerith Conron from UCLA’s Williams Institute, it needs to go further.
She estimates that the census overlooks about 80 percent of adults in the LGBTQ community.
If you are a lesbian, but not living with a partner, or if you identify as transgender, you are invisible. If you are a bi- or queer-identified person living with an opposite-sex partner, you are also invisible. If you aren’t living with a same-sex partner, you are invisible.
This creates a huge gap in our ability to understand and provide services to the LGBTQ community, with a particularly high cost for transgendered people, who suffer from a lack of good data and corresponding resources.
Their push for visibility in other surveys has made a difference, according to Conron: “Even doing an analysis of federal funding for transgender research, I’ve seen a major increase in the number of grants funded for transgender folks in the last 10 years.”
And it isn’t as though we don’t know how to ask these questions — the Williams Institute has even developed a series of best practices for doing so.
Despite the shortcomings of the current census, Conron believes that it will eventually become more and more inclusive.
“I am confident that there are many people in federal government that believe inclusive data collection is a priority and that data collection will move forward,” states Conron.
How a 1940s psychology study sparked the modern gay rights movement
This Pride month, we saw a landmark victory for LGBTQ workers’ rights in the Supreme Court, and the fifth anniversary of gay marriage! Behind the scenes, researchers help make these victories happen. From Dr. Evelyn Hooker, who showed homosexuality was not an illness in the 1940s, to Jody Herman, who documents the needs and realities of trans people today, UC researchers and their work are reaching all corners of the legal and medical communities and changing queer life forever — and the world.
