#Hope

[shitilyposting]

"I don't wanna bother you"

Have you considered that this is how your presence feels?

[reasonsforhope]

"A simple blood test costing less than $10 could prevent hundreds of heart attacks and other adverse cardiac events per year.

Troponin is a protein found in heart muscle cells that if detected in the blood stream means the heart has been damaged in some way: a key indicator of cardiovascular disease risk with greater predictive power than cholesterol levels.

A troponin detection test that can be administered along with other simple blood tests could alert hundreds of patients to their higher risk of heart attack and stroke, allowing them to alter their lifestyle or even start taking statins, in advance of an adverse cardiac event.

The concept was demonstrated in a paper published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The authors showed that adding cardiac troponin levels to existing risk factors such as smoking status, cholesterol, diabetes presence, and blood pressure increased the predictive powers of these screenings—done after CVD events or in advance of a statin prescription.

In fact, in their study of 62,000 Britons with a 15-year follow-up, one additional CVD event would be prevented for every 408 and 473 individuals screened when troponin was added, a result of troponin being a good indicator of so-called “silent” heart damage that could lead to a CVD event in the future.

The study also found adding troponin tests meant that up to 8% of people classified as intermediate risk were changed to high-risk.

“Troponin, even in the normal range, is a powerful indicator of silent heart muscle damage,” said Anoop Shah, a professor of cardiovascular medicine at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and lead author on the study.

“As such, the test provides an extra layer of information that we can use to boost our accuracy when predicting people’s risk. We want to identify as many high-risk people as possible, so that no one misses out on the opportunity to get preventative treatment.”"

-Article via Good News Network, April 11, 2025. Study via Journal of the American College of Cardiology and ScienceDirect, April 2025.

[queerorthodoxy]

Dance as an act of rebellion. Dance as an act of joy.

[hug-your-face]

via @swatercolour here on Tumblr and also on [insta]

EDIT: I do not interpret "just managing" as "just suffering, just enduring, curling into a fetal position and waiting for it to be over." Managing is an active process.

So I'm using this post as a platform to make the reminder that "the power of the people is greater than the people in power," and we all are cordially invited to:

Take good care of ourselves. Mental, physical, emotional health. Hydrate. Move if we can, get outside if we can.

Keep up a routine. Remember quarantine and we all had to find a routine? This is the same.

Be intentional in our news consumption. Let's not stick our heads in the sand but let's not doomscroll either. Get an RSS aggregator. Subscribe to WTF Just Happened Today, Yoour Local Epidemiologist, Fix The News (for some inspiring hopeful news!). We'll check our feeds a few times a week, but no more than once a day.

Connect with friends and loved ones. Remind ourselves that while SOME people are horrible, for the most part people are awesome... if complicated. Share our fears but also our hopes. Eat together.

Now that we're keeping healthy, safe, sane, and hopeful... now we also fight. Quietly if we prefer, loudly if we prefer. But sustainably. I hate that I had to live through three rounds of this nonsense where a few people use half of us as tools to fuck over ALL of us, but here we are again. So let us take just one moment every week or so to...

Use 5calls to keep blowing up our reps phones. Tell them to either break ranks with the Orange Administration, or to stand up louder than just matching outfits and signs. Or to THANK them for standing up.

Use Vote411 to find elections before the midterms. A lot of villages, cities, townships etc have local elections that will affect where we live... and more importantly, the people in office there will affect things upwards too.

Use Ballotpedia to know exactly what's on our ballots ahead of time.

Protest, because it actually works.

Use Vote.org to make a plan to vote in the midterms. Make a plan that is immune to voter suppression tactics. Get our documents in order. Reach out to our friends to go to the polls as a group. Plan to livestream our visit, up until the point we have to turn our cameras off.

Make and share memes that promote hope, organizing, solidarity, and/or resistance.

Get involved with an action network like Indivisible, MoveOn, or Working Families Party.

Go to a local town hall meeting. Speak up.

Heck, start our own local activism networks, letter campaigns, call campaigns, or fundraisers with Action Network.

And we will remember our self-care. We will remind ourselves and each other that they want us scattered, focus is how we resist.

It IS coming back. Things ARE going to get worse. The world has become a place where a very few people are pulling levers and pushing buttons that are actively destroying much of what is good about living in a society where people care for each other.

Many others are in shock, sputtering "but can they do that?" MANY many others are waiting for someone to come save us.

But there are those who are actively, loudly, opposing.

And there are more people speaking up, acting up, every day. More people saying it's time to get scrappy. It's time to get into some good trouble. The shock is wearing off.

Yes, it's gonna get worse before it gets better (the long-term damage of the acts of the past momentum of all the damage that has been done will take that long to be felt -- but it WILL get better.

If WE will it.

[tree-whispering]

[star-girlfriend]

your survival is beautiful

cabindemos tumblr // miraclesandcrosses tiktok // unknown // sanegreen tumblr // wuntrum tumblr // bulldyke-rider tumblr // unknown // iamstillgentle tiktok

[reasonsforhope]

"The first satellite in a constellation designed specifically to locate wildfires early and precisely anywhere on the planet has now reached Earth's orbit, and it could forever change how we tackle unplanned infernos.

The FireSat constellation, which will consist of more than 50 satellites when it goes live, is the first of its kind that's purpose-built to detect and track fires. It's an initiative launched by nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance, which includes Google and Silicon Valley-based space services startup Muon Space as partners, among others.

According to Google, current satellite systems rely on low-resolution imagery and cover a particular area only once every 12 hours to spot significantly large wildfires spanning a couple of acres. FireSat, on the other hand, will be able to detect wildfires as small as 270 sq ft (25 sq m) – the size of a classroom – and deliver high-resolution visual updates every 20 minutes.

The FireSat project has only been in the works for less than a year and a half. The satellites are fitted with custom six-band multispectral infrared cameras, designed to capture imagery suitable for machine learning algorithms to accurately identify wildfires – differentiating them from misleading objects like smokestacks.

These algorithms look at an image from a particular location, and compare it with the last 1,000 times it was captured by the satellite's camera to determine if what it's seeing is indeed a wildfire. AI technology in the FireSat system also helps predict how a fire might spread; that can help firefighters make better decisions about how to control the flames safely and effectively.

This could go a long way towards preventing the immense destruction of forest habitats and urban areas, and the displacement of residents caused by wildfires each year. For reference, the deadly wildfires that raged across Los Angeles in January were estimated to have cuased more than $250 billion in damages.

Muon is currently developing three more satellites, which are set to launch next year. The entire constellation should be in orbit by 2030.

The FireSat effort isn't the only project to watch for wildfires from orbit. OroraTech launched its first wildfire-detection satellite – FOREST-1 – in 2022, followed by one more in 2023 and another earlier this year. The company tells us that another eight are due to go up toward the end of March."

-via March 18, 2025

[margotstjust545]

People forget that you can light a bonfire with a candle; that's what this felt like to me.

on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

[goodnightmari]

I did not know they were stackable ?????????

[randomreasonstolive]

Reason to Live #12242

  The smell of bread baking.   – Guest Submission

(Please don't add negative comments to these posts.)

[margotstjust545]

Alright, that got me.

[curingourhearts]

Getting over someone doesn't need to require hating someone. If they hurt you it's of course okay to be upset but try to rationalize this hurt too and try to not make it into a bigger thing than it is. Just because someone did something wrong doesn't necessarily mean that everyone is a bad person, that you can never trust anyone ever again. I'm not saying trust everyone but do not let your hurt from a previous relationship affect your future.

[reasonsforhope]

"In a gesture of goodwill and neighborliness, Indian officials transferred 88 ambulances to Sri Lanka counterparts back in 2016.

Now, ten years on, this gift has turned out to be a lifesaving one for 1.5 million Sri Lankans who have ridden and received urgent care in the back of those ambulances and the ones added to the fleet in the following years.

At the time, Prime Minister Narendra Modi handed over the ambulances and Sri Lanka was able to launch the nation’s first national emergency service—equivalent to our 911 or Britain’s 999.

“Today, the fleet size of ambulances has grown to 322. It is used to provide free emergency transportation services to the whole country day and night,” Sri Lankan Minister of Health and Media Nalinda Jayatissa told Modi in a communication last Saturday.

Jayatissa said that national statistics report that 2.44 million people have received care in these ambulances for things like cardiac arrest, stroke, and road accidents. 65% of these were in the “golden hour” where medical care within a few minutes can make the difference between life and death immediately.

“That is nearly 1.5 million lives saved up to now due to your generosity, and continues to save lives in Sri Lanka,” Jayatissa said.

Sri Lanka ranks well above other South Asian countries in the Human Development Index with an index score of 0.750, and out of 142 countries surveyed by the World Economic Forum, Sri Lanka cracked the top-third in terms of health industry. That was in 2011, before the ambulance donations arrived.

More modern estimates keep Sri Lanka ahead of other South Asian economies for health industry development, and the island has eradicated several infectious diseases ahead of established targets. Its life expectancy of 75.5 years at birth is 10% higher than the world average, and the country is ranked number 5 on the World Giving Index which ranks charitable behavior and gestures among the population."

-via Good News Network

[jadiaashley]

⋆.˚ ☾ .⭒˚

[thepersonalwords]

Success is the byproduct of desires, purpose-oriented actions, and persistence.

Debasish Mridha