#the american genet

[mindblowingscience]

The longest genome of all the animals on Earth belongs not to a giant, or a cognitively advanced critter, but a writhing, water-dwelling creature seemingly frozen in time, right at the cusp of evolving into a beast that can live on land. These are the lungfish, a class of freshwater vertebrates whose peculiar characteristics are reflected in a colossal genetic code. Able to breathe both air and water, with limb-like fins, and a well-developed skeletal architecture, these strange ancient creatures are thought to is thought to share a common ancestor with all four-limbed vertebrates known as tetrapods.

Continue Reading.

[strangebiology]

Most American bison in the world are privately owned, and therefore the ranchers can breed them with cattle if they want. In fact, you can increase your odds of getting a white beefalo, or creatures of any other color, if you mix them with the appropriate domestic cattle.

However, conservation herds such as the ones in Yellowstone and here in Evanston, Wyoming, are meant to preserve some of the bison purity, so they're not going to actively hybridize them. You can often see the Bear River animals from the highway, although from that distance they kind of just look like little lumps.

The managers at Bear River State Park "try to maintain our herd at 7 to 10 adult animals" and this article from the spring of 2023 says there were 15 total at the time of writing. Three of them, including a calf, are white! You can see the calf in the last image and compare his size now, still not fully grown. They are not albino, but the color actually does come from genes from Charolais cattle, which are white, in their ancestry.

[bitter69uk]

“His lifestyle WAS his art: the drugs, the prostitution, the homelessness, the years spent in jail - it all bled onto the page and created a new kind of poetry. He was the American Genet: a man with one foot firmly in the criminal underworld and one in literature.”

/ From “The man who set the Beats going” by Tony O’Neill, The Guardian, 2007 /

“I never met Huncke. Yet he speaks to me in a voice of gentle desperation and compassionate understanding on the complexity and fragility of the human condition, generously revealing the stamina of his tortured soul …”

/ From the book So Real It Hurts (2015) by Lydia Lunch /

Unlike Lydia Lunch, I did meet literary bad boy and proto-beatnik Herbert Huncke (9 January 1915 - 8 August 1996), who died on this day. Or, more accurately, I had a fleeting encounter with him. Like so many, I went through a Beat literature phase in my twenties. Huncke (who was on intimate terms with and a primary influence on the likes of William S Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac) gave several readings in London in the early nineties which I worshipfully attended. (I also managed to see Ginsberg). Huncke was a spellbinding raconteur with a worldly-wise WC Fields-style delivery, and so desiccated-looking he suggested an unwrapped, upright ancient Egyptian mummy. After one reading, he autographed my copy of The Evening Sun Turned Crimson (1980). I can pinpoint exactly when because Huncke wrote the date [26 October 1994] above his signature in surprisingly pretty, swirling handwriting.

[thoughtportal]

In eastern Mexico’s underground caverns and streams, a blind fish undergoes a peculiar adolescence: as it approaches maturity, taste buds begin to sprout under its chin and on top of its head, creeping toward its back.

“It’s a pretty wild amplification of the sensory system of taste,” says Josh Gross, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Cincinnati and a co-author of a recent study on the cave fish in Nature Communications Biology. Gross and his team discovered that the new buds blossom around the time when the fish transition from eating larval crustaceans to gobbling up their adulthood staple: bat guano. Taste buds outside their mouths might be helping the fish detect bat droppings in the utterly dark, “food-starved” caves, Gross says.

Wandering taste buds aren’t unheard of elsewhere, especially in other fish. Some damselfish cultivate taste buds on their fins, and channel catfish have them across their midsections. And as alien as it may seem, many cells throughout the human body can taste, too. They’re just not sharing the flavors with your brain like taste buds do.

Lora Bankova is a Harvard Medical School respiratory biologist who studies tuft cells, a cell type sprinkled within human mucous tissues like those lining your nostrils, throat and gut. These “rapid responder” cells trigger the immune system if they detect an outside threat, and many of them rely on built-in taste receptors (the same kinds found on taste-bud cells) to do so. Bankova notes that many potentially harmful bacteria communicate via signaling chemicals called lactones—which also happen to activate taste receptors attuned to bitter flavors, prompting tuft cells’ immune response. And it turns out that even environmental allergies may be a matter of taste: dust mites and several mold species can also set off a tuft cell’s taste receptors, Bankova says.

“Evolutionarily, taste receptors [have moved around] the body to protect us from the air we inhale and all the attacks we’re getting through the orifices,” Bankova says. “They’re in the inner ear, the urethra, everywhere something can get into your body.”

Such “extra” taste receptors aren’t just bouncers at the door—they taste test for our internal systems, too. Receptors for sweet tastes help to tune insulin production in the pancreas and make sure neurons in the brain have access to enough glucose. Sweet, bitter and umami receptors in the gut modulate digestion.

Gross says it’s still a mystery what taste receptors the bat guano activates in the blind cave fish. “There may be some sugar content if it’s a fruit bat, maybe some protein content if it’s a carnivorous bat,” he says. So far only the cave fish has signed up to sample it.

[cowboycannibalism]

long live unauthorized horror musicals (and horror musicals in general)

[marchsfreakshow]

Blood and Organs, For You [James Patrick March]

Angst.

What a life. For a Repo man. Such anger and hatred he holds for the one he misses.

Dead reader. I practically ripped off Repo! The Genetic Opera for this fic, because I thought it would suit James.

I re-watched and re-listened to Repo! A lot for this but it's fine cause I love it.

No one's perspective

⊹˚.⋆ ₊꒷ᘏᘏ︶ଓ︶꒷꒦⊹˚ᗢ₊꒷︶ଓ︶꒷

What a living job, only to never be thanked.

Never have the correct payment for his work. Never for his face to be recognised. Never to be known. Never. Oh if only you could come back to him. If only he made the correct choice.

What a stupid man James was.

Picking his unborn child over you. A rash decision which haunted him for 17 years. She was a pretty girl, stuck in her room while her father did nothing but cut up bodies and repossess organs for those who couldn't pay their debts. She didn't know. She couldn't know. James wouldn't live with himself if she knew his true job. She rarely strayed from her bedroom window, watching seasons and stars flow by.

He couldn't bring himself to hate his daughter. He couldn't. In the moment he thought he made the correct choice. Leaving you for dead; his bride and the sweetest one by his side. Stupid man! James needed you now more than ever. He prayed to an unloving and uncaring god for you to be brought back to him, in any way possible. His daughter was only half you, barely even you. He blinked and she was smiling sweetly at him as a little girl, taking her medicine. He blinked and she was a 17-year-old wishing for freedom outside of her little bubble in her room.

His money was only ever worth so much when his real payment should've been going back to when you got sick. Going back to refusing to take that 'cure'. Oh, James was a fool. You were perfect. You were wonderful, you were his. His wonderful wife, and an ideal lady next to his side. Watching him do his job as a doctor. If only he had known. If only he had known the cure was poison from his friend. It was a harsh memory. A harsh thrust into the memories of your screams, and your cries. "Darling..." His voice was weak as he whispered out for no one. Right now, this repo man couldn't face his daughter. He couldn't call for anyone else.

Those holograms of your, gorgeous, beautiful face. Always around the house. So he could pray to your beauty every moment he could. Yet his daughter never felt the same. She resented you. Only slightly. You gave her this blood disease! You caused her to be isolated from the world! Your damn blood. Why'd James have to be so stupid? Why'd he have to pick incorrectly?

Oh right.

You were half dead anyway.

You were practically done for. But James told them all she died with you. He wanted so desperately to be a hero. That's all he wanted. To save you, make you and your child live.

He couldn't do this anymore.

But he had to. He had to continue. Faking a search for a cure.

It was all fruitless in the end. It was just proven worthless. He was baited by his work to find someone behind on their payments. Yet, the one behind the door was...his daughter. That wasn't right. It couldn't've been right. Oh god.

If only he had made the right choice...

⊹˚.⋆ ₊꒷ᘏᘏ︶ଓ︶꒷꒦⊹˚ᗢ₊꒷︶ଓ︶꒷

Tag: @babygorewhore @taintandviolent @oceanblvd111 / @nahoyasboyfriend @slutforgarlogan @briaroftheroses / @am3ricanh0rrorwh0re @evanpeterspeter @feefymo / @starry-eyed-wild-child @fear-is-truth

[shy-raccoon]

This pro birth we need to rise birth rates now bullshit is fucking terrifying because I don't know what will happen to me. I'm a cis woman with a genetic disorder that is very likely to be passed down and causes visable bone differences. I don't know if I'm going to be forced to give birth or forced to get sterilized. I don't know if I'll be a handmaiden or one of the disabled women sent to the colonies to clean up nuclear waste. Look at history it never ends well for disabled people when the goverment starts looking at the birth rate it will inevitably lead to the government deciding who should and shouldn't be contributing to the birth rate.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

In tandem with genetically engineering its three dire wolves, Colossal has cloned two litters of red wolves, the most critically endangered wolf in the world, as part of its overall goal of pairing conservation efforts with its de-extinction efforts.

The company, founded in 2021, has previously announced that it plans to bring back the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, and the dodo bird from extinction.

It says that its work on the dire wolf is a proof of technology.

“This massive milestone is the first of many coming examples demonstrating that our end-to-end de-extinction technology stack works,” says Lamm, who co-founded Colossal with Harvard geneticist Dr. George Church.

Colossal — which claims that it has now set the record for the most-ever genetic edits in a living species — says it plans to restore the dire wolf as a viable species and secure ecological preserves for it on Indigenous land in North America.

📹 AMAZlNGNATURE / X

🐺🥹🔊

[notsosmallbean]

yall watch porn? WEAK. I beat it to horror musicals

[girlboss-pussy-queen]

currently having a gender identity crisis because sometimes my gender is kinda

but then sometimes it's actually kinda like

either way guess i'm sexy and goth and unhinged so i'm doing good things

[thefugitivesaint]

Walter Velez (1939-2018), ''Future Life'', #25, March 1981 Source

[haveyouseenthishorrormovie]

SUMMARY: A worldwide epidemic encourages a biotech company to launch an organ-financing program similar in nature to a standard car loan. However, the repossession clause is a killer.

The mod hasn't seen it, regrettably because it looks like it rips.

[fortunaestalta]

[lesbian-cowpoke]

Man attempts to resist urge to spout cat facts, more at 10

[mau-mao]

American KEUDA Breed Fact

The name (American KEUDA) is an acronym of "Kitten Evaluation Under Direct Assessment", a program in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico in the 1980's, that was attempting to breed a superior quality barn cat from semi-feral specimens. The aim of the program was to produce a cat with the hardest qualities and strongest genes.

In 2002 the breed was standardized and defined. It is intended to focus on behavioral traits rather than physical characteristics.

CREDITS TO KUCING.BIZ

[bucephaly]

It really is frustrating and a little funny how like... people will know full well that cherokee princess great grandma stories exist and aren't true. And that fake family stories in general exist. But people will be So sure that Theirs is the exception and is true for whatever reason, be it that they arent white, it doesn't say 'princess', it has a 'reasonable' story with it like 'they were adopted by a white family' or 'they hid and changed their names', they have photos of someone with tan skin, their family has 'high cheekbones, their dad went to powwows, etc etc etc there are so so many random things people use to justify these stories. Like ok, but do you know this ancestors name? Do you know where they were born? Do you know what year the trail of tears happened??? Do you know anything about cherokee history at all besides the trail of tears is an event that happened? Cuz honestly a chunk of these stories can be at least partially debunked with no genealogy just because the time period or location isn't right. Like 'my cherokee great grandma was sent to a residential school' she was born in Kentucky and continued to live in kentucky?? 'My great grandma told me she was on the trail of tears' the trail was 186~ years ago how old are you??? It's like. Can you do Any Tiny Bit of actual research into our history. If it's a big enough deal to you that you feel the need to talk about it whenever anything native or cherokee comes up, you can do the research I promise