This is real. :)

Some good news for the day. Thank you Onion! 🤣

(April 12th 2024)

No medical confirmation or psychological evaluation necessary. The law will be active by the 1st of November this year.

First names can also be changed while changing gender. One all inclusive package with minimum effort.

Here's the AP article about it for anyone who wants it

[ID: The Destiel meme, edited to say, in the first panel, "I love you", and in the second, "Today Germany passed a law that allows everyone to change their gender by simply going to the registry and telling them to change it." End ID]

I need people outside of Germany to understand how huge this is!

This law came into effect yesterday! Huzzah! \o/

Good for German people and Germany! Finland did this same in February 2023 and also stopped the illegal forced sterilization for trans people (finally!). Let's hope for more countries to join!

This is a cool result: current oral PrEP requires a daily pill, but a trial of a twice-yearly injection of lenacapavir has proven so effective that the trial being conducted was ended early to give all participants the drug. Not only do twice-yearly injections avoid the problem of having to remember to take a pill every day, they also may have less stigma, which has been a problem for PrEP in the past.

(Source)

THE MARRIAGE EQUALITY BILL HAS PASSED IN THAILAND.

It will be published in Thailand’s Royal Gazette for 120 days and become law.

HAPPY PRIDE TO THAILAND!!!!!!! 🏳️‍🌈

Government working for the people

YOU GUYS. This is a huge deal. We recently wrote about ho racist and classist credit scores can be, and this will help the issue.

Credit Scoring Is a Racist, Classist System that Has Us All Trapped

I work in finance/lending.

I cannot tell you how much medical debt I see on a daily basis. The crippling, horrific LEVEL of medical debt wad unimaginable to me before I took this job.

Oh my God. This is a reform that will change people's lives.

—

Vaccine breakthrough means no more chasing strains

This is HUGE. This will fundamentally change how we get inoculated.

HOLY SHIT THEY PASSED THE BILL TO LEGALIZE SAME SEX MARRIAGE

This is huge news AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA next stop is to legalize same sex parenting as for now they passed the bill to change the word "between a man and a woman" in marriage laws to "between two persons"

27 Mar 24

The administration of President Joe Biden acted last month to mostly rescind a Trump-era Denial of Care Rule that invited health care workers to deny medical treatment and services to patients because of personal religious or moral beliefs.

Americans United applauded the move.

“We applaud the Biden administration for taking positive steps toward protecting both religious freedom and patients’ health by rescinding the Trump-era Denial of Care Rule,” said Rachel Laser, AU’s president and CEO. “No one should be denied the health care they need because of someone else’s religious beliefs.

“The Denial of Care Rule was a dangerous policy that weaponized religious freedom and put the health and lives of women, LGBTQ+ people, religious minorities and so many others in jeopardy,” Laser continued. “Today’s rule seeks to protect patients from harm and upholds the fundamental principle of church-state separation.”

HEY SPREAD THIS AROUND, WE ARE SAFER NOW.

As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.

Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.

The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.

With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.

Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There's going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”

Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”

Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...

To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.

During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.

On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.

As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect—the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”

LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface—sidewalks, parking lots, etc.—they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.

So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.

-via Wired, February 19, 2024

A small victory but a victory nevertheless. SCOTUS may make a more permanent ruling in a few years but for now the protections stand.

Dear #SagAftraMembers:

We are thrilled & proud to tell you that today your TV/Theatrical Negotiating Committee voted unanimously to approve a tentative agreement with the AMPTP.  As of 12:01 a.m. PT on Nov. 9, our strike is officially suspended & all picket locations are closed. We will be in touch in the coming days with information about celebration gatherings around the country.

In a contract valued at over one billion dollars, we have achieved a deal of extraordinary scope that includes "above-pattern" minimum compensation increases, unprecedented provisions for consent and compensation that will protect members from the threat of AI, and for the first time establishes a streaming participation bonus. Our Pension & Health caps have been substantially raised, which will bring much needed value to our plans. In addition, the deal includes numerous improvements for multiple categories including outsize compensation increases for background performers, and critical contract provisions protecting diverse communities.

We have arrived at a contract that will enable SAG-AFTRA members from every category to build sustainable careers. Many thousands of performers now and into the future will benefit from this work. Full details of the agreement will not be provided until the tentative agreement is reviewed by the SAG-AFTRA National Board.

We also thank our union siblings — the workers that power this industry — for the sacrifices they have made while supporting our strike and that of the Writers Guild of America. We stand together in solidarity and will be there for you when you need us.

Thank you all for your dedication, your commitment, your solidarity throughout this strike. It is because of you that these improvements became possible.

Hey guess what bitches Poland had a general election last Sunday and we said "fuck you" to the current fascist Orban-wannabes en masse, in a record-breaking historic turnout of 74% (that's a better turnout than the 1989 election which toppled the Soviet regime), with people of all ages standing in lines till 3 am to vote, young people actually outnumbering the elderly for the first time ever; and the result is that the progressive pro-EU coalition won and will form the next government. Been in in a stunned-but-celebratory mood since Sunday night.

It can be done.

Is this a prank? What….

Edit: holy heck it’s real…

They might be able to help us…

The stage that they're at is animal testing but it sounds like it's been successful in mouse and primate models.

My understanding: The way autoimmune diseases usually seem to work* is the immune system is "flagging" the wrong thing as harmful/not needed and destroying it. The typical treatments for autoimmune diseases are just tamping the entire immune system down so it can't destroy anything, which leaves a person vulnerable to infection.

The newer method is basically "tricking" the body using a method that... the human body already came up with. Cells flagging the wrong thing apparently happens all the time, so there are multiple defenses against immune disease, and one of them is in the liver. So scientists figured out a way to tell the body "hey, you flagged this wrong" and sent it to the liver and the liver/body recognized this signal.

There is still a lot of work to be done and it sounds like this isn't foolproof (ie: what if the liver is whats broken? unsure, and what if the immune system flags things wrong again?) but this is literally so amazing. i was tearing up reading it, and i hope that everything goes well in clinical trials.

*theres like a lot medical science doesnt know about the immune system

Thank you for this explanation/synthesis of the article! It's important for us to understand that they're still in early development and testing of these methods, but also that they've seen it work in mice and primates (rather than just petri dishes of human cells). I hope this goes well.

Hi! I'm a microbiologist and I've done work in academia, pharma, and clinical trials.

So the most exciting thing about this article is the last paragraph tbh (working on getting the actual paper, it's not up on sci-hub yet).

The company mentioned, Anokion, has four registered clinical trials for both Celiac and MS patients. The trial for Celiac just submitted data from their phase 1 trial (meaning there's good data it is safe) and are recruiting for a Phase 1/2 trial (meaning they are now testing efficacy). After that, the big hurdle is phase 3, which looks at whether or not it is better than a current treatment. The projected completion date is spring 2025. They are also preparing for a Phase 2 trial but are not yet recruiting.

The phase 1 MS trial is currently active, estimated completion in summer 2024.

I checked the company website and it looks like they are in the process of submitting an investigational new drug (IND) application for Type 1 diabetes. This is the first step to starting clinical safety and efficacy trials.

Now clinical trials can get delayed for a variety of reasons, but this is a really good sign! It's way further along than I initially thought when seeing the news. If the treatment does well, we could see new drugs on the market for Celiacs as early at 2030ish and MS as early as 2035.

this is really good news! the writer’s strike is over! let’s hope the same positive outcome for the sag strike next!

Mexico decriminalized Abortion Nationwide

Viva la Mexico!

article published September 6th, 2023