Good News: We bring it, we make it.
The Good Gnus group is a community of readers, writers, activists, supporters, community builders, and patriots. We begin gathering every day at 7 a.m. ET to celebrate national good news. Our most active members are of course a subgroup of members of Daily Kos, whose Front Pages celebrate “News, Community, Action.” However, you don’t have to be a member of Daily Kos to be a Gnusie.
We are realists, not fools, idiots, or ostriches. We know we live in a world where active, nefarious, and evil decision-makers do very bad things and create stress and anxiety in us, our loved ones, our friends, our allies, and our neighbors, and destroy people and systems we hold dear, yet we choose to focus on the good news that people create around the country. Sometimes we ourselves create Good News. Together we are strong and resilient. We return regularly to these pages to revitalize.
These days, kind, loving, and generous patriots stay home and protect the weak among us.
In the states that will likely decide the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump has already lost his newly declared war against voting by mail.
All six of the swing states that both sides see as the most probable tipping points allow their residents to vote by mail for any reason, and there’s virtually no chance that any of them will retrench their existing laws this year. That means that, however much Trump rages, the legal structure is in place for a mail-voting surge in those decisive states: Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona in the Sun Belt and Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in the Rust Belt. [The Atlantic apparently limits unpaid views to 5 per month.]
Democratic challengers raised nearly twice the amount Republicans did in first-quarter fundraising in five must-watch races that could determine who controls the Senate, the latest campaign finance figures showed.
Republican incumbents facing tough re-elections races in Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Maine and North Carolina all raised significantly less cash than their Democratic rivals in the first three months of 2020.
Kentucky!
Rashida Tlaib
“I was going through old photos. I came across the one of my son and I when we heard I had won my election in 2018. A moment of light and joy. #rootedincommunity
Great picture! My daughter and I were in that room, waiting for results. She had volunteered to drive people on that election day, and I had canvassed for Rashida. However, we left that tension-filled room hours before the photographer grabbed this photo. It was a close election and a very late night.
By organizing with state senators and representatives, Rashida was able to open four service centers in the serpentine and far-flung Michigan 13th Congressional District. I am fighting hard to re-elect Rashida. The corporatists do not want her to retain her office.
Science, Because Science
A star orbiting the Milky Way’s giant black hole confirms Einstein was right.
In 1915, Einstein realized that his newly formulated general theory of relativity explained a weird quirk in the orbit of Mercury. Now, that same effect has been found in a star’s orbit of the enormous black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, researchers with the GRAVITY collaboration report April 16 in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The star, called S2, is part of a stellar entourage that surrounds the Milky Way’s central black hole. For decades, researchers have tracked S2’s elliptical motion around the black hole. ✂
Now, they’ve determined that the ellipse rotates over time, what’s known as Schwarzschild precession. That precession is the result of the warping of spacetime caused by massive objects, according to general relativity. A similar precession in Mercury’s orbit had stumped scientists before Einstein came along (Science News.org: 4/11/18).
Researchers restore sight in mice by turning skin cells into light-sensing eye cells
NIH-funded study offers new path to modeling eye disease, advancing therapies:
Researchers have discovered a technique for directly reprogramming skin cells into light-sensing rod photoreceptors used for vision. The lab-made rods enabled blind mice to detect light after the cells were transplanted into the animals’ eyes. The work, funded by the National Eye Institute (NEI), published April 15 in Nature. The NEI is part of the National Institutes of Health.
Up until now, researchers have replaced dying photoreceptors in animal models by creating stem cells from skin or blood cells, programming those stem cells to become photoreceptors, which are then transplanted into the back of the eye. In the new study, scientists show that it is possible to skip the stem-cell intermediary step and directly reprogram skins cells into photoreceptors for transplantation into the retina.
This Might Be the Longest Creature Ever Seen in the Ocean [New York Times]
Nerida Wilson couldn’t take her eyes off the computer screen. Some 2,000 feet beneath the research boat she was aboard, a creature drifted past in the shape of a vast, galactic swirl. By her team’s estimates, it was 150 feet long. “It looked like an incredible U.F.O.,” said Dr. Wilson, a senior research scientist at the Western Australian Museum.
She and her colleagues documented this organism […] The coiling stringy mass they had just found was a siphonophore, the first spotted off Western Australia and potentially the longest organism in the sea.
[Gag and Disgust Warning] The Food and Drug Administration has granted emergency approval for the first saliva-based coronavirus test, which could potentially reduce the risk of infection for health care workers while helping to alleviate shortages of medical supplies.
The approval was announced on Monday. The test was developed by researchers at New Jersey's Rutgers University. Unlike the somewhat invasive methods currently available, the new test requires a patient to spit into a tube which can then be collected and analyzed.
Current testing most commonly involves a long swab being inserted far into a patient's nose or throat and twisted for seconds, which can provoke strong reactions including gags and coughs from some patients, putting health workers at additional risk.
“Somewhat invasive?” Gag me with a nasal swab! Looks like this new method will be gentler and faster and easier and safer for all. And it does not require nasal swabs, which have been in very short supply.
Addendum: “A colleague of mine likes to say ‘You don’t believe in evolution or modern science? Fine. Next time you’re sick, you get leeches.’ “ [Gizmo59]
A TikTok before we jump the fold