this is allec

On family trips to India as a child, Deepika Kurup often saw kids like herself forced to drink dirty water – as a result, at age 14, this Mighty Girl became determined to find to a way to ensure that everyone has access to safe drinking water. For an 8th grade project, the Nashua, New Hampshire teen invented a water purification system that uses a photocatalytic composite and sunlight to clean water – an invention which earned her recognition as America’s Top Young Scientist in 2012. Three years later, the now 17-year-old scientist has spent several years improving her purification system and is currently one of the finalists for the 2015 Google Science Fair!

According to Deepika, access to clean water is a global crisis; “one-ninth of the global population lacks access to clean water,” she explains “and 500,000 children die every year because of water related diseases.“ On the trips to India, her immigrant parents’ native land, Deepika saw the struggle for clean water first hand: “[My parents] would have to boil the water before we drank it. I also saw children on the streets of India… take these little plastic bottles and they’re forced to fill it up with the dirty water they see on the street. And they’re forced to drink that water, because they don’t have another choice. And then I go back to America and I can instantly get tap water.”

Her early investigations into water purification methods found that many of them were expensive and potentially hazardous. “Traditionally, to purify waste water, they use chlorine, and chlorine can create harmful byproducts,” she points out. “Also, you have to keep replenishing the chlorine, you have to keep putting chlorine into the waste water to purify it.” She wanted to invent a new way to clean water that would be both cheap and sustainable.

Deepika came up with the idea of using a photocatalyst – a substance that reacts with water’s impurities when energized by the sun – that also filters the water. The combination of the reaction and the filtration can remove most contaminants for a fraction of the cost of chlorine purification. She determined that her system reduces the presence of coliform bacteria by 98% immediately after filtration and by 100% within 15 minutes. Another advantage is that her catalyst is reusable: “a catalyst doesn’t get used up in the reaction,” she says. “Theoretically you can keep using my composite forever.”

Deepika’s efforts have already by widely recognized – in addition to being named America’s Top Young Scientist in the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge, she was also the recipient of the 2013 President’s Environmental Youth Award and the 2014 U.S. Stockholm Junior Water Prize, and she was named one of Forbes Magazine’s 2015 “30 Under 30 in Energy.” She’s also excited to meet the other finalists at next week’s Google Science Fair’s Finalist Ceremony – even if it means missing a few days of classes at her new school, Harvard University, where she plans to study neurobiology. Most of all, she’s looking for forward to taking her research from the lab to real life: “It’s one thing to be working in a lab, doing this, and another thing to actually deploy it and see it working in the real world. So that’s one of my steps in the future.”

“Jews, go back to the gas chambers”

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Jewish cultural festival posters in #Budapest have been defaced with “Go to the gas chambers” and other antisemitic slogans. Every face shown on the posters was marked with a swastika. More details about this incident are still unknown.

Photo by Fórum az antiszemitizmus ellen.

Important information for California tumblies!

You are beautiful and magnificent and your pain is valid. 

Hippie culture is based entirely on the exotification of marginalised cultures.

Hippies have a fundamental misunderstanding of the pieces of the cultures that they use (I.e. Chakras, smudging, dreadlocks, etc.). The understanding that they have of these cultural aspects stems from racist interpretations of these cultures based on anthropology (which is still a very biased discipline), but at the time of the inception of the hippie movement, anthropology was still being used to show that other races were inferior to white people. Hippie culture takes bits and pieces of these cultures that they see as being “counter” the norm which is fundamentally racist because they see cultures of color as being outside the norm which further others people of color in a western context.

white hippies like to think they’re the least racist of all whites or even not racist at all because they travel to ~foreign lands and get to know the natives~ “embrace” dreadlocks, eastern religions and imagery; they think their appropriation of our cultures and history is acceptance when it couldn’t be further from it. the whole point of being a hippy is being “free”, a better and softer word for uncivilised which is what they ultimately consider us.

See, we have this concept called “bodily autonomy.” It’s this….cultural notion that a person’s control over their own body is above all important and must not be infringed upon. 

Like, we can’t even take LIFE SAVING organs from CORPSES unless the person whose corpse it is gave consent before their death. Even corpses get bodily autonomy. 

To tell people that they MUST sacrifice their bodily autonomy for 9 months against their will in an incredibly expensive, invasive, difficult process to save what YOU view as another human life (a debatable claim in the early stages of pregnancy when the VAST majority of abortions are performed) is desperately unethical. You can’t even ask people to sacrifice bodily autonomy to give up organs they aren’t using anymore after they have died. 

And here’s another point: When you say that “rape is the exception” you betray something FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN about your own argument.

Because a fetus produced from sexual assault is biologically NO DIFFERENT than a fetus produced from consensual sex. No difference at all.

If one is alive, so is the other. If one is a person, so is the other. If one has a soul, then so does the other. If one is a little blessing that happened for a reason and must be protected, then so is the other. 

When you say that “Rape is the exception” what you betray is this: It isn’t about a life. This isn’t about the little soul sitting inside some person’s womb, because if it was you wouldn’t care about HOW it got there, only that it is a little life that needs protecting.

When you say “rape is the exception” what you say is this: You are treating pregnancy as a punishment. You are PUNISHING people who have had CONSENSUAL SEX but don’t want to go through a pregnancy. People who DARED to have consensual sex without the goal of procreation in mind, and this is their “consequence.” 

And yes, yes, it is my body, thank you. Even if I choose not to wear a seat belt and die in a car crash, you may not harvest my organs without my consent. Even if I choose to eat questionable food, you may not demand I carry a parasite in my intestines. Even if I choose to fuck, you may not demand I carry a parasite in my uterus.

… who… is… me.

Oh. Hi me! 

Having Ehlers Danlos Syndrome sometimes feels about the equivalent of being composed of jello and wet spaghetti. Nothing stays where its supposed to. Literally every single cell in the body is floppy, so fingers are definitely an issue for many of us. I can almost guarantee that for the majority of us, writing is not only slow and painful but nearly impossible at times. FIne motor skills? What even are those? An EDSer surely doesn’t have any of those. Even typing which is far easier than writing, is painful and daunting at times. But last year I joined the population of shiny zebras by getting fitted for a set of Silver Rings Splints and they are beyond magical.

For those of you who have not heard of The Silver Ring Splint Company, they are a company that custom makes finger splints that look like elegant pieces of jewelry. Don’t believe me? Well I can’t even tell you how many compliments I’ve received for them. Nobody even suspects that they might possibly be medical. But more importantly, they work amazing! I still have hand pain and finger dislocations when performing fine motor skills and writing is definitely not something I look forward to but I have saved myself thousands of painful dislocations, I can open doors easier, type faster, write longer and hold objects in my hands without looking like an alien from a sic-fi movie. With the rings on my fingers actually look like fingers rather than tentacles!

The company is also family owned and the people are so sweet and helpful!

If you are having trouble with hand pain, clumsiness and dislocations please check out this amazing company!

A relationship should be about building each other up, together as a team.

Don’t be in a relationship if it doesn’t improve your life over being single.