the sun will rise and we will try again

They want buckskin and face paint, drumming, songs in languages they can’t understand recorded for them but with English subtitles, of course. They want educated, well spoken, but not too smart. Christian, well behaved, never question. They want to learn the history of the people, but not the ones that are here now, waving signs in their faces, asking them for clean drinking water, asking them why their women are going missing, asking them why their land is being ruined.

They want fantastical stories of Indians that used to roam this land. They want my culture behind glass in a museum.

"They come to my class every day. And they’re all going to end up in a Mad Max nightmare world if we don’t solve this problem. Yeah, I was wrong about the water. I don’t care about that. I care about those kids. So give me some gosh-darned Astrophage!"

project hail mary + book quotes 2/?

Saving the stars !! ⋆⭒˚｡⋆

apparently, cats' kidneys tend to be the thing that takes them down, something about their bodies being unable to self-clean their kidneys, and the vaccine is supposed revitalize the body's ability to do just that. It would be very VERY fucking cool to have cats suddenly reaching 30 years of age be the normal thing.

dude cracked the case about WHY kidneys fail, across the board as far as i can tell. turns out there's a specific molecule whose job it is to attach to waste and signal macrophages to come eat it. it remains inactive in cats for some reason, but the molecule is still there. basically what he's done is found the switch to activate them. this will be profound not only for our domestic babies, but for big cats too - especially cheetahs!

although his research was focused on cats, it's already being used to develop drugs for humans too!

on top of that, since these molecules are tags for waste, this could also dramatically lower the rate of fatty liver disease, liver cancer, urinary crystals, rheumatoid arthritis, and even some neurological cases! like, they're hoping it may have an impact on parkinson's and alzheimers, but it DOES have an impact on stroke recovery. like. holy shit.

furthermore, he's insisting that the feline drug be affordable if and when it rolls out onto the market. he wants this to be something anyone can get for their cat!! idk how much sway he'll have over the human drug, but hopefully enough that it, too, won't be that expensive.

annnnnd in his research that he's still doing for the human side of things, he's found a potential link between this molecule and estrogen. in the 20,000 samples he's tested, women between ages 10 and 29 had the highest amount of this molecule present in their blood (a higher amount means Something Fucky is going on, essentially. There's a higher amount of waste the body is trying to clean out) but it drops down to be almost equal amongst men and women after menopause. it hasn't been looked into yet, but fuck, just the fact it's noted and known and probably WILL be looked into soon??? imagine if this is what leads to figuring out all the various ways the ovaries and uterus fucks with people and how to fix it. or even like, maybe there's something about estrogen that makes it work better. who knows! but it's rad the link is there to be researched :D

As for the study itself, the 360 day follow up on stage 3 kidney failure kitties showed that the control had a survival rate of about 20%, while the test group had a survival rate of 80%

And when the Blip-A has been gone twice as long as it should have been with no indication of what happened to them, when the astrophage has been attacking Erid’s sun for 50 years and they are starting to feel the pressure of its effects, when the Tau Ceti plan looks like a failure and the whole crew aboard has been assumed dead and they need to figure out something else… Eridian governments approach Adrian’s dome habitat team with the serious question of how much of the Eridian population could feasibly be moved into climate controlled geothermally-powered xenonite dome cities. (The answer is inevitably “not enough.” But the debates over sending a second crew to Tau Ceti in case what happened to the Blip-A was a weird fluke are not finding any consensus and the planet is snowballing towards total climate collapse and the world is ending and Adrian is bitterly glad that they and Rocky never had children because what kind of future is even left—)

hey don't worry? completely unrelated giant dump of heartwarming PHM doodles ok??

Surgeries require having a designated person to look after you. Many injuries require driving to somewhere like an emergency room which can be hard to do if you are the one injured. If you're home with the flu, it's hard to tell when it's bad enough to go to the hospital without another person checking on you. And if you pass out it requires another person to find you like that to get medical aid.