:3

And it's like oh. oh sweetie. Honey. That's the iron. It's supposed to be there. The baby cereal is fortified with iron.

like, as in the mineral part of "daily essential vitamins and minerals"? You know, that iron? It's actually iron. The metal? Which is magnetic. Because it's iron.

For older children, this is actually an easy lesson to expand a lot more, and can touch on concepts like: history (particularly of medicine and disease, but also cooking and cooking technology), basic nutritional health, and things like global differences in nutritional access, food based laws/regulations, and cooking — just in very broad strokes!

It's cool we put iron in baby food! Why was that so important to do? Is it always necessary to fortify food with iron? What about iron for adults?

It's actually really easy to demonstrate other ways older children and adults sometimes introduce iron into their diet outside of just eating meat.

Time to take out a cast iron pan!

Iron leaches into your food when you use cast iron cookware. And that's a good thing! It's easy to think of the iron age in the context of like, iron weapons — but consider that humans moving to iron metallurgy as a technology that also benefitted our nutrition! What a cool thing to have a way to supplement iron even if you don't have enough meat or iron rich vegetables aren't in season! (Also, iron nails! We often let kids think iron age = better weapons, but don't talk about like, new construction technologies or the development of iron cookware. )

genuinely feels like this sums up so many online interactions

eating large amounts of citrus fruits (mainly oranges) in order to induce vomiting or diarrhea in oneself

black and brown ballerinas being told that they were in the wrong place and that "the sports school nearby [was] that way"

no non white ballet instructors

not having a period until much later in puberty than what is normal

non white girls and girls who hit puberty earlier being called overweight for having any semblence of curves

one little girl (notably, not white) who spent multiple days not eating and instead only recieving nutrients from an IV bag

weight being a determining factor on if you were allowed to continue to study in the academy, my mother was kicked out for being "too fat" (in pictures of her you could see she was actually noticeably underweight)

Trigger warning for graphic descriptions of injured and dead wildlife.

When a fireworks display occurs near a wild bird roost, the birds simultaneously explode into the night skies in utter panic, which can lead to huge numbers of deaths, usually because these birds either smash their skulls or break their necks as the result of flying into trees, fences, billboards, houses and other solid objects that they cannot see in the gloom and ensuing chaos.

Many of the startled birds who take flight fly at much higher altitudes and for much longer durations than they’re used to to escape the noise, which is energetically costly and physiologically stressful.

Small birds and bats can be knocked from the air and killed by the sonic shock. In 2010, 40 dead sparrows were discovered dead under a roost in a nature reserve after a local fireworks display. The manager of the reserve witnessed a tawny owl fluttering and convulsing on the ground after a particularly loud explosion. It died shortly after.

In Arkansas in 2010, some 5,000 red-winged blackbirds, European starlings, common grackles and brown-headed cowbirds suffered blunt-force trauma after colliding with cars, trees and buildings, an ornithologist from the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission would tell National Geographic.

In 2008, federal officials showed that seabirds in the northern California town of Gualala abandoned their nests after a fireworks show, leaving their eggs vulnerable to predators.

Each year in Austin, Texas, the Congress Bridge bats can be seen fleeing the fireworks display en masse on weather radar, and emergences from their roost diminish noticeably in the days following the Fourth.

In 2018, the Galapagos banned the sale and use of pyrotechnics. According to the BBC, conservationists said that fireworks caused elevated heart rates, trembling and anxiety in many animals. 

The threat to wildlife doesn’t stop at startling lights and sounds; fireworks also have the potential of starting wildfires, directly affecting wildlife and destroying essential habitat. Litter from firecrackers, bottle rockets and other explosives can be choking hazards for wildlife and may be toxic if ingested.

So what do you do if you want to watch fireworks responsibly? Experts say municipalities are more likely to be aware of these dangers than private consumers. Their best advice is to stick to the shows put on by professionals and local governments, which tend to follow guidelines put forth by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, among others, about animal safety.

The National Audubon Society offers similar guidelines: “Commercial fireworks are concentrated in one location, rather than in several locations at once, which is what often happens in neighborhoods. This allows birds to take off and land again in a ‘safer’ location rather than continuing to flee noises coming at them from all directions.”

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%

If your advocacy for Black people stops at Black queer people your allyship is conditional. If your advocacy for Black queer people stops at Black trans fems, your allyship is conditional. If your advocacy for Black people has terms and conditions you have unchecked racist beliefs to unlearn and combat within yourself. That is something you desperately need to address in order to be a genuine ally to the most vulnerable demographics of Black people within our community.

pros: yay! i finally look like a guy! people think im a man!