All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Ohio abortion rights backers submit nearly double needed signatures for fall ballot measure – Los Angeles Times

Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights said they dropped off more than 700,000 petition signatures on Wednesday to Republican Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s office in downtown Columbus. LaRose now will work with local election boards to determine that at least 413,446 are valid, which would get the proposal onto the Nov. 7 ballot. Source: Ohio abortion rights backers submit nearly double needed signatures for fall ballot measure – Los Angeles Times

दाग / Stains

कुछ सपने आते हैंऔर गुदगुदाते हैं मेरे दिल को,लेकिन कुछ छोड़ जाते हैं दागमेरे तकिए पर,अलग नहीं होते सपनेजिंदगी से… 🕳️🕳️🕳️🕳️🕳️🕳️ Some dreams …

दाग / Stains

Some dreams come
and tickle my heart,
but some leave stains
on my pillow,
dreams are not different
from life…


–Kaushal Kishore

Human Intelligence

“As human beings we are all the same. We have this marvellous intelligence, which sometimes creates problems for us, but when influenced by warm-…

Human Intelligence

“As human beings we are all the same. We have this marvellous intelligence, which sometimes creates problems for us, but when influenced by warm-heartedness it can be really creative and helpful. This is the context in which having moral principles is of such great value.”His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

Three Vaccines for Fall: What You Need to Know – The New York Times

This past winter, the flu peaked in December instead of in February, as it typically does. The virus may have caused as many as 58,000 deaths, a higher number than usual. Covid kept up a steady number of infections and deaths most of the season, with a peak in January.

Compared with its pattern before the pandemic, R.S.V. peaked several weeks earlier last year, and it circulated for longer than usual.

R.S.V. is increasingly recognized as a major respiratory threat, particularly to older adults, immunocompromised people and young children. “R.S.V. has a burden of disease similar to flu in older adults — it can make you very, very sick,” said Dr. Helen Chu, a physician and immunologist at the University of Washington.

Fevered Planet: How Diseases Emerge When We Harm Nature by John Vidal review – a frightening diagnosis | Science and nature books | The Guardian

…The virus that causes this often-fatal haemorrhagic fever first emerged in 1976 in a village near the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire). Ebola’s most likely “host reservoir” is a bat. As Vidal notes, such jumps from animals to humans often occur at the degraded edges of the world’s tropical forests. As humans encroach, they increasingly come into contact with unfamiliar wildlife, and are prey to the diseases it carries. As a 2017 study showed, from 2004 to 2014, spillovers of Ebola from wildlife to humans in west and central Africa occurred mostly in “hotspots of forest fragmentation”.

In vivid prose, Vidal describes the devastation that followed when a rare moabi tree in the Congolese rainforest – 60 metres tall and 200 years old – was felled for the timber trade. “For several minutes the stricken moabi seemed to rain birds, flies, seeds, spores, leaves, bees, flowers, wasps, nests, ants, beetles, moths, frogs, snails, and all the thousands of insects and small mammals that had lived together in that tree,” he writes. “Anything that could, flew. Everything else ran, crawled, burrowed, hid or took its chances. A complete ecosystem with thousands of interdependent organisms had been transformed in a few moments.”

Source: Fevered Planet: How Diseases Emerge When We Harm Nature by John Vidal review – a frightening diagnosis | Science and nature books | The Guardian