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The deaths of migrant fishers at sea are largely driven by structural labor and governance failures, rather than by safety or compliance issues alone, a new study shows. Migrant sea workers, especially those recruited from low-wage Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia, often experience violence and fatal abuse while aboard distant-water fishing vessels, those that operate in the seas outside any one country’s jurisdiction. The study, published Jan. 27 in the journal Maritime Studies, found that deaths of migrant fishers at sea are frequently the result of systemic working conditions that give boat captains control over basic living and survival conditions, making fatalities a predictable outcome rather than isolated incidents. “In seeking a conceptual framework to analyse these deaths at sea, we employed necropolitics, as it captures how power operates through death and the threat of death as instruments of governance,” lead author Christina Stringer, director of the Centre for Research on Modern Slavery at the University of Auckland Business School, Aotearoa New Zealand, told Mongabay by email. Indonesian migrants on board foreign fishing boats describe experiencing overwork, withholding of wages, debt bondage, and even physical and sexual violence. Image courtesy of Greenpeace. The paper is based on systematic analysis of 55 documented cases of Indonesian fishers who died or went missing on distant-water fishing vessels owned by or operating under the flags of China, Taiwan and South Korea. Using the idea of “necropolitics,” which refers to the power to decide who lives and who dies, the authors found that…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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Wildfires and power outages caused by vegetation near powerlines have contributed to some of the state's most destructive fires.

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Miles Morrisseau
ICT

Even as a child growing up in the small town of Sainte Anne, Manitoba near Winnipeg, Jocelyne Larocque showed a competitive spirit that would make her the most-decorated Indigenous Olympian of all time from North America.

With Jocelyne playing defense and her older sister, Chantal, playing forward, the pair developed a sibling rivalry that fueled the fire they had for hockey.

“When we were young we had kind of a love-hate relationship,” Chantal Fritzsche told ICT from just outside Canada House at the Olympic Village in Milan, Italy, as she and other supporters prepared for the gold-medal hockey game on Thursday, Feb. 19, between Canada and the United States.

“There was a lot of competitiveness and always wanting our dad to pick us over each other,” Fritzsche said. “ So there was a lot of fighting that way. But now, you know, things have come full circle and we’re best friends, and hockey is a big thing that has always brought us together.”

And although the Canadian women would eventually lose 2-1 to the U.S. in overtime Thursday, family was there to watch as Jocelyne, Métis, brought home a silver medal to add to the two golds and silver she had already brought home from three prior Olympics.

Her four Olympic medals make her the most-decorated Indigenous athlete from North America.

Jocelyne’s father, Andy Larocque, coached his daughters, and when Jocelyne decided to move to Calgary and train with the national team he knew that she was destined to be a champion.

“Working with obviously the great people that have so many memories of winning national titles and playing at that level with the likes of Hayley Wickenheiser, Danielle Goyette,” Andy Larocque told ICT. “The stories we got back in Manitoba from Jocelyne is that they really cared for her and they really brought her in and made her feel welcome.”

Canada’s Jocelyne Larocque handles the puck during the second period of a women’s exhibition hockey game against the United States ahead of the Beijing Olympics on Dec. 15, 2021, in Maryland Heights, Mo. Credit: AP Photo/Jeff Roberson

The Larocque family travels all over the world to support Jocelyne and try to keep her comfortable on the road, he said.

“Every time Jocelyn puts on that jersey and we travel internationally or within Canada, it’s always special,” her father said. “We make sure those things are done, from washing laundry to getting Starbucks before the game and all these little rituals that the girls have formed for themselves over the years. We make sure that these things are there. They seem small, but it brings that comfort of home.”

Taking home a medal at the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics adds more hardware to her overflowing trophy case.

In addition to her Olympic triumphs, Larocque has four gold medals and five silver in the world championships. In 2018, she was awarded the prestigious Tom Longboat Award for her contribution to Indigenous sports in Canada. In 2021, she was named Manitoba’s Indigenous Athlete of the Decade.

As a college student in 2008, she won a NCAA championship with the University of Minnesota-Duluth. Jocelyne is currently a member of the Professional Women’s Hockey League, playing for the Ottawa Charge.

Larocque has been representing her country for nearly 20 years, being named to the national team for the first time in 2008. She played in her first World Championship in 2011 and took home gold. She made her Olympic debut at the 2014 Winter games in Sochi, Russia, and took home her first Olympic gold.

Team Canada won silver at the 2018 games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and then returned to the top of the medal podium at the 2022 games in Beijing, China.

This year, Team Canada took on Team USA once again in what is perhaps the most-heated rivalry in hockey, with the competition in women’s hockey almost always coming down to Canada versus the U.S.

Canada won gold at the previous Olympics, but they were dominated by Team USA during the preliminary round at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, losing 5-0.

The Canadians led for most of the gold-medal game Thursday, however, until Team USA Captain Hilary Knight tied the game with the net empty and just over two minutes left to play. Megan Keller scored in overtime to win gold for the U.S.

Jocelyne is proud to be Métis and truly appreciates how her Indigenous identity is being acknowledged with her success.

“Growing up we knew we were Métis, but there wasn’t that much acknowledgement so for her to be acknowledged and for it to be world known that she is the most-decorated athlete, it’s something that she is so proud of and takes to heart,” Fritzsche said.

“And [she] wants Indigenous youth athletes and everybody to know that it doesn’t matter your age, your sex, anything, just if you have a dream, follow it. Look at her.”

The post Indigenous hockey player Jocelyne Larocque makes history with fourth Olympic medal appeared first on ICT.

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In human cells, DNA carries chemical or "epigenetic" marks that decide how genes will be used in different tissues. Yet in a group of specialized cells, known as "germ cells," which will later form sperm and eggs, these inherited chemical instructions must be erased or reshuffled so development can begin again with a fresh blueprint in future generations.

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One day, you’ll appreciate drinking recycled toilet water.

Urban populations are growing as water supplies are dwindling, often due to worsening droughts. In response, some communities are treating wastewater, rendering it perfectly safe for consumption. It is so pure, in fact, that if a treatment facility doesn’t add enough of the minerals the filtering process strips out, it could do serious damage to the human body. And trust me — it tastes great, too.

Cities throughout the American West are already recycling water, easing pressures on dwindling supplies. Now here’s a thought experiment: How much would you pay on your utility bill for the privilege of reused water, if it meant avoiding shortages and rationing in the future? A recent survey offers one answer. Residents of small communities of fewer than 10,000 people said they’d be willing to drop an average of $49 to do so. That money would underwrite water reuse programs, including rain capture systems. “I do think it is a bipartisan issue,” said Todd Guilfoos, an economist at the University of Rhode Island and co-author of the new paper. “It’s often just cheaper than some of the other available solutions.”

Wastewater recycling is not some far-out, prohibitively complicated technology. Western states are already doing a lot of it: A study published last year found that Nevada reuses 85 percent of its water, and Arizona 52 percent. Water agencies do this with reverse osmosis, passing the liquid through fine membranes to filter out solids before blasting it with UV light, which destroys any microbes. On a smaller scale, apartment buildings can house their own treatment infrastructure, cycling water back into units for nonpotable use, like flushing toilets.

Glasses containing raw sewage, plant effluent filtered, and recycled water are displayed at an advanced water purification facility in 2015 in Los Angeles, California.
Bob Riha, Jr. / Getty Images

On the municipal level, though, it’s expensive to build such facilities and run them continuously — it takes a lot of energy, for instance, to force water through those membranes. For a small community, charging each household $49 per month wouldn’t be quite enough to get a system up and running. “While that might be enough for operating, that doesn’t include what it would cost to actually build whatever water reuse infrastructure that you would need,” Guilfoos said. That’s when a town can turn to federal or state grants, or maybe utilize municipal bonds, to break ground. “I think communities need a little bit of a bump, actually, to get there,” Guilfoos added. “I think usually it’s in the face of some crises that these things end up getting built.”

Those crises are piling up across the U.S. Droughts are forcing some rural areas to pump more and more H2O from aquifers, depleting them. Tapped unsustainably, these underground supplies can collapse like an empty water bottle, making the land above sink, a phenomenon known as subsidence. This is a particularly pernicious problem in agricultural regions — California’s San Joaquin Valley has sunk up to 28 feet in recent decades, to offer just one example.

If supplies dwindle, a small community would have no choice but to ration water. Getting more efficient about using what we have can help, like encouraging the adoption of thriftier toilets and spraying less on lawns, as Las Vegas has done. (Those thirsty patches of green are in general an environmental mess, beyond their use of water.) But to truly get more sustainable, a community will have to recycle the H2O it has no choice but to use.

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Los Angeles just showed how spongy a city can be

Matt Simon

What’s interesting about this study, says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, is the apparent overcoming of the “yuck factor.” “There’s a visceral reaction to drinking reused water, particularly reused wastewater, that’s totally understandable,” said Kiparsky, who wasn’t involved in the research. “But over time, that has faded as the notion of reusing water to augment water supplies, including for drinking water, has become increasingly legitimized.”

At the same time, simple infrastructural improvements can capture heaps of another supply that’s readily wasted: rain. That $49 a month could fund bioswales, for instance — ditches full of vegetation that not only collect stormwater, but provide habitat for native plants and pollinators. Cities like Los Angeles are making themselves more “spongy” in this way, with roadside plots of land that collect runoff in subterranean tanks. Elsewhere, architects are building “agrihoods” around working farms that store precipitation to hydrate their crops through the summer.

In the American West, farmers are also having to contend with water whiplash, meaning years of plenty followed by years of desiccation. Generally speaking, rain is falling more heavily because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, increasing the bounty. But so too does climate change exacerbate droughts, making wastewater reuse especially welcome on farms. “All of this makes the water supply less certain in any given year, and more volatile from year to year,” said Tom Corringham, a research economist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who wasn’t involved in the new paper. “So any strategies that we can find that can smooth out the water cycle are beneficial.”

In addition to recycling wastewater, farmers are recharging the aquifers beneath their feet: When rains fall heavily, and there’s a surplus of water, channels divert fluid into “spreading grounds” — basically big dirt bowls built into the landscape. That allows precipitation to percolate back into the ground, reducing loss from evaporation, replacing what’s been drawn out, and helping avoid land subsidence. Then, when needed, a farm can pump the water back out of the ground, in which case it doesn’t need to draw from, say, a dam, leaving more water for others to use.

Together with wastewater reuse, aquifer recharge can help bolster the water system for the climatically perilous years ahead. As metropolises like Mexico City and Cape Town run the risk of running out of water, drinking recycled wastewater will be a whole lot more appealing than losing hydration entirely.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Would you pay $49 a month to drink recycled wastewater? on Feb 20, 2026.

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Peggy Shepard walked into her living room on Tuesday morning when her husband told her Jesse Jackson, the civil rights titan from South Carolina, had died. “Immediately tears started coming,” said Shepard, co-founder and executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a New York City-based nonprofit.

Nearly 40 years ago, Jackson had altered the course of Shepard’s life. In the late 1980s, she was working as an editor at Time-Life Books, when a colleague mentioned an organizing meeting for Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. “I walked into this Saturday meeting, and I walked out on air,” Shepard recalled. “Two hours later, I’m the press secretary for the Jackson campaign in Manhattan.”

That campaign — which would prove groundbreaking for Shepard and the country — pushed issues that had rarely been centered in national politics. Jackson made environmental justice, a term Americans were largely unfamiliar with at the time, a key plank of his second presidential run. He called for a national energy policy that would make offshore oil drilling obsolete, a plan to phase out nuclear energy, measures to reduce tailpipe pollution from cars, a conservation strategy to restore the nation’s wetlands and forests, and a federally sponsored workforce in the style of the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps. (The Biden administration launched a similar program, the American Climate Corps, in 2024, but shuttered it days ahead of President Trump’s return to office last year.)

“Being in the Jesse Jackson campaign led to everything I’m doing right now,” said Shepard of the volunteer job that took her across New York City and exposed her to stark disparities between neighborhoods, especially in pollution burdens. “If I hadn’t gone to that Saturday meeting, I’m not sure that I’d be sitting here today in this position.”

Jackson marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., transformed American politics with his two historic presidential campaigns, and inspired countless organizers — including environmental justice advocates — along the way. In his later years, he began making connections between segregation in Greenville, South Carolina, where he was born, and the toxic drinking water in Flint, Michigan.

He died Tuesday at his South Side Chicago home, surrounded by family. He was 84. Jackson had been in declining health since a 2015 Parkinson’s diagnosis that was later revised to progressive supranuclear palsy, a neurodegenerative disorder.

“Our father was a servant leader,” the Jackson family said in a statement. “We shared him with the world, and in return, the world became part of our extended family.”

Cheryl Johnson, who runs the Chicago-based environmental justice nonprofit People for Community Recovery, was about 10 years old when she first saw Jackson in person. It was a grade-school field trip to the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the prominent civil rights nonprofit he founded in 1971, headquartered on the South Side. The towering figure left a lifelong impression on her.

“I always remember he would say, ‘up with hope, down with dope,’” she said, recalling Jackson’s stockpile of charismatic appeals. “To see him fighting, at that particular time, for the right to be black in America, was an inspiration for me that I followed for many, many years,” Johnson said.

From the television set to magazine covers, Johnson grew up with Jackson in the background. Her mother, Hazel Johnson, founded People for Community Recovery, one of the first environmental justice organizations in the country, and worked with Jackson several times during the Clinton administration. Today she’s remembered as “the mother of the environmental justice movement.” Cheryl Johnson never worked directly with Jackson on environmental issues in Chicago, but the two “would have discussions on the phone,” she said. “He got it.”

Jackson was often pragmatic, not allowing environmental concerns to outweigh what he believed Black communities needed. In 2021, he successfully urged Illinois lawmakers to propose legislation making it easier to build a natural gas pipeline to the rural Pembroke Township south of Chicago, once referred to as the largest Black farming community in the Northern U.S.

“A secure source of energy would help kickstart other development — and in turn create jobs and generate hope,” Jackson wrote in an op-ed in support of the plan. As of this year, the pipeline is delivering natural gas to over 100 residents.

Jackson also took an active interest in the Flint water crisis, showing up repeatedly and lending support. In early 2016, Melissa Mays filed a lawsuit against the city of Flint, Michigan, for exposing nearly 100,000 residents to unsafe water contaminated with lead, a toxic metal linked to developmental delays, cardiovascular issues, and infertility.

Mays, a longtime Flint resident and a then-emerging clean water activist, remembers sitting in front of cameras and answering questions about her lawsuit when, unexpectedly, Jackson walked through the doors. “He walks right up to us to ask if he can say something,” she said.

Not long after, Jackson declared that officials should put “tape around the city, because Flint is a crime scene.” Mays said the moment validated her concerns and in part kicked off a longtime friendship between the two. Jackson returned to Flint repeatedly, helping turn the water crisis into national news and criticizing the Obama administration for not sufficiently responding to the crisis. He made his last public appearance in Flint in 2024 to visit the Flint Southwestern Classical Academy to highlight the importance of voting.

“He was not afraid of anybody,” Mays said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Jesse Jackson’s vision for America embraced environmental justice on Feb 20, 2026.

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Dozens of fans flocked to a Japanese zoo on Friday to catch a glimpse of a baby macaque who shot to social media stardom months after being abandoned by his mother.

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BLANTYRE, Malawi — On Lagson Gumbo’s side of the stream, BCA is a slum. Running parallel to the trickle of murky water is a narrow, dusty street lined with small, unplastered houses and shops trading in groceries, cheap alcohol and artisan services for residents of this crowded sector of Malawi’s principal commercial city, Blantyre. On the stream’s other bank is an affluent neighborhood with the same name. In the wealthy BCA, Blantyre’s City Council provides waste collection services, removing rubbish to a site on the city’s outskirts. It’s an open landfill where people from low-income settlements scavenge for whatever they find worth for reuse or sale. On the side where Gumbo lives and works, there’s no formal waste management. Residents dump rubbish from homes and shops into the stream. Kitchen waste and used nappies, old tires and plastic bottles and carrier bags get thrown into gullies and any other unoccupied spaces nearby. There are also batteries. At his makeshift workshop, Gumbo sorts through metal plates he has extracted from expired lead-acid batteries. Before him is a smoldering charcoal stove and a plastic bag filled with pellets of lead — also extracted from batteries. He puts the lead in a small tin container, pours acid over it and sets it on the stove to heat. “These pieces were positive cells in the batteries,” he says, gesturing to the plates he’s laid out on a small worktable. “When a battery stops functioning, it is not the negative electrodes that have expired. It…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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PADANG, Indonesia — The government of West Sumatra plans to move forward with a legal pathway for up to 300 small mines operating illegally in the heavily forested province, joining several other devolved governments grappling with how to treat the vast number of unlicensed mines operating across Indonesia. “Environmental damage brings long-term problems, therefore we can’t stay silent,” West Sumatra Governor Mahyeldi Ansarullah said in a statement. If approved by Indonesia’s mining and energy ministry, West Sumatra could add substantially to the total number of “community mining zones” already created by the government to date. A crucial distinction is that this deregulation initiative is expanding on paper but remains incipient in practice. By 2024, Indonesia had agreed to 1,215 of these Wilayah Pertambangan Rakyat mining zones in 19 of the country’s 38 provinces, with the zones applying to extraction of commodities like gold and sand. Crucially, however, the government has so far awarded only a handful of the practical permits that actually allow a mine to operate. The development in West Sumatra takes place amid a nationwide crackdown by a military-led forestry task force, which has seized millions of hectares of unlicensed forest operations, shifting its focus from plantations in 2025 to mining in 2026. The government of West Sumatra in 2025 issued calls for a crackdown on illegal mining, but a change in tactics is now underway, recent statements by Mahyeldi indicate. “Regulations must be followed,” the governor added. “But we also have to prepare solutions in order for…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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The climate crisis is warming Antarctica fast, with potentially disastrous consequences. Now scientists have modeled the best- and worst-case scenarios for climate change in Antarctica, demonstrating just how high the stakes are—but also how much harm can still be prevented.

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JAKARTA — The Indonesian government’s revocation of 28 forestry, plantation and mining permits after the deadly Sumatra floods is facing new scrutiny after researchers found that several of the concessions cited in the announcement had already expired, been revoked years earlier or are located outside the disaster-hit watersheds. The revocations, announced after Cyclone Senyar triggered landslides and flash floods that killed about 1,200 people, mark a shift in enforcement. Instead of focusing on court-led environmental cases and restoration orders, officials say the land will be managed by state-owned enterprises under the sovereign wealth fund Danantara. Civil society groups say that risks turning a disaster response into a restructuring of control over forest and resource assets. Officials have said the 28 companies violated environmental and forestry regulations through their activities such as forest clearing and thus contributed to ecological damage linked to the disasters. However, an analysis by the NGO Auriga Nusantara found that some of the permits cited in the announcement had already been revoked years earlier, while others had expired before the floods occurred. The discrepancies add to growing confusion over how the policy is being implemented, which companies are actually linked to the November 2025 floods and landslides and what will happen to the former concession areas now slated for transfer to state-owned enterprises under Danantara. “We found that several companies’ concessions are not located in the disaster-affected areas — they are quite far from the disaster zones,” Auriga legal director Roni Saputra told Mongabay. A woman stands…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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Shirley Sneve
ICT

Marique Moss is an Afro-Indigenous educator and enrolled member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, with Dakota roots in Saskatchewan. She holds degrees in Native American Studies and Indigenous Peoples Law. She is committed to reclaiming narratives, building equity, and uplifting communities through culturally grounded approaches.

With her husband, Theodore “Naawakweose” Marcil, she owns Mashkiki Studios in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It centers Indigenous knowledge and identity through workshops, consulting, and creative offerings that nourish both spirit and community. ICT’s Shirley Sneve caught up with Moss in celebration of Black History Month. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

ICT: Why have you decided to take on this work?

Moss: I’m proudly Afro-Indigenous and I started this work because I saw a need for Afro-Indigenous voices within Indian Country.

I got a degree in Native American and Indigenous Studies. I thought, “this will be a breeze – I’m Native American.” It was the hardest thing of my entire life. But as I was studying and researching, I wanted to know more about myself. Are there more Afro-Indigenous people out there?

There’s a good amount of literature on mixed natives like Métis and things like that. So, I had to pull a lot of different references from a lot of different areas. However, it was still not representative of who I am. So, I saw a gap there. I wanted to know if people looked like me, if people felt like me, and so on and so forth.

So, in my journey, identity became important. I started teaching K through 12 American Indian education and that led into identity — Afro, Indigeneity and affirmations. I always had beautiful blue-eyed Osage babies in my classes, and I had Muskogee babies with beautiful Afros. And they know their songs, they know their dances, their traditions. And I just liked to reinforce and amplify those stories.

Marique Moss holds one of her published works, ‘Sweetgrass and Soul Food.’ She explains that the title is a “play on my identity. Sweetgrass for my mom’s side and soul food for my dad’s side. … The book is filled with grief, humor, joy and real experiences.” (Courtesy photo )

Then I thought that if I could wear my heart on my sleeve and just tell my story, maybe someone out there would be like, “My gosh, this is incredible. This is exactly how I felt at this exact age and the exact time. I’m so glad I’m not alone.”

That’s when my memoir came into being. It’s called “Sweetgrass and Soul Food.” It’s a play on my identity. Sweetgrass for my mom’s side and soul food for my dad’s side. And soul food is also born out of survival. I always overlap that with fry bread, oxtail, you name it. The book is filled with grief, humor, joy and real experiences.

I’ve gotten messages from all over – Wampanoag territory, Oklahoma and California – and they’re, like, “Hey, I’m 53. And I didn’t see myself until I read this book.” And it really hits you right in the heart. Because I thought that I was going to hit younger generations so that they didn’t have to go through that difficult period that I had to go through. But I’m so happy that it’s like hitting across generations. It makes me so incredibly happy.

ICT: It sounds to me like you grew up in a pretty secure, proud household.

Moss: Yes, I definitely did. My mom is a beautiful 6-foot 1-inch Hidatsa from North Dakota but she grew up fighting the headwinds of federal policy. She was adopted by a German father and a Scottish mother. My grandfather was very high in the Veterans Administration, so she hopped around a lot. My grandmother was a nurse. So, my mother did a ton of traveling. She was one of three siblings from the same tribe, MHA, who were adopted and never fit in. My mother has her own Oscar-winning story!

And then there’s my beautiful father, who is 6-foot 9-inches tall. He’s from Detroit – Motown. He’s my favorite person in the world. He’s a social worker. He works to bolster black male adolescent health and strengths. My mom is a nurse, a lawyer and an author. So I definitely had a strong system to look up to – physically and emotionally. I’m one of four siblings.

ICT: Did you face any racism or discrimination in school?

Moss: Oh my gosh, did I ever! In Catholic school, in particular, I internalized that I was Black. I’m a bubbly girl. I like my Lisa Frank (whimsical commercial products and school supplies.) I was watching Sesame Street online. I just saw myself as a curly haired girl who liked to get scratched up with her knees in the backyard. And I saw my dad, he was Black. My siblings are the same color. And I saw my Native mom, was like, “My gosh, this is just normal, right?” But when I started going to predominantly white school, I would get such weird questions. I write about this in my memoir. On the first day, it might have been the second day, the other students were like, “Hey are you guys here on a scholarship?” And I didn’t even know what that meant.

So, it was just sort of things like that popping up that we noticed. There  a couple of instances – that I write about again – including the time I got my hair cornrowed for the first time. I called it my crown, my jewel, my beauty. I felt so awesome. And the next day I was called down to the principal’s office, and I was told I was out of uniform, and I had to take my hair out.

Getting your hair braided takes a minimum of, like, five hours, especially if you’re what you call tender headed like me. Any movement you just sort of pull your head and you hate getting your hair done, but it’s all worth it. It was from my auntie Lynette. I felt so beautiful and they told me I was out of uniform and I had to take it all out.

And then some white girls came back from Jamaica on spring break and had the same cornrows. They were allowed to wear them – with their scalps burned from the sun – until the beads fell out. It was definitely difficult.

ICT: You live in Minneapolis. What’s it like these days?

Moss: Living in Minneapolis right now is extraordinarily tough. I love Minneapolis. This is where I grew up. It is always going to be home base for me. It’s really difficult right now for any type of marginalized citizen with the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) occupation of Minnesota. What we’re doing as a community right now is we’re just trying to collectively heal and band together to try to feel we’re doing something.

Through Mushkiki Studios, my small business that I do run with my husband, we’ve created a mutual aid network. We usually operate as a storefront and we sell teas, tinctures, earrings. Our neighbors around us are immigrant small business owners. We couldn’t in good faith keep operating as a business and put them at jeopardy. That goes against everything in our mission and everything that we stand for.

We went into emergency response mode. We flipped our model completely and we just started taking donations through our storefront. We said, “If you have anything that you can provide, please drop it off at our storefront.” We were joyously overwhelmed when we ended up with 465 volunteers that signed up to help us with our mutual aid efforts.

And as of today, as of right now, we have 355 families that have signed up for mutual aid. Some of them have now been sheltering in place for six weeks. It can really get to you.

I have done a couple of deliveries that have been life-saving medications.I’m glad that I can be a lifeline for my neighbors.

I love Minnesotans so much. What’s happened is just so awesome. We couldn’t do it without our community and we wouldn’t be here without our community. So, we’re really happy to work with each other in this way. We are still taking donations and we’re going to do this until we can’t or until it’s not needed.

The post ‘I’m proudly Afro-Indigenous’ appeared first on ICT.

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Scientists at Rothamsted Research and ApresLabs Ltd have demonstrated that SYN-A, a naturally derived synergist extracted from olive oil, can restore the effectiveness of pyrethroid insecticides against CSFB, the most devastating autumn pest of oilseed rape.In simulated field experiments, plants sprayed with a mixture of SYN-A and lambda-cyhalothrin increased cabbage stem flea beetle (CSFB) mortality from 20% to 75% and reduced plant damage by at least 50% compared to lambda-cyhalothrin applications alone.

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Social interactions are crucial for the survival of most animal species. Living in groups helps animals spot predators, find food and raise more successful young than they could alone. Conventional wisdom has long held that highly social animals, like lions or capuchin monkeys, are highly vulnerable when their populations decline. But new research suggests that more loosely social animals, like agoutis or tapirs, may actually face greater risk when their numbers fall. Researchers reviewed existing models, data and case studies looking at the relationship between social interactions and survival. Michael Gil, a co-author of the study, with the University of Colorado Boulder, told Mongabay in an interview that highly social animals tend to have a stable number of social interactions, “and they’re going to maintain that; even if the population declines, they’re going to figure out a way to maintain that,” he said. If part of an African wild dog (Lycaon pictus) pack is killed off, for example, the remaining animals will do everything they can to join a new group, their immediate survival depending on it. Loosely social species respond differently. “As the populations decline, their social interactions also decline because they do not make up for it,” Gil said. That means there are fewer squirrels, for instance, to keep an eye out and warn of predators. Or smaller schools of fish that can hunt together. If those populations decrease, then their social interactions also decline, which can lead to more population declines. It becomes “a dangerous feedback loop,”…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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Mitral regurgitation is the most prevalent valvular heart disease in humans. It's also common among dogs, especially older and smaller breed dogs. In both species, the mitral valve fails to close tightly enough to keep blood from flowing back into the left atrium as the heart is contracting. Untreated, it can lead to heart failure. Surgery is often needed to repair this issue in humans. For dogs, treatment has historically been less advanced, but veterinarians and animal researchers are taking cues from the human health world.

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Forest loss does more than reduce tree cover. A new global study involving UBC Okanagan researchers shows it can fundamentally change how watersheds hold and release water. The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analyzed data from 657 watersheds across six continents.

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Researchers from the University of British Columbia argue that a widely used method to understand and predict flood risk has led scientists to miscalculate how forests can prevent major flooding. The paper, published in Ambio, synthesizes decades of research to explain why the standard approach used to evaluate how forests impact flooding—comparing individual flood peaks before and after disturbance—fails to capture how floods actually develop.

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Researchers from the USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and the University of California, Davis, are helping beekeepers protect their colonies from destructive varroa mites. In a new study, the researchers investigate the effectiveness of combining a widely used mite-killing pesticide with an agent that inhibits the mites' ability to tolerate the pesticide.

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On World Wetlands Day, the recent report released by the Mediterranean Wetlands Observatory (MWO) warns that despite their vital importance for populations and biodiversity, Mediterranean wetlands remain fragile ecosystems, subject to multiple pressures (intensive agriculture, overexploitation of water, artificialisation, and climate change) that are causing rapid and continuous losses.

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Growing up, you probably changed your style based on your social influences. It turns out, such pressures affect the appearance of young clownfish (anemonefish) too. A new study from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) has revealed the social influences and biological mechanisms controlling bar loss in tomato anemonefish, showing how the presence of older fish changes the speed at which young fish lose their additional white vertical stripe.

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Researchers have identified a "tipping point" about 2.7 million years ago when global climate conditions switched from being relatively warm and stable to cold and chaotic, as continental ice sheets expanded in the Northern Hemisphere. Following this transition, Earth's climate began swinging back and forth between warm interglacial periods and frigid ice ages, linked to slow, cyclic changes in Earth's orbit. However, glacial periods after this tipping point became far more variable, with large swings in temperature over relatively short timescales of roughly a thousand years.

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A paper published in Science describes the discovery of Spinosaurus mirabilis, a new spinosaurid species found in Niger. A 20-person team led by Paul Sereno, Ph.D., Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago, unearthed the find at a remote locale in the central Sahara, adding important new fossil finds to the closing chapter of spinosaurid evolution.

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The search space for protein engineering grows exponentially with complexity. A protein of just 100 amino acids has 20100 possible variants—more combinations than atoms in the observable universe. Traditional engineering methods might test hundreds of variants but limit exploration to narrow regions of the sequence space. Recent machine learning approaches enable broader searches through computational screening. However, these approaches still require tens of thousands of measurements, or 5–10 iterative rounds.

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Scientists have long sought to understand why some plants are fragrant powerhouses while others remain subtle. Now, a research team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has cracked a genetic "bottleneck," using precision gene editing to boost the scent of flowers and the nutritional profile of vegetables. The paper is published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences.

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Pauly Denetclaw
ICT

Deb Haaland, candidate for New Mexico governor, is among the latest public figures named in the Jeffrey Epstein files.

The files show Haaland rode on a jet tied to Epstein in September 2014, when she was the running mate to Gary King as he sought the governor’s office.

During that campaign, Haaland, King and three others chartered a private plane that was paid for and organized by the late Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender who had already served 13 months in jail for his crimes.

A spokesperson for Haaland said she was unaware who had chartered the plane and she did not meet Epstein during that trip.

“Jeffrey Epstein is a despicable predator who committed heinous crimes and Deb strongly supports a full investigation into the crimes committed both in New Mexico and abroad,” Hannah Menchhoff, Deb for New Mexico spokesperson, said in a statement. “Deb never had any interaction with him and the way in which the plane was chartered was never communicated to her.”

The files also showed emails from King to Epstein, asking for campaign donations. King told KRQE News 13 that his campaign gave those donations to a nonprofit once Epstein was connected to sex trafficking.

The post Epstein files show Deb Haaland on jet with Gary King appeared first on ICT.

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