ECLIPSE

Shoulder Thursday!

Alternating Cable Shoulder Press:

Move the cables to the bottom of the tower and select an appropriate weight.

·  Grasp the cables and hold them at shoulder height, palms facing forward. This will be your starting position.

·  Keeping your head and chest up, extend through the elbow to press one side directly over head.

·  After pausing at the top, return to the starting position and repeat on the opposite side.

7 Ways to Be An Ally to Native Peoples This Thanksgiving

In the United States, so much of what Americans are thankful for — our families, homes, the foods we enjoy — are the products of ongoing colonization. We might feel grateful for the place we grew up, but that place exists on stolen land. Coming together with family can be challenging, as we all have different ideas of what “America” is. Yet, if there’s one thing many folks can agree on, it’s that in the history of this country, Native people were wronged.

With the arrival of European settlers, an estimated 90% of the millions of Indigenous peoples — a number debated to be between 20 and 100 million — died. It wasn’t just from disease: The colonizing settlers enacted genocide of Indigenous peoples through starvation, torture, and massacres. It may be true that the “first Thanksgiving” was a peaceful gathering of Pilgrims and Wampanoag people, who together celebrated the Pilgrims’ first harvest in 1621. But given the massive genocide their ancestors experienced at the hands of European colonizers, it’s hard for Indigenous folks to see this holiday as anything other than a national day of mourning.

“What’s wrong with Thanksgiving is not so much the celebration as it is the American mythology that surrounds it,” Alaina Comeaux, an Ishak activist who works to decolonize history, tells Teen Vogue. “It allows for a certain whitewashed fantasy that erases the devastating impacts of colonization that persist to this day.”

Native peoples continue to fight for their lands and sovereignty while facing exceptional rates of poverty, suicide, and sexual violence, so it’s way past time for more Americans to acknowledge the difficult truths at the heart of Thanksgiving. If you’d like to do your part to help rewrite the story at your gathering this year, here are some ways you can start working toward a more just future.

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📸: Getty Images

Artwork by Tomasz Alen Kopera, Animation by George RedHawk

Lobbying, to most people, looks like bribery — the lobbyist who refuses to contribute to the reelection campaign isn’t going to get a meeting, much less an ally.

No member of congress wants to feel bought. What they want to feel is convinced. It’s the lobbyist’s job to make the members of congress ‘feel’ like they’re making the right decision, not just the decision they were paid to make.

Lobbying, persuasion, or interest representation is the act of attempting to influence the actions, policies, or decisions of officials in their daily life, most often legislators or members of regulatory agencies. Lobbying is done by many types of people, associations and organized groups, including individuals in the private sector, corporations, fellow legislators or government officials, or advocacy groups (interest groups). Lobbyists may be among a legislator’s constituencies, meaning a voter or bloc of voters within their electoral district, or not; they may engage in lobbying as a business, or not. Professional lobbyists are people whose business is trying to influence legislation, regulation, or other government decisions, actions, or policies on behalf of a group or individual who hires them. Individuals and nonprofit organizations can also lobby as an act of volunteering or as a small part of their normal job (for instance, a CEO meeting with a representative about a project important to their company, or an activist meeting with their legislator in an unpaid capacity). Governments often define and regulate organized group lobbying that has become influential.

More research below:

How Corporate Lobbyists Conquered American Democracy Is Lobbying Good or Bad? Transparency and the Lobby Problem The Lobbying Problem and How We Can Fix It Corporate Lobbying: Bad for Business, Bad for America Influence & Lobbying Lobbying wiki Lobbying: The Scourge of Good Government What is shadow lobbying? How influence peddlers shape policy in the dark The American lobbying industry is completely out of control Lobbyists Explained Lobbyist Documentary Lobbyists in America 5 Crazy Facts About Lobbyists – End corruption. Defend the Republic

(Image caption: A bundle of neurons: A bioengineering team at Brown University can grow “mini-brains” of neurons and supporting cells that form networks and are electrically active. Credit: Hoffman-Kim lab/Brown University)

An accessible approach to making a mini-brain

If you need a working miniature brain — say for drug testing, to test neural tissue transplants, or to experiment with how stem cells work — a new paper describes how to build one with what the Brown University authors say is relative ease and low expense. The little balls of brain aren’t performing any cogitation, but they produce electrical signals and form their own neural connections — synapses — making them readily producible testbeds for neuroscience research, the authors said.

“We think of this as a way to have a better in vitro [lab] model that can maybe reduce animal use,” said graduate student Molly Boutin, co-lead author of the new paper in the journal Tissue Engineering: Part C. “A lot of the work that’s done right now is in two-dimensional culture, but this is an alternative that is much more relevant to the in vivo [living] scenario.”

Just a small sample of living tissue from a single rodent can make thousands of mini-brains, the researchers said. The recipe involves isolating and concentrating the desired cells with some centrifuge steps and using that refined sample to seed the cell culture in medium in an agarose spherical mold.

The mini-brains, about a third of a millimeter in diameter, are not the first or the most sophisticated working cell cultures of a central nervous system, the researchers acknowledged, but they require fewer steps to make and they use more readily available materials.

“The materials are easy to get and the mini-brains are simple to make,” said co-lead author Yu-Ting Dingle, who earned her Ph.D. at Brown in May 2015. She compared them to retail 3-D printers which have proliferated in recent years, bringing that once-rare technology to more of a mass market. “We could allow all kinds of labs to do this research.”

The spheres of brain tissue begin to form within a day after the cultures are seeded and have formed complex 3-D neural networks within two to three weeks, the paper shows.

25-cent mini-brains

There are fixed costs, of course, but an approximate cost for each new mini-brain is on the order of $0.25, said study senior author Diane Hoffman-Kim, associate professor of molecular pharmacology, physiology and biotechnology and associate professor of engineering at Brown.

“We knew it was a relatively high-throughput system, but even we were surprised at the low cost per mini-brain when we computed it,” Hoffman-Kim said.

Hoffman-Kim’s lab collaborated with fellow biologists and bioengineers at Brown — faculty colleagues Julie Kauer, Jeffrey Morgan, and Eric Darling are all co-authors — to build the mini-brains. She wanted to develop a testbed for her lab’s basic biomedical research. She was interested, for example, in developing a model to test aspects of neural cell transplantation, as has been proposed to treat Parkinson’s disease. Boutin was interested in building working 3-D cell cultures to study how adult neural stem cells develop.

Morgan’s Providence startup company, MicroTissues Inc., makes the 3-D tissue engineering molds used in the study.

The method they developed yields mini-brains with several important properties:

Diverse cell types: The cultures contain both inhibitory and excitatory neurons and several varieties of essential neural support cells called glia.

Electrically active: the neurons fire and spike and form synaptic connections, producing complex networks.

3-D: Cells connect and communicate within a realistic geometry, rather than merely across a flat plane as in a 2-D culture.

Natural density: Experiments showed that the mini-brains have a density of a few hundred thousand cells per cubic millimeter, which is similar to a natural rodent brain.

Physical structure: Cells in the mini-brain produce their own extracellular matrix, producing a tissue with the same mechanical properties (squishiness) as natural tissue. The cultures also don’t rely on foreign materials such as scaffolds of collagen.

Longevity: In testing, cultured tissues live for at least a month.

Hoffman-Kim, who is affiliated with the Brown Institute for Brain Science and the Center for Biomedical Engineering, said she hopes the mini-brains might proliferate to many different labs, including those of researchers who have questions about neural tissue but not necessarily the degree of neuroscience and cell culture equipment required of other methods.

“If you are that person in that lab, we think you shouldn’t have to equip yourself with a microelectronics facility, and you shouldn’t have to do embryonic dissections in order to generate an in vitro model of the brain,” Hoffman-Kim said.

I probably has less than 1000 days. I pray for the best but my current reality and intuition says something otherwise. I’ll get my estate established this year for sure.

“Crystals are living beings at the beginning of creation. All things have a frequency and a vibration.” ~ Nikola Tesla