Today we celebrate Juneteenth, the day when word of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the farthest outpost in America. Many people do not realize that Emancipation did not legally end slavery in the United States, however. The 13th Amendment — the culmination of centuries of resistance by enslaved people, a lifetime of abolitionist campaigning and a bloody civil war — prohibited involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

In the North, that so-called exception clause was interpreted as allowing the private contracting of forced prison labor, which was already underway, and in the ex-Confederacy it gave rise to the much more brutal system by which freed men and women were routinely arrested under false charges and then leased out to plantation owners and industrialists to work off their sentence. Some historians have described this convict leasing system as “worse than slavery,” because there was no incentive to avoid working those people to death.

Over time, courts accepted that all people who are incarcerated lose the protection against slavery or involuntary servitude. The legacy of that legal deference is a grim one. Today, a majority of the 1.2 million Americans locked up in state and federal prisons work under duress in jobs that cover the entire spectrum, from cellblock cleaning to skilled manufacturing, for wages as low as a few cents per hour or, in several states, for nothing at all.

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During a chaotic period some 50 million years ago, the strange deep-sea creatures left the ocean bottom and thrived by clamping onto their mates.

(A male anglerfish. Over time, the male can physically fuse with the female, connecting to her skin and bloodstream. Eventually, the male loses its eyes and all internal organs except for the testes.Credit…David Shale/Nature Picture Library, Alamy)

How did the ghoulish creatures known as anglerfish pull off the evolutionary feat that let them essentially take over the ocean’s sunless depths?

It took peculiar sex — extremely peculiar sex.

Finding a mate in the deep sea can be extremely difficult because of the environment’s incomprehensibly vast size. By some estimates, the dark zone amounts to more than 97 percent of the planetary space inhabited by living things, mainly because the ocean plunges to a maximum depth of nearly seven miles. In contrast, land habitats make up less than 1 percent of the planet’s biosphere because the band of life is so narrow, making its volume quite small.

Scientists at Yale University have discovered that a burst of anglerfish diversification began some 50 million years ago as the ancestral line developed a bizarre strategy to ensure successful reproduction in the dark wilderness.

To mate, tiny males would clamp with sharp teeth onto the bellies of much larger females. Some males would let go after mating while others would permanently fuse into the females. The males that stayed attached became permanent organs for sperm production.

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When President Barack Obama hosted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office in 2014, the Israeli leader lectured him about Gaza’s future, a Palestinian state and an Iranian nuclear deal in a tone that Obama found condescending and dismissive.

After the meeting, an aide asked how it went. Netanyahu “peed on my leg,” Obama replied, according to two people familiar with the exchange who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose a private conversation.

The moment was emblematic of a dynamic that is culminating in the bitter debates over Israel now erupting across the American political landscape. Over the past 16 years, Netanyahu has departed sharply from his predecessors’ studious bipartisanship to embrace Republicans and disdain Democrats, an attitude increasingly mirrored in each party’s approach to Israel.The war in Gaza has vastly accelerated the shift, as the once-broad support from Americans for Israel is shattering along partisan and generational lines. The divide, playing out in angry protests and Democratic debates, marks a fundamental shift in U.S. politics.

“I don’t think there’s any other way to say it: Netanyahu has been an absolute disaster for Israel’s support around the world,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “Here in the United States, Netanyahu made a reckless decision to integrate himself with the Republican Party, taking very clear sides in U.S. politics, and it has come with serious consequences.”

Netanyahu is not solely responsible for the shift. Israel has moved steadily to the right and the Democratic Party to the left in recent years, while memories of the Holocaust, which long undergirded Americans’ sympathy for Israel, have increasingly faded into the past. But Netanyahu has led the change with a strategy of aligning himself with the American right, former aides say — a decision that underlies his growing rift with President Biden, who personifies the traditional Democratic affection for Israel.

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Some excerpts;

You may remember learning about RNA (ribonucleic acid) back in your high school biology class as the messenger that carries information stored in DNA to instruct the formation of proteins. Such messenger RNA, mRNA for short, recently entered the mainstream conversation thanks to the role they played in the Covid-19 vaccines. But RNA is much more than a messenger, as critical as that function may be.

Other types of RNA, called “noncoding” RNAs, are a tiny biological powerhouse that can help to treat and cure deadly diseases, unlock the potential of the human genome and solve one of the most enduring mysteries of science: explaining the origins of all life on our planet.

If RNA could both hold information and orchestrate the assembly of molecules, it was very likely that the first living things to spring out of the primordial ooze were RNA-based organisms.

There are more than 400 RNA-based drugs in development, beyond the ones that are already in use. And in 2022 alone, more than $1 billion in private equity funds was invested in biotechnology start-ups to explore frontiers in RNA research.

Although most scientists now agree on RNA’s bright promise, we are still only beginning to unlock its potential. Consider, for instance, that some 75 percent of the human genome consists of dark matter that is copied into RNAs of unknown function. While some researchers have dismissed this dark matter as junk or noise, I expect it will be the source of even more exciting breakthroughs.

We don’t know yet how many of these possibilities will prove true. But if the past 40 years of research have taught me anything, it is never to underestimate this little molecule. The age of RNA is just getting started.

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posted by f.sheikh