Malevolent Designer News - How A Virus Turns Its Bacteria Hosts Into Zombies - And Reduces The Marine Food Supply

Sunset over the island of Helgoland, from where the researchers obtained their samples.

© Jan Brüwer/Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology

Under the microscope, scientists identified SAR11 zombie cells by their distinct lack of ribosomes. In an example comparing a live, infected SAR11 cell to an infected zombie cell: blue indicates bacterial DNA, yellow shows ribosomes, and purple highlights phage genes. The live cell (upper pictures) displays all three colors, while the zombie cell (lower pictures) lacks the yellow ribosome signal. The final column of images on the right merges these colors, clearly distinguishing the two cell types.

© Jan Brüwer/Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology.

Zombie cells in the sea: Viruses keep the most common marine bacteria in check

Aficionados of creationism’s malevolent designer will be interested to learn that researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Biology in Bremen, Germany, have discovered a virus that seriously reduces the population of a marine microbe that is an essential part of the marine food cycle, so seriously depleting the food chain for other marine organisms.

The microbe is a bacterium, know to science as a Pelagibacterale or SAR11, and, as an added piece of nastiness, the virus doesn't just infect the bacterium, it turns it into something that is halfway between dead and alive. In other words, it keeps the essential processes working while it uses the parts it needs to make more copies of itself from the bacterium's mitochondrial DNA.

Creationism in Crisis - A Spiny-Legged Arachnid From Over 300 Million Years Before 'Creation Week' - Giving Creationists Nightmares

Fossilized Douglassarachne acanthopoda,

Credit: Paul Selden

Reconstruction of the 308-million-year-old arachnid Douglassarachne acanthopoda from the famous Mazon Creek locality.

Credit: Paul Selden

Ancient arachnid from coal forests of America stands out for its spiny legs | KU News

The technical term for the fear of learning that creationists seem to suffer from, is 'sophophobia' (from the Greek for knowledge or wisdom (sophia) and fear (phobia)). Their other manifest fears are 'atelophobia' (literally, a fear of being wrong) and theophobia (fear of gods).

Combine those acute anxiety disorders with arachnophobia (fear of arachnids or more precisely spiders) and sesquipedalophobia (fear of long words) and you can begin to understand why creationists can never be induced to read science papers like this one, which describes a fossilised arachnid with heavily-armoured, spiky legs from about 308 million years ago, that scientists have named Douglassarachne acanthopoda.

If anything is designed to deter creationists from reading about it, it is a fearsome arachnid with a long name that would make any creationists imaginary 'friend' really angry if they learned about it and might even make them wonder if they could be wrong. What could be more terrifying for a creationist?

So, creationists should either stop reading now, or find a responsible adult to be with them, because this describes how and where this 308 million-year-old fossil was found and how it fits in with what we know of the evolution of the arachnids, which includes spiders, mites, harvestmen, tics and the sister group, scorpions.

The fossil was found in shale in a coalmine spoil tip at Mazon Creek, Illinois, USA by palaeontologists Paul Selden from the University of Kansas and the Natural History Museum of London and Jason Dunlop from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. They have written up their discovery in an open access paper in the Journal of Palaeontology and describe it in a University of Kansas news release:

Unintelligent Design - A Heath-Robinson Solution To A Simple Problem

Convolutriloba longifissura.
Fluorescence imaging shows the algal cells in red, and the acoel cells in blue and green.

Dania Nanes Sarfati

Convolutriloba longifissura. The green body color of the adult comes from algal symbionts integrated in its skin. The red stripes in the middle of the body of this 3 millimeter long worm indicate mature oocytes.

Credit: Eric Rottinger/www.Kahikai.org
National Science Foundation - Media Gallery

The surprising relationship between marine worms and the algae that live inside them | Stanford Report

Creationists who like to cite complexity as evidence of intelligent design, either don't understand design or believe the designer is a bumbling idiot who never settles for a simple solution when a more complicated one is available, and never misses an opportunity to make a mountain out a molehill, as my old mother used to say if we turned a small problem into a big one.

That's of course, if you believe that creationist superstition of magic creation and not the scientifically proven, evolution, as an explanation for the form of living things.

Imagine you're a creator who is designing a simple marine flatworm and you decide that just what it needs is to be able to make food the way plants do, using the energy in sunlight to turn carbon dioxide into sugars. You previously designed some bacteria to perform this process, then, in an earlier invention, you put some of these bacteria in a single-celled plant and made algae. You could have given the single-celled plant the same enzymes and metabolic pathway you gave the bacteria but that was too simple, so you put the bacteria inside the plant cell as cell organelles called chloroplasts.

Tell me all about the marine flat worm Convolutriloba longifissura, please. Convolutriloba longifissura is a species of acoelomorph worm that inhabits marine environments. Here are some key details about this fascinating organism:

Taxonomy and Classification

• Kingdom: Animalia
• Phylum: Acoelomorpha
• Class: Acoela
• Order: Acoelida
• Family: Convolutidae
• Genus: Convolutriloba
• Species: Convolutriloba longifissura

Morphology and Anatomy

• Size and Shape: Convolutriloba longifissura are small, flattened worms. They are typically only a few millimeters in length.
• Body Structure: They lack a true gut and body cavity, characteristic of acoelomorphs. Instead, their digestive system consists of a simple gastrovascular cavity.
• Symbiotic Algae: These worms often contain symbiotic algae within their tissues, which provide them with nutrients through photosynthesis. This relationship is beneficial for both the worm and the algae.

Reproduction

• Asexual Reproduction: Convolutriloba longifissura is well known for its remarkable method of asexual reproduction, specifically through transverse fission. The worm can split itself into two or more parts, each of which regenerates into a complete organism. The name "longifissura" hints at this long splitting process.
• Regeneration: Post-fission, each segment is capable of regenerating the missing parts, making this species a subject of interest in the study of regenerative biology.

Habitat

• Marine Environment: These worms are found in marine environments, often associated with coral reefs and shallow coastal waters. They prefer habitats where they can benefit from their symbiotic algae.

Behavior

• Locomotion: Convolutriloba longifissura moves using cilia on its ventral surface, gliding smoothly over substrates in its habitat.
• Feeding: The diet consists mainly of small particles and microorganisms. Their symbiotic relationship with algae also plays a crucial role in their nutrition.

Ecological Role

• Symbiosis and Ecosystem Interaction: As part of the marine ecosystem, they play a role in nutrient cycling and serve as a food source for other marine animals. Their relationship with symbiotic algae also contributes to primary production in their habitats.

Research Significance

• Regeneration Studies: The ability of Convolutriloba longifissura to regenerate its body parts makes it an important model organism in scientific research, particularly in studies related to developmental biology and regenerative medicine.
• Evolutionary Insights: Studying this worm provides insights into the early evolution of bilaterian animals, given its position in the phylogenetic tree.

Conservation Status

• Population and Threats: There is limited information on the conservation status of Convolutriloba longifissura specifically. However, like many marine organisms, they could be affected by habitat degradation, pollution, and climate change.

Fun Fact

• Bioluminescence: Some species within the Convolutriloba genus are known for their bioluminescence, although it is not well-documented if Convolutriloba longifissura exhibits this trait.

In summary, Convolutriloba longifissura is a small but remarkable marine worm notable for its asexual reproduction through fission, its symbiotic relationship with algae, and its significance in scientific research on regeneration and evolutionary biology.

But what about these flatworms?

You now have three choices: you can give them the same enzymes and processes you gave the bacteria, but that was too simple for the algae, so why make it that easy for the flatworm? You could put the bacteria in the flat-worm cells like you did with the algae; but why do that when there is an even More complicated method? The third choice is to put the algae inside the flatworms and, as that's the most complicated way of doing it, why not go for that solution?

Creationism in Crisis - Dinosaurs Evolved Warm-Bloodedness 180 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Artist’s impression of a dromaeosaur, a type of feathered theropod, in the snow. This raptor was a relative of Velociraptor.

Davide Bonadonna/Universidade

First ‘warm-blooded’ dinosaurs may have emerged 180 million years ago | UCL News - UCL – University College London

Of all the different orders of living organisms' only mammals and birds today are warm-blooded, i.e., they are able to maintain a body temperature, within a certain range of ambient temperatures, by either producing heat or losing it, as necessary.

It might be thought that this indicates that the ability evolved in a common ancestor but of the ancestors of birds, the evidence suggests that many dinosaurs were cold-blooded like today's reptiles, and mammals are descendants of an earlier, pre-dinosaurian reptiles, so these similar processes for maintaining the body temperature may be more a matter of convergence than common ancestry.

Do mammals and birds use the same method to maintain their body temperature, and if not, how do they differ? Mammals and birds both maintain their body temperatures through endothermy, meaning they generate and regulate heat internally to keep their body temperatures stable. However, there are differences in how they achieve this due to variations in their physiology and behaviors. Here’s an overview of the similarities and differences:

Similarities in Temperature Regulation

1. Metabolic Heat Production:
   • Both mammals and birds generate heat through metabolic processes. This involves breaking down food to produce energy, with heat being a byproduct.
2. Insulation:
   • Both groups have evolved insulating layers to retain heat. Mammals have fur or hair, while birds have feathers. These layers trap air and provide a barrier against the cold.
3. Shivering Thermogenesis:
   • Both can generate additional heat through shivering, which involves rapid muscle contractions that produce heat.
4. Behavioral Adjustments:
   • Both mammals and birds engage in behaviors to manage their temperature, such as seeking shade or shelter, sunning themselves, or altering their activity levels based on the ambient temperature.

Differences in Temperature Regulation

1. Physiological Mechanisms:
   • Sweating and Panting: Mammals often use sweating and panting to cool down. Sweat glands secrete moisture that evaporates, taking heat away from the body. Dogs, for instance, pant to evaporate moisture from their respiratory tract. Birds, on the other hand, do not sweat. Instead, they often rely on a behavior called gular fluttering, where they rapidly move the skin in their throat to increase evaporation and cool down.
   • Brown Adipose Tissue (BAT): Many mammals, especially small ones and those living in cold environments, have brown adipose tissue that generates heat through non-shivering thermogenesis. Birds lack this type of tissue.
2. Heat Exchange Systems:
   • Countercurrent Heat Exchange: Birds have highly efficient countercurrent heat exchange systems in their legs and feet, which minimize heat loss. Blood vessels are arranged such that warm arterial blood warms the cooler venous blood returning to the body, conserving heat. While some mammals also use countercurrent heat exchange (such as in extremities), the systems are particularly pronounced and crucial in birds.
3. Basal Metabolic Rate:
   • Birds generally have higher basal metabolic rates compared to mammals of similar size, which means they produce more heat relative to their body size. This higher metabolic rate is partly due to the high energy demands of flight.
4. Hibernation and Torpor:
   • Many mammals can enter states of torpor or hibernation to conserve energy and reduce body temperature during periods of cold or food scarcity. While some birds also enter torpor, true hibernation is rare in birds. Instead, some birds migrate to warmer regions to avoid cold weather.

Behavioral Differences

1. Migration:
   • Migration is a key strategy for many birds to avoid extreme temperatures. While some mammals also migrate, it is far more common and pronounced in birds.
2. Nesting and Roosting:
   • Birds often build insulated nests or seek out warm roosting spots to maintain body temperature, especially during breeding seasons or cold nights. Mammals, on the other hand, may use burrows, dens, or other insulated shelters.

In summary, while both mammals and birds use endothermic processes to maintain their body temperatures, the specific physiological and behavioral strategies they employ can differ significantly due to their distinct evolutionary paths and physical characteristics.

A team of researchers led by University College London (UCL) and Universidade de Vigo, Spain, scientists has concluded that dinosaurs may have evolved warm-bloodedness as long ago as 180 million years ago, some 50 million years after the first dinosaurs evolved.

They concluded this after relating the evolutionary tree of the dinosaurs throughout the Mesozoic era to climate and geographical changes over the same time period and examining 1000 dinosaur fossils.

Their findings are the subject of an open access paper in the Cell Press journal, Current Biology. Their work is also explained in a UCL news release:

The ability to regulate body temperature, a trait all mammals and birds have today, may have evolved among some dinosaurs early in the Jurassic period about 180 million years ago, suggests a new study led by UCL and University of Vigo researchers.

In the early 20^th century, dinosaurs were considered slow-moving, “cold-blooded” animals like modern-day reptiles, relying on heat from the sun to regulate their temperature. Newer discoveries indicate some dinosaur types were likely capable of generating their own body heat but when this adaptation occurred is unknown.

The new study, published in the journal Current Biology, looked at the spread of dinosaurs across different climates on Earth throughout the Mesozoic Era (the dinosaur era lasting from 230 to 66 million years ago), drawing on 1,000 fossils, climate models and the geography of the period, and dinosaurs’ evolutionary trees.

The research team found that two of the three main groupings of dinosaurs, theropods (such as T. rex and Velociraptor) and ornithischians (including relatives of the plant eaters Stegosaurus and Triceratops), moved to colder climates during the Early Jurassic, suggesting they may have developed endothermy (the ability to internally generate heat) at this time. In contrast, sauropods, the other main grouping which includes the Brontosaurus and the Diplodocus, kept to warmer areas of the planet.

Previous research has found traits linked to warm-bloodedness among ornithischians and theropods, with some known to have had feathers or proto-feathers, insulating internal heat.

Our analyses show that different climate preferences emerged among the main dinosaur groups around the time of the Jenkyns event 183 million years ago, when intense volcanic activity led to global warming and extinction of plant groups. At this time, many new dinosaur groups emerged. The adoption of endothermy, perhaps a result of this environmental crisis, may have enabled theropods and ornithischians to thrive in colder environments, allowing them to be highly active and sustain activity over longer periods, to develop and grow faster and produce more offspring.

Dr Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, first author
Centro de Investigación Mariña
Departamento de Ecoloxía e Bioloxía Animal
Universidade de Vigo, Vigo, Spain

And Department of Earth Sciences
University College London, London, UK.

Theropods also include birds and our study suggests that birds’ unique temperature regulation may have had its origin in this Early Jurassic epoch. Sauropods, on the other hand, which stayed in warmer climates, grew to a gigantic size at around this time – another possible adaptation due to environmental pressure. Their smaller surface area to volume ratio would have meant these larger creatures would lose heat at a reduced rate, allowing them to stay active for longer.

Dr Sara Varela, Co-author
Centro de Investigación Mariña
Departamento de Ecoloxía e Bioloxía Animal
Universidade de Vigo, Vigo, Spain.

In the paper, the researchers also investigated if sauropods might have stayed at lower latitudes to eat richer foliage unavailable in colder polar regions. Instead, they found sauropods seemed to thrive in arid, savannah-like environments, supporting the idea that their restriction to warmer climates was more related to higher temperature and then to a more cold-blooded physiology. During that time, polar regions were warmer, with abundant vegetation. The Jenkyns event occurred after lava and volcanic gasses erupted from long fissures in the Earth’s surface, covering large areas of the planet.

This research suggests a close connection between climate and how dinosaurs evolved. It sheds new light on how birds might have inherited a unique biological trait from dinosaur ancestors and the different ways dinosaurs adapted to complex and long-term environmental changes.

Dr Juan L. Cantalapiedra, co-author
Departamento de Paleobiología
Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (CSIC), Madrid, Spain.

The study involved researchers from UCL, University of Vigo, the University of Bristol and the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, and received funding from the European Research Council, the Spanish Ministry of Research, the Natural Environment Research Council and the Royal Society.

Highlights

• Warm-blooded dinosaurs flourished in varied climates.
• Dinosaur groups adapted differently to climate, suggesting diverse thermophysiologies.
• Endothermy in theropods and possibly ornithischians evolved by the Early Jurassic
• Sauropod niche conservatism suggests higher thermal sensitivity and poikilothermy.

Graphical Abstract

Summary

A fundamental question in dinosaur evolution is how they adapted to long-term climatic shifts during the Mesozoic and when they developed environmentally independent, avian-style acclimatization, becoming endothermic.^1,2 The ability of warm-blooded dinosaurs to flourish in harsher environments, including cold, high-latitude regions,^3,4 raises intriguing questions about the origins of key innovations shared with modern birds,^5,6 indicating that the development of homeothermy (keeping constant body temperature) and endothermy (generating body heat) played a crucial role in their ecological diversification.⁷ Despite substantial evidence across scientific disciplines (anatomy,⁸ reproduction,⁹ energetics,¹⁰ biomechanics,¹⁰ osteohistology,¹¹ palaeobiogeography,¹² geochemistry,^13,14 and soft tissues^15,16,17), a consensus on dinosaur thermophysiology remains elusive.^{1,12,15,17,18,19} Differential thermophysiological strategies among terrestrial tetrapods allow endotherms (birds and mammals) to expand their latitudinal range (from the tropics to polar regions), owing to their reduced reliance on environmental temperature.²⁰ By contrast, most reptilian lineages (squamates, turtles, and crocodilians) and amphibians are predominantly constrained by temperature in regions closer to the tropics.²¹ Determining when this macroecological pattern emerged in the avian lineage relies heavily on identifying the origin of these key physiological traits. Combining fossils with macroevolutionary and palaeoclimatic models, we unveil distinct evolutionary pathways in the main dinosaur lineages: ornithischians and theropods diversified across broader climatic landscapes, trending toward cooler niches. An Early Jurassic shift to colder climates in Theropoda suggests an early adoption of endothermy. Conversely, sauropodomorphs exhibited prolonged climatic conservatism associated with higher thermal conditions, emphasizing temperature, rather than plant productivity, as the primary driver of this pattern, suggesting poikilothermy with a stronger dependence on higher temperatures in sauropods.

Chiarenza, Alfio Alessandro; Cantalapiedra, Juan L.; Jones, Lewis A.; Gamboa, Sara; Galván, Sofía; Farnsworth, Alexander J.; Valdes, Paul J.; Sotelo, Graciela; Varela, Sara
Early Jurassic origin of avian endothermy and thermophysiological diversity in dinosaurs Current Biology (2024) DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.04.051

Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by Elsevier. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Dinosaurs have always been a problem for creationists because their existence betrays the fact that the age of Earth as calculated from the Bible geneaolgies is wildly inaccurate by several orders of magnitude, but this paper piles on the agony by showign a clear evolutionary pathway from poikilothermy (cold-bloodedness) to homeothermy (warm-bloodedness) supported by geological, geographical and climatological evidence sometime around 180 million years before the biblical 'Creation Week'.

And it goes without saying that, being biologists, the authors of the paper show no sign of abandoning the TOE in favour of the childish notion of magic creation by an unproven supernatural entity. Indeed, they could scarcely be considered scientists if they included magic and superstition in their explanation for natural phenomena like creationists pseud-scientists are obliged to for contractual reasons.

---

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Evolution News - How Tiger Beetles Have Evolved an Unusual Form of Batsian Mimicry - Or Is This Unintelligent Design?

Tiger beetles are fierce predators, running quickly after smaller insects and crushing them with their large mandibles.

Photo: Geena Hill.

Tiger beetle, Lophyra sp.

Muhammad Mahdi Karim - Own work via Wikimedia (GFDL 1.2)

Tiger beetles fight off bat attacks with ultrasonic mimicry – Research News

The idea of predator-prey arms races is of course entirely inconsistent with the childish notion of intelligent design, because constantly designing solutions to problems you created earlier as solutions to even earlier problems you created, is not an act of intelligence.

And yet creationists continue to believe in intelligent [sic] design despite the abundance of these competitive arms races in the natural world.

It seems they have no difficulty in holding several pairs of mutually contradictory views of their putative designer god simultaneously. It is supremely intelligent and acts in ways that can only be described as supremely stupid.

It is omnibenevolent but designs ways to increase the suffering in the world with its parasites; it is omnipotent but powerless against another supernatural designer called 'sin'; and by the way, it is the only supernatural entity capable of designing living thing, so 'evidence' of design (i.e. something a creationist can't understand how it could have evolved) is proof of its existence.

Malevolent Designer News - Has Creationism's Divine Malevolence Designed An Improved Version of Cholera?

Vibrio cholerae

Vibrio cholerae

Persistent Strain of Cholera Defends Itself Against Forces of Change, Scientists Find - UT News

One of the mysteries of microbiology and epidemiology, is why a virulent strain of Vibrio cholerae (the bacterium that causes cholera) has remained so stable ever since it emerged in 1961 in Indonesia, causing the seventh global cholera pandemic. this strain, known as 7PET, is now the predominant strain, out-competing the other strains and infecting an estimated 1.3 - 4 million people a year, of which between 21,000 and 143,000 die.

The reason for those wide-ranging estimates is because many of the deaths from cholera are in remoter areas of mostly third-world countries where sanitation is poor, health-care is hard to obtain, and many of the victims are children, so the cause of death is often not known with any certainty.

The traditional response of creationists to anything concerning the evolution of parasites like V. cholerae is to blame 'Sin'. The more sophisticated creationists who have realised that this is a blasphemy because it implies the existence of another creator over which their supposedly omnipotent, omni-benevolent god is powerless, so they simply blame this 'sin' thing for allowing 'genetic entropy' to cause an organism to 'devolve' (it would be a serious blasphemy to call it 'evolution' so Michael J Behe and the Deception Institute had put their heads together and come up with the term 'devolution' instead, which makes it look like the exact opposite of 'evolution'. Stupidly, this devise claims that everything was created perfectly and, when Adam & Eve 'sinned', somehow this opened the door to 'sin', which apparently took their 'omniscient' god by surprise, even though it had given its alleged creations immune systems in anticipation of the effects of 'Sin'.

But of course, we can dismiss that half-baked notion which no serious biomedical scientist would take seriously because there is no mechanism for a deleterious (i.e, 'devolutionarly' trait to accumulate in the species gene pool, and whatever it is about V. cholerae that gives it the edge over other strains, can't rationally be described as 'devolutionary', or a move away from some notional initial perfection, because there can't be anything better than perfect, and yet the 7PET strain of V. cholerae is better at doing the two things it appears to have been designed to do - making more people sick and making more copies of itself than the other strains.

Unintelligent Design - How a Cell Division Error Sometimes Causes Cancers - Incompetence or Malevolence?

Chromosomes during mitosis (white). In orange, a centromere is visible consisting of two subdomains (arrows), each bound to a discrete bundle of microtubules (magenta).

Credit: Carlos Sacristan Lopez.
© Hubrecht Institute.

Two microscopy images of chromosomes. The left image shows chromosomes during mitosis (white). In orange, a centromere is visible consisting of two subdomains (arrows), each bound to a discrete bundle of microtubules (magenta). The right image depicts a dividing cancer cell showing a missegregating chromosome in the middle. The two centromere subdomains (arrows) of this chromosome appear split.

Credit: Carlos Sacristan Lopez. Copyright: Hubrecht Institute.

Research on centromere structure yields new insights.

Creationists, who, generally speaking, know little or nothing of biology and don't want to either because the risk of wondering it they could be wrong is far too great, are easily fooled by the frauds with a vested interest in keeping them simultaneously ignorant and imagining they have a deeper understanding than the millions of educated, working biomedical scientists who apply the Theory of Evolution every day of their working lives.

One thing they've been fooled into believing is that there is some sort of perfection in design inside a cell and that same designer is responsible for everything about living organisms.

But, in the last few years, under the onslaught of science, the frauds have needed to fall back from the demonstrably false notion of perfection of design in view if cancers, diseases and parasites, and now blame something for these obvious imperfections, which, by definition, could not be the products of a perfect designer god, do they have invented the biologically nonsensical notion of 'genetic entropy' and devolution caused by 'Sin' over which their omnipotent, omnibenevolent designer god is powerless.

And, again under the onslaught of science, the frauds have also conceded that evolution does indeed happen and happened at a massively accelerated rate to account for all the biodiversity produced by a small number of survivors of a genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago.

Evolution in Progress - How Two Isolated Populations in Papua New Guinea Have Diverged

Highlands of Papua New Guinea

François-Xavier Ricaut.

Genetic adaptations have impacted the blood compositions of two populations from Papua New Guinea | Tartu Ülikool

An example of evolution if progress this week comes from a team of researchers from the universities of Tartu (Estonia), Toulouse (France), and Papua New Guinea. They have carried out an extensive analysis on blood samples from two populations in Papua New-Guinea who have remained isolated for the 50,000 years since Homo sapiens arrived on the Island.

One group occupies the highlands and the other group lives in the lowlands, making this a living laboratory to measure the effects of the different environments on the genomes of the two populations.

Different environments provide different drivers of evolutionary adaptation; for instance, the highlanders have adapted to a low oxygen partial pressure and comparatively few pathogens and an absence of mosquitoes; while the lowlands have both mosquitoes and a higher level of endemic pathogens. How each group has adapted to these different environments provides a text-book example of how the environment drives evolution and how isolation results in divergence.

The team's work is published, open access, in Nature Communications and is explained in a press release from Tartu University, Estonia:

Common Ancestry - How Young Chimps Learn To Use Tools - Just Like Human Children

Chimpanzee Zinda fishing for termites in Gombe National Park

Photo: Nick Riley

Wild western chimpanzee using a stick tool to extract high-nutrient food.

Credit: Liran Samuni, Taï Chimpanzee Project (CC BY 4.0)

Protracted development of stick tool use skills extends into adulthood in wild western chimpanzees | PLOS Biology

Chimpanzees are famous for making and using tools, especially sticks, for obtaining nutritional foods like grubs and termites, but using them takes time, just like a human child needs to develop motor skills to use tools such as pens and pencils with sufficient dexterity.

How they do so, and the stages they go through, was described recently in an open access paper in PLOS Biology by a team of animal behaviourists from l'Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod (The Marc Jeannerod Institute of Cognitive Sciences), Lyon, France; the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, and the German Primate Center, Göttingen, Germany, who analyzed film of wild chimpanzees making and using stick tools in the Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire.

They concluded that, like human children, acquiring motor skills is not just a matter of practice, important though that it, but also depends on a protracted childhood during which they observe and copy adults with the necessary skills. In other words, young chimpanzees learn skill from their parents and elders, like a human apprentice.

The team's work was explained in information made available ahead of publication by PLOS, and published in SciTechDaily.com:

Unintelligent Designer News - How Creationism's Idiot Designer Continually Designs Different Solutions To The Same Problem

Squinting bush brown, Bicyclus anynana

Squinting bush brown, Bicyclus anynana

© Judy Gallagher (CC BY-SA)

New sex-determining mechanism in African butterfly discovered - News - University of Liverpool

Once sexual reproduction had become established in multicellular organisms, there was selection pressure to determine the gender of a developing embryo, so the result was either genetically male or genetically female. In humans and other mammals, for example, this is achieved by the XY Chromosomes, which, unlike all the other chromosomes (autosomes) are not paired. A zygote with 2X (homozygous) becomes a female and a zygote with XY (heterozygous) becomes male. Because the zygote gets either one or the other of these chromosomes from each parent these are the only combinations possible, so we never see a YY zygote.

Malevolent Design - Combatting The Highly Toxic, Tissue Destroying Spitting Cobra Venom

African black-necked spitting cobra, Naja nigricollis

Warren Klein via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Black-necked spitting cobra, Naja nigricollis

© Marius Burger, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

First effective treatment found for spitting cobra snakebite - Lancaster University

Snake venom is usually a potent cocktail of multiple different toxins, 'designed' to kill, mostly small vertebrate prey very quickly, so the snake can strike, then wait for the prey to become paralyzed or die before it can go very far.

The reason for this rich cocktail is an interesting piece of evolutionary biology that would embarrass any creationist with the courage to learn about it. It is the result of repeated arms races between the snake and its prey species. Not only that, but it involves new genetic information arising, by gene duplication and mutations - contrary to creationist dogma that such a thing is impossible.

As one prey species starts to evolve resistance there is selection pressure on the snake to change its venom to overcome the resistance or loose one source of food, but, there must be a balance between retaining one food species but loosing several others if the changed venom is less effective against them. Resistance usually arises when there is a change in receptor sites on cell surfaces, on which the venom acts so the active venom molecule doesn't bind to it.

Malevolent Design - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Co-opted Red Squirrels To Spread Leprosy in Medieval England

Lepers having magic spells cast over them

Mycobacterium leprae

Ancient Mycobacterium leprae genome reveals medieval English red squirrels as animal leprosy host: Current Biology

Few places in Europe or elsewhere were more pious than Medieval England, but still creationism's pestilential malevolence continued to make people suffer with diseases such as bubonic plague, tuberculosis and the related leprosy. Even the extreme measures taken by believers to atone for imaginary transgressions that had brought about the Black Death had failed to assuage the putative designer god who was believed to be visiting this pestilence upon people.

The superstitious Bible-based belief in evil spirits and 'sin' as the cause of disease led to the social stigma that made the disease so feared and led to the isolation of sufferers in lepper colonies, and often reduced to begging to stay alive. Poor nutrition and poor sanitation led to a worsening of the condition and, although these counter-measures were visibly ineffective, such was the belief in the Bible that it was inconceivable that the disease could be caused by anything other than 'sin' and evil demons being permitted to enter the victim.

The modern equivalent of this victim-blaming superstition can be found in the modern creationist tactic of blaming 'Sin' and 'genetic entropy' for parasites, with demons being replaced by 'entropy' to make it sound sciencey. It is of course, Bible-based superstition without supporting evidence.

And now, if you believe that stuff, there is evidence that creationism's putative designer god designed M. leprae to also infect red squirrels so they would act as a repository to spread leprosy. Red squirrels were common in those days and were often captured in the wild for pets or pelts. Their skins, when used for clothing, would have carried M. leprae and infected anyone who wore them - a brilliant strategy, if you hate people and want them to be sick, suffer and die.

Unintelligent Design News - How Creationism's Putative Designer 'Brilliantly' Designs Solutions To Problems It Supidly Designed

Two-spot spider mite, Tetranychus urticae

Two-spot spider mite (yellow form), Tetranychus urticae

Plants utilise drought stress hormone to block snacking spider mites | Sainsbury Laboratory

To start at the beginning because that's always a good place to start, plants need to get water and nutrients up to their leaves, so their 'designer' gave them a vascular system but without a pump, so, to maintain the upward flow, they need to evaporate away (or transpire) the water that just arrived in their leaves. They do this through tiny pores (or stomata; singular=stoma) that are just about visible to the naked eye, and clearly visible under a hand lens or a microscope.

These stomata are guarded by guard cells, one on either side, which can swell to close the stoma or shrink to allow the stoma to open, as the need arises.

However, these stomata are an open invitation to sap-sucking arthropods such as mites and aphids, which are cleverly designed, reputedly by the same designer that designed the stomata, which can push their mouthparts into the stoma to get at the nutrient-rich watery contents of the leaf.

So, having designed these sap-suckers to exploit the transport system it designed for plants, creationism's putative designer clearly saw the sap-suckers it had designed as a problem to be solved.

How it added this Heath-Robinson layer of additional complexity to solve the problem the earlier layer of complexity had caused is the subject of a research paper by a collaboration of researchers from the Centre for Plant Biotechnology and Genomics (CBGP), Spain, and Sainsbury Laboratory, Cambridge University (SLCU), Cambridge, UK and a news release from Cambridge University:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Favourite Pathogen Is Designed to Cause UTIs

Escherichia coli,
The usual cause of urinary tract infection (UTI)

UTI's will affect 50% of women at some time in their lives

How E. coli get the power to cause urinary tract infections | Michigan Medicine

Despite their protestations that their god doesn't create pathogens - some other creative entity does that, apparently - they have been in love with Escherichia coli, or E. coli ever since their guru and Deception Insitute flunky, Michael J Behe, persuaded them that he had 'proved' their god exists and designs things because he couldn't work out how the E. coli flagellum could have evolved - so God did it!

There problem then, courtesy of Michael J Behe is that they have accepted that, if there was a designer involved in E. coli's design, it is the god that Michael J Behe 'proved' designed it, so their god designs pathogens, and even designs clever way to make them good at making us sick.

With that in mind, which creationist is going to argue against Michael J Behe's clever 'proof' that their god designs things so must exist, and insist that it isn't also behind the newly discovered way it manages to cause urinary tract infections (UTIs)?

The discovery that they can live, reproduce, and do their nasty thing in the otherwise near-sterile urinary tract, was made by researchers at the laboratory of Professor Harry Mobley in the University of Michigan Medical School.

Having been filtered by the kidneys, while urine contains some chemicals such as metabolites, it is about as sterile as it gets, with anything in it entering through the urethral meatus, in women, stupidly placed near the anus and inside the vulva where it can become infected during sexual intercourse by a penis cleverly designed with a foreskin to harbour pathogens under.

It has now been discovered that E. coli is also cleverly 'designed' to grab the nutrients it needs but can't manufacture itself by have a highly efficient transport system for taking them from its victims at a rate of thousands of molecules a second. One of the genes responsible for this, codes for an enzyme known as ATP-binding cassette (ABC).

Typical of creationism's 'intelligent' [sic] designer, if you believe in such a thing, is the Heath-Robinson workaround for the lack of genes for manufacturing these amino acids, where the parasite needs an energy-intensive ATP-based transport system, complete with multi-layered back-up systems to keep them working - the needless waste and needless complexity, so typical of evolved systems and the antithesis of intelligently designed systems. The researchers have published their findings, open access, in the journal PNAS and explained them in a University of Michigan news release:

Creationism in Crisis - Humans Had Domesticated Dogs At Least 10 Thousands Years Before 'Creation Week'

Siberian grey wolf, Canis lupus

Source: Pinterest

Siberian wolf, Canis lupus

Ancient Mitogenomes Reveal the Maternal Genetic History of East Asian Dogs | Molecular Biology and Evolution | Oxford Academic

These days, no serious scientist sets out to prove the Bible is wrong; discovering truth does that anyway - for anyone who can join the dots and do the simple logic. For example, humans could not have domesticated dogs some 23,000 years ago in Siberia by domesticating the local variety of grey wolf, if the Universe is just 10,000 years old.

And yet a paper published recently in the journal Molecular Biology & Evolution shows that they did exactly that.

In the context of mitochondrial DNA, what are haplotypes? In the context of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), haplotypes refer to specific combinations of genetic variants or polymorphisms within the mitochondrial genome. Unlike nuclear DNA, which is inherited from both parents, mtDNA is passed down exclusively from the mother to all of her offspring. This maternal inheritance pattern makes mtDNA useful for studying ancestry, population genetics, and evolutionary history.

A haplotype represents a unique combination of nucleotide variations or mutations along the mtDNA sequence. By analyzing these haplotypes, researchers can track maternal lineages, study population migrations, and infer evolutionary relationships among different groups of individuals. Haplotypes are often used in studies of human populations, as well as in forensic genetics and medical research related to mitochondrial disorders.

Refuting the Bible was almost certainly not the intention of the authors, jointly led by Songmei Hu, of Joint International Research Laboratory of Environmental and Social Archaeology, Shandong University, Qingdao, China, and Xijun Ni and Qiaomei Fu, both of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Center for Excellence in Life and Paleoenvironment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, but the facts they discovered do just that. They had set out to resolve the question of where exactly dogs had been domesticated, based on an analysis of the mitochondrial DNA.

Mitochondrial DNA (mDNA) is inherited through the maternal line, so an analysis of the geographical and temporal distribution of the various haplotypes of mDNA and how they relate to one another should give an indication of where and when the ancestral haplotype lived.

How the team did this is explained in their paper:

Creationism in Crisis - More Lousy News For Creationists - Human Evolution Mapped In The Genome Of Head Lice Symbiotic Bacteria

Human head louse, Pediculus humanus capitis

Gilles San Martin via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Phylogenetic trees for primate lice and their vertebrate hosts redrawn from Reed et al . [9]. Trees are shown as cladograms with no branch length information, and are based on molecular and morphological data. Dashed lines between trees represent host-parasite associations. Humans are unique in being parasitized by two genera (Pediculus and Pthirus). (Herd, K.E., Barker, S.C. & Shao, R.(2015))

Photo credits: J. W. Demastes, T. Choe, and V. Smith.

Genomic Diversity in the Endosymbiotic Bacteria of Human Head Lice | Molecular Biology and Evolution | Oxford Academic

It's a basic principle of evolutionary biology that an obligate commensal, symbiotic or parasitic organism is evolutionary bound to the organism on which it is dependent, It follows then that the genomes of two or more organism in such a relationships will reflect the same major changes which drive evolution.

I have previously described how the evolutionary tree of the human head and body lice, Pediculus humanus, fits exactly on the evolutionary tree of Homo sapiens as we diverged from the common ancestor with chimpanzees. At the same time, our lice diverged from a common ancestor they share with the lice which are obligate parasites on chimpanzees, Pe. schaeffi.

Interestingly, our lice also reflect when we started wearing clothes having lost our body hair. This loss of body hair meant our lice became head lice which are closely related to the chimpanzee's body lice. When we started wearing clothes our lice diverged into two subspecies - head lice, Pe. h. capitis, and body lice, Pe. h. humanus.

And now, something even more interesting and confirmative of evolution, is the discovery that an obligate, symbiont bacteria on which the lice depends, shows exactly the same pattern of divergence, mapped onto the evolutionary tree of the lice.

The symbiotic bacterium, Candidatus Riesia pediculicola, in a typically Heath-Robinson solution to a problem which is a characteristic of mindless, unplanned evolution, and unlike anything an intelligent designer would design, is essential to the lice because they can't make essential B-vitamins and don't get them from the blood on which they exclusively feed.

And, incidentally, these bacteria have evolved by loss of genetic information - something that creationist frauds tell their dupes is impossible because "every loss of genes is invariably fatal" [sic].

This discovery is the subject of a recent open access paper in the journal Molecular Biology & Evolution:

Antivaxxer Idiot News - How An mRNA Vaccine Is Proving Effective Against A Highly Malignant Brain Cancer

Sadeem Qdaisat, Dr. Hector Mendez-Gomez and Dr. Elias Sayour
discuss their new study.

Photo by Nate Guidry

Dr. Elias Sayour, Chong Zhao and Arnav Barpujari discuss the mRNA cancer vaccine developed at the University of Florida

New mRNA cancer vaccine triggers fierce immune response to fight malignant brain tumor - UF Health

Contrary to the bizarre antivaxxer claims that the mRNA vaccines used against the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 somehow causes cancer, based on nothing more substantial than the fact that some people who developed cancer had previously been vaccinated, there is now an mRNA vaccine that is proving spectacularly effective against a highly malignant form of brain cancer.

Curiously, the fact that some people who developed cancer will previously have sung Christmas carols or eaten potatoes, is never given as a probable cause, but then few people who believe antivaxxer disinformation will understand statistics or statistical correlations.

The mRNA vaccine against the brain cancer known as Glioblastoma has shown very promising results in a small-scale study of four adults by scientists at Florida University, repeating the results of a trial in 10 dogs and preclinical trials in mice.

The vaccine successfully, and very quickly, reprograms the immune system to produce highly specific antibodies against the tumour. Intelligent design proponents (or 'cdesign proponentcists' as they have been known since the Kitzmiller trial) might like to explain why the immune system, supposedly intelligently designed to protect us, needs to be artificially reprogrammed by human medical science.

The trick has been to create clusters of nanoparticles of lipid-enclosed mRNA wrapped around one another like a miniature onion. These means the mRNA will be released slowly and reprogram the immune system more effectively than a single burst would. The specific mRNA is tailor-made for the patient's tumour and creates antibodies against specific tumor proteins, in the same way the mRNA anti-COVID vaccines target the virus's spike proteins, so is specific to that particular cancer.

The results are reported in the journal Cell and are also explained in a University of Florida Health News release:

In a first-ever human clinical trial of four adult patients, an mRNA cancer vaccine developed at the University of Florida quickly reprogrammed the immune system to attack glioblastoma, the most aggressive and lethal brain tumor.

The results mirror those in 10 pet dog patients suffering from naturally occurring brain tumors whose owners approved of their participation, as they had no other treatment options, as well as results from preclinical mouse models. The breakthrough now will be tested in a Phase 1 pediatric clinical trial for brain cancer.

Reported May 1 in the journal Cell, the discovery represents a potential new way to recruit the immune system to fight notoriously treatment-resistant cancers using an iteration of mRNA technology and lipid nanoparticles, similar to COVID-19 vaccines, but with two key differences: use of a patient’s own tumor cells to create a personalized vaccine, and a newly engineered complex delivery mechanism within the vaccine.

“Instead of us injecting single particles, we’re injecting clusters of particles that are wrapping around each other like onions, like a bag full of onions,” said senior author Elias Sayour, M.D., Ph.D., a UF Health pediatric oncologist who pioneered the new vaccine, which like other immunotherapies attempts to “educate” the immune system that a tumor is foreign. “And the reason we’ve done that in the context of cancer is these clusters alert the immune system in a much more profound way than single particles would.”

Among the most impressive findings was how quickly the new method, delivered intravenously, spurred a vigorous immune-system response to reject the tumor, said Sayour, principal investigator of the RNA Engineering Laboratory within UF’s Preston A. Wells Jr. Center for Brain Tumor Therapy and a UF Health Cancer Center and McKnight Brain Institute investigator who led the multi-institution research team.

“In less than 48 hours, we could see these tumors shifting from what we refer to as ‘cold’ — immune cold, very few immune cells, very silenced immune response — to ‘hot,’ very active immune response,” he said. “That was very surprising given how quick this happened, and what that told us is we were able to activate the early part of the immune system very rapidly against these cancers, and that’s critical to unlock the later effects of the immune response.”

Glioblastoma is among the most devastating diagnoses, with median survival around 15 months. Current standard of care involves surgery, radiation and some combination of chemotherapy.

The new publication is the culmination of promising translational results over seven years of studies, starting in preclinical mouse models and then in a clinical trial of 10 pet dogs that had spontaneously developed terminal brain cancer and had no other treatment options. That trial was conducted with owners’ consent in collaboration with the UF College of Veterinary Medicine. Dogs offer a naturally occurring model for malignant glioma because they are the only other species that develops spontaneous brain tumors with some frequency, said Sheila Carrera-Justiz, D.V.M., a veterinary neurologist at the UF College of Veterinary Medicine who is partnering with Sayour on the clinical trials. Gliomas in dogs are universally terminal, she said.

After treating pet dogs that had spontaneously developed brain cancer with personalized mRNA vaccines, Sayour’s team advanced the research to a small Food and Drug Administration-approved clinical trial designed to ensure safety and test feasibility before expanding to a larger trial.

In a cohort of four patients, genetic material called RNA was extracted from each patient’s own surgically removed tumor, and then messenger RNA, or mRNA — the blueprint of what is inside every cell, including tumor cells — was amplified and wrapped in the newly designed high-tech packaging of biocompatible lipid nanoparticles, to make tumor cells “look” like a dangerous virus when reinjected into the bloodstream and prompt an immune-system response. The vaccine was personalized to each patient with a goal of getting the most out of their unique immune system.

“The demonstration that making an mRNA cancer vaccine in this fashion generates similar and strong responses across mice, pet dogs that have developed cancer spontaneously and human patients with brain cancer is a really important finding, because oftentimes we don’t know how well the preclinical studies in animals are going to translate into similar responses in patients,” said Duane Mitchell, M.D., Ph.D., director of the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute and the UF Brain Tumor Immunotherapy Program and a co-author of the paper. “And while mRNA vaccines and therapeutics are certainly a hot topic since the COVID pandemic, this is a novel and unique way of delivering the mRNA to generate these really significant and rapid immune responses that we’re seeing across animals and humans.”

While too early in the trial to assess the clinical effects of the vaccine, the patients either lived disease-free longer than expected or survived longer than expected.

The 10 pet dogs lived a median of 139 days, compared with a median survival of 30 to 60 days typical for dogs with the condition.

The next step, through support from the Food and Drug Administration and the CureSearch for Children’s Cancer foundation, will be an expanded Phase I clinical trial to include up to 24 adult and pediatric patients to validate the findings. Once an optimal and safe dose is confirmed, an estimated 25 children would participate in Phase 2, said Sayour, an associate professor in the Lillian S. Wells Department of Neurosurgery and the department of pediatrics in the UF College of Medicine, part of UF Health.

For the new clinical trial, Sayour’s lab will partner with a multi-institution consortium, the Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium, to send the immunotherapy treatment to children’s hospitals across the country. They will do this by receiving an individual patient’s tumor, manufacturing the personalized vaccine at UF and sending it back to the patient’s medical team, said Sayour, co-leader of the Immuno-Oncology and Microbiome research program at the UF Health Cancer Center.

Despite the promising results, the authors said one limitation is continued uncertainty about how best to harness the immune system while minimizing the potential for adverse side effects.

“I am hopeful that this could be a new paradigm for how we treat patients, a new platform technology for how we can modulate the immune system,” said Sayour, the Stop Children's Cancer/Bonnie R. Freeman Professor for Pediatric Oncology Research. “I am hopeful for how this could now synergize with other immunotherapies and perhaps unlock those immunotherapies. We showed in this paper that you actually can have synergy with other types of immunotherapies, so maybe now we can have a combination approach of immunotherapy.”

Graphic abstract

Highlights

• RNA-LPAs mimic dangerous emboli for lymphoreticular entrapment and systemic immunity
• Systemic immunity resets both the peripheral and intratumoral milieu via IFNAR1/RIG-I
• RNA-LPAs are safe and effective tumor re-modulators in canines with spontaneous gliomas
• RNA-LPAs reprogram the TME and elicit adaptive immunity in human GBM patients

Summary Cancer immunotherapy remains limited by poor antigenicity and a regulatory tumor microenvironment (TME). Here, we create “onion-like” multi-lamellar RNA lipid particle aggregates (LPAs) to substantially enhance the payload packaging and immunogenicity of tumor mRNA antigens. Unlike current mRNA vaccine designs that rely on payload packaging into nanoparticle cores for Toll-like receptor engagement in immune cells, systemically administered RNA-LPAs activate RIG-I in stromal cells, eliciting massive cytokine/chemokine response and dendritic cell/lymphocyte trafficking that provokes cancer immunogenicity and mediates rejection of both early- and late-stage murine tumor models. In client-owned canines with terminal gliomas, RNA-LPAs improved survivorship and reprogrammed the TME, which became “hot” within days of a single infusion. In a first-in-human trial, RNA-LPAs elicited rapid cytokine/chemokine release, immune activation/trafficking, tissue-confirmed pseudoprogression, and glioma-specific immune responses in glioblastoma patients. These data support RNA-LPAs as a new technology that simultaneously reprograms the TME while eliciting rapid and enduring cancer immunotherapy.

Mendez-Gomez, Hector R.; DeVries, Anna; Castillo, Paul; et al.(2024)
RNA aggregates harness the danger response for potent cancer immunotherapy Cell https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2024.04.003

© 2024 Cell Press.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ID is not a problem for science; rather science is a problem for ID. This book shows why. It exposes the fallacy of Intelligent Design by showing that, when examined in detail, biological systems are anything but intelligently designed. They show no signs of a plan and are quite ludicrously complex for whatever can be described as a purpose. The Intelligent Design movement relies on almost total ignorance of biological science and seemingly limitless credulity in its target marks. Its only real appeal appears to be to those who find science too difficult or too much trouble to learn yet want their opinions to be regarded as at least as important as those of scientists and experts in their fields.

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The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is Not Good

This book presents the reader with multiple examples of why, even if we accept Creationism's putative intelligent designer, any such entity can only be regarded as malevolent, designing ever-more ingenious ways to make life difficult for living things, including humans, for no other reason than the sheer pleasure of doing so. This putative creator has also given other creatures much better things like immune systems, eyesight and ability to regenerate limbs that it could have given to all its creation, including humans, but chose not to. This book will leave creationists with the dilemma of explaining why evolution by natural selection is the only plausible explanation for so many nasty little parasites that doesn't leave their creator looking like an ingenious, sadistic, misanthropic, malevolence finding ever more ways to increase pain and suffering in the world, and not the omnibenevolent, maximally good god that Creationists of all Abrahamic religions believe created everything. As with a previous book by this author, "The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax", this book comprehensively refutes any notion of intelligent design by anything resembling a loving, intelligent and maximally good god. Such evil could not exist in a universe created by such a god. Evil exists, therefore a maximally good, all-knowing, all-loving god does not.

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