Malevolent Designer News - Why The Creator Makes SARS-CoV-2 Variants

Study reveals how our immune system reacts to COVID-19 variants - The University of Sydney

Creationist mode:

For devotees of Creationism's intelligent [sic] designer, this finding by an Australian research group should come as no surprise. The experience of the coronavirus pandemic their beloved malevolence inflicted on humanity starting in late 2019, is that just as we seem to be getting to grips with one variant, along comes another even more infectious version.

The Sydney University researchers have found that these later versions, or variants, tend to be less affected by the antibodies our immune systems produce to the earlier variants, and, fortunately, to a lesser degree by those produced by the vaccines designed for those earlier variants. The designer is clearly deeply involved in an arms race with both human medical science and the immune system it supposedly designed to protect us from the viruses it creates to harm us.

Creationist mode:

Quite why it is having an arms race with itself is anyone's guess, but Creationists have defined it as supremely intelligent, so they must assume this is a hallmark of high intelligence! Cult dogma dictates that this can't be attributed to a natural process like evolution, so intelligent [sic] design is the only option available to Creationists, many of who seem to lack the capacity to work out why normal people find this so risible - which might be related to the reason they became Creationists in the first place.

Of course, to anyone who understands how evolution works, this was entirely predictable and presents medical science with a challenge - how to design vaccines which will also work against future variants, or design production techniques which can quickly switch to new variants as they are detected for annual boosters, like we currently have to do with annual flu jabs.

From the Sydney University News release:

We can learn a great deal from these people who were infected in the first wave in Australia as they were infected with the same variant that our current vaccines are based on.

While the approved vaccines are showing good responses, our study highlights the importance of continued vaccine development, especially taking into account the differences in variants.

Fabienne Brilot, Lead author, Associate Professor Sydney University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.

Australian scientists researching how our immune system responds to COVID-19 have revealed that those infected by early variants in 2020 produced sustained antibodies, however, these antibodies are not as effective against contemporary variants of the virus. The research is one of the world’s most comprehensive studies of the immune response against COVID-19 infection. It suggests vaccination is more effective than the body’s natural immune response following infection and shows the need to invest in new vaccine designs to keep pace with emerging COVID variants.

Published today in PLOS Medicine, the study was made possible by a partnership between the University of Sydney, Kids Research, Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network,

What this work has shown us is that current observations about vaccines show they offer a much broader protection against COVID-19 and its variants than the body’s natural immune response following infection, which is usually only protective against the variant of the virus that the person was infected with. We, therefore, should not rely on the body’s natural immune response to control this pandemic, but rather the broadly protective vaccines that are available.

Stuart Turville, Co-senior author Associate Professor
Kirby Institute The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia

the Kirby Institute at UNSW Sydney, Australian Red Cross Lifeblood, St Vincent’s Hospital and NSW Health Pathology, as well as other local and international collaborators.

The team analysed the serum of 233 individuals diagnosed with COVID-19 over 7 months and uncovered that the level of immunity over time is dependent on disease severity and the viral variant. They show that antibodies developed during the first wave had reduced effectiveness against six variants, ranging from those observed in the second wave in Australia through to three variants of concern that have driven the global pandemic in the UK, Brazil and South Africa...

Neutralising antibodies are part of our immune system’s frontline arsenal that is triggered during infection and vaccination. Their job is to shield cells that are usually the target of a pathogen (such as the SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes the COVID-19 disease) from being infected. The level of neutralising antibody response can be a defining feature of how effectively our body fights off illness.

What makes this study stand out is the level and depth of analysis to neutralising antibody levels in people recovering from COVID infection over time, including comparison of infection recovering from different viral variants.

Fiona Tea, First co-author
Postdoctoral fellow
Kids Neuroscience Centre
Children’s Hospital, Westmead, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Key findings

• SARS-CoV-2 antibody responses are sustained for up to seven months post-infection.
• The immune response remained stable in some individuals, and while it decreased in others, no individual showed a negative response during the seven-month period.
• Levels of virus-neutralising antibodies were associated with COVID-19 severity.
• Antibodies generated after early infection displayed a significantly reduced antibody binding and neutralisation potency to globally emerging viral variants.

Method

10 COVID-19 strains and variants of concern/interest were investigated, including:*

• First known classified SARS-CoV-2 strain (Wuhan -1 D614)
• Alpha (B.1.1.7, United Kingdom)
• Beta (B.1.351, South Africa)
• Gamma (P1, Brazilian)
• Zeta (P2, Brazilian)

*Note naming conventions updated to reflect World Health Organisation classifications.

The researchers used a comprehensive suite of assays that measured:

• The longevity and type of antibody response against Spike from various variants over time in serum of COVID-19 diagnosed individuals.
• Neutralisation of infectious SARS-CoV-2 over time, by infecting cell lines that had ACE2 on its surface (which SARS-CoV-2 binds and targets on the cell to begin infection) with a particle designed to mimic a version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus particle.

The good news is that the antibodies produced by the vaccines appear to be long-lasting and to have a broader range of effectiveness across the emerging new strains than those acquired in response to infection, which appear to be too highly targeted on the variant that triggered them. It looks like the result of medical science are proving to be superior to the results produced by what Creationist's believe is their intelligent [sic] designer's method, i.e. making the victim sick first and being fortunate enough to survive and ending up with an inferior product so being vulnerable still to another infection.

The groups findings are published, open access, in PLOS Medicine:

Abstract
The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) antibody neutralization response and its evasion by emerging viral variants and variant of concern (VOC) are unknown, but critical to understand reinfection risk and breakthrough infection following vaccination. Antibody immunoreactivity against SARS-CoV-2 antigens and Spike variants, inhibition of Spike-driven virus–cell fusion, and infectious SARS-CoV-2 neutralization were characterized in 807 serial samples from 233 reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR)–confirmed Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) individuals with detailed demographics and followed up to 7 months. A broad and sustained polyantigenic immunoreactivity against SARS-CoV-2 Spike, Membrane, and Nucleocapsid proteins, along with high viral neutralization, was associated with COVID-19 severity. A subgroup of “high responders” maintained high neutralizing responses over time, representing ideal convalescent plasma donors. Antibodies generated against SARS-CoV-2 during the first COVID-19 wave had reduced immunoreactivity and neutralization potency to emerging Spike variants and VOC. Accurate monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 antibody responses would be essential for selection of optimal responders and vaccine monitoring and design.

Tea F, Ospina Stella A, Aggarwal A, Ross Darley D, Pilli D, Vitale D, et al. (2021)
SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies: Longevity, breadth, and evasion by emerging viral variants.
PLoS Med 18(7): e1003656. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003656

Copyright: © 2021 The authors. Published by PLOS
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0)

Perhaps the most important lesson in all of this is the vital importance of getting a large majority of the world's population vaccinated as quickly as possible to cut down on the rates of transmission of this virus and the opportunities for it to evolve new variants in unprotected victims which can then be passed on to vaccinated individuals to be refined further by natural selection to evolve variant which can evade the antibodies. Cutting down the global viral population to as small a size as possible, is the quickest and most effective way to reduce the probability of new and more deadly strains emerging.

To see how quickly a new variant can spread through a population, see my animation of the daily new cases in the UK and how quickly the δ-variant spread; just as we had reduced the rate of infection to very low levels in most parts of the UK.

YECism Refuted Again - 120 Million-year Continuous Record of Early Paleozoic in Yukon, Canada

Ordovician black shales of the Mount Hare Formation, Road River Group (approximately 465 million years old) rise above conglomerates of the Aberdeen Member. The dangerous rapids of Aberdeen Canyon (Nan Zhak Nadhàdlaii), created by the Peel River cutting through the resistant conglomerates, appear at bottom left.

Image credit: Erik Sperling

Longest known continuous record of the Paleozoic discovered in Yukon wilderness

It was probably furthest from their minds but scientists from Stanford University have refuted Young Earth Creationism yet again, as is so often the case when science discovers facts about the geology and/or biology of an ancient Earth.

The problem for YECs is that their beliefs are so at variance with the facts that the facts, when uncovered by science, rarely, if ever support them, and in fact almost invariably refuted them, so all scientists need do is to continue to do what scientists do and discover the facts and, intentionally or not, they refute Creationism.

The case in point is the discovery in the Yukon, Canada, of deposits laid down over a period of some 120 million years of the early Palaeozoic era.

As Jossie Garthwaite, writing in Stanford News, explains:

Hundreds of millions of years ago, in the middle of what would eventually become Canada’s Yukon Territory, an ocean swirled with armored trilobites, clam-like brachiopods and soft, squishy creatures akin to slugs and squid.

It’s unheard of to have that much of Earth’s history in one place. There’s nowhere else in the world that I know of where you can study that long a record of Earth history, where there’s basically no change in things like water depth or basin type.

In order to make comparisons throughout these huge swaths of our history and understand long-term trends, you need a continuous record.

The early animals were still living in a low oxygen world.

There’s a ton of debate about how plants impacted the Earth system. Our results are consistent with a hypothesis that as plants evolved and covered the Earth, they increased nutrients to the ocean, driving oxygenation.

Although more oxygen is really good for a lot of organisms, graptolites lost the low oxygen habitat that was their refuge. Any environmental change is going to have winners and losers. Graptolites might have been the losers.

Erik Sperling, lead author
Geological scientist
Stanford University.

A trove of fossils and rock layers formed on that ancient ocean floor have now been unearthed by an international team of scientists along the banks of the Peel River a few hundred miles south of the Arctic’s Beaufort Sea. The discovery reveals oxygen changes at the seafloor across nearly 120 million years of the early Paleozoic era, a time that fostered the most rapid development and diversification of complex, multi-cellular life in Earth’s history.

“It’s unheard of to have that much of Earth’s history in one place,” said Stanford University geological scientist Erik Sperling, lead author of a July 7 study detailing the team’s findings in Science Advances. Most rock formations from the Paleozoic Era have been broken up by tectonic forces or eroded over time. “There’s nowhere else in the world that I know of where you can study that long a record of Earth history, where there’s basically no change in things like water depth or basin type.”

Oxygen was scarce in the deep water of this and other oceans at the dawn of the Paleozoic, roughly 541 million years ago. It stayed scarce until the Devonian, roughly 405 million years ago, when, in a geological blink – no more than a few million years – oxygen likely rocketed to levels close to those in modern oceans and the diversity of life on Earth exploded. Big, predatory fish appeared. Primitive ferns and conifers marched across continents previously ruled by bacteria and algae. Dragonflies took flight. And all of this after nearly four billion years of Earth’s landscapes being virtually barren.

Scientists have long debated what might have caused the dramatic shift from a low oxygen world to a more oxygenated one that could support a diverse web of animal life. But until now, it has been difficult to pin down the timing of global oxygenation or the long-term, background state of the world’s oceans and atmosphere during the era that witnessed both the so-called Cambrian explosion of life and the first of Earth’s “Big Five” mass extinctions, about 445 million years ago at the end of the Ordovician.

“In order to make comparisons throughout these huge swaths of our history and understand long-term trends, you need a continuous record,” said Sperling, an assistant professor of geological sciences at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).

Context for past life

With permission from the Na Cho Nyak Dun and Tetlit Gwitch’in communities in Yukon, Sperling’s team, which included researchers from Dartmouth College and the Yukon Geological Survey, spent three summers at the Peel River site. Arriving by helicopter, the research team hacked through brush with machetes beside Class VI rapids to collect hundreds of fist-sized samples of rock from more than a mile of interbedded layers of shale, chert and lime mudstone.

Back at Sperling’s lab at Stanford, a small army of summer undergraduates and graduate students worked over five summers to help analyze the fossils and chemicals entombed in the rocks. “We spent a lot of time splitting open rocks and looking at graptolite fossils,” Sperling said. Because graptolites evolved a vast array of recognizable body shapes relatively quickly, the pencil-like markings left by the fossils of these colony-dwelling sea creatures give geologists a way to date the rocks in which they’re found.

Once the researchers had finished identifying and dating graptolite fossils, they ground the rocks in a mill, then measured iron, carbon, phosphorous and other elements in the resulting powder to assess the ocean conditions at the time and place where the layers formed. They analyzed 837 new samples from the Peel River site, as well as 106 new samples from other parts of Canada and 178 samples from around the world for comparison.

Winners and losers

The data show low oxygen levels, or anoxia, likely persisted in the world’s oceans for millions of years longer than previously thought – well into the Phanerozoic, when land plants and early animals began to diversify. “The early animals were still living in a low oxygen world,” Sperling said. Contrary to long-held assumptions, the scientists found Paleozoic oceans were also surprisingly free of hydrogen sulfide, a respiratory toxin often found in the anoxic regions of modern oceans.

When oxygen eventually did tick upward in marine environments, it came about just as larger, more complex plant life took off. “There’s a ton of debate about how plants impacted the Earth system,” Sperling said. “Our results are consistent with a hypothesis that as plants evolved and covered the Earth, they increased nutrients to the ocean, driving oxygenation.” In this hypothesis, the influx of nutrients to the sea would have given a boost to primary productivity, a measure of how quickly plants and algae take carbon dioxide and sunlight, turn them into new biomass – and release oxygen in the process.

The change probably killed off graptolites. “Although more oxygen is really good for a lot of organisms, graptolites lost the low oxygen habitat that was their refuge,” Sperling said. “Any environmental change is going to have winners and losers. Graptolites might have been the losers.”

The Peel River study section.
(A) Paleogeographic map of Laurentia (ca. 480 Ma) with the study area depicted in the box [from (30)]. (B) Early Paleozoic paleoenvironmental reconstruction of Yukon, Northwest Territories, and British Columbia [modified after (30))]. The northwestern Laurentian margin was divided into a series of shallow-water carbonate platforms (blue) and deep-water shale basins (gray). The Road River Group was sampled at the Peel River locality in the Richardson trough. (C) The majority of the Road River Group consists of unbioturbated interbedded organic-rich mudstone/shale and lime mudstone with local diagenetic chert replacement. Shown here are Tremadocian dark gray to black shale and lime mudstone of the Mount Hare Formation. Seated geologist is at ~38 m in section J1727 [see (30)) for detailed sedimentological discussion of the Peel River section]. (D) Trace fossils occur sporadically throughout the Road River Group, but the primary interval of extensive, continuous bioturbation occurs in the lower to middle Katian (Upper Ordovician). Bedding plane view of heavily bioturbated Katian strata from 81 to 93 m in J1518; 30-cm-long hammer for scale. MCE, Misty Creek embayment; MRE, Meilleur River embayment.

Photo credit: Erik Sperling, Stanford University.

The research team's findings are published, open access, in Science Advances:

Abstract
The extent to which Paleozoic oceans differed from Neoproterozoic oceans and the causal relationship between biological evolution and changing environmental conditions are heavily debated. Here, we report a nearly continuous record of seafloor redox change from the deep-water upper Cambrian to Middle Devonian Road River Group of Yukon, Canada. Bottom waters were largely anoxic in the Richardson trough during the entirety of Road River Group deposition, while independent evidence from iron speciation and Mo/U ratios show that the biogeochemical nature of anoxia changed through time. Both in Yukon and globally, Ordovician through Early Devonian anoxic waters were broadly ferruginous (nonsulfidic), with a transition toward more euxinic (sulfidic) conditions in the mid–Early Devonian (Pragian), coincident with the early diversification of vascular plants and disappearance of graptolites. This ~80-million-year interval of the Paleozoic characterized by widespread ferruginous bottom waters represents a persistence of Neoproterozoic-like marine redox conditions well into the Phanerozoic.

Sperling, Erik A.; Melchin, Michael J.; Fraser, Tiffani; Stockey, Richard G.; Farrell, Una C.; Bhajan, Liam; Brunoir, Tessa N.; Cole, Devon B.; Gill, Benjamin C.; Lenz, Alfred; Loydell, David K.; Malinowski, Joseph; Miller, Austin J.; Plaza-Torres, Stephanie; Bock, Beatrice; Rooney, Alan D.; Tecklenburg, Sabrina A.; Vogel, Jacqueline M.; Planavsky, Noah J.; Strauss, Justin V.
A long-term record of early to mid-Paleozoic marine redox change
Science Advances 07 Jul 2021: Vol. 7, no. 28, eabf4382 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abf4382

In stark contrast to YECism, which this research refutes in just about every respect; it confirms very much of what science had deduced about this time in Earth's history, how oxygen levels changed over the period and what impact this had on living organisms and the evolution of the major orders. The interesting thing is how well the recorded change in atmospheric oxygen maps onto the fossil record, showing a very strong causal link between those environmental changes and evolution/extinctions.

This tendency of science to validate its hypotheses with several different strands of evidence is of course to be expected, since these major events are often causally linked. Evolution, for example, is driven largely by environmental change and environmental change is driven by geological and biological change.

YECism, on the other hand only has the camp-fire tales of nomadic hunter-gatherers and simple goat-herders with what little science they had in the fearful infancy of our species, when 'magic' seemed like a sensible explanation for the unknown. The astonishing thing is that this backward superstition still survives today in the face of the considerable body of verifiable scientific evidence, such as this paper, that it is wrong. It really is time that YECs accepted that the Bible is best read as an account of what primitive people used to imagine before they knew any better. They did their best but had no evidence, so used best guesses - and got it badly wrong, as we are now discovering.

Unintelligent Designer News - Has Creationism's Intelligent Designer Boobed?

Scanning electron micrograph of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria being engulfed by an immune cell known as a neutrophil. Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers have discovered that blocking a specific group of enzymes called caspases boosts the ability of immune cells, including neutrophils, to fight MRSA and other dangerous skin infections — and without the use of antibiotics.

Credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,
National Institutes of Health

'Fortunate Accident' May Yield Immunity Weapon Against Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

Creationist mode:

No-body is perfect, but you would expect Creationism's intelligent [sic] designer to come pretty close if not actually perfect, if it really existed.

But, according to research by scientists from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA, it may have dropped what we in the UK call, a clanger, with its design of MRSA - the multi-resistant Streptococcus aureus bacterium it redesigned to get around the success of medical science with anti-biotics - and it could be a fatal one for its design!

In fact, it was so unlikely that the researchers discovered it by accident (just like Fleming discovered penicillin - the first antibiotic, so you would think an intelligent designer would have learned from that mistake!). As the John Hopkins University News release explains:

We gave the mice a blocker of all caspases [pancaspase inhibitor], a compound known as Q-VD-OPH, thinking it would leave both sets of mice more vulnerable to MRSA infection. To our surprise, blocking caspases had the opposite effect, resulting in a rapid and remarkable clearing of the MRSA bacteria by keeping the immune cells alive and boosting their protective function.

It’s like a fire department where older firetrucks are kept operating to help put out blazes, when otherwise, they would have been taken out of service

It was an accidental finding by Alexander Fleming that led to the golden age of antibiotics, but now that’s nearing the end because of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It seems fitting that another surprise in the lab could be the start of a second golden age, the use of host-directed immunotherapy.

Lloyd Miller, M.D., Ph.D., Senior author
Former professor of dermatology, infectious diseases and orthopaedic surgery
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine,
Now with Janssen Research and Development

...in a paper published today in the journal Science Translational Medicine, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine have announced another accidentally discovered, potentially game-changing treatment — one that may provide an alternative immune-based solution to the danger of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.

And like Fleming’s surprise finding, the bacterium of note is once again S. aureus — but this time, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, the life-threatening strain unharmed by methicillin and other antibiotics, and better known by its acronym, MRSA.

The paper’s senior author, Lloyd Miller, M.D., Ph.D., former professor of dermatology, infectious diseases and orthopaedic surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and now with Janssen Research and Development, says the research team was originally intending to study the mechanisms behind MRSA skin infections in mice with and without the ability to manufacture interleukin-1 beta (IL-1β). This protein, transformed into its active form by enzymes called caspases, enhances protective immunity by helping immune cells called neutrophils, monocytes and macrophages fight bacterial infections.

The paper’s senior author, Lloyd Miller, M.D., Ph.D., former professor of dermatology, infectious diseases and orthopaedic surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and now with Janssen Research and Development, says the research team was originally intending to study the mechanisms behind MRSA skin infections in mice with and without the ability to manufacture interleukin-1 beta (IL-1β). This protein, transformed into its active form by enzymes called caspases, enhances protective immunity by helping immune cells called neutrophils, monocytes and macrophages fight bacterial infections.

A single oral dose of Q-VD-OPH decreased the size of MRSA skin lesions and rapidly cleared the bacteria compared with vehicle-treated [given the carrier solution without Q-VD-OPH] and untreated mice. And surprisingly, the treatment worked whether IL-1β was present or not — and without administering any antibiotics.

The destruction of macrophages by necroptosis releases large amount of tumor necrosis factor, or TNF, a protein that triggers bacteria-fighting immune cells to swarm into an infected area of skin.

Martin Alphonse, Ph.D., Lead author
A dermatology postdoctoral fellow
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

“We gave the mice a blocker of all caspases [pancaspase inhibitor], a compound known as Q-VD-OPH, thinking it would leave both sets of mice more vulnerable to MRSA infection,” Miller says. “To our surprise, blocking caspases had the opposite effect, resulting in a rapid and remarkable clearing of the MRSA bacteria by keeping the immune cells alive and boosting their protective function.”

Sensing they might have accidentally uncovered a means of fighting bacterial “superbugs,” Miller and his colleagues conducted their latest study to confirm the unexpected finding was not a fluke.

The results were encouraging.

“A single oral dose of Q-VD-OPH decreased the size of MRSA skin lesions and rapidly cleared the bacteria compared with vehicle-treated [given the carrier solution without Q-VD-OPH] and untreated mice,” says study lead author Martin Alphonse, Ph.D., a dermatology postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “And surprisingly, the treatment worked whether IL-1β was present or not — and without administering any antibiotics.”

The researchers, says Alphonse, found that the pancaspase inhibitor reduces apoptosis — one of three main methods the body uses to remove worn-out or damaged cells — of neutrophils and monocytes, leaving them in plentiful numbers and better able to remove MRSA bacteria.

“It’s like a fire department where older firetrucks are kept operating to help put out blazes, when otherwise, they would have been taken out of service,” says Miller.

The researchers also saw enhanced necroptosis — a second controlled cell death process similar to apoptosis — of macrophages, which are mature monocytes.

“The destruction of macrophages by necroptosis releases large amount of tumor necrosis factor, or TNF, a protein that triggers bacteria-fighting immune cells to swarm into an infected area of skin,” says Alphonse.

Finally, the researchers tested whether Q-VD-OPH in mice could have broader activity against two other dangerous skin bacteria, Streptococcus pyogenes (the cause of multiple diseases, including scarlet fever, necrotizing fasciitis and toxic shock syndrome) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (often a threat to hospitalized patients on ventilators, with catheters or suffering wounds from surgery or burns). The targeting of the body’s immune system against bacteria via pancaspase inhibition — referred to as “host-directed immunotherapy” — proved just as successful as it had been for MRSA.

In other words, having been up to its old trick of creating a parasite which turns our immune system against us (the immune system it supposedly designed to protect us from its bacterial and viral parasites) the intelligent [sic] designer has accidentally created a major vulnerability because, by turning off part of this system, the researchers found they could wipe out an MRSA infection. What it had been getting away with until this discovery, was setting up a mechanism whereby the infected host destroyed its own phagocytes, so, by turning off that mechanism, it leaves plenty of phagocytes around to kill the bacteria. In addition, this same mechanism now sacrifices old and worn-out macrophages which then release a substance which causes an invasion of the infected tissues by anti-bacterial immune cells.

Creationist mode:

The serious science, which of course pays no heed to Creationist superstitions and fanciful tales, can be read in Science Translational Medicine:

Anti-infection immunotherapy
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) are increasingly prevalent and difficult to treat. Alphonse et al. show that a pan-caspase inhibitor called Q-VD-OPH functioned as an effective immunotherapy in mouse models of community-acquired MRSA, Streptococcus pyogenes, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa skin infections. Q-VD-OPH reduced apoptosis in neutrophils and monocytes and increased necroptosis in macrophages, thereby increasing TNF production and infection clearance in mice. This work suggests a potential strategy to target bacterial infections without requiring the use of antibiotics.

Abstract
Staphylococcus aureus causes most skin infections in humans, and the emergence of methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) strains is a serious public health threat. There is an urgent clinical need for nonantibiotic immunotherapies to treat MRSA infections and prevent the spread of antibiotic resistance. Here, we investigated the pan-caspase inhibitor quinoline–valine–aspartic acid–difluorophenoxymethyl ketone (Q-VD-OPH) for efficacy against MRSA skin infection in mice. A single systemic dose of Q-VD-OPH decreased skin lesion sizes and reduced bacterial burden compared with vehicle-treated or untreated mice. Although Q-VD-OPH inhibited inflammasome-dependent apoptosis-associated speck-like protein containing caspase activation and recruitment domain (ASC) speck formation and caspase-1–mediated interleukin-1β (IL-1β) production, Q-VD-OPH maintained efficacy in mice deficient in IL-1β, ASC, caspase-1, caspase-11, or gasdermin D. Thus, Q-VD-OPH efficacy was independent of inflammasome-mediated pyroptosis. Rather, Q-VD-OPH reduced apoptosis of monocytes and neutrophils. Moreover, Q-VD-OPH enhanced necroptosis of macrophages with concomitant increases in serum TNF and TNF-producing neutrophils, monocytes/macrophages, and neutrophils in the infected skin. Consistent with this, Q-VD-OPH lacked efficacy in mice deficient in TNF (with associated reduced neutrophil influx and necroptosis), in mice deficient in TNF/IL-1R and anti-TNF antibody-treated WT mice. In vitro studies revealed that combined caspase-3, caspase-8, and caspase-9 inhibition reduced apoptosis, and combined caspase-1, caspase-8, and caspase-11 inhibition increased TNF, suggesting a mechanism for Q-VD-OPH efficacy in vivo. Last, Q-VD-OPH also had a therapeutic effect against Streptococcus pyogenes and Pseudomonas aeruginosa skin infections in mice. Collectively, pan-caspase inhibition represents a potential host-directed immunotherapy against MRSA and other bacterial skin infections.

Alphonse, Martin P.; Rubens, Jessica H.; Ortines, Roger V.; Orlando, Nicholas A.; Patel, Aman M.; Dikeman, Dustin; Wang, Yu; Vuong, Ivan; Joyce, Daniel P.; Zhang, Jeffrey;e Mumtaz, Mohammed; Liu, Haiyun; Liu, Qi; Youn, Christine; Patrick, Garrett J.; Ravipati, Advaitaa; Miller, Robert J.; Archer, Nathan K.; Miller, Lloyd S.
Pan-caspase inhibition as a potential host-directed immunotherapy against MRSA and other bacterial skin infections
Science Translational Medicine 07 Jul 2021: Vol. 13, Issue 601, eabe9887 DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.abe9887

Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Reprinted by kind permission under licence #5104301214127

It looks like Creationism's incompetent designer didn't see that one coming, any more than it saw what medical science could do with penicillin which, ironically, it had designed moulds to produce to defend themselves from the bacteria which this same designer had designed to attack moulds.

Creationists regard these developments as the work of a highly intelligent, omni-benevolent god whom the frauds at the Discovery Institute now make look like a malevolent, misanthropic, pestilential sadist who loves making its creation sick, by insisting these things can't be the result of a natural process in which neither gods nor magic are involved.

Evolution News - Two Newly Discovered Species of Homo Add Detail To The Picture

Timeline: The Nesher Ramla Homo type was an ancestor of both the Neanderthals in Europe and the archaic Homo populations of Asia.

New Type of Prehistoric Human Discovered in Israel | Tel Aviv University

We have had two pieces of news about new species of related hominins being discovered recently, and they both point to a period in our not-too-distant past when there were several species or subspecies of Homo living contemporaneously in Eurasia. This adds to the picture which has been emerging over recent years of widely scattered human populations evolving in semi-isolation and incompletely speciating, then coming together again and interbreeding, very much like a ring species, so that modern, non-African H. sapiens are the result of multiple hybridizations and have several ancestral species.

It will be interesting to see how Creationists handle this and the news that they probably interbred, so we not only do not have a single founder couple; we do not even have a single founder species, if they don't do the usual thing and ignore the findings, rubbish the science or redefine some standard terms like, 'species' in order to avoid dealing with the inconvenient facts.

Malevolent Designer News - Science is Winning but It Is Not Giving Up on the SARS-CoV-2 Virus Just Yet

What's the 'Delta plus' variant? And can it escape vaccines? An expert explains

News today that should impress dedicated Creationists who are obliged by dogma to believe all things are the work of their putative creator god, in that yet another, potentially even more dangerous, variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been discovered. This new variant appears to have been 'designed' by a small but important tweak of the δ-variant which is responsible for the new wave of cases in several countries and which is set to become the dominant form of the virus in circulation throughout the world.

Talibangelical Nutter News - Robin Bullock Goes Even Further Round the Bend

Pastor Robin Bullock, Youth Force Ministries Church International

Evangelist: The 2008 Democratic Convention Stage Was Modeled on Satan’s Throne | Beth Stoneburner | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

If you want to see the harm that fundamentalist religion can do to a person's mental state, you need look no further than Talibangelist Trumpanzee, Robin Bullock, of Youth Force Ministries Church International, who is now seeing things that aren't there and finding Satan lurking in everything.

Of course, as usual with Talibangelists who earn their living exploiting the fears and prejudices of vulnerable people who have been raised with a morbid theophobic psychosis as part of their fundamentalist conditioning, and since the line between insanity and religiosity is often blurred or non-existent, it is difficult to tell whether these are simply fantasies designed to appeal to his credulous audience or the genuine signs of clinical psychosis and evidence of the harm that religious fanaticism can do, so I'll leave readers to decide that for themselves.

Christian Bigotry News - SCOTUS Decision Confirms Even Christians Must Obey the Law.

Flower Shop owner, Baronelle Stutzman.
Court rules she must not victimise gays even if she is a Christian and so feels she should be entitled to.

Supreme Court Rejects Appeal from Anti-Gay Christian Florist Barronelle Stutzman | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

In declining to hear a case, the Supreme Court of the United States, even with its Trump-given conservative Christian majority, has in effect confirmed that even Christian bigots do not have the right to deny other people their basic human rights and so cannot victimise minorities of their choice.

In 2013, Baronelle Stutzman, the owner of a New York flower shop, refused to supply flowers for the wedding of Robert Ingersoll to Curt Freed, even though same-sex marriage is legal in New York, and discrimination of the grounds of sexual orienation is illegal. She was prosecuted by NY law enforcement officials, found guilty and fined $1000.

Trumpanzee News - The Repugnicans Just Can't Accept Reality!

Fanatical Trumpanzee, Emerald Robinson
Keeping the Big Lie going

The Right-Wing Pundits Fueling Trumpists’ Hope in the Farcical Arizona ‘Audit’ | Right Wing Watch

The strategy of the Trumpanzee cult is now to convince enough Americans that there really was massive electoral fraud in 2020, to give Donald Trump a good chance of a comeback in 2024 as the candidate who will restore democracy and defeat the evil Democrats, as democracy in the USA descends to the kindergarten level of debate. It is a strategy that relies for its success on the gullibility of a large enough number of American voters so he doesn't lose the popular vote again like the last two times, and gains enough state EC votes so the Electoral College doesn't need to return a bogus result to get a Repugnican candidate into the White House, despite being rejected by a majority of the electorate, like it did in 2000 when Gore beat Bush and again in 2016, when Trump lost to Clinton, despite the Russian interference.

Part of this strategy involves a bogus 'audit' of Arizona's Maricopa County 2012 presidential election returns by a company calling itself Cyber Ninjas [sic], whose CEO is a fully signed-up "Stop the Steal" activist, which has been bought and paid for by rich Trumpanzees whose tactics have already included directing its operative to conduct a forensic search for bamboo fibres as 'evidence that the ballot forms were flown in from South Korea!'. Even before his company was awarded the contract (or maybe that was because of it) Cyber Ninja's CEO, Doug Logan, had come out in support of the "Stop the Steal" movement.

Meanwhile, this recount is being repeatedly hyped in the news and social media by a small number of leading "Stop the Steal" activists like Emerald Robinson.

Biden’s Department of Justice is completely out of line in interfering in with Arizona’s audit.
What we are seeing here is a level of election corruption known only in third world countries.

If you didn’t cheat, why would you ever work to stop an audit of votes?@RealCandaceO

— 🛡️jesúsf. (@Jesusf_Malaka) May 7, 2021

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The Democrats are panicking as the election audit in Arizona continues. They can't stop the American people from finding out what happened in the 2020 elections. Watch Arizona Chairwoman @kelliwardaz with Dan Ball on OANN's RealAmerica. #AmericasAudit #ElectionIntegrity pic.twitter.com/XGsYTgqlnf

— Arizona Republican Party (@AZGOP) April 28, 2021

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THIS IS IMPORTANT!! PLEASE SHARE!!!!! #ArizonaAudit

We are ALL WORKING TOGETHER. Gen. Flynn is raising money, We the People AZ Alliance is raising money. IT IS ALL GOING TO THE SAME FUND. WE HAVE 1.7M LEFT TO RAISE!

Please go to https://t.co/QK0JAt1tzi and give what you can!! pic.twitter.com/b1QOO1oQEa

— Anna Khait (@Annakhait) April 30, 2021

Emerald Robinson was shown to be top of the ten most persistent posters of lies and disinformation about the audit, by the non-profit Advance Democracy, Inc which analysed over 215,000 tweets mentioning the Arizona audit between April 1 and June 19. Also high on the list were other leading Trumpanzee cultists, Emerald Robinson was shown to be the top of the ten most persistent posters of lies and disinformation about the audit, by the non-profit Advance Democracy, Inc which analysed over 215,000 tweets mentioning the Arizona audit between April 1 and June 19.

Also high on the list were other leading Trumpanzee cultists, Candace Owens, former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos, the Arizona Republican Party, far-right online personalities Matt Couch and Alex Sheppard, former reality TV contestant Anna Khait, and prominent Trumpanzee Juanita Broaddrick.

In all, just eight accounts were responsible for the vast majority of the disinformation being promulgates in a way which is clearly co-ordinated and one doesn't need to look much further than the Arizona Repugnican Twitter account (@AZGOP) to see who that might be by.

The farcical nature of the audit can be judged from this account of her observation of the audit process by Jennifer Morrell, a former local election official and national expert on post-election audits, writing in the Washington Post:

When Arizona’s secretary of state asked me if I would serve as an observer of the Arizona Senate’s audit of Maricopa County’s ballots, I expected to see some unusual things. Post-election audits and recounts are almost always conducted under the authority of local election officials, who have years of knowledge and experience. The idea of a government handing over control of ballots to an outside group, as the state Senate did when hiring a Florida contractor with no elections experience, was bizarre. This firm, Cyber Ninjas, insisted that it would recount and examine all 2.1 million ballots cast in the county in the 2020 general election.

So I figured it would be unconventional. But it was so much worse than that. In more than a decade working on elections, audits and recounts across the country, I’ve never seen one this mismanaged.

[...]

I was stunned to see spinning conveyor wheels, whizzing hundreds of ballots past “counters,” who struggled to mark, on a tally sheet, each voter’s selection for the presidential and Senate races. They had only a few seconds to record what they saw. Occasionally, I saw a counter look up, realize they missed a ballot and then grab the wheel to stop it. This process sets them up to make so many mistakes, I kept thinking. Humans are terrible at tedious, repetitive tasks; we’re especially bad at counting. That’s why, in all the other audits I’ve seen, bipartisan teams follow a tallying method that allows for careful review and inspection of each ballot, followed by a verification process. I’d never seen an audit use contraptions to speed things up.

Speed doesn’t necessarily pose a problem if the audit has a process for catching and correcting mistakes. But it didn’t. Each table had three volunteers tallying the ballots, and their tally sheets were considered “done” as long as two of the three tallies matched, and the third was off by no more than two ballots. The volunteers recounted only if their tally sheets had three or more errors — a threshold they stuck to, no matter how many ballots a stack contained, whether 50 or 100. This allowed for a shocking amount of error. Some table managers told the counters to recount when there were too many errors; other table managers just instructed the counters to fix their “math mistakes.” At no point did anyone track how many ballots they were processing at their station, to ensure that none got added or lost during handling.

I also observed other auditors working on a “forensic paper audit,” flagging ballots as “suspicious” for a variety of reasons. One was presidential selection: If someone thought the voter’s choice looked as though it had been marked by a machine, they flagged it as “anomalous.” Another was “missing security markers.” (It’s virtually impossible for a ballot to be missing its security markers, since voting equipment is designed to reject ballots without them.) The third was paper weight — the forensics tables had scales for weighing ballots, though I never saw anyone use them — and texture. Volunteers scrutinized ballots for, of all things, bamboo fibers. Only later, after the shift, did I learn that this was connected to groundless speculation that fake ballots had been flown in from South Korea.

The 'auditors' were looking for anything 'suspicious'. This could include a folded ballot paper, because, so it was reasoned, people who vote in person wouldn't fold their paper before posting it in a ballot box! Other grounds for suspicion was evidence of having handled food before handling the balot, such as cheese dust (from Cheetos!) because people who vote in person don't eat snacks while waiting to vote!

And so the farce continued. Cyber Ninjas even changing the process and the training of its contractors in mid-audit!

As Jennifer Morrell concluded:

What I saw in Arizona shook me. If the process wraps up and Cyber Ninjas puts together some kind of report, that report will almost certainly claim that there were issues with Maricopa County’s ballots. After all, Cyber Ninjas chief executive Doug Logan has publicly voiced his wild conjecture about the 2020 election. But the real problem is the so-called audit itself.

Audits are supposed to make our elections more secure and transparent — to strengthen the public’s trust in our democratic process. Maricopa County is known for having some of the best election practices in the country: Officials had already undertaken a hand-count audit and a forensic audit of their 2020 ballots and found no evidence of fraud. Now a group with no expertise, improvising procedures as it goes, is sowing doubt about the result of a well-run election. This is not an audit, and I don’t see how this can have a good outcome.

It’s a threat to the overall confidence of democracy, all in pursuit of continuing a narrative that we know to be a lie.

Matt Masterson
Former Department of Homeland Security official

This is a well-financed campaign designed to fool the American electorate into believing what started life as Trump's desperate attempt to deny that he had been decisively rejected for a second term at the polls and that Biden won fair and square in a secure election. Having failed to convince any court, including SCOTUS with its Trumpanzee stooges, that there had been a massive electoral fraud, based on nothing more than Trump's say-so, Trumpanzee cultists in the GOP are now trying to manufacture the evidence that was singular lacking when the courts asked for it.

The only fraud going on here is that being inflicted on the American electorate by an undemocratic, would-be dictator and the extreme right who can't accept that the American people had the great good sense to boot Trump out of office at the first opportunity and to revert America to a properly run, democratic state with a legitimate president and good governance, in place of the White House-based crime syndicate many of whom are now facing jail, despite the blanket pardons for their crimes handed out by the syndicate boss, President-reject, Donald J Trump.

Christian Talibangelical News - Celebrating Their Freedom to Deny Freedom to Others

A memorial plaque honoring veterans has become controversial in Monument, Colorado.

Photo courtesy of Military Religious Freedom Foundation

Colorado memorial draws religious freedom concerns

If we weren't so used to it in the (until recently) predominantly Christian West, the arrogance of Christians would be breath-taking. In yet another example of their assumed privileged right to impose their religion on the rest of us, regardless of our own religion, or none, Christian Talibangelicals have erected a memorial in a municipal cemetery, purportedly to honour military veterans, but which is a blatant puff for Christianity and factually and historically wrong.

It reads:

"Only two defining forces
have ever offered to die for you:
Jesus Christ and the American Soldier;
one died for your soul, the other died
for your freedom."

We honor those who made freedom a reality

Although enclosed in quotation marks, there is no attribution. Previously, this quote has been falsely attributed to former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in the context of the Iraq invasion, and to General Patton during WWII. In fact, it appears to have been invented out of thin air on the Internet in about 2000.

Covidiot News - Amish Prefer Magic Spells and Other People's Immunity to Vaccines

People in Amish country prepare a horse team to work on a farm in Pulaski, Pennsylvania, on June 23, 2021. The vaccination drive is lagging far behind in many Amish communities across the U.S. after a wave of virus outbreaks that swept through their churches and homes during the past year.

Photo credit: AP Photo/Keith Srakocic

Amish put faith in God's will and herd immunity over vaccine

Religion news service is reporting that Amish communities across America are eschewing the anti-Covid vaccines and relying instead on prayer and 'herd immunity' to protect them. The notion that magic spells cast towards an imaginary mind-reading sky man who can suspend the laws of nature at will can protect them against a potentially deadly virus, would be laughable if the consequences of this childish notion weren't potentially tragic, and not just for the Amish themselves but for anyone else with whom they might chance to come into contact. In fact, for anyone infected by coming into contact with an infected Amish, the consequences could be the same as if one of these peace-loving, non-violent people had taken a gun and shot them.

As for 'herd immunity', this in substantial part, depends not just on the members of their community having immunity (by surviving an infection) but also on a large proportion of thos with whom they might come into contact also having immunity so they are not shedding virus particles even when asymptomatic. This largely depends on other people having the vaccines. So, whatever their reason for declining the vaccines, they appear to think that doesn't or shouldn't apply to others. Any risks involved (and what risks have been identified are very rare) are okay for others, but not for them.

Malevolent Designer News - More Evidence of the Evil Genius Behind SARS-CoV-2

How a corona infection changes blood cells in the long run | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Creationist mode:

Today we have two more examples of how brilliant Creationism's putative intelligent designer has been in its determination to do as much damage as possible with its new virus, SARS-CoV-2 with which, according to Creationist dogma, it is causing untold suffering and misery in revenge for someone eating its apple.

First, we have this finding by a German research team working at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL), that infection by the virus can cause red blood cells to change in size and stiffness, causing vascular occlusions and reduced oxygen-carrying capacity and giving rise to the breathlessness, headaches and fatigues that characterise the post Covid syndrome, aka, long covid.

Malevolent Designer News - How a Parasite is Designed to Make its Host Commit Suicide

The life cycle of the hairworm After hatching in the water, hairworm larvae parasitize aquatic insects and form a cyst in the hosts’ body cavity. After the aquatic insect has grown wings, the hairworm is transported from an aquatic environment to a terrestrial environment. If the aquatic insect is consumed by a mantid, the hairworm grows inside the mantid’s body until it reaches maturity and causes its host to enter the water. Once the mantid is in the water, the hairworm escapes back into the aquatic environment to reproduce, and its lifecycle ends.

Parasites manipulate praying mantis’s polarized-light perception, causing it to jump into water. | Research at Kobe

Readers of my popular, illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good will already be familiar with several examples of a parasite turning its host into an automaton, where the host is manipulated by the parasite to behave in ways beneficial to the parasite but detrimental to the host, often resulting in the death of its victim.

In fact, viewed as a memetic mind virus, religions which encourage and inspire self-sacrifice can be seen as examples of this manipulative mind-control too. They do nothing to enhance the wellbeing of their victim in this respect and serve only to benefit the religion that induces this behaviour, using the cultural assumptions that self-sacrifice for a cause is to be admired and indicates the validity of the religion that induces it.

This example, discovered by researchers at Kobe University, is yet another to be added to that long list. They have discovered how a nematode or hairworm manipulates the behaviour a praying mantis host to jump into water where the hairworm can escape from its body and produce larvae which infect the aquatic larval stage of flying insects, in response to polarized light reflected off the surface of water.

As the Kobe University News release explains, the biological background to this is:

Biodiversity News - Finding Resources in the Least Expected Places

The European chestnut, Castanea sativa.
The leaves contain a chemical that neutralises MRSA by blocking its ability to make toxins.

eScienceCommons: New molecule found in chestnut leaves disarms dangerous staph bacteria

Another example today of why maintaining biodiversity is important...

Scientists have isolated a chemical from the leaves of the European sweet chestnut tree which could prove invaluable in our arms race with MRSA. They have called this substance, castaneroxy A, after the Latin name for the sweet chestnut tree, Castanea sativa.

According to Carol Clarke, writing in Emory University eScienceCommons:

Talibangelical Covidiot News - The Self-Possessed Arrogance of "God's Prophets".

Chuck Pierce, Global Pheres, Ince, Corinth, Texas
"God cause the Coronavirus pandemic so he could get closer to me!"

'Prophet' Chuck Pierce: God 'Stopped the Whole World' With COVID-19 to a Deeper Relationship With Me | Right Wing Watch

Despite the Christian teaching against the 'deadly sin' of pride, American Talibangelical fundamentalist 'Prophets of God' simply can't get over their self-worshipping idolatry. "God did/does it all for me, because I'm so special!"

This is the clear message from fruitloop Talibangelist Chuck Pierce. A few days ago he 'revealed' to viewers of Cindy Jacob's Facebook 'Religious Center' the astonishing fact that God had caused the Coronavirus pandemic just so he could build a closer relationship with Chuck Pierce, president of Global Spheres, Inc., Corinth, Texas, USA.

Malevolent Designer News - Three More Examples of Malevolent Design

The virus that causes COVID-19 normally gets inside cells by attaching to a protein called ACE2. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that a single mutation confers the ability to enter cells through another route, which may threaten the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics designed to block the standard route of entry.

Image: Getty images

Virus that causes COVID-19 can find alternate route to infect cells – Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

Creationist mode:

Creationists who believe only their special magic friend designs living organisms because nothing can evolve naturally and the only intelligent [sic] designer clever enough is their special magic invisible friend, must be thrilled at the recent news of its brilliance, especially with its design of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that is currently killing people by the tens of thousands, ruining economies and making hundreds of millions more sick.

But, it's not just the SARS-Cov-2 virus which is the result of its special efforts to make us sick: it has been hard at work with its attempt to get round human medical science's success with anti-biotics with its resistant strains such as MRSA, and has come up with a particularly nasty form of Streptococcus pneumoniae, which it has designed to take advantage of an infection with any one of the many strains of influenza virus, to do even more damage to our lungs. First, the news that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have found an alternative way to enter our cells to begin making more viruses and destroying our cells in the process. And this has special relevance to medical science's attempts to control the pandemic with vaccines, because most of these vaccines are designed to reduce the viruses ability to enter our cells using its 'spike' proteins.

Malevolent Designer News - The Sadistic Monster Has Been at it for Millions of Years!

Mushroom growing out of ant's rectum

Mushroom growing out of fossilized ant reveals new genus and species of fungal parasite | Oregon State University

The standard excuse by Creationists for why there is so much evil in the world, in the form of parasites, is because of Eve's sin. Unwittingly, with this excuse, they give away the fact that intelligent [sic] design is far from being the alternative science that Michael J. Behe and the Discovery Institute liars pretend it is, but is nothing more than Biblical fundamentalism in disguise. What other science needs to invoke religious superstition and unproven Bronze Age origin myths to explain anything?

But what are these frauds to make of the fact that one of the nastier parasites has been turning ants into zombies for millions of years, from way before the Bronze Age goat-herders set their tale of Adam and Eve just a few thousand years ago; millions of years before there were any humans to scrump a god's apples even, let alone eat one.

According to George Poinar from Oregon State University Department of Integrative Biology and Yves-Marie Maltier from France, a fungus was parasitising ants 50 million years ago, according to the evidence found in Baltic amber.

Ants are hosts to a number of intriguing parasites, some of which modify the insects’ behavior to benefit the parasites’ development and dispersion. Ants of the tribe Camponotini, commonly known as carpenter ants, seem especially susceptible to fungal pathogens of the genus Ophiocordyceps, including one species that compels infected ants to bite into various erect plant parts just before they die...

We can see a large, orange, cup-shaped ascoma with developing perithecia – flask-shaped structures that let the spores out – emerging from the rectum of the ant. The vegetative part of the fungus is coming out of the abdomen and the base of the neck. We see freestanding fungal bodies also bearing what look like perithecia, and in addition we see what look like the sacs where spores develop. All of the stages, those attached to the ant and the freestanding ones, are of the same species...

There is no doubt that Allocordyceps represents a fungal infection of a Camponotus ant. This is the first fossil record of a member of the Hypocreales order emerging from the body of an ant. And as the earliest fossil record of fungal parasitism of ants, it can be used in future studies as a reference point regarding the origin of the fungus-ant association.

George Poinar, Lead author
Department of Integrative Biology
Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

Readers of my popular, richly illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good will be aware of the fungus that takes control of an ant's behaviour and induces it to find a leaf in the forest canopy, then bite into a midrib on the underside and die, so the fungus growing inside it can produce a fruiting body, growing out of its head, to make spores which can infect another ant.

This newly-discovered Ascomycota fungus produces fruiting bodies out of the ant's abdomen, including its anus.

A mushroom is the reproductive structure of many fungi, including the ones you find growing in your yard, and Poinar and a collaborator in France named their discovery Allocordyceps baltica. They found the new type of Ascomycota fungi in an ant preserved in 50-million-year-old amber from Europe’s Baltic region...

The new fungal genus and species shares certain features with Ophiocordyceps but also displays several developmental stages not previously reported, Poinar said. To name the genus, placed in the order Hypocreales, Poinar and fellow researcher Yves-Marie Maltier combined the Greek word for new – alloios – with the name of known genus Cordyceps...

The fungus could not be placed in the known ant-infecting genus Ophiocordyceps because ascomata in those species usually come out the neck or head of an ant, Poinar said, and not the rectum.

The researcher's findings are published in the journal of the British Mycological Society, Fungal Biology, published by Elsevier Ltd., sadly behind an expensive paywall.

So, if you've believed the Intelligent Design hoax, you now need to explain why your putative intelligent [sic] designer was designing these nasty parasitic fungi to infect, control and kill ants, millions of years before there were humans so millions of years before this mythical 'fall' that is routinely cited to explain the presence of these manifestations of evil (if they were intentionally designed).

Clearly, parasitising ants has nothing to do with what a mythical ancestral human couple are supposed to have done according to a Middle Eastern Bronze Age creation myth. For some inexplicable reason, Creationists are not permitted to ascribe these things to an amoral, natural, unguided process - evolution by natural selection - but, instead, must assign it to the intentions of an omniscience designer, so making it appear that this 'designer' is a malevolent monster who enjoys watching its creation suffer.

How many devout Christians and Moslems prefer this view of their god to the view that it had nothing to do with creating these parasites or the suffering they cause, and for some reason, despite its omnipotence and supposed omni-benevolence, is either unaware of them, powerless to prevent them doing what they do, or indifferent to the suffering they cause?

Reference:

Poinar, George; Maltier, Yves-Marie
Allocordyceps baltica gen. et sp. nov. (Hypocreales: Clavicipitaceae), an ancient fungal parasite of an ant in Baltic amber
Fungal Biology 2021 DOI/: 10.1016/j.funbio.2021.06.002

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Religion - Providing Excuses for People who Need Excuses

The vital element to consider is the gender norms and beliefs surrounding male dominance and male superiority, created by power hierarchies that accord men greater status.

The Australian Institute of Family Studies
Gender Equality and Violence Against Women

Domestic abuse more prevalent among Anglican churchgoers, new report finds - ABC News

Australia has a significant problem of domestic violence perpetrated mostly by men against women with whom they are in an intimate relationship and especially common in Anglican communities. The problem was first highlighted by an ABC News investigation which reported:

Research shows that the men most likely to abuse their wives are evangelical Christians who attend church sporadically*. Church leaders in Australia say they abhor abuse of any kind. But advocates say the church is not just failing to sufficiently address domestic violence, it is both enabling and concealing it

The report had cited as a typical example, a couple named 'Sally' and 'Peter' and the exchange that took place the evening before Sally left the household with nothing except her young daughter and what cloths she could carry to escape from the nightly abuse.

This exchange was triggered by Sally coming down stairs to say 'Goodnight' which Peter interpreted as her unwillingness to have sex. He began screaming abuse at her and accused her of being a disobedient wife who was disobeying God's instruction to be obedient to her husband. He grabbed a Bible and quoted from it:

Refuting Creationism - It's Yet Another of Those 'Missing' Links!

Scanning electron micrographs of Fensomea setacea, gen. & sp. nov.

Scale bars = 5 µm.

Scanning electron micrographs of Fensomea setacea, gen. & sp. nov. (GeoB*184) in (A, B) ventral view, (C) left lateral view, (D) right lateral view, (E) dorsal view, and (F) ventral apical view. Scale bars = 5 µm.

Phytoplankton: The discovery of a missing link - LMU München

Here is yet another example of scientists refuting Creationist dogma simply by discovering the facts. This is easily done of course, without the slightest intent on the part of the scientists because the facts are invariably at odds with evidence-free, superstition-based Creationism, so we would expect the facts and the truth to expose the fallacies and lies Creationist frauds fool their credulous dupes with.

In this case, the dogma refuted is that there are no missing links. The facts reported by the scientists based at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany, is that they have discovered a 'missing link' between the two major phylogenetic groups of unicellular algae known as the dinophytes or dinoflagellates, which sheds new light on the evolution of these organisms.

Missing links at the unicellular organism level might not sound significant to those who, like Creationists, don't understand taxonomic levels, but they are no less significant, or 'transitional', than would be 'missing links' between, for example, chimpanzees and hominins or between old world monkeys and the African great apes. The point is that these organisms lie at the origin of two different taxonomies or branches of the evolutionary tree.
As the Ludwig-Maxillians University news release explains:

Religion - Providing More Excuses for People Who Need Excuses

Pastor Lewis Clemons
Kingdom Awareness Ministries International, Columbus, Georgia, USA
$500,000 compensation for rape victim

Jury imposes $500K verdict on pastor accused of rape | U.S. News | The Christian Post

Pastor Lewis Clemons, Could have settled a claim that he raped a 15-year-old girl with a simple public admission and an apology, but he refused. So, the jury in the Superior Court of Muscogee County, Georgia, found in favour of the complainant, Lequita Jackson, and imposed a $500,000 penalty against him.

In 2017, Jackson and another of Clemons' congregants, Lakisha Smith, launched a civil lawsuit against Clemons, claiming that he had sexually abused them when they were under 16 years old. During the trial, Jackson, who is now 33, told the court that Clemons routinely sought out girls from troubled backgrounds and

Malevolent Designer News - Is Creationism's Magic Designer Preparing Something Even Nastier?

Electron microscopy of selected samples.
A. Negative stain electron micrograph of a ground stool pool homogenate from a Myotis myotis colony.
B. Negative stain electron micrograph of a pooled liver and spleen homogenate from Pipistrellus nathusii.

Metagenomic analysis of fecal and tissue samples from 18 endemic bat species in Switzerland revealed a diverse virus composition including potentially zoonotic viruses

Creationist mode:

Creationism's malevolent designer - the designer who, according to Creationist dogma, must have created the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the coronavirus pandemic - seems to be working on something even nastier!

According to researcher led by Isabelle Hardmeier of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, bats are acting as hosts to viruses from 39 different viral families, 16 of which have the potential to cross over into humans and cause the next major pandemic, just as SARS-CoV-2 is thought to have originated.

The researchers analysed the RNA and DNA of viruses found in the faeces and organs of more than 17,000 bats living in Switzerland. One of the studied bat colonies was found to harbour a near-complete genome of a virus known as Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-related coronavirus (CoV). Others known to have the potential to become pathogenic in humans include coronaviruses, adenoviruses, hepeviruses, rotaviruses A and H, and parvoviruses.

Their findings have been published open access in PLOS ONE:

Christian Hate News - Pastor Greg Locke is Suspiciously Obsessive About Gay Sex!

Pastor Greg Locke of the Global Vison Bible Church, Tennessee

Christian Hate-Preacher: Pride Month Has “Always Been About These Pedophiles” | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

Preacher of hate, Greg Locke, of Global Vision Bible Church, Mt Juliet, Tennessee, seems fixated with homosexuality to a degree that must raise questions about what exactly he is trying to dissociate from. In his latest outburst he is ranting about Gay Pride:

I know what the Bible teaches. And what the Bible teaches is that pride is an abomination. Pride in sin is a double abomination. So now we've decided that we would nationalistically and around the world take an entire month to celebrate something that God clearly says in His Bible grieves Him. "Because, after all, love is love." Not according to the Bible! Love ain't always love! Sometimes love is lust!