…But there’s officially a new cat color in town: salmiak, or ‘salty liquorice.’ You can see one here.

The pretty black, white, and grey shade—named for a popular snack food in Finland, where this coat color has been making itself known—is thanks to a fur strand that starts off black near the root, but grows whiter and whiter out towards the tip. The coat was first spotted in 2007, and in 2019, it was brought to the attention of a group of cat experts lead by feline geneticist Heidi Anderson.

Since then, the group has been trying to figure out exactly what causes this shade to express itself, and recently, they finally figured it out. A paper on the discovery has been published in the journal Animal Genetics.

Leprosy was even creeping back to southern Florida a couple years ago.

HIDE LCARS, ENGAGE AWAY TEAM BEAM-UP

If anyone is down for a fascinating video essay about this by a textile historian: Standardized Sizes Ruined our Clothing Quality

Have you ever wondered how we let clothing quality get so bad? It wasn’t just desperation for cheaper options- the 18th century consumer would never have been willing to pay so much for such poor quality cloth. And yet, they stayed clothed. Even their cheaper options lasting years of hard wear. But they knew what quality looked like and for the most part, we don’t.

When did we forget how to shop for good clothing rather than just trendy? What makes clothing “high quality” is so complex and nearly impossible to track with online shopping. Even in person, it’s not a simple answer. But it used to be that more money meant more quality, plain and simple. Where did we mess up this system? Turns out, standardized sizing allowed (and even encouraged) far more than just issues with poor fit and body image.

I wish I knew. Scouring a metal bottle by using a bottle brush with a little water and rock salt or baking soda can help de-scum the films that lead to mold.

Historically, these are the consensus fave in reusable bottles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calabash

“Pestilence” is such an underused word. They’re a lot like locusts.

Prayers should be applied topically or to worn armor, written on parchment and attached to a stamped wax seal infused with holy oils.

Thoughts are often immunosuppressive and should be guarded against with tinfoil headwear or nerve staples.

Both, I suppose. They go in on both anti-virus action and opposing pro-infection actors.

In their words, “The People’s CDC is a coalition of public health practitioners, scientists, healthcare workers, educators, advocates and people from all walks of life working to reduce the harmful impacts of COVID-19.”

Trump’s health department is stacked with people hostile to the idea of public health. The People’s CDC, an anti-COVID advocacy organization, had this to say about NIH Director Bhattacharya in March prior to his confirmation:

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a health economist with a medical degree but no further medical training or practice. He endorsed and promoted mass COVID-19 infections to pursue an impossible to achieve infection-driven herd immunity. His policies such as mass infections relying on natural immunity would have led to even more illness, Long COVID, and deaths across the US. His extraordinarily wrong views on the pandemic include predicting, even late in 2020, that US COVID deaths would not reach 50,000, and assuring Floridians in mid-2021 that enough had been vaccinated – though far more have died since then. Videos from as recent as 2024 continue to show him advocating ineffective treatments for COVID-19 such as ivermectin, opposing layered protections against COVID-19, and belittling the value of important tools such as masking and vaccines.

Instead of focusing on advancing the medical sciences, Bhattacharya wants to intertwine politics and policies at NIH and prioritize funding based on academic freedom instead of innovative and impactful medical and health sciences research. If confirmed as the director of NIH, he will continue to downplay the seriousness of COVID-19 and potentially other infectious diseases, and steer NIH towards investment in ineffective treatments for diseases such as focusing on seroprevalence studies. Ultimately, this will harm and reverse the already monumental discoveries at NIH. He will likely assist Secretary Kennedy’s current efforts to delay and even prevent the development of effective therapeutics for infectious diseases, including COVID-19 – and for Long COVID. Finally, there is no reason to think he will fight this administration’s attacks on NIH staffing and cuts in research funding.

I do. I caught it in March 2020, yo-yoed in health for a while, and had some surgeries and a treatable cancer which my doctors suspect were related to Long COVID. I’m pretty well marinated in the info, and am happy to share whatever you want to know.

This page from Yale is a great general orientation, though there’s a lot more LC sufferers would want you to know. This “What to Do When I Have Covid” guide from Clean Air Club will be useful.

The best place I know of on Lemmy for a discussion is [email protected]. Mastodon has an active and expansive community of people affected by Long COVID.

Condolences on your illness! I hope you’ll have better luck.

You’re just jealous of GWOT surplus carry handle mounted AR optics because they remind you how evolution didn’t grace you with eyestalks 🐌

You’re correct, unsure why this got a downvote. Think of how distilled water feels weirdly slick in the mouth, almost a bit like glycerin. Soluble minerals are chemically grippy on the grounds and between the tastebuds. Their absence leads to underextracted coffee.

Depends on the minerals. It absolutely matters, in a way apparent to most folks’ palates when drinking a quality cup. At the high end, or for finicky industrial testing, or for things like comparative tastings in different locations, there is even engineered coffee brewing water with controlled chemistry for peak performance.

Was hoping to find a Batman commissary link and/or smuggled out hand drawn comics about Batman’s exciting life on both sides of the people’s justice.

I love me some industrial safety, and I acknowledge the philosophical tension between explosion prevention and explosion encouragement. But if I had 458 fire extinguishers, we’re gonna go inspect the lathe of heaven and make sure it’s up to code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wan_Hu

Is ‘leper state’ some kinda winky dogwhistle about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_IV_of_Jerusalem ?

There will likely be a lot of stupid conflicts over the Arctic in the oncoming decades, sad to say.

me when I finish a cherry slurpee

Unfun fact:

A lot of that infomercial gear is originally invented as a disability aid, and has to go for this fringe market to get manufactured if a big medical equipment supplier doesn’t license it. You either make a tool that can do something big like helping a maimed soldier fight again, or your disability aid gets a silly-seeming commercial that mocks the difficulties faced by the people that the gadget’s creator was attempting to help.