01a Apocalyptic

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A NON-VERBAL autistic boy, 4, has tragically died from a curable snake bite after being unable to tell anyone what had happened.

Italo Alves dos Santos had been playing at his grandma’s home in Equador city, Brazil, when a deadly rattlesnake bit his foot.

Despite predictably being in absolute agony, Italo wasn’t able to tell his family he was bitten.

Instead, the four-year-old could only point to his swollen ankle due to being non-verbal.

Italo’s worried family feared he had twisted his ankle and took him to the hospital.

Medical staffed scheduled an X-ray for the boy the following day – but it was too late.

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Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas were left stunned on Tuesday after their colleagues refused to take up a case involving a Massachusetts middle schooler who was reprimanded in school for wearing a shirt acknowledging biological reality.

As part of its newly released order list, the nation’s highest court declined to hear arguments in L.M. v. Town of Middleborough. The case involves Middleborough, Massachusetts, youth Liam Morrison, who in March 2023 wore a T-shirt that reads, “There Are Only Two Genders” to Nichols Middle School.

As The Federalist previously reported, Morrison — who was in seventh grade at the time — “was pulled from class by acting Principal Heather Tucker, who ordered Morrison to remove the shirt. After Morrison declined to do so, Tucker allegedly said he would not be permitted to return to class until he removed the shirt, prompting the seventh grader to leave school for the day.” This prompted Morrison to instead wear a shirt that reads, “There Are Censored Genders,” which school administrators also prohibited him from wearing.

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Most of us are familiar sloths, the bear-like animals that hang from trees, live life in the slow lane, take a month to digest a meal and poop just once a week. Their closest living relatives are anteaters and armadillos, and if that seems like an odd pairing, there’s a reason why. Today, there are only two sloth species, but historically, there were dozens of them, including one with a bottle-nosed snout that ate ants and another that likely resembled the ancestors of modern armadillos.

Most of these extinct sloths also didn’t live in trees, because they were too big. The largest sloths, in the genus Megatherium, were about the size of Asian bull elephants and weighed roughly 8,000 pounds.

“They looked like grizzly bears but five times larger,” said Rachel Narducci, collection manager of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Narducci is co-author of a new study published in the journal Science in which scientists analyzed ancient DNA and compared more than 400 fossils from 17 natural history museums to figure out how and why extinct sloths got so big.

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Contrary to conspiracy theories, the Earth’s core isn’t hollow. The dense, hot ball instead contains a stew of precious metals including platinum, ruthenium, and pretty much all of the planet’s gold. As lucrative as that sounds, there’s essentially no way humanity will ever access this natural treasure chest buried beneath more than 1,850  feet of solid rock. But according to recent discoveries made at volcanoes in Hawai’i, trace amounts of some of those coveted metals are seeping up from the planet’s deepest reaches.

“When the first results came in, we realized that we had literally struck gold,” Nils Messling, a geochemist at Göttingen University, said in a statement. “Our data confirmed that material from the core, including gold and other precious metals, is leaking into Earth’s mantle above.”

Messling and collaborators explained their findings in a study published on May 21 in the journal Nature. The team recently detected trace amounts of the precious metal ruthenium while analyzing volcanic rock samples collected across the islands of Hawai’i. More specifically, they noted the unexpected presence of the ruthenium isotope, ¹⁰⁰Ru.

“Unexpected” is the key word there. While ¹⁰⁰Ru does exist in Earth’s mantle, it’s slightly more abundant inside of the core—alongside 99.999 percent of the planet’s gold and other precious metals. That’s because during the planet’s formation about 4.5 billion years ago, some of the ruthenium that is locked inside Earth’s core originated from a different source than the small amount found in the mantle today. The discrepancies between these two forms of ruthenium is so slight that the equipment used by geologists to study these isotopes hasn’t been able to tell the two apart.