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The Strangely Unscientific Masking Of America

I remember vividly the day, at the tail end of March, when facemasks suddenly became synonymous with morality: either one cared about the lives of others and donned a mask, or one was selfish and refused to do so. The shift occurred virtually overnight. 

Only a day or two before, I had associated this attire solely with surgeons and people living in heavily polluted regions. Now, my friends’ favorite pastime during our weekly Zoom sessions was excoriating people for running or socializing without masks in Prospect Park. I was mystified by their certitude that bits of cloth were the only thing standing between us and mass death, particularly when mere weeks prior, the message from medical experts contradicted this new doctrine.

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Scientists Accidentally Created A Hybrid Of Two Fish That Last Shared An Ancestor In The Jurassic Period

With a little help from Hungarian scientists, the seemingly impossible just occurred — the birth of long-nosed, spiky-finned hybrids of Russian sturgeons and American paddlefish. Though the results were accidental, about 100 of these so-called “sturddlefish” are now in captivity.

According to LiveScience, the Research Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture in Hungary scientists didn’t intend to birth this entirely new species. After all, 184 million years of evolution on separate continents made it seem clear that these two kinds of fish were sexually incompatible.

After placing sperm from an American paddlefish near eggs from a Russian sturgeon, however, they were proven wrong. According to ScienceAlert, the eggs reproduced asexually through gynogesis, a process that requires the presence of sperm but not the actual introduction of its DNA.

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Pandemic Rules Are Only for the Little People

The defining moment in the “rules for thee but not for me” ethos of the ruling class during the COVID-19 pandemic may have come when Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist behind Britain’s lockdown policy, met with his married girlfriend in defiance of the restrictions he promoted. Eager to threaten the common people with penalties if they failed to socially distance, he saw no reason to inconvenience himself the same way—although at least he conceded that propriety required him to resign his government post when the trysts were discovered in May.

“He has peculiarly breached his own guidelines, and for an intelligent man I find that very hard to believe,” marveled Sir Iain Duncan Smith, a prominent member of the ruling Conservative Party. “It risks undermining the Government’s lockdown message.”

Well, yes. But like all too many officials, Ferguson obviously never thought he’d be caught violating rules that he’d never intended be applied to himself. As we’ve since learned, Ferguson’s above-the-law attitude is common among those who feel entitled to write regulations and impose penalties on others for violating them.

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