TimB

You've written about "gold star pedophiles," people who are attracted to children but have not and would not touch a child, and the trap they're in when seek treatment. Which really gave me unexpected empathy for them.

As a parent myself, I struggle to know what would be the appropriate steps to take if we were ever faced with a Josh Duggar situation. I think a lot of people, while condemning the Duggars (for so very very many things) also wonder what the hell they would do if it was their 14-year-old son, wanting to get the kid and the victims treatment without ruining his or their lives.

Any guidance?

Seeking Unexpected Empathy

Your letter arrived moments after I watched a TED talk given by a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) who works with juvenile sex offenders. Meghan Fagundes lives in California, where she works with minors who've committed sex offenses. Most of the sex offenders she works with are boys and most have offended against family members, usually younger female siblings. Fagundes' TED talk focuses on stereotypes and myths about juvenile sex offenders and the harm these myths do—to juveniles who've offended, to victims and potential future victims, and to families. Everyone should take the time to watch Fagundes' 2014 presentation at TEDxAustinWomen:

One thing Fagundes didn't address in her presentation: What the hell parents should do if they discover that one of their children has sexually abused a sibling or a friend. I reached out to Fagundes, SUE, and shared your letter with her. My conversation with Fagundes is after the jump...

Dan Savage: What should Josh’s parents have done?

Meghan Fagundes: From what I understand about the way they handled the abuse, it seems that it could have been addressed differently. Ideally, as soon as you make the discovery that your child has sexually abused someone, you help your child get treatment for sexually abusive behavior. If your child has abused one of your other children, you also immediately obtain mental health services for the child who has been abused and take steps to make sure that child, and any other children at risk, are kept safe from further abuse. You commit yourself to be supportive and involved with your child’s treatment (both abuser and abused), and in addition, you find your own support for working through the multitude of inherent emotions—sadness, guilt, shame, anger, grief, etc.

That said, watching the Duggars describe how they did handle it was like watching so many families I’ve worked with. For those of us who have never been in their shoes, it’s tempting to say how we would have done things “better”; however, we underestimate the tremendous lengths the human psyche will go to in order to protect us from potentially damaging psychological experiences. Most parents who discover their children have sexually abused are hoping that the problem will go away on its own, that it won’t happen again, that the victim wasn’t really harmed, etc. They oftentimes don’t want to talk about it or address it because it’s shameful, uncomfortable, heartbreaking, and because doing so means that they have to accept the reality that this has happened in their family. They frequently feel a tremendous sense of guilt. So they might use denial, or minimize the abuse; sometimes, they don’t address it at all until it turns into a legal issue and they have no choice. Additionally, most parents have no idea who to turn to for support, and with such a stigma attached to sexual abuse, it takes an incredible amount of courage to speak up and ask for help. Because of that, many of them react in ways that those of us not in their position don’t understand.

DS: What would you tell a parent who discovered that their kid had sexually abused a younger sibling to do?

MF: First and foremost, I would encourage them to ensure the safety of their children and/or any other children who might be at continued risk for sexual abuse. For example, by having the child who sexually abused someone stay for an agreed upon period of time with a supportive relative or friend, and/or by keeping all of the children highly supervised at all times if they are together. Having a conversation with the child who has been abused is imperative; to find out what they need in order to feel safe, to help them understand they did not do anything wrong and that they can come to you if they need to, and to connect them to a mental health professional that can provide them with age-appropriate support for sexual abuse. As soon as possible, I would encourage the parents to talk to the child who has sexually abused to better understand what happened and to connect that child with treatment specifically for sexually abusive behavior.

Together with the mental health professionals, the family should be able to create a safety plan and to get a better idea of how they can create a healing, safe environment for their children. Also, I would want the parents to know that their feelings—angry, confused, guilty, appalled, grief-stricken, ashamed, numb—are all a natural reaction, and that no matter how they feel, their child’s choice to engage in sexually abusive behavior is not their fault. If they are struggling to deal with the aftermath of the sexual abuse, I would encourage them to get their own mental health support. This is especially critical if the parent has their own history of abuse.

DS: How do you get your kid into treatment without potentially ruining your kid’s life?

MF: That question so profoundly reflects society’s feelings towards those who sexually abuse.

The idea of getting treatment for something is typically associated with improving the quality of one’s life, but because of the stigma, saying, “I sexually abused someone” means taking a risk that your life—personally, professionally, financially, emotionally—could be destroyed. If we want people to get better, to hold themselves accountable for what they’ve done and to get help, we can’t slap labels on them and treat them as some sort of pariah when they do. We can hold them accountable for their actions and express our feelings about what they’ve done without treating them in a way that makes them fearful to speak up. So, unfortunately, there’s no easy answer to this. Families who engage in treatment for sexually abusive behavior have to be prepared to navigate the reactions they receive if they choose to be open about their decision. It’s not the treatment itself that has the potential to ruin the child’s life—on the contrary, it’s been shown to be helpful—the destruction comes from stereotypes perpetuated out of anger, fear, and misinformation.

DS: Should parents go to the police? Must parents go to the police? Are parents required to report this kind of abuse to the authorities? Or can parents seek treatment without involving the authorities?

MF: The laws about who is a mandated reporter vary from state to state. In most cases, the mandate for reporting suspected child abuse applies to certain professional roles only, with other parties being encouraged, but not required to report. This website is a great tool for looking up the specific requirements for each state: https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/systemwide/laws-policies/state.

When the parents seek out treatment for sexually abusive behavior, they are reporting the abuse to a mental health professional, who is a mandated reporter. That mental health professional will be required to report the abuse to that state's Child Welfare Services, who will then make their own decisions about whether to intervene, depending on the situation. Some parents call Child Welfare on their own, because they find it's a good way to get connected to resources they otherwise wouldn't have known about. Many are scared about what might happen if they call. And yes, some parents call the police. I know kids who have gotten the help they needed because their parents called the police and the court required them to complete a treatment program for sexually abusive behavior. And I know of kids whose parents called the police and they were sent straight into a detention facility for a very long time and then were released without ever completing the treatment that they needed. It really depends on so many things. But the more open we are to discussing these things, the more likely it will be that we can figure out how best to get these kids the help they need, which ultimately prevents more victims.

DS: The stigma is so great, and there's so much misinformation out there, and both combine to create a disincentive to report abuse or seek help. Families will try to “handle it” privately—that’s apparently what the Duggars did. Is that always a recipe for disaster?

MF: Secrecy is a fundamental piece of sexual abuse. Breaking the silence is the healthy way to address that. Most families are not well-equipped to deal with the reality of having a child who has sexually abused, especially if one of their other children is the victim. Having someone who is professionally trained to provide the kind of support and safety necessary is critical. Reach out. You are not alone. There are thousands of families who have experienced what you’re going through—you don’t have to try to figure it out all by yourself.

And for all of us, it’s important to remember that as long as we continue to perpetuate the stigma around sexually abusive behavior, families will continue to be less inclined to seek help. I’m not at all saying that we have to be okay with what they’ve done, but as long as we continue to vilify juvenile offenders (for example, by perpetuating the erroneous belief they are all pedophiles who cannot be helped), we actually silence the people who need the help the most.

Some helpful links and resources:

Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers

Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network

National Sexual Violence Resource Center

National Child Abuse Hotline: 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453)

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Filmed in December of last year, this specialized laser system at LasX Industries in Minnesota is capable of drawing on surfaces at a rate of up to 6 meters per second. In this example, a design by Andy Gikling is executed in a two-step process. First, the laser moves back and forth in a more familiar raster mode similar to an inkjet or typical laser printer, but at the 1:40 mark things get insane as the system switches to a “vector” process and starts drawing all over the place in real time. If I understand this correctly you’re seeing almost 100,000 vectors drawn in about two minutes and thirty seconds.

You already know that we can run machines with our brainwaves. That’s been old news for almost a decade, ever since the first monkey fed himself using a robot arm and the power of positive thinking. Nowadays, even reports of human neuroprostheses barely raise an eyebrow. Brain-computer interfaces have become commonplace in everything from prosthetic […]

The post Hive consciousness appeared first on Aeon Magazine.

Guy Laramée‘s (previously) new series Onde Elles Moran (Where They Live) captures the mystique of the native birds of the Brazilian region Serra do Corvo Branco (Range of the White Raven) through both portrait and carved landscape. The series contains nine sculptures sourced from secondhand bookstores within the country—tomes of the Classicos Jackson which is a series of literature classics published in the ‘50s in Brazil. The rich linen covers inspired the palettes of many of the portraits, the original colors working their way into Laramée’s artistic remodeling.

Although Laramée had originally planned to photograph the vast canyons of the region during his 4-month visit, the diversity, songs, and liveliness of the native birds kept persuading him to eclipse the beautiful scenes with their portraits. The series is dedicated to these birds and their habitat, each book containing a portrait of one on the cover against a faded background and an environmental carving into the pages of the book on the opposite side. The size ratio of the bird to corresponding landscape highlights the creatures’ importance, acknowledging their role as the true owners and rulers of the region.

“Being in the company of these lively beings were one thing, painting them was another story,” explained Laramée while discussing his process. “They became like ghosts on a theater backdrop, posing in front of wallpaper, looking at a vanishing scenery.”

Laramée hopes that this series exudes the stark differences between Man and bird, recognizing that we do not live within the same world. Man’s world has been transformed into an object from which we now feel alienated he explains—we live within our heads and books, not the canyons or earth. “Maybe where they live is where we should live,” says Laramée. “In the solitude of virgin landscapes, we might rediscover our intimate relationships to the world.”

Laramée is represented by JHB Gallery in New York City.

 

Japanese post rock/jazz fusion band Mouse on the Keys have released a new song, "leviathan". The song is off their new album The Flowers of Romance, which will be released on July 15th in Japan, and September globally.

[y]84fbU39V0Ko[/y]

Rep. Rueven Carlyle has a theory about why the Republican-controlled Senate and Democrat-controlled House of Representatives continue to fail at finding a budget both can agree on: State Republicans are addicted to marijuana.

Carlyle, chair of the House finance committee, says the Senate's budget is over-reliant on cannabis tax revenue to cover state obligations like education—a strategy he argues is both irresponsible (since we don't know how many pot dollars the state is going to earn in a new and volatile market), and a way to avoid more meaningful, long-term tax reform.

"The Senate budget is predicated on marijuana from top to bottom," Carlyle says. "That's a precarious and fiscally irresponsible approach... those dollars allow them to avoid the more responsible approach to tax policy—and discuss things like capital gains, closing tax breaks, and other important steps."

In a detailed blog post published last week, Carlyle outlined the dangers of Republican dependence on yet-uncollected marijuana taxes to fix the state's budget problems:

Washington forecasters are anticipating our 7 million residents will consume a total of 6.2 million ounces per year. Colorado forecasters are anticipating that their 5 million residents will consume 1.4 million ounces in that same year. As I understand it, both state forecasters used the same core data and operating assumptions, metrics and customized studies provided by the respected Rand Corporation.

Here’s the difference: Colorado legislators conservatively slashed the projections in half, delayed recognizing any revenue on their books for a year, and even then revised their estimates down substantially after actual revenue collections came in at less than 40% of projections in order to avoid the uncertainty. Legislators rejected the initial estimates as too large. Our Senate is pushing to do the opposite with the same basic data: Recognize and book every penny of the initial estimates without questioning the common sense of it all...

I find it ironic that on the issue of marijuana taxation it is Democrats—who generally supported I-502—who are more cautious and fiscally conservative and Republicans—who generally opposed I-502—who are acting more like big spending addicts.

In short, he argues that the market is too new and too volatile on its own (not to mention that it's being tinkered with and that that Oregon is about to open its low-tax recreational market) to trust rosy forecasts.

"Maybe I'm being too fiscally conservative and they [Senate Republicans] are right," Carlyle says, "but it seems odd to me to meet your fiduciary, legal, and constitutional obligations to fund education based on $1.12 billion dollars of untested revenue."

Back in April, the ACLU condemned legislators' proposal to "raid" pot taxes for K-12 education—while underfunding the drug treatment and prevention provisions that were part of Washington's legalization law—as "dangerously shortsighted and unwise."

Carlyle says he is trying to rationalize the state's marijuana tax system with House Bill 2136, which would streamline state taxes to 30 percent at the time of sale instead of the current system that taxes pot repeatedly as it moves from grower to processor to retailer. The Senate is proposing a 37 percent tax—an untenable rate, Carlyle says, since Oregon's pot tax will be "a mere 10 percent," and will compete rigorously with Washington's marijuana marketplace.

Beyond the details, Carlyle adds, there are "deeper moral and philosophical questions about having just one more sin tax and pretending that that is a replacement for capital gains, closing loopholes, and having a rational tax system."

Washington State still has the country's most regressive tax system—and sales taxes are regressive taxes.

The office of Sen. Adam Hill, the Republicans' senate budget writer, did not respond to requests for comment.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Churning and frothing just below the old wooden floor of a former movie theater in San Gimignano, Italy, a mysterious vortex of ominous black water seems to perpetually drain into nothingness. The artwork is a new iteration of artist Anish Kapoor's Decension installation that appeared earlier this year in India. The former cinema and theatre space is now the home of Galleria Continua that hosted the exhibition. Kapoor shared about the piece:

All my life I have reflected and worked on the concept that there is more space than can be seen, that there are void spaces, or, as it were, that there is a vaster horizon. The odd thing about removing content, in making space, is that we, as human beings, find it very hard to deal with the absence of content. It’s the horror vacui. This Platonic concept lies at the origin of the myth of the cave, the one from which humans look towards the outside world. But here there is also a kind of Freudian opposite image, that of the back of the cave, which is the dark and empty back of being. Your greatest poet, Dante, also ventured into a place like that. It is the place of the void, which paradoxically is full – of fear, of darkness. Whether you represent it with a mirror or with a dark form, it is always the “back”, the point that attracts my interest and triggers my creativity.

Descension was on view through May 9th of this year. (via My Amp Goes to 11)

We have yet another triumph of Orthodoxy in the removal of all female cabinet members from an official picture with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There are three new female cabinet members — Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, Culture Minister Miri Regev and Minister for Senior Citizens Gila Gamliel — but you would never know it from the pictures in Jewish ultra-Orthodox publications which either removed them or even replaced them in the shot with male cabinet members.

One publication appears to have pixelated the faces of the women while others edited them out. You will recall recently how such publications removed the image of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Ironically, ultra-Orthodox and Orthodox parties were allies of Netanyahu in the recent election, but balked at showing his full cabinet team. In airbrushing away of the new Justice Minister and first-ever minister of gender equality (Gamliel) completed the overwhelming irony.

Many Orthodox publications simply refused to publish the picture due to the inclusion of the women.

Yomleyom, an ultra-Orthodox weekly newspaper run by the Shas political party, actually transplanted a man in the place of one of the women. Yomleyom’s deputy editor, Rabbi Moshe Shafir, did not see anything ridiculous in the exercise and explained “We honor the women specifically because of their special merits and we have reservation from looking upon women as an object.” In other words, we value them so much that we delete them from historic photos and government images. Call it elevation through elimination.

Source: NBC

Filed under: Bizarre, International, Religion

More on the instrument here.

We have previously discussed how schools have rejected students with substantially higher scores for college admissions to allow the admission of African-American and hispanic students. Some academics, myself included, have raised concerns about the significant differences in academic scores — a difference that is particularly great with regard to Asian Americans. For that reason, I share the concern that this constitutes a form of discrimination based on race. While there remains a permissible range in which schools can select students to achieve a diverse and pluralistic student body, the differential of admissions scores can be alarming in some cases and suggest that students are being rejected simply because of their race.

I have previously discussed how schools have largely circumvented prior rulings against affirmative action programs. While many defend race-conscious admissions in terms of the need for affirmative action to correct historic discrimination, the Supreme Court barred such affirmative action in 1978 in Bakke. Justice Lewis Powell allowed for only a limited use of race for the purpose of achieving “diversity” in classes. Notably, in Bakke, the Medical School at the University of California at Davis had a more modest program over all by setting aside 16 of the 100 seats for “Blacks,” “Chicanos,” “Asians,” and “American Indians.” Those slots were justified as a matter of diversity, but found unconstitutional by the Court. However, the Court was deeply fractured. Five justices Powell and the plurality found that Bakke had to be admitted and that the weight given race was unconstitutional.

The exception however soon swallowed the rule as schools fought to maintain levels of minority students as a diversity rather than an affirmative action program. Many academics privately admit that the real purpose of these programs remains the original affirmative action rationale to ensure greater numbers of minorities in higher education.

The fact that the case continues to be referred to as the “affirmative action case” shows how little has changed since Bakke when the Court supposedly closed the door on affirmative action in admissions. By allowing race to still be used for diversity, educators sought to achieve the same numerical goals as a matter of diversity and achieving a racial “critical mass.”

In the most recent case, more than 60 Chinese, Indian, Korean and Pakistani groups filed a complaint with the civil rights offices at the justice and education departments. The Obama Administration is viewed as disinclined to pursue such claims and to support the use of race as part of a “critical mass” approach to admissions.

Robert Iuliano, Harvard University General Counsel, insisted that the university uses a “holistic admissions process” that is “fully compliant with federal law” to build a diverse class. That “holistic” approach is permissible but it can also hide the same type of affirmative action approach that the Court rejected. It comes down to the numbers and the record, which may only be made fully apparent with an investigation or litigation or both.

Source: USA Today

Filed under: Academics, Constitutional Law, Society

Across the backdrop of an expansive retro-Scandinavian landscape, Swedish illustrator Simon Stålenhag has spent the last few years imagining a world of science fiction inhabited by roaming mech robots, dinosaurs, and other technological innovations plopped right onto the Swedish countryside. The digitally painted images spread far and wide across the internet over the last few years, capturing the imagination of legions of fantasy and sci-fi fans who clamoured for comic books and even a feature film. For now, we’ll have to make do with old-fashioned art books.

Stålenhag and Free League Publishing just announced a Kickstarter project for two new books featuring Stålenhag’s dystopian vision of the future that will pair illustrations with short stories written in English. You can explore many more illustrations on his website (just start scrolling), and some are available as individual prints.

The brilliant minds at ThinkGeek just launched this set of 10 glass coasters printed with sequential illustrations of the brain. When stacked in the correct order they reveal a complete three-dimensional “scan” of human brain. Available here. (via Laughing Squid)

Non-governmental agency helping farmers restore ancient system in Andean region and revitalise their water supplies.

collectorsweekly:

19th Century escort cards. (Via Alan Mays, H/T Messy Nessy Chic)

Adam S. Doyle (previously) creates sweeping monochromatic animals, painting creatures that jump, fly, and swim from his simplified brushstrokes. Doyle’s environmental details are limited, instead focusing on the subject which takes up the majority of the painting’s frame. His howling wolves and pensive rabbits have an illustrative quality to their compensation, something that may stem from his interest in interpreting narratives for book covers, greeting cards, and show posters.

Doyle doesn’t attempt to mask his brushstrokes, but rather lets them evolve organically. He explains that his work always begins with his love of the magic of creation, transforming a blank surface into a living thing. “This act has been with mankind forever and yet never ceases to be awe-inspiring,” said Doyle. “I always want my marks to be visible, to keep this sense of wonder present. I’m committed to making images that speak truth to power, that provide space to breathe, and that use simple forms to reveal and make accessible the heart of stories.”

Doyle has exhibited his lively paintings internationally including New York, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong. Currently his paintings are part of the two-person exhibition Wild at Utah-based J GO Gallery. More images of his works can be found on the artist’s Artsy. (via Samsara)

First Lieutenant Jacob Bridge is stationed in Hawaii as a logistics officer. He started Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2007, received his commission in 2011, and was assigned to the Fleet Marine Force in Honolulu in 2013, after graduating in the top 10 per cent at The Basic School […]

The post A conscientious objector appeared first on Aeon Magazine.

Artist Ellen Jewett refers to her sculptural work as “natural history surrealist sculpture,” a blend of plants, animals, and occasionally human-made structures or objects. Her artwork is deeply informed by an extensive background in anthropology, medical illustration, exotic animal care, and even stop-motion animation, all of which accentuate the biological structure of each piece, while freeing her imagination to pursue more abstract ideas.

Over time, Jewett has become more focused on minimizing materials and relying a negative space. “I find my sculptures are evolving to be of greater emotional presence by using less physical substance,” she shares. In addition, she eschews any potentially toxic mediums like paints, glazes, and finishes, opting to use more natural, locally-sourced materials. “This, unavoidably, excludes most of what is commonly commercially available, and has sent me on a journey of unique material combination and invention.” By employing these more uncommon materials, and leaving traces of fingerprints and other slight imperfections Jewett hopes her work leaves a more authentic impression.

You explore more of Ellen’s work on her website, and many of her pieces (some of which you see here) are available for purchase online.

We have previously discussed some pretty animated sign language interpreters, but I just had to share this video of a Swedish interpreter.

I am not sure what the singer is saying, but the sign is good enough to dance to.

Filed under: Bizarre, International

Theologically, the most interesting place today is Silicon Valley, says Yuval Noah Hariri. Its religion, not the ones coming out of Syria and Iraq, will take over the world… more»

Afghan women are anxious for assurances that their gains will not be compromised in an eventual deal with the Taliban.

Aircraft takes off from the UAE without a drop of fuel for flight aimed at raising awareness about clean technologies.

The Globalist post "Time to shed the ‘progressive mystique’ and confront racism in Seattle" by Sharon H. Chang says something that many people of color say day after day: that Seattle is not as progressive as it thinks itself to be, that it has a serious and worsening race problem, that the city's wealth is distributed strongly along racial lines. Though there's a great amount of realism in this picture of the situation, we, as people of color, seem to accept this racism as a matter of course. White people are racist even when they vote for brown/gay/female politicians who promote greater cultural tolerance. But we must ask this question: How is this possible? Why do so many white people in Seattle speak with forked tongues? One that promotes cultural diversity, and the other that supports a system that oppresses blacks, Asian Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans? This is strange, no? My thinking is that the source of the problem, and the strange forked tongue thing, must be found in the very structure of our social environment, which, in one way, can be seen as being defined by a long-growing separation between culture and economics, the superstructure and the base.

This separation began as a solution to the cultural movements of the '60s—the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, the black power movement, and so on. All of these represented a powerful challenge to capital, which at that time had maintained a 30-year truce with working-class white males (labor unions, high wages). The solution? End this truce with white males, which is one of the reasons why wages in general have been flat or stagnant, and grant rights of recognition to minority groups and women as a whole.

However, there was no real redistribution or restructuring of wealth and its processes of accumulation. All that happened is that they were synchronically detached or separated from culture. In a sense, the system that responded to the social critique (honest wages, job stability) of a part of the working class was completely abandoned and replaced by one that enthusiastically responded to cultural critiques of capitalist society—which began (but did not end) with a Hegelian demand for recognition: "I Am a Man!" The reproduction of social power in its dominant form of monetized relations did not intrinsically change, and cultural tolerance, recognition of differences, was normalized and, for legitimacy, codified by law. This is the Seattle we have today: a gay mayor, an Indian-born socialist in the council, two female senators, and so on (progressive), combined with an economic system (regressive) that, though detached from culture, continues to have racial consequences because cultural empowerment was never linked with economic empowerment—a move that would have added a diachronic solution to the main demands of the black power movement of the '60s.

You can vote for Obama or Norm Rice or, in the future, a black lesbian, and yet do everything in your power to keep your white child out of a school with lots of black kids. This is not irrational. This is indeed your social environment speaking with two tongues. What must never stop worrying us is that capital will give us all the cultural tolerance we ever wanted.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Anyone who has ever read the Bible knows that God can speak. Over the course of six days, God speaks the world into existence and then speaks to both Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Later he speaks to Cain and Abel, to Noah, to Abraham and many others. What sorts of things […]

The post Can God lie? appeared first on Aeon Magazine.

When a man loves a pigeon. Nikola Tesla had one true object of affection. She was pure white, with light-gray tips on her wings… more»

First, this incredible information about the technology of the threads of slime:

In self-defense the hagfish produces from its glands a slime that is composed of nanometer width threads and what is likely sugar or glyco-modifications.  The slime is thought to impede capture by making the hagfish slippery, and possibly by clogging the gills of a predator.  The nanothreads are remarkable: comparable to spider silk in tensile strength (800 megapascals or near 1 gigapascal) and lightness, and 5 times stronger than steel on a weight basis. Moreover, each thread is only 12 nanometers wide but 15 centimeters long.  Amazingly, a full thread is wrapped up in so that it fits within a single cell, highly specialized and called a gland thread cell (GTC).

Scientists have uncovered, using electron microscopy, the organization of a single hagfish nano-sized thread, helping resolve the mystery of why extrusion of such a long (compared to its width) thread from the cell does not cause tangling.  The thread is coiled up in a conical “skein” in 15-20 layers.  As a GTC matures, its nucleus migrates to an extreme pole, leaving most of the cell volume packed with a single coil of thread.

For a quantitative comparison, spider drag line silk has a tensile strength of up to 1100 megapascals, whereas hagfish thread goes up to 800 megapascals.  Steel has higher tensile strength up to 5000 megapascals but it is also much denser.  Two rather unusual materials more recently discovered, graphene and carbon nanotubes, have stratospheric tensile strengths of 63 and 130 gigapascals.

The research was carried out by PhD student Timothy Winegard, a team of scientists, and led by senior author Professor Douglas Fudge at the University of Guelph.

Here's a scanning EM of a disrupted thread cell (from the Journal of Cellular Biology):


And finally a video of a hagfish defending itself with slime:

Pretty impressive surveillance-economy satire.

Happy New Year! Once again, an update from my phone, since I’m currently in southern AZ to look at some fiine rocks and cactuses. Enjoy the page! This was a fun one.