DAILY DOSE: Eight-year old girl dies while being detained by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol; The Milky Way gets weird.

The crisis at the southern U.S. border cuts both ways. The recent death of a young girl is testament to the terrible conditions migrants are being detained under. Per the BBC,

An eight-year-old girl with underlying medical conditions who died in US Border Patrol custody was repeatedly denied requests to go to hospital.

Anadith Tanay Reyes Alvarez was seen by medical staff nine times in three days- with "fever, flu-like symptoms, and pain", investigators said.

She was seen by a nurse four times on the day she died.

However, the nurse denied "three or four requests from the girl's mother for an ambulance to be called".

Details of the tragedy come from Customs and Border Patrol, which has written a report about Alvarez's death.

The girl, who was born in Panama to Honduran parents, was treated for her symptoms on 16 May with flu and fever medications, ice packs, and a cold shower, it said.

But none of the staff seemed aware that Alvarez suffered from sickle cell anaemia, a condition which usually requires life-long treatment, or that she had a history of congenital heart disease.

The family said they reported her medical history when they had first been taken into custody at a different facility a week earlier.

Migrant or not, nobody deserves to be treated that way, much less have a young girl die unnecessarily. https://bit.ly/43E77T3

The Universe never seems to disappoint when it comes to strange new discoveries. Per The Guardian,

Astronomers have discovered hundreds of mysterious cosmic threads that point towards the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, after a survey of the galaxy.

The strange filaments, each of which stretches five to 10 light years through space, resemble the dots and dashes of morse code on a vast scale. They spread out from the galactic centre 25,000 light years from Earth like fragmented spokes on an enormous wheel.

Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, an astronomer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said he was “stunned” to discover the structures in data taken by the MeerKAT radio telescope in the Northern Cape of South Africa.

The observatory, the most sensitive radio telescope in the world, captured images of the threads during an unprecedented 200-hour survey of the galactic core. Yusef-Zadeh told the Guardian: “They all seem to trace back to the black hole. They are telling us something about the activity of the black hole itself.”

Strange and a little bit creepy. Just sayin’. https://bit.ly/3N9TPrS

Researchers have done the largest survey of primate genomes in an effort to understand our past. Per Science,

Humans have long seen themselves mirrored in other primates, with apes’ social behavior and cognitive abilities shedding light on our own. Now, two international teams have stared deeper into the mirror. By sequencing the genomes of more than 200 nonhuman primates, from palm-size mouse lemurs to 200-kilogram gorillas, they have come up with clues to human health and disease, and to the origin of our species.

The genomes and their analyses, reported today in Science and Science Advances, represent a massive effort involving more than 100 researchers from about 20 countries who braved logistical challenges and bureaucratic gauntlets to collect blood samples from some 800 wild and captive primates. The resulting data show how knowing a primate’s genetic diversity could improve the odds of saving highly endangered species.

But our own species could also benefit. One team used the genomes to train a machine learning tool that could assess whether human genetic variants are likely to cause disease. And both explored the complexity of primates’ evolution, shedding light on our own. “This massive sample will ultimately spark new and unexpected research directly relevant to human origins,” says Luis Darcy Verde Arregoitia, a mammalogist at the Mexico Institute of Ecology who was not involved with either group.

It’s hard not to believe more insights are on the horizon with the steps in AI currently taken. https://bit.ly/3N7J1e2

Sometimes, those random walks can really be productive. For instance, this woman on a Cali beach. Per the Associated Press,

A woman taking a Memorial Day weekend stroll on a California beach found something unusual sticking out of the sand: a tooth from an ancient mastodon.

But then the fossil vanished, and it took a media blitz and a kind-hearted jogger to find it again.

Jennifer Schuh found the foot-long (.30-meter) tooth sticking out of the sand on Friday at the mouth of Aptos Creek on Rio Del Mar State Beach, located off Monterey Bay in Santa Cruz County on California’s central coast.

“I was on one side of the creek and this lady was talking to me on the other side and she said what’s that at your feet,” Schuh recounted. “It looked kind of weird, like burnt almost.”

Schuh wasn’t sure what she had found. So she snapped some photos and posted them on Facebook, asking for help.

Honestly, all I ever find are cracked pieces of concrete I mistake for stones. https://bit.ly/3IRPzLf

Thanks for reading. Let’s be careful out there.

IMAGE CREDIT: U.S. Customs and Border Protection.