
From the Sept. 1 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends:
PETE HEGSETH (CO-HOST): We know Hollywood has got left-wing bias. The media has got left-wing bias. Higher education, universities and colleges. But what we're looking at today is not even just that. It's high schools, it's junior highs, and parents need to be engaged and aware. What's your advice for them?
JULIE GUNLOCK: Well, you're right. More and more now these schools, elementary schools, middle schools are taking on the role—are really supplanting parents. You look at schools today. Kids can be dropped off at 6:30 in the morning. They get three meals a day. There's after care. There's even health care services at some schools. So, really schools have tried more and more to take on the role of parenting, and now we're seeing it in political issues. They're telling children this is how you should think about certain issues. This is how you should believe. This is the correct way to think on these issues. It's very disturbing, and parental rights are absolutely left out of the picture.
HEGSETH: We see it more and more every year. California's being criticized for allowing transgender issues to be taught in the classroom.
GUNLOCK: Right.
HEGSETH: A New York school board wants to include climate change in what they're instructing their students.
GUNLOCK: Right.
HEGSETH: You say parents need to be actively and aggressively involved. What does that mean?
GUNLOCK: I really do. I think particularly conservatives tend to be very polite and quiet, and they don't like to sort of cause a stir. But you've got to do that. You've got to go to your school. Meet with your principal. Meet with your teachers. Ask for the curriculum. Review it, and if there is something that you don't like, opt out. Now, some states don't allow people to opt out, and that's very unfortunate. But that is why it's important at the beginning of the year that you meet with the officials at the school and say I don't want this happening. I don't want politics in the classroom. And there are certain subjects that I believe, as a parent, I need to talk to my child, not the teacher.
HEGSETH: That's a great recommendation. And run for school boards so that you can be a part of changing it if you want to. But too many parents, you're right, are disengaged. They don't understand that even our public schools today so many of which have an agenda.
Reposted with permission from our media associate Media Matters for America.
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By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
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