Hello.
I discovered the lost secrets of the cosmos.
But stuff still happened.
So what's up?
Do not fear.
They found the space tomato.
They also lost it first, but then they found it.
Let me talk to you about space tomato.
All right, so there's space.
It's out there.
In the space is a space station.
In the space station is space science people.
And those space science people were like,
yo, let's grow a tomato in space.
And then they harvested it.
And they got a space tomato in their inventory.
And they were like, meat.
Let's put this in a bag.
And then they were like, hey, we're
doing this thing with kids.
Kids are going to tune in to a live feed of the space station.
We're going to show them science stuff.
Let's show them the space tomato.
So they grab it.
And they're like, hey, kids, check out this space tomato.
And the kids were presumably like, wow, that sure is a tomato.
After showing off their sweet, sweet mato,
the astronauts decided to go ahead and just
put that to the side.
And the guy who put it to the side
thought that he tethered it down,
but I guess not because it disappeared.
Or at least that's his story.
The rest of the astronauts apparently
just thought that he ate it.
Which is fair.
I mean, it's a space tomato.
How often do you have a chance to eat a space tomato?
But astronaut Frank Rubio maintained his innocence
and ultimately was vindicated because they eventually
found the tomato.
Or rather, it is presumed that they found
a bag full of red goop because it was gone for a while.
And it's space.
Food does not famously do very well in space.
Space ketchup.
No, no, I'm good, actually.
I don't think I want to eat rotten space tomato.
Shocking.
Massive retail corporations lied to you about theft.
Weird.
Can you imagine?
Wow.
You may have heard throughout the year
that massive corporations like Walmart and Target
and whatnot were saying, oh my goodness, oh my stars.
Our stores are being steal from so much.
That's me doing an impersonation of Walmart's PR team.
Hire me.
Don't actually hire me.
I don't want to work for Walmart.
Anyway, the NRF, the National Retail Federation,
represents all of these companies.
It's a lobbying arm, right?
And they've been talking about how urban crime is on the rise.
And all of these stores have to start shutting down
because of shoplifting, making it so they're not making money.
So they have to close their locations
and raise their prices.
Blame those inner city folk.
You know who I'm talking about.
I'm going to evoke the right type of people for you to hate
without actually saying it.
Anyway, they also, that's a lie.
It's just a lie.
It's just a straight up lie.
Turns out they have recently been like, psych,
that was made up.
We didn't ever have the data that actually proved that.
We were going off of our interpretation
of an anecdote that was given during a congressional hearing
by the former president of our lobbying firm.
So the organization whose sole purpose is to try to maximize
the profits of Walmart, Target, et cetera,
used their own former president's words
that were inaccurate to weave this narrative about crime,
making it so that they have to raise their prices
and close stores.
Because it's a lot easier to say that than to say,
we're doing union busting.
Pay no attention to the fact that some of the stores
that we're closing, we're trying to unionize.
No, it's the theft.
The theft that we don't have the numbers to prove.
One last point here.
They also want you to believe that people are shoplifting
like valuables and whatnot.
That's not true either.
Turns out the most targeted stuff are health care products,
infant products, and office supplies.
As always, if you see someone stealing food, no, you didn't.
The US FDA has approved the first gene editing therapy
for sickle cell disease.
You may have heard of CRISPR before,
not the drawer in your fridge,
but like it's a gene editing thing.
Both equally important.
So sickle cell, it sucks.
I would, I think that would,
that accurately summarizes sickle cell.
I think that makes sense actually.
But to get a little more into it,
what it means is that your cells are not producing a compound
that helps to circulate oxygen throughout your body.
And so life just kind of sucks.
I am underselling this.
Sickle cell is a debilitating lifelong disease.
And the only real cure for it
is an extremely invasive bone marrow transplant.
But what if we could instead take your cells,
fix them, and put them back?
That's what this therapy does.
Essentially, instead of doing a bone marrow transplant,
they can take your cells,
throw them in a saucepan on medium high,
stir in a couple of good things,
and then put them back into your body to fix you.
Oh, sorry, that's, I think I'm just hungry.
They take some of your cells,
and they edit the genes to make it work better,
like do the thing, produce the thing it's supposed to produce.
Then they make a bunch of those cells,
put them back into your body,
and then you can benefit from the fixed cells.
Now, there's a lot of asterisks here.
It's still very invasive,
and it's also prohibitively expensive right now.
But this is still huge.
This is yet another step towards hope
for a criminally underserviced disease, and that's hype.
Medical science people are just very, very cool.
Pulling out DNA, taking a little,
just taking an eraser, just like squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak,
and just writing a different DNA there.
That's how they do it.
That's crisp and now we're getting crispy.
A content warning for this next segment,
I will be discussing the mass killing of civilians.
In a study recently published by an Israeli newspaper,
they found that of the airstrikes done against Gaza
between just October 7th and 26th,
61% of the deaths were civilians.
This is an extraordinary outlier,
even in context of Israel's previous attacks on Palestine.
They note that this is an unprecedented killing of civilians, a genocide.
The author notes that any notion of restraint
is a straight up lie.
The numbers just simply don't prove it,
and they're only getting worse.
Israel is now moving their offensive efforts
towards the south of Gaza, where up until now,
they had been telling people to flee to.
And so now the people who have all fled to the refugee camps
that were also air-struck have nowhere to go.
Yes, Israel has bombed sites
that they told people to seek refuge at, 61% civilian casualty rate.
Meanwhile, in the US, Joe, I'm the most progressive president
to ever sit in this office, Biden,
asked Congress if he could send 45,000 tank shells to Israel.
But then he decided he didn't actually care what Congress had to say,
and he just did it anyway.
But do not worry, I have it on good authority
that Joe Biden is actually just a swell guy,
and you should completely ignore his support of genocide
because one time he almost kind of reduced student debt.
Demand more from your leaders, demand to be heard.
The world is watching and taking notes.
On this day in 2009, mobile game developer Rovio
released Angry Birds for the first time.
The game would go on to sell 12 million copies in the first year.
It would then expand to other platforms
and eventually land multiple movie deals.
All of this because the birds were very angry.
Moral of the story, stay mad.
Lightning round.
There was momentarily an app on Android
that allowed Android users to send iMessages to iOS users.
It worked with end-to-end encryption and it showed up as a blue bubble and everything.
And then Apple shut it down.
And then Elizabeth Warren was criticizing Apple for shutting it down.
I don't know.
Apple's out here being like, we had to protect our users' privacy.
Buy an iPhone.
Some burgle boys in whole ass ski mask get up and everything
broke into Keanu Reeves' house.
Thankfully for them, he wasn't home, so they survived the encounter.
Elon Musk has reinstated Alex Jones on Twitter
after doing a poll about if he should do that.
I don't know why he was doing the poll in the first place either.
But then he also hopped on a call with Alex Jones and Andrew Tate and Ramaswamy.
What the fuck?
And speaking of Elon, his own AI, like his own chat GPT competitor,
has some choice words to say about him.
And finally for today, a Baldur's Gate 3 speed runner
has completed the game on its hardest mode, where you have one life
and cannot load your save in 38 minutes.
38 minutes.
What?
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Stuff Keeps Happening.
Head to StuffKeepsHappening.online for sources, bonus content,
and a round ball filled with snails.
My name is Endeavorance.
As a reminder, I have changed the schedule of this show.
I will be back on Thursday.
Take care and be well.