Scientists are figuring out how to take something with a negative effect like toxins from poisonous frogs to something positive like bug spray. Thousands of toxins are now being studied, providing a wealth of potential new drugs. Freelance writer Alison Pearce Stevens says “Scientists are finding ways to adapt compounds that frogs and other animals rely on for protection against threats in their environment. These compounds can be put to use fighting pests that threaten human health, the environment, and the food supply. Frog poisons, for instance, can be used to fight insects such as the mosquito.

Already, some of these natural compounds are being enlisted to guard human health and safety.” Also, “scientists are using sweet wormwood as the source of a widely used malaria treatment”. Wormwood is a woody shrub with a bitter aromatic taste, used as an ingredient of vermouth and absinthe and in medicine. “Foxglove has long been used to treat irregular heartbeat” and is a Eurasian plant with erect spikes of flowers, typically pinkish-purple or white, shaped like the fingers of gloves. “opium poppy has yielded potent medicines for pain relief, including codeine and morphine. The yew tree is so poisonous that eating a handful of needles can kill a person. Yet a chemical found in yew bark has proven to be an effective anti-cancer medicine. Research on spider and scorpion venom may soon help doctors treat conditions ranging from pain to heart disease. The cone snail can rapidly paralyze a large fish—or kill an unwary person. Yet toxins from cone snails have already yielded a useful pain drug; future medicines could potentially be used to fight epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease.” “Dr. Zoltan Takacs collects venoms from around the world, often in remote areas, to get his hands on new venom samples. Using Designer Toxins technology, which he co-invented, Takacs fuses natural toxins from different venomous animals into a single molecule. This technique is used to create vast libraries of toxin variants, such as the World Toxin Bank, that can be screened against known drug targets to find toxins that have the highest promise to treat diseases.”

It may be hurting your psyche, but the jury is still out about whether or not it's going to seriously harm our development. There's one thing we do know. With all the time we spend staring at the screen, there could be some detrimental health effects. Before the pandemic hit hard, our average time spent staring at a screen is 3 hours and 15 minutes! Shocking? Now listen to this! A baby spends 5 hours on a smartphone watching nursery rhymes. Millennials spent an average of 5.7 hours on their phones! An average American school is 6 hours long. Now that it has all been turned into remote learning, that's almost 12 hours of screen time! So, is remote learning harmful to our eyes? Yes, it does harm our eyes. After staring at the screen for too long, their eye muscle can feel a bit tired and you can get headaches from that long period of time.