From left, Judges Stephen Hill, Sarah Warner and Karen Arnold-Burger hear arguments during a Jan. 27, 2025, hearing on the application of Senate Bill 180. (Thad Allton for Kansas Reflector)

OVERLAND PARK — Wednesday marked the first day in two years that transgender Kansans were able to change the gender markers on their drivers licenses after the Kansas Supreme Court denied Attorney General Kris Kobach’s appeal in a long legal battle.

For Jessie Lawson, her driver’s license was the last document to change. She updated her birth certificate before a federal judge halted modifications, and her Social Security card and passport before President Donald Trump’s executive order stated the federal government only recognizes two genders.

“Everything has been updated with the correct gender marker except for my driver’s license, which this guy won’t let us do,” Lawson said. “Republicans in Kansas are very intolerant of anything that’s not like them.”

Lawson didn’t have the proper paperwork to change her driver’s license before Kobach sued the Kansas Department of Revenue for allowing transgender Kansans to change their gender markers. He argued they weren’t complying with Senate Bill 180, which defined women by reproductive ability.

In 2023, Shawnee County District Judge Teresa Watson issued a temporary injunction blocking such changes. KDOR and the American Civil Liberties Union appealed, and the Kansas Court of Appeals overturned Watson’s injunction in June.

Kobach appealed the ruling, but the Kansas Supreme Court declined to hear the case last week.

“We look forward to KDOR resuming gender marker changes on driver’s licenses at the earliest possible time,” said Monica Bennett, legal director of the ACLU of Kansas, in a news release.

Lawson had an appointment at the Andover Department of Motor Vehicles for Monday, but was told the DMVs hadn’t been given the go-ahead. A KDOR spokesperson on Monday told Kansas Reflector the agency was waiting for signed paperwork from the court.

“This is so heart-wrenching,” Lawson said on Tuesday when there was no clear timeline. “These people have no idea what this means to us.”

That wasn’t the first time Lawson was told to wait — in June, she spent the morning at the DMV before being informed of Kobach’s plan to appeal.

“Every little victory is a breath of fresh air, and the fact that this is happening in Kansas is mind-boggling,” Lawson said. “I need to get on this right now because they’re going to pull that special session in November and they’re going to modify SB 180 to include blocking licenses for the rest of time.”

Statehouse Republicans are pushing for a special session in early November.

Senate President Ty Masterson and House Speaker Dan Hawkins originally pushed the special session to gerrymander U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids — the only Democratic, female, and Native American representative from Kansas — out of office.

But after the Kansas Supreme Court’s ruling, they’ve added a goal to amend SB 180 to bar transgender people from changing the gender markers on their drivers licenses.

“Attorney General Kobach has urgently requested that the Legislature call a special session to address an issue that he considers even more important than redistricting,” Masterson wrote in a letter.

In a statement, Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly called Masterson’s letter “political theater.”

Brittany Jones, the president of Kansas Family Voice — a conservative Christian organization — supported Masterson and Hawkins’ quest for a special session.

“The highest court in our state should not allow the confusion of the age to cloud the clarity of our most basic public documents — like driver’s licenses,” Jones said in a news release.

Lawson is tentatively happy about the change. She’s worried that the special session will lead to KDOR adopting a policy similar to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment’s regulation in which birth certificates that have already been changed remain valid but any new copies “must reflect the sex assigned at birth.”

She’s also worried that a change to SB 180 would embolden anti-trans people.

“I take every win where I can get it,” Lawson said. “Everything you read in the news is always like they’re hammering on trans rights, they’re taking our rights away.”

Scientists have developed a unique nanoparticle vaccine that prevented the development of multiple forms of cancer in mice, reports a study published in Cell Reports Medicine on Thursday. 

Eighty percent of mice that received the novel vaccine and were subsequently exposed to cancerous cells did not develop tumors and survived to the end of the 250-day long experiment. In contrast, all of the mice that received different vaccine formulations, or remained unvaccinated, developed tumors and none survived longer than 35 days.

It’s too early to know if this breakthrough will ever be applicable to human cancer prevention or treatment, but the successful demonstration in mice is a promising result for the team’s so-called “super-adjuvant” vaccine. This approach uses nanoparticles made of fatty molecules to deliver two distinct “adjuvants,” which are substances in vaccines that enhance an immune response.

“The results that we have are super exciting, and we're really looking forward to pushing forward to the next steps,” said Griffin Kane, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and first author on the paper, in a call with 404 Media. “But I think that the translation of these types of therapies from preclinical mouse models to the clinic is a very humbling experience for a lot of people and teams.”

“It’s these highlights that make it worth coming to work,” added Prabhani Atukorale, assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the Riccio College of Engineering at UMass Amherst and corresponding author on the paper, in the same call. “But I agree that the translation of these findings is key. We are not satisfied with simply publishing a paper. We want to get these into patients, and it is a humbling process because there are significant gaps.”

Scientists have been working on nanoparticle-based drug designs for decades, and the field has experienced rapid progress in recent years alongside advances in nanotechnology and drug delivery pathways. Nanoparticles provide a stable platform for carrying vaccine components to key targets, increasing the efficiency of delivery to specific sites in the body and uptake by the immune system. 

Atukorale’s team previously published a study on a similar vaccine that shrank and cleared tumors from mice. In their new study, the researchers adapted the nanoparticle design to achieve prophylactic protection from melanoma, pancreatic, and triple-negative breast cancer in mice, with support from the Institute for Applied Life Sciences at UMass Amherst, UMass Chan Medical School, and the National Institutes of Health.

Vaccines consist of two main components: antigens, which are substances that trigger an immune response, and adjuvants, which enhance the immune response. Like other cancer vaccines, the nanoparticle treatment delivers antigens that activate white blood cells in the immune system to help fight off specific types of tumors. 

What’s new in this study is that the nanoparticles accommodated two distinct adjuvants that target different immune pathways known as STING (stimulator of interferon genes) and TLR4 (Toll-like receptor 4), which further boosts the immune response to introduced cancer cells. 

Adjuvants often require very different drug delivery systems, but the nanoparticles, which are about 30 to 60 nanometers across, are big enough to house different adjuvants in their unique environments, while remaining small enough to enter lymph nodes where they can activate key immune cells.  

“The big picture is that we need better adjuvants for our vaccines,” Atukorale said. “We think that we can build them using nanoparticles. This is an example in a tumor.”

One of the most exciting surprises from the study turned out to be the prolonged protection against the spread of cancer provided by the nanoparticle vaccine. The vaccinated mice that did not develop tumors during their first exposure to melanoma cells were then later injected with new metastatic cancer cells, and their immune systems fought those off too, preventing the development and spread of the tumors.

“There's long-term robust memory immunity,” said Kane.

Moreover, while the team focused on certain cancers in their experiment, the nanoparticle platform could deliver a range of specialized antigen-adjuvant combinations to target different types of tumors. 

“We think that this is one of the true strengths of these strategies,” said Atukorale. “They will have much broader reach than many of the cancer-specific treatments out there.”

That said, Kane and Atukorale cautioned that their team’s work is still in early stages—and, of course, focused on mice and not people. They also noted that only a handful of cancer vaccines have been clinically approved out of thousands in development. While the new study represents an intriguing step forward, the dream of wide-ranging prophylactic cancer vaccines is many years away, assuming it can materialize at all. 

“A lot of very elegant technologies have come out of labs and have not fully succeeded in patients,” Kane said. “We believe that we're building this technology towards something that would improve on what current cancer vaccines are able to deliver.”

The organizers of the Bird Photographer of the Year competition received more than 33,000 images for 2025’s contest; here are the winners and runners-up. Photos above by Franco Banfi, Francesco Guffanti, Tibor Litauszki, and Andreas Hemb.

If you have no idea what you’re seeing in that third photo by Tibor Litauszki, you’re not alone — even after reading the photographer’s description (courtesy of In Focus), I can’t figure it out:

It was January and nature had created some very interesting shapes in the saline lakes near Akasztó in Hungary. I sent up my drone and was looking for the right composition when a dozen geese suddenly flew into view. I immediately started taking photos and luckily everything fell into place — the composition as well as the geese.

And eagles? Huge monsters. Dinosaurs never went extinct. (via in focus)

Tags: best of · best of 2025 · birds · photography

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

From afar, they can look like large collections of plants, growing out of the lake and shooting toward the sky, but there’s a little more to the flora popping up on some Overland Park lakes.

Called floating wetlands, these man-made mini islands of native Kansas plants are intended to balance the water’s ecosystem and keep harmful algae blooms at bay.

Overland Park is now adding more of them to lakes at city parks.

How do floating wetlands work?

The floating wetlands are full of native plants like blue flag iris and awl-fruited sedge, and the roots from those plants hang down into the water, soaking up excess nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorus, that can spur harmful algae blooms, said Public Works Water Quality Specialist Julie Roberts.

Those nutrients can enter the lakes from water runoff that may carry lawn fertilizers, pet waste or other organic materials, like leaves and yard waste.

The harmful blue-green algae blooms that feed on them are caused by cyanobacteria, which can lead to neurological illnesses that may be life-threatening for animals and humans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But the roots of the plants on these floating wetlands suck up these nutrients instead, improving the water quality.

“As the plants absorb more nutrients, there are fewer nutrients available for the algae, leading to a reduction in the algae,” Roberts said in a written statement.

Overland Park has experimented with floating wetlands for a few years

Overland Park started playing around with floating wetlands on an experimental basis in 2018 at South Lake Park near 87th Street and Metcalf Avenue, deploying a 50-square-foot floating wetland.

Early success there eventually led Overland Park to ponder expanding the concept.

Over the years, officials at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment have included South Lake Park on multiple statewide health advisory watches, warnings or hazard lists about harmful algae blooms.

In 2023, Overland Park added 10 additional floating wetlands to South Lake Park’s body of water, all 100 square feet apiece with about 100 plants each, and started looking at other lakes in the city that might benefit from their own floating wetlands.

Now, the city has floating wetlands at Regency Lake, Wilderness Lake and Amesbury Lake.

South Lake Park has had fewer harmful algae bloom warnings

Roberts said it’s “too early to point to a trend” when it comes to the success of the floating wetlands and their ability long term to improve water quality at city lakes.

“Improvement in water quality is a slow process because nutrients can be tied up in the sediment, and the amount flowing into the water varies depending on resident actions,” she said.

That being said, the number of harmful algae bloom warnings at South Lake Park each year has started to decline, Water Quality Specialist Cloey Adrian said in a written statement.

In 2024, there were no blooms recorded, and this year, there’s been just one as of late September.

Roberts also pointed to other benefits the floating wetlands offer, like providing shelter for fish and other animals that can hide in the root systems of the native plants.

They can also be a platform for water quality education. In South Lake Park specifically, there’s a sign posted by the lake that provides information about the floating wetlands and the types of water pollutants they’re intended to tackle.

Keep reading: Overland Park has replanted thousands of trees. Now, officials worry they aren’t getting the proper care.

In Romain Veillon’s most recent body of work, Secret Gardens, the enigmatic allure of abandoned greenhouses takes center stage. Traveling to derelict sites to immortalize forgotten corners of the world, the French photographer invites viewers into spaces where humans are decentered.

The boundaries between interior and exterior are a key element in Veillon’s approach to abandoned growing houses, where he emphasizes their convergence. “It is ironic to see that, on the contrary, nature felt imprisoned there and sought to break free from its captor, unleashing its unstoppable force,” the photographer shares in a series statement. “Now, we admire vegetation that has become one with the bars of its cage.”

Veillon’s photographs are formidable, documenting the power nature holds to eventually reclaim spaces no longer governed by human intervention. While echoes of the presence of man persist in each image—through shattered stained glass window panes, rusting pipes, and piles of unused pots—the commanding force of rollicking vegetation is a clear reminder that in the end, nature endures beyond us.

Find more on Veillon’s website, and keep up with his practice on Instagram. (via designboom)

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Untamed Flora Subsumes Abandoned Greenhouses in Romain Veillon’s ‘Secret Gardens’ appeared first on Colossal.