CHARLESTON, WV (WOWK) — A group of coaches, female athletes and women’s advocates made a stop at a rally in Charleston Wednesday with the message to keep males out of female sports.

The event was part of a coast to coast summer tour from women’s advocacy coalition Our Bodies, Our Sports called “Take Back Title IX.”

WV Student Athlete Sabrina Shriver of Lincoln Middle School was there protesting competition with a male athlete at a girl’s championship.

“If something is wrong, then if you speak out, it can be changed, potentially fixed. And, you can give people voices and the courage to also speak out,” Shriver said.

Former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was in attendance as well, arguing that the new Title IX rules strip away protections for women, including equal opportunity and privacy.

“The notion that these young women have to be competing against these bigger, stronger, more powerful biological males who call themselves female and then go change in the locker room, it’s just untenable,” DeVos said.

The Our Bodies, Our Sports coalition formed two years ago. It claims it is the country’s first and only coalition of women’s advocacy organizations from across the political spectrum fighting for equal opportunity and fairness in women’s sports.

CHARLESTON, WV (WOWK) — Nuclear power could be expanding soon in the U.S. and West Virginia is on a list of targeted sights.

This is after the U.S. Senate passed a bill known as “The Advance Act.” One of the three senators who wrote this bill was West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R).

The bill authorizes the expansion of nuclear power in any state where it has also been approved.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates is one of the leading supporters, and he toured a former coal-fired power plant in Kanawha County last year.

It could potentially be turned into a nuclear plant, just like Gates is currently building in Wyoming. The West Virginia legislature has also passed a law allowing nuclear power in the state.

“This basically sets the parameters and will hopefully jump-start much more rapidly, the development of small modular nuclear. These are not the big old nuclear reactors of old. These are small, They are more contained. They have less waste, and they also are emission-free,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, (R) West Virginia.

Only 15 members of Congress voted “no” on the nuclear power bill. It now heads to President Biden for his signature.

Bill Gates was a guest on “Face the Nation” this past Sunday and specifically mentioned West Virginia as a potential location for nuclear power plants.

LISLE, Illinois (AP) — With their bulging red eyes and their alien-like mating sound, periodical cicadas can seem scary and weird enough. But some of them really are sex-crazed zombies on speed, hijacked by a super-sized fungus.

West Virginia University mycology professor Matt Kasson, his 9-year-old son Oliver, and graduate student Angie Macias are tracking the nasty fungus, called Massospora cicadina. It is the only one on Earth that makes amphetamine — the drug called speed — in a critter when it takes over. And yes, the fungus takes control over the cicada, makes them hypersexual, looking to spread the parasite as a sexually transmitted disease.

“They’re zombies, completely at the mercy of the fungus,” said University of Connecticut cicada researcher John Cooley.

This particular fungus has the largest known genome of any fungus. It has about 1.5 billion base pairs, about 30 times longer than many of the more common fungi we know, Kasson said. And when these periodical cicadas live underground for 17 years (or 13 years in the U.S. South), the spores generally stay down there with them.

“This was a mycological oddity for a long time,” Kasson said. “It’s got the biggest genome. It produces wild compounds. It keeps the host active — all these quirks to it.”

Kasson decided to ask people from around the country to send in infected cicadas this year. And despite an injured leg, Kasson, his son and Macias travelled from West Virginia to the Morton Arboretum outside Chicago, where others have reported the fungus that takes over a cicada’s nether parts, dumping the genitalia and replacing it with a white, gummy yet flaky plug that’s pretty noticeable. The spores then fall out like salt from a shaker.

Infected cicadas are supposed to be hard to find.

Ten seconds after she hops off the golf cart, Macias is in the trees, looking. She emerges victorious, hand in the air with a cicada, yelling “I got one.”

“That was just lucky,” Oliver whines.

“Luck, huh? Let’s see you get one,” Macias replies.

Ten seconds later at a neighboring bush, Oliver finds another. And just a bit after that a photographer finds a third.

Kasson and his small team collected 36 infected cicadas in his brief Chicago area jaunt with people sending him another 200 or so from all over. He’s still waiting for an RNA analysis of the fungus.

Some cicada experts have estimated maybe one in 1,000 of the periodical cicadas are infected with this fungus, but it’s not much more than a guess. Mount St. Joseph University’s Gene Kritsky, a biologist who wrote the book on this year’s unique dual emergence, said it might be skewed because the healthy cicadas stay higher up in the trees.

This year “the fungus is about how it always is,” Cooley said in an email. “It’s not super common.”

There’s debate among scientists if the fungus infects more cicadas deep in the soil coming out of the ground after 13 or 17 years or if it infects the newly hatched nymphs on the way underground for more than a decade.

This fungus isn’t the type of parasite that kills its host, but instead it needs to keep it alive, Kasson said. Then the infected cicadas attempt to mate with others, spreading the spores to its mate/victim. The males even pretend in their hypersexualized state to be females to entice and infect other males, he said.

The cousin to this fungus which infects annual cicadas out west also makes a psychoactive compound in the cicadas but it is more akin to psychedelics like magic mushrooms, Kasson said. So sometimes people, even experts, mix up the amphetamine that the infected 17- and 13-year cicadas produce with the more trippy compounds of the annual bugs, he said.

Either way, don’t try it at home. Even though cicadas themselves are edible, not so much the infected ones.

In the interest of science, Kasson tried one during this emergence, making sure they were from the inside of a female so more antiseptic.

“Man, it was so bitter,” Kasson said, explaining that he immediately rinsed his mouth out. “It tasted like something you would consider poisonous.”