“You could never fully steal the show when you’re followed by the blown-out spectacle of Sun Ra Arkestra’s Tiny Desk Concert. But the opening act kept jumping on the piano and nibbling on the set, literally pulling up the carpet and leaving “presents” on the floor. How could we not have them back? Did I mention they’re hamsters?
“Joni and Nash — first names only, please, like Madonna and Cher — are HMSTR. Certainly not the first band to count rodents among its members, but at least they refuse to release a punk album with no punk to be found. “Snow Day” is HMSTR’s first single, a twee-as-all-get-out holiday pop-punk song by virtue of having “snow” in its title. After what sounds like digital snowflakes, the song unleashes a one-minute snowball fight with the fuzziest Tiny Desk destroyers we’ve ever seen.
Last night I sat out at the front porch and had a cup of coffee after work. It’s been a while since I sat out and enjoyed the evening air, and even though it was quite muggy it was nice to contemplate my world and how fortunate I have it in life. I miss my Grace terribly. She would sit out here with me and watch the neighborhood, and I often wondered what she was thinking. She seemed so content to simply watch; to be a part of the life going on around her, the wonderful smells of summer, the sounds of the birds, the kids playing, people walking by getting their exercise. There is a peace in that simple act that I wonder how many people in this world have available to them.
What I miss the most from my walks with Grace was her fascination with things great and small. She loved to go out and see things – like this picture when we went down to a local park for some exercise. Gracie was a great believer in feeling the wind through her ears, smells were fascinating, squirrels were great fun. Sometimes, I must admit, I resented her need for exercise and new sights when I wanted to be lazy and stare at the tv. But, she was mostly patient, waiting and encouraging me to get out and smell the mailboxes.
So, today I went out and did the proverbial smelling of the roses. I got a bit of sunshine on my face. I had a full belly, there was money in my wallet, my bills are paid up, and no one was shooting at me. How many in this world can boast those simple needs in life? How many have watched their homes destroyed, their loved ones hurt. How many are crying with an empty belly? How many live in sadness and despair? How many just hope to keep living? How did I come to be born in Michigan vs. Mexico or Ukraine or some other poverty stricken and war torn area?
So to each of you I wish a bit of sunshine, birdsong, cool grass to lay in and a squirrel or two to brighten your day. Hugs. Randy
New analysis of New Zealand fossils first uncovered in 1987 shows how penguin wings evolved.
The wing fragments were found near the town of Duntroon on New Zealand’s South Island, nearly 1,000km southwest of the Auckland.
The fossils come from a species called Pakudyptes hakataramea. It lived during the late Oligocene (34–23 million years ago). P. hakataramea is described for the first time in a study published in the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand today.
Worldwide, the latter part of the Oligocene was characterised by a drying of the climate. Forests which dominated the continents, including Australia, were beginning to recede. Grasslands and prairies expanded, seeing the evolution of grazing animals.
New Zealand today is believed to be the lost, ancient continent of Zealandia breaking through to the surface. Tens of millions of years ago, Zealandia’s rocky shores and surrounding waters were a hotbed of evolutionary development.
Among the ancient marine and coastal life found in New Zealand are dolphins, seals, crabs and ancestors of tropicbirds.
New Zealand has also thrown up ancient penguin fossils. This includes the largest ever penguin which lived 55 million years ago, stood as tall as a person and weighed a whopping 150kg.
In fact, New Zealand seems to have been teeming with giant penguins. (snip-More)
In the sticky oil seeps known as the La Brea Tar Pits, the tiny petroleum fly and their larvae thrive in the natural asphalt that oozes up to the surface. The larvae hunt among the fossilized bones of dire wolves, mammoths and saber-toothed cats.
New feature spotted in brightest gamma-ray burst of all time
July 28, 2024 Evrim Yazgin
NASA’s Fermi Telescope has revealed new details about the brightest of all time gamma-ray burst which may help explain these extreme and mysterious cosmic events.
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) usually last less than a second. They originate from the dense remains of a dead giant star’s core, called a neutron star. But what causes neutron stars to release huge amounts of energy in the form of gamma radiation is still a mystery.
A jet of particles moving at nearly light speed emerges from a massive star in this artist’s concept. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab.
In October 2022, astronomers detected the largest gamma-ray burst ever seen – GRB 221009A. It came from a supernova about 2.4 billion light years away. The event had an intensity at least 10 times greater than any other GRB detected. It was dubbed the BOAT, for brightest of all time.
Now, analysis of the data from that event has revealed the first emission line which can be confidently identified in 50 years of studying GRBs.
Emission lines are created when matter interacts with light. Energy from the light is absorbed and reemitted in ways characteristic to the chemical make up of the matter which is interacting with it.
When the light reaches Earth and is spread out like a rainbow in a spectrum, the absorption and emission lines appear. Emission lines appear as dimmer or even black lines in the spectrum, whereas emission lines are brighter features.
At higher energies, these features in the spectrum can reveal processes between subatomic particles such as matter and anti-matter annihilation which can produces gamma rays.
“While some previous studies have reported possible evidence for absorption and emission features in other GRBs, subsequent scrutiny revealed that all of these could just be statistical fluctuations,” says coauthor Om Sharan Salafia at the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics Brera Observatory in Milan. “What we see in the BOAT is different.”
The emission line appeared almost 5 minutes after the burst was detected. It lasted about 40 seconds.
It peaked at 12 million electron volts of energy – millions of times more energetic than light in the visible spectrum.
The astronomers believe the emission line was caused by the annihilation of electrons and their anti-matter counterparts, positrons. If their interpretation is correct, it means the particles would have to have been moving toward Earth at 99.9% the speed of light.
“After decades of studying these incredible cosmic explosions, we still don’t understand the details of how these jets work,” says Elizabeth Hays, Fermi project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in the US. “Finding clues like this remarkable emission line will help scientists investigate this extreme environment more deeply.”
that’s sympathetic to conditions in my area. My sinuses are achy with this humidity here today, but the rest of the week will be blazingly (I hope not literally) hot, so I don’t want to jinx anything. I’m thankful for a house with AC, and good things to read. Enjoy!
Breaking Cat News by Georgia Dunn for July 28, 2024
TRIGGER WARNING: Contains disgusting descriptions of the nasty-ass Guinea Worm, though no photos. Do not Google the photos.
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So this is very nice, former President Jimmy Carter — who is still alive and 99 years young, though in hospice — has succeeded in his decades-long goal to get Guinea Worm Disease cases down to zero before he dies. (Warning, the picture at that link is disgusting.) There have now been zero cases of Guinea Worm disease in the past three months, and there were only 14 last year. Extremely promising signs that maybe they are truly gone forever! If no more Guinea Worms burst through anybody’s flesh within the next nine months, then it’ll officially be the second disease eradicated by humanity after smallpox.
When the Carter Center started trying to take down big Guinea Worm back in 1988, more than 3.5 million people in Africa and India were suffering from it. And BOY WERE THEY SUFFERING, because while the worm won’t directly kill you, it is agonizing and SO RETCHINGLY GROSS. First, nasty-ass fucking worm larva gets into your guts through dirty drinking water. Then it grows in your stomach for a fucking year. And THEN, a fucking THREE-FOOT WORM POPS OUT OF YOUR SKIN which hurts like fucking hell, obviously. And there is no vaccine or cure, the only solution is to pull this FUCKING DISGUSTING WORM out of your fucking skin by winding it around a fucking STICK.
So it is not the glamorous kind of affliction that makes a good poster for a benefit concert or bake sale, or plays well on an ad with Sarah McLachlan playing in the background. But one fixed relatively simply, with clean drinking water. And so that is what sweet peanut-farming Jimmy worked at. His Carter Center partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and has been quietly toiling to eradicate many other un-glamorous diseases that no one in the year of our Lord 2024 should have to suffer from, including: poliomyelitis (a virus that paralyzes mostly children), mumps, rubella, lymphatic filariasis (aka elephantiasis, a roundworm transmitted by mosquitoes), cysticercosis (tapeworm infection), measles, river blindness, and yaws (a nasty spirochete bacteria that causes bursting lesions). (snip-More)
Scottie's Playtime 