The Daily Drift

Way to go Stubby  ...

Carolina Naturally is read in 194 countries around the world daily.
 

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Today is - Trivia Day
 

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Today in History

1757		Robert Francois Damiens makes an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate King Louis XV of France.
1863		Union General Henry Halleck, by direction of President Abraham Lincoln, orders General Ulysses Grant to revoke his infamous General Order No. 11 that expelled Jews from his operational area.
1896		Utah becomes the 45th state of the Union.
1902		France offers to sell their Nicaraguan Canal rights to the United States.
1904		The U.S. Supreme Court decides in the Gonzales v. Williams case that Puerto Ricans are not aliens and can enter the United States freely, yet stops short of awarding citizenship.
1920		The Negro National League, the first black baseball league, is organized by Rube Foster.
1923		The Paris Conference on war reparations hits a deadlock as the French insist on the hard line and the British insist on Reconstruction.
1935		President Franklin D. Roosevelt claims in his State of the Union message that the federal government will provide jobs for 3.5 million Americans on welfare.
1936		Billboard magazine publishes its first music Hit Parade.
1941		On the Greek-Albanian front, the Greeks launch an attack towards Valona from Berat to Klisura against the Italians.
1942		Japanese forces begin the evacuation of Guadalcanal.
1951		UN forces abandon Seoul, Korea, to the Chinese Communist Army.
1952		The French Army in Indochina launches Operation Nenuphar in hopes of ejecting a Viet Minh division from the Ba Tai forest.
1969		Spain returns the Ifni province to Morocco.
1970		A 7.7 earthquake kills 15,000+ people in Tonghai County, China.
1972		Rose Heilbron becomes the first female judge to sit at the Old Bailey in London, England.
1974		President Richard Nixon refuses to hand over tape recordings and documents that had been subpoenaed by the Senate Watergate Committee.
1975		The Khmer Rouge launches its newest assault in its five-year war in Phnom Penh. The war in Cambodia would go on until the spring of 1975.
1976		The Ulster Volunteer Force kills six Irish Catholic civilians in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. The next day 10 Protestant civilians are murdered in retaliation.
1979		Ohio officials approve an out-of-court settlement awarding $675,000 to the victims and families in the 1970 shootings at Kent State University, in which four students were killed and nine wounded by National Guard troops.
1990		Over 300 people die and more than 700 are injured in Pakistan's deadliest train accident, when an overloaded passenger train collides with an empty freight train.
1999		Jesse "The Body" Ventura, a former professional wrestler, is sworn in as populist governor of Minnesota.
1999		The euro, the new money of 11 European nations, goes into effect on the continent of Europe.
2004		NASA Mars rover Spirit successfully lands on Mars.
2004		Mikheil Saakashvili is elected President of Georgia following the Rose Revolution of November 2003.
2007		Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-California) became the first female speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
2010		Burj Khalifa (Khalifa tower) officially opens in Dubai, UAE. At 2,722 ft (829.8 m) it is the world's tallest man-made structure.

Non Sequitur

The Celtic Tradition

The WOMAN OF THE BLACK MOUNTAIN was a druidess and a woman-messenger to Finn MacCumhail and her mountain was Slíab Lúachra. Through the heart of her mountain at Slíab Lúachra flowed a stream and, as Gráine washed her hands therein, there appeared a woman who came with the quickness of a swallow and the liveliness of a weasel and the spiritedness of a blast of wind over bare mountain-tops. It was on her mountain that she attended to three green champion kings in bonds.

In Celtic Tradition

CUILINN OF CUAILIGNE came out of his hill holding in his hand a vessel of red gold, and he gave the vessel into Finn’s hand. And no sooner did Finn drink what was in the vessel than his own shape and his appearance came back to him. But only his hair, that used to be so fair and so beautiful, like the hair of a woman, never got its own colour again, for the lake that Cuilinn's daughter Miluchrad had made for Finn would have turned all the men of the whole world grey if they had gone into it. And when Finn had drunk all that was in the vessel it slipped from his hand into the earth, that was loosened with the digging, and he saw it no more. But in the place where it went into the earth, a tree grew up, and any one that would look at the branches of the tree in the morning, fasting, would have knowledge of all that was to happen on that day. Cuilinn is the Holly.

Did you know ...

That the government is giving away more housing to rich people than to poor people

About the marijuana wars

That Ani Difranco apologizes (not really)

That a grad student proves the NSA can link metadata to your identity with very little effort

The repugican cabal declares war on itself

The repugican cabal power-brokers have raised a $50M war-chest to fight the nomination of "fools" to repugican cabal seats in the upcoming mid-term elections. Effectively, the repugican big-business-friendly establishment has declared war on the tea party, in an effort to ensure donors that the slate will not be full of what Matt Taibbi calls "a bottomless pit of brainless Bachmanns and Cruzes and Santorums, all convinced our Harvard-educated president is a sleeper-cell Arab and that Satan is a literal being intent on conquering Nebraska with U.N. troops."
Taibbi is, as always, fucking incandescent on the subject. He points out the delicious irony of svengalis like Karl Rove and Dick Armey -- who put the shrub in the White House by gleefully pandering to the ignorant and prejudiced with "faith-based initiatives" to bring in "the nuts" (as Rove calls evangelicals when he thinks he's in private) and Swift-Boating -- now having to keep those people from derailing the cabal and scaring off all the millionaires and billionaires.
If they're going to keep on donating to the repugican cabal, they need to be assured that the cabal's elected reps understand that gay marriage and no-abortion-for-rape-victims are just distracting side-shows to win votes, and should be set aside once in office to pursue the serious business of looting the nation and spying on everyone to prevent any kind of popular uprising.

For Rove, if that required handing out chestnuts like the "Faith-based thing" to the "nuts," or indulging John Ashcroft’s pathological fear of marble tits, so be it – the important thing was that in the end, Cheney’s energy buddies got their Clear Skies Act, the biotech donors got their Prescription Drug Benefit Act, the consumer credit vampires got their Bankruptcy Bill, and so on.
With Armey and the tea party, the "movement" was about always about rallying ordinary struggling Americans behind an idealized anti-tax/deregulatory agenda that, in an amazing coincidence, also favored the super-wealthy industrialists who happened to be backing groups like FreedomWorks.
The problem with blowing off the whole governing thing in favor of a decade-plus of cynical pandering and generally treating presidential politics like a fraternity pranking competition is that it eventually comes back to bite you.
If you spend years letting your voters think Saddam Hussein was an agent of al-Qaeda, that passing a national health care program will result in the formation of Stalinist "death panels," or that Barack Obama is secretly a foreigner, you’re going to end up with some loopy candidates prone to saying crazy things that will turn off voting majorities, which in turn will make it hard to the deliver policy objectives you actually care about for your big-money donors.
The repugican establishment is only just figuring this out. Hence this new $50 million initiative, which according to the WSJ will involve the Chamber working with party leaders in“an aggressive effort to groom and support more centrist repugican candidates.”

On Xmas, repugicans Quietly Declare War on Themselves

A Trickle Down repugican Assault Is Forcing Americans To Work Themselves to Death

Now that repugicans have most Americans working for poverty wages, they can turn their full attention to those nearing their retirement age, and forcing every American to work…

 

 The idea of a secure retirement, or a decent existence when a person is no longer able to work was a basic human right Franklin D. Roosevelt advocated in his Second Bill of Rights during his State of the Union Address in 1944.  Roosevelt’s argument was that “political rights” guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were “inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness,” particularly after toiling to build America over a lifetime of labor; labor that enriched the privileged few who never had to face poverty when their bodies could no longer work. The repugicans have spent the past seventy years attempting to force Americans to work until they drop dead and their efforts are bearing fruit according to “The Oxford Handbook of Retirement 2013.” Coupled with low wages, and their stated intent to eliminate Americans’ Social Security and pensions, repugicans, the Koch brothers, and Wall Street will be successful in guaranteeing an entire generation will never enjoy FDR’s basic “right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment” borne of work-worn bodies.
It is becoming a common concern amongst blue-collar baby boomers, the 78-million Americans born between 1946 and 1964, that they will have to “do like my father did; I’ll work ’til I die.” The Oxford Handbook of Retirement 2013 cited such concerns due to a trend among companies to provide jobs with less than paltry pensions, or none at all, that most companies have implemented over the past decade. It is a sad fact that many Americans of the baby boomer generation expect to work until they die because they had little cash put away for old age and are concerned that Social Security will not cover basic sustenance. At best, many of them hope they can move into jobs that are less physically demanding, but even that is becoming a hopeless fantasy.
Most of those in blue-collar professions were incapable of saving for their old age because wages have stagnated and not kept pace with the cost of living. Public sector workers at one time  depended on their pensions to keep them out of  poverty after they retire, but between Congress raiding their pensions, states cutting them to fund tax cuts for corporations, and the State Policy Network’s campaign to eliminate state pensions across America, the likelihood of public employees working until their last breath is prospect they should expect.
The man responsible for editing the Retirement Handbook, co-director of the Human Resource Research Center at the University of Florida, said “it’s a misconception that lower-wage workers are slackers in preparing for retirement.” Mo Wang said the biggest issue for blue-collar workers is they “don’t have adequate earnings. It’s not because they don’t want to save. It’s because they just can’t.” Wang also said it is wrong to assume that people with lower incomes have more financial concerns than people with higher incomes. He says “it is that the ratio of life earnings to wealth, how much money a person earns in a life span, compared to how much of it he or she gets to keep that is the major factor in a person’s ability to save for their retirement.” Obviously, a lifetime of low income barely covering living expenses prohibits workers from putting anything away for their retirement. It is why the past decade of declining middle class incomes and low-wages for the working poor guarantees an ever-increasing number of Americans have no hope of ever retiring.
People who’ve worked low-wage jobs for decades now admit they never envisioned an affordable retirement, much less retiring, even if that goal is decades away. A typical low-wage worker told of never earning more than $16,000 a year, even supplementing her income working weekends at a convenience store. She lamented that, “I haven’t given up on living. It’s just certain things I want to do I know I won’t do them. Traditional retirement, I won’t have that.” Sadly, most Americans may as well get used to the idea that “traditional retirement” means having to work until they drop dead just to survive. Between poverty wages repugicans love, and Wall Street, ALEC, and the Kochs pushing to slash Social Security, even with Social Security retirees will have to work to enhance their chances of surviving on a miserable pension.
It is a travesty the baby boomer generation who toiled a lifetime to build this country into an exceptional nation and enriched the people whose idea of work is plotting their next assault on labor, will spend their old age working until they die. It is the result of repugicans assailing pensions, keeping wages low, and corporations padding their bottom line by withholding retirement benefits who are still not finished assaulting labor. In every state in the Union repugicans are either raiding employee pensions to give corporations and the rich tax cuts, or to pay for repugican economic malfeasance that ravaged state budgets sending many into bankruptcy. The repugicans have already stated their target in the debt ceiling crisis is cutting Social Security, and last year during the August hiatus Boehner said he looked forward to slashing discretionary spending on “entitlements like Social Security” that he admitted was a decades-long goal of repugicans.
Americans have been economically besieged by repugicans for the past thirty years through their trickle down economic assault to transfer the nation’s wealth to the richest 1% of income earners. They have taken Americans’ tax dollars and handed them to the rich, kept wages low to enrich corporations, and they will hardly stop until they hand Wall Street Americans’ Social Security and public worker pensions. Now that they have most Americans working for poverty wages, repugicans will turn their full attention to those nearing retirement age because their concept of economic security in old age is forcing  Americans to work until they drop dead which is already a reality for 78 million blue collar baby boomers.

The truth be told

Judge Sticks It to Rick Scott By Ruling Drug Testing of Welfare Recipients Unconstitutional

U.S. District Judge Mary Scriven struck down a 2011 Florida law requiring welfare applicants to undergo drug tests as an unconstitutional infringement on personal privacy. Scriven issued a lengthy and emphatic statement declaring that the law violated the Fourth Amendment. She argued that :

There is no set of circumstances under which the warrantless, suspicionless drug testing at issue in this case could be constitutionally applied.

The judge’s ruling struck a major blow to Florida Governor Rick Scott who is a vocal proponent for drug testing TANF recipients. Judge Scriven noted that the state of Florida failed to show that TANF recipients used drugs at a higher rate than other Florida residents, and even if they did she argued that the law would still violate the Fourth Amendment.
Just two percent of Florida welfare applicants tested positive for drug use in 2011, while 96 percent were drug free (an additional two percent failed to complete the application process and were not tested). Roughly nine percent of American adults use illicit drugs,a percentage that is much higher among the general population than it is among welfare recipients. Despite stereotypes to the contrary, most welfare recipients are drug free.
Requiring TANF recipients to submit to drug tests not only violates their constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches, but it is also not cost effective since so few applicants test positive for drug use. The cost of administering the tests essentially cancels out the amount of money saved from rejected welfare applications.
Rick Scott’s state of Florida attorneys are expected to contest the ruling. They have consistently argued that TANF recipients should be considered a “special interest” exception to the Fourth Amendment. However, the governor’s argument that poor people are a special class of people who should be exempt from constitutional protections is an argument that has yet again not held up in court.

We won't get fooled again!

 

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

Young Viewers Avoid Faux News Like the Plague as Ratings Drop 30%

 

Faux News’ attempt to stop the flood of young viewers from fleeing the network failed as FNC lost the most young viewers of any cable news network in 2013.
TVNewser reported on the big drop in young people tuning into Faux News, “Compared to 2012, Faux News was down -5% in total viewers and -19% in the A25-54 demographic in total day. In prime-time, the network was down -14% in total viewers and -30% in the demo, the steepest decline among younger viewers of all the cable news networks.”
2012 was a presidential election year, so all three cable news networks lost viewers in 2013. The difference is that at Faux News this problem has been going on for years. The move of Maygun Kelly to 9 PM was supposed to attract young viewers, but Kelly suffered a drop 23% in young viewership compared to Sean Handjob’s 2012 ratings. Swiill O’Really is down 23% with younger viewers, and Handjob is down 16%.
Faux knows that this is a serious problem. It’s the reason why they shook up their primetime schedule. The reality is that Faux News has the oldest audience in all television. The average age of a Faux News viewer is 65 years old. FNC can remain the ratings leader in the short term future as long as the senior set keeps tuning in, but what happens when there aren’t enough young people tuning in to replace the elderly audience?
If Faux News fails to build a future audience, they will go extinct. It would have been unfathomable in early 1990s to suggest that one day CNN would be the least watched cable news network, but that is exactly what has happened. Beneath all of the arrogant swagger and bragging, Faux News has a huge problem.
It isn’t just that younger people aren’t watching. They are flat out rejecting Faux News. Just like the repugican cabal, Faux News is aging and fading. Attempts to rebrand are going nowhere, as young news consumers have been turned off by Faux.

Ziggy

Flute virtuoso's rare instruments destroyed by US customs

When Canadian flute virtuoso Boujemaa Razgui flew to JFK en route to Boston, his 13 handmade flutes, made from rare reeds, did not arrive with him. They had been mistaken for bamboo by a US customs inspector who opened Razgui's luggage in transit, removed the instruments, and destroyed them. Razgui's been told to write a letter to the Department of Agriculture in DC if he has any further queries.

5 Habits to Drop in 2014

5 Habits to Drop in 2014

The New Year is upon us, and that means it's New Year's Resolution time! Guest host Cristen Conger goes down a list of five habits you might think are good for you, but should actually consider dropping in 2014.

Can You Trust Your Memory?

Can You Trust Your Memory?

Anthony tells you what goes into remembering something and how, even when we think our memories are strong, we're all susceptible to a false or changing memory!

Decoding Einstein's Brain

The physicist's gray matter has been sitting in a cookie jar for half a century. What does it really reveal about human genius?

After suffering an aortic aneurysm on April 13, 1955, Albert Einstein became the subject of an international deathwatch. He succumbed to internal hemorrhaging at 1:15 AM on April 18. His body arrived shortly thereafter at a hospital in Princeton, New Jersey, for a routine autopsy. That's when the pathologist on duty, Thomas Harvey, faced a stark choice.

Any one of us might have been tempted the same way- who wouldn't want to know what in Einstein's brain made him Einstein? The genius himself expressed interest in having his mind studied and analyzed after he died, and he even sat for brain scans. In the end, though, he decided against preserving the best part of himself because he loathed the thought of people venerating it, the 20th-century equivalent of a medieval Catholic relic. But as Harvey arranged the scalpels in his autopsy room that night, he knew humankind had just one chance to salvage the gray matter of the greatest scientific thinker in centuries. By 8 AM the next morning -without next-of-kin permission and against Einstein's wish for cremation- Harvey had, shall we say, liberated the physicist's brain and released the body to the family without it.

The disappointments started immediately. Einstein's brain weighed 43 ounces, at the low end of normal. And before Harvey could measure anything more, word of the relic spread. During a discussion about Einstein in school the next day, Harvey's son, normally a laconic lad, blurted out, "My dad's got his brain!" A day later, newspapers across the country mentioned Harvey's plans in their front-page obits. Harvey did eventually convince the remaining Einsteins, who were understandably peeved, to grant permission for further study. So after measuring its dimensions with calipers and photographing it for posterity, Harvey sawed the brain into 240 taffy-sized hunks and lacquered each one in celloidin. Soon, he was mailing the blobs in mayo jars to neurologists, confidence that the forthcoming scientific insights would justify his peccadillo.

But over the course of the next 40 years, neurologists ended up publishing only three papers on Einstein's brain. Most found nothing extraordinary. Harvey kept soliciting scientists to take another look, but the brain chunks mostly just sat around, wrapped in cheesecloth and tucked into wide-mouthed glass cookie jars of formaldehyde broth. The jars themselves sat in a cardboard box in Harvey's office, tucked behind a red beer cooler. When Harvey lost his job and took off for greener pastures in Kansas (where he was neighbors with William S. Burroughs), the brain rode shotgun in his car.

In the past 15 years, though, Harvey's persistence has been justified, a little. A few cautious papers have highlighted some atypical aspects of Einstein's brain, on both microscopic and macroscopic levels. Coupled with research into the genetics of brain growth, these findings may yet provide some insight into what separates human brains from animal brains and what pushes an Einstein a few standard deviations beyond that.

Early attempts to find the biological basis of intelligence were based on the idea that bigger was better: More brain mass meant more thinking power, just more muscles meant more lifting power. This theory had its shortcomings; sperm whales and their 17-pound brains don't dominate the globe. Today, the obsession with overall brain size had given way to obsessing over the size of various parts of the brain. Primates have particularly beefy neuron shafts (called axons) compared with other animals and can therefore send information through each neuron more quickly. Even more important is the thickness of the cortex, the outermost brain layer, which promotes thinking and dreaming and other flowery pursuits. Scientists know that certain genes are crucial for growing a thick cortex, partly because it's so sadly obvious when these genes fail. And Einstein's cortex had a few unusual features.

One study found that, compared with normal older men, Einstein had the same number of neurons and had the same average neuron size. However, his prefrontal cortex was thinner, which gave him a greater density of neurons tucked into the space. Closely packed neurons may help the brain process information more quickly -a tantalizing find considering that the prefrontal cortex orchestrates thoughts throughout the brain and helps solve multistep problems.

Further studies examined certain folds and grooves in Einstein's cortex. As with brain size, it's a myth that simply having more folds automatically makes a brain more potent. But folding does generally indicate higher functioning. Smaller and dumber monkeys, for instance, have fewer corrugations in their cortexes. So do newborn humans. That means that as we mature from infants to young adults and as the genes that wrinkle our brains start kicking in, every one of us relives millions of years of human evolution! Scientists also know that a lack of brain folds is devastating. The genetic disorder "smooth brain" leaves babies severely underdeveloped, if they even survive to term. Instead of being succulently furrowed, a smooth brain looks eerily polished, and cross-sections of it, instead of showing scrunched-up brain fabric, look like slabs of liver.

But what about the fact that Einstein often though about physics mostly through pictures? He famously declared, for example, that he formulated relativity theory in part by imagining what would happen if he rode around bareback on light rays. Perhaps that's due to the unusual wrinkles and ridges in the cortex of his parietal lobe, a region that aids in both mathematical reasoning and image processing. The Parietal lobe also integrates sound, sight, and other sensory input into the rest of the brain's thinking. Einstein once said that abstract concepts only achieved meaning in his mind "through their connection with sense-experiences." Indeed, his family remembers him practicing his violin whenever he got stuck on a physics problem. An hour later, he'd often declare, "I've got it!" and return to work. Auditory input seemed to jog his thinking. The parietal ridges and wrinkles in Einstein's lobes were steroid thick, 15 percent bigger than normal. And whereas most of us mental weaklings have skinny right parietal lobes and even skinnier left parietal lobes, Einstein's were equally buff.

Strangest of all, however, is the fact that Einstein seemed to be missing part of his middle brain, the parietal operculum; at the very least, it didn't develop fully. This part of the brain helps produce language, and its absence might explain why Einstein didn't speak until age two and why until age seven he had to rehearse every sentence he spoke aloud under his breath. But there might have been compensations. This region normally contains a small gap, and our thoughts have the ability to get routed the long way around. This quirk in Einstein's brain might have meant that he could process certain information more speedily, by bringing two separate parts of his brain into unusually direct contact.

All of which is exciting. But is it exciting bunkum?

Einstein feared his brain becoming a relic. But have we done something equally silly and reverted to phrenology? To be certain, Einstein wasn't the first autopsy of a celebrity. Doctors set aside Beethoven's temporal bones in 1827 to study his deafness, but a medical orderly nicked them. The Soviet Union founded an entire institute in part to study Lenin's brain and determine what makes a revolutionary a revolutionary. Similarly, and despite the body being mutilated by mobs, Americans helped themselves to half of Mussolini's brain after World war II to determine what makes a dictator.

Einstein's brain has deteriorated into chopped liver by now (it's even the same color), which forces today's scientists to work mostly from old photographs, a less precise method. And not to put a too fine point on it, but Thomas Harvey coauthored half of the various studies on the "extraordinary" features of Einstein's brain, and he certainly had an interest in science learning something from the organ he purloined. It's possible that Einstein's features are idiosyncratic and had nothing to do with genius; it's  hard to tell with a sample size of one. Even trickier, we can't sort out whether usual neuro-features (like thickened parietal folds) caused Einstein's genius or whether his genius allowed him to "exercise" and build up those parts of his brain. But even if Einstein's genius remains enigmatic, scientists have sussed out a lot about the everyday genius of humans.

For example, they now know that a mutation in humans a few million years ago deactivated a gene that bulked up our jaw muscles. This probably allowed us to get by with thinner skulls, which in turn freed up precious space in the skull for brain expansion. Another surprise was that apoE, the gene that made us meat eaters, helped the brain manage cholesterol, which is major component of myelin. To function properly, the brain needs to sheath its axon in myelin, which acts like rubber insulation and prevents signals from short-circuiting or misfiring.

Even more fascinating is the fact that scientists have recently detected 3,181 base pairs of "junk DNA" in chimpanzee's brains that got deleted in humans. This region helps stop out-of-control neuron growth, which can lead to big brains, obviously, but also brain tumors. Human, it turns out, gambled in deleting this DNA, but the risk paid off, and our brains ballooned. Today, the breakthroughs in neuroscience are coming faster and faster. And while scientists still can't pinpoint what makes an Einstein an Einstein, they do know that with DNA it's not always what we gained that makes us human; sometimes it's what we lost.
 

Discovery of oldest footprints gives clues to Mexico's climate

The oldest human footprints in North America have been dated for the first time and could help scientists to understand what Mexico's climate was like 7000 years ago.

Discovery of oldest footprints gives clues to Mexico's climate Museum specimens [Credit: Nick Felstead] The new climate data, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, comes from two sets of footprints found in the Chihuahuan desert in north-eastern Mexico. The first of these sets was discovered in 1961 after workmen stumbled across them while building a road. At the time they were removed and placed in a museum where, despite being described in detail, their provenance was lost. A team of researchers, from John Moores University in Liverpool, who were interested in where these prints came from began interviewing local people to see if they could find more. Eventually, in 2006, another track was found in a quarry. 'When we discovered these new prints, they were preserved in the same material as the ones in the museum. So we presumed it was a rediscovery of these lost footprints as opposed to a new discovery,' explains Dr Nick Felstead now of Durham University, lead researcher on the project. To see if the two sets of prints were from the same track the teams needed to work out their age. So, they used oxygen and carbon isotopes in the surrounding material to work out when our ancestors made the prints.

Discovery of oldest footprints gives clues to Mexico's climate Tracks in situ [Credit: Nick Felstead] 'The age of the prints in the museum had been given a best-guess at being around 10 to 15,000 years old, but they had never actually been dated,' says Felstead. 'The two sets of dates came back at 10.5 thousand years and seven thousand years old, so by age alone we knew they were separate; they couldn't have been same trackways.' At 10.5 thousand years old, the museum footprints pre-date the oldest evidence of humans previously known in the area – a 9000 year old piece of human faeces. Having dated the two sets of footprints the scientists decided to look at what the climate was like when these humans laid down these trackways. The prints were preserved in sediments known as travertine – a mineral that precipitates out when water percolates through limestone rocks - so the scientists knew the area must have been far wetter than it is today. The water which formed the travertine also contains minute traces of uranium, and it was this that enabled the team to date the footprints. Over time uranium decays and turns into thorium, by measuring the ratio of uranium to thorium the scientists were able to determine how old the footprints were. 'It's in the middle of the Chihuahua desert, everyone always thinks that deserts are hot, arid and hostile but these footprints show us that during the Holocene, the desert was just coming out of a period of glaciation and had only just started to dry out,' Felstead says. 'It's a window into a time when the desert was wet enough to support a much greater range of life.'

What Mount Everest and the Grand Canyon have in common

"North Rim Grand Canyon Cape Royal"

Mount Everest isn't the only natural wonder experiencing a ridiculous increase in tourism --and, with it, trash, ecological damage, and risk. At the Arizona Republic, Brandon Loomis writes about the massive increases in athletic backcountry tourism at the Grand Canyon. It's easy to see the similarities to previous stories you've read about crowds of hikers on Everest. Just last month, Loomis writes, 224 rim-to-rim hikers — people who march down one side of the canyon and back up the other in a day, a vertical change of 10,000 feet — converged on a rest area all at once.
The good news is that when these traffic jams happen at the Grand Canyon, nobody dies. The bathroom line just gets really, really long.
The downside is that all this traffic does have a real impact on the backcountry ecology, and on the ability of other kinds of tourists to safely navigate the Canyon, themselves.

Park officials discourage hiking to the river and back in one day — trailhead volunteers talk some ill-prepared hikers out of it, and trail signs warn against it — but it’s allowed. Sometimes, runners racing the clock pass mule trains unsafely, Uberuaga said. In other cases, people attempting to hike rim to rim in a day end up sleeping on picnic tables without permits, or celebrating while campers are trying to sleep. “I’ve been on the corridor trails early in the morning, and the people running it are almost knocking people over and kind of running people off the trail,” he said.

Asteroid spotted on collision course with Earth

On January 1st, around 1:30 in the morning, astronomers spotted an asteroid heading straight for Earth. The good news is that it was probably only between 6.5 and 14 feet long. In fact, the International Astronomical Union says that the asteroid — 2014 AA — has most likely already hit us and burned up in the atmosphere. But here's the cool part: This is just the second time in history that we've spotted an asteroid before it hit us.

Random Photos

The 124 States Of America

Secessionist movements in the United States are all the rage these days. A handful of counties in Colorado tried to secede from the rest of the state earlier this year. There's an attempt to create the State of Jefferson (northern California/southern Oregon) via ballot initiative in 2014.

What would the U.S. look like if all of the secession movements in history had succeeded? Mansfield University geography professor Andrew Shears built a map to answer that question.

The 124 states of America.

Pictures Of The Lost British High Street

At Dick's Depot, pairs of shoes and boots dangle outside the shop. If this was a high street today, such wares may well have been discounted as festive bargain hunters elbowed each other to grab them.

But this is the scene from a bygone and, some might say, more civilised era: the historic market town of Shrewsbury... 125 years ago. The treasure trove of Victorian photos shows every shop front imaginable selling everything from cheeses and chocolates to shovels and shoes.

The Facts About That Most Evil Of Numbers - 666

It’s a number that has vexed and troubled people for generations, a triple dose of the digit between five and seven thought to bring bad luck, and possibly the devil himself, when it appears.
That number is the dreaded 666, and up until six years ago there was an area code 666 that was sent straight to numerical hell by the mostly Christian residents of Reeves, Louisiana.
But did the Reeves townies actually defeat that most evil of numbers, or will 666 forever pop up wherever three digit numbers are used? Here are eleven curious facts about the source of all evil mathematics, the number 666.

Drivers engaged in other tasks about 10 percent of the time

Drivers engaged in other tasks about 10 percent of the time

Drivers eat, reach for the phone, text, or otherwise take their eyes off the road about 10 percent of the time they are behind the wheel, according to a study using video technology and in-vehicle […]

Daily Comic Relief

What Made The Strange Web Towers In The Amazon

A few months ago, we showed you this strange structure found and photographed by graduate student Troy Alexander in the Peruvian Amazon. As far as we knew, no one had ever seen anything like it before. Was it built by an insect, a spider, a fungus, or space aliens? Researchers at the Tambopata Research Center kept observing this and other structures like it until they figured it out. Photographer Jeff Cremer and entomologist Phil Torres tell us how the creature that made the structures was found.

A two week effort led by Phil Torres at the Tambopata Research Center, a jungle lodge in Peru, finally put to rest what had baffled both researchers and thousands of online commenters: the structure was created by a spider.

Images of this structure first went viral in August of 2013 when researcher Troy Alexander encountered two of them on an island in Tambopata, Peru, took photos to document them, and posted the pictures to reddit.

The images were shared widely on that site and throughout the internet, with no clear answers as to what made it, theories ranged from a fungus to a spider, and even space aliens.

Teaming up with Lary Reeves and Geena Hill from the University of Florida, Torres set out to the same island to see if they could find more, and ideally to see if they could catch it being made in action.

A mite near the web structure.

“The most challenging part of the search was that we had so little to go on- should we be eyeing every spider we see suspiciously, or was something flying around and creating these?” said Torres.

After careful macro photography by wildlife photographer Jeff Cremer, the team isolated some of the structures to see what, if anything, hatched out of them.

After several days of nothing hatching and inconclusive dissections, the team was ready to call the structures an elaborate spermatophore created by a spider, basically a package of sperm typically paired with nutrients designed to entice, fertilize, and feed a female.

On the final morning of their excursion, two of the structures hatched out one spiderling each, and the next day a third did the same.

This makes the structure potentially the first documented case of a spider laying a single egg in an egg sac, as they traditionally lay multiple.

While collecting permits are being gathered to inspect the specimens more closely, arachnologists can only guess as to the identity of the spiderlings.

Read more about the research at the Tambopata Research Center blog and see more pictures in an article at Wired.

The Mystery Silkhenge Spider

(YouTube link)

 

An biological mechanism for fire-breathing dragons

Say dragons did exist. In that alternate universe, how would they breathe fire? (Where the answer is not "magic".) Kyle Hill has a nice explanation for how real-life fire breath might work, and how it could have evolved over time.

Deep Sea Creatures at Risk Due to Climate Change

Deep Sea Creatures at Risk Due to Climate Change

Climate models predict a 'staggering' catastrophe for deep-sea marine life.

Animal Pictures