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The place where the world comes together in honesty and mirth.
Windmills Tilted, Scared Cows Butchered, Lies Skewered on the Lance of Reality ... or something to that effect.


Saturday, February 25, 2017

The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of  
Carolina Naturally
You're gonna need it ...!
 
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Today in History

1570
Pope Pius V issues the bull Regnans in Excelsis which excommunicates Queen Elizabeth of England.
1601
Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex and former favorite of Elizabeth I, is beheaded in the Tower of London for high treason.
1642
Dutch settlers slaughter lower Hudson Valley Indians in New Netherland, North America, who sought refuge from Mohawk attackers.
1779
The British surrender the Illinois country to George Rogers Clark at Vincennes.
1781
American General Nathaniel Greene crosses the Dan River on his way to attack Cornwallis.
1791
President George Washington signs a bill creating the Bank of the United States.
1804
Thomas Jefferson is nominated for president at the Democratic-Republican caucus.
1815
Napoleon leaves his exile on the island of Elba, returning to France.
1831
The Polish army halts the Russian advance into their country at the Battle of Grochow.
1836
Samuel Colt patents the first revolving cylinder multi-shot firearm.
1862
Confederate troops abandon Nashville, Tennessee, in the face of Grant‘s advance. The ironclad Monitor is commissioned at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
1865
General Joseph E. Johnston replaces John Bell Hood as Commander of the Confederate Army of Tennessee.
1904
J.M. Synge’s play Riders to the Sea opens in Dublin.
1910
The 13th Dalai Lama flees from the Chinese and takes refuge in India.
1919
Oregon introduces the first state tax on gasoline at one cent per gallon, to be used for road construction.
1913
The 16th Amendment to the constitution is adopted, setting the legal basis for the income tax.
1926
Poland demands a permanent seat on the League of Nations council.
1928
Bell Labs introduces a new device to end the fluttering of the television image.
1943
U.S. troops retake the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, where they had been defeated five days before.
1944
U.S. forces destroy 135 Japanese planes in Marianas and Guam.
1952
French colonial forces evacuate Hoa Binh in Indochina.
1956
Stalin is secretly disavowed by Khrushchev at a party congress for promoting the “cult of the individual.”
1976
The U.S. Supreme Court rules that states may ban the hiring of illegal aliens.

Woman Shows Off Her '57 Chevy, The First And Only Car She Has Ever Bought

People are constantly saying "they don't make them like they used to", a folksy statement that doesn't really apply to many things despite what the speaker had in mind.But there is one thing they truly don't make like they used to- automobiles. The cars made in the early to mid-20th century were built to last a lifetime or more if properly cared for and driven safely.
Case in point- this 2011 video from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel featuring Grace Braeger showing off her cherry 1957 Chevrolet, which is the first and only car Grace has ever bought.
Grace's beautiful 57 Chevy gives new meaning to the term "granny car"!

Big-Money Speculators Are Buying Up and Renting Out Farms

In 1914, Feminists Fought For the Right to Forget Childbirth

The concept of "twilight sleep" during childbirth arose around a hundred years ago. Doctors in Freiberg, Germany, would give a woman in labor a combination of drugs, including scopolamine, which gave them the experience of going to sleep and waking up with a new baby. In reality, the drugs did not alleviate pain, but merely caused women to not remember their experience. Patients were often restrained, and even made to wear straightjackets for childbirth. But for the women who experienced it, particularly after several natural births, twilight sleep was a miraculous experience.
“I was so happy,” one women declared. “The night of my confinement will always be a night dropped out of my life,” says another. The association celebrated when a “tenement house mother” gave a twilight sleep speech on the corner of her street.
The twilight sleep movement was immediately controversial, though. While feminist women pushed for access to the technique, doctors fought back. They “refused to be ‘stampeded by these misguided ladies,’” historian Judith Walzer Leavitt wrote, in her account of the movement. Doctors wrote in the popular and academic press about the dangers of twilight sleep and argued that one popular article shouldn’t guide medical practice. But the practice also had advocates in the medical community, and soon American doctors were also traveling to Freiburg to train in twilight sleep techniques.
The campaign was so successful that twilight sleep became the thing to do, and for decades, women weren't given the choice to remain alert during childbirth. With the rise of better painkillers and exposes about twilight sleep, the practice finally faded out in the 1960s. Read about the controversial technique and the campaign to bring it the the U.S. at Atlas Obscura.

Transgender Students 'Have A Right To Piss As I Do'

'ACA Repeal Is Going To Kill Me, I Have To Get My Story Out

Off-Duty LAPD Cop Opens Fire on Teens

America's Massive Mideast Disaster

Dumbass Trump’s Travel Ban Is Ridiculous

Dr. Seuss Cartoon Proves 'America First' Is Heartless Fascism

Dr. Seuss Cartoon Proves 'America First' Is Heartless Fascism

Did the Government Doctor Legal Documents in Order to Illegally Deport a Dreamer?

Customs Agents Demand Passengers' Papers On Domestic Flight At JFK

Customs Agents Demand Passengers' Papers On Domestic Flight At JFK

ICE Invades Sanctuary Cities

As the DHS and ICE serve as a 2017 Gestapo, some are rising up and fighting back.

Coastal Cities Flooding Three Times a Week

700,000-Year-Old Horse Found in Yukon Permafrost Yields Oldest DNA Ever Decoded

 
Przewalskis-horse by Claudia Feh
The frozen remains of a horse more than half a million years old have reluctantly given up their genetic secrets, providing scientists with the oldest DNA ever sequenced.
The horse was discovered in 2003 in the ancient permafrost of Canada’s west-central Yukon Territory, not far from the Alaskan border.
And although the animal was dated to between 560,000 and 780,000 years old, an international team of researchers was able to use a new combination of techniques to decipher its genetic code.
(Read about another recent find: “Wyoming Cave Yields a Trove of Ice Age Fossils — and Ancient Animal DNA“)
Among the team’s findings is that the genus Equus — which includes all horses, donkeys, and zebras — dates back more than 4 million years, twice as long ago as scientists had previously believed.
Przewalski's Horse


The Przewalski’s Horse, which lives on the steppes of central Asia, likely deviated from the lineage leading to modern domesticated horses some 50,000 years ago. 
“When we started the project, everyone — including us, to be honest — thought it was impossible,” said Dr. Ludovic Orlando of the University of Copenhagen, who coordinated the research, in a statement to Western Digs. “And it was to some extent, with the methods available by then. So it’s clearly methodological advances that made this possible.”
Orlando and his colleagues published their findings this summer in the journal Nature; he discussed them today in a lecture at The Royal Society, London.
Previous to this, the oldest genome ever sequenced was of a 120,000-year-old polar bear — no small feat considering that the half-life of a DNA molecule is estimated to be about 521 years.
By this reckoning, even under the best conditions, DNA could remain intact for no more than 6.8 million years.
(See this recent amazing find: “First Columbian Mammoth With Hair Discovered on California Farm“)
But Orlando’s team was able to make the most of what they had for a number of reasons, he said.
The fact that the remains were frozen helped slow the rate of decay. But they also “targeted specific DNA preservation niches,” he said, like the protein called collagen found in the animal’s bones, which is more DNA-rich than other tissues.
“But also we pioneered the usage of what is called true Single Molecular Sequencing that basically reads through molecules as they stand, without further manipulation,” Orlando added.
By tracking a full, single DNA molecule, the team was able to avoid having to “amplify” fragments, which can often introduce errors.
To get a better sense of what this new, ancient genome held, Orlando’s team compared it against that of a 43,000-year-old horse, plus modern domestic horse breeds, and finally the Przewalski’s horse, an equid that makes its home on the Asian steppes and holds the title as the last surviving population of wild horses.
These full-genome comparisons allowed the scientists to construct “a molecular clock” that can reveal benchmarks in the horse’s evolutionary history, Orlando said.
And first among its revelations is that the shared ancestor of all horses, donkeys, and zebras lived more than 4 million years ago.
“So basically we know that members of the genus Equus are at least twice as old as previously believed,” he said.
The comparisons also shed light on genetic variations, and therefore population size, over time, Orlando noted, revealing “bursts of expansion” during cooler periods as grasslands grew, and contractions in size during times of warming.
(Learn more about how global warming  affected the size of prehistoric mammals: “Prehistoric Global Warming Caused Dwarfism in American Mammals, Fossils Show“)


horse fossilTwo pieces of the 700,000 year-old horse metapodial bone, just before being extracted for ancient DNA. 
The next, most obvious subject for these DNA-decoding techniques are early human ancestors, he said. Methods like those used on the ancient horse could be applied to determine, for example, how human species like Homo heidelbergensis may have been related genetically to Homo neandertalensis and modern humans, he said.
(Explore the history of humans and horses: “Ice Age Cave Dwellers in Oregon Lived Among Extinct ‘Stout-Legged’ Horses, Fossils Show“)
“Basically genomes of that age will enable us to test the validity of the many paleontological species in our family tree,” he said, “and to determine how they relate to each other, and whether they exchanged genes or not.”
“It’s not the future,” he said of whether this technology is in reach.
“It’s basically already there.”

The Water Man

Kenya's Tsavo West National Park has seen no rainfall at all since last June. The waterholes have dried up, and wildlife is suffering. But Patrick Kilonzo Mwalua spends hours every day driving a water truck to concrete-lined waterholes in the park to make sure elephants, zebras, buffalo, and antelopes have enough water to survive. Mwalua is not a park ranger, but a pea farmer with a soft spot for animals. When he and his truck approach a waterhole, huge beasts make their way over to relieve their thirst.
Between road trips, Mwalua runs a conservation project called Tsavo Volunteers. The 41-year-old also visits local schools to talk to children about the wildlife that is their legacy.
"I was born around here and grew up with wildlife and got a lot of passion about wildlife," he says. "I decided to bring awareness to this so when they grow up they can protect their wildlife."
Last year, Mwalua started renting a truck and driving water to several locations in Tsavo West. His mission would extend to several trucks, keeping him on the road for hours every day as he drives dozens of hard miles between stops.
A few Americans are raising money to help Mwalua pay for gas and truck costs as he delivers water to wildlife. See how his road trips help the animals at The Dodo.

Siberian Tigers Take Down Drone

These well-fed tigers live at the Harbin Siberian Tiger Park in Heilongjiang Province, China. A quadcopter was sent in to get some footage of the cats in the snow. But the cats chased the drone just like any prey, and actually caught it!
They soon found out it didn't taste good, and it wasn't quite dead, either. The staff was able to recover the drone and the footage.

Animal Pictures