Summer heat has arrived in the Gulf South….what better time to write about the news that escaped you in the past week?

Recently it was reported that water is most likely on the Moon and now NASA says contrary to popular belief there may be life on the Moon.

You probably think of the Earth’s Moon as a dead husk, void of life.

But NASA says the astronauts who are scheduled to touch down on the surface of the Moon as soon as late 2025 — if everything goes according to plan, an increasingly significant “if” — might not be the first organisms in town, Space.com reports.

“One of the most striking things our team has found is that, given recent research on the ranges in which certain microbial life can survive, there may be potentially habitable niches for such life in relatively protected areas on some airless bodies,” Prabal Saxena, a planetary researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told the site.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/nasa-life-moon

Another immaculate conception…..

Behold, the immaculate crocodile!

An international team of scientists has confirmed through genetic testing that an 18-year-old female crocodile housed at a Costa Rican zoo impregnated herself without a male mate — the first time that such a discovery has been recorded and studied, according to the researchers.

As detailed in a research article published in the journal Biology Letters, the baby croc was a 99.9 percent genetic match for its mother, meaning that no other crocodiles could have been involved in the conception of the hatchling.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/jesus-crocodile-conceived

Ever visit a ghost town?

Some futurist think that a few of the world’s largest cities are on track to becoming one big ghost town….

If you live in a big city, you might generally think that you’re not subject to the rough-and-tumble bits of nature more rural areas might be. You might have even moved there specifically out of a predilection for easily available sushi and generous bar hours over smelling wet dirt more than once a year. But just because you spend your days encased in what is more or less a large-scale concrete pachinko machine doesn’t mean you’re completely out of the woods, no pun intended.

Even the world’s biggest cities can still be reminded of their insignificance with a particular brusque sack-tap from Mother Nature. Whatever your influence on the global economy, if the earth’s tectonic plates decide to shift the wrong way, or a system of warm and cold air mingle in a less-than-lucky pairing, you might find yourself facing down a natural disaster regardless. The fact that, thanks to ease of transport, a lot of the world’s bigger trade centers ended up close to the coast puts them a lot closer to Atlantis status than they’d like to admit.

Here are five big cities that are one global shudder away from becoming ghost towns…

https://www.cracked.com/article_38346_5-modern-metropolises-primed-to-become-ghost-towns.html

The checks in the mail dodge may not work for much longer…..

Check fraud is back in a big way, so much so that postal authorities and bank officials are warning Americans to avoid mailing checks if possible, or at least to use a secure mail drop such as inside the post office. Banks issued roughly 680,000 reports of check fraud to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, also known as FinCEN, last year. That’s up from 350,000 reports in 2021. Meanwhile the US Postal Inspection Service reported roughly 300,000 complaints of mail theft in 2021, more than double the prior year’s total, reports the AP.

Early in the pandemic, government relief checks became an attractive target for criminals. The problem has only gotten worse, despite the fact that check usage has been in decline for decades. Americans wrote roughly 3.4 billion checks in 2022, down from nearly 19 billion checks in 1990, according to the Federal Reserve. However, the average size of the checks Americans write rose from $673 in 1990—or $1,602 in today’s dollars—to $2,652 last year.

Today’s check fraud criminals aren’t small operations or lone individuals. They’re often sophisticated criminal operations, with participants infiltrating post office distribution centers, setting up fake businesses, or creating fake IDs to deposit the checks. The AP has the story of a small-business owner who found himself a victim: Eric Fischgrund, who runs FischTank PR, a 30-person public relations firm in New York, had about 15 checks that were being mailed to him from clients stolen after they all went through the same Postal Service distribution center. Ten of them were successfully cashed by criminals.

I live in a region where the Southern Baptist are a major factor in religious life…..but in the 21st century women are not allowed to lead a church…..

Pleas from pastors whose churches are being expelled because they’re led by women failed to persuade Southern Baptists to reverse their decision. Delegates made the expulsions from the denomination final at their annual convention in New Orleans, the New York Times reports, despite emotional speeches from the leaders of the two congregations. Rick Warren, who founded Saddleback Church in Southern California, told the delegates that famed evangelist Billy Graham had once said his daughter, Anne, was “the best preacher” in the Graham family.

“No one is asking any Southern Baptist to change their theology,” Warren said. “I am not asking you to agree with our church. I am asking you to act like Southern Baptists who have historically ‘agreed to disagree’ on dozens of doctrines in order to share a common mission.” Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville was the other congregation ousted, with more than 90% of delegates voting for removal. Nearly as many voted to kick out Saddleback, the second-largest church in the denomination. The votes were taken Tuesday and announced Wednesday.

The margins surprised Fern Creek’s pastor, the Rev. Linda Barnes Popham, who also addressed the meeting. “I thought there were more people left in the Southern Baptist Convention who support the autonomy of the local church, if not women in ministry,” she said. Baptist churches are independent, per the AP, but the convention can rule them “not in friendly cooperation”—which expels them. It’s apparently the first time a congregation has been kicked out for having a female pastor, though the denomination’s theological statement says the office is for qualified men. Warren told delegates that statement is 4,032 words. “Saddleback disagrees with one word,” he said. “That’s 99.99999999% in agreement! Isn’t that close enough?” The crowd roared “No!”

There is nothing good about these repressive slugs….no redeeming qualities what so ever.

This story I have mixed emotions about….a synthetic human embryo….

An egg plus sperm equals a human embryo—at least that’s traditionally how it’s been done. In a breakthrough, scientists say they’ve created human embryos without the need for either egg or sperm. These “synthetic embryos” or “embryo models” are made from reprogrammed embryonic stem cells. But they resemble true embryos with “cells that would typically go on to form the placenta, yolk sac and the embryo itself,” per the Guardian. As Dr. Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, a professor of biology at CalTech and Cambridge University, tells the outlet, “our human model is the first three-lineage human embryo model that specifies amnion and germ cells, precursor cells of egg and sperm.”

However, “it is not yet clear whether these structures have the potential to continue maturing beyond the earliest stages of development,” per the Guardian. Zernicka-Goetz has previously developed synthetic mouse embryos “with evidence of a developing brain and beating heart,” per the outlet, but these failed to develop when implanted into the wombs of female mice. Synthetic embryos implanted into monkeys also failed to develop. Zernicka-Goetz, who described her research Wednesday at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Boston, only spoke of cultivating the human embryo models just past the stage of development that a natural embryo would reach in 14 days.

As the BBC notes, most countries cut off human-embryo research after 14 days. A host of ethical issues are raised, however, as synthetic human embryos don’t fall under current law, though there are calls for that to change. While “nobody is currently suggesting growing them into a baby,” per the BBC—indeed, it would be illegal to do so—researchers do hope they can be used to better understand genetic diseases and miscarriage in early pregnancy. So similar to human embryos, they present a “very important path towards discovery of why so many pregnancies fail,” Zernicka-Goetz tells CNN, noting the majority of miscarriages occur “around the time of the development at which we build these embryo-like structures.”

I can foresee all sorts of abuses here…no matter what excuse they use for its development the abuse will follow.

That is my offering for this Saturday….enjoy your Summer-like day and be safe…

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”