That magical time. the weekend, when IST brings you all the news that you cannot use.
Big news–Taylor Swift won something….California gets rain….Super Bowl is close at hand….King Charles III has cancer….and a partridge in a pear tree.
Local news….weather has been mild for about a week….some douche bag contractor cut down two protected trees while trying to build condos on the beach….trees that survived Katrina.
Now on to the big stuff that you actually drop by to read.
Theft in Canada…..
It was so cold at Canada’s Lily Lake Resort on January 22 that security patrols at the hotel were canceled—so an opportunistic group of thieves broke in and stole a 500-pound, 12-foot-tall stuffed polar bear. Somehow no one even noticed the massive animal, which had undergone taxidermy, was missing for a few days: As the Globe and Mail puts it, “He’d been there so long, it felt like he would always be there,” and as he was mounted on a platform on the second floor of the Edmonton-area hotel, people had to look up to see him. He hasn’t been seen since the the heist, in which thieves had to sever steel cables to remove him, the Guardian reports.
The resort typically has full-time security, but there is unfortunately no video surveillance. Oddly, last August, two stuffed raccoons were also stolen from the same place. Police say the trio of taxidermy creations are worth a total of $26,000. The public is being asked to report to police if they hear about any suspicious sales of a massive stuffed bear. “That would stick out right away, if you saw that anywhere, right?” says a constable with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Was this the theft of the century?
Speaking of theft let’s go down to Alabama….
There are small-time thefts, and there are big-time thefts—and then there are thefts that no one can adequately explain. One of the latter took place last week in Jasper, Alabama, where a 200-foot-high AM radio tower used by station WJLX was inexplicably stolen, reports the New York Post. In a Friday Facebook post from WJLX, the station announced that a landscaping crew made the discovery that morning when they headed to the Walker County site to tend to the property. When the crew got there, one member called station manager Brett Elmore to let him know “that not only was my building vandalized, but my TWO HUNDRED FOOT TOWER WAS GONE!” the social media post noted.
“I said, ‘What do you mean the tower is gone?'” Elmore tells WBRC, noting that he double-checked that the crew was at the correct location. “He said, ‘The tower is gone. There is wires everywhere, and it is gone.'” Elmore adds that the perp (or perps) cut the wires that secured the heavy steel tower and lifted “every piece of equipment out of the building.” Elmore says they’ll rebuild the tower, and that the FCC has given WJLX the temporary OK to air the station’s AM channel via alternative methods, but he says he’s not going to give up on working with investigators to find out who’s responsible.
Was THIS the theft of the century?
How about some medical stuff?
You know…..like synthetic human embryos….
Embryonic development, also known as embryogenesis, is a cornerstone in understanding the origins of life. But studying this marvel of intricate and layered biological processes in people faces considerable challenges. Early-stage human embryos are difficult to obtain. Then there are ethical issues surrounding their use. This has made it difficult for scientists to understand early human development.
However, advances in genetic engineering and molecular and cellular biology have catalyzed the emergence of synthetic embryology, a subfield dedicated to replicating and studying embryonic development in a petri dish using human stem cells. By offering new tools to explore the enigmatic earliest stages of human development, synthetic embryology can help researchers overcome the challenges of using real human embryos.
I want to say good for them but I am suspicious of anything dealing with genes and stuff for see an opening for unscrupulous actors to mess with humans in some way or another.
We are shrinking!
Back in the day Americans were the tallest people on earth….not anymore….
Back in the 1800s, records showed that Americans were the tallest in the world. But something happened in the 1980s stateside—men and women’s average height was shrinking when compared with other countries. Meghna Chakrabarti spoke with researchers on WBUR’s On Point to dig into why, and they say it’s largely due to factors involving the social safety net. Countries like the Netherlands that have free health care, child nutrition programs, and strong maternity resources rank higher in height, demonstrating that when people’s basic wellness needs are being met, they thrive. “Height is an overlooked indicator,” says John Komlos, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Munich. “It has effects that are important from the point of view of human welfare.”
His research went deep into history to study height over time. This involved trawling through sources like slave trade accounting and military records so old that no one had turned the handwritten, dusty pages in hundreds of years. The data and archaeological records showed that Americans were tallest in the 1800s, when food was plentiful and accessible stateside, especially when compared with other regions (though the data available is really tracking white Americans). Over time, other countries began to catch up, but a real shift occurred in the 1980s, the era of the first millennials and of Reaganomics, when Americans began falling behind Western countries in height and also life expectancy, while child obesity, which can stunt growth spurts, was on the rise.
“It’s the beginning of an incredible rise in inequality, a new ideology in the administration that puts more emphasis on individual agency and less on public service,” Komlos says of Reaganomics. “And as a consequence, the American health care system becomes the most inefficient in the world.” Per the Washington Post, differences sped up quickly during this era. In 1985, 19-year-old men ranked 36th in height and women 38th globally, but by 2019, men fell to 47th and women to 58th (behind China and Lebanon). Inequality in the US, however, was on the rise, and Komlos says we lose more height due to poverty than we gain from extreme wealth.
Okay “Shorty” time for another dire prediction of our demise (I love these things….no one has been right yet)….
Yep, it’s that time again. It’s time to play every doomsayer’s favorite apocalyptic game: “What Way Will We All Die?” Is it nuclear weapons this time? Robotic and/or AI overlords? The disastrous consequences of climate change? The good ole’ zombie horde swarming the land in search of living flesh? An inexplicable cosmic event expanding from the vacuum of space to consume not only Earth but the entire solar system — nay, the galaxy? Maybe an alien invasion? Nah. There are just too many humans.
Basically, that’s what Austrian-American physicist and professor at the University of Illinois Heinz von Foerster thought. Born in Vienna, Austria in 1911, von Foerster got his doctorate in physics in 1944, wound up in the United States post-World War II, won a Guggenheim Fellowship, published some papers, made headways into the academic community, and developed a fascination with cybernetics, as the University of Illinois Archives tells us. He also founded the University of Illinois’ Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) in 1958 to study “computational principles in living organisms.”
And what was this very clever person’s take on the demise of humanity? As Time explains, he predicted that prosperity equals death. Assuming we don’t blow ourselves up and our food supply remains intact, von Foerster pulled out a pencil and in 1960 calculated that humanity will be “squeezed to death” by 2026. Humanity will breed itself to oblivion.
Read More: https://www.grunge.com/1502541/why-2026-end-of-the-world-according-to-scientist/
About time for me to shutdown for the day….I hope you found something interesting and/or entertaining in today’s ‘Dump’.
Enjoy your weekend and as always….Be Well and Be Safe….
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”