A new month but the same old news dump exercise….things happen and IST is there to let you know what you have missed.

Personal–still nothing to write about but soon I will explain everything.

Local–record high temps and no rain for 45 days….my backyard is a dust bowl.

Time to move on to the good stuff.

Let’s begin in the UK and a cheese heist….

Scotland Yard has played a role in many chapters of criminal history, from investigating Jack the Ripper to pioneering fingerprint identification. But a new case on their radar may prove to be the most appetizing of all: the theft of hundreds of premium cheddar cheese wheels worth nearly $400,000.

According to the Associated Press, the London-based Neal’s Yard Dairy was victimized by a con artist posing as a cheese buyer for a French supermarket. The scammer first sent an email inquiry and then launched into a negotiation lasting several months, always demonstrating a keen knowledge of the cheese business. Under false pretenses, the suspect was able to separate Neal’s from 22 tons of premium cheddar cheese. Neal’s agreed to deliver the cheese to a warehouse, where it was later picked up by person or persons unknown, making for a clean getaway.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/london-cheese-thieves

I have heard that an arrest has been made but cheese is nowhere to be found.

The loss of the ‘great ocean conveyor’…..

Last year, climate scientists sent up a red flag over the potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, a network of ocean currents in peril from climate change. That warning indicated it could be decades before that happens, but a new analysis suggests such a “devastating” collapse could be more imminent—and dozens of researchers are now begging Nordic policymakers to take action, reports the Guardian. “A string of scientific studies in the past few years suggests that this risk has so far been greatly underestimated,” the 44 experts from 15 nations write in an open letter to the Nordic Council of Ministers published Monday. The letter adds: “Such an ocean circulation change would have devastating and irreversible impacts especially for Nordic countries, but also for other parts of the world.”

AMOC—which Live Science describes as “a giant ocean conveyor belt that includes the Gulf Stream and transports vital heat to the Northern Hemisphere”—brings warm water from the tropics north and sets it loose in the subpolar Atlantic. Once that water cools, it sinks and then returns south, per the Guardian. That important heat transfer “determines life conditions for all people in the Arctic region and beyond and is increasingly at risk of passing a tipping point,” the scientists note in their letter. An AMOC breakdown could hurl the planet’s climate “into chaos,” per the Guardian, affecting everything from sea levels, ocean oxygen levels, and rainfall patterns, which in turn would disrupt marine ecosystems, agriculture, and, ultimately, food supplies.

When that “tipping point” may come is still unclear, but one thing the scientists worry about is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2023 prediction, with “medium confidence,” that the AMOC “will not collapse abruptly before 2100.” That risk is being seriously underestimated by the IPCC, they say, adding that they want policymakers in the Nordic nations—including Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland—to keep the pressure on internationally to hew as closely as possible to the targets of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. “The passing of this tipping point is a serious possibility already in the next few decades,” the scientists write. Their letter in full here.

And the reports just keep getting worse but not to worry some believe it is all a hoax…..stupid, huh?

Is it possible for two people to communicate in dreamland?

REMSpace claimed that it’s achieved “new dimensions of communication” between two humans who were sleeping, by sending messages while both were in a lucid dream state.

These messages weren’t sent over the ether, but through a special device designed by the company and attached to each participant’s head — thus facilitating “the first ever ‘chat’ exchanged in dreams.”

But since it hasn’t published its latest research yet, you’ll have to take the company’s word for it.

“Yesterday, communicating in dreams seemed like science fiction. Tomorrow, it will be so common we won’t be able to imagine our lives without this technology,” CEO Michael Raduga said in a statement, adding that pursuing REM sleep technology “will become the next big industry after AI.”

Here’s how REMSpace describes the experiment in a press release, in lieu of scientific documentation. You can also “watch” the experiment in a video the company shared, which is just a visualization without real footage.

In a nutshell, it involved having two participants sleep at their homes while their devices, connected to a server over WiFi, collected polysomnographic data, which included monitoring their brain waves and heart rate.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/startup-claims-communication-over-dreams

Wasn’t there a movie along these lines?

We all hold a grudge from time to time….but for 17 years?

Seattle resident Gene Carter spotted a murder of crows encroaching on a robin’s nest one day, so he grabbed a rake and swung it at the black birds. For almost a year afterward, the crows would shriek at Carter through his house windows and “dive-bomb” him when he walked to his car. They would even wait for him at his usual bus stop, then “dive-bomb me all the way home,” Carter tells the New York Times, which reports the harassment only stopped when the computer specialist moved. What he encountered wasn’t fun, but it was business as usual for crows, who are known to hold very long grudges. How long? Around 17 years, according to John Marzluff, a professor at Seattle’s University of Washington.

In 2006, Marzluff trapped seven crows on the university campus while wearing an ogre mask. He released the birds soon after, then watched to see how they would respond to the sight of that ogre mask. The peak response came after seven years, when about half the crows who encountered the mask issued aggressive caws, indicating they associated the mask with danger, per the Times. Aggressive caws continued but slowly tapered off up to this September, when, for the first time, all crows who encountered the mask appeared to ignore it, the Times reports. According to KUOW, “the birds who were initially captured are all dead, as are most, if not all, the birds who witnessed the initial capture.”

Crows belong to the Corvidae family of birds and are often considered some of the most intelligent birds around. Though a crow’s brain is only as big as a human thumb, its size relative to its body is comparable to a primate brain, per Thought Co. That’s partly why Marzluff calls them “flying monkeys.” They can make tools, count out loud, and recognize and remember human faces in a crowd. But their skills aren’t perfect. When Marzluff used a control mask of Dick Cheney, a small number of crows cawed at it, possibly mistaking it for the ogre mask. And if crows can mix up masks, they can mix up people. Blond-haired Lynne Peeples tells the Times she was repeatedly attacked by crows after seeing a man with a blond ponytail kicking birds; she wonders if she was mistaken for him.

Moral of the story….Don’t piss off a crow!

Then there is the ‘poop’ story…..well a ‘poop’ milkshake story….

Whether or not a baby is born vaginally or by c-section is believed to have an impact on the number and type of microbes that end up in the baby’s gut, which in turn can have an effect on their health. Some studies, for example, have found that delivery by c-section increases the risk of a child developing conditions like asthma, celiac disease, and diabetes.

That’s where the Cesarean Section and Intestinal Flora of the Newborn Study (SECFLOR) comes in. It’s a clinical trial that’s been investigating whether a so-called “poop milkshake” – a small amount of the mother’s feces diluted in milk – fed to babies born by c-section can introduce beneficial microbes into their gut.

This is what’s known as a fecal transplant, a procedure that could hold a lot of potential in treating a whole host of different medical conditions – though the current trial is believed to be the first randomized and controlled study testing a combination of milk and poop.

The SECFLOR team recently reported some preliminary findings from the trial, which revealed that the method shows promise.

https://www.iflscience.com/poop-milkshakes-might-give-c-section-babies-a-gut-microbiome-boost-76531

Finally this video from the Everglades…..

Another damn reason to stay far away from Florida in my book.

That does it for me….if the weather is nice go out and enjoy a little fresh air and as always….Be Well and Be Safe….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”