Another week in the bag and another ‘Dump’ headed your way….after a week of total stupidity I thought a little look into under-reported news might make your day.
Local–Our annual Cruisin’ the Coast brought in 10,213 cars that means about 20,000 to 30,000 extra people milling around….the traffic has been god awful but it ends tomorrow and things can to return to hectic chaos…..plus cooler temps are here for at least a few days.
Personal–same old sh*t different weekend….it is nice not being in a hospital every other day but those days are quickly coming to an end.
Let’s begin with an age old question….why do females live longer than males?
The study also found evidence that the sex that is more heavily involved in raising offspring – in mammals, this is usually females – tends to live longer. In species with long lifespans like primates, this is likely to be an evolutionary advantage: females survive until their offspring are independent or sexually mature to ensure continuation of the species.
The species studied were all living in zoos, which offer protection from environmental stressors such as harsh climate, starvation, and predation. It has long been thought that such stressors drive the observed difference between male and female life expectancy. Although the gap was reduced in zoo animals, the female advantage found in wild populations still remained. This mirrors what we see in humans, where advances in medicine and living conditions have narrowed but not been able to eliminate the lifespan gap.
“Our findings may help explain why differences in ALE [adult life expectancy] between men and women are so consistent across time and cultures,” the researchers conclude. “Specifically, female-biased ALE appears to be common to chimpanzees and gorillas, suggesting that longer life expectancies for females are a characteristic long embedded in our evolutionary history.”
https://www.iflscience.com/we-may-finally-know-why-women-live-longer-than-men-81020
Speaking of brains…..growing one from scratch….
John Hopkins University scientists revealed that they had created something astonishing: a miniature whole human brain.
Specifically, it was a type of organoid, a small mass of human tissue grown from stem cells meant to mimic the function of our organs — and, most importantly, serve as a test bed to study diseases and new drugs for treatment.
The existence of this lab-grown brain and other similar organoids have gotten some scientists speculating that these little walnuts may become conscious in the future — essentially a soupçon of human sentience in a petri dish — which, of course, carries immense ethical implications and icks a lot of people out.
https://futurism.com/health-medicine/lab-grown-human-brain-poll
Seriously? That to me just sounds like a cheap scifi movie waiting to happen.
You want terrifying?
While in school, a 13-year-old Florida teen logged onto a school device and typed something bone chilling into OpenAI’s ChatGPT: “How to kill my friend in the middle of class.”
That’s when a school police officer got an immediate alert that this happened via an AI-powered school monitoring system called Gaggle. The officer then cornered the teen, a student at Southwestern Middle School in Deland, a city an hour north of Orlando, local NBC-affiliate WFLA reports.
The teen claimed he was “just trolling” a friend, but the police and school administrators obviously didn’t think it was a laughing matter — especially in light of America’s extensive history of school shootings, such as the tragic massacre at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people died.
Local police from the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office arrested him and booked him at the county jail.
Footage circulating on social media shows the teen in restraints leaving a cop car.
Law enforcement warned parents that their children should be very careful about what they ask of ChatGPT.
“Another ‘joke’ that created an emergency on campus,” the local sheriff’s office said, as quoted by WFLA. “Parents, please talk to your kids so they don’t make the same mistake.”
Police officers were able to respond quickly because Gaggle is installed on school devices, which can detect if a student has exhibited concerning behavior, whether directed towards themselves or others, and block inappropriate content.
(futurism.com)
How we think about death….a stoner’s study….
People who regularly use ayahuasca, a traditional Amazonian psychedelic drink, may have a fundamentally different way of relating to death. A new study published in the journal Psychopharmacology indicates that long-term ayahuasca users tend to show less fear, anxiety, and avoidance around death—and instead exhibit more acceptance. These effects appear to be driven not by spiritual beliefs or personality traits, but by a psychological attitude known as “impermanence acceptance.”
The findings come from researchers at the University of Haifa, who sought to better understand how psychedelics influence people’s thinking and behavior around mortality. According to their data, it is not belief in an afterlife or a shift in metaphysical views that predicts reduced death anxiety. Instead, the results suggest that learning to accept change and the transient nature of life may be central to how ayahuasca helps people relate more calmly to death.
Ayahuasca is a psychoactive brew traditionally used by Indigenous Amazonian groups in healing and spiritual rituals. The drink contains the powerful hallucinogen DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) along with harmala alkaloids that make it orally active. Many users describe deeply emotional, and often death-themed, visions during their experiences. These may include the sensation of personal death, symbolic rebirth, contact with deceased individuals, or feelings of ego dissolution—the temporary loss of a sense of self.
https://www.psypost.org/scientists-studied-ayahuasca-users-what-they-found-about-death-is-stunning/
Who has the longest name?
n 1984, a Texas family made global headlines not because of what their child accomplished, but because of what they named her.
That child — born to Sandra Williams — entered the Guinness Book of World Records with a staggering 1,019-letter name, a middle name stretching 36 letters, and a birth certificate nearly two feet long.
The name, inspired by a mix of films, cars, relatives, and creative invention, began as Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk Koyaanisquatsiuth Williams.
The state’s struggle to accommodate such a lengthy registration even prompted adjustments to how names were legally handled — a reminder that creativity sometimes collides with bureaucracy.
Despite the extraordinary circumstances, everyday life with a thousand-letter name was far from easy.
As a child, she struggled to even remember it, reportedly recording herself saying the full version until it stuck. Teachers, friends, and family, however, opted for the far simpler nickname: “Jamie.”
What does Issac Newton have to say about the world?
It’s a credit to how good Isaac Newton was at physics and math that people rarely mention that time he threatened to burn his mother’s house down, or the equally baffling time he stuck a number of needles into his own eyeballs to see what would happen.
Yes, when Newton wasn’t revolutionizing our notions of motion and gravity, he was, by today’s standards, a bit of a weird dude. As well as dedicating a lot of his spare time to the study of alchemy – a medieval belief that metals could be turned into gold – Newton had a keen interest in the occult and the Biblical apocalypse.
In fact, in a few private pieces of speculation likely not meant to be seen publicly, Newton went about attempting to predict the end of the world, based on his Protestant understanding of the Bible and the events that followed. In one attempt, written on a letter slip next to real math calculations of the non-apocalypse type, Newton apparently made reference to the year 2060:
Prop. 1. The 2300 prophetick days did not commence before the rise of the little horn of the He Goat.2 Those day [sic] did not commence a[f]ter the destruction of Jerusalem & ye Temple by the Romans A.[D.] 70.3 The time times & half a time did not commence before the year 800 in wch the Popes supremacy commenced4 They did not commence after the re[ig]ne of Gregory the 7th. 10845 The 1290 days did not commence b[e]fore the year 842.6 They did not commence after the reigne of Pope Greg. 7th. 10847 The diffence [sic] between the 1290 & 1335 days are a parts of the seven weeks.
How far back does the butt drag go?
Do you ever stop and think about how wonderful it is that it’s so easy for you to scratch your butt? No? Well, perhaps a first-of-its-kind fossil can inspire you to practice a little more gratitude, as it reveals the butt-drag of a rock hyrax committed to the fossil record 126,000 years ago.
Rock hyraxes are remarkable creatures, famous for eating tomatoes like Denethor, being most closely related to elephants, and just generally being weird little guys. In southern Africa, they’re known as “dassies” and they like to chill out on rocky outcrops, occasionally pooping and peeing. The good life.
They also have a penchant for dragging their butts along the ground, sort of like you sometimes see dogs do if they’ve got worms. Nobody’s exactly sure why rock hyraxes like to do it, but we do know they’ve been doing it for a long time.
That understanding has been solidified in a one-of-a-kind fossil that’s thought to be the first-ever remains of a 126,000-year-old butt drag. It was identified by a team with the African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience, who have been scanning the Cape south coast in search of ancient tracks and traces.
Finding fossilized tracks like these falls under the field of ichnology, something we’ve been able to use to get a better understanding of animal behavior by looking at the weird marks they left on the ground as they were doing it. It’s helped us to get a better understanding of everything from dinosaur sex to millipede sex, but it’s not all about sex. Oh no, sometimes it’s just a simple butt drag.
To close out this ‘Dump’ I give you a feel good story…..
A dog named Eeyore turned into a rescuer, leading a Florida sheriff’s deputy to where a missing 86-year-old woman had fallen while walking him, bodycam footage shows. The woman’s husband reported her missing on the night of Sept. 25 after she didn’t return from her walk in their Destin neighborhood, per the AP. “She never takes more than 10 or 15 minutes,” the worried husband told Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Deputy Devon Miller, according to the footage released Monday. “It’s almost an hour now. It’s over an hour now.”
Miller drove around the neighborhood until she spotted Eeyore in the middle of the road. The dog trotted up to the deputy, who responded: “Hi! Where’s your mama?” The dog then led her to the nearby spot where the woman had fallen. “He practically dragged me to her,” Miller later said in a video the department released on social media on Wednesday. The woman, who was alert and later taken to a medical facility, was astonished that Eeyore had guided the deputy to her. “He came up to your car?” the woman asked Miller. “Oh, sweetheart. … Oh, Eeyore, you’re a good boy. Grandma loves you.”
That kind of devotion is not taught….and this is why I love pups they are the very best example of love.
That should do it for this Saturday……I hope everyone has a great weekend and as always….Be Well and Be Safe….
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
The dog story is the best thing I’ve heard all week.
Lab-grown brains? What could go wrong? Everything of course.
Given the amount of school killings in America, those monitoring systems can only be a good thing.
Do you suppose they gave the kid that stupidly long name just to get it into the Guinness Book of Records? If so, shame on them.
Glad to hear the medical stuff wil be tapering off soon.
Best wishes, Pete.
It was my favorite as well….I think it was a chance to set some sort of record….tacky….chuq
A fascinating collection of stories as always!
Thanx John I appreciate your time chuq
This is quite the News Dump! From lab-grown brains that might get existential, to a 13-year-old learning the hard way about AI monitoring (just trolling), and ayahuasca users being deathly calm – its a wild ride. Naming a kid with a thousand letters sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare waiting to happen! Isaac Newton threatening to burn down his moms house and predicting the worlds end in 2060? Talk about a weird dude! And the fossil of a butt-dragging hyrax? Who knew? Its a credit to how weird our world is that these stories even make the cut. Definitely gives random thoughts a whole new meaning.