Lightning Strikes

 

Life Expectancy

New research this week puts the enormous loss of life caused by the covid-19 pandemic into greater context. The study of 29 countries across Europe and North and South America found that nearly all experienced a reduction in life expectancy last year, while some countries had the largest drops seen since World War II.

Life expectancy at birth is a commonly used metric of a country’s overall health. It estimates how long the average person born in a particular year (2020, for example) would be expected to survive, given current trends in mortality among different age groups. 

Over time, life expectancy has trended upward in many countries, thanks to more people living longer into their senior years. But when annual deaths increase significantly for whatever reason, especially when these deaths involve younger people, life expectancy can go down. 

In the U.S., for example, life expectancy had inched lower in recent years due largely to drug overdoses.

Researchers in the UK and Denmark tried to quantify the impact of the pandemic last year on the life expectancy of 29 countries, using mortality figures from 2015 to 2020. These countries included the U.S., Chile, and most of Europe. The results were published Monday in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

Overall, life expectancy dropped from 2019 to 2020 in 27 out of 29 countries, and 22 countries experienced a drop larger than half a year. 

Many countries saw a loss that effectively wiped out five years of progress, with women in 15 countries and men in 10 countries having a life expectancy lower than what was recorded in 2015.

Some, including the U.S., also experienced a year-to-year drop not seen since other great calamities like the end of the Soviet Union or World War II.  READ MORE...

Sheep Dogs

 

Stick Bugs

Nature’s most terrifying creatures can sneak up on us, and a perfect example showed up days ago in a photo shared by Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

A large bug is prominent in the photo, but finding it quickly wasn’t easy.

“Camouflage is a marvelous adaptation that allows some critters to exist practically undetected,” the park wrote.

“As September days grow cooler and shorter, a variety of critters still scuttle around in the undergrowth. Whether or not you can find them, however, is another story!”

So where was the bug in the photo?

Right in the middle, apparently. It’s the dead stick — with legs, park rangers said.

Known as a stick bug, the insects are infamous for not only looking like sticks, but they also “may even sway back and forth to more closely resemble a twig moving in the wind,” according to the National Wildlife Federation.

“Depending on the species, walking sticks can grow from 1 to 12 inches (2.5 to 30 centimeters) long,” the federation says. “Stick insects are the biggest insects in the world — one species measures over 20 inches (51 centimeters) long with its legs outstretched.”

The park’s photo has gotten hundreds of reactions, including some who wanted to know if they could get stung by a stick in the park.  READ MORE...

Solace

 

Yemen's Well of Hell

Cave explorers from Oman have become the first individuals to descend to the bottom of the 367-foot (112 meters) deep "Well of Hell" sinkhole in Yemen, which many local people believe is a genie-infested gateway to the underworld, according to news reports.

The natural sinkhole, officially known as the Well of Barhout, has an eerily circular entrance that spans 98 feet (30 m) in diameter and is located in the middle of the desert in al-Mahra province in eastern 

Yemen, close to the border with Oman. Amateur cave explorers have entered the sinkhole before, but until now nobody was known to have made it all the way to the bottom.

Last week, a team of 10 explorers from the Omani Caves Exploration Team (OCET) explored the Well of Barhout using a pulley system that lowered eight of the members to the bottom while the remaining two stayed at the top. 

A small crowd of intrepid spectators gathered to watch the event, despite local fears surrounding the sinkhole. A video of the explorers descending into the cave was shared by the BBC.  READ MORE

Small Animals

 

Lazy Dogs

 

Einstein Ring

One of the most spectacular Einstein rings ever seen in space is enabling us to see what's happening in a galaxy almost at the dawn of time.

The smears of light called the Molten Ring, stretched out and warped by gravitational fields, are magnifications and duplications of a galaxy whose light has traveled a whopping 9.4 billion light-years. This magnification has given us a rare insight into the stellar 'baby boom' when the Universe was still in its infancy.

The early evolution of the Universe is a difficult time to understand. It blinked into existence as we understand it roughly 13.8 billion years ago, with the first light emerging (we think) around 1 billion years later. Light traveling for that amount of time is faint, the sources of it small, and dust obscures much of it.

Even the most intrinsically luminous objects are extraordinarily hard to see across that gulf of space-time, so there are large gaps in our understanding of how the Universe assembled itself from primordial soup.

But sometimes the Universe itself offers us a helping hand. If a massive object sits between us and a more distant object, a magnification effect occurs due to the gravitational curvature of space-time around the closer object.

Illustration of gravitational lensing. (NASA, ESA & L. Calçada)

Any light that then travels through this space-time follows this curvature and enters our telescopes smeared and distorted – but also magnified and duplicated. These are called Einstein rings, because the effect was predicted by, you guessed it, Albert Einstein.

The phenomenon itself is called gravitational lensing, and while it has given us some absolutely amazing images, it also affords us brilliant opportunities to combine our own magnification capabilities – telescopes – with those of the Universe to see things that might otherwise be too far to make out clearly, or at all.  READ MORE...

Dancing Girl

 

China's New Twin Jet

China's big international airshow in Zhuhai hasn’t even officially kicked off yet, but we are already getting a peek at what is going to be displayed there. One new development is China's J-16D electronic attack jet being seen with jamming pods for the first time. 

Now we are getting our first lifesize view of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation's Cai Hong (Rainbow) 6, better known by its designation CH-6. It is a long-endurance, twin-jet engine, multirole drone. In the past, we have only seen models and low-fidelity renderings of the design.

The CH-6 is considered to be a high-altitude, long-endurance (HALE) unmanned system designed for intelligence gathering, support, and strike roles. It looks almost something like a drastically enlarged CH-5, but its rear configuration is very different from that earlier design. 

It has a high T-tail setup, with two jet engines installed atop the tail section side-by-side. The drone's mid-set long wings are also a bit swept and the entire package sits atop tall landing gear. The aircraft also has a notable chine-line-like edge that wraps around its ellipse-shaped fuselage.

According to China-Arms.com, which claims to have the basic information that will be displayed about the CH-6 at the airshow, its stats include:
The CH-6 UAV’s parameters include maximum takeoff weight of 7.8 tons, maximum load capacity of 300 kg (reconnaissance type) or 2 tons (reconnaissance-attack type), fuel capacity of 3.42 tons (reconnaissance type) or 1.72 tons (reconnaissance-attack type), overall length of 15 meters, wingspan of 20.5 meters, height of 5 meters, maximum level flight speed of 800 km/h, cruise speed of 500 km/h to 700 km/h, cruise altitude of 10 km, ceiling of 12 km, a maximum endurance of 20 hours (reconnaissance type) or 8 hours (reconnaissance-attack type), a maximum range of 12,000 km (reconnaissance type) or 4,500 km (reconnaissance-attack type), a maximum climb rate of 20 m/s, and an operating radius (apparent) of 300 km.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Hopping Dog

 

Reality of the Mind

One of the stranger articles we’ve seen in a long time at Aeon proposes a war on the very concept of “the mind.”

“The terms ‘mind’ and ‘mental’ are messy, harmful and distracting. We should get rid of them,” Joe Gough, a philosophy student, says.

Here is his reasoning:
"The terms mind and mental are used in so many ways and have such a chequered history that they carry more baggage than meaning. Ideas of the mind and the mental are simultaneously ambiguous and misleading, especially in various important areas of science and medicine. When people talk of ‘the mind’ and ‘the mental’, the no-mind thesis doesn’t deny that they’re talking about something – on the contrary, they’re often talking about too many things at once. Sometimes, when speaking of ‘the mind’, people really mean agency; other times, cognition; still others, consciousness; some uses of ‘mental’ really mean psychiatric; others psychological; others still immaterial; and yet others, something else."   JOE GOUGH, “THE MIND DOES

Joe Gough

Of course, all general terms are like that. Singling out “the mind,” as opposed to “a free press” or “wise financial management,” for special criticism is not clearly reasonable. We can’t just get rid of such terms because people are always reinterpreting them or moving the goalposts. That’s part of the very nature of abstractions. Abstractions are, by their nature, easier to just constantly reinvent than something wholly material like furniture or stonework.

And his recommendations?
"When we see the concepts of mind and mental doing such harm, we have good reason to get rid of them. Rather than talk about ‘minds’ and ‘the mental’, we would be better off discussing the more precise and helpful concepts relevant to what we’re doing. The good news is that they already exist for the most part, and work perfectly well once their connections with mind and mental are broken. Psychology has psychological, cognitive science cognitive, and psychiatry psychiatric. Outside these areas, there are many, many more –consciousness, imagination, responsibility, agency, thought, memory, to name but a few. Feminist work on relational autonomy and the relational self, and historical precursors such as Homer provide promising avenues for developing conceptions of people that don’t call on the notion of mind – notions according to which people are coherent wholes, not because they have some unifying inner core, but because of the way they, their relationships and their environments conjoin." JOE GOUGH, “THE MIND DOES NOT EXIST” AT AEON (AUGUST 30, 2021)

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS...  CLICK HERE... 

 

Coffee is Ready

 

History of the Car Radio

Seems like cars have always had radios, but they didn't. 

Here's the story:

One evening, in 1929, two young men named William Lear and Elmer Wavering drove their girlfriends to a lookout point high above the  Mississippi River town of Quincy, Illinois, to watch the sunset.  It was a romantic night to be sure, but one of the women observed that it would be even nicer if they could listen to music in the car.

Lear and Wavering liked the idea. Both men had tinkered with radios (Lear had served as a radio operator in the U.S. Navy during World War I) and it wasn't long before they were taking apart a home radio and trying to get it to work in a car. But it wasn't easy: automobiles have ignition switches, generators, spark plugs, and other electrical equipment that generate noisy static interference, making it nearly impossible to listen to the radio when the engine was running.

One by one, Lear and Wavering identified and eliminated each source of electrical interference. When they finally got their radio to work, they took it to a radio convention in Chicago . There they met Paul Galvin, owner of Galvin Manufacturing Corporation.  He made a product called a "battery eliminator" a device that allowed battery-powered radios to run on household AC
current.

But as more homes were wired for electricity more radio manufacturers made AC-powered radios. Galvin needed a new product to manufacture. When he met Lear and Wavering at the radio convention, he found it. He believed that mass-produced, affordable car radios had the potential to become a huge business.

Lear and Wavering set up shop in Galvin's factory, and when they perfected their first radio, they installed it in his Studebaker.  Then Galvin w ent to a local banker to apply for a loan. Thinking it might sweeten the deal, he had his men install a radio in the banker's Packard.  Good idea, but it didn't work -- Half an hour after the installation, the banker's Packard caught on fire. (They didn't get the loan.)  Galvin didn't give up.  He drove his Studebaker nearly 800 miles to Atlantic City to show off the radio at the 1930 Radio Manufacturers Association convention.

Too broke to afford a booth, he parked the car outside the convention hall and cranked up the radio so that passing conventioneers could hear it.
That idea worked -- He got enough orders to put the radio into production.

WHAT'S IN A NAME
That first production model was called the 5T71.  Galvin decided he needed to come up with something a little catchier.  In those days many companies in the phonograph and radio businesses used the suffix "Ola" for their names - Radio la, Columbia, and Victrola were three of the biggest. Galvin decided to do the same thing, and since his radio was intended for use in a motor vehicle, he decided to call it the Motorola.

But even with the name change, the radio still had problems: When Motorola went on sale in 1930, it cost about $110 uninstalled, at a time when you could buy a brand-new car for $650, and the country was sliding into the Great Depression. (By that measure, a radio for a new car would cost about $3,000 today.) In 1930 it took two men several days to put in a car radio --  The dashboard had to be taken apart so that the receiver and a single speaker could be installed, and the ceiling had to be cut open to install the antenna.  These early radios ran on their own batteries, not on the car battery, so holes had to be cut into the floorboard to accommodate them.  The installation manual had eight complete diagrams and 28 pages of instructions.

Selling complicated car radios that cost 20 percent of the price of a brand-new car wouldn't have been easy in the best of times, let alone during the Great Depression --  Galvin lost money in 1930 and struggled for a couple of years after that.  But things picked up in 1933 when Ford began offering Motorola's per-installed at the factory.  In 1934 they got another boost when Galvin struck a deal with B.F. Goodrich tire company to sell and install them in its chain of tire stores.

By then the price of the radio, installation included, had dropped to $55. The Motorola car radio was off and running.  (The name of the company would be officially changed from Galvin Manufacturing to "Motorola" in 1947.)

In the meantime, Galvin continued to develop new uses for car radios.  In 1936, the same year that it introduced push-button tuning, it also introduced the Motorola Police Cruiser, a standard car radio that was factory preset to a single frequency to pick up police broadcasts. In 1940 he developed with the first handheld two-way radio -- The Handy-Talkie -- for the U. S. Army.

A lot of the communications technologies that we take for granted today were born in Motorola labs in the years that followed World War II.  In 1947 they came out with the first television for under $200.  In 1956 the company introduced the world's first pager;  in 1969 came the radio and television equipment that was used to televise Neil Armstrong's first steps on the Moon.  In 1973 it invented the world's first handheld cellular phone.
Today Motorola is one of the largest cell phone manufacturer in the world --  And it all started with the car radio.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO
The two men who installed the first radio in Paul Galvin's car, Elmer Wavering and William Lear, ended up taking very different paths in life.  Wavering stayed with Motorola. In the 1950's he helped change the automobile experience again when he developed the first automotive alternator, replacing inefficient and unreliable generators.  The invention lead to such luxuries as power windows, power seats, and, eventually, air-conditioning.

Lear also continued inventing.  He holds more than 150 patents. Remember eight-track tape players? Lear invented that.  But what he's really famous for are his contributions to the field of aviation.  He invented radio direction finders for planes, aided in the invention of the autopilot, designed the first fully automatic aircraft landing system, and in 1963 introduced his most famous invention of all, the Lear Jet, the world's first mass-produced, affordable business jet. (Not bad for a guy who dropped out of school after the eighth grade.)

Sometimes it is fun to find out how some of the many things that we take for granted actually came into being!  and It all started with a woman's suggestion!!

Heart

 

Live Without Working

Almost one-third of all working-age men in America aren’t doing diddly-squat. They don’t have a job, and they aren’t looking for one either. One-third of all working-age men. That’s almost 30 million people!

How do they live? What are they doing for money? To me, this is one of the great mysteries of our time.

I’m certainly not the first person to make note of this shocking statistic. You’ve heard people bemoaning this "labor participation rate," which is simply the number of working-age men (usually counted as ages 16 to 64) who are working or are seeking work, as a percentage of the overall labor force.

It’s true that the pandemic, which of course produced a number of factors that made working more difficult never mind dangerous, pushed the labor participation rate to a record low. 

But the fact that millions of American males have not been working precedes COVID-19 by decades. In fact, the participation rate for men peaked at 87.4% in October 1949 and has been dropping steadily ever since. It now stands at 67.7%.  READ MORE

Don't Stop

 

Exoplant Clouds

Using data from multiple telescopes, scientists have detected clouds on a gas giant exoplanet some 520 light-years from Earth. So detailed were the observations, they even discerned the altitude of the clouds and the structure of the upper atmosphere, with the greatest precision yet.

It's work that will help us better understand exoplanet atmospheres – and look for worlds that may have conditions hospitable to life, or biosignatures in their spectra. We're also getting closer to making weather reports for distant alien worlds.

The exoplanet in question is WASP-127b, discovered in 2016. It's a hot and therefore puffy beast, orbiting so close to its star that its year is just 4.2 days. The exoplanet clocks in at 1.3 times the size of Jupiter, but only 0.16 times Jupiter's mass.

This means that its atmosphere is somewhat thin and tenuous – perfect for trying to analyze its contents based on the light that streams through it from the exoplanet's host star.

To do this, a team of researchers led by astronomer Romain Allart of the Université de Montréal in Canada combined infrared data from the space-based Hubble Space Telescope, and optical data from the ESPRESSO instrument on the ground-based Very Large Telescope, to peer into different altitudes of WASP-127b's atmosphere.

"First, as found before in this type of planet, we detected the presence of sodium, but at a much lower altitude than we were expecting," Allart said.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Walkabout

 

World's Biggest Carbon Removal Plant

The world’s largest plant designed to suck carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into rock has started running in Iceland, the companies behind the project – Switzerland’s Climeworks and Iceland’s Carbfix – said on Wednesday.

The plant, named Orca after the Icelandic word “orka” meaning “energy”, consists of four units, each made up of two metal boxes that look like shipping containers.

Constructed by Climeworks, when operating at capacity the plant will draw 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the air every year, the companies say.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, that equates to the emissions from about 870 cars. The plant cost between US$10 and 15m to build, Bloomberg reported.

To collect the carbon dioxide, the plant uses fans to draw air into a collector, which has a filter material inside. Once the filter material is filled with CO2, the collector is closed and the temperature is raised to release the CO2 from the material, after which the highly concentrated gas can be collected.

Then, Carbfix’s process mixes the CO2 with water and injects it at a depth of 1,000 metres into the nearby basalt rock where it is mineralised. Carbfix says the CO2-water mixture turns to stone in about two years, and hydride of sulphur (HS2), within four months. READ MORE

Flashing Figures

 

Our Legs

When we are old, our feet must always remain strong.

When we age, we should not be afraid of hair turning grey (or) skin sagging (or) wrinkles.

Among the signs of *longevity,* as summarized by the US Magazine "Prevention", *strong leg muscles* are listed on the top, as *the most important and essential one*

Do not move your legs for two weeks and your leg strength will decrease by 10 years.

A study from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark found that both old and young, during the two weeks of *inactivity,* the legs muscle strength got weakened by a third_ which is 
*equivalent to 20-30 years of ageing.*

As our leg muscles weaken, it will take a long time to recover, even if we do rehabilitation exercises, later.

Therefore, regular exercise like walking, is very important.

The whole body weight/load remain on legs.

The feet are a kind of *pillars,* bearing the weight of the human body.

Interestingly, 50% of a person's bones and 50% of the muscles, are in the two legs.

The largest and strongest joints and bones of the human body are also in the legs.

Strong bones, strong muscles, and flexible joints form the "Iron Triangle" that carries the most important load on the human body.

70% of human activity and burning of energy in one's life, is done by the two feet.

Do you know this? When a person is young, his *thighs have enough strengths, to lift a small car!

The foot is the *center of body locomotion.

Both the legs together have 50% of the nerves of the human body, 50% of the blood vessels and 50% of the blood flowing through them.

It is the large circulatory network that connects the body.

Only when the feet are healthy then the *convention current of blood* *flows, smoothly, so people who have strong leg muscles will definitely
have a *strong heart.*

Aging starts from the feet upwards.

As a person gets older, the accuracy and speed of transmission of instructions between the brain and the legs decreases, unlike when a person is young.

In addition, the so-called *Bone Fertilizer Calcium* will sooner or later be lost with the passage of time, making the elderly more prone to bone fractures.

Fractures in the elderly easily triggers a series of complications, especially fatal diseases such as brain thrombosis.

Do you know that 15% of elderly patients will die within a year of a thigh-bone fracture.

Exercising the legs, is never too late, even after the age of 60 years.

Although our feet will gradually age with time, exercising our feet is a life-long task.

Only by strengthening the legs, one can prevent further aging.

Please walk for at least 30-40 minutes, daily to ensure that your legs receive sufficient exercise and to ensure that your leg muscles remain healthy.

Let's Get Political

 

Waterfalls

 

Monarch Butterfly

Just as the air begins to cool and the days become that much shorter, the iconic monarch butterflies make their arrival along the California coast.

By the thousands, the tiny little creatures bat their vibrant orange and black wings in unison as they find refuge from the cold for their long winter break. And it turns out, they choose many of the same destinations we do for our winter vacations.

This fall/winter may be the most important time yet to go see the butterflies and do all you can to help protect them for future generations.

Where the Butterflies Come From
According to the California Department of Parks and Recreation, there are two distinct populations of monarch butterflies in the U.S. — those living east of the Rockies and those living to the west. While those living to the east typically migrate to Mexico for the winter, those living to the west migrate to the coast of central and southern California.

"Migration is not an uncommon phenomenon," the department explains. "In October, as colder weather approaches, the butterflies instinctively know they must fly south to escape the freezing temperatures. Some have to fly over 1,000 miles. The journey is hazardous and many never make it. By November, most are sheltering in trees stretching from the San Francisco Bay Area south to San Diego."  READ MORE

Elephant at the Beach

 

Earth's Twin

THE EIGHT PLANETS of our Solar System aren’t the only ones we’ve ever had — they’re merely the survivors.

But that doesn’t mean the other planets were destroyed. Earth may have a long-lost sibling somewhere in interstellar space. At least one rocky planet, around the same mass as Mars, may have been booted out of the early Solar System.

These are just some of the findings compiled in a recent review paper in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, taking a look at the mysterious third zone of our Solar System, those points past Neptune and out into interstellar space.

Today, the planets in our Solar System are neatly sorted by size and composition:

• The four rocky inner planets orbit in the space between the Sun and the Asteroid Belt
• The outer Solar System is the realm of giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — which gathered enormous masses of gas and ice around their rocky cores
• Beyond Uranus and Neptune lies the realm of the dwarf planets, like Pluto, Eris, Sedna, and their even smaller neighbors, whether dwarf planet or comet

And that’s a little strange. As if something is missing.

“It seems unlikely that Nature created four giant planet cores, but then nothing else larger than dwarf planets in the outer Solar System,” planetary scientists Brett Gladman of the University of British Columbia and Kathryn Volk of the University of Arizona write in the review.  READ MORE

Focused

 

THe Iron Mountain

It’s not often we get a glimpse into the road not taken.  There was a movement in the early 1900s to preserve the beauty of the Great Smoky Mountains and create the national park.

But that movement came with consequences. Whether those consequences were good or bad depends on your point of view.

Ultimately, people lost their homes, their land and their way of life for the greater good. Communities were erased. Bizarre fairly lands built for the amusement of the ultra-rich were abandoned back to the mountains.

Loggers who were clearing great swaths of the forest were forced to look elsewhere.  I think by and large, we’re all quite pleased with how things turned out. We love the national park, and the areas surrounding the park drive the local economy.

But what if things had turned out differently? What if the parks had remained private land?

Maybe it would have turned out like Foxfire Mountain Adventure Park, located not far from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Sevierville.  It’s a wonderful place with lots of manmade adventure, where you can hike the natural beauty of the Smokies.

Foxfire Family Adventure Park in Sevierville
The park was founded by the Postlewaite family. Prior to 2009, it was chiefly a cattle farm. By 2009, the family was ready to sell the farm for financial reasons.

However, during an Alaskan vacation, Marc tried ziplining. They called the realtor, took Foxfire off the market and built an adventure park, offering some of the best ziplining in the region.  READ MORE