Housing Boom Over

A crash in the housing market seemed inevitable during the early weeks of the COVID-19 recession. However, that bust didn't come to fruition, in fact, the opposite happened: A combination of government support, recession-induced low interest rates, and eager homebuyers set off a housing boom. 

Since the onset of the crisis, median home prices are up a staggering 24%.

But much of that government aid and support is about to go away. The foreclosure moratorium, which prevents foreclosures of federally-backed mortgages, will come to an end on July 31. 

Then on Sept. 30, the mortgage forbearance program, which allows some borrowers to pause their payments, will lapse. Since the beginning of the pandemic, over 7 million homeowners have been enrolled in the forbearance program. 

However, as the economy has improved that number has fallen. As of July 11, there are still 1.75 million borrowers, or 3.5% of U.S. mortgages, enrolled in the forbearance program.

The foreclosure crisis following the 2008 housing crash was so bad, in part, because tens of millions of financially strained homeowners were underwater (meaning a borrower's remaining mortgage balance is greater than the home's value) and had no choice but foreclosure. 

That's unlikely to be the case for financially strapped homeowners this year. These homeowners are likely sitting on sizable home equity (home value minus the outstanding mortgage), and if they can't repay the mortgage they can simply sell into the currently red-hot housing market.  READ MORE

Dogs and Cats

 

New Species Found

Scientists have confirmed that a species of moss discovered in Antarctica by Indian scientists in 2017 is indeed a new species. Identification is always a time-consuming process. 

It has taken five years to confirm that this species had not been discovered before and that it was unique. Indian scientists spent half a decade sequencing the plant's DNA and comparing it to other known plants.

Indian polar-biologist Professor Felix Bast, working at the Bharati research station, discovered this dark green moss species at Larsemann Hills, overlooking the Southern Ocean. 

Biologists based at the Central University of Punjab have named the species Byrum bharatiensis. The research station and the moss take their name from the Hindu goddess of learning.

The research station Bharati is a permanently staffed station that has been in operation since 2012. This is India's third Antarctic research facility, and one of two still operational along with the Maitri station which was commissioned in 1989. India has had a scientific presence on the continent since 1983-1984. 

But this is the first time that a new plant has been discovered by Indian scientists working in the region.  READ MORE

Being Happy

Riding High

 

Art

 

Naval Ship Destroyed

The United States Navy charged a sailor Thursday for starting a fire last year that destroyed the USS Bonhomme Richard while docked at Naval Base San Diego.

The sailor was a crewmember at the time and was charged with aggravated arson and the willful hazarding of a vessel, Cmdr. Sean Robertson, a U.S. 3rd Fleet spokesperson, said according to ABC News.

Robertson did not give any details as to what evidence was found or what the motive was. The name of the sailor has also not been disclosed.

The amphibious assault ship was nearing the end of its two-year $250 million upgrade when the fire broke out on July 12, 2020. More than 60 sailors and civilians were treated for relatively minor injuries resulting from the fire.

The ship, which can act as a mini aircraft carrier, burned for more than four days. The fire left the ship with extensive structural damage and was later scrapped with estimates that it will cost up to $4 Billion to replace it.  READ MORE

OLYMPICS: Transwomen

Woke IOC Declares ‘Transwomen are Women’ as Transgender Kiwi Readies for Weightlifting Debut

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) reaffirmed its full support of transgender athletes Friday when medical director Richard Budgett declared “transwomen are women” and should be included in women’s sport “when we possibly can.”

“After 100 years of promoting women’s sport, it’s up to each of the international federations to ensure that they try and protect women’s sport,” he told a briefing in Tokyo. “Science will help, experience will help, and time will help.”  READ MORE

Going Down

 

A Littel Different

 

Aircraft Carrier Turned Yacht

There are plenty of outrageously luxurious superyachts out there, and it’s no surprise that expectations keep going higher, with even more outlandish features making us marvel at today’s possibilities. One of the most interesting ideas comes from a Dutch visual production company and a German entrepreneur, who want to transform an old aircraft carrier into a super-premium mega-yacht.

We’re used to seeing aircraft carriers in their ready-for-combat mode, with fierce fighter jets waiting on the deck. What if, instead of that, we would see a completely different picture? Not just a peaceful-looking one, inviting passengers for total relaxation and pure indulgence, but even more daring than that.

Dutch Mitsi Studio created a jaw-dropping concept – the Noah Twins Carrier would not be just the world’s first aircraft carrier turned into a yacht, but it would be built with interchangeable decks, right out of a movie-like fantasy. 

As the Studio puts it, the design would be like a Swiss Army knife, with the possibility of swapping between a landing strip and a golf course. Yes, a landing strip would still be there, but for a helicopter and air-taxis instead of fighter jets. And the nine-hole golf course could also change into a ski slope with artificial snow, because why not?  READ MORE

A Perfect World

 

Animals

 

Missing Microbes

Even in the harshest environments, microbes always seem to get by. They thrive everywhere from boiling-hot seafloor hydrothermal vents to high on Mt. Everest. Clumps of microbial cells have even been found clinging to the hull of the International Space Station (SN: 08/26/20).

There was no reason for microbial ecologist Noah Fierer to expect that the 204 soil samples he and colleagues had collected near Antarctica’s Shackleton Glacier would be any different. 

A spoonful of typical soil could easily contain billions of microbes, and Antarctic soils from other regions host at least a few thousand per gram. 

So he assumed that all of his samples would host at least some life, even though the air around Shackleton Glacier is so cold and so arid that Fierer often left his damp laundry outside to freeze-dry.

Surprisingly, some of the coldest, driest soils didn’t seem to be inhabited by microbes at all, he and colleagues report in the June Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences. 

To Fierer’s knowledge, this is the first time that scientists have found soils that don’t seem to support any kind of microbial life.  READ MORE

A Few Shorts

 

Brains and Consciousness

PLANET EARTH

MIND
Brains Might Sync As People Interact — and That Could Upend Consciousness Research
When we cooperate on certain tasks, our brainwaves might synchronize. This finding could upend the current understanding of consciousness.
By Conor FeehlyJul 26, 2021 7:00 PM


(Credit: Katya Kovarzh/Shutterstock


People synchronize in various ways when we interact with one another. We subconsciously match our footsteps when we walk. During conversations, we mirror each other's postures and gestures.

To that end, studies have shown that people synchronize heart rates and breathing when watching emotional films together. The same happens when romantic partners share a bed. Some scientists think we do this to build trust and perceive people as similar to ourselves, which encourages us to behave compassionately.

Surprisingly, people synchronize their neural rhythms, too. Researchers like Tom Froese, a cognitive scientist from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, think that these findings could upend our current models of consciousness.  READ MORE

Consider These Questions and/or Statements

 

Facemasks

 

Hear What We Want to Hear

Humans depend on their senses to perceive the world, themselves and each other. Despite senses being the only window to the outside world, people do rarely question how faithfully they represent the external physical reality. During the last 20 years, neuroscience research has revealed that the cerebral cortex constantly generates predictions on what will happen next, and that neurons in charge of sensory processing only encode the difference between our predictions and the actual reality.

A team of neuroscientists of TU Dresden headed by Prof Katharina von Kriegstein presents new findings that show that not only the cerebral cortex, but the entire auditory pathway, represents sounds according to prior expectations.

For their study, the team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain responses of 19 participants while they were listening to sequences of sounds. The participants were instructed to find which of the sounds in the sequence deviated from the others. Then, the participants’ expectations were manipulated so that they would expect the deviant sound in certain positions of the sequences. The neuroscientists examined the responses elicited by the deviant sounds in the two principal nuclei of the subcortical pathway responsible for auditory processing: the inferior colliculus and the medial geniculate body. Although participants recognised the deviant faster when it was placed on positions where they expected it, the subcortical nuclei encoded the sounds only when they were placed in unexpected positions.

These results can be best interpreted in the context of predictive coding, a general theory of sensory processing that describes perception as a process of hypothesis testing. Predictive coding assumes that the brain is constantly generating predictions about how the physical world will look, sound, feel, and smell like in the next instant, and that neurons in charge of processing our senses save resources by representing only the differences between these predictions and the actual physical world.

Dr Alejandro Tabas, first author of the publication, states on the findings: "Our subjective beliefs on the physical world have a decisive role on how we perceive reality. Decades of research in neuroscience had already shown that the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that is most developed in humans and apes, scans the sensory world by testing these beliefs against the actual sensory information. We have now shown that this process also dominates the most primitive and evolutionary conserved parts of the brain. All that we perceive might be deeply contaminated by our subjective beliefs on the physical world."

These new results open up new ways for neuroscientists studying sensory processing in humans towards the subcortical pathways. Perhaps due to the axiomatic belief that subjectivity is inherently human, and the fact that the cerebral cortex is the major point of divergence between the human and other mammal's brains, little attention has been paid before to the role that subjective beliefs could have on subcortical sensory representations.

Given the importance that predictions have on daily life, impairments on how expectations are transmitted to the subcortical pathway could have profound repercussion in cognition. Developmental dyslexia, the most wide-spread learning disorder, has already been linked to altered responses in subcortical auditory pathway and to difficulties on exploiting stimulus regularities in auditory perception. The new results could provide with a unified explanation of why individuals with dyslexia have difficulties in the perception of speech, and provide clinical neuroscientists with a new set of hypotheses on the origin of other neural disorders related to sensory processing.

Good Night World