Tuesday, September 7
Cannibal TOADS
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| The cane toad (Rhinella marina) is an invasive species in Australia, where its tadpoles have become voracious cannibals. (Image credit: Jason Edwards via Getty Images) |
The hatchlings of the invasive cane toad in Australia don't stand a chance against their deadliest predator: cannibal tadpoles who guzzle the hatchlings like they're at an all-you-can-eat buffet. But now, the hatchlings are fighting back.
They're developing faster, reducing the time that hungry tadpoles have to gobble them up, a new study finds.
"If cannibals are looking for you, the less time you can spend as an egg or hatchling, the better," said study lead researcher Jayna DeVore, who did the research as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney and is now a biologist for the Tetiaroa Society, a nonprofit conservation organization in French Polynesia.
Developing quickly, however, has its pitfalls. Compared with typically growing hatchlings, those that grew faster fared worse when they reached the tadpole stage of life, the researchers found.
So it isn't "worth it to try to defend yourself in this way unless cannibals are definitely coming for you," DeVore told Live Science. READ MORE
Star Eats Black Hole
It’s the first firm evidence of a rare cosmic phenomenon
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| Jets of energy explode from a star that has cannibalized its dead companion in this artist’s illustration. |
For the first time, astronomers have captured solid evidence of a rare double cosmic cannibalism — a star swallowing a compact object such as a black hole or neutron star.
In turn, that object gobbled the star’s core, causing it to explode and leave behind only a black hole.
The first hints of the gruesome event, described in the Sept. 3 Science, came from the Very Large Array (VLA), a radio telescope consisting of 27 enormous dishes in the New Mexican desert near Socorro.
During the observatory’s scans of the night sky in 2017, a burst of radio energy as bright as the brightest exploding star — or supernova — as seen from Earth appeared in a dwarf star–forming galaxy approximately 500 million light-years away.
“We thought, ‘Whoa, this is interesting,’” says Dillon Dong, an astronomer at Caltech.
He and his colleagues made follow-up observations of the galaxy using the VLA and one of the telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, which sees in the same optical light as our eyes.
The Keck telescope caught a luminous outflow of material spewing in all directions at 3.2 million kilometers per hour from a central location, suggesting that an energetic explosion had occurred there in the past. READ MORE
A Solar Storm
A massive Internet outage can be caused by a massive solar storm today. The Indian scientist says global infrastructure is very vulnerable to, what she called, solar superstorms. Therefore, the world must prepare itself for a destructive solar storm that can knock out the Internet across the world.
A solar storm has a massive potential for destruction, especially when it comes to electronics and infrastructure. So, any big enough solar storm today, would have a catastrophic impact on the global infrastructure that keeps our Internet running. However, if the digital infra is destroyed, it will bring the Internet down along with it. An Internet outage in this modern era will not only cause massive money loss, it would also cost many lives.
The Internet is the backbone of everything that happens in the world today, but nothing carries a greater threat of a mass outage than solar storms. A big enough solar storm today, referred to as a 'solar superstorm', can threaten this very backbone. The world, as such, in unprepared for a solar storm-Internet linked apocalypse. This is in addition to having an impact on the electrical grids, which has already been documented in the case of past solar storms that were truly massive in nature.
Solar storm and the Internet: Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi starts her research paper with this sentence, "Black swan events are hard-to-predict rare events that can significantly alter the course of our lives. The Internet has played a key role in helping us deal with the coronavirus pandemic, a recent black swan event.
Solar storm and the Internet: Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi starts her research paper with this sentence, "Black swan events are hard-to-predict rare events that can significantly alter the course of our lives. The Internet has played a key role in helping us deal with the coronavirus pandemic, a recent black swan event.
However, Internet researchers and operators are mostly blind to another black swan event that poses a direct threat to Internet infrastructure. We investigate the impact of solar superstorms that can potentially cause large-scale Internet outages covering the entire globe." READ MORE
Monday, September 6
Labor Day & Retired
Since being retired, my wife and I do not travel over holidays as there are too many crazy drivers on the road who like to drink and drive or smoke pot and drive, or sniff cocaine and drive... so, we drive when they are either back at work or in jail...
COVID slowed us down in most of our vacationing plans but after 5 years of retired life, we had pretty much reduced our need to go somewhere down to nothing, especially since we had been everywhere we really wanted to go, at least once, sometimes 3 times and had no desire at all to return.
When I was a school boy, Memorial Day Weekend opened the summer and Labor Day Weekend closed the summer but school years have changed because teachers wanted to get paid more by working more but there was no increase in knowledge acquired by our students... but, that is a problem for our politicians... I'm way beyond caring about that.
Labor Day is just another weekend for me and weekends are just like any other day of the week... as I measure the passage of time now by how many doctor visits do I have this week.
Now I know why so many people around the country are not going back to work because of increased unemployment benefits... it is nice to stay home and not have to go to work and be told what to do by some asshole.
Enjoy your day.... because when the benefits stop, you will return to work and I will continue to be retired....
LABOR DAY
Labor Day
is an
annual celebration
of the
social and economic achievements
of
American workers
FROM...
PEW Research Center
More than 157 million Americans are part of the U.S. workforce, and many of them (but not all) will spend the Labor Day holiday weekend away from their desks, assembly lines and checkout counters. As we mark the day, here’s what we know about who American workers are, what they do and the U.S. working environment in general.
Over the past 35 years, the share of American workers who belong to labor unions has fallen by about half.
Point 2
Point 3
Most American workers are employed in the service sector.
Point 4
About 16 million Americans are self-employed
Point 7
The wage gap between young workers with college degrees and their less-educated counterparts is the widest in decades.
About 16 million Americans are self-employed
Point 5
Millennials are now the largest generation in the U.S. labor force.Point 6
American women earn 85 cents on the dollar compared with men, but that gap is narrower among younger workers.
The wage gap between young workers with college degrees and their less-educated counterparts is the widest in decades.
Point 8
A much smaller share of U.S. teens work today compared with earlier decades.
Point 9
More older Americans are working than in previous decades.
Point 10
Raising the federal minimum wage is popular overall, but there’s a sharp partisan divide on the issue.
Building Self Awareness
Simply put, self-awareness is a process of discovery; of exploring your inner knowing. It is an ongoing journey of perceiving your thoughts, feelings, and patterns to arrive at those "light bulb" moments—and here's how to get started.
The more self-awareness you have, the better decisions you will make.
Have you ever started a project or taken a path in life that ultimately led to a dead-end? At some point or another, we've all felt the discomfort of starting over or making a life course correction. Such experiences often leave us confused and asking questions like "Why?" and "What went wrong?"
Self-awareness can help us avoid these pitfalls. When you take in more information from different parts of yourself, you will eliminate false starts and roads that lead nowhere. You'll be more aligned with your whole self or, in other words, more congruent.
Think of the effort it would take to move your belongings by yourself across town versus moving with seven people helping you. Energy and clarity are created when more parts of yourself are aligned. Decisions and actions are faster, easier, and longer-lasting. READ MORE
Transatlantic Speed Records Set
Announcing an air-speed record from Savannah, Georgia, to Doha, Qatar, might sound trivial or even a little absurd. Until you consider the context: This was the world’s largest business jet flying 6,711 nautical miles nonstop at Mach 0.88, or 675 mph, for 13 hours and 16 minutes, on its first international flight. Then it becomes a corporate milestone.
Gulfstream’s new G700 then set another city-pair record from Doha to Paris, flying 2,953 nautical miles at an average speed of Mach 0.90 (690.5 mph) for 6 hours and 15 minutes, before returning to headquarters in Savannah.
Beyond the “records,” the transatlantic flights of Gulfstream’s new ultra-long-range jet shows the business-jet world—and potential buyers—that the aircraft lives up to the publicity it has attracted since first being announced in 2019.
Plus, visiting the capital of Qatar was more than Gulfstream just throwing a dart at the map: Qatar Airways Group is its launch customer and plans to take delivery of the first G700, which has a list price of $78 million, next year.
The flight gave Qatar Executive a chance to show off the Gulfstream flagship—with a fully outfitted interior—at a press conference in Doha. READ MORE
Working From Home
An estimate by Upwork states that 1 in 4 Americans which is over 26% of the American workforce is expected to work remotely through 2021.
Several studies over the past few months show productivity while working remotely from home is better than working in an office setting. On average, those who work from home spend 10 minutes less a day being unproductive, work one more day a week, and are 47% more productive.
In a workweek, those who work at home are more consistent, work more hours, and get more done. Right away, this doesn’t sound right.
How can you be more focused while working at home? Find out how professionals manage to get more done on flexible work arrangements, not in an office setting.
Performance can increase up to 13 percent by working from home
A study by Standford of 16,000 workers over 9 months found that working from home increase productivity by 13%. This increase in performance was due to more calls per minute attributed to a quieter more convenient working environment and working more minutes per shift because of fewer breaks and sick days.
In this same study workers also reported improved work satisfaction, and attrition rates were cut by 50%.
Working Remotely Can Increase Productivity up to 77%
77% of those who work remotely at least a few times per month show increased productivity, with 30% doing more work in less time and 24% doing more work in the same period of time according to a survey by ConnectSolutions.
Before COVID-19
Letting employees work from home has been the fear of plenty of companies because they believe they will be less productive. This isn’t entirely wrong. At home, it’s easy to get distracted, procrastinate, or put in less work than those working in the office.
In 2019, a study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that 24% of people that were employed did some or all of their work at home on days they worked, and 82% of people that were employed did some or all of their work at their workplace. READ MORE
Sunday, September 5
Sunday in the Valley
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| The Great Smoky Mountain Air Balloon Festival |
From inside the safety and security of my screen-in back porch, I am able to survey and observe nature unfolding right in front of me... from squirrels and rabbits frolicing around our backyard, but I can see birds of all sorts flying by from hummingbirds to hawks as there are no restrictions in the sky above me.
My butt is comfortably sitting in a extra-padding deck chair; my Lenovo laptop of over five years is still functioning perfectly with the help of Best Buy's Geek Squad; my YETI cup is full of McCafe coffee from pods with a few spoons of Sugar Free French Vanilla Cappuccino Mix (it holds 3 normal cups of coffee at one time), and my ears of listening to music from 1964 to 1971 via my BOSE earplugs that fit very comfortably in both ears...
A gentle breeze blows through the screens and cools me off ever so effectively as the heat of the day slowly increases to the point that after I eat my brunch out here, I will probably return to the insides of my climate controlled (and completely owned for 15 years) house.
In the meantime, I sit out here with our 3 cats in a mellowing state of euphoria, listening to rock and roll tunes of the best decade EVER as far as music was concerned and the lyrics that were explicit between the lines... and, as I reflect upon the decade of the 1960's, I am appalled by the simple fact that most of the same issues we had then are still with us today... like:
- wage income disparities
- racism and civil rights
- unemployment concerns
- fighting foreign wars
- declining K-12 education
- healthcare costs
- slow economic growth
- fighting against communism
BUT... the only difference is that I now NO LONGER GIVE A SHIT... partly because I am retired and no longer have to KISS ASS and violate my prinicples and/or integrity and partly because all subsequent generations have allowed this to happen.
At 73 years of age, I may have 20-25 years left at best, and the last 5-10 years I will obviously not be in the best of health... as my heart condition worsens, my internal organs degrade, and I continue to receive treatment for 2 kinds of cancer simultaneously... there is just so much one body can withstand before it runs out of whatever it is that sustains its existence and my death will be witness by very few... if any.
Until then, I will continue to enjoy my simple lifestyle as it slowly lingers from one moment to the next gathering its final memories of how life ended up for me.
However, I would do nothing over and have no regrets as my life has followed the only course that it was intended to follow from the getgo...
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