VIdeo

Cades Cove Tennessee

Driving along the edges of East Tennessee’s lakes, there are signs that things are not always as they have been.

Decaying grain silos rise up inexplicably from the water. In other places, ancient roads and trails lead down to lakebeds without turning.

In the days before the Tennessee Valley Authority, Tennessee’s rivers ran wild and free. They were dangerous, frequently jumping the banks and damaging crops and farms and livestock. They could be deadly.

The TVA came along and in the words of Ulysses Everett McGill, “Hydroelectric up the whole dern state” or at least the valley.  READ MORE...

Lava

 

US Nuclear Waste Dump

The federal government has more than $44 billion collected from energy customers since the 1980s specifically to be spent on a permanent nuclear waste disposal in the United States.

Currently, nuclear waste is mostly stored in dry casks on the locations of current and former nuclear power plants around the country.

On Nov. 30, the Office of Nuclear Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy took a preliminary step towards establishing an interim repository for nuclear waste. Some see this as a reason for optimism, others as kicking the can down the road.

This undated image obtained 22 February, 2004 shows the entrance to the Yucca Mountain 

nuclear waste repository located in Nye County, Nevada, about 100 miles northwest of 

Las Vegas.AFP | AFP | Getty Images

The federal government has a fund of $44.3 billion earmarked for spending on a permanent nuclear waste disposal facility in the United States.

It began collecting money from energy customers for the fund in the 1980s, and the money is now earning about $1.4 billion in interest each year.

But plans to build a site in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, were scuttled by state and federal politics, and there’s been a lack of political will to find other solutions. The result is that the U.S. does not have the infrastructure to dispose of radioactive nuclear waste in a deep geologic repository, where it can slowly lose its radioactivity over the course of thousands of years without causing harm.

However, with the effects of climate change becoming more obvious, investors and some political activists are renewing interest in nuclear as a source of energy that does not emit climate-warming carbon dioxide. That is forcing proponents to confront the thorny problem of waste again.

How Nevada became the nexus of the waste story
Congress established the Nuclear Waste Fund in 1982, requiring anyone who was getting some of their electricity from nuclear energy to pay a small amount of money to deal with the waste.

From 1982 through 1987, the Department of Energy explored nine sites for permanent waste disposal, and eventually whittled that list down to three. Yucca Mountain in Nevada was the first choice, with sites in Washington and Texas rounding out the top of the list. Some members of Congress were concerned that analyzing multiple sites would cost too much, and so in 1987, Congress amended its 1982 law to focus all of its attention on Yucca Mountain.  READ MORE...

Christmas Dog

 

Earth's Black Box

(Image credit: Shutterstock)


Every commercial flight you have ever taken has been recorded. 

Every tug on the yoke and every adjustment of the throttle has been dutifully logged by a little recording device tucked away in the tail of the aircraft. 

It's the infamous "black box" that search and rescue crews scan the crash site for any time an aviation incident occurs. 

Its observations are a clear account of how the whole thing went down.

Next year, our planet will get one of these disaster recorders as well.

Called Earth's Black Box, the project is meant to painstakingly record every step on the way to our planet's demise.  READ MORE...

Santa's Deer

 

Two Glasses

Washing Rice

THERE ARE TWO TYPES of people in this world: Those who wash and those who do not wash their rice. Whether you belong to the former or the latter, the choice has a far more menacing consequence than just starchy grains.

Our world is ultra-convenient, and our food choices reflect this — dried pasta goes directly in boiling water, a can of black beans goes straight into chili. Rice enthusiasts, however, tend to insist the grain needs a little extra human touch. Specifically, rinsing the rice under cold water until the water runs clear. Rinsing rice can add significant time to your meal prep. In perhaps the most iconic love letter to rice in film, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Jiro’s apprentice spends an hour preparing rice — starting with a solid rinse — for a plate of nigiri.

Some swear the rinse is what gives cooked rice its fluffy texture (not sure how sticky rice slots in here). But the stakes are far higher than guaranteeing a finished culinary masterpiece: Unwashed rice may be toxic.

WASHING RICE: THE NUTRITIONAL FACTS
Rice accounts for 20 percent of all the energy humans eat worldwide, according to one report. This is far more than wheat and maize, the key ingredients in bread and cornflour. Each grain of rice contains vital nutrients:

• Dietary fiber
• B vitamins like thiamine, riboflavin, and niacin: These keep your cells and organs running smoothly
• Carbohydrates

Because rice feeds billions every day, scientists have investigated how different preparation methods affect the finished product, especially its nutritional qualities. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.S., washing rice before it is cooked may send valuable protein down the drain, as well as other water-soluble nutrients. But washing doesn’t strip the grain of nutritional value entirely.

It may, however, help rid rice of toxic arsenic, a poisonous compound, according to Manoj Menon, an environmental soil scientist at the University of Sheffield.

In turn, scientists discovered that tweaking how you cook rice can help retain these nutrients.  READ MORE...

Big Tongue

 

Universe Expanding Faster Than Expected

This image from the Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy Markarian 1337, which is roughly 120 million light-years away from Earth. In 2006, astronomers saw a certain kind of supernova explode in this galaxy, providing researchers with some of the data nee...IMAGE BY ESA/HUBBLE & NASA, A. RIESS ET AL.

The latest measurements with the Hubble Space Telescope suggest the universe is expanding faster than scientists' models predict—a hint that some unknown ingredient could be at work in the cosmos.

It’s one of the biggest puzzles in modern astronomy: Based on multiple observations of stars and galaxies, the universe seems to be flying apart faster than our best models of the cosmos predict it should. Evidence of this conundrum has been accumulating for years, causing some researchers to call it a looming crisis in cosmology.

Now a group of researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope has compiled a massive new dataset, and they’ve found a-million-to-one odds that the discrepancy is a statistical fluke. In other words, it’s looking even more likely that there’s some fundamental ingredient of the cosmos—or some unexpected effect of the known ingredients—that astronomers have yet to pin down.

“The universe seems to throw a lot of surprises at us, and that’s a good thing, because it helps us learn,” says Adam Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University who led the latest effort to test the anomaly.

The conundrum is known as the Hubble tension, after astronomer Edwin Hubble. In 1929 he observed that the farther a galaxy is from us, the faster it recedes—an observation that helped pave the way toward our current notion of the universe starting with the big bang and expanding ever since.

Researchers have tried to measure the universe’s current rate of expansion in two primary ways: by measuring distances to nearby stars, and by mapping a faint glow dating back to the infant universe. These dual approaches provide a way to test our understanding of the universe across more than 13 billion years of cosmic history. The research has also uncovered some key cosmic ingredients, such as “dark energy,” the mysterious force thought to be driving the universe’s accelerating expansion.

But these two methods disagree on the universe’s current expansion rate by about 8 percent. That difference might not sound like much, but if this discrepancy is real, it means the universe is now expanding faster than even dark energy can explain—implying some breakdown in our accounting of the cosmos.  READ MORE...

Cats

 

Tardigrades and Quantum Entanglement

Quantum life: an electron microscope image of a tardigrade. (Courtesy: Elham Schokraie et al/PloS ONE 7(9): e45682/CC BY 2.5)

Tardigrades are tiny organisms that can survive extreme environments including being chilled to near absolute zero. At these temperatures quantum effects such as entanglement become dominant, so perhaps it is not surprising that a team of physicists has used a chilled tardigrade to create an entangled qubit.

According to a preprint on the arXiv server, the team cooled a tardigrade to below 10 mK and then used it as the dielectric in a capacitor that itself was part of a superconducting transmon qubit. The team says that it then entangled the qubit – tardigrade and all – with another superconducting qubit. The team then warmed up the tardigrade and brought it back to life.

To me, the big question is whether the tardigrade was alive when it was entangled. My curiosity harks back to the now outdated idea that living organisms are “too warm and wet” to partake in quantum processes. Today, scientists believe that some biological processes such as magnetic navigation and perhaps even photosynthesis rely on quantum effects such as entanglement. So perhaps it is possible that the creature was alive and entangled at the same time.

In the preprint, the researchers say that the entangled tardigrade was in a latent state of life called cryptobiosis. They say they have shown that it is “possible to do a quantum and hence a chemical study of a system, without destroying its ability to function biologically”.  READ MORE...

Fire

So What About Christmas

Gift giving at Christmas is a Christian tradition that is widely practiced around the world. ... To Christians, the gifts given at Christmas are symbolic of the tributes made to the baby Jesus by the Three Wise Men after his birth during the story of the Nativity...


So, here is my concern...

What about all those non-believers of any kind of religion, religious beliefs, and/or philosophies...  why do they continuee to give gifts to each other on Christmas Day as if they were CHRISTIANS?

Several of the people I know including members of my immediate family (brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, etc.) have told me that they are ATHEISTS but when it comes to Christmas, they buy and distribute gifts as if they were CHRISTIANS and not ATHEISTS at all.

I don't spend much time thinking about this hypocrisy during the rest of the year, only around the Christmas Season...  but if these people are going to subconsciously or consciously contradict their sworn beliefs during the Christmas Season, how easy will it be for them to contradict their beliefs during the rest of the year?

Obviously, this is a rhetorical question...

The Baseball Bat

CNN Host is Puzzled

 

In a Post piece headlined, "The puzzle of Joe Biden’s unpopularity," Zakaria claimed Biden's low approval rating wasn't actually his fault, but that he was instead "paying the price" for being president during "complicated times."

"I find President Biden’s unpopularity puzzling. He is rounding out his first year in the White House with the lowest end of first-year approval ratings of any elected president in modern times with the exception of Donald Trump. Why?" Zakaria wrote.

He described Biden as "a genial, likable person," and noted that some of his policies were popular amongst Americans with even some Republican support, but also claimed that the country was doing "reasonably well" economically, despite record inflation, nationwide supply chain challenges and a labor shortage.  IF YOU WANT TO READ MORE THEN CLICK ON...READ MORE...

https://www.foxnews.com/media/cnn-host-admits-puzzled-biden-unpopularity

Classic Sunday Morning Newspaper Cartoons

 

Jailed for Praising Wrong Cricket Team

An Indian student has now spent nearly two months in jail for celebrating Pakistan’s victory in a cricket match. The BBC’s Rajini Vaidyanathan went to the northern Indian city of Agra to meet his family, and find out why lawyers are refusing to represent him. Produced by Shalu Yadav Filmed by Syed Shahryar & Ajay Bedi Edited by Aakriti Thapar.

Large Moon