from Vanity Fair

Secrets of the Chateau Marmont

As the ultimate movie-colony clubhouse turns 90, Mark Rozzo prowls among the bungalows and crannies off Sunset Boulevard where mega-stars and ne’er-do-wells, from Garbo and Harlow to Lindsay and Britney, have whiled away nearly a century of enchanted evenings.

by MARK ROZZO

Photograph by Nikolas Koenig/OTTO.

In the late 1920s, as Hollywood was booming and Beverly Hills was sprouting a bumper crop of movie-colony mansions, the stretch between them was little more than sagebrush and scrub. It was known as No-Man’s Land. Winding through it was a forlorn trail with a presumptuous name: Sunset Boulevard. Where this unpaved road met Marmont Lane, catty-corner to an oasis-like complex of villas in mid-construction called the Garden of Allah, the attorney and developer Fred Horowitz became mesmerized by a barren hillside. One day in November of 1926, the story goes, he rolled up to the unpromising site in a town car, pulled out a snapshot he’d taken in the Loire Valley of the Château d’Amboise (where Catherine de Medici and Henry II of France shacked up in the 16th century), and, in a title-card moment from a silent movie, shouted: “YES.”

Horowitz had found his spot. Here, on the north side of Sunset, he would build a brawny, earthquake-proof, seven-story, Manhattan-worthy apartment house in a fairy-tale French Gothic style: thick, buff-colored walls, spiky turrets, steep roofs, arched windows, raftered ceilings, and a vaulted colonnade, with the two flanks of the building folding in upon a grassy courtyard, all adding up to a veritable fortress of luxury, taste, and fantasy. His California castle—“distinctively furnished and decorated,” as the early ad copy put it—would have state-of-the-art kitchens and bathrooms. Promising Park Avenue-style discretion and privacy, it would be a sanctuary for New Yorkers moving West and for movie machersdesiring East Coast polish. Horowitz toyed with names: Chateau Sunset? Chateau Hollywood? He went with Chateau Marmont. It sounded French. Along with the Garden of Allah, the Chateau Marmont turned that faceless frontier into what would become the Sunset Strip.

[ click to continue reading at VF ]

from artnet

Holy Guacamole! A Group of ‘Taco-Loving Creatives’ Is Building a Pop-Up Museum Devoted to the Mexican Snack at SXSW

The pop-up promises to “deliver true Instagrammable goals.”

Sarah Cascone

Avocados. Courtesy of Tacotopia.

The pop-up museum trend shows no sign of dying out as the latest Instagram trap is set to touch down in Austin, Texas, just in time for the SXSW film, music, and media festival, which runs from March 8 to 16. It’s called Tacotopia, and it’s already threatening to go on a six-city tour to New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, and Scottsdale, Arizona.

“The exhibit is part of a larger movement encompassing interactive and experiential art,” the press release helpfully points out for anyone who’s been hiding under a rock since Refinery29’s 29 Rooms and the Museum of Ice Cream ushered in this strange new age of ball pits and thematic odes to avocados, dreams, feminism, pizza, and rosé.

But this particular iteration doesn’t even pretend it’s there for anything more than to “deliver true Instagrammable goals” via larger-than-life immersive installations, according to its website. It will include such attractions as a foam pico de gallo ball pit, a “Señorita Needs a Margarita” lime swing, and a staircase leading to “Churro Heaven.”

It all feels vaguely sacrilegious: the jumping off point for the whole affair is a character dubbed the Goddess of Tacos, a cross between the Zapotec Goddess of Life and Ushnishavijaya, the Buddha Goddess of a Long Life. Tacotopia plans to work with local artists in all six cities to create unique installations for each stop on the tour.

[ click to continue reading at artnet ]

from New York Magazine

The Nature of Sex

By Andrew Sullivan

Photo: Yukipon

It might be a sign of the end-times, or simply a function of our currently scrambled politics, but earlier this week, four feminist activists — three from a self-described radical feminist organization Women’s Liberation Front — appeared on a panel at the Heritage Foundation. Together they argued that sex was fundamentally biological, and not socially constructed, and that there is a difference between women and trans women that needs to be respected. For this, they were given a rousing round of applause by the Trump supporters, religious-right members, natural law theorists, and conservative intellectuals who comprised much of the crowd. If you think I’ve just discovered an extremely potent strain of weed and am hallucinating, check out the video of the event.

I’ve no doubt that many will see these women as anti-trans bigots, or appeasers of homophobes and transphobes, or simply deranged publicity seekers. (The moderator, Ryan Anderson, said they were speaking at Heritage because no similar liberal or leftist institution would give them space or time to make their case.) And it’s true that trans-exclusionary radical feminists or TERFs, as they are known, are one minority that is actively not tolerated by the LGBTQ establishment, and often demonized by the gay community. It’s also true that they can be inflammatory, offensive, and liobsessive. But what interests me is their underlying argument, which deserves to be thought through, regardless of our political allegiances, sexual identities, or tribal attachments. Because it’s an argument that seems to me to contain a seed of truth. Hence, I suspect, the intensity of the urge to suppress it.

[ click to continue reading at New York ]

from The Plain Dealer

Daniel Kaluuya, Jodie Turner-Smith continue movie making on chilly Cleveland set of “Queen and Slim”

By James Ewinger, The Plain Dealer

(AP Photo/Joel Ryan)

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Stars and film crew continue to mine movie gold on St. Clair Avenue, despite bitter cold.

The movie being made here now is called “Queen and Slim,” staring Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith. Filming, much of it at night, began this week and is expected to wrap here Friday.

After filming early Wednesday morning, Turner-Smith said in a Tweet it was “slightly chilly” in Cleveland with a screen shot of her weather app displaying a reading of minus-17 degrees, which likely was the wind-chill. Temperatures at that time were around zero.

By midday Wednesday, there was no evidence of a film on St. Clair Avenue, except for a lone City of Cleveland van. Filming was to resume at 5 p.m. as temperatures dipped below minus-5 with a wind chill in the minus-30s. St. Claire from East 61st to East 71st was to be closed for the second straight night.

Melina Matsoukas is directing the movie, with a script by Lena Waithe and author James Frey. The Hollywood Reporter and other film-focused outlets have called in a “Bonnie and Clyde” story.

“To me, this is protest art,” Waithe told Variety in July. “It’s about being black and trying to fall in love in a world that’s burning down around you.”

Variety called that “Queen & Slim” an “exploration of America’s social and political climate through the lens of a genre-defying love story. The film centers on a black man and black woman who go on a first date that goes awry after the two are pulled over by a police officer at a traffic stop. They kill the police officer in self-defense and rather than turn themselves in, they go on the run.”

[ click to read full article at Cleveland.com ]

from Science Daily

Engineers translate brain signals directly into speech

Advance marks critical step toward brain-computer interfaces that hold immense promise for those with limited or no ability to speak

Credit: © adragan / Fotolia

In a scientific first, Columbia neuroengineers have created a system that translates thought into intelligible, recognizable speech. By monitoring someone’s brain activity, the technology can reconstruct the words a person hears with unprecedented clarity. This breakthrough, which harnesses the power of speech synthesizers and artificial intelligence, could lead to new ways for computers to communicate directly with the brain. It also lays the groundwork for helping people who cannot speak, such as those living with as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or recovering from stroke, regain their ability to communicate with the outside world.

These findings were published today in Scientific Reports.

“Our voices help connect us to our friends, family and the world around us, which is why losing the power of one’s voice due to injury or disease is so devastating,” said Nima Mesgarani, PhD, the paper’s senior author and a principal investigator at Columbia University’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. “With today’s study, we have a potential way to restore that power. We’ve shown that, with the right technology, these people’s thoughts could be decoded and understood by any listener.”

Decades of research has shown that when people speak — or even imagine speaking — telltale patterns of activity appear in their brain. Distinct (but recognizable) pattern of signals also emerge when we listen to someone speak, or imagine listening. Experts, trying to record and decode these patterns, see a future in which thoughts need not remain hidden inside the brain — but instead could be translated into verbal speech at will.

[ click to continue reading at Science Daily ]

from Vanity Fair

The Cult of Richard E. Grant’s Withnail and I Is Finally Having Its Moment

After decades of obsessively quoting Bruce Robinson’s 1987 comedy, Gen Xers are using Grant’s Oscar nomination as an excuse to teach a new generation to demand the finest wines available to humanity.

by DUFF MCDONALD

Bruce Robinson’s script for his 1987 cult classic, Withnail and I,wanders effortlessly between the high (a Hamlet soliloquy) and the low (“You can stuff it up your arse for nothing and fuck off while you’re doing it!”). But it’s the incandescent performance of Richard E. Grantthat sends the dark British comedy—about a couple of out-of-work actors—into the stratosphere of greatness.

So it’s less weird than it might at first seem that the movie which screened at New York’s Film Forum on Thursday night wasn’t the one that has earned Grant a best-supporting-actor Oscar nomination—Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, starring Melissa McCarthy—but the one that forged his legend more than three decades ago.

Over coffee in Brooklyn, I asked Grant if he could tell when he read the script for Withnail and I that it was a role for the ages? “I knew it bone-deep,” he said. “It made me laugh out loud, it was so brilliantly written. Even the stage directions were hilarious. I had also been unemployed for nine months, too, so it was the best preparation I could have had for playing an embittered unemployed actor.”

[ click to continue reading at VF ]

from TIME Magazine

The Polar Vortex Is Causing Striking Solar Phenomena Called ‘Sundogs.’ Here’s What to Know

By GINA MARTINEZ

The polar vortex that has brought deadly cold and record-breaking low temperatures to the Midwest has also resulted in beautiful solar phenomena – sundogs.

According to the National Weather Service, sundogs form when sunlight refracts off ice crystals in the atmosphere and result in colored spots of light approximately 22 degrees either left, right, or both, from the sun.

The origin of the name “sundog” is not entirely clear, but according to Chicago meteorologist Tom Skilling, the name originates from the Greek myth that Zeus walked his dogs across the sky and that the bright “false suns” in the sky on either side of the sun were Zeus’ dogs.

[ click to continue reading at TIME ]

from The Guardian

White gold: the unstoppable rise of alternative milks

How wellness upstarts spoiled milk’s healthy reputation – and built a billion-dollar industry from juicing oats and nuts.

By Oliver Franklin-Wallis

Cows being machine-milked in France in 2017. Photograph: Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images

In the spring of 2018, New York was gripped by a sudden, very particular and, for some, calamitous food shortage. Gaps appeared on grocery shelves. Coffee shops put out signs, turning customers away. Twitter and Instagram brimmed with outrage. The truly desperate searched from Williamsburg to Harlem, but it seemed undeniable: New York was out of oat milk.

It wasn’t just New York, in fact. The entire US was suffering from a shortage of Oatly, a Swedish plant milk whose rapid rise from obscure digestive health brand to the dairy alternative of choice had caught even Oatly by surprise. Since its US launch in 2016, Oatly had gone from supplying a handful of upscale New York coffee shops to more than 3,000 cafes and grocery stores nationwide. The company had ramped up production by 1,250%, but when I spoke to CEO Toni Petersson in late summer, they were still struggling to meet demand. “How do we supply when the growth is this crazy?” Petersson said.

Fortunately, when it comes to milk, in 2019 there is no shortage of alternative alternatives. Visit your local supermarket and you will find a refrigerated aisle overflowing with choice: almond milk, hazelnut milk, peanut, tiger nut, walnut, cashew – and that’s just the nuts. Coconut, hemp, spelt, quinoa, pea – you name it, somewhere a health-food startup is milking it. London tube stations are filled with ads for new plant milks – or rather, “mylks” (EU law prevents dairy alternatives from using the word milk if it isn’t produced by a lactating mammal). Cookbooks dedicate entire chapters to blending and straining your own. Sainsbury’s now stocks around 70 different options. There are the wellness punks (Rebel Kitchen, Rude Health), the dairy puns (Malk, Milkadamia, Mooala) and the nourishers (LoveRaw, Good Karma, Plenish). “People are just looking at every nut that exists and seeing if they can squash it into a milk,” said Glynis Murray, one of the owners of Good, which squashes hemp seeds into oil and milk.

[ click to continue reading at The Guardian ]

from CBS News

Private company launches “largest fleet of satellites in human history” to photograph Earth

A private company has set off a revolution in space by launching hundreds of small satellites, enough to photograph the entire landmass of the Earth every day

by  David Martin

For decades the U.S. Has relied on spy satellites to look deep inside the territory of its adversaries. These giant billion-dollar satellites take high resolution photographs which can see objects as small as a fist inside Russia, North Korea or wherever the target is. Tonight we will take you inside the intelligence agency where those photos are analyzed, and we will also take you inside a revolution that is rocking the top secret world of spy satellites. A private company named Planet Labs has put about 300 small satellites into space, enough to take a picture of the entire land mass of the Earth every day. Those small satellites have created a big data problem for the government which can’t possibly hire enough analysts to look at all those pictures. Welcome to the revolution.

This is how the revolution began. Twenty-eight small satellites sent out into orbit by astronauts from the biggest of all satellites, the International Space Station.

[ click to continue reading at CBS News ]

from National Geographic

A meteor hit the moon during the lunar eclipse. Here’s what we know.

In what may be a first-of-its-kind event, a flash of light seen during totality has astronomers on the hunt for a new crater on the moon.

BY MAYA WEI-HAAS

from Dark Horizons

The Notable Films Of 2019: O-S

By Garth Franklin

“Queen & Slim”

Following his superb turns in “Get Out,” “Black Panther” and “Widows,” Daniel Kaluuya is set to lead this Lena Waithe-penned indie romance drama which sees “Insecure” and “Master of None” director Melina Matsoukas make her feature debut. Famed author James Frey came up with the initial idea for the project about a black man (Kaluuya) and a black woman (Jodie Turner-Smith) who go on a first date that goes awry after the two are pulled over by a cop. They kill the police officer in self-defense and rather than turn themselves in, they go on the run in a film that aims to “define black love as a revolutionary act.”

[ click to see full list of Notables at Dark Horizons ]

from The San Francisco Chronicle

There’s a new texting scam going around, and it starts with a picture of breasts

By Filipa Ioannou

Within a few weeks of each other, two friends of mine in the Bay Area independently received a text with the same unsolicited photo of a woman’s bra-clad, but otherwise exposed, cleavage sent from an area code in central Pennsylvania last month.

Both of them, curious as to the provenance of the boobs, replied and asked who was texting them. It was clear some scam was afoot. But what was it? They wanted to know the endgame.

Local Redditors, too, have reported similar missives.

“Anyone else in SF getting texts from a random number who sends you a nude and then tries to flirt with you over text?” wrote Redditor NaturalPerspective earlier this month. “I have had three people tell me it has also happened to them in the past 3 weeks. Wondering what is going on.”

If you yourself have gotten a similar text out of nowhere and wondered where the trail of breadcrumbs lead — Phishing? Blackmail? Viral marketing? — we followed them, so you don’t have to.

[ click to continue reading at the Chronicle ]

from artnet

Scientists Have Found the Rare Secret Ingredient Rembrandt Used to Make His Paintings So Vibrant

The discovery could be critical in helping to preserve the Dutch artist’s masterful paintings for future generations.

by Henri Neuendorf

Dutch and French scientists and have discovered the secret behind Rembrandt’s brilliant and life-life impasto technique.

Citing a research paper published in the scientific journal AngewandteChemie, the Daily Mail reports that the team has identified a substance called plumbonacrite, a rare compound thus far only identified in works of art from the 20th century and in one painting by Vincent van Gogh. The information is vital for understanding Rembrandt’s work—and could be crucial for conserving and restoring his masterpieces for future generations to enjoy.

“We didn’t expect to find this phase at all, as it is so unusual in Old Masters’ paintings,” the paper’s chief author, Victor Gonzalez of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Delft University of Technology, told the Daily Mail. “What’s more, our research shows its presence is not accidental or due to contamination, but the result of an intended synthesis.”

[ click to continue reading at artnet ]

from The New Yorker

Have Aliens Found Us? A Harvard Astronomer on the Mysterious Interstellar Object ‘Oumuamua

By Isaac Chotiner

On October 19, 2017, astronomers at the University of Hawaii spotted a strange object travelling through our solar system, which they later described as “a red and extremely elongated asteroid.” It was the first interstellar object to be detected within our solar system; the scientists named it ‘Oumuamua, the Hawaiian word for a scout or messenger. The following October, Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, co-wrote a paper (with a Harvard postdoctoral fellow, Shmuel Bialy) that examined ‘Oumuamua’s “peculiar acceleration” and suggested that the object “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth’s vicinity by an alien civilization.” Loeb has long been interested in the search for extraterrestrial life, and he recently made further headlines by suggesting that we might communicate with the civilization that sent the probe. “If these beings are peaceful, we could learn a lot from them,” he told Der Spiegel.

I recently spoke by phone with Loeb, who was frustrated that scientists saw ‘Oumuamua too late in its journey to photograph the object. “My motivation for writing the paper is to alert the community to pay a lot more attention to the next visitor,” he told me. During our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed why Loeb thinks we need to consider the possibility that ‘Oumuamua was sent by aliens, the dangers of unscientific speculation, and what belief in an advanced extraterrestrial civilization has in common with faith in God.

Your explanation of why ‘Oumuamua might be an interstellar probe may be hard for laypeople to understand. Why might this be the case, beyond the fact that lots of things are possible?

There is a Scientific American article I wrote where I summarized six strange facts about ‘Oumuamua. The first one is that we didn’t expect this object to exist in the first place. We see the solar system and we can calculate at what rate it ejected rocks during its history. And if we assume all planetary systems around other stars are doing the same thing, we can figure out what the population of interstellar objects should be. That calculation results in a lot of possibilities, but the range is much less than needed to explain the discovery of ‘Oumuamua.

There is another peculiar fact about this object. When you look at all the stars in the vicinity of the sun, they move relative to the sun, the sun moves relative to them, but only one in five hundred stars in that frame is moving as slow as ‘Oumuamua. You would expect that most rocks would move roughly at the speed of the star they came from. If this object came from another star, that star would have to be very special.

[ click to continue reading at The New Yorker ]

from the Portland Press Herald

Spinning in the Presumpscot, this alien-looking ice disk has Westbrook all abuzz

The circular sheet appears to be rotating and growing, drawing comparisons to a crop circle, a Lazy Susan and a duck-go-round.

BY DENNIS HOEY

A disk of ice roughly 100 yards across that formed on the Presumpscot River and was slowly rotating and gaining size Monday had Westbrook buzzing almost as much as when city police spotted a giant snake eating a beaver in roughly the same location in June 2016.

Nothing ever came of those mysterious snake sightings – the reptile was dubbed “Wessie” by locals – but the sight of an alien-looking circle of ice stuck in the river had some people wondering about that section of the river’s knack for producing weird events.

“It kind of looks like a crop circle,” said Doug Bertlesman, a web developer at Ethos Marketing. His company is at 17 Ash St. The four-story building with a roof deck overlooks the river where the ice disk formed.

[ click to continue reading at the Press Herald ]

from TIME Magazine

An Egg Has Beaten Kylie Jenner’s Record for the Most-Liked Photo on Instagram

By ASHLEY HOFFMAN

An egg won the internet Sunday.

In the latest example that internet dominance is as fragile as an eggshell, an egg Instagram overtook Kylie Jenner by posting the most liked Instagram photo ever.

The egg racked up more than 18.2 million likes as of Sunday evening — a big win for a little egg.

The Instagram account set out on its journey Sunday morning with its first post declaring its ambitions.

“Let’s set a world record together and get the most liked post on Instagram. Beating the current world record held by Kylie Jenner (18 million)! We got this,” the bio read.

[ click to continue reading at TIME ]

from NBC News

Steam-powered spaceship could cruise the cosmos indefinitely without running out of gas

Scientists say the microwave-sized craft would suck its watery fuel right out of the asteroids, planets and moons it’s exploring.

By Brandon Specktor

Come one, come all and behold the future of space travel: steam power!

No, seriously; half a century after the world’s first manned space mission, it seems that interplanetary travel has finally entered the steam age. Scientists at the University of Central Florida have teamed up with Honeybee Robotics, a private space and mining tech company based in California, to develop a small, steam-powered spacecraft capable of sucking its fuel right out of the asteroids, planets and moons it’s exploring.

By continuously turning extraterrestrial water into steam, this microwave-sized lander could, theoretically, power itself on an indefinite number of planet-hopping missions across the galaxy — so long as it always lands somewhere with H20 for the taking.

“We could potentially use this technology to hop on the moon, Ceres, Europa, Titan, Pluto, the poles of Mercury, asteroids — anywhere there is water and sufficiently low gravity,” Phil Metzger, a UCF space scientist and one of the chief minds behind the steampunk starship, said in a statement. Metzger added that such a self-sufficient spacecraft could explore the cosmos “forever.”

[ click to continue reading at NBC ]

from Fox45 Columbus

Dangerous chase during rush hour result of driver having medical emergency

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WSYX/WTTE) – A potentially deadly situation was stopped when a police officer from Hilliard, Ohio managed to safely stop a driver swerving all over the interstate during rush hour, after a short chase. Officers now say the driver was having a medical emergency which led to the dangerous pursuit.

Police received reports about a vehicle driving erratically on I-270 on the west side shortly before 6 p.m. Thursday. After stopping on the side of the highway to look for the driver, an officer had to suddenly move his patrol vehicle out of the way to avoid being struck after he saw the SUV veer off the road right behind him.

The officer immediately began following the car with lights and sirens, trying to pull over the driver. Dashcam video shows the SUV going from one side of the highway to the other, veering into the grass and clipping roadway signs. At one point, the driver stops in the grass next to the off-ramp to Tuttle Crossing, only to suddenly drive off again, going all the way across the median and back onto the highway as traffic passes.

“(Send) me some help from somewhere, this guy’s going to kill somebody. He’s all over all five lanes,” the officer radioed dispatch after the driver speeds off again, veering across 270. Seconds later, as the SUV goes into the grass and back onto the highway, the officer performed a PIT maneuver, hitting the SUV and bringing the driver to a stop in the middle of the highway.

[ click to continue reading at Fox45 ]

from Chicago Tribune

How solitary confinement drove a young inmate to the brink of insanity

by Jeff Coen and Stacy St. Clair

With his mental state deteriorating as he sat in the crushing isolation of solitary confinement, a desperate inmate named Anthony Gay saw a temporary way out.

Sometimes it came in the form of a contraband razor blade. Occasionally it was a staple from a legal document or a small shard of something he had broken.

He would mutilate himself in his Illinois prison cell, slicing open his neck, forearms, legs and genitals hundreds of times over two decades in solitary confinement. Once, he packed a fan motor inside a gaping leg wound; another time he cut open his scrotum and inserted a zipper.

Each time he harmed himself, he knew that, at least for a little while, the extreme step would bring contact with other human beings. Therapists would rush to calm him. Nurses would offer kind words as they took his pulse and stitched him up.

“It’s kind of like being locked in the basement, and then emerging from the basement and being put on the center stage,” he said. “It made me feel alive.”

Gay entered the Illinois Department of Corrections in 1994 as a young man, convicted of robbery after brawling with another teen who told police that Gay took his hat and stole a single dollar bill. He expected to serve as little as three and a half years.

Instead, a fight with a fellow inmate led to Gay’s first stint in segregation, pushing him into a downward spiral that resulted in 22 years in solitary confinement. Shortly after the segregation started, the cutting and suicide attempts began.

[ click to continue reading at the Tribune ]

from news.com.au

Earth’s magnetic pole is on the move, fast. And we don’t know why

Earth’s magnetic field is what allows us to exist. It deflects harmful radiation. It keeps our water and atmosphere in place. But now it’s acting up — and nobody knows why.

by Jamie Seidel

Graphic via Science Journal NatureSource:Supplied

Planet Earth is alive. Deep beneath its skin, its life blood — rivers of molten iron — pulse around its core. And this mobile iron is what generates the magnetic field that causes auroras — and keeps us alive.

But, according to the science journal Nature, something strange is going on deep down below.

It’s causing the magnetic North Pole to ‘skitter’ away from Canada, towards Siberia.

“The magnetic pole is moving so quickly that it has forced the world’s geomagnetism experts into a rare move,” Nature reports.

[ click to continue reading at news.com.au ]

from Real Clear Life

Could NCAA Stars Bolt College for XFL Before NFL?

The XFL isn’t bound by the same eligibility rules that restrict the NFL and its prospective players.

SANTA CLARA, CA – JANUARY 07: Trevor Lawrence #16 of the Clemson Tigers reacts after his teams 44-16 win over the Alabama Crimson Tide in the CFP National Championship presented by AT&T at Levi’s Stadium on January 7, 2019 in Santa Clara, California. (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)

Though it won’t be kicking off until 2020, the XFL is already making it clear it will welcome talented players who want to get paid as early as possible.

Under NFL rules, a player must be out of high school for at least three years before joining the league. In addition to working on their games, that’s a big reason many top prospects choose to play college football, generally for more than one season.

But, the XFL doesn’t have the same rules as the NFL and it sounds as if players who want to play pro football right out of high school may have that option in 2020. Additionally, college players who want to leave school early before they are eligible for the NFL will also likely be in play for the XFL.

[ click to continue reading at RCL ]

from Real Clear Science

What Causes Earth’s Rare and Mysterious Gigantic Jets?

By Ross Pomeroy

We’re all well acquainted with lightning. The bright, brief flashes of electrical energy puncture the general monotony of Earth’s sky. Their luminous dance, however, is restricted to within and below the planet’s billowing thunderclouds. Often shielded from our view above is a light show of a more magnificent nature. Here can be seen transient bursts of luminous plasma, the most common of which is a sprite, resembling a red mushroom cloud between 50 and 100 kilometers above the surface. Lucky onlookers can also see blue jets, bold, yet wispy blue bolts extending upwards from the tops of clouds to as high as 40 to 50 kilometers.

Rarest of all the “lightning above the clouds” is the gigantic jet, which is like a supersized blue jet that transitions to the color red at the highest altitudes. Scientists at the Arecibo Observatory once observed a blue jet extending from a thundercloud up to 70 kilometers, blazing at speeds of roughly 2,000,000 meters per second, more than forty times faster than ground lightning!

[ click to continue reading at RCS ]

from The Daily Star

NASA to crash 13,500mph spacecraft into ASTEROID in mission to stop deadly strike on Earth

NASA is planning to smash a spacecraft into an asteroid in the next phase of its planetary defence experiment.

By Rachel O’Donoghue

SAVE EARTH: NASA will practice stopping a catastrophic asteroid strike (Pic: GETTY)

The US space agency is working on the most fiery and crucial stage of its Double Asteroid Redirection Test, DART.

The experiment will be the latest in NASA’s mission to protect Earth from deadly asteroid strikes.

In 2021, it aims to fully test the new defence system by smashing a spaceship into a rock at 13,500mph (6 km per second).

Space experts are worried an asteroid could potentially smash into earth causing catastrophic damage.

[ click to continue reading at The Daily Star ]

from artnet

Damien Hirst Created a Fake Documentary About His Fake Venice Show—and Now You Can See It on Netflix

The film, financed by the artist himself, seeks to re-enact the fictional backstory behind the divisive show.

Julia Halperin

One of Damien Hirst’s “found treasures.” Screenshot via Netflix & Science Ltd. “Treasures From the Wreck of the Unbelievable” (2017).

The exhibition that launched a thousand angry tweets lives on—on Netflix.

Earlier this week, the streaming service released a mockumentary, “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable,” that chronicles the fictional story behind Damien Hirst’s two-venue exhibition in Venice last year.

The slickly produced film—full of sweeping underwater shots and a swelling soundtrack—was financed by the artist himself, a spokesperson from Hirst’s company, Science Ltd, tells artnet News. “The film is something Damien wanted people to be able to come across in years to come, which explores the backstory of the project,” she says.

According to the 90-minute mockumentary, the vast Venice spectacle was not the 52-year-old artist’s highly anticipated comeback exhibition, which took 10 years and cost a reported $65 million to produce.

Instead, the film suggests the show was the debut presentation of long-lost treasure discovered by a team of archaeologists and divers off the coast of east Africa. The trove—so the story goes—had been assembled during the 1st or 2nd centuries by a former slave turned voracious collector, Cif Amotan II (an anagram, it turns out, for “I am fiction”).

The film follows a team of researchers as they identify Amotan’s shipwreck beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean. But in order to retrieve the sunken booty, they need a benefactor. Enter: Damien Hirst.

[ click to continue reading at artnet.com ]

from The South Florida Sun Sentinel

Bay Area jogger is attacked by a dog, then bitten by the dog’s owner

by Alejandra Reyes-Velarde

A woman jogging in a Bay Area park was bitten by the owner of a dog who also attacked the jogger, police said.

The jogger was in Anthony Chabot Regional Park in Castro Valley when a dog attacked her about 10:30 a.m. Thursday, and she had to defend herself with pepper spray, the East Bay Regional Park District Police Department said.

The woman later came across the dog’s owner — another woman — who tackled and punched her multiple times, authorities said.

“As the victim attempted to push her assailant off of her,” police said, “she was bitten on her forearm by the female, causing significant wounds.”

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