Razorsaurus Rex
Alex Morgan Rocks
Soccer star Alex Morgan offers lessons in leadership for young girls
by Beth Kassab
Alex Morgan is a powerhouse on the pitch.
She’s put the ball into the back of the net six times since January for the U.S. Women’s National Team.
One of those goals, as Sports Illustrated noted, was the fastest in U.S. soccer history. She scored on Costa Rica earlier this month just 12 seconds after kickoff.
Morgan, who is set to start training next month for the Orlando Pride, is also half of Central Florida’s newest and most internationally known power couple. Her husband, Servando Carrasco, is a midfielder for Orlando City.
But Morgan isn’t just about stats. She is channeling all of that power — on and off the field — into feeding the minds of girls hungry for someone to look up to.
Soccer is one of the most popular youth sports in the country.
“But there wasn’t really anything out there for young girls to watch or to read or to follow other than the women’s national team,” said Morgan, 26.
So when an author she knows approached her a few years ago with the idea to create her own series, she said it was a “no brainer.”
The result was “The Kicks,” now a series of six books Morgan created that are centered on fictional 12-year-old Devin Burke, who had to move cross-country with her family only to find that her new school’s soccer team was lousy.
The book revolves around themes like leadership, friendship and perseverance.
Last year Amazon Prime picked up “The Kicks” as one of its original series.
Real Fake Baby Mom Artists
These moms love babies that never throw up or grow up
It’s 1 a.m. and the baby’s fussing. Stephanie Ortiz rises from bed, groggy, tired. Royal needs his diaper changed. Methodically, and like a good mom, Ortiz takes off her baby’s onesie and diaper. As she lifts Royal’s leg — pop! It comes clean off his body. “You don’t see that every day!” she laughs joyfully into the camera, holding the leg in her hand.
Welcome to the world of Reborn dolls.
The Reborn community is a tight-knit, creative class of mostly women who create, collect and role-play with dolls that look so much like real babies, they’re spooky and beautiful all at once.
Go to YouTube and search “Reborn doll” and you’ll find more than 90,000 videos from people of all ages showing off their incredibly realistic, hand-painted dolls and role-playing with them in ways that feel both playful and intensely intimate.
Death Valley Alive
Death Valley Is Experiencing a Colorful ‘Superbloom’
By
Credit: National Park Service
Death Valley, one of the hottest places on Earth, is currently a riot of color: More than 20 different kinds of desert wildflowers are in bloom there after record-breaking rains last October.
It’s the best bloom there since 2005, according to Abby Wines, a spokeswoman for Death Valley National Park, and “it just keeps getting better and better.”
The flowers started poking up in November, but the particularly colorful display emerged late last month in the park, which is mainly in California but stretches across the Nevada border. On Twitter and Instagram, park visitors have taken to calling it a “superbloom.”
The park gets about two inches of rain annually, so it always sees some wildflowers, though not as many or as varied. But it doesn’t take much more rain than that to completely dye the desert, Ms. Wines said, making last fall’s unusually heavy rains particularly effective.
Sorta Hilarious
A New York Politician Is Using Spiteful Street Names to Get Revenge on Developers
Earlier this month, a New York State Supreme Court judge ruled that the Staten Island Borough President James Oddo could go ahead with plans to give a section of the island some fairly unpleasant street names. A few very lucky New York City residents will now live on Cupidity Drive (“cupidity” meaning “greed”), Fourberie Lane (“fourberie” is “trickery” in French), or “Avidita Place” (from the Latin avidus, which means “eager,” or, you know, “greed”).
If you’re wondering why a public official would saddle residents with such sad addresses, know that this is Oddo’s very official revenge against a housing development he has opposed for some time. In 2013, the Savo Brothers development firm purchased a 15-acre retreat from the Society of Jesus. The land had served as the first laymen’s retreat in the United States. The developers wanted to build 250 condominiums on the $15 million parcel, knocking down the Jesuits’s 1920s-era chapel and some 400-year-old trees in the process. Community efforts to preserve the site or reach a satisfying compromise failed. So when the development company finally submitted potential street names for Oddo’s approval (e.g. Lazy Bird Lane, Rabbit Ridge Road, Timber Lane, or Lamb Run), Oddo got the last word—and picked three names very obviously not on the list.
They’re Coming
from The San Jose Mercury News
100-foot asteroid to zoom past Earth in two weeks, and ‘it’s gonna be close’
By Paul Rogers
In this frame grab made from a video done with a dashboard camera a meteor streaks through the sky over Chelyabinsk, about 1500 kilometers (930 miles) east of Moscow, Friday, Feb. 15, 2013. A meteor that scientists estimate weighed 10 tons (11 tons) streaked at supersonic speed over Russia’s Ural Mountains on Friday, setting off blasts that injured some 500 people and frightened countless more. (AP Photo/AP Video)
An asteroid roughly 100 feet long and moving at more than 34,000 mph is scheduled to make a close pass by Earth in two weeks.>
But don’t worry, scientists say. It has no chance of hitting us, and may instead help draw public attention to growing efforts at tracking the thousands of asteroids zooming around space that could one day wipe out a city — or worse — if they ever hit our planet.
This one, known as 2016 TX68, is larger than an 18-wheel tractor trailer truck, and is expected to fly as close as 19,245 miles to Earth at 4:06 pm Pacific time on Monday, March 7. For comparison, that’s less than one-tenth as far as the moon is from Earth, or 238,900 miles.
Umberto Eco Gone
Italian Author And Philosopher Umberto Eco Dead At 84
Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
Internationally acclaimed Italian author and philosopher Umberto Eco has died at age 84. His death was confirmed by his American publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Born in a small Italian town in 1932, Eco is perhaps best known for his 1980 mystery novel The Name of the Rose, which is set in a monastery in the 14th century. It was an unexpected international bestseller, launching his career as an author.
Eco didn’t publish his first novel until he was 48, when a friend suggested he write a detective story. Before that, his focus was medieval studies and semiotics. And even after he published novels, he said “I am a philosopher … I write novels only on the weekends,” the BBC reported.
Here’s how Eco described his transition into fiction in an interview with The Paris Review:
“I have long thought that what most philosophical books are really doing at the core is telling the story of their research, just as scientists will explain how they came to make their major discoveries. So I feel that I was telling stories all along, just in a slightly different style.”
He told NPR’s Scott Simon last October that several of his novels like Foucault’s Pendulum and Numero Zero focused on characters that he affectionately termed “losers” — because “they are more interesting than the winners.”
“They have a more complicated philosophy,” Eco told Scott. “And then in the world, there are more losers than winners, and so my readers can identify themselves with the characters.”
Harper Lee Gone
Harper Lee, elusive author of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ is dead
By Emily Langer
Harper Lee at the White House in 2007. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view,” Atticus Finch tells his daughter, Scout, in one of the most memorable passages of the classic novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” — “until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Few people in the world could claim to really understand Harper Lee, the novel’s elusive author, who has died at 89 in Monroeville, Ala.
She withdrew from public life shortly after her book was published in 1960, only to reappear in old age with the sensational release of “Go Set a Watchman,” a manuscript identified as a long-lost early draft of the book that decades earlier had vaulted her to literary renown.
“To Kill a Mockingbird,” a coming-of-age story set in the Depression-era South where Ms. Lee grew up, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 and sold more than 40 million copies, becoming one of the most cherished novels in modern American literature. One oft-cited survey asked respondents to name the book that most profoundly affected their lives. Ms. Lee’s novel ranked near the top, not far behind the Bible.
Thank you, Sun, for protecting us from the evil space-rocks.
How the Sun Protects Earth From Getting Clobbered By an Asteroid
by Jeffrey Kluger @jeffreykluger
Marat Ahmetvaleev / Duck: The Chelyabinsk meteor lights up the Russian sky, in 2013
A trick of heat and light makes space rocks self-destruct
The Earth grew up in an awfully rough neighborhood and it’s always needed the help of powerful friends. This was specially true in the early days of the solar system, during the so-called heavy bombardment phase, when asteroids and comets turned the region near the sun into something of a free-fire zone.
One of the things that prevented us from getting blown to smithereens was the fortuitous location of Jupiter which, with its powerful gravity, intercepts some of the incoming ordnance before it can reach us. That still leaves a lot of debris on the loose—witness the 66-ft (20 m) meteor that exploded in the skies over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013. All the same, according to a new study in Nature, it appears that we’re more protected than we knew—thanks to the powers of the sun.
Astronomers around the world keep a close watch on what they call near-Earth objects (NEOs)—asteroids that orbit through the solar system within 121 million miles (224 million km) of the sun, which brings them dangerously close to the Earth’s own 93 million mile (172 million km) orbit. Much of that census-taking is done by the Catalina Sky Survey, a program conducted principally by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Arizona.
Recently, a team of investigators led by research scientist Mikael Granvik of the University of Helsinki began looking at the population of known NEOs and noticed something strange: While the mix of dark asteroids and brighter, more reflective ones is more or less even throughout the solar system, in the vicinity of the sun, many of the dark ones go missing. What’s more, in this case, the solar “vicinity” can be pretty huge. Smaller bodies often get torn apart gravitationally as they approach what’s known as the Roche limit of a larger body like the sun or a planet—a distance of about 2.5 times the radius of that body. But the dark asteroids start falling apart at about ten times the solar radius, or about 4.3 million miles from the sun.
These guys are f†cking awesome.
Protect Your Assets
HOW (NOT) TO LOSE A MILLION DOLLARS
You’ll need: One of these travel bags + one Faraday cage
We recently told you how to spend $344,511.
Now, we’re going to tell you how to hide it.
With a little assist from SDR Traveller, makers of “ultra light, ultra strong, discreet luggage for the global traveller.”
Meaning: durable, lightweight bags that can transport up to $1 million in U.S. currency without leaving a trace, thanks to some ingenious tech and a magical material called “Cuben Fiber.”
Cuben Fiber is a waterproof, lightweight and ripstop laminate four times stronger than kevlar at half the weight (as well as resistant to UV light and 100% waterproof).
A stiff material, it gets a bit crinkly over time, offering the bags an interesting, well, patina. But also safety.
This fiber makes up all the stealthy duffels and carry-ons offered by SDR, a company run by Studio D, aka Studio Dradiodurans, an SF-based international research institute named after Deinococcus Radiodurans, an “extremophilic bacteria that can survive acid, drought and has extraordinary tolerance to radiation.”
Global Warming
Upstate New York mountain reaches minus 114 wind chill at its summit
BY ALFRED NG
THE WILD CENTER
While New York City had its coldest start to Valentine’s Day in 100 years on Sunday, it would seem balmy compared with the wicked wind chill at upstate Whiteface Mountain.
As temperatures dropped across the Northeast from the blast of a polar vortex, the wind chill at Whiteface, near Lake Placid, made it feel like a body- and mind-numbing minus 114 degrees late Saturday and into Sunday. Central Park could only muster a minus 1 degree.
The Wild Center, which works with the Atmospheric Science Research Center at SUNY Albany, recorded the frigid temperature from a research station at the mountain’s summit.
How The West Was Won
How a Basket on Wheels Revolutionized Grocery Shopping
by Zachary Crockett, Priceonomics
The shopping cart leads a sad, under-appreciated existence.
He is pushed around. He is battered by cart collectors, and mauled by unattentive parking lot drivers. He is left for dead in dark alleyways, drowned in the sludgy tides of levees and bays. Occasionally, small children poop on him.
We take him for granted. After all, how would we pull off our Thanksgiving shopping, or buy a 16-pound bag of jumbo shrimp at Costco without the assistance of his sinewy, steel arms? How would we keep our children from wreaking havoc on the soup can aisle without his handy baby seat? More broadly, how would we — as over-consuming, gluttonous Americans — manage to carry our selections from the 44,000 items that typically line a supermarket shelf?
Few inventions have so profoundly shaped consumer habits. With the exception of the automobile, the shopping cart is the most commonly used “vehicle” in the world: some 25 million grace grocery stores across the U.S. alone. It has played a major role in enriching the forces of capitalism, increasing our buying output, and transforming the nature of the supermarket — and for its role, it has been dubbed the “greatest development in the history of merchandising.”
Rarely comes the time when we sit back and consider the history of the shopping cart. But gather, friends: that time has come.
By the late 1930s, major changes were happening in the way that food was consumed: Freon, synthesized in 1930, led to the spread of the commercial refrigerator (by the late 1930s, more than 50% of Americans had one in their home). At the same time, preservatives increased the number of canned goods in grocery stores. As a result, consumers were not only buying more food per shopping trip, but bulkier, heavier items.
There was one big problem with this: at the time, self-serve grocery stores (including Goldman’s) only provided small wire-woven baskets to put groceries in. “When the housewife got her basket full, it was too heavy for her to carry and she stopped shopping,” Goldman recalled in a 1970 interview. “I thought if there was some way we could give the customer two baskets to shop with and still have one hand free to shop, we could do considerably more business.”
Goldman came to the realization that “[his] problem as an entrepreneur was no different than the problem [his] customers faced while shopping”: in order to sell more food, he’d have to figure out a way for his customers to carry less food.
At first, the solution didn’t come so easily. “When a clerk would see a customer’s basket practically full, he would hand them another basket and tell them they could find their first basket by the checkout stand,” wrote Goldman — but this required clerks who were constantly alert, and it wasn’t exactly scalable. Next, he considered re-arranging the goods into an “M” shape, attaching baskets to a tiny, parallel railroad track, and having customers shuffle along in an assembly line as their carts moved automatically. This proved to be a bit too complex.
Cascadia Coming To Kill Us
The quake-maker you’ve never heard of: Cascadia
By Michael Martinez, Stephanie Elam, and Rosalina Nieves, CNN
Mother Earth slowly reveals her secrets, and this time, it’s a fault line deep in the belly of the planet.
Its name is a whopper: The Cascadia subduction zone.
Its gargantuan size and potential power amaze earthquake experts, who say it could cause the worst natural disaster in the history of North America — if it ruptures entirely.
This quake-maker sits at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, where the seabed meets the North American tectonic plate. In all, it stretches 700 miles along the Pacific Northwest, from British Columbia’s Vancouver Island to Washington to Oregon to northern California’s Cape Mendocino.
In fact, “the Cascadia” already has made history, causing the largest earthquake in the continental United States on January 26, 1700. That’s when the Cascadia unleashed one of the world’s biggest quakes, causing a tsunami so big that it rampaged across the Pacific and damaged coastal villages in Japan.
Now it’s a question of when the Cascadia will strike again, scientists say.
That big one could “hit at any time,” and there’s even a website called Aftershock that allows Oregonians to enter their address for a custom report on seismic risks. If the Cascadia were to experience a large-magnitude earthquake, the temblor and resulting tsunami could kill more than 11,000 people and injure more than 26,000, according to one FEMA model.
PAINTED NAILS Premiere
Helen Mirren Cracking A Whip. Awesome.
Ellis Knight to AMERICAN GOTHIC
CBS’ ‘American Gothic’ Adds ‘Once Upon a Time’ Alum (Exclusive)
by Kate Stanhope
Getty Images
Elliot Knight will play the husband of Megan Ketch’s character, Tessa.
American Gothic is adding a spellbinding new series regular.
Elliot Knight, best known for playing Merlin on Once Upon a Time, has joined CBS’ murder mystery drama, The Hollywood Reporterhas learned.
American Gothic follows a prominent Boston family attempting to redefine itself in the wake of a chilling discovery that ties their recently deceased patriarch to a string of murders spanning decades, amid mounting suspicion that one of them may have been his accomplice.
The project hails from writer Corinne Brinkerhoff (The Good Wife), who will executive produce alongside Amblin’s Justin Falvey and Darryl Frank (The Americans, Under the Dome, Extant), James Frey and Todd Cohen. Fellow Good Wife grad Matt Shakman is set to direct the pilot.
American Gothic is one of two new series coming to CBS this summer — the other being the comic-thrillerBrainDead from The Good Wife creators Robert and Michelle King.
Rockin’ The Gondola
Couple arrested for alleged sex acts on High Roller
By Nikki Bowers | nbowers@8newsnow.com
Copyright 2016 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
A couple was arrested for taking part in sexual relations on the High Roller, according to police.
In an arrest report released Tuesday, officers said the couple were first noticed by the High Roller’s operations leader. The report said she saw the couple on surveillance cameras taking their clothes off as they smoked cigarettes.
Police said the operations leader took to the intercom to speak to the couple, asking them to stop put on their clothes. The report said Panzica and Scordianos complied, but shortly after, they started up again. However, this time, they performed sexual acts on each other.
The operations leader asked them to stop again, but they didn’t listen. The operations leader then looked at other cameras to see if any of the guests could see the couple, and that’s when she noticed some people in another High Roller cabin recording the couple on their cell phone, the report said.
Year Of The Monkey Coming To Kill Us
Lunar New Year turbulence as ‘fire monkey’ swings into action
By Dennis Chong
As the Lunar New Year of the Monkey swings into action Monday, fortune tellers foresee 12 months of political and financial turbulence at the hands of the mischievous, unpredictable creature.
Hong Kong’s respected feng shui masters expect an incendiary mix as the monkey combines with the fire element, but also say the year ahead will be a boom time for clever innovation and women will be in the ascendant.
The monkey is seen as belonging to the hard metal element, while fire represents the sun, says Hong Kong-based celebrity feng shui master Alion Yeo.
“When the two things combine, it creates an extremely high temperature. We have to be prepared for a lot of disputes, sickness,” he told AFP.
“One can even associate fire and metal with missiles, bullets or rockets,” he said.
Feng shui — literally meaning “wind-water” — is influential in many parts of Asia, where people adjust their lives and renovate offices and homes to maximise their luck and wealth according to its tenets.
It is based on ancient philosophy and the belief that all events are dictated by the varying balances in the five elements that make up the universe: metal, wood, water, fire and earth.
Test-Tube Meatballs Are Not Cool
First test-tube MEATBALL revealed: Startup claims lab grown meat will be on shelves within three years and says raising animals to eat will soon be ‘unthinkable’
By STACY LIBERATORE FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
- The firm says technique produces 90 percent less greenhouse emissions
- Begins by isolating cow and pig cells that have the ability to regenerate
- Costs $18,000 to make 1lb ground beef, compared to $4 in US grocery store
- Working on plant-based alternative to replace fetal bovine serum
Test-tube meat is getting closer to leaving the lab and being served on our plates.
Memphis Meats, which grows meat from animal cells, says it hopes to have its animal-free products on the market in three to four years – and has unveiled the first lab-grown meatball to the public.
It is one of several firms developed ‘test tube meats’ that could one day be cheaper and more environmentally friendly to produce than traditional farming.
‘This is absolutely the future of meat,’ said Memphis Meats CEO Uma Valeti.
‘We plan to do to the meat industry what the car did to the horse and buggy.
‘Cultured meat will completely replace the status quo and make raising animals to eat them simply unthinkable.’
The firm has been growing real meat in small quantities using cells from cows, pigs and chickens, he revealed.
‘We love meat. But like most Americans, we don’t love the many negative side effects of conventional meat production: environmental degradation, a slew of health risks, and food products that contain antibiotics, fecal matter, pathogens, and other contaminants,’ the firm says on its website.
Sex Robots Are Cool
Makers of ‘mindblowing’ sex robot with virtual vagina swamped with orders
Warning – graphic content : Randy men can’t get enough of innovate VirtuaDolls sex aid – prompting the firm behind it to make an astonishing admission
The manufacturers of a pioneering video game controller that doubles as a virtual reality male sex toy have pulled it off the market after being swamped by demand.
VirtuaDolls is a system which allows hi-tech heavy breathers to strap on a VR helmet, sleep with simulated women and be pleasured by a device which responds to on-screen eroticism.
This could, for instance, allow gamers to watch a cyber-siren twerking whilst the silicon sex toy pulsates in time with her every gyration.
So many men rushed to pre-order this device on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo that its designers were forced to “put the project on hold”.
In a series of tweets, the firm behind Virtuadolls admitted demand for their virtual vagina had been enormous.
Slug-like Molds Are Cool
The Slimy Underworld That Emerges After the Rain
After a Good Soak, the City Comes Alive with Rare Snails, Poisonous Mushrooms, and Slug-Like Molds.
BY LILA HIGGINS
You know that earthy smell that comes just as it begins to rain after a dry spell? It has a name. Scientists call it petrichor.
When I smell petrichor, I get excited: Rain is a personal and professional obsession. I begin keeping close tabs on the window while I check weather reports for the forecast. As the manager of citizen science (getting the community involved in scientific studies) at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, I start making a list in my mind to share with others. What mushrooms and slime molds and snails and slugs will I be likely to find? I imagine all of the places I should check to find these uncommon organisms that only come out when the soil is moist.
Where I grew up—England—rain was not at all a rare event. As a kid, I’d follow the slime trails of snails to chase them down among the bushes, then carefully take them to the designated snail house—a crook in a tree. Somehow the snails would always escape! I would walk across the farm fields around my house looking for mushrooms growing in circles, which my grandma told me were called fairy rings.
One day I was exploring a hollow tree and a huge puffball mushroom exploded in my hair. It happened as I climbed up inside the dark recess and spotted a large creamy white orb about the same size as my 7-year old head. As I wiggled through the hollow, trying to pull myself through, I brushed against the puffy mass and it burst. It was white and gooey and made my curly hair stick to my head. My family thought it was hilarious.
In Los Angeles, I have to wait months and months for a good rain. With El Niño 2016 upon us, I am on alert for the new slimy city that springs up after a rain, whenever I hike, walk to the bus stop, or bike through Koreatown.
The Last American Jaguar
Video shows ‘El Jefe,’ only known wild jaguar in US
By: Brent Corrado
TUCSON, Ariz. (KSAZ) – Video of the only-known wild jaguar living in the United States was released on Wednesday.
Conservation CATalyst and the Center for Biological Diversity released the video, which shows ‘El Jefe’ roaming the remote areas of the Santa Rita Mountains near Tucson. This is the first ever publicly released video of the jaguar.
Crackhead Bob Gone
‘Crackhead Bob,’ a recurring guest on ‘The Howard Stern Show,’ dies at 56
ROGER KISBY/GETTY IMAGES
“Crackhead Bob,” a fan-favorite recurring guest on “The Howard Stern Show” in the late 1990s and early 2000s, has died at 56.
Bob, whose real name was George Harvey, regularly appeared on Stern’s show for parts of seven years as a member of the Wack Pack — an eclectic group of guests who typically had something unusual about them.
Harvey earned his nickname after revealing on air that smoking crack led to a series of strokes that hindered his speech and left part of his body paralyzed, according to an announcement on Stern’s website on Monday.
His good-natured sense of humor and willingness to partake in bits such as singing song covers or making prank phone calls made him one of the more popular members of the Wack Pack.
“He was a huge champion of our show,” Stern said Monday.
Oldie But Goodie From The Prank Archives
St. Cloud homeowners find catfish in mailboxes
Residents trying to determine if it is fishy prank or something sinister
ST. CLOUD, Fla. – Several residents in Osceola County have found catfish in their mailboxes and yards, prompting questions whether it’s a prank or something more serious.
Maddison Fertic said she received an unusual delivery Monday morning when her postman discovered a large, dead catfish inside her mailbox.
“I was honestly in shock because it doesn’t make any sense,” Fertic said. “It’s just one of those things where it’s, just, ‘Why?'”
Fertic said the fish was 12 inches long, and she had to use a stick to pull it out.
Eagle vs. Drone – Eagle Wins
Dutch Police Training Eagles to Take Down Drones
No matter how many regulations are put in place, drones are cheap enough now that frequent misuse is becoming the norm. There’s no good way of dealing with a dangerous drone: you can jam its radios to force it to autoland, or maybe try using an even bigger drone to capture it inside a giant net. In either of these cases, however, you run the risk of having the drone go completely out of control, which is even more dangerous.
Or, you can be like the Dutch National Police, and train eagles to take down drones for you.
The video, as you probably noticed, is in Dutch, but here’s what I’ve been able to piece together: the Dutch police (like police everywhere) know that drones are going to become even more of a problem than they already are, so they’ve been testing ways of dealing with a drone in an emergency, like if a drone is preventing an air ambulance from landing. The police are looking into electronic solutions, but also physical ones, including both nets and trained eagles.
The Dutch police have partnered with Guard From Above, a raptor training company based in The Hague, to determine whether eagles could be used as intelligent, adaptive anti-drone weapon systems. The eagles are specially trained to identify and capture drones, although from the way most birds of prey react to drones, my guess is that not a lot of training was necessary. After snatching the drone out of the sky, the eagles instinctively find a safe area away from people to land and try take a couple confused bites out of their mechanical prey before their handlers can reward them with something a little less plastic-y. The advantage here is that with the eagles, you don’t have to worry about the drone taking off out of control or falling on people, since the birds are very good at mid-air intercepts as well as bringing the drone to the ground without endangering anyone.
The Pluot’s Baby-daddy
Luther Burbank, The Maker of Modern Agriculture
BY AMY GLYNN
A lot of people, even self-proclaimed foodies, do not know who Luther Burbank was. I find this odd not only because of his legacy, an almost supernaturally prolific career in plant breeding that gave us many of the foods we eat today, but because in his lifetime the man was the horticultural equivalent of a rock star, and counted among his admirers Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, John Muir, and Helen Keller. Burbank was charismatic, brilliant, tireless, and despite an elementary school education, possessed of an almost mystical ability to conjure plant life. Everyone knew who he was.
Burbank was born in Lancaster, Mass., in 1849. He was the 13th of 18 children. After the death of his father he used his inheritance to purchase a few farm acres and went to work on developing a potato that would have a natural resistance to the blight that sparked the catastrophic crop failures in mind-19th century Ireland. The result was the Idaho or Burbank Russet, which is now one of our dominant agricultural crops and the source of practically every French fry you have ever eaten. He moved to northern California, where the growing season was longer, with the money he made selling the rights to the Burbank Russet.
It sold for $150. If that sounds wild to you, don’t worry—it did to him, as well. As it turns out, there are serious difficulties with making money as an inventor when your inventions are living, reproducing plants. More on that in a minute.
A lot of scientists will tell you that horticulturalist Luther Burbank was not one. In a way, I think that’s probably right—and he might not have minded the exclusion, though it bothered him when people called him a “wizard.” (He felt it smacked of “hocus-pocus,” which he’d have hastened to note was not his thing either.) A devoted acolyte of Darwin, he happened to be a non-scientist who developed over 800 varieties of plants in a 50-year career. Many of them never went to market, some became unfashionable and faded away, some—like the white blackberry and the spineless prickly pear—were flops. But he’s the man you can thank not only for Idaho potatoes, but also for the pluot, most of the plums you’ve ever eaten (including the ubiquitous Japanese hybrid Santa Rosa), rainbow Swiss chard, red sorrel, and a huge number of apples, pears, peaches and nuts.
Bad Human, Good Dog
Dogs may have evolved to handle our bad tempers
A new study tracked the eyes of dogs when shown the photos of humans and other dogs. (University of Helsinki/PlosOne)
Man’s best friend has a clear strategy for dealing with angry owners — look away.
New research shows that dogs limit their eye contact with angry humans, even as they tend to stare down upset canines. The scientists suggest this may be an attempt to appease humans, that evolved as dogs were domesticated and benefited from avoiding conflicts with humans.
To conduct the tests the University of Helsinki researchers trained 31 dogs to rest in front of a video screen. Facial photos — showing threatening, pleasant and neutral expressions — were displayed on the screen for 1.5 seconds. Nearby cameras tracked the dogs’ eye movements.
Dogs in the study looked most at the eyes of humans and other dogs to sense their emotions. When dogs looked at expressions of angry canines, they lingered more on the mouth, perhaps to interpret the threatening expressions. And when looking at angry humans they tended to avert their gaze. Dogs may have learned to detect threat signs from humans and respond in an appeasing manner, according to researcher Sanni Somppi. Avoiding conflicts may have helped dogs — which are the most popular pet in the United States — develop better bonds with humans.
Earth 2x
Earth is actually two planets, scientists conclude
The early Earth was mixed with a baby planet called Theia following a head on collision 4.5 billion years ago, scientists have found
By Sarah Knapton, Science Editor
Earth is actually made up from two planets which came together in a head-on collision that was so violent it formed the Moon, scientists have concluded.
Initially it was believed that the Moon was created when a smaller planet called Theia grazed the Earth and broke up, sending a smaller chunk into space where it was caught in Earth’s gravity.
But if that was the case the Moon would have a different chemical composition to the Earth, because it would be made up, predominantly, of Theia.
However, after studying Moon rocks brought back by astronauts on the Apollo missions, scientists at the University of California have found that their oxygen isotopes are the same as on Earth.
It means that the collision between Their and the early Earth was so violent that the two planets effectively melded together to form a new planet, a chunk of which was knocked off to form the Moon.
Astronomy Babylon
Clay tablets reveal Babylonians discovered astronomical geometry 1,400 years before Europeans
Text A. (Trustees of the British Museum/Mathieu Ossendrijver)
The medieval mathematicians of Oxford, toiling in torchlight in a land ravaged by plague, managed to invent a simple form of calculus that could be used to track the motion of heavenly bodies. But now a scholar studying ancient clay tablets suggests that the Babylonians got there first, and by at least 1,400 years.
The astronomers of Babylonia, scratching tiny marks in soft clay, used surprisingly sophisticated geometry to calculate the orbit of what they called the White Star — the planet Jupiter.
These tablets are quite incomprehensible to the untrained eye. Thousands of clay tablets — many unearthed in the 19th century by adventurers hoping to build museum collections in Europe, the United States and elsewhere — remain undeciphered.