Another weekend begins and I spent time searching the internet for stories that were missed by the MSM….some mundane, some interesting ans some just plain weird….
Locally things are shaping up to be another extremely hot Summer here in South Mississippi…..our night time temps have been the average high temps for May…..high 90s day and 80s after dark…..sucks.
The good news is the garden that was destroyed by the recent storm is producing tomatoes…. the first ones are in and are delicious.
Shall we begin?
I could not let the politics of the day go by without a comment….RFK, Jr is running for president…..you know him, the anti-vaxxer and all around whack-a-doodle…..he made a statement that I could not let go….
At age 70, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has touted himself as “the model of virility” up against older, less robust rivals, per MSNBC. All the while, he’s been keeping mum on his claim that, as the New York Times reports, a worm ate part of his brain. Kennedy was experiencing mental fog and memory loss in 2010 when he underwent brain scans. Several top neurologists believed he had a brain tumor. But as Kennedy explained in a 2012 deposition, one doctor told him the abnormality “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.”
Around the same time, Kennedy was diagnosed with mercury poisoning, a condition linked to serious neurological issues, likely as a result of eating too much fish, the Times reports. “I have cognitive problems, clearly,” Kennedy said in the deposition as part of divorce proceedings, in which he argued his earnings power was negatively affected by his health problems. “I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss,” he said. He also described contracting hepatitis C through intravenous drug use as a young person, but said there were no lingering effects.
This explains so much.
Until recently I was a life long Formula One racing fan but a few years back I told Sue that it was no longer man against machine and become computer versus computer….these machines tell the driver everything even when they need a tire change…..so I commented just how long would it be before there would driver-less cars in the races.
Well guess what?
Abu Dhabi’s Autonomous Racing League got off to a rough start over the weekend.
The Formula 1-style race, the first of its kind, saw its fair share of blunders and crashes, as The Verge reports, with driverless racing cars spinning helplessly and running off the track. One car even crashed into a wall after turning too early.
In short, it’s a perfect microcosm of our current efforts to develop self-driving cars: the industry’s brightest minds from around the world are still struggling to get a vehicle to reliably complete a lap, even without any other racecars around.
The Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League saw eight teams competing, using identical Dallara Super Formula SF23 cars. The vehicles’ 2.0-liter four-cylinder engines can produce around 550 horsepower, and seven Sony cameras provide a 360-degree view from the spot where a human driver would usually sit.
While the cars were the same, each team had its own software engineers writing code and training AI algorithms to have their driverless machines race around the purpose-built Yas Marina Circuit.
In many ways, it’s the natural evolution of Formula 1 racecar driving, given our obsession with driverless vehicles. Who needs those pesky human drivers when you can have algorithms battle it out on your behalf?
https://futurism.com/the-byte/self-driving-formula-1-car-crashes-into-wall-at-first-autonomous-race-event
How long before this becomes the norm rather than the exception?
The tragic story of the three bodies found in Mexico and you will not believe the motive for their deaths…..
Prosecutors say the two Australians and one American killed during a surfing trip to Mexico were likely murdered by thieves who wanted to steal the tires off of their pickup truck. Authorities in Baja California said relatives have confirmed the identities of the three men, whose bodies were found in a remote well near a beach Friday, as Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their friend, American Jack Carter Rhoad. The trio disappeared during a camping and surfing trip along the coast south of Ensenada, the BBC reports. They’d been posting pictures of their adventures before vanishing around April 27, the AP reports.
The thieves “may have been looking for trucks in this area,” chief state prosecutor María Elena Andrade Ramírez says. Spotting the truck and tents, the thieves may have attempted to steal the truck tires when the men came back and saw what was happening. “Surely, they resisted,” the prosecutor says, at which point the suspects shot them—all three had been shot in the head—and dumped their bodies. A fourth body, which had been in the well much longer, was found at the same time as the three men, and authorities say it’s possible the same suspects had dumped another body at the difficult-to-access location after a previous crime. Three people were being questioned in the case.
Okay, how sick is that?
Time for some climate news…..
For millions of years, natural carbon sinks like terrestrial forests and ocean ecosystems have kept the Earth’s atmosphere in a happy balance—then humans came along and mucked everything up. Now, scientists are racing to find ways to clean up the anthropogenic mess we have created over the past two centuries and maintain a planet that’s habitable for future Homo sapiens.
The methods for fixing this problem are as varied as the climate threats we face. One idea is adding baking soda to concrete to help absorb carbon. Another is spreading ultra-fine concrete across agriculture fields to the same effect (while also improving crop yields). Some companies manufacture massive machinery designed to suck up carbon while others focus on creating 2D-structures that can trap greenhouse gasses before the escape from factories across the world.
Now, a new solution by Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University—in partnership with a variety of U.K. universities, as well as the China University of Science and Technology—has created a material that researchers described as a porous “cage of cages,” meticulously designed to capture both carbon dioxide and an even more potent greenhouse gas, sulfur hexafluoride. Using computer modeling to accurately predict how these molecules would form into this nesting doll of cages structure, the researchers created this material from oxygen, nitrogen, and fluorine to help sequester carbon faster than Earth’s natural, tree-based process. The paper was published last week in the journal Nature Synthesis.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a60652670/material-carbon-capture-faster-than-trees/
Can you put a price on health? Well one company can.
Luxury fitness company Equinox is launching a new membership that costs more money than a lot of people make in a year. The Optimize by Equinox personalized health program will cost $3,000 per month, with the price of basic gym membership bringing the total to at least $40,000 a year, CNBC reports. Equinox says it is partnering with Function Health—a lab test start-up with a mission of helping people live “100 healthy years”—to give members personalized plans on improving health and longevity.
Equinox says Function Health will test for 100 biomarkers, and the gym will carry out its own fitness tests to come up with plans that will include 16 hours a month of coaching and training, including sessions with sleep coaches and nutrition coaches. “It’s the same as Formula One or an athlete, where you are given a team of top experts in all these different verticals, to design a program based on all the data that we collected,” Equinox exec Julia Klim tells CNBC.
Equinox says the program will be rolled out later this month in New York City and Highland Park, Texas, with other US locations to follow. The company was hit hard by the pandemic, when gyms were closed for extended periods, but it said earlier this year that it is getting back on track financially. The company said it had secured $1.8 billion from investors to refinance $1.2 billion in loans and fund an expansion to add dozens of new clubs worldwide, reports the Financial Times.
All I can say is “there is a sucker born every minute”.
A little more health news….
Japanese scientists are set to kick off the world’s first clinical trials of “tooth regrowth medicine” at the Kyoto University Hospital, The Mainichi reports.
Researchers from the Japanese startup Toregem Biopharma are planning to enroll patients who were born missing some or all of their teeth from birth, a condition called congenital anodontia, for the trials.
The patients will receive an antibody treatment that deactivates a protein called USAG-1, believed to stop “tooth buds,” which most people have, from developing into either baby or permanent teeth.
People with the condition conventionally resort to getting implants or dentures. However, Toregem’s treatment could provide them with a “third option,” as co-founder Katsu Takahashi explained in a statement, as quoted by Nikkei Asia.
The team is hoping to treat not only those who haven’t been able to grow teeth from birth, but eventually also those who are simply missing teeth due to cavities as well.
https://futurism.com/neoscope/scientists-test-medicine-grow-new-teeth
All this apprehension over the next election….is it as deep as reported…..this could answer that question…..
Worried about how November is going to go, or if Civil War the movie might come to fruition in real life? Talk to Bill Rigdon, whose company Building Consensus Inc. is tasked with erecting panic rooms, bunkers, and the like for an uneasy population. What he’s being asked most these days is: “‘How can I protect myself with the upcoming election and the civil unrest that I’m watching on the news every day?’ People are scared to death,” Rigdon says, per Fox Business, which notes his specialization lies in “state-of-the-art steel-reinforced concrete structures that are equipped with high-tech mechanical and electric installation.”
Rigdon, a consultant for the 2002 film Panic Room, says there’s always been a healthy demand for his services among celebrities, but there’s been an increase in interest overall over the past several months, especially in New York City. In addition to the ostensibly impenetrable exteriors of his safe spaces, Rigdon’s security plan can incorporate such features as electrified door handles; colored pepper spray that “will temporarily blind the intruders and stain their clothing, making them easier to identify if they try to escape,” per ForumDaily; and even drones that drop nets on those fleeing. It’s not a task for amateurs, Rigdon says.
“I once had a Fox News reporter who had a whole plan for a basement bunker where 13, 14 people could stay for a period of time,” Rigdon tells Curbed. “But there was no bathroom.” The outlet notes that “Rigdon would neither confirm nor deny the client was Roger Ailes.” There have been other periods when experts saw a spike in panic room requests, including during the peak of the pandemic, amid the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, and after the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol, when both Democratic and GOP politicians started reaching out to bolster their home security.
It is good to be rich!
Finally the weird news of the week….it has everything to do with underwear….
In 2014, three different countries decided to ban a certain piece of clothing that women often wear. While seemingly controversial at first, especially since the ban was specifically targeted toward women and might seem as if government officials were attempting to control what they wore and how they dressed their bodies, the choice was actually rooted in the well-being of women’s health.
Maybe all women need to reconsider what kind of underwear they wear.
According to CNN, lacy underwear was effectively banned due to new regulations in Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, but rather doing it because of modesty, it’s for safety reasons. The regulation requires clothing in contact with the skin to contain at least 6% cotton.
Any underwear below this threshold will not be available in stores, and both production and import of these will also stop in these countries. This regulation is said to be designed to protect consumers against synthetic garments that don’t absorb enough moisture and can eventually lead to skin problems.
https://www.yourtango.com/self/russia-belarus-and-kazakhstan-banned-womens-lace-underwear
Sorry sports fans but that will have to be enough for this Saturday for I have a garden that needs attending to daily.
Hoping you guys have a wonderful Saturday and as always….Be Well and Be Safe….
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
In Saner Thought 