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The place where the world comes together in honesty and mirth.
Windmills Tilted, Scared Cows Butchered, Lies Skewered on the Lance of Reality ... or something to that effect.


Sunday, June 15, 2014

The Daily Drift

If this idiot lives to make it to adulthood he'll be a repugican, he already displays the stupidity level for it ...!
 
Carolina Naturally is read in 200 countries around the world daily.   

For those interested: In World Cup play Colombia bested Greece 3-0: Costa Rica bested Uruguay 3-1: Italy bested England 2-1: Ivory Coast bested Japan 2-1 in play on the third day of the tourney.

It's Father's Day ... !
Today  is - Father's Day


Don't forget to visit our sister blog: It Is What It Is

Some of our reader today have been in:
The Americas
Phoenix, Biloxi, Miami, Auburn, Tampa, Seattle, Dallas, Orlando, Durham and Kissimmee, United States
Santa Cruz, Chile
Britannia, Vancouver, Joliette, Edmonton, L'ancienne-Lorette and Richmond, Canada
Tipitapa, Leon and Managua, Nicaragua
Rio De Janeiro, Brazil
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Europe
Velizy-Villacoublay, Roubaix, Bordeaux, Cerny and Rouen, France
Sofia, Bulgaria
Arkhangel'sk and Vladivostok, Russia
Ceske Bulejovice, Czech Republic
Bristol, Rowley Regis, London and Middleborough, England
Madrid, Mazarron, Torrent, Malaga and L'Olleria, Spain
Skopje, Macedonia
Treviso, Milan and Ravenna, Italy
Berlin, Nuremberg and Hamburg, Germany
Uppsala, Sweden
Reykjavik, Iceland
Dublin, Ireland
Lodz and Katowice, Poland
Padej, Serbia
Thuro By, Denmark
Lisbon, Portugal
Nokia, Finland
Ljubljana, Slovenia
Asia
Muscat, Oman
Beijing and Guangzhou, China
Bangalore, New Delhi, Kolkata, Tiruchchirappalli, Madhyamgram, Hyderabad and Perungudi, India
Karachi, Pakistan
Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Tehran, Ardabil and Tabriz, Iran
Colombo and Kolonnawa, Sri Lanka
Beaufort, Klang and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Port Louis, Mauritius
Petah Tikva, Israel
Rangoon, Burma
Africa 
Tunis, Tunisia
Cairo, Egypt,
Nelspruit, South Africa
Ouargla, Algeria
The Pacific
Sydney, Australia
San Mateo, Philippines
Auckland, New Zealand

Today in History

1184 King Magnus of Norway is defeated by his rival, Sverre.
1215 King John signs the Magna Carta.
1381 The English peasant revolt is crushed in London.
1389 Ottoman Turks crush Serbia in the Battle of Kosovo.
1607 Colonists in North America complete James Fort in Jamestown.
1752 Benjamin Franklin and his son test the relationship between electricity and lightning by flying a kite in a thunder storm.
1775 George Washington is named Commander in Chief by Congress.
1779 American General Anthony Wayne captures Stony Point, New York.
1836 Arkansas is admitted into the Union as the 25th state.
1846 Great Britain and the United States agree on a joint occupation of Oregon Territory.
1849 James K. Polk, the 11th president of the United States, dies.
1862 General J.E.B. Stuart completes his "ride around McClellan."
1864 The Battle for Petersburg begins.
1866 Prussia attacks Austria.
1877 Henry O. Flipper becomes the first African American to graduate from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
1898 The U.S. House of representatives approves the annexation of Hawaii.
1916 President Woodrow Wilson signs a bill incorporating the Boy Scouts of America.
1917 Great Britain pledges the release of all Irish captured during the Easter Rebellion of 1916.
1920 Three African Americans are lynched in Duluth, Minnesota, by a white mob of 5,000.
1928 Republicans, convening in Kansas City, name Herbert Hoover their candidate for President.
1932 Gaston Means is sentenced to 15 years for fraud in the Lindbergh baby kidnapping.
1940 The French fortress of Verdun is captured by Germans.
1944 U.S. Marines begin the invasion of Saipan in Pacific.
1947 The All-Indian Congress accepts a British plan for the partition of India.
1958 Greece severs military ties to Turkey because of the Cyprus issue.
1964 The last French troops leave Algeria.
1977 The first general election in Spain since 1936 results in victory for the UCD (Union of Democratic Centre).

Non Sequitur

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Mexican Genetics

Vast genetic diversity among Mexicans found in large-scale study


Some of Mexico’s indigenous groups are as genetically different from […]

Real Life Laws That Regulate The Supernatural

Whether you believe in ghosts or not is irrelevant, at least according to the powers that be, because there are laws in place related to ghosts and hauntings that were created to help protect the living...from being ripped off by the living in the name of the afterlife.
For example- if you’re looking to buy a house in New York the realtor has to tell you if it’s haunted or lawsuits may be filed against them.
Looking to practice necromancy in San Francisco? You’d better have a fortune telling permit, or the spiritualist squad will storm your lair and shut you down, and don’t even think about hunting Bigfoot in Skamania County, Washington, or you may find yourself imprisoned for committing a felony!

School Shootings

No geographical pattern emerges for the violence, but plot points underscore scope of the problem.

The Truth Be Told

Language

From contemporary syntax to human language’s deep origins


On the island of Java, in Indonesia, the silvery gibbon, […]

Cursive Brain

It seems like the art of handwriting has gotten a bit lost in the keyboard and touchscreen age, but it turns out keeping the Palmer method alive might help our noggins stay sharp.

Skull da Vinci

The skull could have been the great Renaissance artist’s personal object.

Sunburn and Skin Cancer

New research delivers a frightening thought: Only 5 bad sunburns before the age of 20 could be enough to increase the chances of getting melanoma.

1918 All Over Again

Genes found in nature yield 1918-like virus with pandemic potential


An international team of researchers has shown that circulating avian […]

DEET

It's been repelling bugs and bites for decades -- so far, so good -- but is there anything to worry about when we DEET ourselves before a backyard barbecue?


Ziggy

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Candy balls made with ghost peppers

Thinkgeek's Ghost Pepper Super Hot Candy Balls ($10 for about 44 balls) are red-hot candy balls dusted and infused with powdered Bhut Jolokia (ghost pepper) and Trinidad Scorpion Pepper, coming in at about one million Scovilles. Also, they may contain peanuts, so there's that.

Plant Travel

Plants might have a more exciting life than you might think, since new research finds they can travel far and wide stuck to bird feathers.

The Strange History Of The Sunflower

You may not think that there is much to know about the sunflower. After all, the plant is virtually everywhere. Yet it has something more than a simple, straightforward history and is more of a globe trotter than you may imagine.
Its story has the historical and continental sweep of a Hollywood epic, from the pre-European Americas to Tsarist Russia and back again. Here is the tale of the peripatetic sunflower.

This Airport Disappears During High Tide

Barra is a 23-square mile island off the western coast of Scotland. It has an airport with three marked runways. It conducts regularly scheduled flights. What makes those flights unique is that the schedule takes into account the tide. That's because during high tide, the sea submerges the runways.
According to this history of the Barra Airport, commercial air service to Barra began in 1936. A wide beach called Traigh Mhòr proved to be the ideal landing strip for the rocky island. A passenger terminal was built in 1978.
Here's a video of a plane landing on one of Barra Airport's beach runways.

Hidden Ocean Locked Up Deep in Earth's Mantle

Found! Hidden Ocean Locked Up Deep in Earth's Mantle
Earth's surface oceans are quite apparent, even from satellite images of our blue marble, but now …
Deep within the Earth's rocky mantle lies oceans' worth of water locked up in a type of mineral called ringwoodite, new research shows.
The results of the study will help scientists understand Earth's water cycle, and how plate tectonics moves water between the surface of the planet and interior reservoirs, researchers say.
The Earth's mantle is the hot, rocky layer between the planet's core and crust. Scientists have long suspected that the mantle's so-called transition zone, which sits between the upper and lower mantle layers 255 to 410 miles (410 to 660 kilometers) below Earth's surface, could contain water trapped in rare minerals. However, direct evidence for this water has been lacking, until now.
To see if the transition zone really is a deep reservoir for water, researchers conducted experiments on water-rich ringwoodite, analyzed seismic waves travelling through the mantle beneath the United States, and studied numerical models. They discovered that downward-flowing mantle material is melting as it crosses the boundary between the transition zone and the lower mantle layer.  
"If we are seeing this melting, then there has to be this water in the transition zone," said Brandon Schmandt, a seismologist at the University of New Mexico and co-author of the new study published today (June 12) in the journal Science. "The transition zone can hold a lot of water, and could potentially have the same amount of H2O [water] as all the world's oceans." (Melting is a way of getting rid of water, which is unstable under conditions in Earth's lower mantle, the researchers said.)
A water-rich mineral
Ringwoodite is a rare type of mineral that forms from olivine under very high pressures and temperatures, such as those present in the mantle's transition zone. Laboratory studies have shown that the mineral can contain water, which isn't present as liquid, ice or vapor; instead, it is trapped in the ringwoodite's molecular structure as hydroxide ions (bonded oxygen and hydrogen atoms).
In March, another research group discovered an unusual diamond from the mantle that encased hydrous ringwoodite. Though the find suggested the transition zone could contain a lot of water, it was the first and only ringwoodite specimen from the mantle scientists have ever analyzed (all other samples were produced in the lab or found in meteorites), and may not be representative of other mantle ringwoodite.
"Right now, we're one-for-one, because that ringwoodite had some H2O in it, but we didn't know if it was normal," Schmandt told Live Science. So Schmandt and geophysicist Steven Jacobsen of Northwestern University in Illinois set out to observationally test if other mantle ringwoodite also contains water.
The researchers knew the crystal structure of ringwoodite allows the transition zone to hold water, but that structure changes if the material moves across the boundary to the lower mantle (due to increasing pressures and temperatures). Because the structure of minerals in the lower mantle can't trap water the way ringwoodite can, Schmandt and Jacobsen reasoned the rocks would melt as they flowed from the transition zone to the lower mantle. "Melting is just a mechanism of getting rid of the water," Schmandt said.
To test this hypothesis, Jacobsen and his colleagues conducted lab experiments to simulate what would happen to transition zone ringwoodite as it travels deeper into the Earth. They synthesized hydrous ringwoodite and recreated the temperatures and pressures it would experience in the transition zone by heating it with lasers and compressing it between hard, anvil-like diamonds.
Using their setup, they then slowly increased the temperature and pressure to mimic the conditions in the lower mantle. The ringwoodite transformed into another mineral called silicate perovskite, and transmission electron microscopy showed that the mineral contained silicate melt around single crystals of perovskite.
"What that tells us is if there is similarly hydrated ringwoodite in the transition zone that's dragged down, we would expect it to produce melt," Schmandt said. "Because melt changes how seismic waves propagate, that's a target I can hunt for [with seismometers]."
Finding the melt
Using the Earthscope USArray, a network of portable seismometers across the United States, Schmandt analyzed seismic waves as they passed from the transition zone to the lower mantle. He found the waves slowed as they crossed into the lower mantle, suggesting that melt was present in the boundary. Importantly, the decrease in seismic velocity didn't happen everywhere — models showed the wave velocity decreased only where material was flowing downward from the transition zone to the lower mantle, as the researchers predicted.
The melt produced in the boundary likely then flows back upward, returning to minerals that can hold the water, Schmandt said, adding that this mechanism allows the transition zone to be a stable water reservoir.
"[The study] provides critical experimental support for the important role that the transition zone plays in controlling the melting behavior and flux of hydrogen in the deep Earth," Graham Pearson, a mantle geochemist at the University of Alberta, who wasn't involved in the work, told Live Science in an email.
Anna Kelbert, a geophysicist at Oregon State University who also wasn’t involved in the study, notes that scientists have previously used numerous approaches to look for evidence of Earth's interior water reservoir, but this is the first time researchers have searched for clues of the reservoir by focusing on the potential water-induced melting at the bottom of the transition zone. "It provides an important multidisciplinary perspective on this problem," Kelbert said. "It has important implications on our understanding of the behavior of subducting slabs deep in the mantle, and on our understanding of [the] overall water budget/distribution in the Earth."
Schmandt hopes to now analyze seismic data from other areas across the globe and see how common mantle melting is. This would allow researchers to see if there's something special about the subduction history of the mantle beneath North America, or how the Earth's plates have shifted beneath one another over time.
The new findings will also help scientists better understand Earth's water cycle. "The surface water we have now came from degassing of molten rock. It came from the original rock ingredients of Earth," Schmandt said. "How much water is still inside the Earth today relative to the surface?"

Shedding Greenland

Greenland's fast-moving Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier is 'calving' a huge piece of ice, somewhere between 3.1 and 6.2 square miles in size.

Global Warming Averted ... 300 Million Years Ago

A vast mountain range on the supercontinent Pangea caused a massive drop in atmospheric CO2.

Daily Comic Relief

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Thai shrimp industry runs on brutal slavery and murder

A blockbuster investigative report in The Guardian reveals that the Thai shrimp/prawn fishing industry is powered by a brutal system of slavery through which trafficked workers are bought and sold by captains who starve, beat and murder them in sadistic displays intended to inspire fear in the remaining workforce. The major companies who import Thai prawns, like CP Foods, and their customers, which includes most major grocery stores, admit that there is a problem, but they do not conduct audits that go "all the way to the end of the supply chain." An anonymous Thai government spokesman claims that the problem could be easily dealt with, but there is no political will to do so.
"I thought I was going to die," said Vuthy, a former monk from Cambodia who was sold from captain to captain. "They kept me chained up, they didn't care about me or give me any food … They sold us like animals, but we are not animals – we are human beings." Another trafficking victim said he had seen as many as 20 fellow slaves killed in front of him, one of whom was tied, limb by limb, to the bows of four boats and pulled apart at sea. "We'd get beaten even if we worked hard," said another. "All the Burmese, [even] on all the other boats, were trafficked. There were so many of us [slaves] it would be impossible to count them all." CP Foods – a company with an annual turnover of $33bn (£20bn) that brands itself as "the kitchen of the world" – sells its own-brand prawn feed to other farms, and supplies international supermarkets, as well as food manufacturers and food retailers, with frozen or cooked prawns and ready-made meals. It also sells raw prawn materials for food distributors. In addition to Walmart, Carrefour, Costco and Tesco, the Guardian has identified Aldi, Morrisons, the Co-operative and Iceland as customers of CP Foods. They all sell frozen or cooked prawns, or ready meals such as prawn stir fry, supplied by CP Foods and its subsidiaries. CP Foods admits that slave labor is part of its supply chain.

25 Delicious Facts About Lobsters

If you are a seafood fan, or even if you aren't, here’s some things you should learn about lobsters. No recipes, though; these facts are about the animal itself, its anatomy, and life cycle. Some may ruin your appetite -at least for a short time. For example, lobsters communicate with each other by peeing!
14. Lobsters pee out of their faces. The urine comes from antennal glands located near the antennae. "They're greenish brown spots," Bayer says. "They actually look like two pieces of snot—that’s the best way to describe them. You'd have to open them up to see them." Peeing at each other is part of both fighting and courtship.

17. A lobster that's a pound and a half might carry 8000 to 10,000 eggs, which are kept in place by glue created in her cement glands. "The bigger they are, the more eggs they have," Bayer says. "You might have 30,000 or 40,000 on a really big lobster." If you’re eating lobster and find bright red stuff, that’s unextruded eggs—also known as roe.
Cement glands. That’s something you don’t read about every day. Ain’t nature wonderful? Read the rest of the list at mental_floss.

Super-Sized Before the Dinosaurs?

'Big Mouth Blunt Tooth,' a newly discovered fish, is challenging views on what life was like millions of years before dinosaurs existed.

Pilots in the O.C.

The sociable whales showed up in waters not frequented by the species in 18 years.

When Frogs Fly ...

How We Learned That Frogs Fly
Ninety years ago, scientists were debating the question of animal dispersal. How come there are kangaroos in Australia, and none in southern Africa? Certain frogs show up in warm ponds in one part of the world, but warm ponds a thousand miles away have none. Why?
Scientists in the 1930s hadn't yet come up with the notion of plate tectonics (that continents break up and move, carrying animals with them). Instead, the debate centered on two additional theories. First, that in ice ages, glaciers formed, sea levels dropped, creating land bridges that allowed frogs to hop great distances from one continent to another.

Frogs' Tongues ...

Beware the frog's tongue -- it holds the power to tackle things much bigger than the frog, itself.

Puppies What A Green Surprise

A pair of dog breeders in the Spanish province of Valladolid were surprised recently when two puppies were born green. "I couldn't believe it when I first saw them," Aida Vallelado Molina said.
"I thought the puppies were dirty and tried to clean them, but the color wouldn't come off," said Molina, who breeds hunting dogs with her father in the town of Laguna de Duero.
The animals, born on June 3rd, were smaller and weaker than the other pups in the litter. One of them, a female, died shortly after birth while the male pup is still alive, but very weak. He is now beginning to lose his pigment.

The cause of the death of the dead puppy, and the reason for its odd coloring, are now being investigated by local vet Daniel Valverde. "There are no other recorded cases of this happening in Spanish scientific literature," he said after contacting Madrid's Complutense University. Valverde is now carrying out virological and bacteriological tests to try and find an answer.

Animal Pictures