Moonlighting

Wasps are intense. Equipped with powerful toxins, they are most formidable and manipulative, especially when it comes to certain solitary species' insidious ways of raising their young by paralyzing and/or altering the host's behavior to enable the young to eat the host alive with little undo effort.

“I’ve been working on parasitoid wasps for a very long time,” remarked Jack Werren, a professor of biology at the University of Rochester. His fascination with these animals centers on their specialized venoms, which allow the wasps to be masterful physiological puppeteers. Parasitoid wasps are an enormous group of between 100,00 and 600,000 species that are parasitic when they are larvae, living on or frequently inside a host they eat alive. As free-living adults, they must find and subdue an appropriate creature to play host to their young, which they do with the aid of behavior-altering venoms. The emerald cockroach wasp, for example, transforms its formidable targets — cockroaches many times its size — into complacent meals for the wasps’ hungry offspring by manipulating the animals’ brain chemistry. The Glyptapanteles wasp goes even further, turning its caterpillar offerings into zombie bodyguards that protect the young wasps that have just eaten their way out of the caterpillars’ tissues. Another wasp, Reclinervellus nielseni, forces its arachnid victims to transform their webs into sturdy nests that will continue to protect the wasp larvae after the spiders expire.

A social wasp, Vespula germanica

Nature never ceases to amaze ...

The weird & the wonderful

Quantum Mechanics is based on probabilities and duality whereby a subatomic particle can be a wave or a particle depending on how said entity interacts with its environment, including on whether said entity is measured or not because measuring it (which requires energy) determines whether it's a particle or a wave at the time it's being measured.

Our general logic would assume that the object is either wave-like or particle-like by its very nature, and our measurements will have nothing to do with the answer. But quantum theory predicts that the result all depends on how the object is measured at the end of its journey. And that's exactly what a team from the Australian National University has now found.

"It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it," lead researcher and physicist Andrew Truscott said in a press release.

To yours truly, the experiment is wonderful but saying reality does not really exist is misleading as the entity does exist as a duality and only by applying energy to it by the act of measurement do we assign a specific state of the entity to either being a particle or a wave. This fact has been known for a long time but this elegant experiment proves this to be true without question.

Weird & wonderful indeed. :)

Schrodinger's cat lives. 

Be careful what you wish for

The CF known as Trumpcare or the repeal of Obamacare, being hatched in secret by McConnell and company, will incur blowback in ways that truly boggle the mind. Besides screwing 23 million Americans out of insurance for HC, it's also a tax break for the rich, something that augurs not well for the millions of Trump voters & the middle class who thought this guy was going to protect Social Security, Medicare and last but not least, health care with a new and improved version that's cheaper, more efficient and able to provide coverage for all Americans without question. 

A few days ago a Republican Senate aide was asked by a reporter why the GOP leadership felt the need to keep all the discussions for the health care bill completely under wraps and he replied, “We’re not stupid.” Leading Republicans know that what they’re planning is so poisonous to the voters that if they let anyone see the monstrosity they’re constructing before the bill is hurriedly voted on and signed into law by President Donald Trump, it could well cause riots. After all, according to recent polling, only 17 percent of the American people approve of the bill as it currently stands.

The fact is that Republicans are willing to destroy the health and financial security of millions of Americans so they can give massive tax cuts to Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and others like them who are lucky enough to be vastly wealthy. This is their first real chance to enact permanent tax cuts since 1986. (This Vox article explains why that is.) Republicans have been chasing this dream a very long time. It is their white whale, so important that even the prospect of millions of people suffering and going bankrupt is not enough to make them think better of it. They are willing to hold hands, jump over a cliff and commit political suicide for it.

From this writer's perspective here's hoping blowback will be a bitch for these venial bastards who are throwing millions under the bus in order to reap the paltry amounts of money they are getting from the real owners of the country. 

What America really needs

While America focuses on never ending war to finance the MICC, America is falling apart as we speak. BRT has talked about this impending catastrophe on numerous occasions as my loyal readers know but at this point in time, nothing is happening to rectify this very serious situation. Here's a graphic take on why repairing the country's infrastructure is absolutely essential to the continued existence of this once great nation.

It’s no secret that America’s infrastructure is in dire need of repairs. Earlier this year, America received her infrastructure report card from the American Society of Civil Engineers’ and received a repulsive D+. The ASCE guesstimates the US would need to spend $4.5 trillion by 2025 on infrastructure.

Here’s the breakdown of the report card:  

• Aviation: D
• Bridges: C+
• Dams: D
• Drinking Water: D
• Energy: D+
• Hazardous Waste: D+
• Inland Waterways: D
• Levees: D
• Parks and Recreation: D+
• Ports: C+
• Rail: B
• Roads: D
• Schools: D
• Solid Waste: C+
• Transit: D-
• Wastewater: D+

With that being said, I’ve spent the entire weekend inspecting America’s infrastructure at the Port of Baltimore. At some locations, I was given special access to a behind the scenes view of America’s crumbling infrastructure that the public is not allowed to see. The reasons you’re left out of the know is because it destroys the mainstream narrative that everything is awesome. Even Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba Group says, “the US wasted trillions on warfare instead of investing in infrastructure”.

Stockboard Asset gets it without question. 

Here's yet another video on America's biggest problem.

Less is More ... & ...

Channeling Congress ...

Rumor has it ... the Russians did it.

Kepler yet again :)

Exoplanet numbers keep rising and Kepler's a major reason why. Enjoy. 

3D on a large scale :)

3D on a very large scale. :) https://earth.google.com/web/

95%

How little we know about the ocean is truly staggering.

In the battle for mind-share, space vs. sea is no contest.

From the epic race to reach the surface of the moon, to the well-documented trials and tribulations of SpaceX’s rocket launches, space is widely regarded as mankind’s natural next step.

For centuries, we’ve gazed at the night sky attempting to decode the messages of the cosmos, but we’ve treated the ocean as a dumping ground or as a nemesis. In the era of big data, it’s strange to note that an estimated 95% of the world’s oceans still remain unexplored.

Nature never ceases to amaze

Toons yet again

Blessed servitude

Wheel of misfortune

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. - Macbeth

Us vs. Them

The definition of insanity

The predators are winning .... this time :)

KILLER DRILLERS  Predators such as moon snails (Naticarius orientalis shown) that kill by drilling through other animals’ shells offer a rare chance to test an idea about the power of enemies.

The predator/prey arms race has been around for a very long time as seen by the chart below and by data garnered by researchers regarding, in this case, shell drillers of the carnivorous kind. 

“Predators got bigger — three words!” is Klompmaker’s bullet point for the work. Over the last 450 million years or so, drill holes have grown in average size from 0.35 millimeters to 3.25 millimeters, Klompmaker and an international team report June 16 in Science. Larger holes generally mean larger attackers, the researchers say, after looking at 556 modern drillers and the size of their attack holes.

Prey changed over millennia, too, but there’s no evidence for a shift in body size. The ratio of drill-hole size to prey size became 67 times greater over time, the researchers conclude.

It’s “the rise of the bullies,” says coauthor Michal Kowalewski of the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Nature, like money, never sleeps.

Bigger and bigger

Drill holes (example from a shell about 4 million years old from the Netherlands, left) tended to get larger in relation to the size of the attacked shell as the periods in geologic history marched by (graph, right). This trend and other ways of analyzing drill holes suggest predators outpaced their prey in body size.