As a followup to THIS POST from 2019, scientists have determined that the asteroid or comet that struck the Yucatan around 66 million years ago, ending the era of the dinosaurs, hit during springtime:
A site in North Dakota shows a bunch of fish who had all died within 30 minutes of the impact, jumbled up with tree branches as whatnot due to the wave that rolled through and stirred everything up. I imagine there is, or will be, a hell of a market for fossils from that site; it’s one of the few places on the planet where you have fossils pointing to one exact, understandable and important moment in time. “This specific animal was killed by *the* impactor” is a heck of a notion.
UPDATE: Well, poop. looks like the video got yoinked. My guess is that it was removed for copyright reasons due to the use of the Jam Hammer music.
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More specifically, the video of a seriously obese orangutan driving a golf cart set to Jan Hammer music from “Miami Vice.” Truly, the 80’s were a magical time.
PS: it would be my guess that the golf cart has secondary controls, especially as you can briefly glimpse a human in the passenger seat.
The pig was genegineered to have a heart that would not be rejected by a human immune system, so that human blood would not coagulate within it, and so that the pig would not grow too big (at one year old it was 240 pounds, when otherwise it would have been about 450 pounds).
That’s cool and all, but I imagine that the technique that will eventually win in the future will be hearts (and other organs) cloned from the patient themselves, with whatever genetic modifications to prevent whatever the problem was in the first place. At first that will probably mean organs grown in machines (perhaps even 3D printed), but someday I suspect that your new heart might well be grown in place. Exactly *how* that will happen, I don’t know: maybe the new heart grows next to the old one, starting small and gradually taking it’s place, so for a while you have two beating hearts. Or maybe the new cloned heart will grow *in* the old one… a few scattered new, modified cells seeded throughout the old damaged heart, consuming and replacing the old heart like The Thing, so that it looks like the heart is rapidly repairing itself when in fact it’s being repalced. In the end such a therapy will be of no greater drama than getting a shot of antibiotics today, but the years, perhaps decades, spent perfecting it will doubtless have some exciting failures and screwups.
Can’t speak to the plot, but it sure looks pretty:
Finally gave the t rex some fuzz.
At the end of the last movie, a bunch of dinosaurs were released in the forests of northern California. This would be a problem that would last a very short time: most of the dinosaurs seemed to be lone examples of their species, so breeding will be minimal. In this world, people have known about real live dinosaurs for decades, so there would not be a lot of time lost on disbelief. And once people found out that there are velociraptors and Tyranosaurs running around, every hunter in a 2,000 mile radius would race to the scene.
China certainly seems to be in ascendance, while the US is definitely in decline. The latter fact does not need to be true, but we, like the British Empire before us, are allowing it to happen. When the US fades, *someone* (or several someones) will certainly attempt to step in and fill the void. The void will be one of power, of course, economic and military. but it will also be one of culture… views on individual liberty, cultural norms, ethics and so on. Anyone who can fill the military/economic void will bring their culture with them, and there’s not a reason in the entire universe why their culture needs to be as enlightened as America’s has been.
So, if you’re happy to see the US back off, get ready for *this* on a global scale:
In one case, a dog owner named Ms Fu witnessed through her home security camera as people clothed in hazmat suits entered her home and beat her pet corgi to death with iron rods while she was away in a quarantine facility. She tested negative for the coronavirus.
Sure, the fifty million – or more – Chinese dead at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party is certainly a bigger deal than minor functionaries killing pets. But somehow modern campus leftists and ChiCom apologists seem perfectly happy to wave away the deaths of mere *humans;* after all, the only thing worse for the Earth than humans are white cishet capitalist humans, and a lot of lefties would be perfectly happy to see a lot of *that* *type* exterminated. But puppies and kittens? A little harder to gloss over murdering *them.*
And of course there’s the little problem that China is actively destroying the planet. Not only are they belching CO2 into the air at a phenomenal rate, they are dumping vast mountains of toxic garbage into the ocean… at the same time they’re stripping the oceans bare of all life. There are worse things that could happen than if Chinas fishing fleet were sent to the bottom.
Nixon opening China to the world will be seen in future centuries by the few remaining historians as one of the worst ideas in all human history. Sounded good at the time, but the unintended consequence could well be the conversion of Earth into a sparsely populated trash heap.
The fact that a piece of art is made *specifically* to “tug at the heartstrings” does not negate the fact that sometimes that art can do that job very, very well. Behold:
And if you think *that’s* rough, here’s a longer-form comic by the same artist. If you’ve ever known the company of a black cat, this one will ruin your whole evening.