A research led by William Anderegg of the University of Utah School of Biological Sciences, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found out that pollen seasons were now longer than 30 years ago. And, if you have an allergic reaction to pollen, you know what this means. This means that you get to deal with your pollen allergy longer than before.

[The] research shows that pollen seasons start 20 days earlier, are 10 days longer, and feature 21% more pollen than in 1990—meaning more days of itchy, sneezy, drippy misery.

And what is the reason for the longer pollen season? Unsurprisingly, it’s climate change.

"The strong link between warmer weather and pollen seasons provides a crystal-clear example of how climate change is already affecting peoples' health across the U.S.," says Anderegg.

[...]

The results showed that climate change alone could account for around half of the pollen season lengthening and around 8 percent of the pollen amount increasing. By splitting the study years into two periods, 1990-2003 and 2003-2018, the researchers found that the contribution of climate change to increasing pollen amounts is accelerating.

"Climate change isn't something far away and in the future. It's already here in every spring breath we take and increasing human misery," says Anderegg. "The biggest question is—are we up to the challenge of tackling it?"

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Myriams-Fotos/ Pixabay)

Sometimes, hitting electronic devices makes them work again. Blurry television? Give it a nice tap at its side and the image will get clearer. Computer not booting? Give it a kick and it will boot. This has been an age-old practice. You’ve probably done this, and I’m not going to lie, I have, too.

Surprisingly, this method is recognized even by people in the tech industry, and it even has a technical name — “percussive maintenance”, which means to “hit a malfunctioning device to make it work”.

(Image Credit: Viva La Dirt League/ YouTube)

Our search for aliens still continues in 2021. This time, some scientists say that the key to finding them could be the energy coming from a black hole. They theorize that these extraterrestrial beings might be collecting the said energy.

This energy-harvesting technology could leave traces just outside a spinning black hole's event horizon — the boundary beyond which a black hole's gravity becomes too strong for matter and energy to escape. And the process could explain at least some flares of plasma, a white-hot form of charged gas, that scientists have already detected near these massive disruptions in time and space. a new study published Jan. 13 in the journal Physical Review D proposes.

And while it’s only a science-fiction idea at the moment — the nearest black hole to us is thought to be more than 1,000 light-years away, which is too far to be reached in many human lifetimes — if astrophysicists could ever work out a method of tapping these cosmic behemoths, rotating black holes could become a near-limitless source of energy for a technologically advanced civilization.

Learn more about this theory over at Space.com.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

With the flashy red and gold colors that it displays, the Eumaeus atala butterfly, in its caterpillar state, already makes a statement to the potential predators around it: “I’m not a good meal. Don’t eat me.” And it is not lying when it tells this. Why? Because it’s poisonous. But how did it become a poisonous butterfly? The answer lies in the food it wants to munch on:

plants called cycads that have been around since before dinosaurs roamed the Earth and contain a potent liver toxin called cycasin.

The Atala butterfly’s five closest relatives also share the same behavior, and they are poisonous, too.

Learn more about the Atala butterfly and its relatives over at EurekAlert.

(Image Credit: Robert Robbins, Smithsonian/ EurekAlert)

You can talk to Alexa. You can ask her questions and give her commands. But she doesn't have a physical body--or at least something even vaguely human.

But let's say that Alexa had a human body. Specifically, a hot, sensuously muscular male body that responds to your deepest desires. The advertising firm Lucky Generals tells the funny story of one Alexa owner and her beleaguered husband.

-via Nag on the Lake

January 2, 1900. After thirteen years of planning and construction, the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal was finally opened. The said canal, which was 45 kilometers long, was built in order to reverse the flow of the Chicago River, as well as to redirect the waste away from Lake Michigan, the city’s source of drinking water. It was great, but something unexpected happened.

… it also connected the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins, two of the world’s largest — and until then, isolated — freshwater ecosystems, allowing invasive species to pour through the opening and wreak ecological havoc.

The result was the alteration of the hydrology of two-thirds of the United States.

This brings us to think: Should we tinker with nature? Should we continue attempting to control it? These are the questions that Elizabeth Kolbert asks to her readers in her book titled “Under a White Sky.”

We’ve put our minds toward damming or diverting most of the planet’s rivers, replacing vast tracts of natural ecosystems with crops, and burning so much fossil fuel that 1 in 3 molecules of atmospheric carbon dioxide came from human action, she writes. We’ve warmed the atmosphere, raised sea levels, erased countless species and forged an uncertain future for humankind and the planet.

Our collective ingenuity got us into this mess, and Kolbert explores whether that same ingenuity can get us out. This is “a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems,” she writes.

Learn more about Kolbert’s book over at ScienceNews.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: jpeter2/ Pixabay)

강아지 방구소리 들을사람 pic.twitter.com/2bPBoqM6OO

— 옹ᯅ̈ (@onging_126) February 2, 2021

Have you ever run across someone who had such an amazing encyclopedic knowledge of everything on the internet that it made you speechless? Maybe it was someone you knew, but you never knew they spent that much time online, or had such a memory for detail. That happened recently during a workplace Slack chat. Most Slack conversations are short and to the point, as people communicate with others about work. But occasionally, someone will share something funny. In this instance, it was the above video of a dog farting. The coworker who uses the display name Samer stole all the thunder, so to speak.  

Samer:

somehow i recognize that audio from the guy who farted into the walmart phone, but it’s still good

Patrick: oh damn really?

Samer: yeah, the brassiness of it is distinct

Patrick: this man knows his toots

David Roth: Tuba Energy

The next 20 minutes gave us a Slack conversation for the books. Everyone in the loop was impressed at Samer’s response, and expressed it in all different ways. You can read a transcript (which contains NSFW language) at Defector. A good time was had by all. -via Kottke

Villu Jaanisoo is an Estonian sculptor who lives and teaches in Finland. His source materials include everyday discarded materials, such as tires. Elephant is a life-sized public sculpture made from them and erected in 2018.

Jaanisoo's current project is an even more ambitious build: a fully functional art studio and gallery that floats in Helsinki's harbor.

-via Street Art Utopia

Johan Martin, a master pastry chef, is a specialist in Viennoiserie, a particular type of puff pastry. The Cordon Bleu school describes it as:

[...] the 'bridge' between pâtisserie and French bread. These goods are typically made with white flour and active yeast cultures, which cause the dough to rise quickly and achieve the perfect flakiness. Some are instead made using an enriched puff pastry.

In an interview with So Good magazine, Martin insisted that "The perfect croissant does not exist." But his work, such as this astonishing chessboard, suggests otherwise.

One day four years ago, at the Goffin Lab in Vienna, Figaro the cockatoo saw pebble sitting outside his cage. Figaro wanted the pebble, but how could he get it from where he was? Figaro had the most amazing idea. He tried to get the pebble using a shard of bamboo.

Impressed, the researchers replaced the pebble with a cashew, triggering Figaro to stick his beak through the bars of his cage and gnaw off a splinter of wood from the very beam the cashew was resting on, before using the splinter to reel the cashew into his tensile beak.

But that’s not the end of Figaro’s story. Figaro also managed to pass down his knowledge to his fellow cockatoos.

Learn more about Figaro’s story over at Good News Network.

(Image Credit: Alice Auersperg, University of Vienna’s Goffin Lab)

Do you need to work from home, but don't have a good home office available? Japan, the nation that perfected the vending machine, has a solution. Sora News 24 tells us about the Telecube, which is a complete, portable office:

A Telecube has everything one person needs to work or study efficiently: a charging station, electrical outlets, a WiFi connection, and soundproof walls so you can get those Zoom meetings done. There’s even a ventilation option so you can change out the air, a much-appreciated option in these hazardous times.

The price is about $2.37 for 15 minutes of access.

Photo: Telecube

All computers can be vulnerable to cyber attacks, and because modern aircraft have computers integrated in them, they could be vulnerable, too. Engineers were aware of this fact way back in 1994, when the 777 airliner was first rolled out. Ever since then, they have been thinking of how to defend against these cyber attacks.

So far, the protections devised by those engineers—and the ones who came after them—have worked. No hacker has ever penetrated the computers of an airliner’s flight control system or any part of its avionics. The not-so-shocking news is that hackers have tried.

One of the men tasked to fight against hacks is Mike Vanguardia.

Vanguardia is a cybersecurity engineer with Boeing, the company that gave the world its first “e-Enabled” commercial airplane, the 787 Dreamliner. In 2006, as the Dreamliner was being born, the idea of an e-Enabled airplane—one that lets passengers connect to the Internet with commercial off-the-shelf electronics and Internet protocols, used for in-flight entertainment and some communications systems—wasn’t as scary as it is today. Back then, cybercrime was rare. Today, it is anything but. “The cyberthreat is always moving,” says Vanguardia, who is part of a team that studies the electronic connections on Boeing airliners, as they’re being designed, and tries to make sure that protections are built into them and into the airplanes’ software. His team, he says, is constantly asking, “What things have happened in the news that we haven’t thought about as we design?”

More about this story over at Air & Space Magazine.

(Image Credit: GDJ/ Pixabay)

The obituary for Margaret Marilyn DeAdder stands head and shoulders above everyday obits you may come across. It begins by describing her as many things, including “self-described Queen Bitch,” and then goes into the highlights of her life.  

Marilyn loved all children who weren’t her own and loved her own children relative to how clean-shaven they were. She excelled at giving the finger, taking no sh!t and laughing at jokes, preferably in the shade of blue. She did not excel at suffering fools, hiding her disdain, and putting her car in reverse. A voracious reader, she loved true crime, romance novels and the odd political book. Trained as a hairdresser before she was married, she was always doing somebody's hair in her kitchen, so much so her kitchen smelled of baking and perm solution. Marilyn had a busy life, but no matter what she was doing she always made time to run her kids’ lives as well. Her lifelong hobbies included painting, quilting, baking, gardening, hiking and arson. Marilyn loved tea and toast. The one thing she loved more than tea and toast was reheated tea and toast. She reheated tea by simply turning on the burner often forgetting about it. She burned many a teapot and caused smoke damage countless times, leaving her kids with the impression that fanning the smoke alarm was a step in brewing tea.

Oh, there’s lots more, including her relationships with her family members. All in all, it’s a loving and memorable tribute to a life well lived. No one will forget Margaret Marilyn DeAdder. Read the whole thing at the website of Cobb’s Funeral Home in New Brunswick.  -via Fark

Child prodigy Luca Yupanqui is launching her musical career early. She's 15 months old now, but her new album, Sounds of the Unborn, is a retrospective compilation from her time in the womb. Her parents, Elizabeth Hart and Iván Diaz Mathé, recorded her in-utero sounds and then digitally remixed them. CNN reports:

"The electrodes receive electromagnetic impulses that are translated into MIDI and then hooked up to synthesizers," Hart told CNN. The MIDI devices were placed on Hart's womb over 5 sessions, each one-hour long.[...]

In a release by Sacred Bones, Luca's music is defined as "the expression of life in its cosmic state -- pre-mind, pre-speculation, pre-influence, and pre-human."

Here's a sample from the album. As you can hear, Luca has a promising career ahead of her.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Sacred Bones Records

This film experiment shows that you can find pretty much anything you want in stock footage. If you have the time, money, and patience, you can string together whatever you want. Filmmaker Matthew Highton put in the time and effort to recreate every slip of The Simpsons intro scene using available stock footage. Fox Broadcasting really should use this for the show sometime. -via Fark