September, 2023:
- NASA’s first asteroid sample, from asteroid Bennu, safely landed and is now in a clean room awaiting analysis. That’ll take some time yet, but let’s just say that the journey was definitely the reward—the first of many rewards, I suspect.
- FEMA and the FCC are planning a test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and the Wirless Emergency Alerts (WEA) on Wednesday, October 4 of this year. The timing for the alert is 2:20 PM EST. The WEA portion of the test will be heard on cellphones. The EAS portion of the test will go out to broadcast radio and TV stations. The test broadcasts will announce themselves as test broadcasts and no action need be taken. As I read the release, the EAS portion will last for one minute and the WEA portion for half an hour. (H/t to Don Doerres.)
- Older adults who use the Internet regularly have only half the risk of dementia compared to those who use the net occasionally or not at all. I avoid social media fistfights and use the time I devote to the net to learning new things and promoting my books. Pace Woody Allen, my brain is my first favorite organ.
- The Raspberry Pi 5 has been announced, and the 4 GB version should be available in quantity to end-users by midlate October. (The 8 GB version may not ship until November or December.) Tom’s Hardware has a good long-form overview. The CPU is an A76 quad core with all cores running by default at 2.4 GHz. It overclocks well. Oh, and it has a power button!
- NOAA’s average temperature anomaly chart for the contiguous US shows no clear trend from 2005 to the present. The data come from USCRN, the United States Climate Reference Network, all sites of which are well away from any UHI.
- UHIs bias temperatures quite a bit. Here’s a new study from the peer-reviewed journal Climate that credits UHIs for most of recent recorded warming. As much as 40% of the warming measured since 1850 might be due to measurements made in cities rather than out in the natural environment.
- An NHS study shows that cannabis is a “hyperaccumulator” of heavy metals, especially lead and cadmium. Regular users show hazardous levels of those metals, and traces of several othes, in blood and urine.
- Cannabis isn’t the only hyperaccumulator of heavy metals. Brazil nuts contain 1,000 times the amount of radium found in typical foods. Barium too. I gave up Brazil nuts in my teens because it was just too damned much work to get them out of their shells. Right choice, wrong reason. But emphatically the right choice.
- Another NHS study shows that typical N95 masks emit hazardous levels of toxic organic compounds linked to seizures and cancer. So not only will N95 masks not protect you from COVID, over the long haul they could kill you.
- The penny jars are still coughing up old uncirculated pennies in considerable numbers. Over the past week or so I got brilliant uncirculated (BU) 1976-D and 1969-S pennies. Peculiarly (or maybe not) the uncirculated pennies I find before 2000 tend to be older than pre-2000 pennies showing signs of daily handling. I think this proves my theory that they’ve spent a long time in a jar in somebody’s closet.
- There is now reasonable evidence that night people are at greater risk for type II diabetes than morning people. The researchers seem puzzled by this, but I have a hypothesis based on a lecture I heard 25 years ago at the Mayo Clinic here in Scottsdale: Night people stay up late, but their work or school schedules begin at the same time as for morning people, so night people get less sleep overall. Mayo Climic researchers found that dogs deprived of sleep both gained weight and developed diabetes. There is a metabolic connection to sleep quantity and quality that we don’t fully understand yet, but the research is out there and we could use a lot more.
- A new baby giraffe was born back in July with no spots. Actually, no reticulation; her coat is uniformly the color of giraffe spots. She may be the only such giraffe in the world, and although she’s enjoying the spotlight now, I don’t think she’ll be quite as happy once she gets into giraffe middle school.
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