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A new theory explains Jupiter’s perplexing origin |
A new computer model solves a pair of Jovian riddles. |
Surprising Science |
• Putting the two questions together revealed the answer to both. |
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The 2018 Collection |
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Creating an heirloom. |
Since 2015, Annie Ekstrom Bridal has specialized in handmade custom bridal veils and accessories. |
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Annie Ekstrom began designing veils after her own experience trying to find a veil to match her wedding gown. After shopping around, she realized that no one could sit down with her and work through the style she had in mind. An avid sewer her whole life, Annie decided to create her own veil. |
Soon, Annie found herself creating veils for friends, friends of friends, and eventually Annie Ekstrom Bridal was born. |
Could a Full Moon Keep You Up at Night? |
Study finds it’s a time when people get less shut-eye, have shorter periods of deep sleep. |
“A lot of people complain that they have bad sleep around a full moon. These are anecdotes, but you hear it from a lot of different people,” said Silvia Frey, a neurobiologist at the University of Basel. |
“So, we were sitting there on a full moon night and just discussing this, and we thought maybe we can go back in our data and align it with the date of the full moon,” Frey said. “It was just pure curiosity.” |
That study included 33 healthy people who each spent three and a half days in the carefully controlled environment of a sleep lab. They couldn’t see clocks or outside light. Temperature and humidity were held constant. Scientists kept tabs on their hormones and on brain activity. They also recorded how long it took peo... |
Researchers admit the study has some important limitations. Because they used preexisting data, they weren’t able to get a sense of how sleep might change for a single individual who was followed for an entire month. But they say the retrospective nature of the study might also be a positive. Because nobody, not even t... |
“We didn’t expect to find such huge differences, I must admit,” Frey said. “The drop in melatonin was really unexpected. It points really towards a physiological thing that is happening. Like a circalunar clock,” she said. |
Researchers admit they’re not sure why human biology might be in tune with the moon. Frey said it’s probably an evolutionary relic, left over from a time when it might not have been safe for humans to sleep deeply under the light of a bright moon, making them vulnerable to night-time predators. |
An expert who wasn’t involved in the research said the observations were intriguing. |
“A significant amount of research has been done on circadian rhythms in humans, looking at the light and dark cycles within a 24-hour day and how they influence melatonin production and the overall body clock,” said Shelby Harris, director of the behavioral sleep medicine program at Montefiore Medical Center in New Yor... |
“This is the first study to establish this periodicity in healthy adults as well,” Harris said. |
By Brenda Goodman |
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We had our son’s 4th birthday party at Little Monsters and it took all the stress of organising away so there was more time to enjoy the party ! The kids had a fab time and it was a huge success! Definitely worth doing especially including the character! Spider-Man was awesome, so my son says!! |
Star Trek Discovery: Season 0.5 |
It’s basically a given at this point that any entry in a long running franchise is going to generate a lot of emotional turmoil. Some of us are happy to return to a beloved universe. Some of us are angry that people would dare. Most of us are afraid of how they’re going to screw up the beloved franchise. Most of us, I ... |
As a kid who grew up with Star Trek, the initial announcement of Star Trek Discovery thrilled me. We’ve had our ups and downs, the franchise and I, but the sight of that Starfleet arrowhead filled me excitement. And then… nothing. Nothing for a very long time, beyond rumors of trouble. When the first glimpse of the shi... |
Until CBS offered the service free for a month. Nine episodes and a month to watch them? No problem. |
Star Trek Discovery follows Michael Burnham, a foster child of Sarek and Amanda, raised on Vulcan, now a Starfleet officer. When the series opens, she’s the first office aboard the USS Shenzou, under the command of Capt Phillipa (Michelle Yeoh), when they run across Klingons for the first time in decades. Burnham trie... |
Discovery is a testbed for a new sort of FTL, a “spore drive” that uses the spores of some sort of transdimensional fungus to jump instantaneously from place to place, and for reasons of plot, her commander, one Capt. Lorca, wants Burnham onboard to help weaponize both it and a giant, transdimensional space tardigrade ... |
“I’m a homosexual Lego man! How diverse are we!” |
So how is the show? I’ll be honest. I was prepared to hate it, and the part of me that was hoping for some schadenfreude is kind of disappointed to find out that I don’t. The show is not without its flaws. It really bugs me that this Starfleet visually looks nothing like the Pike-era Starfleet, despite being roughly co... |
In spite of all that, I found myself surprisingly entertained. I’m not bothered by the silliness of the spore-drive: Star Trek likes to pretend it loves science, but it really just sort of smears itself with science jelly as a sort of mating ritual. The fact that the spore drive doesn’t appear anywhere else in Star Tre... |
Doug Jones, as always, does a fantastic job when decked out in 7,000 pounds of makeup; the man is the practical effects version of Andy Serkis. Discovery herself isn’t entirely hideous (although the spinning saucer section during spore jumps is ridiculous). The story of what I can only assume is a ultimately fatally fl... |
Weirdly, I feel like Discovery hasn’t completely lost the soul of Star Trek (Though The Orville remains the Trekier Trek). There’s a trick I use for making Star Trek Voyager‘s adventures in incompetence palatable: Not every ship in the fleet is the Enterprise. Not every captain is competent. Voyager was the story of a ... |
Star Trek Discovery is balanced on the blade of knife, and it could fall any way. It could give in completely to the modern love of grimdark subversion; or it could struggle its way out from under the weight of its the less than stellar hand its creators dealt it to become something genuinely good– you can see hints of... |
I’m still pretty ticked about not having it on Netflix, though. |
Joshua M. Young is an underemployed theologian, sci-fi author (featured in Tales of the Once and Future King, Forbidden Thoughts, and author of the forthcoming novel Do Buddhas Dream of Enlightened Sheep) and blogger at He can be reached on and Twitter @BadgerSensei. |
Thursday, August 7, 2014 |
Ever been driving while using your phone's navigation, make a "wrong" turn and hear it say, "rerouting"? Random trivia - I hear that a lot from my phone, lol. However, today it has a different context. Show prep. Things are going great... I've been feeling good about where my body is at and I'm looking to the finish li... |
And then we weighed in yesterday. |
I've started losing muscle. We did another weigh in this morning just to be sure it wasn't a fluke (it wasn't) and now we're rerouting. Adding protein and calories, reducing HIIT. We're so close that at this point it's really all about the fine-tuning. This isn't a big deal. It's just time to reroute. |
Today's changes were: no fasted cardio in the a.m., removing HIIT from my evening cardio, and adding a bit more protein. I did back/biceps/shoulders this morning, and in a bit I'll return to do my 45 minutes steady state on the stair master. I'll follow that with 20 minutes in the dry sauna, then shower and go do my p... |
On another note... because I have an event next week (HUGE news to share but I have to wait), I need a tan, like STAT! So, for the very first time in my life - and in spite of watching the Final Destination movies - I went to a tanning salon. A spray tan wouldn't work - I sweat too much and it wouldn't have time to dev... |
The manager was not there, someone else was and she was... chatty and distracted, I think that's a nice way of saying it. The end of the story is that I couldn't see the clock, but I am fairly certain that I was not locked in that box for the agreed upon 7 minutes. If I was, that was the longest 7 minutes of my life an... |
And yes... I know all about the dangers of indoor tanning. Enough said. |
So, back to the event... it's going to be a bit of a schedule pretzel, but it'll be fun! At this point, I think I'll be doing my cardio afterwards at the hotel... while everyone else is partying, lol. We're staying overnight, so all my food has to come with. On the fun side, I get to dress up a bit! Yay for being girly... |
Apart from these things, we've got one more event we're prepping for... Once my shows are done, we're having a casual bbq the next day to celebrate, then the following week, Bill and I are running away! OMG! 5 weeks from today! Ok, we're not running, but we are driving. ;-) We cannot wait! I keep sending him pics of wh... |
It's been forever since we've really taken any vacation, let alone by ourselves! In fact, I can't even remember the last time we got away for more than a day or two completely alone. As far as we're concerned, it'll be perfect if we never even speak to another soul the whole time! Hahaha! Seriously though, we're lookin... |
Then, once we return, we'll be packing up Shiloh and helping her move back to San Diego because her hubby is coming home!!!! Cross your fingers, it looks like his deployment will end at the end of September. :-) We've missed him so much! It'll be fantastic to have him home! Of course, I'm going to have major Mommy-with... |
Ok. I'm day 6 no carbs, and my fuggy brain has taken more than an hour and a half to write this post. Lol. Oy! Ready to recharge tomorrow! :-) Sorry if I've rambled. Speaking of no carbs... my car locked me inside it today. Yep. Couldn't get out. Brainiac that I am right now pushed a button that shouldn't be pushed (an... |
Carbs - they're good for your brain. |
Just sayin'. ;-) |
We're nearly there, folks! 2 1/2 weeks from the ANBC show, and 4 1/2 weeks from the NPC! |
1. Okay!! So where are the pics of the ripped back?? I'm all anxious to see!! Or are you holding out now that the show is so close? I guess the real question is: So do you stop and strike a pose whenever you are walking by a window or mirror so you can see if your muscles are coming out to play? :-P |
As for the car....I guess you could always carry a white coat in the vehicle with you (a cotton/canvas one) with long belt can just hold it up and smirk. Let them wonder if you really NEED it or not! hahahaha! (of course no offense to anyone who actually DOES need the white coat). ;-) ~Jen |
1. Hahaha, Jen!!! Yes, I do indeed utilize every reflective surface I pass ;-) LOL! And I keep checking my abs just to make sure I didn't dream them up, haha! Still there? Oh good. Still there? LOL! |
Bwahahaha, I absolutely need that very special jacket! ;-) |
Back... I'll be posting the pic today... woot! |
A Voice in the Crowd |
What’s good and what’s bad about unpopular opinions. |
A Voice in the Crowd |
Image: MirageC / Getty |
The Huffington Post recently drew eye rolls with a tweet claiming that the beloved children’s TV classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was “seriously problematic.” The accompanying video pointed out all kinds of bigotry and abuse in the show—which, as responders were quick to point out, the show was not actually endor... |
But you can’t cause an uproar by just saying what people already know. And lately, causing an uproar seems to be a major goal, if not the major goal, of many who formulate and proclaim opinions for a living. From NPR’s Ira Glass dissing Shakespeare to the various debunkers of It’s a Wonderful Life, trolling cultural ic... |
The Toronto Star actually dedicated an entire column, titled “The Heretic,” to trolling. The idea was to let the paper’s writers take turns sharing “a wildly unpopular opinion.” I found this out one day when I noticed that my timeline was full of angsty chatter about, of all things, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. |
I soon traced the angst to this Toronto Star article: “‘Ode to Joy’ has an odious history. Let’s give Beethoven’s most overplayed symphony a rest.” After glancing over the ideological and political history of the beloved piece, music writer John Terauds threw his bucket of cold water: “But from today’s perspective we k... |
It’s hard to imagine anyone coming up with a more trollish take on anything. (It’s strange, for instance, that a music writer has absolutely nothing to say about the musical value of the piece—that he wouldn’t, for instance, suggest just concentrating on that for a while, instead of dropping the symphony from the reper... |
I didn’t disagree with all the columns; I’ve been saying since 1997 that Titanic is overrated. But “The Heretic” got me thinking about “unpopular opinions,” and the point of having a column just to share them. Does the value of an unpopular opinion lie solely in its lack of popularity? |
To argue that it does is to head down a dangerous road. It’s to suggest that the thing that the opinion is about has no value in itself—that its value lies solely in the way people react to it. That’s an error that seems expressly designed for our social media age, which allows us to spend much of our day reacting—reac... |
Christians have a safeguard against this kind of thinking. When we quote Paul’s famous words to the Philippians—“whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things,” we’re arguing against th... |
But we’re increasingly going against a cultural climate where it’s not whether you said something good or true or beautiful (or the reverse), or whether you drew someone’s attention to something good or true or beautiful (or the reverse), that’s important. It’s how many people you managed to offend or upset or “own” wh... |
Douglas McLennan of ArtsJournal—which had tweeted out the Beethoven column and so faced its own share of the backlash—wrote, “The drug is in the hating. Beethoven is a cultural icon at the pinnacle of Western Civilization. He transcends music, a seemingly unassailable symbol of achievement in all of human history. It d... |
There’s a lot in what McLennan says about the way social media operates, but I think the angry reactions to the “Heretic” column may go a little deeper than that. Perhaps when we rush to defend a cultural icon, it’s because we recognize that there’s good reason for it to be a cultural icon—in other words, that the thin... |
Emina Melonic, a survivor of the war in Bosnia who still owns the tape of the Ninth that she listened to in a refugee camp, responded to Terauds’s column, “In a time of great suffering, this music brought hope, however fragmented it may have been. My teenage mind did not care about political or aesthetic interpretation... |
Art isn’t just what we make of it. Art has meaning that transcends our circumstances and, at its best, makes something of us. |
And ironically, the social media culture in which everyone has a voice, leading to a thousand opinions and arguments rushing by every second, may have renewed our hunger for a few shared “core beliefs” and “fundamental values,” even if they’re only beliefs about which artworks are great enough to stand the test of time... |
“Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows,” James tells us (1:17). A good gift implies a Giver, one who Christians believe imbues it with worth and value. We have reason to believe that some things are inherently, objectivel... |
So is there ever a time when it’s a good idea to share an opinion just because it’s an unpopular opinion? |
There might be. One example would be a “Heretic” column by Murray Whyte, titled “Give Toronto’s most hated new piece of public art a second chance.” Whyte acknowledged that criticisms of the unwieldy new sculpture known as Three Points Where Two Lines Meet had some merit (“if I lived in the second-floor apartments whos... |
Regardless of how one feels about the sculpture in question, there is great value in this kind of unpopular opinion. For one thing, it’s localized. Whyte didn’t just throw a broad opinion about an iconic artifact onto the internet to troll a bunch of strangers. He wrote about a specific issue in a neighborhood he knows... |
It’s this last point that should really influence the way we think about the formulation and expression of unpopular opinions. When public opinion is mostly rushing in one direction, there is value in a voice that asks us to stop and think, to reconsider, to look for goodness where we haven’t been able to see any or to... |
Gina Dalfonzo is features editor for Christianity Today. |
Subscribe to CT and get one year free. |
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1971 OPS |
The professional standards, capability and flexibility of the much expanded Service were soon to be put to the acid test. From early 1971, as the political situation on the sub-continent deteriorated, the IAF was alerted to the possibility of another armed conflict. For some weeks in November, both Indian and Pakistang... |
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