Category: Science&Technology

The summer solstice is one such day of the year when the night is the shortest throughout. This day receives most sunlight throughout the year. This is officially the first day of summer, and this is when the Sun would be at its pinnacle throughout the daytime. Even though the 21st century has seen us shift away from the vast beauties of nature, it wouldn’t go amiss to say that summer and winter solstices and autumn and spring equinoxes are four such phenomena that receive a lot of attention and adulation throughout the ages. It also wouldn’t be wrong to mention that the body would receive much energy, positive in nature, that would help it. Since history repeats itself, it is inevitable that the display and worship of these natural events that took place centuries ago would be present again, in this present century. This is a way to connect to nature and understand the dichotomy or the binary between man and nature. But, there are four such rituals that do not take time, to fully enjoy the summer solstice: 1. Witness the Sunrise Wake up before dawn. Watch the sky as it gets illuminated by the dynamic vestiges of the morning sun. The amount of positive energy that would reach you is tumultuous as these rays are pure and powerful. The body is a solar conduit, and these rays invigorate it. 2. Activation of the Solar Body Due to the similarity between the force which keeps us alive and the force which keeps this Earth moving, and in orbit, watching the Sunrise and feeling the Sun rays hit every node of your body, can be refreshing. As these Sun rays would always balance the equilibrium between the Earth and the body. The body is solar, and so is the Earth. 3. Introspection This is the time to introspect unto yourself where you stand in life as a human. The journey you undertake can be understood at this stage because it allows you to reflect upon your actions and the plans that you would go through later in your life. 4. Go Outside Needlessly informative, go outside. Have a picnic. Camp in the wood. Feel the complete Sun rays hit you and bring you from the deep, dark corner to a place which is bright, and optimistic. FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM HERE

The post High Cosmic Energies Of June Summer Solstice Today: Get Ready For A Huge Energy Shift! appeared first on I Believe In Mother Nature.

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This content was originally published here.

Editor’s note

TeleSUR English today reported on China’s strong support for North Korean leader Kim Jung Un’s “peace efforts on the peninsula”; and successes in constructing the country along socialist lines. The victory of North Korea at the United Nations sanctions committee meeting through the joint defence of China and Russia was also reported on. Black Opinion now republishes the article by TeleSUR English:

China and North Korea have announced a deepening of diplomatic ties and strategic cooperation a day ahead of the Chinese leader’s ‘historic visit’ to the upper peninsula, dampening United States attempts to peel away Chinese support toward the Korean nation.

On Wednesday, President Xi penned an op-ed for Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of the ruling Korean Workers Party (WPK).

In the article, Xi pledged China’s support for Kim Jung Un’s approach to peace efforts on the peninsula.

“We are pleased to see that with Chairman Kim’s correct decisions and the concerted efforts of all parties concerned, the general trend of peaceful dialogue on the Korean Peninsula has taken shape, and a political settlement to the Peninsula issue sees a rare historical opportunity, which has been universally recognized and anticipated by the international community,” stated President Xi as translated by Global Times.

Chinese state media, CGTN, also reports, “China will firmly support Kim’s achievements in socialist construction by leading the WPK and the people through a new strategic route, focusing all his efforts on economic development and improving people’s livelihoods.”

Xi’s article was published the day before his first state visit to North Korea, and the first by any Chinese leader in 14 years.

On Tuesday, China and Russia jointly defended North Korea at a United Nations sanctions committee meeting and successfully blocked the U.S. from ​​​banning refined oil imports to North Korea. U.S. representaives accused the Korean nation of exceeding its limit of 500,000 barrels of refined oil agreed last year at by the U.N. members. However, China and Russia blocked the move, demanding the U.S. provide more robust evidence to its accusation.

The increasingly close ties between Xi and Kim may disappoint U.S. foreign policy analysts who had hoped China would pressure North Korea into backing down on a number of key issues on the penin.

Writing in 2013, Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow for the neo-conservative Cato Institute, noted that China was growing “frustrated” with Kim Jon Un’s government and U.S. foreign policy should be focused on exploiting the rift. “No one should be allowed to throw the region, even the whole world, into chaos for selfish gains,” Xi said several years ago regarding Kim’s governing style.

Yet, as diplomatic and trade tensions grow between the U.S. and China, as well as with North Korea, the two Asian countries are now presenting a united front.

“One can say this friendship is irreplaceable,” President Xi described the North Korea-China relationship in his WPK-published letter.

The post China & Russia show strong support for North Korea appeared first on Black Opinion.

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One afternoon last summer, my partner Rick called me out onto our deck to see a tiny hummingbird. Not just tiny, but the tiniest hummingbird he had ever seen. My curiosity piqued, I walked out and there it was – hovering in front of the bee balm, sipping nectar and beating its wings at an impossible rate. It was a rich rust color and about an inch and a half long. By comparison, the smallest ruby-throated hummingbirds are twice that length. This was truly the most diminutive hummingbird imaginable.

Or was it? When I first spotted it, I was certain it was not a hummingbird. It didn’t seem possible that in all my years of birdwatching, I had never seen this particular species, nor even heard of it. A one-and-a-half-inch-bird, after all, would be something of note. The kind of thing people spend their lives hoping to see, crowds gathering as word of a sighting spread. But the longer I watched it, the less sure I felt. It moved exactly like a hummingbird – hovering, sipping, furiously flapping. I wondered if we had stumbled upon a wayward bird far afield from its home somewhere in the tropics.

We had not. It was a moth.

More specifically, it was a hummingbird moth – a tiny trickster that sounds, acts, and looks much like its namesake. There are several species that fall into this family, known as the Sphingidae or sphinx. The most common in our area, and the one zipping around my garden, is the hummingbird clearwing moth (Hemaris thysbe). Another common species, the snowberry clearwing (Hemaris diffinis), tends to be more abundant in the West. (There is also a genus, Macroglossum, found in North Africa, Asia, and Europe. It is known as the hummingbird hawkmoth and has an epic migration, some of them flying from the Mediterranean and even North Africa to the United Kingdom.)

After the sighting in my garden, I did an internet search on “tiny hummingbird” and discovered that I was not the first person to be fooled. Looking at photos of the insect, I could clearly see it was just that – an insect and not a bird. What looks like a sliver of a beak is actually a proboscis that the moth plunges deep into blossoms for nectar. When not in use, it retracts into a coiled position. It also sports a pair of unbird-like antennae. Details that were hard to see as it flitted about the bee balm in the middle of a sun-drenched day.

Even in caterpillar form, the Hemaris thysbe is easy to mistake for something else. It’s a beautiful spring green, with spots along its sides and a horn on its rear end. In other words, it is almost identical to the tomato hornworm. “All caterpillars in the family Sphingidae have a horn at the rear end,” said biologist Beatriz Moisset, who writes about pollinators for the U.S. Forest Service. “They look similar to tomato hornworms, but feed on different plants, mostly honeysuckles, viburnums, snowberries, and a few others.”

I was relieved to learn this, as I have had an infestation of tomato hornworms two summers in a row and didn’t want to regret the fates they met at my hands. Turns out those garden decimators transform into five-spotted moths and not into the bird look-alikes checking out my bee balm.

Adult hummingbird moths first emerge in spring, but are most active in summer, when flowers such as bee balm and phlox are in bloom. Females lay eggs on the underside of leaves that the larvae eat, including honeysuckle and dogbane. When the caterpillars are full grown they drop to the ground, where they will spend the winter in cocoons. Leaf litter is essential to their survival.

“An immaculate lawn is a death sentence for any pupa laying there. So, if you can reduce the area you rake in the fall, you may be saving some of these beauties” said Moisset. I’ve never been particularly zealous about raking my lawn and now I am even less so.

The sighting last summer proved to be a singular event, but I am hopeful more will follow this year. The next time a hummingbird moth shows up in my garden, I won’t be fooled, but I will be delighted.

This content was originally published here.

This content was originally published here.

This content was originally published here.

Sally Ride aboard space shuttle mission STS-7/Challenger. Image via NASA.

June 18, 1983. On this date, physicist Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. She was the third woman in space overall, after USSR cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova (1963) and Svetlana Savitskaya (1982). Ride was an astronaut aboard space shuttle mission , NASA’s seventh space shuttle mission and the second mission for the shuttle Challenger.

The mission lasted 147 hours. Ride’s job was to work a robotic arm, used to help put satellites into Earth orbit. She flew on the space shuttle again (mission STS-41G) in 1984.

STS-7/Challenger crew during Ride’s historic 1st flight in 1983. Image via NASA Flickr.

Ride was scheduled to board the shuttle again, on proposed shuttle mission STS-61M, which was canceled due to the 1986 Challenger disaster. Ride later helped investigate the Challenger accident, as a member of the Rogers Commission. According to a 2016 article in Popular Mechanics, it was Sally Ride who revealed to General Donald Kutyna – another member of the Rogers Commission – that the O-rings used in the shuttle become stiff at low temperatures, a fact that eventually led to identification of the cause of the explosion.

Sally K. Ride as a teenager. She was passionate about tennis and participated in national championships. Image via Afflictor.com.

Sally Ride was born in Los Angeles, California, on May 26, 1951. As a teenager, she loved sports such as running, volleyball, softball and, especially, tennis. After receiving undergraduate degrees in physics and in English from Stanford University in 1973, she obtained her Ph.D. in physics.

While Ride was studying physics, in 1977, NASA was looking for women astronauts. Ride saw an ad in the school newspaper inviting women to apply to the astronaut program and decided to apply for the job. She was one of six women chosen as an astronaut candidate in 1978.

The following year, she began training as a Mission Specialist for future space flights.

In 1989 – when her career with NASA ended – Ride began teaching physics at the University of California, in Los Angeles. In 2001, she began inspiring other young women to pursue STEM careers through  Sally Ride Science, a company she co-founded with her partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy. Her company targeted middle school students and their parents. With O’Shaughnessy, Ride wrote five science books for children and undertook many other projects to motivate young people toward the sciences.

Sally Ride died on July 23, 2012, after suffering pancreatic cancer.

Sally Ride Science, her legacy, is still directed by Tam O’Shaughnessy.

Read more about Sally Ride from NASA

Read more about her at Sally Ride Science

Bottom line: Sally Ride became the first American woman in space on June 18, 1983.

This content was originally published here.

This content was originally published here.

The fascinating evolution of the original land race cannabis plant. 

The cannabis market has exploded, and as growers learn more about using genetics to their advantage, a wide variety of strains have emerged. With just a quick look online or at your local dispensary, you’ll find hundreds of modified breeds for every possible occasion.

But all this variety has its origins somewhere. Actually, we can trace all cannabis strains to a small number of original cannabis plants known as landrace strains.

What Exactly is a Landrace Strain?

A landrace is essentially an isolated plant that has not been crossbred with other cannabis varieties. They tend to be indigenous to specific regions, and developed their particular qualities as the strain adapted to their unique environment.

As such, landrace strains are often named in accordance with their region: Pure Afghan, Durban Poison, Panama Red, and so on.

Cannabis historians believed landrace strains originated in Asia.

Landrace really only refers to the genetic purity of a cannabis strain. Landrace strains won’t necessarily produce a better product. In fact, the reason there are so many crossbred strains on the market is that breeding a plant for a specific trait ensures a specific, quality finished product.

Being genetically closer to the original wild cannabis species is really the main drawcard for landrace strains. They hold particular intrigue for historians, scientists, and purists.

“Clocking” the Age of Cannabis

Scientists have long searched for cannabis’s origin. Or, at the very least, for the original wild landrace strain of this infamous medicinal plant. Common thought placed the original plant in locations across Asia. However, scientists weren’t so sure of the precise original location.

That was until recently when a study of fossilized pollen found the location of the first cannabis species.

Accurately determining when and where cannabis evolved was extremely difficult due to the lack of a strong print fossil record – impression of leaves or fruits in rocks. For a plant, like cannabis, that lacks a good fossil record, paleobotanists can use a “molecular clock”. This allows them to estimate when cannabis and its sister species Humulus (hops) diverged from a common ancestor. The molecular clock uses DNA to measure time, and calibrates the clock with fossil dates of related plants.

Using this method, they estimated that cannabis first diverged from a common ancestor 27.8 million years ago.

Hops and cannabis derive from the same common ancestor.

Once researchers had figured out when cannabis first diverged from a common ancestor, the question of where still remained. Paleobotanists then turned to microfossils, such as fossilized pollen, to fill in the records. They found that pollen from the closely related cannabis and hop plants are almost indistinguishable.

To overcome this problem, scientists realized that because cannabis typically grows in open grasslands, and hops grow in forests, the pollen could be classified by identifying other plants that commonly occur alongside it. Researchers used plants that are typically seen in open grasslands to identify the fossilized pollen as cannabis.

How Scientists Dated and Located Fossilized Cannabis Pollen

Fossilized pollen is usually used to date the layer in which it is found, which tells a lot about the environment at the time. However, in this case, the pollen was the unknown. Researchers aged it with radiocarbon dating.

Radiocarbon dating measures the amount of radiocarbon (C14) left in a fossilized animal or plant. C14 degrades at a known rate, and so by testing the amount of C14 left in a fossil, its age can be accurately calculated.

By using this analysis, the oldest fossilized cannabis pollen was located in the Ningxia Province, China. Researchers dated the pollen at 19.6 million years old. But with cannabis diverging 27.8 million years ago, this date wasn’t close enough.

Further research of the region and tracking of a plant called Artemisia, which has a close alliance and parallel evolutionary pattern to cannabis, pinpointed the northeastern Tibetan Plateau as the cannabis center of origin. At the time, the Tibetan Plateau created an environment that supports the theory that cannabinoids developed to protect the plant from UV rays and herbivores. These are both issues in the high altitude, open grassland Tibetan Plateau.

Cannabis stems from a single location on the Tibetan Plateau.

Further Landrace Strains

Fossil pollen records tell us that cannabis dispersed into Europe 6 million years ago. Then later East into China 1.2 million years ago. By mapping the distribution of pollen over time, scientists were able to see that European cannabis went through repeated genetic bottlenecks.

Following the warm and wet Holocene period, forests replaced open grasslands. Cannabis retreated to the small pockets of open space that it could inhabit. In these small and isolated areas, the population of cannabis shrank. These separated cannabis populations then evolved differently, eventually creating the separate and distinct landrace strains of the European-evolved sativa and the Asian-evolved indica.

By tracing cannabis evolution back to a single location on the Tibetan Plateau millions of years ago, we have uncovered the site of the original cannabis landrace strain. Over thousands of years, the original cannabis strain moved across continents, becoming isolated in certain areas.

The original landrace strain had to then develop to new conditions, eventually leading to a variety of landrace strains. Each developed unique geno-phenotypical characteristics reflective of adaptations provoked by their local environment. And these ancient strains have become the mythologized landrace strains that we idolize today.

The post Fossilized Cannabis Reveals The Plant is 27.8 Million Years Old appeared first on RxLeaf.

This content was originally published here.

Over the next several weeks, our planet will have a close encounter with the Taurid meteor swarm.  It will be the closest that we have been to the center of the meteor swarm since 1975, and we won’t have an encounter this close again until 2032.  So for astronomers, this is a really big deal.  And hopefully there will be no danger to Earth during this pass, but some scientists are absolutely convinced that the Tunguska explosion of 1908 which flattened 80 million trees in Russia was caused by an object from the Taurid meteor swarm.  As you will see below, the last week of June will mark the point when we are the closest to the center of the meteor swarm, and so that will be when the risk is the greatest.  According to CBS News, our planet “will approach within 30,000,000 km of the center of the Taurid swarm” by the end of this month…

This summer, Earth will approach within 30,000,000 km of the center of the Taurid swarm, the study says. That would be Earth’s closest encounter with the swarm since 1975 and the best viewing opportunity we’ll have until the early 2030s.

30 million kilometers may sound like a great distance, but in astronomical terms that is not very far at all, and it is important to remember that distance is measured from the exact center of the meteor swarm.

And there are some scientists that are convinced that giant rocks from this meteor swarm have been responsible for multiple “once-per-1,000-years catastrophic events on Earth” in the past.  The following comes from Forbes…

The remnants of a comet. As Earth orbits the Sun, its orbital path often goes through dust and debris left by comets, with matter no bigger than a grain of sand busting into Earth’s atmosphere and burning up as “shooting stars”. Mostly, they’re harmless, but the Taurid swam is an exceptionally large cloud of debris, probably from Comet 2P/Encke, that scientists think may be responsible for some once-per-1,000-years catastrophic events on Earth. The Taurid complex-giant comet hypothesis proposes that a giant comet fragmented in the inner solar system, producing dust and small Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), including 2P/Encke and other asteroids, still present today. Among the observational evidence is increased “fireball” shooting star activity when Earth gets close to the “Taurid Swarm”, and increased impacts on the Moon.

In particular, it is now widely believed that the enormous object that exploded over Russia on June 30th, 1908 was from the Taurid meteor swarm.

If you are not familiar with the Tunguska event, here is some excellent information about it from Wikipedia…

Early estimates of the energy of the air burst range from 10–15 megatons of TNT (42–63 petajoules) to 30 megatons of TNT (130 PJ),^[7] depending on the exact height of burst estimated when the scaling-laws from the effects of nuclear weapons are employed.^[7][8] However, modern supercomputer calculations that include the effect of the object’s momentum find that more of the energy was focused downward than would be the case from a nuclear explosion and estimate that the airburst had an energy range from 3 to 5 megatons of TNT (13 to 21 PJ).^[8]

The 15-megaton (Mt) estimate represents an energy about 1,000 times greater than that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan—roughly equal to that of the United States’ Castle Bravo (15.2 Mt) ground-based thermonuclear detonation on 1 March 1954, and about one-third that of the Soviet Union‘s Tsar Bomba explosion on 30 October 1961 (which, at 50 Mt, is the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated).^[9]

It is estimated that the Tunguska explosion knocked down some 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km² (830 sq mi), and that the shock wave from the blast would have measured 5.0 on the Richter magnitude scale.

It is interesting to note that the Tunguska event happened during the last week of June in 1908, and right now researchers are telling us that the last week of June this year “will be the next occasion with a high probability for Tunguska-like collisions or near-misses”…

Researchers from the Universities of New Mexico and Western Ontario warn we could be in for a similarly catastrophic event.

“If the Tunguska object was a member of a Beta Taurid stream, then the last week in June 2019 will be the next occasion with a high probability for Tunguska-like collisions or near-misses,” the researchers wrote in a recent paper.

Of course nobody is saying that something will happen during that time.

It is simply a time when there is a heightened risk, and we should all be hoping that absolutely nothing happens.

However, we should not completely dismiss this threat either.  A couple of years ago, scientists discovered a “new branch” of the meteor swarm that contains “asteroids up to 1,000 feet wide”…

Scientists have discovered a new branch of the Taurids meteor stream that could pose a major risk to Earth, with asteroids up to 1,000 feet wide flying past us every few years.

If a 1,000 foot asteroid hit our planet tomorrow, we would be talking about the sort of civilization-changing event that I have been warning about for a very long time.

But once again, it is probably not likely that something will happen over the next few weeks.

In fact, scientists tell us that it is far more likely that there will be some sort of impact in 2032…

In November 2032, Earth will pass through the Taurid Swarm, a cloud of debris from Comet 2P/Encke that makes brilliant fireballs when its gravelly particles occasionally hit Earth’s atmosphere. Previous encounters with the Swarm in 2005 and 2015 produced showers of bright meteors observed around the world; in 1975 the Swarm contacted the Moon, making Apollo seismic sensors ring with evidence of objects hitting the lunar surface. If forecasters are correct, we’re in for similar activity 13 years from now.

In the end, we simply do not know when the next catastrophic meteor impact will happen, but scientists assure us that they will keep on happening.

Giant rocks go whizzing by our planet on a continual basis, and much of the time we do not even see them until they have already passed us.

So we may get some advance warning before a civilization-killing rock hits us someday, but then again, we might not.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

This content was originally published here.