Only a few months have passed since we reported that the New York-to-Los Angeles Cannonball record was broken. It’s allegedly been broken again. The 26 hour, 38 minute time—which beats the record set in November by more than 45 minutes—appears to be legitimate, according to Ed Bolian, a Cannonball insider and driver who set his own 28 hour, 50 minute record in 2013. Alex Roy, who set the first modern NYC-to-LA record in 2006, also said the new claim is credible based on his analysis of multiple sources.

“It was not me,” Bolian was quick to point out to Road & Track, eager to quell an Internet-generated rumor that perhaps he had been the one to pull it off.

All we know about this new set of scofflaws is that there were three, maybe four of them, and that they were driving a white 2019 Audi A8 sedan with a pair of red plastic marine fuel tanks ratchet-strapped into its trunk. They started at the Red Ball Garage in New York City at 11:15 pm on April 4, and ended less than 27 hours later at the Portofino Hotel & Marina in Redondo Beach, California, the traditional start and end points of a Cannonball attempt.

We also know that their timing was awful. It doesn’t seem likely that the new record-holders were keen to have news reach the public so soon, especially at a time when so many people are understandably on edge. But an exuberant friend posted a picture of the Audi on Facebook this week—situated among a number of other high-dollar cars, with its trunk open to show the auxiliary fuel tanks—along with the team’s alleged time. Within a day, hundreds of people had shared the post, and social media chat groups were abuzz with Cannonball aficionados offering up opinions on the matter.

Source: Cannonball Record Broken During Coronavirus – 26 Hours 38 Minutes

There’s some whining about it being in poor taste or something. Whatever.

Four global drinks giants are responsible for more than half a million tonnes of plastic pollution in six developing countries each year, enough to cover 83 football pitches every day, according to a report.

The NGO Tearfund has calculated the greenhouse gas emissions from the open burning of plastic bottles, sachets and cartons produced by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé and Unilever in developing nations, where waste can be mismanaged because people do not have access to collections.

Taking a sample of six developing countries, reflecting a spread across the globe, the NGO estimated the burning of plastic packaging put on to the market by the companies creates 4.6m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent – equivalent to the emissions from 2m cars.

Tearfund analysed the plastic put on the market in China, India, the Philippines, Brazil, Mexico and Nigeria by the four companies to examine the impact of single use plastic in developing countries. The countries were chosen because they are large developing country markets, spread across three continents.

The sachets, bottles, and cartons sold in these countries often end up either being burned or dumped – creating a pollution problem equivalent to covering 83 football pitches with plastic to 10 centimetres deep each day.

The report says: “This massive plastic pollution footprint, while a crisis in and of itself, is also contributing to the climate crisis.”

It adds that the four companies make little or no mention of emissions from disposal of their products or packaging in their climate change commitments.

“These companies continue to sell billions of products in single-use bottles, sachets and packets in developing countries,” says the report.

“And they do this despite knowing that: waste isn’t properly managed in these contexts; their packaging therefore becomes pollution; and such pollution causes serious harm to the environment and people’s health. Such actions – with such knowledge – are morally indefensible.”

The charity is calling for the companies to urgently switch to refillable and reusable packaging instead of sachets and plastic bottles.

The NGO estimated how much of their plastic waste in each country is mismanaged, burned or dumped using World Bank data.

Source: Report reveals ‘massive plastic pollution footprint’ of drinks firms | Environment | The Guardian

As the COVID-19 emergency continues and an increasing number of cities and countries are establishing quarantines or cordons sanitaire, the Internet has become, for many, the primary method to keep in touch with their friends and families. And it’s a vital motor of the global economy as many companies have employees who are now working from home.

Traffic towards video conferencing, streaming services and news, e-commerce websites has surged. We’ve seen growth in traffic from residential broadband networks, and a slowing of traffic from businesses and universities.

The Cloudflare team is fully operational and the Network Operating Center (NOC) is watching the changing traffic patterns in the more than 200 cities in which we operate hardware.

Big changes in Internet traffic aren’t unusual. They often occur around large sporting events like the Olympics or World Cup, cultural events like the Eurovision Song Contest and even during Ramadan at the breaking of the fast each day.

The Internet was built to cope with an ever changing environment. In fact, it was literally created, tested, debugged and designed to deal with changing load patterns.

Over the last few weeks, the Cloudflare Network team has noticed some new patterns and we wanted to share a few of them with you.

Entire countries are watching their leaders

Last Friday evening, the US President announced a State of Emergency in the United States. Not so long after, our US data centers served 20% more traffic than usual. The red line shows Friday, the grey lines the preceding days for comparison.

On the Sunday, March 15, the Dutch government announced on the radio at 1730 local time closures of the non-essential business (1630 UTC). A sharp dip in the regular Sunday traffic followed:

The French president made two national announcements, on March 12 (pink curve) and March 16 (red curve) at 2000 local time (1900 UTC). The lockdown announcement on March 16 caused French traffic to dip by half followed by a spike:

Evolution of traffic in quarantine

Italy has seen a 20-40% increase in daily traffic since the lockdown:

With universities closing, some national research networks are remaining (almost) as quiet as a weekend (in purple). Current day in red and previous days in grey (overlaps with previous week):

The Internet Exchange Points, a key part of the Internet infrastructure, where Internet service providers and content providers can exchange data directly (rather than via a third party) have also seen spikes in traffic. Many provide public traffic graphs.

In Amsterdam (AMS-IX), London (LINX) and Frankfurt (DE-CIX), around 10-20% increase is seen around March 9th:

In Milan (MXP-IX), the Exchange point shows a 40% increase on Wednesday, 9th of March 2020, the day of the quarantine:

In Asia, in Hong Kong (HKIX), we can observe a faster increase since the end of January which likely corresponds to the Hubei lockdown on the January 23:

The emergency has a non-negligible impact on Internet services and our lives. Although it is difficult to quantify exactly the increase, we observe numbers from 10% to 40% depending on the region and the state of government action in those regions.

Even though from time to time individual services, such as a web site or an app, have outages the core of the Internet is robust. Traffic is shifting from corporate and university networks to residential broadband, but the Internet was designed for change.

Check back on the Cloudflare blog for further updates and insights.

Source: On the shoulders of giants: recent changes in Internet traffic

Source: 2019 Finalists | Best Illusion of the Year Contest

The Galileo satellite positioning service is currently unavailable, with all satellites marked as in outage . Galileo is the European-built and operated alternative to GPS. The outage is being attributed to problems at the Precise Timing Facility in Italy. The availability of multiple Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and the relative newness of Galileo (the system is still under construction and only the newest GNSS receivers will track it) means that it is likely that few users will see an impact but the problem highlights our potential vulnerability to the loss of positioning and timing services available through GNSS.

Source: Galileo Satellite Positioning Service Outage – Slashdot

Twitter is back online for some people after being down for an hour or so Thursday afternoon. Tweets weren’t loading in the app or on desktop for several Engadget editors, while Down Detector had a massive spike in outage reports.

Twitter said the outage was due to “an internal system change” and it’s fixing the issue. It said everything should be up and running again soon.

Source: Twitter is back after a brief outage (updated)

Users began to report outages a little over an hour ago. For this writer, the problem first presented as weirdness with Reddit’s login server and front page timeline, but it quickly worsened. Now navigating to reddit.com is rewarding many with 503 errors.

The outage seems to have hit users visiting Reddit on desktop the hardest. Navigating to Reddit through its app on Android and iOS worked just fine for several Gizmodo staffers, and even the Reddit’s status page claims all systems are operational, though it is showing a sharp uptick in error rates for reddit.com.

If you feel like the internet has been breaking more than usual, you’re not alone. There have been a number of significant outages over the last month.

Google has had at least two major outages, as has Facebook. AT&T also experienced a major outage this month. Hell, even Down Detector has been down.

Source: Reddit Is Down as the Summer of Outages Continues

A bug impacting editors Vim and Neovim could allow a trojan code to escape sandbox mitigations.

A high-severity bug impacting two popular command-line text editing applications, Vim and Neovim, allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary OS commands. Security researcher Armin Razmjou warned that exploiting the bug is as easy as tricking a target into clicking on a specially crafted text file in either editor.

Razmjou’s PoC is able to bypass modeline mitigations, which execute value expressions in a sandbox. That’s to prevent somebody from creating a trojan horse text file in modelines, the researcher said.

“However, the :source! command (with the bang [!] modifier) can be used to bypass the sandbox. It reads and executes commands from a given file as if typed manually, running them after the sandbox has been left,” according to the PoC report.

Vim and Neovim have both released patches for the bug (CVE-2019-12735) that the National Institute of Standards and Technology warns, “allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary OS commands via the :source! command in a modeline.”

“Beyond patching, it’s recommended to disable modelines in the vimrc (set nomodeline), to use the securemodelinesplugin, or to disable modelineexpr (since patch 8.1.1366, Vim-only) to disallow expressions in modelines,” the researcher said.

Source: Linux Command-Line Editors Vulnerable to High-Severity Bug | Threatpost

First off, you can’t click in vi, but OK. Second, the whole idea is that you can run commands from vi. So basically he is calling a functionality a flaw.

How cartography made early modern global trade possible.

Source: First You Make the Maps | Lapham’s Quarterly

A lovely little history of middle early maps and mapmaking

WASHINGTON — The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.

“These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”

In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the objects, and an official mishap report was filed. Some of the incidents were videotaped, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching.

“Wow, what is that, man?” one exclaims. “Look at it fly!”

No one in the Defense Department is saying that the objects were extraterrestrial, and experts emphasize that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents. Lieutenant Graves and four other Navy pilots, who said in interviews with The New York Times that they saw the objects in 2014 and 2015 in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, make no assertions of their provenance.

But the objects have gotten the attention of the Navy, which earlier this year sent out new classified guidance for how to report what the military calls unexplained aerial phenomena, or unidentified flying objects.

Video

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Joseph Gradisher, a Navy spokesman, said the new guidance was an update of instructions that went out to the fleet in 2015, after the Roosevelt incidents.

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“There were a number of different reports,” he said. Some cases could have been commercial drones, he said, but in other cases “we don’t know who’s doing this, we don’t have enough data to track this. So the intent of the message to the fleet is to provide updated guidance on reporting procedures for suspected intrusions into our airspace.”

The sightings were reported to the Pentagon’s shadowy, little-known Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which analyzed the radar data, video footage and accounts provided by senior officers from the Roosevelt. Luis Elizondo, a military intelligence official who ran the program until he resigned in 2017, called the sightings “a striking series of incidents.”

Navy pilots from the VFA-11 “Red Rippers” squadron aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in 2015. The squadron began noticing strange objects just after the Navy upgraded the radar systems on its F/A-18 fighter planes.CreditAdam Ferguson for The New York Times

Image

The program, which began in 2007 and was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time, was officially shut down in 2012 when the money dried up, according to the Pentagon. But the Navy recently said it currently investigates military reports of U.F.O.s, and Mr. Elizondo and other participants say the program — parts of it remain classified — has continued in other forms. The program has also studied video that shows a whitish oval object described as a giant Tic Tac, about the size of a commercial plane, encountered by two Navy fighter jets off the coast of San Diego in 2004.

Leon Golub, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the possibility of an extraterrestrial cause “is so unlikely that it competes with many other low-probability but more mundane explanations.” He added that “there are so many other possibilities — bugs in the code for the imaging and display systems, atmospheric effects and reflections, neurological overload from multiple inputs during high-speed flight.”

Source: ‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects – The New York Times

Billions of years ago when the world was still young, treasure began forming deep underground. As the edges of Earth’s tectonic plates plunged down into the upper mantle, bits of carbon, some likely hailing from long-dead life forms were melted and compressed into rigid lattices. Over millions of years, those lattices grew into the most durable, dazzling gems the planet had ever cooked up. And every so often, for reasons scientists still don’t fully understand, an eruption would send a stash of these stones rocketing to the surface inside a bubbly magma known as kimberlite.

Source: Beyond the Hype of Lab-Grown Diamonds

This article is an excellent analysis of the market and technologies used in Diamonds

Five thousand years after people in the British Isles began building Stonehenge, scientists now know precisely where some of the massive rocks came from and how they were unearthed.

A team of 12 geologists and archaeologists from across the United Kingdom unveiled research this month that traces some of the prehistoric monument’s smaller stones to two quarries in western Wales.

The team also found evidence of prehistoric tools, stone wedges and digging activity in those quarries, tracing them to around 3000 BC, the era when Stonehenge’s first stage was constructed.

It’s rock-solid evidence that humans were involved in moving these “bluestones” to where they sit today, a full 150 miles away, the researchers say.

Researchers traced the origin of Stonehenge’s famous stones.

“It finally puts to rest long-standing arguments over whether the bluestones were moved by human agency or by glacial action,” University of Southampton Archeology Professor Joshua Pollard said in an email.

[…]

Scientists have long known the stones came from the Preseli Hills, but the new research helps disprove claims about the original rock locations made in 1923 by famous British geologist H.H. Thomas. The correct quarries, called Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin, are on the north side of the hills — opposite their long-suspected location, the new findings indicate.

Scientists work to learn more about the source of the monument’s rocks.

“By going back and looking in detail at the actual samples he studied, we have been able to show that none of his proposals stand up to scrutiny,” Bevins said.

Stonehenge celebrates 100 years in public hands

Because the rocks are from the north side of Preseli Hills, the researchers think it’s more likely the massive stones were dragged over land from Wales to England, rather than transported on river tributaries located near the south side.

It’s also possible the rocks were first used to build a stone circle in the local area before being paraded to the Salisbury plains, according to the article in the journal, Antiquity.

Source: Stonehenge: Geologists have found exactly where some rocks came from – CNN

Five minutes away from the town of Tiquina, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, archaeologists found the remains of an ancient civilization under the waters of the lake.

The find was made 10 years ago, by Christophe Delaere, an archaeologist from the Free University of Belgium, by following information provided by the locals. 24 submerged archaeological sites have been identified under the lake, according to the BBC.

The most significant of these sites is at Santiago de Ojjelaya, and the Bolivian government has recently agreed to build a museum there to preserve both the underwater structures and those which are on land.

Lake Titicaca. Photo by Alex Proimos CC BY SA 2.0

The project is supposed to be finished in 2020 and will cost an estimated $10 million. The Bolivian government is funding the project with help from UNESCO and is backed by the Belgian development cooperation agency.

The proposed building will have two parts and cover an area of about 2.3 acres (9,360 square meters). One part of the museum will be on the shore, and it will display artifacts that have been raised from the lake bottom. The second part will be partially submerged, with enormous glass walls that will look out under the lake, allowing visitors to see the “hidden city” below.

Old pottery from Tiwanaku at the Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin-Dahlem.

According to the Bolivia Travel Channel, the museum will facilitate the beginning of an archaeological tourism enterprise, which “will be a resort and archaeology research center, geology and biology, characteristics that typified it unique in the world [sic],” according to Wilma Alanoca Mamani, holder of the portfolio of the Plurinational State. Christophe Delaere said that the building’s design incorporates elements of architecture used by the Andean cultures who inhabited the area.

Jose Luis Paz, who is the director of heritage for Bolivia’s Ministry of Culture, says that two types of underwater ruins will be visible when the building is complete: religious/spiritual offering sites, primarily underwater, and places where people lived and worked, which were primarily on the shoreline. He went on to say that the spiritual sites were likely flooded much later than the settlements.

Chullpas from Tiwanaku epoch. Photo by Diego Delso CC BY-SA 4.0

A team of archaeological divers and Bolivian and Belgian experts have located thousands of items in the underwater sites. Some of these pieces will be brought up, but the majority will remain underwater as they are quite well-preserved.

Wilma Mamani said that more than 10,000 items have been found including gold and ceramic pieces and various kinds of bowls and other vessels. The items are of pre-Inca Tiwanaku civilizations. Some of the artifacts have been estimated to be 2,000 years old, and others have been dated back to when the Tiwanaku empire was one of the primary Andean civilizations.

Gateway of the Sun, Tiwanaku, drawn by Ephraim Squier in 1877.

Tiwanaku was a major civilization in Bolivia, with the main city built around 13,000 feet above sea level, near Lake Titicaca, which made it one of the highest urban centers ever built.

The city reached its zenith between 500 AD and 1000 AD, and, at its height, was home to about 10,000 people. It’s unclear exactly when the civilization took hold, but it is known that people started settling around Lake Titicaca about 2,000 BC.

The Gateway of the Sun from the Tiwanaku civilization in Bolivia.

According to Live Science, the city’s ancient name is unknown, since they never developed a written language, but archaeological evidence suggests that Tiwanaku cultural influence reached across the southern Andes, into Argentina, Peru, and Chile, as well as Bolivia.

Tiwanaku began to decline around 1,000 AD, and the city was eventually abandoned. Even when it fell out of use, it stayed an important place in the mythology of the Andean people, who viewed it as a religious site.

Source: Ancient Hidden City Discovered Under Lake Titicaca

A spokesman for President Tommy Remengesau said there was scientific evidence that the chemicals found in most sunscreens are toxic to corals, even in minute doses.

He said Palau’s dive sites typically hosted about four boats an hour packed with tourists, leading to concerns a build-up of chemicals could see the reefs reach tipping point.

“On any given day that equates to gallons of sunscreen going into the ocean in Palau’s famous dive spots and snorkelling places,” he told AFP.

“We’re just looking at what we can do to prevent pollution getting into the environment.”

The government has passed a law banning “reef-toxic” sunscreen from January 1, 2020.

Anyone importing or selling banned sunscreen from that date faces a $1,000 fine, while tourists who bring it into the country will have it confiscated.

“The power to confiscate sunscreens should be enough to deter their non-commercial use, and these provisions walk a smart balance between educating tourists and scaring them away,” Remengesau told parliament after the bill passed last week.

Environmental pioneer

The US state of Hawaii announced a ban on reef toxic sunscreens in May this year, but it does not come into force until 2021, a year after Palau’s.

The Palau ban relates to sunscreens containing chemicals including oxybenzone, octocrylene and parabens, which covers most major brands.

Palau has long been a pioneer in marine protection, introducing the world’s first shark sanctuary in 2009, in a move that has been widely imitated.

It has also banned commercial fishing from its waters and last year introduced the “Palau Pledge” requiring international visitors to sign a promise stamped into their passport that they will respect the environment.

Craig Downs, executive director at the Haereticus Environmental Laboratory in Hawaii, said other nations would be watching Palau’s move closely.

“It’s the first country to ban these chemicals from tourism. I think it’s great, they’re being proactive,” he said.

“They don’t want to be like Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia, where they’ve had to shut down beaches. The coral reefs around those beaches have died.”

Downs said there were numerous scientific papers pointing to a link between sunscreen chemicals and coral reef degradation.

“What we’re saying is that where there are lots of tourists getting in the water, sunscreen pollution can have a detrimental effect on nearby coral reefs, as far as five kilometres (3.1 miles) away,” he said.

Downs called on sunscreen manufacturers to “step up and innovate”, saying the chemicals used for UV protection had been largely unchanged for 50 years.

He said there were some sunscreens containing zinc oxide and titanium dioxide that were not reef toxic but added: “The other alternative we’ve been pushing is sunwear—cover up, wear a sunshirt.”

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-11-palau-sunscreen-coral.html#jCp

Source: Palau plans sunscreen ban to save coral

Microplastics were found in sea salt several years ago. But how extensively plastic bits are spread throughout the most commonly used seasoning remained unclear. Now, new research shows microplastics in 90 percent of the table salt brands sampled worldwide.

Of 39 salt brands tested, 36 had microplastics in them, according to a new analysis by researchers in South Korea and Greenpeace East Asia. Using prior salt studies, this new effort is the first of its scale to look at the geographical spread of microplastics in table salt and their correlation to where plastic pollution is found in the environment.

“The findings suggest that human ingestion of microplastics via marine products is strongly related to emissions in a given region,” said Seung-Kyu Kim, a marine science professor at Incheon National University in South Korea.

Source: Microplastics found in 90 percent of table salt: potential health impacts?

The European commission will recommend that EU member states abandon the practice of changing the clocks in spring and autumn, with many people in favour of staying on summer time throughout the year.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the commission’s president, said a recent consultation had shown that more than 80% of EU citizens were in favour of the move.

“We carried out a survey, millions responded and believe that in future, summer time should be year-round, and that’s what will happen,” he told the German broadcaster ZDF.

“I will recommend to the commission that, if you ask the citizens, then you have to do what the citizens say. We will decide on this today, and then it will be the turn of the member states and the European parliament.”

Any change would need approval from national governments and the European parliament to become law.

Source: EU to recommend end to changing clocks twice a year | World news | The Guardian

Here’s hoping! More daylight hours all through the year, no waking in the dark and walking home in the dark after work through the winter

Mumbai has the become the largest Indian city to ban single-use plastics, with residents caught using plastic bags, cups or bottles to face penalties of up to 25,000 rupees (£276) and three months in jail from Monday.

Council inspectors in navy blue jackets have been posted across the city to catch businesses or residents still using plastic bags. Penalties have already kicked in for businesses and several, reportedly including a McDonald’s and Starbucks, have already been fined.

Penalties range from 5,000 rupees for first-time offenders to 25,000 rupees and the threat of three months’ jail for those caught repeatedly using single-use plastics.

“For the pollution situation it’s fine to do this but for the people it is a big problem,” said Kamlash Mohan Chaudhary, a Mumbai resident. “People here carry everything in plastic bags.”

Chaudhary, a taxi driver, said he had started carrying a cloth bag and that his local mutton vendor had begun wrapping the meat in newspaper rather than plastic sheets.

Local media have reported complaints from vendors who say some inspectors are using confusion over the ban to extort money from businesses.

India recently hosted World Environment Day, which this year focused on the epidemic of plastic waste. About 6.3bn tonnes of plastic globally has been discarded into the environment since 1950, most of which will not break down for at least 450 years.

Half of the world’s plastic was created in the past 13 years and about half of that is thought to be for products used once and thrown away, such as bags, cups or straws.

India’s use of plastic is less than half of the global average: about 11kg a year per capita compared with 109kg in the US.

Source: Mumbai bans plastic bags and bottles | World news | The Guardian

Some of Africa’s oldest and biggest baobab trees have abruptly died, wholly or in part, in the past decade, according to researchers.

The trees, aged between 1,100 and 2,500 years and in some cases as wide as a bus is long, may have fallen victim to climate change, the team speculated.

“We report that nine of the 13 oldest … individuals have died, or at least their oldest parts/stems have collapsed and died, over the past 12 years,” they wrote in the scientific journal Nature Plants, describing “an event of an unprecedented magnitude”.

“It is definitely shocking and dramatic to experience during our lifetime the demise of so many trees with millennial ages,” said the study’s co-author Adrian Patrut of the Babeș-Bolyai University in Romania.

Among the nine were four of the largest African baobabs. While the cause of the die-off remains unclear, the researchers “suspect that the demise of monumental baobabs may be associated at least in part with significant modifications of climate conditions that affect southern Africa in particular”.

Further research is needed, said the team from Romania, South Africa and the United States, “to support or refute this supposition”.

Between 2005 and 2017, the researchers probed and dated “practically all known very large and potentially old” African baobabs – more than 60 individuals in all. Collating data on girth, height, wood volume and age, they noted the “unexpected and intriguing fact” that most of the very oldest and biggest trees died during the study period. All were in southern Africa – Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, Botswana, and Zambia.

The baobab is the biggest and longest-living flowering tree, according to the research team. It is found naturally in Africa’s savannah region and outside the continent in tropical areas to which it was introduced. It is a strange-looking plant, with branches resembling gnarled roots reaching for the sky, giving it an upside-down look.

Source: Giant African baobab trees die suddenly after thousands of years | World news | The Guardian

Perfect fried rice

• 2 slices of bacon, diced
• 2-3 scallions, sliced thinly on a sharp bias
• 3-4 cups leftover medium or long-grain rice, such as jasmine (no freshly steamed rice)
• 3 eggs, well beaten
• Salt
• 2 tsp. light soy sauce
• Toasted sesame oil

Heat a 12-inch non-stick skillet or wok over medium-high heat. Add diced bacon and sauté until crisp and golden. Remove from pan and leave about a tablespoon of rendered bacon fat in the pan. (Any more and your final product may become too greasy.)

Add beaten eggs, swirling to evenly coat the bottom of the pan. When the edges start to ruffle, add the rice evenly on to the eggs. Gently but expeditiously stir them around, breaking the eggs into small pieces. Do not press down on the rice, as you want to keep the fluffy texture. I use chopsticks to do the stirring, which also curbs the impulse to smoosh down with a spatula.

When the rice is warmed through, add bacon back in and stir through. If using the Chinese preserved vegetables add them in now too. Add a small pinch of salt to season.

Season with a teaspoon of soy sauce to start, and take a quick taste. If you like a bit of a deeper flavor add another teaspoon. Remember we are going for a light brown color, not a murky dark shade.

Turn off the heat, add scallions and stir through. Add a drizzle of toasted sesame oil, and stir gently to incorporate. Scoop into bowls and serve immediately.

Source: How to make perfect fried rice (and I mean perfect)

Preparing for a visit to a foreign country can often be overwhelming, with no shortage of things to learn before you go. Where should you eat? Where should you stay? What do you tip? More so than this service information, though, is a sense of cultural understanding that’s hard to put your finger on. With this in mind, language learning app Babbel asked foreign ambassadors to the U.S. to pick the book they believe first-time visitors to their country should read before they arrive. Their answers may surprise you.

Source: 22 Ambassadors Recommend the One Book to Read Before Visiting Their Co – Condé Nast Traveler

Argentine newspaper Clarín reports that the driver said he didn’t know the area because he had never traveled there before and that he left the road because of a mechanical problem. The newspaper speculated that the driver actually drove off the Pan-American Highway to avoid paying a toll.

Flores Vigo left tire tracks in a football field-sized area of the geoglyphs, damaging three of them. Peruvian authorities released him, as they didn’t have evidence that he’d done it intentionally.
[…]
Artists from pre-Hispanic Peruvian societies between 500BC and 500AD created the massive drawings by removing the top layer of darker rock to reveal the lighter earth below, according to UNESCO. The dry desert environment has allowed the markings to remain for 2,000 years.

This isn’t the first time stupidity has led to someone damaging the lines. Greenpeace performed a stunt back in 2014 in which they laid large pieces of yellow cloth on the lines. I ignore Greenpeace canvassers on the street to this day, for this reason.

Source: Stupid Truck Driver Drove Right Over the Nazca Lines

On Aug. 21, a total solar eclipse will traverse the contiguous United States. It’ll be the first to traverse coast to coast in nearly a century.

Source: Total solar eclipse 2017: How rare is the Aug. 21 eclipse path? – Washington Post

Finally, a Tool for Making Totally Clear Ice Spheres 

http://www.seriouseats.com/2014/07/ice-balls-for-cocktails-best-home-tool-wintersmiths-does-clear-ice-melt-slower.html

No seeds were lost but the ability of the rock vault to provide failsafe protection against all disasters is now threatened by climate change

Source: Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melts

because global warming isn’t happening. NOT.

A small yellow robot submarine, called Boaty McBoatface after a competition to name a new polar research ship backfired, is being sent on its first Antarctic mission.

Boaty, which has arguably one of the most famous names in recent maritime history, is a new type of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), which will be able to travel under ice, reach depths of 6,000 metres, and transmit the data it collects to researchers via a radio link.

Its mission will be to investigate water flow and turbulence in the dark depths of the Orkney Passage, a 3.5km deep region of the Southern Ocean. The data it collects will help scientists understand how the ocean is responding to global warming.

Source: Boaty McBoatface to go on its first Antarctic mission | World news | The Guardian

The real miracle is that the dour bastards at the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) who opened a competition to name their new ship and then blasted the resultant name, have decided to use the chosen name for something at all, even if it is a sad little submarine.