The gymnasts at the US Olympic trials had a very special helping paw providing them with much needed emotional support ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics.

LGBT Activists Oppose Making Child S@x Trafficking a Felony

A team of researchers looking at seismic data from NASA's InSight lander has found that around 280 to 360 objects that cause craters over 8 meters (26 feet) in diameter impact Mars every year.Exoplanet scientists use meteoroid impact data from Mars and other planets to estimate the age of other bodies in the Solar System, the reasoning being that older bodies will have more impact craters than younger ones. Of course, you have to take into account factors such as the size of the object, its orbit, and the effect its atmosphere (should it be lucky enough to have a sizeable one) has on bodies entering it. But generally speaking, the more impacts you see, the older the moon or planet be.      "The current Martian cratering rate of craters <60 m [197 feet] has been estimated from repeated satellite imaging, but such observations are limited by camera resolution and dust coverage," the team explains in their paper. "This requires the target area to be dust-covered to some extent. Extrapolation of the crater density in dusty areas to the full planet requires a global model of dust mobility, for which the thermal inertia is a proxy."Because satellite images are not high resolution enough, the rate of impacts of meteoroid impacts of smaller objects is more uncertain. The team attempted to refine estimates by looking at seismic data collected by an instrument deployed during NASA's InSight mission.While operational on the planet, the seismometer recorded a number of very high frequency (VF) marsquakes. Though the team could not rule out alternative causes for each recorded VF event, they determined that the events as a whole were likely the result of meteoroid impacts in the local area. Determining the size of the impact by looking at its seismic data, and then scaling the impacts in terms of area and time, they estimated that 280 to 360 craters over 8 meters (26 feet) in diameter are formed on the planet every year."This rate was about five times higher than the number estimated from orbital imagery alone," Géraldine Zenhäusern, Professor of Seismology and Geodynamics at ETH Zürich and co-author on the paper, said in a statement. "Aligned with orbital imagery, our findings demonstrate that seismology is an excellent tool for measuring impact rates."Using this method could help us better estimate a solar system body's age. Send a probe with a seismometer to the planet or moon, allow it to collect data on impacts, and then you could use this data and satellite data to get a better idea of its age. Of course, a lot more can be learned by deploying seismometers on the surface of alien worlds.“To understand the inner structure of planets, we use seismology. This is because as seismic waves travel through or reflect off material in planets’ crust, mantle, and core, they change. By studying these changes, seismologists can determine what these layers are made of and how deep they are," co-first author Dr Natalia Wojcicka, Research Associate at Imperial College London’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering explained in a second statement. “On Earth, you can more easily understand the inner structure of our planet by looking at data from seismometers placed all around the globe. However, on Mars there has been only one – SEIS. To better understand Mars’ inner structure, we need more seismometers distributed across the planet.”The study is published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

After a suspicious set of test results triggered an investigation last week, public health officials in Pueblo County, Colorado, have now confirmed a case of plague in a local resident.Plague is a bacterial infection that’s best known for decimating Europe’s population in the mid-14th century, with what came to be known as “The Black Death” becoming one of the deadliest pandemics in human history.But as this latest case will tell you, plague hasn’t been consigned to the history books. Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes the disease, naturally circulates in many parts of the world in rodents, other small animals, and fleas.That means that, on rare occasions, plague can end up in humans too. An average of seven cases are reported in the US each year, with most of them being the bubonic form – the one with the characteristic swollen, pus-filled lymph nodes. Most cases are found in a region encompassing northern New Mexico, northern Arizona, and southern Colorado, and another with California, southern Oregon, and western Nevada.While the source of the Colorado case is still being investigated, human cases of plague are typically the result of being bitten by an infected flea or handling an infected animal. For example, earlier this year, the first case of human plague in Oregon in eight years was found to likely be the result of an infected pet cat.With that in mind, Pueblo County’s Department of Public Health and Environment (PDPHE) has asked the public to take a number of precautions, including:Avoiding contact with dead animalsRat-proofing your home by removing places they can hide, breed, and feed, like piles of lumber and pet food containersUsing insect repellent to prevent flea bitesFlea-treating petsNot letting pets sleep in bed with youIf people do develop symptoms, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends seeking medical attention immediately due to the seriousness of the disease. The main symptoms to look out for with bubonic plague are a sudden fever, chills, headache, weakness, and swollen, painful lymph nodes.These symptoms can provide healthcare professionals with an indication that plague is present, and the diagnosis can be confirmed by lab tests that use samples taken from the swollen lymph nodes or blood.Though a serious illness, plague is thankfully treatable.“Plague can be treated successfully with antibiotics, but an infected person must be treated promptly to avoid serious complications or death,” said Alicia Solis, program manager of the Office of Communicable Disease and Emergency Preparedness at PDPHE, in a statement.

Joe Biden ripped into the Supreme Court following its ruling last week over Donald Trump’s presidential immunity. “Each, each of us is equal before the law,” he said in a brief nationally televised address. “No one, no one is above the law, not even the president of the United States. [With] today’s Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity, that fundamentally changed for all practical purposes.”Really, Mr. President? Do you, of all people, have the audacity to claim that “no one is above the law, not even the president of the United States?” You should know about some people who are actually being targeted by your administration. You have people crying that their political opponents are corrupt while they’re putting people in prison for the things they have done themselves.Paul Vaughn, a Christian pro-life father of 11 children, was facing over a decade in prison for a peaceful protest in Tennessee at an abortion clinic. He was charged with violating the Face Act for praying in the hallway. Upon his imminent sentencing, he said, “It's real easy for me. I can go and go to battle and go to jail as an individual, and it's not a big loss.” Would you have the courage to say that in such a moment? I pray I would. “The challenge comes when you’re leading your family through it, when you’re talking to your 3-year-old and your 23-year-old and your other family,” Vaughn continued. He said he wanted to pray to God every day to be ready to “take on that day with whatever circumstances come my way and a humility and a grace and a spirit-led life that represents him in our society and our community around us.”How many politicians order their life in such a way after truth and justice, versus power and greed?Vaughn ended up avoiding prison time. Instead, the judge ordered him to six months of home confinement and three years of supervised release — for praying in a hallway. What would Biden have to say about him? Do you think the state is being weaponized against Paul Vaughn?Last week, Steve Bannon reported to prison for contempt of Congress. There are now 15 people in the Biden administration who have been deemed in contempt of Congress. None of them are being prosecuted. But Donald Trump’s people are. I don't agree with Bannon on everything. He's a thought leader who I strongly disagree with at many times, but he should not be going to jail.“I am proud to go to prison,” Bannon told reporters. “If this is what it takes to stand up to tyranny; if this is what it takes to stand up to the [Attorney General Merrick] Garland corrupt criminal DOJ; if this is what it takes to stand up to Nancy Pelosi; if this is what it takes to stand up to Joe Biden — I’m proud to do it.”You have people crying that their political opponents are corrupt while they’re putting people in prison for the things they have done themselves.How about Dr. Eithan Haim? He was the anonymous whistleblower behind Christopher Rufo’s groundbreaking story that exposed Texas Children's Hospital's continuation of transgender treatments on minors even after it said it stopped. Even though he was anonymous, the Justice Department found out who he was and sent armed agents from the Department of Health and Human Services to his house. Now, he and his expecting wife are being charged with felonies. What does Biden say about him?Please, Mr. President, don’t talk to me about “out-of-control tyranny” from the Supreme Court. The court has done exactly the opposite. It has protected the presidency while it is dismantling the administrative state. But you’re right in saying that “no one is above the law, not even the president of the United States.” I challenge you to hold yourself to that standard.Want more from Glenn Beck? Get Glenn's FREE email newsletter with his latest insights, top stories, show prep, and more delivered to your inbox.

After the French revolutionaries beheaded their king, they had a bright idea: Let's make the day 10 hours long! This is not a joke: Left-wing "experts" actually changed the length of minutes, hours, and weeks in the name of science. This is the story of that disaster.The designers answered 'solely to the principles of Reason and Science.'The French revolutionaries adopted a new calendar for three reasons:To eliminate religious consciousness from French society;To make time more “rational”;To announce the birth of an egalitarian era.In their zeal, they forgot an important factor: human nature. This is a story of political arrogance. The revolutionaries overestimated science's power and underestimated religion's stickiness. In their new utopia, one hour equaled 100 minutes, and one minute equaled 100 seconds. The new year shifted from January 1 to September 22. A radical attempt to redefine time itself.Rutgers sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel notes that the 10-day week was meant to disrupt the “traditional, sacred seven-day cycle.” The purpose was to disorient people and make them lose track of “Sunday.” That is, the day for going to church and having a weekly sitdown with the divine. The French Revolutionary calendar was designed by the top experts of the day. The chief designer was C.G. Romme, a physics professor, and mathematicians and astronomers chipped in. In the minds of these experts, tradition/old habits didn’t matter. The designers answered “solely to the principles of Reason and Science.”“The Revolutionary Calendar was introduced in an age which advocated the total obliteration of the old order in the name of progress and modernity,” Zerubavel observes. “The beginning of the new Republican Era marked the total discontinuity between past and present.” Ring a bell?Every calendar has “critical dates,” which are imbued with symbolic importance. The revolutionaries changed the first day of the year from January 1 to September 22 — the day of the “foundation of the French Republic.” Society was to spin not around religion but politics.Days that had a unique flavor due to their religious significance, like “the saints’ days, Sunday and the Church's religious holidays,” were abolished. Each day became mathematically and symbolically alike. Differences were to be erased — whether among people or on the calendar.By adopting calendrical rhythms alien to the rest of the world, the French created artificial barriers to communication, understanding, and ultimately, trade.How would you fix delivery schedules with a country whose calendar is untranslatable into yours? Imagine you're a Frenchman in 1793. The revolutionaries have not just beheaded the king and slaughtered their own but have also made the week 10 days long. The day is now 10 hours, not 24, and your old clocks — and instincts — need to be thrown out. By denouncing all authority as arbitrary, the revolutionary finally harms himself. On what grounds will he govern once the king is gone? In hindsight, we can see the “boomerang effect” of the calendar redesign. If the old dogmas were random, why are the new ones any better?The people hated the new calendar. It made them work for nine days straight instead of six, and it was confusing. Special clocks were made to translate the French Revolutionary calendar into the Gregorian calendar and back. People’s age-long habits were redesigned without their consent.Stalin imposed a new calendar, too. The week was cut to five days to eliminate the holiday of Sunday. Days were assigned colors, and workers were given colors. When it was your colored day, you took a day off. Families and friends had different colors, so they never hung out.Here’s the French Revolutionary calendar, designed by the biggest scientific minds of the time. A failed dream ... a symbolic warning. An attempt to restructure time by politics instead of the sacred. Reasonable, rational, and, hence, doomed. An emblem to the madness of equality: Heritage Images/Getty ImagesAnd here’s the man who ended the tyranny of artificial time and took his country back to the Gregorian calendar, 218 years ago: Hulton Archive/Stringer/Getty Images

Late-night comedians returned to work this week knowing their lies had finally caught up with them.Colbert. Fallon. Meyers. Stewart. They all admitted President Joe Biden’s mental failings are no longer “cheap fakes” but stone-cold truths. They had no other choice following the June 27 debate.Hollywood stars can no longer afford to insult half the country. Streamers are feeling the economic pinch. The Biden economy is crushing film and TV crews in LA (and beyond).And boy, was it delicious to behold. Not necessarily funny, of course. They gave up that ghost a while ago.Stephen Colbert opened his monologue by pretending to take a stiff drink. Then he got down to business — i.e. dismantling his spin from three-plus years.“I don’t know what’s going on in Joe Biden’s mind, something I apparently have in common with Joe Biden.”“Biden debated as well as Abe Lincoln ... if you dug him up right now.”Jon Stewart teed off on both the president and his administration.“For a campaign based on honesty and decency, the spin about the debate appears to be blatant bulls***, and the redemption tour hasn’t gone that much better.”Seth Meyers, the nakedly partisan “Saturday Night Live” alum, pulled most of his punches. He sounded more like an MSNBC pundit than a comedian, but that’s par for the “Late Night” course.He seemed madder about Biden staying in the race than a media landscape that hid the truth from the country.“If you truly believe American democracy is at stake, and it is, then you have to act like it ... you can’t claim to be the last bulwark against fascism, and also have a more-sleep plan. If you think this is serious, you need to act like it’s serious.”Perhaps if Team Late Night had spoken truth to power a few months, or even years, earlier, this train wreck could have been avoided.Michael Moore decries Biden 'elder abuse'We’re living in crazy times. That’s certifiable. Need more proof? Michael Moore is a voice of reason on the Biden front.The far-left filmmaker, who hasn’t made a film of consequence in eons, is aghast at how Democrats are treating President Biden. He called shoving Biden onto the June 27 debate stage “the cruelest form of elder abuse I’ve ever been forced to watch.”Here's a pitch: Crusading documentarian starts knocking on doors to get some answers from current Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison. Call it ... "Jaime & Me"? Hey — we'd watch it.Minnie mopesMinnie Driver didn’t get the memo, apparently.Hollywood stars can no longer afford to insult half the country. Streamers are feeling the economic pinch. The Biden economy is crushing film and TV crews in L.A. (and beyond). Stars like Charlamagne tha God and Dwayne Johnson have retracted their past political endorsements. Even awards shows have cut back on the partisan lectures (the recent BET awards notwithstanding).Tell that to the “Good Will Hunting” actress. She just tore into Trump supporters as if it were 2017 all over again.She recently blasted MAGA nation, describing its fans as “70 million people who really quite like a bit of a racist attitude and non-existent immigration policies and dismantling the environmental agencies.”Oh.She also said she’d never live in a red state but feels safer in Los Angeles. She might be the only soul who finds that hellscape preferable to Heartland, USA.She later praised her native Great Britain for being more open to debate and conversation than the U.S. Of course, if you label half of a country “racist,” it makes conversations a wee bit harder.Rogan's gains“Jokes, folks. Just jokes.”That's how Joe Rogan teased his upcoming Netflix comedy special, “Joe Rogan: Burn the Boats," which the streaming giant will broadcast live August 3.Rogan has every reason to be in a laughing mood. Just a few years ago, the Austin-based comic's contrarian COVID-19 views sparked furious efforts to crush his Spotify podcast. Aging rock stars lobbied for his removal from the service while news outlets erroneously dubbed a medication he used to recover from the virus as “horse de-wormer.” (In fact, ivermectin has been so effective at treating parasitic infections in humans that its two creators were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2015.)Since then, Rogan's been racking up the wins. He’s re-upped his lucrative Spotify contract, expanded his reach across YouTube, iTunes, and other platforms, and created a free speech comedy mecca in Austin, Texas.Maybe his special could use an opening act. We hear Neil Young's available.

Want to buy American? Many Americans do. In fact, a recent Cars.com survey found that 58% of American consumers are willing to pay as much as 10% more for a vehicle if it creates domestic jobs. But how do you know you're buying American? When it comes to cars, the answer is particularly complicated. "You can't trust the brand on the hood or the legacy of an automaker's history," says Cars.com's Patrick Masterson, who led the website's 2024 American-Made Index. "This goes back to the complexity of the global supply chain," says Masterson. "Just the littlest tweak can affect where a vehicle lands on the list and that's why we keep doing it."Now in it's 19th year, the American-Made Index takes more than 400 different mode-year 2024 vehicles available in the United States and judges them by five criteria: assembly location, parts content, engine origin, transmission origin, and U.S. manufacturing workforce. Taking the top spot again this year is Tesla, once again the only American car company on the list, with its Model Y. While last year's list saw the EV company sweep the top four slots, this year it faces increased competition from Honda (the Passport is at number 2, while the Ridgeline is at number 5) as well as Volkswagen. The latter company's electric ID.4 hits number 3 this year. Masterson says that reflects the ongoing trend of carmakers diversifying their powertrain lineup to include EVs. "If you got one of the handful of model year 2021's and then the 2022's, those were all German made" says Masterson. "But since then they've retooled their Chattanooga, Tennessee, plant and now every ID.4 you buy is rolling off those plants."Tesla's Model 3 dropped from the number 1 position all the way to 21, thanks to its long-range model and its low percentage of American parts. "That was a big surprise to me," says Masterson. On the other hand, Masterson points out that the Model 3's performance variant has 75% percent American parts, a level only equalled by the Honda Passport. As for the least American-made cars, Masterson acknowledges that "that's a longer list." More than half of the cars bought in the United States last year were imports, including some iconic American brands. This includes the Buick Envista (made in South Korea) and the redesigned Lincoln Nautilus (China), as well as the Ford Bronco Sport (Mexico) and the Ford Maverick (also Mexico). "The big takeaway is that no vehicle is 100% American," says Masterson. "No vehicle is 100% top-to-bottom from the U.S."Additional key findings from this year’s list include:51% of vehicles on the list were assembled in the South, followed by 45% in the Midwest, and 4% in the West.While over half of Americans say they prefer auto brands that are built by union labor, none of the top-10 vehicles were produced at a union plant.Lexus TX made the top 10 with its first appearance on the AMI list, while the Toyota Camry and Jeep Gladiator both jumped 19 spots for a top-10 finish.All of Honda's luxury-brand Acura models are made in either Ohio or Tennessee. The complete top-10 list:Tesla Model YHonda PassportVolkswagen ID.4Tesla Model SHonda OdysseyHonda RidgelineToyota CamryJeep GladiatorTesla Model XLexus TX

Democrat Senator Predicts Trump Landslide Win in November

Cook Political Report's Latest Moves on Electoral College Map Are Five-Alarm Fire for Joe Biden