Picture an alligator climbing over a fence. That sounds pretty scary, right? Well, it turns out that the reality is a lot funnier than it has any right to be. Alligators may be lightning-fast predators with all four feet on the ground, but climbing might just be this creature’s Achilles’ heel. One social media user captured the silliest clip of an alligator trying to clear a fence, and we can’t stop laughing! See, these animals have an obvious disadvantage when it comes to climbing. Their bodies are long, but their limbs are not! When this alligator could easily see over the top of a fence while standing on their hind legs, they probably figured it would be a piece of cake to climb over. However, it was actually quite an ordeal! View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Ghost Story Guys Podcast (@theghoststoryguys) Although the alligator was easily able to lift themself off the ground by grabbing onto the top of the fence with their front legs, they weren’t quite sure what to do next. The poor creature simply hung there kicking their back legs uselessly in the air for a while! In the video, you can hear the person behind the camera rooting for the animal. Of course, this creature wasn’t about to give up. There was a body of water on the other side of the fence, and the alligator was determined to climb over and get to it! Eventually, they were able to hoist themself up and over. Unfortunately, they didn’t manage a very graceful landing on the other side. Instead, they tumbled face-first into the ground! Still, it was totally worth it. Once the alligator climbed the fence, they made a beeline for the water. Screengrab from Instagram Even though the alligator had a hilariously tough time, many users still found the concept of alligators being able to scale a fence pretty scary. “The fact it CAN climb a fence is terrifying,” one person wrote. Another added, “How on Earth would I find the news that alligators can climb fences to be comforting?!” We still think the video is too funny! You can find the source of this story’s featured image here. The post Did You Know Alligators Can Climb Fences… And That It’s Hilarious To Watch? appeared first on InspireMore.

The one time that I wanna buy a UFC pay-per-view

A human trial in Scotland found that a dye that clings to cancer cells can give surgeons an unprecedented view of tumors as they enter to remove them. Developed for use in the removal of prostate cancer, the dye could be adapted to other cancers but is already successfully helping to extract greater amounts of […] The post How Glowing Dye That Clings to Cancer Cells Gives Doctors ‘second pair of eyes’ appeared first on Good News Network.

A The life, success and troubles of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, as told by Antonio Salieri, the contemporaneous composer who was deeply jealous of Mozart’s talent and claimed to have murdered him. Cast: 1984 memories ?Amadeus, CONTINUE READING... The post 84 From ’84: Amadeus appeared first on The Retro Network.

Sun's out, pup's out! With the arrival of summer, a trip to the lake or the beach for some refreshing water escapades with your four-legged best friend is the way to go.

Reform Party Edges Ahead of Tories in UK Polling

As the Moon orbits the Earth, the Earth orbits the Sun, and the Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way, oscillating up and down relative to the galactic plane as it does so. A new study has suggested that this motion of our star through the galaxy potentially takes us through regions of space that could affect our planet's climate. According to the study, the Solar System may have passed through an interstellar cloud so dense that it may have interfered with the flow of the solar wind, potentially cooling the planets. The Solar System is protected, to some extent, from the interstellar medium (ISM) by our heliosphere."The Sun sends out a constant flow of charged particles called the solar wind, which ultimately travels past all the planets to some three times the distance to Pluto before being impeded by the interstellar medium," NASA explains. "This forms a giant bubble around the Sun and its planets, known as the heliosphere."       The Solar System is currently in a 1,000-light-year-wide "Local Bubble", or "local interstellar cloud" (LIC). This "bubble" is a lot less dense than typical interstellar space, with 0.001 particles per cubic centimeter compared to the typical 0.1 atoms per cubic centimeter. The Solar System will leave this sparse region of space in the next few thousand years and head once more into the interstellar medium.Looking at the Solar System's path, and mapping the Local Ribbon of Cold Clouds, the team found we have likely traveled through denser regions in the past."In the ISM that the Sun has traversed for the last couple of million years, there are cold, compact clouds that could have drastically affected the heliosphere," the team explains in their paper. "We explore a scenario whereby the Solar System went through a cold gas cloud a few million years ago."Though research on the effects of traversing such regions has been sparser than atoms in the local bubble, the team believes it could have contracted our heliosphere, which in turn had an effect on our climate. Our heliosphere is protective, and as it contracted some of the material in these denser regions could reach Earth."Large amounts of neutral hydrogen as a result of an encounter with cold clouds with densities above 1,000 cm−3 will alter the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere," the team wrote. "Very few works have investigated the climatic effects of such encounters quantitatively in the context of encounters with dense giant molecular clouds. Some argue that such high densities would deplete the ozone in the mid-atmosphere (50–100 km [31–62 miles]) and eventually cool the Earth."The team says that geological evidence of increased amounts of 60Fe (iron 60) and 244Pu (plutonium 244) isotopes found in ice cores, the oceans, Antarctic snow, and samples of the Moon, could be evidence of these particles reaching Earth as we traversed the Local Lynx of Cold Cloud 2 million years ago. These isotopes are spat out by supernovas and neutron star mergers, which then become trapped by interstellar dust. These isotopes in the geological record have previously been explained as being sent here by a close supernova, but the current team believes they could be explained better by particles trapped in the cloud, as a close-by supernova would collapse the heliosphere to distances of 1 AU (the distance between the Earth and the Sun), while a further afield supernova would not deposit enough 60Fe on Earth.“This paper is the first to quantitatively show there was an encounter between the Sun and something outside of the solar system that would have affected Earth’s climate,” space physicist at Boston University, Merav Opher, said in a statement, later adding, "but as soon as the Earth was away from the cold cloud, the heliosphere engulfed all the planets, including Earth."The contraction of the heliosphere could have lasted from hundreds of years to a million years, according to the team, and it is likely we will encounter another such heliosphere-contracting cloud within another million years or so. While interesting, there is a lot more to find out."This work should be revisited with modern atmospheric modelling," the team writes. "It has been suggested that climate changes around this time could have affected human evolution. The hypothesis is that the emergence of our species Homo sapiens was shaped by the need to adapt to climate change. With the shrinkage of the heliosphere, the Earth was exposed directly to the ISM."The paper is published in Nature Astronomy.

With a new Mad Max movie in theaters, and the online chatter in overdrive, it’s hard not to recognize that, as a country, we’ve been obsessed with our own downfall for a long time now. It started in earnest with the collective fear of nuclear annihilation – a well-meaning impulse, to be sure, but over the decades, it has gone to counterproductive extremes.Our commonplace notions of retreat from the world at its best are often far more misguided than we believe. The relentless fantasizing about America’s collapse — whether in the form of good news, bad news, or some heady mix — is taking our eye off the ball of the real catastrophes that have already happened and in which we now struggle for purchase on the direction of our lives. It’s not just the problem of introducing into the collective consciousness crazy notions that, once acted out in voluntary or involuntary fashion, can spin into real damage real fast. It’s the flip side of the catastrophist coin: dreaming of dropping out of our “cooked” society and hunkering down somewhere in the woods. As Ted Kaczynski learned the hard way, one does not simply “go live in the woods.” Martin Heidegger might have been able to distract himself with made-up words from shipping out mail bombs from his isolated hut, but those who try to retreat from the world armed only with a merciless view of everything people have ever done wrong are all but certain to strike back in vengeance — against others or, fundamentally, themselves. No, stronger spiritual stuff than that is required. But even so, our commonplace notions of retreat from the world at its best are often far more misguided than we believe. Elon Musk, who not long ago referred to his current living situation as a “tech monastery,” recently posted an open call for applications to his latest mega project with a curious sales pitch: “Join xAI if you believe in our mission of understanding the universe, which requires maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth, without regard to popularity or political correctness.” Sounds good, but a snappy comeback would be that someone treating tech monastically to understand the universe through truth instead of opinion ought to try out a real monastery. Yet, the prevailing Western sense of the purpose of monasteries reveals the surprising hollowness of a “so true” joke like that. Here in the West, the experience of Europe after the archetypal fall of the Roman Empire is that the monasteries “saved civilization” — a trope people nowadays seem unable to look past as the pillars of contemporary life crumble around us. All those monks who ran away from the falling empire should be celebrated and imitated, we’re advised, because they ... preserved the great works of Western civilization in their scriptoria! People seem to have forgotten that monks should have a more than passing familiarity with the propensity of Jesus, who criticized so few, even when his life depended on it, to criticize the scribes. The purpose of monasteries, especially in catastrophic times, is assuredly not to hoard knowledge, however much, in such times, people outside the monasteries fail to preserve much of anything of lasting use or value. Monasteries have one all-important job and that is simply to pray for the salvation of the whole human race and each and every person within it. I find it troubling and revealing that, in these post-catastrophic times, so many people seem willfully ignorant of this simple truth, or even actively resistant to it. They seem to really believe, whether they are ready to admit it or not, that piles of books are genuinely more important to our salvation (or that of “civilization”) than round-the-clock prayers from those most wholly dedicated to communing with God to the limits of human ability on earth ... even though the knowledge stored up by those rare and precious people is probably a lot different from what the average person outside a monastery would want or expect it to be. Similarly, such people are strangely inclined to be dismissive of monastic prayer that God not allow the one thing they are ostensibly most stressed out about — the destruction of decently ordered human life. Of course, it’s not that strange for people who just don’t believe God has control over whether we thrive or perish. But few, even now, are quite willing to come right out and say that. And even many who do claim to believe that God is in control still spend a lot of time sweating the apocalypse that, surely, they insist, is right around the corner.These conflicting, confused, and contradictory attitudes are not just a lot of mental jibber jabber. They’re actually the source of our chaotic and cursed-like situation. So many different ways of dodging the reckoning with our misplaced priorities that we’re being pushed toward, harder and harder, by a merciful God — no matter how much we substitute fretfulness for right action.

Several U.S. states and cities are trying to sue or legislate fossil fuel companies out of existence while lining their own pockets. Hawaii has litigation against fossil fuel companies pending before its state supreme court as well as the U.S. Supreme Court. Similarly, California’s attorney general and lesser jurisdictions are suing fossil fuel companies. Recently, the Vermont legislature passed a bill requiring fossil fuel companies to pay for storm damage in 2023.The claims about harm are speculative. The legal and constitutional arguments are even worse. These blatant cash grabs will usher in a brave new world of predation and conflict in which every state legislature will seek to fill its coffers at the expense of its neighbors.State officials and other aspiring petty tyrants have no right to cancel the American energy industry and impoverish American citizens.These states have confused their authority to regulate emissions generated within their state’s borders with the alleged indirect effects of global emissions in their state. If any of these states succeed in their attempt to extort billions of dollars from fossil fuel companies, our entire economy will be at risk of catastrophic contraction.Still, states continue their crusade against fossil fuel companies because, as Willie Sutton famously said of banks, “That’s where the money is.” State officials hungry for more funding see fossil fuel companies as a tempting target. These efforts blend climate change alarmism with financial opportunism.In Vermont, advocates claim that Senate Bill 259, “An act relating to climate change cost recovery,” simply holds fossil fuel companies accountable for damage they caused Vermonters by drawing oil from the ground, refining it, and selling it to customers whose use of it then released greenhouse gases that contributed to climate change, which increased the severity of these storms.If that sounds like a stretch, that’s because it is.Ironically, these states attempt to penalize the unintended indirect consequences of fossil fuels that they themselves have benefited from tremendously. People benefit, not only when they drive to work or to the store, but whenever they buy goods or go out to eat or fly in an airplane or turn on a light switch. We shouldn’t penalize companies that deliver tremendous value to us every day.We know that when governments shake down fossil fuel companies, all those activities become much more expensive. California shows us what a war on fossil fuels creates: $5 per gallon gas and electricity costs twice the national average. Similarly, Europe’s war on fossil fuels has made its electricity costs twice those of the United States and four times those of China.Stealing billions of dollars from domestic fossil fuel companies (really shareholders, workers, and customers) will drive costs through the roof, bringing higher prices at the pump and skyrocketing electricity costs.Allowing any and every jurisdiction to shake down U.S. oil and gas companies will also stunt economic growth. Look again at Europe. Their economy has grown less than 1% a year since 2010. Such shakedowns may eventually shutter America’s energy industry altogether, in which case China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia will sit back and laugh while gladly accepting billions of our dollars for their oil and gas.Allowing states to pursue speculative damages from American companies will discourage entrepreneurship, innovation, and investment, as executives will worry about being sued or taxed for potential unintended consequences of their decisions from years or decades ago.These state cash grabs should be rejected quickly and definitively. State officials and other aspiring petty tyrants have no right to cancel the American energy industry and impoverish American citizens.