Tarantulas might be an arachnophobe's greatest fear – but who could resist the power of an electric blue tarantula? Three species are particularly famous for having an electric blue hue, and while they might be the stuff of nightmares for some, they are pretty dreamy to behold. The Cobalt Blue TarantulaOur first blue species is the cobalt blue tarantula (Cyriopagopus lividus). Unfortunately, little is known about the ecology and habits of all of our three popular species and most of what is known is mainly learned from hobbyists and pet owners. This species is a popular pet and originates from the tropical rainforests of Thailand and Myanmar. Despite its popularity as a pet species, the tarantula has a reputation for being aggressive and can even deliver a painful bite. They spend much of their time in burrows The Electric Blue TarantulaThe second species in our list is a relatively new one. Only officially described last year, the electric blue tarantula (Chilobrachys natanicharum) is native to Thailand, and researchers found it on a tree in a mangrove forest. “The secret behind the vivid blue coloration of our tarantula lies not in the presence of blue pigments, but rather in the unique structure of their hair, which incorporates nanostructures that manipulate light to create this striking blue appearance.” researcher Dr Narin Chomphuphuang said in a statement at the time. The Greenbottle Blue TarantulaThe greenbottle blue tarantula (Chromatopelma cyaneopubescens) is again a popular pet and hobby species because of its attractive coloration. Endemic to Venezuela, this species has blue legs but more of a green-colored carapace, hence the name. Citizen science has helped researchers learn more about the distribution of this species.Image Credit: NATTHAWAT101/Shutterstock.comWhy Are Some Tarantulas So Vividly Coloured?It’s long been a puzzle to scientists why species like the cobalt and electric blue tarantulas possess such vivid colors when they are largely nocturnal or crepuscular species. There has even been the suggestion that the species themselves do not possess true color vision, or could tell colors apart. However, research from 2020 showed that the tarantulas could perceive the bright blue tones on their bodies. The team also suggested that the color had nothing to do with defense, but rather was to attract potential mates. "While the precise function of blueness remains unclear, our results suggest that tarantulas may be able to see these blue displays, so mate choice is a likely potential explanation.” Said Dr Saoirse Foley from CMU in a statement. 

On the morning of June 3, look to the East. Just before sunrise, you will get six out of seven planets nicely aligned. Venus will be a bit too close to the Sun to be visible before the Sun appears. The alignment will give you great views in the order Jupiter, Mercury, Uranus, Mars, Neptune, and Saturn. And for good measure, you will be getting a Moon crescent too, just near Mars in the sky.Uranus and Neptune can’t be seen with the naked eye so you will need a telescope or high-powered binoculars for that. If you care more for the presence of planets than their arbitrary alignment, then any day is now good to see Venus too before it gets too close to the Sun. But hurry! If you look tomorrow or the day after, the order will be slightly switched. Mercury is currently not very near the Sun, and while its maximum elongation is months away, the littlest planet is clearly visible.Since we are approaching the summer solstice, there are places in the Northern Hemisphere where dawn will be in the middle of the night (maybe do not go to sleep?) or will require a very early rise. So do not worry if you miss this one. Planetary alignments of this type are not extremely rare.The eight planets all orbit the same plane in the Solar System (plus or minus a handful of degrees), so they often end up in this kind of alignment. They do orbit at different speeds though, so there is the occasional switch between who’s on one side of the Sun or who’s on the other. Alignments of three or four planets are fairly common.Six is a bit rarer, but you can have multiple days in a calendar year where at least six are visible in the night sky. Venus and Mercury move pretty quickly around the Sun, so they do get round again. Although the other planets might have stretched to the other side of the celestial vault by then, it is a long arc that connects the planets.If you are not particularly a morning person, worry not. A seven-planet alignment is coming next year, best seen in late February 2025 after sunset!

New research has challenged one of the most widely accepted theories about the function of sleep: that it allows the brain’s waste clearance system to take out the trash in the form of harmful toxins that build up while we’re awake. It’s something we all absolutely have to do, yet scientists know surprisingly little about the function of sleep. It must be important, or else evolution wouldn’t have allowed us to spend several hours a day in a state of such vulnerability, completely unaware of that hungry sabertooth purring just outside the cave. One theory that’s gained a lot of traction, especially in the last decade, is that sleep provides a vital opportunity to “clean” the brain ready for a new day, via the glymphatic system. However, as the authors of the new study write in their paper, “How metabolites and toxins are cleared from the brain is unresolved.” And their recent findings are calling some assumptions into question.What did the study find?Through experiments in mice, the team at Imperial College London found evidence that glymphatic clearance was actually less efficient during sleep and under anesthesia. They applied fluorescent dye to the animals’ brains so they could watch the clearance happening in real-time. In mice that were asleep, clearance was reduced by about 30 percent. In anesthetized mice, the figure was more like 50 percent. “The field has been so focused on the clearance idea as one of the key reasons why we sleep, that we were very surprised to observe the opposite in our results,” commented study co-lead Professor Nick Franks in a statement. One of the hypotheses that arose from the glymphatic clearance theory is that impaired sleep, and therefore impaired waste removal, might cause or accelerate the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. The new results don’t necessarily dispute the fact that poor sleep and dementia go hand in hand, but they might suggest a different underlying mechanism at work.“It may well be that having good sleep does help to reduce dementia risk for reasons other than clearing toxins,” said study co-lead Professor Bill Wisden.     What’s the reaction to the study?The study attracted a lot of attention when it was published in mid-May 2024, as you might expect for results that offer a counterpoint to such a widely held theory. Speaking to Science, University of California Santa Barbara biologist Stephen Proulx, who has done similar work looking at cerebrospinal fluid flow in the brain, called the study’s methods “very clever.”However, not every commenter was quite so complimentary.“You can’t just come in and do something that’s completely different and say all the old data is wrong. I’m actually shocked that this paper was published,” neuroscientist Maiken Nedergaard told Science, mentioning plans to write a letter detailing concerns about the study to Nature Neuroscience, the journal that published it. Nedergaard led the seminal study, published in 2013, which originally demonstrated the clearance of β-amyloid – of Alzheimer’s disease infamy – from the mouse brain during sleep. Much of the controversy surrounds particular methodological choices in the new study. The fluorescent dye was injected directly into the brain, which critics say risks creating unreliable data by damaging tissues and increasing intracranial pressure. Speaking to The Transmitter, Nedergaard was strident in her critiques: “They are unaware of so many basic flaws in the experimental setup that they have.” Other examples of the issues, as Nedergaard sees it, include the fact the animals weren’t in natural sleep, that steps were not taken to ensure the dye successfully reached the tissue, and that the measurements of glymphatic drainage were not taken in optimal locations. For Franks’ part, he admitted to the Guardian that, like many others, he’d supported the glymphatic clearance theory. “It sounded like a Nobel prize-winning idea,” he said. “The idea that your brain is doing this basic housekeeping during sleep just seems to make sense.”The team’s self-confessed surprise at their results has only made them keener to investigate further. Wisden commented in the press release, “The other side to our study is that we have shown that brain clearance is highly efficient during the waking state. In general, being awake, active and exercising may more efficiently clean the brain of toxins.”However, it was in part because of the inevitable contention the work would cause that the team opted not to present it at any conferences. “Step back from it. Publish your paper, do the best you can, and then see what happens,” Franks told The Transmitter.What happens, in this case at least, is a debate that is no doubt as charged as they suspected it might be. And the best, maybe the only, way to resolve it is to do even more research to try and get to the root of why we spend a third of our lives in peaceful slumber.Or not so peaceful, as the case may be. The study is published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. 

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Progressivism is a multipronged deviation from the straight and narrow that talks — or takes — people off the path to the New Jerusalem and toward false secular utopias. In this loose coalition, these otherwise unreconcilable strays are drawn in by a lack of gratitude and the sense that "better" must be anywhere other than here and anyone besides those present. And they're kept together by a Procrustean vibe – and what they've turned their backs on. The arch-conservative Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn emphasized in both “Leftism” and “The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large” how the left – a term that encompasses the progressive movement – takes after Procrustes, the legendary highwayman of Attica. This Luciferean movement appears eager to take the whole of our species away from the straight and narrow, presuming the raw material made in the image of God needs to change. In Greek mythology, Procrustes, also known as Damastes, "tied his victims upon an iron bed, and, as the case required, either stretched or cut off their legs to adapt them to its length.” Like Procrustes, progressives have a habit of socially, legally, or literally hacking away at those parts or wholes of human beings that fail to fit into their preconceived systems. The 20th century is full of atrocities in which millions of innocents were cut up because progressives in the Soviet Union, Germany, Cambodia, and elsewhere, with an eye to purportedly better futures, desired that all bodies and minds fit the lengths of their Procrustean beds. This tendency is clear also in other progressive subgroups, such as the eugenicists and transsexual activists, who both seek to cut away at biological realities they find undesirable. This Procrustean verve is, however, becoming especially pronounced among the transhumanists of our day. Before noting some of the ways the transhumanist movement is working to carve up a new mankind, it is important first to note the other tendency that unites progressives. Progressives share in common a prideful rejection of the primacy of God, the goodness of His creation, and the worth of the humanity Christ endured and elevated with his suffering, death, and resurrection. Simply put: Progressivism is Luciferian. In the garden, the serpent — who cannot create but can only distort and destroy — told Eve of eating the forbidden fruit, “Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods.” Eve was enticed not to emulate or follow the one true God, but to follow Satan’s example and seek divinity besides and without God, contrary to His will. This lack of humility and the desire to be independent of God not only resulted in the fall of mankind, but has ever since stained progressive efforts to achieve immortality and to escape the humanity that was evidently valued enough by God for Christ to take on and save. C.S. Lewis wrote in “Mere Christianity," “People often ask when the next step in evolution – the step to something beyond man – will happen. But in the Christian view, it has happened already.” He went on to write, “In Christ a new kind of man appeared: and the new kind of life which began in Him is to be put into us.” Technological and political innovations aside, the apex of humanity and the superlative by which the comparative “progress” should be measured was nailed to a tree two millennia ago. The Christian understanding is that the pursuit of God and true progress means trying to follow Christ and fit the cross. After all, on the cross are perfection and immortality, which entail the very suffering and death the transhumanist seeks to eliminate. The transhumanist endeavor, ultimately, is to pursue godhood by rejecting the cross and setting oneself down on Procrustes’ bed, cutting off anything resembling the Son of Man. In this sense, transhumanism is the epitome of regression. Artificial wombs, brain implants, virtualization of everything in the anti-sacramental Metaverse, transsexuality – these transhumanist drives away from our humanity each substitute parts of what makes us human and human life worth living. What’s more, they amount to sterile shortcuts off the path to the New Jerusalem that cut away at the travelers who take them. A video from Yemeni “science communicator” Hashem Al-Ghaili entitled “EctoLife: The World’s First Artificial Womb Facility” recently went viral, discussing the so-called “bioreactors” that may soon supplant mothers and enable investors to “genetically engineer” prospective children, reported the Christian Post. The mother and the bond she enjoys with her baby, unborn and newborn, appear not to fit the transhumanists' Procrustean bed. EctoLife: The World’s First Artificial Womb Facility youtu.be Rather than improve the ways we teach or understand, the transhumanists appear keen to change the raw material that is taught or comprehended. The brain implants that may one day soon help the blind to see and the lame to walk will in short order be also used – along with some version of OpenAI's ChatGPT – as stand-ins for the common man’s common sense. The promise of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse is that we can skip the messy, real interactions between human beings that we have long enjoyed, at least up until the pandemic, and instead stream into false realities remotely. The new humanity need not risk adventure or moral consequence in the world of flesh and bone that God deemed good. These experiences will join our common sense and the other cuttings at the foot of Procrustes' bed. G.K. Chesterton reminds us in “Orthodoxy” — the book that helped set the militant atheist and World War I infantryman C.S. Lewis on his way to Christian conversion — “You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel.” The transhumanist prong of the progressive movement is doing precisely that: freeing us camels of our humps. This Luciferean movement appears eager to take the whole of our species away from the straight and narrow, presuming the raw material made in the image of God needs to change, as opposed to the will and moral reflexes of the immortal, albeit imperfect, persons animating it. “If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive,” wrote Lewis. The progressive coalition and all its Procrustean subgroups, transhumanism in particular, appear to have taken a wrong turning and are desperate for us to go with them, bereaving us of our proverbial humps along the way. For all their hacking and dreaming, their efforts to go forward have not brought them anywhere nearer the place where we all ought to be: not like gods, apart from God, but with God in Christ.

The Federal Reserve may be the central bank of the United States — but it’s a private corporation that actually has nothing to do with the federal government. Not only is it a private corporation, but Thomas Massie believes it’s what’s causing America’s skyrocketing inflation. “What they did during COVID is they created trillions of dollars out of thin air,” Massie explains to Glenn Beck. “Congress spent those trillions of dollars, but it’s the Fed that enables it and it’s the Fed that pulls it off.” “The Fed acts like they’re the firefighters, but they are the arsonists,” he continues, adding, “The Fed starts out as the arsonist, then they come in and they do the firefighting by raising interest rates, and then they go in and bail out the couple of banks last year. So, they’re causing the problems that they come in and allegedly solve.” While inflation impacts millions of Americans negatively, the Fed doesn’t care — because it’s only the rich who matter to them. “They make sure that the rich people can survive through inflation. The poor people can’t, or even the middle class can’t,” Massie explains, telling Glenn that while the U.S. dollar is the world’s reserve currency, it may not be for long. “No politician in any other country is going to take responsibility for their own fiscal madness. Everybody’s going to blame it on the United States because we were greedy, grotesque, and took on so much debt that we devalued the dollar, and it’s going to affect the entire world,” Glenn agrees. This is why Massie believes it's time to end the Federal Reserve. “They’ve been asking me, ‘What if you get rid of the Fed? What do you replace it with?’ That’s like saying if you take out a tumor, what do you replace the tumor with,” he says, adding, “The serious answer is we go back to stable currency that the government can’t manipulate.” Want more from Glenn Beck?To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

World Economic Forum founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab has shocked the world by announcing that he's stepping down from his role running the WEF. Schwab had founded the global gathering in 1971 and was operating as the executive chairman until now — though he won’t be leaving his brainchild. Rather, Schwab will be transitioning to a role as a nonexecutive chairman pending approval by the Swiss government. While his successor has yet to be named, Glenn Beck and comedian Eric Hollerbach aren’t wasting the opportunity to poke a little fun at the global villain. “Hello my slave, Glenn Beck-ing-hamming, how are you today,” Hollerbach says, impersonating Schwab’s fictional son, who they joke will now be running the WEF. “I’m good,” Glenn laughs. “It’s interesting that you would agree to come on this particular program. I’m not sure how your father feels about people like me.” Hollerbach, aka Klaus Schwab’s heir, tells Glenn that he hopes to make some “conversions” from Glenn’s side and that Schwab’s brain “is analog at this moment, and it will go to digitalization.” “So, he was just kind of getting the upgrade,” Hollerbach jokes, adding, “It’s more of a lateral movement.” When Hollerbach explains what the role of the WEF is, Glenn can’t help but laugh. “We do certain rituals to ensure that we go up the food chain, closer and closer and closer to the great architect of the universe. And we are the embodiment to inherit earth incorporated,” he explains. “People, like the average people, how are they going to benefit?” Glenn asks. “Well, their slavery will be more like digital token. They will have equitable access to making labor or jails,” Hollerbach answers, embracing his power hungry character. Want more from Glenn Beck?To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Harrison Butker is not apologizing.The Kansas City Chiefs kicker and three-time Super Bowl champion became the target of controversy this month after delivering a pro-Catholic commencement speech that affirmed traditional values. A petition demanded that Butker be fired, a sports writer said a woman should replace him, and media subjected his teammates to a barrage of questions about his views.'Being disliked and mischaracterized by some is nothing compared to finding yourself in a lion's den.'But in the face of cancel culture, Butker refused to back down.Speaking at the Courage Under Fire gala in Nashville last Friday — an event hosted by Regina Caeli Academy, a Catholic hybrid homeschool organization — Butker told attendees he has zero regrets."In my seven years in the NFL, I've become familiar with the positive and negative comments, but the majority of them revolve around my performance on the field. But as to be expected, the more I've talked about what I value most, which is my Catholic faith, the more polarizing I have become," Butker said."It's a decision I've consciously made and one I do not regret at all," he revealed.In his first public remarks since the controversy erupted, Butker explained that he has no regrets because he trusts in the "Lord's providence" and because he is not "trying to please" people — but Jesus Christ."Glorifying God and not ourselves should always remain our motivation despite any pushback or even support," Butker said. Later in the speech, Butker explained that he is "humbled" by all the support he has received. But he immediately turned the attention away from himself."If I constantly remind myself of the hardships the saints went through — especially the martyrs and their persecution — it makes it all seem not so bad. For if heaven is our goal, we should embrace our cross, however large or small it may be, and live our life with joy — to be a bold witness for Christ," Butker said."In the end, being courageous starts with the small things. Being disliked and mischaracterized by some is nothing compared to finding yourself in a lion's den," he concluded, referring to the biblical figure of Daniel.Despite the outrage and cancel attempts, Butker's jersey became a best-seller, his teammates defended him, and clergy praised him.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Pope Francis made the derogatory comment while discussing the Vatican’s absolute ban on homosexual priests.

What Judge Merchan Told Parties About 'Not Going Into the Law' Before Trump Jury Entered Seems Shady AF