As Florida’s population passes 23 million for the first time ever, the Sunshine State may have to change its name to the Twilight State someday soon – not for a sudden influx in sparkly vampires, but retirees.According to a report released Friday by the state’s Demographic Estimating Conference, there were 23,002,597 people living in the state as of April 1 this year. It’s a remarkable increase on the 20 million residents reported back in 2015, and comes thanks to an annual increase of between 300,000 and 380,000 every year for the past decade.With data showing an increase of 365,205 in 2023 alone, Florida has cemented its place as the state with the second-largest population growth by both percentage (beaten only by South Carolina) and raw numbers (beaten only by Texas).Much of this growth comes from a not-unexpected source: boomers. Florida is famously popular with retirees from out of state – in fact, one study from 2023 named Florida the most popular state in the country for baby boomers looking to relocate – and with almost one in ten residents past the age of 75, it’s also home to the second-largest population percentage of elderly folks in the country, according to 2023 census data. But that growth is not projected to continue at such pace. Deaths have been outpacing births in the state – a trend which has been continuous since late 2019 and early 2020 – and that’s predicted to continue for quite some time. Meanwhile, the flow of retirees is set to slow down by the end of the decade, as the final cohorts of boomers enter retirement (Generation X, the next demographic group by age, is much smaller population-wise and less well-off, so taking up the reins of the Florida retirement industry may not be on the cards for them.)It's not all golden oldies pushing the population up, however. The state is also the second-most popular destination for middle-class Millennials looking to move, and more than one in five Floridians were born outside of the US. Higher immigrant populations generally correlate to younger demographics – those are the people who come with kids, after all – and it may be thanks to them that four of the five fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the US were found to be in Florida this year.And not all immigrants to Florida are from outside the US. Nearly three-quarters of the 2023 population increase came from people moving from other states – chief among which was New York, who said “so long, and good luck in Florida” to some 91,000 people this year. That’s more than the number coming from California and Georgia, who took the second and third spots respectively, combined.So, keep your eyes peeled, folks – there’s never been more Florida Men and Women than there are now. What a time to be alive.

If you find yourself in certain parts of Miami, you may well come across a distinct new dialect that’s been developing in the city – a unique combination of Spanish and American English that’s been dubbed “Miami English”.Over the last decade, researchers at the city’s Florida International University (FIU) have been closely following its emergence.“All words, dialects, and languages have a history,” Professor Phillip M. Carter, Director of the Center for Humanities in an Urban Environment at FIU, told IFLScience.“In Miami, there are many ways of speaking English. The variety we have been studying for the past 10 years or so is the main language variety of people born in South Florida in Latinx-majority communities,” he added. “The variety is characterized by some unique but ultimately minor pronunciations, some minor grammatical differences, and word differences, which are influenced by the longstanding presence of Spanish in South Florida.”So, what does Miami English sound like?It typically involves translating a Spanish phrase into English, but keeping the structure of the original phrase, known in linguistics as a calque. Phrases like “bajar del carro” become “get down from the car” instead of the more typical American English, “get out of the car”. You might hear someone saying they’re going to “make a party” rather than “throw a party”.Those aren’t just phrases you might hear from the bilingual communities that first developed them though – Carter has found the dialect has spread.“What is remarkable about [the calques] is that we found they were not only used in the speech of immigrants – folks who are leaning on their first language Spanish as they navigate the acquisition of English – but also among their children, who learned English as their co-first language,” said Carter.But despite its wider adoption, the emergence of a new dialect often comes with stigma attached to it, particularly when it’s sprung up from marginalized communities. Carter questions why that stigma should exist when the rise of different dialects has played such an important part in the evolution of language.“I want Miami English to lose its stigma because Miami English is someone’s home language variety. It’s the language that person learned from their parents, that they used in school, that they hear in their community. It’s the language variety they developed their identity in, developed their friendships in, found love in. Why should that be stigmatized?” asks Carter. “This principle holds to any and every language variety. There is no reason to stigmatize any form of human language. Doing so reflects our own limited understanding of humanity and human language. All human language varieties are a reflection of the miraculous interweaving of our evolutionary capacity for language with the unique historical and cultural circumstances in which that capacity finds context,” he added.

Perseverance has analyzed a rock in Jezero Crater that shows signs of chemical reactions hinting at ancient life. This interesting rock, shaped like an arrowhead and dubbed ‘Cheyava Falls,’ may be among the most groundbreaking finds on Mars. Its significance lies in the chemical markers and formations within it, which could have originated from primitive extraterrestrial life billions of years ago, during a time when Mars was far more habitable. “Cheyava Falls is the most puzzling, complex, and potentially important rock yet investigated by Perseverance,” said NASA’s Ken Farley. “On the one hand, we have our first compelling detection of organic material, distinctive colorful spots indicative of chemical reactions that microbial life could use as an energy source, and clear evidence that water – necessary for life – once passed through the rock.” “On the other hand, we have been unable to determine exactly how the rock formed and to what extent nearby rocks may have heated Cheyava Falls and contributed to these features.” Although it’s still early in the investigation and we should temper our excitement, Cheyava Falls holds the potential to be one of the most groundbreaking discoveries ever. It could provide evidence that life may have originated on a planet other than Earth. “These spots are a big surprise. On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated with the fossilized record of microbes living in the subsurface.” said astrobiologist David Flannery of the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. The post NASA’s Rover Find Potential Evidence of Ancient Martian Life appeared first on Anomalien.com.

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