Many people enjoy bird watching. Although most don’t go out with binoculars and an Audobon Guide, they enjoy watching birds frolic in their yards. One couple was lucky enough to have a robin build a nest in a hanging flower basket on their porch. The nest was built, eggs were laid, and the mama bird was in the nest. When the woman’s husband decided he wanted a better look, the little bird went into full mama-bear mode. @nattlemarie Bird watching at its finest #bird #birdsoftiktok #jumpscare #scared #birdwatching ♬ original sound – Nathalie The man climbed slowly and purposefully to gain a better vantage point. The mama bird was on high alert when he reached the nest’s level. She stretched out to her full size and turned to face the intruder. Image from TikTok. What happened next was a move quicker and fiercer than any jump scare ever produced. The camera went flying, so the next view is slightly off-kilter. The man fell from his higher vantage point and landed with the camera view pointed at the porch’s ceiling. We’re not sure exactly what happened, but this mighty little bird epically bested her opponent! We see the camera view shift as he falls, turning sideways before he lands unceremoniously. Image from TikTok. The wife’s comment indicates that the man spilled an entire cup of coffee as he fell. He survived the fall and makes a brief, smiling appearance at the end of the video as he retrieves his phone. While we understand that this man was just curious, we should add a plea to other bird-watching fans who might attempt to do something similar. Many people don’t realize that disturbing a nest is against federal law under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA). Please use caution around nesting birds near your home. Please share. You can find the source of this story’s featured image here. The post When Bird Watching Goes Wrong: Woman Shares Hilarious Clip Of Husband’s Snafu With Nesting Robin appeared first on InspireMore.

If you ever feel like your life isn’t moving forward fast enough, remember that this lotus flower literally waited 200 years to bloom! According to NHK WORLD-JAPAN, excavators discovered the centuries-old seed at a Buddhist temple 25 years ago while digging up a pond. It was buried in a layer of earth that has likely been around for 200 years. Once properly potted and cared for, the seed began to grow into a beautiful lotus plant. Now, it’s bursting with blossoms! Byodoin Temple, where the blooming lotus flower is on display, is located in Uji City within the Kyoto Prefecture. This historic site has been standing since the 11th century, during Japan’s Heian Period. UNESCO considers it a World Cultural Heritage site. The temple creates a beautiful display of lotus flowers and their magnificent blooms every year. Right now, there are around 50 pots for visitors to enjoy. Many of these blossoms are red or pink, but the 200-year-old seed produced a plant with white flowers. Apparently, this started sometime in mid-June. Meet the Byodoin Temple Lotus. Screengrab from YouTube This particular type of lotus is called the Byodoin Temple Lotus. Its appearance reminds viewers of the lotus flowers pictured in the temple’s ancient murals. These images can be found in Hou-ou-do, or Phoenix Hall, which the Byodoin Temple website calls “one of the most important cultural assets of Japan.” In a video from NHK WORLD-JAPAN, Head Priest Kamii Monsho explained some of the significance of the lotus flower’s lovely white blooms. “The lotus has a very transparent, clean feel to it,” he said, through a translator. “The transparent whiteness helps clear the mind.” Unfortunately, visitors will only be able to view the rare plant and its ethereal blossoms until mid-July. Still, isn’t it inspiring that a 200-year-old seed excavated 25 years ago was able to bloom into such beautiful lotus flowers? You can find the source of this story’s featured image here. The post 200-Yr-Old Seed Excavated Decades Ago Grows Into Beautiful, Blooming Lotus appeared first on InspireMore.

'You want my fingerprints too? You want a chip in me?'

It’s easy to be romantic about trains, but that typically doesn’t grow into a hobby, at least for everyone other than Iain Smith from Aviemore in the Scottish Highlands. Smith and a small group of volunteers have spent the last quarter-century restoring this Ivatt Class 2 2-6-0 engine—serial no. 46464—to working order, and after years […] The post Hobbyists Restores Steam Locomotive to Pristine Condition–Puffs Down the Tracks for the First Time in 44 Years appeared first on Good News Network.

Framed on a wall in my office is a copy of my first opinion column, published by The Dallas Morning News on Oct. 11, 1987. Until then, I had been a wire-service reporter and editor in Washington, D.C., and, before that, a sports writer in Boston, but had never written opinion. When given the chance by the Morning News, I jumped on a subject that had piqued my curiosity: A senator for Delaware running for president had brazenly stolen a speech by a Welsh Labour Party leader in the United Kingdom and, when caught, paid the price by humiliatingly dropping out of the 1988 presidential race. The Welsh politician was Neil Kinnock, and 27-year-old me simply used the brouhaha over the purloined speech as an excuse to praise him for daring to tell Labourites that “socialism had become old hat,” as I put it. Democrats should be stealing that speech, I wrote. The senator from Delaware was President Joe Biden. Over the past 37 years since my column was published, I have watched him lie and lie again, sometimes about small things, other times about larger ones, but always with impunity.  The media are just as much to blame for Biden’s habitual dishonesty because, instead of covering him, they’ve covered for him. Even on those rare occasions when the legacy media have acknowledged that Biden is a fabulist, they have made excuses for him. The New York Times, for example, wrote protectively of him in 2022, saying that “President Biden has been unable to break himself of the habit of embellishing narratives to weave a political identity.” It’s not that he’s lying, you see. Biden merely adorns reality. Sometimes, Biden’s fabrications were just so oddball that they made you wonder if he was all there—even before he started showing signs of senility. An example of this is Biden’s insistence that his “Uncle Bosie” was eaten by cannibals in Papua New Guinea during World War II. The Defense Department was forced to put out a statement that Ambrose J. Finnegan was lost when his plane crashed in the Pacific Ocean.  Biden has also lied about graduating in the top half of his law school class, having his house “burn down with my wife in it,” growing up in the Puerto Rican community, and once being the driver of “an 18-wheeler,” to name only a handful of falsehoods that reveal a bizarre distance from reality. He also habitually lies about former President Donald Trump leaving behind a 9% inflation rate. Inflation was 1.4% in January 2021.  Other times, however, Biden’s mendacity reveals a level of pathos that makes you want to look away. A case in point is when he told the mothers of the 13 troops killed in Afghanistan because of his ill-conceived pullout in 2021 that he could feel their pain because his son, Beau Biden, had also died in the war.  It was not the first time. Joe Biden has a history of saying that Beau Biden “lost his life in Iraq.” Beau Biden died tragically at the age of 46 in 2015 of cancer at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. “We lost our son as well and brought him home in a flag-draped coffin,” Cheryl Rex said the president told her. Rex later complained at a forum, “My heart started beating faster, and I started shaking, knowing that their son died from cancer, and they were able to be by his side.” The context was Joe Biden’s stubborn insistence at the time that he was not culpable for the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. He was callously using his family’s tragedy to buy sympathy. As The Wall Street Journal’s Bill McGurn put it, “Mr. Biden is not a gold star father and should stop playing one on TV.” This long record of deceitfulness was on display in the president’s televised train wreck of a debate with Trump on June 27, when he again lied about many things, including not having any military deaths during his term in office.  “I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any, this decade, that doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world,” Biden said at one point, ignoring the 13 body bags from the attack during his Afghanistan withdrawal, again painfully reminding the loved ones of those who died. Biden also claimed that Trump left him a 15% unemployment rate, that he had been endorsed by the U.S. Border Patrol, and that Trump had told people to inject themselves with bleach during the COVID-19 pandemic. All these things were lies. Incongruously, post-debate Joe Biden is making truth-telling his badge against his display of precipitous cognitive degeneration. No, he doesn’t debate as well as he used to, he angrily spat out at a rally on Friday, but “I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth.” And the media are there for him, regurgitating the new White House talking points. Biden may be mentally incapacitated, but he’s a truth-teller, unlike Trump, they claim. “The ex-president got away with a torrent of lies,” wrote a CNN senior reporter. That phrase is garnering mentions on Google. All of this to say: My first column has aged well. Originally published by the Washington Examiner The post Joe Biden Has Always Been a Liar appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Joe Biden, host of the 75th anniversary NATO summit in Washington that ends Thursday, last week claimed to ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos that he “put NATO together.” Trying to find a charitable spin on this claim, let’s assume Biden means that he helped NATO stand stronger against Russian President Vladimir Putin in the crisis over Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Biden certainly didn’t put together NATO, founded in 1949, regardless of his recollection. In that context, it makes one wonder about the purpose and intent behind Biden’s energy policies and their implications for our NATO allies.  The president’s words imply one thing, but his actions are exactly the opposite. At this week’s NATO summit, America’s allies should have denounced Biden’s energy policies for benefiting Russia. For example, if we investigate the Biden administration’s policies on liquefied natural gas, we find that rather than supporting NATO against Russia, they clearly enable Russia and disadvantage our allies. Biden’s imposition this year of an export moratorium on liquefied natural gas, or LNG, has hampered U.S. companies that are trying to aid our allies by weaning them off dependence on Russian natural gas. You can debate Biden’s words (and his faulty memory), but his policies are simply dead wrong.  First, let’s look at Biden’s disastrous pause in exports of liquefied natural gas. The Energy Department has stopped new permits for such exports to Europe and Asia, which has led to price volatility and no assurance of reliable sources for our allies to meet their energy demands. A federal judge in Louisiana recently reversed Biden’s moratorium. That action could eventually help allow private sector companies in the U.S. to support our allies in Europe and Ukraine.  One example of note includes Ukraine and Venture Global, an American company that wants to come to the rescue by supplying Ukraine and Europe with liquefied natural gas to help them reduce their dependence on Russian gas. Biden’s continued pause had stood in the way.  The judge in Louisiana noted that the Biden administration’s suspension of LNG exports conflicts with settled law such as the Natural Gas Act, which directs the Energy Department to “ensure expeditious completion” of permit reviews.  Biden’s LNG export moratorium also violates the Administrative Procedure Act, since there never was a congressional direction that the Energy Department impose it. All of this is a clear conflict (again) between responsible policy and the extremist green faction of Biden’s Democratic Party and his administration. That faction must decide which is the priority: stopping Putin and helping our friends in Europe permanently leave the sway of Russia’s energy extortion, or crippling American energy companies to virtue-signal how “green” America can become. You can’t really have both. And yet, ironically, new evidence demonstrates that U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas represent a climate-conscious solution. A recent Berkeley Research Group report found that these exports result in lower greenhouse gas emissions than does natural gas supplied by competing countries, and much lower emissions compared with coal. The second example of this dangerous conflict is Biden’s support for a Middle East pipeline owned by the Russians. Here at least the president’s position seems to be nuanced, since a greater supply of oil could help lower energy prices.  Biden’s State Department has strongly supported restarting an oil pipeline that has been offline because of a political dispute among Kurdistan, Iran, and Turkey. Unfortunately, the pipeline is 60% owned by Rosneft, an oil company that itself is owned by the Russian state. Oh, and a point I skipped above: We shouldn’t be helping Iran or a hostile Turkey to control or influence significant energy in any way. All this defies logic.  It’s obvious that Biden wants cheaper energy. Every president does in an election year. That said, why is the State Department supporting reopening a Middle East pipeline that’s majority-owned by the Kremlin after the Biden administration canceled infrastructure projects here at home? The administration’s priorities are entirely misplaced. There is a path forward. It involves reinforcing American leadership in domestic energy production.  Instead of playing into the hands of our adversaries (Russia, Iran, and Venezuela), the Biden administration needs to change course and open more access to American oil and gas production.  That starts by permanently ending the suspension on LNG exports, ending the moratorium of oil and gas exploration on federal lands, ending unprecedented restrictions on offshore oil and gas leasing, ceasing resistance to the Canadian Enbridge Pipeline 5, and restarting canceled pipeline projects such as Keystone XL. America’s energy resources are the envy of the world and should be leveraged to protect our citizens and our allies. U.S. energy exports strengthen our competitive edge against China, Russia, and other hostile regimes. They also produce high-paying jobs at home and lessen dependence on any foreign source.  If America really wants to help Ukraine and be a leader in NATO, this is a path that will be consistent, effective, and inexpensive compared with direct financial or material support.  The green energy activists will hate it, but simply put: They’re wrong. The post Biden Talks Tough About NATO, but His Energy Policies Tell Different Story appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Stray dogs in Istanbul are going viral after they are found lying on a display bed and looking very much at home inside a store. The now-viral video shows three stray dogs inside the store. One is seen already cuddled up in the sheets and pillows, while another joins it to comfortable lie on the […]

It’s no secret that the planet is getting warmer, but how are our bodies responding to increased exposure to extreme conditions? From record-breaking temperatures to an uptick in severe weather warnings, the consequences of the climate crisis are all around – so how is climate change impacting our health?This is the Big Question host Rachael Funnell put to author and neuroscientist Clayton Aldern. Author of The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Minds, Brains and Bodies, Aldern is well versed in the science that backs up what we know about how extreme weather can alter the way we think, act, and feel.You can listen to this episode and subscribe to the podcast on all your favorite podcast apps: Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, Podbean, Amazon Music, and more. A transcript of the conversation is available here.

An aerospace engineer and astronomer has made waves on social media after checking the math of an astronaut that seemed too good to be true. Max Fagin, who has worked for NASA and SpaceX, as well as working as commander at the Mars Desert Research Station, wrote on X that an astronaut casually told him a counter-intuitive statement last week. That statement was that "it takes 2 hours to orbit at the surface of any object made of rock".This sounded a bit odd to Fagin, but when he looked skeptical the astronaut merely smiled and told him to "check it yourself" – and so he did. First, he thought about the low orbits of (mainly) rocky objects that we know about: Earth, Mars, and the Moon.        IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.All these orbits are around 2 hours, with the low-Earth orbit period being the quickest orbit. Fagin did the math and realized that the radius and mass of an object are unimportant when calculating low orbits. What is important is the density.      IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.The astronaut was correct, it takes around 2 hours to orbit any object comprised of rock. Looking into it further, he realized that the same physics keeps asteroids above a certain size rotating no faster than once every two hours."Most asteroids larger than 200 meters [656 feet] spin at a rate below that which would cause an object on its equator to experience weightlessness," a paper on the mechanics of moving asteroids explains. "This translates to rotation rates below 12 revolutions/day (2 hr/rev) with most having rotation periods of 4 hours or greater."     IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.As Fagin explains, asteroids grow through collisions of smaller rocks and are held together (often very loosely) through their own gravity. Any of these objects that spin faster than once every two hours would eject material into orbit, until it shrinks or its rotation slows to the 2-hour limit defined by its density. Which, we're sure you'll agree, is pretty cool to know.

Chile’s Atacama Desert – the driest nonpolar desert on the planet – is currently blanketed in swathes of pretty purple flowers. It may seem strange for plant life to bloom in such a hostile place, but, stranger still, it is happening in the dead of winter, several months earlier than anticipated.The phenomenon is known as “desierto florido” (the flowering desert), and it occurs every few years, carpeting the desert with flowers. The usually sandy, rocky, and barren landscape is transformed into a garden of 200 different species of pink, purple, and yellow blooms that span hundreds of kilometers.The event usually happens between September and November – springtime in Chile – when rainfall, temperature, and sunlight join forces to awaken dormant desert seeds. But this current bloom is unseasonably early – it’s currently the middle of winter in the Southern Hemisphere – and that is down to El Niño.    IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.El Niño, and its counterpart La Niña, are the extreme phases of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle – a recurring climate pattern that describes how changes in the water temperature in the Pacific Ocean have a global impact on the world. Everything from wind, temperature, and rainfall patterns to the intensity of hurricane seasons is affected. During El Niño – the “warm phase” of the ENSO – ocean surface temperature rises in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. This coincides with an increase in rainfall, explaining the recent heavy rains in the Atacama Desert that have caused flowers to spring to life.The blooms are not yet sufficient in number to be considered “desierto florido”, Cesar Pizarro, head of biodiversity conservation for the National Forestry Corporation (CONAF), an organization run by the Chilean government, told Reuters. But with more rain expected, they are likely to spread over a larger area. "In the meantime, we have to wait," Pizarro said.    IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.The Atacama is the driest nonpolar desert – but not the driest place on Earth, that title belongs to somewhere you might not expect – receiving just 1 to 3 millimeters (0.04 to 0.1 inches) of precipitation per year in some places. But that hasn’t stopped life from thriving there.Over the past 40 years, around 15 blooming events have taken place. The last time it happened this early, according to Reuters, was in 2015.In 2022, the Chilean government announced the creation of a new national park in the province of Copiapó, in an effort to protect these spectacular displays along with the wildlife they help support.