Prog singer songwriter Louise Patricia Crane will release her new solo album Netherworld in June

If you haven’t heard, Harrison Butker, the Chiefs’ phenomenal kicker, is facing an onslaught of attacks for a commencement speech. The fascists are trying to get him canceled. He gave a commencement speech praising family, mothers, and children and expressing the Catholic Church’s stated values. This was on his own time. The attempt to cancel […] The post Harrison Butker Is More Catholic Than Benedictine Nuns appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

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Cats come in a glorious variety of colors and coat patterns, and back in 2007, a brand-new flavor of feline appeared in Finland, looking like the black printer ink had run out. Named after a type of licorice popular in the country, scientists have now figured out the genetic basis for these distinctive and delicious-looking cats.You’d be lucky to come across one of these kitties out and about. Though they’ve since made it out of the single feral population they were first spotted in, they’re still a rare find. What makes them stand out from the crowd, however, is their unusual coat. They share much of the same pattern as “tuxedo” cats, with a white chest, belly, and paws, though the coat has also been seen in tabbies and tortoiseshells. Their back fur, on the other hand, is something of an ombre moment, with black coloration at the base of the hair gradually fading to white at the tips.In a new study, a team of scientists dubbed this the “salmiak” phenotype – an observable trait with a genetic basis – due to its similarity in color to the salty variety of licorice common in Finland, and sought to find out its molecular cause.But when the team searched the cats’ DNA for the variants that typically affect white coat coloration, these classic mutations were nowhere to be found, leaving them somewhat… purr-plexed.   Not giving up, the team members from the University of Helsinki put out a call to the public in search of further licorice cats to analyze. This time, they focused on the KIT gene, variants of which are often associated with different white coat patterns in many animals.After conducting whole genome sequencing on two licorice cats, again, there were no variants of note to be found in the gene. However, there was a mutation downstream of it – a pretty big one, in fact, as around 95,000 of the base pairs that make up DNA had been deleted.Found in both of the cats tested, it’s a mutation that could certainly influence the expression of KIT and, as a consequence, lead to the distinctive coat pattern.To confirm this, the researchers tested another group of house cats, some of which had the salmiak phenotype. These salmiak cats were found to have two copies of the mutation, whilst another three non-salmiak cats were found to have one copy. The remaining non-salmiak cats had no copies.Not only did this help to confirm that the mutation the team identified was most likely responsible for the distinctive coat color, but that it’s also recessive. This means that in order for a cat to be licoriced, both of its parents have to carry at least one copy of the variant.“The discovery of the salmiak variant enriches our understanding of feline coat color genetics. But that’s not all,” said study author Heidi Anderson in a blog post. “This knowledge could also be valuable for breeding efforts, potentially contributing to the preservation of this trait in our feline companions.”The study is published in the journal Animal Genetics.[H/T: New Scientist]

Circular depressions around 150 meters (500 feet) wide off the coast of Central California are quite ancient and owe their longevity to sediment flows, new research reveals. However, their original cause has yet to be discovered.The Sur Pockmark Field has puzzled oceanographers since its discovery in 1998. More than 5,000 shallow circular depressions are packed into an area the size of Los Angeles around 40 kilometers (26 miles) off the coast of Big Sur, Central California.The formations are only around 5 meters (16 feet) deep on average, although some can be almost 10 times that. Similar formations elsewhere in the world have been attributed to pockets of methane escaping through sediments, like the craters that have recently started appearing in Siberia. The release of all that methane is a serious problem for the planet, given the gas’s global warming potential if it reaches the surface, but there is a more local issue as well. The area off Big Sur is marked for offshore wind farms, and having methane bubbling up where the floating towers are anchored would be a concern. This spurred the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) to investigate the topic more deeply, and they found another explanation. The researchers concluded the depressions are caused by sediment gravity flows, a sort of underwater avalanche of mud and sand. “There are many unanswered questions about the seafloor and its processes,” said MBARI’s Eve Lundsten in a statement. “This research provides important data about the seafloor for resource managers and others considering potential offshore sites for underwater infrastructure to guide their decision-making.”Lundsten and co-authors started by deploying underwater robots to map more than 300 pockmarks and their surrounds, providing resolution surface-based sonar could not match. They also took more than 500 sediment samples in and around five pockmarks, none of which showed any sign of methane.A clue to the cause lies in something not obvious from maps; the field lies on the sloping continental margin, between the shelf and the deep ocean. That slope creates the conditions for enormous gravity flows, and the team found the sediment to include layers of sandy deposits called turbidites left behind by gravity flows over the last 280,000 years. The most recent flow was around 14,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age.The team’s conclusion is that the gravity flows erode sediments that build up in the pockmarks under more normal conditions, maintaining the indentations, but the initial formation process remains a mystery.“We collected a massive amount of data, allowing us to make a surprising link between pockmarks and sediment gravity flows. We were unable to determine exactly how these pockmarks were initially formed, but with MBARI’s advanced underwater technology, we’ve gained new insight into how and why these features have persisted on the seafloor for hundreds of thousands of years,” Lundsten said.Adding to the mystery of the pockmarks’ formation is that they are fairly evenly spaced, a common feature of pockmark fields elsewhere. They vary from 10 to 700 meters (33 to 2,297 feet) across, with the larger ones in deeper waters. The team also found evidence individual pockmarks can sometimes migrate along the ocean floor.Windfarm developers may not like the sound of enormous avalanche-like activities in their field, but the timescales between these events suggest they’re less of a threat than methane releases.The work makes the Sur Pockmark Field one of the best-studied offshore regions in North America, and therefore probably the world. The study is open access in the Journal of Geophysical Research Earth Surface.