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A motorbike riding loner rebel on the high school football team wins a date with a cute, rich cheerleader. At the high school dance, her boyfriend’s behavior leads to a breakup – opening doors. Cast: CONTINUE READING... The post 84 From ’84: Reckless appeared first on The Retro Network.

Spectrum Brands Pet Care voluntarily recalls their FURminator deShedding Ultra Premium Dog Conditioner due to potential contamination of bacteria.

Scientific American Gets Unscientific About Homeschools

Palaeontologists have struck giant new dinosaur gold with the discovery of Lokiceratops, an ornate beast that was approximately 22 feet (6.7 meters) long, weighed around 11,000 pounds (5 metric tonnes), and had a seriously fancy hat. It belonged to a group of vegetarian dinosaurs known as the “centrosaurines,” and dates back 78 million years.A spectacular dinosaur and one that’s been given a spectacular name, the new species has been crowned Lokiceratops rangiformis, meaning “Loki’s horned face that looks like a caribou.” It’s a hat tip to the Norse god Loki and his horned helmet, and the differing horn lengths of each side of its frill that are asymmetric, much like the antlers of a caribou.It sits within a group of horned dinosaurs known as ceratopsids that first evolved around 92 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous. We know that the group gave rise to several species of ornately decorated dinosaurs, but this discovery is shining a light on the previously unrecognized diversity of these animals.Fossil skull bones of Lokiceratops reconstructed and displayed at the Museum of Evolution in Maribo, Denmark.Image credit: Museum of Evolution“A new horned dinosaur found in the Cretaceous badlands of northern Montana reveals unexpectedly high diversity, suggesting elevated speciation rates and regional endemism in members of the group,” said study co-lead Dr Mark Loewen, a professor and lecturer at the University of Utah, to IFLScience. “Lokiceratops rangiformis is the fourth centrosaurine, and fifth horned dinosaur overall, from a single fauna, and is closely related to two of the other animals it lived alongside. Fossils from this region along the US-Canada border suggest horned dinosaurs were living, and evolving, in a small geographic area. The high endemism seen in centrosaurines implies that dinosaur diversity is presently underestimated and contrasts with the large (historic) geographic ranges seen in most large mammals today.”Reconstruction of Lokiceratops surprised by a crocodilian in the 78-million-year-old swamps of northern Montana, USA.Image credit: ©Andrey Atuchin for the Museum of Evolution in Maribo, Denmark“In addition to being one of the largest and most ornately decorated horned dinosaurs ever discovered, Lokiceratops also reveals an unexpectedly high level of richness in a Laramidia ecosystem,” added co-lead Dr Joseph Sertich, Affiliate Professor, Department of Geosciences, Colorado State University. It must have been so impressive to potential mates that it really was worth having such a huge head!Dr Mark Loewen“Even more surprising, three of the five horned dinosaurs that lived in this ecosystem are close relatives, revealing a surprising pattern of rapid, regionally restricted evolution in the centrosaurine group of horned dinosaurs, a pattern similar to birds and other animals that use display features.”Its headgear is weird even by ceratopsian standards, being one of the largest frill horns ever seen among this group of dinosaurs. Beyond being very fabulous, these ornaments provide a lot of information on the diversity of horned dinosaurs, helping us to build a more complete picture of the species richness of Cretaceous ecosystems. That said, carting it around wouldn’t have been easy.Portrait reconstructions of all four centrosaurine dinosaurs that lived together in the Kennedy Coulee Assemblage of northern Montana and southern Alberta.Image credit: Fabrizio Lavezzi © Evolutionsmuseet, Knuthenborg“Having a giant head like Lokiceratops required massive neck muscles to balance it on the body and lots of calories to grow as the animal matured,” continued Loewen. “At the same time, it must have been so impressive to potential mates that it really was worth having such a huge head!”Lokiceratops was the biggest horned dinosaur of its time, but remarkably it was one of five living together at the same time. It had been previously thought that no more than two species of horned dinosaurs could coexist, but Lokiceratops’ big head has blown that theory out of the water.The prehistoric behemoth is also unique in that it didn’t possess a nose horn, but what it lacked on the snoot it made up for on its frill, which was packing the two blade-like horns that inspired its name. The groundbreaking specimen was excavated from the badlands of northern Montana, and will go on display at the Natural History Museum of Utah, so you can see one of the largest and most ornate dinosaurs ever found for yourself.The study is published in PeerJ.

A Bronze-Age ship that sank around 3,300 years ago has been discovered on the Mediterranean Sea floor, along with its cargo of hundreds of intact jars that once stored merchandise. Located around 90 kilometers (56 miles) off the northern coast of Israel and at a depth of 1,800 meters (6,000 feet), the ancient vessel is the oldest ever found in the deep sea.Until now, all shipwrecks dated to the Bronze Age – which began a little over 5,000 years ago – had been discovered in shallow waters close to the shoreline. For instance, the world’s oldest known sunken vessel is located just off the coast of the Greek island of Dokos and is thought to have met its end around 4,200 years ago.As a result, “the academic assumption until now was that trade in that time was executed by safely flitting from port to port, hugging the coastline within eye contact,” explained Jacob Sharvit, Head of the Israel Antiquities Authority Marine Unit, in a statement via email. “The discovery of this boat now changes our entire understanding of ancient mariner abilities: It is the very first to be found at such a great distance with no line of sight to any landmass.”“To navigate they probably used the celestial bodies, by taking sightings and angles of the Sun and star positions,” he said.The ship and its cargo were spotted during a routine seafloor survey by a major natural gas exploration and production company. After mapping the site, the firm confirmed that the boat was between 12 and 14 meters (39 to 46 feet) long and was loaded with hundreds of Canaanite amphorae.Two of the many Canaanite jars found onboard the sunken ship.Image credit: Emil Aladjem, Israel Antiquities Authority“The vessel type identified in the cargo was designed as the most efficient means of transporting relatively cheap and mass-produced products such as oil, wine and other agricultural products such as fruit,” explained Sharvit. The presence of such a sizable booty hints at “significant commercial ties” between whichever country the ship came from and the ancient Levant, he added.At this stage, little is known about the vessel’s origin or history, although Sharvit says that “the ship seems to have sunk in crisis, either due to a storm or to an attempted piracy attack – a well-known occurrence in the Late Bronze Age.” Fortunately, the boat’s resting place at the bottom of the deep blue has protected it from waves, currents, and divers, all of which impact and damage shipwrecks in shallow waters.As a result, the ship’s body has remained well preserved for almost three-and-a-half millennia, with its wooden beams safely buried in the sediment on the ocean floor.“There is tremendous potential here for research,” said Sharvit. “The ship is preserved at such a great depth that time has frozen since the moment of disaster.”

We often take it for granted that animals can be smart. Corvids have distinct cultures, can cheat death, and will hold a grudge. Elephants refer to each other by name. Dogs will throw children into rivers to score a tasty snack. You know – normal signs of intelligence.But still, you probably wouldn’t want to hire, say, a monkey to do statistical analysis. Unless, that is, you’ve read a new paper from researchers out of Paris and Marseille, which claims to show that baboons can understand scatterplot graphs and extract information about the statistical trends shown within.“Humans are known to perform remarkably well at tasks involving statistical evaluations of their environment, an ability with clear evolutionary advantages,” reads the paper, currently available as a preprint – that is, not yet peer reviewed.“They correctly estimate the probability of the occurrence of events drawn from given distributions; they can recognize and learn statistical regularities in both linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli,” the authors explain; “they can extract the average of many different features such as color, orientation or size from large datasets of items, a set of skills that has been called ‘ensemble perception’.”And, turns out, we’re not the only smart monkeys out there. “For instance, chimpanzees can make probability judgments based on several proportional ratios,” the authors point out, while “long-tail macaques can infer simple heuristics, capuchin monkeys can make probabilistic inferences, and baboons can learn spatial statistical contingencies.”But can they do what humans do – perform ensemble evaluations on a given dataset? To find out, the researchers taught a group of 23 Guinea baboons to associate the various qualities of scatterplots – their noise level, whether the trend was increasing or decreasing, that kind of thing – to certain geometric shapes. It was, basically, a way for the monkeys to describe what they were seeing to the researchers – akin to a human test subject saying “ooh, not much of a correlation here, but generally a negative relationship.”Now, you may not think such a judgement is based on detailed statistical calculations – and it’s not, to be fair – but this kind of intuitive assessment of data actually lines up pretty well with a measure known to statisticians as the t-value. It’s “a summary of several data features,” the researchers explain; “it combines the signed slope (either positive or negative), the level of noise in the dataset (with noisier scatterplots resulting in lower t-values), and the number of points in the graph (the larger the number, the higher the t-value).”Why is that important? Well, it turns out that not only were the baboons able to perform the same kind of intuitive statistical analysis as human adults and children – albeit less accurately, especially on harder tasks – but they did so using the exact same t-value measure.“We found that, if the animals were provided with easily distinguishable response stimuli, they could learn this task,” the researchers report. “Their performance, in the presence of noise, was predicted by the t-value of the scatterplot, the index that a statistician would use to compute the strength of the correlation in the plot.”This isn’t just exciting for fans of baboons and statistics, however. It also has some pretty interesting implications for our understanding of how the brain processes statistical information at all: “this similar behavior, observed in both humans and baboons, suggests that the human visual system, when performing trend judgments over noisy datasets, recycles phylogenetically older brain areas involved in the recognition of the principal axis of objects,” the paper explains.It’s not a new hypothesis, but the addition of more evidence is tantalizing. The idea, basically, is that humans are taking bits of their brain that once were used for lower-level environmental assessments – think: numerical approximation of visual stimuli – and using them for much higher-level calculations that are close enough to the original for the brain to be able to wing it – think: symbolic mathematics. It’s bolstered by the suggestion that the baboons’ weaknesses in more complex tasks may have been due to a lack of cultural context – that is, they couldn’t “see” the data the same way human participants could, but it might have just been that they hadn’t been taught to, rather than the species difference. In any case, there was definitely one way in which the baboons mirror their human cousins in mathematical ability: some of them just don’t have it.“As in humans, sensitivity in the trend judgment task varies among individuals,” the researchers report. “This finding should push animal cognition researchers to always consider inter-individual variability when studying the performance of non-human animals.”The study, which is yet to be peer-reviews, can be found on the biorXiv preprint server.

TikTok is suing the United States government over a new bipartisan federal law requiring it to separate from its Chinese government-controlled parent company. Both the facts and the law demonstrate that the lawsuit should fail. TikTok is basing its argument on false claims that it is a champion of free speech and that the First Amendment of the Constitution protects its legal ties to the Chinese Communist Party.These are lies. The truth is that the First Amendment protects Americans’ right to free speech, not TikTok’s right to be owned by the Chinese Communist Party.ByteDance and the CCP will decide whether TikTok is banned in the United States if they refuse to divest. The decision won’t be the US government’s.TikTok’s cynical claim to champion free speech should fool no one. Chinese law requires the company to follow the Chinese Communist Party’s commands. The Chinese government owns part of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, which employs a CCP official as its chief censor. TikTok has a documented history of spying, repeatedly lying to Congress, and exploiting American children. The company’s attempt to misuse U.S. freedoms against our national security is clearly disproven by the facts.TikTok’s legal claims are also meritless. The company continues to falsely claim that the new federal law is a “ban.” It is not. TikTok can continue operating in the United States if it’s sold to a company that’s not controlled by an adversary government. But TikTok keeps lying about the federal law because the Chinese government has banned the sale of TikTok’s algorithm as a state secret, which only shows that national security concerns about TikTok’s inner workings are justified.It's true that TikTok has already won some victories in American courts. The company survived an attempt to ban it by the Trump administration and more recently won a preliminary legal battle against a state-level ban in Montana. But neither of these cases indicate that TikTok is likely to prevail in a constitutional challenge to the new federal law. The Trump administration sought to ban TikTok in 2020 using a sanctions law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA. But IEEPA is outdated and has not kept pace with modern tech threats. It contains an exception that was originally intended to prevent the U.S. government from banning literature.The law was later amended in 1994 — when the internet was in its infancy — in a way that courts have interpreted to cover all data. TikTok was easily able to use this loophole to convince a court that IEEPA couldn’t be used against the company. The case wasn’t decided on free speech grounds. IEEPA was simply the wrong tool for the job and needs to be updated for a time when America’s greatest adversary controls global tech companies.Montana’s effort to ban TikTok was blocked last year by a federal court. Though the court laid out a First Amendment basis for its decision, the outcome rested on the court’s view that Montana’s national security concern was an infringement of federal authority. This sealed TikTok’s victory on constitutional grounds because it led the court to conclude that the ban would fail under any of the relevant standards of scrutiny.That decision also meant that Montana could not meet the First Amendment requirement of “tailoring” — the closeness of the fit between the restriction and its intended purpose — because the court rejected Montana’s security interests. TikTok could not replicate this outcome when challenging the federal law. More relevant is that the Montana court also dedicated part of its analysis to whether Montana’s law left “ample alternative channels of communication.” Startlingly, the court decided that TikTok’s allegedly unique features were sufficient to invoke constitutional protections. The court’s analysis would give social media platforms, including those controlled by hostile foreign governments, a distinctly privileged position in First Amendment jurisprudence, suggesting that any government action that causes such a platform to cease operating may run afoul of the First Amendment regardless of legitimate national security concerns.If future rulings affirm the Montana decision, it would significantly favor social media companies. TikTok probably couldn’t expect to replicate this outcome through successive appeals because this ruling rejected TikTok’s clear national security threats. Congress extensively examined those threats while crafting the new law, which is structured differently. The federal law requires divestment rather than simply banning the app outright as the Montana decision sought to do.ByteDance and the CCP will decide whether TikTok is banned in the United States if they refuse to divest. The decision won’t be the U.S. government's, further reducing the chances that other judges would adopt the Montana court’s conclusions.Ultimately, it’s preposterous that a social media platform controlled and censored by the CCP would be able to neutralize any national security action by claiming it is an “indispensable” provider of free speech. Thankfully, this cynical attempt to denigrate American constitutional freedoms is likely to be rejected in any lawsuit TikTok brings. TikTok’s days are numbered.