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Weekender: When I was a small child in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, shoe stores came equipped with x-ray machines that allowed salespeople and parents to make certain that a shoe fit a child’s foot without crowding growing bones. I remember eagerly stepping up on the platform and peering through the lens for a fascinating view of the bones of my feet surrounded by shoe leather.

Now, of course, routine x-rays of children’s feet are an appalling idea. But unfortunately, total numbskullery often becomes evident only in retrospect.
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It’s heating up in Antarctica and flooding in the driest place on Earth – Chile’s Atacama Desert. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are higher now than they’ve been in the last 23 million years.

From what can be gleaned from air bubbles trapped in ancient ice, C02 levels have averaged between 170-280 parts per million since our species first emerged on Earth approximately 200,000 years ago. Now, however, they’re reached 400 ppm. At the rate we’re going, C02 concentrations could well reach 550 ppm by 2100. We are all canaries in this coalmine.
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The Transportation Security Administration announced today that all passengers who have ever been stopped and searched for any reason at TSA checkpoints will be required to wear transparent clothing in the future when moving through checkpoints. Officials refused to say how many passengers are involved, but sources within the agency have said that the list contains over thirteen million names. Affected travelers will not be notified in advance, but will be provided with disposable transparent clothing upon attempting to pass through a checkpoint. It will be necessary for travelers to continue to wear the transparent clothing until arriving at their destination and leaving TSA-controlled airport areas.
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10 fast radio bursts have been detected in the past 15 years that all have the same unusual characteristic of an arrival delay close to a multiple of 187.5. There is no known natural process to explain this. Initially the bursts appeared to be coming from billions of light years away, far outside of our own galaxy. But recent analysis suggests that they may be coming from a group of objects in the Milky Way. Michael Hippke of the Institute for Data Analysis in Germany and John Learned at the University of Hawaii say that if the pattern is real, it is very hard to explain. There is a 5 in 10,000 probability that the line up is a coincidence. If it is a natural process, perhaps in some way involving pulsars, it is the result of a physics that we don’t yet understand.read more