Esoteric Meandering Shouting Into the Void

People breathe roughly 20,000 times every day.

If we could track our breaths the way many people do steps or exercise, the results would be astonishing. While there’s no app for that, scientists estimate that an average person takes 20,000 to 25,000 breaths over the course of 24 hours. That breaks down to between 12 and 18 breaths per minute for an adult. Children typically breathe more quickly, up to 60 breaths per minute, which tapers down to the adult rate by their teenage years. All those inhales and exhales add up, and by age 50, the average human has taken at least 400 million breaths. Each one helps fuel our bodies; oxygen is a crucial component needed for our most basic functions, like moving muscles, digesting food, and even thinking.

Breathing tends to be an automatic process, but some scientists say that not everyone does it right. Mouth breathing isn’t just annoying when you’re sick or to those around you — it’s actually inefficient for your body. Inhaling through the nose helps heat and pressurize air so that the lungs can extract oxygen efficiently, and the cilia (aka nose hairs) are able to stop particleslike pollen and pollution from entering the lungs; neither job can be done by the mouth. Mouth breathing can also cause sleep apnea, snoring, and even asthma. Amazingly, it can change the structure of your face over time; children who primarily breathe through their mouths have a higher chance of having narrow mouths and misaligned teeth.

Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

The President has decided to take action on the latest stupidity coming from the Supreme Court, the immunity issue. So far he is calling for an amendment to the Constitution declaring No One is Above the Law. Good start but he should take some other action as well.
Since the act of lying under oath is also illegal we need to see the 3 newest justices put on trail and removed from the court. They all stated that they would not overturn the issue of abortion and then proceeded to do that very thing. Lying under oath is a crime and they need to be tried and jailed for that.
Two other members of the court are supportive of the insurrection on Jan 6. One for sure has accepted millions in gifts and bribes which should put him out of the court. These kinds of things are not acceptable at any other level of government, will not say it doesn’t happen, but it is not acceptable and is punished when discovered.
The court feels that along with the President they have given themselves immunity and put themselves above the law. It is time to take them down and show them how very wrong they are in the belief that they have somehow become untouchable. That title belonged to Elliot Ness during the 1930s.
Our Democracy is a better form of government than any other in the world. It is dynamic and even with problems better for all of us. It is also fragile and with the wealthiest of our nation seeming to want to change things we do not need our highest court to be on the agreement committee. If we must then purge the court and get rid of the rotten fruit it is the method used to maintain the rest of the crop in all things.

The U.S. Coast Guard once trained pigeons to spot people lost at sea.

Enlisting animals into military service isn’t entirely unusual — dolphins have been used for underwater surveillance and even camels have helped haul supplies. Those successes could be why a Coast Guard program meant to train pigeons for search and rescue missions was able to get off the ground in the late 1970s. Project Sea Hunt’s goal was to more easily (and quickly) find people lost at sea using trained pigeons to act as real-time spotters. Despite their reputation as nuisance fowl, pigeons are easily trainable creatures with outstanding eyesight; they (like many birds) may even have better vision than humans, thanks to their ability to see UV light.

Pigeons selected for the program underwent six months of training to spot yellow, orange, and red objects in the ocean (the most common colors for flotation devices and rafts), and were then placed in special pigeon chambers underneath helicopters that had a view of the water below. When the trained birds spotted a bright color, they could signal to Coast Guard pilots above by pecking a special pedal that flashed a signal in the cockpit. Test runs found that the pigeons were able to spot targets 90% of the time, compared to the human success rate of just 38%. The pigeons were also faster than their human counterparts, spotting potential victims before humans did 84% of the time.

Despite these successes, Project Sea Hunt was shuttered due to federal budget cuts in the early 1980s. In the years since, the Coast Guard has combined flyovers, ocean-tracking software,and other methods to quickly and safely rescue those lost at sea.

Nation Light House Day

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Chemist Joseph Priestley may not be a household name, but his discoveries impact most of our everyday lives. Born near Leeds, England, in 1733, Priestley not only invented carbonated water (plus the pencil eraser) during his career, but he also independently discovered the atomic element oxygen. Of these accomplishments, his creation of seltzer came first, in 1767, when he lived near a brewery and was fascinated by the gaseous vapors it produced. Priestley mixed sulfuric acid and chalk to form carbon dioxide (though he didn’t know what it was at the time) and used the compound to add bubbles to still water. Shortly thereafter, he earned the prestigious Copley Medal for his publication “Directions for Impregnating Water With Fixed Air.” The beverage was later named “seltzer” in honor of the natural springs found in the German town of Selters.

When it comes to oxygen, Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele actually studied the element in 1772, predating Priestley. However, Scheele’s findings weren’t published until 1777, allowing Priestley to conduct groundbreaking studies in the interim. On August 1, 1774, Priestley experimented by heating the red mercuric oxide of a candle to produce a then-mysterious colorless gas that was capable of supporting life. Two months later, Priestley presented his findings to French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who conducted tests of his own, which proved to be more thorough and scientifically accurate. Priestley pushed back on Lavoisier’s subsequent findings, instead embracing archaic scientific theories such as the existence of a fire-like element called phlogiston. Lavoisier persisted, however, and named the new gaseous element “oxygen,” after the Greek “oxy genes,” meaning “acid-forming.”

There are more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way.

Astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in his 1980 book Cosmos that there were more stars in the universe than grains of sand on beaches on Earth — a statement that’s both wondrous and impossible to prove. But some scientists pondering similar ideas believe that there may be more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way galaxy. The theory stems from a 2015 study that attempted to determine how many living trees could be found on the planet, by estimating the number of trees living in different environments. Tropical and subtropical forests appear to have 43% of the world’s tree population, nearly double that of frosty boreal forests found in places such as Canada, Russia, and Norway. Other regions, including the temperate biome (central Europe and the U.S. Northeast), generally have the fewest number of trees. The combined estimates per zone lead some scientists to believe that Earth is home to roughly 3 trillion trees. Compared to NASA’s estimate of more than 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, it appears that trees far outnumber the Milky Way’s sparkling orbs.

However, the scientific community acknowledges that we’ll likely never know the true number of stars in the sky orhow many trees are rooted in the Earth, because there are too many factors at play. Astronomers can guess at the number of stars by observing how the galaxy rotates and calculating its mass, though not all stars are visible from Earth, and it’s impossible to count them individually to confirm the math. On Earth, humans cut down 15 billion trees annually but replace some, with an estimated 1.3 billion saplings produced in the U.S. each year in the hopes of balancing the count. After all, even if we have trillions of them, each tree on the planet is precious.

Marcus Aurelius (161-180 CE)

A devotee of Stoicism, a Hellenistic school of philosophy emphasizing the pursuit of virtue, Marcus Aurelius is best remembered for the collection of self-reflections that comprise his famed work Meditations. Ironically, Rome’s philosopher-king had little time to enjoy the inner peace he sought; his two-decade reign was marked by armed conflict with Parthians to the east and invading Germanic tribes from the north, as well as a devastating plague that wiped out millions of Roman citizens. Despite the hardships, Marcus Aurelius was largely successful at maintaining the prosperity forged by his predecessors. However, he also garners criticism from historians for passing the empire to his son Commodus, whose inept reign is considered to have brought an end to the Pax Romana.

All human beings are 99.9% identical genetically.

Our diversity is part of what makes human beings special. Yet as far as our genes are concerned, we’re all fairly similar: Humans share 99.9%of their genes with one another. To put this into perspective, bonobos and chimpanzees — the closest relatives to humans in the animal kingdom — share approximately 98.8% of their genes with humans. Clearly, even small differences in genetic similarity can have a major impact. 

That may be especially true when it comes to human health. According to the National Institutes of Health, nine of the 10 leading causes of death in the U.S. (barring accidental deaths) are influenced by our genetics, and variations among individuals can mean significantly varying health outcomes. 

In the 21st century, advances in our understanding of the human genome — thanks to the completion of groundbreaking scientific studies including the Human Genome Project — have pushed medicine into the genetic frontier. Now doctors can screen newborns for genetic abnormalities and sometimes use gene-based therapies, while nutritionists are using genomics to tailor diets to specific genetic dispositions. According to some, the future of medicine is in our genes.

The Earth shakes every 26 seconds, and scientists aren’t sure why.

Like a lot of strange happenings, it was first noticed in the 1960s: a small seismic pulse, large enough to register on seismological instruments but small enough to go otherwise unnoticed, occurring every 26 seconds. Jack Oliver, a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, documented the “microseism” and sussed out that it was emanating from somewhere “in the southern or equatorial Atlantic Ocean.” Not until 2005 was it determined that the pulse’s true origin was in the Gulf of Guinea, just off Africa’s western coast, but to this day, scientists still don’t know something just as important — why it’s happening in the first place.

There are theories, of course, ranging from volcanic activity to waves, but still no consensus. There does happen to be a volcano on the island of São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea near the pulse’s origin point, not to mention another microseism linked to the volcano Mount Aso in Japan, which has made that particular explanation more popular in recent years. Though there’s no way of knowing when (or even if) we’ll learn the why of this phenomenon, one thing’s for sure: better a microseism than a macroseism.