chocolate cake

In a last minute mad dash to at least keep the lights on for a few more days, the US legislature passed what’s known as Continuing Resolution, a stop gap, kicking the can appropriations measure that keeps the American federal government funded for another week.  A few days from now, we’ll be witnessing the same histrionics, except afforded more time for debate that probably translates to neither side finding a point of compromise—and, ironically, the US government will close up shop for Cinco de Mayo over among other items, a border wall. Remember the Alamo—that was some beautiful chocolate cake.  Regardless of the outcome, we are only speaking of funding the government through the end of the fiscal year, 30 September, and after that the stakes get much higher.

nestling or radiological dispersal device

Through a FOIA filing, Paleofuture has obtained an orientation, promotional film that the US Department of Energy issued in 1976 to present ostensibly to Congress members in order to justify their budget item for a little programme called Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST) but without revealing too much about their covert operations and techniques, which makes an ideal conversation piece for addressing the horrors and abject anxiety that the public is spared when it comes the daily duties of first responders.
Without peeking behind the arras periodically, one might think that the job of governing is a walk in the park. Run of the mill bomb-threats—in many cases hoaxes or attempts at extortion, suddenly in 1970s America became far more serious and fraught, with the menace of a dirty, nuclear-laced explosive being detonated in a crowded urban area. To this day NEST has maintained a low profile and the times it has been deployed to respond to a terrorist-threat involving nuclear materials have been under-reported and handled discreetly, sparing the public the burden of worry. Read more about the history of dirty bomb threats and watch the video at Paleofuture.

pishtaq, iwan

A Hong Kong based design team has constructed a coiling passageway of arches in Sharjah—one of the capital cities of the United Arab Emirates, that portrays the architectural development of the Islamic arch. Like the more familiar Doric, Ionic and Corinthian progression of the Greek column, the Islamic gateway went from the unadorned to the more elaborate over the ages: round, ogee, tented, parabolic, multifoil. Take a video tour with BLDGBlog at the link up top.

one million b.c.

Like forensics experts working on a case that went cold hundreds of thousands of years ago, archæologists are discovering that equipped with the next generation of genetic sequencers that there able to find bits of ancient hominid DNA when sifting through the sediment of practically any old cave.
No fossil evidence nor artefacts, though surely that’s pretty exciting to uncover, is required to trace how our direct ancestors and Neanderthal cousins spread across the continents and perhaps interacted. Surely this can be expanded to the whole of the plant and animal kingdoms, as well.  I wasn’t expecting that our machines were so finely calibrated to detect biochemical markers as so faint a trace, but this is sure to be revolutionary as palæontologists have already managed to extrapolate and reconstruct whole monstrous dinosaurs and more modest primogenitors of our kind out of just a fragment of a tooth or a little toe bone.

up-cycle/down-cycle

A company called Miniwiz, as The Awesomer informs, has created a mobile, pop-up recycling facility that’s more than just a repository where garbage is sorted but one where waste is actually processed in situ. This first solar-powered station, expected to be deployed to tourist attractions to clean up afterwards but also as a demonstration of the Trashpresso’s potential, coverts plastic and textiles into architectural tiles and other building materials. I can imagine a whole host of other possible applications, digesting a construction site and regenerating it anew.

😱

The theory that Edvard Munch’s iconic The Scream (Skrik) has its sky coloured by memories of the eruption of Krakatoa, which made the sunsets very dramatic in the whole of the Western Hemisphere for an entire year a decade prior to the work’s painting has been circulating since 2004 (the year it was stolen from an Oslo museum—to be recovered two years later. Now, however, geoscientists and meteorologists (it’s strange to think that the weather reporter is the only scientist that many of us see on regular basis) believe the swirling clouds may represent a recently classified but rarely occurring formation called a polar stratospheric or mother-of-pearl cloud, which become iridescent when the winter sun dips below the horizon.