Arguably an oasis of deeper vocals in a century where shrill chirping sounds seem to dominate.
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How UK has become a country music hotspot
https://www.channel4.com/news/how-uk-has...ic-hotspot
EXCERPTS: I find myself in a sea of cowboy hats, not a fever dream but Country 2 Country music festival at the O2 in London.
[...] Country music was once the soundtrack to rural, small-town America. Fast forward to 2026, and it’s having a full-blown UK renaissance. The shift? The wild west of social media has turned the genre into a virtual saloon, helping artists bypass traditional gatekeepers.
Nashville isn’t just a place anymore – it’s a feed to follow. Streaming platforms like Spotify are putting country in front of a new generation. Nearly half of UK country listeners are under 30, home to the fastest growing fanbase in Europe.
There’s something about being in the moment. Tens of thousands now flock to country festivals in the UK to sound out the noise of the relentless news cycle.
[... Line dancing, sweating in numbers, the crowd belting out every word of a ballad – simpler times. From Nashville to North Greenwich – as songwriter Harlan Howard famously once said, country music is “three chords and the truth” – and that works on both sides of the Atlantic... (MORE - details)
How country music is growing in the UK ... https://youtu.be/Av0XtoDBKtQ
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Av0XtoDBKtQ
Of course..let's send ice agents to airports because all those tired and grumpy people standing in long lines for hours need something else to piss them off even more.
"President Donald Trump sent Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to airports around the country on Monday, March 23, as long security lines continue amid a partial government shutdown.
Transportation Security Administration worker absences reached their highest levels over the weekend since the shutdown began in mid-February, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Officers have been working without regular pay, and more than 400 have quit, the White House said in a March 22 post on X.
ICE agents were spotted at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) and more. Here’s where they're being sent.
Which airports are ICE agents going to?
Agents are being sent to the following 13 airports, CNN reported:
Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD)
Cleveland Hopkins International Airport (CLE)
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL)
Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport (HOU)
John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK)
New York’s LaGuardia Airport (LGA)
Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport (MSY)
Luis Muñoz Marin International Airport in Puerto Rico (SJU)
Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR)
Philadelphia International Airport (PHL)
Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport (PHX)
Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT)
Southwest Florida International Airport (RSW)
The outlet noted that ICE agents' functions could vary by airport and deployment plans could change. However, the New York Times reported that ICE and Homeland Security Investigations personnel would be sent to a total of 14 airports (the outlet named multiple airports and cities on the list published by CNN, but did not include a comprehensive list)."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/ne...285937007/
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026...aginations
EXCERPT: . . . Time is elusive in other ways, too. We have no sensory organs for detecting it, nor any dedicated brain areas for tracking it. Our experience of time can vary hugely: minutes drag if we’re bored or uncomfortable; hours race if we’re excited or having fun; we can easily be fooled about how much time has elapsed. And in certain circumstances, our sense of time can even go in circles, break apart or stop altogether.
Take Lara, who suffers from a condition called akinetopsia, in which events no longer progress smoothly but in sudden jumps. When she pours tea, the liquid appears as a frozen column in the air, before suddenly overflowing the cup. One man with psychosis described repeatedly reliving the same half hour. In one classic study of the psychedelic drug mescaline, an intoxicated volunteer ate a spoonful of soup before glancing away from his plate and back down: “It had been in front of me for hundreds of years.”
Rather than being mere mistakes or distortions, these effects reflect something deeper: the role we all play in creating our own time. Because even cosmologists, measuring the universe, don’t find any moving river of time: most believe there’s no physical flow of events beyond our perception, no moment of “happening” or “becoming” in which the future slips into the past. Quantum physicists come up empty-handed, too. The famous double slit experiment shows that a physicist’s choice of how to measure a photon influences what they observe: whether it travels through one slit, like a particle; or through both, like a wave. But there’s a lesser known variant of this experiment, in which the physicist doesn’t decide what measurement they’ll make until the last possible moment.
In this case, their choice, at the point of measurement, apparently influences not just the current status of the particle they find, but the journey it has already completed: even “past” events are unfolding as we look. As the novelist William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”
Time, then, is less a universal truth than a feature of how we interact with the world. This insight is reflected in the way some indigenous communities experience time... (MORE - details)
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The brain itself is the sensory organ for detecting time or the appearance of it. Via antecedent information being stored in memory, it compares that with new information and discerns a difference between the two (interpreting that as change). Each of those cognitive distinctions is an island unto itself, only presenting itself as real. Granted, though, the narrative part of consciousness isn't usually paying attention to each automatic discernment of difference and so the assessment of "temporal passage" can subjectively seem to vary.
One thing about akinetopsia is that it illustrates how -- even if there was an objective flow, where time is speciously treated as if a substance flowing through a structure -- we would not be experiencing that mind-independent rate but instead the brain's retarded representations. There are subatomic events measured in zeptoseconds and "smaller" time units that the brain's milliseconds in duration snapshots of consciousness would extend over and not capture (even if they could peer down unaided to that substrate).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scotttraver...-explains/
INTRO: If you were to make eye contact with a chimpanzee, you’d likely notice something uncanny about them very quickly: you cannot easily tell where they’re looking. The tissue that surrounds their iris, known as the sclera, is dark brown or nearly black, which makes their gaze almost impossible to track.
Contrastingly, if you were to make eye contact with a friend or family member, you’d have no trouble instantly discerning the direction of their attention. Because human sclerae are bright white, our gaze is involuntarily legible; others can always tell, within a fraction of a second, exactly what we are focused on.
This, evolutionary biologists argue, is the product of hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection, which has sculpted the human eye into a highly precise social signaling instrument. Because of this selection, we are the only primates on Earth with uniformly white sclera. The larger question scientists have spent decades wrestling with is why.
The leading explanation for this unique exception comes from a theory known as the Cooperative Eye Hypothesis.
The hypothesis was initially formalized by Michael Tomasello and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Broadly, it proposes that human white sclera evolved specifically to make gaze direction visible to other humans. In turn, this would have enabled the kind of tight, wordless coordination that underpins almost all of our important social interactions, from raising children communally to building cities... (MORE - details)
https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/03/y...-heard-of/
INTRO: There’s a virus you may have never heard of before that is estimated to infect up to 90 percent of people and lurks quietly in your cells for life—but if it becomes activated, it will destroy your brain. If that’s not startling enough, researchers reported this week that there may be a new way for this virus to activate—one that affects up to 10 percent of adults worldwide.
The virus is the human polyomavirus 2, commonly called either the JC virus or John Cunningham virus, named after the poor patient from whom it was first isolated in 1971. It shows up in the urine and stool of infected people and spreads via the fecal-oral route. Many people are thought to be infected early in life, and blood testing surveys have suggested that 50–90 percent of adults have been exposed at some point.
Researchers hypothesize that the initial site of infection is the tonsils, or perhaps the gastrointestinal tract. But wherever it happens, that initial infection is asymptomatic. At that point, a person is infected with what’s called the archetype JC virus, which quietly sets up a persistent but utterly silent lifelong infection.
For the vast majority of people, that is all their JC virus infection will be—silent. But for an unlucky few, the JC virus will seemingly awaken, rearrange its genetic material, and morph into a brain-demolishing nightmare that causes a disease called progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy or PML... (MORE - missing details)
https://academeblog.org/2026/03/13/the-a...ottleneck/
INTRO: Peer-reviewed scholarship remains the central currency of academic life. It advances careers, drives innovation, informs policy, stimulates economies, and lays the groundwork for the next generation of inquiry. Yet the very system designed to vet and disseminate knowledge increasingly drains enthusiasm from scholars—especially early-career investigators—by subjecting them to burdensome, time-consuming, and often pointless article submission portals. The problem is not peer review. It is the bureaucratic machinery that now precedes it... (MORE - details)
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1120327
INTRO: The history of the Earth is written on the great tablets of tectonic plates. The motions of plates shaped land masses, formed oceans, and created the varied climates and habitats that set the stage for evolution and the diversity of life.
But this grand drama begins with a deep mystery: just when did the continental and oceanic plates begin to drift? Did the lithosphere begin to move soon after the formation of the Earth 4.5 billion years ago or only in the last billion years?
A new study by Harvard geoscientists shows the oldest-yet direct evidence of plate movement by 3.5 billion years ago. In a study published March 19 in Science, the team found that plate movements—though not necessarily the modern type—shaped the early history of our planet.
“There has been a huge range of ages suggested for timing,” said lead author Alec Brenner, PhD ’24, who conducted the research in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) in the Harvard University Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “With this study, we're able to say three and a half billion years ago, we can see plates moving around on the Earth surface.”
The new revelations came from some of the oldest well-preserved rocks in the world, the Pilbara Craton in western Australia, which contains formations from the Archean Eon when the Earth was hosting early microbial life and under heavy bombardment by astronomical objects. The Pilbara area contains evidence of some of the earliest known life, stromatolites and microbialite rocks deposited by single-celled organisms such as cyanobacteria.
A team led by Roger Fu, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, has been conducting research in East Pilbara since 2017. Fu specializes in paleomagnetism, a branch of geophysics that examines changes in the Earth’s magnetic fields to reconstruct the early history of the planet. Last year, they published a paper about an ancient meteor impact at the same site.
In addition to revealing the properties of the Earth’s magnetic field, paleomagnetism can also be used to track the motions of plates. By analyzing the magnetic signals of ancient mineral grains, the researchers can infer the orientation and latitude of the rocks at the time of formation—thus using the ancient samples like paleo GPS units.
“Almost everything unique about the Earth has something to do with plate tectonics at some level,” said Fu. “At some point, the Earth went from something not that special, just another planet in the solar system with similar materials, to something very special. A very strong suspicion is that plate tectonics started Earth down this divergent track.” (MORE - details, no ads)
