[ozswede]

Australia and the Nutbush: the quest for the origin of a cultural phenomenon goes on

For 50 years, Australian primary school students have been learning the steps to a dance that will carry them through social events and weddings and allow them to locate other Australians across crowded nightclubs anywhere in the world.

Nowhere else do they do the Nutbush. But while almost every Australian knows the steps, no one knows who created the dance.

Two professors – Panizza Allmark from Edith Cowan University in Western Australia and Jon Stratton from the University of South Australia – have narrowed down their search for the choreographer to a teacher’s conference in New South Wales in 1975.

“What we seem to know is that there was a committee in the New South Wales education department that devised the idea of the Nutbush,” Stratton says. “Whether they devised the dance itself, we don’t really know. But what’s interesting is that nobody has come forward.”

The conference was held two years after the song Nutbush City Limits was released by Tina Turner. It is part of the reason behind Australia’s special love for the soul singer, who died last year.

Line dances were reckoned to be a good way to get children up and moving in physical education classes; the steps to the Nutbush are similar to the Madison, a line dance popularised in the US in 1960. But Allmark and Stratton say the Nutbush remains a uniquely Australian dance.



“One of the key differences is that the Madison has calling, somebody who stands out the front and says what particular aspect of the dance you’re going to do next,” Stratton says.

“In the Nutbush, there’s nobody saying ‘lift your leg up, turn to the left, turn to the right, kick this way’.”

It was also “much cooler” than dancing a traditional line dance to a country song, says Allmark.

Other songs have hit high rotation in primary school PE classes: the Macarena, 5,6,7,8 by Steps, YMCA by the Village People and the Grease megamix. But none have reached the popularity of the Nutbush. In 2023 the Mundi Mundi Bash set a new world record for the largest Nutbush dance with 6,594 dancers.

“It’s cool, but slightly daggy, but it’s also inclusive,” Allmark says. “It’s intergenerational – parents, grandparents and children all learn the Nutbush.”


Record-breaking number perform Tina Turner's Nutbush at Mundi Mundi bash

While the origins of the dance remain murky, Stratton said the phenomenon wasn’t “totally unusual”.

“These things just evolve,” he says. “There are other tracks now that people use to do the Nutbush; it could be that in a generation or two someone will be asking why it’s called the Nutbush.”

A spokesperson for the NSW education department says it is looking into the matter. Similar theories have been floated in Queensland but a Department of Education spokesperson in that state says it has no records relating to the origin of the Nutbush.

Catherine Amesbury, the deputy principal of Burgmann Anglican school, says the Nutbush brings “joy and access” to students who may otherwise not engage with physical education or dance in the classroom.

“When it comes to students dancing, it’s often polarising,” she says. “They come with a preconceived idea that they either had ability and mastery of dance or they don’t.


It’s intergenerational – parents, grandparents and children all learn the Nutbush.

“The Nutbush allows students to feel psychologically safe because it’s so familiar. It takes away that potential of embarrassing yourself. It also allows a connection and a sense of belonging because you’ve got a group of people or moving in rhythm together to a pretty catchy tune.

“A sense of accomplishment is there, despite it being so simple.”

Amesbury was taught the Nutbush during teacher training at the University of Wollongong in the 1990s, specifically with the aim of building connection with future teachers and students.

“It was a skill that we needed to be able to teach kids, and so they slowly introduced [the Nutbush] as a simple introductory activity for us to feel comfortable, then switched it up saying this is how you can make kids feel comfortable,” Amesbury said.

It is not just schools that have reached for the Nutbush: a community legal centre in Brisbane used the dance to build a sense of belonging among staff and to have standing breaks during the workday.

“It came up over coffee one day; [a colleague] said, ‘I’m thinking of doing the Nutbush every day because I feel like I never get up from my desk, would you like to join?’” says Mollie O’Connor, a Brisbane- based lawyer. “And we were all keen to do it.”

The opportunity to step away from the desk and “be a bit silly together” was the start of building more connections with colleagues, she says. While the practice left with O’Connor’s colleague, she said the potential of a Nutbush, or movement-related, revival in the office isn’t off the cards.

“I don’t know if it’ll look like a Nutbush, or maybe a little walk by the Brisbane River, but I feel like my office is the kind of place where people are open to things like that,” she said. “It definitely gets your heart pumping.”

(Wow. I grew up doing this and until now I had no idea that it was a uniquely Australian thing. I thought it was done all over the world. I think I'll crank up the Tina Turner and appall my Swedish husband yet again )

[goldie0608]

The ‘World’s Largest’ Vacuum to Suck Up Carbon Emissions Begins Operating in Iceland



A pair of climate-solution firms have just turned on the largest CO2 vacuum in the world, capable of sucking thousands of tons of carbon out of the atmosphere.

In 2021, GNN reported on the operation of the Orca facility in Iceland, run by the firm CarbFix in partnership with the Swiss company Climeworks. The company said it can pull 4,000 tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year, the equivalent of taking 870 cars off the road.

Now though, they’ve outdone Orca’s output 10 times with the Mammoth plant in Hellisheiði Iceland.

Sucking 36,000 tons of carbon out of the air every year with Climeworks’ modular, stackable intake fans, CarbFix’s unique technology deposits the carbon deep underground where it will mineralize and not emerge for hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of years.

The whole thing will be powered by geothermal energy, making it carbon-negative.

Mammoth and Orca are projects known as Direct Air Capture (DAC), which many criticize as being unproven or too expensive.

But scientists have begun predicting that carbon will have to be removed from the atmosphere to prevent the worst effects associated with a 2°C increase in average global temperatures, in addition to simply scaling back how much carbon is emitted.

Several other large operations are in the process of being planned or built, including a massive one in Wyoming that aims to capture 5,000,000 tons annually.

Climeworks didn’t give an exact price of the carbon credit, but said it would be closer to $1,000 than $100, the number that many feel needs to be reached for DAC plants to run sustainably.

In September 2022, just months after Orca first came online, Climeworks announced plans to scale up in the United States.

The company outlined its intent to engage in several large-scale DAC projects over the next few years, with the potential to create thousands of direct U.S. jobs in the process.

Texas Food Bank Builds Housing for the People Who Need Their Food–Right Next Door



credit – Open Studio Architecture/San Antonio Food Bank

A food bank in a fast-growing Texas community is building affordable housing next to its bank, to ensure people who have to juggle food and rent are able to with minimal effort.

The 51-unit apartment complex hasn’t gone up yet, but planning has begun for facilities that would temporarily house people struggling to afford the cost of living while undertaking job training or studies.

30 minutes outside San Antonio lies one of the fastest-growing towns in the US: New Braunfels.

Here, homelessness is growing due to an exploding population. The New Braunfels branch of the San Antonio food bank wondered if they could do more than just cover the cost of food.

“What we know about a food insecure household is that rent eats first in every household budget,” says Eric Cooper, president and CEO of the San Antonio Food Bank.

“If we can provide food, that in some ways allows a family to cost-shift their dollars to stay housed. For food banks across the country, hundreds of millions of dollars in the value of food is offsetting rent payments going to landlords.”

Cooper told Adele Peters of Fast Company that despite believing they could do more, the board of directors of the food bank was worried about ‘mission creep’—trying to do too much and ending up doing several things poorly.

But the opportunity was there to make the leap when a vacant lot next to their location had been sought after by local organizations working on homelessness. A foundation purchased the land, but they needed someone to take on the building.

After long deliberations, the board came to the conclusion that their purpose was to help their neighbors, whether that be with food or housing.

Partnering with Open Studio Architecture, the food bank is planning a 51-unit complex that will be rented to families with children for a period of 24-36 months that may have either one or two earners who are currently undergoing training or education for a job that pays enough to support the family outright.

Cooper believes it’s the first affordable housing complex ever built by a food bank.

[rflash8]

Could a toad’s psychedelic venom be the next big anti-depressant?



A hallucinogenic toad’s venom could be a new form of anti-depressant, scientists say.

The Colorado River toad, also known as the Sonoran Desert toad, has psychedelic venom just below the surface, which they secrete through their glands when it is scared.

And although it is well known that this toad’s venom can cause intense hallucinations and trippy experiences, until now scientists have been unsure how exactly it influences the brain.

But a recent study has found that the toad’s hallucinogenic compound could be the basis of a new antidepressant.

Researchers looked at a modified form a DMT compound and how it interacts with one of out happy hormones known as serotonin, but more a more obscure one known as the 5-HT1A serotonin receptor.

Research on psychedelics tend to focus on a similar serotonin receptor, 5-HT2A, as this is what’s activated when we hallucinate.



But structural pharmacologist Dr Daniel Wacker, from the Icahn School of Medicine, and his team wanted to look further at the 5-HT1A receptors.

The team chemically tweaked the toad venom to target solely the 5-HT1A serotonin receptors and tested it against mice who had signs of stress and depression.

They found that the toad venom compound had a similar antidepressant and anti-anxiety effect in the mice – but the mice did not get high or hallucinate.

The mice who had the compound drank more tasty sugar water and spent more time with their peers, which are signs of lowered anxiety and depression.

‘Frankly, that’s what we hope to see,’ Audrey Warren at Mount Sinai Hospital told New Scientist.

‘It’s our hope that down the line, someone could use the findings of our study to help design novel antidepressants for humans, but that’s certainly a long way out.’

However, the researchers say that further studies are needed to see if this compound could have a similar effect in humans.

And it does seem more likely that other well-known psychedelics may be approved as mental health aids sooner than any treatments derived from the toad venom.

Psychedelics have been in the spotlight for anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medicine. Magic Mushrooms, or psilocybin, has led the research as scientists say that it could help in some of the hardest-to-treat cases.

[HogwartsExpress]

Mum orders Harry Potter book for daughter but gets Scots version about 'Laddie Wha Lived'



A mum was left shocked after accidentally ordering her English daughter the 'Scottish version' of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, which opens with lines about 'The Laddie Wha Lived'


A mum who recently treated her kid to a copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was left shocked by the delivery of its 'Scottish Edition'.

The first instalment of the iconic series was released in 2001 and has since gone on to shift more than 120 million copies - making it one of the best-selling books of all time. Translated into numerous languages such is its popularity around the world, you'd perhaps expect to find Spanish and German copies every now and again - but this Scots version has certainly raised eyebrows on Reddit.

Featuring the classic front cover of the novel - albeit with 'Stone' spelt 'Stane' - the bottom states: "Translatit intae Scots by Matthew Fitt." Sharing a snap of the book on the social media platform, its new owner penned: "Accidentally ordered my English daughter the Scottish translated version of Harry Potter."



Looking at the first pages of both the English and Scottish versions, the latter is almost unrecognisable, such is the strong Scottish tongue Fitt has incorporated into J. K. Rowling's masterpiece.

Rowling writes in the opening paragraph of the novel: "Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense."

And Fitt 'translates' it to: "Mr and Mrs Durley, o nummer fower, Privet Loan, were prood tae say that they were gae normal, thank ye verra much. They were the lest fowk ye wid jalouse wid be taigled up wi onythin unco or weird, because they jist didnae haud wi havers like yon."



The mum shared images of the book to the r/MildlyInfuriating subreddit, where her mistake was widely mocked. One user joked in response: "I understand why this would be mildly infuriating but goddamn it's f*****g hilarious. I need this in my life."

And it turns out the mum made the same mistake twice. She replied: "Oh trust me I find it soo funny, the worst thing is though after realising my mistake, I told her to get the Matilda book I ordered at the same time so she could read that. Managed to also order her the Welsh version of Matilda - I don’t know how I managed both in one order - but I did it!"

Another user quipped: "Well, that's one way to introduce her to a new language and culture! Time for some Scottish magic and a wee bit of confusion mixed in." A third agreed: "She’ll at the least be a little cultured after the read." And a fourth begged: "Please someone do a Scottish audio book! I would buy the s*** out of that."

src: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mum-orders-harry-potter-book-32777778

[DaveLDaveL]

Pioneering gene therapy restores UK girl's hearing



A UK girl born deaf can now hear unaided, after a ground breaking gene-therapy treatment.

Opal Sandy was treated shortly before her first birthday - and six months on, can hear sounds as soft as a whisper and is starting to talk, saying words such as "Mama", "Dada" and "uh-oh".

Given as an infusion into the ear, the therapy replaces faulty DNA causing her type of inherited deafness.

Opal is part of a trial recruiting patients in the UK, US and Spain.
Doctors in other countries, including China, are also exploring very similar treatments for the Otof gene mutation Opal has.

Her parents, Jo and James, from Oxfordshire, say the results have been mind-blowing - but allowing Opal to be the first to test this treatment, made by Regeneron, was extremely tough.
"It was really scary, but I think we'd been given this unique opportunity," Jo told me.

Her sister, Nora, five, has the same type of deafness and manages well wearing an electrical cochlear implant.
Rather than making sound louder, like a hearing aid, it gives the "sensation" of hearing, by directly stimulating the auditory nerve that communicates with the brain, bypassing the damaged sound-sensing hair cells in a part of the inner ear known as the cochlea.

In contrast, the therapy uses a modified, harmless virus to deliver a working copy of the Otof gene into these cells.

Opal had the therapy in her right ear, under general anaesthetic, and a cochlear implant put into her left.

Just a few weeks later, she could hear loud sounds, such as clapping, in her right ear.

And after six months, her doctors, at Addenbrooke's Hospital, in Cambridge, confirmed that ear had almost normal hearing for soft sounds - even very quiet whispers.

[Fatima99]

Cancer Vaccine Triggers Fierce Immune Response to Fight Malignant Brain Tumors in Human Patients



In a first-ever human clinical trial, an mRNA cancer vaccine developed at the University of Florida successfully reprogrammed patients’ immune systems to fiercely attack glioblastoma, the most aggressive and lethal brain tumor.

The results in four adult patients mirrored those in 10 pet dog patients suffering from brain tumors whose owners approved of their participation.

The discovery represents a potential new way to recruit the immune system to fight treatment-resistant cancers using an iteration of mRNA technology and lipid nanoparticles, similar to COVID-19 vaccines, but with two key differences: use of a patient’s own tumor cells to create a personalized vaccine, and a newly engineered complex delivery mechanism within the vaccine.

“Instead of us injecting single particles, we’re injecting clusters of particles that are wrapping around each other like onions,” said senior author Elias Sayour, M.D., Ph.D., a UF Health pediatric oncologist who pioneered the new vaccine, which like other immunotherapies attempts to “educate” the immune system that a tumor is foreign.

“These clusters alert the immune system in a much more profound way than single particles would.”

Among the most impressive findings was how quickly the new method spurred a vigorous immune-system response to reject the tumor, said Sayour, principal investigator at the University’s RNA Engineering Laboratory and McKnight Brain Institute investigator who led the multi-institution research team.

“In less than 48 hours, we could see these tumors shifting from what we refer to as ‘cold’—very few immune cells, very silenced immune response—to ‘hot,’ very active immune response,” he said.

“That was very surprising given how quick this happened, and what that told us is we were able to activate the early part of the immune system very rapidly against these cancers, and that’s critical to unlock the later effects of the immune response,” he explained in a video (below).

Glioblastoma is among the most devastating diagnoses, with median survival around 15 months. Current standard of care involves surgery, radiation and some combination of chemotherapy.

The new report, published May 1 in the journal Cell, is the culmination of seven years of promising studies, starting in preclinical mouse models.

In the cohort of four patients, genetic material called RNA was extracted from each patient’s own surgically removed tumor, and then messenger RNA (mRNA)—the blueprint of what is inside every cell, including tumor cells—was amplified and wrapped in the newly designed high-tech packaging of biocompatible lipid nanoparticles, to make tumor cells “look” like a dangerous virus when reinjected into the bloodstream to prompt an immune-system response.

The vaccine was personalized to each patient with a goal of getting the most out of their unique immune system.

“The demonstration that making an mRNA cancer vaccine in this fashion generates similar and strong responses across mice, pet dogs, and human patients is a really important finding, because oftentimes we don’t know how well the preclinical studies in animals are going to translate into similar responses in patients,” said Duane Mitchell, M.D., Ph.D., director of the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute and a co-author of the paper. “This is a novel and unique way of delivering the mRNA to generate these really significant and rapid immune responses that we’re seeing across animals and humans.”

While too early in the trial to assess the clinical effects of the vaccine, the patients either lived disease-free longer than expected or survived longer than expected. The 10 pet dogs lived a median of 4.5 months, compared with a median survival of 30-60 days typical for dogs with the condition.

The next step, with support from the Food and Drug Administration and the CureSearch for Children’s Cancer foundation, will be an expanded Phase I clinical trial to include up to 24 adult and pediatric patients to validate the findings. Once an optimal and safe dose is confirmed, an estimated 25 children would participate in Phase 2.

For the new clinical trial, Sayour’s lab will partner with the multi-institution Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium, to send the immunotherapy treatment to children’s hospitals across the country. They will do this by receiving an individual patient’s tumor, manufacturing the personalized vaccine at UF and sending it back to the patient’s medical team, said Sayour, co-leader of the Immuno-Oncology and Microbiome research program at the UF Health Cancer Center.

“I am hopeful that this could be a new paradigm for how we treat patients, a new platform technology for how we can modulate the immune system,” said Sayour in a UF Health news report by Michelle Jaffee. “We showed in this paper that you actually can have synergy with other types of immunotherapies, so maybe now we can have a combination approach to unlock those immunotherapies.”

[Alessa9]

Historical coins found under floor sell for £60,000

Trove found under couple’s home thought to have been depositied by landowner during the English Civil War


The coins sold for £60,000 at auction.

A couple was able to pay off part of their mortgage after unearthing a hoard of historical gold and silver coins underneath their home.

Robert and Becky Fooks of South Poorton, Dorset, discovered more than 1,000 coins dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries - which have now sold for £60,000.

Mr Fooks was digging with a pickaxe by torchlight in October 2019 when he found the coins in a pottery bowl buried in a bare earth floor.


Mr Fooks was digging with a pickaxe by torchlight in October 2019 when he found the coins in a pottery bowl.

The British Museum has speculated they were deposited early in the English Civil War (1642-51) by a landowner trying to keep his wealth safe.

Mrs Fooks, a 43-year-old NHS health visitor, told the Dorset Echo: “It is a 400 year old house so there was lots of work to do.

“We were taking all the floors and ceilings out and took it back to its stone walls. One evening, I was with the children and my husband was digging with a pick axe when he called to say they’ve found something.


The British Museum has speculated they were deposited early in the English Civil War.

“He put all the coins in a bucket and brought them home to me. If we hadn’t lowered the floor they would still be hidden there. It is amazing and fascinating to find the hoard.”

In 2022, a different couple sold more than 260 ancient gold coins for £754,000 after finding them under their kitchen floor.

The collection was hidden inside a pot under the 18th-century floorboards of the anonymous couple’s home in Ellerby, East Yorkshire, in 2019, and dates back from 1610 to 1727.


Mrs Fooks said it was ‘amazing’ and ‘fascinating’ to find the hoard.

Spink & Son, the auctioneers who sold the coins, called the final sale price “absolutely extraordinary” after they were predicted to fetch £200,000 to £250,000.

After attracting worldwide attention, the collection was sold to dozens of buyers in individual lots by the auctioneers in London, totalling £754,000.

The auction house called the collection “one of the largest hoards of 18th-century English gold coins ever found in Britain”.

[lush]

Company Creates Miniature Sports Cars Models That Cost More Than Real Cars
022624*

UK-based company Amalgam specializes in miniature models of iconic sports cars that feature all the features of their full-size inspiration down to the tiniest elements and have a price tag to match.

Founded in 1995 in Bristol, UK, Amalgam has built a reputation for building the most detailed miniature car replicas in the world. By maintaining close relationships with top manufacturers like Ferrari, Lamborghini, or Aston Martin, the company has access to the original CAD data and engineering drawings of the vehicles they replicate, as well as to their paint codes and color samples. Amalgam also uses high-resolution photos and digital scans to recreate each vehicle perfectly. Every one of the company’s 1:8 scale replicas takes between 250 and 450 hours of painstaking work to complete, hence the eye-watering price tags which can reach $30,000, depending on the model.


Photo: Amalgam Collection

Amalgam recently announced that it will be adding the iconic Lamborghini Countach LP400 and the upcoming Lamborghini Revuelto to its already impressive collection of 1:8 replicas. The former will be produced in a series of 199 units, and just like Amalgam’s other creations, will feature all the tiniest elements of the original car, including functional scissor doors and pop-up headlights, as well as an impressive replica of its naturally aspirated V12. It can be yours for “just” $18,700. As for the Revuelto, the company has so far only published digital renderings of the replica, but its price has already been announced – $16,400.

It’s important to point out that Amalgam’s creations aren’t simple toys, as some online sources suggest, but collectible works of art aimed at owners of luxury cars who want their prized possessions recreated at smaller scale. In fact, the Bristol-based company offers to create bespoke 1:8 scale replicas of anyone’s car, down to the tiniest details.


Photo: Amalgam Collection

“We will create for you a superbly and deeply detailed model replicating every aspect of your car’s specification.,” the Amalgam website reads. “We will finish the model with the precise colour of the paint and the interior finishes. Even the smallest details including for example the colour of the stitching on the seats, the license plates, the wheels, every visible aspect of your car will be perfectly reproduced on your model.”

Bespoke miniatures are slightly more expensive than limited edition ones. For example, while the series Revuelto model is priced at $16,400, a bespoke replica would cost you around $23,500.



At the moment, the most expensive 1:8 replica on the Amalgam website is that of the Ferrari 250 GTO, priced at $29,760. As for the most expensive model, that title belongs to a couple of 1:4 replicas of two Mercedes Formula 1 vehicles, each costing $41,145.

If you’re on a budget, but would love to have an Amalgam miniature, you can opt for one of the company’s 1:18 scale replicas, which range between $1,000 and $2,000.



Amalgam doesn’t have Rolls Royce in its list of partner brands, but just in case you’ve dying to get your hands on a 1:8 replica of the Rolls Royce Cullinan, we got you covered! Sadly, you’ll still have to pay a whopping $27,000 for it.

i love minatures so much

[PennySerenade]

Invisible Women: On the Victorian Custom of Cutting Mothers Out of Portraits



In the weeks after the birth of my second child, I began saving pictures of Victorian hidden mother portraits, which are, to this day, interspersed on my phone with images of my newborn and my older child, sleepy and shocked by the transition to family of four, respectively. In the black and white photographs, Victorian mothers remain obscured so the babies can be photographed; they are often draped in sheets or curtains and holding their children, helping them stay still while the early cameras’ long exposure times captured infancy and toddlerhood. Like their mothers, I am nowhere to be found in my own pictures on my camera roll of that tender era.

In these examples of early photography, Victorian hidden mothers are both present and absent, embodying furniture on which their babies sit or lie, becoming their cradles or chairs, shrouded in floral blankets or shadow-dark. In most of the photos, the mothers’ heads and faces are thoroughly wrapped as though they are corpses, and in others, a hand might be coming from nowhere to grip their toddler in place.



Sometimes they hold more than one child, or crouch behind a wooden chair, arms sticking out to support a wobbly baby, the tops of their heads and their upright child the only clue that they were present. The images are sometimes ghostly and others, downright comical. Why not just photograph the mother? I wish I could ask the photographer.

Holding my own nursing baby, I didn’t know why I was searching for these hidden women, or what they meant to me in my early postpartum haze, but I was drawn to the genre’s creepiest examples—the ones in which I don’t even register the children meant to be captured by the image, because the hidden mother is too distracting. Still, she presumably wanted her child photographed to preserve something of that time of her own life. None of the photographs could exist without the thing they are trying to hide.



Susan E. Cook, author of “Hidden Mothers: Forms of Absence in Victorian Photography and Fiction,” explains on her website why the images might fascinate us almost 200 years later. They “draw attention to the shrouded figure they are attempting to obscure,” she writes, “and beg the question of why this figure is shrouded to begin with. Is this actually a member of the family (the mother of the children), or an employee (a nanny or an assistant at the photographic studio) whose job it is to essentially become a piece of movement-restricting furniture?”

This is easy to believe when you see, for example, a black arm holding a white child—further erasing the importance of women of color, who cared for the children but whose bodies weren’t visible in the documentation. Cook also cites a horrifying debate she read on a post about hidden mother portraits on Chelsea Nichols’s blog, The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things, about whether some of the children are even alive, or if they had to be propped up by hidden mothers because the portraits are actually a memento mori. Cook points out that this debate further obscures the mothers.



The Victorian era marked a permanent shift in how society viewed families. The period’s focus on domesticity positioned families as an emotional unit rather than a purely economic one, and children as subject to their parents’ desire to preserve their innocence. Although the method of hiding the mother is ridiculous, I still recognize the impulse. After all, in preserving memories of my own children through my phone’s camera lens, I am erasing so much of the work it took to feed, clothe, and otherwise care for them, getting them into position for the photo.

Motherhood can feel like a shrinking of the self, until our families’ attention to our own needs vanishes entirely. There are things I want to remember—their sweet smiles or cozy dreams—and things I don’t—the messes I cleaned and tantrums I soothed and illnesses I held them through. I don’t want to be in the picture when I am crying from sleep-deprivation and frustration at trying to tear myself in half so each child has enough of me. I mainly photograph the clean outfits, the happy mealtimes, the calm outings. In the process, I am erasing my own labor, and therefore, myself.



At first, I understood hidden mother photographs as metaphorically relevant to my own life. Motherhood makes it hard to access or identify our desires, needs, or identities separate from our children, and I have often felt like a ghost haunting my own life. This is the first thing I have written for publication since my second daughter was born last July, even though I have felt a constant thrumming desire to have a complete idea and have the space and energy to commit it to writing, as I always have.

In my darkest moments, I have fantasized about falling down the stairs and breaking a bone just to be able to spend a night alone in a hospital room, where I could read and sleep as much as I want. I think about a spontaneous night out, drinking wine with my husband, whose company I really enjoy, even though we can rarely do much these days besides pass the parenting and work baton back and forth. He practices parenting as a chance to be present with our children, whereas I often experience it as an endless series of tasks, things I have to buy and plan for well after they’ve gone to bed. The stereotype of fathers being praised for simply existing in public spaces with their children irks me precisely because it is one more way the mother is invisible.

It’s almost impossible for me to say what I would do with a whole day to myself. Or even a whole morning to myself. I have lost any ability to identify what would feel good or fulfilling. Any time alone I feel I must maximize by writing or folding laundry or grading student papers or meal prepping. I have erased my own desires so that I can still be productive, in other words, enough to keep my family and my career going. I, too, must vanish from the photograph, with only my hand gripping a child’s leg, keeping the toddler balanced on the chair. To let go would be disastrous, I have told myself.



It was only recently, as I put together a monthly photo book of my youngest daughter and realized I’m not in any of the photos, that I understood them literally as well. The hidden mother portraits I kept coming back to were early precursors to modern day family photos, from which mothers are still often absent. When I asked my husband for a picture of me with the baby for the monthly photo book, he sent me one of her, with just my nose and foot visible in the frame. “Don’t you have one of my whole face or body?” I asked him. He did, but the baby wasn’t looking at the camera, so he didn’t think to send it. I’m not the one the family is trying to remember as I am. Like many mothers, I am often focused on capturing the child and the moment, but am hidden from the camera.

While the camera has advanced and the frequency of kid photos have increased, moms today are no more visible. The images I returned to the most laid bare the expectation that women, particularly mothers, were mainly embodied and supporting roles. I want to say to them, I see you, and I see the stillness you created by being present. I understand the loss of the body’s primacy because I have experienced it—early in my adult life, when I was unable to continue dancing ballet, as I was trained to do from childhood—and again as a mother, when other people’s needs necessarily superseded my own.



What makes these hidden mother portraits so fascinating compared to the family pictures of today, in which everyone is there except the mother, is that we have to willfully read the Victorian mothers as absent. Yet to read her as absent is absurd, when she is right there, covered in a blanket. To read ourselves as absent in the photo books we create might be willful too. After all, the photos exist because of a hidden mother. What does that mother want? What does she uphold? Who is still hiding her?

[Misstee]

106-year-old man becomes world's oldest skydiver
By Ben Hooper









May 9 (UPI) -- A Texas man reclaimed his Guinness World Records title by going skydiving at the age of 106 years and 327 days old.

Alfred "Al" Blaschke originally earned the title of the oldest person to tandem skydive when he jumped out of a plane at the age of 103 in 2020, but his record was broken by Swedish woman Rut Linnéa Ingegärd Larsson, who was 103 years and 259 days old when she went skydiving.

Blaschke recaptured his title by going skydiving at the age of 106 years and 327 days old. He was joined by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who made his first jump.

"If you think you can't, you're just underestimating yourself. Everyone is more capable than they think. They just need to make the decision to try," Blaschke told Guinness World Records.

Life expectancy study reveals longest and shortest-lived cats



A team of pathobiologists at The Royal Veterinary College, in the U.K., working with a colleague from National Chung Hsing University, in Taiwan, has created a life expectancy chart for approximately 8,000 domestic cat breeds.

In their paper published in Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, the group outlines their findings and offer some insight into why some cats live longer or shorter lives than others.

Prior research and anecdotal evidence suggest that some cat breeds have longer or shorter lifespans than average. The research team sought to more specifically categorize life expectancy in domestic cats by creating a chart showing the average lifespan of thousands of house cats.

The work by the team involved pulling death certificate data from the VetCompass Program, for the years 2019 to 2021. In so doing, they were able to learn the details of 7,936 cat deaths in the U.K., which they then used to create a chart listing cat breeds in order of life expectancy from longest-lived to shortest.

In looking at their data, they found that life expectancy for the cats overall was 11.74 years and that males lived on average 16 months less than females. They also found that the Burmese breed was the longest-lived, with a life expectancy of 14.42 years, and that the Sphynx, was the shortest, with a life expectancy of just 6.68 years.

They also found that, like humans, lifestyle had an impact on longevity—overweight cats, for example, tended to not live as long. They also found that the types of breeding that have been done to generate new or different types of breeds have had an impact on life expectancy as well.

Such breeding, they note has been linked to common birth defects in cats, such as heart defects, eye disease and weaker than normal muscles. The Sphynx breed, they note, is a prime example of breeding that has led to a popular but unhealthy pet.

The hairless cats (bred to allow people with fur allergies to have a cat) have an increased risk of several different types of diseases, many of which can lead to an early death.

More information: Kendy Tzu-yun Teng et al, Life tables of annual life expectancy and risk factors for mortality in cats in the UK, Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery (2024). DOI: 10.1177/1098612X241234556 (open access)

Meet the Vetter Extra Terrestrial Vehicle: A Car So Wild You'll Wish You Were Beamed Up
Source: autoevolution


Image: RiversCars

MTV Concepts is one of the most innovative and extreme car building shops in the nation. Its ETV might be the most famous model it produces, and at L'Automobile 2021, Mike Vetter's personal car was on display.

Miami is a city full of supercars and super SUVs. In just a few short days there, we saw at least 50 Lamborghinis, not to mention dozens of other supercars. It's a place where being seen is of paramount concern and just having a supercar isn't always enough to capture attention.

That's just one reason that the Vetter Extraterrestrial Vehicle is so special. For less than $100,000, it's going to gather eyeballs faster than actual aliens. That's because it's shaped unlike any other car ever produced.


Image: RiversCars

The exterior is as tear-drop shaped as it could possibly get and features the only windshield we can think of that's longer from front to back (5 feet) than it is from side to side.

All four wheels are encapsulated seamlessly in this shape. The turning radius isn't negatively affected either. In fact, the only thing about getting it out of a tight parking space or a garage is a lack of visibility.

Vetter has some help with that, though, thanks to a rear-mounted reverse camera. Of course, forward visibility is a challenge for first-time drivers, too, since the tip of the nose is further ahead of the driver's seat than in most cars.


Image: RiversCars

Nevertheless, Vetter says that this is his personal car and one he drives often. The inclusion of a back seat was necessitated when he and his wife needed a place for their daughter. Interestingly enough, this is a very rare version of the ETV that doesn't feature a rear window.

Instead, a sort of diamond-patterned skin sits on the rear half of the vehicle. Combine it with the stunning copper-colored paint, and the ETV sincerely does look other-worldly in the Florida sun.


Image: RiversCars

The doors open similarly to a McLaren or Lamborghini, but Vetter didn't just find a Lambo door kit online. He designed the hinges himself, and they're seriously impressive. They open and shut as well as any factory door.

Inside each one is a pair of windows. One is fixed in place while another one actually rolls all the way down. That's no easy feat, but Mike pulled it off.

Under the front of the ETV sits a 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine made by General Motors. It routes power to the front wheels through an automatic transmission.

It might not sound fun, but it is reliable and easy to work on. Vetter has built the chassis of the ETV to allow access to almost any component from below or through one of the wheel wells.

Every ETV is a little different, but they all have one thing in common. They will make you feel like the star of your own movie everywhere you go.

[Zbignieww]

The Quietest Place On Earth Is Minus Decibels
It's so quiet you can hear your own heartbeat.



The sound of silence is one that few people truly know, but there is a place you can go if you’d like to get acquainted. Be warned, however, that the deafening hush of the place can cause you to become oddly disoriented, and it’s thought that no one is able to last more than an hour in this creepy sound void.

Holding the Guinness World Record for the quietest place on Earth, the anechoic test chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis has a background noise level of -24.9 decibels. By comparison, the average whisper clocks in at a booming 30 decibels, while the faintest sound detectable to the human ear is around zero decibels.

The word anechoic means ‘without echo’, and it’s this complete lack of sound reverberation that makes the room so horribly silent. The effect is achieved thanks to a series of fiberglass wedges that cover the walls, floor and ceiling, breaking up and stifling any sound waves that dare to arise within the space.

Thick layers of brick and steel serve to soundproof the room, while springs separate the chamber from the surrounding building to ensure that no external vibrations have a chance to intrude.

According to designer Steven J. Orfield, those who enter the chamber are able to hear their own heartbeats as well as the machinations of their internal organs. Being able to see walls without hearing any echoes, meanwhile, can throw one’s senses completely out of whack, resulting in a loss of balance and a general feeling of intense unease.

Orfield says it’s impossible to remain in the chamber for more than half an hour without needing to sit down, and that even the assistance of a chair can’t make the place bearable for much longer than that.

Like the Orfield Lab, the anechoic chamber at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, boasts an ambient sound that is far quieter than complete silence. With a minimum level of -20.6 decibels, the room previously held the record for the world’s most noiseless place, and the two have been locked in a back-and-forth competition for the title for a number of years.

Yet these mute spaces were not just built for prestige, and do actually serve a number of valuable functions. For instance, manufacturers who want to know exactly how much noise their products make use anechoic chambers to take readings in the complete absence of background sound, while astronauts sometimes enter these eerily quiet rooms to help prepare themselves for the silence of space.

At least in here, their screams can be heard.

https://www.iflscience.com/the-quietest-place-on-earth-is-minus-decibels-74176

[johngriffen]

I sometimes get REALLY DEPRESSED reviewing the news these days.
It's always about a global pandemic threatening life as we know it,
protests around the world, stupid politicians, natural disasters,
or some other really bad story.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

Welcome to The mobi weekly news magazine
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SUNDAY MAY 12
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​Naked sunbather chases wild boar through park after it steals his laptop bag

A naked sunbather was seen chasing wild boar through a park after it stole his laptop bag.
Amusing photographs from Germany show the man running after the animal to try and claim the plastic bag back.
But the cheeky boar and its two piglets appear to be too quick for the sunbather, who can't keep up with their speedy little trotters.
As the incident unfolds, groups of friends and family sat on the grass watch on and laugh.
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The incident happened at Teufelssee Lake - a bathing spot in the Grunwell Forest in Berlin, Germany.

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