Carl Sagan's foreboding (29 years ago)

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance” 

-- The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Random House, 1996

Reposted from last year because it's so damn accurate and needs to be publicized. 

Surprisingly valuable collectible coin

This 1967 Kennedy half dollar sold for $192.

It was graded "Poor" (grade 1) by PCGS - the lowest possible grade.  Normally coins are priced higher for higher grades from poor up to brilliant uncirculated and proof.  The odd valuation on this one is discussed in some Reddit comments: "Because it’s rad! Full of character - wholesome, as they say - it took years of honest wear for this coin to get this way, and for it to return so near to its original unstruck planchet, while still being recognizable as this exact year’s issue - is kind of special, rich in history."  "It doesn’t have the dings of being in commerce to me though. People will carry a coin special to them in their pocket every day and I’ve only seen a coin look that smooth from them doing that. And it takes a long time." "Think how rare it is for a coin to get just that amount of worn without also getting damaged...scratched, cleaned, environmental issues, rim dings."

I have numerous similar-quality Indian Head pennies, buffalo nickels, and Barber dimes, but sadly the same valuation criteria don't tend to apply.

Impressive dismount

Food for bears

Biologists estimate about 200 [grizzly] bears each year feast on moths in the eastern portion of the carnivores’ range. Each gram of moth offers bears about eight calories, which means some bears will eat up to 40,000 a day.

“A bear could, in about a month’s time, get one-third of the calories they need to build up fat for hibernation at these moth sites,” says Frank van Manen, leader of the interagency grizzly bear study team with the US Geological Survey...

At a time when other food sources, such as whitebark pine nuts and cutthroat trout, have been hit by global heating, disease and invasive species, the army cutworm moth population has remained remarkably stable, making it a critical ingredient in the grizzly bears’ continued recovery in the US...

Researchers believe the army cutworm moth population remains healthy, and because they arrive from many locations as far east as the Missouri River and as far north as the Northwest Territories, no localized issue, such as pesticide use or flooding, can crash their populations..."

The story continues at The Guardian.  I was surprised at the long distances these small moths migrate.

Reposted from 2023 to accompany an adjacent new post.

"Grizzly bears are mostly vegan"

The title on The Atlantic article startled me, although I've actually blogged this fact before.

Before Europeans arrived on the West Coast in 1542, the bears thrived on diets that were roughly 90 percent vegan, as Alagona and his colleagues found in a study published this week. (The typical modern American, meanwhile, derives about a third of their daily calories from animal-based foods.) In the decades after colonizers began to introduce new settlements and animals to the West Coast, the bears probably did start eating more meat. And humans were likely the ones to blame.

California grizzlies, like most other brown bears, were never averse to eating meat. Chemical signatures in the skulls, teeth, and pelts of museum specimens, analyzed by Alagona and his colleagues, reveal that land animals made up just under 10 percent of the bears’ diet, even in the precolonial era—on par with the tastes of grizzlies elsewhere. (Marine meat made up less than 2 percent of the menus of the bears sampled.) And if modern brown-bear habits are any indication, what land animals the grizzlies were eating were probably mostly small, sluggish, newborn, or already dead. Grizzlies, for all their heft and roar, are kind of crummy hunters. “By and large, they’re just too slow,” Garth Mowat, a bear biologist at the University of British Columbia, told me.

Then, European colonists made meat-eating much, much easier—and perhaps more necessary. Livestock proliferated around California, many of them untended and unfenced. Indigenous populations dipped, which likely led to a bump in some wild-animal populations, Alagona told me. Swelling settlements thinned woodlands and pared back grasslands, potentially chipping away at the bears’ vegetarian menus. By the early 17th century, California grizzlies were probably eating quite a bit more meat—as Alagona’s team found, maybe nearly triple what they were consuming before.

The story continues at the link.  Check the other link for a report on bears eating 40,000 moths in a day.

Prehensile opossum tail useful for nest-making

A tip of my blogging hat to Marcie O'Connor at Prairie Haven for posting a video of an opossum gathering leaves for its nest using its prehensile tail (scroll down in the December journal entry).  Her video was captured using a motion-sensing night-vision camera, so I've embedded above a daylight version from the North Carolina Museum of Natural History.  Another video, from Manhattan (NYC) shows an opossum carrying its leaves up a tree to its nesting site.  I knew the tails were prehensile, but didn't know they were used for this purpose.

Pancake ice

It's truly amazing all the different forms ice can take.  Having spent much of my life in northern climates, I've seen many of them, but this photo (cropped for size) from The Guardian is my introduction to pancake ice (in eastern France).  You learn something every day.