I want to introduce you to Steve. He’s 83. His wife died a few months ago and he comes to this lodge in Spring Mill, Indiana and draws. He taught art in Terre Haute, IN his whole life. He also did courtroom sketches in court cases. In the comments I’ll share some pics from his sketchbook. He was excited when I said I was going to share his sketches with the world.
There are only 236 of them left on Earth. Every single one has a name.
The kākāpō is the world's heaviest parrot - a mossy green, owl-faced bird the size of a small dog that cannot fly, may live to 90 years, and only breeds every 2 to 4 years when New Zealand's rimu trees produce enough fruit to trigger the urge.
Rats. Cats. Stoats. Humans clearing forests. The kākāpō never evolved to outrun any of them.
By 1995, 51 birds remained. Scientists, rangers, and Ngāi Tahu - the Māori people who have always known this bird as taonga, a treasure—evacuated every last one to predator-free islands.
Each bird got a transmitter. Each nest watched around the clock.
This past February 14th, the first kākāpō chick in four years hatched. They named her Tīwhiri. By spring, 59 chicks had been born.
236 birds. Every name known. Every nest watched.
Who's counting down the days until the rimu trees fruit again? 🦜
#DemsUnited #Nature
30,000 hours of footage, equivalent to 3 years and 7 months, were filmed to capture the blooming of 77 types of flowers, and the result is spectacular.
🌕✨ This isn't a Giant Moon.
It's one of the most difficult types of photographs in astronomy.
Captured during the rare May 2026 Blue Moon, this image shows the full Moon rising behind Stonehenge using a technique called perspective compression.
The Moon only looks enormous because the photographer was positioned miles away with an extremely powerful telephoto lens.
In reality, the Moon was nearly 384,000 km from Earth.
Stonehenge was built more than 4,000 years ago.
And tonight, those ancient stones stood beneath the same Moon that humans have watched for thousands of years.
The timing had to be nearly perfect.
A few minutes too early or too late, and the alignment would be gone.
Others capture thousands of years of history in a single frame. 🌌
📍Stonehenge, England
Here's our video of the explosion at Launch Complex 36. It happened about 9 pm ET (0100 UTC) as Blue Origin was beginning a static fire test of its New Glenn rocket.
Watch live views: https://t.co/tm2wZQmAVD
With everything we are hearing right now about ticks this seems like good information to share.
“Here’s what I’ve learned after more ticks than I care to count.
First, whatever your uncle told you, forget it. No matches. No nail polish. No Vaseline. No soap on a cotton ball. All of those do the same terrible thing, they stress the tick out, and a stressed tick empties its gut back into the bite before letting go. Which, if you think about what that actually means for a second, is literally how Lyme and the rest get transmitted so you’re not speeding up its exit. You’re making it throw up into you.
Fine-tipped tweezers. Grip right where the mouthparts enter the skin, not the body, the head. Pull straight up, steady, no twisting, no jerking. It’ll feel like it’s resisting because it is, the mouthparts are barbed. Just keep the pressure on and it lets go in a few seconds. If a piece breaks off in the skin, leave it alone. Your body pushes splinters out. Digging around with a needle does more damage then the fragment ever would.
Clean it with alcohol or soap. Wash your hands.
Now here’s the part most people skip: don’t flush the tick.
Tape it to an index card. Clear packing tape right over the body, write the date and where on your body it was, and stick the card in a drawer. If you come down with anything weird in the next 30 days, rash, fever, joint pain, that flu-that-isn’t-flu feeling, that tick goes with you to the doctor. Some labs will test the tick itself, which is faster and often more reliable than waiting for antibodies to show up in your own blood. A dated tick taped to a card is one of the most useful things you can hand a doctor who’s trying to figure out what’s wrong with you.
The other thing worth saying out loud: if the tick was engorged when you pulled it, and you can’t swear it was off your body within 24 hours, call your doctor that same day. Don’t wait for a rash. Fewer than three out of four Lyme cases even produce the classic bullseye. A single preventive dose of doxycycline within 72 hours of a deer tick bite cuts the Lyme odds way down, and most docs in tick country will write that prescription without giving you a hard time, especially if you walk in with the tick taped to a card and a clear timeline.”
An 18-year-old Japanese classical guitarist, Haruna Miyagawa, performs Niccolò Paganini’s Caprice No. 24, a technically demanding violin piece arranged for guitar, highlighting its sequence of variations and arpeggios in a contemporary concert hall setting.
The real nerdy detail is the tail. It's longer than its body and has a distinctive silver sheen on the underside. Researchers use tail markings to identify individuals in the wild because each squirrel's pattern is slightly different. I did a small photography project in the Western Ghats back in 2024 and managed to get a shot of one mid-leap. The color saturation is so high that people thought I'd photoshopped it.