MN Native living on the East Coast. I'm a retired Army Medic, 25th ID 211 FAR. I love America, My President, MN Sports, NASCAR, Metal Music, and Combat Sports.
@SlappinDa_Bass When Earnhardt died we all had JR to root for right away. looks like you will have to wait a bit for Brexton. Sorry man. you got a back up driver you root for? I'm a Larson guy and root for Sprire motorsports as backup after meeting Hocevar and McDriver a couple times.
@DaleJr@NashvilleSuperS yep didn't see it. the schedule has been rough with rain the last few weeks and NASCAR should have more flexibility to change start times according to weather. I go to sleep with my guy Larson in the lead and wake up to a Denny win! Not cool NASCAR.
@DaveOsborn41 sweet!! I would love this. I'm a disabled vet that only buys jerseys when I can afford it. my last jersey was from Theilen when he signed. I have a veterans teddy too.
Scientists fired lasers down through the Amazon canopy from a helicopter. On their screens, the trees disappeared. Sitting underneath was a 1,500-year-old city with stone pyramids as tall as a seven-story building.
Six hundred miles of canals and raised earth paths linked dozens of towns across the area. The Casarabe people built it between 500 and 1400 AD. Until LIDAR showed up, historians had pictured Amazon civilizations of that era as small wandering bands of hunters.
The tool that found the city is called LIDAR. From the air, it shoots 1.5 million pulses of invisible light per second, most of which hit leaves and bounce straight back. A few slip through tiny gaps in the canopy and reach the soil. A computer sorts which pulses came from leaves and which came from dirt, then draws a 3D map of the ground itself. The trees vanish from the picture. The shape of the earth appears underneath.
A 2022 paper in the journal Nature reported the find. Twenty-six ancient sites turned up in one survey area, and eleven had never been documented before. Heiko Prümers, the German archaeologist who led the work, said the same job by hand would have taken 400 years.
Then it got bigger. A team in Brazil ran LIDAR data covering about one tenth of one percent of the Amazon. From that small slice, their model predicted that 16,187 more ancient sites still sit hidden under the trees across the rest of the basin. Ditches and earth mounds. Walled villages and stone monuments. Built, lived in, and then swallowed back by the forest over centuries.
A WWF report counted 381 new plant and animal species in the Amazon between 2014 and 2015 alone. The list ran 216 plants, 93 fish, 32 amphibians, 20 mammals, 19 reptiles, and one new bird. That works out to roughly one new species every two days. In December 2024, a research team from Conservation International walked into a populated part of Peru and came back eight weeks later with 27 more new species. Four of them were mammals.
196 tribes worldwide still live with no contact with the outside world. Most are in the Amazon. In June 2024, 53 men from the Mashco Piro tribe were photographed walking out of the Peruvian forest near a logging camp. They are nomadic hunter-gatherers who have stayed away from outsiders for generations.
The Amazon covers 2.1 million square miles across nine countries. That is about two thirds the size of the United States. It holds one of every ten species on Earth, 390 billion trees of about 16,000 species, and 2.5 million types of insect.
The tweet says current technology cannot see beneath the canopy. The trees have already been seen through. The race is to map the rest before it burns.