bartender here. guess what: robots are never going to be programmed to take a beer off your tab because they feel sorry for you after your wife took the kids
Jimmy Carter was the 39th U.S. President - and never ordered a single aerial bombing campaign against a foreign country. Every modern president before and after him did. Carter chose diplomacy where others chose firepower. His defining moment came at Camp David in 1978 - locking Egyptian and Israeli leaders in 13 days of brutal negotiation, emerging with a peace agreement that ended 30 years of war. His presidency faced the Iran hostage crisis, oil shocks and economic turmoil - crises that would have given any leader justification for military escalation. He held the line anyway. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He died in 2024 at 100 years old. The man who never bombed anyone outlived almost every critic who called him weak.
Did you know the TV show “To Catch a Predator” was cancelled because they kept catching law enforcement, teachers, preachers, local officials, and other people meant to protect Children?
The final straw? An Assistant District Attorney in TEXAS was courting who he thought was a 13yo boy. He didn’t show for the sting, so they sent law enforcement and camera crew to his home. The police entered, and Louis Conradt shot himself, taking his own life.
Can’t make this shit up.
Capitalism is the only socio-economic-political system on Earth where you can be the world's leading beef producer, but your own citizens can't afford what they produce...
A biologist once figured out part of this mystery by accident, during a nap. In 1982, Jack Putz lay down under a group of mangrove trees in Costa Rica, looked up, and watched the wind slam their top branches into each other over and over.
Every gust snapped off leaves and twigs. So Putz had a theory. When two trees grow close together, they sway in storms and their branches beat each other up. Over years, that beating trims back the treetops where they meet. That wear and tear carves out the gap.
A 2015 study backed him up. Researchers checked the branches along these gaps and found that at least half of them had been broken in just the previous six years. Trees are getting slapped around constantly up there.
But the theory falls apart in some forests. Alan Rebertus, a scientist who studied a cloud forest where winds hit over 100 kilometers an hour, compared it to sheltered forests. He expected the windy ones to have bigger gaps. They didn't. The gaps looked the same.
The Malaysian camphor tree doesn't show any sign of rubbing either. It grows as tall as a 25-story building, and researchers looked carefully where the branches stopped. They found nothing. Whatever was keeping those branches apart, it wasn't physical contact.
So there's a second theory, and this one is the part I love. Trees might actually sense each other. Their leaves carry a protein called phytochrome that acts like a little light meter. It notices a kind of light called far-red, which healthy leaves bounce off instead of absorbing. So if a tree's growing tip is suddenly drowning in far-red light, it knows another tree's leaves are right there. The tip stops growing in that direction. The gap forms on its own.
Plants even do this politely toward relatives. Next to kin, they back off. But put them next to a stranger and they grow right up in the neighbor's face.
The honest answer to what we're looking at in the sky is: we don't fully know. Probably wind in some species, light sensing in others. Plenty of trees do both at the same time. A hundred years of science and nobody has cracked it.
In 1986, a 3-foot parasite was emerging through the skin of 3.5 million people a year. In 2025, the number was 10.
Guinea worm disease is about to become the second human disease ever eradicated, after smallpox. And it's being done without a vaccine and without a single drug.
The worm takes a year to mature inside your body. Then it tunnels to your foot or leg, forms a burning blister, and begins emerging over several weeks. The pain drives people into water for relief, which releases thousands of larvae and restarts the cycle in whoever drinks from that source next.
The Carter Center broke that loop with pieces of cloth. They taught villages to filter their drinking water through fine mesh. They paid cash rewards for reporting cases. In 2025, national programs investigated over one million rumors of the disease, nearly all within 24 hours.
Jimmy Carter took this on after he left the White House and said he wanted to outlive the last Guinea worm. He didn't quite make it. But the 10 cases in 2025 showed up in just three countries: four in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. 200 other countries are already certified clean.
A parasite that infected 3.5 million people a year is being wiped off the planet by pieces of cloth and a million phone calls.