Niassa Park, in Mozambique, is one of Africa’s largest wildlife preserves. The last time an elephant was lost to poaching was in May 2018.
They implemented a rapid-response police force and have increased their patrolling and response by air. The preserve has benefited from the desire of Mozambique’s president to see poaching reduced.
The rapid-response police force is billed as an “elite” unit and are better armed than normal reserve rangers. There are just 72 hours between the arrest of a potential poacher and their presentation to prosecutors.
One of the reasons for less poaching victims is also the lack of targets. In recent years the population has declined from 12k animals to 3,600 in 2016 (illegal poaching reached a peak in 2011).
Now, the park has set it’s sights on achieving similar milestones with the rest of it’s wildlife species, not just elephants.
Did you know a a massive race riot occurred in Los Angeles almost thirty years before the Rodney King riots?
The Watts riots were named after the Watts neighborhood in LA, near Compton. Longstanding racial injustices and a history of police brutality against both black and Mexican citizens left an underlying tension which came to a head in August 1965 when a young black man was pulled over for alleged reckless driving.
His brother, who was the passenger in the car, walked home and retrieved their mother. When they got back to the scene the situation escalated. Eventually it was reported that the police used exessive force and kicked a pregnant woman which led to members of the community taking to the streets.
Police tried to disperse the crowd multiple times but were attacked by the mob. Blockades were established to try and contain the riot zones.
The National Guard was called in to help the police and arrived two days later. The situation was said to resemble a warzone.
An 8pm curfew was put in place in areas with a large black majority and led to the arrest of ~3,500 black rioters. By the end of the six-day riots, 34 people were dead, over 1k injured, and ~$40 million of propert damaged.
Black essayist Bayard Rustin wrote that it asserted the black community “would no longer silently submit to the deprivation of slum life.”
These were the largest riots in LA until the officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted of using excessive force.
Not only it’s brain, but it’s tongue, ears, fangs, and hair! The preservation of soft tissues of any specimen is a rare find and this discovery will provide mountains of data for scientists to analyze.
The head was found in the Siberian permafrost in 2018 and is from a now-extinct subspecies of wolf which was ~25% larger than today’s wolf species. It was alive during the ice age and was 2-4 years old when it died.
The discovery was announced during a special exhibition at a museum in Japan called “The Mammoth.”
Django Reinhardt was born into a Belgian Romani family in 1910. He grew up in Romani camps around Paris and learned a wide range of stringed instruments, eventually settling on the banjo-guitar as his preferred instrument. He practiced by mimicking older musicians, never learning to read music.
His trajectory as a musician was almost derailed when he spent a year and a half in the hospital recovering from extensive burns after an accident. His injuries led to the loss of use of his left ring and pinky finger, both used extensively when playing guitar. He took the challenge of learning to play again and was able to use just his left index and middle finger to form chords and regain his mastery.
When Reinhardt found jazz he went on to become part of the most accomplished European jazz groups of the thirties. During World War II he was able to avoid the Romani Holocaust but had to also change his musical direction since the offical Nazi stance prohibited jazz.
After the war he toured the US with Duke Ellington before returning to Paris, where he died at the age of 43.Reinhardt is credited with the creation of gypsy jazz. Two all-time great guitarists, Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi and Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, both played guitar after losing fingers in accidents and were inspired by Reinhardt. Jimi Hendrix’s album Band Of Gypsys is also inspired by Reinhardt.
If you're interested in learning to play gypsy jazz on the guitar, check out this comprehensive guide.
The International Space Station (ISS) sits, on average, 400km/250 miles in orbit above the Earth.
The first private astronauts could visit as soon as 2020. NASA has limited the numebr of visitors to two per year.
Whoever is willing to make the trip can stay up to thirty days on board and are required to reimburse NASA’s cost to keep them aboard, approximately 35k per day.
NASA requires visitors to use commercial US spacecrafts so Elon Musk’s SpaceX might have some more flights booked in the future.
It seems the long-term plan for the ISS will be a transition to commercial use.
An archaelogical dig in Ethiopia has unearthed flaked stone tools dating back to 2.78 million years ago, approximately 200k years before the previously known flaked stone tools.
The tools were dropped near a water source and buried in the sediment millions of years ago.
The strange thing is there’s no clear connection between this technology and earlier stone tool use, in which stones were used as a hammer (Chimpanzees and monkeys, in modern times, currently use stone tools in this way) or between these flaked stone tools and those found at other archaeological sites. This suggests flaked stone tools were invented multiple times in multiple places.
The shift between using stones as blunt objects to flaking pieces of stone off to sharpen the stone occurred approximately 2.6 million years ago and coincided with a change in human biology. Specifically, teeth grew smaller since food was being processed before being consumed.
This region in Ethiopia is a hotbed for archaeological activity; in 2013 a jawbone was found which is the oldest fossil known to belong to a member of the Homogenus (of Homo Sapienfame).
The Venona Project ran from 1937-1980 and stayed secret until 1995. It was initally begun by the Army Signal Intelligence Service until this division was absorbed by the National Security Agency during WWII. The CIA was made aware of the project in 1952.
Army Chief of Staff Omar Bradley decided not to inform President Truman of the project, only telling him about the intelligence and not how they were obtained.
The project discovered Soviet Agents in the UK and uncovered Soviet penetration of the US’s Manhattan Project, responsible for the development of the atomic bomb. Additionally, the project uncovered a number of Soviet agents within the US government.
Decrypted messages suggest Laurence Duggan, an official in the State Department, had passed information to the Soviet Union in the 40’s. His case gained prominence when he fell to his death from his New York office ten days after being questioned by the FBI about whether he had communicate with Soviet Intelligence. It is believed he committed suicide and at the time of his death there was no evidence of his work with the Soviets. It was only after the Venona Project was declassified 47 years later that suggest the accusations had some truth behind them.
Archibald Macleish, Librarian of Congress and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote “The Black Day” in memory of Duggan.
The theory goes like this: cosmic energy from supernovae hit the earth millions of years ago, increasing electrical activity in the lower atmosphere (lightning), which led to increased forest fires, which forced ancient humans out of forests and into the savannas.
Though human ancestors spent most of their lives climbing trees, they are believed to have had the ability to walk upright between trees though it wouldn't have been their primary mode of travel. The ability to walk upright in savannas would allow humans to see over the grasses and scan the horizon for predators.
The forest-fire theory is supported by increased carbon deposits in corresponding soil. Scientists determined the supernova would have been between 50-100 light years away and it would have increased electrical activity up to 50x greater than normal.
Don’t worry about any of this happening again though. “The nearest star capable of exploding into a supernova in the next million years is Betelgeuse, some 200 parsecs (652 light years) from Earth.”
