Astronomers announced Thursday that they had detected the most promising "hints" of potential life on a planet beyond our Solar System, though other scientists expressed scepticism. There has been vigorous debate in scientific circles about whether the planet K2-18b, which is 124 light years away in the Leo constellation, could be an ocean world capable of hosting microbial life. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, a British-US team of researchers detected signs of two chemicals in the planet's atmosphere long considered to be "biosignatures" indicating extraterrestrial life. On Earth, the chemicals dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide are produced only by life, mostly microscopic marine algae called phytoplankton. The researchers emphasised caution, saying that more observations were needed to confirm these findings, and that they were not announcing a definitive discovery. But the implications could be huge, according to Nikku Madhusudhan, a Cambridge University astrophysicist and lead author of the study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. "What we are finding at this point are hints of possible biological activity outside the solar system," he told a press conference. "Frankly, I think this is the closest we have come to seeing a feature that we can attribute to life." But outside experts pointed to disputes over previous discoveries about the exoplanet, adding that these chemicals could have been created by unknown means having nothing to do with life. https://www.sciencealert.com/strongest-evidence-of-alien-life-yet-found-124-light-years-away

https://www.wsj.com/politics/elon-musk-children-mothers-ashley-st-clair-grimes-dc7ba05c Ashley St. Clair wanted to prove that Elon Musk was the father of her newborn baby. But to ask the billionaire to take a paternity test, the right-wing social-media influencer had to go through Musk’s longtime fixer, Jared Birchall. “I don’t want my son to feel like he’s a secret,” St. Clair told Birchall in a two-hour phone call in December. Birchall offered St. Clair some advice. His boss was a “very big-hearted, kind and generous person,” he said. But Musk had a different side. When a mother of his child goes “the legal route” in these discussions, “that always, always leads to a worse outcome for that woman than what it would have been otherwise,” Birchall told the 26-year-old. Plus, he said, Musk wasn’t sure the child was his. It wasn’t the first such conversation for Birchall. His public job is running Musk’s family office, and he recently helped organize Musk’s more than $250 million push in support of Donald Trump’s election. Behind the scenes, Birchall also manages the financial and privacy deals Musk wants for the women raising the world’s richest man’s babies. Musk has had at least 14 children with four women, including the pop musician Grimes and Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain computer company Neuralink. Multiple sources close to the tech entrepreneur said they believe the true number of Musk’s children is much higher than publicly known.

That’s cold Italy! Brrrrrrrr! That’s Italian for brrrrrrr

@LuFins-Dad said in College Graduation Party?: @jon-nyc said in College Graduation Party?: Make it slightly embarrassing. Call it a ‘look out, world’ party. Just a little cringe? Okay to actually do the cookout myself? Could just do burgers and hotdogs, but I would prefer to do Fajitas… If everybody likes fajitas, why not? Was at a Mexican place the other day and ordered standard fair for me, a Hawaiian Fajita. Chicken, ham, shrimp, pineapple, onions and peppers with fajita seasoning.

Looks like that's a baby too... aren't they suppose to get like 20-40 feet in length? That seems to be a foot or two based on the smaller creatures around it. Maybe they said that in the audio, I didn't have audio on.

@Klaus said in Why are car headlights so blindingly bright now?: I can leave on the floodlight all time without blinding anyone because the car automatically makes a hole in its light cone where other cars are. Maybe that is what I read about that the US has finally accepted and will allow in cars now sold in the US.

You know he's turned it into toilets for export to the Saudi's, right?

More like paybacks are hell.

@Axtremus said in Better wine, more lamb to eat. I like this idea.: @Jolly said in Better wine, more lamb to eat. I like this idea.: If all imports ceased tomorrow, could a wine afficiondo survive on American wines? Don't see why not. I suspect, if put to a double-blind taste testing, the wine aficionados can consistently tell American wines apart from foreign wines. I can.

Works for me.

There is something to be said about being a decent person. Not the biggest winner, not the coolest guy, not the person with the most money or the person with the hottest chicks. While playing against the woke mime Donald Trump turns out to be the ultimate post modernist icon. Good for him. To his credit he never said he was anything different.

I bought one years ago in Cancun. We were on vacation there but my wife was getting her MBA at the time and all she did was study. We bought a timeshare. $5,000. Never went there, never used it. They charged us some money for "whatever" and we never paid. We got a blanket from the deal. It's around the house somewhere and it's called the "$5,000 blanket."

Possibly. Here is the dashboard. If you go back a level in the breadcrumbs and click on CAROL you can build your own query. I started to try but decided I wasn't sure how they classified "commercial" so I decided to let you have fun! You can thank me later. https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/data/Pages/monthly-dashboard.aspx

They're coming...

@Horace 555 That was my goal!

@LuFins-Dad Good points!! [image: federal_lands.jpg]

@Renauda Wow!!! Glad that you were okay. It is weird how some things happen, and if you were there a second/day/week earlier or later, the outcome would have been very different.

@Mik said in This is not right: As I said, I have no issue with reducing the federal workforce but it doesn't have to be done in a capricious and unnecessarily harmful way. I've said this before more than once, but I find the fact that Elon Musk appears very much to enjoy doing this to people really distasteful.