jspeter9191 has added a photo to the pool:
Dawn at Tallawong Metro Station, Sydney, Australia.
Peace be with you.
The Brighton-based photographer was walking along a crowded beach looking for ice-cream when he spotted this calm, minimalist scene
Bertram Greenhough had promised his six-year-old daughter Audrey an ice-cream. It was a warm June day in Brighton and the pair were playing tourists in their own city, having just visited an upside-down house near the i360 observation tower. The beach was packed, and they were heading in the direction of the Palace Pier so that Greenhough could stay true to his word. Along the way, they passed this lifeguard shelter.
“I often walk around Brighton with my SLR film camera – very hipster of me. However, that day I only had my phone,” Greenhough recalls. “But, as the adage goes, the best camera is the one you have with you. I saw this calm, minimalist scene suspended above thousands of people and I remember saying to my daughter, ‘Oh, look at that, I need to take a picture!’ She had no idea what I was talking about!”
Continue reading...South Western and GTR announce fightback after move away from paper tickets increases fare dodging
There is more than one way to commit fraud and, for some rail travellers, it has been as simple as a couple of taps on their phone as their train approaches its destination.
That telltale last-minute purchase of a digital ticket – for the shortest journey that will allow them to bleep through the gates, regardless of how far they have travelled – is one of a number of illegal wheezes that train operators are trying to eliminate, with the enthusiastic backing of the government department that will directly oversee most of England’s rail services when they are renationalised next year.
Continue reading...
Welcome back to another special edition of the Abstract! As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, I have saved up some of the most mind-boggling studies from 2026 so far to share while I’m out on vacation.
With that said, here are the studies this year that hit the bottle, went hog wild, slithered into prominence, and double-detonated.
First, a tale of survival on the high seas from a trash-bound crab. Then: a hybrid emerges from radioactive fallout, a snake in the grass (and lots of other places), and a surprise from a space jellyfish.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
Next week, we’ll be back to our regularly-scheduled programming. Until then, enjoy the last special summer edition of the Abstract!
Tell me about a complicated crab
In the summer of 2022, scientists conducting a boat survey off the coast of Sesoko Island, Japan came across a floating bottle of Shaoxing cooking wine carrying a lonely female crab.
It appears that this three-spot swimming crab (Portunus sanguinolentus) entered the bottle as a youngster and then grew too large to get back out again. Judging by its size, the crab spent at least one or two months drifting across the seas, like a crustacean Odysseus consigned to Poseidon’s whims. Though the scientists released the crab, she did not get to enjoy her freedom for long as she was promptly dissected in order to reconstruct her journey, according to a study published in April.
“We hypothesized that the crab survived by hunting juvenile fish that entered the bottle,” said researchers led by Hajime Sato of Hiroshima University. “The stomach contents revealed that the crab consumed the same fish species…observed near the bottle. Green and brown algae…most likely growing inside the bottle, were also identified in the diet.”
The team likened the crab to the story “The Salamander” by the writer Masuji Ibuse, which tells the tale of a salamander that grew too large to escape its burrow. The story also reminds me of one of my favorite anecdotes from a study: Anacondas will sometimes slither into chicken coops, feed on all the poultry, and then become so engorged that they’re unable to escape.
In addition to offering a timeless warning about feasting in confined spaces, the study is a testament to the negative impacts of anthropological debris on wildlife. Who knows how many other animals are out there in the wild, trapped in our trash?
“The bottle was made of high-density polyethylene (HDPE), which is buoyant in seawater and can persist in the environment for several decades (>28 years) while retaining its shape,” the researchers noted. “Given its narrow-neck design, we hypothesize that such bottles may have similar impacts on other crustaceans and fishes associated with drifting objects.”
“Although little evidence has suggested that drifting debris has an immediate and direct impact on crab populations,” they concluded, “shouldn't we listen faithfully and carefully to the tragic messages from small marine organisms?”
In other words, not every message in a bottle is an antiquated handwritten letter—some are living symbols of our changing world.
In other news…
Beware the crossbred radioactive boars
The tale of the bottled crab is not the only study this year that sounds like a dark children’s allegory—indeed, it’s not even the only one from Japan.
In January, researchers reported on the emergence of hybrid pig lineages made up of domestic swine that escaped in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster and began breeding with wild boars.
The feral swine have introduced genes into wild boar populations through a hybridization process known as genetic introgression. The hybrid population has skyrocketed both due to the relative absence of human interference in the fallout zone, and because swine breed much more often, and produce larger litters, than wild boars.
Genes “introduced by escaped swine following the FDNPP accident have persisted and spread within wild boar populations through repeated backcrossing and range expansion,” said researchers led by Donovan Anderson of Hirosaki University. “The results underscore the ecological significance of hybrid individuals as indicators of post-accident population recovery and gene flow dynamics in a contaminated landscape.”
Did I mention that the hybrid hogs are also radioactive? Their bodies contain high levels of cesium isotopes from their habitat, even after more than a decade. This phenomenon of radioactive wildlife has been observed at other contaminated sites, such as Chernobyl, offering yet another eerie glimpse of the persistent human impact on the natural world.
Snakes on multiple ecological planes
Simões, Tiago R. et al. “Exceptional brain and ecological diversity in the earliest snakes.” Nature.
It’s time to return to one of my all-time favorite beats—SNAKE NEWS. Snakes have evolved into a dazzling array of species that range in length from a few inches to 36 feet and occupy wildly different habitats. But the origins of these legless lifeforms have long been shrouded in mystery, as scientists have debated whether early snakes first emerged in water, in underground burrows, on land, or falling from the sky (just kidding).
Scientists have now discovered that the answer is basically: all of the above. By studying rare fossilized remains of snakes—including one exceptionally-preserved new species that lived 85 million years ago—a team found that the earliest snakes lived in burrows (fossorial), above ground (non-fossorial), and in marine habitats, challenging the idea that they slithered into existence from one type of environment, according to a study published in July.
“Snake origins therefore were not shaped by a single, linear event as traditionally thought,” said researchers led by Tiago R. Simões of Princeton University. “Instead, early snake evolution involved repeated shifts in habitat use and sensory ecology, characterizing a dynamic ecological history in which multiple lineages independently explored fossorial and non-fossorial lifestyles.”
How appropriate that the evolutionary history of this amazing group should be non-linear and, dare I say, serpentine. This has been SNAKE NEWS.
A brilliant binary blowup
What’s better than one star blowing up? That’s right: two stars blowing up right next to each other, a situation that has been reported for the first time in a study published in July.
For more than a century, astronomers have marvelled at a vast dust cloud called IC 443, also known as the Jellyfish Nebula, which is all that is left of a massive star that went supernova thousands of years ago.
Located about 6,000 light years from Earth, this beautiful nebula has been visible to telescopes since the 19th century. But a team only recently discovered that another supernova remnant, called G189.6+3.3, appears to occupy the same space thanks to long term gamma-ray observations captured by NASA’s Fermi telescope. The results suggest that the objects were once a pair of stars that orbited each other in a binary system before they both exploded.
“IC 443 is one of the most extensively studied supernova remnants in the Galaxy, yet the surrounding region remains shrouded in mystery,” said researchers led by Miltiadis Michailidis of Stanford University. “Here we show that 16 years of Fermi-LAT observations uncover…gamma-ray emission from G189.6+3.3, a source long hidden in the shadow of the much brighter IC 443.”
The discovery “bolsters the hypothesis that these two remnants are part of a binary system, both resulting from separate supernova events,” an observation that has “no known analogue” in all of observational astronomy.
It’s a reminder that even the most famous and well-observed celestial objects can still contain amazing hidden surprises for those patient enough to look.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.!
Vaak, dan heb je principes, maar soms, dan ben je ook gewoon onredelijk geil. Zo ook Gianni Infantino, die als grote baas bij de FIFA alles op alles zet om het voetbal kapot te maken, tot ongenoegen van zijn oude werkgever de UEFA, die in iets mindere mate alles op alles zet om het voetbal kapot te maken, en nu dus vindt dat de FIFA, in casu Gianni Infantino, kapot moet, en daartoe alles op alles zet. Het heeft er alle schijn van dat de UEFA nu allerlei lelijkheid over Infantino's periode aldaar de wereld aan het in slingeren is, met nu een werkelijk schitterende onthulling weer in The Telegraph. Infantino is getrouwd en heeft vier kinderen, maar is daarnaast, we hintten er al op, zo nu en dan ook zo bronstig als een net vrijgelaten gevangene. Afijn, de beste man zou een vrouwelijke collega de kans hebben gegeven tegelijkertijd op hem te klimmen en op te klimmen in de organisatie - ze was eerst junior medewerker, maar na inmenging van Infantino naar verluidt plots leidinggevende. Volgens The Telegraph wees toenmalig UEFA-topman Michel Platini vervolgens Infantino terecht, waarna de vrouw in kwestie afzwaaide met een bedrag van zes nullen in haar zak. De regels voor dergelijke oprotpremies zijn sindsdien aangepast, waardoor dergelijke excessen niet langer mogelijk zijn.
Infantino ontkent overigens alles.
The race for the first before-and-after images of the spent SpaceX rocket on the Moon has been won by the South Korean space agency. The Korean Aerospace Administration (KASA) posted imagery from its Danuri lunar orbiter showing the impact site on the Moon on August 6. The impact was predicted to occur on August 5, and marked a landing on the Moon for SpaceX several years ahead of schedule, just without humans onboard and traveling a good deal faster than planned. The words "crater" and "SpaceX" are not something investors nervously tracking the company's stock price following the weeks since its IPO will want to think about. The impact came on the fourth anniversary of Danuri's launch, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. It took a few months for the probe to reach the Moon, and its initial one-year mission has since been extended twice – most recently through 2027. The plan is currently for Danuri to intentionally make its own impact crater in March 2028. The upper stage of the Falcon 9 is expendable, and this one was used to send Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission 1 and ispace's RESILIENCE to the Moon in 2025. On most Falcon 9 missions, the upper stage burns up in Earth's atmosphere, but a lunar transfer orbit like this one made that impossible. In a post, SpaceX stated, "Impacts like this are rare, but they can happen with objects in these types of orbits, and we worked with NASA on the optimal disposal solution," and wrote, "a controlled disposal maneuver is not always possible." NASA boss, Jared Isaacman, noted that NASA intentionally crashed spent stages into the Moon in the name of seismic research, and commented, "The reality is that meteoroids strike the lunar surface hourly, with impacts comparable to this upper stage occurring roughly every six days." Humanity has not done a great job of managing space junk around the Earth. While the SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage did not pose any risk to humans, it highlights the need to devise rules for the use of lunar space rather than risk an uncontrolled buildup of debris. In June, The Register spoke to Neuraspace boss Chiara Manfletti about how things might be done differently as lunar traffic increases. Neuraspace is all about satellite collision avoidance, and Manfletti's ideas included requirements from stakeholders to designating dumping grounds on the Moon. NASA's veteran Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was also attempting to capture the impact, and more images are likely to be released over the coming week. Now to name the impact site. Elon Crater, anyone? ®
