Ooooh, neat! I’m not actually that big of a space nerd (in terms of excitement about what our current space program is doing), but anything that ups the chances of our actually discovering extraterrestrial life is enormously exciting in my book 🙂

It’s official. There is liquid water on Mars. And not just a little, either. A research team led by Roberto Orosei, a professor at the University of Bologna, has detected a lake of liquid water 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) wide about 1.5 kilometers (.9 miles) below the surface of Mars’ southern ice cap in a region known as Planum Australe. They suspect that dissolved salts from nearby minerals prevent the water from freezing, despite the low temperatures.

https://futurism.com/martian-lake-liquid-water/

Four transgender men on their experiences of gender, power, and how those are modulated by race.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/07/20/feature/crossing-the-divide-do-men-really-have-it-easier-these-transgender-guys-found-the-truth-was-more-complex/

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/07/temporary-forest-installations-by-ellie-davies/

Matt Taibbi, so pitched heavily toward the sensational. But still deeply troubling.

[The judge] veered into troubling language when she added that Kareem seeks only “his birthright… a timely assertion of his due process rights under the Constitution to be heard before he might be included on the Kill List and his First Amendment rights to free speech before he might be targeted for lethal action” (emphasis mine).

This is just the beginning of what will surely be a fight for the ages. Civil cases in America can last years, and few are this complex.

The state has a few options, any of which could still end up with the drone murder of Americans pre-sanctified.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-to-survive-americas-kill-list-699334/

This seems incredibly plausible to me. I think if Trump were explicitly receiving orders from Moscow, his actions toward Russia would have been more subtle and coherent. Whereas in this scenario, what we’re seeing is Trump trying, in his own bizarre ways, to placate people whose exact agenda and even identity he doesn’t even know with any certainty.

The scenario that, to my mind, makes the most sense of the given facts and requires the fewest fantastical leaps is that, a decade or so ago, Trump, naïve, covetous, and struggling for cash, may have laundered money for a business partner from the former Soviet Union or engaged in some other financial crime. This placed him, unawares, squarely within sistema, where he remained, conducting business with other members of a handful of overlapping Central Asian networks. Had he never sought the Presidency, he may never have had to come to terms with these decisions. But now he is much like everyone else in sistema. He fears there is kompromat out there—maybe a lot of it—but he doesn’t know precisely what it is, who has it, or what might set them off.

Trump and many of his defenders have declared his businesses, including those in the former Soviet Union, to be off-limits to the Mueller investigation. They argue that the special counsel should focus only on the possibility of explicit acts of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. This neatly avoids the reality of sistema. As Pavlovsky wrote, “Under Putin, sistema has become a method for making deals among businesses, powerful players, and the people. Business has not taken over the state, nor vice versa; the two have merged in a union of total and seamless corruption.”

https://www.newyorker.com/news-desk/swamp-chronicles/a-theory-of-trump-kompromat

Good if breezy review of our current understanding of sleep. Most interesting factoid: turns out that fetuses dream for about a month continuously, starting at about 26 weeks.

Our brain profoundly alters its behavior and purpose, dimming our consciousness. For a while, we become almost entirely paralyzed. We can’t even shiver. Our eyes, however, periodically dart about behind closed lids as if seeing, and the tiny muscles in our middle ear, even in silence, move as though hearing. We are sexually stimulated, men and women both, repeatedly. We sometimes believe we can fly. We approach the frontiers of death. We sleep.

Around 350 B.C., Aristotle wrote an essay, “On Sleep and Sleeplessness,” wondering just what we were doing and why. For the next 2,300 years no one had a good answer. In 1924 German psychiatrist Hans Berger invented the electroencephalograph, which records electrical activity in the brain, and the study of sleep shifted from philosophy to science. It’s only in the past few decades, though, as imaging machines have allowed ever deeper glimpses of the brain’s inner workings, that we’ve approached a convincing answer to Aristotle.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/08/science-of-sleep/

http://www.viruscomix.com/page571.html

We’ve been poisoning ants this week, so I got curious about what strategies and colonies had evolved for dealing with poisonous food sources in the wild.

On cold, damp days, starving ants often march into homes seeking food, and some homeowners put out poison to try and stop them. But ants have evolved three successful ways to combat both poisonings and famine, including sacrificing some ants as poison tasters.

The findings, accepted for publication in the journal Animal Behavior, may apply to humans — and not just those with ant invasions — because they show how food can be distributed quickly after a famine, while also guarding against sickness, or even death, from poison.

https://www.seeker.com/poison-taster-ants-help-save-colonies-1764994009.html

It took me a long time to get to the point where I had appropriately low expectations of humans…

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal –

Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal – Good