Welcome to Sunday, the Sabbath made for goyische cats. It’s August, 3, 2025, and National Grab Some Nuts Day. They mean, of course, the edible variety. They are NOT talking about this:
It’s also Friendship Day, National Watermelon Day, and Esther Day (sadly, not honoring our latest mallard hen).
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 3 Wikipedia page.
Do not expect much from me today as I’m racked with insomnia, having not slept a wink last night nor more than four hours per night for several weeks. As always, I do my best.
Da Nooz:
*Surprisingly, a federal judge has okayed the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) withholding of research money from grants involving DEI, a move that was of course ordered by the Trump Administration: And it’s not just DEI-related grants, either:
The National Science Foundation can continue to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars from researchers in several states until litigation aimed at restoring it plays out, a federal court ruled Friday.
U.S. District Judge John Cronan in New York declined to force the NSF to restart payments immediately, while the case is still being decided, as requested by the sixteen Democrat-led states who brought the suit, including New York, Hawaii, California, Colorado and Connecticut.
In his ruling, Cronan said he would not grant the preliminary injunction in part because it may be that another court, the Court of Federal Claims, has jurisdiction over what is essentially a case about money. He also said the states failed to show that NSF’s actions were counter to the agency’s mandate.
The lawsuit filed in May alleges that the National Science Foundation’s new grant-funding priorities as well as a cap on what’s known as indirect research expenses “violate the law and jeopardize America’s longstanding global leadership in STEM.”
ADAnother district court had already blocked the the cap on indirect costs — administrative expenses that allow research to get done like paying support staff and maintaining equipment. This injunction had been requested to restore funding to the grants that were cut.
In April, the NSF announced a new set of priorities and began axing hundreds of grants for research focused on things like misinformation and diversity, equity and inclusion. Researchers who lost funding also were studying artificial intelligence, post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans, STEM education for K-12 students and more.
Researchers were not given a specific explanation for why their grants were canceled, attorney Colleen Faherty, representing the state of New York, said during last month’s hearing. Instead, they received boilerplate language stating that their work “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities
NSF has long been directed by Congress to encourage underrepresented groups like women and people with disabilities to participate in STEM. According to the lawsuit, the science foundation’s funding cuts already halted efforts to train the next generation of scientists in fields like computer science, math and environmental science.’
It looks as if the NSF has been directed to focus solely on merit and not the background of the investigator, though that doesn’t explain why they’re cutting grants involving PTSD for vets and stem education for kids. The latter two areas don’t seem to be subject to much controversy, and, of course, the administration doesn’t feel the need to explain itself. It’s even more mysterious given the lack of uniformy on how the cuts are applied:
The science foundation is still funding some projects related to expanding representation in STEM, Cronan wrote in his ruling. Per the lawsuit filed in May, for example, the University of Northern Colorado lost funding for only one of its nine programs focused on increasing participation of underrepresented groups in STEM fields.
*It’s been a quiet weekend, so the rest of today’s Nooz items are for relaxation and not stress. The first is that, according to the WSJ, Kim Jong-Un has built a beach resort in North Korea. The thing is, though, that it’s limited to foreigners, and those foreigners are limited to being Russian.
At North Korea’s new beach resort, the white sand glistened against the crystal-clear waters. Ten minutes of Wi-Fi cost $1.70. Food arrived in abundance, albeit with the same three beverage choices: water, tea or beer.
The weeklong trip cost roughly $2,000. The catch? All travelers had to be Russian.
Welcome to North Korea’s Wonsan Kalma coastal complex, a megaresort built by the regime to portray the country as modern and affluent. It is opening to foreign vacationers for the first time, as part of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s drive to attract more tourism to his cash-strapped country and show his people they can experience some of the finer things in life despite international sanctions.
Anastasia Samsonova, a 33-year-old from Moscow, was looking for something offbeat for her summer vacation. Having never been to North Korea, she
But as she took her first steps on the sand, Samsonova—who, along with 12 other Russians, was part of the first group of foreign vacationers allowed to visit the resort several weeks ago—faced an unsettling sight. “The entire beach was empty,” she said. “In fact, we seemed to be the only guests in the entire resort.”
One upside: The lack of fellow travelers meant the service was excellent, said Samsonova, a human-resources specialist. When the group asked for porridge and brioche buns, staff quickly produced them. Portable music speakers were hand-delivered on the beach upon request. Patio chairs for the balcony came instantly.
“We really felt like the most important people on Earth,” said Samsonova. She went home with a souvenir statuette shaped like a nuclear warhead.
North Korea once welcomed hundreds of thousands of foreign tourists a year—mostly from China—before slamming its borders shut in January 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. The country reopened to tourism in February 2024 exclusively to Russian travelers. Last year, roughly 1,500 vacationers actually went, according to a Russian official from Vladivostok, a far-eastern city that has direct flights to Pyongyang.
Starting this February, North Korea allowed certain Western tourists to visit a special economic zone near the Chinese border. But after several weeks, the tours were halted without explanation. That leaves very few nationalities able to enter North Korea. The U.S. State Department since 2017 has barred American citizens from entering the country.
All my life I’ve wanted to go to North Korea, which I consider the world’s most oppressive country. But two things have stopped me. The main one is that every tourist sees the same carefully-curated sights: a trip to the DMA from the North Side, an obligatory visit to the statues of the two previous Dear Leaders (you have to pay obeisance and buy flowers, too), and the captured U.S.S. Pueblo. You can never wander off on your own, which means you can’t see the country. Second, after what happened to Otto Warmbier, I would never feel safe there. So I’ll never go unless I happen to be in South Korea and go to the DMZ, where you’re allowed to wander into part of a conference room that’s actually in North Korea. But that’s no fun. What makes my heart break is all the North Koreans who live under horrible oppression as well as poverty and almost no medical care. And since they’re told that they’re actually living in a worker’s paradise, and are forbidden to use the Internet or access foreign media, I guess many of them believe it. It’s a horrible situation that seems to have no resolution.
*Carl Zimmer reports in the NYT about a remarkable experiment in genetic engineering. As you may know, the DNA code, which comes in triplets of bases, has 64 “codes” (4 X 4 X 4), but they code for only 20 proteins (some are also “stop codons” that terminate transcription). That means that many codes are “redundant,” with different triplets, once in messenger RNA, yielding the same amino acid in a position. We’re not sure why we have this redundancy, but Zimmer’s piece gives two explanations at the end (you can read the archived version here). Zimmer reports that scientists decided to pare down the redundancy in the bacterium E. coli, and managed, as reported in a Science paper, to get it down to 57 codons, and yet it still worked! Now you may wonder why it wouldn’t work, but remember that there are overlapping genes in which a stretch of DNA can code for two proteins using different DNA “reading frames”, so changing a code redundant for one protein could screw up another important protein. And to do this paring, you have to look at every DNA base in the genome, changing them so that some codons simply don’t appear, but are changed to synonymous ones. Remember that E. coli, though a bacterium, still has 4.6 million base pairs and produces 4,288 proteins.
Here’s what the study involved to produce “Syn 57,” an E. coli with just 57 codes needed to function (i.e., 7 were completely eliminated):
Over the past decade, scientists have built microbes with smaller codes that lack some of that redundancy. A new study, published Thursday in the journal Science, describes a microbe with the most streamlined genetic code yet.
Remarkably, the engineered bacteria can run on an abridged code, making it clear that a full genetic code isn’t required for life.
“Life still works,” said Wesley Robertson, a synthetic biologist at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, and an author of the new study.
. . . . For Syn61, the researchers had altered more than 18,000 codons in E. coli’s genome. To make Syn57, they would have to alter more than 100,000. They tested these changes by making small fragments of DNA and observing how well the microbe could read them.
Some changes caused no trouble, but others caused devastating harm. Bacteria have certain genes that overlap, for instance, and changing a codon in one can accidentally wreck the sequence of the other.
The scientists had to invent a lot of repairs to undo the damage, including separating overlapping pairs of genes to create two distinct stretches of DNA.
“We definitely went through these periods where we were like, ‘Well, will this be a dead end, or can we see this through?’” Dr. Robertson recalled.
Glitch by glitch, the researchers figured out how to fix the altered DNA. On Thursday, the researchers announced that they had succeeded: They had created Syn57.
Given that tranfer RNAs are also made to match each codon, I’m not sure whether the scientists got rid of the 7 genes making the 7 unnecessary tRNAs. If not, I would expect the engineered bacterium to waste some of its metabolic energy making unneeded RNA. And indeed, the engineered bacterium was not as good as the original one, though I’m not sure why:
Syn57 is unquestionably alive, but just barely. E. coli typically takes an hour to double its population; Syn57 needs four hours. “It’s extremely feeble,” Dr. Chemla said.
Dr. Robertson and his colleagues are now tinkering with Syn57 to see if they can speed up its growth. If they succeed, other scientists might be able to engineer it to carry out useful jobs that ordinary microbes can’t.
Now you may be asking yourself, “Why bother to do this? Is it merely a sort of genetic stunt? It turns out that the research is touted as having has practical uses.
Along with the 20 amino acids that our cells use to make proteins, chemists can create hundreds of others. It might be possible to reprogram Syn57 so that its seven missing codons encode unnatural amino acids. That would enable bacteria to make new kinds of drugs or other useful molecules.
Syn57 might also help scientists address the potential risks that could come if engineered microbes were released into the environment. Microbiologists have long investigated how microbes might eat plastic or detect pollutants in the ground. But bacteria trade genes with ease; a gene could escape from an engineered microbe and spread through the environment, potentially causing ecological harm.
Then again, that spread would become a threat only if other bacteria could read the engineered gene and make proteins from it. If the gene came from a microbe like Syn57, which used a different genetic code, it would be gibberish to natural microbes.
“We can then prevent the escape of information from our synthetic organism,” Dr. Robertson said.
Well, I’m not that convinced. At any rate, Zimmer, as usual, gives a clear explanation of the whole thing, so if you’re interested, go over and read it yourself. As for why the code is redundant, I asked Matthew, who responded, “I would tend to side with Crick’s ‘frozen accident’, but there are very smart people who think there is a logic to it (but they disagree, which, like with consciousness, suggests they are wrong.)”
*Some persiflage (my brain is working slowly today). As you know, people extol the taste of Mexican Coca-Cola, which is made with cane sugar, over American Coke, sweetened with corn syrup. People will pay a big premium to get Mexican Coke (real-sugar Coke is also sold to Jews on Passover, as Ashkenazi Jews traditionally avoid corn on that day). But has anybody done a blind taste test about these claims? Well, the NYT did, using its wine critic Eric Asimov. The results are mixed.
First, the previous data:
Paul Breslin is a professor of nutrition at Rutgers University who specializes in the genetic basis of taste perception. He said that recent research in his laboratory, and others, shows that people tend to choose sugar over high-fructose corn syrup, even when the sweetness level is comparable.
“There’s a clear preference, even in blind tests,” he said
Precisely how we taste the difference is not yet fully known, according to Dr. Breslin. . . .
. . .I enlisted The New York Times’s wine critic, Eric Asimov, for a blind tasting, knowing he would bring the same vocabulary and attention he brings to wine, paying attention to things like balance, finish and structure. As in wine, the sweetness in cola should be just one of many flavor notes, balanced by notes like spice, citrus, vanilla and mint.
To nail down the question of whether cane-sweetened cola tastes better, the tasting was limited to four drinks:
1. Coca-Cola Classic, sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup
2. Mexican Coke, imported and sweetened with cane sugar
3. Pepsi, sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup
4. Pepsi-Cola Made With Real Sugar, which contains both beet sugar and cane sugar
He tasted each twice: first, chilled and straight from the can (or bottle, in the case of Mexican Coke); then, poured over pebble ice for a fountain-soda effect. Potato chips were our palate cleanser.
The results? Although both tasters preferred Mexican to corn-syrup Coke, both lost to, yes, Pepsi:
In the end, the soda that we both picked as the winner was Pepsi, made with high-fructose corn syrup. It wasn’t more “syrupy” than the sugar-sweetened sodas, and seemed to have more — and more balanced — flavors than the others.
Overall, we didn’t find that soda with sugar tastes better than — or even different from — soda sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.
We did, however, manage to illustrate the well-known “Pepsi paradox,” noted since the 1970s, that although Coke is a far more popular drink, Pepsi often wins blind taste tests.
So there you go. Just drink regular Pepsi! I had a technician in my lab who swore she could tell Pepsi from Coke with 100% accuracy. Well, you know what I did: we used clean lab containers to do a blind taste test of about twelve trials. She failed miserably, unable even to deviate from randomness in her identification (I used corn-syrup versions of both). I think I won some money on that one, and I didn’t participate myself. From now on, for me it’s “No Coke—Pepsi!”
*Finally, a spoof of the Democrats’ 2028 campaign from The Babylon Bee (h/t Jay)
As preparations geared up for the 2028 presidential election, the Democratic Party unveiled its new campaign slogan of “We Hate Capitalism, Hot Chicks, and the Jews.”
The party expressed belief that the new slogan would convey a clear message about the party’s values while broadening its appeal to new groups of potential voters.
“We were looking for a slogan that would communicate our agenda of abolishing capitalism, Jewish people, and objectively attractive women,” one Democrat source said. “This new slogan couldn’t be more perfect.”
Party leaders reportedly scrapped other suggestions to return their platform and slogan to a more patriotic, America-loving tone in favor of embracing messaging that more accurately captured the hatred of economic success, Jews, and natural beauty.
“Beautiful women and Jews, much like capitalism, cannot be the future of this country,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, who was given input to keep him from running again. “Personally, I’m for Justin Trudeau, but they tell me he’s not qualified or something because he’s ‘Canadian.’ Whatever that means.”
Insiders said that creating a broad platform based on hating money, hot chicks, and Jews would be the key to building a strong coalition of voters for the next election cycle. “It’s a perfect mixture of the people who vote for us,” said one Democrat. “Once we find the right candidate who embodies all of those things, we’ll have the election wrapped up.”
At publishing time, former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg reportedly had an early advantage to land the party’s nomination due to finding attractive women “icky.”
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is scaring me by making out his will.
Hili:
The Administrator is writing his will. Ever since Małgorzata died, he thinks out loud, so I hear everything. He’s wondering whether a will can be decorated with photographs. Małgorzata left him a legacy of generosity. She had no siblings. She had two aunts, both of whom died many years ago. The rest of her family were murdered by the Nazis. Technically speaking, the Administrator inherits everything from Małgorzata – that is, the entire urge to share what was once shared between them. But it has to be translated into legal language: distribute belongings, define percentages, allocate the money that will remain after his death. He must do it quickly, because the law requires it. He’s grateful to fate for his granddaughter – that is, his friend’s daughter who adopted him as a substitute grandfather, one she never had, and to whom he can now leave instructions on how to share what remains of him. That makes writing the will easier.
In Polish:
Hili: Administrator pisze testament. Odkąd Małgorzata umarła, myśli głośno, więc wszystko słyszę. Zastanawia się, czy można testament ozdobić zdjęciami. Małgorzata w spadku zostawiła mu chęć dzielenia się. Nie miała rodzeństwa. Miała dwie ciotki, które zmarły wiele lat temu. Resztę rodziny wymordowali naziści. Technicznie rzecz biorąc, Administrator dziedziczy po Małgorzacie wszystko, czyli całą chęć dzielenia się tym, co było dotąd wspólne. Trzeba to jednak przełożyć na język prawniczy: rozdać przedmioty, określić w procentach, komu ile pieniędzy z tego, co po nim zostanie. Musi to zrobić szybko, bo tego wymaga prawo. Dziękuje losowi, że ma wnuczkę, to znaczy, za córkę przyjaciela, która adoptowała go jako substytut dziadka, którego nigdy nie miała, a której może zostawić instrukcje w kwestii dzielenia się tym, co po nim zostanie. To ułatwia pisanie testament
*******************
From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy. Ray got it right.
From CinEmma:
From David:
Masih is again quiet today, but we have Islamic violation of women’s rights promoted in a retweet by J. K. Rowling:
The brutality Afghan women endure under Taliban rule is not just a national crisis—it is a stain on the conscience of the world. Girls as young as ten are being stripped of education. Women are being beaten in the streets for the simple act of trying to live. Every day, their… pic.twitter.com/wLkFiRmxT9
— WDI.Afghanistan (@WDIAfghanistan) August 2, 2025
. . . and another:
She is one of millions, an Afghan woman with credentials and dreams, now in prison just for being female.
Since the fall of the Republic, Afghan women have been banned from school, work, and public life.
August 15: Join the global protest, for freedom of Afghan women and girls. pic.twitter.com/znhSuxa5PK
— Jahanzeb Wesa (@JahanzebWe) August 1, 2025
From reader Michael: cat fights! TRIGGER WARNING: Feline violence; may be disturbing.
This is real wrestling not fake and scripted 😂 pic.twitter.com/86yf3pFGg2
— Wholesome Side of 𝕏 (@itsme_urstruly) August 1, 2025
From Simon; a governor invokes prayer and fasting to end drought. Are we in the Middle Ages?
Nothing says climate policy like skipping brunch and hoping the sky notices.
— 𝕊𝕦𝕟𝕕𝕒𝕖 𝔾𝕦𝕣𝕝 (@sundaedivine.bsky.social) 2025-08-02T13:54:43.986Z
From Cate, who wrote me, “You won’t approve of someone greasing a pole with a bird feeder to repel squirrels, but you WILL enjoy watching a squirrel slide down that pole.” She was right on the first count, wrong on the second.
Squirrel sliding down the greased bird feeder pole pic.twitter.com/HIt08ktmS7
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) August 1, 2025
One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
This Frenchman, apparently not Jewish, lived just a bit more than a month in Auschwitz before he died. https://t.co/qxEtChfUS2
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) August 3, 2025
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. I may have posted the first one already, but it’s worth seeing again. Raspberries for Colossal Biosciences!
Are we settled on No-a for the neo-Moa?
— Tori Herridge (@toriherridge.bsky.social) 2025-07-09T21:19:43.029Z
And he gave two exclamation marks for this one:
The thing about entomology is, there are always weirder bugs than anything you could imagine on your own. Here's Cysteodemus wislizeni, a blister beetle from west Texas.
— Alex Wild (@alexwild.bsky.social) 2025-07-09T20:20:21.585Z
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves. -P.D. James, novelist (3 Aug 1920-2014)
OTOH:
I’m sorry about your insomnia, Jerry. I hope you can find some relief.
P.S. Correction: that spoof of the Dem’s 2028 campaign is from the Babylon Bee.
I’ll fix it, thanks.
Off the top of my haste-driven head, the codons edited out might be equal in the corresponding amino acid sense, but do not necessarily have the precise shape, charge, or interaction with water or other proteins or nucleic acids.
I’d have to look at the possibility of how that affects binding with other nucleic acids or proteins, etc.
Was it Deez?
(Spoiler – last line is in honor of the Nuts day).
😆
Well, I enjoyed watching the squirrel slide down the pole.
Me too. I couldn’t stop giggling at the squirrel glaring at the camera at the end;
sad trombone
“yeah, yeah, yeah. REAL funny, Janet”.
I’ll bet PCC(e) really hates those electric birdfeeders that give the squirrels a shock. (I refuse to attach a YouTube video link.)
I’m not sure whether the scientists got rid of the 7 genes making the 7 unnecessary tRNAs.
IIRC, you wouldn’t need to do that since the redundancy is at least in part based on pseudo bases in the anticodons of certain tRNAs. To use the two most extreme examples – a given tRNA for something like arginine (aka Arg, aka R) or leucine (aka Leu, aka L) for which there are six codons in each case, can pair with more than one codon for R or L. Thus, in each case there are fewer than six actual tRNAs. So, in eliminating a given R codon, the tRNA that pairs with that codon is still pair with another R codon, and so eliminating the production of that tRNA would be lethal.
Are some of the codons they eliminated “rare” ones. From somewhere I recall that the rare ones are used to temper production of proteins whose genes use them, so some of the poor growth might be from the metabolic cost of over-production of such proteins.
I figure that the squirrel will figure out that it can leap from the bushes to the bird feeder, thus defeating the greased pole. Until then, it is pretty funny!
According to the AP: “Researchers who lost funding also were studying artificial intelligence, post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans, STEM education for K-12 students and more.”
Well, certainly, but researchers can study all the above through an ideological lens, whether they are incorporating identity politics, inclusivity, gender, or any other flavor of the day. Unfortunately, I could not find the PTSD study, which was my chief interest, but here are some examples from other cancelled NSF grants. The following, judging by the abstract for a $2.4M grant, could be depicted as research about K-8 education, AI, and STEM: “Black Girls as Creators: an intersectional learning ecosystem toward gendered racial equity in Artificial Intelligence education.” Or consider this conference grant: “Advancing AI in Science Education (AASE): A Comprehensive Approach to Equity, Inclusion, and Three-Dimensional Learning.” Are these grants to study AI, education, “social justice,” all the above? Then you have another $500k towards “Stress, Resilience, and Persistence Factors that Impact Success of LGBTQ Undergraduate Students in STEM.” The following grant of nearly $1.5M bridges college and secondary school research: “Educating Science and Mathematics Majors to Teach with Social Justice Models in High-Needs Schools.” And, finally, we could puzzle over why this innocuous sounding title triggered the NSF cancellation algorithm: “AI for the Workforce of Tomorrow: Attending to Ethics and Collaboration in Learning Artificial Intelligence for High School Aged Youth.” Ah, it was the abstract that did it rather than the title: “As AI becomes increasingly integral to a broad range of industries, it is critical that the field develops equitable and justice-oriented instructional models that can support youth to integrate technical knowledge about AI with ethical principles for AI development and deployment.” You get the picture. The presence of ideological themes—even if some researchers were just word-dropping in vogue phrases—somewhat complicates the AP claims that, and I paraphrase, “they were just studying K-12 STEM education.”
I am not saying that all the cancellations are legitimate if merit alone is considered. The NIH, for instance, has an appeals process, and they have restored over 20% of the previously-cancelled grants. I am not even saying that ANY of the cancellations are legitimate; that is a legal question about funding and who decides. I am saying that previous Administrations have used science funding to advance political and ideological agendas. It is, perhaps, inevitable that all of them will. Moreover, one cannot trust the media to report on these issues with any objectivity. Will individual news pieces be objective? Sure, but the ideological and politicized slant is so pervasive that one cannot trust that any given article will be accurate and objective.
For those who are interested, you can track some of the cancellations at: https://grant-witness.us/
Maybe a rule of journalism :
• Write to establish the frame and keep the areas separated
• write as if the sky will fall if it weren’t for the elements of the topic in your piece
On a broader issue about research in general on education in K-12, we are surely well beyond the point where we can assess what recommendations that come out of all this research is ever implemented, and what implementations actually give positive results in terms of children attendance in schools, test scores, and other concrete measures of success. The only sure thing is that these grants do is they employ an army of academics and bureaucrats.
I keep reading about how the budget for the Department of Education had been ballooning, and yet test scores were still going down in ways that could not be explained by Covid.
Doug makes an excellent point. Moreover, “—even if some researchers were just word-dropping in vogue phrases—”, cancellation of precisely such grants pour encourager les autres will improve the culture of grantsmanship.
Loved the cat episode of Championship Wrestling! And the crowd goes wild!
On a tour of the Great Wall in China once I discovered an RC Cola. It was a hot and dusty day, so I needed it. It was a great discovery because I prefer RC Cola to either Coca Cola or Pepsi.
Was there a Moon Pie to go with it?
I prefer RC as well. I wonder what that means…
I actually experienced something very similar to David’s plugged into itself photo.
I was an Asia Pacific support engineer for X-ray in the 80’s and got called to Japan for a non working Injector (shoots dye into veins to visualize vasculature). Turns out they had plugged an interface cord coming from the injector into a jack on the injector rather than to the EKG machine from which it would have received trigger signals.
Disagree about Ray. The fact that there are no penguins in the Arctic is true, but irrelevant in the context of the question.
IF penguins DID lay eggs which, of course, they don’t, then there’s no reason they couldn’t be imported into the Arctic for eating.
So the people who are correct are the other ones, who say that they can’t eat them in the Arctic because they don’t exist.
Yes, I’m a pedant. But thanks for all the interesting stuff.
I thought someone would suggest a new website called Britain’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy, but there were no takers 😁.
This is a great webcam at Edinburgh Zoo. I often check it before getting out of bed in the morning to see what the weather is like 😁 They help the penguins to nest and they currently have the nests out waiting for eggs. They don’t usually have sunshades on the nests, I’m not sure why they’ve added them this year, I don’t think penguins use umbrellas in the Antarctic.
https://www.edinburghzoo.org.uk/animals/webcams/penguin-cam