Connect the Texas grid to the rest of the country you fucking morons

Here's the problem: Gold is an element, which means you can't make it through ordinary chemical reactions — though alchemists tried for centuries. To make the sparkly metal, you have to bind 79 protons and 118 neutrons together to form a single atomic nucleus. That's an intense nuclear fusion reaction. But such intense fusion doesn't happen frequently enough, at least not nearby, to make the giant trove of gold we find on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system. And a new study has found the most commonly-theorized origin of gold — collisions between neutron stars — can't explain gold's abundance either. So where's the gold coming from? There are some other possibilities, including supernovas so intense they turn a star inside out. Unfortunately, even such strange phenomena can't explain how blinged out the local universe is, the new study finds.

Former “Mythbusters” co-host Adam Savage allegedly sexually abused his younger sister for years while calling himself the “raping blob” during the late 1970s, the woman says in a lawsuit filed Tuesday. Miranda Pacchiana, 51, claims the abuse happened when she was between 7 and 10 years old when the siblings lived in Sleepy Hollow, New York.

As “loltyler1,” his Twitch audience expects him to be tirelessly brash and dominant. But Tyler is trapped in a losing streak, and he’s been reeling from too little sleep. He dies in an in-game brawl and snaps: “I’m so over this s---.” Another 282 messages blast in. At 26, Tyler is a millionaire and one of the Internet’s most popular streamers. For 50 hours a week, he broadcasts himself playing video games from his cramped living room in his 900-person Missouri hometown to 4.6 million followers, watching from around the world. He earns more than $200,000 a month in Twitch ads and viewer subscriptions. Sponsorships with Nike and Doritos, contracts with giant esports teams, fan donations and merchandise sales have earned him millions more.

“I think the Navy has more than dragged their feet. They have lost their feet."

A lawsuit has been filed against Texas assistant coach Jeff Banks and his girlfriend after her monkey allegedly bit a child on Halloween night.

Imani and Hermien are believed to be the first hippopotamuses with a confirmed COVID-19 infection.

Hack the planet

“We retained a respected law firm to conduct the review, and have terminated him, effective immediately,” the cable network said on Saturday.

Billions of these tiny plastic pellets are floating in the ocean, causing as much damage as oil spills, yet they are still not classified as hazardous

A homeowner in Maryland tried to fight a snake infestation with coal, only to burn their own house down, causing more than $1m in damage. Nobody was injured.

A new study provides a glimpse into the future of Western U.S. snow and the picture is far from rosy: In about 35 to 60 years, mountainous states are projected to be nearly snowless for years at a time if greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked and climate change does not slow. Due to rising temperatures, the region has already lost 20 percent of its snowpack since the 1950s. That’s enough water to fill Lake Mead, the nation’s largest human-made reservoir. It stands to lose another half, and possibly more, later this century, from the Rockies to the Sierra Nevada and into the Cascades of the Pacific Northwest, according to a literature synthesis conducted in the study leveraging dozens of peer-reviewed climate model projections. The current snow situation in the West offers a preview of what the future may hold. Snow water equivalent, or the liquid water from snowpack, is much lower than normal in much of the Western United States. Snow cover across the nation is only at 6 percent — the lowest since records began in 2003. Decades ahead, the “potential for persistent low-to-no snow to disrupt the [Western U.S.] water system is substantial, potentially even catastrophic,” the study’s authors write.

Proposed register would come into effect in January, a year after near-total ban on abortion

Now on Netflix, the steamy, silly 1998 thriller feels like it exists in a parallel reality where Hollywood was into threesomes and lurid love stories

Now another potentially damaging torpedo is also headed toward the media—this time involving a different account of suspected collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. This curious episode, known as the Alfa Bank “pinging” story, centered on an allegation that computer servers owned by Alfa Bank, a major Russian financial institution, and one linked to the Trump Organization, were being used for secret back-channel communications. The pinging story was shopped to journalists by some of the same people who marketed the Steele dossier, including Fusion GPS, the investigative firm that hired Steele on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s campaign to dig up dirt in Russia about Trump. Now information and documents coming to light through the Durham investigation and lawsuits filed by Alfa Bank and its owners against Fusion GPS and others are providing a much clearer picture of how the firm operated. These new disclosures suggest that Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, the two former Wall Street Journal reporters behind Fusion, used the same strategy to publicize the Steele dossier and the Alfa Bank pinging story. Along with others, they simultaneously funneled information about suspected collusion to journalists, the FBI, and lawmakers—and then told reporters that government officials were investigating the issue. The result was a feedback loop that convinced journalists who already abhorred Trump for good reasons to believe they were on the right track.

A gene editing technique may prevent the slaughter of animals not needed by the livestock industry. Scientists have used gene editing technology to create female-only and male-only litters of mice. Their technique could prevent the destruction of hundreds of thousands of unwanted mice used in research. The team says it could also prevent the slaughter of millions of male chickens in the UK, which are culled because they don't lay eggs. The government is considering allowing gene editing to be used by the livestock industry in England. The technique, which has been outlined in the academic journal Nature Communications, deactivates a gene involved with embryo development. The system can be programmed to kick in for either male or female embryos at a very early stage of development - of between 16 and 32 cells.

There are more than seventy-five thousand Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones,” laid into footpaths across Europe. Collectively, it is the largest decentralized memorial of its kind anywhere in the world. Each four-by-four brass stone is placed at the last known residential or working address of a human being who was murdered by the Nazis. Though most of the stones commemorate people who were Jewish, Roma and Sinti, homosexual, or disabled, there were many other groups persecuted by the Nazis–including Black people. In Germany, four of these stones are dedicated to Black victims, two of which were installed in Berlin in 2021. They belong to Martha Ndumbe and Ferdinand James Allen. “The Black victims of the Nazis have long not been considered—neither by academic research nor by memorial politics,” says Sophia Schmitz from the Coordination Office Stolpersteine Berlin. “But in a town like Berlin a Black community in the 1920s and 1930s did exist, all of whom were at first harassed and later more often than not murdered during Nazi rule. It is our aim to uncover their stories and make them present again, late as it is.”

After he was exposed as a fabricator, the journalist swore he would always tell the truth. Fate forced him to lie again.

Northwest Wisconsin, western Wisconsin and the Fox Valley have no open ICU beds, while other northern region ICU beds dwindle.

As tensions mount between Washington and Moscow over a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine, U.S. intelligence has found the Kremlin is planning a multi-front offensive as soon as early next year involving up to 175,000 troops, according to U.S. officials and an intelligence document obtained by The Washington Post. The Kremlin has been moving troops toward the border with Ukraine while demanding Washington guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO and that the alliance will refrain from certain military activities in and around Ukrainian territory. The crisis has provoked fears of a renewed war on European soil and comes ahead of a planned virtual meeting next week between President Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin. “The Russian plans call for a military offensive against Ukraine as soon as early 2022 with a scale of forces twice what we saw this past spring during Russia’s snap exercise near Ukraine’s borders,” said an administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. “The plans involve extensive movement of 100 battalion tactical groups with an estimated 175,000 personnel, along with armor, artillery and equipment.” The unclassified U.S. intelligence document obtained by The Post, which includes satellite photos, shows Russian forces massing in four locations. Currently, 50 battlefield tactical groups are deployed, along with “newly arrived” tanks and artillery, according to the document.