Thurs-Why Does Doug Hate Polkas? Fat Bear Week is Here!

The Long Wait Is Over.  It's Finally Fat Bear Week

For humans, staying warm in the winter often means swapping out flimsy tank-tops for thick parkas. For Alaskan bears, it means eating a jaw-dropping 500lb (225 kg) of fresh salmon.

These bulking creatures are the focal point of Fat Bear Week - a highly anticipated online bracket that pits the portly mammals at Alaska's Katmai National Park against one another, with voters crowning the fattest of them all.

The competition is stiff this year: Otis, a large adult bear with the record for most Fat Bear Week wins at four, is back to defend his title.

He once ate 42 salmon in one sitting, and his fishing skills and patience are hard to beat.

But Bear 747, winner of Fat Bear Week 2020, might give Otis a run for his money. He is one of the largest bears on earth, weighing as much as 1,400lb (635kg). Most bears know they can't compete with him.

The winner of Fat Bear Week 2022 remains to be seen. Voting is open until 11 October - Fat Bear Tuesday - when the champion will be crowned.

Don't Forget to Vote  (And In November)

For a Change, I Think Thoughts and Prayers Are Appropriate

A former police officer opened fire at a daycare centre in Thailand killing at least 35 people, mostly children, before turning a weapon on his family and then himself.

The attacker – armed with a shotgun, pistol and a knife – began the killing spree in Nong Bua Lamphu province at about 12:30pm (05:30 GMT) on Thursday before fleeing the scene in a pick-up truck.
The dead included at least 23 children, said police Colonel Jakkapat Vijitraithaya. The gunman forced his way into a locked room where children were sleeping at the time, according to a witness.

After the attack, the gunman went home and killed his wife and child, Jakkapat said.

The attacker was named as former police officer Panya Khamrab, 34, and Jakkapat said he was dismissed from the force last year for drug use.

Hershel Lie-Walker Had a Child With the Women He Says He Doesn't Know

The woman who alleges Herschel Walker paid for her abortion more than a decade ago also says she is the mother of one of his children, the Daily Beast reported Wednesday, an allegation that counters the Georgia Republican's claim that he does not know his accuser.

The news outlet said that when it published an article this week saying Walker had urged a woman to have an abortion in 2009 after he got her pregnant, it had agreed to not reveal her identity over her safety and privacy concerns.

But after Walker, who is challenging Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., for his seat, told Fox News on Wednesday morning that he did not know who the anonymous woman was and characterized the allegation as an attempt by Democrats to hurt his campaign, the woman told the Daily Beast that she was astounded by the comments.
“Sure, I was stunned, but I guess it also doesn’t shock me, that maybe there are just so many of us that he truly doesn’t remember,” she told the news outlet. “But then again, if he really forgot about it, that says something, too.”

The Mediterranean Goes "Fizz, Pop"

Think of this part of the Mediterranean as a cake made of liquid, essentially. Fierce sunlight heats the top layer of water that sits on cooler, deeper layers below. Out in the open ocean, where water temperatures are lower, CO2 dissolves in saltwater—which is what allows Earth’s seas to collectively absorb a quarter of the carbon emissions that humans pump into the atmosphere. But as the eastern Mediterranean Sea heats up in the summer, it can no longer absorb that gas and instead starts releasing it.

It’s the same thing that happens in a bottle of soda that is carbonated with carbon dioxide. “You usually keep it cold, so the dissolved gasses will stay dissolved,” says Or Bialik, a geoscientist at the University of Münster in Germany. “If you leave it in your car for a while and try to open it, all the gasses are going to pop out at once, because when it warms, the capacity of the fluid to hold CO2 goes down.” Boom, fizz, you’ve got a mess on your hands.

In the Eastern Mediterranean, this dynamic is rather more consequential for the climate than a sticky car interior, as the sea begins burping up great quantities of CO2 that the water can no longer hold. And Bialik and his colleagues have discovered that these warming, stratifying waters teem with a second carbon problem: The team recently caught aragonite crystals in sediment traps. Aragonite is a form of calcium carbonate, which oceanic creatures like snails use to build their shells. Except in the increasingly hot Eastern Mediterranean, the aragonite is forming abiotically. That’s another sign that the water is getting so warm that it’s releasing its carbon load.

In these hot, shallow, stable waters, the fluid on top doesn’t mix much with the underlying colder layers, in contrast to deeper parts of the ocean, where upwelling brings up cooler H2O. “The conditions are so extreme that we can definitely generate calcium carbonate chemically from these waters, which was kind of a shock for us,” says Bialik, who coauthored a recent paper describing the discovery in the journal Scientific Reports. (He did the research while at the University of Malta and University of Haifa.) “It's basically like a beaker that sits there for a very long time, and it's long enough to get these reactions going and start generating these crystals.”

It’s also worth noting that the Mediterranean Sea is one of the most microplastic-polluted water bodies in the world: In 2020, scientists reported finding 2 million particles in a single square meter of sediment that was only 5 centimeters thick. Whether aragonite crystals are forming around microplastics floating in the water column, Bialik doesn’t know. “They could probably form around any nucleation center,” says Bialik. “I suspect that microplastics may also be a possible one. But as scientists love to say, more research is needed.”