A California church deacon allegedly sexually abused numerous boys on religious mission trips under the guise of inspecting their genitals for “concerning” moles—helping protect the children, he told them, from the ravages of skin cancer.

But beware of drag queens folks

Watched a few episodes of Criminal Minds and The Blacklist. They’re great for sure, but they are episodic. I’m in the mood for a serialized show.

Will check out Bones tonight.

From the bill

Texas cities have passed burdensome local ordinances, creating a patchwork regulations across the state. These policies are better left to the employer, and if necessary, the state and federal government. Uniformity and consistent policy gives employers and employees greater clarity and flexibility.

It’s a move aiming to centralize control of the state.

the purpose of this Act is to provide regulatory consistency across this state and return the historic exclusive regulatory powers to the state where those powers belong.

Yup, boost and upvote if you want to give a bigger push to a post towards the top. Remember boosts are like retweets - they’re public and will show up on your profile in the boosts section.

While I understand the fediverse may pose a learning curve, please note it does not refer to a forum, which is why there are introduction pages. As for Reddit being straight forward, it’s been developing for about 18 years now. Kbin in comparison is about two months into development.

From the space.com article:

Dark matter and dark energy are believed to make up most of the universe, but we can’t see these phenomena in wavelengths of light. Rather, we can track the dark universe through its effects on other objects. (Gravitational lensing is one example, when a massive object bends the light of a distant object behind through the force of gravity, bringing otherwise faraway stars or galaxies into sharp focus.)

Cosmologists — scientists studying the history of space — seek to understand how the dark universe behaves to chart the effects of time on our cosmos. The mergers of galaxies, the expansion of the universe and the movements of individual stars are all subject to the forces of dark energy and dark matter.

The Euclid space observatory, which is designed to seek out invisible dark matter and dark energy, is expected to separate from its rocket 40 minutes after liftoff and will then make a distant journey to the sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, which is roughly 1 million miles (1.5 million km) away from our planet on the opposite side of the sun. Lagrange points are relatively stable orbits where satellites use a minimum of fuel, and Euclid’s destination is a popular location: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope also orbits at L2, for example.

See the image feature from NASA here -> nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2023/hubble-checks-in-on-a-galactic-neighbor

The highly irregular galaxy ESO 174-1, which resembles a lonely, hazy cloud against a backdrop of bright stars, dominates this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. ESO 174-1 lies around 11 million light-years from Earth and consists of a bright cloud of stars and a faint, meandering tendril of dark gas and dust.

This image is part of a collection of Hubble observations designed to better understand our nearby galactic neighbors. The observations aim to resolve the brightest stars and basic properties of every known galaxy within 10 megaparsecs. A parsec is a unit used by astronomers to measure the vast distances to other galaxies – 10 megaparsecs translates to 32 million light-years – and makes astronomical distances easier to handle. For example, the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is about 1.3 parsecs away. In everyday units this is a staggering 25 trillion miles (40 trillion km)!

The program to capture all of our neighboring galaxies was designed to use the 2-3% of Hubble time available between observations. It’s inefficient for Hubble to make back-to-back observations of objects that are in opposite parts of the sky. Observing programs like the one that captured ESO 174-1 fill the gaps between other observations. This way the telescope can move gradually from one observation to another, while still collecting data. These fill-in observing programs make the most out of every last minute of Hubble’s observing time.

Monochrome infrared imaging, wavelength of 3.23 microns color mapped to orange hue. Source (pg. 2)

An excerpt:

Methane gas absorbs almost all the sunlight falling on the atmosphere at this picture’s specific infrared wavelength (3.23 microns). As a result, Saturn’s familiar striped patterns aren’t visible because the methane-rich upper atmosphere blocks our view of the primary clouds. Instead, Saturn’s disk appears dark, and we see features associated with high-altitude stratospheric aerosols, including large, dark, and diffuse structures in Saturn’s northern hemisphere that don’t align with the planet’s lines of latitude. Unlike Saturn’s atmosphere, its rings lack methane, so at this infrared wavelength, they are no darker than usual and thus easily outshine the darkened planet.

See the official press release by SETI institute here -> seti.org/press-release/new-image-james-webb-space-telescope-reveals-astonishing-saturn-and-its-rings

Would it?

Neutrinos can interact with matter via the weak force, which is so weak and short ranged that most neutrinos incident on matter just pass through it. However, you can imagine if a HUGE chunk of neutrinos falls on matter, at least a few are bound to interact, statistically speaking. These interactions are like collisions, and the collision may result in generation of new particles. If these new particles are energetic enough, they emit a special type of radiation, which can be detected through sensors. So, you’re not directly capturing neutrinos, but are making the inference that they are there, because you know a weak force interaction has taken place if your sensor goes off. And to make sure something like cosmic radiation doesn’t affect detection, this particular detector is isolated under a huge sheet of ice in Antarctica.

Update: Scot Peterson acquitted of all charges

Read more here -> interactions.org/press-release/our-galaxy-seen-through-new-lens-neutrinos-detected-icecube

See also comparison picture of the Milky Way as depicted with visible light and with neutrinos

The posted image is a composite of both; the neutrino depiction of the galaxy is in blue

Upvotes don’t affect reputation (yet) so I feel there is no foul in self-upvoting. It just slightly improves visibility of the content in the ‘hot’ section when freshly posted.

deleted by creator

Google Search has been accusing me of being a robot a lot lately, making me solve a bajillion captchas. So I’ve stopped using search engines entirely. I’ve bookmarked a lot of the sites I regularly visit and have realized I don’t really need Google, apart from for getting the correct links to said websites because I can’t remember their .orgs and .coms.

I think reading up on this has made me more appreciate the profoundness of that Arthur C. Clarke quote

Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying

The possibility of being alone is not just terrifying in and of itself. Its horror is also in mulling over why we might be alone.

The second case is infuriating.

Mendonça was 11 years old

A prostitute, Alcina Dias, confirmed that [Afonso Dias] had taken Mendonça to see her on the day he disappeared. [Afonso Dias] allegedly drove up to see her in his car and asked her if she was working. When she assented, he offered to pay her to have sex with Mendonça.

and later

police forces raided alleged members of an international child pornography ring known as the Wonderland Club. The operation was code-named Operation Cathedral and resulted in the confiscation of 750,000 images and videos depicting 1,263 different children. Mendonça was among the few children (16 only) that could be identified. However, his whereabouts remain unknown and police suspect that he was murdered by his abductors after being abused on camera for other members of the paedophile ring.

Top it off with the fact that the police refused to take his disappearance seriously initially and just assumed he was lost or injured and would eventually turn up.

Fucked up.

It’s the same as Lemmy just replace c/ with m/ in the links for kbin instances

lemmy.sdf.org/c/[email protected]
kbin.social/m/[email protected]