Friends,
Halloween is just around the corner, so I have to ask: what’s the creepiest thing you do? For me it has to be genealogy. On one hand you’re digging-up information on a bunch of dead people. On the other, the personal details gathered about distant living relatives can border on stalking. As if that weren’t bad enough, the software I use has a glitch that interprets any date in the current month as being in the future. So, if my daily home town obituary search (I know) yields a new entry, I get an alert that “John Doe’s death date is in the future”. It might as well finish the question: “are you planning on killing them?” Lately, I’ve also noticed several online family trees appear to show living people as dead. These “living dead” exist to circumvent pesky privacy rules designed to prevent identity thieves (and bona fide researchers) from seeing information about the living. Creepy! Speaking of which, I think I’ll bite into my ghoulish anthropomorphic donut and bid you adieu!
Friends, This week’s news were literally radioactive -and I’m not talking about the fallout from the Trump-Putin summit. I’m talking mutate your DNA-exciting news. I’m talking Marie Curie-worthy news. I’m talking Geiger-counter-tilting news. I’m talking… well, you get the (glow in the dark) picture. A study about a lone wolf collared near Chernobyl and tracked on a long trek spawned the headline “ Could Chernobyl Wolves Be Spreading Mutations? ” While one can be forgiven for envisioning a flying wolf with laser eyes and a green aura about it, the disappointing story basically says most mutations are harmful to an animal’s health -and unhealthy animals are unlikely to travel 250 miles and mate with other wolves, contaminating the gene pool. So, much ado about nothing. The desire to open Rocky Flats (a nuclear weapons facility turned wildlife refuge) to the public has triggered some litigation from an environmentalist group. At st...
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