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  Have a Happy Thought: Lightning can be spectacular to watch. It’s beautiful, and a little bit awesome (in the “terrifying” meaning of the word) to see the visible manifestation of electricity in the atmosphere. Especially in those dramatic cloud-to-ground discharges.   Lighting strikes the ground in Placitas, New Mexico, July 25 2009. Image: John Fowler   What I had never thought of before, is that there is a lot of cloud-to-ground transfer of electricity that doesn’t wait for a massive bolt of lightning. It can happen in lots of little transfers, say across the tops of trees. And that these small transfers might create corona: Coronae glow on the tips of spruce needles, induced by charged metal plates in a laboratory. These weak electric discharges subtly singe the tips of leaves and needles, and new observations indicate they may occur ubiquitously across treetops under thunderstorms. Credit: William Brune   Researchers recently used essentially a...

Have a Happy Thought: If I were to tell you a story about a woman with spiral side-buns on her head who crossed an insurmountable barrier in order to “take out a power station in order to allow the rebel forces to attack during night without being seen”… you’re probably thinking of this fictional character: Image: Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope   Would you be surprised to learn that the quote above is actually about this, real, historical woman: Image: Coronela Clara de la Rocha in the book Las Soldaderas: Women of the Mexican Revolution, alongside her father, General Herculano de la Rocha. Images of Clara de la Rocha, along with images of Hopi women (Native Americans of the US Southwest) were all used as inspirations for the indefatigable, undefeatable, inspiring Princess Leia. Oh, and that daring night raid that Clara carried out? That was far from her only contribution to...

Have a Happy Thought: Humans on bicycles are the most energy efficient animal movement we have yet discovered. In the chart below, animals (as well as human-created vehicles) are plotted on a graph showing energy cost of transport, per weight. The bottom-right corner is the most efficient – moving the most weight for the least amount of effort.​ ​ DTAN Studio; Sources: “Energetic Cost of Locomotion in Animals,” by Vance A. Tucker, in  Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology , Vol. 34; June 15, 1970 ( most data ); chart by Dan Todd in “Bicycle Technology,” by S. S. Wilson, in  Scientific American , Vol. 228, No. 3; March 1973 ( data for human on a bicycle ); Tyson Hedrick/University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ( velomobile calculation )   So for example a fruit fly and a bee are very light, but not very efficient because it turns out that flying is very “metabolically expensive”. Things that can swim, like salmon, can be really efficient due to body shape bu...

  Have a Happy Thought: Renewable energy is good for the planet, and our bank accounts… turns out it can also be visually stunning!   Image: Bill Liao Floating Solar panels in Walden Image: Dennis Schroeder Lenghu, Qinghai Province, with tourists at the Heidu Mountain Scenic Area and nearby wind turbines, June 2023. © Weimin Chu   Tala Desert, Qinghai Province: Solar power is used to transform the barren land into grassland. The herders raise “Photovoltaic sheep” to prevent the grass from growing too tall, June 2025. © Weimin Chu   This week for #ShareGoodNewsToo: We’ve now gone the longest time since a nuclear explosion since the first one in 1945. That is, it’s been eight years and five months without a nuclear explosion (the most recent one was a test in North Korea on September 3 rd , 2017).       More images from Weimin Chu as well as more of the story on Powering change: a visual journey into China’s green transitio...

  Have a Happy Thought: Capybara are a famously relaxed animal. You can easily find photos of capybara happily laying in the sun, or in water, or anywhere really, often alongside other animals that you wouldn’t think would be “chill”. So it should be of no surprise, but great delight to you, to hear that some zoos in Japan have created a competition called “Long Bath Showdown” to find out how long a capybara can sit and soak in a bath. And yes, there are photos.   Here’s Hechima from Saitama Children’s Zoo Park, with a timer showing when she decided to end her bathtime. Image: @capybarabath on X And the winner: Prune, from Nagasaki Bio Park, who took a leisurely soak of 1 hour 45 minutes. Image: @capybarabath on X   Capybara bath time is not restricted to this one competition – zoos all over the country let these beautiful creatures relax in heated water all winter long – and let visitors come and watch for a true moment of relaxation for everyone involved...

  Have a Happy Thought: Last week we all learned something about one time of “AI” – Large Language Models. This week may I introduce you to the other type of AI – one known by farmers around the world: Artificial Insemination.   Side note: A few years ago I was hitch-hiking between some small towns on the South Island and was given rides by two separate women… who happened to be the two AI specialists for that region of the country. Apparently AI folk are good people! And because I am such a city girl, those car rides are how I learned about farming AI at the age of 42.   Artificial Insemination in animals can be done for many reasons – the farmers on the South Island often use it for their cows to help prevent injuries to the cows when the bulls are… over-enthusiastic. Meanwhile, biologists are using AI to help an adorable endangered species – the kākāpō. Image: kākāpō ( Strigops habroptila ) © Oscar Thomas , (CC BY-NC-ND)   You see, for the last f...

  Have a Happy Thought: Ok, maybe not a happy thought, but it is pretty funny. Every time you use a Large Language Model (LLM), like Chat GPT or whatever has been stuffed into your search engine, you put in a “prompt”. That is the question you ask, or the words you type in asking it to do something. Like: “write me a five-paragraph essay about the causes of the Great Depression”, or “what are good ideas for a 13-year-old’s birthday party” Now, unless you have an ongoing conversation with your LLM (it’s not actually artificial intelligence , no matter how many times the tech companies use the term AI), you probably thought that this prompt is all that’s going in to the program to generate a response.   That is.. not at all what is happening.   Some software engineers kept prompting Chat GPT in ways that finally had it output the remainder of the background prompt. Here is a short snippet – follow this link if you want to see the whole thing (4,219 words!) ...

  Have a Happy Thought: A fun fact you all learned at some point in your life is that SCUBA is an acronym – meaning it is a word made up of the first letters (or sounds) of other words. Can you remember what it means? Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. And we humans think we are so smart for coming up with this concept. Turns out, some other air-breathing animals also take pockets of air with them when they go underwater. (as in: not just holding their breath) 1.     Diving-bell spiders (Argyroneta aquatica). These live in freshwater across the Eurasian continent, and take air with them so they can live out most of their lives underwater – they even hunt and breed underwater! But since they still need to breathe air, they spin a silk canopy and trap air bubbles that naturally form along their body hairs under the canopy. And when they need to venture out to hunt, they basically create a smaller air bubble and carry it around like a backpack. ...

Have a Happy Thought: This year-end post is inspired by a social media trend that has definitely helped my mental health: #ShareGoodNewsToo   2025 was a bad year for disease. As in, humans made great progress in controlling or eliminating some diseases that have plagued us for millennia (or in some cases, before we even became humans). Image: World Health Organisation   The World Health Organisation has tracked (and helped make) some great gains in global health this year: ·       Maldives became the first country to achieve “triple elimination” of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, syphilis and hepatitis B. ·       Brazil also eliminated mother-to-child transmission of HIV, making it the most populous country in the Americas to achieve this historic milestone. ·       Burundi, Egypt and Fiji eliminated trachoma ·       Guinea and Kenya eliminated slee...