Thursday Things: Buffalo Roam Edition
1 July 2021. Vol 3 No 26 By Dan McGirt. #99
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“If only I could visit Illinois someday.” Photo by Jon Sailer on Unsplash
If there is one thing we love at Thursday Things almost as much as dog mayors, it is flying cars. Flying car completes test flight between airports.
A prototype flying car has completed a 35-minute flight between international airports in Nitra and Bratislava, Slovakia.
The hybrid car-aircraft, AirCar, is equipped with a BMW engine and runs on regular petrol-pump fuel.
Its creator, Prof Stefan Klein, said it could fly about 1,000km (600 miles), at a height of 8,200ft (2,500m), and had clocked up 40 hours in the air so far.
It takes two minutes and 15 seconds to transform from car into aircraft.
You have to love that the inventor of this particular flying car is a professor. It gives off a certain mad scientist vibe that lends credibility to the whole enterprise. (And if you’d like to become a professor of flyingcarology, there is apparently a course for that: Degree in 'flying car' engineering offered online
Look! Up in the air! It’s the AirCar! Source: Klein Vision
It’s hard to be a dinosaur. Dinosaurs were struggling long before the asteroid hit
Millions of years before a massive asteroid struck what's now the Yucatan Peninsula, the dinosaurs were already struggling.
Though the devastating effects of the asteroid impact that ended the Mesozoic Era likely turned out the lights on the dinosaurs, new research suggests global cooling was already ushering them to the door.
According to the new study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, rates of extinction were outpacing speciation among the six largest dinosaur families some 76 million years ago, well before the asteroid strike.
So in a way, the asteroid was doing the dinosaurs a favor. Maybe we owe the giant space rock an apology.
Maybe an asteroid could solve this problem too. Pandemic turned Americans into hoarders: 2 in 3 ‘desperate’ for places to store all the junk they bought
The past year has apparently turned many Americans into hoarders. New research finds two in three people are desperate to find places in their homes to fit everything they’ve purchased during the pandemic.
A survey of 2,000 Americans reveals many have spent more money than usual on items such as kitchen and cooking utensils (30%), home décor (30%), and personal care products (27%) over the last year. Some respondents say random items like exercise equipment, extra boxes, and even bird feeders are taking up all the space in their homes.
Sixty-three percent have so much junk in their homes they have a difficult time finding where to store it.
But remember - it’s not hoarding if it’s books. That’s what I keep telling myself.
Where the buffalo roam: world’s longest wildlife bridge could cross the Mississippi A buffalo bridge! I know they are technically not buffalo, but that’s what we call them. Properly, it’s a bison bridge. Either way, this is a pretty cool idea and I hope it happens. Although, I do have a vague sense that bison/buffalo are a “West of the Mississippi River” animal, or should be. But then, that’s what I thought about coyotes too, and those thing are everywhere now.
If completed, the bridge would become the longest human-made wildlife crossing in the world. The plan would see a new bridge built further down the river, where car traffic will be rerouted, and the existing bridge converted for use by humans and American bison – colloquially known as buffalo.
On one side would stand a pedestrian path and bike path, and on the other an enclosed bison paddock that would let visitors see eye to eye with the huge creatures. The herds would be free to roam between Iowa and Illinois in the grassy expanse, and the project would establish the first national park in either state.
I did not know there were no national parks in either Iowa or Illinois. That seems strange to me, but if anyone would know that, it’s a British newspaper.
List of National Parks by State. It turns out there are twenty states lacking a national park, including my own state of Georgia! The catch here is that we don’t have any sites in Georgia that are designated as straight up “_______ National Park”. We have national historic sites, national monuments, national scenic trails, national historical parks, national battlefield parks, etc. There is a national forest and even a national seashore. I imagine it is the same in the other 19 states that “don’t have a national park”.
California has the most with nine, followed by Alaska with eight, Utah with five, and Colorado with four.
The newest national parks are New River Gorge National Park established on Dec. 27, 2020, White Sands National Park was upgraded from a national monument Dec. 20, 2019 and Indiana Dunes which changed its name from “National Lakeshore” to “National Park” on Feb. 15, 2019.
Fort Pulaski National Monument in Savannah, Ga. I once almost stepped on an alligator there. Photo: National Park Service.
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