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Gray whales learn daring feeding strategy in Puget Sound: Digging for ghost shrimp at high tide
SEATTLE — Every spring, a small group of about a dozen gray whales pauses along an epic migration from calving lagoons in Baja California to their feeding grounds in the Arctic. They travel more than 170 miles off their coastal migration route, to stop off in northern Puget Sound. There, they linger from about March through May. Now scientists think they know why the Sounders, as this beloved group of regulars is known, likes to visit — and hang around. New research confirms these whales have figured out a brilliant feeding strategy. Combining drone photography with long-term data on the Sound...
The Seattle Times
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If you’re sick of Tinder, try new dating app Struck for astrology lovers and skeptics alike
Astrology has become almost therapeutic during the pandemic, with apps like Co-Star and Sanctuary making the spiritual practice more accessible. But can astrology help users find love? Struck, a dating app that matches users based on their birth charts (the placements of the sun, moon and planets at the time of a person’s birth), launched this past summer, initially in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. The new app recently became available to Chicago residents. Rachel Lo, co-founder and CEO of Struck, said Chicagoans made an overwhelming number of requests on the website for the app to ...
Chicago Tribune
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Tijuana sewage pounded South Bay beaches last year. EPA says help is on the way
SAN DIEGO — When a storm pummeled the San Diego-Tijuana region two weeks ago, hundreds of millions of gallons of water laced with raw sewage, trash and industrial chemicals flowed over the border shuttering beaches as far north as Coronado. The shoreline stink and closures came as no surprise to residents of Imperial Beach — a city where swimming was strictly prohibited at its main oceanfront for nearly half of 2020. The waterfront to the south along Border Field State Park was closed last year for 295 days. The South Bay shoreline was partially opened after the recent rains, only to be abrupt...
The San Diego Union-Tribune
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Commentary: Greens who object to geoengineering put planet at risk
Apocalyptic warnings about climate change — such as the U.S. Geological Survey-Cornell-University of Arizona report in 2014 that the American Southwest faced a significant risk of a 35-year "megadrought" — grow more plausible and terrifying each year as new global temperature records are set and massive wildfires come to seem normal. Some scientists believe the planet may already be past the tipping point. "The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future," a 2019 book by American journalist David Wallace-Wells, laid out the view that there is already so much carbon in the atmosphere that global...
The San Diego Union-Tribune
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Great white shark numbers up significantly in Monterey Bay
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Researchers have discovered a "dramatic increase" in the number of great white sharks swimming in Monterey Bay in recent years, including an area off Santa Cruz County where a surfer was killed last year, according to a new study published Tuesday. Juvenile great white sharks — younger animals that are between 5 and 9 feet long — that traditionally concentrated in warm waters off northern Mexico and Southern California have moved north since 2014 as water temperatures have warmed, the study found. Where once there were no juvenile white sharks spotted in the ocean between Ma...
The Mercury News
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This Chicago TikTok star is a middle-aged dad who does history videos. Next up: Black History Month
CHICAGO — In the Bungalow Belt on a Wednesday morning, off an unplowed street in Auburn Gresham, in an office behind his living room, hours before he heads off to work at ComEd, Shermann Thomas — aka 6figga_dilla, aka Dilla, aka my favorite Chicago historian at the moment — prepares to shoot yet another TikTok video about a slice of local history. He checks his teeth for food, then he washes his face, then he takes a quick shot of whiskey to steady his nerves. He smiles sheepishly. He’s winging this history thing, but he’s also being watched by tens of thousands, and he’s only been doing this ...
Chicago Tribune
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‘Bliss’ review: Salma Hayek introduces Owen Wilson to ‘Matrix’-adjacent living
Writer-director Mike Cahilll’s “Bliss” is about Greg, played by Owen Wilson, who can’t seem to focus on his job at a firm called Technical Difficulties. Psychologically he too is having technical difficulties; he loses himself in a kind of reverie, sketching detailed drawings of his imagined dream home by the sea, and of a sultry woman, smoking, framed in a doorway. In the first few minutes Greg is fired. Then, a comically abrupt inciting event: Getting up from his seat, dazed and newly unemployed, he startles his supervisor who stumbles back, hits his head on his desk, and dies. “Bliss” has o...
Chicago Tribune
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Author Charles Soule wrote ‘Light of the Jedi’ — and in a galaxy far, far away, the story continues
Someone must leap into the abyss. And that someone is Charles Soule, son of Milwaukee and Grand Rapids, now keeper of the Jedi. Picture a job you wouldn’t want under any circumstance — say, presidential social-media consultant, Chicago Bears quarterback, cesspool scrubber — and Soule has you beat: He was tasked with (shudder) introducing a completely fresh storyline to the “Star Wars” universe. Meaning, no Luke, no Rey, no Han, no Leia, no Mandalorian, no Baby Yoda. Soule is no monster, but rather, a fine writer, a brand name in comic books, author of well-received science-fiction novels, and ...
Chicago Tribune
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Female resident orcas especially disturbed by vessels, new research shows
SEATTLE — Female orcas are most thrown off from foraging when boats and vessels intrude closer than 400 yards, according to new research — troubling findings for the endangered population of southern resident orcas that desperately needs every mother and calf to survive. The research, gathered by attaching suction-cup electronic tags to the whales, is a clear wake-up call to the protection endangered mother orcas need, researchers and experts say. "Anything that takes food away from a mom trying to support a calf, that is something we should carefully consider," said Marla Holt, lead author on...
The Seattle Times
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How Marshawn Lynch's 'Beast Quake,' which just turned 10, helped prepare scientists for actual earthquakes
SEATTLE — "The crowd is silent now, as opposed to when the Saints have the ball," NBC broadcaster Tom Hammond said, before more than 66,000 fans refuted that fact. It was Jan. 8, 2011, and the 7-9 Seahawks led the 11-5 Saints, 34-30, with 3:40 left in the NFC wild-card game. At a supposedly silent Qwest Field in Seattle, Matt Hasselbeck took a snap at his own 33-yard line, turned and handed the ball to Marshawn Lynch. Amid a morass of broken tackles, the "Beast Quake" was born. Lynch — a 215-pound, 24-year-old torpedo — laid waste to New Orleans' defensive line, burrowing through Scott Shanle ...
The Seattle Times
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