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Behind Jet Li's martial arts mastery and international fame is a deeply personal journey to understand purpose, ego, and freedom. In today's episode, he sits down with Ryan to discuss the three levels of martial arts, how surviving the 2004 tsunami changed his life, and what he believes is the highest form of strength.Jet Li is a martial artist, actor, philanthropist, film producer, and author. He became the youngest national martial arts champion in Chinese history at twelve years old and went on to become one of the most internationally recognized Chinese film stars of all time, with roles in Shaolin Temple, Once Upon a Time in China, Fist of Legend, Hero, Fearless, Romeo Must Die, Lethal Weapon 4, The Expendables, and Disney's live-action Mulan.Beyond film, Jet has spent more than thirty years studying Buddhism and has devoted much of his life to philanthropy. After surviving the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami with his family, he founded One Foundation, a charitable organization focused on disaster relief, mental health, and grassroots giving. His new book is Beyond Life and Death: The Way of True Freedom.Follow Jet Li on Instagram | @jetli
Jeremy Zakis reports on the unprecedented rainfall sweeping across Australia, driven by a super El Niño cycle interacting with the Indian Ocean Dipole. South Australia and Adelaide experienced the heaviest downpours, breaking monthly rainfall records in a single day, while Sydney's infrastructure coped with several inches of rain. Victoria and Melbourne were largely spared due to the Great Dividing Range acting as a barrier. Zakis warns that weekly spring rains are highly unusual and threaten to fuel rapid forest undergrowth, which could dry out and create a dangerous bushfire hazard during future droughts. (10)
On this, our 340th Evolutionary Lens livestream, we discuss the recent flash flood on the border of Nepal and Tibet, climate science, and the nature of evidence. What commonalities are there between a glacial dam breaking and flooding the valley below, taking out towns and villages; Dry Falls and the Columbia River Gorge in Washington state; the Boxing Day tsunami in the Indian Ocean; and the 2011 earthquake that resulted in the destruction of the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan? In some cases we have to infer what happened; in some cases we have direct observation; in all cases we have to construct a plausible story that fits all of the evidence. Meanwhile in climate science, a new paper reconstructs NOAA data from 1,200 weather stations from over 100 years, uses a different metric than NOAA does to describe the data, and concludes that the world—or at least the coterminous U.S.—is not heating up in the way we have been told. We discuss.*****Our sponsors:Ethos: Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get up to $3 million in coverage in as little as 10 minutes at https://ethos.com/darkhorseCaraway: Non-toxic, highly functional & beautiful cookware and bakeware. Save up to $230 on their 12 piece cookware set, and visit http://Carawayhome.com/DarkHorse for an additional 10% off your next purchase. Add their minis duo, and save up to $350.Puori: Clean and safe supplements, lab tested and guaranteed. Go to http://Puori.com/DarkHorse for 32% off grass-fed whey protein with a subscription. DarkHorse code works on all products!*****Join us on Locals! Get access to our Discord server, exclusive live streams, live chats for all streams, and early access to many podcasts: https://darkhorse.locals.comHeather's newsletter, Natural Selections (subscribe to get free weekly essays in your inbox): https://naturalselections.substack.comOur book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, is available everywhere books are sold, including from Amazon: https://amzn.to/3AGANGg (commission earned)Check out our store! Epic tabby, digital book burning, saddle up the dire wolves, and more: https://darkhorsestore.orgMusic: "Marble Machine" by WintergatanThis track can be downloaded for free at www.wintergatan.netFree License to use this track in your video can be downloaded at www.wintergatan.net*****Mentioned in this episode:New York Post on flood: https://nypost.com/2026/08/26/world-news/flood-hits-china-nepal-border-leaving-many-dead-and-missing/ Flood video: https://x.com/weaponizedwheat/status/2092652586935763289?s=46 More flood video: https://x.com/charlesarthur/status/2092613128387211617?s=20 Christy 2026. Declines in hot and cold daily temperature extremes in the conterminous US, 1899–2025. Theoretical and Applied Climatology, 157(5): 309: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00704-026-06200-3 Epoch Times: https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/climatologist-says-a-century-of-weather-data-contradicts-claims-of-record-heat-6072358Support the show
You might remember Olivia Wyatt from two previous episodes. She sails a Robert Perry Panda 34 solo and has been sailing around the world visiting remote places and documenting indigenous people in her instagram posts. We talk about Namibia and why she loves it, the magical landscape, the wildlife, Walvis Bay, language, clearing in to various countries, a roller-furling problem and how she dealt with it, foul weather in the Indian Ocean, locking the wheel while using the Hydrovane, a spirit that lives in her boat, guiding voices, freediving, nitrogen narcosis, the lemurs of madagascar, sailing solo and when a second person would be ideal, The Golden Globe Race and her alternate plan, the indigenous people of Namibia, a proposition from a chief, the friendliest people, the places she would live if she had to pick from places she has been, modifications and additions she has made to her boat, her Hydrovane, a UFO sighting, alien abductions, finding adventure every day, why she chose to back out of the GGR, seven years of bliss, cold water, and more. Photos and links are on the podcast shownotes page Support th show through Patreon Shop for or sell sailboats at SailboatsFroSale.com Sail in New England / Canada with Sailing Resolution Sail California / Hawaii with Shearwater Sailing Get marine electrical help from Meridian Marine Electrial
Jeremy Zakis, Part One: Zakis discusses the unprecedented 4°C Pacific anomaly—ocean warming not seen in 150 years—its disruption of global trade at the Panama Canal, and the unseasonal heavy rains hitting Sydney rather than a baking heat dome. He explains the science of a wet El Niño: how moisture from the Indian Ocean dipole is driving these downpours, and the meteorological trend showing Australian El Niños shifting wetter over the last century, potentially linked to climate change. Zakis then turns to the looming fire threat—how these heavy rains trigger rapid undergrowth that soon dries out into highly flammable bushfire fuel—and Sydney's strategy of preparing containment lines and fire breaks around inhabited areas. (1)
What happens when a "short, few-week mission" spirals into an endless 14-hour combat days thousands of miles from home?From sudden operational shifts in Bahrain to isolated deployments in the Indian Ocean, service members are paying the price for high-level strategic miscalculations. Michael Steele exposes the sharp disconnect between decision-makers in the White House and Pentagon and the front-line troops executing their orders. This discussion breaks down why empathy, real-world deployment experience, and accountability are dangerously missing at the top.Catch Michael Steele on The Weeknight Mondays - Fridays at 7pm EST on MSNBC: https://www.msnbc.com/weeknightFollow Michael on X: https://x.com/MichaelSteeleFollow Michael on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/michaelsteele.bsky.socialFollow Michael on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chairman_steele/Follow Michael on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@chairman_steeleListen to The Michael Steele Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-michael-steele-podcast/id1412905534Watch The Michael Steele Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJNKzTkCZE9uNqPiKYw5eU5YkS_mMsr6oIf you enjoyed this, be sure to share it with a friend!
TABLE OF CONTENTS, JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW, 8-18-2026Liz Peek discusses the resilience of the American economy, noting that high-end consumer spending remains strong despite recession fears. Small businesses are reportedly "humming," with hiring and profitability reaching their highest levels since 2026. This economic momentum is increasingly driven by a massive boom in AI development, which has created an exponential demand for long-term capital. However, this appetite for money is pressuring the bond market, leading to higher mortgage rates that hinder the housing industry. Peek highlights a growing divide between red and blue states, where the former are more likely to embrace AI investment while the latter resist it. She also addresses the influence of Hasan Piker, a radical Twitch streamer who mobilizes young men for Democratic candidates like Abdul El-Sayed. Despite concerns about AI-related job losses, Peek argues it is a vital tool for productivity and medical advancement. (1)Jonathan Schanzer examines the fractured state of Hamas, noting the group currently controls only 30% of Gaza while facing internal discord over potential disarmament. International negotiators are discussing a "disarm first" condition, which Hamas leadership currently rejects, demanding an Israeli withdrawal instead—a term Schanzer deems unacceptable to any Israeli leader. The conversation turns to Iran, where Donald Trump has threatened to bomb Omandue to its perceived collaboration with the Iranian regime. Despite its "Switzerland of the Middle East" reputation, Oman hosts Houthi and IRGC headquarters, facilitating intelligence and weapon transfers. Schanzer warns that Iran is in "war mode," coordinating closely with its proxy network to prepare for future violence. He also details the rapid rearmament of the Syrian military under Turkish and Russian influence, which concerns Israel. Finally, a new Sunni alliance between Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia seeks to diminish Iranian Shiite power. (2)Gregory Copley analyzes China's recent ICBM test in the South China Sea, interpreting it as "Wolf Warrior diplomacy" designed to signal naval reach to the US and regional neighbors. Australia is countering this threat through the AUKUSand Five Eyes alliances, though Copley notes a lack of cohesion between current heads of government. He highlights Canada's significant pivot under Mark Carney toward independent defense spending, reaching 5% of GDP to secure the Northwest Passage and Arctic interests. Regarding Yemen, Copley argues the Houthis represent the legitimate military weight of North Yemen, while the internationally recognized government is merely a "Saudi puppet." He suggests Western diplomacy should deal directly with the Houthis rather than adhering to Saudi preferences. Additionally, Copley provides a historical defense of Charles I, arguing his execution was an illegal abrogation of the social contract. He maintains that constitutional monarchies remain a viable and flourishing modern system. (3)Mary Kissel discusses the strained US-South Korea alliance, where disagreements over military funding have prompted Seoul to seek independent nuclear-powered submarine capabilities. She characterizes North Korea as a reckless actor that has committed tens of thousands of combat troops and ballistic missiles to aid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Kissel critiques the "transactional nature" of current diplomacy, noting that contradictory signals toward Kim Jong-unundermine national security strategies. Regarding Oman, she defends the nation as a moderate partner vital for counterterrorism and the release of detained Americans, viewing Trump's threats to bomb the country as an expression of frustration over Iran. Kissel also highlights political successes in South America, where center-right victories in Colombia and Chile represent a return to capitalist principles and closer ties with the US. She concludes by noting that environmental factors like El Niño will soon challenge regional stability in Brazil. (4)Joseph Sternberg addresses the looming "year of doom" in 2032, when the Social Security trust fund is projected to run out. Without reform, benefits could be slashed by 22% to match current payroll tax revenues, creating a massive political crisis. Sternberg explores potential remedies such as means testing for high-earners like Elon Musk or raising the payroll tax cap, though he warns these could impact broader economic growth. He highlights the generational fairness issue of asking younger workers to fund benefits that baby boomers were unprepared to pay for themselves. The discussion also covers the rise of Hasan Piker, a popular Twitch streamer who broadcasts far-left economic views to a younger audience. While Piker is photogenic and compelling, Sternberg describes him as a "popularizer" rather than a deep thinker. Piker's pugnacious approach serves as a bellwether for whether radical progressive ideas can succeed in general elections. (5)Thaddeus McCotter analyzes the recent Michigan Democratic primary, where Dr. Abdul El-Sayed narrowly defeated the establishment candidate, Haley Stevens. El-Sayed, an "anti-establishment" fighter endorsed by Bernie Sanders, capitalized on unhappiness within the Democratic base, particularly in counties with large young populations like Washtenaw and Kent. While El-Sayed distances himself from the "Socialist" label, he supports extensive economic regulation and holds anti-Israel sentiments popular in Ann Arbor. McCotter notes that the Democratic establishment is now rallying around El-Sayed to preserve their Senate majority, hoping a "common enemy" in Donald Trump will bridge internal divides. Republican candidate Mike Rogers, a former Intelligence Committee chair, plans to counter El-Sayed by focusing on manufacturing, border security, and the risks of "Medicare for All" to seniors. McCotter warns that Trump's messaging on the "Iran war" and rising inflation remains a significant hurdle for Republican candidates in the general election. (6)Bob Zimmerman reports on the successful recovery of a SpaceX Starship near Christmas Island, which remained seaworthy for 24 days after a vertical splashdown in the Indian Ocean. This achievement, along with SpaceX's record-breaking launch frequency, signals a "renaissance to American ingenuity." Zimmerman notes that Elon Musk's political involvement was a defensive reaction to the Biden administration's regulatory pressure on his companies. In the Ukraineconflict, Ukrainian missiles successfully targeted a Russian factory producing Soyuz-2 rockets, aiming to cripple Russia's military satellite and drone communication capabilities. Regarding spaceport expansion, Zimmerman details SpaceX's potential new site in Louisiana, which offers hundreds of square miles for operations. He also critiques government-funded spaceports, like those in Australia or New Mexico, which often fail because they lack dedicated rocket companies as customers. Finally, research on mice aboard the International Space Station suggests that weightlessness does not fundamentally damage the heart's contracting mechanisms. (7)Two corrections applied, pending your confirmation: Hasan Piker (transcribed as "Hassan," segments 1 and 5 — the Twitch streamer spells it with one s) and Washtenaw County (transcribed as "Washington," segment 6 — Ann Arbor's county, which fits the context of young Democratic voters; flag me if the audio genuinely said Washington).
Bob Zimmerman reports on the successful recovery of a SpaceX Starship near Christmas Island, which remained seaworthy for 24 days after a vertical splashdown in the Indian Ocean. This achievement, along with SpaceX's record-breaking launch frequency, signals a "renaissance to American ingenuity." Zimmerman notes that Elon Musk's political involvement was a defensive reaction to the Biden administration's regulatory pressure on his companies. In the Ukraineconflict, Ukrainian missiles successfully targeted a Russian factory producing Soyuz-2 rockets, aiming to cripple Russia's military satellite and drone communication capabilities. Regarding spaceport expansion, Zimmerman details SpaceX's potential new site in Louisiana, which offers hundreds of square miles for operations. He also critiques government-funded spaceports, like those in Australia or New Mexico, which often fail because they lack dedicated rocket companies as customers. Finally, research on mice aboard the International Space Station suggests that weightlessness does not fundamentally damage the heart's contracting mechanisms. (7)
Jeremy Zakis reports on the looming weather crisis in Australia, where meteorologists predict a "super El Niño" combined with a positive Indian Ocean Dipole. This rare combination is expected to cause extreme drought and record-breaking temperatures in New South Wales and Victoria. Zakis warns that a wet winter has fueled rampant eucalyptus growth, creating a massive volume of flammable oils. These conditions have "primed" the landscape for catastrophic wildfires. Residents are being urged to clear undergrowth immediately, as the upcoming fire season could surpass the severity of the devastating 2020–2021 bushfires. (12)
Jeremy Zakis: Jeremy Zakis explains that Australia is entering a super El Niño cycle, exacerbated by a positive Indian Ocean Dipole that dries out the continent. He warns that recent winter rain has fueled undergrowth that will soon become tinder-dry wildfire kindling. Shifting to wildlife, Zakis recounts a fascinating experiment in which magpies cooperated to remove GPS trackers from one another, demonstrating high social intelligence. He also shares anecdotes about his dog Dallas and the vandal cockatoos that have been destroying hardwood birdhouses in his yard. (1)
Londinium Chronicles — Multi-Part, Part One: Gaius (John Batchelor) and Germanicus (Michael Vlahos) meet in the wine bar in Londinium, 92 AD, where they are overseeing its expansion during a rainy summer. They discuss a potential partnership with a Greek vintner in Gaul, likely from the Gironde valley, who wishes to market a specific vintage to retired centurions. The conversation shifts to modern geopolitical turmoil, specifically the integration of conflicts in the Black Sea and Indian Ocean basins into a singular war over energy resources. Germanicus criticizes the twenty-first century Imperator for prioritizing domestic gasoline prices over strategic military objectives, such as requesting that Ukraine avoid attacking Russian tankers. He highlights a severe morale crisis in the US Navy, noting that the carrier Lincoln was withdrawn because of conditions bordering on mutiny. This crisis is attributed to the flagrant abuse of the professional military, where nuclear-powered ships are kept deployed indefinitely without sufficient crew rotation or logistical support, a sharp contrast to the rotation systems used during the Vietnam War. Germanicus warns that such disregard for the military's welfare historically leads to the overthrow of emperors. (1)
#274: Captain Mark Brouker, United States Navy (Retired), is a thought leader, keynote speaker, professor, coach, consultant, facilitator, pharmacist, and proven leader who is passionate about helping others on their leadership journey. He has more than twenty-five years of leadership experience, fifteen of which were in C-suite-level positions. The recipient of numerous military and civilian leadership awards, he held a wide array of leadership positions both during and after his naval career. He served as commanding officer at one of the largest naval hospitals worldwide and as chief of staff for Navy Medicine West, responsible for ten hospitals spanning the West Coast to the Indian Ocean and health care for eight hundred thousand patients. After transitioning from the military, Captain Brouker founded Brouker Leadership Solutions, a company dedicated to helping leaders succeed on their leadership journeys. He has presented to thousands of professionals in twenty-one countries, and his clients include Fortune 500 companies, professional and military organizations, and top universities. Brouker volunteers as an executive coach at The Honor Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps U.S. Navy SEALs and other Special Operations Forces transition from the military environment to the corporate environment. For more information, please visit: www.broukerleadershipsolutions.com.Enjoy the show!
SpaceX wants Starship Flight 14 to carry viable payloads into orbit and then bring the upper stage back to the launch tower for its first catch attempt. The company is tentatively aiming for the end of August, although it still needs regulatory approval and a clean review of the previous flight. SpaceX has caught Super Heavy three times, but it has never tried to catch a 52-meter ship after orbital entry. Can Flight 14 really go from useful payload deployment to a tower catch on the same mission?Flight 14 asks Starship to do far more than repeat another hourlong trip to the Indian Ocean. We are going through the likely hardware, the orbital flight path, the payload deployment, the deorbit burn, the return to Texas, the catch sequence, the booster problem, and every decision that could send the ship away from the tower.
In the last few episodes we have tracked the miraculous discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand — the importance of which cannot really be overstated. While diamonds placed South Africa on the map, gold was going to convert the struggling region into a financial paradise for British financiers — and therein lies the imperial rub. However, it's time to step back a tad to provide an historical overview for the late 1880s and it's also time to zoom out of southern Africa to take a good hard look at global events. For centuries before European powers drew border lines across maps of the continent, the western Indian Ocean functioned as a single economic basin. Fleets of dhow's linked Gujarat, the Persian Gulf, the South Arabian coast, and the Swahili littoral, their journey's dictated by the predictable rhythm of the monsoon winds which blow southwest toward Africa from November to March and reverse northeast toward Arabia and India from April to September, This was a commercial matrix of city-states fueled by the exchange of African ivory, timber, gold, and slaves for Indian textiles, Chinese porcelain, and Middle Eastern metalwork. The Sultanate of Zanzibar was born directly out of this maritime deep history. In 1840, Sultan Seyyid Said of Oman moved his royal court from Muscat to Stone Town on the island of Zanzibar. By anchoring his authority off the East African coast, he consolidated control over the lucrative trade routes stretching deep into the African interior to the Great Lakes. The island served as a massive commercial emporium and agricultural power, built heavily on clove plantations operated by slaves while Indian merchant financiers—the banyans—backed the long-distance caravans into the mainland. Sultan Barghash bin Said was a proud son of the legendary Seyyid Said, inheriting the throne of Stone Town in 1870 while his brother Majid was bequethed Oman itself. Sharper and more ambitious than Majid, Barghash spent his eighteen-year reign modernizing Zanzibar—building piped water systems, telegraph links, and grand stone palaces. But his survival relied on a faustian bargain. Guided by Sir John Kirk—the British Consul-General who became his shadow advisor—Barghash aligned his dynasty entirely with London. Kirk was the single most influential British official in East Africa during the late 19th century. A Scottish physician, naturalist, and explorer, he first gained prominence as David Livingstone's trusted second-in-command on the Zambezi Expedition between 1858 and 1864. In 1866, he was appointed to the British Agency in Zanzibar, eventually rising to become Consul-General and Political Agent. When German agent Carl Peters began seizing territory on the mainland, London chose European alliance-building with Berlin over its promises to Zanzibar. In 1873, under direct British gunboat pressure, Barghash signed the treaty that outlawed the maritime slave trade and shut down Stone Town's notorious public slave market. It was an act of political self-mutilation; it deeply alienated his own Omani elite and rich plantation owners, but Barghash traded his domestic standing for what he believed was an ironclad guarantee of British protection over his mainland empire. Unfortunately, that gamble proved fatal. The Foreign Office in London watched the global map with growing anxiety as rival flags sprouted across the continent. What infuriated British diplomats most was a sudden, unnatural alliance between their two greatest rivals: France and Germany. Furious over Britain's unilateral grab of Egypt in 1882, the French teamed up with Otto von Bismarck to check British ambition. London had tried a sly maneuver in West Africa—signing a treaty with a weak Portugal to recognize Portuguese control over the mouth of the Congo, effectively using Lisbon as a buffer to keep other powers out. But Bismarck saw right through it.
In the last few episodes we have tracked the miraculous discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand — the importance of which cannot really be overstated. While diamonds placed South Africa on the map, gold was going to convert the struggling region into a financial paradise for British financiers — and therein lies the imperial rub. However, it's time to step back a tad to provide an historical overview for the late 1880s and it's also time to zoom out of southern Africa to take a good hard look at global events. For centuries before European powers drew border lines across maps of the continent, the western Indian Ocean functioned as a single economic basin. Fleets of dhow's linked Gujarat, the Persian Gulf, the South Arabian coast, and the Swahili littoral, their journey's dictated by the predictable rhythm of the monsoon winds which blow southwest toward Africa from November to March and reverse northeast toward Arabia and India from April to September, This was a commercial matrix of city-states fueled by the exchange of African ivory, timber, gold, and slaves for Indian textiles, Chinese porcelain, and Middle Eastern metalwork. The Sultanate of Zanzibar was born directly out of this maritime deep history. In 1840, Sultan Seyyid Said of Oman moved his royal court from Muscat to Stone Town on the island of Zanzibar. By anchoring his authority off the East African coast, he consolidated control over the lucrative trade routes stretching deep into the African interior to the Great Lakes. The island served as a massive commercial emporium and agricultural power, built heavily on clove plantations operated by slaves while Indian merchant financiers—the banyans—backed the long-distance caravans into the mainland. Sultan Barghash bin Said was a proud son of the legendary Seyyid Said, inheriting the throne of Stone Town in 1870 while his brother Majid was bequethed Oman itself. Sharper and more ambitious than Majid, Barghash spent his eighteen-year reign modernizing Zanzibar—building piped water systems, telegraph links, and grand stone palaces. But his survival relied on a faustian bargain. Guided by Sir John Kirk—the British Consul-General who became his shadow advisor—Barghash aligned his dynasty entirely with London. Kirk was the single most influential British official in East Africa during the late 19th century. A Scottish physician, naturalist, and explorer, he first gained prominence as David Livingstone's trusted second-in-command on the Zambezi Expedition between 1858 and 1864. In 1866, he was appointed to the British Agency in Zanzibar, eventually rising to become Consul-General and Political Agent. When German agent Carl Peters began seizing territory on the mainland, London chose European alliance-building with Berlin over its promises to Zanzibar. In 1873, under direct British gunboat pressure, Barghash signed the treaty that outlawed the maritime slave trade and shut down Stone Town's notorious public slave market. It was an act of political self-mutilation; it deeply alienated his own Omani elite and rich plantation owners, but Barghash traded his domestic standing for what he believed was an ironclad guarantee of British protection over his mainland empire. Unfortunately, that gamble proved fatal. The Foreign Office in London watched the global map with growing anxiety as rival flags sprouted across the continent. What infuriated British diplomats most was a sudden, unnatural alliance between their two greatest rivals: France and Germany. Furious over Britain's unilateral grab of Egypt in 1882, the French teamed up with Otto von Bismarck to check British ambition. London had tried a sly maneuver in West Africa—signing a treaty with a weak Portugal to recognize Portuguese control over the mouth of the Congo, effectively using Lisbon as a buffer to keep other powers out. But Bismarck saw right through it.
When the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami struck the coast of Kenya, a baby hippo named Owen was swept out to sea and separated from his family.After being rescued, he was taken to Haller Park in Mombasa, where he formed an extraordinary bond with Mzee, a 130-year-old giant tortoise. Their unlikely friendship captured the world's imagination and became an international sensation.In 2023, conservationist Dr Paula Kahumbu told Gill Kearsley the remarkable story of Owen and Mzee.Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by and curious about the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more. Recent episodes explore everything from how the Excel spreadsheet was developed, the creation of cartoon rabbit Miffy and how the sound barrier was broken.We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: the moment Reagan and Gorbachev met in Geneva, Haitian singer Emerante de Pradines' life and Omar Sharif's legendary movie entrance in Lawrence of Arabia.You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, like the invention of a stent which has saved lives around the world; the birth of the G7; and the meeting of Maldives' ministers underwater. We cover everything from World War Two and Cold War stories to Black History Month and our journeys into space.(Photo:Owen and Mzee in January 2005. Credit: Peter Greste/AFP via Getty Images)
Episode #589: The AAS Conference in Vancouver brought together thousands of scholars and practitioners focused on Asia, with Burma emerging as a key topic amid its ongoing crisis. Insight Myanmar Podcast was invited to record on site, capturing a series of short, real-time conversations with participants and sharing these perspectives with a wider global audience. This is the second of a four part series, and features two guests. First up is Ponpavi Sangsurasdej, a Thai historian of modern Burma. She studies the years around independence not as the inevitable birth of a nation, but as a struggle among rival political futures, where communists, socialists, and ethnic minority leaders were all attempting to shape what a free Burma might become. The problem, she argues, is that later nationalist history flattened that contested moment into a far cleaner story than it was, since “we only focused decolonizing movement that were successful,” pushing other anti-colonial visions to the margins. In her telling, Burma's history cannot be reduced to a single Burman-centered trajectory, especially given Rangoon's role as a transnational hub of ideas, ideologies, and political networks, where categories like communism or decolonization carried unstable meanings across different actors and contexts. Rather than replacing one dominant narrative with another, she returns to sidelined figures and failed negotiations, asking who was excluded and how labels like collaborator or nationalist concealed deeper fractures. Those omissions, she suggests, continue to shape the distrust and fragmentation that define Burma today, where “there's no easy, simple answer to it,” only the ongoing work of tracing how these narratives were formed and what was lost when one version prevailed. Next up is Wenxu Zhang, a historian of the Indian Ocean world. He examines Rangoon in the interwar period as a cosmopolitan port caught between global connection and social fracture, focusing on the 1930–31 riots to understand how Chinese diaspora communities experienced that instability. What began as labor conflict during the Great Depression escalated into broader violence, where anti-colonial sentiment, economic distress, and opportunistic attacks blurred together, leaving Chinese merchants increasingly vulnerable despite their partial cultural integration. Zhang resists reducing the events to a single narrative, showing how British, Burmese, and Chinese perspectives framed the same violence as revolution, nationalism, or banditry depending on position, while for those on the ground, the sense that society was becoming unstable remained the dominant reality. He situates this moment within a larger shift toward a more inward Burmese nationalism, where identity hardened and cosmopolitan fluidity receded, leaving behind traces still visible in Yangon today—a city that retains the physical remnants of its global past, even as the networks and vitality that sustained it have largely disappeared.
SpaceTime with Stuart Gary | Astronomy, Space & Science News
SpaceTime Series 29 Episode 95 Spectacular vortices discovered on the Sun's surface Astronomers have for the first time observed swirling whirlpool like vortices deep in the Sun's photosphere – its visible surface. The event horizon of merging black holes seen for the first time Astronomers have for the first time picked up gravitational waves from the event horizon during the actual merger of two black holes. Starship recovery efforts underway off Western Australia SpaceX are towing their Test 13 Starship prototype back to shore after it survived its Indian Ocean soft splash down off the Western Australian coast. The Science Report Scientists develop a new blood test to help test for signs of Alzheimer's. E-scooter riders found to be 3.5 times more likely than motorcyclists to get traumatic brain injuries. Reshaping sciences understanding of mammal evolution during the age of dinosaurs. A new study shows how wireless charging for drones could be achieved using lasers. Skeptics guide to claims Artemis II was a hoax. This Week's Guests Professor Robert Ward from the Australian National University Our regular guests: Alex Zaharov-Reutt from techadvice.life Tim Mendham from Australian Skeptics
China launched the world's first geosynchronous synthetic aperture radar satellite in 2023, giving it continuous all-weather surveillance over roughly one-third of the planet (including the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean), later pairing it with a high-resolution optical spy satellite. Let's discuss the critical mineral chokehold that allowed China to achieve this milestone, as well as the alternative supply chains that the United States is now building to counter the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
Most people plan an African safari without realizing the Indian Ocean is right there. We've now added a beach stay to our safari, where we checked out both Diani Beach in Kenya and Zanzibar and we are here to say we think it's an excellent idea before heading home. In this episode, we introduce you to Diani Beach, Kenya, compare it honestly with Zanzibar, and help you decide which one might be the best fit for the end of your safari trip. Some links are affiliate links. See our disclosure. What We Cover in This Epsiode Why you should consider adding a few days at the beach to your safari. The journey home from East Africa can be brutal, and after a week of 5 am game drives, you may not be as rested as you think. We make the case for four or five extra days in one of these locations and explain why it's a lot easier to pull off than most people assume. (We went from a morning game drive in the Maasai Mara to sitting on a beach by that same afternoon.) Diani Beach: the one you probably haven't heard of is on the Kenyan coast, south of Mombasa, and it's quieter, more local, and considerably less expensive than Zanzibar. We stayed at Eleven Pearl Boutique Hotel, a 20-room property right on the beach. Our honest review: what it delivers, what it doesn't, and who it's perfect for. Other Diani options worth knowing. We also visited the Sands at Nomad and the very unique Chale Island Resort, where the tide determines how you arrive. At low tide, a tractor pulls you across. We'll explain. Zanzibar vs. Diani: the real comparison. Beach quality, water clarity, activities, food, vibe, beach vendors, getting around, and the price difference that genuinely surprised us. (The food and drink total for four nights in Diani will raise your eyebrows.) Matching the destination to the traveler. Honeymooners, luxury seekers, budget travelers, first-time visitors to Africa, families. We go through them all and tell you which destination fits which traveler, without preparing our answers in advance. Here are our Quick Tips No extra visa needed for Diani if you're already on a Kenya safari since you're still in Kenya Zanzibar requires a Tanzania visa plus their own mandatory travel insurance (~$45/person) — factor that into the total cost Getting around Diani: tuk-tuks during the day, Uber at night — your hotel can call a trusted one At both destinations, tides are dramatic and affect where you can walk and when excursions run. If you want to buy from beach vendors, ask for exactly what you want since custom is often on the table Resources Episode 183 — our full Zanzibar episode (Turaco Nungwi Beach Resort, the Dream Dhow, Stone Town, and the mandatory insurance explained): listen before this one Dream Dhow snorkeling trip near Mnemba Island Kenya Group Safari, June 2027 — we're leading a small group, vehicles capped at 3–4 guests: sunshinetravelersexperiences.com/safari-group-trip Plan your trip: sunshinetravelersexperiences.com More Resources & Links: Get Our FREE Ultimate Packing Guide See ALL our Favorite Travel Resources Don't waste your precious vacation time with Jet Lag, get Flykitt and watch Jet Lag disappear! Protect your privacy, boost your security, and keep your browsing data safe with Express VPN. Plus, get 3 months free with a yearly plan. Follow Sunshine Travelers Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube Read more about this and other travel destinations on our BLOG Follow our travels on TikTok @sunshinetravelerspodcast Follow us on X @sunshinetrvlrs Connect with us on LinkedIn @sunshinetravelerspodcast Get travel tips and follow our travels on Instagram: @sunshinetravelerspodcast Follow us on Facebook @sunshinetravelerspodcast Connect with us on Threads @sunshinetravelerspodcast See our travel videos on YouTube @sunshinetravelerspodcast Save our travel ideas on Pinterest @sunshinetravelerspodcast Music: This Acoustic Happy Music by Dmitrii Kolesnikov from Pixabay
Guest Host Joe DeMare talks about the Wood County Fair and brings up issues of animal cruelty, and how our society hasn't caught up with the information that animals have the same feelings and emotions humans do. Next he interviews Ralph Bloemers, creator of the movie "Elemental!" about the fires in the Pacific Northwest and why they've been so destructive of homes and businesses. Rebecca Wood talks about the Indian Ocean and dugongs. Ecological News includes the Trump administration allowing toxic sewage sludge which includes PFAS to be spread on prime farmland; more evidence we're in a global positive feedback heating loop, and solar installations hit their third Terawatt.
Astronomy Daily · S05E163 · “The Long Way Home” · Monday 10 August 2026. Sources verified against primary / institutional outlets. Starship “lost at sea” (Flight 13) • Flight 13 launched 24 July 2026 from Starbase, South Texas; the upper stage (“Ship,” Ship 40, ~52 m) made the softest Starship water landing yet in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia — and, in a program first, survived intact and afloat. • SpaceX had not planned to recover it. Musk confirmed the salvage attempt on 28 July (“We're sending a ship out to recover Starship”); recovery ship Go Australis was joined by Norwegian tugs Normand Ranger and Skimmer Tide, with a tow line to the nose. • On 7 August, Musk said recovery is “not looking good right now” in rough seas — but the team had already obtained close-up photos of critical heat-shield and engine regions for future upgrades. A saltwater-soaked Ship was never going to be reflown. • Heat shield: on SpaceX's first quarterly earnings call (4 August) Musk said he'd “consider the heat-shield problem solved,” long the biggest hurdle to full reuse. • The flight also deployed 20 next-gen Starlink V3 satellites; the Super Heavy booster had engine trouble and was lost in the Gulf of Mexico. Stacked, Starship stands ~124 m. Flight 14 is targeted for late August — its first attempt at operational orbit with production Starlink. • Sources: SpaceX / @elonmusk on X (7 Aug); Space.com (Mike Wall, 7 Aug); CNN (3 Aug). Landspace Zhuque-3, second landing attempt • Landspace (private, Beijing, founded 2015) targets liftoff ~7:45 p.m. EDT Mon 10 Aug (23:45 UTC / ≈9:45 a.m. AEST Tue 11 Aug) from Jiuquan, aiming for a propulsive first-stage recovery on legs (Falcon 9-style), landing downrange in Gansu. • The methalox, stainless-steel Zhuque-3 (~66 m) is broadly a Falcon 9 rival. Its Dec 2025 maiden flight reached orbit but the first stage failed its landing burn and crashed. • Accuracy note: this is China's fourth orbital-class recovery attempt. A Long March 10B already landed via net-capture on 10 July (China became the 2nd nation to land an orbital booster) — so tonight would make Landspace the first Chinese company to attempt a propulsive/landing-legs recovery, not “China's first.” • Sources: Space.com (7 Aug); Yahoo/Space (7 Aug); launch trackers (NOTAM-based). Uranus's “breathing” bow shock • New multifluid-MHD modelling shows Uranus's bow shock expands and contracts over a single ~17-hour Uranian day — driven by the planet's own extreme rotation and tilted, offset magnetic field, not by changes in the solar wind. • The model is constrained by Voyager 2's 1986 flyby — still the only direct measurements ever taken inside the Uranian system (a nice callback to E159's Voyager 2 “Big Bang” lead). • Implications for future ice-giant missions and for the many ice-giant exoplanets now being found. Cao et al., AGU Advances; surfaced via an Eos research spotlight this week. (Framed as newly-spotlighted rather than newly-published.) • Sources: AGU Advances (Cao et al.); Eos research spotlight; phys.org (7 Aug). Total solar eclipse — 12 August 2026 • The only total solar eclipse of 2026. Unusual over-the-pole path: Arctic Siberia → eastern Greenland → western Iceland → northern Spain (clipping NE Portugal) → the Balearics at sunset. • Greatest eclipse ≈17:46 UTC; max totality 2 min 18 s just off Iceland's west coast, with the Sun only ~26° high. Iceland's first total eclipse since 1954 (Reykjavik's first in 593 years); Spain's first since 1905. • North America sees a partial across the northern tier (Alaska to North Carolina) and most of Canada — deepest in the far north, a shallow bite (
It's Friday, August 7th, A.D. 2026. This is The Worldview in 5 Minutes heard on 140 radio stations and at www.TheWorldview.com. I'm Adam McManus. (Adam@TheWorldview.com) By Adam McManus Tanzanian Christians worried about Muslim threats In several Muslim-majority communities along Tanzania's coast in eastern Africa along the Indian Ocean, small Christian churches continue to worship under growing pressure, with pastors and congregations describing intimidation, disruption, and insecurity, reports International Christian Concern. For many believers in Zanzibar and parts of coastal Tanzania, where 99 percent of the population is Muslim, church leaders say some congregations have experienced threats, harassment, and occasional attacks. One pastor said, “When a church is threatened, it is not only a building that is affected. People begin to fear even the simple act of coming together to pray. Mothers worry about bringing their children, and some believers spend the entire service looking over their shoulders instead of worshipping freely.” Please pray for our brothers and sisters in Christ in Tanzania. Trump, Hegseth clashed over missile depletion concerns President Donald Trump's frustration over the Iran war boiled over at Camp David last week, where he demanded answers from War Secretary Pete Hegseth on why he had apparently been misled on extreme munitions shortages that now threaten to limit military options with Iran, reports The Washington Post. President Trump vented at Hegseth that he thought the munitions issue “had been fixed.” The shortages, particularly in long-range guided missiles and air-defense interceptors, have been part of the reason President Trump has pulled back from launching additional massive strikes against Iran in recent days. Senate Republicans hold Dr. Fauci in contempt of Congress Senate Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in contempt of Congress after he declined to answer lawmakers' questions during a fiery hearing last week, reports NBC News. Fauci, who has been a target of the right since he served as a top health official during the Covid pandemic, invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times during the hearing, explaining in his opening remarks that he believed Republicans would try to use his testimony to prosecute him. However, Fauci had been given a full and unconditional pardon by President Joe Biden before he left office on January 19, 2025. In an 8-5 party-line vote, Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held Fauci in contempt. Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the committee chair, said, “We are voting on whether a witness who has received the benefit of a sweeping federal pardon can be ordered by this committee to answer questions and then defy that order without consequence.” He added, “I ordered him to answer and warned him about contempt, yet he still refused. That is obstruction of a congressional investigation.” The committee can refer the contempt of Congress resolution directly to the Justice Department or request that Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota hold a full Senate vote. Senator Paul said the committee would hand-deliver the referral to the Justice Department. Contempt of Congress is a criminal misdemeanor offense punishable by up to a $100,000 fine and one year in jail. Proverbs 18:12 says, “Before a downfall, the heart is haughty …” In an impromptu press conference, Senator Paul insisted that Dr. Fauci be held accountable for the COVID-19 pandemic. PAUL: “A million Americans died, and I think they deserve to know the truth. Anthony Fauci has advocated for dangerous gain-of-function research for two decades now. The question ‘why' is not a question that he can have liability for. “He was given a pardon. Interestingly, the pardon starts in 2014. That's when the funding of the lab in Wuhan, [China] started. So, I think he should answer questions. As far as pleading the Fifth [Amendment] when you have a pardon, all you have to do is tell the truth, just not commit a new crime. So, I think the American people do deserve to know this. “This is the same Anthony Fauci who said, in a Washington Post op-ed in 2011, even if a pandemic should start from a lab, if someone's bitten in a lab or the virus escapes the lab, that the knowledge would be worth the risks. I don't think many Americans believe that! “This deserves to be thoroughly, exhaustively debated, so we don't do this again.” Christian congressman: Dr. Fauci under divine judgment Appearing with Fox News Host Brian Kilmeade on July 27th, Republican Congressman Tim Burchett of Tennessee talked about the recent revelations from Dr. Anthony Fauci's pandemic-era diary entries which showed a fixation on his own "explosive" fame, reports The Christian Post. KILMEADE: “Congressman, we saw this, but now we can read this. What changes about how this guy is perceived once and for all?” BURCHETT: “I think his arrogance shows. The Bible talks about professing themselves to be wise; they became fools. We closed down mom-and-pop operations. Jewish and Christian fellowships were shut down. The big boys were allowed to stay open. This thing was a disaster from the start, and we celebrated this guy, [meaning Fauci].” The phrase from Romans 1:22-28, which is part of the Apostle Paul's larger indictment against the pagan world, describes the corruption and prideful self-delusion that afflicts the minds of those who reject God. The refusal to worship God leads to a litany of self-destructive sins that ends with God abandoning individuals and societies "to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.” Southwest Airlines blocks ICE from detaining illegal aliens on 6 flights Firm in the belief that immigration enforcement is bad for business, Southwest Airlines is pushing back hard against efforts to detain illegal immigrants at U.S. airports, reports The Western Journal. A report from the Wall Street Journal highlights a July 25 incident in which an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent tried to board a Southwest Airlines jet in Dallas. The agent was prevented from carrying out his duties by Southwest Airlines. The Dallas-based airline staff also refused to share passenger information with ICE. In recent weeks, a half-dozen other incidents involving Southwest have taken place. The incidents occur as ICE has been broadening their efforts to arrest illegal aliens at airports. Write a polite, 3-sentence letter of complaint to Southwest Airlines President Bob Jordan. Send it to: 2702 Love Field Drive, Dallas, TX 75235. Planned Parenthood sues Trump over denial of Title X funding And finally, Planned Parenthood is suing the Trump administration to challenge updated Title X funding guidelines issued earlier this year that could render the abortion giant ineligible for so-called “family planning” grants, reports LifeSiteNews.com. In April, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services issued updated guidelines for Title X applications, which drop contraception promotion in favor of “natural family planning methods,” tout an objective to “strengthen family formation and assist clients in achieving healthy pregnancies,” and require applicants to reject abortion as a method of family planning. The new standards threaten to disqualify longtime Title X recipients such as Planned Parenthood. As a result, the nation's largest abortion chain announced on July 29 that it is suing the Trump administration over them. Isaiah 59:7 describes the abortion giant to a “t.” “Their feet run to evil, and they are swift to shed innocent blood. Their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity. Desolation and destruction mark their ways.” Close And that's The Worldview on this Friday, August 7th, in the year of our Lord 2026. Subscribe for free by Spotify, Amazon Music, or by iTunes or email to our unique Christian newscast at www.TheWorldview.com. Plus, you can get the Generations app through Google Play or The App Store. I'm Adam McManus (Adam@TheWorldview.com). Seize the day for Jesus Christ.
Bob Zimmerman highlights the rapid evolution of the commercial space industry, comparing it to the early 20th-century auto boom. A major milestone includes SpaceX successfully retrieving a Starship stage from the Indian Ocean to analyze its thermal protection tiles. Zimmerman notes that the FAA is proposing to exempt spaceports from 13 environmental laws to curb "mission creep" and "lawfare." In the satellite market, Starlink's dominance has forced competitors like Hughes into bankruptcy. Internationally, Zimmerman criticizes the European Union Space Act as a regulatory disaster that could drive U.S. and Chinese businesses away from the EU market. Other notable developments include Spain's $1 billion offer to move the Thirty Meter Telescope to the Canary Islands and new evidence that near-surface ice is ubiquitous on Mars, simplifying future colonization. He also mentions the mapping of 200,000 supermassive black holes. (2)
SCHEDULE THE JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW, 8-5-2026.Michael Bernstam discusses how August is historically a "month of curses" for Russia, citing the 1991 coup and the 1914 start of WWI. Currently, Russia is facing a severe fiscal and production crisis driven by Ukrainian drone strikes that have crippled 25% of its oil refining capacity. Additionally, Ukrainian drones recently destroyed a massive Wildberrieswarehouse—Russia's equivalent to Amazon—stripping a million vendors of their livelihoods and stressing the banking sector. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is in fiscal trouble due to its $1.5 trillion "The Line" project and Houthi attacks on its pipelines. This pressure is leading the Saudis to urge the Trump administration toward concessions with Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and stabilize oil flows. Bernstam notes that while the EU has frozen the Russian oil price cap at $44.10, the real impact on Russian revenues will come from any reduction in world oil prices. (1)Bob Zimmerman highlights the rapid evolution of the commercial space industry, comparing it to the early 20th-century auto boom. A major milestone includes SpaceX successfully retrieving a Starship stage from the Indian Ocean to analyze its thermal protection tiles. Zimmerman notes that the FAA is proposing to exempt spaceports from 13 environmental laws to curb "mission creep" and "lawfare." In the satellite market, Starlink's dominance has forced competitors like Hughes into bankruptcy. Internationally, Zimmerman criticizes the European Union Space Act as a regulatory disaster that could drive U.S. and Chinese businesses away from the EU market. Other notable developments include Spain's $1 billion offer to move the Thirty Meter Telescope to the Canary Islands and new evidence that near-surface ice is ubiquitous on Mars, simplifying future colonization. He also mentions the mapping of 200,000 supermassive black holes. (2)James Holmes and Gordon Chang address the critical lack of frigates in the U.S. Navy, which Holmes describes as essential low-cost platforms for monitoring adversaries. The current fleet is "top-heavy," relying on Arleigh Burke-class destroyers that are overworked. Holmes explains that the new Constellation-class frigate program has been delayed because the Navy continues to "monkey with the designs," resulting in vessels that are destroyer-sized but under-armed. Meanwhile, China and Russia have conducted joint naval exercises since 2005 to improve interoperability and provide military options in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait. Holmes suggests the U.S. should consider leveraging the superior shipbuilding capacity of allies like South Korea, which claims it could produce five Arleigh Burkes annually, whereas the U.S. struggles to build two. The focus remains on regaining the ability to build plentiful, cost-effective combatants. (3)Piero Tozzi and Gordon Chang explore the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) "long arm" influence in the U.S., specifically regarding a Purdue University professor pressured to cancel a speech at a Catholic conference. Tozzi explains that the CCP uses "patriotic churches" to "sinicize" Catholicism, which involves forcing the religion to conform to Party dictates. Tozzi criticizes the Vatican's "accommodationist approach" under the 2018 Sino-Vatican Accord, noting it neglects the persecuted "underground" church. He highlights that figures like Cardinal Zen and Archbishop Cordileone have been vocal defenders of figures like Jimmy Lai. Tozzi argues that the Catholic hierarchy must understand the totalitarian nature of the CCP, which seeks absolute control over all institutions. The discussion emphasizes that Chinese officials use intimidation to project dominance even within American universities and religious organizations. (4)Steve Yates and Gordon Chang discuss the proposed ban on Chinese components in U.S. data centers, warning that these devices allow for foreign sabotage of critical infrastructure. Yates notes that the CCP often fuels "astroturf" protests in rural America to block data center construction and slow U.S. AI development. Regarding Taiwan, Yates reports that security cooperation is becoming more transparent, moving away from "strategic ambiguity" to reassure allies and deter China. However, he notes a delay in a $14 billion arms package for Taiwan, suggesting that some in Washington still prioritize "walking on eggshells" to preserve the relationship with Xi Jinping. Yates argues for a shift toward helping partners buy and use their own deterrent capabilities. He concludes that U.S. leadership in compute power is a vital strategic advantage that China is actively trying to undermine through influence operations. (5)Peter Huessy provides a historical overview of nuclear arms control, starting with the 1972 SALT I agreement, which actually codified a buildup of weapons while banning missile defenses. He describes the "window of vulnerability" in the 1980s when Soviet SS-18 missiles threatened a first strike. The START I and START II treaties in the 1990s achieved the first real reductions, with START II aiming to ban destabilizing multiple-warhead (MIRV) land-based missiles. However, START II unraveled when Russia demanded limits on U.S. missile defenses. Following the Moscow Treatyand the 2010 New START, the arms control regime has effectively collapsed. Huessy emphasizes that today, there is no active treaty governing nuclear weapons between the U.S. and Russia. He underscores the importance of past verification measures, like "portal monitoring" in missile factories, which are no longer in place. (6)Humberto Briceño describes Venezuela as a state captured by a transnational alliance of criminal organizations, including colectivos (paramilitaries) and narco-traffickers. He criticizes the decision to leave "gangsters" like Delcy Rodríguez in power while attempting to rebuild democracy. Briceño argues that the judiciary and military must be entirely replaced, as they currently serve only as agents of the regime. Despite $13 billion in recent oil earnings, massive corruption has left the funds unaccounted for. He maintains that free elections, ideally by March 2027, are impossible without first dismantling the criminal infrastructure and placing the military under civil authority. Briceño praises the leadership of María Corina Machado and Edmundo González, noting the Venezuelan people are desperate for transformation after three decades of state-sponsored violence and economic collapse. (7)Simon Constable reports on the extreme weather and energy pressures facing Europe, with Brent crude prices up 12% and natural gas up 22% in a single month. He details a "semi-invasion" of Spain, where 60,000 migrants recently attempted to cross from Morocco, and the controversy in the UK over using the Royal Navy to return migrant boats to France. Constable describes the lack of logic in French police allowing these dangerous rubber rafts to depart. Switching to his "data center quiz," he reveals that 67% of new data centers are planned for rural areas, which often brings both high local resistance and significant tax revenue. He identifies labor shortages—particularly for electricians—and tariff uncertainties as the primary barriers to U.S. data center construction. Constable notes that within five miles of an operational data center, a significant portion of the U.S. population now resides. (8)Mary Kissel analyzes the "stuck" state of global diplomacy, arguing that China and Russia are actively judging the strength of U.S. deterrence in the Strait of Hormuz and Ukraine. She disputes the idea that China is a neutral bystander, noting that Beijing benefits from Russian energy, Iranian markets, and the depletion of U.S. military assets like Patriotmissiles. Kissel asserts that the "merging" of the wars in Ukraine and Iran actually happened years ago through long-standing regime cooperation. She warns that a "halfway house" deal with Iran would only grant the regime more leverage and threaten European population centers with ballistic missiles. NATO must recognize a "condominium of countries"—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—that are aligning against Western security. Kissel emphasizes that these regimes' interference in U.S. domestic politics is a strategic tool used to promote their own ends. (9)Colonel Grant Newsham challenges the assumption of inevitable Chinese dominance, labeling it a "fake it till you make it" strategy intended to intimidate foreigners. He points out that China's property market is a "crater" and its currency is not freely convertible, forcing the CCP to aggressively export overcapacity to earn the dollars needed for raw materials. Newsham highlights that over 600 million Chinese citizens live on less than $5 a day, and even the CCP elite, including Xi Jinping, keep wealth overseas as a hedge against the system's future. He argues that China's high-tech focus on AI and robotics does not solve its massive youth unemployment. Newsham concludes that China is a "big power but not a great one," functioning as a "rigged casino" without property rights or the rule of law, which is increasingly deterring foreign direct investment. (10)
In this conversation, we are entering an Indian Ocean world connected by steamships, telegraphs, pilgrimage routes, and print. From Bombay and the Gulf to Cairo and Mecca—and onward to Moscow and Geneva—merchants, scholars, activists, and political exiles debated a question that still feels urgent: how can different communities live together without being reduced to permanent majorities and minorities? Bombay sits near the center of our story. Under British rule, it was a major imperial port. But it was also a meeting place where Indian Ocean merchants financed publications, hosted traveling scholars, and helped ideas cross borders. At the same time, British censuses and representative politics produced a striking paradox. South Asia contained the world's largest Muslim population, yet Muslims were increasingly classified as a political minority within India. Dr. Roy Bar Sadeh is a historian of modern South Asia and the broader Islamic world, joining the University of Oxford in September 2026 as an Associate Professor in the Faculty of History and at St Antony's College. He is currently a Lecturer at the University of Manchester. His many articles and forthcoming book with University of Chicago Press, Muslims and the Minority Question: A Global History of South Asia, 1856–1947, follow the people who refused to accept that minority label as their political destiny. Along the way, we'll talk about food and language, Gulf pearl merchants and printing presses, rival plans for Mecca, an unlikely Soviet-Saudi partnership, and the search for protection beyond the nation-state. Host: Dr. Ahmed Y. AlMaazmi, an assistant professor of history at New York University Abu Dhabi. Co-host: Dr. Mohammed Alsudairi, a Lecturer of Politics and International Relations of the Arabic-speaking world at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
In this conversation, we are entering an Indian Ocean world connected by steamships, telegraphs, pilgrimage routes, and print. From Bombay and the Gulf to Cairo and Mecca—and onward to Moscow and Geneva—merchants, scholars, activists, and political exiles debated a question that still feels urgent: how can different communities live together without being reduced to permanent majorities and minorities? Bombay sits near the center of our story. Under British rule, it was a major imperial port. But it was also a meeting place where Indian Ocean merchants financed publications, hosted traveling scholars, and helped ideas cross borders. At the same time, British censuses and representative politics produced a striking paradox. South Asia contained the world's largest Muslim population, yet Muslims were increasingly classified as a political minority within India. Dr. Roy Bar Sadeh is a historian of modern South Asia and the broader Islamic world, joining the University of Oxford in September 2026 as an Associate Professor in the Faculty of History and at St Antony's College. He is currently a Lecturer at the University of Manchester. His many articles and forthcoming book with University of Chicago Press, Muslims and the Minority Question: A Global History of South Asia, 1856–1947, follow the people who refused to accept that minority label as their political destiny. Along the way, we'll talk about food and language, Gulf pearl merchants and printing presses, rival plans for Mecca, an unlikely Soviet-Saudi partnership, and the search for protection beyond the nation-state. Host: Dr. Ahmed Y. AlMaazmi, an assistant professor of history at New York University Abu Dhabi. Co-host: Dr. Mohammed Alsudairi, a Lecturer of Politics and International Relations of the Arabic-speaking world at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
In this conversation, we are entering an Indian Ocean world connected by steamships, telegraphs, pilgrimage routes, and print. From Bombay and the Gulf to Cairo and Mecca—and onward to Moscow and Geneva—merchants, scholars, activists, and political exiles debated a question that still feels urgent: how can different communities live together without being reduced to permanent majorities and minorities? Bombay sits near the center of our story. Under British rule, it was a major imperial port. But it was also a meeting place where Indian Ocean merchants financed publications, hosted traveling scholars, and helped ideas cross borders. At the same time, British censuses and representative politics produced a striking paradox. South Asia contained the world's largest Muslim population, yet Muslims were increasingly classified as a political minority within India. Dr. Roy Bar Sadeh is a historian of modern South Asia and the broader Islamic world, joining the University of Oxford in September 2026 as an Associate Professor in the Faculty of History and at St Antony's College. He is currently a Lecturer at the University of Manchester. His many articles and forthcoming book with University of Chicago Press, Muslims and the Minority Question: A Global History of South Asia, 1856–1947, follow the people who refused to accept that minority label as their political destiny. Along the way, we'll talk about food and language, Gulf pearl merchants and printing presses, rival plans for Mecca, an unlikely Soviet-Saudi partnership, and the search for protection beyond the nation-state. Host: Dr. Ahmed Y. AlMaazmi, an assistant professor of history at New York University Abu Dhabi. Co-host: Dr. Mohammed Alsudairi, a Lecturer of Politics and International Relations of the Arabic-speaking world at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies
In this conversation, we are entering an Indian Ocean world connected by steamships, telegraphs, pilgrimage routes, and print. From Bombay and the Gulf to Cairo and Mecca—and onward to Moscow and Geneva—merchants, scholars, activists, and political exiles debated a question that still feels urgent: how can different communities live together without being reduced to permanent majorities and minorities? Bombay sits near the center of our story. Under British rule, it was a major imperial port. But it was also a meeting place where Indian Ocean merchants financed publications, hosted traveling scholars, and helped ideas cross borders. At the same time, British censuses and representative politics produced a striking paradox. South Asia contained the world's largest Muslim population, yet Muslims were increasingly classified as a political minority within India. Dr. Roy Bar Sadeh is a historian of modern South Asia and the broader Islamic world, joining the University of Oxford in September 2026 as an Associate Professor in the Faculty of History and at St Antony's College. He is currently a Lecturer at the University of Manchester. His many articles and forthcoming book with University of Chicago Press, Muslims and the Minority Question: A Global History of South Asia, 1856–1947, follow the people who refused to accept that minority label as their political destiny. Along the way, we'll talk about food and language, Gulf pearl merchants and printing presses, rival plans for Mecca, an unlikely Soviet-Saudi partnership, and the search for protection beyond the nation-state. Host: Dr. Ahmed Y. AlMaazmi, an assistant professor of history at New York University Abu Dhabi. Co-host: Dr. Mohammed Alsudairi, a Lecturer of Politics and International Relations of the Arabic-speaking world at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies
A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/from-chanakya-to-ai-india-needs-its-own-management-model-14038647.html/ampIf you interpret the term ‘management' broadly, that is, to include not only the day to day running of companies, but also the bigger picture of governance, leadership, strategy, geoeconomics, and even civilizational survival, the clear answer is that there indeed is a unique Indian style of management.Whether it has been uniquely successful in the past is an open question, and given the ravages of invasion, one may be tempted to say it hasn't been; similarly whether, or how, it is appropriate for today's and tomorrow's needs is another good question.But it is useful to identify what may in fact be the factors underlying such a style of management, and there are likely three reasons: civilizational, cultural, and practical.CivilizationalThe first is perhaps the idea of Bharatiya exceptionalism: that is to say that Bharat exemplifies a singular civilizational thread that goes back to the ancient four-fold Hindu idea of purusharthas: dharma, artha, kama, and moksha. It is a holistic approach, perhaps most evident in the Bhagavad Gita, with its emphasis on ethical leadership and nishkama karma.It is certainly influenced by the topography and geography of the land, Jambudvipa, which has natural boundaries marking its extremities: Bharat, the land between the mountains and the sea.The climate and the rivers and the vegetation reflect a reality of natural abundance: what Rajiv Malhotra referred to when he spoke of the ‘religions of the forest' versus ‘the religions of the desert'. Bharat, in general, had a tropical cornucopia of food, and perhaps that was reflected early in a certain tolerance for not only for other humans, but also for all life.It is notable that among all the lands that were populated early, Bharat was the one that retained its megafauna the best. All other human settlements saw the rapid extinction of large animals. Sustainability, a key mantra these days, was built into the Bharatiya outlook all along.This same generosity was seen in trade patterns in the Indian Ocean as well: from 5,000 years ago, Bharatiya sailors executed cross-oceanic voyages, eastward during the southwest monsoon and vice versa during the northeast monsoon. The trade benefited everybody, as valuable goods were exchanged, in an illustration of the theory of comparative advantage.The infrastructure for trade was brilliantly executed: not only the building of ocean-going ships that plied the Spice Route, and the ability to defend them from pirates, but also the subtler aspects: the “multi-protocol switch” that allowed trading guilds along the peninsular coasts to facilitate trade between say, Romans, and say, Chinese, who had different languages and currencies. Bharatiya traders smoothed the transactions.Furthermore, the venture capital and banking services for the trading guilds were provided by Hindu temples.Pax Indica was benign; for instance, 1,001 years ago Rajendra Chola dispatched a large fleet to open up the Straits of Malacca for trade when the Srivijaya Empire interfered with it. The contrast with the current standoff in the Straits of Hormuz is salutary. Yes, it is necessary to ensure freedom of navigation, and the commons, with deadly force if need be.There was a very real notion of the ‘common good'. For instance, perhaps the greatest intellectual contribution of Bharat was innovation and the creation of Intellectual Property, and then making it freely available to all: not hoarding it for individual benefit.The model was that scholars and intellectuals were frugal, that the State (king or temple) provided for their basic needs, and in return, they produced masterworks over which they, unlike patenting in the western sense, did not claim any rights.Thus you have intellectual giants such as Brahmagupta with his invention of the zero, Panini with his context-free grammar, Madhava with his infinite series for trigonometric functions, and much later Ramanujan who wrote down his extraordinary theorems for all, and JC Bose whose seminal wireless communication discoveries he refused to patent, on principle. In fact, one could argue that the entire idea of “open-source” is a Bharatiya invention.The natural resources of the Indian subcontinent along with the industriousness of its residents allowed for the creation of tremendous wealth; but in the “Guns vs Butter” dichotomy in economics, Bharat neglected to build the guns; which meant that often invaders with guns were able to capture the butter.Management theory suggests that there are only three sustainable business strategies for long-term viability: 1) customer intimacy, 2) cost leadership, 3) innovation. Bharat historically chose innovation, and its native genius may result in the flowering of an intellectual revolution as the effects of impoverishment by conquest begin to recede.CulturalIt is interesting to note that Bharatiyas are different from both Occidentals, (e.g. the Anglosphere) and Orientals (e.g. East Asians) culturally. The stereotypes (with good reason) is that Occidentals are highly individualistic and that Orientals are highly group-oriented. Bharatiyas fall somewhere in between, being fairly individualistic, and gregarious, yet only moderately group-oriented.This has implications for governance. A highly individualistic society needs powerful laws that control individuals, including their tendencies for mischief. Thus, for example, the US is a highly regulated society, and their police are quite capable of unleashing deadly force. A highly group oriented society like Japan has norms that mean children clean after themselves in schools, and that discipline carries over into adulthood as well.Bharatiyas are neither; the net result is that there is a distinction between public spaces and private spaces. While people may keep their homes spotlessly clean, they have no problem littering anywhere or throwing trash just over their walls onto the public street. They also have no problem breaking traffic rules. “The tragedy of the commons” is rife.There is also the cultural memory of shortages and deprivation. Since people have grown up in a shortage economy, there is a tendency to hoard, cut corners, to pay bribes, to find any way of getting a slight advantage over others. Thus the unnecessary pushiness on roads, the inability to queue up anywhere, and especially the unwillingness to let people exit a lift before you enter.This applies to groups as well, as is seen in the “race to the bottom” in the case of the backward, the most backward, and the extremely backward designations intended for government largesse.There is also the unfortunate feeling that a contract is just a mere annoyance, not something that is to be followed to the letter. Punctuality is a small indicator of this: Bharatiyas on average feel justified in being late and casually making excuses. In contrast, both Anglosphere people and many East Asians (especially the Japanese) are punctual, and they can be trusted to deliver absolutely whatever they promise, whenever they promise.Interestingly, Chinese, like Bharatiyas, do not have integrity in terms of keeping promises, which is a problem in doing business with both. In Bharat, there is also extreme reluctance to deliver bad news until the very last minute, for instance the day before something is due to be delivered. This can be very difficult for partners to deal with.Perhaps all this makes Bharat a low-trust society. As a result of all this, doing business in Bharat takes twice as long, and managers need to have contingency plans, and to do intrusive ongoing audits to ensure that things are on time.But there are inspiring counter-examples of community action and high trust. One is the re-greening of the Aravallis with the support of the Tarun Bharat Sangh and Rajendra Singh: a few villages built simple check dams based on traditional knowledge, bringing back an extinct river.PracticalIn addition to the refined heights of the civilizational perspective, Bharat also excelled in the theories of tactical management and even realpolitik. Even though there is a tendency in certain circles to lionize Machiavelli, von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, it is likely that Chanakya outdid all of them in the single-minded pursuit of strategy and governance, and he wrote his masterwork a millennium before them.Chanakya's ideas of statecraft are notable for their cold realism. He focuses on the creation of leverage and thus power for the sovereign. Speaking of leverage, or competitive advantage, we have seen how China has turned its control of the rare earths supply chain into a weapon; similarly the US has its technology (the recent denial of Anthropic Mythos to all foreigners) as well as its control of the SWIFT network of financial transactions. These can be coercive.Another of Chanakya's supremely rational assumptions is that your neighbor is likely to be your enemy, if not today, maybe tomorrow, simply because of proximity and the resulting irritants. Thus it becomes useful to make common cause with their neighbor.Taking this one step further, you arrive at the Mandala theory of statecraft: a series of concentric circles (for convenience of depiction), where you cultivate your neighbor's neighbors, and also the Far Emperor or udasina (indifferent power), a player outside the immediate neighborhood, but powerful, and who can have a significant impact on your local power politics. Clearly Indian foreign policy has looked upon the US as a Far Emperor; similarly Indian firms may look upon Big Tech companies as Far Emperors in their local struggles.Chanakya does not shy away from the harsh realities of power politics. Matsya nyaya, where big fish eat little fish, is a crystal-clear exposition of the idea that might is right: which we see in contemporary affairs, both business and international relations, on a daily basis. In addition, he recognized that information is the key to advantage (as Big Tech demonstrates today), and as such, he made it a priority to collect data, including through a network of spies. This leads to intrigue, infiltration, and the creation of internal dissent among the enemy.Chanakya's four classic stages of competition are notable: sama, dana, bheda and danda. Of these, possibly the one that is most widely practised today is bheda,the exploitation of internal fault lines within the enemy. With the “million mutinies” in India, such as farmer protests, CAA riots, and the recent ‘cockroach' riots, it is clear that there are “toolkits” in play. There is much information warfare, as seen in relentless bot attacks on Bharatiyas on social media.In modern management terms, India should learn from the successful business models of the G2 powers. The US as a nation, and its big firms, typically use overwhelming force (financial, technological or military, as the case may be) to overwhelm their foes. The metaphor is American football: massive force is a major factor, though tactical misdirection is also widespread.China uses a different tactic. It goes for cost leadership by using state-guided industrial policy to build massive over-capacity in selected areas; with fierce internal competition, this leads to plummeting costs. Then by flooding export markets with cheap products, they are able to destroy local players in those markets. A case in point right now is the explosion in cheap generativeAI Large Language Models (LLMs) that are undercutting US firms such as Anthropic and OpenAI.Thus both powers are using their standard operating procedures in generativeAI: US firms are pouring in hundreds of billions of dollars in an effort to corner the market; Chinese firms (and the state) are collapsing the prices in the market.What should India's business model look like in this context? Instead of going head-on against these large economies, India should find ways to thrive around them: for example, look for ‘white spaces' that are not in their gunsights. But these open areas will change rapidly: an example is IT services, which was an opportunity for 20+ years, but not any more.In generativeAI, a sound Bharatiya play might be to avoid over-investment in foundational models, use (Chinese) open-source models and modify them, for example with multi-lingual capabilities; invest in other areas of the stack such as in vertical applications, for instance in agriculture, or medicine, or governance, or jurisprudence. Bharat can use ‘distillation' techniques to reduce the need for data, and also create Small Language Models (SLMs) in narrow domains, e.g. in Indic Knowledge Systems.There is also the salutary example of the operating system, which is arguably the most important piece of software on any machine, because it controls the entire functioning of the system. But Unix, possibly the most capable operating system ever, was open-sourced as Linux, and is freely available and ubiquitous. On the other hand, Microsoft realized its OS, Windows, was a tremendous distribution channel for third-party applications, and has made its trillions based on it. This is what Anthropic, OpenAI et al are betting on.Will the future of LLMs be Unix/Linux (open source) or Windows? Nobody knows at the moment, and therefore it may be best to avoid that battle, and focus on other layers of the stack, such as applications (higher layers) or hardware and GCCs (lower layers).Nimbleness and innovation are key when you are dancing with elephants. Direct confrontation is a bad idea, as in the metaphor of the tree and the cane from the Mahabharata's Santi Parva, where Bhishma comments on the dialogue between the Ocean and Ganga. He suggests that as canes bend to the river, but trees do not, it is best to yield tactically to superior force.Bharat therefore has to evolve a business model of its own that is sustainable in the long run, and based on its own capabilities. At the moment, a good test case is generativeAI. Another is aerospace, where as soon as ISRO began to offer niche markets to the private sector, there has been a virtual explosion in startups doing interesting things.ConclusionTradition and ancient texts give Bharat a set of management practices and principles that may have within them the basis for a unique business model that can outperform the competition, which at the moment consists of American-style private capitalism and Chinese-style state-controlled enterprises.2300 words, 4 August 2026 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe
In this episode, Mike is joined by Dr Arzan Tarapore, Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. They unpack the Pentagon's decision to revert the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) name back to Pacific Command (PACOM). They explore the strategic and political rationale behind the change; its implications for security dynamics in the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific; and what it reveals about U.S. conceptions of the Indo-Pacific as an operational theatre in U.S. defence planning.
Sri Lanka's logistics story is visible almost everywhere you look. Colombo sorts containers for the region. Hambantota is building an automotive transshipment business. Tea and cinnamon turn mountain geography into a first-mile challenge, while apparel compresses production timelines into something you can watch happen in a single day. In this solo episode, I'm nerding out on the logistics I noticed during a trip through the country. The episode also looks inside Jetwing Yala, where solar power, biomass cooling, desalination, wastewater treatment and biogas make hotel operations part of the supply-chain story.Links: Jetwing YalaCeylon Artisanal Tea AssociationWatch this episode on YouTubeNote: sorry for the added text in the video version. I spent 25 hours editing this damn thing only to "add a little to the beginning" right before uploading that ended up displaying the rest of a track from an entire other episode. Whoops. If this bothers your OCD like me, hit the YouTube link above to watch the new upload that's free of these rookie mistakes! -----------------------------------------THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS!SPI Logistics has been a Day 1 supporter of this podcast which is why we're proud to promote them in every episode. During that time, we've gotten to know the team and their agents to confidently say they are the best home for freight agents in North America for 40 years and counting. Listen to past episodes to hear why.CargoRex is the search engine for the logistics industry—connecting LSPs with the right tools, services, events, and creators to explore, discover, and evolve.Digital Dispatch maximizes and manages your #1 sales tool with a website that establishes trust and builds rock-solid relationships with your leads and customers.
Listen Now to 020 WTFuture Watch 020 WTFuture Hey folks! We are coming to you from Boulder Creek today, joined by Bobby in sunny San Francisco, before we head off on our annual summer vacation to Montreal! In this week’s chat, we completely geeked out over the future of our “augmented brains” and the rise of local AI, like the mind-blowing new Bonsai tech that squeezes a massive 27-billion parameter model right onto an iPhone. It is a total game-changer because it acts as a private, “sovereign” AI companion that does not need the cloud, saves energy, and ensures nobody steals your ideas. We also had a great time joking about the “dead internet” theory now that bot traffic has surged 7,800%. But don’t worry, human creativity is still king—especially when we use AI as a collaborator to create hilarious, custom animations of floppy disks barfing green data goo, complete with gassy liquid sound fx! Looking to the stars, we were absolutely captivated by SpaceX’s Starship landing beautifully in the Indian Ocean and their wild plans to launch giant AI compute satellites to build an off-planet internet. We also discussed the hilarious twist of a 1972 Soviet Venus probe, Cosmos 482, finally crash-landing back on Earth after a 53-year detour in orbit. To top it all off, astronomers just found LHS1140B, a rocky exoplanet 48 light-years away that has a faint stream of helium, marking the first time we’ve detected an atmosphere on a habitable-zone rocky world! It’s a beautifully abundant, high-tech future ahead of us, and as we pack our bags for the Laurentian Mountains, we can’t wait to see what wildly optimistic paradigm shifts happen next. Enjoy!
Nir Peled, author of Beyond 100 Percent: Rebuilding Life After It Breaks (May 1, 2026)? Rooted in a background spanning Israeli Defense Forces leadership, high-pressure technology executive roles, and the quiet wisdom of his Holocaust-survivor grandmother, Nir built a practical system for healing that delivered results few thought possible, one that took him beyond 100%.Life can change in a heartbeat. What will you do when it happens to you?When Nir Peled collapsed on the floor of his home office from a stroke at age 49, everything changed. In an instant, he lost his speech, mobility, and sense of identity. In the months that followed, he embarked on a grueling journey of rehabilitation, rebuilding his body, mind, and cognitive function, and in the process, uncovered more than he ever expected.The stroke wasn't Nir's first brush with death. He has survived a car bombing in the Sinai Desert, anaphylaxis that ended his military career, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, a violent armed robbery deep in the Amazon jungle, cancer that spread fast, and a serious motorcycle accident. Each crisis taught him something different about resilience and rebuilding, but the stroke became his greatest teacher, revealing how all those lessons could come together into a framework for moving forward after life falls apart.This book began as a recovery journal. What the reader discovers alongside Nir, one honest chapter at a time, is something he didn't set out to write: a complete framework for rebuilding after everything breaks. The principles weren't planned. They were earned.Written with raw honesty and unexpected humor, this is not a clinical guide or a collection of platitudes. It's the story of a recovering high performer who had to relearn everything, and a powerful guide for anyone rebuilding life after it breaks.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-like-it-s-live--4113802/support.
Episode Title : Sakili – Life is Beautiful Episode Description Sakili is a beautiful Creole expression that means, “It's going to be okay,” or simply, “Life is beautiful.” In this heartfelt episode, Lynette explores what it really means to participate in your own rescue. Recovery isn't simply about giving up alcohol—it's about reclaiming your life, expanding your world, and reconnecting with the joy that has always been available beneath the numbness. Drawing on a powerful encounter with four magnificent sperm whales in the Indian Ocean, Lynette reflects on how addiction slowly shrinks our comfort zone until life itself becomes small. True recovery begins when we stop waiting for life to change and begin courageously participating in it. In this episode you'll discover: Why recovery is about so much more than stopping drinking. How addiction gradually shrinks your world—and how to begin expanding it again. The difference between understanding your past and participating in your future. Why thoughts alone don't change the brain—behaviours do. A fresh perspective on the Hero's Journey, and why sometimes the dragon has to slay the old identity before a new life can emerge. How coming home to your body reconnects you with your joy, vitality, and life force. If you've relapsed, feel discouraged, or are wondering whether life without alcohol can ever feel joyful, this episode is a gentle reminder that healing isn't about perfection. It's about choosing one courageous step. One new behaviour. One breath at a time. Sakili. Life is beautiful. Quote from this Episode “Every time you choose life over numbness, every time you participate in your own rescue, your world expands.” Resources If this episode resonated with you and you'd like support on your own alcohol-free journey, you can connect with Lynette through: Website: https://www.tribesober.com/ Path to Purpose Community: https://www.tribesober.com/path-to-purpose/ Email: lynette@llrcoaching.com Music Intro & Outro Music: “Life is Beautiful” by The K Club featuring Brittany Rogers. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow the Tribe Sober Podcast, leave a review, and share it with someone who may need the reminder that recovery is not about losing your life—it's about finding it.
Nearly seven kilometers beneath the Indian Ocean, a team of scientists went looking for hydrothermal vents — and found something else entirely. What they mistook, at first glance, for smoking chimneys turned out to be whale skulls: the opening of a necropolis stretching 1,200 kilometers across the sea floor, holding nearly 500 fossilized whales alongside active whale falls still teeming with life. In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Xikun Song of the Institute of Deep-Sea Science and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, one of the researchers behind this landmark discovery, newly published in Nature. Dr. Song walks us through the moment of realization on the submersible monitors, the physiology that may be driving deep-diving beaked whales to their limits, and why this site could rewrite what we know about whale evolution over the past 5.3 million years — with remains that may number in the millions, and roughly 6.7 million tons of sequestered carbon locked into the sea floor. He also shares the story in his own words — in Mandarin, with translation — describing the exact moment his team realized they'd found something extraordinary. Links mentioned in this episode: The full study in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10546-z Smithsonian Magazine's coverage, with photos from the dives: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-discover-the-worlds-largest-deepest-whale-graveyard-where-cetacean-remains-have-been-piling-up-for-five-million-years-180988942/
Maps have triggered territorial claims, saved fragile environments and brought home the fragility of the Great Barrier Reef in the face of climate change. In her book Plotting the Oceans: Stories of Powerful Maps and Their Makers, Sarah Hamylton tells the stories of five cartographers whose maps and ideas produced big results but in different ways. Charles Darwin mapped the world's coral reefs to support a theory about how they formed, and in doing so developed insights that shaped his eventual theory of evolution. The trailblazing Marie Tharp, barred from ocean expeditions in the 1950s, created the first detailed map of the ocean floor, providing key evidence for the then radical idea of continental drift. In this discussion with Robyn Williams Sarah Hamylton describes geographer and academic David Stodardt who made maps of remote atolls and whose advocacy led to the saving of Aldabra Atoll in the western Indian Ocean. It is home to hundreds of thousands of giant tortoises but was once considered as the site for an Anglo/American military base.
SpaceX finally launched Flight 13 successfully and Starship's landing was so soft that it's still afloat in the Indian Ocean. What are the mysterious Little Red Dots? A terrestrial exoplanet only 49 light years away has an atmosphere! The Nancy Grace Roman space telescope is prepping for a late August launch ahead of schedule!Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/made-of-stars--4746260/support.
In 1947, the Army announced it had recovered a crashed "flying disc" near Roswell, then reversed itself within a day — a contradiction the Air Force didn't explain until 1994, when it revealed a classified spy program called Project Mogul. Roswell wasn't even the first: unidentified wreckage and bodies had been turning up for decades before it.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/RoswellWasntFirstFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: When you hear the words “UFO crash” you likely think of Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. And while that is the most famous of supposed extraterrestrial spaceship crashes, it is by no means the first. In fact, there were several taking place before Roswell became a household name. (UFO Crashes Before Roswell) *** But first – we'll take a look at Roswell itself… and what might have been behind the crash, the UFOs, and the aliens! (Behind Roswell's Aliens) *** Numerous travelers have gone missing in Nahanni Valley… and many whose bodies have been found, have been decapitated. It's no wonder it has been nicknamed “The Valley of Headless Men”. (The Valley of Headless Men) *** In 2016, construction in a San Francisco family's backyard unearthed a terrifying find… a glass coffin. And the history behind it tells a morbid history of the city. (The Karner's Backyard Glass Coffin) *** Former Green Beret Jeffrey MacDonald claimed that a gang of acid-crazed Manson Family copycats brutally murdered his pregnant wife and two daughters in 1970, but then he was found guilty. Did he commit the crime, or did the law convict the wrong man? (The Evil Deeds of Jeffrey MacDonald) *** It's understood that scientifically, alchemy – attempting to turn a substance or element into gold – is impossible. But then, there is that one incident that took place in the early seventeenth century that has some people wondering if that's wrong. (The Alchemy Master)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:27.594 = Show Open00:03:47.621 = Behind Roswell's Aliens / UFO Crashes Before Roswell00:19:45.640 = The Valley of Headless Men ***00:33:18.357 = The Karner's Backyard Glass Coffin00:44:54.640 = The Evil Deeds of Jeffrey MacDonald ***00:55:31.498 = The Alchemy Master01:02:26.698 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:“Behind Roswell's Aliens” by Adam Janos for History.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yd5fhudu“UFO Crashes Before Roswell” from Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2w6d76yh“The Valley of Headless Men” by Aleksa Vuckovic for Ancient-Origins.net: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9c6zf4“The Evil Deeds of Jeffrey MacDonald” by Marco Margaritoff for AllThatsInteresting.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8eant7“The Alchemy Master” by Ellen Lloyd for AncientPages.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4xzysbwc“The Karner's Backyard Glass Coffin” by Trilby Beresford for Ranker.com's Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3mpvk9jh(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: January 2021This episode of Weird Darkness moves from a classified Cold War balloon program in the New Mexico desert to a Canadian valley littered with decapitated bodies, a Victorian child's glass coffin dug up in a San Francisco backyard, a Green Beret convicted of butchering his own family, and a seventeenth-century alchemist tortured for the secret of turning lead into gold.It opens with the 1947 Roswell crash, tracing how rancher W.W. "Mac" Brazel's discovery of wreckage on his Lincoln County property led Colonel William Blanchard's Roswell Army Air Field to announce the capture of a "flying disc," only for the Army to reverse itself within days and blame a weather balloon, complete with staged photos of Major Jesse Marcel posing with the debris. The story follows the account through the U.S. Air Force's 1994 admission that the wreckage actually came from Project Mogul, a secret high-altitude balloon array built to detect Soviet atomic tests, and its 1997 explanation that reported alien bodies were fallen parachute test dummies, then weighs those official conclusions against UFO researcher Donald Schmitt's objections and journalist Annie Jacobsen's competing claim that the crash involved deformed children deployed by Joseph Stalin and designed by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.From there, the episode moves through six UFO crash reports that predate Roswell by decades, including an 1897 cigar-shaped craft said to have destroyed Judge Proctor's windmill in Aurora, Texas, and left a small humanoid body buried in the local cemetery; an 1862 wreck witnessed by shipwrecked sailors from the vessel Christine on a deserted Indian Ocean island, where they found twelve-foot-tall bodies with bronze beards; a UFO crash near Stavropol, Russia, whose three survivors reportedly died from being unable to breathe Earth's atmosphere; a 1941 crash in the Carolinas recovered by the U.S. Army during a military exercise involving soldier Guy Simeone; an 1884 debris field of gear-like metal fragments found by rancher John Ellis in Dundy County, Nebraska; and a wartime British crash investigated by journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, who died shortly after publishing claims that the recovered craft's crew stood under four feet tall.Next, the story shifts to Canada's Nahanni Valley, where at least 44 people have died or vanished since 1908, beginning with prospector brothers Willie and Frank McLeod, whose headless skeletons were found at their camp two years after they disappeared, and continuing through the decapitations of Swiss prospector Martin Jorgenson and outlaw "Yukon" Fisher, the mysterious cabin fire that killed Phil Powers, and the vanishing of Annie Laferte, who was later spotted wandering naked and disoriented near the Flat River — deaths locals attribute variously to the legendary Naha tribe, the valley's hot sulphur springs, or predators, while Dene oral history holds that the warlike Naha people simply disappeared without explanation.The episode then turns to 2016, when a construction crew remodeling John and Ericka Karner's San Francisco home unearthed a 19th-century glass-and-cast-iron coffin containing the preserved body of a toddler, later identified through DNA testing led by genealogist Elissa Davey as Edith Howard Cook, who died of malnutrition in 1876 and was accidentally left behind when San Francisco's Odd Fellows Cemetery was relocated to Colma in the 1930s — a discovery the Karner family says ended years of unexplained footsteps they'd heard from a toddler no longer in the house.From there, the story follows former Green Beret Jeffrey MacDonald, convicted of stabbing his pregnant wife Colette and daughters Kimberly and Kristen to death at Fort Bragg in 1970 after claiming a blonde intruder chanting about acid and "pigs" oversaw the killings, an account investigators concluded was staged using details from the recent Manson Family murders; the case follows his decades of appeals, including the 1983 bestseller "A Fatal Vision" that branded him a psychopath and filmmaker Errol Morris's later book arguing the evidence against him was mishandled.The episode closes with the story of Alexander Seton, a secretive Scottish alchemist known as the Cosmopolitan, who in 1602 convinced skeptical Swiss professor Wolfgang Drenheim that he had transmuted lead into gold using nothing but a wrapped powder and a goldsmith's crucible in Fribourg. Seton's success drew the attention of Emperor Rudolf II and later trapped him in the custody of Christian II, Elector of Saxony, who had him pierced with iron spikes and burned with molten lead in an attempt to force him to reveal his formula; Seton escaped in 1603 with the help of his friend Michael Sendivogius but died a broken man soon after, and the alchemical text he was said to have written, the Book of Twelve Chapters, was destroyed, leaving his method lost.
FILE 13. Headline: Starship Test 13: Success and Challenges in Reusability Guest: Doug Messier Summary: SpaceX's Starship Test 13 achieved a controlled landing of the spacecraft in the Indian Ocean, though the Super Heavy booster exploded during its Gulf landing. Doug Messier explains that while the mission successfully deployed Starlink satellites, the FAA remains concerned about future overland flights. The ultimate goal is full reusability for NASA's upcoming lunar missions and upgrading the capacity of the Starlink network for laser communications.
SCHEDULE JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW, 7-27-26Headline: Signaling Peace Amidst Conflict: The US and Iran Standstill Guest: Ambassador Hussein Haqqani and Bill Roggio Summary: John Batchelor discusses the current tensions between Iran and the United States following a sudden halt in American bombing. Ambassador Haqqani explains that both nations are seeking a diplomatic "off-ramp," though they face severe internal political constraints that prevent either a ground invasion or a total surrender. Bill Roggio adds that while secret talks are likely, reports of depleted US munitions might be influencing the decision to pause military action.Headline: The Threat of Escalation in the Caspian Theater Guest: Ambassador Hussein Haqqani and Bill RoggioSummary: This segment examines the potential for unconventional warfare escalation across Eurasia and the specific risks within the Caspian theater. Haqqani warns that Iran's ability to hold the global economy hostage through the Red Sea and Hormuz Strait creates a complex dilemma for the US. Bill Roggio concurs that limited aerial bombardment is insufficient for regime change and notes that neighboring countries like Kuwait remain hesitant to directly engage for fear of retaliation.Headline: Somalia's Unverifiable Victories: The Death of a Shabaab Founder Guest: Caleb Weiss and Bill RoggioSummary: Somali officials claim the death of Maalim Ibrahim, a co-founder of al-Shabaab and a key military planner who held many executive hats. However, guest Caleb Weiss cautions that such claims often lack third-party verification and may be false. The US is currently threatening to cut funding for the UN mission in Somalia due to a perceived lack of progress against the group and pervasive internal political corruption.Headline: Houthi Blockades and the Siege of Saudi Energy Ports Guest: Bridget Turner and Bill Roggio Summary: Houthi rebels have initiated a maritime blockade against Saudi Arabian ports, causing ship traffic through the Bab el-Mandeb strait to fall to its lowest level in months. While the Houthis cite local grievances, their actions align with Iran's broader strategy to pressure global energy markets. Despite the threat, Saudi Arabia has retaliated by bombing Houthi ports, even as the rebels receive targeting assistance from Iranian spy ships.Headline: High Stakes Diplomacy: Netanyahu's Visit and the Iranian Threat Guest: Malcolm Hoenlein and Thaddeus McCotter Summary: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu travels to Washington to meet with President Trump and attend the funeral of the late Senator Graham. The agenda focuses heavily on Iran's continued aggression, including reports of the "Pickaxe Mountain" facility containing thousands of centrifuges deep underground. Malcolm Hoenlein notes that despite the diplomatic pause, Iran continues to execute young dissidents and sponsor assassination plots in Israel and the United Kingdom.Headline: The Lebanese Pilot Zones: A Fragile Experiment in Peace Guest: Malcolm Hoenlein and Thaddeus McCotterSummary: Lebanon is attempting to establish humanitarian pilot zones where the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) replace withdrawing Israeli troops. Critics argue this model mirrors the failed Gaza disengagement, as Hezbollah remains entrenched and unwilling to disarm. Additionally, Hoenlein discusses a recent Ukrainian attack on an Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea, which signals a dangerous expansion of the regional conflict that may have broader retaliatory implications for the future.Headline: Hezbollah's Surveillance and the Ineffectiveness of the LAF Guest: David Daoud and Bill Roggio Summary: The IDF recently shot down an unarmed Hezbollah drone gathering intelligence over strategic ridges in southern Lebanon. David Daoud highlights that Hezbollah continues to operate freely despite the presence of the Lebanese Armed Forces in pilot zones. The segment questions why Western leaders trust the Lebanese government, given its failure to demand nationwide disarmament and its history of coordinating with Hezbollah to hide military infrastructure from international monitors.FILE 8: Not provided in the sources.Headline: Brazil's Transnational Politics: Lula vs. the Conservative Alliance Guest: Ernesto Araújo and Alejandro Peña Esclusa Summary: President Lula da Silva of Brazil has shifted toward an anti-American stance, aligning himself with "criminal socialism" and the São Paulo Forum. Former Foreign Minister Araújo describes a growing transnational alliance between Donald Trump, Javier Milei, and Flavio Bolsonaro to counter communist penetration in Latin America. The upcoming Brazilian election is seen as a critical battleground for the future of economic freedom and regional stability against organized crime.Headline: The Venezuelan Transition and the Shield of the Americas Guest: Ernesto Araújo and Alejandro Peña EsclusaSummary: Acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez has received unexpected praise from President Trump, causing concern among opposition members who view her as a gangster. Alejandro Peña Esclusa argues that Rodriguez is a repressive figure and suggests a reconstruction government of experts instead. Meanwhile, Brazil's Flavio Bolsonaro seeks to join the "Shield of the Americas" to combat regional criminal gangs and support a democratic transition in Venezuela.FILE 11: Not provided in the sources.Headline: Iran's Drone Test: Challenging the US Strategic Pause Guest: Edmund Fitton-Brown and Bill RoggioSummary: Following a US suspension of airstrikes, Iran launched drone attacks against Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Iraq to test the Trump administration's resolve. Edmund Fitton-Brown explains that Iran aims to prove it decides when pauses occur, not the US. The segment warns that without consistent US pressure, Iran could establish a "regional protection racket," leaving Arab states to seek separate accommodations with the bully on the block.Headline: Starship Test 13: Success and Challenges in Reusability Guest: Doug Messier Summary: SpaceX's Starship Test 13 achieved a controlled landing of the spacecraft in the Indian Ocean, though the Super Heavy booster exploded during its Gulf landing. Doug Messier explains that while the mission successfully deployed Starlink satellites, the FAA remains concerned about future overland flights. The ultimate goal is full reusability for NASA's upcoming lunar missions and upgrading the capacity of the Starlink network for laser communications.Headline: Decapitating Hamas: Targeted Strikes in Gaza Guest: Samuel Benner and Bill Roggio Summary: The IDF has conducted targeted strikes against Hamas's internal security commanders, including the head of the police force in central Gaza. Samuel Benner reports that while the upper military echelon has been largely eliminated, Israel is now targeting those responsible for imposing rule on Gazans. Despite these strikes, Hamas continues to control food distribution, effectively using humanitarian aid as a "piggy bank" for the organization.Headline: The Iran War: A Strategy Stuck in Stalemate Guest: Jonathan Schanzer and Bill Roggio Summary: After twelve days of intense US bombing, there is confusion regarding the long-term plan for achieving behavior change in Tehran. Jonathan Schanzer argues that the regime remains ideologically committed to power and is unlikely to offer concessions for money alone. Furthermore, Iran's capability to launch ballistic missiles remains significant, and the IRGC has not yet felt the impression that a total regime collapse is imminent.Headline: The AI Bubble: China's Strategic Intellectual Property Theft Guest: Brandon Ward and Gordon ChangSummary: China is allegedly using stolen American intellectual property to train its artificial intelligence models, such as Moonshot's Kimmy K3. Brandon Ward suggests this is a strategic move to collapse the inflated market value of the American AI sector. Gordon Chang warns that despite export bans, Chinese firms continue to acquire high-end Nvidia chips, complicating US strategic plans and economic dominance while threatening a potential future shooting war.
We can decide to stay home, but even then, the wider world is always close to our skin. From global trade to ideas that travel across continents, the wider world is always woven into our modern life.Since when has this been the case?There is a modern story about globalisation — a story about telecommunications and aeroplanes and such — but this is the climax of a long process, not its beginning. To find the deeper roots of globalisation, we should turn our gaze to the medieval world, and specifically to events around the year 1000.Or so argues historian Valerie Hansen.In this episode, we discuss the various curious developments around the year 1000 that began to connect the world into an interconnected web. From Viking explorers to the Silk Roads in Africa, Hansen offers many fascinating windows into the surprising connections that were already beginning to link the medieval world together. We also discuss the spread of inventions and world religions, as well as the deeper forces that Hansen thinks have long been driving world history.Enjoy!FACT-CHECKINGNo errors have been detected in this conversation. If you notice one, please get in touch via Substack or the form below.LINKSHansen's books: The Silk Road: A New History and The Year 1000.Support: Patreon.com/OnHumansArticles & newsletter: OnHumans.Substack.comGet in touch: https://forms.gle/h5wcmefuwvD6asos8Music credit: Aleksey Chistilin (Lexin_Music) via Pixabay.MENTIONSNames: Erik the Red | Bjarni Herjólfsson | Jacques Cartier | Vladimir the Great | Mansa Musa | William Dalrymple | Kenneth Pomeranz | Andrés Moreno-Estrada | Michael Coe | Mary Miller | Ralph Austen | Richard Davis | Paul Freedman | Thor HeyerdahlHistorical places: L'Anse aux Meadows | Greenland | Newfoundland | Chichén Itzá | the Yucatán Peninsula | the Baltic Sea | the Song dynasty | the Liao dynasty | the Abbasid Caliphate | Baghdad | the Indian Ocean | the Swahili Coast | Mali | Kaifeng | Hagia SophiaKEYWORDSglobal history | macrohistory | economic history | medieval history | early global trade | long-distance trade | Silk Roads | Indian Ocean trade | trans-Saharan trade | maritime trade networks | Viking / Norse exploration | Polynesian migrations | population genetics | pre-Columbian contact | Viking–Maya contact hypothesis | Polynesian–Native American contact hypothesis | Song dynasty | Liao dynasty | Abbasid Caliphate | medieval Africa | Swahili Coast trade | medieval slavery | trans-Saharan slave trade | slavery and serfdom | slavery in China | spread of world religions | Christianisation of Europe | spread of Islam | Buddhism in Asia | diffusion of technology | history of inventions | paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass | Indian numerals and zero | Maya mathematics | history of food
Astronomy Daily · S05E150 · “Lucky Thirteen” · Saturday 25 July 2026. Your Weekend Wrap: Starship Flight 13 finally flies and floats, the strongest exomoon candidate yet, a robotic satellite-servicer on its way to GEO, and what the Moon's far side reveals about Earth — plus a both-hemispheres skywatch. In this episode Chapter Segment 00:00 Cold open & headlines 01:30 LEAD: Starship Flight 13 flies — softest splashdown yet, first real Starlink V3 deploy 09:00 Exo-satellite at CD-35 2722 — strongest exomoon candidate yet (Nature) 11:45 Northrop Grumman MRV-MEP — a mechanic for the geostationary belt 14:30 Chang'e-6 — the Moon's far side records Earth's magnetosphere (Nature Geoscience) 17:15 Skywatch — Buck Moon, Delta Aquariids, the 12 Aug Perseids + total solar eclipse 20:45 Sign-off Sources & further reading STARSHIP FLIGHT 13 • Space.com — Starship's “softest splashdown” yet after Flight 13 — https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/spacexs-starship-megarocket-makes-the-softest-splashdown-ever-after-launching-next-gen-starlink-satellites-in-flight-13-test-video • UPI — Starship successful flight test, splashes down in Indian Ocean — https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2026/07/24/Starship-has-successful-flight-test-splash-down-in-Indian-Ocean/3791784840519/ • CNN — Starship hits key milestones in “Lucky 13” test flight — https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/24/science/live-news/spacex-starship-flight-13-launch EXO-SATELLITE CD-35 2722 • ESO — New “exomoon” detection challenges cosmic labels — https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2610/ • Nature (paper) — Planetary-mass exosatellite around a substellar companion — https://www.nature.com/ • Phys.org — Jupiter-mass “exomoon” orbiting a brown dwarf — https://phys.org/news/2026-07-jupiter-mass-exomoon-orbiting-brown.html MRV-MEP SATELLITE SERVICING • Northrop Grumman — MRV launches, ushering in a new era of in-space servicing — https://news.northropgrumman.com/launch/northrop-grummans-mission-robotic-vehicle-launches-ushering-in-a-new-era-of-in-space-servicing • Spaceflight Now — Novel geosynchronous robotic servicing satellite launch — https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/07/21/live-coverage-spacex-to-launch-novel-geosynchronous-robotic-servicing-satellite-on-decade-long-mission/ CHANG'E-6 FAR-SIDE SOLAR WIND • Nature Geoscience — Deeper solar wind penetration on the Moon's far side — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-026-02042-w • EurekAlert! / CAS — Chang'e-6 samples reveal how Earth slows the solar wind — https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1136535 SKYWATCH • EarthSky — Delta Aquariid meteor shower 2026 — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/everything-you-need-to-know-delta-aquarid-meteor-shower/ • EarthSky — Visible planets & night-sky guide / 12 Aug total solar eclipse — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/visible-planets-tonight-mars-jupiter-venus-saturn-mercury/ Astronomy Daily is part of the Bitesz.com Podcast Network. Follow @AstroDailyPod and find every episode at astronomydaily.io.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-latest-space-news--5648921/support.Sponsor Details:Ensure your online privacy by using NordVPN. To get our special listener deal and save a lot of money, visit www.astronomydaily.io/nordvpn. You'll be glad you did!Get the best secure and private email on the planet. Stop your Government, google and who knows who else spying on every email you write. Do what we did and use ProtonMail. They beleive in privacy and there are no ads in their business model...yet they still provide a free forever service. Check them out and get out special deal at www.astronomydaily.io/protonmailBecome a supporter of Astronomy Daily by joining our Supporters Club. Commercial free episodes daily are only a click way... Click HereThis episode includes AI-generated content.
Astronomy Daily S05E148 — "Far Side" Thursday 23 July 2026 Starship gets a second shot at Flight 13 — with a schedule caveat worth knowing about. The first far-side lunar samples reveal that Earth has been quietly shielding the side of the Moon that faces us. Astronomers debate whether the lunar far side should be closed to industry. The Milky Way's only helium nova finally steps out from behind twenty-five years of dust. And the case that our entire galaxy once turned over. Plus a skywatch closer with a straightforward piece of advice about the Delta Aquariids: do not wait for the peak.In this episode Starship Flight 13 ● Window opens 6:45pm EDT / 2245 GMT Thursday 23 July — 8:45am AEST and 10:45am NZST Friday 24 July. ● Schedule is not locked: Starbase road and beach closure notices point to further Pad 2 testing. ● The 16 July attempt aborted at T-0 when four of 33 Raptors missed start parameters; the limit is three. ● Two Raptors were removed and replaced before this attempt. ● First-ever Starship deployment of V3 Starlink satellites — 20 of them. ● Super Heavy splashes down in the Gulf at ~7 minutes; Ship targets the Indian Ocean off Western Australia at ~65 minutes. No catch attempts. Chang'e-6 and the solar wind ● Published in Nature Geoscience by a team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Geology and Geophysics. ● Based on 1,935 grams of regolith returned from the South Pole–Aitken basin on the lunar far side. ● First direct laboratory comparison of solar wind implantation between the near and far sides. ● Far-side soil records faster, deeper-penetrating particles; the neon isotope ratio sits below every near-side sample measured. ● About a quarter of the solar wind exposure at the Chang'e-5 near-side site involved wind decelerated by Earth's magnetosphere. The far-side site shows none. ● Opens the possibility of using lunar noble gases as a fossil record of Earth's magnetic field over deep time. The far side debate — NAM 2026 ● Held Tuesday 21 July at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting, University of Birmingham. Convened by Prof Martin Ward. ● For the motion: Prof Joe Silk (Johns Hopkins) and Dr Jonathan McDowell (Durham Space Research Centre). ● Against: Dr Nikita Chiu (Durham) and Dr Manuel Salvoldi (aerospace engineer and educator). ● For: the far side is the only radio-quiet site near Earth — critical for detecting the cosmic dark ages, and an exceptional platform for gravitational wave detection. ● Against: commercial investment is what makes lunar exploration sustainable, and governance can let science and industry coexist. ● Audience support for the motion rose from 68% to 76% across the debate. V445 Puppis ● Presented at NAM 2026 by John Mills, University of Warwick. ● The only confirmed helium nova in the Milky Way. Erupted in late 2000, then vanished behind its own dust for over twenty years. ● Now confirmed as a white dwarf accreting from a rare stripped helium star — only a few thousand such stars are thought to exist in the entire galaxy. ● Orbital period of 3.7 days, roughly double previous estimates. Mass transfer has resumed. ● Unexplained high-speed "bullets" of possibly oxygen-rich gas travelling up to 20 million mph (~9,000 km/s) — never seen in any other nova. ● Data from ESO's Very Large Telescope, Hubble, the Southern African Large Telescope and TESS. ● Helium novae may be one pathway to Type Ia supernovae, the standard candles used to measure cosmic expansion. The Milky Way disc flip ● Presented at NAM 2026 by Kirill Batrakov, Durham University. ● Based on 25 Milky Way-like galaxies in the Auriga simulation suite, followed across roughly 11 billion years. ● Galaxies with the most slowly rotating stellar haloes shared a major head-on merger and a disc reorientation greater than 90 degrees. ● Our stellar halo rotates at only 10–20 km/s; the disc moves at around 220 km/s. ● The Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus collision roughly 10 billion years ago is the candidate trigger. ● Batrakov describes a disc flip as likely rather than confirmed, and is looking for independent signatures. ● Separate 2026 work led by Ling Zhu, using 600,000+ giant stars from Gaia and LAMOST, found the outer dark matter halo oriented almost vertically to the stellar disc — consistent with the disc having tilted. Skywatch ● Southern Delta Aquariids are active now, running into late August, with maximum around 30 July. ● Full Moon on 29 July means peak night is close to 98% illuminated — the worst conditions of the run. ● Best window: the pre-dawn mornings from now until roughly 27 July, after moonset. ● Radiant near Skat in Aquarius. Use Fomalhaut and the Great Square of Pegasus to locate it. ● Australia and New Zealand: radiant climbs near overhead. Best from around 2am to first light. ● North America: radiant sits low in the south — fewer meteors, but a better chance of long-trailed earthgrazers. Same 2am-to-dawn window, local time. ● Sunspot region AR4493 has grown rapidly to beta-gamma-delta complexity — the highest classification — and has already fired three M-class flares in a day. Worth watching aurora alerts. Sources ● SpaceX / Space.com — Starship Flight 13 mission details and timing ● Nature Geoscience — noble gas analysis of Chang'e-6 regolith (Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Geology and Geophysics) ● Royal Astronomical Society — NAM 2026 far side governance debate ● Royal Astronomical Society — NAM 2026, V445 Puppis (John Mills, University of Warwick) ● Royal Astronomical Society — NAM 2026, Milky Way disc flip (Kirill Batrakov, Durham University) ● EarthSky and the American Meteor Society — Delta Aquariid observing guidance ● NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center / EarthSky Sun News — AR4493 activityBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-latest-space-news--5648921/support.Sponsor Details:Ensure your online privacy by using NordVPN. To get our special listener deal and save a lot of money, visit www.astronomydaily.io/nordvpn. You'll be glad you did!Get the best secure and private email on the planet. Stop your Government, google and who knows who else spying on every email you write. Do what we did and use ProtonMail. They beleive in privacy and there are no ads in their business model...yet they still provide a free forever service. Check them out and get out special deal at www.astronomydaily.io/protonmailBecome a supporter of Astronomy Daily by joining our Supporters Club. Commercial free episodes daily are only a click way... Click HereThis episode includes AI-generated content.
President Donald Trump says Iran desperately wants to meet to end the current war escalation with the U.S., but the U.S. has no interest in doing so until 'they're ready to meet in a meaningful way', and the President says the U.S. will be able to deal with the Houthi terror group if they move to aid Iran and block oil shipments between the Red Sea and Indian Ocean; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testifies before the Senate Appropriations Committee on the Trump Administration's supplemental spending request, most of which is for the military and costs of the war with Iran; House debates a bill to extend federal government funding from the current deadline October 1 through December 4, after the midterm elections, as concerns grow that disagreements between Republicans and Democrats could lead to another government shutdown; Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney responds to President Trump's threat of 50% tariffs on most Canadian goods; Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announces $1 billion in Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota are being withheld because of suspected fraud; Director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History Anthea Hartig testifies before Congress after a White House report accused the museum of anti-American bias, telling the lawmakers, 'The museum does not take sides in America's political debates. We preserve and document the evidence of American life in all of its breadth, so that the public can encounter the past and draw their own conclusions.' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
SpaceX Starship Flight 13 is launching 20 next-generation Starlink satellites that are designed to burn up in the atmosphere shortly after deployment. Advanced hardware with laser interconnects and complex deployment mechanisms, built to operate for minutes and then turn to ash. It sounds like an engineering paradox. It isn't. This episode explains why.We break down the full Starship Flight 13 flight profile and what SpaceX is actually testing. This mission continues the Version 3 architecture that debuted on Flight 12, and the fixes SpaceX made after that flight tell you everything about where the program actually stands.What went wrong on Flight 12: at stage separation, slight differences in engine startup timing caused the Super Heavy booster to flip roughly 90 degrees off axis. Then during the boostback burn, 5 of the 33 Raptor engines failed to relight, ending the burn early. The booster survived, but barely. Also covered in this Starship Flight 13 breakdown:Why 20 Starlink satellites are being deployed just to be destroyed, and what data they capture firstThe heat shield tiles painted white on purpose to create visible flaws for camera calibrationWhy Starship is intentionally flying at higher dynamic pressure (max Q) than any previous flight, and what breaking the vehicle would proveThe in-space Raptor relight, and why restarting an engine in zero gravity is a fluid dynamics nightmareThe landing flip and the three-engine to two-engine to one-engine descent sequenceWhat the Indian Ocean splashdown means for the programThe through-line is an engineering philosophy that values extreme stress testing over cautious preservation. SpaceX is building this system by intentionally finding out exactly where it breaks. If this is the stress they apply to an uncrewed test vehicle, the safety margins they're building for crewed flights are the real story.Subscribe for more Starship coverage, SpaceX flight breakdowns, and AI and technology news.
In today's episode we sit down with a truly singular guest: Richard J. Perry—entrepreneur, seasoned guitarist, wellness advocate, and the soon‑to‑be‑published author of In Search of the Perfect Guitar: An Unexpected Journey of Awakening (coming fall 2026).Richard's story reads like a modern adventure: from tracking Soviet submarines in the Indian Ocean's convergent zones, to chasing the perfect tone on vintage and boutique guitars, to founding Red Spinach Company, a functional‑food supplement that fuels body and mind. He'll share how the “ping” of a sonar echo first sparked his fascination with vibration, how a single low‑E note can become a meditative anchor in moments of depression, and why flamenco's raw, historical sorrow resonates with him more than any playlist.We'll also dive into:The surprising parallels between sonar pings and guitar notes.The ritual of holding a guitar—how a wood's “aura” can carry the memory of centuries‑old trees and past players.Richard's go‑to “single‑note” practice for emotional reset and why he prefers the silence that follows.A lightning‑round of quick picks—acoustic vs. electric, underrated guitars, the one song that never lets him go, and the instrument that would headline his life's soundtrack.The powerful synergy of nutrition and music, and why feeling good physically amplifies artistic expression.The magic of live performance—the breath‑holding moment right before the first note, and why a small‑venue show can feel more alive than a stadium.If you've ever felt stuck in a mental fog, wondered whether a particular sound could shift your mood, or simply love the quiet mystery of a perfectly struck chord, this conversation is for you. Grab your headphones, settle in, and let Richard's journey remind us that beneath every wave—whether oceanic or sonic—lies a path toward healing.When Words Fail, Music Speaks—let's listen together.
Nalika Gajaweera (Research Affiliate, Walter H. Capps Center, University of California, Santa Barbara; PhD, Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, 2013) is an anthropologist of Buddhism, race, and ethics, with a focus on community well-being and resilience. Her current book manuscript, Transforming the American Sangha, funded by the Kataly Foundation, is an ethnography of the Insight Meditation movement in North America, focused on the efforts of practitioners of color to raise awareness of oppressive racial conditions in these communities. Her doctoral research examined how Buddhist ethics and practices of giving shaped Sri Lankan local NGOs doing humanitarianism work in the context of two disasters: the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and ethnic conflict that ended in 2009. A former Fulbright fellow, Dr. Gajaweera has conducted fieldwork in North America and South Asia, managing and conducting complex multi-stakeholder research projects, exploring power building efforts among marginalized groups. Funders for these projects included Kataly Foundation, John Templeton Foundation, Hilton Foundation and GHR. Nalika Gajawira will collaborate with Ann Gleig on a comparative ethnographic study of how Buddhist communities adopt and adapt popular spiritual exercises such as "secular" mindfulness and yoga classes within a wider Buddhist framework. Their work aims to illustrate the processes, frameworks and relationships that can enable more responsible relationships between specific religious communities and the word of spiritual wellness practices. Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/templeton-working-group Visit Nalika Gajaweera: https://nalikagajaweera.com/ https://dornsife.usc.edu/crcc/profile/nalika-gajaweera/
From The Australian, this is The Flood. The true story of 60 Australian men and women trapped in a submarine deep under the Indian Ocean when an explosion threatens to sink the vessel and send its crew to the bottom. In Episode 2: Shut all hull valves, Commander Scott initiates emergency procedures, Petty Officer Bunting battles for his life in a submerged motor room. Exclusive interviews with the captain, crew and top brass reveal the terror and emotion that still haunts this group of proud warriors, who risked their own lives every day in the defence of Australia. The Flood is a truly inspirational story of human courage, resilience, teamwork and ingenuity. The Flood is a four-part audio and video series by Cameron Stewart, Claire Harvey and Jasper Leak. Listen to all of The Flood by searching ‘The Flood’ wherever you listen, or watch The Flood and find graphics, stories and pictures at thefloodpodcast.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Researchers just published details of a massive undersea graveyard of whales deep in the Indian Ocean. Spanning about 1,200 kilometers (745 miles), it contains whale remains dating back more than 5 million years—and at least five active whale fall sites still teeming with life. Fossil whale expert Nick Pyenson joins Host Flora Lichtman to discuss these findings. Then, marine biologists Rachel Sipler and Sara Jobson join Ira Flatow to describe an unusual discovery in certain species of sea cucumbers: If a foot or tentacle becomes detached, the parts don't wither up and rot away. Even without a stomach, these parts appear to directly extract nutrients from the surrounding seawater. “Zombie” sea cucumber parts have been observed surviving for more than three years. Guests: Dr. Nick Pyenson is curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Dr. Rachel Sipler is a senior research scientist in the Bigelow Laboratory in East Boothbay, Maine. Sara Jobson a PhD student at the Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. Johns, Canada. Other episodes you may enjoy: Remembering Roger Payne, Who Helped Save The Whales Can A Microbe Conservation Movement Take Off? Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that's keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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