Podcasts about New Guinea

The hooded pitohuis is an evil-smelling, blue jay-sized bird that is native to New Guinea. The bird has been known to science since 1827, but it held a secret that only began to be uncovered in 1989.An American graduate student made the discovery while studying another local bird, the bird of paradise. Unfortunately, hooded pitohuis kept getting caught in his nets. As he released the unwanted pitohuis, they would claw and peck at him. After he released the birds, he licked the wounds they had caused. As a result, his mouth began to burn and finally became numb for several hours. This led the graduate student to send dead hooded pitohuis to the National Institutes of Health for further study. The poison the birds produce was finally identified as one of the most poisonous substances known. It is hundreds of times more poisonous than strychnine. The amount of poison in one bird can kill 500 mice. Most amazing is that only one other creature produces the same poison, the poison dart frog of Central America.Those who believe in evolution maintain that the ability to produce the poison must have evolved twice. But it's not that simple. Not only do both bird and frog, half a world apart, have to evolved this unlikely ability twice, but they both had to evolve immunity to their own poison. Ultimately, evolution is a faith. It is a faith that is poisonous to Christianity because it makes death natural rather than a result of the first Adam's sin. And without the fact of the first Adam, there is no need for the Second Adam, Jesus Christ.Acts 14:2“But the unbelieving Jews stirred up the Gentiles, and made their minds evil affected against the brethren.”Prayer: Lord, I thank You for Your victory over sin, death and the devil. Amen.Ref: Natural History. Image: Hooded Pitohui 4 Benjamin Freeman, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/1232/29?v=20251111

In February 2022, British explorer Charlie Walker flew to Siberia's Sakha Republic to walk a thousand miles up frozen rivers to the Arctic Ocean, through Earth's coldest inhabited region. Days later, Russia invaded Ukraine. Tamping down his concerns, he continued on his journey, meeting indigenous people and ice road truckers along the way. Yet his trip ended in fear and confusion, with an arrest and a month in a Yakutsk jail, the story of his new book, On Thin Ice: An Explorer's Memoir of Siberia, Surveillance and Survival (Duckworth, 2026) Charlie is an award-winning explorer, author and international keynote speaker. He has travelled over 60,000 miles by foot, horse, raft, bicycle, ski and dugout canoe, in places as varied as the Tibetan plateau, the Mongolian steppe, the Congolese jungle, the Arctic tundra, the highlands of New Guinea and the Sahara desert. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a Scientific Exploration Society Explorer Award winner, and the author of Through Sand & Snow (Nielsen UK: 2021) and On Roads That Echo (Nielsen UK: 2021) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of On Thin Ice. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In February 2022, British explorer Charlie Walker flew to Siberia's Sakha Republic to walk a thousand miles up frozen rivers to the Arctic Ocean, through Earth's coldest inhabited region. Days later, Russia invaded Ukraine. Tamping down his concerns, he continued on his journey, meeting indigenous people and ice road truckers along the way. Yet his trip ended in fear and confusion, with an arrest and a month in a Yakutsk jail, the story of his new book, On Thin Ice: An Explorer's Memoir of Siberia, Surveillance and Survival (Duckworth, 2026) Charlie is an award-winning explorer, author and international keynote speaker. He has travelled over 60,000 miles by foot, horse, raft, bicycle, ski and dugout canoe, in places as varied as the Tibetan plateau, the Mongolian steppe, the Congolese jungle, the Arctic tundra, the highlands of New Guinea and the Sahara desert. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a Scientific Exploration Society Explorer Award winner, and the author of Through Sand & Snow (Nielsen UK: 2021) and On Roads That Echo (Nielsen UK: 2021) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of On Thin Ice. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

William Paul Young is back! This time to talk about his new book Return to The Shack. Paul was born in Canada and grew up in a missionary family in New Guinea. He wrote the book The Shack as a Christmas present for his children and had no idea that it would become more than that. The Shack became a great success, selling several million copies and has been translated into several languages. The book has also been available as a movie since 2016. And today we have a wonderful conversation about his new book and about lots of other things. Follow Paul on social media and listen to The Paul Young Podcast.   Like and share this episode on Social media and to your friends. Follow the podcast on Facebook; Instagram and the Blog and if you want, write your thoughts and comments in the comment section under the episode

New Guinea er ikke bare en ø. Det er en af verdens sidste store grænser. Med uigennemtrængelige regnskove, tågede bjergkamme og afsidesliggende sumpe rummer den stadig områder, hvor mennesker knap har sat spor. Det er her, fortællingerne om væsner som Artrellia, Row, Ropen og Kayadi får liv. - For aner vi over hovedet, hvem vi deler planet med?Papua Ny Guinea er et af de mest fascinerende steder iverden for enhver, der jagter levende mysterier. Lyt med i dag!Om denne podcast:Flyveøgler på himlen over Texas. Overlevende dinosaurer i Afrikas sumpe. Sorte pantere i udkanten af europæiske storbyer. Kan det virkelig passe?Hvert år fortæller mennesker om møder med dyr, som ikke burde eksistere – eller som ikke burde befinde sig dér, hvor de bliver set.Kryptozoologi er læren om de skjulte dyr, og i De mystiske dyr  dykker Mikala Rosenkilde ned i beretningerne, mysterierne og teorierne bagverdens mest hemmelighedsfulde væsner.Finder du historier om søslanger, Bigfoot og levende dinosaurer fascinerende?Så findes der allerede to bøger i serien ⁠⁠⁠⁠I en verden så stor⁠⁠⁠⁠,som udforsker mystiske dyreobservationer fra hele verden – tillands, til vands og i luften.Bøgerne ⁠⁠⁠⁠Fra sabelkatte til levende drager ⁠⁠⁠⁠og ⁠⁠⁠⁠FraLoch Ness til Megalodon ⁠⁠⁠⁠findes som trykt bog, e-bog og lydbog – på biblioteket, online og hos boghandlere. Flere bind i serien er under udarbejdelse.Vil du støtte podcasten og samtidig få adgang via Podimo, kan du følge De mystiske dyr ⁠⁠⁠⁠dér⁠⁠⁠⁠. Det hjælper podcasten og gør det muligt at fortsætte arbejdet med nye afsnit.Følg også De mystiske dyr på ⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠, hvor der løbende deles nye observationer, ældre vidneudsagn og spændende historier fra kryptozoologiens verden.Leder du efter en dansksproget hjemmeside om kryptozoologi, finder du også nyt, artikler og en spændende blogroll på ⁠⁠⁠⁠Kongamato⁠⁠⁠⁠. Her samles spændende historier og nyt fra hele verden ét sted. Her finder du også Danmarks eneste kryptozoologiske ⁠⁠⁠⁠Blogroll⁠⁠⁠⁠. De mystiske dyr  tilrettelægges og produceres af forfatter og podcaster Mikala Rosenkilde.

Caster Salemi was 19 years old when Japan attacked the U.S. at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He tried to enlist in the U.S. Navy but was rejected. After working in a facility producing Norden bombsights, he was finally drafted into the U.S. Army. While training in Paris, Texas, Salemi was assigned to the 251st Field Artillery Battalion in a communications role. He was part of a unit firing 105mm howitzers.In this edition of Veterans Chronicles, Salemi tells about arriving in New Guinea, which brought high temperatures, high humidity, and tropical diseases. Salemi then talks about his service in Luzon, Philippines, starting in January 1945 and  describes the "constant combat" against the Japanese, including one battle that lasted two months straight. He also recalls how relentless the Japanese were and how cruel they could be. He also shares how the Japanese disrupted his artillery communications efforts.Finally, Salemi details the end of the war and how one of those tropical diseases sent him home earlier than expected - and right through a typhoon.

In this episode, Ray Cochrane breaks down NVIDIA’s case for world action models, the shift that swaps a robot’s picture-describing backbone for one trained to predict what happens next. He also covers Perseverance closing in on the off-world driving record, a derelict SpaceX rocket stage hitting the Moon, and Anthropic’s rework of Claude Fable 5’s biology safeguards. Finally, he digs into Gemini Omni, Google’s undisclosed trip-planning rankings, the Danube’s record low, and iFixit’s call for Apple to unlock the iPad bootloader. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens with a personal update. Wildfires in Eastern Oregon made for a rough week of heavy smoke, and a local building burned down, which he calls a real tragedy. Meanwhile, his work at Blubrry has centered on PowerPress fixes, where reproducing customer-reported bugs remains the biggest headache. Support tickets rarely carry enough detail, and the errors themselves are often too vague to diagnose. Consequently, he is leaning toward a stronger logging and error layer, and he asks experienced developers to share what actually works for them. Beyond VLAs: NVIDIA’s Case for World Action Models The featured story comes from NVIDIA’s developer blog, and it answers a question sitting underneath this year’s robot news. Why do robot arms fall apart the moment anything changes? Move a cup six inches, swap its shape, or change the lighting, and a policy that worked perfectly in training fails. The answer, according to NVIDIA, is not the robot but the model underneath it. For the last few years, the dominant approach has been the vision-language-action model, or VLA, built on an AI that originally learned to describe pictures. Consequently, it recognizes a banana it has never seen, in a kitchen it has never seen, yet it has no idea what that banana will do next. As the article puts it, such a model “does not learn what happens to a mug when the gripper closes, how a towel folds, where an object lands when released.” Because the physics never arrives with the model, every scrap of it has to come out of hand-recorded demonstrations. The proposed fix swaps the foundation entirely. Instead of building on a model that learned to caption images, a world action model builds on one trained to predict how video continues, so the physics is already paid for. Notably, these models output an action and a prediction of what the robot’s cameras will see, in the same pass. Cochrane likens it to forethought, imagining your own motion as you make it. NVIDIA’s implementation is Cosmos 3, pretrained on roughly 767 million images and 348 million videos of real-world dynamics. It ships in 4, 16, and 64 billion parameter sizes named Edge, Nano, and Super, and it runs in real time on a Jetson Thor board bolted to the robot itself. Cochrane recalls his dad owning one of those Jetson boards, and he asks anyone working in robotics to explain how the throughput figures fit together. However, he closes on an open question: where did 348 million videos actually come from? For deeper detail, he points listeners to the source article and to NVIDIA researcher Jim Fan. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. Perseverance Closes In on the Off-World Driving Record Ars Technica reports that NASA’s Perseverance rover is about to take the record for most distance driven on another world. The mark sits at roughly 28 miles, set by NASA’s own Opportunity rover across more than fourteen years before it went quiet in 2018. As Cochrane works out on air, that averages about two miles a year. Perseverance will pass it in roughly five years instead. The difference is a navigation system called AutoNav. Since a radio signal takes several minutes to reach Mars, earlier rovers crept along pre-plotted routes and stopped every half meter to think. Perseverance carries a second computer dedicated to processing what its cameras see, so it plans while the wheels keep turning. Consequently, about ninety percent of its driving is autonomous, against roughly ten percent for Curiosity, and it averages around 110 meters an hour rather than 15 to 18. Cochrane notes researchers finding the rover at planned sites days ahead of schedule, and he wonders aloud whether world action models might drive the next one. A SpaceX Rocket Stage Slammed Into the Moon Next, Smithsonian Magazine covered the Falcon 9 upper stage that struck the Moon on August 5. That stage flew back in January 2025, carrying Firefly’s Blue Ghost and ispace’s Resilience landers, and it was never meant to end up there. SpaceX’s Julianna Scheiman says a mixture of solar activity and gravity nudged the derelict onto a lunar path after nineteen months adrift. Four tonnes of dead hardware arrived at about 5,400 miles per hour. Nobody watched it happen, and the reason is a nice bit of physics. It struck sunlit ground near a crater called Einstein, and no impact flash has ever been detected on the lit part of the Moon. However, the instruments caught the aftermath. South Korea’s Danuri orbiter imaged a dark new mark, while the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope picked up sodium and lithium in the plume, the lithium possibly shed by the rocket itself. Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell quipped that he has “Sir Isaac Newton’s personal assurance that it did indeed hit the moon,” while planetary scientist Hannah Sargeant warns against making a habit of it. Cochrane points out the Apollo landing sites are still sitting up there. Anthropic Reworks Claude Fable 5’s Biology Safeguards Anthropic published a post on how Claude Fable 5 handles biology questions, and the bind is genuine. Biology is the textbook dual-use problem, since the knowledge behind reading your own lab results also helps someone build a weapon. Rather than refusing outright, a classifier watches for risky requests and quietly reroutes them to Claude Opus 5, a capable model without Fable 5’s biological depth. Anthropic calls that mechanism a fallback. The trouble was how often it fired on people doing nothing wrong. This update cut biology-related fallbacks by roughly 85 percent in Anthropic’s own testing, with expected overall drops of 67 percent on Claude.ai and 55 percent on Cowork. Genuinely dual-use territory still trips it, and Anthropic names virology, toxicology, and molecular design. Cochrane hit the old behavior himself and found it irritating, so he welcomes the refinement. Even so, he would rather see a false positive than a model helping someone produce a virus. Five Builders Put Gemini Omni Through Its Paces Google highlighted five builders working with Gemini Omni. Omni is a model rather than an app, and it generates video from text, images, other video, or audio, while also editing footage you already have. Google claims it “combines an intuitive understanding of physics with Gemini’s real-world knowledge,” citing gravity, kinetic energy, and fluid dynamics. As Cochrane observes, that is the same bet NVIDIA is making with robots, only pointed at video generation instead. He also flags a naming collision worth knowing about. NVIDIA calls its architecture an omni-model while Google’s product is simply Omni, two different things landing in the same week. Additionally, he encourages listeners to watch the demos, though he still senses a disconnect in AI-generated video and concedes that knowing its origin may color the impression. Gemini Wants to Plan Your Vacation Another Gemini piece, a how-to on trip planning, drew Cochrane’s sharpest take of the night. Gemini plugs straight into Google Maps, Flights, and Hotels, pulling live locations, reviews, and prices to build an itinerary. Switch on a feature called Personal Intelligence, and it reads across your Google apps, turning a messy trip-planning email chain into a clean master plan. Clever, but he calls it extremely concerning. Once these become services, he expects partnerships to quietly push particular hotels, restaurants, resorts, and destinations onto users. Notably, Google’s post never explains how any of it gets ranked, and the words sponsored, ad, affiliate, commission, and paid never appear once. There is no disclosure of a commercial arrangement, and no denial of one either. Meanwhile the post hands readers off to Viator to book tours without describing that relationship at all. Cochrane suspects the real effect shows up slowly, in the shape of small businesses continuing to disappear. The Senate Blocks a Rule on Who Controls Research Money Science reports that the Senate passed a temporary spending bill in the early hours of Saturday the 8th. The Senate’s version carries a one-paragraph rider the House version lacks, and that rider stops the White House Office of Management and Budget from finalizing a set of proposed rules. OMB builds the president’s budget, clears agency regulations, and controls how approved money actually reaches agencies. The bill itself is a stopgap, which prevents a shutdown without settling anything. The rules reach every organization that takes federal money, a pot of roughly $1.1 trillion across 41 agencies, about $150 billion of it research grants. They would let political appointees second-guess which grants get funded, allow awarded grants to be pulled when the work does not match presidential priorities, and put several countries off limits for research partnerships, China first among them. Senator Susan Collins pushed the block through after telling OMB director Russell Vought the proposal was deeply flawed, noting nearly 500,000 public comments, the vast majority opposed. However, the 90-6 vote is not law. Both chambers are on recess. Vought reportedly said the rule would not have been finalized before December anyway, and the block only lasts as long as the stopgap, which expires December 11. The Danube Falls to a Record Low ESA published a pair of Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite images showing the same bend of the Danube, 45 kilometers upstream of Budapest, photographed a year apart. Cochrane calls the before-and-after shocking, going from green to brown completely. Wire reports put the Budapest gauge near 10 centimeters at the start of the month, about four inches of water, against a previous record of 33 centimeters set in 2018. The knock-on effects arrived fast. Budapest ran short on both power and drinking water, while the shrinking flow concentrated pollution in what remained. Romania hit record lows on its own stretch as well. Cochrane hopes the recovery is already underway. What a Heatwave Actually Does to the Power Grid That river story runs directly into a Carbon Brief factcheck. Nuclear plants cool themselves with river water, so when the Danube dropped, plants in Hungary and Romania throttled back and pulled roughly 2.5 gigawatts off the grid. Romania declared a state of alert in its energy sector, and its navy reportedly used explosives to steer more water toward a plant intake. Carbon Brief then walked through what heatwaves do to each way of making electricity. Nuclear loses efficiency when the cooling water is already warm, though its shutdowns are mostly regulatory rather than mechanical. Gas turbines pull in less air because hot air is thinner, costing capacity. Wind falls off hardest, since a heatwave is a big stalled dome of high pressure and nearly still air. Solar is the surprise: cells genuinely do get less efficient as they heat up, yet total output climbs anyway, with UK solar up 46 percent during a four-day June heatwave against the week before. Butterflies Are on the Move Everywhere A new study in Nature Ecology and Evolution covered 1,758 butterfly species, roughly one in ten of every species we have named. The team pulled 6,182 records from 105 countries, reading non-English research alongside 68 expert write-ups. Four out of five species pushed into new territory, and about 79 percent of the logged shifts traced back to climate change and extreme weather. Separately, 27 percent saw their range shrink somewhere, and 22 percent moved up or down a mountain slope chasing cooler air. That sounds like good news, and it really is not. Expansion means a boundary moved, not that butterflies are thriving, since a species can push its northern edge forward while its southern edge quietly collapses. Lead author Shawan Chowdhury says the shifts turn up on every continent where butterflies occur. Additionally, monitoring gaps leave Central Africa, Southeast Asia, New Guinea, and the Amazon Basin barely counted at all. Cochrane recalls hearing years ago that butterflies were disappearing in Hawaii, and he invites listeners spotting unfamiliar species locally to contribute what they see. Primates Make Friends Across Species Cochrane called this one a fun find. A study in the journal Primates, led by Cyril Grueter at Oxford, gathered 427 documented cases going back to the 1970s across 88 primate species and 127 partner species. Play and grooming dominated at 139 and 136 cases, alongside carrying, huddling, food sharing, and even adoption. Primates usually started the interactions themselves, with juveniles playing most, adult females handling grooming and caregiving, and adult males least likely to join in. The examples are remarkable. Japanese macaques on the island of Yakushima groom sika deer and climb on their backs, a silverback gorilla cradled a tiny wild bushbaby, and wild capuchins in Brazil adopted an infant marmoset in a bond that held for weeks. However, Grueter rejects the pet-keeping headline and prefers the hedged term proto-pet keeping. The actual claim is smaller and more interesting: curiosity, tolerance, caregiving, and play have roots running far deeper than humans do. iFixit Tells Apple to Unlock the iPad Finally, an opinion piece from Charlie Sorrel at iFixit struck a chord. This fall, iPadOS 27 drops support for a batch of older iPads, including the 8th-generation iPad, the third-generation Air, the fifth-generation mini, and the first-generation iPad Pros. Cochrane owns one of those Pros and reports it still works fine. Those devices will not break, but they stop getting OS and security updates until apps abandon them and the battery gives out. The obvious second life is Linux, except the bootloader stays locked. Apple’s iBoot will not load anything else, unlike a Mac, a PC, or most Android phones. Sorrel argues it “should be a user choice, not a vendor choice,” and Cochrane agrees flatly. You own the device, so why does Apple decide what runs on it? He compares the situation to jailbreaking, and he suspects most consumers have never pushed back simply because it never occurs to them. Nevertheless, he hopes an unlock eventually breathes new life into hardware that still works perfectly well. Cochrane wraps with housekeeping: become a GNC Insider at geeknewscentral.com/insider, email geeknews@gmail.com, subscribe to the newsletter, and grab a modern podcast app at podcastapps.com. He thanks GoDaddy for over twenty years of keeping the show on the air, and he signs off wishing listeners a wonderful evening. The post The Robot That Imagines First #1872 appeared first on Geek News Central.

Further reading: How did a tiny bee get to French Polynesia? Eight new species help solve a scientific mystery Secrets in the canopy: Scientists discover 8 striking new bee species in the Pacific Canopy specialist Hylaeus bees highlight sampling biases and resolve Michener's mystery Scientists discover endoparasitic marine tapeworm trapped in Cretaceous amber Show transcript: Welcome to the Patreon bonus episode of Strange Animals Podcast for August 2024! It's the start of Invertebrate August, so we have two invertebrate mysteries to discuss today, one mostly solved and one not. Let's start with the solved mystery, about a tiny bee. In 1934, three tiny bee specimens were collected in French Polynesia, specifically on a particular type of flower in the Tuamotu Archipelago. The bees really were tiny, only 4 mm long. They weren't described until 1965, when they were placed in the genus Hylaeus. This is a really big genus with over 500 species that live throughout the world, but the species most closely related to the newly described Tuamotu's masked bee lives in Australia, New Guinea, and New Zealand. In case you're kind of hazy on geography, like me, Australia, New Guinea, and New Zealand are part of what's called Oceania, a giant chunk of the Pacific Ocean where there's not a whole lot of land. I mean, except for Australia, which is big. The Tuamotu Archipelago is also part of Oceania, and part of French Polynesia, but it's really remote. It consists of a spread-out collection of 78 low islands, many of them too tiny to support humans, none of them with a source of fresh water except for rain. They're tropical and quite beautiful, with many unique animals and plants living on and around them. They're also almost 2,500 miles, or 4,000 km away from the places where the tiny bee's closest relatives live. Even in 1965, scientists had questions about the tiny bee. How did 4mm bees get to such remote islands, and were they even still around? The bees hadn't been seen in the wild since 1934. Since the Tuamotu Archipelago has suffered from European explorers and missionaries bringing invasive species to some islands, colonization by France, and nuclear weapons testing, scientists worried the bee had gone extinct and that they would never solve the mystery of how it got there in the first place. Bees are attracted to flowers, and the three 1934 specimens were discovered on flowers, so naturally scientists had been looking for the bees on flowers. But it turns out that in the Polynesian islands, bees mostly hang out in the treetops. Once scientists figured this out, they began discovering new species of bee—eight of them in fact, collected between 2014 and 2019 from various islands in Fiji, Micronesia, and French Polynesia. All eight species are closely related to Tuamotu's masked bee, so scientists now have a pretty good idea of how it traveled thousands of miles to get to its French Polynesian home. Its ancestors island-hopped. There are more than 1,700 islands in the Pacific Ocean, many of them barely known to humans. Researchers think there are probably a lot more species of bee to be discovered in the treetops of Pacific islands, now that they know where to look. With luck, they'll be able to find Tuamotu's masked bee too, quietly living out its bee life above the scientists' heads. Next, let's discuss our unsolved mystery. Amber, which is fossilized tree resin, is the gift that just keeps on giving to the scientific world, and our mystery involves a flatworm found in amber. The amber comes from Myanmar and dates to about 99 million years ago. In addition to bits of inorganic matter like tiny pebbles and sand grains, most organisms found in amber from this site are insects and roundworms, animals you'd expect to find on and around trees. The team examining this particular piece of amber found lots of interesting things, but then they discovered this one. The flatworm is about 10mm long and it's beautifully preserved, which means the scientists were able to compare it to modern flatworms to see what it might be most closely related to. It's most similar to a parasitic flatworm found in shark intestines. You know, an animal not typically found in trees. (I stole that joke from paleontologist Kenneth De Baets, by the way. Credit where credit's due.) It isn't a complete worm but a partial one, basically a tentacle with little hooks to keep it in place in the host animal's digestive system. The modern worm is classified as a type of tapeworm, and tapeworms are distressingly common parasites. If you've ever adopted a rescue cat or dog, you've probably had to have it treated for a tapeworm infestation. Luckily, tapeworms are also very specific about which species they parasitize, so you can't get tapeworms from a pet. (It's still icky.) Fish get tapeworms too, after eating marine invertebrates carrying various kinds of tapeworm larvae. The question is, how did a parasitic worm found in fish end up in amber? Occasionally there is rare amber found that fell into water and trapped water organisms, but this particular amber wasn't associated with water. Other items found in the same piece of amber included sand grains, tiny hairlike structures found on some ferns, and the nymph of a scale insect. The team suggests that the tree where the amber came from grew near a beach and that a dead shark washed ashore. While scavengers were picking through the carcass, a piece of worm somehow got separated from the body and ended up in a tree. Possibly a scavenger grabbed a big yummy mouthful of rotting shark guts and either climbed or flew up into a tree to eat it, and part of the worm fell out and landed in a blob of amber. Because tapeworms are endoparasites, meaning they live inside their hosts, and because they're soft-bodied and fragile, it's very rare that one is preserved. Pretty much the only other preserved tapeworm specimen we have isn't a tapeworm itself but some eggs found in fossilized shark dung, dated to 270 million year ago. Scientists aren't even completely sure the eggs are from a flatworm since they're not that well preserved. So it's fantastic that this particular specimen was so well preserved, and that it made its way into the hands of scientists! Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

On this episode of Africa Today, host Walter Turner speaks with Sónia Vaz Borges about the legacy of Amílcar Cabral and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde. They explore how liberation schools in Guinea-Bissau used education, political consciousness, and community organizing as vital tools in the struggle against Portuguese colonial rule, and what those lessons continue to offer today. A weekly news program providing information and analysis about Africa and the African Diaspora, hosted by Walter Turner. The post Amílcar Cabral's Liberation Schools and the Fight to Build a New Guinea-Bissau [ENCORE] appeared first on KPFA.

Reg Chard, the last Kokoda veteran, has passed away at age 102. This is a re-release of the 2022 podcast, with a tribute from host Alex Lloyd at the start. The original video podcast is still available on YouTube. Rest in peace, Reg. Life on the Line tracks down Australian military veterans and records their stories. Reg Chard was an infantryman in the Australian Army in the Second World War. He fought in the jungle against the Japanese in New Guinea along the Kokoda Trail in 1942 for months. Since 2011, Reg has been a volunteer guide at the Kokoda Track Memorial Walkway in Sydney. In 2022, the 98-year-old celebrates the release of his biography, THE DIGGER OF KOKODA by Daniel Lane. Reg spoke with Alex Lloyd about his military service, his experiences in New Guinea and how Kokoda still lives with him today. This conversation can be watched as a video podcast on YouTube or heard through all podcast apps. Closing music by The Externals. To see photos related to today's interview, visit our website - www.lifeonthelinepodcast.com - or follow us on social media: @lifeonthelinepodcast on Facebook and Instagram, @LOTLpod on X and 'Thistle Productions' on LinkedIn.

Trap Talk Reptile Network Presents:The Boelens Python Round Table PodcastEpisode 21: Professor Mark O'Shea MBE University of Wolverhampton, UK And New Guinea Host: Ari Flagle Of Project Black Python https://www.instagram.com/projectblackpython/https://www.projectblackpython.org/Donate PayPal: BoelensPythonConservation@gmail.com   About:The Boelens Python Round Table Podcast brings together herpetologists, keepers, and enthusiasts to share knowledge and experiences about one of the world's most elusive and beautiful pythons. Each episode dives into natural history, conservation, husbandry, and the challenges of working with this rare species. Listeners can expect engaging discussions, expert insights, and stories from the field that celebrate the mystique of the Boelens python. - Ari F

Sentient Seas: Archaeologies of Seascapes and Maritime Rituals (UP Florida, 2026), published by University Press of Florida (2026), offers a global perspective on maritime cultures, examining how societies across time and space have understood and interacted with the sea. Synthesizing archaeological evidence, historical documents, and ethnographic accounts, Ian McNiven explores maritime traditions from ancient civilizations in the Middle East and Mediterranean to medieval Europe and Scandinavia to contemporary Indigenous communities in the South Pacific. McNiven investigates diverse cultural practices including shipbuilding, the treatment of shipwrecks and shipwreck victims, and maritime resource use, interpreting the evidence through the perspectives of mariners who understood the seas to be sentient and capable of acting with intentionality. He introduces the concepts of “terrestrial seascapes” and “ontological switching” to illustrate how land-based shrines and votive offerings extend maritime cosmologies and maintain a liminal transition from land to sea. By bridging anthropological and archaeological research with transdisciplinary blue humanities scholarship, Sentient Seas approaches seas as spiritscapes, recontextualizing folkloric beliefs about maritime superstitions. Ian J. McNiven is Research Professor of Indigenous archaeology at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre at Monash University in Melbourne, and a Chief Investigator with the Australian research Council Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures. He is coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Sentient Seas: Archaeologies of Seascapes and Maritime Rituals (UP Florida, 2026), published by University Press of Florida (2026), offers a global perspective on maritime cultures, examining how societies across time and space have understood and interacted with the sea. Synthesizing archaeological evidence, historical documents, and ethnographic accounts, Ian McNiven explores maritime traditions from ancient civilizations in the Middle East and Mediterranean to medieval Europe and Scandinavia to contemporary Indigenous communities in the South Pacific. McNiven investigates diverse cultural practices including shipbuilding, the treatment of shipwrecks and shipwreck victims, and maritime resource use, interpreting the evidence through the perspectives of mariners who understood the seas to be sentient and capable of acting with intentionality. He introduces the concepts of “terrestrial seascapes” and “ontological switching” to illustrate how land-based shrines and votive offerings extend maritime cosmologies and maintain a liminal transition from land to sea. By bridging anthropological and archaeological research with transdisciplinary blue humanities scholarship, Sentient Seas approaches seas as spiritscapes, recontextualizing folkloric beliefs about maritime superstitions. Ian J. McNiven is Research Professor of Indigenous archaeology at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre at Monash University in Melbourne, and a Chief Investigator with the Australian research Council Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures. He is coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea. 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

Sentient Seas: Archaeologies of Seascapes and Maritime Rituals (UP Florida, 2026), published by University Press of Florida (2026), offers a global perspective on maritime cultures, examining how societies across time and space have understood and interacted with the sea. Synthesizing archaeological evidence, historical documents, and ethnographic accounts, Ian McNiven explores maritime traditions from ancient civilizations in the Middle East and Mediterranean to medieval Europe and Scandinavia to contemporary Indigenous communities in the South Pacific. McNiven investigates diverse cultural practices including shipbuilding, the treatment of shipwrecks and shipwreck victims, and maritime resource use, interpreting the evidence through the perspectives of mariners who understood the seas to be sentient and capable of acting with intentionality. He introduces the concepts of “terrestrial seascapes” and “ontological switching” to illustrate how land-based shrines and votive offerings extend maritime cosmologies and maintain a liminal transition from land to sea. By bridging anthropological and archaeological research with transdisciplinary blue humanities scholarship, Sentient Seas approaches seas as spiritscapes, recontextualizing folkloric beliefs about maritime superstitions. Ian J. McNiven is Research Professor of Indigenous archaeology at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre at Monash University in Melbourne, and a Chief Investigator with the Australian research Council Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures. He is coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Sentient Seas: Archaeologies of Seascapes and Maritime Rituals (UP Florida, 2026), published by University Press of Florida (2026), offers a global perspective on maritime cultures, examining how societies across time and space have understood and interacted with the sea. Synthesizing archaeological evidence, historical documents, and ethnographic accounts, Ian McNiven explores maritime traditions from ancient civilizations in the Middle East and Mediterranean to medieval Europe and Scandinavia to contemporary Indigenous communities in the South Pacific. McNiven investigates diverse cultural practices including shipbuilding, the treatment of shipwrecks and shipwreck victims, and maritime resource use, interpreting the evidence through the perspectives of mariners who understood the seas to be sentient and capable of acting with intentionality. He introduces the concepts of “terrestrial seascapes” and “ontological switching” to illustrate how land-based shrines and votive offerings extend maritime cosmologies and maintain a liminal transition from land to sea. By bridging anthropological and archaeological research with transdisciplinary blue humanities scholarship, Sentient Seas approaches seas as spiritscapes, recontextualizing folkloric beliefs about maritime superstitions. Ian J. McNiven is Research Professor of Indigenous archaeology at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre at Monash University in Melbourne, and a Chief Investigator with the Australian research Council Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures. He is coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology

Sentient Seas: Archaeologies of Seascapes and Maritime Rituals (UP Florida, 2026), published by University Press of Florida (2026), offers a global perspective on maritime cultures, examining how societies across time and space have understood and interacted with the sea. Synthesizing archaeological evidence, historical documents, and ethnographic accounts, Ian McNiven explores maritime traditions from ancient civilizations in the Middle East and Mediterranean to medieval Europe and Scandinavia to contemporary Indigenous communities in the South Pacific. McNiven investigates diverse cultural practices including shipbuilding, the treatment of shipwrecks and shipwreck victims, and maritime resource use, interpreting the evidence through the perspectives of mariners who understood the seas to be sentient and capable of acting with intentionality. He introduces the concepts of “terrestrial seascapes” and “ontological switching” to illustrate how land-based shrines and votive offerings extend maritime cosmologies and maintain a liminal transition from land to sea. By bridging anthropological and archaeological research with transdisciplinary blue humanities scholarship, Sentient Seas approaches seas as spiritscapes, recontextualizing folkloric beliefs about maritime superstitions. Ian J. McNiven is Research Professor of Indigenous archaeology at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre at Monash University in Melbourne, and a Chief Investigator with the Australian research Council Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures. He is coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Send us Fan MailSubscribe and unleash your inner science goblin. We see you. We respect it.What if dragons were real... and they could run across water?In this minisode of Wildly Curious, Katy Reiss and Laura Fawks Lapole explore one of the most incredible reptiles you've probably never heard of: the sailfin dragon, also known as the sailfin lizard (Hydrosaurus). Native to the rainforests of Southeast Asia and New Guinea, this dragon-like reptile combines the best features of an iguana, a basilisk, and a dinosaur. With giant sail-like fins, vivid colors, powerful swimming abilities, and juveniles capable of running across water, it's one of the most unique lizards on Earth. In this episode:

The Pineapples That Weren't Mine #RTTBROS #Nightlight"If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me." - Luke 9:23 (KJV)I heard about an old missionary named Otto Koning who spent years in the jungles of New Guinea trying to reach a village for Christ. To break up the monotony of his diet, he planted a hundred pineapple shoots and waited three long years for them to ripen. The day they finally did, someone stole every last one, and it turned out to be the very man Otto had hired to help him plant them. When confronted, the man just shrugged and said, "My hands plant them, my mouth eats them."For seven years Otto fought for those pineapples. He threatened to close the mission clinic. He brought in a guard dog. Nothing worked, and worse, nothing about his anger looked like Jesus. In seven years of preaching, he never saw a single soul come to Christ.Then at a seminar back in the States, Otto realized something that changed everything. His anger was not really about the fruit. It was about ownership. He was gripping something with both fists and calling it his right. So he went back to that garden and gave it away. He told God, out loud, that the pineapples belonged to Him now.Not long after, the villagers stole from him again, and Otto just smiled. They could not figure out what had happened to him. Finally one of them asked why he was not angry anymore, and Otto said, "I gave that garden away. You are not stealing from me. You are stealing from God." Word got around fast, and folks who will steal from a missionary without blinking will not touch what belongs to the Almighty. A revival swept through that village, all because one man let go of something he had been holding onto with white knuckles.I think most of our anger works the same way. Somebody takes our time, our credit, our comfort, and we come up swinging because we believe it is ours to defend. But Jesus said if we are going to follow Him, we deny ourselves and pick up a cross, not a fist. The moment we hand our rights over to God, whatever gets taken from us becomes His problem, not ours. And that kind of peace preaches louder than any sermon we could give.Prayer:Lord, I hand my pineapples over to You today, my time, my reputation, my comfort, all of it. Where I have been gripping my rights with white knuckles, loosen my hold, and let Your peace be the sermon my life preaches. In Jesus' name, Amen.Be sure to Like, Share, Follow and subscribe it helps get the word out.https://linktr.ee/rttbros

On this episode of Africa Today, host Walter Turner speaks with Sónia Vaz Borges about the legacy of Amílcar Cabral and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde. They explore how liberation schools in Guinea-Bissau used education, political consciousness, and community organizing as vital tools in the struggle against Portuguese colonial rule, and what those lessons continue to offer today. A weekly news program providing information and analysis about Africa and the African Diaspora, hosted by Walter Turner. The post Amílcar Cabral's Liberation Schools and the Fight to Build a New Guinea-Bissau appeared first on KPFA.

He hadn't prayed in 25 years. Then at 3:00 AM, a voice woke him up: "Get up. Find your Bible."What followed was a four-hour encounter with Jesus that Brad Richter had no framework for — a flood of memories of every failure he'd ever committed, followed by an answer he never expected: not condemnation, but "I chose you." Brad describes being embraced in his own filth, before any cleanup, before any effort to make himself presentable.Brad grew up a missionary kid in New Guinea, where the cost of the gospel — death, tragedy, and unanswered questions — hardened his heart by age 13. For the next 25 years he was disconnected from God: not hostile, just numb. He wasn't praying. He wasn't searching.In this conversation, Brad walks through:• The night God broke into his life with no warning and no spiritual buildup• Asking Jesus one question — "How much do you love me?" — and what happened next• How obedience in small, ordinary moments (fixing a stranger's roof, giving a ride to a woman searching for God, feeding a homeless brother in Christ) became the doorway to experiencing God personally• A vision of spiritual warfare — pinned in the mud with Satan's foot on his neck, refusing to tap out — and what he found in his hands when he didn't• What it means to invite God into your burdens instead of asking Him to remove them• Why God's delight in us is often harder to receive than His forgivenessThis is a story about what happens when God interrupts a life that wasn't looking for Him — and what it costs, and gives, to say yes.-----Small Group Questions From This Episode:⇨ What impact did witnessing trauma on the mission field have on Brad's view of God? ⇨ How did Brad respond when he heard the command, “Get up,” in the middle of the night? ⇨ How does Brad describe the moment when he realized Jesus knew his name? ⇨ What did Brad mean when he said receiving God's love would “cost him his life”? Bible References for Further Study:⇨ Acts 6–7⇨ John 10:3-4 ⇨ Luke 15----------✟ Donate to A Stronger Faith ⇨ https://www.astrongerfaith.org/give-----------✟ Recommend a guest for us ⇨ https://www.astrongerfaith.org/contact----------✟ CONNECT WITH US! ⇨ Website: https://www.astrongerfaith.org/ ⇨ YouTube: https://bit.ly/asfmyoutube ⇨ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/astrongerfaith/ ⇨ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@astrongerfaith ⇨ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/astrongerfaith---------✟ For prayer or deliverance, or to become a prayer partner, please visit: https://www.astrongerfaith.org/prayer.✟ ASF recommended books: https://www.astrongerfaith.org/books

The sermon centers on the reality and power of spiritual warfare, drawing from Ephesians 6 to illustrate that believers do not battle physical enemies but spiritual forces of darkness, which can overwhelm even the most dedicated Christian. Through vivid personal testimony from a missionary's years in the jungles of New Guinea, the preacher reveals how fear, doubt, impurity, and despair led to spiritual defeat until a profound encounter with the Holy Spirit's daily presence transformed his life. The turning point came not through human strength or knowledge, but through surrender, confession, and the empowering authority of Jesus' name, which enables believers to resist Satan and stand firm. The message underscores that victory is not achieved by personal perfection but by continual dependence on Christ, where the Spirit-filled life becomes the foundation for spiritual warfare, and obedience to Scripture—especially resisting the devil—results in his retreat. Ultimately, the sermon affirms that no believer is too weak, too broken, or too defeated for God to use, as true strength comes not from self but from the power of Christ's name.

How can we live without fear when suffering feels overwhelming? In this message, we see through the life of Darlene Deibler Rose that Christ's command to “fear not” calls us to trust the Lord more than our circumstances, feelings, or fears (Matthew 10:28). From the mission field of New Guinea to imprisonment under the Japanese during World War II, Darlene learned that Jesus could never be locked out, even from a death-row cell. Her testimony reminds us that God's promises are surer than our emotions, His presence is stronger than our terror, and His love casts out fear. As we fix our eyes on Christ, we too can walk by faith in the “evidence not seen,” trusting Him to keep us, sustain us, and use us for His glory.

Further reading: https://www.audubon.org/news/like-finding-unicorn-researchers-rediscover-black-naped-pheasant-pigeon-bird https://www.sci.news/paleontology/confuciusornis-shifan-11528.html The black-naped pheasant-pigeon: Confuciusornis: Show transcript: We're going to learn about two birds that have been in the news lately. The first is the black-naped pheasant-pigeon. The word nape refers to the back of the neck, and this bird does have a black neck. It's a dark blue-black all over, in fact, with reddish-brown wings, a red bill, red eyes, and long yellow legs. It looks almost identical to the other three species of pheasant-pigeons known, although some scientists think they're subspecies. Those three are the white-naped, the green-naped, and the grey-naped pheasant-pigeons, and if you're wondering if the spot of color on the back of the neck is the easiest way to tell these birds apart, you are exactly right. All four species are native to parts of New Guinea or small islands nearby. Pheasant-pigeons look a lot like pheasants and are about the size of a chicken, although they're actually pigeons. They live in forests and eat seeds and fruit, and while they can fly they spend almost all of the time on the ground. We don't know a whole lot about them because they're so secretive and hard to spot in the wild, although the white-naped and green-naped birds are sometimes kept in zoos. In the case of the black-naped pheasant-pigeon, all scientists knew about it was from two specimens collected in 1882. It hadn't been seen since…until September of 2022. A team of scientists visited Fergusson Island off the east coast of Papua New Guinea in September, as part of a worldwide collaboration of scientists called The Search for Lost Birds. This is similar to the Search for Lost Frogs that has been active for over a decade, discovering lots of new amphibians and rediscovering even more. The 2022 search was actually a follow-up to a 2019 expedition that had failed to find the bird, although it did make other discoveries. In 2022, the team brought more people and equipment, determined to make the best effort possible to find the black-naped pheasant-pigeon. They consulted with local hunters to find the best places to search, and talked to lots of residents to see if anyone had seen one, and spent day after day hiking through forested mountains. For weeks they had no luck. Then, in a remote mountain village, they finally met some people who were familiar with the bird. One man led them to the right part of the forest and they set up camera traps, but at that point they only had a few days left before they had to leave the island. When they checked the pictures captured by the camera traps, though, they'd found it! Two of the cameras had taken pictures and video of what were definitely black-naped pheasant-pigeons, and since the cameras were several kilometers apart the pictures were probably of different individuals. The black-naped pheasant-pigeon wasn't extinct, which means it can be protected. Habitat loss, especially from commercial logging, and feral domestic cats are the two main threats to birds in the area. The other bird we're going to talk about today hasn't been seen in even longer: 119 million years, in fact. The article about this fossil was only released a few days ago as this episode goes live. You can check the show notes for links to this article and a good one about the pheasant-pigeon too. Paleontologists discovered the bird's fossil remains in northeastern China, in fossil beds that contain incredibly well-preserved animals and plants. The Jiufotang Formation in China dates to the early Cretaceous, between about 122 and 119 million years ago, and researchers think it's from an area that was once a shallow lake surrounded by forests. Every so often, a nearby volcano would erupt and the resulting ash would fall into the lake, causing anoxic conditions that helped preserve animals that died and sank into the mud at the bottom of the lake. There are lots of fish, pterosaurs, birds, and dinosaurs among the fossils discovered, most of them small but a few quite large. This includes a type of tyrannosaur that probably grew around 33 feet long, or 10 meters. A few early mammals have been discovered too. In one case, the remains of 40 individual birds were found on one big slab of stone, and scientists think an entire flock of birds was killed by a volcanic ashfall or poisonous gases from the volcano. The newly described fossil we're talking about today was almost complete and almost completely articulated, preserved with the impression of feathers around its body. The bird has been named Confuciusornis shifan and was a little smaller than a modern crow. It had a toothless beak and a short tail, although it probably had long tail feathers. Other Confuciusornis species have been discovered with the impressions of long tail plumes. All of the Confuciusornis fossils discovered so far were birds that could fly well but probably nowhere near as well as any bird today. But C. shifan had an adaptation in its wings not seen in any other bird, living or extinct. It had a small extra bone in the wing that acted like a cushion and probably helped the wings withstand the stresses of flight. The most interesting thing about the different Confuciusornis species is that if we could go back in time and see them when they were alive, they probably wouldn't have looked unusual to most people, except to bird experts who would instantly freak out. For the most part, they just looked like birds. Some specimens show preserved melanosomes under electron microscopy that indicate the feathers were various colors including white, brown, red, and black. There's even evidence of a pattern of spots and streaks on some feathers. Their feet were adapted for perching the way many modern songbird feet are. But Confuciusornis wasn't a direct ancestor of modern birds as far as we know. Even though we have lots of beautifully preserved Confuciusornis fossils, the fossils can only tell us so much. We have a pretty good idea of what the birds looked like, but we don't know much about how they lived. One specimen was found with the remains of a tiny fish inside its body, so researchers think the birds may have eaten fish or might have just been omnivores that weren't picky about what they ate. One specimen was found with an egg beside it that was the right size to have fit through its pelvic opening, but we can't know for sure if the egg belonged to the bird or was from another bird and just happened to have settled near the dead bird when it fell in the water. Still, even though we only have fossil remains, that's much better than having no knowledge of these early birds at all. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

A miracle happens, a man stands up after 38 years, and the first reaction from religious leaders is to argue about a rule. That single moment from John 5 exposes a trap that still catches us today: we can become so devoted to the letter of the law that we miss the heart of God right in front of us.We walk through the Pool of Bethesda story and the escalating conflict over the Sabbath, then follow Jesus' own words about His relationship to the Father. The point is not vague inspiration, it's a direct claim of authority: the Son gives life, the Son judges, and honoring God means honoring Jesus Christ. Along the way, we connect Scripture to real life, including what religious freedom is supposed to protect, and how a culture can confuse “tolerance” with pretending all beliefs are the same.The conversation also turns personal with a marriage devotional from Song of Solomon and a practical warning from Proverbs 14 about anger. Stress doesn't just test us, it reveals us, and we talk honestly about how spiritual distance shows up in our words at home. We close by remembering courage and sacrifice: an honor killing that shows the cost of evil ideas, a Medal of Honor act of self-sacrifice, and a 9/11 reflection that calls us to thank the police, firefighters, military, and everyday providers who rarely get noticed.If this helped you think clearly and live faithfully, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find the show.#AmericanPatriot#ChristianNation#September2001Support the showThe American Soul Podcasthttps://www.buzzsprout.com/1791934/subscribeCountryside Book Serieshttps://www.amazon.com/Countryside-Book-J-T-Cope-IV-ebook/dp/B00MPIXOB2 

Send us Fan MailMost birds are harmless.This one is poisonous.In this minisode of Wildly Curious, Katy Reiss and Laura Fawks Lapole dive into one of the strangest birds on Earth: the pitohui, a brightly colored songbird from New Guinea that carries powerful neurotoxins in its skin and feathers.  The toxin is chemically similar to the same compounds found in some poison dart frogs, making the pitohui one of the very few known poisonous birds in the world. But how does a bird become poisonous in the first place?

In this episode, Dale and Christophe cover one of the most decisive — and most overlooked — air-sea battles of the entire Pacific War: the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, March 2–4, 1943.In three days, Allied air power destroyed an entire sixteen-ship Japanese convoy carrying nearly 7,000 troops of the 51st Infantry Division bound for Lae, New Guinea. All eight transports were sunk. Four of eight destroyers were lost. Roughly 2,900 Japanese soldiers and sailors were killed. Allied losses: thirteen airmen and a handful of aircraft.It was not luck. It was the product of broken enemy codes, a network of courageous coastwatchers operating behind enemy lines, and months of classified training in a revolutionary attack technique most of the military establishment had dismissed as reckless.In this episode:The strategic situation in early 1943 — why New Guinea and Rabaul were the twin keys to the Southwest PacificJapan's calculated decision to run the convoy despite the risks, and the reasoning behind itThe ULTRA code-breaking program and how Allied signals intelligence handed General Kenney the convoy's route, composition, and timing days before it sailedThe unsung coastwatcher network — Allied personnel living in Japanese-occupied territory, transmitting intelligence at mortal riskGeneral George C. Kenney — one of the most innovative and underappreciated air commanders America has ever producedThe development and perfection of skip-bombing, and how Kenney's crews modified the B-25 Mitchell into a ship-killing weapon the Japanese had no answer forMarch 2: the opening B-17 strikes through bad weather, and why Japanese commanders made the fateful decision to press onMarch 3 morning: the coordinated killing blow — B-17s, RAAF Beaufighters, A-20 Havocs, and B-25s in a sequenced assault that shattered the convoy in thirty minutesMarch 3 afternoon and night: the destruction continues, the PT boats enter the picture, and the moral complexity of the strafing ordersThe final accounting: losses, survivors, and Japan's institutional reckoning with what had just happenedOperation Cartwheel, the isolation of Rabaul, and why the road from New Guinea to Tokyo ran directly through the Bismarck SeaDale and Christophe also sit with the moral weight of the lifeboat strafing — a decision that exists in genuine tension with the laws of war and with the brilliance of the tactical victory surrounding it. They don't resolve it cleanly, because it doesn't resolve cleanly.Connect with the show:Email: usnavyhistorypodcast@gmail.comX/Twitter: @USNHistoryPodDiscord: https://discord.gg/MYuwdV73If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review and tell someone who'd appreciate it. It's how the show grows.Fair winds and following seas.

Link Up w/The Morning Sickness Digitally All Over:Instagram: @hms_98_official, @bosskupd, @bretvesely, @dickToledoX/Twitter: @HMSon98, @DickToledo, @bretveselyFacebook: @HMSKUPDYouTube: @hmspodcast9320, @98kupdRequest/Call in/Wakeup Song line:(IN AZ) 602.585.9800More HMS: holmbergpodcast.com, 98kupd.comEmail: dtoledo@98kupd.com, bvesely@98kupd.com, bbogen@98kupd.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Link Up w/The Morning Sickness Digitally All Over:Instagram: @hms_98_official, @bosskupd, @bretvesely, @dickToledoX/Twitter: @HMSon98, @DickToledo, @bretveselyFacebook: @HMSKUPDYouTube: @hmspodcast9320, @98kupdRequest/Call in/Wakeup Song line:(IN AZ) 602.585.9800More HMS: holmbergpodcast.com, 98kupd.comEmail: dtoledo@98kupd.com, bvesely@98kupd.com, bbogen@98kupd.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Send us Fan MailWhy are birds named what they're named?In this mini episode of the Bird Name Game series from Wildly Curious, Katy Reiss explores the fascinating naming history behind two giant flightless birds that look like they walked straight out of the dinosaur era: cassowaries and emus.Both birds are massive, powerful, and deeply tied to the evolutionary story of modern birds—but their names come from very different linguistic journeys.Cassowaries, found in the tropical forests of New Guinea and northern Australia, are famous for their bright blue necks, dagger-like claws, and the mysterious helmet-like casque on their heads. Their name likely comes from Southeast Asian languages describing the bird's distinctive “horned head.”Emus, the shaggy runners of the Australian outback, inherited a name that originally referred to many large flightless birds—including ostriches and cassowaries. Early European explorers often confused these giant birds, and for a time emus were even called “New Holland cassowaries.”In this episode we explore:Why cassowaries are sometimes called the most dangerous bird in the worldWhat the mysterious cassowary casque might be used forHow early explorers confused emus, ostriches, and cassowariesWhy the word “emu” once referred to multiple species of giant birdsHow language, exploration, and first impressions shaped bird namesIf you love birding, ornithology, wildlife science, or natural history, the Bird Name Game series reveals how the names of birds tell stories about exploration, language, and the way humans first encountered the natural world.Subscribe for more episodes of Wildly Curious, where science, nature, and curiosity collide. Support the show

Who can say that they don't want to drive a speedboat? Not one single living human being, including members of uncontacted tribes in New Guinea. Though they know nothing of the outside world, each and every single one of them dreams of piloting a 1000 horsepower fiberglass beauty across the waves.

Johnny Mac eports that the Two Brothers set a Guinness World Record with a robot solving a 4x4x4 Rubik's cube in 45.3 seconds using four robotic arms and two cameras with shutters for fairness, beating a 2014 mark of 1:18 after multiple improving attempts. A large study of over 100,000 women found AI analysis of routine mammograms can identify calcium in breast arteries linked to future cardiovascular disease, with mild calcification tied to about a 30% higher risk of serious events, and experts want integration and reporting guidelines. In Seattle, Rain Works uses hydrophobic spray stencils to create sidewalk art that only appears when wet and has spread globally. Scientists rediscovered the long-fingered possum and ring-tailed glider alive in New Guinea. In England, 19-year-old Nate monetized a realistic Spider-Man costume for parties and events.John also hosts Daily Comedy NewsUnlock an ad-free podcast experience with Caloroga Shark Media!  For Apple users, hit the banner which says Uninterrupted Listening on your Apple podcasts app. Subscribe now for exclusive shows like 'Palace Intrigue,' and get bonus content from Deep Crown (our exclusive Palace Insider!) Or get 'Daily Comedy News,' and '5 Good News Stories' with no commercials! Plans start at $4.99 per month, or save 20% with a yearly plan at $49.99. Join today and help support the show!Get more info from Caloroga Shark Media and if you have any comments, suggestions, or just want to get in touch our email is info@caloroga.com

Send us Fan MailIn this episode, we are joined by Laurie Gwen Shapiro, a bestselling author, journalist, and adjunct professor at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. A member of the Explorers Club, her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. She is the author of The Stowaway, the true story of a teenager who stowed away on a ship bound for Antarctica during the Jazz Age, and The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon, a New York Times Editors' Choice and one of the best books of the year by NPR, The New Yorker, and Smithsonian Magazine.But before our conversation with Laurie, we set the stage, because the Amelia Earhart story is deeply a Pan Am story.On January 9, 1929, three defining figures of the aviation age stood on the tarmac of Pan Am's new Miami terminal, Juan Trippe, Charles Lindbergh, and Amelia Earhart. Trippe invited Earhart aboard Pan Am's Fokker F-10A, captained by Edwin Musick, for the inaugural flight to Havana.At the center of that relationship was Fred Noonan, Pan Am's greatest navigator, who charted the transpacific routes. When Earhart assembled her team in 1937, Noonan was the navigator every conversation kept returning to. Trippe extended Pan Am's full cooperation, and Pan Am mechanics spent a week on her Lockheed Electra in Miami. On July 2, 1937, Earhart and Noonan departed Lae, New Guinea, bound for Howland Island - 2,556 miles of open ocean...and vanished.This episode also features rare archival audio from the Elgen and Marie Long oral history collection...aired publicly for the first time. Their 220-plus hours of recordings are preserved at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum as the Amelia Earhart Project Recordings. Among those voices is Pan Am's Harry Canaday, recorded in 1985 at age 76, reflecting on Noonan, the Pacific survey flights, and the world that produced the Earhart flight.These recordings are presented courtesy of David Jourdan of Nauticos and the Smithsonian Institution's Amelia Earhart Project.Support the showVisit Us for more Pan Am History! Support the Podcast!Donate to the Museum!Visit The Hangar online store for Pan Am gear!Become a Member! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter!A very special thanks to Mr. Adam Aron, Chairman and CEO of AMC and president of the Pan Am Historical Foundation and  Pan Am Brands for their continued and unwavering support! 

About 70,000 years ago, there was a huge piece of land off the coast of Australia that could have supported around half a million people. This land connected modern-day Indonesia to Australia and was part of the North-West Australian Shelf. It used to be part of a bigger landmass called Sahul, which linked Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania into one continent. Today, scientists are mapping this lost "Atlantis" to learn more about it. It's fascinating to think about this ancient world that once existed! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When every earthly support is stripped away and you are faced with the "executioner's sword," where do you turn for protection? Is it possible to maintain unshakeable joy while trapped in solitary confinement, falsely accused, and surrounded by the darkest of circumstances? In those moments when the enemy hurls his most poisonous arrows of doubt and fear, how do we find a shield that truly holds?In this episode, Tracie and Abigail continue the season When War Comes”through the breathtaking life of missionary Darlene Deibler Rose. Focusing on the Shield of Faith, we explore Darlene's four-year journey as a POW in the jungles of New Guinea and the Japanese internment camps. Her testimony is a powerful demonstration of how faith acts as a practical, protective barrier against the onslaught of the devil—reminding us that when we take up this shield, God provides the "evidence of things not seen" to sustain us through the fire.If you know of someone who can be helped by listening to the Abundant Living Podcast, please share this episode with them. Please let us know what you think by rating and reviewing this podcast in your podcasting app! We love hearing from our listeners, whether through comments on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠our Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠or messaging us on our website, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠christianladiesfellowship.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. You may also apply to be a part of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠our private Facebook group⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, but be sure to answer all the questions and agree to the group rules when you click to join.You can also email Tracie directly at tburns@immanueljax.org. Thank you for being part of this uplifting and encouraging community of ladies who want to live abundantly for the Lord!

Episode 348 Thought extinct for 6,000 years, two marsupial species have been discovered alive in New Guinea. Biologists have found a new genus of marsupial glider and the Pygmy Long-fingered Possum on a small Western part of the island. One biologist said this discovery was “more important than finding a living Thylacine in Tasmania”. Host Rowan Hooper is joined by Tim Flannery of the Australian Museum in Sydney, who led the team that confirmed the discovery. He tells us all about these quirky and cute creatures, one of which is held up as sacred by some Indigenous communities - who won't even utter its name in public. Learn about the glider's habit of forming monogamous relationships and its gardening prowess. And discover why the long-fingered possum's finger is so long. Other key players in this research are Professor Kris Helgen, multiple researchers from the University of Papua - and some of the local villagers. To read more about these stories, visit https://www.newscientist.com/ Glider image credits: Dewa, Australian Museum Other image credits: Flannery et al Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's the misty dawn of the 20th century in the remote highlands of Papua New Guinea. A British explorer's team pushes into uncharted territory, chasing rumors of something massive lurking in the grass. Then, one terrified porter spots it: not a pig, but a hulking, long-snouted beast that moves with unnatural grace, vanishing into the underbrush as gunshots ring out. Tracks the size of dinner plates scar the earth, and whispers of the “devil-pig” spread through villages. Was this a relic from a lost age thought to be extinct or a shadow of a monster born of fear?Join Gary and GoldieAnn today as they explore Within the Mist of New Guinea to discover the Gazeka, the Papuan Devil-Pig.Facebook Fan Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/544933724571696Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/withinthemistpodcast/Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@withinthemistpodcast1977 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's the misty dawn of the 20th century in the remote highlands of Papua New Guinea. A British explorer's team pushes into uncharted territory, chasing rumors of something massive lurking in the grass. Then, one terrified porter spots it: not a pig, but a hulking, long-snouted beast that moves with unnatural grace, vanishing into the underbrush as gunshots ring out. Tracks the size of dinner plates scar the earth, and whispers of the “devil-pig” spread through villages. Was this a relic from a lost age thought to be extinct or a shadow of a monster born of fear?Join Gary and GoldieAnn today as they explore Within the Mist of New Guinea to discover the Gazeka, the Papuan Devil-Pig.Facebook Fan Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/544933724571696Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/withinthemistpodcast/Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@withinthemistpodcast1977 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s the annual discoveries episode! Thanks to Stephen and Aryeh for their corrections and suggestions this week! Further reading: Salinella Salve: The Vanishing Creature That Defied Science for Over a Century Three new species of the genus Scutiger Baeticoniscus carmonaensis sp. nov. a new Isopod found in an underground aqueduct from the Roman period located in Southwest Spain (Crustacea, Isopoda, Trichoniscidae) A new species of supergiant Bathynomus Giant ‘Darth Vader' sea bug discovered off the coast of Vietnam A New Species of easter egg weevil Bizarre ‘bone collector’ caterpillar discovered by UH scientists Researchers Discover ‘Death Ball’ Sponge and Dozens of Other Bizarre Deep-Sea Creatures in the Southern Ocean 1,500th Bat Species Discovered in Africa’s Equatorial Guinea Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about some animals discovered in 2025! We'll also make this our corrections episode. This is the last new episode we'll have until the end of August when we reach our 500th episode, but don't worry, until then there will be rescheduled Patreon episodes every single week as usual. We'll start with some corrections. Shortly after episode 452 was published in September, where we talked about the swamp wallaby and some other animals, Stephen emailed to point out that I'd made a major mistake! In that episode I said that not all animals called wallabies were actually members of the family Macropodidae, but that's actually not the case. All wallabies are macropodids, but they aren't all members of the same genus in that family. I corrected the episode but I wanted to mention it here too so no one is confused. Stephen also caught another mistake in episode 458, which is embarrassing. I mentioned that marsupials didn't just live in Australia, they were found all over the world. That's not actually the case! Marsupials are found in North and South America, Australia, New Guinea and nearby areas, and that's it. They were once also found in what is now Asia, but that was millions of years ago. So I apologize to everyone in Africa, Asia, and Europe who were excited about finding out what their local marsupials are. You don't have any, sorry. One update that Aryeh asked about specifically is an animal we talked about in episode 445, salinella. Aryeh emailed asking for more information if I could find any, because it's such a fascinating mystery! I looked for some more recent findings, unfortunately without luck. I do have an article linked in the show notes that goes into detail about everything we covered in that episode, though, dated to mid-January 2026, and it's a nice clear account. Now, let's get into the 2025 discoveries! There are lots more animals that were discovered last year, but I just chose some that I thought were especially interesting. Mostly I chose ones that I thought had funny names. Let's start with three new species of frog in the genus Scutiger. Species in this genus are called lazy toads and I couldn't find out why. Maybe they don't like to move around too much. Lazy toads live in mountains in some parts of Asia, and we don't know very much about most of the 31 species described so far. Probably the most common lazy toad is the Sikkim lazy toad that lives along high altitude streams in the Himalaya Mountains. It's mottled greenish-brown and yellowish in color with lots of warts, and while its feet have webbed toes, it doesn't have webbed fingers on its little froggy hands. This is your reminder that every toad is a frog but not every frog is a toad. The Sikkim lazy toad grows about two and a half inches long, or about 65 mm, from nose to butt. It seems to be pretty average for a lazy toad. The three new species of lazy toad are found in Yunnan Province in China, in a mountainous region where several species of lazy toad were already known. Between 2021 and 2024, a team of scientists collected 27 lazy toads from various places, then carefully examined them to see if they were species already known to science. This included genetic analysis. The team compared their findings with other lazy toad species and discovered that not all of the specimens matched any known species. Further comparison with each other revealed that the team had discovered three new species, which they described in December of 2025. Next, isopods are common crustaceans that live throughout the world. You have undoubtedly seen at least one species of isopod, because an animal with lots of common names, including woodlouse, pill bug, roly-poly, and sowbug, is a terrestrial isopod. That's right, the roly-poly is not a bug or a centipede but a crustacean. The order Isopoda contains more than 10,000 species, and there are undoubtedly thousands more that haven't been discovered by scientists yet. About half the species discovered so far live on land and the other half live in water, most in the ocean but some in fresh water. They don't all look like roly-polies, of course. Many look like their distant crustacean cousins, shrimps and crayfish, while others look more like weird centipedes or fleas or worms. There's a lot of variation in an animal that's extremely common throughout the world, so it's no surprise that more species are discovered almost every year. In 2021 and 2022, a team of Spanish scientists took a biological survey of an ancient Roman tunnel system beneath Carmona, Spain. The tunnels were built around 2,000 years ago as a water source, since they capture groundwater, but it hasn't been used in so long that it's more or less a natural environment these days. The scientists quickly discovered plenty of life in the tunnels, including an isopod living in cracks in some ancient timbers. It grows about two and a half millimeters long and actually does look a lot like a tiny roly-poly. It has long antennae and its body mostly lacks pigment, but it does have dark eyes. Most animals that live in total darkness eventually evolve to no longer have functioning eyes, since they don't need them, but that isn't the case for this new isopod. Scientists think it might take advantage of small amounts of light available near the tunnel entrances. As far as the scientists can tell, the Carmona isopod only lives in this one tunnel system, so it's vulnerable to pollutants and human activity that might disrupt its underground home. Another new isopod species that's vulnerable to human activity, in this case overfishing, lives off the coast of Vietnam. It's another isopod that looks a lot like a roly-poly, which I swear is not what every isopod looks like. It's a deep-sea animal that hunts for food on the ocean floor, and it's a popular delicacy in Vietnam. Remember, it's a crustacean, and people say it tastes like another crustacean, lobster. In fact, scientists discovered their specimens in a fish market. Deep-sea animals sometimes feature what's called deep-sea gigantism. Most isopods are quite small, no more than a few cm at most, but the new species grows almost 13 inches long, or over 32 cm. It's almost the largest isopod known. Its head covering made the scientists think of Darth Vader's helmet, so it's been named Bathynomus vaderi. Next we have a new species of Easter egg weevil, a flightless beetle found on many islands in Southeast Asia. Easter egg weevils are beautiful, with every species having a different pattern of spots and stripes. Many are brightly colored and iridescent. The new species shows a lot of variability, but it's basically a black beetle with a diamond-shaped pattern that can be yellow, gold, or blue. Some individuals have pink spots in the middle of some of the diamonds. It's really pretty and that is just about all I could find out about it. Another new insect is a type of Hawaiian fancy case caterpillar, which metamorphose into moths. They're only found on the Hawaiian islands, and there are over 350 species known. The new species has been named the bone collector, because of what the caterpillar does. Fancy case caterpillars spin a sort of shell out of silk, which is called a case, and the caterpillar carries its case around with it as protection. Some of the cases are unadorned but resemble tree bark, while many species will decorate the case with lichens, sand, or other items that help it blend in with its background. Some fancy case caterpillars can live in water as well as on land, and while most caterpillars eat plant material, some fancy case caterpillars eat insects. That's the situation with the bone collector caterpillar. It lives in spider webs, which right there is astonishing, and decorates its case with bits and pieces of dead insect it finds in the web. This can include wings, heads, legs, and other body parts. The bone collector caterpillar eats insects, and it will chew through strands of the spider's web to get to a trapped insect before the spider does. Sometimes it will eat what's left of a spider's meal once the spider is finished. The bone collector caterpillar has only been found in one tiny part of O'ahu, a 15-square-km area of forest, although researchers think it was probably much more widespread before invasive plants and animals were introduced to the island. Next, the Antarctic Ocean is one of the least explored parts of the world, and a whole batch of new species was announced in 2025 after two recent expeditions. One of the expeditions explored ocean that was newly revealed after a huge iceberg split off the ice shelf off West Antarctica in early 2025. That's not where the expedition had planned to go, but it happened to be nearby when the iceberg broke off, and of course the team immediately went to take a look. Back in episode 199 we talked about some carnivorous sponges. Sponges have been around for more than half a billion years, and early on they evolved a simple but effective body plan that they mostly still retain. Most sponges have a skeleton made of calcium carbonate that forms a sort of dense net that's covered with soft body tissues. The sponge has lots of open pores in the outside of its body, which generally just resembles a sack or sometimes a tube, with one end attached to something hard like a rock, or just the bottom of the ocean. Water flows into the sponge's tissues through the pores, and special cells filter out particles of food from the water, much of it microscopic, and release any waste material. The sponge doesn't have a stomach or any kind of digestive tract. The cells process the food individually and pass on any extra nutrients to adjoining cells. In 1995, scientists discovered a tiny sponge that wasn't a regular filter feeder. It had little hooks all over it, and it turns out that when a small animal gets caught on the hooks, the sponge grows a membrane that envelops the animal within a few hours. The cells of the membrane contain bacteria that help digest the animal so the cells can absorb the nutrients. Since then, other carnivorous sponges have been discovered, or scientists have found that some sponges already known to science are actually carnivorous. That's the case with the ping-pong tree sponge. It looks kind of like a bunch of grapes on a central stem that grows up from the bottom of the ocean, and it can be more than 20 inches tall, or 50 cm. The little balls are actually balloon-like structures that inflate with water and are covered with little hooks. It was discovered off the coast of South America near Easter Island, in deep water where the sea floor is mostly made of hardened lava. It was classified in the genus Chondrocladia, and so far there are more than 30 other species known. The reason we're talking about the ping-pong tree sponge is that a new species of Chondrocladia has been discovered in the Antarctic Ocean, and it looks a lot like the ping-pong tree sponge. It's been dubbed the death-ball sponge, which is hilarious. It was found two and a quarter miles deep on the ocean floor, or 3.6 km, and while scientists have determined it's a new species of sponge, it hasn't been described yet. It's one of 30 new species found so far, and the team says that there are many other specimens collected that haven't been studied yet. We haven't talked about any new mammal discoveries yet, so let's finish with one of my favorites, a new bat! It was discovered on Bioko Island in Equatorial Guinea, which is part of Africa. During a 2024 biodiversity assessment on the island, a PhD student named Laura Torrent captured a bat that turned out to be not only a brand new species, it is the 1,500th species of bat known to science! Pipistrellus etula gets its name from the local language, Bantu, since “etula” means both “island” and “god of the island” in that language. The bat was found in forests at elevations over 1,000 meters, on the slopes of a volcano. Back in 1989, a different researcher captured a few of the bats on another volcano, but never got a chance to examine them to determine if they were a new species. When Torrent's team were studying their bats, one of the things they did was compare them to the preserved specimens from 1989, and they discovered the bats were indeed a match. P. etula is a type of vesper bat, which is mostly active at dusk and eats insects. It's brown with black wings and ears. Just like all the other species we've talked about today, now that we know it exists, it can be protected and studied in the wild. That's what science is really for, after all. It's not just to satisfy our human curiosity and desire for knowledge, although that's important too. It's so we can make this world a better place for everyone to live—humans, animals, plants, isopods, weird caterpillars, and everything else on Earth and beyond. You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That's blueberry without any E's. Thanks for listening! I'll see you in August.

Across unimaginable scales of time and space, a young explorer risks everything to prove that intelligence can bloom in the most unlikely conditions. When his search for reason turns into an accusation of harm, the fate of two civilizations hangs on what it truly means to be rational. Some Like it Cold by Dave Dryfoos. That's next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast.Dave Dryfoos has never been on the podcast, but I enjoyed narrating this story and this won't be the last time we hear from him. He was born in San Francisco in 1915. Dryfoos was in the United States Army during World War II, serving in Australia, New Guinea, and the Philippines.He wrote about 20 short stories that were published between 1950 and 1955 and then his literary work came to an end. He retired as assistant hospital administrator at Camarillo State Psychiatric Hospital in California in 1980.If you walked up to a newsstand in November 1952 with a quarter in your pocket you could've purchased the most recent issue of Startling Stories magazine. And if you peeled back the pages you would find an intriguing tale of a spacefarer stumbling upon, well I don't want to give it away. Find out for yourself on page 108, Some Like it Cold by Dave Dryfoos…Next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, What if the people who feel out of place aren't broken — but simply living in the wrong world? One man's brilliant solution promises escape, fulfillment, and happiness… until the cost of paradise becomes impossible to ignore. The Worlds of Joe Shannon by Frank M. Robinson.Buy Me a Coffee - https://lostscifi.com/coffeeNewsletter - https://lostscifi.com/free/Rise - http://Lostscifi.com/riseX - http://Lostscifi.com/xInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/lostscifiguyFacebook - https://lostscifi.com/facebookYouTube - https://lostscifi.com/youtube❤️ ❤️ Thanks to Our Listeners Who Bought Us a Coffee$200 Someone$100 Tony from the Future$75 James Van Maanenberg$50 MizzBassie, Anonymous Listener$25 Someone, Eaten by a Grue, Jeff Lussenden, Fred Sieber, Anne, Craig Hamilton, Dave Wiseman, Bromite Thrip, Marwin de Haan, Future Space Engineer, Fressie, Kevin Eckert, Stephen Kagan, James Van Maanenberg, Irma Stolfo, Josh Jennings, Leber8tr, Conrad Chaffee, Anonymous Listener$15 Every Month Someone$15 SueTheLibrarian, Joannie West, Amy Özkan, Someone, Carolyn Guthleben, Patrick McLendon, Curious Jon, Buz C., Fressie, Anonymous Listener$10 Anonymous Listener$5 Every Month Eaten by a Grue$5 TLD, David, Denis Kalinin, Timothy Buckley, Andre'a, Martin Brown, Ron McFarlan, Tif Love, Chrystene, Richard Hoffman, Anonymous Listenerhttps://lostscifi.com/podcast/some-like-it-cold-by-dave-dryfoos/Please participate in our podcast survey https://podcastsurvey.typeform.com/to/gNLcxQlk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The sixth in our series on the Seven Summits, Carstensz Pyramid, is the tallest peak within Oceania. While some Seven Summits lists include Mount Kosciuszko in Australia, most modern lists acknowledge Carstensz Pyramid due to its higher altitude and increased technical challenge. Locally known as Puncak Jaya, the peak sits at 4,884m or 16,024 feet above sea level, on the island of New Guinea. Unlike all other peaks on the list of seven summits, Carstensz Pyramid is a true rock climb, where climbers ascend a limestone ridgeline with both vertical walls and exposed traverses. - Much of the climb has been fixed with ropes, including a span which now has a cable bridge, to accommodate the number of climbers looking to climb the mountain and prevent issues of overcrowding. - Due to it's relatively low altitude, as compared to it's counterparts, climbing Carstensz is generally quite quick, and much of the true adventure lies in the many-day trek through the jungle to reach the base of the peak. - Unfortunately, with a long history of unrest in the jungle, it has become standard to heli into basecamp for your climb. With ethnic tribal conflicts and civil disturbances, it's no longer feasible to trek through the jungle. Follow our podcast on Instagram @duffelshufflepodcast where you can learn more about our guests and us. Visit our website at www.duffelshufflepodcast.com and join our mailing list. The Duffel Shuffle Podcast is supported by Alpenglow Expeditions, an internationally renowned mountain guide service based in Lake Tahoe, California. Visit www.alpenglowexpeditions.com or follow @alpenglowexpeditions on Instagram to learn more.

Thanks to Audie, Katie, Eilee, Emily, Maryjane, and Dylan for their suggestions this week! Sorry this episode is late–the site was down.

This week Seth Paridon and Jon Parshall welcome their mutual pal, historian and author John McManus back to the show for another Q&A round with emcee US Army retired Major Shawn Bergstrom.  This session gets DEEP in the weeds on several topics such as the American Homefront, PTSD, war dogs, Tarawa, New Guinea, bypassed Japanese bastions and much, much more.  This episode is a lot of fun, and the questions are, and continue to be, absolutely amazing.  Thank you so much to our beloved Nerderati, who have really brought their A-game to these Q&A episodes.  You guys rock.  #wwiihistory #ww2 #usnavy #usa #usarmy #medalofhonor #enterprise #aircraft #aircraftcarrier #cv6 #midway #wwii #wwiihistory #ww2 #worldwar2 #usnavy #usnavyseals #usmc #usmarines #saipan #usa #usarmy #aircraft #aircraftcarrier #battleship #battleships #ussenterprise #aircraftcarriers #museum #essex #halsey #taskforce38 #wwii #wwiihistory #ww2 #usnavy #usa #usarmy #medalofhonor #enterprise #aircraft #aircraftcarrier #cv6 #midway #wwii #wwiihistory #ww2 #worldwar2 #usnavy #usnavyseals #usmc #usmarines #saipan #usa #usarmy #aircraft #aircraftcarrier #battleship #battleships #ussenterprise #aircraftcarriers #museum #hollywood #movie #movies #books #mastersoftheair #8thairforce #mightyeighth #100thbombgroup #bloodyhundredth #b17 #boeing #airforce wwii #wwiihistory #ww2 #usnavy #usa #usarmy #medalofhonor #enterprise #aircraft #aircraftcarrier #cv6 #midway #wwii #wwiihistory #ww2 #worldwar2 #usnavy #usnavyseals #usmc #usmarines #saipan #usa #usarmy #aircraft #aircraftcarrier #battleship #battleships #ussenterprise #aircraftcarriers #museum #hollywood #movie #movies #books #oldbreed #1stMarineDivision #thepacific #Peleliu #army #marines #marinecorps #worldwar2 #worldwar #worldwarii #leytegulf #battleofleytegulf #rodserling #twilightzone #liberation #blacksheep #power #prisoner #prisonerofwar #typhoon #hurricane #weather #iwojima#bullhalsey #ace #p47 #p38 #fighter #fighterpilot #b29 #strategicstudying #tokyo #boeing #incendiary #usa #franklin #okinawa #yamato #kamikaze #Q&A #questions #questionsandanswers #history #jaws #atomicbomb #nuclear #nationalarchives #nara #johnford #hollywood #fdr #president #roosevelt #doolittle #doolittleraid #pearlharborattack #salvaged #medalofhonor #tarawa #malayalam #singapore #guadalcanal

Alright, friends—we've come to the end of the 2025 run of Many Minds! Our final episode of the year is an audio essay by yours truly. This is a classic format for the show, one that we only do every so often. Today's essay is about names. It's about the question of whether animals have something like names for each other. And it's also about a deeper question: What even is a name? How do humans use names? How does the historical and ethnographic record kind of complicate our everyday understanding of what names are. I had a lot of fun putting this together, and do I hope you enjoy it.  Now, the holiday season is a time when people might be shopping around for new podcasts to listen to. That makes it a great time to recommend us to your friends and family and colleagues. You can think of it has an especially thoughtful gift, one that's absolutely free, and that keeps on giving throughout the year.  Speaking of gifts, as an addendum to this episode you'll find a little stocking stuffer after the credits. It's a reading of a poem that figures prominently in today's essay.  Without further ado, here is my essay—'In search of names.' Enjoy!   Notes: A text version of this essay will be published shortly.   Notes 2:00 – The text of, 'The Naming of Cats,' by T.S. Eliot is here. See also the full collection, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. The lines about cats' taste preferences and cats having different kinds of minds comes from another poem in the collection, 'The Ad-Dressing of Cats.' 3:00 – The 2019 study finding that cats know their names, and the 2022 study showing that cats know the names of their friends. 4:00 – For an overview of research on dolphin "signature whistles," see here. 5:00 – For the 2024 study reporting name-like rumbles in elephants, see here.  6:00 – For the 2025 study reporting vocal labels for individuals in marmosets, see here. A critical response to the study is here; the authors' response to the criticism is here. 12:00 – For overviews of cross-cultural variation in names and naming practices, see here, here, here, and here. Richard Alford's 1988 study, published in book form, is here.  13:30 – The study reporting name signs in Kata Kalok is here. 15:00 – For research on expectations based on the sounds of people's names, see here and here. 16:00 – For recent work on the "face-name matching effect," see here. For the study on "nominative determinism" in the medical profession, see here. (Note that, while this latter study does report empirical data, its rigor is questionable. And, yet, at least one other study has reported similar findings.) 17:30 – For the example of over-used names in Scotland, see here.  19:30 – For discussion of names in New Guinea, see here. For examples of research on "teknonymy" see here and here. For discussion of Penan "necronyms," see here.  20:30 – For an overview of name taboos, see here. For more on "alexinomia," see here. 22:30 – For an example of recent work on "name uniqueness," see here.   23:00 – William Safire's column on dog names is here. The study of gravestones in the world's oldest pet cemetery is here.     Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

In this episode, we are joined by Mark O' Shea to hear the story of the rough scaled python (Morelia carinata).Mark has written many books includingIn 2000 Mark coauthored the DK Handbook to Reptiles and Amphibians with the late Tim Halliday, this book being rebated Smithsonian Handbook in the UK and republished in at least 14 languages. Venomous Snakes and Boas & Pythons were also published in German, Swedish, Hungarian. He also wrote a book called Nature Watch: Lizards in 2003 and that has come out in various forms since. He wrote chapters for several books ranging from endanged species too snakebite.  He is currently working on the slow-burn revision of my New Guinea snake volume and Snakes of the World, the sister books to Lizards of the World. You can have stocks of The Book of Snakes and Lizards of the World which Mark is signing and selling.Mark's Website--------------------------Follow MPR Network on:FB: https://www.facebook.com/MoreliaPythonRadioIG: https://www.instagram.com/mpr_network/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtrEaKcyN8KvC3pqaiYc0RQMore ways to support the shows.Swag store: https://teespring.com/stores/mprnetworkPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/moreliapythonradio ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

On this Live Greatly podcast episode, Kristel Bauer sits down with "Courage Catalyst" Dr. Margie Warrell, six-time bestselling author of The Courage Gap.  Kristel and Margie discuss how to navigate being an insecure overachiever and how to build courage. Tune in now!  Key Takeaways From This Episode: A look into being an insecure overachiever and how to overcome it Tips to build courage within ourselves A look into Dr. Warrell's book, The Courage Gap ABOUT DR. MARGIE WARRELL Dr. Margie Warrell is a six-time bestselling author, leadership advisor, keynote speaker, and "courage catalyst" bringing deep insight into human and organizational behavior to foster braver leadership and better outcomes.  Dr. Warrell has gained profound insights on managing fear, navigating risk, and embracing change since her childhood in rural Australia. Thirty years of living and working around the world—from Papua, New Guinea to Singapore—have provided her with a globally grounded perspective on navigating risk and overcoming the barriers that stifle potential in individuals and organizations. Drawing on her doctoral research and experience in coaching and Fortune 500 consulting, Dr. Warrell is a trusted advisor across private and public sectors, helping to embolden braver leadership and cultivate forward-thinking "cultures of courage" that counter change resistance, foster learning, and accelerate growth. Organizations such as NASA, Dell, Morgan Stanley, SAP, Novartis, the UN Foundation, HP, Google, and Johnson & Johnson have sought her expertise.  Author of the new book, The Courage Gap, Dr. Warrell is renowned for her ability to bridge the "head and heart" as a writer and speaker. She has also co-authored two other books with Stephen Covey, Ken Blanchard, and Jack Canfield. Her interviews with leaders and luminaries—including Bill Marriott, Richard Branson, and Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School—inform her thought leadership, which she shares through her global top 1.5% podcast, Live Brave, Forbes column, and leading media outlets such as CNN, Bloomberg, and the WSJ. Dr. Warrell's commitment to "braver leadership for a better world" extends to advising US Congressional Chiefs, McCain Global Fellows, and emerging female leaders in burgeoning democracies. A passionate advocate for women in leadership, she has served on numerous government roundtables, co-led Korn Ferry's Power of All initiative to advance more women to C-suite and board tables, and been Senior Partner in their CEO & Leadership Institute. Connect with Dr. Warrell Order Dr. Warrell's book: https://a.co/d/81cuf2F  Website: https://margiewarrell.com/  Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/margiewarrell/  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/margiewarrell/  About the Host of the Live Greatly podcast, Kristel Bauer: Kristel Bauer is a corporate wellness and performance expert, keynote speaker and TEDx speaker supporting organizations and individuals on their journeys for more happiness and success. She is the author of Work-Life Tango: Finding Happiness, Harmony, and Peak Performance Wherever You Work (John Murray Business November 19, 2024). With Kristel's healthcare background, she provides data driven actionable strategies to leverage happiness and high-power habits to drive growth mindsets, peak performance, profitability, well-being and a culture of excellence. Kristel's keynotes provide insights to "Live Greatly" while promoting leadership development and team building.   Kristel is the creator and host of her global top self-improvement podcast, Live Greatly. She is a contributing writer for Entrepreneur, and she is an influencer in the business and wellness space having been recognized as a Top 10 Social Media Influencer of 2021 in Forbes. As an Integrative Medicine Fellow & Physician Assistant having practiced clinically in Integrative Psychiatry, Kristel has a unique perspective into attaining a mindset for more happiness and success. Kristel has presented to groups from the American Gas Association, Bank of America, bp, Commercial Metals Company, General Mills, Northwestern University, Santander Bank and many more. Kristel has been featured in Forbes, Forest & Bluff Magazine, Authority Magazine & Podcast Magazine and she has appeared on ABC 7 Chicago, WGN Daytime Chicago, Fox 4's WDAF-TV's Great Day KC, and Ticker News. Kristel lives in the Fort Lauderdale, Florida area and she can be booked for speaking engagements worldwide. To Book Kristel as a speaker for your next event, click here. Website: www.livegreatly.co  Follow Kristel Bauer on: Instagram: @livegreatly_co  LinkedIn: Kristel Bauer Twitter: @livegreatly_co Facebook: @livegreatly.co Youtube: Live Greatly, Kristel Bauer To Watch Kristel Bauer's TEDx talk of Redefining Work/Life Balance in a COVID-19 World click here. Click HERE to check out Kristel's corporate wellness and leadership blog Click HERE to check out Kristel's Travel and Wellness Blog Disclaimer: The contents of this podcast are intended for informational and educational purposes only. Always seek the guidance of your physician for any recommendations specific to you or for any questions regarding your specific health, your sleep patterns changes to diet and exercise, or any medical conditions.  Always consult your physician before starting any supplements or new lifestyle programs. All information, views and statements shared on the Live Greatly podcast are purely the opinions of the authors, and are not medical advice or treatment recommendations.  They have not been evaluated by the food and drug administration.  Opinions of guests are their own and Kristel Bauer & this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests.  Neither Kristel Bauer nor this podcast takes responsibility for possible health consequences of a person or persons following the information in this educational content.  Always consult your physician for recommendations specific to you.

From WWII soldiers in New Guinea to pygmy tribes in the Congo, eyewitnesses across multiple continents have reported encountering spiders with bodies the size of puppies and dinner plates—yet science insists such creatures cannot exist.IN THIS EPISODE: Something came out of the river near New Richmond, Ohio – those who saw it said it was a kind of alien lifeform, and utterly indescribable. What was the strange creature that has come to be known as Octoman? (The Ohio Octoman) *** Drivers were convinced they'd spotted the infamous Blue Bell Hill ghost on the A229 in February 2019. That was the last time the ghost was spotted – and some believe it wasn't really the ghost at all, but something else. (The Ghost of Blue Bell Hill) *** There are plenty of ghost stories in the Lake Placid area, but probably the most unique and mysterious is the story of the Lady in the Lake. So mysterious is this ghost that it has inspired many authors and filmmakers – but the true story is more creepy than any ghost story. (The Lady In Lake Placid) *** In the early days of those reaching the New World, superstitions and unusual beliefs about others, even your own neighbors, were commonplace. Most anyone could be accused of being a witch. And I do mean anyone. Be thankful you weren't one of the first settlers to live in America. (American Witches) *** Gigantic spiders are reported worldwide, yet we have yet to actually capture one to prove their existence or study them to see how they grow so large. Is it possible the giant spiders don't exist – or could it be a different creature we have yet to identify? (The Actuality of Enormous Arthropods)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Lead-In00:02:33.184 = Show Open00:04:50.539 = The Actuality of Enormous Arthropods00:22:16.449 = ***The Ghost of Blue Bell Hill00:28:05.894 = The Ohio Octoman00:42:19.972 = ***American Witches01:02:17.734 = ***The Lady In Lake Placid01:07:27.405 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakSOURCES and RESOURCES:“The Ohio Octoman” from It's Something Wiki (Itsmth): https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4x2ua8c***BOOK: “Bigfoot: Tales of Unexplained Creatures, UFO and Psychic Connections”: https://amzn.to/3scEJ85***BOOK: “The Bigfoot Case Book” by Janet Bord, Colin Bord, Loren Coleman: https://amzn.to/3ccYVkY***BOOK: “Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us” by John Green: https://amzn.to/3d08z9w“Mammoth Spiders” heard at the beginning of the episode is from UnexplainedMonsters.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5pfd8“The Actuality of Enormous Arthropods” by Karl Shuker from the book, “Mirabalis – A Carnival of Cryptozoology and Unnatural History”: https://amzn.to/3d1p8Sm, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3dxsemrm“The Ghost of Blue Bell Hill” by Victoria Chessum and Ben Ashton for Kent Live: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2cyteuy8***PHOTO of Ghost of Blue Bell: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/47pm6yzd“The Lady In Lake Placid” by Jess Collier for LakePlacid.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2mjnvdjs***BOOK: “A Lady in the Lake” by George Christian Ortloff: https://amzn.to/3lI30Ap***BOOK: “Dancehall” by Bernard F. Conners: https://amzn.to/392XRhm“American Witches” by Charles Skinner, gathered and edited by Kathy Weiser for Legends of America:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y4cyjxnh=====(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.)= = = = ="I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness." — John 12:46= = = = =WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2025, Weird Darkness.=====Originally aired: March 2021EPISODE PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/GiantSpidersABOUT WEIRD DARKNESS: Weird Darkness is a true crime and paranormal podcast narrated by professional award-winning voice actor, Darren Marlar. Seven days per week, Weird Darkness focuses on all thing strange and macabre such as haunted locations, unsolved mysteries, true ghost stories, supernatural manifestations, urban legends, unsolved or cold case murders, conspiracy theories, and more. On Thursdays, this scary stories podcast features horror fiction along with the occasional creepypasta. Weird Darkness has been named one of the “Best 20 Storytellers in Podcasting” by Podcast Business Journal. Listeners have described the show as a cross between “Coast to Coast” with Art Bell, “The Twilight Zone” with Rod Serling, “Unsolved Mysteries” with Robert Stack, and “In Search Of” with Leonard Nimoy.DISCLAIMER: Ads heard during the podcast that are not in my voice are placed by third party agencies outside of my control and should not imply an endorsement by Weird Darkness or myself. *** Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised.#WeirdDarkness #GiantSpiders #Cryptozoology #CryptidSightings #JbaFofi #UnexplainedMysteries #EyewitnessAccounts #MonsterSpiders #ParanormalCreatures #TrueCryptids

Thanks to Viki, Erin, Weller, and Stella for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Tasmanian tiger pups found to be extraordinary similar to wolf pups The thylacine could open its jaws really wide: A sugar glider, gliding [photo from this page]: A happy quokka and a happy person: A swimming platypus: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about some marsupial mammals suggested by Erin, Weller, and Stella, and a bonus non-marsupial from Australia suggested by Viki. Marsupials are mammals that give birth to babies that aren't fully formed yet, and the babies then finish developing in the mother's pouch. Not all female marsupials actually have a pouch, although most do. Marsupials are extremely common in Australia, but they're also found in most other places around the world. Let's start with Weller's suggestion, the Tasmanian tiger. We've talked about it before, but not recently. We talked about it in our very first episode, in fact! Despite its name, it isn't related to the tiger at all. Tigers are placental mammals, and the Tasmanian tiger is a marsupial. It's also called the thylacine to make things less confusing. The thylacine was declared extinct after the last known individual died in captivity in 1936, but sightings have continued ever since. It's not likely that a population is still around these days, but the thylacine is such a great animal that people hold out hope that it has survived and will one day be rediscovered. It got the name Tasmanian tiger because when European colonizers arrived in Tasmania, they saw a striped animal the size of a big dog, about two feet high at the shoulder, or 61 cm, and over six feet long if you included the long tail, or 1.8 meters. It was yellowish-brown with black stripes on the back half of its body and down its tail, with a doglike head and rounded ears. The thylacine was a nocturnal marsupial native to mainland Australia and the Australian island of Tasmania, but around 4,000 years ago, climate change caused more and longer droughts in eastern Australia and the thylacine population there went extinct. By 3,000 years ago, all the mainland thylacines had gone extinct, leaving just the Tasmanian population. The Tasmanian thylacines underwent a population crash around the same time that the mainland Australia populations went extinct—but the Tasmanian population had recovered and was actually increasing when Europeans showed up and started shooting them. The thylacine mostly ate small animals like ducks, water rats, and bandicoots. Its skull was very similar in shape to the wolf, which it wasn't related to at all, but its muzzle was longer and its jaws were comparatively much weaker. Its jaws could open incredibly wide, which usually indicates an animal that attacks prey much larger than it is, but studies of the thylacine's jaws and teeth show that they weren't strong enough for the stresses of attacking large animals. Next, Stella wanted to learn about the sugar glider, and I was surprised that we haven't talked about it before. It's a nocturnal marsupial native to the forests of New Guinea and parts of Australia, with various subspecies kept as exotic pets in some parts of the world. It's called a glider because of the animal's ability to glide. It has a flap of skin between its front and back legs, called a patagium, and when it stretches its legs out, the patagia tighten and act as a parachute. This is similar to other gliding animals, like the flying squirrel. The sugar glider resembles a rodent, but it isn't. It's actually a type of possum. It lives in trees and has a partially prehensile tail that helps it climb around more easily, and of course it can glide from tree to tree. It's an omnivore that eats insects, spiders, and other small animals, along with plant material, mainly sap. It will gnaw little holes in a tree to get at the sap or gum that ...

For the past 30 years Sadhana Peterson has mainly exhibited with her 3 siblings who are also creatives (blame it on their mother's influence). Sadhana's love of clay was ignited in 1970 when she was 10 years old. Sadhana was handed some clay by Barbara Quittenbaum, the pottery teacher at a school where her mother was teaching. Sadhana proceeded to make a pig inspired by an ancient Egyptian hippopotamus and she knew at once that she wanted to be a potter when she grew up. At 15 years old Sadhana started serious classes with Margaret Tuckson who was well known for her documentation of New Guinea ceramics and her love of wood firing. https://ThePottersCast.com/1168

HEADLINE: The Two Stages of Pacific Settlement: Early Migrations and the Lapita Culture AUTHOR NAME: Nicholas Thomas SUMMARY: Human settlement of the Pacific occurred in two stages. Early migrations crossed Wallacea 50,000-60,000 years ago, settling New Guinea and Australia. Much later, around 5,000-6,000 years ago, agriculturalists speaking Austronesian languages left Taiwan. This culture, known for distinctive Lapita pottery, migrated swiftly, establishing complex societies and settling western Polynesia (Fiji, Tonga, Samoa). 1899 SAMOA

INTRO (00:23): Kathleen opens the show drinking a Crossroads Cream Ale from Terre Haute Brewing Company. She reviews her weekend in Indiana, performing shows in Terre Haute and at Caesars Southern Indiana and eating shrimp cocktail at St. Elmo's in Indy.    TOUR NEWS: See Kathleen live on her “Day Drinking Tour.”   COURT NEWS (16:25): Kathleen shares news announcing that Jelly Roll met Pope Leo at the Vatican, Tom Brady is causing ripples in the NFL, and Taylor Swift allegedly arrived at the Chiefs vs Eagles game behind bulletproof glass.    TASTING MENU (1:46): Kathleen samples Broad Ripple Chip Co. Sweet & Spicy chips, Monastery Baked Goods Ranch Prayer Pretzels, and Lay's Loaded Nacho chips.    UPDATES (21:12): Kathleen shares updates on Red Lobster's reinvention of Endless Shrimp, Bill Belichick's girlfriend is denied trademarks, The Wizard of Oz saves the Sphere, Prince Harry kneels to King Charles, and Coachella's 2026 lineup has been released.   HOLY SHIT THEY FOUND IT (46:20): Kathleen reveals that a tree kangaroo has reappeared in New Guinea after vanishing for 90 years.   FRONT PAGE PUB NEWS ( ): Kathleen shares articles on a cruise ship passenger who jumped off a ship to avoid a gambling debt, AOL is discontinuing dial-up internet service, Mariah Carey makes a major Christmas announcement, John Daly sets a new PGA record, rare pink dolphins are spotted in Louisiana, Finland is introducing a four-day work week, defiant nuns flee their care home, Celebrity Cruises is launching new river ships in 2027, Amazon rolls out Zoox driverless taxis in Vegas, fireflies are disappearing, and Girl Scouts are releasing a new cookie flavor in 2026.    SAINT OF THE WEEK (1:20:33): Kathleen reads about St. Anastasia of Sirmium, patron saint of martyrs, weavers, widows and those suffering from poison.    WHAT ARE WE WATCHING (40:22): Kathleen recommends watching “The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets” on Peacock.    FEEL GOOD STORY (1:14:14): Kathleen reads highlights of Michael Jordan's latest free medical clinic opening in North Carolina, and lost cat Charlie ran away from home and traveled 30 miles to get to his favorite pub.