164 rasterized charts based on ENC material (IHM) updatedSunday, May 11, 2025
Mickey Muñoz on how to surf until you’re 100 years old
Mickey Muñoz was one of the original icons of California surf culture at Malibu in the early 1950s and was among the first group of hellmen to pioneer riding big waves at Waimea Bay later that decade.
He has stunt-doubled in Hollywood surf films, invented his own surfing maneuver, shaped boards alongside the best in the business, and prone paddled farther than any sane man should.
This film is about none of those things.
Mickey is now 87 years old—or at least he thinks he is—and plans to keep riding waves until he’s 100 or so.
He’s a true professional at making lemonade when life gives him lemons and answers every question with a story that may or may not outlast your attention span.
If you aim to surf longer than most people live, click play.
From The Inertia by Alexander Haro
In the early ’50s, Mickey Muñoz cemented himself as one of California’s best surfers.
In the early ’50s, Mickey Muñoz cemented himself as one of California’s best surfers.
All these years later, he’s gone from one of California’s best surfers to a living legend in the surfing world.
A new film from the ever-talented Kyle Buthman focuses on Muñoz now, and it’s exceedingly clear that his life is a well-lived one. It’s also clear that at the age of 87 (he thinks), he’s not even close to done.
“I want to keep surfing until at least a 100 or so,” Muñoz says from a couch in a living room full of colors.
“I want to keep surfing until at least a 100 or so,” Muñoz says from a couch in a living room full of colors.
“I try and stay away from doctors, I try and eat good food and think good thoughts and run every day.”
He’s been riding waves for a very long time. The first time he stood up was on a Surf King Junior, a hollow plywood paddleboard, when he was 10 or 11 years old.
He’s been riding waves for a very long time. The first time he stood up was on a Surf King Junior, a hollow plywood paddleboard, when he was 10 or 11 years old.
“I think I first stood up in 1947 or 1948,” he remembered, “and I’m still standing. I’m privileged.”
A few years later in 1950, he got his first real surfboard, a Joe Quigg balsa board, and it changed his life.
Mickey Muñoz is 87 years old (he thinks).
His life has been incredible, and he’s not done yet.
Photos: Buthman
A few years later in 1950, he got his first real surfboard, a Joe Quigg balsa board, and it changed his life.
The next decades were formative not only for him but for surfing culture as a whole, and Muñoz was right in the thick of it.
He’s rumored to have dated Kathy “Gidget” Koehner, and he was one of Sandra Dee’s doubles in the first Gidget movie. It wasn’t just Malibu that kept him surfing, though.
He was also part of one of the first groups – comprised of absolutely wild men – who surfed at giant Waimea Bay.
The film you see here is beautifully done, and does an incredible job of conveying the constant optimism that Muñoz is famous for.
“He’s a true professional at making lemonade when life gives him lemons,” Buthman wrote, and answers every question with a story that may or may not outlast your attention span.”
He plans on surfing until he can’t surf anymore, and after a lifetime spent riding waves, he has an outlook on life that we should all subscribe to.
“There are no bad waves,” he laughs.
The film you see here is beautifully done, and does an incredible job of conveying the constant optimism that Muñoz is famous for.
“He’s a true professional at making lemonade when life gives him lemons,” Buthman wrote, and answers every question with a story that may or may not outlast your attention span.”
He plans on surfing until he can’t surf anymore, and after a lifetime spent riding waves, he has an outlook on life that we should all subscribe to.
“There are no bad waves,” he laughs.
“Only a poor choice of equipment and a lousy attitude… I think you have to keep chasing perfection. If you keep chasing perfection, you know you’ll never find it or catch it, but it keeps you in the game. You gotta just… be surfing.”
Saturday, May 10, 2025
Ocean with David Attenborough review – a passionate case against the ruination of the sea
Ocean with David Attenborough takes viewers on a breathtaking journey showing there is nowhere more vital for our survival, more full of life, wonder, or surprise, than the ocean.
The celebrated broadcaster and filmmaker reveals how his lifetime has coincided with the great age of ocean discovery.
Through spectacular sequences featuring coral reefs, kelp forests and the open ocean, Attenborough shares why a healthy ocean keeps the entire planet stable and flourishing.
Stunning, immersive cinematography showcases the wonder of life under the seas and exposes the realities and challenges facing our ocean as never-before-seen, from destructive fishing techniques to mass coral reef bleaching.
Yet the story is one of optimism, with Attenborough pointing to inspirational stories from around the world to deliver his greatest message: the ocean can recover to a glory beyond anything anyone alive has ever seen.
From The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
Released on his 99th birthday and presented in the context of his remarkable career, Sir David’s authority is matched only by nature’s grandeur in this visually stunning film
A visual marvel like all his work, governed by his own matchless authority and striking a steady tonal balance between warning and hope, David Attenborough’s new film about the oceans is absorbing and compelling.
He makes a passionate case against the ruin caused by industrial overfishing and the sinister mega-trawlers which roam everywhere, raking the seabed with their vast metal nets, brutally and wastefully hoovering up fish populations of which the majority is often simply thrown away, depleting developing countries and fishing communities of their share.
Attenborough says that this is the new colonialism.
The film is released in cinemas in anticipation of the UN’s World Oceans Day in June, which is campaigning for 30% of the world’s oceans to be preserved from exploitation – at present, only around 3% is protected in this way.
As he arrives at his 99th birthday, Sir David presents this new documentary in the context of his own remarkable life and career, studying and thinking about the oceans as the last part of the world to be fully understood and also, perhaps, the last part to be exploited – and despoiled.
As he says, until relatively recently, the ocean was regarded as a kind of mysterious, undifferentiated Sahara, a wilderness, of interest largely for providing an apparently endless supply of food.
But he shows us an amazing vista of diversity and life, an extraordinary undulating landscape, a giant second planet of whose existence humanity has long been unaware but now seems in danger of damaging or even destroying.
Attenborough shows us that glorious places of colour and light and life can be scoured and scorched into a nuclear winter of nothingness by overfishing, but that by preserving places from this kind of industrialisation, creating “no take zones”, we can give the ocean and its lifeforms time to recover.
This is often possible within quite a short space of time and the revived species can “spill over” into other zones; effectively, it is this preservation model that is being suggested.
But Attenborough is always emphasising that this is not a cause for complacency, for saying that overfishing doesn’t matter because the overfished areas can always be nursed back to life: because we never know how close we have come to the point of no return.
Attenborough matches the natural world’s grandeur with his own intellectual and moral seriousness.
Links :
Friday, May 9, 2025
What do we owe the octopus?
How many hearts does an octopus have?
How do species like the mimic octopus camouflage themselves?
Find out about these and other octopus facts.
From Wired by Emily Mullin
Now, the National Institutes of Health is considering new animal welfare rules that would put them in the same category as monkeys.
Consider the octopus.
Smart and sophisticated, it has a brain larger than that of any other invertebrate.
With 500 million or so neurons, its nervous system is more typical of animals with a backbone.
In lab experiments, the octopus can solve mazes, open jars, and complete tricky tasks to get food rewards.
In the wild, they’ve been observed using tools—a benchmark of higher cognition.
Researchers have long been awed by their ability to camouflage, regenerate lost limbs, and release ink as a defense mechanism.
They have been used for studies on how psychedelics affect brains, and they may even dream.
Importantly, research shows that they also seem to experience pain.
Almost all animals have a reflex for responding to noxious stimuli, called nociception, but not all are aware that the sensation is bad or unpleasant—an awareness scientists now think octopuses and other cephalopods have.
Some scientists say this is proof of sentience, the capacity to experience feelings and sensations.
The state of cephalopod science has prompted the United States National Institutes of Health to consider whether these animals—which also include squid, cuttlefish, and nautiluses—deserve the same research protections as vertebrates.
“A growing body of evidence demonstrates that cephalopods possess many of the requisite biological mechanisms for the perception of pain,” the NIH wrote on its website.
The agency is soliciting feedback from scientists and the public online through the end of December.
Currently, invertebrate animals are not regulated under the Animal Welfare Act in the US, nor are they included in national standards for laboratory animals in federally funded studies.
Under these rules, scientists must seek approval from their institutions’ ethics boards for experiments involving animals such as mice and monkeys.
These boards ensure that proposed experiments comply with federal laws and minimize pain and distress to the animals.
The research must also produce benefits for human or animal health or otherwise advance knowledge.
Scientists often use rats, mice, monkeys, worms, and zebrafish as models to mimic aspects of human diseases and study biological processes.
But there’s growing interest in studying cephalopods to investigate movement, behavior, learning, and nervous system development, which means more researchers than ever are doing experiments on cephalopods.
Photograph: Imagen Rafael Cosme Daza/Getty Images
Robyn Crook, a leading cephalopod researcher and an assistant professor of biology at San Francisco State University, says studying cephalopods may provide important insight into how the brain works.
“If we want to understand fundamental organizing principles of nervous systems, we need to look beyond brains that are all of the same evolutionary kind, and cephalopods are the only independently evolved, really complex brain,” she says.
Crook authored a study in 2021 showing that octopuses experience the emotional component of pain—like mammals do—rather than simply having a reflexive reaction to it.
Her experiment involved putting octopuses in a three-chambered box with different patterned walls.
After letting the animals swim freely between the chambers, Crook injected them with a stinging substance called acetic acid and noticed that the octopuses avoided the chamber in which they received the shot.
A control group injected with saline showed no such effect.
She then gave a painkiller to the octopuses that received the stinging shot and observed that they tended to prefer the chamber in which they got the pain relief.
The saline group, meanwhile, didn’t show a preference.
The results, she concluded, are evidence that octopuses experience a negative emotional state when exposed to pain.
The move toward treating cephalopods used in research more humanely started in 1991, when Canada became the first country to adopt protections for them.
In 2010, the European Union passed a directive to extend protections already in use for vertebrate lab animals to include cephalopods.
Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Norway have also adopted regulations.
Last year, after an independent report concluded that cephalopods and crustaceans have the capacity to feel pain and distress, the United Kingdom passed an amendment recognizing them as sentient beings.
In the US, a group of petitioners led by Harvard University’s Animal Law & Policy Clinic sent a letter to the NIH in 2020 asking the agency to amend the definition of “animal” in its policy on laboratory animal welfare to include cephalopods.
The letter made its way to Congress, and last October, 19 lawmakers requested that the US Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the NIH, adopt humane care handling standards for them.
“In recent years, there has been a wealth of research demonstrating that cephalopods are sensitive, intelligent creatures who, like other animals used in biomedical research, deserve to be treated humanely,” they wrote.
Jennifer Mather, a professor of psychology at the University of Lethbridge in Canada, also welcomes this action.
Mather, who has been studying octopuses for 40 years, was a signatory on the 2020 Harvard letter.
“As we expand the populations of species that we use for research, we have to also expand our thinking of what matters to them, and how we can take care of them,” she says.
“If we want to understand fundamental organizing principles of nervous systems, we need to look beyond brains that are all of the same evolutionary kind, and cephalopods are the only independently evolved, really complex brain,” she says.
Crook authored a study in 2021 showing that octopuses experience the emotional component of pain—like mammals do—rather than simply having a reflexive reaction to it.
Her experiment involved putting octopuses in a three-chambered box with different patterned walls.
After letting the animals swim freely between the chambers, Crook injected them with a stinging substance called acetic acid and noticed that the octopuses avoided the chamber in which they received the shot.
A control group injected with saline showed no such effect.
She then gave a painkiller to the octopuses that received the stinging shot and observed that they tended to prefer the chamber in which they got the pain relief.
The saline group, meanwhile, didn’t show a preference.
The results, she concluded, are evidence that octopuses experience a negative emotional state when exposed to pain.
The move toward treating cephalopods used in research more humanely started in 1991, when Canada became the first country to adopt protections for them.
In 2010, the European Union passed a directive to extend protections already in use for vertebrate lab animals to include cephalopods.
Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Norway have also adopted regulations.
Last year, after an independent report concluded that cephalopods and crustaceans have the capacity to feel pain and distress, the United Kingdom passed an amendment recognizing them as sentient beings.
In the US, a group of petitioners led by Harvard University’s Animal Law & Policy Clinic sent a letter to the NIH in 2020 asking the agency to amend the definition of “animal” in its policy on laboratory animal welfare to include cephalopods.
The letter made its way to Congress, and last October, 19 lawmakers requested that the US Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the NIH, adopt humane care handling standards for them.
“In recent years, there has been a wealth of research demonstrating that cephalopods are sensitive, intelligent creatures who, like other animals used in biomedical research, deserve to be treated humanely,” they wrote.
Jennifer Mather, a professor of psychology at the University of Lethbridge in Canada, also welcomes this action.
Mather, who has been studying octopuses for 40 years, was a signatory on the 2020 Harvard letter.
“As we expand the populations of species that we use for research, we have to also expand our thinking of what matters to them, and how we can take care of them,” she says.
To that end, she says researchers need to think about how to raise and house cephalopods.
These animals require shelter or dens, and they need regular enrichment so that they can express their normal behavior.
And she notes that because many octopuses and squid are cannibalistic, they should be kept in separate tanks.
Another consideration is the water quality of their tanks, says Clifton Ragsdale, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Chicago who studies octopuses.
Poor water quality can make the animals stressed or even kill them.
He thinks the NIH’s proposal is very reasonable and welcomes new rules.
“I’m hopeful that these regulations won’t be onerous and will improve the quality and kind of research that’s done,” he says.
Frans de Waal, a biologist and primatologist at Emory University, says new regulations could help reduce invasive experiments on cephalopods, such as ones that involve detaching their arms.
“I think there are going to be questions about: Is this really necessary?” says de Waal, who also directs the Living Links Center, which studies ethical and policy issues related to animal sentience.
“I would love for scientists to start thinking in alternative ways.”
De Waal thinks research guidelines should also extend to other invertebrates, such as crustaceans.
He points to a 2013 study in which researchers from the University of Belfast showed that crabs in tanks learned to avoid electric shocks and sought out areas in the tank where they could escape them.
The authors argued that this was evidence the crabs experience some form of pain, rather than just a reflex.
“Basically, every animal that has a brain—I’m going to assume that they are sentient for the moment because the evidence is going in that direction,” De Waal says.
It’s thought that animals without brains, such as starfish, jellyfish, and sea cucumbers, do not feel pain in the same way humans do.
Crook is in favor of regulations for cephalopod research, but she says it’s not as simple as including them in current policies that apply to vertebrates.
“Because these are a fundamentally different evolutionary branch of animals, it’s really hard to know whether a drug that you would give to enhance welfare in a vertebrate animal is at all effective in a cephalopod,” she says.
For example, the opioid buprenorphine is often given to lab rodents and monkeys as a painkiller.
Its effects on cephalopods, however, is unknown.
“How do you look at a cephalopod and say, ‘That one’s in pain and that one’s not?’” Crook asks.
“There’s no point regulating if we have no idea whether or not we’re actually enhancing the welfare of the animal.” She thinks more research is needed on anesthetics and pain relievers to learn how to best carry out experiments that may cause pain to these animals.
For now, the NIH is only considering changes, and the agency hasn’t yet set a date on when those revisions would be implemented.
As scientists learn more about how invertebrates experience pain, research protections may one day extend to much more of the animal kingdom.
These animals require shelter or dens, and they need regular enrichment so that they can express their normal behavior.
And she notes that because many octopuses and squid are cannibalistic, they should be kept in separate tanks.
Another consideration is the water quality of their tanks, says Clifton Ragsdale, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Chicago who studies octopuses.
Poor water quality can make the animals stressed or even kill them.
He thinks the NIH’s proposal is very reasonable and welcomes new rules.
“I’m hopeful that these regulations won’t be onerous and will improve the quality and kind of research that’s done,” he says.
Frans de Waal, a biologist and primatologist at Emory University, says new regulations could help reduce invasive experiments on cephalopods, such as ones that involve detaching their arms.
“I think there are going to be questions about: Is this really necessary?” says de Waal, who also directs the Living Links Center, which studies ethical and policy issues related to animal sentience.
“I would love for scientists to start thinking in alternative ways.”
De Waal thinks research guidelines should also extend to other invertebrates, such as crustaceans.
He points to a 2013 study in which researchers from the University of Belfast showed that crabs in tanks learned to avoid electric shocks and sought out areas in the tank where they could escape them.
The authors argued that this was evidence the crabs experience some form of pain, rather than just a reflex.
“Basically, every animal that has a brain—I’m going to assume that they are sentient for the moment because the evidence is going in that direction,” De Waal says.
It’s thought that animals without brains, such as starfish, jellyfish, and sea cucumbers, do not feel pain in the same way humans do.
Crook is in favor of regulations for cephalopod research, but she says it’s not as simple as including them in current policies that apply to vertebrates.
“Because these are a fundamentally different evolutionary branch of animals, it’s really hard to know whether a drug that you would give to enhance welfare in a vertebrate animal is at all effective in a cephalopod,” she says.
For example, the opioid buprenorphine is often given to lab rodents and monkeys as a painkiller.
Its effects on cephalopods, however, is unknown.
“How do you look at a cephalopod and say, ‘That one’s in pain and that one’s not?’” Crook asks.
“There’s no point regulating if we have no idea whether or not we’re actually enhancing the welfare of the animal.” She thinks more research is needed on anesthetics and pain relievers to learn how to best carry out experiments that may cause pain to these animals.
For now, the NIH is only considering changes, and the agency hasn’t yet set a date on when those revisions would be implemented.
As scientists learn more about how invertebrates experience pain, research protections may one day extend to much more of the animal kingdom.
Links :
- GeoGarage blog :World's largest deep-sea octopus nursery discovered / Watch baby octopuses hatch from a surprising deep-sea ... / 'A symbol of what humans shouldn't be doing': the new ... / Eight reasons why octopuses are the geniuses of the ocean / True facts about the octopus / Deep Intellect : inside the mind of the octopus / Dance of the Dumbo octopus / Evolution of mimicry in octopuses / Deep Discoverer discovers a very deep, ghostlike octopod / Squid and octopus switch on camouflage / Tool use found in octopuses / Giant Pacific octopus babies: thousands of eggs hatch / Yeti crabs & ghost octopus! Unique life found at 1st Antarctic ... / Kings of camouflage
Thursday, May 8, 2025
Building Panama Canal: demolition,disease and death
Discover what it took to build the Panama Canal, and how this colossal construction project changed the region.
In the 19th century, the California gold rush brought thousands of settlers to America's west coast.
But finding gold may have been easier than transporting it back east.
The only hope for avoiding a grueling six month wagon journey was to travel the narrowest portion of the continent — the 48-kilometer Isthmus of Panama.
Alex Gendler details the creation of the Panama Canal
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