Welcome to Summerween season! You know: that magical time of year when homes are decorated with jack-o-melons (carved watermelons, obviously), and everyone dresses in scary costumes. This ominous-sounding fake holiday was inspired by the Disney Channel cartoon Gravity Falls, in which the titular town celebrates Halloween twice a year.
Sadly, unlike other TV-show inspired observances like Galentine’s Day, Summerween hasn’t fully caught on with the masses. So far. You might not be able to go trick-or-treating, but you can still throw a party to celebrate. Before you send out your invites, here are a few items you should pick up to take your party to the next level.
Watermelon knife
You need the right tool to sculpt your jack-o-melons, and this easy-to-control, non-stick stainless steel knife will help you slice the scariest-looking specimens on your street. It comes with a protective guard to prevent your guests from finding your fingers in the fruit dish.
Halloween gummies
If you want your guests to get creeped out, put these fruit-flavored gummies in your candy bowl. Guests can indulge in their cannibalistic tendencies and nibble on fingers, eyeballs, bones, and—for your zombie friends—brains.
Inflatable coffin cooler
Drinks liven up any party, and this durable drink cooler keeps with the macabre Summerween theme. Should your party head over to the pool, this coffin doubles as a flotation device.
Black tea lights
These tea lights may be black as night, giving your Summerween party a gothic atmosphere, but the 24 flickering LED lights inside glow so bright that you won’t miss any of the subtle details hidden in your guests’ costumes. They also have excellent battery life—important for when your party goes late into the evening.
Black witch hats and bats
These themed decorations will put a spell on your coven of friends. Some reviewers say they’re sturdy, too, so you can use them again for your October party.
Scientists have the most convincing evidence yet of an underground cave on the moon.
The large cave could be a safe, warm place for astronauts to work and live on the moon.
The researchers want to use radar technology to identify even more caves under the lunar surface.
In the ongoing effort to establish a permanent lunar base where humans can live and work on the moon, scientists have discovered a possible game changer: a large underground cave.
For decades, scientists have suspected the moon may harbor caves below its surface. Now, a new paper from a team of Italian researchers offers the most convincing evidence yet.
“Lunar caves have remained a mystery for over 50 years. So it was exciting to be able to finally prove the existence,” authors Leonardo Carrer and Lorenzo Bruzzone of the University of Trento told The Associated Press.
The team speculates that, given how they think this cave formed, there could be hundreds more hidden under the lunar surface. Instead of building homes on the moon, we could inhabit the existing caverns beneath it.
Judging from the data, the researchers estimate the cave is approximately 150 feet wide and up to 260 feet long, which is slightly smaller than an American football field with the end zones cut off.
The cave sits deep within a pit, called the Mare Tranquillitatis pit, which likely formed when a lava tube collapsed. The moon has no active volcanoes today, but billions of years ago, its surface was covered with lava that flowed down and through valleys, carving tubes across the lunar surface.
Over millennia, some of those tubes became unstable and collapsed, creating pits, like the one the research team studied from radar images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. We don’t have a clear picture of what the caves look like inside, but lava tubes, like those in Hawaii, can offer some idea.
NASA’s LRO has identified over 200 of these pits on the moon, suggesting there could be hundreds of underground caves, too. These caves could offer future astronauts protection against the extreme conditions on the moon’s surface, the researchers reported in the paper published Monday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Astronomy.
The pros and cons of living in moon caves
“The thick cave ceiling of rock is ideal to protect people and infrastructure from the wildly varying day-night lunar surface temperature variations and to block high energy radiation which bathes the lunar surface,” Katherine Joy, a professor in earth sciences at the University of Manchester who wasn’t involved with the study, told The Guardian.
Nitrous oxide might make root canals bearable, but the world-warming gas is no laughing matter for the planet.
It is commonly called laughing gas for its ability to create a state of euphoria when inhaled. Experts at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences also know it as the “forgotten greenhouse gas,” because it warms the planet around 300 times more effectively than carbon dioxide, according to a lab summary — an estimate supported by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for a 100-year time span.
Per the lab report, it represents 4.8% of Norway’s heat-trapping pollution and also damages the ozone layer. That’s why the researchers are growing bacteria that can consume the fume at its leading source: fertilizer.
Our growing population and food demand is a large reason why nitrous oxide has spiked in abundance during the last 200 years. Although it is not as abundant in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide or methane, nitrous oxide is potent and can linger.
“We have a major challenge because we need to maintain global food production while reducing N2O emissions,” doctoral student Elisabeth Gautefall Hiis, who is working on the project, said.
While bacteria are plentiful in soil, they often create nitrous oxide when they consume nitrogen, a component of fertilizer that on its own can cause big problems in our waterways when it is washed off fields and into rivers and streams. The runoff can cause large fish kills and other disasters, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency notes.
Hiis and other researchers had to scour through soil samples that contain billions of bacteria per teaspoon to find the kind that are hungry for laughing gas (and converting it into a harmless nitrogen gas), according to the lab summary. They eventually found one that fascinatingly “eats” it, reducing nitrogren pollution from soil by between 40% and 95%.
“Some of the bacteria we initially looked at can both eat and produce nitrous oxide. That made it complicated. One bacterium, for example, would eat nitrous oxide in the laboratory, but once it was in the soil, it had little effect,” Hiis said.
A type of cloacibacterium, dubbed the “one-armed bandit” by the team, was found to be the nearly perfect fit for the task.
“It simply does not have the gene to produce nitrous oxide, it can only eat it,” she said in the summary.
Experts at labs elsewhere are working on technology to help farmers better manage fertilizer use. The University of Texas at Austin is developing a hydrogel that can catch excess nitrate from fields before it pollutes the surrounding environment. There are around 895 million acres of farmland in the U.S. alone, per the Department of Agriculture.
Growing your own food at home in gardens or raised beds is an excellent way to learn about sustainable agriculture while reducing waste and pollution. A $70 investment can produce $600 worth of food each season. Composting food scraps prevents the would-be garbage from filling gassy landfills. The process also creates great soil for future gardens, limiting fertilizer use.
Project 2025, the sweeping right-wing blueprint for a new kind of U.S. presidency, would sabotage science-based policies that address climate change, the environment, abortion, health care access, technology, and education. It would impose religious and conservative ideology on the federal civil service to such an extent that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has, dubiously, tried to distance himself from the plan. But in 2022 Trump said the Heritage Foundation—the think tank that authored Project 2025—would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.” The project’s main document, a lengthy policy agenda, was published the following year.
Although Trump is not among its 34 authors, more than half are appointees and staff from his time as president; the words “Trump” and “Trump Administration” appear 300 times in its pages. At least 140 former Trump officials are involved in Project 2025, according to a CNN tally. It’s reasonable to expect that a second Trump presidency would follow many of the project’s recommendations.
Project 2025 presents a long-standing conservative vision of a smaller government and describes specific, detailed steps to achieve this goal. It would shrink some federal departments and agencies while eliminating others—dividing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into two weaker entities, for instance, and abolishing the Department of Education (ED) entirely.
What is even more unusual, and also mapped out in detail, is a plan to exert more presidential control over traditionally nonpartisan governmental workers—those Trump might describe as members of the “deep state,” or regulatory bureaucracy. For example, Project 2025 claims that the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other scientific institutions are “vulnerable to obstructionism” unless appointees at these agencies are “wholly in sync” with presidential policy. To that end, it would reclassify tens of thousands of civil service jobs as political positions that answer to the president.
“The independence of science is being attacked across the board in this document,” says Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the Climate and Energy program at the nonpartisan Union of Concerned Scientists. “The importance of this science is that’s how we can ensure people’s health and the environment are being safeguarded.” (Cleetus notes that her comments address the policy agenda’s contents, not the upcoming presidential election.)
Kids grow fast, which makes shopping for kid’s clothes—and adding to the “donate” pile—a second job for parents. For those caregivers looking for a deal on children’s clothing or a way to pocket a few extra bucks while they declutter, plenty of great options are available online.
Hanna-Me-Downs
Hanna Anderson clothing is high-quality stuff—and it’s pricey. Last year, the clothing company started a resale program called Hanna-Me Downs, where customers can sell the threads their kids have outgrown for cash or store credit. Sellers list their items and set their own price—or let the site do it for them. Once an item is purchased, sellers get a prepaid, pre-addressed shipping label and must send items out in three business days.
Pro: Shoppers get nearly 50 percent off retail prices.
Con: The inventory is limited to Hanna Anderson products only.
Kidizen/Tea Rewear
This popular app/website is specifically for maternity and children’s clothing. Parents can start by setting up a “shop” to list and post pictures of the items they wish to sell. Like Hanna-Me-Downs, once an item is sold, you’ll be given a shipping label, and Kidizen keeps 12 percent plus $0.50 of the sale. Kidizen has built up such a loyal customer community that Tea Collection has partnered with the site to offer parents a place to resell their clothes.
Pro: If you’re short on time, you can work with a “Style Scout” in your area to sell your clothes.
Con: The Style Scout will take half your profit.
Out&Back
Kids wear outdoor and winter clothes for only a few months out of the year, only to have outgrown their barely used hoodies and jackets when the cold weather comes around again. Out&Back knows this, and their resale process works similarly to trading in your smartphone: Answer a few questions about what you’re selling on their site, and you can either ship your items with a prepaid label or drop them off at a select location. Once they’ve confirmed the condition of your articles, you’ll receive payment through Venmo, PayPal, or a gift card.
Pro: The trade-in process works fast, especially if you live in an area where you can drop off your items.
Con: Those drop-off locations are currently limited to seven states.
The Swoondle Society
Paid memberships support The Swoondle Society. When you sign up, you request a prepaid, reusable trade-in bag to fill with the clothing you wish to sell. What you send is credited using a point system determined by factors that include brand, condition, size, and demand—Level 1 through Level 5. You can use these credits to purchase similarly classified clothing. For example, If the clothing you sold was assigned a Level 2, you can swap for other Level 2 items.
“Dorothy” was deliberately fed to an Oklahoma F5 tornado about 30 years ago in the classic disaster movie Twister. The film followed storm-chasing scientists trying to use that special apparatus (a meteorological device containing hundreds of sensors and named after the tornado-jockey ingénue in The Wizard of Oz) to understand the inner workings of one of nature’s most fearsome phenomena. Now its just released stand-alone sequel, Twisters, follows another band of storm chasers who want to actually disrupt and dissipate these monster phenomena with today’s technology and knowledge.
Contrasting the two films shows how much tornado science has changed since the original flick, which featured radar and computer technologies that are now outdated. “We’ve come a long way since [Twister],” says Elizabeth Smith, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Administration’s National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL). And much of this progress has come through what she calls “the sum total of incremental change,” not singular projects like those depicted in the original movie. Some advances since then have in the decades transformed fiction into reality, enabling the latest film to explore even greater possibilities in managing and responding to dangerous weather events.
In the 1996 original, Helen Hunt’s character, Jo Harding, wanted to increase the warning times for tornadoes from three to 15 minutes by getting data from inside a funnel cloud to better understand how they work. And over the decades since, this science-fiction dream has turned into reality. “Now, when we issue a warning, the average lead time is 15 minutes,” says Harold Brooks, a senior research scientist at the NSSL. Though this may seem like a minor increase in the grand scheme of things, it offers considerably more time for people to reach shelter.
This improvement stems from a variety of new technologies, including more detailed radar readings and more powerful computers. But Smith says the most crucial development is computer models that can render storms in far greater detail—and can process observations much more quickly and accurately to better predict what those storms will do.
Early work in modeling focused on building a digital rendering of a storm from observational data—akin to Dorothy’s mission. But today’s tornado simulations are actually displaying never-before-observed aspects of the structure of tornadoes across different simulations. Storm chasers have later validated these phenomena in the field. “Instead of trying to go out and sample something to represent in the model, the opposite is now happening,” Smith says. “That’s a huge paradigm shift.”
Modern forecast models sometimes even predict tornado touchdowns more than an hour in advance. This extended warning time isn’t always helpful, though. “People tend to prioritize other activities over immediate safety with one to two hours of advance notice, which isn’t the reaction we want,” says Sean Waugh, a research scientist at the NSSL. A 2011 study found through public surveys that about 30 minutes is the preferred warning time, balancing urgency with enough lead time to get to safety.
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Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as their characters Jo and Bill Harding in the 1996 movie Twister. Universal Pictures/Maximum Film/Alamy Stock Photo
When Olivia Myers became pregnant with her first child, she was so nauseated that she had to either miss work or work from home in Calera, Alabama, from bed, with a trash can nearby. With her doctor, she attempted to ease the nausea and vomiting. She tried an anti-nausea medication, and then another and another — more than 10 different medications in all. A nurse came to her home to administer IVs to help with the dehydration from vomiting. She would walk around with a needle in her arm, wheeling around a pole that held the fluid slowly flowing into her body. She tried a Zofran pump — an anti-nausea medication that entered her body through a small needle she wore on her skin and a pump that she carried around in a backpack.
“It wasn’t working,” she says.
At her lowest point, when she was about 12 weeks pregnant and bedridden due to nausea and vomiting, she became terrified she wouldn’t be able to remain pregnant. “I was so scared that I was either going to miscarry or that I just wasn’t going to be able to do this for nine months,” she says. “I was having a mental breakdown.” Her husband considered taking her to the hospital on her worst day, a day she vomited 12 times.
Although most people experience some pregnancy nausea, an unlucky group that Myers belongs to experiences such severe nausea that can have serious effects on their bodies and lives. Myers had hyperemesis gravidarum, often known abbreviated as HG — severe pregnancy nausea characterized by a disruption in regular life, the inability to eat or drink regularly, weight loss, and sometimes malnutrition. It can become so severe that it can lead to miscarriage, organ damage, or death. About 0.3% to 2% of pregnancies are estimated to have severe HG. But pregnancy nausea and HG are on a spectrum, and even mild HG can be miserable.
Marlena Fejzo, a geneticist at the University of Southern California, was one of those unlucky 2%. Fejzo had HG in two pregnancies. Her first pregnancy, in 1996, left her with nausea and vomiting so severe she couldn’t work for two months, and she received IV treatments twice, The New York Times reported. In her second pregnancy in 1999, she became so malnourished from severe nausea and vomiting that she was put on a feeding tube. “I didn’t eat or drink for over a month,” she tells me. She miscarried at 15 weeks. When she came back to work after the loss, she told her boss she wanted to find the cause of HG. Her boss, the chair of the genetics department at the University of California, Los Angeles, laughed at her.
So for the next two decades, Fejzo researched HG in her free time, when she wasn’t researching ovarian cancer. “There was sort of a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ phase also where I worked on it on the side,” she says. “I couldn’t talk about it, really. It was a bit isolating — until recently.”
Fejzo started her first HG study in 2000 by posting a survey about pregnancy nausea on the Internet. Responders faxed their answers to her. One of the women who took the survey was Kimber MacGibbon, who had HG and went on to co-found the HER Foundation, dedicated to research, education, and support for those with HG.
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Hyperemis gravidarum, or HG, is a debilitating pregnancy nausea that affects 2% of pregnancies. Researchers know how to cure it — if they could only get funding.
Nicolás Maduro, who was elected president of Venezuela in April 2013, has divided opinion almost as much as his predecessor, Hugo Chávez.
The first half of his presidency saw the opposition regain control of parliament and launch a united effort to remove him from office. That bid failed – and his second term began in 2019 after an election marred by an opposition boycott.
Since taking power, he has been accused of undermining democracy and violating human rights in Venezuela, which is in the grip of a severe economic crisis.
Scores of anti-government protesters have been killed in clashes with the security forces since 2014. in the US, the Trump administration says Mr. Maduro is running a “devastating dictatorship”.
And yet, despite the outrage from within and beyond Venezuela, he remains a commanding figure there – and not just because of his 1.90m (6ft 3in) stature.
Many followers of the country’s leftist Bolivarian Revolution say that while he lacks the magnetism of Mr Chávez, the president is a loyal defender of his legacy.
In August 2017, Mr Maduro controversially set up a new constituent assembly with the power to rewrite the constitution, or to bypass and even dissolve the opposition-led National Assembly.
He pitched it as a way of promoting “reconciliation and peace”, but critics saw an attempt to strengthen his grip on power.
The European Union and major Latin American nations said they would not recognize the new body, and the US imposed sanctions on Mr Maduro.
He found himself further isolated after his re-election. National Assembly leader Juan Guaidó proclaimed himself interim president in January 2019, alleging widespread vote rigging and arguing that the presidency was vacant as a result.
More than 20 nations branded Mr Maduro’s presidency illegitimate, and recognized Mr Guaidó.
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Mr Maduro, a former bus driver, likes to be behind the wheel himself and is proud of his modest beginnings
It’s that time of year: a thick, oppressive heat blankets everything, people huddle inside air-conditioned homes, offices, shops and cafes for respite—and COVID is surging again.
Levels of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, have increased in wastewater samples across the U.S., with the biggest uptick in the West. The percentage of positive tests—though not a perfect metric because people aren’t testing as much—has also increased, but hospitalizations have remained relatively low. Most viral respiratory infections, such as influenza, peak in the winter. But for the four years that SARS-CoV-2 has circled the globe, it has caused peaks not just in winter but every summer, too. The question is, why?
Possible reasons for the summer COVID peak are complex, but they fall into three main categories: characteristics of the virus itself, characteristics of its human hosts, and environmental factors.
SARS-CoV-2 continues to evolve new variants. One rises to the fore every six months or so, according to Peter Chin-Hong, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who specializes in infectious diseases. In recent weeks, several new subvariants of the virus’s Omicron variant have emerged as dominant—including the so-called “FLiRT” variants (such as KP.2 and KP.3), as well as a newer variant called LB.1. These variants may be slightly more transmissible or better at evading the immune system than previous ones, Chin-Hong says.
Human behavior and the environment are other likely drivers of summer surges. During the summer, many people gather for events, travel for vacations or simply spend more time inside to beat the heat. The Northern Hemisphere winter has a string of holiday gatherings that are perfect for
spreading disease; likewise, “in the summer, it’s Father’s Day, graduation, Fourth of July, and then summer travel,” Chin-Hong says. “It’s kind of a like a one-two-three punch.”
“We know that nearly all [COVID] transmission happens indoors, in places with poor ventilation and/or poor filtration,” says Joseph Allen, an associate professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and director of the Harvard Healthy Buildings Program. “One hypothesis is that these building factors and human behavior are driving the summertime increases in cases.” Although many offices or other large buildings have an HVAC system that can pull in fresh air from outside, many houses and apartment buildings with window-mounted air conditioners do not. Instead, these ACs simply recirculate stale, virus-laden air inside a room.
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COVID cases have increased every summer in the U.S., thanks in part to summer travel and gatherings. Scott Olson/Getty Images
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Credit: Gravity Falls/YouTube
Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images
Hyperemis gravidarum, or HG, is a debilitating pregnancy nausea that affects 2% of pregnancies. Researchers know how to cure it — if they could only get funding.
Mr Maduro, a former bus driver, likes to be behind the wheel himself and is proud of his modest beginnings
James' World 2 