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Things began to change after Katherine's mother died from cancer in 2009 and she started researching whether she had any half-siblings from the same donor.

What she found was a shock.

Katherine has since discovered she's at the centre of a scandal involving two of Australia's biggest fertility companies.

DNA testing has revealed poor vetting practices allowed her biological father to keep donating sperm over several years with alarming consequences.

She's now telling her full story to Four Corners as part of an investigation into the lack of accountability and transparency in the multi-million-dollar IVF industry.

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The photo of the ancient coffin was recently shared on Reddit where the uncanny depiction of Marge generated excitement from people who joked that ‘Egypt predicted The Simpsons.’

The picture in the sarcophagus bears a striking resemblance to the blue-haired cartoon character.

Experts believe it depicts the woman buried in the coffin as she traveled to the afterlife. 

Archaeologists say the Egyptian coffin held the mummified remains of Tadi Ist, the daughter of the high priest of El-Ashmunein - a town located on the western bank of the Nile River and 27 miles south of where she was buried in Minya.

The coffin was unearthed in early 2023 and found the Marge Simpson look-alike image on the inside of the lid that was surrounded by twelve high priestesses that represented the 12 hours of the day.

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CLIMATEWIRE | Wealthy philanthropists with ties to Wall Street and Silicon Valley are unbowed by a botched climate experiment to limit the amount of sunlight hitting the earth, vowing to continue bankrolling future solar geoengineering tests as temperatures catapult upward.

POLITICO contacted a dozen people or groups who funded a controversial program by the University of Washington to reflect sun rays by altering clouds. Those who responded indicated that it's worth pushing through the public skepticism surrounding efforts to determine how to best deploy the last-ditch global warming fix — if at all.

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Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:

A new study by a psychologist at University of Stirling in Scotland has found that, like humans, wild bumblebees are capable of logical reasoning.

In the study, the bees were tasked with spontaneously locating strips of sugar-coated paper in various colors and positions. In both circumstances, the analysis showed they looked in the correct location well above chance, a press release from University of Stirling said.

“My studies examine the ability to make a decision by excluding alternatives, known as inferential reasoning, which is usually considered uniquely human and language dependent,” said Dr. Gema Martin-Ordas, the study’s lead researcher and a University of Stirling senior lecturer in the faculty of natural sciences, in the press release.

It was the first demonstration of insects being capable of inferential reasoning — a hallmark of human cognition.

“The ability to make a decision by excluding alternatives (i.e. inferential reasoning) is a type of logical reasoning that allows organisms to solve problems with incomplete information. Several species of vertebrates have been shown to find hidden food using inferential reasoning abilities. Yet little is known about invertebrates’ logical reasoning capabilities,” Martin-Ordas wrote in the study.

“For example, if I am presented with two cups and I am told that one of them hides a nice reward, when lifting one of them and seeing that it’s empty, I will be able to infer that it is the cup that was not lifted that hides the reward,” Martin-Ordas said in the press release. “This is the first time that this ability is shown in invertebrates, specifically in insects, and questions whether language or big brains are required for this ability. The results are very robust because bees’ performance was consistent across the experiments.”

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Most dedicated thrifters usually find junk on the clearance rack, but one Washington, D.C., woman discovered a link to ancient history when she purchased a 2,000-year-old Mayan vase. The priceless artifact bought by Anna Lee Dozier in a Clinton, Maryland, thrift store came at a bargain, costing only US$3.99 (C$5.50). Officials said the vase is believed to have been made by Indigenous Mayan people in Mexico between 200 and 800 CE. Dozier, who told WUSA9 she purchased the vase five years ago, said she did not know the artifact was the real thing. She said the vase looked “old-ish” and she suspected it to be a 20- or 30-year-old tourist reproduction of Mayan-style pottery. Dozier liked the vase anyway and decided to bring it home. The vase stayed in Dozier’s residence until January of this year, when she visited Mexico’s Museum of Anthropology and realized the museum’s Mayan pottery looked strikingly similar to the one that she thrifted.

Continue Reading.

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Parisians have threatened to poo in the River Seine in a protest ahead of the Olympics. 

People angry at the expense of cleaning up the river have rallied under the hashtag #JeChieDansLaSeineLe23Juin, which translates as "I shit in the Seine on 23 June".

Sunday was supposed to be the date Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo would swim in the Seine to prove the water was clean enough for Olympic athletes - but she delayed the dip until after the French elections in July.

President Emmanuel Macron has also promised to swim in the Seine before the Games, but has not said when.

A website has been set up with the slogan: "They have plunged us into shit, it's their turn to plunge into our shit."

The anonymous programmer behind the website told news outlet Actu Paris why people are angry.

"The problem is that all the resources that have been invested have not been to resolve all the social problems we have at the moment," he said.

"We have the feeling of being abandoned. We see where their priority was."

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there is a town called sandwich in massachusetts

there are literally police cars labelled sandwich police

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Miles Astray entered a real, albeit surreal photo of a flamingo into the AI category of the 1839 Color Photography Awards which the judges not only placed third but it also won the People’s Vote Award.

“I wanted to show that nature can still beat the machine and that there is still merit in real work from real creatives,” Astray tells PetaPixel over email.

“After seeing recent instances of AI-generated imagery beating actual photos in competitions, I started thinking about turning the story and its implications around by submitting a real photo into an AI competition.”

The color photography contest is judged by people who work for The New York Times, Getty Images, Phaidon Press, Christie’s, and Maddox Gallery, among others. None could apparently tell that Astray’s photo was real.

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A Hertz customer accomplished a new feat in the annals of rental car company disservice, actually being charged for a red light ticket before even renting the vehicle.

They rented the vehicle on May 15th at the Calgary Airport for a period of six days, starting at 10:30 p.m. However the agent at the airport logged the rental as starting at 10:30 a.m.

They were hit with an extra day’s charge, beyond the period they actually had the car for

And the previous renter “ran a red light at 2:33pm.” But since the system now saw them as having the car at the time, their credit card was hit with $436.50 for the bill.

It would have been impossible for the customer to have had the car at 2:33 p.m. because they were inflight on American Airlines. They provided copies of their boarding passes. Hertz agreed with them about the rental start time – they removed the extra day’s charge – but they still refused to budge on the red light ticket (or the extra fees associated the with the extra day – Hertz removed only the base rental charge). And now Hertz has refused to communicate further, it seems.

Much of the advice to this customer has been to just dispute the charges and that’s fine if you do not plan to rent from Hertz or any of their affiliated companies again. Even a righteous dispute might get you placed on their Do Not Rent list. Hertz has even been known to ban a customer’s descendants, too.

Considering the Hertz toll scam, charging customers who rent Teslas for failing to fill up the gas and of course a history of customers getting arrested just because they rented from the company – and Hertz refusing to admit its mistake lest the police stop believing them when they file false police reports, just getting charged for tickets written by police before you rented the vehicle doesn’t actually seem that bad in the scheme of things?

In fact, isn’t this the least you expect to happen to you when you rent from Hertz? And it’s not even their first example of imposing time travel on a customer. Earlier this year I wrote about one person who tried to rent from Hertz for the very first time and found they’d already been banned by the company.

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Part of Stonehenge has been covered in orange powder paint by protesters.

Two Just Stop Oil campaigners sprayed the powder paint on the historic site near Salisbury, Wiltshire, at about 12:00 BST on Wednesday.

The move comes the day before celebrations beginfor the Summer Solstice at the 5,000-year-old landmark.

Wiltshire Police confirmed two people had been arrested on suspicion of damaging the ancient monument.

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The bottles were found in five storage pits in the mansion’s cellar, with 29 of them intact and containing “perfectly preserved cherries and berries, likely gooseberries or currants,” according to a news release from George Washington’s Mount Vernon on Thursday.

Crews unearthed the 18th-century bottles during the ongoing $40 million revitalization project launched last year at Mount Vernon, Virginia.

The bottles were extracted from the pits and refrigerated, and are expected to undergo scientific analysis, the release states.

The slowly drying bottles, “composed of materials and foodstuffs that are likely 250 years old,” will be sent from Mount Vernon’s archaeology lab to an off-site location for conservation, according to the release.

The latest discovery comes after the recent find of two intact European-manufactured glass bottles, also from the 18th century, filled with liquid, cherries and pits in the same cellar, according to the organization.

👀

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In a Facebook statement posted Tuesday, the aquarium addressed Hugh’s death, saying the manatees “engaged in natural, yet increased, mating behavior observed and documented in manatees both in managed care and in the wild.”

Although the aquarium said the April incident with Buffett and Hugh “was the first time such heightened mating behavior was witnessed between the two manatees,” it said that in previous years, the two annually exhibited “approximately two months of seasonal behavioral changes including, but not limited to, an increase in sexual behavior.”

The aquarium said that Hugh and Buffett “were both observed initiating and mutually seeking interactions from each other throughout the day, and there were no obvious signs of discomfort or distress such as listing, crunching, or active avoidance that would have triggered a need for intervention.”

RIP Hugh. You would have loved poppers 💔

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was at the local watering hole when the news broke and a random guy looking at his phone went "wow!" so i asked "trump?" and he said "no, new species of tiger beetle"

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I'm working on clearing out some old tabs, and ran across this piece from last fall. The short version is that your gut microbiome and other microbes that accompany you in a series of symbiotic relationships throughout your lifetime persist even after you die. While you might assume that these bacteria and other little beings would perish along with you once you're no longer warm and living, it turns out that they shift gears upon your death, being part of the massive effort to return your remains en masse to the nutrient cycle.

There's honestly something rather poetic about that. Here you've spent a lifetime being the center of a holobiont--a sort of miniature, migratory ecosystem. And these many millions of life forms that you have given safe harbor to for thousands upon thousands of their generations are among the funerary vanguard caring for your remains after you're gone. They pour forth from their ancestral lands--the gut, the skin, and other discrete places--and spread out through even the most protected regions of your form.

And then, just as you constructed your body, molecule by molecule, from a lifetime of nutrients you consumed, so do these microbes go through the process of returning everything you borrowed back to the wider cycles of food and growth and life and death. The ancient halls where their ancestors lived in relative stability are now taken apart in the open air, and their descendants will disperse their inheritance into the soil and the water through the perpetual process of decomposition.

I've always wanted a green burial, and I find it comforting that when my remains are laid in the ground, they'll be accompanied by the tiny ecosystems I spent a lifetime tending, and who will return the favor by sending my molecules off in a billion new directions.

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Advertisement from the Hutchinson News, Kansas, 4 March 1920.

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He says the bear didn't make a sound as it came in his back door. He was stunned when he turned around and saw the large animal just a few feet away.

He grabbed his phone and started rolling on the encounter.

"Are you nice? You're in my house," he's heard saying in the video.

When the bear, which appeared to be young and untagged, finally left, Wightman realized the bear wasn't alone. In the video, another bear could be seen peeking out from behind some bushes.

"Is it just you two? I see you over there."