#de-evolution

#de-evolution

As the rust expands, it weakens the rock and helps break it apart. It's a very red part of the country, it's got that rusty hue, so you get that color getting whipped up with the strong winds.

Star-formation will eventually end, and then the last shining stars will burn out. Galaxies will dissociate due to gravitational interactions, ejecting all masses and leaving only supermassive black holes behind. And then those black holes will decay via Hawking radiation, leaving only cold, stable, isolated bodies, from which no further energy can be extracted, all accelerating away from us within our dark energy-dominated Universe.

When it comes to prepping, look to the Mormons. It's right there, in the official name of the religion: To be a "Latter-day Saint" is explicitly to believe in, and prepare for, the end times. This is why, on a calm morning last September, I arrive just outside Salt Lake City in a place called American Fork and knock on the door of Tyler Stapleton, the chief product engineer for off-grid power products at 4Patriots, one of the biggest companies pushing preparedness into the mainstream.

The war began the week of my 26th birthday. There was a lightness on that day, something born from what remained of our childhood. Sparks like candy, crackling in our mouths: colorful letters; laughter leaking out through voice notes; hearts adorning our text chats; an abundance of cake. But the days that followed are laid out like burnt matchsticks; once the first one was lit, the flames consumed the rest. The war spared nothing on the calendar; I have had no other birthdays since.

Peter Drucker saw this symbiosis first. He realized that the new industrial order would depend on a worker who produced ideas instead of widgets. The knowledge worker became the engine of prosperity, and management became the social technology that synchronized millions of minds. The modern firm was as much an invention as the transistor it depended on. Three decades later, Tom Peters caught the next wave.

The mirror spider can rapidly shift a patchwork of minuscule reflective plates underneath its abdomen's outer surface, altering the pattern of mirrorlike flashes. This uncommon display comes from common building blocks: Similar tilelike arrangements of plates and soft joints appear throughout the tree of life, from turtle shells to tropical fruit peels. Researchers have now compiled 100 examples of this pattern across animals, plants, microbes and viruses, which they describe in PNAS Nexus.

Sometime in the late 1990s, an adult ribbon worm was scooped up from the murk in the waters off the San Juan Islands, in the Pacific Northwest. He was moved to a tank along with a smattering of other invertebrates, including two vermilion bat stars and approximately 30 beige peanut worms. In the years since, the worm has been transported across the country to Virginia, where he lives now.