Harley and Vinny the morkie dogs – @harleymacthemorkie
In California, a little dog was saved from a prowling coyote when his friend, a 10 lbs. Maltese “hero in a fur suit” summoned all his wolfish instincts to chase the predator out of his yard.
It happened in a flash; just 10 seconds as Erin Macaluso recounted on Facebook.
Coming back from a nighttime walk, she and her husband forgot to put the cover on the doggie door.
“We are super vigilant dog owners,” she wrote. “Unfortunately, on this one night, we had just taken the dogs out to go potty, and forgot to put the cover on the doggie door.”
A coyote slipped through the bars of the metal fence, and, hearing his intrusion, Macaluso’s two dogs quietly went outside to investigate the noise.
They were a 12-pound Morkie, which is a mix between a Maltese and a Yorkshire terrier, named Harley, and Vinny, an 11-year-old Maltese with just three teeth.
Californians lose hundreds of pets every year to coyote attacks. With few larger predators to keep their numbers in check, they regularly roam directly into urban and suburban areas to snatch cats and dogs.
In a video posted on Facebook, security camera footage shows a little dog immediately being chased around the yard by a coyote while another beast lurks beyond the fence. Then, a white knight bolts from the house towards the coyote and scares it away.
“Our little HERO Vinny is 10 lbs, 11 yrs old, and only has 3 teeth! But he’s always been scrappy,” wrote Macaluso in celebration of her tiny dog. In the post she encourages pet owners to never let their guard down. She claims to have lived in the town of Mission Viejo, California, for 30 years without ever seeing a coyote in the yard.
If that’s true, the one time she left the doggie door unlocked, the coyotes were ready to pounce.
Harley the dog suffered major injuries but will make a full recovery, the vets said.
WATCH the video below…
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155 years ago today, the Treaty of Bosque Redondo was signed between the US and the Navajo, allowing them to return to their ancestral lands from the squalid conditions on the Bosque Redondo Reservation. No American today should be under any illusion that a steadily growing imperialist streak in America was to give the Navajo a fair shake, but compared to many of the other treaties signed with other tribes, the Bosque Redondo Treaty was a major moment in US-Indian relations and is still celebrated on their lands today as a public holiday called Treaty Day. READ about the treaty… (1868)
Photo of a marker at Bosque Redondo, Fort Sumner, in New Mexico
It was costing the US government 2 million gold-backed dollars to support the Navajo nation’s 9,000 captive members on the Bosque Redondo Reservation by 1865, just one year after their arrival there. The squalid conditions didn’t match the expenditure, and so the Doolittle Committee was formed in Congress, taking authority over the situation from a general named James Carleton.
To that end, General William Sherman and Samual Tappan visited Bosque Redondo to negotiate a treaty with the Navajo, who presented a list of serious grievances. The conditions in the reservation appalled the two men, and eventually Sherman telegraphed the Congress informing them that “the Navajos were unalterably opposed to any resettlement in Texas, or any place further east, and would not remain at the Bosque Redondo without the use of overwhelming military force.”
On June 1st, 29 Navajo leaders made their mark on a treaty that was to allow them to go back to around 10-20% of their ancestral lands, where they would make their homes, and where they would be permitted to leave for hunting and trading.
The newly-established reservation consisted of 3,500,000 square miles (9,100,000 km2) on the border between New Mexico and Arizona, excluding the best grazing and farming lands. But the treaty was headed by the terms “an agreement between two nations.” In their “Long Walk Home”, the Navajo became a rare example in US history of native people successfully returning to their ancestral lands after being forcibly removed.
Perhaps because of this, there are 400,000 members of the Navajo tribe today—the largest federally-registered tribal community in the country.
MORE Good News on this Day in History:
James Clark Ross discovered the magnetic North Pole (1831)
Andy Griffith, the actor, comedian, television producer, and writer (Andy Griffith Show, Matlock), was born in North Carolina (1926–2012)
Marilyn Monroe, the film actress known for her sex appeal brought to life in the comedy Some Like It Hot, was born as Norma Jean Mortenson in Los Angeles (1926–1962)
The Heimlich maneuver for rescuing choking victims was published in the journal Emergency Medicine (1974)
Known for his distinctively smooth, deep voice, he got his first acting gig as a cast member in the 1970s children’s program The Electric Company. Today, Freeman is ranked the 3rd highest Hollywood box office star because his films have earned over $4.316 billion in total gross receipts.
While residing on the Gulf Coast in Charleston, Mississippi, Freeman owns and operates Ground Zero, a blues club in nearby Clarksdale and has stayed busy with films—co-starring in a just-released 7-part anthology series on Amazon Prime called Solos, as well as an action-thriller called Vanquish. WATCH a new interview and see him dance in the trailer… (1937)
66 years ago today, an American runs a sub-4 minute mile for the first time when Dan Bowden passed the line with a time of (3:58.7) at the Pacific Association AAU Meet in Stockton, California. He was inducted into the Track and Field Hall of Fame in 2008.
33 years ago today, U.S. President George H.W. Bush joined the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to sign a pact to end chemical weapons production and destroy their nation’s stockpiles.
The two countries began the historic process with on-site inspectors from both nations monitoring compliance. And, in 1993, the US and Russia, along with another 150 nations, signed a comprehensive treaty outright banning chemical weapons. (1990)
Photo By Roy Kerwood, CC
And, on this day in 1969, John and Yoko recorded Give Peace a Chance, Lennon’s first solo single, while in a bed surrounded by celebrities and the press in Montreal, Canada. The song was written in Room 1742 of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel during their famous “Bed-In For Peace”, when a reporter asked what he was trying to achieve by staying in bed. Lennon answered spontaneously “All we are saying is, give peace a chance”. He liked the phrase and set it to music, singing the song several times during the week-long bed-in.
Finally, on June 1st, they rented an 8-track tape machine and recorded it while still in bed. The recording session (published under the name Plastic Ono Band) included Timothy Leary, Rabbi Abraham Feinberg, Petula Clark, Dick Gregory, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Williams, and Murray the K, some of whom are mentioned in the lyrics. Lennon and Tommy Smothers played acoustic guitars while everyone joined in on vocals for the chorus. Forever after, room 1742 in the Queen Elizabeth Hotel has been their most frequently requested room.
One of the most popular hiking apps has made 27,000 trail maps available for download for free in a bid to increase hiker safety.
Most hikers, if they’re honest, will at some point have experienced this situation: they thought they needed to follow one trail, but instead they followed another. Seeking to reorient themselves, they timidly pulled out their smartphone and see, as they suspected, there was no reception of any kind.
Last year, search and rescue missions were up 32% across the US. This is mainly down to the hikers being inadequately prepared. Access to offline maps would help ensure that all hikers can be best prepared for their hike.
To that end, the Irish hiking app HiiKER has released all trail maps in its database for download free of charge. They can either choose to download them directly to their smartphone or as a GPX file to their smartwatch—saving the battery of their device while away from electricity access.
“Hiker Safety is our absolute priority. Offering hikers Free Offline maps on HiiKER, means that everyone can feel confident that they’re on track, regardless of mobile service,” said Paul Finlay, CEO and Founder of HiiKER.
The app team claims that other incumbent Hiking apps such as Alltrails, Strava, and OutdoorActive charge for access to offline maps. As this service is critical to hiker safety, HiiKER is offering it to hikers for free.
Now used by over 600,000 hikers worldwide, the app which began life on the Emerald Isle three years ago is now one of the most-used hiking apps on the market, with over 27,000 hiking routes available to users.
credits from left to right and top to bottom – Chandra: NASA/CXC/SAO, XMM: ESA/XMM-Newton; IR: JWST: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI, Spitzer: NASA/JPL/CalTech; Optical: Hubble: NASA/ESA/STScI, ESO; Image Processing: L. Frattare, J. Major, and K. Arcand
Looking for a cool way to get your kids involved in astronomy? Just show them this picture.
These images are composite pieces of technological artwork that would be invisible to the naked eye. Five space-based observatories teamed up with one down here on Earth to color in famous regions of space with X-rays and infrared light—neither of which can be seen by us.
The image in the top left is of NGC 346, a star cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 200,000 light years from Earth. The purple and blue haze on the left are X-rays, a form of high-energy light, left over from a supernova explosion. On the right, infrared data from the James Webb and the now-retired Spitzer space telescopes shows plumes of gas and dust that all those twinkling stars are either currently using, or have used to create their shining, burning forms.
The X-rays are being detected by the space-based Chandra X-ray Observatory, developed by Harvard, and humanity’s flagship X-ray observatory.
To the right side, NGC 1672 is a spiral galaxy, but one that astronomers categorize as a “barred” spiral, meaning that the arms close-in to the center appear more like straight bars rather than curved tentacles. Here, Chandra’s purple-colored X-rays reveal black holes amid the James Webb and Hubble telescopes infrared and optical light picture of this galaxy.
Messier 74 is also known as the “Phantom Galaxy” because it’s relatively dim and difficult to spot with telescopes in a region that is otherwise pretty close to Earth. It’s anything but dim in this image, captured face-on thanks to our planet’s position.
Webb outlines gas and dust in the infrared lights which we see as green, yellow, red, and magenta, while Chandra’s data spotlights high-energy activity from stars at X-ray wavelengths colored in Purple. Hubble’s optical data showcases additional stars and dust along the dust lanes.
Messier 16, also known as the Eagle Nebula, is a famous region of the sky often referred to as the “Pillars of Creation.” The Webb image shows the dark columns of gas and dust shrouding the few remaining fledgling stars just being formed. The Chandra sources, which look like dots, are young stars that give off copious amounts of X-rays.
Here, the X-rays are in red and blue, and highlight the huge activity given off by some stars in the area.
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Artist depiction of a pachycephalosaur named Platytholus clemensi – SWNS
Researchers say this strange, dome-headed, bristle-bristling dino from 68 million years ago has traces of keratin, what fingernails and rhino horn are made of, sticking up from its skull.
The paleontologists who discovered the beast completed a CT scan on the partially-completed skull and revealed these keratin bristles, described as giving the animal the appearance of having a “brush cut.”
The animal is called Platytholus clemensi, and is a type of pachycephalosaur discovered in 2011 in Montana’s Hell Creek Formation. It was a plant-eating dinosaur that grew up to 15 feet long and walked on two legs.
Dinosaur skulls sport an amazing variety of bony ornaments, ranging from the horns of Triceratops and the mohawk-like crests of hadrosaurs to the bumps and knobs covering the head of Tyrannosaurus rex.
There is a theory that pachycephalosaurs bashed heads in courtship rituals much like some mammals do today. But despite a gash being discovered on the skull which had healed up, the researchers say there is no real evidence to support this, and the discovery of bristles is currently considered more like an elaborate headdress.
“We don’t know the exact shape of what was covering the dome, but it had this vertical component that we interpret as covered with keratin,” said Dr. Mark Goodwin of the University of California, Berkeley. “A bristly, flat-topped covering biologically makes sense. Animals change or use certain features, particularly on the skull, for multiple functions.”
The head wound is about half an inch deep but it could have been caused by anything from a falling rock to a chance encounter with a tree or another dinosaur.
“We see probably the first unequivocal evidence of trauma in the head of any pachycephalosaur, where the bone was actually ejected from the dome somehow and healed partially in life,” said Dr. Goodwin. “We don’t know how that was caused. It could be head-butting—we don’t dispute that.”
However his colleague and co-author of the paper describing the curious animal, Dr. John Horner at the University of California, Orange, believes that since Dinosaurs’ closest living relatives are birds, they should look at skull ornamentation among them, rather than their distant lizard precursors as a guide for what the purpose of these bristles was.
Artist depiction of a pachycephalosaur named Platytholus clemensi – SWNS
“That’s the first place everybody wants to go—let’s crash them together. And, you know, we just don’t see any evidence of it, histologically,” said Dr. Horner. “Any features, any accouterments that we find on the heads of dinosaurs, I think, are all display—it’s all about display.”
He said that reptiles and birds, the closest relatives to dinosaurs, have head ornamentation for display and rarely butt heads like mammals such as sheep. While crocodiles bash their heads together over territorial and mating disputes, sometimes for hours, dinosaurs diverged from crocodiles more than 200 million years before this animal was living.
Pachycephalosaurs also lack a pneumatic chamber above the braincase, as found in bighorn sheep, which protects their brain from injury.
“I don’t see any reason to turn dinosaurs into mammals, rather than just trying to figure out what they might be doing as bird-like reptiles,” Dr. Horner said.
The study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology said that blood vessels in the skull ended abruptly at the surface of the dome, indicating that the blood originally fed some tissue that was sitting atop the dome.
And as the vessels were perpendicular to the surface they most likely fed a vertical structure.
“What we see are these vertical canals coming to the surface, which suggests that there might be keratin on top, but it’s oriented vertically,” Horner continued.
“I think these pachycephalosaurs had something on top of their head that we don’t know about. I don’t think they were just domes. I think there was some elaborate display on top of their head.”
The authors added that it could have been high, colored, or even subject to changes in color depending on the seasons. It suggests they were used for sexual display and courting, though they may have been used to butt the flanks, as opposed to the heads, of male rivals.
Dr. Goodwin said he suspects that dinosaurs likely distinguished gender by color, as do most modern birds, such as cassowaries, peafowls, and toucans, which have bright integumental colors around the face and head for visual communication.
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One of the most popular hiking apps has made 27,000 trail maps available for download for free in a bid to increase hiker safety.
Most hikers, if they’re honest, will at some point have experienced this situation: they thought they needed to follow one trail, but instead they followed another. Seeking to reorient themselves, they timidly pulled out their smartphone and see, as they suspected, there was no reception of any kind.
Last year, search and rescue missions were up 32% across the US. This is mainly down to the hikers being inadequately prepared. Access to offline maps would help ensure that all hikers can be best prepared for their hike.
To that end, the Irish hiking app HiiKER has released all trail maps in its database for download free of charge. They can either choose to download them directly to their smartphone or as a GPX file to their smartwatch—saving the battery of their device while away from electricity access.
“Hiker Safety is our absolute priority. Offering hikers Free Offline maps on HiiKER, means that everyone can feel confident that they’re on track, regardless of mobile service,” said Paul Finlay, CEO and Founder of HiiKER.
The app team claims that other incumbent Hiking apps such as Alltrails, Strava, and OutdoorActive charge for access to offline maps. As this service is critical to hiker safety, HiiKER is offering it to hikers for free.
Now used by over 600,000 hikers worldwide, the app which began life on the Emerald Isle three years ago is now one of the most-used hiking apps on the market, with over 27,000 hiking routes available to users.
