rickgrimes

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Deep under the hills of southern Brazil and northern Argentina, scientists found huge tunnels that appear to be cut into solid rock. They say no human or geological process created them.

They do not follow river channels, they show no signs of mining, and they look nothing like normal caves.

Many of the passages are longer than 600 yards (550 meters) and tall enough for an adult to walk through without bending.

The leading idea is that giant, extinct ground sloths dug these colossal shelters, turning parts of South America into a maze of underground homes.

Over the past decade, a detailed study mapped more than 1,500 giant burrows across southern and southeastern Brazil.

These tunnels can reach several hundred feet in length. They branch into side passages, and display long, parallel claw marks etched into their walls.

The work was led by Heinrich Frank, a geologist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. His research centers on paleoburrows – fossil tunnels carved by large, extinct animals that once reshaped the landscapes of southern South America.

Many passages appear in consolidated sands, sandstone, or weathered volcanic rock. These materials are hard for machines to excavate, and harder for humans with simple tools.

Collapsed ceilings and overlapping tunnels show that some routes were widened and reused, a pattern outlined in a chapter on Cenozoic tunnels

Geological processes such as landslides, joints, and natural caves rarely create long, nearly circular tunnels that slope up and down or branch like these.

Frank notes that the tunnel walls are packed with claw marks, sometimes in three parallel grooves, right where a digging limb would bite into rock.

Similar tunnels crop out along road cuts in Argentina, where they intersect and crisscross in dense clusters on some hillsides.

Taken together, the layout looks less like an accident of erosion and more like a network of shelters dug and maintained over long periods.

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President Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was the result of something extraordinary for a Central American leader and convicted cocaine trafficker—a web of powerful advocates stretching from Washington to Mar-a-Lago.

Trump’s announcement stunned the president’s allies and some members of his administration, including officials who spent years building the landmark case against Hernández, according to people familiar with the matter. The decision allowed Hernández, who had been serving a 45-year prison sentence for conspiring with cartels to ship 400 tons of cocaine to the U.S., to walk free this week as the Trump administration escalates its war on narco-traffickers by launching airstrikes on low-level smugglers at sea.

The move wiped out Hernández’s conviction with little explanation and sparked outrage from Democrats and some Republicans in Washington.

The pardon, which Trump announced in the run-up to elections in Honduras, was the result of a lobbying campaign months in the making. Hernández’s appeal had quietly circulated since January through a tight orbit of Trump confidants and conservative media personalities.

Trump has privately told advisers in recent days that he decided to grant the pardon after his allies in Florida, including longtime confidant Roger Stone and members of his Mar-a-Lago club, pushed for it, according to a person who spoke to him. Trump told reporters this week that “the people of Honduras” had asked him to pardon Hernández, blaming then-President Joe Biden for targeting the former Honduran leader. The White House declined to detail Trump’s conversations with Hondurans and defended the pardon, pointing to the president’s public comments.

Hernández, a savvy political operator from a coffee-growing family in Honduras’s highlands who was president from 2014 to 2022, spent a decade building powerful allies in the U.S. During Trump’s first term, he made inroads with Republicans in Washington, attending evangelical events and pitching himself as a staunch ally on migration and security. In 2019, Trump praised him for “stopping drugs at a level that has never happened.”

Hernández also cultivated relationships with American business leaders. He courted Silicon Valley investors by offering semiautonomous “charter city” zones on the country’s Caribbean coast.

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Sources: Florida has shifted focus from Lane Kiffin in the school’s coaching search, as the school has sensed through irregular communication that he’s interested in other options. Florida has interviewed roughly a dozen candidates and is optimistic about the process.

Florida targeted Kiffin early in the search and offered him a deal to put him among the highest paid coaches in college football, which included significant incentives

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After Ars wrote a story on the potential of autonomous assembly to construct large data centers in space, Musk responded on X by saying that Starlink satellites could be used for this purpose.

“Simply scaling up Starlink V3 satellites, which have high speed laser links would work,” he said on the social media site X. “SpaceX will be doing this.”

Musk’s interest in space-based data centers significantly raises the profile of the nascent industry. Proponents of the idea say the advantages are clear: free, limitless power from the Sun and none of the messy environmental costs of building these facilities on Earth (where opposition is starting to grow). Critics say it is economically impractical to build these facilities in space and that supporters underestimate the technology needed to make it work.

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