- 3 days ago

OGN Monday

What better way to start the week than with some upbeat news stories?

Pink Floyd band members wrapped in pink silk — Pink Floyd

Looking Rosy

Things are looking rosy for Pink Floyd as the band are reported to be closing in on a $500m deal to sell its music rights catalogue to Sony. There has been an explosion in the music rights market in recent years, with high-profile artists including Bob Dylan and Neil Young, selling their back catalogues in deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Indeed, Sony recently snapped up Bruce Springsteen’s catalogue in a deal worth an estimated $550m, and is currently in talks to buy Queen’s music rights for more than $1bn.

Splashdown

SpaceX's Polaris Dawn crew has returned to Earth after five days in orbit, following a historic mission featuring the world's first commercial spacewalk. The Dragon capsule made splashdown off the coast of Florida yesterday morning. "Splashdown of Dragon confirmed! Welcome back to Earth," SpaceX said on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. The US space agency NASA said the mission represented "a giant leap forward" for the commercial space industry.

The fossilized mandible of a saber-toothed salmon is among the items found | Credit: Wayne Bischoff/Envicom Corp

Entire Ecosystem

Marine fossils dating back to as early as 8.7m years ago have been uncovered beneath a south Los Angeles high school. The Los Angeles Times reports that fossils including those of a saber-toothed salmon and a megalodon, the gigantic prehistoric shark, were found. The fossils also include an 8.7m-year-old bone bed from the Miocene era and a 120,000-year-old shell bed from the Pleistocene era. Wayne Bischoff, the director of cultural resources at Envicom Corporation, said: “It’s the entire ecosystem from an age that’s gone … We have all this evidence to help future researchers put together what an entire ecology looked like nine million years ago. That’s really rare.”

Old subway car submerged off Georgia — Credit: MARTA/Georgia Department of Natural Resources

Fish Ride The Subway

Old subway cars in Atlanta have found a new life underwater. At the end of last year, the transit authority dumped two old railcars off Georgia’s coast as part of a program to develop reef habitats and marine wildlife. All hazardous materials were removed and inspected by the Coast Guard to make sure they were safe to submerge. Recently, divers checked on the cars and were pleased to see the site teeming with fish and sea turtles. They even discovered soft coral beginning to grow. Subway cars aren’t the only unusual objects scuba divers can find in what’s known as Artificial Reef L about 23 nautical miles east of Ossabaw Island. There are also US Army M-60 battle tanks, barges, tugboats and even New York City subway cars. Imagine what the fish think...

Shem Tov Bible

A rare, ornate, talismanic and mystical Hebrew Bible that was written by an illustrious rabbi in 14th century Spain, and whose gilded and colourful pages blend Jewish, Christian, and Islamic artistic traditions, is to go on public display after being bought at auction for $6.9m (£5.3m). The Shem Tov Bible, which was completed by Rabbi Shem Tov Ibn Gaon in the northern Spanish city of Soria in 1312, has led a peripatetic and almost miraculous existence, surviving countless wars and upheavals on its travels to Jerusalem, Baghdad, Tripoli, London and Geneva over the course of seven centuries. The Bible - described as “a tour de force of biblical and kabbalistic scholarship and a precious witness to the medieval tradition of Sephardic book art” - sold near the top end of its estimate at Sotheby’s in New York.

Screen-Free School

Lately, there’s been a growing movement to get phones out of classrooms, but one Finnish town is taking this screen-free push a step further. After a decade of using laptops and digital devices in schools, educators are going back to the basics of good ol’ pen and paper. “Young people are using phones and digital devices so much these days that we didn’t want school to be one of the places where children are only staring at screens,” Maija Kaunonen, an English teacher at Pohjolanrinne Middle School in Riihimaki, told Reuters. The change-up in the town of about 30,000 comes as children’s learning results are slowly decreasing across Finland. So far, the experiment in Riihimaki seems to be working as intended - some students are reporting improved concentration and sleep.

Star Power

Taylor Swift’s Instagram post to her 280 million followers, endorsing Kamala Harris after the Presidential debate, resulted in over 337,000 visits to a voter registration website. Swift shared a custom URL that directed people to vote.gov, which helps people register to vote in their respective states.

"Laughter is an instant vacation." Milton Berle

On This Day

16 September 1620: English colonists aboard the Mayflower set sail for America, where they founded Plymouth, Massachusetts, after 41 men, including William Bradford and Myles Standish, signed the Mayflower Compact.