Senior Women Web

"I always contended that if not revealing my age would actually make me younger, I would be as tight-lipped as the enigmatic Mona Lisa; but since nothing can actually erase the years, why not just accept and admit them?... Above all, almost all my friends would submit to waterboarding before revealing their age, blissfully unaware that these days that statistic is available to anyone who makes a simple Google query or two. They don’t realize that the mere fact that they don’t know that identifies them as ancient and that exactly how ancient is no longer a secret. They believe they can guard that number to the bitter end — and beyond. No exaggeration. One woman I knew made her son vow not to put her date of birth on her headstone when she died." more »

“Dicynodont tusks can tell us a lot about mammalian tusk evolution in general,” says Ken Angielczyk. “For instance, this study shows that reduced rates of tooth replacement and a flexible ligament attaching the tooth to the jaw are needed for true tusks to evolve. It all ladders up to giving us a better understanding of the tusks we see in mammals today.” “Tusks have evolved a number of times, which makes you wonder how — and why? We now have good data on the anatomical changes that needed to happen for dicynodonts to evolve tusks. For other groups, like warthogs or walruses, the jury is still out,” says Christian Sidor, a curator at the University of Washington Burke Museum and one of the paper’s authors. A more »

"The framers of the Civil War Amendments recognized that access to the ballot is a fundamental aspect of citizenship and self-government. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 sought to make the promise of those amendments real. To do so, it gave the Justice Department valuable tools with which to protect the right to vote. In recent years, however, the protections of the Voting Rights Act have been drastically weakened. The Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in the Shelby County case effectively eliminated the preclearance protections of Section 5, which had been the department’s most effective tool for protecting voting rights over the past half-century. Subsequent decisions have substantially narrowed the reach of Section 2 as well. Since those decisions, there has been a dramatic increase in legislative enactments that make it harder for millions of eligible voters to vote and to elect representatives of their own choosing. Those enactments range from: practices and procedures that make voting more difficult; to redistricting maps drawn to disadvantage both minorities and citizens of opposing political parties; to abnormal post-election audits that put the integrity of the voting process at risk; to changes in voting administration meant to diminish the authority of locally elected or nonpartisan election administrators. Some have even suggested permitting state legislators to set aside the choice of the voters themselves." more »

"The ensuing seven years saw America serve with distinction in many theaters, including a second Mediterranean cruise in 1967 that included the Six Day War, and deployment in Vietnam in 1968. New Year’s Day 1969 found her back in Norfolk, Virginia. America would be deployed a second time to Vietnam in 1970, return to the Mediterranean in 1971, and deploy to Vietnam for a third time in 1972. NARA’s digitized logbooks for America currently end in 1973, when the carrier was anchored in Hong Kong Harbor." In 2019 the National Archives entered into an agreement with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to digitize U.S. Navy and Coast Guard deck logs from vessels with Vietnam-era service (1956–78). The more than 200 million images will be used to validate the claims for those who served in Vietnam and establish service connection for disability benefits. The National Archives is making the digitized records available on Archives.gov, after images are transferred by the VA and screened for privacy concerns. more »