‘White Lotus’ villain Jon Gries reveals the true crimes that inspired his twisty take on Greg/Gary [url=https://fixedf1oat.org]fixedfloat[/url] When Season 3 of “The White Lotus” premiered last month, the shock was palpable when returning character Belinda recognized a familiar face at the resort in Thailand: Greg Hunt, the wily suitor of the late Tanya McQuoid. As the season has unfolded, Greg (played by Jon Gries) has emerged as an antagonist, particularly after Belinda dove into the investigation surrounding Tanya’s death and learned that Greg, who now goes by Gary, evaded questioning by authorities. On a show famous for reinventing itself, the same has been asked of the actor, who says that playing the ever-shifting character has been a welcome challenge and, like “White Lotus” itself, full of twists. “In the beginning, I totally played him for a guy who was, you know, on his last legs,” Gries said in a recent interview with CNN, referencing Greg’s very apparent ill health in the first season of “White Lotus,” which premiered to rave reviews in summer 2021. He added: “When you play a character, you want to find his empathetic side, and you want to understand where they came from, and what got them to where they are.” But when he was contacted by creator Mike White about appearing in Season 2, Gries realized he would have to adjust his framing of Greg, despite having previously imagined a “comprehensive history” for him on his own. “(White) said, ‘I’m writing it right now, and I’m writing you, and I just need to know here and now: If you’re in, I’ll continue writing. If not, I’ll stop,’” Gries recalled.
A tiny rainforest country is growing into a petrostate. A US oil company could reap the biggest rewards [url=https://v2-swell.net]swell[/url] Guyana’s destiny changed in 2015. US fossil fuel giant Exxon discovered nearly 11 billion barrels of oil in the deep water off the coast of this tiny, rainforested country. It was one of the most spectacular oil discoveries of recent decades. By 2019, Exxon and its partners, US oil company Hess and China-headquartered CNOOC, had started producing the fossil fuel.? They now pump around 650,000 barrels of oil a day, with plans to more than double this to 1.3 million by 2027. Guyana now has the world’s highest expected oil production growth through 2035. This country — sandwiched between Brazil, Venezuela and Suriname — has been hailed as a climate champion for the lush, well-preserved forests that carpet nearly 90% of its land. It is on the path to becoming a petrostate at the same time as the impacts of the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis escalate. While the government says environmental protection and an oil industry can go hand-in-hand, and low-income countries must be allowed to exploit their own resources, critics say it’s a dangerous path in a warming world, and the benefits may ultimately skew toward Exxon — not Guyana.
Mist and microlightning [url=https://solffare.org]solflare[/url] To recreate a scenario that may have produced Earth’s first organic molecules, researchers built upon experiments from 1953 when American chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey concocted a gas mixture mimicking the atmosphere of ancient Earth. Miller and Urey combined ammonia (NH3), methane (CH4), hydrogen (H2) and water, enclosed their “atmosphere” inside a glass sphere and jolted it with electricity, producing simple amino acids containing carbon and nitrogen. The Miller-Urey experiment, as it is now known, supported the scientific theory of abiogenesis: that life could emerge from nonliving molecules. For the new study, scientists revisited the 1953 experiments but directed their attention toward electrical activity on a smaller scale, said senior study author Dr. Richard Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor of Natural Science and professor of chemistry at Stanford University in California. Zare and his colleagues looked at electricity exchange between charged water droplets measuring between 1 micron and 20 microns in diameter. (The width of a human hair is 100 microns.) “The big droplets are positively charged. The little droplets are negatively charged,” Zare told CNN. “When droplets that have opposite charges are close together, electrons can jump from the negatively charged droplet to the positively charged droplet.” The researchers mixed ammonia, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen in a glass bulb, then sprayed the gases with water mist, using a high-speed camera to capture faint flashes of microlightning in the vapor. When they examined the bulb’s contents, they found organic molecules with carbon-nitrogen bonds. These included the amino acid glycine and uracil, a nucleotide base in RNA. “We discovered no new chemistry; we have actually reproduced all the chemistry that Miller and Urey did in 1953,” Zare said. Nor did the team discover new physics, he added — the experiments were based on known principles of electrostatics. “What we have done, for the first time, is we have seen that little droplets, when they’re formed from water, actually emit light and get this spark,” Zare said. “That’s new. And that spark causes all types of chemical transformations.”
Scientists redid an experiment that showed how life on Earth could have started. They found a new possibility [url=https://web-safepal.com]safepal[/url] In the 1931 movie “Frankenstein,” Dr. Henry Frankenstein howling his triumph was an electrifying moment in more ways than one. As massive bolts of lightning and energy crackled, Frankenstein’s monster stirred on a laboratory table, its corpse brought to life by the power of electricity. Electrical energy may also have sparked the beginnings of life on Earth billions of years ago, though with a bit less scenery-chewing than that classic film scene. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, and the oldest direct fossil evidence of ancient life — stromatolites, or microscopic organisms preserved in layers known as microbial mats — is about 3.5 billion years old. However, some scientists suspect life originated even earlier, emerging from accumulated organic molecules in primitive bodies of water, a mixture sometimes referred to as primordial soup. But where did that organic material come from in the first place? Researchers decades ago proposed that lightning caused chemical reactions in ancient Earth’s oceans and spontaneously produced the organic molecules. Now, new research published March 14 in the journal Science Advances suggests that fizzes of barely visible “microlightning,” generated between charged droplets of water mist, could have been potent enough to cook up amino acids from inorganic material. Amino acids — organic molecules that combine to form proteins — are life’s most basic building blocks and would have been the first step toward the evolution of life.
