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Fermi Bubbles are massive gamma-ray and X-ray emissions from the center of the Milky Way. (Should we start wearing stretchy pants?)

Read Top 10 Mysteries of the Universe in the Smithsonian magazine.

Ash cloud over Mt Pinatubo

Late in the afternoon on April 2, 1991, Mt. Pinatubo, a volcano on the Philippine island of Luzon, began to rumble with a series of the powerful steam explosions that typically precede an eruption. Pinatubo had been dormant for more than four centuries, and in the volcanological world the mountain had become little more than a footnote. The tremors continued in a steady crescendo for the next two months, until June 15th, when the mountain exploded with enough force to expel molten lava at the speed of six hundred miles an hour. The lava flooded a two-hundred-and-fifty-square-mile area, requiring the evacuation of two hundred thousand people.

Within hours, the plume of gas and ash had penetrated the stratosphere, eventually reaching an altitude of twenty-one miles. Three weeks later, an aerosol cloud had encircled the earth, and it remained for nearly two years. Twenty million metric tons of sulfur dioxide mixed with droplets of water, creating a kind of gaseous mirror, which reflected solar rays back into the sky. Throughout 1992 and 1993, the amount of sunlight that reached the surface of the earth was reduced by more than ten per cent…

Read The Climate Fixers: Is there a technological solution to global warming? by Michael Specter in The New Yorker.

So you have a few more millennia to bore everyone to death with your existential anguish. You can be the apocalypse!

Read Oldest known Maya calendar found in Guatemala in the LA Times.

The Wall as seen from the south

Yesterday morning it was frizzling hot—you could feel your hair curling as you stepped out of the shower. Whenever we opened the door to the stairs we were slapped in the face by a blast of warm air.

After lunch it got dark suddenly, almost We-forgot-to-pay-Meralco dark, then we heard thunder in the distance but it did not herald the appearance of Chris Hemsworth alas. It started to rain. The drops hitting the baked pavement sizzled and produced the fug old people used to warn us about (“Hala may singaw baka sipunin ka!”).

Two hours later we were driving through Remedios, Malate when we came upon the last thing one expects in the dead of summer: a flood. Six to eight inches of water on Nakpil. It hadn’t rained that much but the drains were clogged, apparently, and the pedicabs were sloshing about with half their tires underwater.

Photo of Bronx Science HS from the NY Daily News

While leafing through an old magazine we found this article about the Bronx Science High School. We didn’t attend the school, but the third thing we learned at Pisay (Philippine Science) was that it was modeled on that science high school in the Bronx, New York. Making us the children? wards? bastards? of Bronx Science. This article is about their principal, whose methods have been widely condemned but also praised in some quarters. Ayyy the obsession with test scores.

There was a time when working at the Bronx High School of Science seemed like the pinnacle of a teaching career in the New York public schools. Along with Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science is one of the city’s most storied high schools and among its most celebrated public institutions of any kind—part of a select fraternity that promises a free education of the highest quality to anyone with the intelligence to qualify. Together, the three schools reflect some of the city’s most prized values: achievement, brains, democracy. Founded in 1938, Bronx Science counts E.L. Doctorow and Stokely Carmichael among its alumni, as well as seven Nobel laureates and six Pulitzer Prize winners. It has spawned 135 Intel science-competition finalists—more than any other high school in America. Virtually every senior last year gained acceptance to one of the country’s top colleges. The faculty has long been known as among the best, most beloved anywhere. Teachers have traditionally held on to their jobs for decades; some have come to teach the children of their former students.

Read A Bronx Science Experiment in New York Magazine.

One of the pusakal adopted by the staff of the Peninsula Manila.

For years we’ve been telling you about Toxo, a.k.a. Toxoplasma gondii, an extremely clever parasite that is found in cat poop. How clever can a parasite be if it resides in poop? Extremely.

Toxo is picked up from the soil by other animals—pigs, sheep, cows, and especially rats. This parasite then lives in their brains and tissues. Humans have the same genes as other mammals and may also harbor toxo.

Before you freak out and try to boil yourself or overdose on purgatives, relax. We don’t know if you have toxo. Touching cats won’t give you toxo, unless you somehow ingest their poop…

Read our column Emotional Weather Report, the Pet Life edition, today in the Philippine Star.