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The Go-Go Museum & Café, the world’s only collection dedicated to the celebration, study and preservation of all things go-go, opens Wednesday in its birthplace, Washington, D.C.

For the uninitiated, the genre is a syncopated, drum-driven style of funk. Its distinctive sound is heavy on percussion instruments such as congas and cowbells, as well as brass horns. Go-go is often played live, where its exuberant rhythms soar. “It is a powerful expression of joy,” said Natalie Hopkinson, the museum’s chief curator, who wrote her Ph.D. dissertation about go-go. “It is an art form.”

While several bands played roles in early prototypes of the music, Chuck Brown, the “Godfather of Go-Go,” is widely credited with creating the genre in the 1970s. During a club performance with his band, The Soul Searchers, Brown reportedly had the percussion section play continuously between songs. Meanwhile, he engaged the audience in lively call and response. That groove — which goes and goes — became go-go.

A half-century later, go-go is still going. In 2020, it was designated the official music of Washington, D.C. Over the years, artists such as Brown, Rare Essence and Trouble Funk have appeared on NPR’s “Tiny Desk” concert series. Go-Go acts have also appeared at Pharrell Williams’s Something in the Water festival in Virginia, at the Kennedy Center and beyond.

Transphobia and homophobia are common in Nigeria, which has no legal protections for LGBTQ+ people. The Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act of 2014 reinforced existing colonial-era laws that criminalized same-sex activity as “carnal knowledge against the order of nature,” punishable by up to 14 years imprisonment. The 2014 act went further than the original laws by banning marriages and civil unions, the operation of gay organizations and social clubs, public expressions of LGBTQ+ identity and advocacy of LGBTQ+ rights. In northern Nigeria, where Sharia law operates, homosexual activity can be punishable by death by stoning. There is no specific provision in the 2014 law covering trans people, but it is not possible to legally change your gender in the country and gender-affirming health care is hard to access. Trans Nigerians seeking hormone therapy typically obtain drugs through international pharmacies online and take them at home without guidance from medical professionals. Cross-dressing is prohibited under Sharia law in the north and the Nigerian military; in recent years, some lawmakers have attempted to pass a federal ban.

Area Mama’s murder took place amid rapidly spreading misinformation about LGBTQ+ rights in Nigeria, resulting in a surge in transphobia and homophobia. On social media, fans mourned the loss of Area Mama, whose content provided one of the few examples of a publicly out trans person living in the country. “I remember how unapologetic she was about being herself, and how beautifully her energy radiated every time she came on screen,” said Victoria, a Lagos-based queer woman who was in law school in Abuja at the time of Area Mama’s murder. Almost 6,000 people signed a petition calling for the Nigerian Ministry of Justice to take “immediate and decisive action” to thoroughly investigate her murder, categorize it as a hate crime, end violence against LGBTQ+ people and advocate for legislative reforms. At the same time, Nigerians posted hateful messages on Area Mama’s videos, misgendering her and saying that she deserved to die. No one expects the petition to put significant pressure on authorities or the government. Members of Nigeria’s queer community have come to accept that they only have each other — and that to live safely as themselves, they have to do so underground.

Organizations that support the rights of trans and non-binary people are sometimes able to operate more openly because the 2014 act lacks a specific provision against trans people. Creme De La Crème (CDLC), for example, a Nigerian transgender and non-binary rights foundation, has been able to operate despite the hostile environment. The organization works with Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission, a non-governmental group that promotes and protects human rights in the country, to educate state bodies, such as the Nigerian military, on the experiences of trans Nigerians. Even so, Franklin Ejiogu, CDLC’s executive director, said the organization’s offices and safe shelters have been raided repeatedly. CDLC has moved headquarters on multiple occasions and is now looking to buy its own properties to safeguard against threats from landlords and the public that can lead to raids.

Rather than lobby for national policy change, which they know is a losing battle given the government’s staunch anti-LGBTQ+ stance, many organizations prioritize smaller-scale efforts to improve the daily lives of queer folks. They run education initiatives to improve representation and stop the spread of misinformation, including hosting in-person panels, which they publicize as relating to “equality” rather than LGBTQ+ rights specifically. They also publish online material on the queer experience in Nigeria. In one episode of Q Convos, a podcast featuring conversations on queer identity and culture run by The Initiative for Equal Rights (TIERs), five queer Nigerians discuss the prevalence of kito, a slang term for people who entrap, assault and extort queer people through dating apps, as well as other luring mechanisms.

The city of Alto Hospicio, in Chile’s Atacama Desert, is one of the driest places on Earth. And yet its population of 140,000 continues to balloon, putting mounting pressure on nearby aquifers that haven’t been recharged by rain in 10,000 years. But Alto Hospicio, like so many other coastal cities, is rich in an untapped water resource: fog.

New research finds that by deploying fog collectors — fine mesh stretched between two poles — in the mountains around Alto Hospicio, the city could harvest an average of 2.5 liters of water per square meter of netting each day. Large fog collectors cost between $1,000 and $4,500 and measure 40 square meters, so just one placed near Alto Hospicio could grab 36,500 liters of water a year without using any electricity, according to a paper published on Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science.

By placing the collectors above town — where the altitude is ideal for exploiting the region’s predictable band of fog — water would flow downhill in pipelines by the power of gravity. So that initial investment for collectors would keep paying liquid dividends year after year. “If you’re pumping water from the underground, you will need a lot of energy,” said Virginia Carter Gamberini, a geographer and assistant professor at Chile’s Universidad Mayor and co-lead author of the paper. “From that perspective, it’s a very cheap technology.”

Don’t have a whole lot to say in this intro paragraph. If you enjoy these, do a blog post with your own game and art recommendations. If you don’t have a blog, consider starting a free one on neocities or bear blog. I also have start putting more effort into my recommendation list on Itch.io if you want more recommendations. Consider starting one of those too. I’ve heard they’re way cooler and sexier than Steam Curator pages. I like these ones by Meagan and WildWeasel. And leave nice comments on things you like! Anyway, as Geoff Keighley always says, “Now more than ever, video games.”

A large mural of a teacup decorated with a green flower bursts off the white wall on the ground floor of a tall apartment building in the Kebun Baru area of Singapore. A bowl with a rooster adorns another building nearby. Up the street, another tower features a candy with a white rabbit on the wrapper.

The paintings are more than street art. These 10 murals — each depicting a distinctive Singaporean food-related item — are helping residents with dementia find their way home.

More than 80 percent of Singapore residents over the age of 65 live in public housing blocks like these. But, as the social service agency Dementia Singapore heard from locals in Kebun Baru, the uniform, whitewashed design of the ground floors made it difficult for residents with dementia to get around. Dementia — a family of conditions that impact cognitive function, including Alzheimer’s disease — changes how people are able to navigate even familiar areas, and can impair their ability to read information like numbers.

Along with the hype, the ambitious experiment—building a "car-free" neighborhood in one of the most auto-dependent population centers on the planet—has aroused skepticism. An article by the nonprofit advocacy organization Strong Towns, for instance, contends that Culdesac is a far cry from "the incremental urbanism and thickening our cities need. A dozen or even a thousand Culdesacs can’t solve that problem," because they would lack long-term growth benefits including "the resilience of a system where many hands have built the neighborhood and have a financial stake in it" and would reflect "a zoning and finance stream that favors industrial over incremental production."

But these critics don’t live there. Those with more proximity see the place as a big plus.

Many young people tell me that they fear there is no future. When they ask about the future, they are also asking: what is still imaginable or for what may we still hope? To say there is no future, or that the future moves only in the direction of greater destruction, then we are still imagining something, even if it is a dark picture, one that shows no signs of hope. If we are imagining a fatal conclusion, we are still imagining.

When we say, for instance, that we are imagining the end of the world, or the end of the world as we have known it, we are imagining the end to imagination itself. That is surely something difficult, if not impossible for the imagination to do. For it is one thing to imagine an ongoing destructive process and quite another to feel one’s own power to imagine draw to a halt, potentially destroyed by the destructive processes one is tracking. Tracking fatality is still anticipating, and that assumes a form, whether a picture, a sequence of associations, a cluster of images, a story yet to be narrated about history unfolding, or the new landscapes now lay before us.

If we have an image or story to communicate or we find a form or discover that the image or story is already taking form and that the story took shape in one of the languages we speak. No one is predicting the future at such moments, since it is the unknowable dimension of the future that has us most concerned.

And so, we find that what we imagine is framed and formed in ways that support one kind of interpretation of what will happen over another. The frame and the form are central to an everyday form of conjecturing, one that informs the fear we feel and the imagining we do. All this happens not only inside the mind, but in the modalities and objects through which fearing and imagining take place: specific sensuous modes of presentation, specific media. These are not simply vehicles for preformed thought, but formative powers in themselves.

relevant study: A humanized NOVA1 splicing factor alters mouse vocal communications:

NOVA1, a neuronal RNA-binding protein expressed in the central nervous system, is essential for survival in mice and normal development in humans. A single amino acid change (I197V) in NOVA1’s second RNA binding domain is unique to modern humans. To study its physiological effects, we generated mice carrying the human-specific I197V variant (Nova1hu/hu) and analyzed the molecular and behavioral consequences. While the I197V substitution had minimal impact on NOVA1’s RNA binding capacity, it led to specific effects on alternative splicing, and CLIP revealed multiple binding peaks in mouse brain transcripts involved in vocalization. These molecular findings were associated with behavioral differences in vocalization patterns in Nova1hu/hu mice as pups and adults. Our findings suggest that this human-specific NOVA1 substitution may have been part of an ancient evolutionary selective sweep in a common ancestral population of Homo sapiens, possibly contributing to the development of spoken language through differential RNA regulation during brain development.

A new study links a particular gene to the ancient origins of spoken language, proposing that a protein variant found only in humans may have helped us communicate in a novel way. Speech allowed us to share information, coordinate activities and pass down knowledge, giving us an edge over extinct cousins like Neanderthals and Denisovans.

The new study is “a good first step to start looking at the specific genes” that may affect speech and language development, said Liza Finestack at the University of Minnesota, who was not involved with the research.

The genetic variant researchers were looking at was one of a variety of genes “that contributed to the emergence of Homo sapiens as the dominant species, which we are today” said Dr. Robert Darnell, an author of the study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

Baby mice with the human variant squeaked differently than normal littermates when their mom came around. Adult male mice with the variant chirped differently than their normal counterparts when they saw a female in heat.

Both are settings where mice are motivated to speak, Darnell said, “and they spoke differently” with the human variant, illustrating its role in speech.

This isn’t the first time a gene has been linked to speech. In 2001, British scientists said they had discovered the first gene tied to a language and speech disorder.

By the time President Donald Trump retook office, lawmakers had announced nearly $700 billion in funding for infrastructure- and climate-related projects under two bills passed during Joe Biden’s administration — the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law. That money was promised to all sorts of community and local projects, from clean energy initiatives to water system upgrades.

Some of these projects have received their funding. Indeed, some have been completed. But in light of the Trump administration’s freeze on many forms of federal funding, the future of as-yet-undistributed money is unclear.

What kinds of climate and infrastructure projects have been announced in your community and across the country? Which ones may now be at risk? Now you can use your ZIP code to find out.

To understand the stakes of these signature pieces of legislation, Grist developed a tool that combines information across multiple datasets to reveal where more than $300 billion of the funds promised under the two pieces of legislation have been awarded across the United States. Enter a ZIP code, city name, or other location in the search box below to discover projects within any radius of your chosen area.