Good Morning, RVA: Ground control to Major Tom

Cool space happenings today and the last bit of warm weather for…ever?

November 12, 2014; 6:58 AM • by Ross Catrow

Good morning, RVA! It’s 61 °F, and the rest of today will be beautiful and pleasant. Soak it up like a warm-weather sponge because The Cold Front approaches: looking at the forecast for the next couple of days, the warmest weather on deck is a high of 50 °F on Sunday.

Water cooler

OK people, this is your first warning: this weekend the Richmond Marathon takes over many city streets, shuts them down, and fills them with insane running enthusiasts. With all of the road closings, this town is like a pressure cooker turned up to high! Look at this map and chart of the closings so you can better plan your Saturday.

Here’s an anonymous editorial in the RTD about the City’s Economic Development Authority handling construction of the Stone Brewing Co. facility. It contains this sentence: “But being the tallest of the Seven Dwarfs does not make you the Jolly Green Giant.”

People who have real and tangible skills fill me with awe–like this guy, Adam Birce, who’s opened a violin repair shop in Manchester. He had to be trained by another man, not Stack Exchange or YouTube!

You probably saw all of those Alton Brown food pics from his recent trip to RVA. Somehow I missed this blog post in which he says incredibly flattering things about Richmond. Things like: “There is something incredible happening with the food scene in Richmond.”

At 11:00 AM, a 220-pound space probe named Philae will attempt to land on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Part of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission, it’s the first time anyone has ever attempted to land on a tiny comet deep in the blackness of space. You can watch the poor, stressful humans at mission control live as they either succeed or fail. Good luck humans!

Sports!

• Caps downed the Blue Jackets, 4-2, and improve to 7-5-3.

This morning’s longread

This Is Where Your Childhood Memories Went

Interesting? Depressing? You decide.

On average, people’s memories stretch no farther than age three and a half. Everything before then is a dark abyss. “This is a phenomenon of longstanding focus,” says Patricia Bauer of Emory University, a leading expert on memory development. “It demands our attention because it’s a paradox: Very young children show evidence of memory for events in their lives, yet as adults we have relatively few of these memories.”

In the last few years, scientists have finally started to unravel precisely what is happening in the brain around the time that we forsake recollection of our earliest years. “What we are adding to the story now is the biological basis,” says Paul Frankland, a neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. This new science suggests that as a necessary part of the passage into adulthood, the brain must let go of much of our childhood.

This morning’s Instagram

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November 12, 2014 6:58 AM 0