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Man Found Dead in Great South Bay - NewsBreak
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My brain hurts!! Quantum and subatomic particle physics boggles my mind...
In an experiment that ticks most of the mystery boxes in modern physics, a group of researchers announced on Wednesday that they had simulated a pair of black holes in a quantum computer and sent a message between them through a shortcut in space-time called a wormhole.
Physicists described the achievement as another small step in the effort to understand the relation between gravity, which shapes the universe, and quantum mechanics, which governs the subatomic realm of particles.
“This is important because what we have here in its construct and structure is a baby wormhole,” said Maria Spiropulu, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and the leader of a consortium called Quantum Communication Channels for Fundamental Physics, which conducted the research. “And we hope that we can make adult wormholes and toddler wormholes step-by-step.”
In their report, published Wednesday in Nature, the researchers described the result in measured words: “This work is a successful attempt at observing traversable wormhole dynamics in an experimental setting.”
The wormhole that Dr. Spiropulu and her colleagues created and exploited is not a tunnel through real physical space but rather through an “emergent” two-dimensional space. The “black holes” were not real ones that could swallow the computer but lines of code in a quantum computer. Strictly speaking, the results apply only to a simplified “toy model” of a universe — in particular, one that is akin to a hologram, with quantum fields on the edge of space-time determining what happens within, sort of in the way that the label on a soup can describes the contents.
To be clear: The results of this experiment do not offer the prospect anytime soon, if ever, of a cosmic subway through which to roam the galaxy like Jodie Foster in the movie “Contact” or Matthew McConaughey in “Interstellar.”
“I guess the key question, which is perhaps hard to answer, is: Do we say from the simulation it’s a real black hole?” Daniel Jafferis, a physics professor at Harvard, said. “I kind of like the term ‘emergent black hole.’”
He added: “We are just using the quantum computer to find out what it would look and feel like if you were in this gravitational situation.” He and Alexander Zlokapa, a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are the lead authors of the paper.
Physicists reacted to the paper with interest and caution, expressing concern that the public and media would mistakenly think that actual physical wormholes had been created.
“The most important thing I’d want New York Times readers to understand is this,” Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing expert at the University of Texas in Austin, wrote in an email. “If this experiment has brought a wormhole into actual physical existence, then a strong case could be made that you, too, bring a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you sketch one with pen and paper.”
Daniel Harlow, a physicist at M.I.T. who was not involved in the experiment, noted that the experiment was based on a model of quantum gravity that was so simple, and unrealistic, that it could just as well have been studied using a pencil and paper.
“So I’d say that this doesn’t teach us anything about quantum gravity that we didn’t already know,” Dr. Harlow wrote in an email. “On the other hand, I think it is exciting as a technical achievement, because if we can’t even do this (and until now we couldn’t), then simulating more interesting quantum gravity theories would CERTAINLY be off the table.” Developing computers big enough to do so might take 10 or 15 years, he added.
Leonard Susskind, a physicist at Stanford University who was not part of the team, agreed. “They’re learning that they could do this experiment,” he said, adding: “The really interesting thing here is the possibility of analyzing purely quantum phenomena using general relativity, and who knows where that’s going to go.”
Originally it seemed that wormholes were effectively useless; theory held that they would slam shut the instant anything entered them. They have never been observed outside of science fiction.
A month earlier that same year, in 1935, Einstein, Rosen and Boris Podolsky made another breakthrough, one they thought would discredit the chancy nature of quantum mechanics. They pointed out that quantum rules permitted what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” Measuring one of a pair of particles would determine the results of measuring the other particle, even if the two were light-years apart. Einstein thought this prediction was absurd, but physicists now call it “entanglement” and use it every day in the lab.
Until a few years ago, such quantum tricks weren’t thought to have anything to do with gravity. As a result, physicists were left with no theory of “quantum gravity” to explain what happened when the realms of inner space and outer space collided, as in the Big Bang or inside black holes.
But in 2013 Juan Maldacena, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Dr. Susskind proposed that these two phenomena — spooky action and wormholes — were actually two sides of the same coin, each described in a different but complementary mathematical language.
Those spooky, entangled particles, by this logic, were connected by equally mysterious wormholes. Quantum mechanics could be enlisted to study gravity, and vice versa. The equations that describe quantum phenomena turned out to have analogues in the Einsteinian equations for gravity.
“It’s mostly a matter of taste which description you use because they give exactly the same answer,” Dr. Jafferis said. “And that was an incredible discovery.”
In quantum teleportation, physicists use a set of quantum manipulations to send information between two particles — inches or miles apart — that are entangled in a pair, without the physicists knowing what the message is. The technology is expected to be the heart of a next-generation, unhackable “quantum internet.”
Physicists like to compare the teleportation process to two cups of tea. Drop a cube of sugar into one teacup, and it promptly dissolves — then, after a tick of the quantum clock, the cube reappears intact in the other teacup.
The experiment became conceivable after a pair of papers by Dr. Susskind and, independently, by Dr. Jafferis, Ping Gao of M.I.T., and Aron Wall, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge. They suggested a way that wormholes could be made traversable, after all. What was needed, Dr. Gao and his collaborators said, was a small dose of negative energy at the exit end of the wormhole to prop open the hatch long enough for information to escape.
In classical physics, there is no such thing as negative energy. But in quantum theory, energy can be negative, generating an antigravitational effect. For example, so-called virtual particles, which flit in and out of existence using energy borrowed from empty space, can fall into a black hole, carrying a debt to nature in the form of energy that the black hole must then pay back. This slow leak, Stephen Hawking calculated in 1974, causes the black hole to lose energy and shrink.
When Dr. Spiropulu proposed trying to recreate this wormhole magic on a quantum computer, her colleagues and sponsors at the Department of Energy “thought I was completely nuts,” she recalled. “But Jafferis said, Let’s do it.”
“We make uncertainty an ally and embrace it,” Dr. Spiropulu said.
To reach their full potential, quantum computers will need thousands of working qubits and a million more “error correction” qubits. Google hopes to reach such a goal by the end of the decade, according to Hartmut Neven, head of the company’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence lab in Venice, Calif., who is also on Dr. Spiropulu’s team.
The Caltech physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once predicted that the ultimate use of this quantum power might be to investigate quantum physics itself, as in the wormhole experiment.
“I’m excited to see that researchers can live out Feynman’s dream,” Dr. Neven said.
The wormhole experiment was carried out on a version of Google’s Sycamore 2 computer, which has 72 qubits. Of these, the team used only nine to limit the amount of interference and noise in the system. Two were reference qubits, which played the roles of input and output in the experiment.
The seven other qubits held the two copies of code describing a “sparsified” version of an already simple model of a holographic universe called SYK, named after its three creators: Subir Sachdev of Harvard, Jinwu Ye of Mississippi State University and Alexei Kitaev of Caltech. Both SYK models were packed into the same seven qubits. In the experiment these SYK systems played the role of two black holes, one by scrambling the message into nonsense — the quantum equivalent of swallowing it — and then the other by popping it back out.
“Into this we throw a qubit,” said Joseph Lykken, leader of the Fermilab Quantum Institute and an author on the Nature paper; he was referring to the input message — the quantum analog of a series of ones and zeros. This qubit interacted with the first copy of the SYK qubit; its meaning was scrambled into random noise and it disappeared.
In a Nature article accompanying Dr. Jafferis’s paper, Dr. Susskind and Adam Brown, a physicist at Stanford, noted that the results might shed light on some still-mysterious aspects of ordinary quantum mechanics. For instance, after the sugar cube dissolves in the first teacup, why does it reappear in the other cup in its original form?
“The surprise is not that the message made it across in some form, but that it made it across unscrambled,” the two authors wrote.
The easiest explanation, they added, is that the message went through a wormhole, albeit a “really short” one, Dr. Lykken said in an interview. In quantum mechanics, the shortest conceivable length in nature is 10⁻³³ centimeters, the so-called Planck length. Dr. Lykken calculated that their wormhole was maybe only three Planck lengths long.
“It’s the smallest, crummiest wormhole you can imagine making,” he said. “But that’s really cool because now we’re clearly doing quantum gravity.”
Then, in a tick of the quantum clock, the two SYK systems were connected and a shock of negative energy went from the first system to the second one, briefly propping open the latter.
The signal then reappeared in its original unscrambled form — in the ninth and last qubit, attached to the second SYK system, which represented the other end of the wormhole.
One clue that the researchers were actually recording “wormholelike” behavior, Dr. Lykken said, was that signals emerged from the other end of the wormhole in the order that they went in.
In a Nature article accompanying Dr. Jafferis’s paper, Dr. Susskind and Adam Brown, a physicist at Stanford, noted that the results might shed light on some still-mysterious aspects of ordinary quantum mechanics. For instance, after the sugar cube dissolves in the first teacup, why does it reappear in the other cup in its original form?
“The surprise is not that the message made it across in some form, but that it made it across unscrambled,” the two authors wrote.
The easiest explanation, they added, is that the message went through a wormhole, albeit a “really short” one, Dr. Lykken said in an interview. In quantum mechanics, the shortest conceivable length in nature is 10⁻³³ centimeters, the so-called Planck length. Dr. Lykken calculated that their wormhole was maybe only three Planck lengths long.
“It’s the smallest, crummiest wormhole you can imagine making,” he said. “But that’s really cool because now we’re clearly doing quantum gravity.”
Physicists Create ‘the Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can Imagine’
Scientists used a quantum computer to explore the ultimate escape route from a black hole.In an experiment that ticks most of the mystery boxes in modern physics, a group of researchers announced on Wednesday that they had simulated a pair of black holes in a quantum computer and sent a message between them through a shortcut in space-time called a wormhole.
Physicists described the achievement as another small step in the effort to understand the relation between gravity, which shapes the universe, and quantum mechanics, which governs the subatomic realm of particles.
“This is important because what we have here in its construct and structure is a baby wormhole,” said Maria Spiropulu, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and the leader of a consortium called Quantum Communication Channels for Fundamental Physics, which conducted the research. “And we hope that we can make adult wormholes and toddler wormholes step-by-step.”
In their report, published Wednesday in Nature, the researchers described the result in measured words: “This work is a successful attempt at observing traversable wormhole dynamics in an experimental setting.”
The wormhole that Dr. Spiropulu and her colleagues created and exploited is not a tunnel through real physical space but rather through an “emergent” two-dimensional space. The “black holes” were not real ones that could swallow the computer but lines of code in a quantum computer. Strictly speaking, the results apply only to a simplified “toy model” of a universe — in particular, one that is akin to a hologram, with quantum fields on the edge of space-time determining what happens within, sort of in the way that the label on a soup can describes the contents.
To be clear: The results of this experiment do not offer the prospect anytime soon, if ever, of a cosmic subway through which to roam the galaxy like Jodie Foster in the movie “Contact” or Matthew McConaughey in “Interstellar.”
“I guess the key question, which is perhaps hard to answer, is: Do we say from the simulation it’s a real black hole?” Daniel Jafferis, a physics professor at Harvard, said. “I kind of like the term ‘emergent black hole.’”
He added: “We are just using the quantum computer to find out what it would look and feel like if you were in this gravitational situation.” He and Alexander Zlokapa, a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are the lead authors of the paper.
Physicists reacted to the paper with interest and caution, expressing concern that the public and media would mistakenly think that actual physical wormholes had been created.
“The most important thing I’d want New York Times readers to understand is this,” Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing expert at the University of Texas in Austin, wrote in an email. “If this experiment has brought a wormhole into actual physical existence, then a strong case could be made that you, too, bring a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you sketch one with pen and paper.”
Daniel Harlow, a physicist at M.I.T. who was not involved in the experiment, noted that the experiment was based on a model of quantum gravity that was so simple, and unrealistic, that it could just as well have been studied using a pencil and paper.
“So I’d say that this doesn’t teach us anything about quantum gravity that we didn’t already know,” Dr. Harlow wrote in an email. “On the other hand, I think it is exciting as a technical achievement, because if we can’t even do this (and until now we couldn’t), then simulating more interesting quantum gravity theories would CERTAINLY be off the table.” Developing computers big enough to do so might take 10 or 15 years, he added.
Leonard Susskind, a physicist at Stanford University who was not part of the team, agreed. “They’re learning that they could do this experiment,” he said, adding: “The really interesting thing here is the possibility of analyzing purely quantum phenomena using general relativity, and who knows where that’s going to go.”
The two faces of Einstein
Wormholes entered the physics lexicon in 1935 as one of the weirder predictions of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which describes how matter and energy warp space to create what we call gravity. That year Einstein and his colleague, Nathan Rosen, showed in a paper that shortcuts through space-time, connecting pairs of black holes, could exist. The physicist John Wheeler later called these connectors “wormholes.”Originally it seemed that wormholes were effectively useless; theory held that they would slam shut the instant anything entered them. They have never been observed outside of science fiction.
A month earlier that same year, in 1935, Einstein, Rosen and Boris Podolsky made another breakthrough, one they thought would discredit the chancy nature of quantum mechanics. They pointed out that quantum rules permitted what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” Measuring one of a pair of particles would determine the results of measuring the other particle, even if the two were light-years apart. Einstein thought this prediction was absurd, but physicists now call it “entanglement” and use it every day in the lab.
Until a few years ago, such quantum tricks weren’t thought to have anything to do with gravity. As a result, physicists were left with no theory of “quantum gravity” to explain what happened when the realms of inner space and outer space collided, as in the Big Bang or inside black holes.
But in 2013 Juan Maldacena, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Dr. Susskind proposed that these two phenomena — spooky action and wormholes — were actually two sides of the same coin, each described in a different but complementary mathematical language.
Those spooky, entangled particles, by this logic, were connected by equally mysterious wormholes. Quantum mechanics could be enlisted to study gravity, and vice versa. The equations that describe quantum phenomena turned out to have analogues in the Einsteinian equations for gravity.
“It’s mostly a matter of taste which description you use because they give exactly the same answer,” Dr. Jafferis said. “And that was an incredible discovery.”
Escape hatches
The recent wormhole experiment sought to employ the mathematics of general relativity to examine an aspect of quantum magic, known as quantum teleportation, to see if some new aspect of physics or gravity might be revealed.In quantum teleportation, physicists use a set of quantum manipulations to send information between two particles — inches or miles apart — that are entangled in a pair, without the physicists knowing what the message is. The technology is expected to be the heart of a next-generation, unhackable “quantum internet.”
Physicists like to compare the teleportation process to two cups of tea. Drop a cube of sugar into one teacup, and it promptly dissolves — then, after a tick of the quantum clock, the cube reappears intact in the other teacup.
The experiment became conceivable after a pair of papers by Dr. Susskind and, independently, by Dr. Jafferis, Ping Gao of M.I.T., and Aron Wall, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge. They suggested a way that wormholes could be made traversable, after all. What was needed, Dr. Gao and his collaborators said, was a small dose of negative energy at the exit end of the wormhole to prop open the hatch long enough for information to escape.
In classical physics, there is no such thing as negative energy. But in quantum theory, energy can be negative, generating an antigravitational effect. For example, so-called virtual particles, which flit in and out of existence using energy borrowed from empty space, can fall into a black hole, carrying a debt to nature in the form of energy that the black hole must then pay back. This slow leak, Stephen Hawking calculated in 1974, causes the black hole to lose energy and shrink.
When Dr. Spiropulu proposed trying to recreate this wormhole magic on a quantum computer, her colleagues and sponsors at the Department of Energy “thought I was completely nuts,” she recalled. “But Jafferis said, Let’s do it.”
Harnessing uncertainty
In ordinary computers, including the phone in your pocket, the currency of calculation is bits, which can be ones or zeros. Quantum computers run on qubits, which can be 0 or 1 or anywhere in between until they are measured or observed. This makes quantum computers super powerful for certain kinds of tasks, like factoring large numbers and (maybe one day) cracking cryptographic codes. In essence, a quantum computer runs all the possible variations of the program simultaneously to arrive at a solution.“We make uncertainty an ally and embrace it,” Dr. Spiropulu said.
To reach their full potential, quantum computers will need thousands of working qubits and a million more “error correction” qubits. Google hopes to reach such a goal by the end of the decade, according to Hartmut Neven, head of the company’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence lab in Venice, Calif., who is also on Dr. Spiropulu’s team.
The Caltech physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once predicted that the ultimate use of this quantum power might be to investigate quantum physics itself, as in the wormhole experiment.
“I’m excited to see that researchers can live out Feynman’s dream,” Dr. Neven said.
The wormhole experiment was carried out on a version of Google’s Sycamore 2 computer, which has 72 qubits. Of these, the team used only nine to limit the amount of interference and noise in the system. Two were reference qubits, which played the roles of input and output in the experiment.
The seven other qubits held the two copies of code describing a “sparsified” version of an already simple model of a holographic universe called SYK, named after its three creators: Subir Sachdev of Harvard, Jinwu Ye of Mississippi State University and Alexei Kitaev of Caltech. Both SYK models were packed into the same seven qubits. In the experiment these SYK systems played the role of two black holes, one by scrambling the message into nonsense — the quantum equivalent of swallowing it — and then the other by popping it back out.
“Into this we throw a qubit,” said Joseph Lykken, leader of the Fermilab Quantum Institute and an author on the Nature paper; he was referring to the input message — the quantum analog of a series of ones and zeros. This qubit interacted with the first copy of the SYK qubit; its meaning was scrambled into random noise and it disappeared.
In a Nature article accompanying Dr. Jafferis’s paper, Dr. Susskind and Adam Brown, a physicist at Stanford, noted that the results might shed light on some still-mysterious aspects of ordinary quantum mechanics. For instance, after the sugar cube dissolves in the first teacup, why does it reappear in the other cup in its original form?
“The surprise is not that the message made it across in some form, but that it made it across unscrambled,” the two authors wrote.
The easiest explanation, they added, is that the message went through a wormhole, albeit a “really short” one, Dr. Lykken said in an interview. In quantum mechanics, the shortest conceivable length in nature is 10⁻³³ centimeters, the so-called Planck length. Dr. Lykken calculated that their wormhole was maybe only three Planck lengths long.
“It’s the smallest, crummiest wormhole you can imagine making,” he said. “But that’s really cool because now we’re clearly doing quantum gravity.”
Then, in a tick of the quantum clock, the two SYK systems were connected and a shock of negative energy went from the first system to the second one, briefly propping open the latter.
The signal then reappeared in its original unscrambled form — in the ninth and last qubit, attached to the second SYK system, which represented the other end of the wormhole.
One clue that the researchers were actually recording “wormholelike” behavior, Dr. Lykken said, was that signals emerged from the other end of the wormhole in the order that they went in.
In a Nature article accompanying Dr. Jafferis’s paper, Dr. Susskind and Adam Brown, a physicist at Stanford, noted that the results might shed light on some still-mysterious aspects of ordinary quantum mechanics. For instance, after the sugar cube dissolves in the first teacup, why does it reappear in the other cup in its original form?
“The surprise is not that the message made it across in some form, but that it made it across unscrambled,” the two authors wrote.
The easiest explanation, they added, is that the message went through a wormhole, albeit a “really short” one, Dr. Lykken said in an interview. In quantum mechanics, the shortest conceivable length in nature is 10⁻³³ centimeters, the so-called Planck length. Dr. Lykken calculated that their wormhole was maybe only three Planck lengths long.
“It’s the smallest, crummiest wormhole you can imagine making,” he said. “But that’s really cool because now we’re clearly doing quantum gravity.”
Dumping of ‘Green Book’ Actor’s Body Leads to Corpse-Hiding Charge
Frank Vallelonga Jr., whose father’s story was the basis for the Oscar-winning film, was found dead in the Bronx this week.A Bronx man has been charged with concealing a human corpse after the body of an actor best known for his role in the Oscar-winning film “Green Book” was found dumped outside a sheet-metal shop in the borough’s Hunts Point section, the police said on Thursday.
The dead man, identified by the police as Frank Vallelonga Jr., 60, was found on Oak Point Avenue just before 4 a.m. Monday by officers responding to a 911 call about an unconscious man, officials said.
Emergency services workers pronounced Mr. Vallelonga dead at the scene, the police said. His body showed no obvious signs of trauma, and the medical examiner’s office was conducting an autopsy to determine the cause of death, according to the police, who described Mr. Vallelonga as homeless.
In addition to concealment of a human corpse, the man arrested in the case, Steven Smith, 35, was charged with several other crimes, including grand larceny of a vehicle and criminal possession of stolen property, according to court records.
Mr. Smith was arrested after a review of surveillance video showed a gray Hyundai Elantra that he was driving stop at the Oak Point Avenue address, according to a criminal complaint. He got out of the car, pulled a body out of the passenger’s side, dropped it onto the sidewalk, got back in the car and drove off, the complaint says.
The car belonged to Mr. Vallelonga’s brother Nick, who told the police that Mr. Smith did not have permission to be driving it, the complaint says.
Mr. Smith told investigators that he did not know Frank Vallelonga Jr. “at all,” the complaint says.
Ooopsie!!
A Missouri man pleaded guilty this week to stealing his dead mother’s Social Security payments for more than a quarter century, accumulating nearly $200,000 in the process, federal prosecutors said.
The man, Reginald Bagley, 62, of Dellwood, Mo., pleaded guilty on Thursday to a felony charge of stealing money belonging to the United States, the Justice Department said in a news release. The crime could land him in prison for up to 10 years and result in a fine of up to $250,000 when he is sentenced in March.
Mr. Bagley told federal prosecutors that he had never reported his mother’s death on March 12, 1994, to the Social Security Administration, the agency said.
In 1998, Mr. Bagley set up a bank account where his dead mother’s benefits were deposited, according to a plea agreement in the case.
In total, from April 1, 1994, to July 31, 2020, Mr. Bagley stole $197,329 in Social Security benefits, prosecutors said.
His lawyer, Daniel A. Juengel, said in an interview on Friday that Mr. Bagley “has accepted responsibility for his actions.”
“He’s very remorseful and understands that he’ll have to pay restitution back for the amount of money that was taken,” Mr. Juengel said.
The case against Mr. Bagley underscores a longstanding problem in which people collect benefits meant for their dead relatives. The Social Security Administration is responsible for issuing about $1 trillion in benefit payments every year, meaning that “even the slightest error in the overall payment process can result in millions of dollars in improper payments,” according to the agency’s financial report in 2021.
What made Mr. Bagley’s case particularly unusual, Mr. Juengel said, was how long it had taken the Social Security Administration to investigate.
“The money just kept being used, and kept coming in and kept being used,” Mr. Juengel said. “Then, you know, he was in over his head. And then eventually the Social Security Administration did an investigation.”
It’s unclear when exactly the agency began its investigation into Mr. Bagley.
The Social Security Administration and its Office of Inspector General did not immediately respond to emails and calls seeking comment on Friday. The U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Missouri also did not immediately respond to an email and a call seeking comment.
When the Social Security Administration determined that Mr. Bagley’s mother had not been using her Medicare benefits, the agency sent a letter to Mr. Bagley’s address to try to contact her, prosecutors said.
Shortly after the letter was sent, the bank account was closed, and the remaining balance of $2.83 was given to Mr. Bagley in a cashier’s check on July 24, 2020, according to the plea agreement.
Mr. Juengel said that Mr. Bagley, who is married and has five children and some grandchildren, was “not a wealthy guy.”
Mr. Bagley was a trash truck driver with a history of depression and anxiety who had been trying “to make ends meet,” Mr. Juengel said.
“Those are all factors that contributed to the nature of what was happening,” he said.
Still, Mr. Juengel emphasized that his client did not want to shirk responsibility for what he had done.
“He understands what he did,” Mr. Juengel said, “and he’s remorseful.”
Man Cashed His Dead Mother’s Social Security Checks for 26 Years, U.S. Says
Reginald Bagley of Dellwood, Mo., pleaded guilty to stealing about $200,000 from the government, prosecutors said.A Missouri man pleaded guilty this week to stealing his dead mother’s Social Security payments for more than a quarter century, accumulating nearly $200,000 in the process, federal prosecutors said.
The man, Reginald Bagley, 62, of Dellwood, Mo., pleaded guilty on Thursday to a felony charge of stealing money belonging to the United States, the Justice Department said in a news release. The crime could land him in prison for up to 10 years and result in a fine of up to $250,000 when he is sentenced in March.
Mr. Bagley told federal prosecutors that he had never reported his mother’s death on March 12, 1994, to the Social Security Administration, the agency said.
In 1998, Mr. Bagley set up a bank account where his dead mother’s benefits were deposited, according to a plea agreement in the case.
In total, from April 1, 1994, to July 31, 2020, Mr. Bagley stole $197,329 in Social Security benefits, prosecutors said.
His lawyer, Daniel A. Juengel, said in an interview on Friday that Mr. Bagley “has accepted responsibility for his actions.”
“He’s very remorseful and understands that he’ll have to pay restitution back for the amount of money that was taken,” Mr. Juengel said.
The case against Mr. Bagley underscores a longstanding problem in which people collect benefits meant for their dead relatives. The Social Security Administration is responsible for issuing about $1 trillion in benefit payments every year, meaning that “even the slightest error in the overall payment process can result in millions of dollars in improper payments,” according to the agency’s financial report in 2021.
What made Mr. Bagley’s case particularly unusual, Mr. Juengel said, was how long it had taken the Social Security Administration to investigate.
“The money just kept being used, and kept coming in and kept being used,” Mr. Juengel said. “Then, you know, he was in over his head. And then eventually the Social Security Administration did an investigation.”
It’s unclear when exactly the agency began its investigation into Mr. Bagley.
The Social Security Administration and its Office of Inspector General did not immediately respond to emails and calls seeking comment on Friday. The U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Missouri also did not immediately respond to an email and a call seeking comment.
When the Social Security Administration determined that Mr. Bagley’s mother had not been using her Medicare benefits, the agency sent a letter to Mr. Bagley’s address to try to contact her, prosecutors said.
Shortly after the letter was sent, the bank account was closed, and the remaining balance of $2.83 was given to Mr. Bagley in a cashier’s check on July 24, 2020, according to the plea agreement.
Mr. Juengel said that Mr. Bagley, who is married and has five children and some grandchildren, was “not a wealthy guy.”
Mr. Bagley was a trash truck driver with a history of depression and anxiety who had been trying “to make ends meet,” Mr. Juengel said.
“Those are all factors that contributed to the nature of what was happening,” he said.
Still, Mr. Juengel emphasized that his client did not want to shirk responsibility for what he had done.
“He understands what he did,” Mr. Juengel said, “and he’s remorseful.”
Thousands still in dark after ‘cowards’ shoot up North Carolina substations
More than 33,000 North Carolina power customers remained in the dark and under curfew Monday two days after two electric substations were shot up in what officials said was a “targeted attack…
nypost.com
Seriously....WT.....
nypost.com
Family exhumes grandma after 10 years, shocked by her appearance
She was still drop-dead gorgeous.
nypost.com
wader
Well-Known Angler
WTF Indeed.Seriously....WT.....
Family exhumes grandma after 10 years, shocked by her appearance
She was still drop-dead gorgeous.
Rick67
Well-Known Angler
She looked like shit and dead to me.Seriously....WT.....
Family exhumes grandma after 10 years, shocked by her appearance
She was still drop-dead gorgeous.
I instructed my wife & daughter, closed casket with a large banner behind me saying, "He doesn't look good, HE'S DEAD!!!"
wader
Well-Known Angler
talk about off the wall........................
As the biggest rock band of the 20th century, the Beatles were naturally also the subject of an infamous conspiracy theory. According to urban legend, Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by an imposter, with his surviving bandmates leaving cryptic clues to the coverup in their music and album art.
Decades later, a far-right fringe movement would make this kind of outlandish claim as a matter of course. QAnon followers, who started out as Trump loyalists believing that he was engaged in a secret war with the “deep state” and a cabal of pedophile elites, have floated the idea that JFK Jr. is still alive and suggested that President Biden is actually a robot. They come to these conclusions in much the same way as a Sixties stoner would have “proved” that Paul was dead: by interpreting images and texts in a way that no reasonable person ever would. QAnon, too, holds that the people running the world like to taunt us with hints of their evil influence — that the evidence is always hidden in plain sight.
So it can’t be a surprise that this cult, which now studies any artifact they can to advance a new “satanic panic,” is arguing about whether the Beatles were tied up in witchcraft and child sacrifice.
====================
more at the link below if you want a good laugh,,,,,,,
www.yahoo.com
QAnon Followers Are Arguing if the Beatles Were Involved in Witchcraft and Child Sacrifice
As the biggest rock band of the 20th century, the Beatles were naturally also the subject of an infamous conspiracy theory. According to urban legend, Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by an imposter, with his surviving bandmates leaving cryptic clues to the coverup in their music and album art.
Decades later, a far-right fringe movement would make this kind of outlandish claim as a matter of course. QAnon followers, who started out as Trump loyalists believing that he was engaged in a secret war with the “deep state” and a cabal of pedophile elites, have floated the idea that JFK Jr. is still alive and suggested that President Biden is actually a robot. They come to these conclusions in much the same way as a Sixties stoner would have “proved” that Paul was dead: by interpreting images and texts in a way that no reasonable person ever would. QAnon, too, holds that the people running the world like to taunt us with hints of their evil influence — that the evidence is always hidden in plain sight.
So it can’t be a surprise that this cult, which now studies any artifact they can to advance a new “satanic panic,” is arguing about whether the Beatles were tied up in witchcraft and child sacrifice.
====================
more at the link below if you want a good laugh,,,,,,,
QAnon Followers Are Arguing if the Beatles Were Involved in Witchcraft and Child Sacrifice
Followers of the fringe movement think Paul is dead, John was assassinated by communists, and that the group normalized child sacrifice
Oldest Known DNA Offers Glimpse of a Once-Lush Arctic
In Greenland’s permafrost, scientists discovered two-million-year-old genetic material from scores of plant and animal species, including mastodons, geese, lemmings and ants.
An illustration of the Kap Kobenhavn Formation in northern Greenland two million years ago, when it was covered with poplar and birch forests and populated with mastodons. Credit...Beth Zaiken
By Carl Zimmer
Dec. 7, 2022 Updated 3:35 p.m. ET
In the permafrost at the northern edge of Greenland, scientists have discovered the oldest known fragments of DNA, offering an extraordinary look at an extraordinary ancient ecosystem.
The genetic material dates back at least two million years — that’s nearly twice as old as the mammoth DNA in Siberia that held the previous record. And the samples, described on Wednesday in the journal Nature, came from more than 135 different species.
Together, they show that a region just 600 miles from the North Pole was once covered by a forest of poplar and birch trees inhabited by mastodons. The forests were also home to caribou and Arctic hares. And the warm coastal waters were filled with horseshoe crabs, a species that today cannot be found any farther north of Maine.
Independent experts hailed the study as a major advance.
“It feels almost magical to be able to infer such a complete picture of an ancient ecosystem from tiny fragments of preserved DNA,” said Beth Shapiro, a paleogeneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
“I think it’s going to blow people’s minds,” said Andrew Christ, a geoscientist at the University of Vermont who studies the ancient Arctic. “It certainly did so for me.”
The discovery came after two decades of scientific gambles and frustrating setbacks.
One of the leaders of the project, Eske Willerslev, pioneered methods for pulling DNA out of sediment while he was a graduate student at the University of Copenhagen. In 2003, studying a chunk of Siberian permafrost, he and his colleagues found DNA from plants such as willow and daisies dating 400,000 years ago.
Rick67
Well-Known Angler
Humor is good. I asked to have a melodic death metal band play at mine with an open bar.
Jaws1948
Angler
My son wants wires attached to his hands and someone hidden behind a curtain. As people pass the coffin, the wires get pulled so he waves to them. At the same time a tape recording of his voice saying, "Hi. Thanks for coming. I hope you enjoyed yourself while you were here."
I told him he's so funny, he should be on the stage. There'll be one leaving in five minutes.
I told him he's so funny, he should be on the stage. There'll be one leaving in five minutes.
I neglected the rest of my request, that being a chum bucket on top of the casket full of ice and beer so folks can have one last beer with me.
When the wake is over, casket goes into the oven and burned. Ashes go into the bucket which will be entrusted to a fishing companion who will mix in some chum and chum me out into the ocean as a final resting place
wader
Well-Known Angler
Mountain lion barges into California home, drags dog outside: video
A woman in Sonoma County, California, shared video showing a mountain lion standing over her dog in her backyard after she says the predator burst into her home and dragged her pup outside by its neck last month.
Rebecca Kracker, of Bennett Valley, told FOX2 KTVU on Tuesday that she went to check on her border collie, Sherman, after she heard him yelping and growling.
To her shock, Kracker said she found a mountain lion inside her home with Sherman’s neck in its jaws.
Video she shared shows the mountain lion standing over Sherman in the backyard after the big cat dragged the dog outside.
"She was bearing her teeth and hissing, and he had passed out from shock," Kracker told the outlet. "I thought he was dead at that point."
However, the predator returned the following day, according to Kracker, this time to target two of her goats.
Kracker said she notified state wildlife officials, who tracked down the big cat and euthanized the animal.
Mountain lion enters California home, drags dog outside | Fox News Video
A woman in Sonoma County, California, said a mountain lion burst into her home and dragged her dog into the backyard by its neck. (Credit: Rebecca Kracker)
video.foxnews.com
and here I am complaining about stray cats........
Mountain lion barges into California home, drags dog outside: video
A woman in Sonoma County, California, shared video showing a mountain lion standing over her dog in her backyard after she says the predator burst into her home and dragged her pup outside by its neck last month.
Rebecca Kracker, of Bennett Valley, told FOX2 KTVU on Tuesday that she went to check on her border collie, Sherman, after she heard him yelping and growling.
To her shock, Kracker said she found a mountain lion inside her home with Sherman’s neck in its jaws.
Video she shared shows the mountain lion standing over Sherman in the backyard after the big cat dragged the dog outside.
"She was bearing her teeth and hissing, and he had passed out from shock," Kracker told the outlet. "I thought he was dead at that point."
However, the predator returned the following day, according to Kracker, this time to target two of her goats.
Kracker said she notified state wildlife officials, who tracked down the big cat and euthanized the animal.
Mountain lion enters California home, drags dog outside | Fox News Video
A woman in Sonoma County, California, said a mountain lion burst into her home and dragged her dog into the backyard by its neck. (Credit: Rebecca Kracker)
and here I am complaining about stray cats........
Damn, it looks like that border collie was smart enough to play dead since it survived.
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