Meet the Moranbong Band – North Korea’s Version of Spice Girls

(www.express.co.uk)

Believe it or not, North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, is actually a big fan of K-pop music. In fact, he’s so passionate about it that he hand-picked every member of the girl group ‘Moranbong Band’ – his country’s answer to the Spice Girls.

As a result of Kim Jong-un’s endorsement, the band has been playing sell-out gigs across the country. Their first concert was so popular that the streets of Pyongyang were apparently deserted during the broadcast. Often dressed in conservatively sexy attire – with skirts cut well above the knee and hair clipped short – the Moranbong girls have received good reviews from local critics as well.

Although the band has been around for a few years, they appeared to have fallen out of favor in late 2013. But after a six-month hiatus, they were back to performing in April 2014 to rave reviews from Korean media, thus reclaiming their status as queens of North Korea’s pop scene, and the darlings of primetime TV. Their comeback concert featured ‘colorful numbers’ such as ‘O My Motherland Full of Hope’, ‘Our Father’, and ‘We Think of the Marshall Day and Night’.

(imgarcade.com)

“The supreme commander spared time to watch the performance though he was very busy with the work to protect the destiny of the country and its people from the arrogant and reckless moves of the US imperialists and other hostile forces,” the concert host is reported to have announced. “Kim Jong-un waved back to the cheering performers and audience and congratulated the artistes on their successful performance.”

The band is believed to represent the softer, more likable face of Kim’s regime. Ethnomusicologist Donna Kwon, of the University of Kentucky, believes that the Moranbong Band represents an effort to update North Korean ‘popular’ music practices. Traditionally, the country’s top performing groups tend to be symphonies or operatic troupes, consisting of highly trained and technically skilled musicians who are also kind of frozen and stodgy. In one of their earlier concerts, they even played the theme song to the ‘Rocky’ movie series.

Several experts have stated that in North Korea art serves a political end and the Moranbong Band is no different. “North Korea has a history of regime-supported arts that in both content and form serve the state,” said Darcie Draudt, a North Korea analyst. Kim Jong-un’s predecessor Kim Jong-il had a special interest in the film industry – he saw it as a powerful ideological weapon. Experts believe that Kim Jong-un is trying to use the Moranbong Band in the same manner, as a tool to get his people to sympathise with his leadership.

It’s hard to say what the band feels about all these speculations, because the members don’t do interviews. But it is widely believed that they only exist to serve their number one fan – Kim Jong-un. “North Korean artists and musicians know their place within that system and know that to succeed within it, one does not attempt to go beyond established boundaries,” said Adam Cathcart, a China and North Korea expert.

(source: www.express.co.uk/The Guardian)

Asteroid firestorm didn't kill the dinosaurs

Scientists believe that a giant asteroid hitting Earth would not be able to ignite a firestorm on a global scale (google image/www.telegraph.uk)

A favorite theory to explain the sudden demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago has been debunked by an experiment suggesting that it would have been unlikely for a giant asteroid impact to cause a global firestorm.

It is known that a massive asteroid collided with the Earth at around the same time that the dinosaurs went extinct and it was thought that the impact generated high enough temperatures to ignite vegetation around the world in a global conflagration.

However, an experiment involving a heat furnace and various items of living and non-living plant material has shown that the temperatures created by such an impact, and crucially for how long they occurred, would probably not have been great enough to ignite living vegetation on a global scale, scientists said.

“Previously, people would only have been able to speculate on whether the heat from an asteroid would have caused firestorms. We actually recreated the heat predicted from computer models of such an impact,” said Claire Belcher of Exeter University.

“We found that the living plant material that would have been close to the impact site did not ignite. If there were any firestorms, they were likely to have been localised rather than global,” Dr Belcher said.

However, a collision with an asteroid large enough to leave behind an impact crater 200km (124 miles) wide would still have caused cataclysmic damage to the global environment, throwing up enough ash, dust and debris into the atmosphere to block sunlight for many months to create a “nuclear” winter, she said.

“We’re not saying that an asteroid didn’t wipe out the dinosaurs, only that it probably didn’t cause the global firestorms that many people assumed had happened as a result of the impact,” she added.

The idea that an asteroid was responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs goes back 35 years when Luis and Walter Alvarez of the University of California, Berkeley, discovered worldwide deposits of iridium, a mineral found in meteorites, within a layer of rock formed about 65 million years ago.

About a decade later, scientists discovered a huge underground impact crater straddling the coastline at Chicxulub on the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. The date and size of this impact crater matched the timing of an asteroid collision large enough to cause global devastation 65 million years ago, possibly resulting in a global firestorm.

However, a study published in the Journal of Geological Science found that although the temperatures nearby the impact site probably reached in the region of 500C, they lasted for only a minute, which was not enough to ignite most forms of living plant material.

In addition, the researchers found that the heat generated at greater distances, equivalent to a site as far away from Mexico as New Zealand, would have reached about 200C, but this time would have lasted for about seven minutes – long enough to ignite living trees and plants.

“This has shown that the heat was more likely to severely affect ecosystems as long distance away, such that forests in New Zealand would have had more chance of suffering major wildfires than forests in North America close to the impact,” Dr Belcher said.

“This flips our understanding of the effects of the impact on its head and means that palaeontologists may need to look for new clues from fossils found a long way from the impact to better understand the mass extinction,” she said.

Even if global firestorms did not occur, the environmental changes brought about by the asteroid impact would not have hindered the dinosaurs’ survival given that they were too large to hide away or hibernate underground, she added.

(Source: independent.com)