“I think at some point you need to provoke people. Science is meant to make people uncomfortable.”
It is hard to know how our future descendants will regard the little sliver of history that we live in. It is hard to know what events will seem important to them, what the narrative of now will look like to the twenty-fifth century mind. We tend to think of our time as one uniquely shaped by the advance of technology, but more and more I suspect that this will be remembered as an age of cosmology—as the moment when the human mind first internalized the cosmos that gave rise to it. Over the past century, since the discovery that our universe is expanding, science has quietly begun to sketch the structure of the entire cosmos, extending its explanatory powers across a hundred billion galaxies, to the dawn of space and time itself. It is breathtaking to consider how quickly we have come to understand the basics of everything from star formation to galaxy formation to universe formation. And now, equipped with the predictive power of quantum physics, theoretical physicists are beginning to push even further, into new universes and new physics, into controversies once thought to be squarely within the domain of theology or philosophy.
In January, Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and Director of the Origins Institute at Arizona State University, published A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, a book that, as its title suggests, purports to explain how something—and not just any something, but the entire universe—could have emerged from nothing, the kind of nothing implicated by quantum field theory. But before attempting to do so, the book first tells the story of modern cosmology, whipping its way through the big bang to microwave background radiation and the discovery of dark energy. It’s a story that Krauss is well positioned to tell; in recent years he has emerged as an unusually gifted explainer of astrophysics. One of his lectures has been viewed over a million times on YouTube and his cultural reach extends to some unlikely places—last year Miley Cyrus came under fire when she tweeted a quote from Krauss that some Christians found offensive. Krauss’ book quickly became a bestseller, drawing raves from popular atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, the latter of which even compared it to The Origin of Species for the way its final chapters were supposed to finally upend “last trump card of the theologian.”
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Discovery News “Discovery News digs deep into our world’s mysteries. Join us to explore current events and uncover the science behind the headlines. We Dig. You Discover.”
Of the more than two million Americans that currently use cocaine, just over 700,000 are users of freebase or crack cocaine. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
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New Yorker Zack Hample‘s collection of more than 5,800 baseballs, both home runs and fouled balls, is the largest in the world. “Yes, I’m obsessed,” admits Hample, who’s snagged balls since 1990. His only goal during baseball season is to hit as many Major League stadiums as possible and snag at least a thousand balls — and his success relies on a carefully honed combination of preparation, ingenuity, and pure dumb luck.
“If the White Sox come out early for batting practice, I’m going to throw on my White Sox gear and start shouting at them,” he says. But he’ll happily switch gear depending on the team. Some of the players make a game out of throwing him the ball: “It’s cool to be connected to all these guys. It’s my own version of fantasy baseball, where I get to interact and play with numbers and feel like I’m a part of it somehow.” Hample also has a rigged mitt, and he yells at foreign players in their native languages.
If you’ve read this far and consider Hample a Major League distraction, or just a jackass ballhawk, take note: He’s written three books about baseball, and he’s also started an initiative through which people pledge a dollar amount for every ball he collects. He donates the proceeds to Pitch in for Baseball, a charity that provides baseball equipment to underprivileged kids around the world. “I just love baseball,” Hample says, “and I feel like I would be going to games regardless and just being obsessed with the sport.”
From: neatorama
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Glass-Half-Full Outlook Good for Heart
Studies suggest that optimistic, satisfied, and happy people have a lower risk of heart disease and stroke. Among the most optimistic individuals, risk was found to be 50 percent lower. While healthier people may tend to be happier people, researchers believe that a positive outlook can positively impact heart and cardiovascular health in a number of ways. Firstly, a sense of well-being could help lower blood pressure and cholesterol. In addition, people who are optimistic tend to be more inclined to engage in healthy behaviors like exercising and eating well. More …
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In a big reversal, the Army has issued a stern new set of guidelines to doctors tasked with diagnosing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among returning soldiers. Stop spending so much time trying to spot patients who are faking symptoms, the new guidelines instruct. Chances are, they’re actually ailing.
The 17-page document has yet to be made public but was described in some detail by the Seattle Times. In it, the Army Surgeon General’s Office specifically points out — and discredits — a handful of screening tests for PTSD that are widely used by military clinicians to diagnose a condition estimated to afflict at least 200,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.
The Army Surgeon General finds great fault with a dense personality test popular with clinicians that ostensibly weeds out “malingerers,” as PTSD fakers are known.
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The wretched plight of the troops manning Syrian defense divisions defending the Golan border and Mt. Hermon was clearly visible from lookout points on the Israeli side in the last two days, debkafile’s military sources report. The regular water and food supplies to their bases, the backbone of Syria’s defense lines against Israel, were stopped and redirected to the units fighting anti-Assad rebels in other parts of the country. Large groups of armed soldiers have gone AWOL to hunt for food. For the first time in years, some have approached the border fence. They don’t ask Israeli soldiers for food, but parcels thrown across the fence vanish in a trice.
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U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Elizabeth Boyer, left, shares sleeping space with her military working dog, Ricky, and another service member during an overnight break from Operation Eagle Mountain in Didar, Afghanistan, April 14, 2012. Boyer, a military dog handler, is assigned to Company B, 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Marc Loi
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A New Variant of Malware Takes Aim at Mac Users
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Washington, D.C. — news of the Titanic and possible survivors. “After midnight April 17, 1912, and still selling extras, 12th Street near G. There were many of these groups of young newsboys selling very late these nights. Youngest boy in the group is Israel Spril (9 years old), 314 I Street N.W.; Harry Shapiro (11 years old), 95 L Street N.W.; Eugene Butler, 310 (rear) 13th Street N.W. The rest were a little older.” Photo and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine
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BELLINGHAM, Wash. — I’ve logged thousands of miles to catch a glimpse of one exotic creature or another, to Costa Rica to be dazzled by the bird known as the resplendent quetzal, to Hawaii to admire sea turtles, to Venezuela to spy man-eating anacondas. So it seemed more than a little odd that the one time I made a sighting worthy of a scientific publication, I was looking out of my living room window.
This window does not face onto pristine wilderness. It looks at my neighbor’s bathroom window. My street in this small former mill town is crowded enough that when someone sneezes in a backyard, the person next door is likely to say “gesundheit.”
Yet out of that window — actually on the window — I saw a creature that I would later learn had never before been seen alive anywhere in North America. It was a tiny moth less than half an inch long, with elegant forewings held tentlike over its back, each painted in fluorescent yellow, iridescent blue, and black. All I knew was that my husband, Merrill Peterson, who is an entomologist at Western Washington University, ought to go out and catch it with his net, which he did.
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Gong Yuebin art is on display at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, Calif. Photo by Spencer Michels.
In the ornate ballroom of the venerable Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, Calif., a 210-strong army of clay soldiers stands in formation. Most soldiers are replicas of the famous terra-cotta warriors that were discovered by a farmer in 1947 in a field in Xian, China. Those ancient warriors — 8,000 have been unearthed so far — have drawn crowds in China and on tours around the world. Scholars say they were buried with China’s first emperor to protect him in the afterlife. As beautiful as they are, they were never meant to be seen.
The warriors in Sacramento serve a different purpose. They are a project by artist Gong Yuebin, who moved to the United States from China in 2004. Gong, 52, grew up during China’s Cultural Revolution, when his family was forced to move from the city to the countryside. The government controlled their lives, which were filled with fear and sacrifice. Those memories have been etched indelibly into his psyche and his artwork.
“Site 2801,” a massive sculpture, is a result of those years, Gong said. The title refers to a time nearly 800 years from now, when archaeologists might dig up his terra-cotta soldiers to learn about the past — our present.”Site 2801″ by Gong Yuebin is on display at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, Calif. Photo by Spencer Michels.
In the ornate ballroom of the venerable Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, Calif., a 210-strong army of clay soldiers stands in formation. Most soldiers are replicas of the famous terra-cotta warriors that were discovered by a farmer in 1947 in a field in Xian, China. Those ancient warriors — 8,000 have been unearthed so far — have drawn crowds in China and on tours around the world. Scholars say they were buried with China’s first emperor to protect him in the afterlife. As beautiful as they are, they were never meant to be seen.
The warriors in Sacramento serve a different purpose. They are a project by artist Gong Yuebin, who moved to the United States from China in 2004. Gong, 52, grew up during China’s Cultural Revolution, when his family was forced to move from the city to the countryside. The government controlled their lives, which were filled with fear and sacrifice. Those memories have been etched indelibly into his psyche and his artwork.
“Site 2801,” a massive sculpture, is a result of those years, Gong said. The title refers to a time nearly 800 years from now, when archaeologists might dig up his terra-cotta soldiers to learn about the past — our present.”Site 2801″ by Gong Yuebin is on display at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, Calif. Photo by Spencer Michels.
In the ornate ballroom of the venerable Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, Calif., a 210-strong army of clay soldiers stands in formation. Most soldiers are replicas of the famous terra-cotta warriors that were discovered by a farmer in 1947 in a field in Xian, China. Those ancient warriors — 8,000 have been unearthed so far — have drawn crowds in China and on tours around the world. Scholars say they were buried with China’s first emperor to protect him in the afterlife. As beautiful as they are, they were never meant to be seen.
The warriors in Sacramento serve a different purpose. They are a project by artist Gong Yuebin, who moved to the United States from China in 2004. Gong, 52, grew up during China’s Cultural Revolution, when his family was forced to move from the city to the countryside. The government controlled their lives, which were filled with fear and sacrifice. Those memories have been etched indelibly into his psyche and his artwork.
“Site 2801,” a massive sculpture, is a result of those years, Gong said. The title refers to a time nearly 800 years from now, when archaeologists might dig up his terra-cotta soldiers to learn about the past — our present. by Gong Yuebin is on display at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, Calif. Photo by Spencer Michels.
In the ornate ballroom of the venerable Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, Calif., a 210-strong army of clay soldiers stands in formation. Most soldiers are replicas of the famous terra-cotta warriors that were discovered by a farmer in 1947 in a field in Xian, China. Those ancient warriors — 8,000 have been unearthed so far — have drawn crowds in China and on tours around the world. Scholars say they were buried with China’s first emperor to protect him in the afterlife. As beautiful as they are, they were never meant to be seen.
The warriors in Sacramento serve a different purpose. They are a project by artist Gong Yuebin, who moved to the United States from China in 2004. Gong, 52, grew up during China’s Cultural Revolution, when his family was forced to move from the city to the countryside. The government controlled their lives, which were filled with fear and sacrifice. Those memories have been etched indelibly into his psyche and his artwork.
“Site 2801,” a massive sculpture, is a result of those years, Gong said. The title refers to a time nearly 800 years from now, when archaeologists might dig up his terra-cotta soldiers to learn about the past — our present.”>
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World’s first children’s slide
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There are no walls between Stanford and Silicon Valley. Should there be?
Stanford University is so startlingly paradisial, so fragrant and sunny, it’s as if you could eat from the trees and live happily forever. Students ride their bikes through manicured quads, past blooming flowers and statues by Rodin, to buildings named for benefactors like Gates, Hewlett, and Packard. Everyone seems happy, though there is a well-known phenomenon called the “Stanford duck syndrome”: students seem cheerful, but all the while they are furiously paddling their legs to stay afloat. What they are generally paddling toward are careers of the sort that could get their names on those buildings. The campus has its jocks, stoners, and poets, but what it is famous for are budding entrepreneurs, engineers, and computer aces hoping to make their fortune in one crevasse or another of Silicon Valley.
Innovation comes from myriad sources, including the bastions of East Coast learning, but Stanford has established itself as the intellectual nexus of the information economy. In early April, Facebook acquired the photo-sharing service Instagram, for a billion dollars; naturally, the co-founders of the two-year-old company are Stanford graduates in their late twenties. The initial investor was a Stanford alumnus.
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After President Lincoln settled in to enjoy Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre, his guard left to drink at a nearby saloon, leaving Lincoln vulnerable.
Bettmann / Corbis
When a celebrity-seeking couple crashed a White House state dinner last November, the issue of presidential security dominated the news. The Secret Service responded by putting three of its officers on administrative leave and scrambled to reassure the public that it takes the job of guarding the president very seriously. “We put forth the maximum effort all the time,” said Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan.
That kind of dedication to safeguarding the president didn’t always exist. It wasn’t until 1902 that the Secret Service, created in 1865 to eradicate counterfeit currency, assumed official full-time responsibility for protecting the president. Before that, security for the president could be unbelievably lax. The most astounding example was the scant protection afforded Abraham Lincoln on the night he was assassinated. Only one man, an unreliable Washington cop named John Frederick Parker, was assigned to guard the president at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865.
Today it’s hard to believe that a single policeman was Lincoln’s only protection, but 145 years ago the situation wasn’t that unusual. Lincoln was cavalier about his personal safety, despite the frequent threats he received and a near-miss attempt on his life in August 1864, as he rode a horse unescorted. He’d often take in a play or go to church without guards, and he hated being encumbered by the military escort assigned to him. Sometimes he walked alone at night between the White House and the War Department, a distance of about a quarter of a mile.
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Fossils from two caves in south-west China have revealed a previously unknown Stone Age people and give a rare glimpse of a recent stage of human evolution with startling implications for the early peopling of Asia.
The fossils are of a people with a highly unusual mix of archaic and modern anatomical features and are the youngest of their kind ever found in mainland East Asia.
Dated to just 14,500 to 11,500 years old, these people would have shared the landscape with modern-looking people at a time when China’s earliest farming cultures were beginning, says an international team of scientists led by Associate Professor Darren Curnoe, of the University of New South Wales, and Professor Ji Xueping of the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archeology.
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30 Famous Mythical Humanoid Creatures
Some mythical creatures, have their origin in tradition and some might be living in distant past. However each culture is associated with a multitude of such creatures, many of them being humanoids. Literally, there are thousands of legendary humanoid creatures that might have in real or believed to be lurked upon our planet but we shall tell here the tales of the most popular ones integrated in various cultures.
1. Gog and Magog
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