The General Blogger

Grandfather’s ghost story leads to mysterious mass grave .

CultureLab: Home.

PressTV – Israeli spy balloon flies over Lebanon.

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With population and per-capita consumption both on the rise, it’s hard to believe humans’ impact on Earth is sustainable. Is the problem too many people or too much consumption?

Two German Shepherds kept as pets in Europe or the U.S. use more resources in a year than the average person living in Bangladesh. The world’s richest 500 million people produce half of global carbon dioxide emissions, while the poorest 3 billion emit just 7 percent. Industrial tree cutting is now responsible for the majority of the 13 million hectares of forest lost to fire or the blade each year—surpassing the smaller-scale footprints of subsistence farmers who leave behind long, narrow swaths of cleared land, so-called fish bones….

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Burger King’s Double Whopper with cheese contains 923 calories. A man would need to walk for about nine miles to burn it off. Adding french fries and a large cola brings the total calories to an amazing 1,500 calories (2/3 of an adult man’ s recommended daily caloric intake). – Provided by RandomHistory.com

The Life Of A MI5 Agent.

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The Mystery of Our Sexual Evolution:

Question: You teach a class on sex evolution and human nature. Do you consider science sexy?

Laurie Santos: Oh yeah. I think science is very sexy. I mean, there are a lot of big scientific puzzles when it comes to sexual reproduction. You know, why do we choose to have sex? It would be much easier just to kind of bud a little clone, boop! It saves lots of time and energy, waste, and disease and all of these things. But you now, many, many animals in the animal kingdom actually put in the time and energy and risk the disease and you know, all the pains and heartache to actually sexually reproduce. So, it’s a big puzzle in the evolutional biology. And then when you start looking at the different ways animals go about sexual reproduction, all the different way they go about finding mates and you know, strategizing to get mates and convincing individuals to mate with them, and so on, you know, it’s kind of just fascinating to see all the strategies that are out there. And in many ways, humans are real outliers in this. So, it’s fun to look at the techniques that we see across the animal kingdom.

Question: In what ways are humans outliers when it comes to sex?

Laurie Santos: Well, humans are a very funny species when it comes to sexual reproduction. We’re very weird relative to our closest living primate relatives, the other apes. So, we, for the most part, seem to be a pair-bonded species. In other words, a male and a female get together and form this pair bond and kind of cooperatively rear their young. There’s nothing really like that in the rest of the great ape species. In chimpanzees, our closest living relative, you see lots of multi-male, multi-female reproductive behavior. Meaning, you know females are mating with multiple males; males are mating with multiple females. But also in chimpanzees, you also see that males and females just aren’t interested in sex during the period where females aren’t very reproductive.

So, female chimpanzees advertise their receptivity, that period when they’re fertile by having this huge sexual swelling that kind of blows up and males are only interested during this period. Somehow humans, unlike our closest living relatives, have kind of gotten rid of this. You know, human females of course, don’t go around advertising with you know, really robust, blown-up, red, sexual skins when they’re receptive, which is a bit of a puzzle. You know, why did we lose this trait just in the last 7 million years? You know, these are the kinds of things that hang on for long periods of time in primate evolution, so the fact that we got rid of this very quickly is a bit of a puzzle. So weird kind of weird relative to other primates regarding our sexual behavior….MORE>>>

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Top Secret America – Army intelligence buys intelligence like Netflix?.

Science Daily “Breaking science news and articles on global warming, extrasolar planets, stem cells, bird flu, autism, nanotechnology, dinosaurs, evolution — the latest discoveries in astronomy, anthropology, biology, chemistry, climate & environment, computers, engineering, health & medicine, math, physics, psychology, technology, and more — from the world’s leading universities and research organizations.”

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Notes on the back of a 400-year-old letter have revealed a previously unknown language once spoken by indigenous peoples of northern Peru, an archaeologist says.

Penned by an unknown Spanish author and lost for four centuries, the battered piece of paper was pulled from the ruins of an ancient Spanish colonial church in 2008.

But a team of scientists and linguists has only recently revealed the importance of the words written on the flip side of the letter.

The early 17th-century author had translated Spanish numbers—uno, dos, tres—and Arabic numerals into a mysterious language never seen by modern scholars.

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UN/World Bank Afghanistan Drug Industry Report .

The Kingdom of Bhutan is sometimes overlooked, locked between Tibet and India, but the Land of the Dragon as the Bhutanese call it is home to some of the most exquisite Buddhist monasteries in the word. Here, we take a fleeting visit to some of the over forty monasteries in Bhutan – quite a number considering the population of the entire country is only around 700,000.

CLICK HERE

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Just because something is delicious doesn’t always means it can translate well into ice cream form. Unusual flavors like pistachio and muscadine might actually work out, but peanut butter and jelly? A Black and Tan? Back to the drawing board with these 8 flavors that were doomed from the start!

Oxford English Dictionary ‘will not be printed again’ – Telegraph Another loss of a great print dictionary because of the internet. Sad really.

Groot Constantia, in the heart of Cape Town’s wine country, can deal with inebriated holidaymakers – but it is invading baboons which have developed a taste for its grapes that the wine makers are struggling with.

Each day, dozens of Cape Baboons gather to strip the ancient vines – the sauvignon blanc grapes are a particular favourite – before heading into the mountains to sleep. A few, who sample fallen fruit that has fermented in the sun, pass out and don’t make it home. see here.

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Audio Exclusive: Eight Never-Before-Heard Clips From America’s Jazz Greats – Newsweek.

Hackers accidentally give Microsoft their code – Hackers working on malicious code crash their systems. When that happens, Windows asks the user to send a report to Microsoft. Many malware writers say yes, thus sending their code to Microsoft. This is a very interesting read for sure.

PC industry’s woes could mean bargains this fall – Intel forecasts weaker demand. Look for prices to come down to stimulate PC buying.

Paul Allen Sues Apple, Others Over Patents and Google, Facebook To Microsoft’s Paul Allen: Your Argument Is Invalid – Paul Allen turns patent troll, files suit over patents related to information retrieval.

USA Today to Remake Itself to Stress Digital Operations – The emphasis will shift from print to digital products, which makes sense for this brand.

Hardware Acceleration is Coming to Chrome – Try it Now – You’ll need to download and install the very early “Canary” builds of Google’s browser.

Guess Who Is Trying To Trademark The Word “Face”? (And Guess Who Is Trying To Stop It?) – Facebook is making legal threats against companies that used “book” as the last part of their names. Now it’s also trying to do the same with “Face” in company names.