A new historical marker went up last month in eastern North Carolina, commemorating the first documented practicing Jewish person to set foot in North America. Joachim Gans arrived in the New World as part of the first Roanoke Colony, an experiment conceived and supported (although not well) by Sir Walter Raleigh.   

How did a German-speaking Jew end up in the first English colony in the Americas? Gans grew up in 16th-century Prague, then the center of innovation in mining and metallurgy. England was still a relatively poor and backward European country, desperate for help in extracting copper and tin. Growing tensions with the Spanish Empire would soon would lead to war, and the English needed cannon to arm their merchant ships and navy. Jews had been banned since 1290, but a courtier of Elizabeth I secured Gans a kind of Tudor H-1B visa. Soon after, Sir Walter Raleigh sought a credible scientist to join England’s first venture to colonize the Americas on what is now the North Carolina coast. In Gans, Raleigh saw the perfect candidate for the specialized job of sourcing and analyzing metals.

Gans arrived on Roanoke Island in 1585, along with a motley crew of more than 100 men that included French, Portuguese, Belgian, Irish and Scottish men as well as English soldiers and merchants. The Prague Jew, who made no secret of his religious background, quickly constructed a state-of-the-art chemistry lab outfitted with Bavarian crucibles and a high-temperature furnace. He tested metals brought to him by local Algonquian-speaking tribes and tramped through the swamps in search of mineral deposits. Though he failed to find gold, , as Raleigh had hoped, there is evidence he isolated iron, silver, and copper in his experiments. That was promising news for an England eager to access metal deposits.

Gans returned to England with the other colonists in 1586, and was not part of the famous Lost Colony of Roanoke that arrived in 1587. However, there is a sad coda to his story that you'll learn in an article about Joachim Gans (and historical markers) at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: courtesy of Brindley Beach vacations)

Back in 2017, an unusually large fatberg was discovered in the sewers beneath London, specifically in the Whitechapel area. The battle to break up and remove the fatberg was such a distinctive chapter in London sewer history that Thames Water has memorialized it with a manhole cover! While it looks like any other sewer entrance from a distance, the metal is embossed with "The Whitechapel Fatberg was defeated here in 2017." See more of the unique manhole cover at Londonist.  -via Nag on the Lake

It is ambitious to dream of visiting every country on Earth. It is more ambitious to dream of fulfilling that dream before you turn 40, but this man just fulfilled that thanks to his considerable stockpile of credit cards. This man is Stefan Krasowski.

Krasowski is part of a growing subculture of people for whom earning points has become a kind of sport.

And that's why Krasowski founded a group called Reach For The Miles in New York, a meetup of travel hackers and deal optimizers who trade tips for gaming the points system.

"I've taken out over 46 credit cards in five years and earned 2.6 million miles just in sign-up bonuses" said Janice Lintz, a travel blogger. She's a regular at Reach For The Miles and, like Krasowski, she's determined to visit every country in the world. She's at 135.

Earlier this month, she had just gotten back from Easter Island. The trip was great, but what Lintz really wanted to talk about was all the points she earned by flying there.

"So I'm not sure where I came out, but I think I may have been paid to go to Easter Island," Lintz said.

Krasowski and Lintz are only two people out of many who dabble on this highly risky “credit card game.”

As for me, I’d rather play it safe. What about you? What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Stefan Krasowski/Rapid Travel Chai)

Indonesia — Skies over the Jambi Province turned red over the weekend due to the widespread forest fires that rage over huge parts of the country. A resident of the province, who took photos of the sky, stated that the haze “hurt her eyes and throat.”

Every year, fires in Indonesia create a smoky haze that can end up blanketing the entire South East Asian region.

A meteorology expert told the BBC the unusual sky was caused by a phenomenon known as Rayleigh scattering.

Eka Wulandari, from the Mekar Sari village in Jambi province, captured the blood-red skies in a series of photos taken at around midday on Saturday.

The haze conditions had been especially "thick that [day]", she said.

(Image Credit: Eka Wulandari)

Marathons are a difficult feat to finish under normal circumstances, imagine joining and completing a marathon with a tree strapped on your back! A group of runners who ran the Cape Town marathon in South Africa managed to complete the event with saplings strapped to their backs. 

The reason for such a gimmick was to promote the planting of native trees. According to one of the members of the group, Siyabulela Sokomani (who had a wild olive on his back during the run), the group is raising cash to plant 2,000 trees in Khayelitsha. 

(via Reuters)

image credit: Mike Hutchings via Reuters

It's been almost six years after the blockbuster success of Disney's Frozen and now, we are going to be treated to a sequel where the Frozen world will get that much bigger. But as we wait for its worldwide release, Disney is giving us a few snippets here and there about what we should expect. And on Monday, they will drop a new trailer on Good Morning America.

(Image credit: Disney; IMDb)

After the success of the television series, Downton Abbey had an encore with its movie, which was initially released a couple of days ago. But due to the success of its cast, the series creator Julian Fellowes said that the production of the movie was a logistical nightmare.

Speaking on CBS Sunday Morning, Fellowes said: "To the wider public, none of the young ones were really known, and now they're all famous around the world.

"They were doing shows on Broadway and movies and series in Hollywood and plays in London and God knows what.

"They all had to be extracted for a kind of 12-week period, and I think that was a logistical nightmare, but we happily got there in the end."

(Image credit: Jaap Buitendijk/Focus Features; IMDb)

The artificial intelligence has been infiltrating every industry over the years, with its impact ranging from transportation, medicine, and language, and there’s a lot of hype surrounding it. DataRobot CEO Jeremy Achin puts it this way: “Everyone knows you have to have machine learning in your story or you’re not sexy.”

But which companies are using AI in a meaningful way, and demonstrate big business potential? With the help of Meritech Capital, Forbes assembled a list of private, U.S-based companies which fit the criteria.

Check out the list over at Forbes.

(Image Credit: GDJ/ Pixabay)

Spinning toys are almost universal, although they take slightly different forms in different cultures. The 1969 short film Tops takes us on a mesmerizing tour of spinning tops from all over. It was produced by designers Charles and Ray Eames, who are more famous for their office chair. The soundtrack is by composer Elmer Bernstein.  -via Kottke

Archaeological findings are interesting because they tell and show the richness of human civilization. There are so many ancient ruins that are not that famous, but surely worth it seeing! Here are the 14 lesser-known but notable archaeological sites.

1.    Gobekli Tepe  – carved stone structures dated to 10,000 B.C., found in Sanliurfa, Turkey

2.    Moray Ruins – sunken terrace extending down over 30 meters found in Moray, Peru. It’s much less crowded than Machu Picchu!

3.    Valley of the Temples – feels like being in Greece but you’re in Agrigento, Italy!

4.    La Ciudad Perdida – almost 1,000 years older than Machu Picchu, built by indigenous people who lived in the Sierra Nevada de Sta. Marta but abandoned after the Spanish conquest. Rediscovered at Magdalena, Colombia.

5.    Acrocorinth – also known as the Upper Corinth, it’s a nearly deserted and basically open Acropolis found in Corinth, Greece.

6.    Ostia Antica – an ancient port of Rome, Italy with an outstanding forum and arena and mosaics

7.    Diocletian’s Palace – Roman Emperor Diocletian’s Palace built in Split, Croatia

8.    Uxmal Pyramid – one of the incredible ruins in Yucatan, Mexico

9.    Volubilis Archaeological Site – ruins of the Roman City destroyed by an earthquake in the 18^th century Meknes, Morocco

10. Hagar Qim – more ancient than the Stonehenge and Pyramids of Giza, found in Malta

11. Copan Ruins – filled with detailed, baroque and meaningful carvings, with a stairway covered in Mayan hieroglyphs found in Copan Department, Honduras

12. Ruins of Jerash – most intact Roman city outside of Italy located in Jerash, Jordan. It’s partly Greek, Byzantine and Nabatean and a crossroads of many cultures.

13. Norba Ruins – ruins of the Latium town of Norba destroyed by Lucius Cornelius Sulla in 82 B.C.

14. Gran Quivira – ruins in New Mexico

Discover more about these archaeological here.

Image Credit: Moray Ruins by Mckay Savage / CC BY 2.0

The rise of technological advancement is rampant in our generation. One of the prevalent technologies is the use of Closed-circuit television or CCTV cameras. They serve many purposes including crime prevention, traffic monitoring, or observing industrial operations in environments not suitable for us.

Depending on whom you ask, the increased prevalence and capabilities of CCTV surveillance could make society safer and more efficient, could trample on our rights to privacy and freedom of movement, or both. No matter which side you argue, the fact is that live video surveillance is ramping up worldwide.

Comparitech researchers conducted a study on the use of CCTVs and came up with the list of top 50 most-surveilled cities around the world. Eight out of the top 10 cities were found in China! Chonqing, China (number 1 most surveilled city) has 168.03 cameras per 1,000 people.

What’s the use of installing so many CCTVs? Probably for public safety. However, the study showed that there is little correlation between the number of public CCTV cameras and crime rate or safety.

Image Credit: Amazon (UK) Website

Learning how to read activates the parts of the brain which process non-written visual objects such as houses, faces, and tools, according to a new research. Rather than negatively affecting brain responses to these types of objects, the study, published in the journal Science Advances, states that reading may cause increased brain responses to them.

Learning to read causes the development of a letter- and word-selective brain region known as the visual word form area (VWFA). However, some researchers have claimed that the development of this area takes up space that is otherwise available for processing objects.

To decipher what really happens, researchers led by Alexis Hervais-Adelman from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands recruited 29 completely illiterate adults from two rural villages near Lucknow in northern India for a six-month literacy training program.

The participants learned to read and write the alphabet, two-letter and three-letter words and sentences, including basic grammar rules such as verbs, nouns, pronouns, tense and gender in Devanagari script, the writing system for Hindi, the local language.

[...]

They found no evidence that brain areas for responding to non-word objects shrank in the brains of participants in the literacy program. Instead, reading reuses the same brain areas that are usually used for processing objects, keeping such areas intact.

More details of the study over at Cosmos.

(Image Credit: Faulk Huettig)

Thousands of people worked in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and someone had to feed them. That task fell to restauranteur Joe Baum, who opened the iconic Four Seasons restaurant in 1959. In the early 1970s, he had a grand vision for a series of eateries in the World Trade Center, capped by a spectacular complex of fine dining on the 107th floor. Baum had high hopes for the restaurant that would became known as Windows on the World.

In 1970, he told the New York Times he was planning 20 restaurants in the WTC, mostly housed in the concourse, which was beneath its open plaza, as well as private cafeterias for the Port Authority, the United States Customs House, and New York State employees. He also said that the restaurants included a “luncheon club” on top of the North Tower, with exclusive access for its one thousand members during the day. At night, the restaurant would be open to the public, which could use the World Trade Center’s 2,000-car underground garage for free.

“This will not be a tourist trap,” Baum said, perhaps a defensive impulse that the Times reporter ran with when he highlighted the irony that the creator of the Four Seasons was now setting up snack bars — which he very much was: about 60 of them and other small-food operations throughout the complex.

But Baum positioned his task as just as impressive as any of his previous grandiose projects. He emphasized the international flavor of the restaurant, which people would want to go to, he suggested, before heading uptown to the theater. As for feeding the masses, he was thinking big, conjuring carefully planned eating aeries that would form “vertical neighborhoods... little cities, each with a life of its own.”

From 1976 to 2001, Windows on the World was the ultimate place to see New York City from above. The new book The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World tells the story of the restaurant, particularly its last day on September 11, 2001. Read an excerpt that goes back to the restaurant's beginnings at Eater. -via Nag on the Lake

The medical drama ER premiered 25 years ago this past week. It ran for 15 seasons, but in the beginning, it was difficult to get a TV network interested in the concept. It was based on writings by bestselling author Michael Crichton, backed by Steven Spielberg, and it was a medical drama. Why wouldn't every network want to jump on it? According to producer John Wells, it was because it was too real- the patients often died, as they do in real hospitals.

Long before “prestige drama” was a thing, ER had all the qualities of one. It was created by one of the world’s most popular authors, shepherded by Hollywood’s most powerful director, and bolstered by a diverse cast filled with stars, up-and-comers, and a future Academy Award–winning leading man. The series featured complex characters and through its story lines boldly tackled dozens of issues of the day, including racism, AIDS, substance use disorders, and domestic violence. Its influence can still be seen in the hundreds of uncompromising hour-long shows that have followed.

“The audience is intelligent,” Wells says. “And particularly video literate, in that they’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of hours of storytelling and they can follow. You do not have to talk down to your audience. And in fact, if you don’t talk down to your audience, they appreciate it and reward you.”

There were other factors that made ER a unique show in the landscape of 1990s television. Read a history of the show at The Ringer.

Mandy Pursley is a professional cosplayer and amputee who went viral for her new Cinderella costume. She made it herself, plus the Prince's costume (worn by her husband Ryan), and commissioned a glass arm to complete the fairy tale look. She tells the story behind the costume at Facebook. 

After a medical fiasco kept me from competing at a costume competition this summer, I was going to keep these photos under wraps for another year to try again. But a friend asked me today if I had any pictures I could share with a little girl who was born with one arm, and I realized that we never know what the future may hold...but we can still bring joy to people today!

This whole project was done with a lot of love. When my daughter was studying Cinderella stories at school last year, I realized that even though there were so many beautiful tales from around the world, there were still no princesses who looked like ME! When I was growing up with a physical difference, I never saw girls like myself represented in the media, so it took me a long time to realize that what makes us different can also be the thing that makes us strong, beautiful, and unapologetically unique.

So what do you do when you can't find a princess like you? You make up your own! I spent countless hours sewing Cinderella's ballgown and her Prince's uniform. And my fairy godfather Gilbert Lozano brought everything together with the most amazing glass arm (glass slippers are SO last year!

This costume is dedicated to all the little girls learning to navigate the world with their "lucky fins" or other challenges. I hope you know you are beautiful, and that you are UNSTOPPABLE!!! Write your own story, and be your own kind of princess.

Pursley has been inundated by messages from young princesses and their families who consider her a role model and inspiration. See the gallery of Cinderella and Prince Charming at Facebook. And don't worry about the glass arm. In the original story, the slippers didn't change at midnight like the coach and everything else, and Pursley treats the glass arm like the work of art that it is. -via The Daily Dot