The last pack of mammoths on Earth met what may perhaps be considered as the most depressing end for a species. Isolated on a spit of island off the coast of Siberia, they were sickly and weak due to centuries of chronic inbreeding. No longer fertile and with some of them suffering from neurological problems, the last of the mammoths were beyond hope, and they eventually went extinct around 4,000 years ago.

Today, the only mammoth you’re likely to see is a hulking reconstruction in a museum — the size and structure of its bones drawing an outline of the beast. But there’s more to mammoths than their skeletons. In a time when the possibility of bringing the pachyderms back to life regularly makes headlines, researchers are studying how the mammoths lived and died through their genes as well as their bones.

Unfortunately, when it comes to bringing these mammoths from extinction, there are a lot of factors to be considered, and, as of now, it may not be possible. The only thing we can do right now is to modify a cell of a close relative of a mammoth, and turn it into something mammoth-like, but…

… it wouldn’t be a true revival but a best-guess version that leaves quite a bit out.

More details about this over at Discover.

(Image Credit: Thomas Quine/ Wikimedia Commons)

This man from Makassar, Indonesia has earned 32 academic and non-academic titles over 21 years. Wenlin Kusuma is actually Welin Kusuma, S.T., S.E., S.Sos., S.H, S.Kom., S.S., S.Ap., S.Stat., S.Akt., S.I.Kom., S.I.P., M.T., M.S.M., M.Kn., RFP-I, CPBD, CPPM, CFP, Aff.WM, BKP, QWP, CPHR, ICPM, AEPP, CBA, CMA, CPMA, CIBA, CBV, CERA, CSA, ACPA. Now that’s a man with a lot of achievements, and a lot of titles appended to his name. Kusuma has no intentions of stopping the addition of both academic and non-academic titles, as learning is a hobby for him. Vice has the details: 

He started his higher education journey in 1999 at the age of 18 and hasn’t stopped since. His first degree was in Industrial Engineering at Surabaya University, located in Indonesia’s second-largest city.

“University is a hobby for me, I truly enjoy learning. I’m certain that by going to university, I will gain knowledge that is useful to me in a practical sense,” Kusuma told CNN Indonesia.

Not all of Kusuma’s certifications were earned through a university; he also received professional certifications in various fields. In total, he has 11 Bachelor’s degrees, three Master’s degrees, and 18 professional certifications.

When asked about how he manages his time, Kusuma said he once took one degree course in the morning, one at night, one on the weekends, and one exclusively online.

image via Vice

After decades of being forgotten in the shadows, this time might just be the era of the beans. Apparently, over the past five years, there has been a 73% increase in bean and lentil consumption in the United States. This would translate to 14.5 pounds of bean consumption per capita. Amazing!

Beans have notoriously played supporting roles on dinner plates, cast as a food to be tolerated or choked down in the name of healthfulness. US children gave legumes such poor reviews that the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in June 2018 created a whole web page devoted to creative ways to try and get kids to eat their beans. “Many kids hate the mushy texture of beans,” the global organization stated. Their bad reputation has been immortalized in children’s literature, too: In 1993, author Rita Schweitz published “I Hate Lima Beans.” That specific bean variety was pummeled again in 2001, when Dan Yaccarino published “The Lima Bean Monster.”

But the era of the spurned bean appears to have ended—at least for now.

More details about this over at Quartz.

(Image Credit: Sanjay Acharya/ Wikimedia Commons)

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” We’ve heard of this saying countless times in our lives. For most of us, however, this does not apply.

It is said that a vast majority of people today feel disengaged at their work. It is also said that at any given moment, one out of three individuals are unqualified for their jobs, while one out of four individuals are overqualified for their current jobs.

Winding up in the wrong profession seems to be a surprisingly common experience.

When it comes to finding jobs most suitable for a person, career and personality tests might be a good lead. However, since most of them rely on time-consuming self-report surveys which could be fake, they are not that much reliable.

It’s also debatable whether the results from these tests are meaningful. The popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, for example, has been critiqued for offering a “ridiculously limited and simplified view of human personality.”

So what can help us in finding the profession that suits us? A new study suggests an alternative to the usual career and personality test we take, and that is our Twitter feeds.

More details about this over at Nautilus.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

When Michael Winter found no one to take care of his goldfish, he knew he had no choice but to bring him to where he would spend his summer: to Newfoundland.

Upon his arrival over at Pearson airport, Michael knew that we would have a long time negotiating with the airport officials to allow his goldfish on board, and so he told people behind him that they “might be better off in another line.”

Security took one look at the goldfish bowl on the conveyor belt and said, “No, no, you can’t bring a fish on board.” I said there was nothing in the regulations about a live fish. The line was halted and a manager fetched, who sized up the situation and also said no. We continued up the chain in this way until the person who, I think, built the airport security system came and agreed with me that, technically, I was allowed to bring the goldfish on board.

Onboard the plane, some crazy things happened while Michael was fast asleep, and the goldfish would end up co-piloting the flight.

Find out more about Michael’s fantastic adventure with his goldfish, and see more of his adventures over at The Walrus.

(Image Credit: Hans/ Pixabay)

Despite spending his 20-year career in designing strategies to make genetic circuits in engineered bacteria work, Jeff Hasty of the University of California, San Diego still had to admit this thing that he was not able to do, and that is outfoxing the humble bacterium Escherichia coli.

Hasty didn’t have a problem engineering useful, tightly regulated new genetic traits or getting them to work in cells. That was the easy part. What’s harder, he discovered, is maintaining those traits. If a cell needs to divert some of its resources to make a desired protein, it becomes marginally less fit than cells that don’t synthesize it. Inevitably, cells acquire mutations deactivating the introduced genetic circuitry, and the mutants quickly replace the original cells. As a result, the desired characteristic disappears, often within 36 hours.

“It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when,” Hasty said.

How do we maintain the genetic circuitry that we made for the engineered bacteria? This is the question that arises from Jeff’s experience, and the answer might be found on a childhood that I believe all of us have played, and that game is rock-paper-scissors.

More details about this over at Quanta Magazine.

(Image Credit: Tumisu/ Pixabay)

Dogs can be seen as the happiest animals on the planet. A simple gesture could easily make them wag their tails and jump for joy. But dogs are not happy all the time. Like us humans, they can have other emotions, too — they can be sad, angry, and anxious. Yes, dogs can also feel anxious.

… results of a recent survey suggest that anxious behaviors may be more widespread amongst the world’s most popular pets than previously thought.

The findings, published last week in Scientific Reports, evaluated nearly 14,000 dogs—the largest-ever study on canine temperaments—and showed that nearly three-quarters of the pets showed at least one anxiety-related behavior, with some variation across breeds. A better understanding of these differences could help pet owners and vets better care for their pups, and perhaps even reduce the number of animals that end up in shelters or optioned for euthanasia, reports Michael Price at Science magazine.

More details about this over at Smithsonian.com.

(Image Credit: Fran_/ Pixabay)

The city of Wuhan has been in lockdown now for weeks. But on the empty streets of the city, what you’ll hear are motorcycles and scooters of delivery workers zipping through the silence.

To avoid transmission of the virus, people have been told to stay at home and limit time outdoors. As a result, when they need food or other necessities, many of them turn to delivery workers, who put themselves at risk of exposure to the virus by interacting with dozens of customers, some of whom are sick, and handling multiple packages a day.

The brave couriers deliver fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as instant noodles and some treats such as waffles, to the people of the city. What’s more, hospitals also depend on these couriers to bring medical supplies.

Delivery companies are struggling to keep up. In a press conference in February, the department of commerce director of Hubei province, Qin Jun, said that in a single day, e-commerce companies received 22,000 orders in the province and delivered 1,337 tons of necessities. JD Logistics, one of the country's largest courier companies, says they are looking to hire 20,000 warehouse workers, couriers and drivers to help with deliveries during the outbreak. JD hires men and women, and a recent ad said it pays between $721 to $1,400 a month.

More details about this over at NPR.

(Image Credit: Stringer/for NPR)

There is a boom in young Muslim designers who are revolutionizing the fashion industry by creating stylish and modest Muslim fashion. It seems that there's been a need for this movement, and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum aims to cover this through their “Contemporary Muslim Fashions” exhibit.

“When we initiated the exhibition in 2016, we were coming right off the burkini ban,” explains Jill D’Alessandro, curator in charge of costume and textile arts at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, where a version of the exhibit first debuted. “There seemed to be a lot of misunderstanding or just lack of information about this fashion sector. And it’s a vital sector. It’s a growing sector.”

You may visit “Contemporary Muslim Fashions” until August 23 at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Read more at The Cut.

Photo: Sebastian Kim/Courtesy of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum/Sebastian Kim

Photo: Courtesy of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum/© Bouguessa

YOU GUYS. I just saw the most wild thing! A man started walking toward the Girl Scouts cookie stand in front of the grocery store and he yelled “my bitches are BACK” and this Girl Scout just yelled “no. Walk away.” AND HE DID.

— Eli McCann (@EliMcCann) March 7, 2020

Eli McCann's Tweet has gone viral, approaching half a million hearts and 50K reTweets. It had sparked a lot of conversations on various forums, in which some wondered what the fuss was about, since it was a short and simple interaction between a young girl and a rude guy. While experiences vary, the scene was remarkable for different reasons, such as:

1. A girl who is about 12 or so knew exactly what to say to assert her right not to be called names, and did it without hesitation, unlike generations of women who were raised to take whatever a man says as a compliment.

2. The guy actually walked away instead of reacting angrily. The expected deferential behavior from a woman (or girl) is often due to fear of an angry or even violent reaction.  

3. Many people pointed out that if she were a store employee instead of a Girl Scout, she would have been fired for not putting up with a customer's rudeness.

McCann wrote a blog post about the experience that goes into more detail, including the girl's priceless comment afterward. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: carol)

Are you familiar with Vin Diesel's xXx movies? There are three of them, plus a short film, and another feature film in development now. It really doesn't matter if you know them or not, because the Honest Trailer is probably as entertaining as all three movies together.

You may now download any of the massive 2.8 million high-resolution images from across Smithsonian Institution's collections --- free of charge!

For the first time in its 174-year history, Smithsonian Institution released their resources on an open access online platform, and their purpose? For you to peruse, download, use, and transform them in any way you want!

"And this gargantuan data dump is just the beginning. Throughout the rest of 2020, the Smithsonian will be rolling out another 200,000 or so images, with more to come as the Institution continues to digitize its collection of 155 million items and counting."

"“Being a relevant source for people who are learning around the world is key to our mission,” says Effie Kapsalis, who is heading up the effort as the Smithsonian’s senior digital program officer. “We can’t imagine what people are going to do with the collections. We’re prepared to be surprised.”"

What do you plan to do with these images?

Image Credit: Jon Scieszka and Steven Weinberg

The database’s launch also marks the latest victory for a growing global effort to migrate museum collections into the public domain. Nearly 200 other institutions worldwide—including Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago—have made similar moves to digitize and liberate their masterworks in recent years. But the scale of the Smithsonian’s release is “unprecedented” in both depth and breadth, says Simon Tanner, an expert in digital cultural heritage at King’s College London.

Which museum collection do you wish would follow these museums' steps?

Video Credit: Youtube / Smithsonian

We've often posted about medieval art and imagery, particularly illuminations and marginalia that scribes used to decorate manuscripts. We laugh at the ridiculous use of snails and rabbits, but there are oh, so many cats. And they all look goofy, as if they were cartoon drawings plopped down in the middle of careful portraits of people and dogs (and rabbits).

“In the Medieval period, animals were understood to be the mirror of human society,” historian Damien Kempf, who is writing a book on Medieval depictions of animals, told me. “Even though animals were believed to be irrational beings, they were given human traits and characteristics.” Dogs, for example, were lauded for being loyal companions, created to guard the house and assist in the hunt.

Cats? Not so much.

“Sources emphasize the rather unruly nature of cats,” Kempf said. “Unlike dogs, cats cannot be trained to be loyal and obedient. As one author complains, they will go to whoever gives them food.” So that’s one reason cats probably got such an unflattering edit.

But it's not the only reason. Altogether, medieval artists may have something in common with modern meme makers- as funny as cats are, we love to make them funnier. Read more on this subject at Medium, and you'll see some funny cats. -via Digg

Scientists do the most amazing things today. A study on a single specimen of fossil mollusk has determined the length of an each day 70 million years ago. The shell is of the species Torreites sanchezi, described as a rudist clam, which makes one wonder what it did that was so rude.

Like counting the rings of a stump to discern the age of a tree, scientists from the Environmental and Geochemistry Research Group at Brussels University have counted the microscopically thin layers of an extinct mollusk to calculate the length of a Late Cretaceous day. The new paper, published in Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, shows that, some 70 million years ago, days were around 23.5 hours long and that the Earth rotated 372 times each year, as opposed to the current 365 days per year.

The overall length of the year hasn’t changed since the Late Cretaceous—a total year consisted of 8,760 hours during the Late Cretaceous, just as a year does today. It’s just that our planet’s spin is getting progressively slower, thanks to the gravitational effects of our Moon. Accordingly, the new research, led by Niels J. de Winter, could improve our understanding of the Earth-Moon relationship over time and even the timing of the origin of the Moon.

Scientists had already figured the length of days back then, but this is another source that confirms their calculations. What's really amazing how they did it. The fossil shell is not particularly big, and the daily "growth rings" are actually layers no more than 40 nanometers thick. They counted these, and compared the number to seasonal changes in the shell to figure out how many days were in a year. In a fossil. Read more on this study that shows what you can learn by taking a very close look at tiny things at Gizmodo. 

(Image credit: AGU)

There are multiple ways to  fully enjoy a meal. While it can vary from one person to another, it seems that some people on the Internet agree that the best way you can eat fries, particularly Wendys' french fries, is by dipping it into their Frosty. Wendy’s Frosty is basically soft, melted ice cream. Some like their fries dipped in chocolate, while some like their dipped in vanilla Frosty. What do you prefer? Dipped or not dipped fries? 

(via Diply)

image via Diply