What does friendship mean? Perhaps if I asked all people in the world about the meaning of friendship, I will get billions of different answers. All of us have different pictures of what friendship is like, and these photographers are no exception.
These are some of the photos entered into Agora’s competition called “The World’s Best Photos of #Friends2020”, where over 16,000 photographers entered the competition. Check them out over at Good News Network.
Added to the World Health Organization’s priority list of neglected tropical diseases in 2017, snakebite victimizes around five million people yearly, causing up to 138,000 deaths and 400,000 permanent disabilities, such as limb amputation. The world, unfortunately, has a shortage of venom antidote, which is partly due to commercial pressures on biopharmaceutical companies, as well as the labor-intensive nature of antivenom production.
Thankfully, this might just be our lucky break.
European researchers have used stem cells from snakes to grow mini-glands that make venom, a finding that could address the global shortage of life-saving antivenom for snakebite.
The team, led by Hans Clevers at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht, the Netherlands, dissected out the venom glands of nine snake species, including the Cape Coral snake and the Cape Cobra, both endemic to southern Africa.
Before the 19th century, most workers put in a six-day week. It was only the influence of the church that mandated the Sabbath as a non-working day. In Britain, there were some people who knew that six days a week was more than enough work.
For much of the 19th century, for example, skilled artisan workers adopted their own work rhythms as they often hired workshop space and were responsible for producing items for their buyer on a weekly basis. This gave rise to the practice of “Saint Monday”. While Saint Monday mimicked the religious Saint Day holidays, it was in fact an entirely secular practice, instigated by workers to provide an extended break in the working week.
They worked intensively from Tuesday to finish products by Saturday night so they could then enjoy Sunday as a legitimate holiday but also took Mondays off to recover from Saturday night and the previous day’s excesses. By the mid-19th century, Saint Monday was a popular institution in British society. So much so that commercial leisure – like music halls, theatres and singing saloons – staged events on this unofficial holiday.
But taking Monday off wasn't universal, nor was it mandated. Campaigns arose to make Saturday a half-day, and then a full day off, which was championed by the leisure industry as well as trade unions. Read the story of how the two-day weekend came into being at the Conversation. -via Damn Interesting
If you know England only through crime novels, you're probably terrified to set foot in the country, despite it having a murder rate way below that of the US. The most dangerous place, according to those novels, is the quaint English village. The blog Crime Reads is all about the literature of crime, whether it's true crime, novels, mysteries, or related genres. They have some advice for fans of these books, if they were to travel to such a village. First of all, you must avoid these things:
The village fête
The village fête is a fair, a celebration on the village green. They toss coconuts, judge cakes, drink tea, and whack toy rats with mallets. It’s a nice way to spend a summer’s day and thin out the local population, because where there is a fête, there is murder. If you enter a town while the fête is happening, you are already dead. The tea urn is filled with poison. The sponge cakes are full of glass. There’s an axe in the fortune telling tent. The coconuts are bombs. It’s like the Hunger Games, but dangerous.
Anywhere with a vat
In English villages, vats only exist for drowning people—in beer, in pickling brine, in whiskey, in jam. This is doubly true if the vat was built by 14th century monks. If anyone offers to show you a vat, say you need to get something from your car, then start the engine and run them over. The police understand this sort of thing. Tell them about the vat.
There are a lot more dos and don'ts to memorize if you want to survive your sojourn in a quaint English village, which you can read here. -via Metafilter
Do you have an IQ in the top 2% of the human population? If you do, you should apply to join Mensa, the international organization of geniuses.
Its youngest member is 3-year old Muhammad Haryz Nadzim, a Malaysian toddler who lives in the United Kingdom. He recently joined after scoring 142 on an IQ test. That's in the 99.7th percentile for the test. The New York Post quotes his mother, Nur Anira Asyikin:
Asyikin, an engineer living in the northeast city of Durham, said the family knew Nadzim was special even before Mensa took notice — and she calls him her “little brainbox.”
“We are so proud and happy for Haryz,” Asyikin said. “He’s not only good at academics, but he’s just like other children who love playing and growing up. We know he will give so much back to society in the future.” [...]
“He’s very much your typical 3-year-old,” Asyikin said. “He really loves painting and reading books, really anything arts and crafts. He loves playing with Legos and Play-Doh especially.”
Shelter Director Amber Lowery says 4-year-old Perdita came to the shelter on Christmas Eve like the Grinch and quickly asserted dominance.
“We are animal lovers here and very patient, but we’ve been concerned about her for awhile,” Lowery told McClatchy News.
“I’m looking at her right now, and she’s rolling around in her little bed, looking all sweet and cute, but the minute you try to rub her, she slaps you. We thought she was in pain and took her to the vet and he said: ‘No, this cat is just a jerk’.”
Since then, the shelter has had to warn visitors that Perdita’s shy, kitten-like attempts to draw passersby to her cage are, in fact, a ruse that will end badly.
The Facebook ad offering Perdita for adoption went viral. The shelter is waiving all fees for someone willing to take her. Arm & Hammer has offered free cat litter for a year. Some people recognize Perdita as a kindred spirit- so far, they have received 115 applications. -via Mental Floss
Marie Downing Williams led a unique life. A working class woman in England, she managed to become a dresser and confidant of both Queen Victoria and exiled Empress Eugenie of France. She fell in love with Harry Williams, a butler to the aristocracy, and they secretly wed -because the Queen's ladies-in-waiting were forbidden to marry. Harry wanted to be his own boss, so he emigrated to Manitoba and then to North Dakota to farm the prairie. A couple of years later, Marie left England to join him.
She later said she arrived 28 December 1886 but this cannot be right – the only sailing for the Gallia that fits is one for 1887 that arrived in New York on 27 December. And now comes the most bizarre part of Marie’s story: on landing in New York and reclaiming her luggage, Marie was told, much to her surprise, by the customs inspectors at the port that ‘I had several more trunks than I claimed. Upon investigation I discovered the trunks were all labeled with my name and I knew that Her Majesty had sent them.’ The queen, it would appear, ‘had made sure that her favored maid-in-waiting should have many reminders of the regal days she had left behind her.’ Hm …
Marie’s recall might be faulty on some things but she never forgot the long and arduous train journey from New York to the bleak, snow-covered plains of the Dakota Territory in the dead of winter; it had been ‘much more terrifying than her trip with the Empress Eugenie to South Africa’. Harry was there to meet her on 1 January (Marie said 1887 but it must have been 1888) when she arrived at Minnewaukan, the terminus of the recently completed Northern Branch of the North Pacific Railroad.
Life on the prairie was hard, but Marie grew to love it. Besides, she had trunks full of dresses and gifts from the Queen that made her the envy of Rolla, South Dakota. Those gifts also came in handy as they were sold off when times were hard. Marie told her story to the local newspaper in 1930. Helen Rappaport researched the details of Marie's life and found discrepancies in the accounts that were, after all, related 40 years after the fact by an elderly woman. What she found hints at a somewhat more nefarious story that you can read about at Rappaport's blog. -via Strange Company
This isn't a sea monster walking the bottom of the ocean- it's a school of juvenile striped eel catfish working in unison to look menacing enough to ward off predators. This was filmed off the coast of Bali. The Kid Should See This has more:
Try rewatching the video, picking one fish and following it the entire time. Then pick another fish and watch the video again. The juvenile striped eel catfish seem to cycle through positions within the school as the entire swarm moves forward.
I was captivated by the ones at the bottom, that seem like pixels in an animation of a creature walking on thick legs. -via Kottke
Dolly Parton posted a collage of four images on Instagram and started a meme. The original caption is "Get you a woman who can do it all." However, people were impressed at how well she pegged the different moods of the various photo-based social media platforms. It wasn't long before others joined in.
The funniest are of actors and other celebrities who have a bank of roles or phases to draw on. I really like this one. The pictures don't even have to be human to be funny.
Sesame Street may have only been on the air for six years in 1975, but the show had already changed children’s television and was considered a cultural institution. The kids’ show aimed to portray an accurate and nonjudgmental depictions of the lives of inner-city kids.
… it was set in a brownstone tenement, and the cast included strong African American characters Gordon and Susan (who were the cornerstone of the street) and Hispanic characters Maria and Luis (added in 1972). White characters were deliberately in the minority. They also cast everyday kids, not child actors, to play the children of Sesame Street.
In his 2008 book titled “Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street”, author Michael Davis stated that at the end of its first year, Sesame Street was in the homes of 1.9 million Americans. A decade later, over 9 million American kids under the age of six watched the show daily.
One day, the producers of Sesame Street decided to call singer Buffy Sainte-Marie (which took her by surprise) to ask her to be a typical one-shot guest on the show. She almost said no to them.
She was busy with other ventures, and she didn’t really want to go all the way to New York just to count to ten like everyone else who made a guest appearance. But before she hung up she asked a question. “I said, have you ever done any Native American programming?” she recalls. They hadn’t, but they called her back with a new offer to include her as a writer and contributor and appear as a semiregular cast member. She knew it would be a good opportunity to reach millions of young children and their parents with the same message she had been bringing to her concert audiences for years: “Indians exist.”
The term collage, taken from the French verb “coller” which means “to stick”, refers to the artistic technique of gluing different elements together. The term has its origins back in the early modernist movement, especially in Cubist works by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. But even centuries even before this movement, collage can already be seen through history and values cultures.
Check out this video posted by the National Galleries of Scotland to know more about the artistic technique.
George Musser is a writer on physics who loves to seek new metaphors to better understand Einstein’s general theory of relativity. While working on his last book, which was titled “Spooky Action at A Distance”, Musser thought to compare the warping of space-time to the motion of Earth’s tectonic plates.
Einstein explained gravity as the bending of spacetime. A well-hit baseball arcs through the air to an outfielder’s glove because it is following the contours of spacetime, which the planet’s mass has resculpted. The mutability of spacetime also means that nothing in the universe has a fixed position, since the framework by which position is defined is fluid. And something like that is also true of Earth’s surface. Nothing on the ground has fixed coordinates because the landscape is ever-shifting.
This intrigued Musser.
If nothing has fixed coordinates, then how do Google Maps, car nav systems, and all the other mapping services get you where you’re going? Presumably they must keep updating the coordinates of places, but how?
He figured that he can just Google the answer quickly and get back immediately to Einstein. Unfortunately, what he thought to be just a 30-second Q&A turned out to be a several days’ search for answers.
I discovered a sizable infrastructure of geographers, geologists, and geodesists dedicated to ensuring that maps are accurate. But they are always a step behind the restless landscape. Geologic activity can create significant errors in the maps on your screens.
… The image above shows my position in Google Maps while I was standing on my back deck—a discrepancy of about 10 meters, much larger than the stated error circle. When I go to Google Earth and compare images taken on different dates, I find that my house jumps around by as much as 20 meters.
RUSSIA — A pair of elephants have caused some traffic delays after they escaped from a circus so that they can play in the snow.
The Yekaterinburg Circus said in an Instagram post that Asian elephants Carla, 45, and Roni, 50, were being taken for a walk outside before they were due to be driven to St. Petersburg for an Italian Circus show hosted by the Bolshoi State St. Petersburg Circus when they pulled free from their handlers.
A video captured by one of the witnesses show the pair rolling and playing in the snow, as their handlers unsuccessfully try to put them back to the circus building.
"The elephants have their own character and emotions, they are very smart," the Instagram post said. "They walked outside and got very happy from seeing the snow, the trees and the pedestrians whom they took for spectators. Roni stayed by one of the trees while Carla walked towards a pile of snow."
[...]
The elephants were eventually led back to the circus building and loaded into a transport vehicle for the trip to St. Petersburg.
After months of anti-government protests, Hong Kong has changed much. Walls of Post-It sticky notes and other creative displays can be found in public places. Called “Lennon Walls” by locals, these spaces have emerged on buildings, walkways, underpasses, and storefronts. Messages like “Hong Kongers love freedom,” and “We demand real universal suffrage,” can be seen.
The original Lennon Wall was in central Prague, west of the Vltava River and south of the iconic Charles Bridge. Since the 1960s, the wall had been a location for romantic poems and anti-government messages. After Beatles legend John Lennon’s murder in 1980, someone painted a portrait of Lennon and some of his song lyrics on the wall. In time, messages evoking Lennon’s common themes of peace, love and democracy covered the space. It became a location for community-generated protest art that endures – yet is ever-changing – today.
Galileo Galilei is the Italian mathematician and philosopher often credited with recognizing the essential role of mathematics in our attempt to understand the universe. In his essay “Il Saggiatore” (“The Assayer”), which was written in 1623, Galileo compares nature to a book laid open for us to read. However, he notes that we cannot understand this book unless we “comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.” For Galileo, the book “is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.”
While Galileo was thinking primarily of astronomy and physics, mathematical biologist Kit Yates shows us that there is no reason to stop with the physical sciences. In his new book titled “The Math Of Life and Death: 7 Mathematical Principles That Shape Our Lives”, the mathematical biologist argues that math, in a nutshell, is everywhere.
And, as his title suggests, math matters: We need it to understand how nuclear explosions work and how infectious diseases spread (and how they can be stopped); we need it to make sense of medical studies and crime statistics, and to evaluate the arguments that lawyers present in the courtroom; we need it to send rockets into space — and to understand why NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter crashed to the planet’s surface…
Though this is a fun and non-technical book (there are no equations), some of the topics are deadly serious.
Yates also offers us some practical ways to apply math in our lives. Check it out over at Undark.
