This is the story of how two publishers went on a legal battle for the publication of Mein Kampf's unabridged version and how it nearly killed the Great American Novel in the process.

Read more about it on Medium.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Having a set routine has its benefits and risks. It definitely makes things more efficient. The more you are used to doing something, it becomes automatic like an integral part of your life.

However, the more you are accustomed or familiar about something, the less you take notice of it and it fades into the background. That's where wit comes into play. It tends to break the ice and snap us out of our lethargy of familiarity and routine.

We tend to define the quality of wit as merely being deft with a clever comeback. But true wit is richer, cannier, more riddling. And the best of it is often based on a biological phenomenon called supernormal stimuli.

James Geary tells us the story of supernormal stimuli and why exaggeration jokes work on The Atlantic.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

It's called the everything store for a reason and it's one of the biggest retail companies in the world. People go to Amazon to look for anything they need and they would find it. It has become a household name.

However, behind all the good things we hear about Amazon, there are some inconspicuous and shady dealing happening behind the scenes. No, they don't deal in the black market or any other illegal things like that. But it is the system that Amazon places upon its sellers where we see the dark side to the retail giant.

Zac Plansky is one of the many sellers on Amazon who have been targeted with a "dirty seller trick". That is, a competitor of his bought fake reviews and sent it to his account. His account was frozen and his listings were shut down.

Desperate, Plansky turned to the Amazon seller consultants who revealed to him the nasty practices being done by sellers on the platform to one up each other and get the most profits out of it.

Listen to his story and those of others on The Verge.

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Chinese researchers have newly discovered a method to turn copper into a material with similar properties to gold.

Now, talk about a get-rich-quick scheme. But the purpose of their study is not to make counterfeit gold, rather this method could significantly reduce the use of rare, expensive metals in factories.

Professor Sun Jian and colleagues at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Liaoning, shot a copper target with a jet of hot, electrically charged argon gas.

The fast-moving ionised particles blasted copper atoms off the target. The atoms cooled down and condensed on the surface of a collecting device, producing a thin layer of sand.

The researchers put the material in a reaction chamber and used it as a catalyst to turn coal to alcohol, a sophisticated and difficult chemical process that only precious metals can handle efficiently.

“The copper nano particles achieved catalytic performance extremely similar to that of gold or silver,” Sun and collaborators said in a statement posted on the academy’s website on Saturday.

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It's a staggering number that we have been able to compute. Just writing this new largest-known prime number may take years to accomplish, every single digit of it.

The newly discovered number is what's known as a Mersenne prime, named for a French monk named Marin Mersenne who studied primes some 350 years ago.

Mersenne primes have a simple formula: 2n-1. In this case, "n" is equal to 82,589,933, which is itself a prime number. If you do the math, the new largest-known prime is a whopping 24,862,048 digits long.

We would write the number out for you, but it would fill up thousands of pages, give or take, and look like this gigantic zip file.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

From still images, these drawings and illustrations come to life with this new AI-powered technology that creates a 3D animation from a single photo.

Algorithmically generated content can sometimes turn out to be hilariously nonsensical or remarkably dumb. But researchers at the University of Washington (one of whom sold her startup to Facebook) developed a system that uses machine vision to create indisputably cool 3D animations.

In the paper, the researchers compare it to the moving portraits at Hogwarts, a fictitious part of the Harry Potter world that a number of tech companies have tried to recreate. Previous attempts have been mildly successful, but this system is impressive in its ability to isolate and create a pretty realistic 3D animation from a single image.

- via Gizmodo

We might be having several firsts being accomplished this year and one of them is the first person to reach the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean.

Victor Vescovo became the first person to do so on a solo mission in a manned submersible vessel and the second ever to make a solo dive deeper than 5,000 meters (16,400 feet).

The deepest point of this trench plunges to 8,376 meters (27,480 feet) below the surface of the ocean. James Cameron, in the Deepsea Challenger vessel, dove deeper in 2012 to 10,908 meters (35,790 feet) down in the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, the world's deepest spot.

(Image credit: The Five Deeps Expedition)

There is no longer any place on Earth that has never been polluted at one point or another, not even the deepest part of the ocean.

The researchers plumbed the depths of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, near Challenger Deep, the lowest place on the face of the planet.

They found the highest levels of microplastics yet found in the open ocean, compared with surveys from elsewhere in the Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic oceans.

(Image credit: Dr. Richard Kirby via The Guardian)

As Jews were forced to either convert to Catholicism or face death during the Spanish Inquisition, many became conversos and as Spain began its voyages across the oceans and into territories unknown to them, Jewish people also made their way to the colonies.

The stories have always persisted—of people across Latin America who didn’t eat pork, of candles lit on Friday nights, of mirrors covered for mourning.

A new study examining the DNA of thousands of Latin Americans reveals the extent of their likely Sephardic Jewish ancestry, more widespread than previously thought and more pronounced than in people in Spain and Portugal today.

It appears that Latin Americans are a genetically-diverse people with a mix of different ancestries in their DNA. One of those is Sephardic Jewish blood. And there seems to be more of them than initially thought.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas, as the song goes, and for these two Antarctic explorers, that might just be the case.

Louis Rudd and Colin O'Brady are on a race to be the first to succeed in attempting to do a solo, unassisted expedition across the Antarctic continent.

Rudd reached the South Pole on his 41st day while O'Brady peddles ahead and leads by a day and a half as he reached the South Pole after 40 days.

Aaron Teasdale details the experiences and updates from both explorers on National Geographic.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The farside of the moon, a frontier that no one has yet been able to land on it and so little is known about the farside of the moon. China wants to be the first.

Consisting of a lander and a rover, Chang’e-4 is targeting the moon’s farside, the lunar hemisphere that is always facing away from Earth. No spacecraft has ever achieved a soft landing there before, although in 1962 NASA crashed its Ranger 4 probe into the farside surface.

“Relative to the nearside, in many respects we know very little about the farside,” says Mark Robinson, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University and the principal investigator for NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC).

Read more on Scientific American.

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What are the ingredients for a hit song? Well, a study published by a group of mathematicians analyzed half a million songs and found out the recipe for success.

If you want to write a hit song then make sure it is happy, hits a party vibe, is not likely to relax listeners, and preferably is sung by a woman.

Using a machine-learning algorithm known as random forests, and controlling for potentially complicating factors such as the fame of an artist, Myra Interiano and colleagues from the University of California Irvine in the US plumbed the depths of a couple of huge community-generated music databases and looked for trends developing over decades.

Success, in this case, was, the researchers note, a “crude measure” that required only that the piece of music made it onto the UK official Top 100 Singles Chart in any year.

Learn more on how to write a hit song on an article written by Andrew Masterson.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

When you look at the two skulls in the image, you would seem to see a purple and orange skull but actually, they are both red. Only the striped background changes our perception of their color.

The pigments morph because of the ­Munker-​White illusion, which shifts the perception of two identical color tones when they’re placed against different surrounding hues. No one knows for sure, but the illusion probably results from what David Novick, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at El Paso, calls the color-completion effect.

The phenomenon causes an image to skew toward the color of the objects that surround it. In a black-and-white image, a gray element would appear lighter when it’s striped with white, and darker when banded with black.

(Image credit: Popular Science)

New Horizons is on its course toward Pluto and its moons, and with the images that it has captured so far, scientists are wondering why Ultima Thule, a trans-Neptunian object located at the Kuiper Belt lacks a light curve.

Even though scientists determined in 2017 that the Kuiper Belt object isn't shaped like a sphere – that it is probably elongated or maybe even two objects – they haven't seen the repeated pulsations in brightness that they'd expect from a rotating object of that shape.

The periodic variation in brightness during every rotation produces what scientists refer to as a light curve.

Read more on the New Horizons site.

(Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

The winter blues is not just something people experience out of the blue. There might be a biological explanation as to why we sometimes become sad during the winter.

Two recent studies suggest the culprit is a brain circuit that connects special light-sensing cells in the retina with brain areas that affect whether you are happy or sad.

When these cells detect shorter days, they appear to use this pathway to send signals to the brain that can make a person feel glum or even depressed.

A recent research also found that a certain brain circuit above the eyes when stimulated might relieve depression.

With these studies, we may have a more nuanced understanding of the causes behind depression and other mood disorders, and as such be able to find an appropriate treatment for it.

(Image credit: Patrick Brinksma/Unsplash)