Whenever we encounter some new type of food, we would probably hesitate a bit before trying it. If you're more adventurous, you might just go ahead and dig in.

For a lot of people, eating insects is an exotic practice, something that you may not see that often or even think about doing. But when you go to places in Asia or Africa, it's part of their culture.

Julie Lesnik, an anthropologist, explores the practice of entomophagy and wrote about it in her dissertation. At the very least, having insects in your diet not only would cut down costs but it can prove to be healthier.

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Having a rough idea of the Cold War and its beginnings, we know that it was basically a battle of ideologies, trying to prove to the other that their system was better. But the means of doing this were both blatant and subtle.

It was a "battle for freedom" with both sides trying to convince other nations that there were threats to freedom, democracy, and even national security.

Knowing that they needed something more substantial to combat the Soviet Union's propaganda, the CIA and other US government officials turned to the scientific community to help with psychological warfare in what is called Project Troy.

Undersecretary of State James Webb asked the noted physicist and veteran adviser Lloyd Berkner’s help in assembling a crack team of scientists to tackle the problem of psychological warfare.

The resulting Project Troy brought together a group of social scientists and physical scientists from MIT and Harvard that either already had or would soon play leading roles in the Cold War.

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We all like a good mystery story and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes may be one of the most famous fictional detectives in history.

But as we are enamored with the brilliance of Mr. Holmes, there were other contemporary fictional detectives who may not inspire the same kind of admiration as the former.

In the wake of Sherlock Holmes’s massive success, the world was so overrun by lady detectives, French detectives, Canadian lumberjack detectives, sexy gypsy detectives, priest detectives, and doctor detectives that there was a shortage of things to detect. Why not ghosts?

And thus was spawned the occult detective who detected ghost pigs, ghost monkeys, ghost ponies, ghost dogs, ghost cats and, for some strange reason, mummies. Lots and lots of mummies.

Besides sporting ostentatiously grown-up names that sound like they were randomly generated by small boys wearing thick glasses (Dr. Silence, Mr. Perseus, Moris Klaw, Simon Iff, Xavier Wycherly) these occult detectives all had one thing in common: they were completely terrible at detecting.

(Image credit: Eugene Thiebault)

A week or so ago, the Curiosity rover found a smooth shiny rock at the Vera Rubin Ridge. It has not yet been analyzed to see its chemical composition but scientists say that it could be another meteorite which isn't uncommon.

Curiosity has been at the Highfield drill site before, but NASA’s mission controllers wanted to take a look at four previously detected rocks—including an unusually smooth rock that, in black and white at least, looks a bit like a chunk of gold.

Immediate suspicions are that the rock, dubbed Little Colonsay, is a meteorite, but NASA scientists won’t know for sure until Curiosity performs a chemical analysis.

Read on for more on Gizmodo.

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Los Alamos National Laboratory)

What are solar winds and more importantly, how does it affect Earth and other planets in our solar system? We have a rough idea of solar winds in that, they are a stream of particles being emitted outward from the sun.

But scientists want to know more and have a deeper understanding of how it interacts with Earth. So they sent a probe on a mission toward the sun. In the meantime, the Imperial College of London is doing research on these solar winds by recreating it.

The Mega Ampere Generator for Plasma Implosion Experiments, or MAGPIE, is a two-storey machine within the labyrinthine basement of Imperial College London. Inside, a box-sized crucible resides at the heart of a collection of giant tubes.

Every now and then, for half a millionth of a second, it literally explodes into life, releasing a burst of miniaturized solar wind that scientists can study as it interacts with its magnetic target.

(Image credit: Goddard Space Flight Center/NASA)

The laws of nature govern much of how the world works from the vast reaches of space to the tiniest particles that make up all living and non-living things. There are certain determined forces and factors that inevitably dictate why and how things are.

The question one might ask is "How did everything came to be if we assume that everything happened in a random manner?" Evolutionary biologists suggest that it was through the process of natural selection.

The process of natural selection winnowed the field. Moreover, it seems likely that nature somehow also found other shortcuts, ways to narrow down the vast space of possibilities to smaller, explorable subsets more likely to yield useful solutions.

These algorithms are tested in various iterations, continuously mutating, combining, and adding on features that would become beneficial to organisms.

Eventually, many repetitions of this process lead to a highly fit individual, or solution.

(Image credit: Ricardo Bessa/Quanta Magazine)

With all the stars in our universe, many of which are several lightyears away, it is an enormous task to measure how much light they have produced and emitted throughout history. But now, astronomers have been able to quantify it.

From the earliest, faintest stars, to the largest galaxies, an international team has managed to measure the total amount of starlight emitted over the entire 13.7bn-year history of the universe.

The first stars flickered into being a few hundred million years after the big bang. Since then, galaxies have churned out stars at a stupendous rate, and scientists estimate there were now about a trillion trillion.

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Depression is a silent killer. Nobody wants to have it, especially those who have it. They can't understand why they feel that way and most of the time they just want it to end because it bears so much pain, suffering, and agony. The hard part of it is they have no control over it.

However, a lot of researchers are trying to find ways to address the issue of depression and other mental health issues or any mood disorder that can affect a person's wellbeing and daily life.

There's new evidence that mild pulses of electricity can relieve depression — if they reach the right target in the brain.

A study of 25 people with epilepsy found that those who had symptoms of depression felt better almost immediately when doctors electrically stimulated an area of the brain just above the eyes, a team reported Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

These people were in the hospital awaiting surgery and had wires inserted into their brains to help doctors locate the source of their seizures.

Several of the patients talked about the change they felt when the stimulation of the lateral orbitofrontal cortex began, says Kristin Sellers, an author of the paper and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.

Jon Hamilton tells us more about the study and its findings on NPR.

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Ancient Rome is known for the various ways they mete out justice to criminals. From the smallest to the largest offences, they have nothing but cruel and often painful, torturous methods of squeezing the life out of criminals and showing people the consequence for their crimes.

One of those punishments is being thrown off a cliff. Now, Tarpeian Rock has a legend about it and why only specific criminals are given this type of punishment, mostly murderers and particularly, traitors.

Read more on the Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Augustyn Mirys)

Some of the greatest feats of engineering began a millennia or two ago with structures such as the Great Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the Roman Colosseum among others.

Rome is one of the ancient civilizations that paved the way for us to have the knowledge of building roads, bridges, aqueducts, and all sorts of infrastructure.

One such edifice is the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran:

The basilica, where the Pope presides in his role as Archbishop of Rome, was already ancient when it was rebuilt in the 1650s. Its walls still hold some of the original material used to build the cathedral under Emperor Constantine in 312 CE.

And beneath the modern church lies the original Roman foundation. Excavations since the 1700s have opened up a network of dark, cramped spaces called scavi beneath the four-hectare site of the cathedral.

After years of excavation and research, archaeologists have now been able to map out the various structures within and beneath the cathedral using laser scanning and ground penetrating radar technology.

(Image credit: Lateran Project/Newcastle University)

Adaptation is the name of the game in order for creatures to survive in any environment or situation that they encounter. Animals evolve and develop certain features and characteristics that enable them to weather even the harshest conditions imaginable.

Now, Chinese researchers have made a remarkable find on the roof of the world: the oldest signs of human activity in this demanding landscape.

Researchers led by Xiaoling Zhang, an archaeologist at China's Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, have found more than 3,600 stone artifacts in a part of the central Tibetan Plateau called Nwya Devu.

The site is rich with black slate—not the ideal raw material for stone tools, but the best available for miles around. Whoever the toolmakers were, they took advantage of what they had, expertly crafting bladed flakes of stone up to eight inches long.

This just goes to show how early humans were able to thrive and use their resourcefulness in order to live given the environmental and other external factors that they experience. It shows ingenuity and the human spirit. Whether it be on the "roof of the world", the Antarctic, or the most remote areas, humans find ways to live.

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Clever Hans was this amazing horse that was said to solve mathematical problems and other feats that one would think animals should not have the capacity to do. Not by themselves, at least.

The news spread and an investigation was done. It turned out that the horse picked up and responded to certain cues that his owner or whoever was asking him exhibited.

Recently, a study was conducted on AI and how it learns how to perform certain functions and activities:

The aim of the paper was to look at whether an Artificial Intelligence (more specifically, a “Convolutional Neural Network”) developed to interpret chest x-rays in one hospital, would be able to perform as well when faced with data from an external site.

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We know that Japan is one of the countries at the forefront of innovations in various fields such as technology, electronics, and engineering. And one of the feats of their engineering marvel is their sophisticated floodwater channeling system.

Diego Arguedas Ortiz writes:

Cecilia Tortajada recalls making her way down a long staircase and into of one of Japan’s engineering marvels, an enormous water tank that crowns Tokyo’s defences against flooding. When she finally reached the tank’s ground, she stood among the dozens of 500-tonne pillars supporting the ceiling. In the cavernous, shrine-like cistern, she felt humbled.

If Japan is a pilgrimage destination for disaster and risk-management experts like her, this is one of its main temples. The floodwater cathedral hidden 22 meters underground is part of the Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel (MAOUDC), a 6.3 km long system of tunnels and towering cylindrical chambers that protect North Tokyo from flooding.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Due to intense illegal poaching activities on various wildlife, these creatures are becoming very close to extinction. It is sad to think that the ones who are benefiting most from the resources of the world are the ones who push it to the extremes.

Rhinos are already endangered species, hunted for their precious horns that contain ivory used in manufacturing electrical appliances and equipment as well as piano and organ keys, billiard balls, and other decorative items. But such luxuries are produced at the cost of these animals' lives.

Much worse is the fact that for certain rhinos like the Sumatran rhino, there are only a few that exist. So the government in partnership with various nonprofits have launched a rescue mission for these rhinos.

Yessenia Funes has more on Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Ridho Hafizh Zainur Ridha/WWF Indonesia)

If you have ever tried translating a sentence in a different language into English using Google Translate, you know the difficulty of getting a natural translation since Translate gives a rough, literal translation of it.

But more than that, Google Translate doesn't actually have a comprehensive list of languages even if they were widely spoken languages. Most of the languages available on Google Translate are only the popular ones but more obscure languages have yet to be added.

Why do Greek, Czech, Hungarian, and Swedish, with their 8 to 13 million speakers, have Google Translate support and robust Wikipedia presences, while languages the same size or larger, like Bhojpuri (51 million), Fula (24 million), Sylheti (11 million), Quechua (9 million), and Kirundi (9 million) languish in technological obscurity?

(Image credit: Flickr user International Transport Forum)