For millennia, the objective fact of paternity was thought to lie behind an “impenetrable veil.” It was the performance of fatherhood that mattered most: claiming parentage, supporting children day to day, and leaving them an inheritance.
This entrenched social landscape began to shift by the early 1900s, thanks to some experts’ proclamations that lab-tested techniques could settle questions of fatherhood beyond doubt.
However, even though we can now identify a child's biological father with more certainty than before, cultural concepts about what a father is still persists and perhaps, will continue to persist into the future.
We have probably read or heard stories of people going through near-death experiences and what it was like to be in such a state. Stephanie Arnold, author of 37 Seconds, recounts one such experience when she was having her second pregnancy.
She had been getting premonitions or a general sense of foreboding that things might not go well this time around. At the end of it all, when she had finished delivering her second child, she was pronounced clinically dead for about 37 seconds. You may listen to her story and the other narratives that surrounded it on Narratively's new podcast, Believable.
Before it might be uncommon for someone to find a Catholic priest who is a big fan of music apart from the liturgy. It might even be rarer to find a priest who is into heavy metal music but one Robert Culat did not find such music repulsive, instead he expressed a deep sense of curiosity and fascination for it.
“I was waiting at the beginning of the school year for young people to sign up for religion classes,” Culat says. Among the first to sign up were two young brothers who looked quite strange to Father Culat. “I was surprised,” Culat says, “the long hair, all in black, with the band T-shirts.” Most priests would have said a Hail Mary or two and avoided them. Culat wanted to know more.
He found out that the two young guys were part of a band called Cortege which was a death metal band. Once Culat learned about it, it became an object of interest and study.
“I was like a scientist in a laboratory,” Culat says. “I didn’t feel any attraction, I just wanted to know more about it.” In typical metalhead fashion, the fans in the community inundated him with recommendations. Cassettes and CDs began to pile up at Culat’s home next to his books on theology and philosophy. Gradually, he found himself listening to some of the albums not out of scientific curiosity but for recreational purposes.
For many of us outside the scientific circles and for those who were still in school trying to learn the stuff that scientists had been debating about for a decade or so it seems, Pluto's demotion to a dwarf planet came as a surprise. But talks about the definition of what a planet should be had already been underway since the 1990s. Only until about twelve years ago did the International Astronomical Union voted to reclassify Pluto.
Less than 5 percent of the membership of the IAU voted and the room was full of astronomers like me, with no particular expertise on planetary science. The new IAU rules said that a planet must meet three criteria: it had to orbit the Sun, it had to be massive enough for gravity to make it round, and it had to have “cleared out” its orbital neighborhood. Pluto stumbled at the third criterion.
Current debate centers on the third criterion: that a planet must have cleared out material in its orbit. In other words, there should be no object of comparable size at that distance. The rule is hard to apply consistently since it depends on details of the formation process. Planetary scientist Phil Metzger reviewed the research literature and found only one instance in the past two hundred years where orbit-clearing had been used to classify a planet. He said of the IAU rule: “It’s a sloppy definition.”
Now, as we continue to discover new worlds, galaxies, and planets beyond our own, it's possible that these rules would continue to change and many other exoplanets, asteroids, and other space objects would be reclassified. Although, the more we see of the universe, the more difficult it might be to apply consistency in the rules that we create to make things more systematic. In the case of Pluto, however, it doesn't seem like it will be reconsidered anytime soon.
Our perceptions of the real world rely on various factors such as the sensory data and stimuli we pick up from our interactions with the world, our brains' processing of that data, and the interpretation we have based on previous experience and knowledge.
Some neuroscientists say that the way we see the world is not as simple of a mechanism or system as we might think because there are too many steps and variables involved from the moment our senses perceive what goes on around us until they have been processed by the brain. There are also obstacles in that process which might affect our perception of objective reality.
So in order for our brains to make sense of the world, they suggest that we actually base our perceptions on expectations or predictive mechanisms with which our brain gives form to what we experience.
One challenge that our brains face in monitoring our actions is the inherently ambiguous information they receive. We experience the world outside our heads through the veil of our sensory systems: the peripheral organs and nervous tissues that pick up and process different physical signals, such as light that hits the eyes or pressure on the skin.
One can even think of the challenges that the brain possesses in the same manner with which Plato posed the dilemma of trying to know what is objective truth in the Allegory of the Cave.
Even if these circuits transmitted with perfect fidelity, our perceptual experience would still be incomplete. This is because the veil of our sensory apparatus picks up only the ‘shadows’ of objects in the outside world.
So how does the brain get around these issues?
Psychologists and neuroscientists have long wondered what strategies our brains might use to overcome the problems of ambiguity and pace. There is a growing appreciation that both challenges could be overcome using prediction. The key idea here is that observers do not simply rely on the current input coming in to their sensory systems, but combine it with ‘top-down’ expectations about what the world contains.
Do we see what we believe because that's how our brain processes the information it receives from different sensory signals? And if so, how can we determine objective reality based on the experiences we have had?
Three years before Neil Armstrong and company landed and walked on the moon, and then placed an American flag on it, another flag had already been there. And the way in which it had been done was so meticulous and methodical that it's almost like something from a thriller novel.
Surveyor—a series of seven identical robotic spacecraft headed to different places on the Moon—was a mission run by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, California. The distinctive, three-legged lunar landers were built by Hughes Aircraft.
That June day that Surveyor 1 landed on the Moon and started sending back pictures, Sheldon Shallon, Hughes’ chief scientist, held a press conference and revealed that the ship carried a small, unscheduled item that neither NASA nor Shallon’s bosses knew about: an American flag.
Read the story of how Shallon and his colleagues attempted and succeeded to bring Old Glory to the moon on Fast Company.
Slender Man has become a famous pop culture horror icon which was originally created on the internet forum, Something Awful, in which someone responded to a challenge to "make something creepy". And so the stories of Slender Man began.
But the thing about the creation of such urban legends is that, though we have an inherent rationalizing that it's not real, our unfathomable experiences attributed to Slender Man connects people on a certain level which creates this collective shared belief that perhaps, despite the knowledge of its origins, it could be real.
Slender Man is not a simple entity that can be looked at as belonging to a single folk group. The reason why he “feels real” to so many people is because he helps to give a voice to real experiences that are difficult to articulate otherwise. Slender Man not only gives us a place to assign value to these experiences, he is standing there, acknowledging these experiences.
On the full and new moons, Limulus polyphemus, the Atlantic horseshoe crab, glides up from the ocean floor. It floats and skims along the water’s edge, using one set of legs to push aside mud, silt, and sand. Of its ten eyes, the largest two on the sides of its shell are used to look for mates.
Once mating season begins, these crabs will go on a search for a nest to breed in and there, the females will lay about 20,000 eggs in a day, which could go as many as 80,000 per season. However, of all the eggs that will be laid and fertilized, only 3 in 100,000 will survive.
But the thing is, this has been their cycle for 450 million years. And they still continue on with life despite their circumstances. There have been concerns of their populations depleting due to the huge numbers being harvested for various reasons.
This ancient mariner brings gifts: medically valuable blue blood for humans and protein-rich eggs for shorebirds. If you have had surgery or been vaccinated, you can thank the horseshoe crabs and their blood—which contains the chemical limulus amoebosyte lysate (LAL).
You could say that their blood is hardly a gift, but something stolen for the survival of another species—us. The very wildness of the horseshoe crab enables contemporary human civilization to perpetuate itself.
Despite all that, these are some tough creatures. They will continue to spawn and push forward which would hopefully inspire us humans to help them survive which in turn would help us survive.
Seattle has been battered with so many incidents of wildfires lately which caused the air quality in the city to dip to being one of the worst in the world. But these incidents are becoming a growing reality and they expect things not to get any better.
The pilot program will outfit five public buildings with high-tech filtration systems that screen out smoke and toxins. The buildings will also be equipped with detection systems to keep tabs on how clean the indoor and outdoor air is, and air doors at entrances to push dirty air away. The installations are expected to be completed by late July.
Being a teacher is one of the most important professions because it has a direct impact on our future. Teachers are the ones filling children's minds with information, insight, and the right tools that they would need in order to face the world and hopefully, make it a better place. Having that kind of responsibility is a big task. But it's something that Danika Ellis found challenging but also fulfilling.
I taught at a small alternative school in British Columbia, Canada, and the circumstances vary wildly between schools, never mind countries. The first thing that struck me with the overwhelming amount of preparation.
In the week between my semester’s end and practicum, I spent what felt like every waking moment poring over resources and making endless lesson plans, second-guessing myself all the way.
In her experience, she was given freedom to choose which topics to teach and how to teach it, considering their curriculum didn't have any mandatory texts. However, she also realized the difficulty in trying to choose.
Moreover, it comes point wherein you don't feel as confident in yourself to teach what you're teaching. She felt that she was by no means an expert in the field but also found that using her conversational approach works to her strength as it engaged students more.
What I really took away from the experience, though, was how much I became emotionally attached to my students, even after only knowing them six weeks. Coming in as a first-time teacher, I fully expected to have to win over a class of skeptical teenagers.
Instead, they were receptive and polite, and I ended up having a lot of great conversations with them. They shared vulnerable truths in class. They brought enthusiasm and humour. They showed creativity and insight.
Master's students from EPFL put their programming skills to the test and see who wins in an AI race. They programmed their robots to identify certain images which when recognized the robots will start to follow.
“We had to program our robot to recognize a visual signal captured by an embedded camera and then follow the signal. That required developing our own algorithm and programming it in the robot,” says Rayan Abi Fadel, a student in the College of Management of Technology.
To make things fair, all the students used the same robot and the same base algorithm which was developed by PhD students, Yuejiang Liu and George Adaimi. However, the students may change and fine-tune the algorithm with their own tweaks.
“For example, since we wanted our robot to follow an object while the student holding it was running, we artificially blurred the background of the images used to train the robot, to simulate the effect of rapid movement.”
If you have blueprints, schematics, or designs of any object, then you can build it yourself with the help of a 3D printer. For Sterling Backus, that meant building his own Lamborghini Aventador inspired supercar with his son which they will showcase at local schools as a STEAM project.
“The parts’ design is based on the Lamborghini Aventador, but we have changed each panel significantly, to add our design flair,” Backus added. “In addition, no molds are made, and none are for sale. This is a one only project, and not for sale.”
Whenever we go online, we probably don't pay much attention to how the websites we go to were designed. Since all we see is the end result, we simply go through the site and do what we went there for. But once the conventions and principles of web and UI design are broken, we get to appreciate such things a whole lot more.
And that's the purpose of the site User Inyerface, a UI experiment which was intentionally designed poorly so that it would show how much we take for granted when we go online.
Over the past decennium, users have grown accustomed to certain design patterns: positions, colors, icons... Rather than looking at a UI, users tend to act instinctively and take 90% of an interface for granted.
...But what happens if we poke all good practice with a stick and stir it up? What if we don't respect our self-created rules and expectations and do everything the other way around?
Some people dream of going to space but are never able to do it in their lifetime so in a way, having a space memorial for them and blasting their remains to space might be the best way to have their wish come true, if only in their after life.
For as long as humans have dreamed of space travel, we’ve been forced to reckon with what it would be like to die on that final frontier. Eighteen astronauts and cosmonauts have died midair in the history of spaceflight.
Those aren't bad odds, at just three percent of the 536 total humans sent to space. But most of these astronauts either perished during launch or landing, in accidents that rendered their bodies unretrievable, vaporized by explosive heat or scattered back to earth amongst shuttle parts.
But it such a surreal feeling of wonder at what it must be like to die in space. It's pretty far off after all and it's an unfamiliar place where all that surrounds you are stardust and space objects. Who knows, someday all our remains would one day find their place in space as well.
Though languages evolve over time, they don't necessarily undergo dramatic changes when it comes to the symbols used or distribution of words and characters. And it would be possible to decode an unknown language if it's related to a known progenitor language.
Based on the premise, a team from MIT have used machine learning to crack certain languages which could be used as a technique that would allow us to decode even long-lost languages, by sheer brute force. The difference being, machines don't get fatigued and have copious databases with which to compare texts and symbols.
Enter Jiaming Luo and Regina Barzilay from MIT and Yuan Cao from Google’s AI lab in Mountain View, California. This team has developed a machine-learning system capable of deciphering lost languages, and they’ve demonstrated it by having it decipher Linear B—the first time this has been done automatically.
The idea is that any language can change in only certain ways—for example, the symbols in related languages appear with similar distributions, related words have the same order of characters, and so on. With these rules constraining the machine, it becomes much easier to decipher a language, provided the progenitor language is known.
