After being hunted for a long time, the gray whales' presence vanished in the 18th century leading people to believe that they have gone extinct. But the emergence of this gray whale may be more than just a hopeful sign, as the reason why it appeared in the Atlantic waters after more than two centuries could be because of climate change.
Normally, gray whales would be drifting along the Pacific Ocean. It was quite rare to see one swimming in the Atlantic or Mediterranean seas. Only five have been sighted over the past 15 years. One of those included the one sighted off the coast of Florida last December, and the scientists believe that the one they sighted off New England is the same one.
It is possible that due to climate change, the Northwest Passage which connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans has become ice-free, and so paving the way for gray whales to travel to the other side. Although this is a good sign that the Atlantic will once again be populated with gray whales, scientists think it will be gradual.
Despite this sighting, however, scientists still consider the gray whale to be extinct in the Atlantic, as a lone whale is not enough to change its status. There needs to be evidence that a breeding population is present before scientists can say that the Atlantic gray whale is no longer extinct.
Bread is often recommended to be eaten at most within a week after baking, since exposure to air and moisture would cause the growth of molds. If you plan on eating bread beyond a week, it is best to keep it sealed in an airtight container and refrigerated. However, that drastically reduces the freshness and taste, so it's best to eat it right away.
Although bread can be kept from spoiling by refrigerating it, I doubt it would last more than a couple weeks or even a month. So, to discover well-preserved residues of what seems to be bread or some kind of bread-like substance is quite a finding indeed.
That's what archaeologists working at the Cumra district of Konya, Catalhoyuk, in Türkiye found while they were excavating the area called "Space 66". From a Neolithic-era structure which resembled an oven, they found an artifact comprising traces of wheat, barley, and pea seeds.
Analysis of the spongy residue revealed that the substance might have been leavened bread which was left unbaked. Usually unbaked bread wouldn't even last for such a long time, but they found that the residue had fermented which preserved the starches.
Whether the specimen can actually be called bread is up for debate, since it's unbaked, and one can only speculate that the traces of ingredients found in it point to the substance having been in the process of becoming bread. Nevertheless, the researchers believe that there is a high possibility that the artifact is, in fact, bread, and they are considering it possibly the world's oldest piece of bread.
According to Mariana Custodio, the biggest art fraud in the United States was committed by Knoedler, one of the most reputable art galleries in New York. They had sold 60 fake artworks in a span of almost 20 years which were supposedly created by artists such as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning, all of which were actually original artworks by the Chinese artist Pei-Shen Qian. It is estimated that the artworks' total value was about $80 million.
But that sum doesn't even come close to what may be considered the world's largest art fraud in history. At the center of it all is Norval Morrisseau, Canada's most famous Indigenous artist, who, in the years before his death, claimed that auctioneers and art galleries were selling fakes. Although he filed affidavits identifying the forgeries, Morrisseau was not able to pursue any lawsuits due to his death in 2007 from complications with Parkinson's disease.
Now, over 16 years after his death, investigators have finally discovered the sheer scale and magnitude of the art fraud. And it took an unlikely group of individuals to get down to the bottom of the scheme, which included Scottish Canadian singer John McDermott, the rock star keyboardist Kevin Hearn, an acquaintance of Morrisseau's relatives Dallas Thompson, and the Canadian homicide detective Jason Rybak.
In 2013, McDermott filed a lawsuit claiming that a supposed Morrisseau painting he bought was a fake after conducting an investigation on the matter. This led him to identify Gary Lamont and David Voss as the ringleaders of the Thunder Bay fraud ring. However, McDermott dropped his claim for unknown reasons. Thankfully, another buyer of an alleged Morrisseau also went to court regarding the fraud. And that was Kevin Hearn.
Hearn, a member of the band Barenaked Ladies, had bought his first Morrisseau painting called Spirit Energy of Mother Earth in 2005 for CA$20,000, which he lent to the Art Gallery of Ontario for a show in 2010. A few days after lending it, he learned that the painting was a fake.
So, he sued the Toronto gallery from which he bought the painting in 2012, but the judge ruled in 2018 that the fake was merely contested, and there was no conclusive evidence that indicated that the painting which Hearn bought was indeed a fake. This was despite Thompson's testimony revealing that a fraud ring existed in Thunder Bay which created thousands of Morrisseau paintings, as well as expert testimony saying that the painting was a fraud.
Hearn, determined to get down to the bottom of the Morrisseau fraud scandal, continued with his investigation and tapped a filmmaker friend, Jamie Kastner, to make a documentary about the Morrisseau fakes titled There Are No Fakes, which was released in 2019. It was this documentary that brought Jason Rybak to the case.
At the time, Rybak was investigating the murder of Scott Dove, and one of the suspects of the murder was none other than Gary Lamont. On the suggestion of Dove's mother, Rybak watched the documentary made by Hearn's friend, and immediately, he contacted Hearn. Rybak spent the next four years working on the case, looking into Morrisseau's life and all the information available on the lawsuits of fraud victims.
It was only in March 2023 when officials announced that they had arrested eight people involved in the fraud rings, which included Lamont and Voss. Rybak also discovered that Voss started the scheme in 1996 which was then copied by Lamont in 2002, creating two separate fraud rings. Later on, a third came about when a friend of Lamont and Voss began making forgeries in southern Ontario.
Just last December, Lamont pled guilty to one count of forgery and fraud. Police filed 40 charges against him and his other accomplices, and more trials will be conducted this year and the next.
Humans have always been concerned with aesthetics and beauty, as a recent discovery of an ancient lipstick found in Iran shows. The lipstick was found inside a small container made of greenish chlorite bearing an intricate design with fine incisions. The markings on the vial suggest that the lipstick may have been marketed the same way cosmetic products are today, with a particular branding and packaging.
The researchers believe that the size and shape suggest that it might have been held alongside a mirror with one hand while the other free hand would be holding an applicator like a brush. Such a practice was possibly commonplace during that time as evidenced by an illustration on the Turin Papyrus 55001 which showed an Egyptian woman applying lipstick with a similar kind of vial that the team discovered.
As for the formulation of the lipstick, an analysis of the vial and the traces of materials left on it, the team found that several mineral ingredients were used in making the lipstick. These include ground hematite, quartz, braunite, anglesite, and a tiny crystals of galena, a lead mineral. It was the presence of hematite, which accounted for more than 80% of the sample, that suggested that this artifact must have been a cosmetic product as the mineral produced a deep red color.
More than this, the analysis also indicated that vegetal fibers were present in the sample, which could have been used to make the lipstick fragrant. At the moment, no connections have yet been made regarding who might have used the lipstick or in which contexts, but further excavations in the graveyards in the region may reveal such details.
If more evidence can be unearthed showing that these cosmetic artifacts are somehow related to female burials, the researchers say that it might indicate how this technology influenced the social dynamics of those times, and that women may have felt the pressure associated with the changing times.
For years, Charles Darwin's personal library had been rumored to contain around 1,480 books, which was the total of surviving items found in the two main collections preserved by the University of Cambridge and Down House. However, after further digging, researchers have found out that this number only comprised about 15% of Darwin's total original collection of books, publications, journals, and papers.
According to John van Wyhe, the lead academic who took great pains to track down and catalogue all the pieces of Darwin's original collection, there were more than 7,400 titles across 13,000 volumes and items, which proves just how extensive a researcher Darwin was.
These include publications in a wide range of subject matters including biology, geology, farming, animal husbandry, geography, philosophy, psychology, and religion among others. Most of the works were written in English, but Darwin also had copies of works written in other languages such as German and French.
It took over 18 years for the Darwin Online project to fully reconstruct the entirety of Darwin's collection, and now, they have an index of more than 9,700 links to copies of the works that Darwin had. Some of the interesting finds that van Wyhe and his team notes is that Darwin actually had copies of works by John Stuart Mill and August Comte, as well as Charles Babbage and Paul Du Chaillu's Explorations and adventures in equatorial Africa.
Although most of Darwin's collection were scientific in nature, he was a wide reader and also had in his possession other works outside the realm of scienctific or academic literature. The team notes that Darwin once had a book on chess which was sold in 1889. Just recently, in 2019, a Darwin family copy of Elizabeth Gaskell's 1880 novel Wives and daughters had been up for auction.
Darwin also had a book about finances titled A treatise on investments by Robert Arthur Ward, which most likely helped him take care of his wealth, investing the money he received from his inheritance and publications into assets like land, securities, and even investing in railroad projects.
Apart from the collections maintained by Cambridge and those kept at Down House, the Darwin Online team also traced and located the original sources of thousands of clippings, pamphlets, and other titles which were referenced in the Darwin Archive but whose author, publication, or date was unknown.
How large are US factory farms, really? According to data from the US Department of Agriculture, the most recent record in 2022 was a little over 10 billion animals being raised for consumption. This is almost a 100% increase from 1987, which was at 5.2 billion.
As the chart above shows, majority of these animals are meat chickens. And this can be explained by the rising trend of chicken consumption, replacing beef as one of the staple meats Americans consume, since chicken meat is perceived to be healthier than red meat.
However, this has also posed certain problems. For one, raising billions of chickens in a concentrated area can cause air pollution, not to mention the waste that it brings. Moreover, disease spreads more rapidly in these spaces, which could easily disrupt the food supply chain, inflating prices.
Chickens are not the only ones overpopulating farmlands. Cows, pigs, and turkeys have also seen an increase in number. And they pose the same problems if not more seriously than chickens as waste management for these animals may become an environmental and public health safety issue. They are not being disposed of or treated at sewage plants, but stored in pits inside the farm, which can leak to water sources and cause contamination.
Not only this, but since there are more animals being raised on farms, farmlands are decreasing, and more land is needed to plant soybeans and corn to feed the animals, which can further aggravate the situation when pesticides and other harmful chemicals are being used in growing these crops, which could all be washed off into rivers, streams, and the ocean, further exacerbating environmental pollution.
Jim Simons is an American mathematician who turned hedge fund manager when he founded Renaissance Technologies, hiring several physicists, mathematicians, astronomers, and statisticians to work on the Medallion Fund, which is effectively the best counterexample to the efficient market hypothesis. Essentially, he and his team beat the market.
But the story behind his journey toward becoming the greatest Wall Street investor is one built on the shoulders of other greats in the past. It's no surprise why many mathematicians and physicists excel in financial markets as many of the formulas that make these markets go round can be expressed in mathematical terms.
In fact, one of the earliest works on being able to predict one aspect of financial markets, derivatives, came from the PhD student Louis Bachelier, whose doctoral thesis focused on figuring out what the best price is for options.
He saw that the movements of stock prices over time form a normal distribution, and also found that the best price for options was that which both buyer and seller would stand to gain the same amount for the risk that they are taking.
Building upon this idea, other mathematicians, namely Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, were able to formulate an equation that would allow stock traders to plug in the numbers and come up with an exact price for the option. Meanwhile, Robert Merton had an independent paper published with his version of the same concept in option pricing, and so he was later credited along with Black and Scholes.
Although the secrets have been let out of the bag, Simons was able to use his background in mathematics and all of these derivations and formulas to exploit the inefficiencies in the market. To do that, he and his team gathered data from the stock market and the federal reserve, on which they used machine learning to find patterns in the stock market, and use models to become the highest-returning fund of all time. - via Digg
It must be a completely surreal experience to be able to remember everything that you have seen, heard, felt, or experienced in any way, down to the minute detail. Solomon Shereshevsky was one such individual. He could remember everything that his editor had instructed them, verbatim, at the morning meeting without having to take any notes.
It was fascinating, and it became the subject of Alexander Luria's study on human memory. As a mnemonist, Shereshevsky was able to experience everything in a visceral way, and in multiple senses which enabled him to form memories resistant to interference.
To put it simply, the way Shereshevsky recalled things was to create stories in his imagination piecing those memories and bits of information together, in order to make elaborate multisensory mental representations.
To use a more familiar analogy, it's similar to how Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock has a mind palace from which he can pull bits and pieces of information that he witnessed or experienced. But instead of a palace that resembles a vast library of information, Shereshevsky has a whole world of images and stories.
This brings us to Sir Frederic Bartlett's study on how humans remember. And in his famous experiment, he told the Native American story of the "War of the Ghosts" to British students. When asked to retell the story, the students were able to get the gist, but missed certain details.
The important insight he got from this experiment was that it wasn't simply a matter of misremembering the details, but that the students adapted those details and made the story their own infusing their own cultural expectations and norms into them. So, Bartlett finds that the act of remembering is not simply recalling minute, seemingly fragmented details but an exercise of imaginative reconstruction. - via The Daily Grail
Traditional IQ tests usually measure an individual's mathematical ability, logical reasoning, and language proficiency, but many have found these types of tests to be lacking. Although these types of tests may indicate an individual's potential academic ability, it has been argued that they do not capture the full potential that an individual possesses. Moreover, they do not measure all aspects of an individual's intelligence.
Looking back at one of the earliest archives of IQ tests conducted on Scottish children in the 1930s, Lawrence Whalley decided to compare the results of those individuals with their current mental ability. Just based on those, he uncovered a few things.
One of the more striking insights from his investigation on the matter was that the motive behind the 1932 survey of Scottish schoolchildren's IQ was to identify children who would perform better at school, and give them the opportunity for education instead of their poorly-performing peers. It was a survey funded by the Eugenics Society.
Of course, these days, we have the theory of multiple intelligences, and many educators are advancing the idea that children should be taught collective scientific problem-solving, which urges them to exercise and learn interpersonal skills, teamwork, and rational thinking.
It seems that even for those we consider as great minds, IQ tests were either insignificant or irrelevant, when it came to human ingenuity and progress. For them, creativity, curiosity, and intuition were the necessary ingredients to pushing the boundaries of human achievement. And of course, the only way to foster these qualities even further was in the context of collaborative and even competitive landscapes.
Finally, when Whalley interviewed the participants of the 1932 survey, what they remembered most from their school days was not those IQ tests but the bonds they shared with their peers, and they spoke of how glad they were that schools no longer tested children by those IQ tests.
The current film rating system that the Motion Pictures Association of America implements did not start out with five different tiers. It was in the 1930s when Hollywood began to self-regulate and impose content regulation guidelines on films due to criticism from the public and the push for censorship on certain subjects.
Back then, the industry turned to Will H. Hays to draft for them a set of guidelines that will ensure moral standards on the films being put out in theaters. This document was called the "Hays Code".
For the first couple of decades, it governed the way films were made based on the morality being depicted so that parents may rest assured that the films they will see won't adversely affect their children. But as times changed, people in the industry felt the need for the Hays Code to change as well.
In comes Jack Valenti, in the 1970s, who proposed a classification system that comprised of four tiers: G, M, R, and X. Later on, M would be replaced by PG, and so the rating system was as follows: G for general audiences; PG for films wherein parental guidance is advised; R stands for restricted, and requires that anyone under 17 be accompanied by an adult; and X, which is strictly prohibited for anyone under 17.
When the 80s came in, a few things happened that urged the MPAA to add an intermediate PG-13 rating. Ronald Reagan's presidency brought with it a stronger sense of morality in the public sphere which affected the film industry as well. But more than this, three films in particular drove the industry to action toward a more nuanced rating system: Poltergeist, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Gremlins.
And so, today, the MPA's film rating system is comprised of five tiers: G for general audiences; PG which urges parental guidance; PG-13 which strongly recommends parents to exercise caution with their children; R for films which require adult supervision for those under 17; and NC-17, which is for clearly adult films.
Utter destruction, in a nutshell. This is not to sound pessimistic or nihilistic, but when our sun eventually goes the way of all things in the universe and dies, it will swallow up both Mercury and Venus, and then lastly, Earth, as it becomes a red giant.
However, there's not much to worry of that happening in our lifetime, as the projection for the sun's expansion rate until this happens is in the next 7 billion years, so when we're all long gone.
Once the inner planets have been engulfed, Mars and the larger planets will be stripped of their atmospheres, and the outer planets will be ejected. Along with Uranus and Neptune, the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud will also be ejected.
The sun will then shrink down and become a white dwarf with some of the remnants from Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn remaining in its system although depending on how much mass the sun has lost, whether there will be remnants of these planets is still quite uncertain.
The American avant-garde composer John Cage is probably most notable for his 1952 composition titled 4'33", shown in the video above. It is a piece that was deliberately devoid of sound, trying to challenge what we traditionally believe about musicianship and musical experience.
Now just before he died in 1992, Cage left some instructions regarding one of his other pieces titled Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible), which was basically to play the piece as slowly as possible. What that meant exactly, may be quite hard to determine. How slow should it be, or for how long should a single note be played?
Several music scholars, art professors, and theologians who comprised the John Cage Organ Foundation in Halberstadt, Germany tried to figure out how to execute such eclectic instructions, so after much deliberation, they settled on the piece being played for 639 years, by using sandbags to weigh down the keys.
The rationale behind this decision was based on the time between the construction of the world's first 12-tone Gothic organ in Halberstadt, in 1361, and the year 2000. The performance had started on September 5, 2001, which would have been Cage's 89th birthday.
Of course, trying to plan out a performance spanning multiple centuries is quite difficult, and Rainer Neugebauer, a member of the foundation, attested to that fact, citing the thousands of mistakes that have happened just in the first years of the performance.
They had realized that the first part of the piece was supposed to be played for 28 months, instead of the original 17 months. Or when a crew had knocked over one of the pipes of the organ while they were filming, which changed the note being played. There was also the time when they had to delay the chord-change ceremony for a couple of weeks because a politician who was supposed to attend could not.
The piece is scheduled to end in the year 2640, and the first of the piece's eight movements is scheduled to finish on September 4, 2072.
Last year, archaeologists discovered a 500-year-old board game of Mill carved on the walls of an old Polish castle. Just recently, Yale archaeologist Veronica Waweru noticed some odd holes on rocks when she visited the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya. After closer inspection, she believes that the pits may have been used as game boards for mancala, going as far back as 5,000 years ago.
Mancala is a turn-based strategy board game which pits two people against each other, with the goal of trying to gather or collect as many stones, seeds, or beans as possible and store them in their home base. The setup requires two rows of shallow holes or pits, and each player has a larger hole at either end of the board where they stored their rocks.
Waweru saw a whole valley filled with these rows of pits, forming what seemed like an ancient rock arcade. Regarding who had formed these game boards, Waweru conjectures that they were herding societies who must have settled in the area around 5,000 years ago, but she also believes that people of that region must have been playing mancala since 10,000 years ago.
As Waweru and her team continue to investigate the site and conduct research there, they might be able to uncover, through DNA testing, the identities of the people groups who settled in that area, and perhaps even the ages of the basin's inhabitants. The presence of these pits may indicate that life in ancient times were more than just constant survival mode. They may have also had time for leisure and play. - via Atlas Obscura
I have only recently realized why I used to hear comedians say "tip your waitresses" as a closing joke, and why tipping culture is quite prevalent in the United States. Being someone from a place that doesn't have that custom, I only thought that the dual meaning behind the act of tipping was the punchline of the joke, and it is. But I didn't know how necessary tips actually are for servers in the United States.
Charlotte Andersen at Reader's Digest explains the rationale quite simply: servers in restaurants generally receive a "minimum food wage" of $2.13 per hour, much lower than the actual minimum wage of $12, depending on the state one lives in. This rule is stated in the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the law presumes that servers will be able to make up for the difference between this food wage and minimum wage through customers' tips.
So, what is the general rule of thumb when it comes to tipping etiquette? Perhaps, one may have been accustomed to the 10-15-20 principle in which 10% is the base tip, 15% is for decent service, and 20% is for excellent service, but times have changed. Nowadays, people are expected to tip at least 20%. But this isn't the no. 1 mistake people make when tipping. Andersen asserts that it's tipping strictly based on the total amount of the bill.
We are presented with four different scenarios in which the customer either makes use of discounts, coupons, or other benefits that cause them to pay lower on their tab, or are given free food or drinks as a service from the kitchen.
In these cases, Jan Goss, an etiquette expert, suggests that the best way to keep in step with proper tipping etiquette, one should always consider the actual total amount of the bill had such discounts or rebates not been used, as well as adding the amount of the free food or drinks to the total amount on the bill, and then tipping from that.
Another thing to note is that some people would tip based on the pre-tax amount on their bill. Goss states that it's best practice to always calculate tips based on the total amount after-tax.
Despite these practices being the custom, there is an argument about the tipping culture becoming a bit too overwhelming these days. However, Goss contends that servers should not have to bear the brunt of the dissatisfaction people might have on excesses of tipping culture.
Many servers work hard to earn an honest living, and if customers can help alleviate that burden and show gratitude at the same time, then that would be quite swell. Otherwise, it might mean that the law needs to be revised to either abolish this "minimum food wage" or at the very least, raise it so that neither the customer nor the servers have to bear this heavy burden.
If you have ever searched for RAM to upgrade your PCs, then you might have noticed that most RAM circuit boards, if stripped bare, are colored green. Many brands now try to add some fancy covers on the circuit board, but at its core, their usually green in color. Why is that?
Although there are technical details to the manufacturing of these circuit boards, especially regarding the type of materials used to make them, the main reason why companies went for a green color on the circuit boards is due to the need for high contrast to make quality control faster and easier for inspectors.
Most of the chips and circuits are dark in color, so manufacturers tried to mix pigments to improve the contrast. Initially, because of the resin, the boards were brown, and then, they tried adding red and blue pigments which just resulted in first, a rusty color, and then a darker brown.
Until finally, they found a nice contrast by mixing blue and yellow pigments, which gave a dark green, satisfying the criteria for high contrast and reducing eye strain for inspectors. Evolutionary biologists suggest that the reason why humans are more receptive to the green color was so that they could navigate the forests and jungles back in the day.
The adoption of green became more standard when the US military requested manufacturers to make the circuit boards green, which spilled over to commercial circuit boards, and so, it has been used to this day.
The only reason why this might change is the fact that getting the green color results in toxic fumes being released, causing harm to the environment. Some manufacturers offer "halogen-free" circuit boards, but the dominance of the green circuit boards won't seem to be challenged anytime soon.
