Expressing state of being is one of the first things anyone learns when learning a language. In English, the verb "to be" is the most basic verb you would encounter and need to have a good grasp of in order to express yourself and describe various things around you. But if we look into other languages, we will find that expressing that something exists does not necessarily take a verb form. And digging a bit deeper into this odd verb, we find some interesting facts that we probably don't know or take for granted.
During the Soviet regime, much of Western culture was banned from entering the country. Despite these restrictions, teenagers found a way to enjoy music being released in the West. They had to make their own records with scrapped materials. With ingenuity, they duplicated many albums and used X-ray films to press music onto the discs. These became known as "bone music" or "rib recordings".
Just as humans catch disease through physical contact or through the air, plants also have somewhat a similar dynamic. There are cases when the wind could carry a disease and spread it across a wide area which would start the plant epidemic. Soil, bugs, and rainwater may also become vessels for which diseases would infect other plants.
Many bacteria and some types of fungal spores also jump from leaf to leaf in splatters of rainwater, a plant’s version of a sneeze. These so-called rain-dispersed pathogens surround themselves in a slimy secretion called mucilage, which protects them but also prevents them from being picked up by wind. When a raindrop strikes an infected leaf, it scoops up the microorganisms, flinging them away in a ricocheting spray.
A devastating fungus called barley scald (Rhynchosporium commune) sweeps through fields in this way. So does septoria leaf blotch (Zymoseptoria tritici), which threatens wheat, and potato blackleg (Pectobacterium atrosepticum), a bacterium that stunts and kills plants. Now, however, modern imaging technologies are enabling researchers to precisely capture foliar sneezes, revealing intricate and unexpected patterns that could inform how farmers space plants or pair different kinds of crops to shield against these diseases.
No, Pluto is not being reinstated as one of the planets in our solar system but scientists are examining evidence that indicates a possiblity of the existence of Planet Nine. The definition of a planet is simply "a celestial body orbiting the sun, big enough for its gravity to make it round, and has dominated the surrounding objects in its neighborhood. Pluto did not satisfy the third requirement and so it was demoted to a dwarf planet. However, scientists are convinced that there is an object large enough to influence other objects around it with its gravitational field.
Much mystery still surrounds Denisova cave, where bone fragments from a hominin whom archaeologists called Denny were found. From that finding, they gleaned that Neanderthals and Denisovans had mingled, interacted, and interbred to produce mixed offspring. There is a possibility that the site was not only a place where these two groups converged but a whole host of other humans including modern humans.
In the cave’s younger deposits, archaeologists have uncovered tools and jewellery sculpted from the bones and teeth of deer and other animals that resemble artefacts associated with the first H. sapiens to reach Europe, during a period known as the Initial Upper Palaeolithic, which began roughly 50,000 years ago. The Russian archaeologists who led the cave’s excavation have proposed that the tools and jewellery were made by Denisovans and suggest that the group had the capacity for symbolic thinking. But archaeologists in the West tend to favour the idea that the artefacts were made by early modern humans, whose remains have been found at another Siberian site, Ust’-Ishim7, and date to the Initial Upper Palaeolithic.
It might take further digging and excavating before we uncover much of what lies in the cave but one thing is for certain, we have a treasure trove rich with information about the links in human history, different groups interaction with one another, and how those interactions turned out for each of their groups.
Better be watch out how much fatty foods you eat because you might experience the same case that a 39-year-old man had recently been diagnosed with, having too much fat in his blood that it became life-threatening. In fact, there was so much fat, or triglycerides, in his blood that it caused his blood to turn white. Doctors needed to manually draw out blood so that they could extract and reduce his triglyceride levels to normal. Reports by the doctors who handled his case say that his triglyceride levels were way beyond the normal, at 14,000 mg/dL.
Have you ever wondered how scientists come up with names for newly discovered things, whether in nature or in extraterrestrial objects and places? Well, there are interesting rules set up by the International Astronomical Union for new stuff in space, and for Saturn's moon Titan, they want it to be named after fantasy or science fiction places.
Richard Feynman was a well-loved and respected scientist who could be considered like a scientist for the laypeople, one who was able to make complex concepts that seemed so distant into something within reach for ordinary minds.
And though we might think that scientists and other intellectuals would not be able to understand how it feels to be an irrational human, that's simply not true. They are as human and vulnerable as the rest of us. He loved and lost just as we all have.
In the letter discovered by biographer James Gleick, we see how Feynman poured out his heart in a letter he wrote two years after his wife had died. Read it on Brain Pickings.
At some point during the Exploration era, the Dutch had reached a bargain trade with the British by giving Manhattan for one of the Banda islands in Indonesia, because of its nutmeg. The Dutch wanted to take a firm hold of the nutmeg monopoly and so considered that it was a worthy investment to exchange Manhattan for it. Unfortunately for the Dutch, Manhattan became one of the most bustling boroughs in New York while nutmeg depreciated in value. However, this account of what transpired back then was only scratching the surface of what truly happened or, rather why the Banda Islands became popular for its various spices, particularly nutmeg.
In light of the commercial space race, NASA has been making plans to build a space station that would become the gateway for people going to the moon. But they want to place it in a weird orbit. They call it the Near-Rectiliniar Halo Orbit. It seems complicated as the name it has been given but in simplistic terms, it looks like a parabola around the moon.
So many decisions come into play when you are thinking of doing something that would be unthinkable for you like say, bungee jumping off a high cliff or tower. Now, there is a moment just before you make the decision to jump off when your brain spikes up in activity. Researchers have recently been able to measure that split-second decision-making which was first coined in 1964 as bereitschaftspotential (BP) or the "readiness potential" in English.
The German and Austrian authors of the current study opted to have their subjects go bungee jumping in hopes of recording this readiness potential. While bungee jumping has its roots in an ancient ritual on the South Pacific island-nation of Vanuatu as a way to test one's courage, prior studies have shown it results in a sharp rise in concentrations of beta-endorphins right after jumping. (This spike is despite the fact that, the authors note, bungee jumping is statistically less life-threatening than more common activities like bicycling or dancing. Our impulse reactions are not rational.)
Long before commercial space flights were being talked about, the idea had already been floated during the 1960s when an Austrian journalist told a Vienna travel agency that he wanted to fly a Pan Am to the moon. Ridiculously as it sounded, they tried to fulfill that request and Pan Am jumped on that opportunity to do some publicity stunt.
The travel agency, presumably dumbfounded by this request, decided to simply do its job and make the ask: It forwarded the impossible request to the airline, the legend goes, where it attracted the attention of Juan Trippe, the notoriously brash and publicity-thirsty CEO of Pan American World Airways, the world’s most popular airline. Trippe saw a golden opportunity, and the bizarre request gave birth to a brilliant sales ploy that cashed in on the growing international obsession with human spaceflight: Pan Am was going to launch commercially operated passenger flights to the moon. Or, at least, that’s what it was going to tell everyone.
In hindsight, it’s beyond ludicrous. NASA wouldn’t land men on the moon for five more years; the promise of lunar getaways on a jetliner sounds like a marketing scam at worst, and the most preposterous extension of 1960s techno-optimism at best. And yet, in a striking parallel to today’s commercial space race, would-be customers put down their names on a waiting list for their chance to go to space, joining Pan Am’s “First Moon Flights” Club.
When it comes to handling PR crisis situations, he's the guy they call to fix them all. He is called the Master of Spin as he knows how to twist sentences and words such that he is not outright telling a lie neither is he telling the truth or facts. That's his job. To dispel the chaos coming from controversies and scandals. His name is Michael Sitrick.
Michael Sitrick, 71, is a public relations puppet master who has pulled the strings behind some of the biggest stories in media. Clients in that category have included Roy Disney during the ouster of Michael Eisner as CEO of the entertainment company; Food Lion, a grocery chain, during its fight against an ABC report about unsafe food-handling practices; Metabolife, accused of lying to the Food and Drug Administration about how ephedra can kill you; Patricia Dunn, during the Hewlett-Packard spying scandal; Lee Iacocca, during his life as Lee Iacocca; the Los Angeles Catholic archdiocese during the abuse cover-up scandal; American Apparel when it cut ties with creepy founder Dov Charney; R. Kelly, although not recently; and Harvey Weinstein.
Blind people may not necessarily see things non-visually impaired people do but in a sense both share a common experience of trying to understand abstract objects that have no physical correspondence. When we see color, we only identify if it is red or blue because we acquired that meaning as we grew up. When we something that exhibits that pigmentation, we associate this color or that color to it. But essentially, there is no one-to-one correspondence. It is only a meaning that we attach to something abstract. So, researchers attempted to understand the way blind people "see" or understand color in their study.
It seems like an episode taken out of your late night crime thriller shows but this mystery that has surrounded Yuba County for more than 40 years still confounds those who were involved. Nobody has solved the case of what happened to the four mentally disabled men who were found dead in a forest while the fifth member of their group is still reported as missing. The circumstances of this case was bizarre as one investigator said. There are several scenarios that might come to mind considering their situation but one particular possibility was that the fifth man had killed the other four. But there is no proof that supports it neither has the man turned up since 1978. Read part one and part two of this story.
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