Angelika Graswald loved the outdoors and taking photos of the places she has been and the things that she has done. While out on a kayaking trip with her fiance, a tragedy had befallen them. Her fiance lost control of his kayak, fell over the water, and disappeared into the Hudson River. It was not until a month later when they recovered his body but it had all been too late, he had already drowned. As she set up a memorial for late fiance, police had already been investigating on Vincent Viafore's death and had considered Graswald as the prime suspect. After an interrogation with her, they cuffed her and sent her to jail. Now, she's out on parole and wants to clear things up.
When Tunisians started to become obsessed with drinking tea in the 1920s and 1930s, some French doctors had become alarmed that it might cause the collapse of Tunisian society. Today, the drink is still quite popular and locals often drink it many times a day. This was the reason why the French feared the tea craze back then:
French publications named this phenomenon “teaism,” a medical diagnosis that had already been established in the 19th century, and ascribed it, somewhat bizarrely, both to an innate lack of self-control in all (uneducated) Tunisians, and to them preparing the “wrong” kind of tea in the “wrong” way. In 1941, the French doctor Edmond Sergent described in several scientific articles how Tunisians, instead of adding fresh tea leaves to already boiling water, added used leaves to the water as it boiled, creating a harmful, tar-like drink. Sergent also argued that Tunisians’ black tea was more dangerous than Moroccan green tea, which explained why cases of teaism were rare in Morocco, despite Morocco’s tea consumption being much higher.
Now, one can safely assume that this is not everything that there is to the panic about the tea craze. It actually has more to do with "social fears and economic concerns".
For the most part, humans would generally try to look for some comfort food when they are stressed and a big chunk of people crave sweets, though I have met some who would rather have something salty when they want to relieve stress. But what is the reason behind craving these comfort food when we are under some pressure?
Although our brain accounts for just 2 percent of our body weight, the organ consumes half of our daily carbohydrate requirements—and glucose is its most important fuel. Under acute stress the brain requires some 12 percent more energy, leading many to reach for sugary snacks.
Uncertainty is part of living in our world and we can never erase the risk of being involved in an unforeseen circumstance that would eventually lead to someone's death or even our own. So we tend to worry about things that we don't even have the assurance of happening apart from the things that we know are going to happen like bills to pay, mortgage, unemployment, and civil strife among other things. But there are certain things that we shouldn't bother worrying about like these three things that Lise A. Johnson and Eric Chudler listed down as part of their book, "Worried?".
Since its establishment as a national park in 1919, the Grand Canyon has witnessed many changes throughout the past century. Many people have treaded its paths and hiked its trails. Seasons came and went, and much has definitely changed. But what's in store for the Grand Canyon National Park in the next century? Experts weigh in on what they think the challenges and issues that it would face.
A new study conducted by NASA could show how the ingredients of life might have formed billions of years ago. And in doing so, they hope to find the same conditions present in other worlds in the universe that could have given birth to life and consequently, we might get a clue as to where we can find extraterrestrial life within and beyond our galaxy.
Astrobiologist Laurie Barge and her team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are working to recognize life on other planets by studying the origins of life here on Earth. Their research focuses on how the building blocks of life form in hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor.
To re-create hydrothermal vents in the lab, the team made their own miniature seafloors by filling beakers with mixtures that mimic Earth's primordial ocean. These lab-based oceans act as nurseries for amino acids, organic compounds that are essential for life as we know it. Like Lego blocks, amino acids build on one another to form proteins, which make up all living things.
As opposed to the belief that the ancient Cambodian city of Angkor was abandoned all of a sudden due to military defeat, researchers suggest that the city was gradually forsaken by its people.
New sediment analyses indicate that the city’s ruling elites gradually abandoned Angkor starting in the early 1300s, researchers report online February 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
That’s when geologic signs of human activity began to decline at Angkor Thom, a walled city within Greater Angkor, the team found. Evidence of burning, forest disturbances and soil erosion from farming — gleaned from remnants of plants, pollen and minerals that had accumulated from the surrounding area in sediment taken from Angkor Thom’s moat — decreased throughout the 1300s, say geoscientist Dan Penny of the University of Sydney and his colleagues.
Despite contrary opinion, it's pretty obvious that humans are the ones who caused climate change and all the environmental destruction that has happened on Earth. Scientists are not making it up because there is overwhelming evidence that supports the fact.
According to the research by scientists at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, that’s because climate data has now reached a so-called “gold standard” of scientific evidence — there’s only a one in a million chance that ongoing climate change could have been caused by anything other than humanity, reports Reuters.
Having a gold standard of scientific evidence is no small matter. The processes involved are rigorous and the criteria are set quite high with stringent measures to test whether the data is accurate. So we can be certain that climate change is not caused by some external factor apart from human activity. However, scientists still consider some degree of uncertainty but it is very minimal in the case of climate change.
The new analysis looked at the three largest satellite data sets used by climate scientists. It shows that two of those data sets reached the gold standard of certainty that humanity causes climate change back in 2005, and the third did in 2016.
James Fulton had been convicted of criminally negligent homicide when his white Dodge pickup crashed into Haile Beasley's Ford Focus killing her. Detectives who investigated the case had dismissed it as an accident since they argued "it did not meet the threshold for criminal prosecution." But the family of Haile Beasley saw it in a different light.
James had admitted that he had drunk several ounces of beer at dinner though he did not seem impaired after the whole thing occurred. He also passed a sobriety test but refused to have his blood drawn and the officers also decided against getting a search warrant for the blood draw. With this in mind, the Beasleys pursued a case against Fulton which led to the whole drama of whether it was an accident or a crime.
Moderating content online has become a necessity for social networks as more people are experiencing the negative impacts of inappropriate or disturbing content posted on these platforms. However, filtering the posts of individual users is a big challenge. For Facebook alone, looking into every post that their 2.3 billion active users make each day would take up too much time. Enforcing their policies and guidelines can also have a double-sided effect. They have to balance free speech and anything that resembles hateful or racist remarks, discrimation, bullying, and other blatantly damaging content. But they also need to look into the context of posts, otherwise they would face backlash from users for removing a post that they believe does not express any intent to harm. So the life of a Facebook moderator is harsh and difficult, and here are some stories that detail its risks and potential danger to the lives of people working in this business.
There are several mysteries that wrap the Great Pyramids of Giza such as how they were built without modern technology. But one particular secret captivated Glen Dash, an archaeologist and engineer. He wanted to know how the Egyptians were able to align the pyramids perfectly with a margin of error that is rotated slightly counter-clockwise from the cardinal points. Several theories on how this was done exist however, Dash has a much simpler method which he thinks could explain the phenomenon.
His recent research suggests that the Egyptians roughly 4,500 years ago could have used the autumnal equinox to achieve perfect alignment.
The equinox is regarded as the moment twice a year when the plane of Earth's equator passes through the centre of the Sun's disc, and the length of day and night are pretty much equal.
Previously equinox measurements had been overlooked as a possible alignment method, as it was assumed it wouldn't provide enough accuracy.
But Dash's latest work show that there's a way this could have worked - using a rod known as a gnomon.
Beauty standards and practices change over time and across different cultures around the world. One of the ancient Chinese practices that defined what beauty entailed for women was foot binding. This practice resulted in women having lotus feet. Not only was it a standard of beauty but it was a status symbol as well since not all women had the luxury of having their foot bound. Recently, researchers were able to excavate bones of elite women whom they believe experienced foot binding.
Historians and economists are still publishing papers investigating the factors that influenced foot-binding, as the motivations behind the practice seem to be complex and not simply about enforcing beauty standards. One recent study in the journal PLOS ONE showed that foot-binding, in the early 20th century at least, was linked to high productivity among girls and women in craft industries like weaving and embroidering textiles, which contradicts a conventional assumption that the practice was a fetishistic custom that continued despite the economic burden it placed on families.
You don't have to experience the practice in order to see how extremely painful this form of body modification is. And looking at the excavated bones, the researchers discovered the extent of what foot binding does.
The researchers noticed that the women's metatarsals, which are the long bones in the arch of the foot, and the few surviving toe bones had been dramatically altered. However, compared with the few known later cases of foot-bound skeletons, the ones found at Yangguanzhai had tarsal bones around the heel that were not as clearly altered, though they were slightly reduced in size, Berger said. "That suggests there might have been an increase in how extreme the binding was over time during the Qing Dynasty," she said.
Today, the practice has died out as a result of campaigns against it and only a few women who had their foot bound are still living today.
With the possibility of life having been present on Mars and other planets, astronomers and astrophysicists are still searching for actual evidence of extraterrestrial civilization. So far, there have not been any signs of alien lifeforms inhabiting other planets in the galaxy but there is no discounting the possibility of there being some that exist. A research team has tried to explain why we haven't seen any aliens or technosignatures from outer space yet and they looked through the lens of the Fermi Paradox and tried giving a more nuanced explanation to it by considering the possiblities laid out by Fact A.
Sergei Krikalev was launched into space during a time when the Soviet Union was seeing cracks in their political and economic system. But up and away he went, sent to do repairs on Mir, the Soviet space station. Two others came along with him, Anatoli Artsebarski and Helen Sharman, Britain's first astronaut. Eight days later, Sharman returned back to earth with the crew who would be replaced by Krikalev and Artsebarski. Five months after that, Artsebarski would go home as well, leaving Krikalev alone in Mir. During his time in space, Krikalev would be oblivious from all the turmoil happening in his country, and the long separation would see him coming back to a whole different world, 311 days after he launched into space.
In a recent experiment, scientists have observed how a single-celled algae evolved and developed multicellular structures in response to predators. This study aims to test the hypothesis that evolution of simple organisms to more complex ones may have been brought about by predation. Here is an excerpt of their discussion in the paper:
Our results show that the transition to a simple multicellular life cycle can happen rapidly in response to an ecologically relevant selective pressure. By increasing in size beyond the “predation threshold” of a filter-feeding predator, multicellular C. reinhardtii that evolved from an ancestrally unicellular lineage are protected from predation for at least part of their life cycle. Under selection for increased size, formation of multicellular structures may be an easier route than increasing cell size because of trade-offs imposed by scaling relationships (chiefly the reduction in surface-area-to-volume ratio), because more mutational paths are available, and/or because available mutations have fewer or less severe pleiotropic effects.
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