There are different people groups that inhabit the arctic regions of Canada, Siberia, Alaska, and Greenland. And none of them refer to themselves as "Eskimos". It's an outsider term which may be considered "racist" or "offensive". Rather the proper name for these people groups is "Inuit" though there are also various Arctic groups apart from the Inuits such as the Aleut, Nunavut, and Yupik. So where does the term "Eskimo" come from and why has it been used to refer to people who live in the Arctic regions? Read more on Popula.

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Nuclear physics, particularly fission, may not have been discovered without Lise Meitner, but history seems to have forgotten about her. Of course, we all know the history of sexism in all fields but science has probably been one of the most affected by it. Most of the discoveries made by female scientists have been attributed to their male contemporaries despite the idea originating from the women. The same was true for Meitner.

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The explosion of a supernova is a magnificent sight. It emits an incredible amount of energy as well as dust particles that would drift off into space. Supposedly, a supernova's blast waves should destroy everything in its path but a new observation by astronomers with SOFIA show the opposite.

The new study is based on observations of a nearby supernova explosion, called Supernova 1987A. When it was discovered in 1987, it was one of the brightest supernovae seen in 400 years! Due to its close proximity, astronomers have been able to monitor its impact on the surrounding environment continuously for the past 30 years.

SOFIA’s observations of the iconic supernova suggest dust may actually be forming in the wake of the powerful blast wave. These results are helping astronomers solve the mystery surrounding the abundance of dust in our galaxy.

(Image credit: ESA/NASA/Hubble)

Public opinion is almost always influenced by certain biases especially when it has something to do with controversial scientific research like genetically modified food. There is a massive gap that separates the public's perception of the safety and credibility of GMOs and GM foods compared to that of the scientific community. However, are the public's opinions on such matters credibe in themselves? It turns out, they're not as well informed as they would think.

Unlike some subjects where this divide between layperson and expert opinion is heavily mediated by politics, such as climate change caused by human activity — in the U.S. and elsewhere, conservatives are far less likely to believe in it than are liberals and climate scientists — the GM-food divide doesn’t really have a political dimension: Liberals, centrists, and conservatives are all about equally likely to have what are, from the point of view of experts, unfounded fears about the safety of GM foods.

To better understand the source of these fears, a team led by Philip M. Fernbach, a professor at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder, surveyed nationally representative samples in America, Germany and France, and other online participants, about their views on both GM foods and climate change, tested their knowledge on these subjects by asking them to answer factual questions, and also asked them to gauge their perceived level of knowledge on those subjects.

What they found from their study can be summed up by its title: "Extreme opponents of genetically modified foods know the least but think they know the most."

(Image credit: Fernbach et al)

Though this piece of news is not yet a cause for celebration but it is one step closer to giving amputees hope of regaining their past life. To be clear, amputees are capable of doing whatever they set their sights on just as much as people with complete limbs but if they were given a chance to have their limbs grow back, then they probably wouldn't hesitate to try it.

Scientists have found that two proteins responsible for bone growth and joint formation can help regenerate amputated limbs. They tested it out on mice whose toes had been amputated and after three days of applying the protein, the mice recovered 60% of their lost limbs from the stump bones.

The result was more effective when the team treated the wounds first with BMP2 and then BMP9 a week later. Not only did the bones regrew, they also formed more complete joint structures with part of the new bones attached to them. Although the method does not yet produce a full toe.

“Our study is transformational,” says Muneoka. He suggests this experiment proves that even though mammals can’t regenerate body parts, we have cells that know how to and what to grow. “They can do it, they just don’t do it. So, we have to figure out what’s constraining them,” he says.

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Couples, sweethearts, and people who want to express their love for someone give chocolates, flowers, and all the sweet, merry gifts you can think of on Valentines Day. If you didn't have someone to give something to, then you just go on with your life. But back in the 1800s, people were more up front with their feelings, even to those they hate.

If you detested someone so vehemently, then you would give them the opposite of what you would send your lover or a sweetheart. These are called vinegar valentines or comic valentines. People did not hold back what they thought of their sworn enemies. From subtly rude to downright, blatant cruelty, these vinegar valentines are relentless. Whether it be rejection or creative, verbal insults, they don't hold back on anything.

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Sometimes we do things that we just feel like doing without knowing the significance of what we are doing. Edwin Smith was in a similar situation. He was an Egyptologist and he happened upon a papyrus scroll which he thought would be relevant to what he was doing. Looking at it, he couldn't really decipher what it meant. He held onto it until his death in 1906, at which point, his daughter donated it to the New York Historical Society. Only then did they realize what the papyrus was.

The Edwin Smith Papyrus is a medical document—the world’s oldest surviving text book on surgery. It was created in around 1600 BCE, but careful examination of the writing reveals that the document is only a copy of an even older medical treatise believed to have been written around 3000-2500 BCE. The scribe who copied the Edwin Smith Papyrus from the earlier document in the 17th century BC made many errors, some of which he corrected in the margins. Eventually, he pushed aside the document and left it incomplete, for reason which we may never know.

Even uncompleted, the Edwin Smith Papyrus was an important document because it showed for the first time that ancient Egyptians had a far greater knowledge of the human anatomy and medicine than previously thought of. Notably, it showed that the Egyptians’ understanding of traumatic injuries—which the Edwin Smith Papyrus deals with extensively—was based on observable anatomy rather than relying on magic or potion.

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Space exploration has been trying to get itself more and more commercialized with the idea of sending ordinary citizens to space. Mars One Ventures was a company that wanted to be the first to colonize Mars and they had very elaborate and expensive advertising campaigns for the venture. But currently, the idea of sending people who have not been professionally trained is farfetched to say the least. It's one of those crazy endeavors where you shoot for the moon and hope it lands. Unfortunately for Mars One, it crashed long before it even launched.

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Originally, Ultima Thule was modeled into the shape of a snowman, two round bodies stuck to one another, with one smaller than the other. But after some new data came in from New Horizons, scientists are changing that illustration to a flatter pancake-like image.

"We had an impression of Ultima Thule based on the limited number of images returned in the days around the flyby, but seeing more data has significantly changed our view," the mission's principal investigator, Alan Stern, said in a news release. "It would be closer to reality to say Ultima Thule's shape is flatter, like a pancake. But more importantly, the new images are creating scientific puzzles about how such an object could even be formed. We've never seen something like this orbiting the Sun."

Read more on Ars Technica.

(Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI)

Furthering the study of meteorology in the Victorian era was a struggle for scientists as the credibility of their proposed method - using a hot air balloon - had been plagued with such stigma that doing so would risk their reputation in the scientific community, not to mention getting scoffed at by spectators. It was an interesting idea but the method itself had to face certain challenges that would prove difficult to gather empirical evidence. Read more on Jstor.

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A new paper is challenging the idea that eating meat was a critical factor in the evolution of humans. Fats which could be derived from the marrow from skeletal remains of large animals, became an important precedent for humans to develop bigger brains.

“Our ancestors likely began acquiring a taste for fat 4 million years ago, which explains why we crave it today,” says Jessica Thompson, the paper’s lead author and an anthropologist at Yale University. “The reservoirs of fat in the long bones of carcasses were a huge calorie package on a calorie-poor landscape. That could have been what gave an ancestral population the advantage it needed to set off the chain of human evolution.”

(Image credit: Scitech Daily)

Particularly, where would we find sources of food when we are migrating from Earth to an exoplanet, a trip which would essentially take thousands of years to make? We can take inspiration from movies like Passengers and The Martian, specifically the latter where Matt Damon's character grew food. The idea is simply to grow a farm inside the spaceship that would sustain all the basic needs of the crew.

But how much space would you need aboard a spaceship in order to build a farm? Frederic Marin, an astronomer at the Astronomical Observatory of Strasbourg in France, along with his colleagues tried to calculate that and this is what they found:

For a crew of 500 people with omnivorous diets, just 0.45 square kilometres would be enough to feed them all. This assumes that fruits, vegetables, starch, sugar, and oil would be produced using aeroponic techniques, which allow plants to grow without soil, while conventional farming would produce meat, fish, dairy, and honey.

Read more on Cosmos Mag.

(Image credit: NASA/JPL)

Beer before wine and you'll feel fine, wine before beer and you'll feel queer. That makes no sense at all, at least from the point of view of science. Or common sense. No matter how we look at it, when we drink too much alcohol, it would definitely give us a hangover especially if our system can't handle it. Sure, there are people who can drink multiple glasses of liquor without feeling awful the next morning. But that's not because they drank beer before wine.

"We didn't find any truth in the idea that drinking beer before wine gives you a milder hangover than the other way around," lead study author Jöran Köchling, of Witten/Herdecke University in Germany, said in a statement. "The truth is that drinking too much of any alcoholic drink is likely to result in a hangover."

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Lucky honeymooners who have spent a night in the honeymoon suite of a hotel in Chester in the United Kingdom would be surprised to discover that the bed they had slept on was the famed Bed of Roses.

In it, the nuptial frolics of King Henry VII and Elizabeth of York celebrated the end of the Wars of the Roses (during which King Richard III died) and birthed England's famed Tudor dynasty.

The bed's former identity came to light after it was retired from the hotel and discarded in a parking lot. It was rescued by an antiques dealer who listed it as "a profusely carved Victorian four poster bed with armorial shields," according to a description from a symposium about the bed's history, held on Jan. 21 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

(Image credit: The Langley Collection)

Though it is true that the downfall of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera would be a milestone achievement for the War on Drugs in the US, it also paradoxically has no significance whatsoever. That's because El Chapo was only one of the leaders of the Sinaloa cartel. Just one. There were others who led the organization. Cutting one head of the dragon wouldn't kill it completely when there are still other heads breathing.

So what does this whole trial mean going into the future? Well, it could give some important information regarding the cartel and its mechanisms, the structure, the backbone, the network. But then again, it would take much longer before the War on Drugs would come to an end. Still, this could be a critical step, small but it's one way going forward. Read more on Vanity Fair.

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