America has a rich history of music. One of the most influential genres that came out during mid-20th century was Motown music which would create such great classics from artists like The Jackson 5, Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder. Here is its history.

On 12 January 1959, the music sensation that changed America – and the world beyond it – was set in motion. Detroit-born 29-year-old Berry Gordy founded Tamla Records with an $800 loan from his family’s collective savings.

By the following year, he’d merge this into the Motown Record Corporation: an independent empire that would seal its genuinely iconic status, introducing legends including The Jackson 5; Diana Ross and The Supremes; Stevie Wonder; Smokey Robinson; Marvin Gaye; Martha and The Vandellas; The Commodores and many others among its hundreds of signings.

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Though we might be enjoying the fruits of technology and development of new devices and methods, several societies lived just as comfortably as we do now, given their social, cultural, and economic contexts. They had what they need and much more, so we can say that they aren't as undeveloped in relation to their contemporaries.

One such society is the Ohlone peoples which populated the San Francisco Bay Area centuries ago.

Five hundred years ago, this swath of northern California was populated by the Ohlone peoples, about 10,000 of whom lived in the stretch of land that we call the San Francisco Bay Area. So rich in plant and animal life was this region that the Ohlone were able to survive without farming or animal domestication; indeed, western explorers, when they eventually arrived, were amazed at the quantity of wild animal life.

Of course, everything changed once the colonizers, Spanish missionaries, arrived in America and began forcibly trying to convert the people. What followed is a struggle between the Western concept of civilization and the existing system of the peoples they occupied.

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In September 1982, thousands of teenagers filled the Stockholm park for no other reason other than to meet each other in person. How did this happen? They used a glitch in the Swedish national telephone system to connect with each other like we do today through the Internet. It didn't sit well with the police.

Since it all began with a group of ingenious teenagers who took advantage of a flaw in the design of the Swedish national telephone system in order to create an unofficial hotline, the chaos at the park became known as the heta linjen-upploppet: the hotline riot.

Decades before the popularization of the internet as a decentralized place for people to connect and ideas to proliferate, the Swedish hotline did the same, and in so doing marked a change in the country’s direction.

For the teens involved in this forgotten slice of history, it was just a small rebellion. But today it’s early proof that the seams of the public square were ready to burst, even in 1982, as soon as young people figured out that technology would allow it.

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Black holes suck everything that draws near its gravitational pull and in it, the environment feels like a vacuum. But what happens when a huge black hole spins at half the speed of light?

The crumbs left over from a supermassive black hole's recent meal have allowed scientists to calculate the monster's rotation rate, and the results are mind-boggling. The huge black hole, known as ASASSN-14li, is spinning at least 50 percent the speed of light, research team members said.

"This black hole’s event horizon is about 300 times bigger than the Earth," study co-author Ron Remillard, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said in a statement. (The event horizon is the limit beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole's gravitational clutches.)

"Yet the black hole is spinning so fast it completes one rotation in about two minutes, compared to the 24 hours it takes our planet to rotate," Remillard added.

ASASSN-14li was discovered in November 2014, after it tore apart a star that strayed too close. This dramatic event caused a flash of bright light, which was spotted by a system of optical telescopes called the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (hence the black hole's name).

(Image credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss; X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/D. Pasham et al: Optical: HST/STScI/I. Arcavi via Space)

Our blood is the most important part in our body that gives us life. Without it, our body will not receive the nutrients it needs to function properly. The importance of blood in our lives cannot be overstated and in her new book, Nine Pints, Rose George examines the history of blood and its connections to the origins of the earth and of life itself.

“The iron in our blood comes from the death of supernovas, like all iron on our planet,” she writes. “This bright red liquid ... contains salt and water, like the sea we possibly came from.” George charts the distance that our blood (as her title suggests, we contain, on average, between nine and eleven pints of it) travels in the body every day: some twelve thousand miles, “three times the distance from my front door to Novosibirsk.” Our network of veins, arteries, and capillaries is about sixty thousand miles long—“twice the circumference of the earth and more.”

Ancient peoples knew none of this biology, but they were certain of blood’s importance and fascinated by its mystery. For them, blood was something hidden—visible only when flowing from a wound, or during childbirth, miscarriage, and menstruation—so it became a symbol both of life and of death.

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The reason why we have the convenience of searching anything that we can possible think of online is due to the work of the Cambridge professor of computers and information, Karen Sparck Jones, who basically taught computers how to understand human language.

A self-taught programmer with a focus on natural language processing, and an advocate for women in the field, Sparck Jones also foreshadowed by decades Silicon Valley’s current reckoning, warning about the risks of technology being led by computer scientists who were not attuned to its social implications.

Sparck Jones’s seminal 1972 paper in the Journal of Documentation laid the groundwork for the modern search engine. In it, she combined statistics with linguistics — an unusual approach at the time — to establish formulas that embodied principles for how computers could interpret relationships between words.

Know more about her extraordinary life and work on the New York Times.

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Churchill. Roosevelt. Stalin. Three names etched in the history books and some of the most famous names that came out of the WWII era. They were the leaders of three nations under the Allied Powers yet their relationship as allies is more suspect than anything.

National Geographic gets an inside scoop with Winston Groom who studied and wrote about the history between these three unlikely allies in his new book, The Allies.

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When we think about evolution, the phrase that comes to mind is always "the survival of the fittest." Only the strong can thrive and live on, produce offspring and pass on their lineage and genetics to the next generation.

So function is the key concept that surpasses all objectives. Other things like aesthetics are not necessary for survival. But recently, scientists are shifting their view of beauty toward having a more functional aspect rather than simply an aesthetic.

Numerous species have conspicuous, metabolically costly and physically burdensome sexual ornaments, as biologists call them. Think of the bright elastic throats of anole lizards, the Fabergé abdomens of peacock spiders and the curling, iridescent, ludicrously long feathers of birds-of-paradise.

To reconcile such splendor with a utilitarian view of evolution, biologists have favored the idea that beauty in the animal kingdom is not mere decoration — it’s a code.

According to this theory, ornaments evolved as indicators of a potential mate’s advantageous qualities: its overall health, intelligence and survival skills, plus the fact that it will pass down the genes underlying these traits to its children.

Read more on The New York Times.

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The quest for dark matter has been long and arduous, trying to find a shred of its faint traces anywhere they think it could have been which led scientists to look for the elusive evidence under the earth's crust.

For many decades, the favored candidates for dark matter particles have been hypothetical shy things called weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. Many experiments search for them by looking for evidence that a WIMP has come by and knocked regular matter around. In this scenario, a WIMP would tap an atomic nucleus via the weak force.

After searching for these faint pings for decades, scientists have little hard evidence to show for it. Now a team of physicists in Poland, Sweden and the U.S. has another idea.

Look not to the germanium and the xenon and the scintillators in detectors buried beneath the earth’s crust, they argue: Look to the planet’s crust itself. In the rock record, where stories of our solar system’s past lay buried, we might find the fossilized recoil of startled atomic nuclei, the frozen footprints of a WIMP.

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If we try to fathom works of art, we might place different meanings to the elements on the canvas - the colors, the shapes, the brush strokes, the image created from the conglomeration of these - and in so doing, we might even read too much into it.

But in this collection of masterpieces, which include famous works like The Scream shown above and The Girl with the Pearl Earring, we will look closely to find some odd details that we may not have taken notice before.

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Looking at these worms is oddly satisfying in a way. They are called Lumbriculus variegatus, a black aquatic worm just half the size of a cigarette. And actually, they act in such an odd way as a defense mechanism, to adapt to their environment.

Tangled up in squishy masses that can be the size of a basketball or bigger, the worms are transformed into a pulsating ball versatile enough to squeeze through tubes, hold together and bounce off surfaces, or spread out or shrink depending on the conditions.

(Video credit: Science Mag)

With all that's happening on the earth, we already have enough to deal with but if we consider how interactions and phenomena that occur in space, then it might just dawn on us how inevitable the end of the world would be.

The topic of mass extinction through a supernova explosion has been explored for decades and a recent study suggests how it might have caused the extinction of large-bodied organisms.

The idea is that radiation from the distant cosmic explosions caused an epidemic of mutations and cancer in these huge organisms. It might sound far-fetched, but the idea of supernovas as a driver of extinctions is actually not new.

The idea of extinction by supernova-induced mutation was introduced by paleontologist Otto Schindewolf in the 1950s. Schindewolf believed that supernova radiation would bathe organisms and cause a lethal spike in mutations.

Various authors have explored extinction by radiation since then, but, as Steven D’Hondt points out in a comprehensive review of extraterrestrial extinction theories, few studies propose the same mechanism twice.

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With talk of NASA sending tourists to space, will the idea of sending ordinary, untrained civilians who would likely spend millions of dollars just to see a glimpse of space and what it feels like to be surrounded by the stars? The experience would be out of this world. But before all this hype came about, a man had already thought of the idea.

Twenty years ago, one man got a crazy idea: what if he started a loyalty program ... for space travel? But it turns out that space tourism is an industry perpetually on the brink of actually happening.

Read further to know about his story.

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Ancient texts have been studied and interpreted but there are still some that we don't understand. One such example would be the texts of the Indus civilization which existed 4,000 years ago in modern-day Pakistan and northwest India.

From this culture, archaeologists have recovered several thousand short inscriptions, most with just 4 or 5 signs. There is no consensus on how to read them, although dozens of speculative decipherments have been proposed over the past century.

Complicating efforts, the underlying language the script is tied to is disputed, and there are complex modern-day political ramifications to the question. Rival ethnic groups claim to descend from this once-great civilization and knowing its language would help cement cultural ties. Hence the reported threats to scholars immersed in the matter.

So why are these texts so elusive and is there a way for us to understand them?

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As much as our pollution and climate change destroy the oceans, there is one creature that can thrive in it: the jellyfish, and they are taking over the waters.

Jellyfish have been around for a half billion years. Now, pollution and climate change are allowing them to take over and choke the oceans.

That’s according to Juli Berwald, the author of “Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone,” according to a new interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation — a dire warning about how human activity has upset the natural ecosystem.

What makes these seemingly harmless and mesmerizing creatures so tenacious in the face of big threats to the ocean?

Jellyfish reproduce well in warmer waters, Berwald said, and they do well in polluted areas because they need less oxygen than other sea life. Exploding jellyfish populations have swept into power plants across the world — including two nuclear plants in Scotland — shutting down parts of the power grid, she said.

“One jellyfish scientist from Japan told me that the first threat to the electric system in Japan is earthquakes, but the second is jellyfish,” Berwald told ABC. “We are dealing with a ubiquitous creature.”

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