This mosaic of the Red Planet released by the European Space Agency (ESA) is made up of many images taken by the agency’s Mars Express spacecraft. These images were then stitched together, resulting in this highly detailed mosaic.

It indeed is a magnificent image.

(Image Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

Naomi Klein, an author and activist, in her book On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal, states that we are all "sleepwalking toward apocalypse." Her new book, which is a collection of reports, public talks, and essays, demands that a radical action be made in order to save our dying planet.

If we don’t end carbon emissions quickly, the future of our planet is in serious jeopardy. According to the Green New Deal, which Klein co-authored, America has ten years to do it. A burgeoning youth movement recognizes the dire situation. On September 20, 2019, youth around the world organized climate strikes, demanding change. And while its leader Greta Thunberg, a 16-year old Swedish environmental activist whose autistic condition––she sees the climate situation in black and white––has illuminated the dissonance between the rise in global temperatures and the lack of political action, many of us simply turn our heads and look the other way.

Klein states that denying climate change is not actually about disputing science. Rather, it is about the fear of “the radical redistribution of power and wealth necessary to heal the planet.” She also argues that major issues like gender, race, economic inequality, climate change, and corporate overreach should not be seen in a compartmentalized manner. She believes that since these issues are inextricably interwoven, “only a holistic approach to equalizing society will suffice”.

Hope Reese of JSTOR Daily spoke to Klein regarding this matter. See the interview over at the site.

(Image Credit: TheDigitalArtist/ Pixabay)

There has been a continuously increasing volume of data which has demonstrated that victimization, the clinical term for bullying, affects hundreds of millions of children and adolescents which can sometimes last for years and even decades. This is seen as a global health challenge by the World Health Organization and the United Nations. However, researchers maintain there is still a limited understanding of how this act can affect the developing brain physically.

Most of the research into the neurobiological processes that might contribute to these negative health outcomes has occurred in the past decade, much of it focused on bullying’s impact on the body’s stress response system. A paper published last December in the journal Molecular Psychiatry sheds some light on a different area: brain architecture. The trauma stemming from chronic bullying can affect the structure of the brain, according to longitudinal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data collected by an international team based at King’s College London. The findings echo previous research, which has demonstrated similar changes in children and adults who experienced what’s known as “child maltreatment” — neglect or abuse by adult caregivers.

Long-term changes to the brain’s structure and chemistry are an indicator “of how sinister bullying is” says Tracy Vaillancourt, a developmental psychologist at the University of Ottawa. Along with others in the field, she is hopeful that studies like the one from King’s College will be a catalyst for further research which could ultimately be used to inform policy decisions and support anti-bullying interventions.

Find out more details about this study over at Undark.

(Image Credit: ElisaRiva/ Pixabay)

The engineer, Seth Vargo, pulled his open-source code off Github when he found out that the company using his code worked with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. With him pulling off his code from the repository hosting device, the company, enterprise software company Chef, discovered that without Vargo’s code, their business stopped working.

Vargo had worked for the Seattle-based company, but he didn’t know about the contract with ICE until tech writer Shanley Kane tweeted about it on Monday. ICE, which was formed under the presidency of George W. Bush in 2003, has stirred protests as it ratcheted up deportation and family separation policies under President Donald Trump.

Vargo reached out to Chef executives to better understand their rationale for the ICE contract, but got no response for three days. “It became apparent that they had no interest in acknowledging their partnership with ICE — the organization best known for tearing apart families and locking children in cages,” Vargo wrote in a text conversation with The Verge.

… he decided to pull the open-source project off Github. He knew the company would notice, but he was surprised to find out it relied on his code so heavily that it began experiencing significant downtimes at once.

More details of this news over at The Verge.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Comfreak/ Pixabay)

props to the Google Engineer who yanked code from Chef for working with ICE. You've made my job harder today, but I really don't mind.

— marea rosa (@smrt_fasizmu) September 19, 2019

From the origin of the word “muggle”, to what Voldermort’s name means, and how the term “horcrux” came to be, this video lists 30 words in the Harry Potter universe and what their origins are. But I guess you already know all of this if you’re a hardcore fan of the series.

Via Mental Floss

(Video Credit: Mental Floss/ YouTube)

If there was something in life that can’t be brought back whatever we do, it would be time, and according to some studies, people who value this over money tend to be much happier. A new research published in the journal Science Advances further proves this, stating that new graduates who value time and money are more likely to go after things they truly enjoy, which include “hobbies, social relationships, internships, and careers that provide intrinsic satisfaction.”

Researchers asked 1,000 graduating students at the University of British Columbia to rate how satisfied they felt with their lives overall, and the extent to which they had experienced positive emotions (like joy and happiness) and negative emotions (like sadness and stress) over the past four weeks. A year later, the graduates were surveyed again.

In both surveys, about 62% of them said they value time more than money, and those people were happier. Comparing the time-money trade-off to other well-established happiness factors, the researchers found that valuing time over money brought double the magnitude of happiness related to materialism in general and happiness known to accrue from high parental income. And while the study does not prove cause and effect, it suggests that valuing time over money can also predict how happy the graduates become as adults. The graduates in the study came from families with incomes ranging from low to high, but family socioeconomic status was not predictive of their tendency to prioritize time or money.

See more of this study over at Medium.com.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Bru-nO/ Pixabay)

The brain ages with a person, and that’s a fact. Over time, its performance deteriorates, and a person’s life is deeply affected as he faces difficulty in many cognitive processes such as recalling things and paying attention.

At some point in our 20s or 30s, something starts to change in our brains. They begin to shrink a little bit. The myelin that insulates our nerves begins to lose some of its integrity. Fewer and fewer chemical messages get sent as our brains make fewer neurotransmitters.

As we get older, these processes increase. Brain weight decreases by about 5 percent per decade after 40. The frontal lobe and hippocampus — areas related to memory encoding — begin to shrink mainly around 60 or 70. But this is just an unfortunate reality; you can't always be young, and things will begin to break down eventually. That's part of the reason why some individuals think that we should all hope for a life that ends by 75, before the worst effects of time sink in.

However, it seems that some people’s brains aren’t affected by the effects of time, and, even more amazing, they can perform just as well as people in their 20s. They are called “super-agers.” How is this phenomenon possible? Scientists went to find out.

More details of this one over at Big Think.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: StockSnap/ Pixabay)

We are born in a difficult time, and I know most of us would agree with me on this one. Aside from our own personal problems that we deal with everyday, we are also bombarded with problems in our respective communities, and, last but not least, issues on a global scale.

One of the problems that plague the whole world is climate change, an issue which makes us ourselves: How should a person live in order to cope up with the major environmental change happening around him?

You might be surprised at how the wisdom of the philosophers from the ancient world can help us navigate our lives in these tough times.

Find out more about this over at The Conversation.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Most of us are unaware of our mistakes, but, for some reason, we can spot somebody else’s mistakes from a mile away. 

Today, our dumbness can be broadcast faster than ever because of the Internet. A subreddit called “Crappy Designs” is dedicated to, well, designs so dumb it’s so hard not to notice.

Check out 30 of this epic restaurant and bar design fails over at BoredPanda.

(Image Credit: BoredPanda)

As part of its McDelivery Night In promotion, fast food company McDonald’s enters the fast fashion world “with a line of free swag,'' which include Yoga pants covered with Big Macs and french fries, joggers striped with the Mcdonald’s color scheme, and a hoodie. Where’s the irony?

To get your hands on the limited-edition swag, place a delivery order from McDonald’s through Uber Eats on September 19 starting at 5 p.m. Order at least $10 worth of Big Macs, Filet O Fish, Quarter Pounders, or french fries (or whatever) from one of the many, many participating locations. (The map is here.)

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: McDonald’s)

The fires engulf the Amazon rainforest, as the smoke rises up into the sky. Brazil’s indigenous Manoki watch helplessly as the flames tear their places apart.

“The fires did irreversible damage to the places we hunt and collect medicine. Huge trees that took centuries to grow have been cut and burned,” tribe member Giovani Tapura, 38, told VICE News from the Amazon’s smaller Irantxe Indigenous Territory, where the Manoki live.

As much as they fear losing their hunting grounds, Tapura and other Manoki also fear losing their very own language, which could mean the end for their cultural heritage.

It was already on the cusp of extinction, between population loss from Portuguese massacres and disease, and missionaries forbidding Manoki to speak their language. Of the 400 remaining Manoki left in Brazil, only eight speak the tribe’s native language, also called Manoki, according to Tapura.

[...]

They are far from alone with this problem: There are nearly 1 million indigenous Brazilians living in the Amazon, speaking roughly 200 languages, and almost half are endangered. The Amazon fires encroaching on many of their territories are heightening fears that if indigenous groups are driven out of the Amazon and forced into cities, their languages will go extinct.

Know more about this saddening news over at Vice.

(Image Credit: AP Photo/Leo Correa/ Vice.com)

You may have heard (and probably have seen) the viral memes about storming Nevada’s famed Area 51, which aim to discover the secrets that lurk inside the facility. 

The US Air Force has already warned the general public that it will defend the area at all costs, and has discouraged people from storming the place.

For decades, the American imagination has run wild conjuring up all sorts of conspiracy theories about what is really going on at the site.

Is it a place where the US government is hiding UFOs and aliens? Or is it just a boring military base? And if it’s just a boring military base, why is the US government so obsessed with keeping everything about it a secret?

To get some answers to the questions about Area 51, without risking himself from getting shot at by the US military, Alex Ward of Vox called up Annie Jacobsen, author of the book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base.

To write the book, Jacobsen interviewed over 70 people who had first-hand knowledge of the secret facility, including 32 who lived and worked at Area 51. The result is basically the most comprehensive account of the history of Area 51 you can get without a super-high-level security clearance.

If anyone had answers for me, it was her. And boy did she. But she also left me with new mysteries I hadn’t even known to ask about.

Check out the interview over at the site.

(Image Credit: MartinStr/ Pixabay)

We usually use Google Maps to view the places we’ve been to before. These places can be our childhood neighborhood, or any place that have been memorable to us and have been a part of us at some point in our lives. But Google Maps isn’t limited to that; it has many more uses we might not realize. Gizmodo lists 9 ways we can use the Google Maps Street View.

One of these uses is checking out tricky intersections:

This is one we do all the time—checking out the layout of tricky city intersections before a road trip, to be sure we know where we’re going. Even with the best mapping technology on your phone, it can be all too easy to get lost driving across multiple lanes and multiple intersections when you’re in a strange city, and even more so abroad. Check out the intersection on Street View first, and you at least know what’s coming your way.

Check out the others over at the site.

(Image Credit: Tumisu/ Pixabay)

JAPAN — Amidst one of Ginza’s many backstreets lies an L-shaped plot of land. This plot of land, which remained vacant for 3 years and hidden by the shadows of the tall buildings surrounding it, is only 2.7 meters wide (around 9 feet). Eventually, a developer stepped in.

The developer teamed up with So Teruuchi of SO&CO to create one of the district’s most skinniest buildings. Due to the nature of the property, the architect was faced with several constraints: not only did they have to leave enough room for scaffolding but they couldn’t fit any heavy machinery into the plot. So everything had to be done by hand.

But the result is a surprisingly minimal and elegant 4-story building. Unlike many people’s perception of a high-end and ritzy Ginza, the majority of backstreets are filled with drab, nondescript office buildings. This structure stands out like a gem. Titled “Ginza Tenant Building,” it was completed in early 2019.

Check out the interior of the building over at Spoon & Tamago.

(Image Credit: Takumi Ota/ SO&CO)

Aboard his vessel named Force of Habit, Captain Daryl Dunham recently caught this peculiar lobster in Stonington, Maine. It’s a little speckled on one side, and creamsicle-orange on the other, and an unnaturally straight line meets both of these sides right down at the middle. What’s going on with this lobster?

Lobsters can be a variety of colors, from brown to blue to yellow, depending on the proteins that bind to astaxanthin, a carotenoid pigment, says Richard Wahle, director of the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine. “A variety a proteins bind with astaxanthin and mask it to varying degrees,” he says, resulting in that wide spectrum of possibilities. (When a lobster of any shade is steamed or plunged into scalding water, it will turn red, he adds.)

A two-toned exoskeleton like this one is not new to science. Back in 1959, researchers at the Smithsonian Institution and University of New Hampshire trawled through past papers and discussed specimens that were, among other mashed-up palettes, “half normal color and half light sky blue” and “half greenish black and half light orange.” And these colorways can be a clue that something else is going on, too. “Split-color lobsters are often also split sexes,” Wahle says.

Find out more about this on Atlas Obscura.

(Image Credit: Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries)