‘Takotsubo syndrome (TTS) is known as “broken heart syndrome” and is characterised by a sudden temporary weakening of the heart muscles that causes the left ventricle of the heart to balloon out at the bottom while the neck remains narrow, creating a shape resembling a Japanese octopus trap, from which it gets its name. Since this relatively rare condition was first described in 1990, evidence has suggested that it is typically triggered by episodes of severe emotional distress, such as grief, anger or fear, with patients developing chest pains and breathlessness. It can lead to heart attacks and death.

Now, for the first time, researchers have systematically analysed data from the largest group of patients diagnosed with TTS worldwide, and found that some patients have developed the condition after a happy or joyful event; they have named it “happy heart syndrome”. …’

Source: Neuroscience Stuff

‘Stephanie Cegielski was in the Trump campaign from the beginning, first serving as communications director of the Make America Great Again Super PAC, then shutting down the PAC “in order to position him as the quintessential non-politician.”

Cegielski served as Trump’s communications director through the campaign, which, she says, no one intended to be a serious run at the White House — not even Trump. Rather, the goal was to take Trump to double-digit poll numbers and shake up the establishment, because Trump didn’t want to be president, he “just wants to be able to say that he could have run the White House.”

As Trump’s campaign success exceeded beyond everyone’s wildest speculation, Cegielski watched in horror as Trump talked himself into believing that he had what it took to run the nation. Even as this was happening, Cegielski was coming to appreciate that the campaign’s internal slogan, “Let Trump Be Trump,” was hiding the real truth: “Let Trump Help Trump.”

She discovered (later than she had any excuse to, really), that Trump was a self-serving monster who’d throw his own mother under the bus to secure even the smallest advantage for himself. Trump is a walking Dunning-Kruger effect, whose lack of self-awareness about his own limitations results in gaffe after gaffe. Combine this fatal, unknowing ignorance with his lack of compunction about harming others to help himself and you get a campaign where Trump’s most loyal followers are, one after another, sacrificed by Trump himself, who scapegoats them to make up for his shortcomings.

Cegielski’s realization that this would be the motif of a Trump presidency, with America itself standing in for the hapless interns that Trump has victimized on his race to the top, led her to “defect” and to warn Trump’s supporters that they’re creating a monster.

I fear that Cegielski’s revelations about Trump’s self-absorption and indifference to the welfare of others has been obvious to everyone who wasn’t a Trump supporter since day one, and that her note will do no good in convincing the faithful who’ve ignored so many other warnings to date.’

Source: Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

It’s “the worst bleaching ever seen on what was the healthiest part of the Great Barrier Reef,” Dr. Mark Eakin, the Coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch, told me. “It’s quite sad.”Australia, he says, “may lose half of their healthiest corals.” He adds: “This won’t be the end of the GBR but it is a huge amount of damage. The problem is that it can take decades for reefs to recover from bleaching this bad and severe bleaching is becoming much more frequent and more severe.”

Source: Motherboard

‘Sometimes not all is as it seems. On the the streets of New York City, that can mean some of the iconic yellow cabs are in fact disguised NYPD cop cars—but how can you spot them?

Motherboard yesterday published an article, based on FOIA requests, which saw the NYPD admit that it has at least three undercover cop cars that are made to look like taxis. But, as Boing Boing reports and Gawker has told us in the past, some people have known about the phenomenon for much, much longer.

One of those people is Herman Yung, who’s a keen taxi-spotter. Yesterday, in response to the Motherboard article, he published his own gallery showing seven cabs that he’s spotted in recent years which he believes to be cop cars. Incidentally, their registered cab numbers are—or at least, were—2W97, 6Y19, 6Y17, 2W95, 2W68, 6Y13, and 6Y21, if you’re watching out.But perhaps more interesting is Yung’s guide to spotting these undercover cop cars. Here are his top tips…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘The above video comes from photographer Eric Cheng who explained:

“The source video is a CNN highlights reel from Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy announcement in July 2015. I used audio volume (averaged over each frame) to dictate how deep to dream. For fun, I used a picture of Cthulu as a guide image.”

Cthulu meets Trump as understood by an A.I. that can dream. Welcome to the state of American politics in 2016.’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Most NYC subway riders are pretty blasé when panhandlers hit them up for cash between stations. When a panhandler announced he was collecting funds to build a time machine, riders chuckled at the odd request—until another man boarded the train and announced he was the inventor’s future self. He implored them not to give any money because time travel will ruin everything.It sounds just like that X-Files episode (“Synchrony”) where a scientist travels from the future to stop his younger self from making the cryobiological compound that will one day enable time travel. But it’s actually an elaborate prank by Improv Everywhere…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘The term “bird brain” is going out of fashion as biologists come to understand that birds are actually quite smart and competent. Now scientists in Barbados say that, in many respects, urban birds are smarter than rural birds…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘…[s]cientists at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Poland have found that James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—a novel we might think of as perhaps the most self-consciously referential examination of language written in any tongue—is “almost indistinguishable in its structure from a purely mathematical multifractal.” Trying to explain this finding in as plain English as possible, Julia Johanne Tolo at Electric Literature writes:To determine whether the books had fractal structures, the academics looked at the variation of sentence lengths, finding that each sentence, or fragment, had a structure that resembled the whole of the book.

And it isn’t only Joyce. Through a statistical analysis of 113 works of literature, the researchers found that many texts written by the likes of Dickens, Shakespeare, Thomas Mann, Umberto Eco, and Samuel Beckett had multifractal structures. The most mathematically complex works were stream-of-consciousness narratives, hence the ultimate complexity of Finnegans Wake, which Professor Stanisław Drożdż, co-author of the paper published at Information Sciences, describes as “the absolute record in terms of multifractality.” …

A close second to Joyce’s classic work, surprisingly, is Dave Egger’s post-modern memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and much, much further down the scale, Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Proust’s masterwork, writes Phys.org, shows “little correlation to multifractality” as do certain other books like Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The measure may tell us little about literary quality, though Professor Drożdż suggests that “it may someday help in a more objective assignment of books to one genre or another.” …

Of the finding that stream-of-consciousness works seem to be the most fractal, McBride says, “By its nature, such writing is concerned not only with the usual load-bearing aspects of language—content, meaning, aesthetics, etc—but engages with language as the object in itself, using the re-forming of its rules to give the reader a more prismatic understanding…. Given the long-established connection between beauty and symmetry, finding works of literature fractally quantifiable seems perfectly reasonable.” Maybe so, or perhaps the Polish scientists have fallen victim to a more sophisticated variety of the psychological sharpshooter’s fallacy that affects “Bible Code” enthusiasts? I imagine we’ll see some fractal skeptics emerge soon enough. But the idea that the worlds-within-worlds feeling one gets when reading certain books—the sense that they contain universes in miniature—may be mathematically verifiable sends a little chill up my spine.’

Source: Open Culture

‘A map of the known universe to a constant scale would either be very big, or very useless. But use a logarithmic scale to compress the distances as you travel outwards, and you get this gorgeous and slightly Eye-of-Sauron image.The map was created by artist Pablo Carlos Budassi, using a series of images and data gathered by NASA and ESA missions. Starting in the middle, you move through the Solar System, past the Kuiper belt, into the Milky Way, all the way out into cosmic microwave radiation and the Big Bang’s plasma on the edge.The image has been released into the public domain, which means you’re perfectly welcome to stick it onto a black background, set as your phone background, and spend your commutes staring endlessly into the vortex of space…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘In advance of her HBO special Heart of a Dog premiering on April 24, the amazing Laurie Anderson appeared on Late Night With Stephen Colbert and performed a beautifully discordant song for a small group of dogs. A bit earlier in the show, Anderson spoke about the project and how she came up with the idea with renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma while they were both waiting backstage at a graduation….’

Source: Laughing Squid

‘From The Atlantic’s archives, a harrowing 1961 account of a Soviet surgeon on a primitive Antarctic base who had to remove his own appendix, stopping frequently as he battled vertigo and blood loss…’

Source: Boing Boing

Via Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory:

‘Greenland’s snowy surfaces have been getting darker over the past two decades, absorbing more heat from the sun and increasing snow melt, a new study of satellite data shows. That trend is likely to continue, with the surface’s reflectivity, or albedo, decreasing by as much as 10 percent by the end of the century, the study says.

While soot blowing in from wildfires contributes to the problem, it hasn’t been driving the change, the study finds. The real culprits are two feedback loops created by the melting itself. One of those processes isn’t visible to the human eye, but it is having a profound effect.’ (Thanks, Seth).

So essentially, melting begets more melting, as if we shouldn’t have known that already.

“If you wake up tomorrow morning and believe that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of Elvis, you’re a lunatic. But if you believe the same thing about a cracker turning into the body of Jesus, you’re just a Catholic.”

‘What’s newsworthy isn’t just that AlphaGo has won its first two matches, but what this means for the acceleration of the pace at which computers are getting smarter…’

Source: Medium

Via NYTimes.com:

‘Islamic State leaders have made sexual slavery as they believe it was practiced during the Prophet Muhammad’s time integral to the group’s operations, preying on the women and girls the group captured from the Yazidi religious minority almost two years ago. To keep the sex trade running, the fighters have aggressively pushed birth control on their victims so they can continue the abuse unabated while the women are passed among them.’

Today I learned: that this nasty sociopathic, lying, bombastic, sausage-fingered demagogic man’s real family name was the considerably less impressive ‘brand’ “Drumpf.”

‘Appearing this morning on Jake Tapper’s State of the Union, Donald Trump was asked to disavow support from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and other white supremacists and politely declined.Trump, being a cautious sort and not one to just talk without gathering all the facts and giving a matter serious consideration, said he would have to do more research because at the moment he lacked sufficient information to disavow them…’

Source: Vox

‘…[T]he difference between Sanders and Clinton can be seen in which black leaders support each candidate. Because [Sanders is] an upstart in terms of national-level politics, he’s much more willing to bring in innovative thinkers. You can see by some of the people who have backed him that some of these are people who are leading the way when it comes to black political thought in the modern era. In thinking about mass incarceration, black wealth accumulation, political voice, things of that nature. Whereas Hillary Clinton has found a niche with more of the traditional leadership infrastructure…’

Source: Vox

‘…[M]ost establishment Republicans fear Trump more than they hate him. They’re not willing to risk coming out against him now; they assume the damage they would do to his campaign is less than the damage he can do to them if he wins…’

Source: Vox

‘Twitter has been crucial to the terrorist group ISIS convincing Westerners to join its “caliphate” in the Middle East and mount attacks at home.But it looks like ISIS — aka the Islamic State, ISIL, or Daesh — is now losing steam on the social-media platform. A new report from the George Washington University Program on Extremism shows that efforts to suspend terrorist-affiliated Twitter accounts have been successful in slowing the group’s reach on the platform…’

Source: Business Insider

‘…just as today’s cat lovers flood the internet with anthromorphized felines, Victorian-era Englanders also found representations of the pets to obsess over—namely, the cats drawn by prolific illustrator Louis Wain, whose cartoonish animals populated the era’s magazines, children’s books, and postcards. During Wain’s life, though, his fortunes reversed several times. Believed to be suffering from schizophrenia, Wain lived his final years in institutions. Eight of his cat drawings—which range from cuddly to psychedelic—came to be known as the “Famous Series” and for years would be offered up as a the stages of a deteriorating mind, illustrated. But the truth is a bit more complicated….’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘Some animals are capable of magnetoreception—an added sense that helps them detect magnetic fields. European scientists have now learned that the molecule responsible for this trait is also found in the eyes of dogs and some primates, which suggests they too might be capable of seeing magnetic fields.

Cryptochromes are a common group of light-sensitive molecules that exist in bacteria, plants, and animals. In addition to regulating circadian rhythms, these specialized proteins enable certain animals, such as birds, insects, fish, and reptiles, to sense magnetic fields, allowing them to perceive direction, altitude, and location. Humans are incapable of magnetoreception. Some mammals, like bats, mole rats, and mice, appear to have this sense, but the extent of this capacity among other mammals is largely unknown.

Now, in the first study of its kind, researchers from the Max Planck Institute and several other institutions have investigated the presence of the mammalian version of this molecule, called cryptochrome 1, in the retinas of 90 animal species. Researchers found this molecule in the blue-sensitive cones of dog-like carnivores, such as dogs, wolves, bears, foxes, and badgers, but not in the eyes of cat-like carnivores, such as cats, lions, and tigers (felines have their own unique way of looking at the world). Among primates, researchers discovered the presence of cryptochrome 1 in orangutans, the rhesus macaque, the crab-eating macaque, and others. The details can now be found in Nature Scientific Reports.

Though it’s considered a “sixth sense,” magnetoreception is tied to an animal’s visual system. Magnetic fields activate cryptochrome 1 in the retina, which the animal “sees” as the inclination of magnetic field lines relative to the Earth’s surface. Because the active cryptochrome 1 is located in the light-sensitive outer segments of the cone cells of the mammals, the researchers suspect that it’s assisting with magnetoreception, and not circadian rhythm management or some other visual capacity.

It’s not immediately obvious how mammals like dogs and primates use their magnetoreception, but foxes may provide a clue: When hunting, foxes are more successful at catching mice when they pounce on them in a northeast direction. For primates, this built-in compass may help with bodily orientation, or it could be a vestigial evolutionary trait that’s largely unused…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘When not delighting in the epic meltdown of establishment Republican Party politics, many people I know — my wife, my boss, etc. — are expressing terror at the notion that Donald Trump might actually become president of the United States. I’m more sanguine. Not out of any particular love for Trump, but because he’s actually running on a much less extreme agenda than his “establishment” rival Marco Rubio, who’s offering a platform of economic ruin, multiple wars, and an attack on civil liberties that’s nearly as vicious as anything Trump has proposed — even while wrapping it in an edgy, anxious, overreaction-prone approach to politics that heavily features big risky bets and huge, unpredictable changes in direction…’

Source: Vox

‘The evidence against tipping is voluminous and damning: it plunges workers into sub-subsistence wages, subjects woman servers to sexual harassment, encourages servers to deliver poor service to people of color (and old, young, and foreign people), incentivizes workers to take actions that harm the business (free drinks for big tippers!), and covers up a system of widespread criminal wage-fraud that lands disproportionately on the backs of workers who are already poor and marginalized…’

Source: Boing Boing

From the National Geographic twitter feed:

‘Monlam, the great prayer festival is being celebrated this weekend throughout the Tibetan world. Here in Labrang Monastery, novice monks (trapa), practice blowing the dungchen, the Tibetan long horn, that will be used in ceremonies and the call to prayer. The sound can be compared to the singing of elephants.’

‘It was a sad day for poetry when Ezra Pound discovered Confucius. Like some latter-day Don Quixote addled by tales of chivalry, Pound became enthralled by Confucian precepts, and though they never had any appreciable influence on his own thoughts or actions—he was the least Confucian of men—those precepts, or his version of them, scrambled his brains for the next sixty years…’

Source: 3quarksdaily

Via Tech Insider: A major event affecting the world’s supply of bananas could leave us without the world’s most popular fruit.

‘The FBI wants Apple’s help to investigate a terrorist attack. Apple says providing this help is the real danger. We’ve reached a boiling point in the battle between tech companies and the government over encryption. And what happens will affect anyone who uses a smartphone, including you…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘The experimental setup cost roughly $3000, researchers say.’

Source: Motherboard

‘A groundbreaking new therapy in which white blood cells were reprogrammed to attack cancer cells is showing great promise after more than 90 percent of terminally ill leukemia patients had their symptoms disappear completely.

For the new therapy, white blood cells were extracted from terminally ill cancer patients, and then genetically reprogrammed to better recognize and target cancer cells. Once reintroduced into a patient’s bloodstream, the juiced-up immune cells made it much more difficult for the cancer to spread and take hold. Oncologist Stanley Riddell from Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center shared his team’s findings on Monday at the annual meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Washington DC.

In one trial, 94 percent of terminally ill lymphoblastic leukemia patients went into remission. Patients with similar blood cancers experienced response rates greater than 80 percent, with more than half going into remission.

The details have yet to be published in a peer reviewed science journal, so we need to be cautious about these findings. Indeed, the researchers themselves said that the results are very preliminary and that more work needs to be done. It’s not known, for example, how long the patients will remain in remission; the scientists aren’t calling it a cure, even though symptoms disappeared in many cases. What’s more, two patients actually died from the therapy after it triggered an extreme immune response. All participants involved in the study were terminally ill cancer patients with about two to five months to live, and none were responding to conventional treatments. But Riddell described the early data as “unprecedented,” saying it’s a “potential paradigm shift” in cancer treatment…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘The United States’ commitment to combatting climate change will affect the entire world. Last week, the Supreme Court froze Obama’s plan to uphold that commitment, sparking fears that the Paris climate agreement would fall apart. But the death of justice Antonin Scalia over the weekend changes everything.Scalia might have been surprisingly progressive on technology, but when it came to climate change, the justice was a staunch defender of the proud American tradition of doing nothing.’

Source: Gizmodo

A few great articles today:

Man missing for 30 years realizes that he’s someone else: ‘This is Edgar Latulip of southwestern Ontario. The developmentally disabled man has been missing since 1986 but was just found about 120 kilometers from his hometown. Or rather, he found himself. Latulip had lost his memory due to a head injury after he disappeared and had created a new identity. Last month, he realized he wasn’t who he thought he was. On Jan. 7, Latulip met with a social worker and told her he thought he was somebody else, Gavin said. The social worker found his missing persons case file and police were then called in. Latulip volunteered to have a DNA test done and on Monday, the results came back indicating he was Latulip.’

Sparrow joins Japanese family: ‘A sparrow followed an elderly Japanese woman home from her job as a crossing guard in November, and now lives with her and her husband. “He’s like a family member – he’s very comforting. It’s fun, coming home to a sparrow,” Yoshiko Fujino told Reuters.’

‘Henry Rosario Martinez died at the age of 31. He loved poker, so his friends played one last game with him by propping up his corpse and giving him a large pile of chips. Despite Martinez’s remarkable poker face, he didn’t win.’

A New York State Supreme Court judge has confirmed that Staten Island Borough President James Oddo can name three streets in a new property development with words that imply greediness and deceitfulness on the part of the developers.

Puppy shoots Florida man: ‘A man who decided to shoot a bunch of puppies was himself shot by one of his intended victims. NBC News reports that Jerry Allen Bradford, 37, of Pensacola, Florida, sustained a gunshot to the wrist when “one of the dogs put its paw on the revolver’s trigger.” ‘

And this one is serious. Black travel guide for a racist America: ‘In 1936, postal worker Victor H. Green worked with his colleagues in the Postal Workers Union to create a guide for black travelers navigating a country where many restaurants, hotels, and shops were still “whites only,” and the real threat of physical assault and arrest hung in their faces. “You needed The Green Book to tell you where you can go without having doors slammed in your face,” civil rights leader Julian Bond once said. The Green Book was updated and in print until 1966. “There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published,” reads the introduction.’

One is supposedly not to speak ill of the dead, but I (and, I imagine, many classes of disadvantaged and disenfranchised in this country) would be dishonest if I didn’t mark the death of Antonin Scalia with some satisfaction. And I take a particular pleasure in the fact that this longest serving judge on the court and its most influential and outspoken conservative (if not reactionary) took his final bow on Pres. Obama’s watch. With any luck, we can gain some relief from a quarter-century of the execrable and intellectually damaged originalist school of thought he championed, which led to outcomes so pleasing to conservatives. Here’s a trip through prior FmH pieces on Scalia’s uniformly unflattering legacy.

(And what in the world is the shiftless Clarence Thomas going to do without his guidance?)

Vox has by far the consistently best roundup and explanation of the issues engendered by his death. Here is a sampling:

The fight over Obama’s next Supreme Court nominee will be the most politicized and high-stakes nomination fight in decades. Replacing Antonin Scalia will be a profound test of the American political system. With Scalia’s death, the Presidential race is a referendum on the Supreme Court.

Antonin Scalia’s death could lead to more 4-4 ties. Here’s what happens if it does.

The death of Justice Antonin Scalia has forced partisans to become experts on Supreme Court history. But, despite the so-called Thurmond Rule, at least 14 Supreme Court justices have been confirmed during election years.. In fact, Scalia himself was appointed by Pres. Reagan in his last year in office. Mitch McConnell: “this vacancy should not be filled” until 2017. The Senate’s top Democrat: that’s “shameful.” Hillary Clinton: Republican calls to leave Justice Scalia’s seat vacant “dishonor our constitution”

Scalia’s sudden death — and the chaos it’s about to cause — makes a strong case against lifetime appointments to the Court. Time for term limits for Supreme Court justices.

Who will Obama choose to replace Antonin Scalia? Here are 7 of the strongest candidates. Place your bets now. I went to college with Merrick Garland but I think the likelihood of the sole white male on the list getting the President’s nod is pretty low, although he is one of the candidates more palatable to the likely rabid Senate opposition.

‘As the tide of refugees rises in Europe, so does the frequency and amplitude of some very nasty rumours about these “others.”

These rumours echo historical slander against Jews, Gypsies, and other groups of outsiders previously seen as threatening. You’ve probably heard variations of some of these:

Their customs are barbaric and they hold ours in contempt; they don’t feel bound by our rules and laws; they get preferential treatment from the government; they harass, rape, and kill; they have too many children, and they’re here to “take over.”

Many of these stories are very specific and detailed, and thus sound convincing. Yet they usually have no clear source, and often they grow taller in the telling. It’s the classic urban legend syndrome, seasoned with a dose of racism — and enhanced by Twitter, Facebook, and other modern means of communication.

One concerned German netizen has decided to fight back against this rising tide of viral xenophobia.

“Since the middle of last year, we’re witnessing an increasing trend of rumours about asylum seekers going viral — ranging from them poaching swans to desecrating graves. Those stories are collected here,” writes Karolin Schwarz on Hoaxmap, which has gone live on 8 February.

Hoaxmap uses a map of Germany and Austria as the geographic backdrop for a growing collection of rumours reported and invalidated. Each rumour is described, dated, localized, categorized — and refuted, with a link to the evidence.  Some examples…’

Source: Big Think

‘Donald Trump finally made some bold and provocative claims that were largely true, and the Republican Party finally closed ranks to attack him.

Saying Mexican immigrants are rapists didn’t do it. Calling for a return of torture didn’t do it. Calling for a ban on Muslim immigration didn’t do it. Raising questions about Barack Obama’s status as an American citizen didn’t do it. Pretending that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered 9/11 didn’t do it.

So what did? Trump said that invading Iraq was a disaster, that the country was misled into invading Iraq by the Bush administration, and that the claim that Bush kept the country safe from terrorism is ridiculous because 9/11 happened on his watch…’

Source: Vox

‘Until a recent study led by researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas was published online last month in PLOS ONE, there was no scientific evidence to back up the anecdotal stories of people… who reported aberrant sensations and neuropathic pain around cellphone towers and other technology that produce radio-frequency electromagnetic fields.

“Our study provides evidence, for the first time, that subjects exposed to cellphone towers at low, regular levels can actually perceive pain,” said Dr. Mario Romero-Ortega, senior author of the study and an associate professor of bioengineering in the University’s Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. “Our study also points to a specific nerve pathway that may contribute to our main finding.” ‘

Source: The University of Texas at Dallas (thanks, abby)

‘A prank originating from 4chan claims that if you set your iPhone’s (5s models and up) date back to 1970, it’ll display a retro Apple logo…

What actually happens if you decide to set your iPhone back to January 1st, 1970? It’ll brick your device, and there’s no fix for it: even Apple’s own Geniuses can’t figure out how to fix it, and you’ll have to get the phone completely replaced.

Update: according to Ars Technica, … allowing the phone’s battery to go completely dead (or disconnecting the battery) will reset the date…’

Source: Gizmodo

Einstein was right — in predicting gravitational waves — and wrong — in feeling they would remain too feeble to be detected:

‘A “revolutionary” new era in science has just begun with a violent event deep in space.

Today researchers announced that they have detected ripples in the fabric of space called gravitational waves. It’s a groundbreaking discovery that has eluded Earth’s brightest minds and most sensitive machines for decades…’

Source: Tech Insider

LIGO’s Discovery will open new era in cosmological research

‘In deep space, two black holes spiraled toward each other, their tremendous mass warping spacetime and propagating gravitational waves across the fabric of the universe at light-speed. The two black holes eventually crashed into one another and merged into one even bigger black hole, emitting a crescendo of waves.That quiet tremolo on the catgut of reality made it to Earth, where the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory was listening. For 13 years LIGO heard, it seemed, every vibration but the one it was supposed to. But on September 14, 2015 it detected those black-hole-crashing swells as they washed over the planet.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves,” David Reitze, LIGO’s Executive Director, declared today at a press conference. “We did it.” This is big-deal physics, a long-awaited bit of evidence that vindicates the work of Albert Einstein, opens a new scientific field, and gives astronomers a peek at a side of the universe they’ve never seen.

Decoding the data gave it more specificity. The waves came from black holes with 26 and 39 times the mass of the sun, respectively. Merged, the newly created black hole had 62 times the mass of the sun. Right, that arithmetic doesn’t exactly work, but don’t worry about it. The newly-formed body emitted energy to stabilize, a process called “ringdown.” That energy, emitted as gravitational waves, came from three suns’ worth of stuff…’

Source: WIRED

‘If recent rumors are true, scientists have finally detected gravitational waves—shockwaves rippling through space and time itself.

Albert Einstein first proposed the existence of gravitational waves 100 years ago, and directly observing them would provide the final vindication for his masterwork: the theory of general relativity.

On Thursday, we’ll find out if Einstein is right one last time. Researchers from Caltech and MIT will convene for a press conference where they may announce that they’ve picked up the tiny wobble of gravitational waves produced by two colliding black holes…’

Source: NatGeo

Scientists to announce detection of gravitational waves. Here’s how to watch.

Source: Tech Insider

See how hard it is to detect gravitational waves by playing this maddening online game

Source: Tech Insider

‘Fourteen women and nine men were found in a cremation burial near Stonehenge. These findings help support the theory that Stonehenge functioned as a cremation cemetery for people of high status…’

Source: Tech Insider

‘Horses understand human facial expressions, and they can tell the difference between happy and angry faces, according to a new Biology Letters study published this week.

Previous work has revealed that horses are able to produce complex facial expressions and also perceive these in other members of their species. They’re also sensitive to signals from us, too. After all, the ability to read emotions across the species barrier would be especially helpful for social, domesticated species – no matter how different our faces might look from theirs.

To see if they can discern our expressions, a University of Sussex team led by Amy Smith showed photographs to 28 domestic horses (Equus caballus) aged four to 23, recruited from five stables in Sussex and Surrey in the U.K. These color photos were of two unfamiliar men smiling or frowning (pictured to the right). In order for the researchers to get spontaneous reactions, the horses received no training for this experiment. The team measured the horses’ heart rate, which is correlated to stress, and recorded their responses with camcorders.

When the horses saw photos of the men making an angry face, their heart rate increased faster than when they looked at photos of the men smiling. Additionally, many of them also moved their heads to look at the angry photo with their left eye – a behavioral response previously linked to negative stimuli perception.

The right brain hemisphere, which handles information from the left eye, is specialized for processing threatening stimuli. “It is particularly important for animals to recognize threats in their environment,” Smith explains in a statement. “In this context, recognizing angry faces may act as a warning system, allowing horses to anticipate negative human behavior such as rough handling.” This is called the left-gaze bias, and dogs do it too. Neither species showed a gaze bias towards the happy facial expressions, since these aren’t threatening cues…’

Source: IFLScience

‘John McCain is very angry about the way the Republican race is going — on the specific issue of torturing detainees suspected of terrorism.”It’s been so disappointing to see some presidential candidates engaged in loose talk on the campaign trail about reviving waterboarding and other inhumane interrogation techniques,” McCain, who was himself tortured while he was held prisoner during the Vietnam War, said during a Tuesday Senate speech. “Our enemies act without conscience. We must not.”

McCain has good reason to be angry. Several Republicans have suggested that they’d be open to torturing suspected terrorists if elected — especially New Hampshire primary winner Donald Trump. “Waterboarding is fine, and much tougher than that is fine,” Trump said at a Monday campaign event in New Hampshire. “When we’re with these animals, we can’t be soft and weak, like our politicians.” Previously, Trump promised to “bring back” types of torture “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” during Saturday’s Republican debate. The rest of the GOP field took a somewhat more nuanced position. Marco Rubio categorically refused to rule out any torture techniques, for fear of helping terrorists “practice how to evade us.” …’

Source: Vox

‘Famed Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates finally confessed to whom he’s supporting in the Democratic primary. It seems the MacArthur Genius Grant recipient is feeling the Bern. “I will be voting for Sen. Sanders,” Coates told host Amy Goodman on Democracy Now. Coates said he was initially avoiding the question, hoping to separate his role as a writer from his views as a private citizen, but no longer saw value in staying neutral. He said his son, who was present for the interview, convinced him to reach that point…’

Source: Vox

Upscale couple in Irvine CA who mistook the volunteer tennis coach’s comment as insulting their son’s intelligence end up planting drugs in her car when they can’t get her fired. And it goes on from there. Source: The Washington Post

‘A dictionary of the extinct language of ancient Mesopotamia has been completed after 90 years of work.’

Source: BBC News

‘It’s not just your imagination. Horror films are much more scary than they were in the past. Here’s how they do it…

This new brand of film, the neurothriller, creates a spiral of fear or lust, a warm bath of sorrow, not through classic narrative, but with sound, image, and sophisticated computer technology, all of it tapping the circuitry of the ancient emotional brain…’

Source: Aeon

Via The Atlantic:

”For close to a decade, the trauma of the Iraq War left Americans wary of launching new wars in the Middle East. That caution is largely gone. Most of the leading presidential candidates demand that the United States escalate its air war in Iraq and Syria, send additional Special Forces, or enforce a buffer zone, which the head of Central Command, General Lloyd Austin, has said would require deploying U.S. ground troops. Most Americans now favor doing just that.

The primary justification for this new hawkishness is stopping the Islamic State, or isis, from striking the United States. Which is ironic, because at least in the short term, America’s intervention will likely spark more terrorism against the United States, thus fueling demands for yet greater military action. After a period of relative restraint, the United States is heading back into the terror trap…’

This article is not primarily about Trump. It describes social science research based on so-called Moral Foundations Theory, codified by one of the co-authors, which describes six moral factors the patterns of which form a powerful explanatory framework differentiating the supporters of the major candidates, left and right. Oh yes, and Trump is an outlier, as if that would be a surprise…

Source: Vox

‘…[O]ver 2,000 people have already moved to New Hampshire (referred to simply as “the shire” by the group), purchasing upwards of $30 million in real estate. The group has chosen New Hampshire for a number of reasons, although chief among them is that the group is able to “maximize [its] odds of success” because of “the easy access to politics.” (New Hampshire has the largest state legislature in the US at 400 persons.)

In the 13 years since its founding, the group has made large strides toward establishing its libertarian utopia. This is most noticeable in the group’s widespread adoption of Bitcoin, which has earned the state the unofficial moniker of “Bitcoin Capital of America.” Self-identified Free Staters in New Hampshire launched Lamassu, one of the most popular Bitcoin ATMs, in 2013. SatoshiDice, the Bitcoin gambling website, was also launched out of New Hampshire in 2012 by Bitcoin mogul and Free Stater Erik Vorhees.

Although both of these Bitcoin businesses have been forced out of the US by various regulatory agencies, the Free State Project hopes to garner enough influence in New Hampshire politics to make the state more friendly to liberty-minded businesses. They seem to be well on their way to this goal, with 16 Free State Project members now serving in the state’s House of Representatives…’

Source: Motherboard

Oh, this is very sad, in the same week as two giants from Jefferson Airplane. One of the liabilities of my continuing romance with the music of my young adulthood is that its important practitioners are dropping like flies. My classic jazz and blues musician faves are long gone and more contemporary indie and alternative performers by and large still have a lot of life in them.

Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks have always had, and will always have, a constant place in my favorites playlist. So pleased I got to see him live, in intimate venues, a couple of times in the last decade. Go out and find “Where’s the Money,” “I Scare Myself” “Walkin’ One and Only” or “I Feel Like Singing” for a never-ending kick.

Via The New York Times:
‘In the seven months since declaring his candidacy for president, Donald Trump has used Twitter to lob insults at presidential candidates, journalists, news organizations, nations, a Neil Young song and even a lectern in the Oval Office. We know this because we’ve read, tagged and quoted them all. Below, a directory of sorts, with links to the original tweets.’

Here’s hoping they keep it current.

A sweet mama dog named Maggie who had been separated from her puppies when she was adopted, responded to two rescued 9-week old female puppies (Hannah and Kari) who were also being boarded at the B…’

Source: Laughing Squid

‘One of the most disturbing developments of the 2016 Republican race for president has been Donald Trump’s popularity among the most racist elements in US society. The New Yorker, for example, had lengthy piece over the summer detailing the excitement he has generated in the neo-Nazi movement. But here’s the thing: Trump isn’t the only guy with dangerous supporters. The media don’t talk about it as much, but Ted Cruz – Trump’s closest competitor for GOP front-runner status – has also won the backing of some downright terrifying people…’

Source: Truth-Out

‘The Kangbashi District of Ordos, China is a marvel of urban planning, 137-square miles of shining towers, futuristic architecture and pristine parks carved out of the grassland of Inner Mongolia. It is a thoroughly modern city, but for one thing: No one lives there.

…Kangbashi is one of hundreds of sparkling new cities sitting relatively empty throughout China, built by a government eager to urbanize the country but shunned by people unable to afford it or hesitant to leave the rural communities they know. Chicago photographer Kai Caemmerer visited Kangbashi and two other cities for his ongoing series Unborn Cities. The photos capture the eerie sensation of standing on a silent street surrounded by empty skyscrapers and public spaces devoid of life…’

Source: WIRED

‘Facebook ran the numbers and concluded that we are all much closer than the traditional “six degrees of separation.”The social media giant released a report on its blog Thursday announcing “each person in the world” is separated from every other by “an average of three and a half other people.” …’

Source: The New York Times

Via NYTimes:

‘Two fireballs streaked across the sky in the past week, creating dazzling, ephemeral displays for hundreds of people below. Dashboard cameras, rooftop cameras and even one mounted on a small airplane captured footage of the bright objects in the night skies.’

Includes wonderful albeit brief videos.

Via Medium: ‘MIT neuroscientist Earl Miller notes that our brains are “not wired to multitask well… when people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost.” This constant task-switching encourages bad brain habits. When we complete a tiny task (sending an email, answering a text message, posting a tweet), we are hit with a dollop of dopamine, our reward hormone. Our brains love that dopamine, and so we’re encouraged to keep switching between small mini-tasks that give us instant gratification.’

“Since Donald Trump dropped out of Fox News’ final GOP debate, Stephen decided to hold the classiest, Trumpiest debate of all time.”

I am heartbroken. The Airplane and its spinoff groups (before Jefferson Starship descended into kitsch in the following decade) were the pinnacle of the best decade’s music for me. At least Paul will be joining Jerry, Janis, Jim and Jimi in the heavenly choir. Going home to put Blows Against the Empire on loud!

The Voracious Fish That Looks Like a Pug and Stings Like a Bee:

‘…The bulging eyes and frowny mouth that make [the stargazer] look like an aquatic pug are brilliant adaptations for an ambush predator. And even beyond its … singular looks, this is one of the sea’s most remarkable fishes—it’s venomous and it shocks like an electric eel…’

Source: WIRED

‘Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is a Twitter addict and often uses the medium to issue comments, responses and campaign pronouncements. But he also lets others do the talking, simply by retweeting them. 62 percent of those he retweets are white supremacists…’

Source: Boing Boing

Via Engadget:

‘Even if you have thousands of Facebook friends, you can probably only count on a handful in a pinch, according to a new study. The author, anthropologist Robin Dunbar, should know. He’s the guy who came up with Dunbar’s number, which shows that in the real world, people can only maintain about 150 stable relationships… ‘

‘Donald Trump has led polls for the Republican presidential contest for over six months now. Nothing, it appears, can dislodge him from that top position — not his many offensive comments, not his lackluster debate performances, not his seeming lack of knowledge on basic public policy issues. His seemingly endless poll dominance is a truly bizarre phenomenon — one that Trump himself acknowledged at a campaign stop in Sioux Center, Iowa on Saturday. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?” Trump bragged. “It’s, like, incredible.” …’

Source: Vox

‘At around the turn of the millennium, some disturbing findings surfaced in the biomedical literature. Macrophages—immune cells whose function is to attack and kill microbes and other threats to the body—do not gather at tumor sites to destroy cancer cells, as had been optimistically imagined. Instead, they encourage the cancer cells to continue their mad reproductive rampage. Frances Balkwill, the British cell biologist who performed some of the key studies of treasonous immune cell behavior, described her colleagues in the field as being “horrified.” …’

Source: Barbara Ehrenreich, The Baffler

1980, the year of Ronald Reagan’s election, was probably more significant for

‘…an utterly private event whose significance would not be noticed for years. Charles and David Koch, the enormously rich proprietors of an oil company based in Kansas, decided that they would spend huge amounts of money to elect conservatives at all levels of American government. David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket in 1980, but when the campaign was over, he resolved never to seek public office again. That wouldn’t be necessary, he and his brother concluded; they could invest in the campaigns of others, and essentially buy their way to political power.

Thirty years later, the midterm elections of 2010 ushered in the political system that the Kochs had spent so many years plotting to bring about. After the voting that year, Republicans dominated state legislatures; they controlled a clear majority of the governorships; they had taken one chamber of Congress and were on their way to winning the other. Perhaps most important, a good many of the Republicans who had won these offices were not middle-of-the-road pragmatists. They were antigovernment libertarians of the Kochs’ own political stripe. The brothers had spent or raised hundreds of millions of dollars to create majorities in their image. They had succeeded. And not merely at the polls: They had helped to finance and organize an interlocking network of think tanks, academic programs and news media outlets that far exceeded anything the liberal opposition could put together…’

Source: Jane Mayer – The New York Times

‘Prayer occurs in many faiths. It stays recognisable despite its varied forms. It must be good for something – but what?’

Source: Benjamin Dueholm, Aeon

‘Don’t want to get sick this season?Sure, you’ve heard the basics: Carry hand sanitizer everywhere. Grab public-bathroom door handles with paper towels. Hold your breath when your unwell-looking subway seat partner starts coughing.Bad news, germaphobe — your meticulous habits likely aren’t doing much to protect you.Here’s a look at all the weird germ-avoidance behaviors that are probably useless…’

Source: Business Insider

Via Tech Insider:

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‘Over the next two weeks, five planets will line up for a cosmic dance that will dazzle skywatchers all over the world.Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are aligning for the first time in over a decade, and there’s no need for telescopes or binoculars to see the event, since all five planets will look like bright stars in the morning twilight.’

Source: National Geographic

The Man Who Saw His Cat As An Impostor: ‘Capgras syndrome is a strange disorder in which the sufferer becomes convinced that someone close to them has been replaced by an impostor. Yet now, a new and even stranger variant of the syndrome has been reported – “Cat-gras”. This is the name coined by Harvard neurologists R. Ryan Darby and David Caplan in a new paper in the journal Neurocase. The authors describe the case of a man who believed that his cat was in fact a different cat…’

Source: Neuroskeptic

Retired fisherman uses sonar equipment to uncover new crevice nine miles east of Inverness, big enough to fit the phantom beast:

‘It has evaded capture for years, with dozens of alleged sightings and endless speculation about its whereabouts.But the hunt for the Loch Ness monster has just become even more arduous, after a retired fisherman used sonar equipment to show that it could be hiding at previously undiscovered depths.Tourist sightseeing boat skipper Keith Stewart, 43, claims to have found a crevice large enough for the phantom beast to be hiding in, about nine miles east of Inverness.

Britain’s deepest loch is Loch Morar, allegedly home to another elusive “water kelpie” Morag at 1017 feet.Loch Ness is the UK’s second largest, with an official maximum depth previously recorded at 754 feet.However, Mr Stewart says that his newly discovered crevice measures 889 feet deep, according to his state of the art sonar equipment…’

Source: Telegraph.UK

‘It started the first month that Christina Lee and Michael Saba started living together. An angry family came knocking at their door demanding the return of a stolen phone. Two months later, a group of friends came with the same request. One month, it happened four times. The visitors, who show up in the morning, afternoon, and in the middle of the night, sometimes accompanied by police officers, always say the same thing: their phone-tracking apps are telling them that their smartphones are in this house in a suburb of Atlanta.

But the phones aren’t there, Lee and Saba always protest, mystified at being fingered by these apps more than a dozen times since February 2015. “I’m sorry you came all this way. This happens a lot,” they’d explain. Most of the people believe them, but about a quarter of them remain suspicious, convinced that the technology is reliable and that Lee and Saba are lying.

“My biggest fear is that someone dangerous or violent is going to visit our house because of this,” said Saba by email. (Like this guy.) “If or when that happens, I doubt our polite explanations are gonna go very far.” ‘

Source: Fusion

‘There’s nothing quite so magical as seeing the snow fall on a winter’s day. Get ready to have the magic ruined. A recent study has revealed snow has become so polluted in urban areas by emissions that consumption of the stuff, yellow or otherwise, is not recommended…’

Source: Big Think

‘It’s the golden rule of crowded escalators: Stand on one side, walk on the other. But passengers taking the escalator in one of London’s busiest tube stations were recently confronted with a weird rule: Everyone must stand. Officials claim it will make stations run more efficiently. But how?’

Source: Gizmodo

Experts Say Prove It

‘An international team of neuroscientists claims to have successfully carried out a head transplant on a monkey, along with other related experiments. But because the details haven’t been published, experts remain skeptical.

As New Scientist reports, the procedure was led by Sergio Canavero, a neuroscientist who works for the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group in Italy. Canavero made headlines last year by suggesting that head transplants are about to become a reality, and that the medical technology required to perform such a seemingly radical procedure already exists. At the time, Canavero said the first human head transplant would happen in about two years. If this latest development is true, his team appears to be right on track…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Theoretical physicists have been predicting that it should be possible for knots to form in quantum fields for decades, but nobody could figure out how to accomplish this feat experimentally. Now an international team has managed to do just that, tying knots in a superfluid for the very first time by manipulating magnetic fields.

… It’s tough to visualize these exotic objects, but they are essentially particle-like rings or loops in a quantum field connected to each other exactly once. A mathematician might not consider these structures to be true knots; typically a knot is defined as a knotted circle, like a pretzel, while a rubber band would be considered an “un-knot.” Hall and Möttönen prefer to think of their structures as knotty solitons….’

Source: Gizmodo

‘We have yet to discover a single trace of alien life, despite the extremely high probability that it exists somewhere. This contradiction is popularly known as the Fermi Paradox. A new theory attempts to solve this conundrum by suggesting that habitable planets are quite common in our galaxy, but nascent life gets snuffed out very quickly.

An oft-cited solution to the Fermi Paradox—that is, the lack of observational evidence that our galaxy has been colonized by an extraterrestrial civilization—is the Great Filter hypothesis. Devised by Robin Hanson of George Mason University, this theory suggests that some kind of cosmic-wide obstacle is preventing life from developing beyond a certain stage. Trouble is, we’re not entirely sure if this Great Filter actually exists, or what it looks like.

Some astrobiologists look to our planet’s ancient past and point to the presence of three possible filter points: the emergence of reproductive molecules, simple single-celled life, or complex single-celled life. If we could prove that any one of these critical evolutionary steps are true, that would be exceptionally good news—it would imply that the Great Filter is behind us. On the other hand, some pessimistic futurists fear that the Great Filter looms ahead of us, an event that will likely come in the form of a self-inflicted existential catastrophe…’

Source: Gizmodo

Via NPR:

‘The astronomer whose work helped kick Pluto out of the pantheon of planets says he has good reason to believe there’s an undiscovered planet bigger than Earth lurking in the distant reaches of our solar system.’

One by one, like guests at a late party
They shake our hands and step into the dark:
Arabian ostrich; Long-eared kit fox; Mysterious starling.

One by one, like sheep counted to close our eyes,
They leap the fence and disappear into the woods:
Atlas bear; Passenger pigeon; North Island laughing owl;
Great auk; Dodo; Eastern wapiti; Badlands bighorn sheep.

One by one, like grade school friends,
They move away and fade out of memory:
Portuguese ibex; Blue buck; Auroch; Oregon bison;
Spanish imperial eagle; Japanese wolf; Hawksbill
Sea turtle; Cape lion; Heath hen; Raiatea thrush.

One by one, like children at a fire drill, they march outside,
And keep marching, though teachers cry, “Come back!”
Waved albatross; White-bearded spider monkey;
Pygmy chimpanzee; Australian night parrot;
Turquoise parakeet; Indian cheetah; Korean tiger;
Eastern harbor seal ; Ceylon elephant ; Great Indian rhinoceros.

One by one, like actors in a play that ran for years
And wowed the world, they link their hands and bow
Before the curtain falls.

— Charles Harper Webb (2006)

Via POLITICO Magazine:

‘…I’ve found a single statistically significant variable predicts whether a voter supports Trump—and it’s not race, income or education levels…’

Via The New York Times: : What You Need to Know About Zika Virus: This tropical virus is newly spreading in the Western Hemisphere and has just had its first demonstrated North American case. Pregnant women should be warned that there seems to be a link between exposure of babies in utero and microcephaly at birth.

Via New Scientist:

‘A black hole sun could be friendlier than you might expect. Planets orbiting a black hole – as they do in the film Interstellar – could sustain life, thanks to a bizarre reversal of the thermodynamics experienced by our sun and Earth.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, life requires a temperature difference to provide a source of useable energy. Life on Earth exploits the difference between the sun and the cold vacuum of space, but what if you flip the temperatures around, with a cold sun and a hot sky?’

Via The Atlantic:

‘Domesticated felines are one of the biggest threats to birds worldwide. Two pet owners think they’ve found a solution.’

Via The Washington Post:

‘Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates…’

Via The NY Times we learn that a boy accused of blasphemy by the imam of his mosque, on the basis of a misunderstanding, returned to the mosque bearing his self-severed right hand on a tray. Said imam has fled, fearing repercussions for inciting passions to such an extent. Both the boy and his family feel his action was a loving statement of his devotion to the prophet. This is so wrong on so many levels, as abby commented in pointing me to this coverage. We live in such a sick, sick world.

Via NY Times, although they have no power to do so (it is actually up to the Home Secretary), the British Parliament has been debating two petitions to bar Donald Trump from Great Britain on the basis that his anti-Muslim rhetoric violates British bans on hate speech.

‘Sense About Science works with scientists and members of the public to change public debates and to equip people to make sense of science and evidence.

Sense About Science responds to hundreds of requests for independent advice and questions on scientific evidence each year. We chase down dodgy science and mobilise networks of scientists and community groups to counter it. We also invite scientists to publish corrections of misreported research in our ‘For the record’ section.

Where we are constantly fire-fighting on a particular issue, we work with scientists and members of the public to draw out the underlying assumptions and to address misconceptions. Examples of this can be seen in the Making Sense of… series and other projects.

Underpinning this, Sense About Science runs programmes to promote general understanding of scientific evidence, such as use of statistics, the process of peer review and how to design a fair test to see whether medicines work.Sense About Science’s campaigns involve wide collaboration across society to make a permanent difference across all areas of our work and to create an environment that supports open public discussion about scientific research, free from intimidation, hysteria and political pressure…’

Source: Sense about Science

Sounds worthwhile. However, while I think that evidence-based conclusions are better than conjecture and assumptions, research findings are only as good as the studies that generated them. In behavioral health, “evidence-based practice” often leads us down the garden path.

‘Just 62 people, 53 of them men, own as much wealth as the poorest half of the entire world population and the richest 1 percent own more than the other 99 percent put together, anti-poverty charity Oxfam said on Monday.Significantly, the wealth gap is widening faster than anyone anticipated, with the 1 percent overtaking the rest one year earlier than Oxfam had predicted only a year ago.Rising inequality and a widening trust gap between people and their political leaders are big challenges for the global elite as they converge on Davos for the annual World Economic Forum, which runs from Jan. 20 to 23…’

Source: Reuters (via Boing Boing)

‘Martin Luther King Jr. often used characters in his sermons. Given that he was a Baptist preacher, they were usually biblical figures, like the 12 apostles, Moses, and Lazarus. But he also drew from a wide array of innovative thinkers, both ancient and contemporary…

I looked through 13 well-known King sermons, which admittedly is not comprehensive. But the sermons span from 1953 when he was a guest preacher at his uncle’s Second Baptist Church in Detroit to a handful in 1968, right before his assassination. I think these 82 people give a decent of idea of the people he included as characters in his sermons…’

Source: Vox

Source: Business Insider: “If you tell someone they’re not being logical or say something like ‘you’re getting off track,’ it doesn’t work,” says John Gottman.

Not only can the right approach help you bounce back sooner and more thoroughly from a squabble but perhaps even turn it into an opportunity for growth.

‘[T]he weird, flickering star known as KIC 8462852 still isn’t sitting right with astronomers. In fact, it just got a lot weirder.Ever since KIC 84628532 was spotted in the Kepler Space Telescope’s dataset, astronomers have puzzled over what the heck could be responsible for the star’s logic-defying light curve. Over four years of observational data, KIC 8462852 flickered erratically, its light output sometimes dropping by as much as 20%. That’s highly unusual stellar behavior, and it can’t be explained by a transiting planet.Some astronomers proposed that KIC 8462852 might be occluded by a swarm of comets. Others suggested aliens…’

Source: Gizmodo

The sixty-plus foot horse chestnut tree which has towered over my house for my entire life there is gone. It toppled into the street in a windstorm the day before yesterday. Took out power, cable, phone and internet service for the block. I’ve lost an old friend.

‘Right now, astronomers are viewing a ball of hot gas billions of light years away that is radiating the energy of hundreds of billions of suns. At its heart is an object a little larger than 10 miles across. And astronomers are not entirely sure what it is. If, as they suspect, the gas ball is the result of a supernova, then it’s the most powerful supernova ever seen…’

Source: ScienceDaily

‘David Bowie… had an incalculable impact on pop culture throughout his shape-shifting career. But perhaps more than any other musician, he also had a tremendous impact on science fiction. He changed the way we thought about the alien, the uncanny, and the familiar.’

Source: Gizmodo

Not that I have ever or would ever do this, but as a lover of chocolate it concerns me tremendously. (This is part of my “Emperor-has-no-Clothes” occasional feature.) If you have ever shelled out for a $2000-a-pop chocolate tasting (or even, probably, a $10-$15 chocolate bar), you have probably been ripped off. The world of high-end chocolate appears to involve systematic deception about the bean-to-bar myth and, in general,  the sourcing, production value and quality of the product they push. But with recent muckraker revelations, it seems to be all unravelling.

What does it tell us about our captivity to consumer culture? As the saying goes, fool me once, shame on you. But fool me twice…

‘Our delight at their downfall truly reveals how we as a consumer culture lie to ourselves about being consumers of culture.’

Via Eater

Via Smithsonian:

‘The discovery in a remote part of Indonesia has scholars rethinking the origins of art—and of humanity…’

…or reincarnated? (via Micheline the Creator)