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POPSThe first evidence for a belief in the region for the soul - found in Turkey What is it with humans and the idea of a soul? "It might also be an evolutionary strategy that takes us away from the anxieties of self-consciousness. Once fully modern humans knew they could die, it probably made sense to pretend that no one really died but that some part of us lived on into the cosmos. Given the vagaries of ancient life, it probably also made sense to invent souls that had the power to haunt and cause harm to explain all the bad stuff in life".
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POPSThe Origin of the Crossword Puzzle Crossword Casualties Some folks were driven over the edge by the craze. In 1924, a Chicago woman sued her husband for divorce, claiming "he was so engrossed in solving crosswords that he didn’t have time to work." The judge ordered the man to "limit himself to 3 puzzles a day and devote the rest of his time to domestic duties." In 1925, a New York Telephone Co. employee shot his wife when she wouldn’t help with a crossword puzzle. And in 1926, a Budapest man committed suicide, leaving an explanation in the form of a crossword puzzle. (No one could solve it.) Eventually, the craze died down. It took The New York Times to revive it. Today, The New York Times crossword puzzle is considered the puzzle of choice for hardcore addicts, but that hasn’t always been true. Believe it or not, the Times resisted crosswords for more than two decades.Here’s the story of how the newspaper changed its mind...<<
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POPSRestorer finds hidden pig in 1600's Dutch work "It's this grotesque scene, this butchered animal hanging in a barn. And quite likely this patron hired another artist to paint it over." Zwart said the restored work "looks a lot different than before, and it looks better. The restoration work also revealed information about the painting's history. It turns out that the work is a "pendant," one of a pair of paintings on a shared theme. Barn Interior's companion painting hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Art history professor Henry Luttikhuizen said he is pleased the discoveries about the painting are drawing attention to Van Nuis, who died last year. "Kees would have really enjoyed seeing the painting restored. I can readily imagine him chuckling with delight at the conservator's findings," Luttikhuizen said.
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POPSThat's my mum!! My mum's (was) in the paper! I'm so proud! She even mentioned me!!! Happy Mother's Day!!!!
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POPSAmerican Muslims grateful to Colin Powell Powell said he felt especially strongly about the because of a photo he saw in The New Yorker magazine of the mother of a Muslim soldier in Arlington Cemetery embracing her son's grave, which was marked with a Muslim crescent and star. The soldier, Kareem R. Khan of New Jersey, was 20 when he was killed in Iraq.
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POPSBig-brained Animals Evolve Faster a substantial body of evidence has confirmed that animals with larger brains, relative to their body size, have more developed skills for changing their behavior through learning and innovation, facilitating the invasion of novel environments and the use of novel resources. Despite the progress, the role of the brain in the adaptive diversification of animals has remained controversial, mostly due to the difficulties to demonstrate that big-brained animals evolve faster. Now, ecologist Daniel Sol of CREAF-Autonomous University of Barcelona and evolutionary biologist Trevor Price of the University of Chicago, provide evidence for such a role in birds in an article in The American Naturalist. Analyzing body size measures of 7,209 species (representing 75% of all avian species), they found that avian families that have experienced the greatest diversification in body size tend to be those with brains larger than expected for their body size.
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POPSDiscovery Of 'Broken Symmetry' At Subatomic Level Earns 2008 Nobel Prize In Physics
It has proved to be extremely useful, and Nambu’s theories permeate the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. The Model unifies the smallest building blocks of all matter and three of nature’s four forces in one single theory. The spontaneous broken symmetries that Nambu studied, differ from the broken symmetries described by Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa. These spontaneous occurrences seem to have existed in nature since the very beginning of the universe and came as a complete surprise when they first appeared in particle experiments in 1964. It is only in recent years that scientists have come to fully confirm the explanations that Kobayashi and Maskawa made in 1972. It is for this work that they are now awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. They explained broken symmetry within the framework of the Standard Model, but required that the Model be extended to three families of quarks. These predicted, hypothetical new quarks have recently appeared in physics expe
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POPSBehind the Scenes: Picturing Fetal Remains Other questions arose. How did you know for sure that Malachi was not a miscarriage? How did you know the damage to the fetus did not come from simple decomposition, or the month that it was outside the freezer? Mr. Benham said there was no doubt in his mind that the image captured the truth of abortion because Malachi was found at a clinic dedicated to abortions. He cited the mark by Malachi’s right ear. “You can see that, it’s forceps,” he said.
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POPSPathologising Human Unhappiness It is the last sentence that expresses my anger. I work with the severely mentally ill and I am sick and tired of resources being diverted to privileged, spoilt, articulate miseries. Sure, the latter need help but not from doctors.
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POPSWho Is The Real Patriot? I may not agree with his religion or some of his views, but I'd rather be in his fox-hole than Dick Cheney's or George Bush's.
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POPSBrain Waves Pattern Themselves After Rhythms Of Nature Although the bulk of his work involves deriving equations, Cowan's findings mesh well with laboratory data generated on the cerebral cortex and electroencephalograms. His latest findings show that the same mathematical tools physicists use to describe the behavior of subatomic particles and the dynamics of liquids and solids can now be applied to understanding how the brain generates its various rhythms.
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POPSObama Gives Victory Speech: Hundreds of Thousands in Chicago Awesome... Frigging awesome. (I guess it can be found on YouTube tomorrow) Black leaders from the Civil Rights struggle days of Martin Luther King have been on TV. They all say the same thing: They never thought they would live to see such a day. And with pride say that now their children can see pictures of a black family in the White House. And this is all they wanted, every wanted: equality, full participation in America, to see their story as fully integrated and seen as part of the American story. And then, these old hardened men, they cry.
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