See the overlay of Europe, Japan, British and USA onto the map of Australia.
Yup, Australia is HUGE.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
The Santa Fe Institute is a refuge for scientists frustrated by academe’s narrowness. Now come the humanists. What would C.P. Snow think?... more
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Future of Money: Classifying Virtual Currency Systems via Big Think by Parag and Ayesha Khanna
By Aaron Smith Since the beginning of the digital age, pundits have hailed virtual currencies as the future of our civilization’s money. While it may be difficult to imagine a cash-less society, it’s important to understand that money is merely an agreement to use something as a medium of exchange.Read More
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Creating a Safe Harbor for Nonbelievers via Big Think by Adam Lee
In my essay “Into the Clear Air”, I wrote about how people leaving religion often go through a stage of profound darkness. In the end stages of deconversion, there’s acceptance and peace – even a sense of joy at rediscovering the world. But to get there, people from intensely religious backgrounds often have to leave behind everything they knew and believed, deconstructing their own value system down to the foundations.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
As a teenager, Richard Handl mixed explosives in his garden. As an adult, he tried to split the atom in his kitchen. Be glad he’s not your neighbour... more
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New Orleans Business Directory, 1889 via Retronaut by Chris
Decisions, decisions, decisions. There are times when I hate decisions! However, I can’t leave this item at a headline and an acknowledgement. I have to include at least one of the pictures.
OK, finally settled on Edison (which you can’t read at this size) but you just have to go and look at the others here.
Source: 9Bytz (including a short spiel about the directory)
Thank you to Jean Paul Lagarde, Dirk DeKlein and Mildred Crouere
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THIS IS YOUR BRAIN. this is your brain on stress. via Big Think by David Ropeik
Want something else to worry about? Worry about worrying too much. The evidence is building that chronically elevated stress shrinks your brain! A study in press at the journal Biological Psychiatry asked 103 people about how often they had experienced stressful events, both recently and over the course of their lifetimes, as well as about their chronic ongoing stress, and then took functional magnetic resonance images of their brain.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Publishing with Oxford University Press has been likened to marrying royalty &ndash: the honour is greater than the pleasure. In India, OUP was revered. Then it started caving to Hindu extremists... more
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Electrified Highways Will Recharge Tomorrow’s Cars via Big Think by Orion Jones
Wireless electricity transfers may power tomorrow’s electric cars by making use of recharging coils placed beneath the surface of roads, particularly along interstate highway systems. The coils would be set to the same electromagnetic frequency as the car’s battery, allowing an efficient transfer of electricity.
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The Lethal Gene That Emerged in Ancient Palestine and Spread Around the Globe via 3quarksdaily by Abbas Raza
Jeff Wheelwright in Discover:
The breast-cancer mutation 185delAG entered the gene pool of Jews some 2,500 years ago, around the time they were exiled to Babylon. Random and unbidden, the mutation appeared on the chromosome of a single person, who is known as the founder. In the same sense that Abraham is said to have founded the Jewish people, scientists call the person at the top of a genetic pyramid a founder. This particular founder was born missing the letters A (for adenine) and G (guanine) from the DNA chain at the 185 site on one copy of his or her BRCA1 gene. BRCA1 is a tumor-suppressor gene; the deletion of the two letters disabled its protective function. But the mutation wasn't immediately harmful to the founder because he or she had another copy of the gene that worked.
Researchers have no idea who the founder was, but they can deduce from historical evidence when he or she lived. When Jews were permitted to return to Jerusalem after their captivity in Babylon, not all the exiles went home. The ones who stayed behind are the ancestors of Iraqi Jews, whose numbers are today much reduced but who for centuries constituted a venerable center of the faith. In addition to the Jews living in Mesopotamia and Jerusalem, satellite immigrant communities sprang up elsewhere in the Middle East. A decentralization of the gene pool had begun, and the distances between groups acted as barriers to the exchange of DNA, barriers that have persisted into the modern day. When scientists in Israel tested BRCA1 carriers from the dispersed Jewish populations, they discovered that all shared the same basic spelling in the genetic region of 185delAG. But some of the matches between Jewish groups were off by a letter or two, which indicated minor changes since the groups had split. Rolling back the demographic clock, the scientists inferred that its founder must have lived before the groups divided—that is, prior to the Babylonian watershed.
More here
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