via OUP Blog by Chelsea Clinton and Devi Sridhar
This female mosquito (Aedes aegypti) is just starting to feed on a person’s arm on May 23, 2012. USDA photo by Stephen Ausmus. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.
Science matters. In a moment in which facts can apparently have factual and alternative flavors, it feels important to state that unequivocally. We recognize that in an era of growing insularity and retrenchment, it may seem strange to argue for more global health investments and cooperation. But, we hope that, regardless of individual or even national views on the larger debate of insularity or openness, consensus exists – or at least could emerge – that cooperation is necessary in global health. Microbes have not yet met an ocean, wall, or national border they could not permeate. Zika once again has demonstrated that large and small countries, relatively wealthy and relatively poorer countries all are dependent on a larger infrastructure for their national health security – even the United States cannot rely solely on itself to fight an outbreak or protect itself and Americans from the next one.
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Wild orangutan figures out how to saw wood
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
This wild-born, free-living orangutan found a saw and quickly figured out how to cut wood with it.
That’s it, nothing more to read.
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The Purpose of Sleep? To Forget, Scientists Say
via 3 Quarks Daily: Carl Zimmer in The New York Times
A PET scan of a brain during normal sleep. Two scientists say sleep may help the brain prune back unneeded synapses. Hank Morgan/Science Source
Over the years, scientists have come up with a lot of ideas about why we sleep. Some have argued that it’s a way to save energy. Others have suggested that slumber provides an opportunity to clear away the brain’s cellular waste. Still others have proposed that sleep simply forces animals to lie still, letting them hide from predators. A pair of papers published on Thursday in the journal Science offer evidence for another notion: We sleep to forget some of the things we learn each day. In order to learn, we have to grow connections, or synapses, between the neurons in our brains. These connections enable neurons to send signals to one another quickly and efficiently. We store new memories in these networks.
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10 of the Best Classical Plays Everyone Should Read
via Interesting Literature
The best drama from the ancient world
For over 2,000 years, the Greek dramatist Menander’s works were lost. Then, in the twentieth century, they were rediscovered. Menander was praised by his contemporaries as a great comic playwright – some even said the greatest, beating even Aristophanes into second place. But when Menander’s work was rediscovered in the twentieth century, it was something of a disappointment. Translators and Greek scholars were lukewarm in their praise for the newly discovered Menander material. He was, perhaps, the first writer to be the victim of over-hype surrounding his work.
All of this makes us wonder: which are the greatest plays of the classical era? What are the finest ancient Greek and Roman plays? Here is our pick of ten of the best. We’ve tried to offer as great a range of authors as possible here, so have restricted ourselves to just two entries by the same playwright (which proved difficult with some playwrights who wrote a number of classic plays).
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Everyone should read? No way. Everyone should see which is what a dramatic work is about.
However, I know that I cannot do what an acquaintance of mine does. He takes every possible opportunity of watching these, and other classical plays, in their original language.
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Nobody Heard or Saw This Landslide. What’s the Big Deal?
via Big Think by Robby Berman
On October 17, 2015, a rainy night to begin with, a huge tsunami cresting at 600 feet barrelled through the darkness of the remote Taan fjord in Alaska. It stripped away forests on both sides of the fjord, and dragged an iceberg out into Icy Bay on the coast. Nobody witnessed it, and it’s only by seismic waves picked up 155 kilometres away that scientists knew something had happened. That something was a one-minute-long 200-million ton, 72-million cubic meter landslide of stones slamming down into the deep waters of the fjord. To give you a sense of the resulting wave’s height, the tsunami that devastated Japan in 2011 was only 130 feet above sea level. To say that scientists are concerned is an understatement, since this may just one of many such catastrophes we can expect thanks to climate change. There have been five other huge landslides in the area in just the last five years.
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Turkey splits up fight between roosters
via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
Dennis Coon was unable to stop two roosters kicking off in the yard, but Officer Gobbles was having none of it.
Nothing further to read
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It Turns Out Cosmic Dust Is Everywhere
via Big Think by Robby Berman
Who among us doesn’t thrill to catch a glimpse of a meteorite streaking across the night sky? Except for a few colorful cases – a living room in Connecticut, an explosion in the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia – these beauties disappear into our atmosphere. They’re just a small fraction of the objects that hit the earth – scientists estimate that some 4,000 tons of them arrive yearly. Some are so tiny they don’t even fall: They just float down. So where is all this stuff? Researchers have found micrometeorites – which are typically smaller than width of a human hair – in Antarctica and other remote locations. Now a new picture book, In Search of Stardust: Amazing Micro-Meteorites and Their Terrestrial Imposters, reveals that, really, it’s everywhere.
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The Mathematician In The Asylum
via 3 Quarks Daily: Romeo Vitelli in Providentia
As one of the leading French mathematicians of his generation and author of two books on elementary geometry, Jacques Hadamard was always open to new mathematical ideas. When he received a mathematical proof in the mail from a previously unknown mathematician named Andre Bloch, Hadamard was mesmerized by its elegance. The proof related to a branch of elementary geometry involving paratactic circles, systems of two circles with orthogonal planes with the intersection being the common diameter of the two circles and cut according to a harmonic division. According to Bloch, parataxy remained invariant under inversion and any inversion with respect to a point situated on one of them transforms them into a circle and its axis.
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The Real Story of What Got Us to the Top of the Food Chain
via Big Think by Jag Bhalla
What got us to the top of the food chain? Yuval Harari says it wasn’t bigger brains and tools. His view of what mattered will surprise fans of evolution’s red-in-tooth-and-claw story.
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Tiny crack in steel seen through an electron microscope
via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
Canyon or crack? Crack, obviously, since it’s right there in the headline, but isn’t it amazing? Especially with clouds photoshopped in to improve its virality coefficient.
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