via Boing Boing by Andrea James
If you've ever approached San Francisco's airport from the south during landing, you may have noticed the colorful salt ponds along the southern shore of San Francisco Bay.
In this lovely drone footage, they look like modern art:
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta
Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine, source: Reidun Twarock
More than a quarter billion people today are infected with the hepatitis B virus (HBV), the World Health Organization estimates, and more than 850,000 of them die every year as a result. Although an effective and inexpensive vaccine can prevent infections, the virus, a major culprit in liver disease, is still easily passed from infected mothers to their newborns at birth, and the medical community remains strongly interested in finding better ways to combat HBV and its chronic effects. It was therefore notable last month when Reidun Twarock, a mathematician at the University of York in England, together with Peter Stockley, a professor of biological chemistry at the University of Leeds, and their respective colleagues, published their insights into how HBV assembles itself. That knowledge, they hoped, might eventually be turned against the virus.
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via Interesting Literature
The best religious poems
What are the best religious poems in English literature? Obviously religious faith – and, indeed, religious doubt – has loomed large in English poetry, whether it’s in the devotional lyrics of John Donne and George Herbert or the modern, secular musings of Philip Larkin in ‘Church Going’. We’ve excluded longer works such as John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, although naturally that’s a must-read work of English religious poetry, just conceived on a different scale from what we have here.
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via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Throwing away expired medicine is a waste of money, according to the results of a recent test on a cache of pills predating the 1969 moon landing.
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Unfortunately we will never be told which drugs are perfectly safe and as potent as when originally dispensed unless the manufacturers tell us. And why would they?
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via Big Think by Philip Perry
Nomads in Kazakhstan near the Chinese border. Getty Images.
The sheer variety of languages on Earth is dizzying in their array and divergence. What’s more intriguing, is that about half of them spoken today by some three billion people, come from a single root language, used thousands of years ago. Hindi, Bengali, Persian, English, German, Spanish, and Greek, all come from the same root, known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). In total, 400 languages and dialects originate from PIE.
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A dynamic and gory history of the celebrated gem, from emperor Shah Jahan’s peacock throne in the 1600s to present-day demands for its return
via the Guardian by Maya Jasanoff
Duleep Singh, the last Indian owner of the Koh-i-Noor. Photograph: Alamy
Investigative journalists know that the way into a great story is to “follow the money”. In this vivid history of one of the world’s most celebrated gemstones, the Indian diamond known as the Koh-i-Noor, Anita Anand and William Dalrymple put an inventive twist on the old maxim. “Follow the diamond,” they realise, and it can lead into a dynamic, original and supremely readable history of empires.
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via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Before the streets were taken over by cars and taxis, pedestrians ruled.
This photo of old New York was colorized by Sanna Dullaway.
Sanna is a Swedish artist who uses technology to colourise old photographs but my Great-Aunt Amy made a living for herself and her older sister by hand colouring in the days before colour photography.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Alexandra Ossoli in Tonic
What has become clearer in recent years, is that intelligence, like many facets of health and even complex diseases, is the result of a complex interaction of genetics and the environment. Several studies over the past five years have identified hundreds of genes that may be involved in intelligence. The results of IQ tests can even vary depending on a person's state of development, which is usually triggered by genetics—the greatest fluctuation usually happens during adolescence, when the brain is still developing. But non-genetic factors can drastically affect IQ. There are elements of a person's childhood environment that can depress IQ scores later in life, such as poverty, poor at-home intellectual environment, and exposure to toxic chemicals such as lead. Repeated head injuries lower IQ in the long run. Some things can also raise them, such as hanging out with smarter people—moving a child from an impoverished household to a middle- or upper-class one can result in sizable gains in IQ scores. "The brain seems to be rather like a muscle—the more you use it, the stronger it gets. That means you can upgrade your own intelligence all through life," intelligence researcher James Flynn told The Australian. For an individual, it's easier to depress the score of IQ tests over a lifetime than to boost them, especially after adolescence. "You don't see many reports of significant increases in IQ unless someone had screwed up the testing," Silverman says.
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via The New Statesman by Helen Lewis
Researchers have often fitted the evidence to their theories, rather than the other way round.
There are a few things we just know about the difference between the sexes. Men are strong, tough, prone to promiscuity but better at parking; women are more empathetic, less intellectual, better suited to caring roles and less interested in casual sex. Some of these views are so ingrained that they seem natural, immutable and preordained. Others are supported by superficially convincing evidence – either from human history (where’s the female Mozart, eh?) or the animal kingdom (chimps live in male-dominated groups, you know). But many of our most firmly held assumptions do not stand up to detailed scrutiny.
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via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Assemblage artist Bernard Pras creates incredible 3D installation portraits from trash. (via @saatchi_gallery Instagram)
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