via Arts & Letters Daily: Katy Waldman in The New York Times Style Magazine
The artwork of Edi Rama, who is both an artist and the prime minister of Albania.Edi Rama, “Set 34, 6/6,” 2007, mixed media on paper, courtesy of Galerie Michael Schultz, Berlin
Once upon a time, artists had jobs. And not “advising the Library of Congress on its newest Verdi acquisition” jobs, but job jobs, the kind you hear about in stump speeches. Think of T.S. Eliot, conjuring “The Waste Land” (1922) by night and overseeing foreign accounts at Lloyds Bank during the day, or Wallace Stevens, scribbling lines of poetry on his two-mile walk to work, then handing them over to his secretary to transcribe at the insurance agency where he supervised real estate claims. The avant-garde composer Philip Glass shocked at least one music lover when he materialized, smock-clad and brandishing plumber’s tools, in a home with a malfunctioning appliance. “While working,” Glass recounted to The Guardian in 2001, “I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him that I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Signe Dean in Science Alert
Just when we thought octopuses couldn't be any weirder, it turns out that they and their cephalopod brethren evolve differently from nearly every other organism on the planet.
In a surprising twist, in April last year scientists discovered that octopuses, along with some squid and cuttlefish species, routinely edit their RNA (ribonucleic acid) sequences to adapt to their environment.
This is weird because that's really not how adaptations usually happen in multicellular animals. When an organism changes in some fundamental way, it typically starts with a genetic mutation – a change to the DNA.
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via the OUP blog
‘Perereca-macaco – Phyllomedusa rohdei’ by Renato Augusto Martins. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Most of us remember learning the life cycle of a frog when we were young children, being fascinated by foamy masses of frogspawn, and about how those little black specks would soon be sprouting legs. That was a while ago, though. We think it’s about time that we sat you down for a grown-ups’ lesson on the life cycle of a frog.
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via the Big Think blog by Philip Perry
El Castillo, a pyramid in Mexico, was built in such a way that the “snake of sunlight” would slither down its steps at the dawning of each equinox, as the sun rose into the sky.
How we think about the Earth and how it actually is aren’t necessarily the same. In a way, we’re victims of our own education. For instance, while any globe or on any map it’s round and spherical, scientists tell us the shape of the Earth is actually and oblate spheroid—a sphere that’s bulging out at the center (equator) and squished down at the poles. Sir Isaac Newton was the first discovered this. And our planet isn’t exactly straight up and down, either. It’s tilted by approximately 23.44°, which accounts for seasonal changes.
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via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
A team of material scientists from Northwestern University figured out how to make hair dye in various shades of grey, all the way to a very, very black black, out of graphene sheets.
The dye is easy to apply, contains no toxic substances, tames flyaway hair, and conducts heat(!).
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via Interesting Literature
Are these the best hymns to urban life?
There are countless classic poems about the countryside, but what great poems have been written about the city and urban life? We’ve tried to include a range of cities here, so although there are three on London and two on New York, there’s also one on Paris, one about Oxford, one on Birmingham, a Glasgow poem, and one that sums up a whole host of (UK) towns and cities.
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via About History by Alcibiades
The Battle of Agincourt took place on October 25, 1415, between French and English troops near the town of Agincourt in Northern France, during the Hundred Years War. The most interesting and important fact about this battle is that the French army, which had a significant numerical superiority, suffered a crushing defeat. The reason was the English use of archers armed with longbows. As a result of the defeat at Agincourt, the French were forced to sign a treaty in Troyes in 1420, according to which the English King Henry V was declared the heir to the French throne.
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via the OUP blog by Dylan Nelson
Rendering of the gas velocity in a thin slice of 100 kiloparsec thickness (in the viewing direction), centred on the second most massive galaxy cluster in the TNG100 calculation. Where the image is black, the gas is hardly moving, while white regions have velocities which exceed 1000 km/s. The image contrasts the gas motions in cosmic filaments against the fast chaotic motions triggered by the deep gravitational potential well and the supermassive black hole sitting at its centre. Public domain via The IllustrisTNG Collaboration.
At the center of every galaxy is a supermassive black hole. Looking at the wider scale, is it possible that these gravity monsters influence the overall structure of our universe? Using a new computer model, astrophysicists have recently calculated the ways in which black holes influence the distribution of dark matter, how heavy elements are produced and distributed throughout the cosmos, and where cosmic magnetic fields originate. The project, “Illustris – The Next Generation” (IllustrisTNG) is the most ambitious simulation of its kind to date. By using supercomputers to explore the basic laws of physics, the simulations evolve a large piece of the Universe – roughly one billion light years across – from shortly after the Big Bang until the present day. Researchers use the simulations to study many of the outstanding puzzles of how our Universe, and the galaxies within it, came to be.
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via the Big Think blog by Frank Jacobs
Here's why Latin American cities are the deadliest in the world.
Back in 2016, 61 people were killed in Los Cabos, a favorite holiday destination for Americans. Last year, 365 people were murdered in the city, a 500% increase over 2016. The Mexican municipality at the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula now officially is the deadliest city in the world.
With an average of one murder per day and a total population of just under 330,000, Los Cabos has a murder rate of 111.33 per 100,000 inhabitants—a fraction more than the 111.19 figure for Caracas, in second place. But the Venezuelan capital is much larger. With a population of just over three million, its (relative) murder rate translates into an (absolute) death toll of 3,387 murders last year, more than any other city on the list (which excludes combat zones like Syria or Yemen).
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via Interesting Literature
The best water-themed poems
Previously, we’ve offered our pick of the best rain poems, the best river poems, and the best sea poems. Now, we’re broadening the focus a little to ‘the best water poems’…
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