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via the Big Think blog by Ned Dymoke
This is a remarkably rare case of non-human primate tool use in the wild. We're witnessing another species dawn of their Stone Age.
It may be hard to believe, but for 4,262 million years or so, it was f**king rocks that stumped our ancestors. How do they work? Where is the 'on' button? Why so many sizes? But approximately 2 million years ago some prehistoric early human descendant picked up a rock and started using it as a tool. Like a bad meme or terrible fashion trend, it caught on quickly. Pretty soon, everyone wanted their own rock and before long your very, very early grandparents had begun sharpening them and using them for hunting. It was a glorious time.
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via Boing Boing by Rib Beschizza
The good news: it's all ours. The bad news: there's nothing to stop us. A new model of civilization, arrived by taking the Drake equation and plugging in models of chemical and genetic transitions on paths to the origin of life, predicts that humanity is the only advanced one in observable space.
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via About History by Alcibiades
The great migration is a conditional name for the ethnic change in Europe in the 4th-7th century, mainly from the periphery of the Roman Empire, initiated by the invasion of the Huns from the east in the middle of the 4th century. The Great Migration is considered an integral part of global migration processes, covering seven to eight centuries. A characteristic feature of the resettlement was the nucleus of the Western Roman Empire, where ultimately, the mass of German settlers headed, was already densely populated by the Romans and Romanized Celtic peoples by the beginning of the fifth century.
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via the Guardian by Suw Charman-Anderson
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, the only British woman to have won a Nobel prize for science. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images
As Dr Jess Wade, postdoctoral researcher in plastic electronics at Imperial College London, continues her mission of adding women in science to Wikipedia, she highlights a key problem with many “women into science” projects: a lack of evidence that they work. “There’s so much energy, enthusiasm and money going into all these initiatives to get girls into science. Absolutely none of them is evidence-based and none of them works. It’s so unscientific, that’s what really surprises me,” she says.
You wouldn’t know it from marketing campaigns such as EDF Energy’s Pretty Curious competition or IBM’s #HackAHairDryer campaign, but there’s a solid body of research from which advocates can draw inspiration. We know that, for example, role models play a crucial part in developing girls’ and women’s interests. Studies by Girlguiding UK have shown that girls value role models and that a lack of role models puts them off careers such as engineering. And a psychologist, Penelope Lockwood, found that women needed female role models to illustrate that success was attainable.
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via Interesting Literature
The best village poems in English literature
Previously, we’ve offered some of the best poems about big cities like London and New York; now, it’s the humble village’s turn. Poets down the ages have often written about villages and rural communities, but they have often done so for very different reasons. Here are ten of the very best poems about village life.
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via UNESCO Courier by Lucía Iglesias Kuntz
An Aymara ceremony in Tiwanaku, Bolivia.
Tiwanaku, the spiritual and political centre of Bolivia’s Tiwanaku culture, is seventy kilometres west of La Paz and fifteen kilometres from the shores of Lake Titicaca. Inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List since 2000, the place still holds many secrets today. A UNESCO project reveals some extraordinary discoveries.
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via About History by Alcibiades
The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, in the Palace of Versailles in France, which officially ended the WWI. The terms of the treaty were worked out at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919-1920 and it was signed by the representatives of Germany and the Allies: British Empire, France, Italy, Japan, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil , Cuba, Ecuador, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Liberia, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, Siam, Czechoslovakia, and Uruguay.
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via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
Under normal circumstances, Tardigrades (previously) live a couple of years. But when they go into cryptobiosis in response to environmental adversity, they can wait it out for decades.
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via About History by Alcibiades
“One Hundred Days” is the period between the return of Napoleon I on March 1, 1815, and his fall on July 7, 1815. The conclusion of the Paris Peace meant that Napoleon would no longer be able to participate in the political life of Europe. Napoleon Bonaparte was invited to choose his place of exile between the islands of Corfu, Corsica, and the Elbe. Napoleon chose the Elbe that was not far from his native Corsica. On May 3, 1814, on an English ship, Napoleon arrived on the island, on 14 May, Cambronne and other French generals joined him with a part of the old guard, who wished to go with their Emperor.
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