via the OUP blog
Popular as pets, considered lucky by some, and widely recognised as agricultural nuisances, rabbits are commonplace all over the world. Their cute, fluffy exterior hides the more ingenious characteristics of this burrowing herbivore, including specially-adapted hind legs, extra incisors, and prolific breeding capabilities. Whilst rabbits thrive in most areas, certain species face the common struggle of their specialist habitats being destroyed, and myxomatosis has devastated rabbit populations in the past, at one point destroying 99% of the rabbit population of the United Kingdom. Luckily, rabbits have been able to recover from this, and several species of rabbits have lately been able to recover from the brink of extinction. Learn more about what makes rabbits so fascinating with our factsheet.
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via Interesting LIterature
‘The Flower’ is a little gem of a poem from Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92), who remains the longest-serving UK Poet Laureate (from 1850 until his death in 1892). During the six decades of his career as a poet, Tennyson had to endure criticism as well as enjoy praise and awards, and ‘The Flower’ seems to address the less pleasing side of being a public poet.
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Large-scale cemetery in Africa points to shared workload without social hierarchy
via the Guardian by ason Burke, Africa correspondent
Stone pendants and earrings from the communal cemetery of Lothagam North, Kenya, built by eastern Africa’s earliest herders up to 5,000 years ago. Photograph: Image courtesy of Carla Klehm
Herders in east Africa 5,000 years ago lived in peaceful communities that shunned social hierarchies, communicated intensively and worked together to build massive cemeteries, new research by archaeologists has revealed.
Work by a team of US-based experts on a remote site near Lake Turkana in Kenya contradicts longstanding beliefs about the origins of the first civilisations. It suggests that early communities did not inevitably develop powerful elites or compete violently for scarce resources, but may have worked together to overcome challenges instead.
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via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
In the 1970s, there was a boom in pocket calculators, driven by the plummeting costs of their electronic components, and an industry that had once prided itself on its high-end offerings for serious business users found itself rethinking the nature of the calculator, producing "ladies' calculators," calculators for kids (accompanied by bestselling books of "calculator games") and all manner of weird form-factors.
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Trees may avoid touching each other in the forest canopy creating giant, backlit jigsaw puzzles from a light-sharing phenomenon called 'crown shyness'.
via the Big Think blog by Robby Berman
Walking under a forest canopy can be a magical experience. It's not quite normal light under there, more a sort of dreamworld—one would be forgiven for never bothering to look up. But if you do, and you're in a tropical rainforest or beneath lodge-pole pines of the American West Coast, you might notice something really odd. When the tree canopy is flat enough, you may see lines of sunlight between the trees, looking for all the world like a map of their boundaries. And that is basically what you're seeing. Certain species of trees avoid touching each other, creating these fantastic patterns overhead. They exhibit what's called 'crown shyness'.
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Even if one of the last surviving Tolstoyan communes has fallen short of Leo Tolstoy’s ideals, it’s still turned into something meaningful. It’s a place for people who don’t want to be found.
via Arts & Letters Daily: Jordan Michael Smith in Longreads 29 minutes!
“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.”
— Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness
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via the OUP blog by Amy Cluett
“Woman dentist with gloves showing on a jaw model how to clean the teeth with tooth brush properly and right” by Vadim Martynenko. Used under license from Shutterstock.com.
You use it every day; it’s a facial feature that everybody sees; and one that enables almost all animals to survive. We’re talking, of course, about the mouth. Our mouths truly are amazing, and enable us to eat, breathe, and form words. Unfortunately, our mouths can cause us problems too, leaving many people with intense fears of “the dentist.” Nevertheless, dentistry is a truly fascinating subject, and covers an enormous range of topics. This list of ten facts will open your eyes to some of the lesser-known facts about dentistry, including where the myth of the tooth fairy comes from, how braces work, and what Aristotle had to say about the art of dentistry.
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via Boing Boing by Seamus Bellamy
War is a thing of terror, traditions, heartache and often, boredom. Passing the time between patrols, and the banality that comes from life in the field, is a constant challenge. Some people read. Most exercise. Everyone complains about the food. Soldiers write, train and call home--if there's someone there that'll pick up the phone. Video games? Totally a thing, in some instances. If you have a Sharpie, or a knife, there's a good chance that you might wind up doodling, scratching or scrawling something, at one point or another, to prove that you were there, where ever ‘there’ might be.
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via Interesting Literature
One night in late October 1978, the poet John Riley was tragically murdered by muggers in Leeds, a horrific crime recently investigated in Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’ Deaths of the Poets. Riley’s Collected Works were published two years later by Grosseteste Press, the publishing house he’d helped to set up, but copies of this hardcover volume remain few and far between (I am currently reading the copy from my university library; the stamps on the flyleaf tell me it’s been borrowed three times previously, in 1983, 1995, and 2000). For 15 years, Riley’s poems lay largely forgotten except by a few devotees. Then, in 1995, it looked as though John Riley’s posthumous reputation would be given a leg up, courtesy of an edition of his selected poems, brought out by the poetry publisher Carcanet. But barely a year later, in the summer of 1996, the Carcanet offices in Manchester were damaged in an IRA bomb explosion, and virtually all copies of John Riley’s Selected Poems were lost. At the time of writing, a single copy is available for sale on Amazon. It will set you back just £10,000. I cannot find any other copies available for sale online.
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via the Big Think blog by Robby Berman
New research spots a remarkable meeting of Jupiter’s jet streams and its magnetic field and proposes that it may contain the explanation for the planets’ striking cloud patterns.
It’s a planet whose unanswered mysteries are as baffling as its appearance is captivating. Pretty much any image one sees of the gas giant can stop you in your tracks to stare in awe at the ever-shifting bands of colors and swirls and wonder “What is going on here?” You’re not alone in feeling that way. The more scientists learn — much of it from NASA’s Juno probe, which arrived at Jupiter in July 2016 and will continue orbiting it until 2022 — the more out of their depth they’re likely to feel. As Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton tells BBC, “We're getting the first really close up and personal look at Jupiter and we're seeing that a lot of our ideas were incorrect and maybe naive.” We do know Jupiter has a massive, uneven magnetic field, and a new study asserts that it’s behind — or beneath — the planet's peculiar cloud formations.
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